The Grand Cañon of the Colorado was once, in the minds of white men, an Indian fable. It exists to-day. It is now familiar ground. Getting there is an easy, quite luxurious journey, if one has the money. The Santa Fe Railway system has removed all the one-time misery and terror of the desert route to it. The hostile tribes, the sun and thirst that plagued Don Pedro de Tovar and Don Garcia Lopez de Cardenas in 1540, when given leave to discover what truth was in the Cibola stories, have been subdued by engineers and steam. Coronado’s search for treasure cities and fabulous mines, for Quivira, ended in weariness, failure, disillusion; and his record in obscurity. Cardenas saw the Grand Cañon, while Tovar found something that should endear his name to the ubiquitous tourist. He located the Hopi Indians under their castellated cliffs. Now—had Tovar seen a Snake Dance! Although he arrived in August, that was denied him. [241]

Thus a Wall of China was prepared in America nearly four centuries ago, and through “spirit and curiosity,” male and female wearing pants, tourists seek it to-day. When the clans have all gone back to the Underworld, leaving their educated young to jazz and evangelists, the wall will retreat northward to the silent cavern-cities and the monuments of the Utah border, to Betatakin, and Kitsiel, and Inscription House. When a Service station desecrates the beautiful Laguna Cañon—the Tsegi—the wall will make a last stand at Rainbow Bridge—Nunashoshe—that great archway of the triumphant desert gods.

Tourists! Age does not wither them. I remember a very old lady, traveling alone. Alone she arrived on the mail-stage, obsessed by a mission, quite as Kim’s lama. Having viewed one hundred miles of desert beauty from the mail car, she caught a little sleep, and then aroused me Sunday morning, quite early, with determined cries. Thinking that someone had been injured, I very nearly greeted her in pajamas, to learn that her search must be continued, and that it required an automobile or other conveyance. I referred her to the local trader, who also slept late of Sundays, and he sleepily turned her over to Ed. Ed told me of it later. He said that he “packed” her about sixty miles farther, hither and yon, around the Moqui cliffs and through the tinted valleys. She granted him not a croak of interest. And when he was thoroughly tired out, with the gas “about all,” and the hour late enough to suggest a return to the post, she halted him with:—

“Now, my man, I’ve seen this, and it is very fine indeed; but—I came to see the Painted Desert.”

“And we had been a-trompin’ it all day!” said Ed.

Nor does their curiosity decay. I recall a party that [242]came upon us one evening, just at twilight. They erected tents, and stretched around them the fetish of a hair-rope, though no snake would have ventured near that camp for many gophers. Their cook banged his pan, and they came and “got it.” The mail-stage pulled in late that season, and my miscellaneous collection of letters, newspapers, and books from everywhere would be dumped in the trader’s private office, a combined place of business, art gallery, and Agent’s rest. By the open fire I would dissect this mail, and reduce its bulk to ashes. But this night “dudes” filled the room and wrangled over a pile of Navajo blankets. An old man of the party pestered me with searching questions.

“Is this a good blanket—worth forty dollars?” he asked.

“Quite good. You may depend on Mr. Hubbell’s prices.”

“I would rather deal directly with the natives.”

“May I advise you not to? The trader is regulated, the Indian is not. Many persons have lost their eyeteeth in a rug-deal with the Navajo. Besides, you have no guaranty from them. That blanket is guaranteed.”

“And by whom?”

“By me, as Agent.”

“But the Hopi,—or is it Moqui?—they are different. One of them offered to sell me a ceremonial altar at Oraibi.”

“Sorry, sir; but you could not purchase it.”

“Who would object?”

“I would, as Agent.”

“And this prehistoric pottery I have seen—”

“It is recovered from graves, by Indians. It may not be sold or transported from the State.” [243]

“Who issued that order?”

“When the Office forgot it, I did, for this Reservation.”

“Ah, yes—you are the Agent here. Now what are your authorities?”

“Well, one might say, the supervision of everything.”

“Is that your mail—your official mail?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have many duties?”

“Quite a few.”

“What is your salary?”

I dropped the letter of the Department that I had been trying to decipher between questions, arose calmly, and led the old gentleman aside.

“That,” I said in a whisper, “is a State secret. There is an agreement between the War Department and the Interior Department, entered into just after the Navajo Treaty of 1868, and concurred in by every President since Andrew Johnson, that no Indian Agent of the Navajo country shall ever divulge the exact size of his reward. He may, with discretion, reduce the sum in speaking of it; but he may not under liability of extreme penalty, give out the true figures. It might encourage the native to revolt. You see my position?”

“Naturally,” he said. He wiped his brow. He was simply overpowered. And he bothered me no more.

But Messrs. Weber and Fields’ famous answer would have been more appropriate. “I’m ashamed to tell you.”

---

And in early August come letters to the Agency. The queries are many and various.

“Please furnish the date of the Snake Dance.”

“Will you send me a permit to Oskaloosa, Michigan?” [244]

“Mail me a permit to the El Tovar, Grand Cañon, where I will meet my wife and see if she wants to come.”

“Are moving pictures permitted, and if not, why not?”

“What are the rates at the Hopi hotels?”

“Is it good form to carry an umbrella in the Desert?”

“A Hopi woman sold me a loaf of bread in 1895. I want some of that bread this trip.”

“Please reserve me a room and bath; I will arrive on the eighteenth.”

All these should be answered, to the effect that the date of the dance will be given to the press as soon as known; that permits are issued when the permittee arrives; that there are no hotels; that the Agent can reserve nothing; that tourists should provide themselves with camping equipment and come prepared for rain. Does not the Snake Dance produce rain? The thunder mutters and the rain-clouds lower ominously, if no rain falls. There will be a drencher in the fortnight of the Snake Dance, one may be sure; and it often occurs so shortly thereafter as to cause one to wonder how the priests dope it out. In 1911 the storm broke just at the close of the ceremony. It broke immediately over me, as I perched on top of the Dance Plaza rock. That is an excellent place for an unobstructed view of the whole show, but it has an enormous—and unforeseen by me—disadvantage, in that one may wish to get down at a specific moment, as I did. And at that moment, the tribe’s collection of snakes, scores of them, hissing, writhing, entangled, were thrown into the sacred-meal circle just below my dangling feet. I did not get down. I sat there in the rain, and soaked.

A slicker, or oiled-coat such as fishermen wear, is an important part of a desert outfit. It does not weigh much, it may prove useful in covering the hood of the engine [245]when bucking flooded washes, and it will certainly protect its owner after the Hopi prayer for rain. Pack one in from the railroad towns; for while the desert traders carry them, the demand is often heavy enough to exhaust stocks. Like the Texan’s gun, it may not be needed; but if needed, it will be “wanted damn bad.”

Comes also to the Agent a telegram from the Commissioner: HOPE YOU ARE DOING NOTHING TO ENCOURAGE HOPI SNAKE DANCE—just that. Already advertising or lurid press-stories have announced the date in Washington. The somnolent Bureau, that so often finds it inexpedient to administer justice, arouses itself and heaves the telegram over three thousand miles. Never shall it be said that the joys of the savage should receive sympathetic understanding. By no means permit them to be happy in their way. Teach them to be happy in our way. Encourage that broad spirit of charity we invite from Kansas via the Civil Service examinations. But do these things without hurting the native’s feelings. Never act so as to arouse or even risk antagonism. “Do nothing to encourage the Snake Dance,” but remember, if you have an urge to discourage it, that we have not directed you to do anything. We have simply expressed the hope that you will successfully do nothing.

And the Agent, whoever he may be, has just finished wrestling with the last of his fiscal-year accounts, closing June thirtieth and requiring all of July to assemble. He has signed 7863 papers of different colors and symbols, all explaining his honesty. He has completed one thousand calculations forming the statistical section of his Annual Report, long arrays of figures, giving the exact value of each washtub, proving the altitude and longitude of everything, from the number of sheep the Indians [246]devour in a year and why, to the number of tacks used in fixing the linoleum to his kitchen floor. He will have recently emerged from the impotent phrases of his narrative Report, a mandatory composition of past woes and future griefs, destined to fill an Eastern pigeonhole. These things are fetishes, thieves of time and destroyers of efficiency, worshiped by the Bureau as the documentary reason for its existence. Like prefaces, they are hopefully prepared, but seldom read, and certainly never acted on.

The Agent will pause long enough to sign a permit—a colored slip of paper printed over with regulations having a local significance. Read them; for he will not have time to read them to you. He has had them printed for a purpose—the purpose of relieving him of explanations.

Should the Agent appear a trifle acrid in manner, have patience. He may have just opened a batch of exceptions to his last year’s accounts, rebuking him many times for intelligently carrying on the business of the Government, when absence of intelligence would have been much cheaper and approved. Or he may have received one of those Departmental questionnaires, calculated on the abacus of economy, and propounding solemnly something like this:—

It is noted that you mine coal, and request $3000 annually for the pay of miners. This seems beyond all reason. The Office has been informed on good authority that excellent bituminous coal may be purchased at five dollars the ton, f.o.b. Gallup, New Mexico. Would it not be advisable to purchase fuel in Gallup? You are directed to procure bids f.o.b. your station, and transmit them to the Office for consideration and comparison with your mining costs.

[247]

“Yes,” you are startled to hear him comment aloud; “The advanced class in idiocy will now recite. Required: 2000 tons of coal, now mined within two miles of the bunkers, costing $1.50 per ton. Would it not be efficacious, not to say superb and miasmic, to purchase at Gallup, ship in cars one hundred miles to Holbrook, and thence haul eighty miles in wagons at one cent per pound cartage? Total cost, $27.00 per ton delivered, plus handling-losses and slackage. Ask me?”

But this inane query, signed by the Commissioner without reading, as he talked of the November elections with Congressman Grampus, must be answered. The record must be fixed in the mausoleum of files. The Agent will finally deny himself to Indians having real business requiring his attention, will neglect other duties, while he laboriously composes a fulsome answer, figuring the cost to five decimal places, and proving that $1.50 per ton in hand, supervised, is cheaper than $27.00 per ton on the road. He recommends—of course respectfully—that he be authorized to continue mining the coal God gave the Indians, until such time as the field may be leased to a syndicate; and then, with true official loyalty to those who arrange leases, to purchase from the syndicate, thus maintaining a perfect parity between whites who need money and Indians who do not need coal.

Before you harshly judge this desert pessimist, reflect a bit. He will be found sufficiently educated to issue you a permit. In the long nights of winter he has time for reading and reflection. The ignorance of the Desert is slowly disappearing before education; but no one has endowed a grammar school for the relief of those you place in Washington.

Classes in simple geography and numbers would help. [248]

Each season more and more people come to view the Prayer for Rain. Not all are strangers. Many Navajo ride in from the ranges, tribal differences for the moment forgotten, just as they attend the fiestas of the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico; and the Hopi are equally hospitable with food and fruit at this their gala time. Many white guests repeat, year after year. Next to our trading friends, the Hubbells, father and son, who undoubtedly hold the record as to regular attendance, there is an engineer of the Indian Service who has viewed more Snake Dances than any other seriously engaged man. My own record is not insignificant. But this class is at home in the country, with business or duties or friendship to excuse it.

It is the sort of outing that true sons of Arizona enjoy. Carl Hayden, of Congress, has kept one eye on a Snake Dance and both ears open to Hopi conditions. Governors Hunt and Campbell have been found there repeatedly, and Governor Hunt has sought to preserve its record in pictures for the State Capitol at Phoenix and the museum of the University of Arizona at Tucson. In these men the Hopi have had good friends, and at least one Moungwi found them filled with understanding of the Desert and its peculiar conditions.

At Walpi one has a fit setting for a theatrical ceremony. Roosevelt wrote of it, “In all America there is no more strikingly picturesque sight.”

The place of the dance is a narrow shelf at the very edge of the mesa. The houses of the people, tier on tier, terraced into little balconies, form a back-drop. Through these houses, and leading from the shelf, a tunnel gives on to another street. The ledge is simply a continuation of the rock roadway that skirts the brink of the village, [249]overhanging the wide First Mesa Valley. There is a sheer drop from this edge, straight down at least sixty feet, to the masses of shattered stone and drifted sand that buttress the mesa and shelve off hundreds of feet more into the orchards. At each end of this shelf is an underground kiva, marked by its projecting ladder-poles. A curiously eroded rock seems to balance at one end of the little plaza, between the houses and the precipice. Before Walpi was evolved for purposes of defense, this rock existed. Probably it was because of this freak that the place was selected for the rites of the tribe.

The ground-area available to spectators and dancers measures about ninety feet in length and not more than thirty in width. This approximate twenty-seven hundred square feet must contain about forty Indian actors and a large percentage of the mob, to say nothing of the snakes, a most important and active feature of the meeting, among which are many rattlers. It is like staging a nervous ballet on the cornice of the Woolworth Building, knowing that fifty mice will be turned loose on signal.

The wisest of the visitors seek places on the balconies and housetops; but not all of them can be accommodated there. Many are forced, if they would see anything, to stand on the ledge with the dancers. Dense groups mass at each end of the plaza and along the house-walls, and men and boys, white and red, stand four-deep on the outer edge, facing the snakes, and with a death-drop behind them. A tourist who would hesitate about hunting a rattlesnake out of a bush will at this time develop courage beyond all understanding.

When I first noted the possibility—the probability—of accident at this unguarded mesa-brink, I proposed stretching a stout rope along it as some small measure of [250]precaution; and I summoned the old Snake man to advise him of its purpose. A rope there might easily have been against the traditions, and I was new at the game of supervision. From the kiva came a nude figure and stood before me in the sight of the multitude. The interpreter explained my plan.

“I see,” said the old man, nodding; “these people are your friends, and you do not want them hurt.”

Now I did not care to vouch for all those present, and so corrected him.

“No, they are not my friends—not all of them; they are people who travel about the country and come to see your dance.”

“Didn’t you send them letters—write to them to come?”

“No.”

“Well,” he concluded, “I didn’t send for them. They are no friends of mine. And you say they are not friends of yours. Why should we care about it? Let them fall off.”

But notwithstanding his unconcern, every year I had a rope stretched there, and compelled the daring to stand behind it. This too prevented them from crowding the dancers, which the Indians appreciated; for when a man is juggling an angry snake he doesn’t crave close company, and I have seen an annoyed dancer thrash a tourist across the face, using a live snake as his whip.

Some day the breaking of house rafters, or a flurry of panic at the mesa edge may present tragedy as a closing feature of this ceremony. “Let them fall off” may yet have a grim sound.

The rites are conducted by the Indians with solemnity and reverence. It is not a show in a juggler’s booth, to be guyed and ridiculed. But when one of the poisonous [251]snakes has coiled, and is hissing and rattling and striking, just the time when one would think spectators would become more tense, that is when taunts are flung and a perfect bedlam of thoughtless merriment arises. Were there fewer visitors, as at minor ceremonies, they would be reproved; but the Hopi are a patient people, and they never insisted that these strangers behave themselves; they only expected that the visitor would keep his place, and not attempt to join the dance, a thing that some wild whites—including a few wild women—are only too ready to do. You now see all the standpoint of the old priest.

Each tourist packs one of those devices sold by Mr. Eastman. At many of the ceremonies, particularly the Flute Dance, cameras are barred by the Hopi, and I had their restriction respected. But when I proposed to increase the tribe’s revenue by taxing each visitor a dollar for the camera privilege, the clan thought it good business, and asked me to arrange it. I had camera tags prepared, and the trails to the top policed. Each policeman was accompanied by a representative of the clan, who sold the tags, and who carried a sack of money to change anything up to a fifty-dollar bill. Usually twenties were thrust forward, and promptly nineteen hard, cumbersome cart-wheels were dumped into the canny tourist’s lap. It was disconcerting to those who sought that form of evasion. Occasionally came one who demanded a decision of the Supreme Court against this outrage, chanting invariably that he was a taxpayer, and often adding that he knew Wilson, or whoever happened to occupy the place of Chief Magistrate. But backing the collector was the imperturbable Indian policeman, who did not pay taxes and who did not know Wilson. The policeman knew Moungwi [252]only, who had been found ready to “stand behind,” as an officer put it. Either pay “una peso,” “shu-kashe-vah,” “thathli ibeso,” or “one iron-man,” in Spanish, Hopi, Navajo, or Americanese, whatever language you cared to have it in, or surrender that black devil-box in which a man’s spirit may be imprisoned.

One dollar! Yet there were many who sought to evade, and forced unpleasantness; there were a few who flatly refused to pay and yielded their kodaks; there was even one who tried to steal a moving-picture film, who was hunted down at night in the black desert, caught in the early morning, handcuffed, lodged in the Agency hoosegow, and had his precious record confiscated for Uncle Samuel, who preserves it in Washington to-day. This tricky envoy of a famous news-service has related in a magazine his harrowing experience, giving me full credit as his one-time host. I have not space in which to analyze his inaccuracies. Suffice it to say that he cost one very tired and harassed Moungwi and two hard-boiled rangemen a night’s rest. He should know that every trail to the railroad was watched, and he would just as surely have been apprehended and had his outfit confiscated had he escaped to the Mecca of Los Angeles, that windy city out of which he worked. The jurisdiction of the Indian Agent extended there, or for that matter anywhere, in connection with a plot affecting his wards.

There was a midnight conference with the visiting official then acting as Commissioner, who, surrounded by loneliness and an empty sterility, not having at his beck a Law Board, seemed bewildered. For once, delay could not be sought by mail. There was no one to receive the buck. A Departmental order was being laughed at. Despite the possibility of ridicule, the visiting mandarin [253]feared that I might jar the gentle traditions and affect several votes in Southern California.

“I can handle him on the reservation,” I said, anxious to be off. “What I want to know, and all I want to know, is, do you authorize me to follow him to the Coast?”

The Acting Commissioner shivered in his pajamas. It is cold at those altitudes, even on August nights; and when one is standing barefoot, you know, and being pressed for a warrant—he wavered into the wrong pew, for he said: “Ask Shelton about it.”

Now Shelton was the most determined Indian Agent that ever wielded authority in the lonely desert. He and a dozen other Agents were among my guests. He was that one with a chipped-granite face I had met in the Office long ago, and whose language had failed when he tried to describe the subtle beauty of his domain. Roosevelt called him one of the best Agents in the Service, “who has done more for the Navajo than any other living man.” He disciplined the criminal element among Indians, and protected all of them, good and bad, from exploitation. His Agency was a lovely garden wrested from a sterile immensity, where the Desert bloomed as a rose. Shelton is gone now. Only the Indians miss him. His place in the great Desert has not been filled. There are Nahtahnis and Nahtahnis. And I venture to say that the praise of Theodore Roosevelt, plus the few words I have written, are all the record shows for Shelton’s many years in that empire of the San Juan River, where the Ship Rock trims its great stone sails against the desert winds.

Shelton rolled out and sat on the edge of his bed. He listened.

“How far to your line?” he asked.

“Nine miles by the road I think he has taken. He’s [254]across the line long ago, unless the Jedito is running and has stopped him.”

“Do you need me?” he said. He was not a man to waste words.

“No. But there is an early train west. He may be off the reservation. What would you do?”

“Get him,” said Shelton, and went back to bed.

For it had been ordered that no moving-picture film of the Hopi Snake Dance should be made, unless by permit of the Secretary of the Interior; and it had been further decreed that such permission should be granted to representatives of State and National museums only. The Governor of Arizona had respected this order. The Commissioner had declined to request any modification of it. I was therefore anxious to find the fellow who had slipped in furtively, had procured a reservation permit by evasion, had been warned not to work, who had proposed a contract requiring the Secretary’s approval, and who had broken his word.

For a week I had been on my toes, so to speak. Two thousand tourists, threescore official guests, including a dozen observing Indian Agents and the Colonel and everything, had caused me to become a trifle peevish. The Dance was over; the tumult and the shouting had died, the captains and the kings were departing. And so was an insolent crank-operator with a valuable film. Too much is enough.

We got him. He will never forget it.

Because of this untoward happening, and the wild cries of wounded vanity heard in Washington, the Commissioner became annoyed. He issued a crushing order that no photographs, still, animated, or out of focus, should be permitted thereafter. Thus all innocents are [255]restricted to this day, and the official in charge reaps the criticism. He must locate and check the cameras on the day of the Snake Dance, a terrible procedure, bringing him into argument with almost everyone. This must be done because a few tourists may not be trusted to obey the order. A very foolish order. Nearly everyone was happy when he could bang away a roll of films for the family album and for a fee of one dollar. The tourist loses his chance to vie with Edward Curtis, and the Indians lose their feast money.

The reason for such an order against the movies? Well, it would never do to puff, through an entire administration, that all our Indians are domesticated, tamed, and engaged regularly in singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and then to have a spine-thrilling vision flashed up in every movie-theatre each September. Some of the mildest of the Hopi are members of the Snake clan, and go their peaceful ways at Walpi; but they zealously enact their parts in the pageant every second year; and to see those fellows painted ferociously, garbed in savage dress, with snakes held in their mouths—yes, in their mouths; and two or three active snakes can weave a revolting mask for a painted face—

I can conceive of no more terrible close-up than that of a Snake Priest, coming toward one with eyes glaring, cheeks and chin painted black, his mouth a huge white daub, and snakes, some of them with rattles, feeling around his ears, through his hair, and about his face and neck. This would never do for general consumption. The public would accept such a pictorial news-item as proof that these continental United States contain savages very like those who beat the awesome drums in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. [256]

Tourists! I remember the incidents of an Oraibi Snake Dance. At Oraibi the water-supply is limited. The assembled multitude drank the trader’s well dry, and it was then a choice between the mesa-spring, an unsanitary flow, and the water-wagon of the day school. Trip after trip to a distant well this wagon made, the horses dragging through heavy sand; and as fast as it arrived the tourists emptied it. Precious water! But I had to appoint a guard to prevent their leaving the faucet running. Because my employee objected to several wasting the water, he was reported to Washington as a villain who had refused a drink to a suffering traveler in a burning and inhospitable Desert!

Then came an Indian who complained that they were taking his wood. The Indians at Oraibi have to haul their firewood a distance of ten to twelve miles. After one has brought in his winter’s supply, he grows rather petulant to see another man, who rides about in an automobile, calmly burning it.

“Go back to them, my friend,” I said, “and politely ask for payment.”

“I did that first, but they told me to get out.”

I directed a policeman to go with the Indian, and the policeman returned to report that he had been received—not to say insulted—with words. Whereupon the policeman departed a second time, evidently pleased with his mission, and efficiently led in a very angry gentleman. The complainant trailed along too.

“This Indian claims that you have burned his wood.”

“Yes, we used some of it.”

“He has to go a long way for that wood.”

“Well, what of it?”

“I understand he has asked for payment. I pay six dollars a cord for firewood delivered by these Indians.” [257]

“Yes, he did ask for payment—”

“How much?” I inquired, thinking the Indian might have overreached.

“Early this morning he arrived, and demanded fifty cents.”

“A very reasonable charge, don’t you think?”

“Reasonable! We come seventy-five miles into this barren desert, and are denied firewood! Do you call that hospitality? Is that the way you educate Indians to view the public that supports them? A fine sense of courtesy!”

Having delivered himself of this rejoiner, the gentleman turned away to signify that the interview was finished; but the policeman happened to be standing at the door.

“Who asked you to come into this desert? This Indian did not invite you. You arrived without notice or summons. He is under no obligation to furnish your comfort. And you do not support these Indians. They are self-supporting. They pay the Government for everything they receive, other than the education of their children; and I’ll bet your own children attend a public school. Suppose this Indian came to your town, camped without asking in your dooryard, and helped himself to your firewood. You would call him a vagabond, and he would get, very likely, a magistrate’s sentence. Pay him a dollar.”

“I will pay him nothing.”

“One dollar, or I will show you the line.”

The dollar was paid.

Tourists! Are all of them like this? I answer from a long experience in the Indian country that a very large percentage of them are just like this. Outside the reservations they form the bulk of unthinking sentimentalists, [258]preaching a crusade for dissatisfied and malcontent Indians, stirring them against real friends and worthy tribesmen, making a pother and often a hell’s brawl of half-baked accusations and charges. Recently a crew of them discovered “religious liberty” among the dangerous barbarians of certain backward pueblos in New Mexico. The knowledge of men of experience, the views of priests and ministers, the affidavits of eyewitnesses, the testimony of Indians who had emerged from the twilight zone and had accepted both education and Christianity, all availed nothing against those who would demonstrate that a Pueblo cacique, having a phallic doctrine to uphold, was being denied his “religious right” to enslave and debase the helpless of his community. A terrible banner for friends of the Pueblos to raise.

Whose fault?—Washington’s. Washington has known of and winked at this disgrace for more than a decade.

Permit me to inform you that there are within the United States Indians as benighted and as evil as those who beat the drums in the Heart of Darkness. I have had them in charge. I have spent nights in their villages. I have faced the duty of restraining them. I have seen the results of their malicious performances. I have taken to hospital the unfortunates they viciously maltreated. I have arrested and prosecuted some of the guilty. I have protected a few of those they threatened—but not all; for I have exhumed their dead.

But do not think for a moment that I was directed to curb these evil clans of New Mexico. With my Indian police from other and freer pueblos, with determined employees both white and Mexican, and on one occasion backed by a United States Marshal’s posse, I was fortunate enough to get away with it. The United States [259]Court, and the press, and the wholesome of the community, approved my actions and wished more power to me as Agent. A respect for law was being established. One New Mexican disgrace was being eliminated.

But lo! this became embarrassing to the East. Even as Nahtahnis, those in supreme command change and are different. Imagine being told that efforts toward control should cease, since the Government would find it inexpedient to lend support! What mattered it if a man were hanged until nearly dead, or a woman tortured, by caciques claiming “religious liberty”? As for violated children—who should presume to disturb the ancient Indian customs? [260]