When I first read this, I thought of and began to compare the different types of Indian dances and ceremonies I had witnessed: the Butterfly, Basket, and Corn dances, the Snake and Flute Dances of the Hopi; the Medicine Sings, and squaw dances, and the Ye-be-chai of the Navajo; the colorful pageants of the Pueblos, after Catholic Mass is celebrated on the name-days of their patron saints, and the fiesta begins; the memorial ceremony of the Mohave, and their cremation of the dead. And those slam-bang, whirlwind dances of the Sioux.

Some of these were commemorative; some were fixed ceremonials; some were of little moment; some seemed nothing more serious than masquerades; some were filled with superstition and had just a touch of smoldering fanaticism under the veneer of paint and feathers. A few were social gatherings, a break in the monotony of existence, having in them “the joy of life.” And while all of the native dances should have thrown around them a thin [276]line of supervision and restraint, many of them should be by no means “lightly touched.”

The Snake Dance may be dangerous, and it is certainly revolting at first sight. And perhaps it should be prohibited. That is a point of view. I am not thoroughly convinced of its danger to Indians, since I never heard of a Hopi dying from snake-bite. I saw so many Snake Dances that the edge has been dulled from my original thrill. If tourists were denied the pleasure of seeing it, I believe the ceremony would soon languish, and pass away entirely with the going of the elders from the mesa stage. Certainly I sought to prevent its perpetuation through the initiation of children, but without result, for I was unsupported in this, and alone I feared my inability to stifle a pagan war.

But of those things that should be dealt with gently, the tiny shows that the vacationist seldom sees and the Bureau has never heard of, I recall the Dance of the Dolls.

One afternoon, at First Mesa, I came along a trail toward the witch’s camp, meaning to start for home once the team was harnessed. I met an Indian of the district walking with my interpreter, and was about to give direction concerning the horses when the latter said:—

“He wants you to stay and see the Dolls’ Dance.”

Now I had quite a collection of Hopi dolls, those quaint figurines carved with some skill from pieces of cottonwood, and dressed in the regalia of twig and feather and fur to represent the various katchinas of the clans. But I had never heard of a dance devoted to these little mannequins.

“What sort of dance is that?” I asked.

“It is called the Dolls-Grind-Corn dance,” he replied.

“When—to-morrow?” thinking of those monotonous [277]open-air drills, having various names but scarcely to be distinguished one from the other.

“No. To-night, in the kiva.”

This interested me. I could see that the interpreter longed to remain overnight among his people, and to take in this show.

“Well,” I said, “is it worth climbing that mesa in the dark?”

“I think you would like it,” he answered; “it is a funny little dance, and the children go to see it.”

So I did not order up the team.

After supper, when the twilight had faded into that clouded blackness before the stars appear, I scrambled after my guide up the mesa trail. When we reached the end of that panting climb, the houses of the people were murkily lighted by their oil lamps, but most of the householders were abroad, going toward the various kivas. To the central one we went, and down the ladder.

The place was lighted by large swinging lamps, borrowed for the occasion from the trader, lamps that have wide tin shades and may be quickly turned to brilliancy or darkness by a little wheel at the side. I had expected to find it a gloomy place, whereas they had arranged something very like the lighting of a theatre. It was a trifle difficult to find a place in that crowded vault. The far end was kept clear, but the two long sides and the ladder-end were packed with Hopi women and their little ones. Just as I have seen in our theatres, the children could scarcely repress their nervous interest, now sitting, now standing on tiptoe, turning and watching, as if this would hasten matters.

I seated myself on the lower rung of the ladder, believing this place would be most desirable from my point [278]of view, because from it I had a view of the kiva’s centre and could most easily make my way to the upper air when things became too thick. A crowded kiva is rather foreign in atmosphere when filled to its capacity and with lamps going. But I soon found that I would be disturbed. From above came the noise of rattles and the clank of equipment, calls and the shuffling of feet. A line of dancers descended upon me. I moved to let them pass into the lighted centre-space. They were garbed in all the color and design of Hopi imagination, and wore grotesque masks. They lined up, and I sensed that their mission was one of merrymaking. Two clowns headed the band, and soon had the audience convulsed. They hopped about, postured, and carried on a rapid dialogue. There was a great deal of laughter.

I had my usual experience in trying to gain a knowledge of the show through an interpreter, quite the same as that lady who accompanied an attaché to hear a speech by Bismarck in the Reichstag. You will remember that the visitor kept demanding interpretation, whereas the attaché remained silent, intently listening, as the Iron Chancellor droned on, monotonously voluble.

“What does he say?” asked the visitor for the fifth time.

“Madam,” replied the attaché, “I am waiting for the verb!”

And that is about as far as I ever got toward exact knowledge of the clowns in any dance. I have tried it many times. The interpreter always enjoyed the show for himself, first, and left me in outer darkness. Occasionally he would attempt to explain some part of the horseplay in progress, probably such simple portions as he thought my feeble intellect would rise to. [279]

“You see,” he would begin, pointing, “he is one of the uncles!”

And apparently there are always two, paternal and maternal, I suppose. The uncle is the great man of the Hopi family. The father does not amount to much—he can be divorced in a jiffy and, while the mother is the household boss, she is always dominated by the grandmother, if living, and dictated to by the uncle in matters concerning alliances with other families. Perhaps one should call him a social arbiter. He has a great deal to say about weddings, marriage portions, and the like. Whenever I have watched the clowns at these smaller dances, and have asked their rôles in the play, invariably they have been of the uncles. Perhaps the Hopi in this manner square themselves at the expense of the family martinet.

I could not see that there was anything to cause suspicion of evil in this little scene. In old Navajo dances the clowns would often engage in dialogue that interpreters feared to translate. This is the charge too against the clowns of certain Pueblo and Zuni dances; and the clowns of the Hopi have been known to indulge in antics that were not elevating. I cannot bring myself to believe, however, that the clowns of the Dolls’ Dance were relating anything other than crude witticisms, for the little children laughed as loudly as the others, and it seemed sheer fooling. Had a slapstick been in evidence, I should have been sure of the nature of the proceedings; but the Indians have not developed exactly this form of humor.

Then the dancers filed out, up the ladder, and away.

“They go to another kiva,” said my companion.

And almost immediately came another and different set of fun-makers. They took the centre of the kiva and [280]soon had all laughing at similar jokes and grimaces. So, I thought, the old tiresome reel over again, to be continued throughout the night. For I had seen this dancing in relays last an entire day, only stopping for hasty meals and new costumes or make-up, and to one who does not understand the differences in scenes it becomes an intense boredom. As I once heard a man remark: “They are three days making ready for one day’s dancing, and the rest of the week getting over it.” This critic was not too severe, for there is much to be said about the time lost in Hopi spectacles, when one is seriously engaged in thrusting them along the pathway of progress. I arose and was about to depart; but my interpreter pulled me down.

“Wait!” he urged. “They will put out the lights.”

This time the dancers did not leave the kiva. One of them came to the lamp just above me, and at a signal all the lights were dimmed. The kiva was in thick darkness. One could hear childish sighs of expectation. Perhaps the lights were off for thirty seconds, although it did not seem so long. Then they flared up, to reveal a curious little scene that had been constructed in the dark. I had not noticed that the dancers packed anything in with them. The setting may have been in that crowded kiva all the time; but where had it been concealed?

At any rate, it was a queer little show, quite like that of our old friend Punch. There was a painted screen of several panels, and in the centre ones were two dolls, fashioned to represent Hopi maidens. Before each was the corn-grinding metate. And farther extended on the floor before them and their stone tubs was a miniature cornfield—the sand, and the furrows, and the hills of tiny plants.

Hardly had the first sigh of pleased surprise from the children died away, when, even to my astonishment, the [281]dolls became animated, and with odd life-like motions began to grind corn, just as the women grind daily in the houses of the villages, crushing the hard grain between the stone surfaces of the metate and the mano. These mannequins worked industriously, and with movements not at all mechanical. Then a little bird fluttered along the top of the screen, piping and whistling. Shrills of delight from the youngsters, to be followed by audible gasps, for from a side panel came twisting a long snake, to dart among the corn hills of the scenic field, and then to retreat backward through the hole from which it had appeared. These actions followed each other in quick succession. The fellow behind the screen was quite skillful in working his marionettes for the delight of those children of the tribe.

Perhaps in all this there was some deep-laid symbolism, checking rigidly with the North Star and the corn harvests of the past and future. Perhaps it was a primitive object-lesson, to encourage thrift and industry as a bulwark against famine. But if you ask me, I saw in it exactly a repetition of the district schoolhouse or the country chapel at holiday time, when Cousin Elmer obliges with a droll exhibition of whiskers and sleighbells and cotton snowflakes. Sometimes the Hopi at these festivals for children give them presents too, and a handful of piki-bread bestowed by a clown, however bizarre his facial appearance, has all the gift-wonder of our childhood Santa Claus and his treasure-pack.

Touch gently! They—all children will be gone soon enough. A little while and you can rest from anæmic policies and sophist sermons. The Desert will be lonely without its simple shepherds and their simple customs. Those who strain to inherit it, through legislation, will [282]pack with them no poetry and attract no culture. Great cattle- and sheep-camps, monopolies, grimy oil-rigs, and yawning coal-drifts will mar the Desert. A few old books, a few paintings,—their creators gone, too,—will picture what you once possessed, and experimented with, and auctioned off. For one Shelton, discredited perhaps by a clamor of sanctimonious mediocrity, you have entrusted these people and their empire to twenty Bumbles. Twice you have sought to partition their community life, to make swift the end, to hasten the advent of the speculator who follows estates and bids for the possessions of the dead. At length,—because at length you will succeed in selling the desert heritage,—there will be only the museum case, and dust, and a ticket.

---

The days of approach to a major celebration in the Desert, such as the Snake Dance, were passed in a ferment of preparation and a stew of unrest. All employees would be imposed on in one way or another. Some would be called on to act as stewards, others would surrender their quarters to house unappreciative idlers. And certainly the men would have to drag cars from muddy sloughs, ferry them across dangerous washes, repair them when broken, and perhaps by main strength push some into havens of rest. Certain camps would have to be arranged, and some supplied. No! we did not welcome these extra duties, so often repaid with meagre thanks.

But we did enjoy meeting cordial people, both neighbors and visitors, who, catching the holiday freedom of the moment, invigorated by the tonic of the fresh desert air, gave us entertainment of a kind that was relief from long monotonies.

The Snake Dance ends very close to sunset. The [283]crowds leave the mesa-top, down the trails afoot or mule-back, down the rocky roads in rough wagons, a scrambling multitude. The sun is gilding the western walls of First Mesa, throwing the east-side roads and trails in shadow, and above, the ruined crest of the headland loom black in a gorgeous halo. The farther eastern valley is bathed in a strange lemon light. The far-away northern capes gleam luminously in scarlet and gold, and then suddenly are gone. Huh-kwat-we, the Terrace of the Winds, pales in lavender and grayish green. Twilight, with its mysterious desert hush, steals over Hopi-land. Something has been fulfilled in accordance with an ancient prophecy. The desert gods have been appeased.

Soon it is dark, and stars appear as vesper candles. And then, all about the foot of the great fortress-like mesa, lighting the sand dunes, gleaming warmly through the peach trees, grow camp-fires. Where is usually a heavy silence at evening, broken only by sheep bells, now one hears laughter, many voices, the sound of the chef at work; and the smell of cooking rises. Coffee and bacon, desert fare, spread their aroma, and a ravenous hunger comes to one. Here is a tiny group about a tented auto, there amid horses and harness and camp dunnage are thirty around one board. “Come and get it!”

I recall incidents of my introduction to these scenes. Armijo, the trader’s relative, had brought his treasured violin. I heard its tones from the trail, and when I came to Hubbell’s camp, there a group of them, musicians of the posts, were making ready to match their skill against the melody that tourists bring. Supper put away, the concert began.

“How do you like this?” asked the master of the bow, and as he swept the strings, that saddest of memory songs [284]cried poignantly, a song fit for a desert night and a desert camp: La Golondrina! Such harmonies of double-stopping I had seldom heard. It seemed to me—or was it desert magic?—that Kreisler could do no more. Silence. And then applause from fifty camps.

And Ed’s guitar. Soon the lilting airs of old fandangos would sing through the stunted trees, and one could imagine that the long-dead children of the padres made fiesta.

“Now, Doctor,” said someone.

“What do you play, Doctor?” I asked.

“I play the banjo,” he replied—I thought with a shade of mockery in his voice. Now I had just heard the Spaniard’s violin sob a song that had swept a nation, and Ed’s lightsome Mexican airs were no mean music for a summer camp. Night, under the old trees and in the shadow of the mesa of the gods, brings the romance of serenades, especially soothing after a long, tiresome day.

But—a banjo! That thumpety, plankety, plunkety thing! I was sorry I had spoken. He would oblige with something to fit clogs and the levee, and the whole atmosphere of that evening would vanish, never to return! The doctor opened a case.

“What would you like to hear?”

That is a terrible question from a banjoist, isn’t it?

“Well—what do you play?”

“Oh! the—anything—popular classic stuff. Now there’s the Melody in F or Mendelssohn’s Spring Song, Schubert’s Serenade, the Fifth Nocturne—”

“Great God!” I cried. “On a banjo!”

I think he pulled this little joke on all strangers, for, after allowing it thoroughly to soak in, he brought that wonder instrument closer to the fire and began strumming [285]the strings of it until its resonant cadences hushed all the noises of the camps. Then, softly through the grove, sounded the Melody in F, in organ tones.

Of course you will perceive that I am no musician and no critic. I have not the ear of the one, nor the language of the other. I am simply one of those who like to hear what I like—hopeless. The Andante from the Sonata Pathétique haunted and eluded me for years and, but for a wandering pianist disguised as an investigator, I might have classed it with a dream. Sordid duties dull one to accept coarser things on a phonograph.

“Yes,” said the doctor, “I have played through the East and on Canadian circuits, but I don’t care for the stage. I took up concert work, traveling with glee clubs and orchestras, but that wasn’t much better. Hurried life. I like the quiet places.”

And he was a doctor in the Indian Service!

Someone called: “Play it again!” And he played it again—on a banjo!

Down under the hill were camped a bunch of troubadours that once had trooped with a second company, passing as the Original New York Cast. By the light of a lantern they played accompaniments on an old melodeon, dragged from the schoolhouse. A rousing chorus, and then a tenor voice: the Irish Love Song. Followed a roar of applause that brought drowsy Indians to the mesa edge. Strange Americanos! Strange Bohannas, who mock at drums and chanting, and who then make such queer music and many cries.

And by midnight the fires would die down, one by one, to mere glows. The pueblo lights, high up along the mesa cornice, would be blotted out. Beyond the camps, only the sound of horses munching, the bray of a desert [286]nightingale from the upper corrals, or the canter of a mounted policeman through the sand, as he gave a last look around before rolling in his blanket. Then silence under the dark star-strewn sky, a tranquil desert silence, to be broken, perhaps—who knows?—by ghostly sandals, as the padre walked to see that curious company, asleep in his one-time garden, guests of a pagan feast. [287]