The Indians ^ The Terraced Houses Charles Francis Saunders A Snake Priest of Walpi in dance attire. (Copyright by A. C. Vroman.) The Indians of the Terraced Houses Charles Francis Saunders With numerous illustrations from photographs mainly by C. F. and E. H. Saunders " These people, since they are few, and their manners, govern ment, and habits are so different from all the nations that have been seen and discovered in these western regions, must have come from that part of Greater India, the coast of which lies to the west of this country." The Narrative of Castaneda, Coronado s Chronicler, 1540-42. G. P. Putnam s Sons New York and London be fmfcfcerbocfoer press 1912 e f. AC, COPYRIGHT, i CHARLES FRA^CfS SAUNDERS ftnicfeerbocher So THE EVER-PRESENT MEMORY OF MY WIFE THE INSPIRATION OF OUR JOURNEYINGS AND STUDIES AMONG THE PUEBLO PEOPLE WHOM SHE LOVED THIS VOLUME IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED H69O92 Introductory But the Author would LiKe to Have It Read WHEN we decided on our way to Cali fornia, a few years ago, to stop off for a week in New Mexico s quaint old capital, we had, in common with most Ameri cans, as little interest in Indians as in South Sea Islanders, and as little knowledge of them. To be sure, we remembered in a general way from our school-books that the Indian had been a troublesome thorn in the flesh of our push ing pioneers; and that the Government now has him systematically in hand under an Indian pol icy operated from Washington, often with great injustice to the red man, we also thought we knew from Ramona and one or two less popular romances. Furthermore, we were aware that there are in the land Indian schools wherein the aboriginal youth are drilled in the white man s better way, to vi INTRODUCTORY the great comfort of the philanthropic taxpayer, and the credit of the Government, if we were to believe the pieces in the magazines and family newspaper, especially at Commencement time. That there was any other sort of Indian, how ever, than the warpath-treading, scalp-raising stock of the novels and the Wild West shows, we did not know. We did not know that, in our South -West, there dwells a very different type of Indians the Pueblos who, even at the time of the discovery of America, were experienced stone- house builders and town-dwellers, devotees of peace and order, with a fairly well developed civilisation of their own; who were then, and still are, industrious, self-governing agriculturists, and who have never been at war with the United States. It was a revelation to us when we learned that more than a score of these settled, picturesque Pueblo communities still exist in northern New Mexico and Arizona, striving to live on in their ancient way as well as our Government will let them. Our state of ignorance at that time, I have reason to believe, is still shared by the major part of our fellow-citizens; and it is in the hope of INTRODUCTORY vii directing more general attention to what our country possesses in that remarkable aboriginal remnant the Indians of the Terraced Houses, as an old Spanish chronicler called them that this book has been written. With the hope goes the earnest prayer that something will be sympathetically done by the people of our great Republic to arrest the dis integration and sure extinction of these little Pueblo republics an extinction towards which the present well-intended but misdirected govern mental interference is inevitably tending. What John Fiske, in his preface to The Discovery of America, states of one section of the Pueblos the Hopis is true of them all: Some extremely ancient types of society [says this American historian], still preserved on this continent in something like purity, are among the most instruc tive monuments of the past that can now be found in the world. Such a type is that of the Moquis of north-eastern Arizona. I have heard a rumour . . . that there are persons who wish the United States Government to interfere with this peaceful and self- respecting people, break up their pueblo life, scatter them in farmsteads, and otherwise compel them, against their own wishes, to change their habits and vin INTRODUCTORY customs. If such a cruel and stupid thing were ever to be done, we might justly be said to have equalled or surpassed the folly of the Spaniards who used to make bonfires of Mexican hieroglyphics. That very " cruel and stupid thing" is now being done and more, doubtless, is contemplated. If any steps to stop it are to be taken, they need to be taken quickly; for the native arts and customs of the Pueblos and their individuality as a people have suffered more in the last decade or two of Washington than during the whole three centuries of Spanish domination; and as a body going down hill goes the faster the nearer it gets to the bot tom, so the Pueblo deterioration hastens with each returning year. I know no more direct way to enlist an interest in these unique citizens of the United States than to start at the beginning and tell what awakened ours. C. F. S. PASADENA, CALIFORNIA. AcKnowledgment The author is indebted to the editors of The International Studio, Sunset Magazine, and The Pacific Monthly, for their courteous permission to reproduce in this work, parts of certain articles which he contributed to those periodicals. Contents PAGE CHAPTER I OF OUR FIRST SIGHT OF THE PUEBLO INDIAN; OF TESUQUE AND HOW WE TOOK A PHOTO GRAPH THERE .:....! CHAPTER II OF ACOMA, PUEBLO OF THE SKY; HOW EDWARD HUNT FOUND US LODGINGS THERE; AND OF THE FIESTA OF SAN ESTEBAN . . .14 CHAPTER III OF WHAT BEFELL US UNDER THE ROCK OF ACOMA, AND HOW WE TURNED CLIFF DWELLERS . 32 CHAPTER IV OF THE PUEBLOS OF THE RAILROAD SIDE, LAGUNA AND ISLETA, AND HOW MANUEL CARPIO SANG IN THE SUN 43 CHAPTER V OF THE THREE PUEBLOS OF THE JEMEZ RIVER VALLEY, AND SOMEWHAT OF JOHN PAUL, THE COWHEAD . . . . . . . 53 xii CONTENTS CHAPTER VI OF OTHER PUEBLOS OF THE UPPER RIO GRANDE, AND HOW SANTIAGO QUINTANA TRAVELLED FOR SHELLS ....... 69 CHAPTER VII OF CERTAIN PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE . .84 CHAPTER VIII OF TAGS AND THE WAY THITHER ... 97 CHAPTER IX OF THE FIESTA OF SAN GERONIMO AT TAOS, AND THE DELIGHT MAKERS . . . . 1 05 CHAPTER X OF PICURIS IN THE COUNTRY OF THE PENITENTES, AND HOW FRANCISCO DURAN s MOTHER COULD NOT FORGET 112 CHAPTER XI OF ANCIENT ZUNI, AND HOW THE CONQUISTA- DORES CAME TO DISCOVER IT . .125 CHAPTER XII OF ZUNI IN THE RAIN, AND OF ZUNI DICK . 130 CHAPTER XIII OF HOUSEKEEPING IN ZUNI, AND HOW ZUNI DICK HELPED US TO BUY MEAT . . . .137 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER XIV OF SA-WI-ETSI-TSITA, HOW SHE MADE US JARSJ AND SOMEWHAT OF ZUNI BABIES . . .142 CHAPTER XV OF A ZUNI GRINDING SONG, AND OF PRAYER PLUMES 148 CHAPTER XVI OF THE NIGHT DANCE OF THE SHALAKO GODS 153 CHAPTER XVII OF THE EIGHT PUEBLOS OF MOQUI, AND THE WAY THITHER . . . . . .167 CHAPTER XVIII OF THE LIFE IN MOQUI ; AND A HINT OF ITS LATTER-DAY TROUBLES 1 82 CHAPTER XIX OF HOTAVILA, THE EIGHTH PUEBLO OF MOQUI, AND HOW IT LOOKED BLACKLY AT US . IQ2 CHAPTER XX OF WALPI, AND THE SNAKE DANCE THERE . 2O3 CHAPTER XXI OF THE ARTS OF THE PUEBLOS, ESPECIALLY THE CERAMIC . 220 xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER XXII OF THE NATIVE GOVERNMENT OF THE PUEBLOS, AND THEIR POLITICAL STATUS UNDER OURS . 233 CHAPTER XXIII OF THE NATIVE RELIGION OF THE PUEBLOS . 240 CHAPTER XXIV OF WHAT THE UNITED STATES POSSESSES IN THE PUEBLO INDIAN BEING A BRIEF SUMMING UP . . . . . . . . 247 CHAPTER XXV OF WHAT OUR GOVERNMENT IS DOING WITH THE PUEBLO 253 CHAPTER XXVI OF THE FUTURE OF THE PUEBLO, IF HE HAS ANY 272 APPENDICES A TABLE OF APPROXIMATE POPULATION OF EACH PUEBLO IN 1910 . . . . . 277 GLOSSARY AND PRONUNCIATION OF SPANISH- AMERICAN AND INDIAN TERMS . . . 282 A PARTIAL PUEBLO BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . 285 INDEX . ... . . . 291 Illustrations PACK A Snake Priest of Walpi in dance attire Frontispiece Tesuque plaza and church, on a feast day. The crowd is watching a ceremonial dance . . 6 A street in Acoma . . . . .14 Spanish church, forty years in building, Acoma. All the material was brought up on Indians backs, from the plain 350 feet below . . 20 The tombe* beater, Acoma. Fiesta of San Esteban ....... 26 The melon sellers, Acoma, on San Esteban day . 28 Women dancers, Acoma. Fiesta of San Esteban 30 Great Rock of Acoma from the north-east. Sky-line of Acoma pueblo at right of middle notch 38 Acoma from the church belfry, looking towards the Enchanted Mesa, seen in the middle distance 42 Pottery seller, Isleta . . . 46 The estufa, pueblo of Isleta .... 50 Saline flats of the Jemez River at Santa Ana pueblo, which lies unseen under the mesa. The XV xvi ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE pueblo farms are ten miles distant across a desert over which the crops are hauled each, autumn to the home pueblo . . . . 58 Ysidro, Governor of Sia, in native attire . . 60 Eagle cage on housetop, Jemez. Eagles are kept in captivity for the sake of the feathers for ceremonial use ...... 68 A Pueblo woman bearing water home from the well. Open-air ovens in background . . 72 A Tesuque mother and baby. The child is asleep in the cradle swinging by cords from beams in the ceiling . . . . .86 San Juan woman in her doorway. Note the boot-like moccasins, worn in certain pueblos . 94 North pueblo, Taos. The governor stands on the uppermost roof making an announcement to the people 98 South pueblo of Taos, early morning . .102 Fiesta of San Geronimo, Taos. The crowd is gathered to watch the foot-races. . . .106 Raising the greased pole, Taos. Fiesta of San Geronimo .... . . . 108 A Taos Indian and Mexicans on the way to a fiesta . . . . . . .no ILLUSTRATIONS xvii Towa-yalleni, Zuni s sacred mountain, in the snow ....... 130 Women burning pottery, Zufii . . .142 A Zuni man knitting his wife s leggings. The men also run the sewing-machine, when a household owns one . . . . .146 Si na-he (Zufii Dick) making beads, Zuni. The loom at his back holds an unfinished blanket on which his wife was at work before the pho tograph was taken. She got out of the way, being afraid of the camera . . . .152 The Zufii shrine He -patina, believed by the Zunis to be the centre of the earth, which in their view is flat . . . . .164 Shipau luvi, Moqui, acropolis-like on a hilltop overlooking the Painted Desert . . .168 Chief Snake Priest of Walpi, hoeing his corn two or three days after the Snake Dance. Note how short the stalks are, yet they are full grown. The man is but five feet high . .170 A Hopi potter preparing to fire pottery bowls. Her home is on the distant mesa top, but she has come down here because a nearby corral affords abundant fuel of dried sheep manure . 1 82 A corner of a pueblo of the Second Mesa, Moqui ....... 186 xviii ILL USTRA TIONS A blanket weaver. Second Hopi Mesa. Among the Hopis, the men are the weavers the reverse of the Navajo custom . . .,190 A Beau Brummel of H6tavila. . . .198 Walpi, like a mediaeval fortress, on the edge of the Painted Desert ..... 202 Mealing stones on which Pueblo women grind their corn ....... 206 Snake Rock, Walpi. " Boy-afraid-of-the- Camera" and his grandmother . . .210 Nampeyo of Tewa moulding a water-jar. No wheel is ever used by Pueblo potters . m . 220 A collection of Moqui ware very distinct from all other Pueblo pottery both in form and decoration ...... 224 Water-jar of San Ildefonso and Cochiti with bird decorations symbolical of lightness. . 224 Zuni ware, a feature of which is the frequent use of animal forms in the designs deer, frogs, butterflies, etc. The jar decorated in curves and lines, depicts, as explained by the potter who made it for the author, a pueblo (blocks against which rest poles with cross-pieces representing ladders) and rain (vertical lines) descending from clouds (arches) above. . 226 ILLUSTRATIONS xix Black lustrous ware of Santa Clara and San Juan. The only ornamentation used is a slight moulding, as along the bulging edge of the double-necked jar in the foreground. . . 226 Water- jars of Acoma. The prevalent designs are suggested by flower and leaf forms. The older potters often introduced figures of birds, as in the upper right-hand jar, symbolising lightness ....... 228 Water- jars of Santo Domingo. This ware is distinguished by an especial grace of shape and a remarkable scheme of decoration in triangles, circles, and other geometric forms ....... 228 A basket maker of Mishong -novi, Moqui . 230 A cupid of Shimo povi. The very small children go unattired in summer in Moqui . . 238 Husking corn on a Zuni housetop. Flush times for the burros .... . 248 A man of Taos, in native dress. Sheets are worn in lieu of blankets in warm weather . . 254 A little mother of the pueblo. It is a duty of the little Pueblo girls to attend their baby brothers and sisters, when the parents are busy ....... 260 xx ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Piki-bread maker, Sichumovi. The bread is baked on a flat, griddle-like stone over a small fire . . . . . . 264 Pueblo women baking wheaten bread at the outdoor ovens ...... 266 A little maid of Taos in native attire . .268 Map At End The Indians of the Terraced Houses The Indians of the Terraced Houses Chapter I Of Our First Sig Kt of the Pueblo Indian, of Tesuque and How "We TooK a PKotograpK There. IT was November, 1902, and Sylvia and I were sitting at our first breakfast in Santa Fe, when we saw an ancient waggon, drawn by two burros, coming up the street. With that joy which every traveller knows at each fresh incident of a long-planned trip into new territory, we were smiling at the novel sight of the odd little draft animals with their great flapping ears, their nod ding white noses, their obvious disinclination to go faster than at a snail s pace, when we were ^Pronounced Te-soo -ka. i OUR FIRST PUEBLO attracted by the remarkable nature of the load which the old waggon bore pottery of various colours, shapes, and sizes, bundles of gaily-dyed horsehair whips, squat drums stained yellow and red, and other articles which our untrained eyes failed to catalogue. Suddenly, from the other side of the cart, appeared the driver an Indian, bareheaded save for a red fillet binding his black hair, which was cut short at the sides and caught up behind in a club wrapped with red yarn. A bright red blanket, drawn closely about his body, reached to his ankles. His feet were encased in beaded moccasins. Our waiter, an English wanderer repairing his broken fortunes in this most un-English of Ameri can capitals, flicked his napkin from one arm to the other and patronisingly observed : " Hindians from Tesuque, sir, come into town to sell their pottery and such like, sir. " After breakfast we fared forth, guide-book in hand, to view the conventional sights of the quaint old city; but there kept lingering in the minds of both of us the memory of that gleam of colour in a grey land a touch of the poetic in the driver s way of carrying himself, his primitive stock in OUR FIRST PUEBLO trade, and his Oriental donkeys that gave a certain Old World quality to the whole affair. Finally we paused before the cathedral and gazed so intently at its abbreviated towers that two Mex icans, sunning themselves against an adobe wall, nudged each other and remarked one to the other : "Ah, these American heretics! Well may they admire! What so beautiful a holy church have they in their country?" But they were deceived in our thoughts, for we saw not the church. Sylvia said: "What did he mean by Tesuque Indians?" "I was thinking of that myself," I replied. "I have heard of Choctaws and Comanches and the Last of the Mohicans; but Tesuque is a new sort to me. We must find out. " The hotel clerk was appealed to, but he had not been long in the Territory and there were some points about the Tesuques, he observed, that he had not learned. "But why not go out and see them for your selves?" he said. "You can do them in an afternoon with a two-horse rig. " So it transpired that, immediately after lunch- OUR FIRST PUEBLO eon, we were in a backboard with two tough little broncos to draw us, on our way to spend a couple of hours at the Tesuque pueblo. It was a nine-mile drive thither, and as we travelled, we learned incidentally from our driver that Tesuque is a small community of Indians descended from those strange people known as the ancient Cliff Dwellers; that each community has an especial name of its own, like Tesuque for this one, but that all have the same methods of life and are known, generally speaking, as Pueblo Indians, because they live in pueblos. " Pueblo, you know/ he explained, "is the Mexican way of saying town. All these sort of Injuns live in towns built to stay of rock and adobe. They do say some date back to Columbus s time and further. They re sure old, all right, and a good job of building. " The road was typical of New Mexico now hard- baked adobe, now sand; now crossing dry arroyos, now climbing water- worn hillsides, where small pinon trees and cedars made a scrubby growth, up to glorious views of majestic mountains, wide plateaus, and valleys with strange Spanish and Indian names, but never a sign of life. OUR FIRST PUEBLO At last we came to a little valley with running water, following which for a couple of miles, we crossed at a ford into a narrow lane fringed with peach trees and wild plums and, in a few minutes, were in our first pueblo. We had never looked upon the like before, and, had we not felt competent to account for every minute of time since we left our home in the East, we should have been tempted to think that we had somehow been diverted into a trip to Syria. Our vehicle had stopped in a large, open plaza, facing upon the four sides of which was a solid square of adobe houses, excepting that, on one side, the white fagade of a church edifice broke the regular line of dwellings. Some of the houses were one-storied in height and some two; but in the latter case, the second story was set back so as to make a terraced effect, the roof of the front room of the first story serving as a front yard to the second-story rooms. Ladders were reared against many of the houses, affording means of reaching the second-story dwell ings, and people were going up and down busily. Here and there, upon the topmost roof, erect or leaning against a chimney, were motionless OUR FIRST PUEBLO Indian men, enveloped in scarlet blankets, which they drew about them so as to cover the entire head, leaving only the eyes visible, and making, more than any hat, a complete protection from the shrewd November wind, which was now blowing across the valley from the snow-fields of the high Sangre de Cristo Range. Aside from these statue- like watchers, however, the village was full of activity. Some Indian men, who had driven in behind us in a farm waggon, were busy unhitching their team; an old man, sitting in the sun by his open door, was mending a broken moccasin; a bevy of young girls, chatting and laughing, came across the plaza, each bearing upon her head a pottery jar filled with water from the creek, and, separating, went each to her individual home. One climbed the ladder to the second-story rooms as lightly and gracefully as though the fragile vessel on her head, with its twenty pounds of water, were a feather weight. Women were mov ing in and out of the houses on domestic errands of one kind and another, not the least interesting of which to us was the tending of great mud ovens in the plaza, and on the housetops, in which wheaten bread was baking. OUR FIRST PUEBLO The attire of both women and men was strangely different from anything we had ever seen and as distinct in its way as the national attire of Nor wegian peasants or of people of the Orient not that it was like any of those, however. The dis tinctive feature of the- men s attire, when the blan ket was removed, was a loose, cotton shirt, worn outside the trousers, which, in many cases, were short, wide, and flapping. The women s dress was made of a dark, woollen stuff, neatly belted at the waist. It came only a little below the knees, the lower part of the legs being swathed in buck skin, which formed an appendage to their moccasins. A sort of coloured cape of light material hung from the neck down the back. The women s hair was invariably banged low across the fore head and, like the men s, tied with red yarn into a club at the back. Our vague thought of all red men and women being lazy savages, unat tired save as to odds and ends from missionary boxes, and subsisting upon Government rations, underwent rapid revision as we looked on at this busy scene. Everybody appeared as though dressed for the stage. "Have they fixed up because they knew we 8 OUR FIRST PUEBLO were coming? " we asked the driver with a touch of the national egotism. "Gosh, no!" he replied. " Fixed up nothing. This is the way these Pueblo Injuns always dress the women in particular. They seem to think their short skirts and buckskin leggins has the Paris fashions plumb skinned. There s lots of missionaries and Government school teachers and the like that has spent good money tryin to get them into sensible calico dresses with red and yeller patterns to sort of catch the eye; but they could n t make it stick. The women are great stay-at-home bodies and that makes em set in their ways. The men go about more among white folks and some of em are bein shamed into overalls and jumpers; even a hat goes with a good many of em now. But, Lord! it s slow changing these Injuns ways. They have good money to spend, too; but it seems that, when it comes to doing anything with em, it s a case of manana, just as it is with the Mexican Dagos nothin* doing to-day, come to-morrow, says they." Somehow, we failed to rise in spirit to this pro gressive point of view. This slow life, busy enough as it appeared over necessary things, OUR FIRST PUEBLO looked rather pleasant to us fresh from the world of skyscrapers, department stores, and automobiles. Suddenly the quiet of the scene was broken upon by the monotonous beating of a hollow-voiced drum. It came from a point behind the buildings, grew rapidly louder, and almost before we could draw our astonished breath, there emerged into the plaza from an alley among the buildings a group of the most startling figures that our eyes had ever beheld. There were some twenty -five or thirty of them, inching along in single file with a curious sort of dance-step, one bringing up the rear with the drum, a primitive affair made from a hollowed log, upon which he pounded without cessation. Some were men and some women. Save for a sort of kilt about the loins, the men were naked, their red bodies smeared with black and vermilion paint. Jingling shells and rattles hung from their knees and wrists and about their necks, and corn husks were twisted fantastically in their streaming hair and about their ankles. The women were dressed in gay attire, each cheek painted with a bright red spot, while upon their heads were fastened grotesquely -patterned tablets of wood that stood upright. io OUR FIRST PUEBLO A look of intense seriousness was in the faces of the dancers. Not a glance was cast our way ; our existence was apparently ignored. Inch by inch, into the centre of the plaza, the strange dance moved; and now, in rhythm with the untiring drum, there arose from the throats of the dancers a solemn musical chant in unison, the same phrase repeated over and over again; yet, in a way, it was fascinating to us. We had never heard Indian music before, but we knew instinctively that this was the real aboriginal thing. There could be noth ing else like it in the heavens or under the earth. Separating into two lines, facing each other, the dancers footed it sideways up and down the middle space of the plaza, to the unceasing accompani ment of the music and certain movements of the arms performed in precise unison. All the while the busy life of the pueblo continued almost without interruption, as little attention being paid to the dance as though it were an every- day occurrence. An Indian who was strolling by was accosted in Spanish by our driver, who offered him a cigarette and inquired the -meaning of it all. Then he informed us: OUR FIRST PUEBLO u "These are a bunch of visiting Injuns from Cochiti pueblo, about forty miles west of here, run over to dance the corn dance with these folks this afternoon. We are in luck to catch em at it. They have lots of these little private fiestas among themselves, that nobody else knows about. " At that time we were in the typical tourist class, understanding neither Indians nor New Mexico. Therefore, with the anticipation of rehearsing this scene to friends on the Atlantic seaboard, who would never in the world believe us, unless we had ocular demonstrations to submit, we drew the ko dak from its case. The driver glanced at it. " Them things and Injuns don t mix, " he warned us. "But they can never see what we are doing at this distance," we replied the dance by this time was the length of the plaza away from us. "Besides," remarked Sylvia, "I ll throw the end of my wrap over the camera and they can t know," and with a click the shot was taken. Nothing, we thought, could have been more unobserved and quietly done. "Oh, how wonderful! Shall I take another?" asked Sylvia, intent upon the kaleidoscopic picture 12 OUR FIRST PUEBLO in the finder and snapping again. "What s the matter? Is the dance over?" As if the tiny click had been carried by magic across the wide space and sounded in each dancer s ear above all the chanting, the music had ceased suddenly and the performers had broken into disorder. Everybody was looking looking, too, anything but agreeably towards us; and, to our dismay, across the plaza there came running, with whoops that made the chills run down our backs, two of the fantastic dancers with painted faces more like demons than men. An unintelligible uproar of pagan speech rose from their lips as they pressed their faces close to ours. Sylvia had a logical mind. It was she who had insisted upon taking the picture, and it was plain to her that now she was to be scalped for it. There was, however, a possibility that her companions might avoid a like fate if she surrendered the offending machine; and, snatching the camera from beneath the cloak, she thrust it tremblingly into the arms of the more ferocious-looking of the savages and, with blanched lips, cried : "Here, take it all!" The Indian looked at it gravely, and at her. OUR FIRST PUEBLO 13 With every movement of his body the corn husks in his hair rustled mysteriously and the rattles at his knees clinked gruesomely. He spoke several sentences in his outlandish tongue, which did not help to quiet our palpitating hearts. Then, to our astonishment, he smiled good-humouredly and said in perfect English : "We do not like pictures taken here, and you will please not do it again; but if you want them badly, please see the Governor. Perhaps, for five dollars, he will let you photograph." Down the plaza the drum began its monotonous note again, the dancers lined up, and the chant arose once more. Our two interviewers took up the refrain and departed to join the rest. "Them bucks is Carlisle fellows," grinned the driver. "They had you pretty well scared; but you got off easy. I once seen em run a spear plumb through a camera." "Five dollars the idea!" said Sylvia absently; "and I do believe I took both those pictures on one film! Is n t it too bad?" Chapter II Of Acoma, Pueblo of tHe SKy ; How Edward Hunt Fo\nd Us Lodgings TKere; and of tHe Fiesta of San Esteban. THE most poetic of all New Mexico pueblos, in point of situation, is Acoma, J a veri table city of the sky, built upon the flat, seventy-acre summit of a huge rock with per pendicular sides, thrust up some three hundred and fifty feet out of the midst of a sandy soli tude of plain. Beyond the plain and encircling it is a rim of mountains, touched morning and evening with the mysterious colours of the desert ; and if there is a world beyond the mountains, it is not evident to Acoma. To reach this village of the upper air, one leaves the train at Laguna, where also is an Indian pueblo. Close by are a few homes of white people with whom arrangements can be made for transporta- 1 Pronounced Ah co-ma. 14 if s i A COM A AND ITS FIESTA 15 tion to Acoma, which lies fifteen miles to the south. Most tourists who take the trip are, after the man ner of their kind, in haste about getting home, and pare the time down to one day ; but a week is none too much to devote to the sights of this miniature wonderland which has been described as "the Garden of the Gods multiplied by ten plus a human interest" and to experience the spirit of its simple life and its primitive people. There is, however, no accommodation available except that offered by Indian homes, and, as few travellers care for that sort of adventure, it is advisable for intending sojourners to take their own blankets and provisions, and if it be in the season when rain is likely, a tent. The road from Laguna is through a characteris tic northern New Mexico landscape, dotted with pinon and cedar and black lava blocks, around and among which, in summer, an ocean of sunflowers flows and ebbs ; and near and far rise red and purple mountains fantastically cut and gashed by the weather of ancient times into titanic, battlemented fortresses, towers, domes, and pinnacles. As the road enters the valley of Acoma, our eyes are greeted with the sight of that famous table- 1 6 A COMA AND ITS FIESTA rock of the South- West the Enchanted Mesa lifting its cylindrical block against the turquoise sky. Four miles beyond towers the rock of Acoma, similar in form, but somewhat less lofty. A few cattle and sheep are grazing on the wild growths of the plain and an Indian on pony-back, his shock of jet black hair bound about with a scarlet fillet and his white, cotton trousers flapping in the breeze, lopes by on some errand toward the hills. A snatch of the barbaric melody which he sings drifts back to us as he disappears around the sand hills, and we realise that it is happiness to be an Indian in a real Indian country. Why the Enchanted Mesa is enchanted, I have never heard explained. The term is a translation of the name given to it by the first Spaniards, who called it "La Mesa Encantada." The Indians say "Katzimo. " A tragic interest attaches to it because of the tradition of the Acomas that their own town, a long time before the coming of the white man, was located on its flat top, which was accessible by only one trail. One day, when most of the inhabitants were busy in their fields out in the plain^ a storm destroyed this approach and it was necessary for the people to establish a new A COM A AND ITS FIESTA 17 home for themselves, which they did upon the present rocky site. Of course, the hard-fact scientist has fallen afoul of this legend, and some years ago a Princeton professor thought to give it a scientific burial. After a brief visit to the top, accomplished only after several days labour, he saw nothing which would pass in New Jersey for the remains of a prehistoric settlement, and said so in print. This nettled the archaeologists of the South- West, and an expedition was fitted out for the scaling of the rock by Dr. F. W. Hodge of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, who dis covered abundant evidence of a human habita tion at some very distant time. Under the title "Katzimo the Enchanted," there is an interesting popular account of this visit in the Land of Sun shine Magazine for November, 1897. The curious traveller, desirous of following in the footsteps of these venturesome climbers, will not find it possible unassisted to approach nearer than within some thirty or forty feet of the summit of the Mesa; but arrangements may be made at Laguna for an outfit of ladders and ropes by which the top may be reached by hard scrambling. One needs to be close under the cliffs of Acoma 1 8 A COM A AND ITS FIESTA before any sign of the village is visible, as the houses are of the same colour as the rock upon which they stand and so far above the plain that, as old Castaneda, the chronicler of Coronado s expedition in 1540, records, "it was a very good musket that could throw a ball as high." The huge mesa is of soft brown rock, worn by the sand which the wind of ages has hurled against it. This, acting as a natural sand-blast, has cut the rock into many a grotesque shape, squat columns and airy minarets, caverns and ogres dens, and strange forms with features like those of fabled creatures of old romance. The fine sand of the plains, piled up by these wind-storms of the past, has finally created two or three giants pathways up and around the cliffs on one side. By one of these, animals are enabled to attain the summit, though it is not possible for vehicles to do so. Human beings usually reach the town by means of one of two steep stairways of rock, carved out and built up through two of the crevasses of the mesa s side. To one unaccustomed to climbing, it certainly is a dizzy sight the first look up this dark and winding flight of aboriginal steps. Yet the ascent is not difficult, having been made safe and easy by A COM A AND ITS FIESTA 19 cutting hand holes in the soft sandstone at ticklish places, and the Indians ascend and descend non chalantly, bearing back-bowing burdens. It was up one of these trails that Brother Juan Ramirez, the apostle to the Acomas, unheralded and alone, made his missionary way one day in 1629. Before reaching the top, he was greeted with flying arrows, shot at him by a group of Indians gathered on the cliff above; for the Acomas had by that outlived their love for white men. Simultaneously with the arrows, the story goes, a little girl accidentally fell over the edge of the cliff and lit, unseen by the Indians, on a sheltered ledge within reach of the Brother s hand. He picked her up unhurt, and, when he appeared a little later holding in his arms the smiling child whom the Indians thought dashed to pieces by that time at the foot of the precipice, their opinion of him went rapidly to a premium, and he was received as a great medicine man. The story is recounted by Lummis in his fascinating book, The Spanish Pioneers; and readers who would enjoy a stirring recital of one of the most heroic assaults in history, will find, in the same volume, an account of the storming of Acoma in 1599 by seventy Span- 20 A COM A AND ITS FIESTA iards. The rock, manned by four hundred Indian warriors, was considered as impregnable as Gibral tar now is, but the Spanish took it, though every man of them, who was not killed, was wounded. Like all the New Mexico pueblos excepting Zufii, Acoma is a cure of the Roman Catholic Church, and is endowed with a patron saint Stephen. To the average sightseer the most in teresting time to visit the old town is on the occasion of this Saint s feast the Fiesta de San Esteban, which occurs annually on September 2d. Sylvia and I engaged a Laguna Indian to drive us over on the day before, and when our team of little grey ponies, their ancient harness held thriftily together with baling wire, landed us at the foot of the Acoma cliffs, we were greeted by Edward Hunt, a large, good-humoured Acoma Indian, who had picked up a Quakerish name, a fair knowledge of English, and American ways enough to make him think that a trader s store at the foot of Acoma would be an agreeable and profitable vehicle in which to make the journey of life. To him we unfolded our plan of spending a few days in the village, and asked if he could help us to rent a house up in the pueblo. I C/5 I i- <fi A COM A AND ITS FIESTA 21 No, he thought no one had any, and smiled genially; and then, seeing our disappointment perhaps, he turned more hopeful and added : "Well, you eat your lunch, and I guess I have to go with you peoples pretty soon up the mesa and look around. You wait awhile. Pretty soon I come again. " With that he disappeared into the recesses of his little adobe half store, half dwelling. We ate our luncheon, and knowing something from experience of the leisurely ways of the red brother, we did not hurry through it. Then a bit of siesta, and so into the store to look about for Edward. Through a door he was discovered in the next room in the midst of his family, chang ing his shirt. He smiled at us benignantly and remarked : " You wait. Pretty soon I come. " We waited twenty-five minutes by the watch. At the end of that time, he came out and glanced leisurely around the store, picked up a large grey sombrero adorned with a magnificent hat-band, set it carefully on his raven locks, viewed himself in a square inch or two of mirror that hung behind the door, took one more last look slowly 22 A COM A AND ITS FIESTA around the store, went into the next room, chatted with his wife, patted one of the children on the head, and then, stepping forth into the sunshine, observed, as though we had been keeping him waiting : "You ready? Let sgo." Two hours had been thus consumed in getting Edward under way, but three more went into the maw of time before our lodging was found. The way of our aboriginal house-hunt was this: First, Edward had to pause at the top of the trail, light a cigarette, and pass the time of day with a knot of his cronies who were sunning ihem- selves at the brink of the broad rock where, three centuries agone, their assembled ancestors spat defiance at the King of Spain. Then, when pro gress was resumed and we were really within the pueblo, friendly faces would peer out of sundry doorways and the sociable Edward, leaving us to sit on the steps and distribute candy to the children who were trooping after us with murmurs of "gooties, " would disappear within a house, where we would descry him smoking more cigarettes and passing more time of day. Emerging after a while, he would smile his kind, indulgent smile, A COM A AND ITS FIESTA 23 and remark, as though communicating the best news in the world : "Well, he say, No " (" he " being the woman of the house). "Mebbe better luck some other houses, I don* know. Let s go!" And so to another house and another, all to no purpose; for it seemed that, because of the fiesta on the morrow, the hospitality of Acoma was taxed to the physical limit for the accommodation of friends, who took precedence over the white strangers. It looked as though we should have to roll up in our blankets on the rock. At last we had exhausted the town and stood on the outskirts overlooking the ancient Spanish church with its two-century-old balcony. Ed ward s roving eyes settled upon it as a last hope, and he observed insinuatingly: "Well, what you say that porch way up on the church? That s pretty good place, no? Mebbe the Governor he let you have that porch. What you say?" We could hardly believe we were not dreaming. To have offered us for our very own a balcony overlooking all Acoma, the Enchanted Mesa, and the; sunrise a balcony with an ancient, hand- 24 A COMA AND ITS FIESTA carved, wooden railing around it, as Sylvia had observed the balcony of one of the most famous churches in the New World, famous because every stick and adobe brick in it had been carried up the dizzy trails bit by bit from the plain three hundred feet below, on Indians* weary backs, and because the church had been as long a-building as the children of Israel were in getting out of the wilderness it was like a fairy tale to us and, of course, we said "Yes." "Let us go!" said Edward. And so to the Governor s. There we all sat gravely down as to the discussion of an inter national modus vivendi and, after rolling a cigarette apiece, the Governor and Edward launched out upon a pourparler, which came with the shadows of evening to this happy conclusion, as interpreted to us by Edward : "The Governor he say church belong to all tho people; but you say what you worth to sleep there two or three days and he be satisfied. What you say?" We parried this by asking Edward what he thought was right, and it was finally arranged that we should pay fifty cents to the Governoi 4 A COM A AND ITS FIESTA 25 for the rent, fifty cents to a friend of Edward s who had a burro and would bring up our bundles of blankets, provisions, and two cots, and fifty cents to the Governor s niece to bring us water every morning in an Indian jar balanced on her head, as one sees in pictures. We were awakened at dawn the next morning by the hollow voice of the tombe or official drum and the stentorian tones of the public crier as he walked up one street and down another, announc ing the exercises of the day at least, we assumed this to be the purport of his words, which were in the native tongue and by the time the sun had risen, all Acoma was astir. Blankets and beds were being shaken out from the upper roofs, where many had slept the night before, Syrian fashion, under the glowing stars; fires were sending up their smoke straight into the delicious air of the New Mexico morning ; girls, with water jars poised upon their heads, climbed ladders to the upper terraces and disappeared into various houses. Into our own airy balcony came the Governor s niece and, silently setting down a brimming tinaja in one corner, as silently departed. Certain fragrances that rose from beneath us indicated that the padre, 26 A COM A AND ITS FIESTA whose apartments were immediately under our balcony, and who had arrived sometime during the watches of the night, was prefacing his spiritual labours with a substantial breakfast. We met him later in the morning a rotund little Spanish man, jovially disposed by nature, but that day sallow and hollow-eyed, having, it seems, supped on canned caviare and suffered a colic during the night. "But it was a sick padre, my friends," he said sadly with a kindly shake of our hands, "that was beneath you last night that detest* caviare bah!" The first order of the day at these Pueblo fiestas of the saints is always the mass in the church; this apparently atones in advance for the pagan features which make up the bulk of the day s doings. It was a picturesque throng that assem bled before the church that sunny September morning, and upon which we looked down from our balcony such a sight, indeed, as one would hardly think possible in these United States. On every hand, mingling with the Indians, were swarthy Mexicans, their wives and children decked out in wondrous effects of green, yellow, white, The tombe beater, Acoma. Fiesta of San Esteban. A COM A AND ITS FIESTA 27 and red. The Acomas were in divers sorts of raiment : there were the rich progressives in broad- brimmed sombreros, set squarely on their heads, which, with their plain faces, gave them somewhat of a Quaker appearance. To a man, this group wore clean, boiled shirts, black trousers, open, black waistcoats without a coat, and uncompro misingly stiff new brogans encasing their feet. Their bright new bandas wound about their heads were the only visible remnants of the distinctive Pueblo dress, and these were apparent only when the men eased their heads by carrying their hats in their 4 hands. In contrast to this group, were the hat less rich conservatives, resist ers of the American invasion, clad in shirts that hung out side flapping white trousers, with ample red garters with tassels wound about their knees. For the most part, too, they were enveloped in blankets of striking designs, wherein, like as not, a baby was carried, while the wife, arrayed in short Pueblo skirt, gorgeous leg moccasins, silver neck lace, and silver bracelets, followed close behind. Mingling with these folk in gala attire were many of the poorer sort, clad in their every-day overalls, and such scraps of clothing, American and Pueblo, 28 A COM A AND ITS FIESTA as their poverty might vouchsafe them. But everyone who could afford it had a new banda about his head. Among the crowd, too, were wolfish-looking Navajos, draped in gay blankets of their own weaving, thus displayed for sale, and, though hereditary enemies of the Pueblos, come to barter and pick up such loaves and fishes as the day might vouchsafe them. And here, too, were In dians from far Isleta, Pueblo farmer folk with baskets of fruit for sale. There were loose clusters of sweet Mission grapes, pears, and persimmon- like plums, and luscious peaches that reminded us of the white October peaches of the East; and there were long yellow muskmelons and little round watermelons the size of one s head. Very gifts of the gods were these fruits to dwellers in that sunburnt dewless plain of Acoma, and none remained unsold. After all that would, had been drummed to church, the services there came to a close. Then, thronging out into the sunlight, the people formed in procession, the image of Saint Stephen in their midst, with mushroom halo and wooden hands raised in blessing, and marched about the village The melon sellers, Acoma, on San Esteban day. A COM A AND ITS FIESTA 29 to the accompaniment of clanging bells from the belfry, the firing of muskets to keep off the devil, and the solemn chanting of a hundred reverent voices. So to a rustic shrine of corn plants and leafy cottonwood branches which had been erected for the occasion. Here deposited, Saint Stephen received that day, with two old Indians sitting at the doorway of the shrine to keep off errant swine and other godless interlopers. Hither for hours the devout came bringing baskets heaped high with thank-offerings, which were tendered on bended knee and left lying at his feet melons, peaches, and corn, chili peppers and candles and brown loaves of fresh bread. The Saint would have none go hungry on his day, and at frequent intervals basketfuls were handed out to the multi tude or thrown high into the air to be scrambled for. To the visitors the main event was the Indian dance. Long before Fray Juan Ramirez came to Acoma, the people held festivals of prayer offered paganwise to the Powers Above for the gift of rain and festivals of thanksgiving for harvests vouchsafed. The heart of Acoma is still warm to its old love, and the Church indulges it in such of the immemorial practices as are innocent of 30 A COM A AND ITS FIESTA offence against decent living. So no feast day is complete without its dance in ancient costume. Shortly after noon, the dull thumping of a tombe was heard from an unseen quarter, and streaming down from the upper stories of certain houses came the dancers, who formed in two lines, and, to the chanting of a choir of Indian men, moved in step, an inch at a time, toward the Saint s booth. The men dancers were stripped to the waist, their faces and bodies painted in fantas tic fashion, while from neck and shoulders, waist and ankles, depended all sorts of tinkling and gay ornaments. Twigs of live spruce were thrust in their head-dresses, wristlets, and arm-bands, and in their hands were rattles made of gourds with pebbles within. There was no sign of levity, for this was a religious rite hallowed to the tribe by ancestral usage and doubtless more real to them than those morning services in the church. The women dancers had sweet, shy faces, and their eyes were modestly downcast. Their costumes were very brilliant in colour and had the special distinction of a curious head-dress, consisting of a large painted board set upright and cut into shapes of symbolic significance. Women dancers, Acoma. Fiesta of San Esteban. A CO MA AND ITS FIESTA 31 All the hot, September afternoon the dancers kept step to the choiring, until the sun sank low in the heavens. Then, suddenly the singing ceased and the dancers, breaking ranks, crowded about the Saint s booth and knelt for a moment in silent adoration before his image. The booth was then stripped of its green ; the image was brought out; the faithful, candles in hand, again formed in procession, and amid the ringing of the church bells and the firing of guns as in the morning, the precious relic was borne back to its niche in the old church, and the feast of Saint Stephen was over. Chapter III Of wHat Befell Us vinder tKe RocK of Acoma, and How We Turned Cliff Dwellers. IN quest of SL new experience, we took a hint from a band of Navajos who had encamped among some rocks islanded in the plain a quarter of a mile or so from the foot of the Acoma cliffs, and when they struck camp on the night of the fiesta, we moved down. To watch our goods for us during absences from our camp and to bring us water, the redoubtable Edward secured us the services, at the stipend of a dollar a day, of one Carlitos, an Acoma man who was admittedly ignorant of English but held to be very honest. Night had fallen when Carlitos, having brought down our last bundle from the pueblo, bade us adios. The moon, shining amid cloud drift, re vealed far out on the plain the outlines of the Bedouin cavalcade of departing Navajos cantering into the desert, and gave us fitful light as we 32 UNDER A COMA S ROCK 33 spread our blankets and set our sky-roofed house in order. We had a small alcohol lamp, which we lighted to boil water for a cannikin of tea, and opening a tin of sardines and a box of crackers, we prepared to discuss a bit of supper before turning in. Suddenly the quiet was disrupted by a blood- chilling yell, which rose from behind a gigantic rock close by. The can-opener dropped from my nerveless fingers, and Sylvia s face blanched. Then another scream, nearer and, if possible, more demoniac, and before we could form a connected theory as to what the fearful outcry meant, there staggered into a strip of moonlight before us a Navajo crazy with whiskey. He was too blind drunk to see us and plunged stumbling past us down to the edge of some rocks, where we dimly made out the figure of an Indian woman, gaunt and black, holding two ponies. Stopping the reeling man, she succeeded in steering him to one of the horses and got him into the saddle. Then, mount ing the other herself, the two rode off at a mad run, side by side, he still whooping devilishly at inter vals, and she silently steadying him with one hand, until, to our intense relief, the night swal- 34 UNDER A COMA S ROCK lowed them up. It was our first experience of the wretched aftermath of many Indian fiestas, when whiskey is apt to be smuggled in by boot-leggers. But there was more to come. Hardly had the crazy yelling died away in the distance, when we heard the clatter of hoofs, and where the woman had been, three horsemen now were reining in their broncos. They, too, we could see, were Navajos, and to our discomfort were looking intently our way. They hallooed something we did not under stand, and then two, dismounting, walked rather unsteadily towards us. Stepping close to us, they evilly surveyed our little tenderfoot camp, with its cots and alcohol lamp and all, and muttered something among themselves in their pagan jargon. Though our hearts thumped unmercifully, I am inclined to think we outwardly bore ourselves tranquilly. I know Sylvia, arranging crackers on a tin plate, was as composed as Werther s Char lotte spreading bread and butter. Then the less drunk of the two growled out something that sounded like "Navajo John." "Well, Navajo John, " said I, putting up a bold front, "what do you want?" UNDER A COMA S ROCK 35 "Navajo John?" he repeated, interrogatively this time, I noticed, and making an ugly drunken lunge forward with a heavy emphasis on the John. "He means," said Sylvia, "are the Navajes gone. Oh, do tell him that they are!" I did, in English, in Spanish, and in an attempt at the sign language, pointing out the direction they had taken. By this time, however, the red brethren were more interested in us and our camp than in pur suing their departed company. The light of the alcohol lamp attracted their bleary gaze and had to be maundered over between them, one of them skeptically thrusting his finger into the tenuous flame before believing in the power of its heat. They fingered our soft down quilts with a kind of awe, and they tripped over the hidden leg of one of the cots, and that had then to be looked criti cally into. Thinking to hasten their departure, Sylvia plied them with soda-crackers, and if it had not been for the third man with the horses, who now began hallooing to them out of the inter mittent moonlight, they would have probably spent the night with us. As it was, they yielded 3 6 UNDER A COMA S ROCK at last to their comrade s importuning, and motioning for soda-crackers for him, they at last made off. "And now, " said I, as the trio galloped away, "we 11 do what the Pueblos have had to do from the dawn of time, because of these pestiferous Navajos; we 11 turn cliff dwellers. " While there had still been daylight, I had noticed high up in the face of a cliff near us, which was a spur of the Acoma Mesa, a shallow cave, half hidden behind a great boulder. A sand dune had formed below it and drifted gradually upward till its summit flowed into the cave and rendered the latter easily accessible. One camping there would have a wide outlook over the plain and at the same time be remote from the pathway of travel to and from Acoma. Thither with small labour we quickly transported our blankets, our cots, and ourselves, leaving other things to be looked after by Carlitos when he should arrive in the morning; and settling down behind our bul wark boulder, we sought sleep. It was a troublous night, however; for although no more Navajos came in the flesh to disturb us, our excited fancies persisted in filling the rocky space with their UNDER A COMA S ROCK 37 skulking forms and the echoes of their fiendish yells ; and when the stars faded in the white dawn, our eyes were still unshut. We had, however, unwittingly stumbled upon the most enjoyable way of "doing" Acoma. An ancient church balcony, though enclosed by a genuine antique hand-carved rail, and with the Governor s niece to serve you with water in a decorated Indian jar, is undeniably romantic; but it is, strictly speaking, more of a stage property than a permanent apartment for light housekeep ing. It is, besides, very public. But camping as we now did, with Carlitos on guard by day and our cliff chamber to sleep in by night (for the disturbing spectres did not come again), we had all the privacy we wanted, could mount the trail to the village whenever we so desired, and at the same time saw some phases of the happy life of the Land of the Terraced Houses which otherwise we should have missed. Now, for the first time, we came to know the spell of the Enchanted Mesa, silhouetted against the sky four miles away and melting from colour to colour in the changing lights of the day s pro gress now clothed in indescribable tones of pink, 38 UNDER A COMA S ROCK of red, and of yellow, and again, when storm clouds hovered over it, paling to an unearthly white. The changes were often in the twinkling of an eye. We would avert our faces for a moment, and when we looked again, a new glory dwelt there. Most enchanting was the Mesa when invested in the delicate hues of dawn, those evanescent tints which, born of the sun, cannot look on their lord and live prophets of his coming who perish in his ineffable presence. Every morning as we looked towards the flushing east from our gate in the cliff, our hearts sang an involuntary jubilate, and we could not wonder that the Pueblos regard the sun as the house of the Divine. Sun-worship seems one of the most natural of religions and it is no credit to our "advanced" civilisation that we have ceased to pray at every dawn and to marvel at the fresh miracle of the sunrise. With the dawn, too, the birds which shared our cliff with us, waked, and after divers sleepy chirp ings, flew abroad to the business of their day; certain nervous little animals in grey coats, that we knew not, peered out from behind stones and rocks and scampered away in the sands, and Brother Coyote, far out on the flowery plain, UNDER A COMA S ROCK 39 yelped his matin notes just as he did in the youth of the world when he and the Pueblo folk spoke one tongue. With the risen sun, Acoma men, singly or in pairs, afoot or ahorseback, would come by on their leisurely way to the corn-fields in the plain. Often, as they went, their joy in the morning would find vent in songs, quaint, aboriginal melodies pitched high, almost like Swiss yodels, one strain repeated over and over. Descending to our Navajo rocks for breakfast, we would find Carlitos sitting by the bucket of fresh water which he had just brought, enjoying his matutinal cigarette. Carlitos stock of English, as has been stated, was negligible. In fact, it consisted, so far as we could ascertain, of "Hello!" picked up from the courteous diction of the frontier white population, and "Yes," which complaisant mono syllable we found he was prone to use so indis criminately as to be a pitfall to English-speaking inquirers who did not know his ways. Like most New Mexican Pueblos, however, he knew Spanish, and it was thus we communicated with him. And so we would say to Carlitos, seated by the bucket, "Buenos dias," and he would smilingly reply, 40 UNDER A COMA S ROCK "Buenos dias, " and the intercourse of the day was pleasantly begun. Our camp was a feature that attracted all passers-by, and there was none who did not call on us. Our first visitors were two old men in flapping cotton pantaloons and moccasins. They were en route for wood and rabbits, for one bore an axe on his shoulder and the other had a bow and a quiver full of arrows slung at his back. They shook hands all around and, without further formality, sank on their haunches like Orientals; then, rolling a cigarette apiece, they proceeded to gossip with Carlitos in the soft tones which the Pueblo religion teaches that the gods commend not only in women but in men also. After a decent length of time, they rose to go, when their keen eyes spied one of Sylvia s water-colour draw ings, representing a street in Acoma. They caught it up eagerly, and hung over it for a long time, oh-ing and ah-ing, tracing the lines of the houses with their pointing fingers, disputing together ap parently about certain features which were not clear to them; and ending up with a laugh all around, they departed in high good humour. When we sought to learn from Carlitos what the UNDER A COMA S ROCK 41 turmoil all meant, he mildly observed that they thought the picture "mucho bueno. " The pictures, indeed, were a drawing card with all our visitors, but even more astonishing than pictures was a nickel-plated collapsible cup, the fame of whose magical way of appearing and disappearing spread abroad. Perhaps it will be incorporated in Acoma traditions and some twenty-fifth century folk- lorist will think he has found in the story of it another moon eclipse- or sun-myth. It was interesting to us to note in all our Indian callers what we afterwards found to be character istic of unspoiled Pueblos that they never begged and never lounged. If Carlitos was absent, they would sit awhile in dignified silence, as though to be companionable, then say "adios" and move on about their business; but there was no suggestion of the loafer s attitude while they stayed. They were prodigal of time, but did not kill it. If we offered them anything to eat or drink, as we gener ally did, they would receive it gravely and either consume it on the spot or stow it away in their clothing. Some things we found were not to their liking; but salty things, such as bacon or salt- crackers, they found very tasty, and above all did 42 UNDER A COMA S ROCK sweets appeal to them candy or sugar or a bit of preserve. A half-emptied tin of sweetened con densed milk, which we handed to a couple of women one day, seemed a special treat. One marked with her ringer on the can what would be half the contents, and after drinking to the line, handed the remainder to her companion to finish. This act illustrated another point we found characteristic of Indian nature the practice of sharing with one another. Even our half-shot Navajos had done that with their soda-crackers. Small Indian adventures these, you will say, but they served to endear to us these gentle Pueblos, whose childlike ways seem in keeping with the present era of peace that has settled on our Indian country; and when our Laguna boy came to take us back to the railroad, we felt a little as though we were leaving home. - " W mm -jil Chapter IV Of the Pueblos of tKe Railroad Side, Laguna and Isleta, and How Manuel Carpio Sang in tKe Sun. YOU will find them both rather prosy after Acoma; but if you want a -glimpse of Pueblo life at a minimum of exertion to yourself, you may have it at either Laguna or Isleta. These are both stations on the Santa Fe Railway, and the traveller has but to step from the train and walk a few rods to be within either pueblo. If you know a bit of Spanish, you will remember that laguna means a lagoon or lake, and you wonder at such a name for this village, founded on a rock-bound knoll, with not even a duck pond in the surrounding plain. It seems, however, that in olden times, there was really a marshy lake there, due originally to the constriction of the channel of the neighbouring little Rio de San Jos6 43 44 LACUNA AND ISLET A by a lava-flow, supplemented by the work of beavers, which industriously dammed the nar rows. The river waters, thus held back, spread out in the form of a lagoon, and hither about the end of the seventeenth century came certain pioneering Pueblos from various villages in the neighbourhood of Santa Fe and set up a new pueblo which was called and is still called in the Laguna tongue Kow-ike, meaning, they say, a lake. This unmusical name did not suit the Spanish, who, when they visited the pueblo to exact its oath of vassalage to his Catholic Caesarian Majesty, the King of Spain, redubbed it, "San Jose de la Laguna." The proximity of humanity was not agreeable to the beavers which, in the course of time, levanted and left their dams to the Pueblos to maintain. As the latter liked the lake, they accepted the legacy of the beavers and kept up the dams for several generations. About half a cen tury ago, however, internal dissension developed in the community, and while the disputing con tinued, the communal work was neglected. When peace returned, the lake was gone for ever vanished through breaches unrepaired. Laguna enjoys the distinction of being the first LACUNA AND ISLET A 45 pueblo to have had a white teacher appointed to it by the United States Government. That was in 1871, and this pueblo has ever since been pretty much under the thumb of the white educationists. A white man, Robert G. Marmon, was even elected governor of the pueblo at one time, and under the irreverent hand of American domination, one old-time custom after another has been swept into the ash-bin. Whatever essential good, if any, may have accrued to Laguna from all this, it cannot be said that it has helped Laguna s man ners, if the experience of Sylvia and myself is any criterion; for in no other pueblo were we so thoroughly given the cold shoulder as here, and we visited it several times. Sour looks and turned backs were the features of our reception at most houses, instead of the smile and hospitable "entra" which the average Pueblo extends to a visitor. "Oh, yes, we ve spoiled them both with ill- considered philanthropy and continually dumping impertinent tourists on them from the railroad here to pester them out of their lives," remarked an artist whom we encountered at the outskirts of the village, at work under a big umbrella; for 46 LACUNA AND ISLETA Laguna, with its rambling, hilly streets and skyey vistas, is full of picturesque bits for the folk of the brush; "if I were king for a day, I r d have a tight stockade built about every pueblo and put St. Peter at the gate to keep out all school teachers and missionaries whatsoever, and every tourist who had not passed a previous examination in good manners." 1 To Isleta the railway pays the especial compli ment of there stopping even its transcontinental limited trains, and travellers are thus afforded a leisurely look at the pueblo and an opportunity to buy pottery and fruit from the picturesque Isleta girls, who, at train time, flock about the station platform with their commodities. The Isletenos are enterprising traffickers and, in a small way, commercial travellers. Not depending on the 1 Besides their main pueblo of Laguna, these Indians main tain half a dozen farming villages in the neighbourhood, viz. : Seama, Pahuate, Paraje, Mesita, Casa Blanca, and Santana, established to enable the people to be near certain tracts of cultivated land. The jurisdiction of the governor and council at Laguna extends over all these outlying villages, the in habitants of which consider the mother pueblo their official home and repair thither, from time to time, for the joint celebra tion of native religious ceremonies. I am indebted to John M. Gunn of Laguna for several facts as to the pueblo and its history, given in this chapter. Pottery seller, Isleta. LACUNA AND ISLETA 47 buyers that come to them, they quite regularly make up bundles of the small pottery knickknack- ery which tourists love, and boarding the train, travel up to Albuquerque where the chances of sale are more numerous than at Isleta. Isleta pottery, by the way, is only good enough for tourists. The clay of the neighbourhood is not of the kind that makes first-class ware, and so, for their own use, the Isletas buy the jars of Acoma. In a land of poco tiempo, like New Mexico, there are more appropriate methods of travel than by train, and if you are at Albuquerque and have a day and six or seven dollars to spare, you will be doing the sensible thing by getting a team, put ting a luncheon in your pocket, and driving the dozen miles or so to the pueblo. Do not have a driver ; there is no danger of missing the way, and I never knew a hired driver yet that did not spoil a trip he is always in such haste to get it over. The road is a broad highway skirting the wide waters of the Rio Grande, and is one of the most picturesque in all the South- West, particularly in the late autumn, when the great cottonwoods, in their yellow glory, are lifted against the blue sky like gold on turquoise. 48 LAGUNA AND ISLETA So, one morning, through the delicious October sunshine did Sylvia and I fare to Isleta, traversing a typical New Mexico farming country, where drying chili-peppers streaked the landscape with scarlet, and ragged shepherds tended bands of sheep. Now and again we jogged through quaint adobe villages, mellowed by time s kindly touch and embowered in trees and shrubbery ; and where, about the store porches, groups of Mexicans were lounging picturesquely in the genial sunshine and, perhaps, thinking a bit of what they should do on the morrow ; for that day was too good to waste in work. Other travellers passed us on the way to Albuquerque, and men driving burros laden with boxes of country produce touched their hats to us and wished us Buenos dias. Once a Mexican wedding party filed past us a string of buggies, farm waggons, and other nondescript vehicles. In the lead were the bride and groom in a buggy to themselves, she looking seriously into a bouquet in her hand and he silently regarding the road between the horse s ears, while the end of the pro cession was brought up by an open spring waggon, in which the orchestra a violin, a flute, and a guitar sat in chairs and weightily smoked cigar- LAGUNA AND ISLETA 49 ritos. It was a taciturn company altogether, and we wondered if there had been a hitch in the pro ceedings or if it was the fashion with Mexican weddings to begin thus solemnly. It was the time of the corn harvest and we found Isleta literally buried under the drying ears of many colours, spread out to sun upon the roofs, and in the little plazitas before the houses, each plazita with a neat pathway to the door, left in the midst of the corn. We asked a woman looking out from a doorway for permission to photograph her yard full of corn, and she nodded acquiescence, backing into the shadow of the room. As we wanted her also in the picture, we invited her into the light; but she still held back. American-like, I thought she wanted to be paid. " Diez centavos," said I, holding out a dime. "No quiero," from the darkness. "Dos reales," I bid up, showing a quarter. "I no wish," repeated the darkness. Then Sylvia stepped into the doorway and, taking a seat that was hospitably proffered, explained carefully our desire to make the picture complete with an Isleta figure. Then the truth came out. The woman, it seems, did not live in 50 LACUNA AND ISLET A that house; she was only a visitor and it was not right for her to have her picture taken in another woman s house. By and by, the other woman would come home and maybe she would let us photograph her in the door; for it was her own house and that would be proper. "But me, no," concluded the woman in a tone that showed further parley hopeless. On its architectural side, Isleta differs markedly from the conventional pueblo, being built liberally over a wide space, with great trees in and around it, and the houses, as a rule, are of but one story instead of being terraced. They are neat and comfortable homes, furnished more or less on the American plan, with bedsteads, tables, and chairs, and now and then a chest of drawers. In most, however, an Indian flavour is preserved by Navajo rugs spread upon the floors or folded as mattresses upon benches extending along the whitewashed walls. The Isletenos are a thrifty community and everything about their pueblo betokens it. Proud and independent, they are, nevertheless, not averse to American innovations of a certain sort, when convinced of their suitability to Isleta, and they know as much as you and I about mow- LACUNA AND ISLET A 51 ing-machines, for instance, and baling alfalfa. Like all Pueblos, they work literally night and day when the crops demand it ; when nothing is pressing they have abundant leisure and know how to enjoy it. This explains our finding old Manuel Carpio seated in his American chair in the sunshine of his plazita, singing an aboriginal ditty at midday. His corn was all in the house; his melons were sliced and drying on the roof or jacketed in yucca strips and swinging from the rafters indoors to keep till winter; his chili -peppers were sunning in a vivid row above the door; and had not his wife, at that very moment, four fat sacks of wheat safe in the little black storeroom where her wafer-bread stones were set? There was something to sing about; why should he not sing? Seeing us looking through his bit of wicket gate, he beckoned us within, called to his wife to fetch two more chairs, and proceeded to find out, as well as our lame Spanish would let him, where we came from, where we were going, and how much Sylvia would take for the fur boa which she wore about her shoulders and which was evidently very lovely in the eyes of both Manuel and his 52 LACUNA AND ISLETA spouse, for their eyes glistened as they handed it from one to the other, stroking it longingly. We shall always think of Isleta as a very honest place; for, on leaving the Carpio home, Sylvia forgot the boa, and before she had discovered the loss, behold Martini ta running laughingly down the street after us, holding out the coveted article in her hand. Her Pueblo nature had merely seen a great joke in what another might have seized as an opportunity for theft of a coveted treasure. I 1 Isleta has been given a special place in literature through the delightful stories of Charles F. Lummis, who spent some years as an inhabitant of the village and had unusual opportunities to become acquainted with the inner life of this most interesting people. With unusual sympathy he has given expression to this life in several of his books notably A New Mexico David, and Pueblo Indian Folk Stories. Chapter V Of the THree Pvieblos of tKe Jemez River Valley, and SomewHat of JoHn Pavil, tKe CowHead IT was a little after seven on a frosty October morning when the Overland deposited me at Bernalillo and I looked into the welcoming Spanish face of Juan Pablo Cabeza de Vaca, who was there in response to my telegram sent the day before. Nearby stood his team of two natty little mares and an open buggy. Juan Pablo himself was attired in his Sunday best and wore a new, wide-brimmed sombrero with a wonderful hat-band. He was about to make ten dollars or possibly fifteen, and the occasion warranted some outlay for personal adornment. "Little cold weather this morning, " he observed affably, as we climbed into the buggy. "You want to Jemez 1 no?" I answered : Yes, by way of Santa Ana and Sia. 1 Pronounced Ha -mess. 53 54 JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS "Bueno," he replied, pulling on his gauntlets and picking up the lines. "Let s go!" Trotting jauntily through the wide, leisurely streets of the picturesque old county town, where no one was yet stirring, past the court-house, and down the shady lane behind the padre s, we came out upon a bleak little bridge that here spans the treacherous current of the Rio Grande. Crossing upon this and climbing a steep grade, we topped a broad mesa, sunburnt and wind-swept. There before us, mile upon mile, stretched white, desert sands, and far on the north horizon Cabezon lifted his dim, round head by the Rio Puerco ol the Navajos. Somewhere at our backs along the willow- fringed river, not far from where we had crossed, Coronado s army, three hundred and seventy years ago, spent their first New Mexico winter, quartering themselves in an Indian pueblo, from which the inhabitants were obliged to turn out and double up with their friends in an adjoining village. According to the Spanish chronicles, there were at that time a dozen pueblos in that vicinity, the largest being known as Tiguex. The result of an idle army of adventurers wintering in their midst JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS 55 was what the reader of American history will know without being told first rapine and ravishment by the whites, then retaliation by the outraged Pueblos, and finally a wholesale slaughter of In dians to teach the rest a lesson. Coronado s lieutenant, Alvarado, the first white man to see the Tiguex country, which this October morning I looked down upon, described the region as a broad plain by the river, "sown with corn plants" a description measurably apt to-day, as Juan Pablo showed me. Pointing with his whip up-stream, where the river came flowing out of the east through yellowing willows and cotton woods, as between ribbons of gold, he said, "You see some corn stalks? That is Ranchitos de Sant Ana the little ranches of Santa Ana, you say. The Sant Ana Indians they have a summer pueblo there along the river, and raise everything they eat, because the old pueblo land back in the desert where we go, no good for crops. They haul everything back to the old pueblo to eat up in winter time; then, in the spring, move down again at the river and raise some more. Pretty soon we see people hauling corn for old pueblo. After- while come winter" and Juan Pablo shivered 56 JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS dramatically "and everybody from Ranchitos go to old pueblo for stay. Lots of work that makes, no? but what else can they do? Old pueblo good for stay in. Ranchitos good for crops. You see?" As we passed over the next hill and down into a huge basin in the sand-dunes, waterless as Sahara, Juan Pablo s prediction was realised and we over hauled a train of laden Studebaker waggons at which teams of scrawny Indian ponies were tugging, urged on by the cracking whips of half a dozen picturesque Pueblos in flapping shirts and red bandas, plunging afoot through the sand alongside. There was a joke in the situation somewhere, and Juan Pablo and the Indians bandied it about among them with good-humoured laughter, until we left them in the rear. As the talk was an unintelligible mixture of Indian and Mexican, I could only guess how funny it was; but doubtless it was only a bit of the elemental joy of childhood, which the Pueblo Indian never outgrows. In an hour our wheels were crunching over the broad flats of the Jemez River at Santa Ana, where the white alkali fringed the river sides like a snow fall. Fording the thread of a stream, we mounted JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS 57 the hill past the picturesque Spanish church, and halted in the deserted pueblo. Doors were pad locked, windows boarded up, and the silence was so oppressive that even the barking of the mongrel dogs, which are the sentinels and scavengers of every live Indian village, would have been wel come. "Everybody away at Ranchitos, like I said," observed Juan Pablo. You like to walk around ? When I returned from an uneventful pasear, Juan Pablo had found a gossip an old Indian who, it seems, was the village caretaker in the absence of the population. He appeared anything but easy with our presence there, even the solace of a gift of tobacco failing to quiet him, and when, as we were starting away, I opened my kodak to take a picture of the village estufa, his suspicions were thoroughly awakened. He put his finger hesitat ingly on the camera and, leaning into the buggy, asked in excited Spanish what we were doing. "Brujeando," replied Juan Pablo calmly. The poor Indian leaped back as if he were shot, and flinging his arms up, cried, with fear depicted on every line of his countenance : " Vamos, vamos, vamos I" 58 JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS "What s it all mean?" I asked of Juan Pablo, as we drove off. "What did you tell him?" The descendant of the Cowhead grinned. "He want to know what you do with that machine. I told him you going to make witches in the pueblo. He thought I was tell the truth and was scare . Then he say get out !" Which was to be expected; for belief in witch craft is as active an influence among Pueblo In dians to-day as it was among our own respected forbears two or three centuries ago. That the Santa Anas should shut up their pueblo every spring and summer, as a millionaire closes his city house, transport themselves, bag and baggage, to their farming village by the river, and every autumn haul their gathered crops laboriously across ten miles of sandy, sun-scorched desert to the pueblo again, is a striking illustration of the love of home ingrained in the Indian nature. To the Yankee mind, the obvious dictate of common- sense would be to quit the worn-out desert land, and settle permanently by the river, where soil is tillable and water abundant. That would mean, however, the severance of old associations, sacred and personal, which bind their spirits mightily to II JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS 59 the crumbling old pueblo where the desert voices call. Of course, the Pueblo, under stress, does leave his dead- the South -West is marked with ruined terraced towns, which attest his rovings long centuries since ; but adverse circumstance has not yet been strong enough to make the people of Santa Ana abandon the spot where their fathers lived, died, and are buried. Thither they return not only with the winter frosts, but on occasions throughout the summer to bury their dead, and to render thanksgiving and praise to the gods of their destinies. From Santa Ana it is six miles or so of desert travelling to Sia, perched upon a Moqui-like promontory jutting out above the Jemez River. This is the most pathetic of all the pueblos, for it knows it is fighting extinction. The ground upon which it stands is a barren hill strewn with dark, round stones of malpais, and before it and below, extends the broad Jemez wash, winding mile after mile, leprous white with alkali, among the dunes of the desert. Far away on the north-eastern horizon stretches the long chain of the Jemez Mountains with their romance of the Cliff Dwellers buried cities, and ancient shrines of a vanished people. 60 JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS Once among the finest and most populous of all the pueblos, according to the chronicles of the Conquistador es, who set it down as Chia, Sia is now desolate, its population dwindled through wars and epidemics to a bare hundred, its buildings in partial ruin, and its light all but gone out. As we drove in, the Governor, a fine-looking man in orthodox Pueblo costume flapping, white, cotton trousers and cotton shirt, worn blouse-like outside of them, his head encircled with a red banda and without a hat, his feet encased in home-made moccasins came down to meet us and shook hands hospitably. Most of the dwellings are tenantless and, to the casual visitor, the place seems hopelessly lifeless and uninteresting. Yet here in moribund Sia a Government ethnologist, not long ago, spent a year with the richest results, enabling her to write one of the most illuminating and readable scientific reports extant upon any of the Pueblo communities. * Apart from the pueblo at the foot of the mesa, stands a small American building with a flagstaff before it, betokening a schoolhouse. Government Indian teachers, in my experience, are rather curt 1 The Sia, by Matilda Coxe Stevenson. Ysidro, Governor of Sia, in native attire. JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS 61 towards self-invited visitors; but the one at Sia, to my surprise, proved to be a real lady, who extended me, stranger that I was, as cordial a welcome as any Pueblo ever offered me, and that is the best praise I know. Moreover, she possessed unusual qualification, by virtue of sympathy with Pueblo Indian nature, to teach this sensitive people. " But it is sad business teaching here at Sia," she remarked, "and watching the dying of a race. They are so reduced in numbers, it is no longer possible for them to keep up their institutions and their healthfulness in the way their traditions re quire them to do ; yet they would rather die out as Sias than amalgamate with another pueblo. The Santa Ana people would like them to go over there, which would seem a sensible course, strengthening both peoples ; but the Sias cannot bring themselves to the surrender. It shows a fine spirit, I think, and I cannot help honouring them for it, suicidal as it is. At evening, as I sit here on my porch, looking up at the pueblo there, I often watch the old men walk along to that point jutting into the river, and there they stand for the longest time, looking pathetically out over the desert and up and down the river, until the dark- 62 JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS ness shuts down on them. I always wonder what their thoughts are : whether it is despair brooding over a prosperous past for Sia was a great pueblo once or hope in some promised saviour of their people, whose coming may any time gladden their eyes. But I am afraid it is only despair/ The sun was near its setting as our brisk little team splashed through the swift waters of the upper Jemez River, seven miles beyond Sia, and bore us into Jemez Pueblo, a homelike village with a picturesque setting of mountains at its back and a pleasant green valley dropping away before it. The peaceful evening scene was typical Pueblo. The smoke from indoor fires, where the evening meals were preparing, rose straight from scores of chimneys into the sweet, still air; fathers and grandfathers sat at their doorways, nursing little red babies as tenderly as ever women did, for to the masculine Indian heart nothing is more pre cious than the dimpled flesh of childhood; girls, bearing water- jars upon their heads, pattered into the pueblo from the river, and glad burros, dis charged of their burdens, tripped it lightly into their corrals. In the street before many houses men were chopping wood, while from open doors JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS 63 came the pleasant hum of the metate and the fragrance of grinding corn; and through all rippled the soft laughter of romping children, mingled, now and then, with a scrap of song from some grown-up s lips. Jemez enjoys the blessing of a bountiful water supply, which issues from the canons at its back. Fruit orchards and vineyards extend down to the river side, so that the menus of Jemez are as varied as Isleta s, and in good years there is a surplus of agricultural products to sell. To the tourist, a picturesque feature of the pueblo is an establish ment of Franciscan Brothers, set up here for the conversion of the Indians, both Pueblo and Navajo, in that corner of New Mexico. The Brothers, clad in their brown gowns and cowls and wearing the white cord of the order around their waists, work in the fields and about the mission buildings, and help us to picture that early day of the Spanish occupancy which was for the avowed purpose of seeing "that the Indians should become Christians and know the true God for their Lord and His Majesty the King of Spain for their earthly sovereign." In return for their spiritual offices, the Brothers collect from the Indians a tax in kind 64 JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS that is, chili, wheat, corn, etc. which is readily converted into money at the trader s. The trader, who has a room or two at the dis posal of travellers, was eloquent to me in his esti mation of his red clientele. He said that, in the thirty years he had lived in the neighbourhood, he had never heard of a man being killed in Jemez pueblo, a record not likely to be equalled in any American town of the same size, he thought. "Of course," he remarked, "they have their spats; but they talk it out, make up, and forget about it. When it comes to farming, they are just natural-born farmers and irrigators. There was a government farmer here, paid to teach them; but he could n t tell them much that would stick. And when it comes to work in irrigating land, no white man can stand up with them. The Indians just take off all their clothes, except a breech-clout, and wade right in. There is nothing about water that buffaloes them and they don t want no dinky hoe, neither. Why, bless you! you can t get a hoe too big for them. There was an old scoop shovel that I had here, lying about the place, which was just naturally rusting away, and one of them In dians come in one day and asked me if I would n t JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS 65 let him have it. I said: Why, what in thunder do you want of that?* Why, he says, it s ueno for hoe. Why, you know, the thing was nearly three feet across and I could n t see how he could lift it; but he could and, next thing I knew, he d made a peach of a hoe out of it. "Religious? Well, they don t mind belongin to the Catholic Church. You see, the Catholics don t particularly interfere with their native religion, which is the only religion that really goes down with them, and they never let up on that. All through the year, they have their own religious dances. There is one that comes in January that would pay you to come out to see. It is a dance of animals buffaloes, antelopes, and turkeys. They call it Los Reyes that s Spanish for Kings. There is a story that once some dancers, way back, turned into animals, and these Jemez folks think that they are liable to come home every year; so they go out at the time of this dance early in the morning, before sunrise, and after watching a. bit on the mesa back of the pueblo, they come down to the plaza and dance all day. Every morning there s something doing out on that mesa, I think; because the Indian priests go up 5 66 JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS there and what goes on we white folks don t know ; but it has something to do with their religion. The Presbyterians started a mission here once and they sure worked hard for several years; but all it netted them was one convert. He was a black smith here was n t no good, anyhow, and finally stole a man s gun and got arrested, and then the Presbyterians excommunicated him. After that, they decided to let Jemez go to Hades its own way. "Drinking? Well, of course they do some drinking; but it is mostly their own wine. They have lots of vineyards around here and make wine and barrel it up, and as long as it lasts, of course, they drink it. But I don t know as it harms them much. It certainly is n t as bad as sulphuric acid whiskey that they would get from the bootleggers. The big fiesta that they have on the twelfth of November, which is their Saint s Day, is very apt to wind up in a jollification when they all get drunk, and I suppose it would be better if they did n t ; but I don t know how it is going to be stopped. That is a big show you ought to see it : all sorts here, Navajos, Apaches, Mexicans, and Indians from other pueblos. " Shortly after supper, the trader closed up his JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS 67 store and he and I adjourned to his living room to enjoy the warmth of an open wood fire. There we were joined by an itinerant chili buyer who had been over at the Brothers house negotiating for their stock of chili. "They re sports all right, " he said, as he bit off the end of a cigar and stretched out his feet toward the grateful warmth. "They don t stand on no two-and-a-half cents a string like some folks I know" (with a wink at me and a jerk of his head toward the imperturbable trader), "and they always set out a bottle of wine. " "You bet these Pueblo Indians ain t half a bad lot," said the trader, as though he had not heard. "I say they re one o the best assets that this country has. They re hard workers by night just the same as by day, when the moon s right an the crops need it; and then, when they can be spared from the pueblo, lots of em go up to Colorado and work in the fields there at wages. I sometimes think they just naturally like to work, the way they joke and laugh about it when a white man d just swear and sweat sulphur; but, say, they sure are funny to trade with. You know, it s Indian nature to be close-mouthed. If you 68 JEMEZ VALLEY PUEBLOS want to get any information out of an Indian, it s no use asking him straight questions like you would a white man. He just plumb shuts up. And it s the same way when he comes to trade with you. You got to let him tell what he has to tell when he s ready. Just for instance one come into the store to-day and asked for a spool o thread. I knew it was n t no use to ask him what kind of thread he wanted; so I guessed black fifty and set it out. He shook his head and said he wanted big thread. So I guessed again and put out black number eight. No bueno, he said and handed it back. Blanco, he says, meaning white. So I handed him out a spool o white thread and that stuck. You see, that took up about five minutes of my time and his; but it was interestin and time s nothing to an Indian. " .5 3 ". *rt - Chapter VI Of OtHer Pueblos of tKe Upper Rio Grande, and How Santiago Quintana Travelled for Shells. WITHIN a distance of about fifty miles east of Albuquerque, along the Rio Grande, is a chain of four pueblos, three of which are plainly visible from the train and contribute their quota to the entertainment of the car window traveller. The first of these is Sandia, in the shadow of the Sierra de Sandia, beyond which, near Cerrillos, are the ancient turquoise mines of the Pueblos. Sandia is a moribund little place whose present population is only about seventy-five and half its houses are tumbledown or transformed into corrals and store rooms. It presents little interest to the casual visitor, but is rather important in its own estima tion at the time of the autumn harvests, when it enjoys a brief heyday of prosperity through the selling of corn and alfalfa to itinerant Mexican buyers who frequent the pueblo at that time. 69 70 SANDIA TO COCHITI After the Pueblo revolt against the Spanish rule in 1680, the Sandians for some reason so the old men say vacated their pueblo and moved to Moqui. A half century later, they returned to the old home, whether on account of the aridity of Moqui or because the voices of the past irresistibly called them, the historians do not say. However, they did not prosper ; and ill-fortune, in the Pueblo philosophy, means that the spell of witchcraft is on you. So Sandia settled down to witch-baiting so earnestly and so successfully that, to-day, there are not only no witches there, but almost nobody else. The next in order of this chain of pueblos is San Felipe on the opposite bank of the Rio Grande. You may, if you choose, drop off the train at a flag station within two or three miles of the pueblo and walk to the river, taking your chances of being ferried across by a team or pillioned behind some passing horseman. For myself, I found it more agreeable to leave the train at Bernalillo and engage Juan Pablo to drive me ten miles up the pleasant valley of the Rio Grande, through its rustling "corn plants" and its whispering willows. After an hour of this, our proximity to the SANDIA TO COCHITI 71 pueblo was indicated by our meeting Indians, sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot, some times in Studebaker waggons, on their way to the trader s tienda beneath the shady cottonwoods at Algodones. One old man in his bright red banda and clubbed chongo, his old-fashioned, flapping, cotton pantaloons and moccasins, was such a good picture of the ancient Pueblo type that we bar gained with him for his retrato. He was at first reluctant to consent; but when some of his brethren from the pueblo, travelling the same road, were out of sight behind a bend in the highway, he courageously agreed to accept a quarter and stand for the picture, but was manifestly nervous until the operation was over, lest some one else should appear and catch him posing. No one greeted us in San Felipe, as we drove past the old Spanish church with its twin towers and neatly- walled campo santo in front; for, being harvest time, most of the men of the pueblo were away in their fields, gathering their crops, and the streets were all but deserted. There was a mur mur of childish voices from the little school where the tired, anxious-faced teacher was endeavouring to drill her very cheerful little charges in the 72 SANDIA TO COCHITI rudiments of American education; and there was Rosario Sanchez, the village policeman, walking importantly about the pueblo, peering into sus picious corners for the purpose of discovering and rounding up such truants as were disposed to bolt the paths of knowledge. Now and then a girl passed by from the river, with her water-jar dripping on her head, and shyly kept in the shade as much as possible, so that any designs that the stranger might have upon her with the camera should be frustrated. An old man with one baby in the blanket at his back and another tagging alongside crossed the sunny plaza singing an Indian song doubtless an expression of the joy in his heart, but doubtless also with the ulterior view of instructing the little fellow at his side in some traditional melody of his people. In the sunshine before one of the houses, a shell-bead maker was rubbing upon a whetstone the bits of shell which he had broken up into small sizes and which, after being thus ground into proper shape, would be bored and made suitable for stringing with his primitive pump-drill that hung by the doorway. On some of the housetops women were spreading out ears of corn and round, fat melons A Pueblo woman bearing water home from the well. Open-air ovens in background. SAND I A TO COCHITI 73 to dry in the hot sunshine, and upon the outer walls of almost every house hung brilliant strings of chili. "A nice pueblo, this, " I said to a man who came out of a doorway. "Nice?" he replied, puzzled. "Nice? Quien sabe nice*?" Then I said: "Bueno pueblo," and he said: " Oh, bueno, si, " and laughed as though it were a great joke that "nice" should mean "bueno. " It was all a quiet, homelike scene and the people themselves were so evidently in full enjoyment of life that the sight would certainly have been a surprise to some concerned philanthropists three thousand miles off, who are anxious to change all aboriginal ways and to instil into the Pueblo mind the principles of the "higher life," ignorant or unobservant of the fact that these red brethren of ours have already chosen the simple path of a wis dom that is marked with pleasantness and peace. When the sun was straight overhead, marking high noon, I looked about for Juan Pablo, and found him comfortably seated in one of the houses upon a low stool and partaking of a hearty lunch spread upon the floor. There were frijoles, tor- 74 SAND I A TO COCHITI tillas, a fried egg or two, and a cup of black coffee, while in the three-cornered fireplace, there were warming more frijoles and coffee and tortillas of which a pleasant-faced matron smilingly invited me to partake without charge. From the rafters overhead hung a score of watermelons, each snugly harnessed in strips of soap weed, tied at the bottom into a neat bow like a necktie. There they would hang well into the winter and would be an item of refreshment in the wintry menu of dried things. As we ate, it seemed a fitting opportunity to obtain enlightenment on a point in New Mexico cookery that had never been clear in my mind, so I said to Juan Pablo as he dreamily sipped his black coffee: "What is an enchilada?" "It is something you make of bread and meat, chop up with chili, and all cook together. " "Do you have tamales in New Mexico?" I continued. "For sure," he replied with a joyful smile. "How are they made?" "Well, senor, they re made of some bread and chop meat, an chili cook together." SANDIA TO COCHITI 75 "In California we have tamales," I said; "but we use corn-meal not bread and wrap all up in a corn-husk before cooking. You don t do that with your tamales?" "Oh, yes, we wrap all that in the corn-husk and we use corn -meal, too." "Then how about the enchilada? Is that wrapped in a corn-husk?" "Si, senor, that wrap in the corn-husk." "Well," said I, "what is the difference, then, between the enchilada and the tamale?" "Well, senor, it is thees way: enchilada and tamale very much alike; but they re a leetle different, too, senor. " Then Juan Pablo, his luncheon finished, took a square piece of corn-husk from his pocket and reflectively scraped a little tobacco upon it, which, with deft fingers, he twirled into a cigarrito. "Leetle warm weather to-day, senor, no?" he observed, looking through the doorway into the sun. Another ten miles to the east, built upon flat bottom lands of the Rio Grande, is Santo Do mingo. Among all the pueblos this is the only one that we had heard spoken of as showing inhos- 76 SANDIA TO COCHITI pitality towards white visitors. This attitude, so far as it is a fact, is due probably to the deep- rooted aversion of these people to having their pictures taken, and picture- taking is a white man s habit. Even artists with the brush, whose guile less presence in freakish clothing beneath white umbrellas is tolerated and even enjoyed in other pueblos because of their aboriginal love of colour even artists have been denied the privilege of painting in the streets of Santo Domingo and have been summarily escorted without the walls. As for the man with a camera he is a very child of the devil to these primitive folk, and if he attempts to operate his infernal machine there, he is apt to have it smashed and himself ejected. Such being Santo Domingo s views upon American art, Sylvia and I decided that it would be best to bow to them ; so paint-box and camera were left behind when we drove over to the pueblo. Whether or not our manifestly free hands and air of conscious innocence had a mollifying in fluence, I cannot say ; but, in point of hospitality, we certainly had nothing to complain of. It was the day after the Feast of the Dead, which is a fiesta in all Roman Catholic pueblos, held annually SANDIA TO COCHITI 77 on the second of November; and in every home we entered, coffee, meat, and bread were set before us and we were expected, for the nonce, to make that home ours. At one house a watermelon was presented to us as we rose to go and water melons, you must know, are among the choicest of earth s fruits to the Indian, not to be lightly parted with. 1 It is not only in its antagonism to cameras and brushes that Santo Domingo s conservatism is manifested. The encroachments of the American school-teacher are even more distasteful, though less easily dealt with. The resistance to white education had led, at the time of our visit, to the abandonment of the local day-school within the pueblo; but the result of this has merely been the transference of the children to the Govern ment s big boarding-school at Santa Fe. Much as the pueblo authorities deplore this, they can- 1 Frederick Starr in his delightful volume for young people, American Indians, notes a similar cordi ality of welcome at Santo Domingo. "The old governor of the pueblo," he says, "rode out to meet us and learn who we were and what we wanted. On explaining that we were strangers who only wished to see the town, we were taken directly to his house on the town square. His old wife hastened to put before us cakes and coffee. After we had eaten, we were given full permission to look around. " 78 SAND I A TO COCHITI not help themselves, for the arm of the United States Indian Bureau is longer than the longest in Santo Domingo. In the matter of dress, too, the Santo Domin- gans conservative taste is manifested; for they still cling tenaciously to many of the old fashions which, under the influence of contact with the whites, are fast disappearing from most of the other pueblos. Especially is this noticeable in the attire of the women, who are often beautiful of countenance, and, as a class, are finely developed physically, and who still wear the quaint, sleeve less mania, or garment of one piece, which leaves one shoulder bare and reaches a little below the knee. The fashion is precisely what Castaneda, writing of Coronado s expedition in 1540, has recorded : l The women wear blankets which they tie or knot over the left shoulder, leaving the right arm out." Another feature of Santo Domingo, which is to be credited to the conservatism of its guiding spirits, is the sustained Indian quality of its ceremonial dances. August 4th is the date of the principal public fiesta of the year, and it ranks in beauty and in general interest with the religious SAND I A TO COCHITI 79 ceremonies of Moqui, Zufii, and Taos. The ac cessibility of Santo Domingo from Santa Fe and Albuquerque draws to this fiesta great crowds of Americans, Mexicans, and Indians of various kinds, who make a scene as picturesque in its way as the dance itself. The fourth of the pueblos with which this chapter deals is Cochiti. It is a small place now, ten miles or so up the river from Santo Domingo and far out of sight from the railroad. It has become so much Mexicanised that if you were to drop into it without knowing where you were, you would not be likely to take it for a pueblo at all, but, rather, for an ordinary Mexican town. The houses, one-story structures, are scattered about without much system, and very close to the en trance of the pueblo is a hideous one of frame, painted blue with a red roof the handiwork, we were told, of a Carlisle student. Any pueblo that tolerates within it a house like that is condemned out of its own mouth. The Cochiti Indians, what is left of them, are very hospitable and seem disposed to let the wave of Americanism wash over and engulf them without much protest on their part. The girls and women 8o SAND I A TO COCHITI are quite as likely to be found dressed in calico skirts and shirt-waists as in their native costume and have abandoned very largely the beautiful tinajas of their people for store buckets and lard pails in which they lug water from the river, by the hand, American- wise. They appear, on the whole, rather spiritless. They will even allow you to take their pictures without bargaining and are grateful for ten cents, if you care to give it to them, for the privilege. But even in Cochiti, the protest against Ameri canism is not entirely dead. There is Santiago Quintana, for instance. Santiago is a mucho rabio, who, in the councils of his people, stands vigor ously for the old order. We found him a lively old man, in flapping trousers and buckskin moc casins, and a discontented Mexican, whom we encountered loitering about the pueblo, informed us that things would be much easier for outsiders when Santiago was once dead and buried ; that he was a stubborn old fool. He seemed to us, how ever, just a kindly old Pueblo, who loved the ways of his fathers and wanted to see them main tained as the gods of Cochiti had directed. His eyes sparkled when we told him that we were from SAND I A TO COCHITI 81 California, and he plunged vivaciously into an ac count of a trip which, as a young man, he made thither in quest of the great water where the shells are cast up, which every true Pueblo prizes as the white man prizes pearls. He travelled all the way on foot, driving a pack burro before him, across deserts and over mountains, with leisurely stops by the way, and three moons had waxed and waned by the time he caught sight of the Pacific. Old as he was he looked to be seventy that marvellous journey was to him as if it had ended but yesterday. He was as familiar with the names of San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo as we were; and of the picturesque old pastoral life of California, which exists now only in books, Santiago knew infinitely more than we ever shall, for he was for two years a part of it. As he could stick to a horse s back like a Navajo, he found occupation as vaguer o on some of the big Spanish ranches which, half a century ago, were still untouched by the real-estate agent and the subdivider, and he must have laid by money, for his return was not afoot but on horse-back. "And Cochiti looked finer to you than ever when you got back, did it not?" we asked senti- 82 SANDIA TO COCHITI mentally. " There s no place equal to Cochiti, is there?" "Yes, there is," he answered unexpectedly, " California much better, bonito campo, mucho trigo t fruto t sandia, ah, sandia!" (beautiful county, much wheat, fruit, and watermelons, ah, the watermelons!). "But here in Cochiti are all my people, my cousins, my brothers, my friends, my children these are all in Cochiti and here my fathers lived ; so Santiago Quintana he lives in Cochiti." If you are ever at Cochiti, it will be worth your while to make a trip into the magnificent moun tain region north of the pueblo lands where numer ous ancient remains, attesting the romantic past of the Cochiti community, are to be found such as the sculptured mountain lions of the Potrero de las Vacas, the rock paintings of La Cueva Pintada, and the marvellous ruins of the Cave City on the Rito de los Frijoles. Perhaps Santiago will guide 1 This region, now under Governmental care, is more expedi- tiously reached by automobile from Santa Fe, if you like travelling to ruins by such conveyance. The Institute of Archaeology of that city has been active for some years past in uncovering and, to some degree, restoring the remains of this ancient city in the Frijoles Canon, one of the most complete and interesting ruins of the South- West. SAND I A TO COCHITI 83 you, or, if not, Natividad Arquero or another; but go, and when you return you will never again talk of America s lack of ancient ruins or of a past with out human interest. This region, rich beyond words in natural beauty and in archaeological interest, was first made known to the world by that sterling ethnologist, Adolph F. Bandelier, who made Cochiti his home for years, and whose romance, The Delight Makers, embodies in the form of fiction a wealth of information about Pueblo Indians and their ancestors of the cliff dwellings. Chapter VII Of Certain Pueblos near Santa Fe THE tourist in Santa Fe who has a few spare days upon his hands may entertain him self very pleasantly by hiring a team, or an automobile if he prefers it, and visiting the half dozen Indian pueblos which are within easy reach of New Mexico s ancient capital. Nearest is Tesuque, of which some mention has already been made, but which will increase in interest with acquaintance. It is an unobserving traveller who does not see something new upon each succeeding visit to an Indian town; for the Pueblo does not wear his heart upon his sleeve and by no means shows at first meeting all that he is. The proximity of Tesuque to Santa Fe nine miles has not been altogether good for Tesuque. The constant contact with traders and tourists has developed a decidedly commercial quality in this people, and they are paying much more at- 8 4 PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE 85 tention to the manufacture of indifferent curios for an undiscriminating tourist trade than to any serious prosecution of their native arts. Neverthe less, it is interesting to watch the moulding of such things as the imitation American pipes and tipsy vases, wobbly match-trays, and those hideous monstrosities, the rain gods, which are in every curio store in the South-West; and to see the returned scholars labouring at the bead-work which has been taught them in the Government school as a suitable and remunerative vocation for Pueblo artists. Such occupations are carried on in the common living-room of the family, while the hum of the metate fills the house with its dull monotone, and the slumbering baby, strapped securely on his padded board cradle, suspended by thongs from rafters in the ceiling, swings slowly back and forth. At Tesuque, more than at any other pueblo, we found our presence mainly tolerable in proportion to our willingness to spend money, and we got more than one ugly look when we declined to pay two prices for the indifferent wares that were plentifully set before us. Yet it was not so at all houses in many we found still the simple, uncal- 86 PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE culating hospitality of the unspoiled Indian, as at the home of Juanita Chinana. Her kind eyes took note of us as we sat at luncheon on a log in the shade of her man s corral, and she brought from her house two chairs for us to sit on, while her son pulled down a flake of alfalfa for our Dobbin. He looked surprised at the silver coin which we tendered him he was still too unso phisticated to expect payment for ministering to the wants of the stranger even though uninvited within the gates. The date of Tesuque s annual public fiesta, November I2th, is one of Santa Fe s gala days, and the road thence to the pueblo is crowded that morning with carriages, farm waggons, bicycles, horses, and automobiles, carrying visitors to the festivities. The character of this Indian dance differs in different years, but is always interesting, and, with the preceding mass and church proces sion, consumes the greater part of a day. Sitting on a housetop looking down on the great plaza at the dancers in their beautiful, barbaric costumes and kaleidoscopic colour, and on the encircling spectators, most of whom are Mexicans in more or less gay attire, we seem to be looking at a foreign A Tesuque mother and baby. The child is asleep in the cradle swinging by cords from beams in the ceiling. PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE 87 scene, so unlike is it to what we associate with our United States. The intoxication at Tesuque on these occasions is often a distressing concomitant of the novel beauty of the ceremonies, and at the time of our last visit, many of the Indian spectators were maudlin drunk before noon. The dancers themselves, however, were entirely sober and seemingly suitably impressed with the solemnity of the religious rite in which they were engaged; but it seems the debauch with them was simply postponed. When the shadows drew long across the plaza, and the dancers finally disappeared into their ceremonial chamber, we asked an Indian standing near us if there was anything more to come. "No," he replied ingenuously, "nothing more now except to get drunk. " About ten miles from Tesuque, beneath the shoulder of the snow-capped -Santa Fe "Baldy, " is nestled the pretty little pueblo of Nambe. Time was when there was a good deal doing at Nambe, which, like Sandia, had an evil reputation in the matter of witches; but those strenuous days are now past and the little place is very much Mexi- canised and down at the heel, and its atmosphere 88 PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE is rather melancholy. Nevertheless, the old Pueblo spirit is still there and on their annual fiesta, which takes place on October 4th, they render their public dance with a half dozen participants, just as joyously as though there were as many hundred. The country all about this pueblo is thickly settled by Mexicans whose lands are close up to the pueblo walls, and it will probably not be long before Nambe will become as thoroughly swallowed up by these neighbours of Spanish blood as the extinct pueblo of Pojuaque, l five miles farther down the Nambe River. Pojuaque, when its population had dwindled to ten, decided to quit ; and two or three years ago, the little remnant moved to Nambe, and now the looker-on in Pojuaque sees nothing to indicate that it ever was an Indian pueblo. If you are travelling by carriage and that is the ideal plan of travel among the pueblos you will find Pojuaque a convenient stopping-place for the night; and if you do stop there, you might do worse than lodge at Senora Bouquet s, whose long, rambling establishment, part residence, part store, and part stable, is set there by the road. The 1 Pronounced Po-hwa ka. PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE 89 Senora is the Spanish widow of a French husband "Old Man" Bouquet of fragrant memory. You will remember him if you have ever read Thomas A. Janvier s story, Santa Fes Partner. There is a famous well, embowered like a shrine among trees, just across the road from the house, and you must compliment the Senora upon the deliciousness of its waters; for there is no finer in New Mexico. You will enjoy a stroll through her garden of fruit trees, too a thousand of them, she will tell you, which she herself planted with her own hands when she came to Pojuaque, a bride ah, how many years ago, quien sabe? and now many are grown so big she cannot put her arm around them. From Pojuaque a few miles through a lonely, sun-scorched plain, un tilled and untillable, gashed and ditched by a thousand dry arroyos and bar rancas, and you come again to the Rio Grande and the pueblo of San Ildefonso, with its liberal plaza, an ancient cot ton wood in the midst. The pic- turesqueness of the pueblo has suffered in the last year or two by the erection of a barn-like Roman Catholic edifice within it, replacing the historic church of adobe, which, dating from the time of the 9 o PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE early Spaniards, had become unsafe. 1 Looking down upon the pueblo is a huge, flat-topped moun tain of black lava the Mesa Huerfana, as the Mexicans call it, that is, "The Orphan." Upon its summit San Ildefonso sought refuge when, after the bloody Pueblo uprising in 1680, the avenging army of De Vargas appeared on the other side of the Rio Grande. The siege of the Black Mesa lasted nine months off and on, accord ing to Lummis, the beleaguered Indians resisting four assaults upon their Gibraltar-like fortress; but Spaniards, in those days, were of a mettle hard to conquer and the San Ildefonsans were finally brought to knee. They had gone up free men of the plain, but they came down vassals of the Spanish King. The San Ildefonso which we know to-day, at the foot of that black mount of humiliation, is not the original pueblo; that stood across the river. As at Nambe, the Mexican invasion of San Ildefonso has begun and is, little by little, en croaching upon the distinctive Pueblo features of 1 In that ancient church, it is stated by Bandelier, Jean rArche"- veque, who betrayed the French explorer La Salle to his death, was married in 1719 to a Spanish lady. PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE 91 the place. The Indians are very hospitably dis posed to white visitors, kindly and good-humoured, and our memory of their home by the great river is full of the joyous laughter of children, which even the dull tasks of the Government day school at the town s edge have not quenched. "Yes," sighed the schoolmistress in charge at the time of one of our visits an elderly New Eng- landish spinster upon whom the responsibility of her lively pupils lay very heavy "that s one trouble with them they are too happy. If they only realised their real condition in life, there would be some hope of their improving. " Eight miles up the river from San Ildefonso is the Americo-Mexican village of Espanola, where you may put up your tired team and rent a room from Shorty. Shorty, the Boniface of Espanola, is a spectacled gentleman of middle age and five feet three, stouter than is safe to be, red-visaged, and during our acquaintance with him, never known to be separated from a half-chewed cigar gripped in the corner of his mouth. He keeps a saloon for the bibulous, while " Mamma" ministers to the pangs of the hungry by running in the rear of the premises a dining-room of an excellence far 92 PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE above what the surroundings would lead one to expect. Here at Espanola you are within easy reach of the wonderful cliff of Puye, with its ancient cavate dwellings and its buried pueblo; and you are not far from Chamita, the site of the first Spanish settlement in all New Mexico; nor from Abiquiu of the Penitentes; nor from Sanc- tuario, famous for miracles. Near at hand, too, are the Indian pueblos of Santa Clara and San Juan, as well as San Ildefonso, which has just been mentioned. Santa Clara, indeed, is within after-supper walking distance, and there is no pleasanter time of day than day s close to visit the place. The pueblo is on a sandy dune, a mile or two south of Espanola, overlooking the Rio Grande, which here winds its muddy course through sunny, green bottom lands before disappearing around the Black Mesa of San Ildefonso, to be swallowed up in the wild gorge of the Pena Blanca Canon above Cochiti. Beyond the river, the jagged peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Sierra lift themselves against the sky the Truchas, the Santa Fe "Baldy, " and the cratered Peak of the Lakes, exceeding 12,000 feet and often snow-clad even in summer. Bande- PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE 93 Her, in one of his New Mexico papers, vividly describes the beauty of this scene. If one stands in the evening [he writes], when the sun is setting and the shadows are already cast over the valleys, on the swell above the church of Santa Clara, he will see the snow-peaks glowing for a little while in fiery red. The crags of the Truchas blaze like flowing ore. An Alpine lustre is displayed, less soft in colours than that of the central mountains of Europe, but much more intense and longer lasting. The mountains stand out ghostly pale as soon as the last glow is extinguished, and a white shroud appears to rest upon the landscape. One is not long in Santa Clara before noticing that many of these Indians are taller and more slender in build than the short, stocky Pueblos of the south. Their hair, too, is worn differently, being parted in the middle and braided at the sides. This difference in look has been attributed to a probable mixture in past times with their nomadic neighbours, the Utes, the Apaches, and the Navajos. The Santa Clara women have made a substantial reputation for themselves as makers of a peculiar, shiny black pottery, the best of it very beautifully fashioned; for, being without decoration, its at- 94 PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE tractiveness must necessarily depend largely upon form. The clay of the region naturally burns red, but the potters long ago found that, by smudging the fire at a certain stage in the opera tion, the black smoke is absorbed by the clay and results in a permanent black. Our interest in pottery at the time of our first visit to Santa Clara several years ago developed an unexpected evi dence of the innate honesty of the old type of Pueblo nature. We had bought some specimens of black ware from old Piedad, and noticing on a shelf some newly moulded forms, still unburned and showing the reddish nature of the raw material, we offered to buy one. She shook her head vigor ously, and when we persisted in wanting it, she turned her distressed old face towards a young man whose short hair, indifferent manner, and recumbent attitude betokened the Government scholar, and said something to him in the native tongue. Interpreted, it meant that he should tell us that such ware would not hold water and it was not right to sell pottery until fired; for it would melt away and what then would we have for our money? It was only after she was made to under stand clearly that we knew this and would not . San Juan woman in her doorway. Note the boot-like moccasins, worn in certain pueblos. PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE 95 subject the pottery in any way to the action of water, that she consented, though still reluctantly, to let us bear away a piece. San Juan, also on the banks of the Rio Grande, but north of Espanola eight miles, was the town that gave to the Pueblos their most famous leader, Pope. He was the organiser of that one unani mous and, therefore, successful revolt of the Pueblos against Spanish rule, which occurred in 1680 and resulted in their killing or driving every Spaniard from the Pueblo country, and keeping them out for twelve years. San Juan is in the midst of a rather populous Mexican community, as populosity goes in New Mexico, and a well- travelled public highway runs through the pueblo lands. On it John Barleycorn travels all too frequently and San Juan s morals, as well as Santa Clara s, are not bettered by the fact, if the school-teacher s gloomy report to us as to the prevalence of inebriety there is correct. The day we spent at San Juan, however, every one was sober and reasonably happy. Old men sat in the sun at their doors, mending tattered moccasins, and, now and then, one reminiscently sang a scrap of song as he sewed ; women busily came and went, 96 PUEBLOS NEAR SANTA FE preparing the street ovens for the wheat-bread baking; and pleasant-faced girls with glistening black Una j as of water on their heads, as at Santa Clara, the gourd dippers clinking against the rims, filed in from the well. Farm waggons loaded with corn or with wood, and now and then a slaughtered sheep on top, creaked in from the country, and children played about everywhere. It may have been here that one toddler stumbled over a log and, hurting itself, fell to crying. A returned student, who had been sullenly sitting in the shade watching us, jumped to his feet with every sense alert, and gathering up the little fellow, soothed it as a woman would. " If the Pueblos are ever to be saved as Pueblos, " murmured Sylvia, "it will be a little child that will keep them." Chapter VIII Of Taos and tKe Way THitKer. THOUGH you are a native-born American and though you may have travelled from Maine to Florida and from New York to California, and though you may have encircled the entire globe a time or two, I wonder if you have ever heard of the Taos 1 country. The chances are that you have not; yet it is one of the most delightful regions of our delightful country. Not the least interesting part of a visit to Taos, lapped in the heart of the Southern Rockies, one hundred miles north of Santa Fe, is the getting there. The nearest railroad is the Denver & Rio Grande s Santa Fe branch, which binds Colorado s capital to New Mexico s. You leave this line at a choice of stations, Servilleta being as good as any, having first written or telegraphed the livery at Taos to meet you with a team; for the little way- 1 Pronounced Towss. 9 97 98 TAOS PUEBLO station in the wilderness has no accommodations for travellers. A drive of thirty glorious miles is now before you, across a sunny, open mesa country, rimmed about with magnificent mountains, which the declining sun touches with fascinating colours pink and red and wine, amethyst and violet and purple. Half-way on your journey and without warning, the highway runs out to the brink of a narrow, precipitous gorge, and six hundred feet below you, the current of the Rio Grande plunges and roars. Down it, into the depths, your team picks its way gingerly by a road cut out of the perpendicular canon sides to meet the river and to cross it. There is a little riverside stopping-place down there where you may break your journey, if you wish; then, climbing out of the gorge by the canon of the Arroyo Hondo, where a hurrying stream of clear mountain water flashes and bounds down among rocks, you are again upon the wide plain. Before you is the ineffable splendour of the Rockies, their sides all splashed, if it be autumn, with the orange and gold of the aspen groves, and yonder, at the mountains foot where one canon, the Glorieta, more noble than the rest, pours a flood of crystal water out into the plain, lies Taos. TAOS PUEBLO 99 Speaking of Taos one must discriminate; for there are three of it. First in point of size, there is Fernandez de Taos, a Mexican village with its adobe houses and gardens half -hidden behind adobe walls, its picturesque lanes and its shady plaza, its shops with their signs in Spanish and its Spanish newspaper, its memories of Kit Carson, and its summer colony of Eastern artists, who find the place as foreign of atmosphere as Egypt is; then there is Ranches de Taos, into which the first village merges in one direction; and, lastly, there is Taos pueblo, which lies a couple of miles beyond the village in another. Of the three, the oldest is the pueblo, the most northern of all pueblos and, in old times, the most exposed to harassment from the Comanches and other predatory tribes of the buffalo plains. So hard, indeed, did those savages press the Taos Pueblos, some after scalps and some after horses, that the Taos people, to save them selves from extermination, offered grants of their fertile and well- watered lands to Mexican immi grants to help keep the marauders in check. So the Mexican settlements came to be and Taos pueblo remains on the map. The last mile of the road to the pueblo is a shady ioo TAOS PUEBLO lane banked high with wild roses, wild plum trees, and clambering clematis. Off to one side a line of willows marks the course of a stream, and out of the tangle of bushy growths comes the music of hidden waters rippling over stones. Openings, here and there in the wild hedge, reveal little fields of wheat and tasselled corn, fringed about with masses of purple asters, yellow sunflowers, and bigelovia, and here groups of bareheaded Taos Indian men are at work, their blankets wrapped about their waists and falling to their knees, resembling skirts. This sort of attiring, combined with a fashion of wearing the hair parted in the middle, the divisions braided and hanging down in long side-locks in front of each shoulder, gives the men a remarkably feminine look. They are a tall, athletic-looking lot, as a class, however, and thoroughly masculine, though the Pueblo gentle ness shows in their faces. All this while we see nothing of any Indian village, but now a turn in the road brings us into the open and there, ahead of us, through trees, we catch sight of some outdoor threshing floors where horses, driven around and around by Indians, are treading out the grain, like the un- TAOS PUEBLO .- A . . ,.ipj. muzzled oxen of Scripture, and beyond rise the two great pyramids that constitute Taos pueblo. Between them flows a broad, never-failing stream, issuing in transparent purity out of the Glorieta Canon at the pueblo s back. It is a poetic situa tion, and in the morning, when the smoke of a hundred hearth-fires rises into the crisp air, or at evening, when the mountains that look protect- ingly down on the peaceful village glow in the sunset like altars alight, the sight is an unforget table one. To the scientifically inclined, Taos is fascinating as an architectural study, being, among contemporary pueblos, the most perfect specimen of the terraced style of house-building, the stories of one pyramid numbering five and of the other seven. These structures are, indeed, not com munal residences in the sense of their being common to all, but rather are aboriginal apartment houses. Each family has its suite of two or three rooms opening out on its terrace, and maintains its own individual privacy of life, as though living in a separate structure. The governing powers in Taos have very old- fashioned views as to conduct, and it is law here that all the men, whatever they may do when 102 TAOS PUEBLO working outside, shall, within the pueblo, go with out hats and shall enter no house without their blankets on. Perhaps it is this edict which has given rise to the prevalent fashion among men in summer weather of wrapping themselves in white sheets ; for woollen blankets would at that season be uncomfortably warm during the daytime. White, however, is a favourite among colours and blankets of white flannel or wool are cherished possessions. In its way, Taos is quite progressive. The hum of the sewing-machine is heard from many an open door. McCormick harvesters reap the wheat that, not long ago, was pulled by hand. Studebaker waggons and sturdy horses have largely supplanted the burro, and the postmaster at Fernandez de Taos will tell you that Taos pueblo trades by mail with the Cheyennes and Utes beyond the mountains. Yet, when Pablito Antonito went a step farther in progressiveness and, as an American citizen, appealed to the county court for redress in a dispute with a fellow Indian of Taos, he became disgraced in the eyes of the pueblo for carrying his quarrel outside. So, too, when Mar- quitos and Felipa, fresh returned from Carlisle or it may have been Grand Junction or Riverside, 7. TAOS PUEBLO 103 married and put a big American window, sash and all, in their front room, public sentiment made matters so warm for them that they had to remove it and restore the little old peep-hole which conservative Taos believes in. You may see the very window yet, where the walling-up of the enlargement is still plain. There is progress and progress. While no Pueblo Indians, as a tribe, have ever been at war with the United States, Taos has the distinction of having been pretty close to it. There has always been a certain masterful quality in the make-up of the Taos Indians, which has made them prone to be on hand when a fight was in progress. Pope of San Juan, who headed the red rebellion of 1680, was a resident of Taos for some time before he launched the trouble, and undoubt edly had strong counselling there. In the turbu lent decade or two prior to the Mexican War and the gathering of New Mexico into the fold of the United States, the co-operation of Taos Indians was often asked and obtained by the New Mexi cans in the carrying out of their plots. One of the New Mexico governors, under the pre- American regime, was a Taos man, Jose Gonzalez (1837-8), io 4 TAOS PUEBLO and the first American governor, Bent, was murdered in cold blood as the result of a conspiracy of revolutionary Mexicans, aided by Taos Indians. Mute testimony to the avenging of this atrocity is the ruin of the old Catholic church in Taos, battered down in the attack on the pueblo by American troops seeking the murderers. All this Taos obstreperousness, however, was individual work. It is so contrary to what we know of the Pueblo mildness of character when even half- decently treated that one is inclined to believe that, at Taos, as at Santa Clara, there has been some admixture of Plains Indian blood, Comanche or Apache, and that it crops out now and again in the love of a fight. Chapter IX Of the Fiesta of San Geronimo at Taos, and the Delight Makers. ""IT 7 ANT to buy some greps, senora, no ? " \ /\ / " uena sandia, treinte centavos!" ?Y " Duraznos, mucho barato I 11 " Compra melones, compadre? Melones mitcho uenos!" You might think it market day in some town of Old Mexico, but you are still under the Stars and Stripes and it is only the Fiesta of San Geronimo at Taos. The edges of the great plaza in front of the north pueblo are jammed with waggons, loaded with grapes, apples, peaches, melons, Indian pottery, and blankets, the virtues of which are set forth in Spanish or crippled Eng lish, according to the nationality of inquiring buyers. Between the waggons and the grand promenade before the houses is a line of gaudily decorated booths of lemonade- and sweetmeat- 105 io6 THE FIESTA AT TAOS vjendors and of fakirs of various sorts of catch penny trinkets. It is only nine in the morning, yet, outside, the terraced houses are lined from base to apex with crowds of spectators, waiting for the ceremonies that are to come off no one knows just when, but "poco tiempo", and mean time is not the sunshine pleasant to the soul, and the moving picture of the foreign-looking crowd entertainment enough? Every moment brings new arrivals, ahorseback and afoot, in farm waggons and in buggies. Though Americans are the dominant race in the land there is but a sprinkling of them in the vast throng, but gathered from a wide radius ranchers, school-teachers, store-keepers, invalids, an artist or two, seeking diversion in this half-barbaric fiesta as city folk visit a play. Mexicans are most in evidence, the elderly men and women in sober black, the girls in bright-hued silks and calicos, the fit of which cuts little figure, the colour being the thing; and the Pueblo women are only a shade less gay in their showy upper garments and silver necklaces. Taos men, blanketed or sheeted to the eyes, stalk about in the crowd or stand watching the photograph man, with his little nickel cannon, make retratos THE FIESTA AT TAOS 107 of foolish Mexicanos and Mexicanas in their gala finery. Here is a Pueblo family from Picuris, the man s unhatted head picturesquely crowned with a chaplet of quivering aspen leaves; here is another from far San Ildefonso, with a load of pottery jars to sell ; there are a couple of phlegmatic Apaches in sombreros with long feathers stuck in the band, and in their ears silver earrings set with turquoise, their hands holding beaded belts and beaded moccasins for whoever will to buy ; and over yonder is an alert-eyed Navajo, carrying upon his arm blankets which, however much he may asseverate that they are his squaw s own weaving, have probably been entrusted to him by some crafty white trader to sell to the gullible tourist at two or three prices. All this while the church bell is clanging at intervals, and worshippers in relays crowd into the church and crowd out again ; but it is not so much this as the aboriginal features of the fiesta that interest the lookers-on from the housetops. These features are threefold : There is a short dance of blanketed Indian men bearing upright branches of quivering aspen, facing each other in two lines and yelping from time to time like coyotes. Then io8 THE FIESTA AT TAOS there is a hotly contested foot-race between the young men of the two pyramids, the participants naked, except for a kilt of some kind about the loins, and with feathers emblems of flight in the hair, down the arms, and encircling the ankles. Finally there are the antics of a group of clowns, chiffonetti or "delight makers," as Bandelier calls them. Their faces and naked bodies smeared with paint, and their hair entwined with rustling corn- husks, these buffoons come suddenly bounding and yelping into the plaza and set the crowd into an uproar of laughter with their horseplay, which continues off and on for hours. Nothing is safe from their irreverent touch. They steal peaches from a waggon and, starting to eat, spit them out with a wry face as if bitter; they swarm up a ladder to a housetop and into a room, whence screams and laughter announce some prank, and in a moment they reappear, one bearing a water melon. Descending to the plaza, the thief stands the melon on his head and the others line up before him and dance and chant in mockery of some ceremony. Taken with a sudden thought, they all sit down in a circle on the ground, and leaning THE FIESTA AT TAOS 109 forward, seem intent on some wonder in their midst. This, of course, excites the curiosity of the crowd, who draw near only to be blinded with showers of dust which the rogues throw over their shoulders. Then they rise, put their heads plottingly together, looking, from time to time, into the crowd. Suddenly they advance, grab a man from it, and lifting his struggling form, carry him in triumph up and down the plaza, meantime blowing horns which they have gotten somewhere. Then they drop the fellow and there follows a series of im promptu contortions, stoopings and twistings and leapings, tooting horns backward between their legs, climbing upon one another s shoulders, until their ingenuity seems at its limit, and they stand meditating, finger to forehead. Then another whispered consultation, and separating, they wan der off amid the crowd. All at once there is a shout, followed by a childish scream of terror. A little boy in fiesta attire of new purple trousers has met the eye of one of the clowns, who swoops the frightened urchin from the ground and, swing ing him under his arm, marches off with him towards the river, followed by the other chiffonetti, sounding blasts upon their horns. Arrived at the I io THE FIESTA AT T A OS stream, the little kicking form is dropped into the water, whence the boy is fished out by his observ ant mother and piloted home to be dried off, while the buffoons, grunting and wagging their rascally heads, trudge back to the plaza. The climax of their sports is the climbing of a greased pole at the top of which sundry prizes melons, cakes, a whole sheep, and so on are slung. These secured, the clowns fade away to their estufa, and quite undramatically the fiesta comes to a close. Among the fiestas of the New Mexico Pueblo Indians there is none that the traveller is more often urged to attend than this of San Geronimo, held annually on September 3Oth. As an Indian ceremony, it is rather disappointing, though a short dance at sunset the evening before, in which, as on the fiesta day, the participants bear branches of quivering aspens, is very striking, with its background of the evening shadows and the sunset light glorifying the orange and yellow foliage of the shaken branches. But the inter est of the San Geronimo day is mainly in the pic turesque crowd which assembles in the old pueblo, the largest gathering, probably, that ever attends any of the South- Western Indian dances. This is THE FIESTA AT TAOS in due in part to the added attraction of a Mexi can fiesta of several days duration during the same week, held at Fernandez de Taos, which draws several thousand visitors from all over North-Eastern New Mexico and Southern Colo rado Mexicans, whites, and Indians of several tribes. Chapter X Of Picwfs in tHe Country of tKe Penitentes, and How Francisco Dxiran s MotHer Covilcl not Forget. WHEN you are through with Taos, you will do well to return to the railroad by way of Picuris pueblo that is, pro vided you are sound of heart and lungs ; for Picuris lies eight thousand feet above the sea, encompassed by mountains which must be crossed at an altitude of ten thousand. This is a superb trip in itself, though a rough one, and you need for it a stout team and an experienced driver. "The team f s all right," said the livery man, as he came to see us off and patted the two fat horses, big enough for Brobdingnag, "and Ballard s all right; he 11 deliver the goods. " Ballard, the driver, a serious-faced, square- jawed youth, made no response to this encomium, except to say, "So long," as he gathered up the 112 THE PICUR1S COUNTRY 113 lines and drove us off into the glorious New Mexican sunshine of the clear October morning. For several miles the road traversed a valley country, crossed now and again by little brooks of sparkling water, fresh sprung from the high moun tains at our backs. On every hand were apple orchards where the reddening fruit glowed cheer fully beside some low, rambling ranch-house, look ing to Eastern eyes less like a home than a fortress, with barred gates and a high adobe wall joining the house to the corrals and outbuildings, the whole forming a square about an enclosed courtyard. And then, without warning, ranches and green pastures were as a tale that is told and we were winding upward through wild ravines, beneath huge, scattering, forest trees, and climbing, climb ing, climbing the "U. S. hill," the steepest and about the poorest apology for a highway in New Mexico. Never any too good, it was now at its worst from the unrepaired effects of the summer rains, and in many places the original road was washed entirely away, leaving only a wrack of rocks and gullies behind it. At such spots Ballard would alight, prospect for a promising way around, and then our team would blaze a new road through ii 4 y THE PICURIS COUNTRY brush and boulders until the old one was picked up again. And all the time we were climbing mile upon mile as up the side of a steep-pitched roof. We now saw the reason for the Brobdingnagian horses. They flinched at nothing; took arroyos and boulders with composure, and when the steep mountain steepened more sharply, leaned but hard er into their collars. Nevertheless, at approach ing two miles above sea-level, even Brobdingnagian breath comes short, and as the summit ridge grew nearer, Ballard would call a halt every fewliundred feet, jam down the brake, and let the horses blow. Though the acclivity sometimes seemed nearly forty-five degrees, so that the team clung like a fly to a wall and Sylvia and I fully expected to see the unblocked wheels, when the brake was released, fly backward and carry us all over the cliff, the strength and temper of the horses were always equal to the resumption of pulling without the loss of an inch. "Cussedest proposition in the South- West," remarked Ballard with simple fervour, when, the top at last reached, he lit a cigarette and looked backward down the mountain. Once over the divide, however, the beauty of THE PICURIS COUNTRY 115 the scene was inexpressible, as we bowled along across open, natural parks, their grassy expanses brightened with wild bloom, and set in the midst of magnificent, coniferous forests, whose inter spaces were golden with the heavenly sunlight. Now and then the road descended into some little, sequestered valley where running waters made the raising of wheat and chili possible, and here was always the conventional Mexican village of adobe, clustered about a Catholic church with its cross- surmounted steeple and bell. On the outskirts of these hamlets, often in the wildest, loneliest spots, would be a rude wooden cross planted near the roadside in a heap of stones, and again on the summit of some hill whose sides were a mass of flinty stones and thorny cactus clumps, there would stand a taller cross. "They are set up by the Penitentes," Ballard said, in reply to our question. "The Penitentes are a sort of Catholics who believe if they turn out in Lent stripped to the waist and walk barefooted over sharp stones, with loads of cactus packed on their bare backs, and whip themselves at the same time with whips knotted with bits of sharp iron till the blood runs off their bodies like rain, it 11 n6 THE PICURIS COUNTRY make up for the sins they have committed during the year. Gosh! it ought to; for I m here to tell you cactus hurts, to say nothing of the whips and the stones. None of that society for me, unless I could be an honorary member. " "Are these Indians who do this?" "Not on your life," Ballard replied, "they ve too much sense. No, it s these greaser Mexicans. Now, those hills you see with a big cross on top, they call them places Calvary, out of the Bible, and, 7 on Good Friday, they always hold some special doings in such places, and time has been and not long ago, either when one of the bunch more fanatic than the rest would have himself crucified there. But the Church won t stand for that, and they have had to cut it out, though I would n t swear it is n t yet done on the quiet. These little crosses near the road are where funerals have stopped on the way to the graveyard. Descansos they call them that means rest and whenever a pious Penitente comes along, he is supposed to say a prayer and chuck a stone or two on the pile at the foot of the cross to help his cousin out of purgatory; for pretty much all Mexicans are THE PICURIS COUNTRY 117 "And how does all this affect their morals?" we asked, our thoughts still on the penitential stripes. "Do they try to be good for the ensu ing year so as to weaken the next dose of self- torture?" "No, it works just the other way. They d rather play the devil for eleven months in the year any time, if they re sure they can wipe off the score with packing cactus for a week or two. Why, I ve known a man to cut himself all up within an inch of his life, so he had to go to a hospital to get made over; and when he got out, he was as bad as ever again. Worse, in fact. It s human nature, if you believe in the cure. Oh, they re a hard outfit, all right!" And so into Penasco with its one rambling street, and, at the end of it, Senor Smith s veran- dahed adobe home, with flowers blooming about its posts, and a big room placed at our disposal, with two soft beds and windows open to all outdoors, and a pretty Mexican maiden who, as she with drew after filling the pitchers, said in the pleasant Spanish way, "You are in your own home; please let us know if there is anything you want. " Two miles from this Penitente village of Penasco n8 THE PICURIS COUNTRY and you are on the rim of a fertile valley through which the little Rio Pueblo winds its beneficent way between fields of corn and apple orchards and thickets of wild plum to join the Rio Grande, and by its banks Indian women kneel to wash their clothing and their wheat. On a slight eminence in the midst of the valley is the pueblo of Picuris, a mile and a half above the sea, yet high mountains look down upon it, their rounded summits, that early October morning when we first saw them, crowned with fields of snow above aspen belts of gold. Time was, if tradition is to be trusted, when Picuris boasted its four thousand fighting men; but pestilence swept off much of the population at a breath, and the spirit of emigration took away others; so that the Picuris of to-day harbours a bare two hundred souls to keep alive the ways of the red fathers of the pueblo. Mexican squatters dwell on the lands by the river and a Penitente morada, or meeting place, is established in the very shadow of the ancient Spanish church where San Lorenzo keeps watch and ward over his diminished flock. "Yes, they re pretty fair Catholics," said the THE PICURIS COUNTRY 119 bachelor school-teacher, who left his breakfast dishes to welcome us a rare proceeding for a Gov ernment servant in the Indian country ; " that is, they go to the priest to marry them and send for him to bury them, if he comes within twenty-four hours, else the dead man is blanketed and buried anyhow. Certain corn-lands by the river are set aside to pay for the priest s fees, which he gets in a lump for the year s services. But, all the same, the old Indian faith is the one they live by and is zealously kept alive. There is a lot goes on in the old under ground estufas up there, and at ancient shrines in the hills that no white man knows of. It was only the other day one of the Indian men came to me and asked permission for his boy to be absent from school for four days. What for? I asked. That is not for you to know, he answered. It sounds like a saucy speech to a representative of the United States Government, but he did not mean it so, and I knew very well it was some religious rite that was to be performed, school or no school; so I said, All right. The boy was back at his desk in four days, and I said, Como sta, Pablito? and he said, Bueno, and so the matter ended; but that scholar knew something 120 THE PICURIS COUNTRY I did n t and never will nor any other white man." To the student of antiquarian tastes, Picuris has a special interest, by reason of certain old ruins there which stand, cheek by jowl, with the more modern dwellings that form the main part of the pueblo. One of these ruins is the so-called Scalp House, in which hang scalps taken from conquered enemies of a former generation, perhaps by some of those four thousand fighting men aforemen tioned. Less gruesome is the Casa Vieja or the "old house," an example of the mud architecture of the pre-Spanish pueblo. One of the first things the Pueblos learned from Spain was the making of brick. Before that, where stone was not used, they built up walls by making a mud base, and when this was dry, piling more on top, and so on. This method the Casa Vieja plainly shows. Picuris seemed deserted of natives until we in nocently drew out the camera. Then, apparently from the earth before us, sprang an old man the war-captain, it turned out in tight trousers with wide flaps down the side, who put his veto upon our photographic intent. The schoolmaster ar- THE PICURIS COUNTRY 121 gued with him in Spanish and we in English ; but he was adamant against the taking of pictures in the pueblo, unless we paid five dollars. As we could see nothing in the place worth that sum of money, we shut up the camera. This was an evident disappointment to him, as he had undoubt edly calculated upon us as a source of revenue. The Mayor of Chicago, it seems, had once been to Picuris and paid that sum for the privilege, and why should not we? So the school-teacher ex plained. Whether from the hope that we might yet relent or from a suspicion that, if left to our selves, we would do as we pleased, the man stuck to us closer than a brother while we walked about. Upon other subjects than the camera, however, he was more complaisant and even became communi cative upon matters pertaining to the present life of the pueblo. He was no friend of the American education, which, in his view, was pernicious to Pueblo morals. "The young people," he remarked, "are not what they were. We cannot trust them any more, as we used to, nor teach them the secret things of our people; so they re ignorant of a great many things that it would be good for them to know. 122 THE PICURIS COUNTRY And then the whiskey every young man in Picuris nowadays gets drunk whenever he has a chance. That is very bad, mucho malo!" Pleasant faces looked out at us from doorways where crooning voices told of babies being put to sleep, and the hospitable salutation " entra" en couraged us to enter more than one habitation and sit with the family awhile. There was the usual interest in where we had come from and where we were going, and was it hot in California, and did many people live there. A peculiar kind of pottery is made here of glistening, micaceous clay, which is serviceable for cooking vessels; and what with buying some of this and distributing candy liberally among the children, our popularity in the pueblo waxed so much that I am not sure but a bid of a dollar to our truculent capitan de guerra might at last have secured us permission to photograph the Casa Vieja. But our dignity for bade our reopening negotiations and he of the flapping trousers made no overture; so Picuris remained for us unphotographed save from the outlying hill. As we walked towards our carriage to return to Penasco, we heard a cry behind us, and turning, THE PICURIS COUNTRY 123 saw an old Pueblo woman and a young man running towards us. The woman was gesticu lating violently, and when she was close to us, addressed us rapidly in Spanish. "My son!" we interpreted her wailing. "Do you know Francisquito in California? I am so very sad here," placing her hands upon her breast. Then, throwing up her hands, she moaned, "Oh, my son, my son! For many years, now, nothing from my son!" There was more we could not understand, and we turned for an explanation to the young man, who then spoke to us in English. "This woman, she is my mother, and she has a boy, my brother, and his name is Francisco Duran. A long time ago he left Picuris and went to Califor nia where you come from, where the ocean is. That was many years ago and he has never come back and he has never written to say if he is well. When you go back to California, my mother says, you see if you cannot find him where he is, and, when you see him, you tell him to send word to his mother in Picuris how he is. She is very sad in her heart about him, and she wants to know. You will do this?" 124 THE PICURIS COUNTRY So, in red breasts as in white, dwells the uni versal mother-heart, which never forgets, but yearns unceasingly for the child whom the world has rapt from her sight. Chapter XI Of .Ancient Zvini, and Ko\v tKe Conquistadores Came to Discover It. WITH Zuni and its picturesque life, the general reader is probably more par ticularly acquainted than with any of the other pueblos, and this because of the writings of the poet-ethnologist, Frank H. Gushing, who for a time made a Pueblo Indian of himself and dwelt, some thirty years ago, in this terraced town. Though inevitably undergoing modernisation, it is still a place of unique interest, the largest of all the pueblos and, perhaps, the most tenacious of the ancient way. Zuni was the first of the Pueblo communities to be seen by Old World eyes, and those eyes were a negro s one Estevanico s. The way of it was this : In 1536, there unexpectedly appeared in the Spanish settlements of Mexico, out of the northern wilderness, three Spaniards and this negro, the 125 126 SPAIN DISCOVERS ZUNI sole survivors of Narvaez s expedition of discov ery and conquest which, eight years before, had landed in Florida and later perished miserably of swamps and Indians all but these four, who had worked their painful way across the entire south ern border of what is now the United States. Their tale excited the gold-hunting Spanish in Mexico to the desire of exploring that more northern country; but as the wanderers had come out of it empty-handed, it was thought prudent by the Spanish viceroy in Mexico, before fitting out an expedition, to despatch a small reconnoitring party to ascertain in advance if an expedition were worth while. This reconnaissance, which was made in 1539, was placed in charge of a Franciscan friar, known to history as Fray Marcos de Niza. His compan ions were another Franciscan Brother (who, how ever, soon became ill and had to be left behind), several Mexican Indians, and the negro, Estevanico aforesaid, as guide. After a little, the negro was sent on before, with orders to make report, from time to time, by Indians of what he found. These reports proved very glowing and contained, among other matter, the assertion that a month s journey SPAIN DISCOVERS ZUNI 127 ahead was a province called Cibola, containing seven large cities, all subject to one lord. In them were houses of one, two, and three stories, built terrace-like, and the chief s residence was of four stories ; there were many decorations on the houses ; the people were well-clothed ; and there was wealth of turquoise. Thus encouraged, the friar pushed on, accom panied by his Indians, all footing it across the midsummer desert of what, in our day, is South- Eastern Arizona. Now and again an Indian run ner brought back word from Estevanico of his safe progress until, at last, Fray Marcos was within an easy journey of Cibola s seven cities. Then a great blow befell. Fugitive Indians of Estevani co s escort on a sudden appeared with news of the negro s arrival in Cibola and of his murder there. The African, it seems, left so long to his own de vices, had grown arrogant, and upon reaching Cibola, although hospitably received, had set about mistreating the women. This infuriated the men of the pueblo, who incontinently repaid the outrage with death 1 ; for, as Coronado 1 How thoroughly the negro s offence aroused the Pueblo men is indicated by Coronado s statement in a letter sent a year later 128 SPAIN DISCOVERS ZUNI records, "their women the Indians love better than themselves. * Under these circumstances, the place being in a fever of resentment, prudent Brother Marcos decided that, if he was to deliver a report of his findings to the viceroy, he had best stay out of Cibola. Nevertheless, if he might not enter the towns of his quest, he did, like Moses on Nebo s peak, get at least a glimpse of the Promised Land from a hilltop overlooking the great plain in which the villages lay. On that height, he tells us, he planted a wooden cross, symbol of the faith that was some day to be preached there, and then, descending, beat his retreat towards Mexico, carry ing such stories of settled towns and fertile valleys that the Spanish adventurers, when they heard the tale, felt sure of the presence there of gold and other treasure. from Cibola to the Viceroy Mendoza, to the effect that, although he had been in the pueblo some time, he had not been permitted to see any of the women, whom the men kept under guard from the strangers. This letter, "given from the Province of Cevola and this city of Granada [Coronado s new christening of the pueblo in which he was quartered], the 3d of August, 1540, by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who kisses the hand of his most illustrious lordship, the Viceroy," gives a very graphic and read able account of Pueblo life as the first Spaniards found it. It will be found in Winship s Coronado. SPAIN DISCOVERS ZUNI 129 So was the ground cleared for the memorable expedition of Coronado, which set out from Mexico the next year (1540) and resulted in the discovery of all the Pueblo towns, which, at that time, num bered upwards of three score. The Cibola of Fray Marcos was what we now know as Zuni r ; but the seven little cities of that early day are now but rubbish heaps, of interest only to the archaeologist and the curio hunter. The present pueblo, ancient as it looks, is post-Coronadian, a consolidation of the original seven, but its human life is essentially unchanged from what that knightly servant of the Spanish King observed and recorded. 1 For an interesting account of the identification of Zuni with the sixteenth -century mystery of the "Seven Cities of Cibola," see Bandelier s "Cibola" in The Gilded Man. Chapter XII Of Zuni in tKe Rain, and of Zuni DicK. THOUGH the sun shines upon New Mexico three hundred days on an average out of the three hundred and sixty-five, it was raining on the October evening when we arrived at Zuni. The next morning, the rain still de scending, we decided it would be more comfortable out in the real thing than in our adobe room, where from a variety of leaks in the roof an intermittent drip fell emphatically upon the floor, unless inter cepted by some part of our bodies. So, clad in rubber, we went forth to investigate the old pueblo. There was a streak of light in the west, where the sky bent down to Arizona, but in the east, Towa- Yalleni Mountain of the Sacred Corn was still wrapped in mists, out of which diverse winds blew shrewdly one, colder than its predecessor, now and again turning the rain to short-lived spits of snow. The tortuous little streets were gummy, 130 WE MEET ZUNI DICK 131 as only adobe can be on a wet day, and deserted of life. Even the pigs, dogs, and burros were hidden away under lee walls, and the turkeys lurked disconsolate in the covered alleys. But human Zurii was as gay as though the sun shone. Its good humour was but increased by the wet, which meant the showered blessings of the gods, filling the springs and making the earth fruitful. A dusky face beneath a crown of glossy black hair, filleted about with a bright magenta head band, looked out at us from a half -opened door way, and the smiling Zuni man said : You happy ? Where you go ? " We stopped and smiled back. "I, Zuni Dick," continued the Zuni. "You no hully? 1 You come in my houses. " The door was hospitably opened; one puppy was lifted by the nape of its mangy neck and deposited outdoors, while another was shunted under the table, and we were invited to sit down in the household s two cherished American chairs. It was a typical Zuni interior, with clean, white washed walls and a beamed ceiling of unhewn logs. 1 The Zuni language has no sound of r, which the Zuni tongue, like the Chinese, pronounces as an /. I 3 2 WE MEET ZUNI DICK At one end of the great room were the mealing stones a half-dozen square slabs of malpais, dipped to the floor at an angle of forty -five degrees and boxed about with stone. At one of them a young girl knelt, and with a smaller stone was rubbing corn up and down, as on a washboard, and crushing it to meal. The air was fragrant with the sweetness of the bruised grain and musical with the hum of the stones in contact. About the room at the base of the walls ran a low bench of whitewashed adobe, which served as a seat as well as a shelf for the blankets that, by night, were spread on the floor for beds. Tacked to the wall, beside a bundle of gourd rattles and a leather pouch for sacred meal, was a row of coloured covers of magazines and weeklies whose publishers little suspected the extent of their circulation. A row of water-jars with decorations in red and black gave a bright touch to their corner, and a gaily- coloured blanket, still in the loom, flamed out from one of the walls. A triangular fireplace, built into the corner near the door, was aglow with a leaping fire of juniper wood set on end, while in a pot cocked against the blazing sticks, roasting pifion nuts were being stirred by Dick s wife, who WE MEET ZUNI DICK 133 with a deft toss of her head as we entered had caused her long hair to fall modestly over her face to veil it. It was a scene in our twentieth-century America not essentially different from scenes with which the old Conquistador es of three centuries ago were familiar. Zuni is conservative. "I all a time busy," remarked Dick compla cently, as he rubbed bits of turquoise beads upon a flat stone in his lap to make them smooth. Then, as he prattled on, we gathered that he was local policeman, by the grace of the Indian agent at Black Rock, and wore a blue coat with brass buttons and a Kossuth hat with gold cord. The duties of this office consisted principally in con voying to the Government school truant little Zufiis who, preferring sunshine and freedom to paleface knowledge, vanished from sight when the school-bell rang. It was a busy life, this, of round- ing-up these luckless young savages, involving not only exercise of leg but nimble argument with conspiring matrons, who wanted to keep their progeny uncontaminated by influences which made for bad manners and for skepticism regarding the red gods of their fathers. Saturday and Sunday, however, were holidays, and Dick was then free i 3 4 WE MEET ZUNI DICK to follow his own devices one of which was to cultivate the acquaintance of white visitors to Zuni, and let them into such of its mysteries as he thought suitable for white folk to know. Perhaps, then, he could take us where we could watch a Zuni silversmith at work? We wanted to see a Zuni man make a bracelet. "Ye-es," he said indulgently, "I show you. When you want to go, you come to my houses. " When we came out of Dick s "houses, " the clouds had parted and the sun was shining glori ously in the blessed blue. Doors stood open that had been shut against the rain; men were ascir catching donkeys to ride, on one errand or another ; the turkeys and the pigs and laughing children were abroad again. A bright-faced woman was patiently leading a blind man to a warm corner, where he might bask in the sun while she went to the town well to fill her jar, the gourd dipper clinking within it as she walked. The silversmith was a young man with the face of an angel and huge turquoise earrings. His shop was set up in the one room of his house, for, excepting Nick, the storekeeper, who wears white man s clothes and a hat, and was once strung up WE MEET ZUNI DICK 135 for a witch, and lives out of his shop, no Zuni man divorces business and home. "You want im make HI closses like ol time?" asked Dick, to whose Zuni heart the characteristic double-barred crosses of his people were very dear, "or necklace of beads with piece of moon on end, or you want im blacelet with pictu put on?" We explained that what we desired was a brace let with ornaments stamped on it. "You want im make blacelet," pursued Dick. "You give im money dolla half-dolla 7 dunno you know. Fully quick he make blacelet you see you give im all same money again you take blacelet." We understood enough of this to realise that it was needful to supply the craftsman with the raw material at the outset; so we produced a Mexican silver half-dollar and taking two proffered chairs sat down to abide the issue. Said Dick: "You stay and see no be aflaid all same home good-by, " and departed. The silversmith blew up the fire in a little forge which stood against the wall, and into a small crucible which he picked from the ashes of a previous fire, he dropped our coin to its melting. i 3 6 WE MEET ZUNI DICK Then he poured the puddle of molten metal into an oblong depression of the forge hearth and the result was a short pig of silver. This he placed upon an anvil and hammered patiently, heating and reheating it as it cooled, until it had become a flat, narrow strip of bruised and blackened silver, which, bent into a circle until the two ends all but touched, would fit the wrist. (Unlike the bracelet of civilisation, the Indian bracelet has a gap in its circle, through which the wrist is passed.) The blank surface was then ready for decoration. Our smith took from a basket a handful of small iron punches, each of which bore at its tip a die of different design from its fellows dots, variously arranged, combinations of slashes, crescents, stars, and what-not. With these he composed an elaborate ornamentation, punching it upon the silver with hammer taps. Finally, the bracelet was dipped in boiling water in which a lump or two of a cleansing white earth, gathered in the neighbouring hills, had been dissolved, and was handed to us unsoiled and fresh as from the mint. We paid another half-dollar for the work and the negotiation was completed. CKapter XIII Of Hoviseheeping in Zvirii, and How Zvini DicK Helped Us to Dvy Meat. A T Zuni temporary sojourners have the / % choice of three ways of existence. The 2 "\. Government school may take you to board, but as it is not a boarding-house, that is not to be counted on. Almost any Indian family would harbour you the Zunis not yet having been civilised out of the primitive virtue of hospi tality but unless the ways of civilised life rest as lightly upon you as they did upon Gushing, you would not stomach that. The third way is to hire a room (the missionary may accommodate you) and board yourself. We did that and prospered. The Indian trader will provide most of the neces saries of life at rates as a rule not exceeding one or two hundred per cent, over the prices of civilisation he must live and some luxuries may be had from Gallup, forty -five miles away, when a team 137 138 OUR ZUNI HOUSEKEEPING comes thence. Fresh meat is to be had of the Indians, as also eggs. As two sparrows in Biblical times were sold for a farthing, so it is the unwritten law of Zufii that three eggs sell for a nickel. Thus forewarned and provided with a borrowed egg which, held up, should make known our need, for we talked no Zufii and few Zufiis speak English, we had no trouble. The quest of meat proved a more serious matter, and we decided to call on Dick for assistance. He was not at home when we knocked at his door, but his wife smilingly gave us seats, made some matter-of-fact remark in Zufii, and went on dyeing wool. We sat expectant for three quarters of an hour; then, our Caucasian impatience getting the better of us and the sun being low, we said good- by and left. Two corners away we found Dick passing the time of day with a neighbour. "You want sheep meat or cow?" he asked. If sheep meat was not goat, we should like that, we thought. Dick meditated, then said : "You come mebbe some Zufii man he have cow meat / dunno we see." We filed across the great plaza, through a black, OUR ZUNI HOUSEKEEPING 139 covered passage into the little north plaza, clamorous with dogs all atongue at our intrusion, then zigzag by one lane and another till we were lost. The evening fires were gleaming in the houses, and through doors ajar we could hear the pleasant voices of the inmates gathered about their suppers. It occurred to us then that, though we had been three days in Zuni, we had not heard a cross word spoken by man or woman, or seen a child harshly treated. After a stay of seven weeks, we could say the same. The gods of Zuni have no ear for rough speakers. Dick knocked at a door and we all entered. A murmur of welcome greeted us, and an elderly Zuni man alertly came forward and shook hands. In the dim twilight we could distinguish seven or eight people in the room, collected about a lit tle cook-stove in the centre. Our host set three stools for us. "Long time ago, same as Melican sit-down chai s, " explained Dick. A few minutes* decorous silence and then all the Zunis joined in a leisurely conversation; now and then a cigarette was lighted and enjoyed, and there was an occasional musical laugh at some 140 OUR ZUNI HOUSEKEEPING witticism of Dick s, who seemed to be a humourist. Through a window we saw the moon beginning to flood the street with radiance and so far as we could judge the meat was as far from us as ever. By and by, three cups and a pot of coffee, a pan of meat, and a basket of bread were placed on the floor in front of us. "You eat, " said Dick, "it no cost you nossing. " Then more talk, and finally our host went to an inner room and reappeared with a foreleg of beef, which he deposited upon the floor. "You want im meat," said Dick, "you take." "How much for fifty cents?" we asked. "I dunno, " said Dick; "you got scales? Mebbe you weigh some." We explained that we did not carry a butchering outfit in our pockets, and they must cut off fifty cents worth. Whereupon a saw and an axe were brought, and with these and the assistance of most assembled, a piece was hacked off and placed in our hands au naturel. We tendered our benefactor half a dollar. He glanced at it and said something in Zuiii. We looked appealingly at Dick. "He say seventy -five cents." OUR ZUNI HOUSEKEEPING 141 "But we ordered only fifty cents worth." Another outburst of Zuni, and then Dick observed, as though shedding new light upon the subject : "He say seventy-five cents." "But we only ordered fifty cents worth. Tell him to throw in a soup-bone and we will give sixty cents." And on this basis the negotiation was concluded with a handshake all around. Chapter XIV Of Sa-wi-etsi-tsita, How She Made Us Jars, and SomewHat of Zuni Babies. DEEP in a hillside at the foot of the pueblo is the great well of Zuni. Here sometimes we would sit of a morning to watch the fashion in water- jars. The Zuni water-carriers are invariably women or girls, and Rebecca at her well was not a fairer sight, we fancied, than some of those Indian maidens in their picturesque pueblo dress. Here all day they came and went, singly or in couples, pausing for a moment s gossip in the cool cavern of the shady well before setting their brimming jars upon their heads. Then, erect as arrows and without touching hand again to their burdens, they mounted the broad stairway and climbed the hill to home. The making of pottery is to the Zufiis what blanket-weaving is to the Navajos. It is their characteristic industry. The material used is a 142 ZUNI POTTERY-MAKING 143 bluish clay, which is obtained from the summit of Towa-Yalleni, several miles distant, and brought laboriously home slung in a blanket upon the potter s back. The clay is powdered on a stone metate to the fineness of meal, mixed with water, and kneaded until the mess resembles blue corn- mush. The building-up of the jar is done entirely by hand, excepting the base, which is moulded upon the bottom of an old pot. There is a concavity in the bottom which just fits the head of the carrier and helps hold it steady there. Upon this base, coil upon coil of the plastic mud is built up, the creases of conjunction being smoothed away with a bit of gourd. The jar is then set aside to dry thoroughly. One day we saw one in this unfinished stage in Sa-wi-etsi-tsita s house and asked her if she would let us watch her decorate it, to which she consent ing, we came with candy for the babies and spent an afternoon. The colours used in decoration are made from minerals found in the hills about Zufii, and are white, red, and a brown that is almost black. Sa-wi-etsi-tsita is an artist and feels the inspiration of appreciative visitors, her face glow ing with content and the joy of creation as she works. She sits flat upon the floor, and after I 4 4 ZU NI POTTERY-MAKING covering the jar with a coating of white, and polishing it with a smooth stone until the surface shines, she lays on the figures of the decoration with a sliver of yucca leaf, shredded at the end to make a brush of it. Out of the storehouse of her memory the design grows without an error, and is balanced in all its parts as perfectly as though the jar had first been measured and sectioned off for it with rule and compass. The design may be purely geometrical, symbolic perhaps of clouds and rain; or it may be of conventionalised leaves and flowers; or it may be and her Zuni soul loves this above all representative of swimming ducks and of deer with visible hearts; but whatever the design, once started it is worked out on certain conventional lines which have come to her by tradition and can not be arbitrarily varied. Sa-wi-etsi-tsita made sev eral pieces of pottery for us during our stay at Zuni, and of one the pattern was so exceedingly plain, in severe lines of brown on white, that we asked her not to do that for us again but always to put in some red decoration, too. Our American ignorance dis appointed her, for did we not know what every Zuni knows, that that design never permits red? The final stage of pottery-making is the firing, ZUNI POTTERY-MAKING 145 and when this is reached, the entire female portion of the household is agog. The decorated jar is carefully borne into the street, a place protected from wind and travel is chosen, and the jar is set mouth down upon a circle of small stones or scrap iron. Then a cylinder of dry sheep-manure chips is built up around the jar. Kindling of cedar shreds is laid within, together with a sheep shank or head (why, quien sabe? Sa-wi-etsi-tsita only knows it makes the fire burn better) , and the whole is fired. Little by little the flame spreads and fattens upon the unpromising fuel, and, through the open chinks of the chips, one may see the pot brightening in the intense heat, as safe as Daniel in his fiery furnace. When the fuel is consumed, the jar is carefully lifted out and set aside to cool, when it is ready for service. Woman s invasion of man s time-honoured voca tions has not yet reached Zufii. There the old- fashioned partition of life s labours between male and female is as it was in the days of the ancients. Men plant the corn and harvest it; the women grind it and make the bread. 1 Men tend the 1 "They make the best corncakes I have ever seen anywhere, " writes Coronado from Zufii in 1540, "and this is what everybody 146 ZUNI POTTERY-MAKING sheep and cattle and go rabbit hunting ; the women cook the meat. The women are the potters and blanket-weavers ; the men are the silversmiths, and do the knitting and moccasin-making and most of the sewing on the American machines, which many households possess. The men build the houses ; the women plaster them and build the ovens, and bit terly disappointed would they be if they should not be allowed to put these finishing touches to houses to be consecrated at Shalako time by the pres ence of the Tall Gods and their attendant maskers. As to the babies, everybody has a care of them. Their lives are one round of pleasant happenings. When they are not sleeping, they are eating, and when they are doing neither of these, they are taking the air so runs their infant world away. To the little girls and the grandfathers falls the lion s share of nursing the little folk; but it is no unusual sight to see smiling middle-aged or young fathers striding along about their business, with a baby in a blanket swung upon their backs. The men cannot bear to hear a child cry, and we have ordinarily eats. They have the very best arrangement and machinery for grinding that ever was seen. " And the fashion in corncakes is still as it was in Coronado s time. A Zuni man knitting his wife s leggings. The men also run the sewing-machine, when a household owns one. ZUNI POTTERY-MAKING 147 seen them stop their work to pick up a fretting baby and take it out for a walk. How the babies got on the back was as much of a puzzle to us, until we saw the deed done, as was the apple in the dumpling to the old philosopher. The man humped himself as for leap-frog, swung the de lighted infant so that it lit lightly on its stomach upon the broad of his back, its arms and legs spread out like a swimming frog s, and then the blanket was caught under and around the child so as to hold it as in a sack. In Zuni, the baby is never in the way of all the blessings of the gods it is the most desired and the most cherished. High up on the Mountain of the Sacred Corn is a double spire of rock, which according to Zuni folk-lore represents the meta morphosed bodies of two children sacrificed in ancient days to save Zuni from a flood. Dick pointed them out to us one day. "Zuni man and woman," he remarked, "they get mallied. Bimeby, no have any chillen. They solly. They come to mountain, climb way up- put on player plumes way up. Then next year mebbe have chillen, and all happy. " CKapter XV Of a Zuni Grinding Song, and of Prayer Plumes. ONE afternoon a knock came at our door and there stood Dick. You no busy ? " he inquired. You want listen em sing song? You come with me. " So we went. It was the week before the great annual festival of the Shalako gods, and Zuni was all preparation for the joyous feast. For weeks, by waggon and burro back, the corn had been coming in from the distant fields, and housetops and yards were piled high with the rustling harvest. Women and old men were sitting in the sun, stripping the husks from the ears, which were of a score of colours red, yellow, blue, white, black, magenta, orange, lilac, pink, and tossing them into kaleidoscopic piles. There would be no hun ger in Zuni this year, for the harvest was abound ing and even the burros shared in the general good humour, feeding and fattening knee-deep in corn- husks. 148 A GRINDING SONG 149 We ascended a ladder at the sun priest s house and, crossing a number of roofs, came to a door from which the sound of a drum issued. The small room, dimly lighted by three windows under the roof, was thronged. Two mustachioed Nava- jos were bartering silver trinkets with a little, soft- voiced Zufii man behind the door; a cluster of women were cooking at the fire, and through the door others came and went bearing baskets heaped high with meal or corn. In a dusky corner was a choir of eight young men, singing to the accompani ment of a primitive drum a large jar with a skin stretched tightly over its mouth. Across the room, where from one of the windows the light fell upon them, were five or six young women grinding corn upon as many mealing stones, their lithe bodies rising and descending in unison and keeping time with the music of the men. As one would tire, her place would be taken by another in the room. So the grinding never ceased and would not till the sun set. The faces of the grinders were half hidden by the veil of hair that hung down before them; but their dress of many colours, their brown arms encircled at the wrists with silver bracelets, the flash of shell or silver necklaces 1 50 A GRINDING SONG swinging as they knelt over the mealing bins, made an animated scene. As for the music, it, too, never flagged. The air changed from time to time; one singer or another might pause to puff a cigarette or drink from a gourd of water, but the stream of the music suffered no stoppage. It was a Zufii grinding song a song of thanksgiving, it might be, or an invocation for rain and good crops the words of which had come down from father to son for generations. Sometimes the singers turned rever ent faces upward; sometimes they lifted their hands as in supplication; never was there a sign that they held the performance as otherwise than of the most solemn import. Indeed, the vim, the precision, the religious fervour which these eight serious men put into the music, made us feel that we were in a household of faith, where the depend ence of humanity was realised and the daily gifts of God to men were received not as matters of course but with thankfulness of heart. It was heathendom s testimony to the power and goodness of God, and we felt humbled as we stepped into the air. We passed one of the Govern ment teachers on the way to her Christian home. A GRINDING SONG 151 "Hello," she remarked, "been visiting the savages? Find em pretty dirty, don t you?" Zuni s prayers are breathed to little bunches of feathers, set in the earth, or deposited by certain sacred springs, which are peep-holes of the gods to keep watchful eyes on Zuni, or laid in the recesses of certain stone shrines of the valleys and the hills, one of which, on the great plain just outside of the pueblo, marks the spot known in Zuni geography as the centre of the earth. We used sometimes to see men walking silently from one house to another, carrying in their blankets wooden boxes with sliding lids, of which one projecting end was carved in the terraced shape that symbolises to Zuni the rain-cloud. One day in Dick s house, we saw one of these boxes open, out of which our dusky friend was solemnly taking feathers of various kinds turkeys , hawks , and bluebirds and making them up into prayer plumes, according to a strict ritual fastening them with cotton string to short, painted sticks, and laying them in a cere monial basket by his side. "By and by, do you say prayers to them?" we asked. Dick nodded. 152 A GRINDING SONG "What do you pray for?" "Oh, lots of lain to fill up wells and make plenty co n for Zufii man and white man, too, so ev y- body all happy; and lots chillen for ev ybody; and plenty HI sheep and goat and HI cow" a kindly prayer, we thought, which in its inclusive- ness put us to shame, who had not always been so mindful of those not of our own household. Later in the day we saw Dick and four of his clan, their red blankets wrapped about them, and the tips of prayer plumes peeping from the folds, wending their way in single file, with grave, down cast eyes, out to the plain where Zufii s sacred places are; and a little prayer was born in our hearts that the God whom these children of His ignorantly worshipped would incline His ear to their prayer, now and for evermore. $ C ^j 3 c i 6 II .~ & - ; Chapter XVI Of the Nig Ht Dance of tKe SHalaKo Gods. THE Shalako festival of Zurii, which occurs every year near the end of November, is a remarkable sacred drama, enacted in the open for the double purpose of invoking the divine blessing upon certain newly-built houses, and of rendering to the gods of Zuni thanks for the har vests of the year. The exact date of the coming of the Shalako is fixed each year by some occult formula of the Zuni priests, and while the ap pointed day is generally known several weeks in advance, the official publication of it is not made until the eighth evening before the event. The immediate effect of this announcement, which is given out by ten masked buffoons in the principal plazas, is to quicken the easy-going life of the old pueblo into a bustle of industry. The labour on the new houses, which has dragged along half heartedly for weeks, receives a fresh impetus, the 153 154 DANCE OF THE SHALAKO women putting on the mud plaster with rabbit- skin mittens as the men lay down the roofs. Daily from outlying farming villages of the Zunis, country waggons arrive laden with corn in the husk, beans in the pod, and little round water melons all white within, or piled high with trunks and branches of pinon and cedar, wherewith to set the Shalako hearths ablazing. On the housetops and in the sunny doorways the huskers go merrily on with their husking, cluttering the narrow streets with the rustling sheaths, which crones, too old for heavier labour, gather up in blankets and carry off to be burned. From the ceilings of nearly every house are swinging the fresh carcasses of sheep or goats or cattle the wet skins tacked out on the floor to dry and every where as you thread the tortuous alleys of the town, the air is sweetened with the fragrance of fresh-milled corn as the women grind, kneeling at the mealing stones, their voices the while lifted in weird, minor songs, keeping time with the movement of their bodies. At the little adobe store which Nick conducts in the heart of Zufii, the ordinarily sluggish pulse of trade leaps to fever temperature in the last days DANCE OF THE SIIALAKO 155 before Shalako. Men, women, and children crowd in front of the counter behind which Nick, his placid full-moon of a face surmounted with a flat- crowned, broad-brimmed hat, set well down over his ears, dispenses sugar and coffee, leather gaunt lets, checked calico, and scarlet blankets, in trade for pinon nuts, sheepskins, silver bracelets, hens eggs, and wheat. Nomad Navajos from Gallup and beyond arrive on tough little ponies, in companies of three and four, bedecked with silver necklaces, belts, and bangles, which they are ever ready to barter away to trafficking Zunis. Then one evening, as the sun drops to the Arizona line, a bugle sounds upon the plain and a troop of United States cavalry, in command of a pleasant-faced lieutenant, rides quietly in and pitches its tents just without the village. Shalako being a night ceremony, we might as well have left our camera at home. To be sure, we had hopes of snapping the God of the Little Fire, avant-courier of the Shalako, as he came in from the plain just before sundown on the eventful day, but Five-Cent Marmon, the teniente, wise in the ways of the white man, divined the intent and enjoined us beforehand. 1 5 6 DANCE OF THE SHALAKO "Man," said he, with an eye upon a suspicious bulge of one of my coat pockets, "you take pictu ?" We assented. "You no take pictu till Shalako gone," he dissented. "You sabe ? I say so. " So the God of the Little Fire, carrying in one hand a smouldering torch of twisted cedar bark, his bare, painted body spotted with many-coloured sparkles, and his head eclipsed within a hemi spherical mask, also dotted, that rested like a starry dome upon his slender shoulders, came and went unpictured, as becomes a god. Before him walked a Zufii priest in ceremonial dress, a great, white buckskin slung across his shoulders, a bunch of rabbits depending from his belt, and bearing reverently before him a basket of prayer plumes, upon which his downcast gaze rested. It was our old friend Dick in apotheosis. The two made the tour of the village, planting the prayer plumes at certain appointed places, and followed by a group of dancers who impersonated gods of the Zufii pantheon and wore wonderful masks, presenting an ensemble of superb colour as they danced and chanted. DANCE OF THE SHALAKO 157 The sight of these strange beings, more like denizens of another world than of this, put us in a fever of expectation, and we impatiently awaited the darkness under whose cover the Giant Gods should arrive. As the twilight deepened to dusk, slowly moving groups upon the plain could be dimly seen ap proaching Zuni from the southern hills, stopping on the farther side of the river that flows past the pueblo. Five-Cent Marmon, wrapped to the eyes in his blanket, strode by us. "Shalako come," he observed, in a burst of friendliness. But not till darkness had completely settled down we, meanwhile, shivering on the bank and anathematising Indian deliberation did the groups finally cross the stream. Then they paused in a hollow of the bank, the Shalakos kneel ing while the attendants gave the finishing touches to their make-up. In Zuni mythology, the Shalako Gods are the couriers of the divine rain-makers, stationed at each quarter of the compass, which in Zuni cos mography has six points North, South, East, West, Zenith, and Nadir. So gigantic in stature 1 58 DANCE OF THE SHALAKO are the Shalakos that they must be represented in effigy -astonishing creatures, ten feet or so in height, with staring, painted eyes, horns for ears, a horizontal, wooden snout that opens and shuts with a snap, and a head-dress, like an open fan, of upright eagle or turkey feathers. From the figure s waist, which is at the height of a man s head, swings a huge hoopskirt of heavy, white cotton of native weaving, ornamented in colour around the bottom with the inverted pyramids that symbolise rain-clouds. Completely hidden within this is the effigy s motive power, a Zufii man, whose moccasined feet are seen below the skirts. He carries the effigy by means of a pole, lodged in a pocket of his belt. As the Shalako moves teetering along like a superannuated dandy it utters at times a shrill whistle and snaps the jaws of its snout with nerve-racking violence. It was now pitch dark, a thin layer of snow flaked the ground, and the wintry wind, blowing up from the icy river, chilled the marrow of our bones. Now and again the Shalakos would make as though to resume their progress, only to settle down once more to an interminable wait. Finally, the few white spectators, who, with ourselves, were watch- DANCE OF THE SHALAKO 159 ing developments, grew tired, and at seven o clock decided to go indoors somewhere and get warm. As for us, some experience with red human nature had taught us that when the Caucasian s patience with Indian ways has all leaked out, something is apt to happen. So we decided to remain a little longer, and wrapping our blankets closer about us, we shrank into the corner of an old corral a few rods off, that shielded us from the wind, and waited and waited and waited. By and by, we shifted our positions, and again waited. And now there is a stir among the Shalakos, and we see the grotesque heads and shoulders rise from the ground into distinct outline against the starlit sky, far above the level of the crowd of Zufii attendants. With a commingled, wheezy whistl ing and snapping of snouts, the Giant Gods sway into single file; suddenly there bursts in unison from a hundred throats a majestic chorus, a simple minor theme repeated over and over, fas cinating and soul-compelling in the darkness; and the weird procession is off upon its march about the village. We rush beside it, breathless and excited, and fall into step. 160 DANCE OF THE SHALAKO As the notes of the solemn chorus penetrate into the dwellings, the doors are thrown open, emitting the light of a multitude of glowing hearths, and the people throng out upon the housetops and on the streets, watching the coming of the long-expected divinities. Many from the houses hurry out and swell the procession, which stops at each new dwelling where the ceremony of blessing is to be performed, and there leaves a Shalako. Kneeling before the open doorway, the gigantic god waits while, to the chanting of the chorus and the contin ual sprinkling of sacred meal, the priests plant in front of the steps the prayer-laden bunches of feathers which constitute the vehicles of the Zunis invocation to the powers above. Then, stooping, the great effigy passes in. We follow and find a seat to our great content near the fireplace, where a cedar log is crackling. It is to a feast of fat things that every visitor to a Zufii house comes on the night of the Shalako a feast that is the full-blown flower of Zufii culinary art. There is, for instance, meat-stew mutton or beef or rabbit even a tasty mess of mountain rat, garnished with onions and chili peppers; there is blue wafer-bread of corn and grey wafer-bread of DANCE OF THE SHALAKO 161 beans; there are wheaten loaves and frijoles, roasted pifion nuts and watermelons, none the worse to aboriginal taste if they are frosted; and there is coffee flowing free as milk in Canaan. For two or three hours the feasting is kept up, until about midnight the ceremonial dances begin. Beside the primitive altar which is erected in the room, there sits a choir of men, who supply the music, which is entirely vocal, except for the accompaniment of gourd rattles and a hollow- voiced drum, made, in the orthodox Zuni way, of a huge earthen jar. The spectators throng the walls of the long room or crowd the doors and windows that open from the inner apartments of the house a motley lot, interesting indeed, under the flaring lights. Predominant, of course, are the Zufiis, some in the picturesque costume of their fathers from head band to moccasins ; others in the nondescript attire that the trader sells them grey sombreros, blue overalls, suspenders, and clumsy brogans. There is, too, a sprinkling of other Pueblo people, from Acoma and Laguna or even the distant Hopi mesas. Of Navajos, traditionary enemies of Zuni, yet never debarred from the hospitalities of Shal- XX 162 DANCE OF THE SHALAKO ako, there are many their gaunt-visaged women with roly-poly, uncomplaining babies by their sides, strapped in queer little rockerless cradles f either asleep or blinking at the unaccustomed lights. A few whites are looking on, too, but they soon tire employes of the Government agency and schools, a surprised tourist or two, lured hither perhaps by a railroad advertisement, and an occasional hard-faced trooper of the lieutenant s squad. Only Mexicans, of all the world, are for bidden to view the Shalako, and no word of Spanish is permitted to be spoken during the ceremonies. The dancers come and go in bands, each with its leader one set appearing from the outer darkness as another departs into it. Hour after hour until dawn streaks the sky beyond the eastern mesa, the singing and the dancing go zealously on, and lest any of the spectators should so far forget the proprieties of a religious occasion, certain of the dancers carry a yucca switch, sharper than birch, which they lay lustily upon the shoulders of any tired wight who nods. Now and then the Shalako takes the floor, its head almost touching the ceiling, and after a few conventional rounds, breaks into a brisk run DANCE OF THE SHALAKO 163 that seems aimed to annihilate some frightened onlooker in the front row, but with surprising dexterity the huge figure whirls about in the nick of time and drops again into the customary shuffle. Now and again there is a pause in the music and the dancers, perspiring at every pore, retire to be replaced by a fresh band, arriving from another house. Each set of dancers is differently attired, and in their songs and accoutring represent diverse features of the complex Zuni mythology, that only the initiated may comprehend. But whatever it may mean on its esoteric side, to the uninitiated the spectacle appeals as a thing of marvellous beauty, growing more beautiful as the night wears on. The intense earnestness of the dancers, trained in their movements to act as one man ; the fineness of many of the faces, that for the time being are lighted with the glow of a god-like enthusiasm ; the litheness and grace of the more or less nude figures, painted in harmonious hues, and adorned with tinkling ornaments of shell and turquoise and silver, and the native loveliness of the furry skins of wildcat or fox ; the music of the voices sounding in unison, now fierce and fortis- 164 DANCE OF THE SHALAKO simo, now tender and low, now tempered with almost organ-like majesty, ever varying with the sense of the legendary words that proceed from the lips of dancers and choir all this, enacted by men who render it as a free service to the Omnipotence that rules their lives, is as different from the work of players acting for pay as light is from darkness. The beauty of the make-up of these dancers is a revelation to one who thinks of Indian art as a hodge-podge of crudities in form, and of glaring colours of anything so it be red and yellow ! As a matter of fact, the Indians as a race have a true artistic sense, the phenomena of nature serving as their most frequent models ; and the harmony and balance of colour evidenced in the shifting scenes of the Shalako dancers are a delight to the most cultivated eye an exhibition, indeed, that would do credit to any metropolitan stage with the added fact that it is no make-believe but the real thing. The last song had been sung, the last dance had been danced, and the Giant Gods, showered with sacred meal from the surging crowd, filed slowly away under the risen sun, towards the gullied mesa out of which the night before they had appeared. DANCE OF THE SHALAKO 165 Our sleepy eyes followed the strange procession of swaying figures until it reached the foothills where, breaking into a run, it passed from view to re appear in a year, bringing to Zurii renewed assur ance that the gods of the harvest and the rain do not forget. Over at the troopers camp the round up for departure was on and the Government mules were lending their patient backs once more to the pack-saddles; the visiting Navajos were bunching together and striking into the north trail that led off to the hogans of their people; the Zuni folk were vanishing into their houses for a nap ; and the dance of the Shalako was over. As we strolled back to our own quarters to pack up for home, we marvelled at the indifference of our countrymen to this beautiful religious cere mony of a race who antedate us as Americans. People travel far to attend the Passion Play, or metropolitan representations of the Nibelungen Cycle, or Shakespearean revivals to see, indeed, any sort of dramatic make-believe, if it be well enough staged ; but this sacred service of the Zunis to their gods, which is no play, though performed with dramatic fervour and with a magnificent setting that symbolises the living things of their 166 DANCE OF THE SHALAKO faith to this service of life only an occasional, stray traveller comes, or an ethnological student now and then and some nomad Indians. The shadow of Five- Cent Marmon fell across our threshold as we sat thinking it over. "You take pictu now?" he observed; "all light, you take pictu . I say so. Shalako gone." But the teniente was outwitted. Though we had obeyed his orders and pocketed the camera, we had none the less secured the picture of Shalako, impressed indelibly upon the enduring film of memory. Chapter XVII Of the Eight Pueblos of Moqvai, and tKe Way TKitHer. THE Moquis ? What are they to the Hopis ? Oh yes, I know, the Snake Dance. Some body told me of that. And Maria went to a lecture about it once. Not real rattlesnakes? Oh awful ! But their fangs must be taken out first of course. And we sewed for them one winter in our King s Daughters, and sent them a box of nice flannel shirts, poor things. Oh, not for the snakes, you ridiculous thing, for the people ! Yes, I really know a great deal about them. How dread ful for them to live way out in Arizona ! And now do tell me about the cotillion last night; I heard, " etc. "The Moquis? Where have I heard of them? They re Dakota Indians, are n t they? Arizona? Oh, yes, that s so, I remember. A fellow wanted me once to take a trip to see them, when we were 167 168 MOQUI PUEBLOS on our way to California. He said they beat the band for picturesqueness and all that but Great Scott ! it takes two days by waggon across a desert to get to them and carry your own booze. So I said: Not on your life, my boy this train suits me! You go, if you want to, and tell me the features when we meet again. I have n t heard of him since, so maybe he got scalped. Anyhow, it seemed a fool trip to me. How s the fishing at Catalina nowadays? " This is what you get when you try to interest the average citizen of the United States in the case of the eight pueblos of Moqui. Shall I gain any more attention by writing it out on paper? Perhaps not. Nevertheless I shall try. At least I shall not be interrupted till I am through with the story I have to tell. Northward a hundred miles or so from the rail road, beyond the muddy flow of the Rio Colorado Chiquito, beyond the mirages and sand-storms, the unutterable droughts, and the summer cloud bursts of the Painted Desert of Arizona, are the eight pueblos known collectively as Moqui and individually by names of such rare difficulty to I I I o TI M MOQUI PUEBLOS 169 pronounce that I shall disturb you with them as little as possible. This Moqui is the region which the ancient Conquistador es called the Province of Tusayan. Coronado, resting on his arms after the conquest of Zuni in 1540, heard of it and sent one of his lieutenants with half a dozen musketeers up from Zuni to ascertain what it was like. This lieutenant s name was Pedro de Tobar, or Tovar, and he enjoys a twentieth-century fame, having a great hotel named for him a hundred miles from Moqui on the rim of the Grand Canon of the Colorado in Arizona. Little cities of stone, built fortress-like upon the apexes and dizzy edges of four lofty, rocky promon tories that jut out into the desert, and housing a population of some two thousand Pueblo Indians, the pueblos of Moqui have a sublime outlook, without parallel in America or probably in the world, upon desert, sky, and distant mountains. Silence and sunlight by day, starlight and silence by night, and always the desert s own peculiar mystery, envelope this land of Moqui, where no man except he be an American office-holder can live for a day without being sensible of his individ ual insignificance in the make-up of the universe, 170 MOQUI PUEBLOS Hither, long centuries ago, came the ancestors of the present dwellers in Moqui, after movings whose course is fairly well marked to this day by ruins of prehistoric towns scattered along the valley of the Little Colorado, in the canons of the White Mountains of Arizona, and among the Mo- gollones. There is every reason to believe that they came seeking in this desert fastness an asylum from war and the depredations of their enemies. For the Lord of Life, it seems, had implanted in the hearts of these red children of His, not a spirit of unrest, rapine, and war qualities which our superior civilisation invariably associates with the unreconstructed red man, but the love of peace, of home, and of tilling the ground. Indeed, they called themselves, and still do, Hopi, meaning "the Peaceful"; and because their settled abodes and ordered lives of industry as agriculturists and artsmen enabled them to gather to themselves property which excited the cupidity of warlike nomads of the South-West, such as the Utes, the 1 They are also quite generally called Moquis (or Mokis) ; but this is really a term of contempt, as Dago for an Italian or Mick for an Irishman. In this book the word " Moqui" is used in its geographic sense, meaning the locality in which the Hopis live. Chief Snake Priest of Walpi, hoeing his corn two or three days after the Snake Dance. Note how short the stalks are, yet they are full grown. The man is but five feet high. MOQUI PUEBLOS 171 Apaches, and the Navajos, their fields and terraced towns would appear to have been the object of attack and spoliation by these enemies. Then, to escape the ceaseless harrying of marauders, came the flight of the Hopis to the desert, taking to them selves the barren waste as an ally and establishing themselves where the hardship of getting at them would minimise the liability to invasion. So the pueblos of Moqui came to be no man can say when, but certainly before the coming of the sixteenth-century Spaniards; and to reach them across the long, sun-scorched, waterless leagues was, in old Spanish parlance, literally una Jornada de muerte a journey of death. Here in Moqui, the Hopis planted their corn of many colours and set up altars and shrines that stand to this present day ; and with invocations and thanks giving to the red gods that had brought their fathers up from the darkness of the underworld to this world of light, they wrestled unceasingly with the desert for a living and won. In a land where the annual rainfall is but a few inches, and that confined principally to two sum mer months, and where the sandy ground, shifting continually before the wind, is almost as unstable 1 72 MOQUI PUEBLOS as the waves of the sea, this untutored race has scored over adverse nature a victory which wins the admiration of every serious-minded person, scientist or layman, who visits Moqui. The Hopis have searched out every spot in the desert within a score of miles, where moisture lingers long enough to mature a crop of corn or beans or melons, and industriously cultivate it and protect it from burial by shifting sands from seed-time to harvest. Of the desert s resources practically nothing es capes them. Of its rocks and stones they have fashioned implements and built stable towns; of the fibres of its plants and the skins of its animals they have made clothing; of its clay they have moulded serviceable and beautiful pottery; of its grasses they have woven baskets of superior weave and design; upon its bitter shrubs they pasture their flocks; certain saponaceous roots provide them with soap, and many herbs contribute to their vegetable dieting. In fact, their knowledge of the desert plant life is little short of marvellous. Out of one hundred and fifty known species of plants growing wild in Moqui a white farmer would call them all weeds the Hopis have found use, it is said, for about a hundred and forty. From MOQUI PUEBLOS 173 the Spaniards, who sought to Christianise them, but whose iron rule only succeeded in driving these Quakerly-disposed Indians to such desperation that they finally threw the priests over the cliffs and demolished the church, taking its beams for roofing their own pagan fanes from the Span iards they got enrichment of their lot in the shape of horses, burros, sheep, iron implements, and peach trees. The peach orchards are to-day a special feature in the environs of every Hopi town, the deep green of the foliage, billowing the yellow sands, being visible to the traveller as he ap proaches long before the town itself is distinguish able from the rock upon which it is founded. The nearest railroad to Moqui is the Santa Fe s transcontinental line, and the pueblos lie seventy- five to a hundred miles north of it. To them are four principal waggon routes, and unless you are used to desert travel, whichever one you take, you will likely wish you had chosen another; for, at the best, the trip is a hard one. You may, first of all, set out for Moqui from Canon Diablo, a flag-station where a lone trading-post has been established for many years; amply capable, how ever, of fitting you out in thorough style. This 174 MOQUI PUEBLOS way is the shortest to Oraibi, the westernmost pueblo. Then there is the route from Winslow. This Arizona town has the advantage of superior hotel accommodations; so from there you may count upon starting well-fed. The third route, that from Holbrook, a smaller place thirty-three miles east of Winslow, is a direct one to Walpi. Lastly, there is the Gallup route, the longest of all, taking from three to three and a half days as against two days by either of the other roads. It it, however, the pleasantest from the standpoint of comfort and general interest, with a minimum of desert to cross and a good deal of pine forest to traverse. The latter is very lovely, especially in the autumn, when the resplendent foliage of small oaks scattered through the pines fills the wood lands with a glory of bright colour. The Gallup road also crosses a considerable part of the great Navajo Reservation, affording the traveller a good opportunity to observe this remarkable tribe at close range. Both the Hol brook and Gallup routes present one important advantage over the other two in that their starting point is north of the Little Colorado River, the fording of which is thus avoided. This is an im- MOQUI PUEBLOS 175 portant consideration as, in time of rains, the river is not infrequently flooded and impassable for days. As both Canon Diablo and Winslow lie south of the Little Colorado, this possibility of the risen river s causing delay is to be reckoned with from those points. It was with the view of including the world- famous Snake Dance at Walpi that we timed our expedition to the Hopi mesas in August. One of the few things we did know about the trip before hand and this was confirmed by experience was that, even in August, we should not encounter any overwhelming heat. Everything else, how ever, which the midsummer elements could fur nish, we had in liberal doses including wind and cloudbursts, radiant sunshine by day and delicious nights for slumber. We decided upon the Gallup route. We are not of the robust type of travellers, and previous experience with desert and Indians had taught us our physical limitations. We accordingly made careful provision in advance for a first-class team and competent driver, as well as for as many comforts as could be packed under the seats. On two nights of the journey we knew that lodging ac- 1 7 6 MOQUI PUEBLOS commodations could be had; but one other night must be spent in the open ; while, as to Moqui, we knew not how we should be housed and fed there. So we included in our impedimenta two folding cots; two down quilts folded lengthwise and turned up a few inches at the side and bottom and pinned there with safety-pins, making sleeping- bags, using them by day for cushions in the car riage; a telescope satchel, containing needful changes of clothing; and a box of such provisions delicacies and the finer grade of necessaries as we should not likely find in Indian traders stocks. Furthermore, to relieve the minds of anxious friends, we carried a vial of permanga nate of potash crystals, for use in case of getting bitten at the Snake Dance a very, very remote contingency. Though one may travel forty miles without sight of a white face, there are no dangers on a trip of this kind any greater than would be met with in motoring from New York to Boston. The stock bugaboos of the tenderfoot, such as venom ous snakes, Indians on the war-path, and "bad men" of the shilling shocker type, are negligible factors. Our frontier West develops in its men, MOQUI PUEBLOS 177 along with some picturesque vices, a broadness of dealing, combined with a certain chivalry where women are concerned, that makes it the safest of regions for travellers who mind their own busi ness, and if these do not put on airs and become condescending or instructive, they will be always in the hands of their friends. At the lonely post of the white trader or in the Navajo hogan, they are welcome without charge to such board and lodging as the place affords. As one hospitable Arizonian put it to us: "Your coin don t pass here, brother; it s hard enough to have to travel this country without paying out money." Nevertheless, it was somewhat of a strain on our faith when we applied at the livery stable at Gallup for the team we had arranged for some weeks in advance, to be told apologetically by the proprietor that the experienced man whom he had counted on to drive us had sprained his arm, and he would have to put us in charge of his only other driver, a seventeen-year-old boy, who had never been thirty miles from home. "But he ll pick up the way all right," he continued comfortingly ; you see, you travel most of the time over the Navajo Reservation and Bob 178 MOQUI PUEBLOS talks Navajo with a regular Parisian accent. Why, when he talks, I m here to tell you it just makes the squaws weep, he does it so good: so, if there s ever any doubt about the road, he can ask an Indian, and it s just the same as if he knew the road himself. Accommodating? Yes, sir, you bet; he 11 play ball all right, He d better; his job depends on it. He s over to Fort Defiance to day with a party. That s on your road, and he starts back in the morning. So, if you re ready to hit the trail to-morrow, I 11 drive you out and we 11 meet him fifteen or twenty miles out ; then he 11 turn in with you, and I will bring his bunch of people on into Gallup. He 11 deliver the goods, all right don t you worry." As there was no alternative, we did not worry, though there seemed some cause for solicitude in being put in the care of a stripling on a two hundred and fifty mile trip through a wilderness that was as unknown to him as to ourselves; and the next morning found us early on the road. Bob, when we met him, proved to be a tall youth with a serious countenance, an olive com plexion, and calf-like eyes. He wore a hat with the crown pinched up into an elevated peak, blue MOQUI PUEBLOS 179 jumper and overalls, and long-legged, yellow boots. He listened without comment as his employer delivered him his orders. "This lady and gentleman are going up to the Moqui country and will be gone three or four weeks. You are to take them. Here s twenty dollars for the expenses of the team, and if you need any more, ask the gentleman for it. If you kill one of the horses, buy another, and if you need to pay any cash down, he 11 give you a bunch of money. And here s your war-bag" (holding up to view a small telescope some eighteen inches long) . "Your mother packed it for you. There s a couple o pair o socks and a bunch of cigarette papers in it ; that will keep you for a month. Now, you get aboard here, and adios everybody." So, without more formality, the transfer of Bob was effected, and we drove off over a pifion ridge and down into a wide, solitary waste of sagebrush, where all the world was as new and fresh to us as to our first parents when they stepped forth into the great world without Eden. It was through a country of wild beauty that three days trip. Every day our Jehu lost the way; but, through the goodness of Providence that 1 8o MOQUI PUEBLOS watches over infants, found it again; every day were hard thunder-showers of an hour or two, succeeded by a radiant glory of clearing; and every day there were such bursts of sunshine out of a turquoise sky, where huge, cumulus clouds gath ered and moved in stately procession, as only the South- West knows. Wild flowers bloomed on every hand tangles of yellow sunflowers and forests of purple cleome, sometimes as high as the horses heads; and always ahead of us long, flat-topped mesas, bathed in soft tones of pink and mauve and amethyst, stretched themselves into the plain, beckoning us on. Hills of mystery, they seemed like the ramparts of some heavenly city let down into this world of sense, awakening in us, far from all things, the hope of all things. No wonder the old Conquistador es kept striving towards them! There is that in the alluring, warm-toned, canon- gashed steeps that makes the presence of a pot of gold there or a pocket of precious stones seem the most natural thing in the world. Of human life, there were only occasional Navajos, men and women, always ahorseback and often driving before them great bands of sheep. Bob never missed the opportunity of intimate conversation MOQUI PUEBLOS 181 with them to assure himself of the road and the location of water for his team. For ourselves, we had in the carriage two canteens fresh-filled every morning. And, by and by, we came out of this semi-desert upon pure desert and caught our first sight of Moqui the pueblo of Walpi, perched upon a lofty, outstretched promontory, silhouetted against a streak of light in the western sky, the long streamers of the rain descending waveringly out of black clouds upon the town. Chapter XVIII Of the Life in Moqui ; and a Hint of its Latter Day Trembles. A" the foot of Walpi s steep is a scattering of houses the Government school, the field matron s, the doctor s, and a few that Indians dwell in. In one a Hopi trader keeps a little store. To Americans his name is Tom, and him we had been instructed to find and consult as to our lodging while in Moqui. As we drew up before the store, an Indian came briskly forth to greet us, a small man with a pleasant smile, jet black hair cut square at the neck, and a clean, white shirt that bellied picturesquely in the breeze. No, he was not Tom, he was Tom s bruzzer n law, Percy, and yes, he sought mebbe he knew about some house if we wanted to hire one till after Snake Dance; mebbe his sister Mary, Snake Priest s wife, she would hire hers, it was just bow-shot away, and she would go up to the mesa and stay ; he would spoke to her. 182 X ,"- A Hopi potter preparing to fire pottery bowls. Her home is on the distant mesa top, but she has come down here because a nearby corral affords abundant fuel of dried sheep manure. LIFE TO-DAY IN MOQUI 183 And so it came to pass that, in the course of an hour, we found ourselves, for a consideration of a dollar and a half a week, sole tenants of a tight- roofed, one-roomed, stone house with a little, walled front-yard, and a glorious view eastward across the yellow desert to pink and purple moun tains. Here and there, amid the sands, were green patches of growing corn, beans, and melons, and far away in the sunshine an Indian was riding, warbling a Hopi yodel as he rode. An old man, naked to his breech clout this August day, was singing, too, and driving two dun pack-burros afield, to whose sober coats a touch of vivacity was given by red saddle-blankets. Children were tumbling and romping in the dunes, where wild flowers bloomed, and the air was sweet with the music of their laughter. The natural life of the Pueblo is happy and gay in his sunlit land. I want to tell you this before the Government has civilised the joy of his native life out of him. All Moqui, like omnia Gallia, is divided geo graphically into three parts three finger-like me sas which extend out into the Painted Desert, the tips approximately ten miles each from the other. Upon the eastern or First Mesa, stand three of the 1 84 LIFE TO-DAY IN MOQUI pueblos in a line Walpi, Sichomovi, and Tewa, so close together that they really are like one long, rambling village. Nevertheless, they preserve their respective individualities even to the extent of one employing a radically different language from the others. The Second or Middle Mesa is forked at the tip and upon it are three more villages. On one prong of the fork are perched Mishong-novi and the acropolis-like Shipau-lovi, while on the other prong is Shimopovi. I wish the names were less formidable-looking in print, but they are not unmusical from Hopi lips. The Third Mesa was, until recently, the site of but one pueblo Oraibi, the largest of all in Moqui ; but a new one, Hotavila, now shares the Mesa with it. Then there is a farming colony of Oraibians, known as Moenkopi, twenty-five miles or so to the west ward ; but it is not customarily reckoned a separate entity from Oraibi. In all eight villages, life is much the same, though the influence of white contact is more marked in some than in others. Perhaps Oraibi and Walpi have been most affected by this Shimopovi the least so, and our visit to this conservative place was delightful in proportion; for conservatism LIFE TO-DAY IN MOQUI 185 means having a mind of your own and sticking to it, and that makes people interesting. Shimopovi internally is full of quaint bits and corners dis tracting to an artist, and at the time of our visit, the streets were clean and neat, and the village was the home of as peaceful and happy a primitive life as one could desire to see. It is, of course, the happiness of the unprogressive and condemnable accordingly, you will say; but then is there not apostolic authority for abiding in the same calling wherein one is called, and for being, in whatsoever state one is, therein content? All doors opened to us in Shimopovi and a smile of welcome was on every face. In one home, a mother with a tiny baby extends it for our inspection, looking at it meantime with unspeakable depths of mother love in her eyes, as she pats the little, round cheeks. In another home a family, seated on the floor at dinner, bids us enter and eat stewed mutton and piki bread with them, and receives our apologetic declination with pleasant merriment. Farther on, three old women, their wrinkled faces tender with grandmotherly kindliness, sit weaving the peculiar basketry for which the Second Mesa is famous a weave known nowhere else on this continent, 186 LIFE TO-DAY IN MOQUI though practised by certain tribes of Northern Africa. Each of the old women is dressed in a single garment of close- woven, dark-blue cloth, the typical squaw dress of Moqui, comfortable and convenient and involving none of the continual care which their sisters over at Walpi are beginning to learn under white direction goes with sundry curious pieces of underwear. The voices of the old dames are as soft as music ; they motion us to be seated, supplying us with the two stools that their little room affords, and then go pleasantly on with their gossip in the still, sunny afternoon. We are welcome to stay as long as we wish, and, when we leave, a smiling Shimo- povi au revoir is chorused to us. Chief among Pueblos, the Hopis appear to have been deemed especially needful of an all-round educational uplift, and during the last decade or two, they have certainly had an old-fashioned, allopathic dose of it. What with day schools, reservation boarding-schools, and non-reservation boarding-schools, all having their turn at train ing the Hopi young idea what with professional farmers, field matrons, resident agents to cut Hopi hair, and what-not the reconstruction of Moqui A corner of a pueblo of the Second Mesa, Moqui. LIFE TO-DAY IN MOQUI 187 has been going on at a pace that would be found humorous in some aspects, if it did not spell the speedy death, as a distinctive class, of this "little people of peace. " The picturesque and healthful costume of old Moqui is being replaced by American ugliness. Overalls, suspenders, ragged coats, and more ragged trousers, clumsy store shoes, hats with hang-dog brims that the wind delights to whirl off, are now everyday features of men s attire where, but a few years ago, the loose, cotton blouse and wide, flapping, cotton pantaloons, deerskin mocca sins that fit the rocky trail with the sureness of the foot itself, and the blanket that is hat, coat, and gloves in one, were the general vogue. As for the women, the sensible, native- woven " squaw-dress * of one woollen garment, free at the throat, neat- belted and short-skirted, is being systematically replaced by slovenly shirt-waists, bedraggled long skirts, and conventional undergarments of the white woman a style of attire which is well enough in a land where the Troy Laundry has an agency at every corner, but rather out of key in the yellow dust of an unpaved Arizona desert, with forty miles between water-holes. Open fireplaces, 188 LIFE TO-DAY IN MOQUI which have always been an important means of ventilation in the pueblo rooms, are being closed up and American cook-stoves are being everywhere set up, making the houses unhealthy and tubercu losis-breeding, and encouraging the introduction of American forms of food and cooking, distinctly unwholesome to a people always accustomed to a plain diet, cooked in a radically different way. The people, furthermore, are discouraged from living in their own towns on the breeze-swept mesas, and the Government has erected a number of houses for them at the mesa-foot in the sands of the desert ( !) . A row of these, which we visited at Oraibi, had a pathetic interest in the fact that every family inhabiting them had from one to many members sick. The good sense of the Hopis is shown by the fact that, whenever possible, they rent such houses to white people and go back to the old towns on the heights. Last but not least potent in the reconstruction of Hopi life, is the allotting agent, whose business is to apportion to each Indian a stated amount of land in severalty, and so break up the communal owning of land an unobjectionable feature of Pueblo life, as ingrained in the people as its opposite is ingrained in LIFE TO-DAY IN MOQUI 189 us. x When he gets through, there will probably be a considerable portion of the present reservation of Moqui for sale; but any white man ought to be ashamed to be caught owning the land of a race who have gained their title to it by such hard- earned conquest of its resources. Worse than all this, the touch of aggressive white domination is bringing about a deterioration of the Hopi spirit the old, old story that ever attends Caucasian meddling in the native life of so-called " inferior" races the inoculation of a fine, contented, wholesome people with the virus of "civilised" vice, unrest, and disease. The practical result is that the Hopis are developing into a body of parasites instead of perpetuating the sturdy independence of a people whom all travellers, even as late as ten years ago, spoke of with enthusiasm. At Oraibi, particularly, the evidences of white influence are simply sickening. Any one who doubts it has only to go and see for 1 Unlike the lands of the New Mexico Pueblos, which were, all or in part, Spanish grants subsequently confirmed to the Indians by United States patents, the Moqui land is a Govern ment Reservation, existing by executive order, and accordingly liable to division, alienation, or whatever else Congress may dictate. LIFE TO-DAY IN MOQUI himself. Seeing is a better basis for correct infor mation than reading Government reports. From the first appearance of the Government teachers among them, the Hopi counsellors recog nised the "white peril," and the people protested against it. Why should they, with an ancient culture of their own, sufficient to their condition and hallowed to them by a thousand memories and traditions, give it up for the way of the white man with his record of broken promises and duplicity? Asking nothing whatever from our Government and willing to work and pay for all they need, what do they want with a white education for their red children? They know things enough already of real worth to put their teachers to shame ; but they do not attempt to force their Indian codes upon the whites even had they the power, they would not be so impertinent. Why, then, should they be white- jacketed? But the benighted views of this handful of Quaker Indians, of course, had no standing as against the progressive policies of an enlightened Great Republic with a hungry family of place-hunters and land-seekers to be cared for out of the public providing. So at the present time, most of the Hopis have given up the fight and - A blanket weaver. Second Hopi Mesa. Among the Hopis, the men are the weavers the reverse of the Navajo custom. LIFE TO-DAY IN MOQUI 191 have resigned themselves to what seems to be the inevitable. Not all of them, however. There is the case of Hotavila the eighth pueblo of Moqui, four years old this year of grace 1911 a little bit of an Indian village whose less than a hundred families have dared to try to live independently of the dictation of our Government in their internal affairs, even as our own fathers aforetime resented the interference of certain over-sea kings in mat ters too intimate. But this is matter for another chapter. Chapter XIX Of Hotavila, tKe EigHtH Pxxeblo of Moqvii, and How it LooKed BlacKly at vis. READING your evening paper, some five years ago, in your smoking- jacket and slippers, you may have noticed a despatch of half a dozen lines your Eastern journal would hardly have spared it more space about a Hopi uprising in Arizona, and the soldiers from Fort Wingate being sent to quell it. That is what soldiers are for, out West, so you probably forgot all about the incident as quickly as read, and turned to the more important matter of the divorce scandal elaborately reported on the same page. The uprising was not against this Government, but was a family revolution among the Hopi of Oraibi pueblo whom the Government s educational policy had divided into two factions. One party, popularly known as the "Friendlies," feeling it 192 HOT A VILA 193 useless to contend against the power of Wash ington, was for accepting the Government s plans in toto and grafter-like, getting anything else it could for itself out of the United States. The other faction, called the "Hostiles," was for entire independence of the United States Govern ment, wanting no favours and unwilling to accept any, asking only the reasonable privilege of con tinuing undisturbed the mode of life their fore fathers had found good. The crisis came on September 7, 1906. At that time the population of Oraibi was in round numbers one thousand persons, and about half the families were enrolled in each faction. When the break came, each party tried to oust the other from the pueblo, not with weapons or military tactics, but by the homely, old way of pushing and pulling, catch-as-catch-can. The "Hostiles" were worsted and, without disputing the issue, proceeded five miles along the high wedge of land on which Oraibi stands, to Hotavila Spring, where, in the succeeding months, they built for themselves a new pueblo . This body of separatists , standing for the principle of Hopi-land for the Hopis, were looked upon by the Indian Bureau 13 194 HOT A VILA as disturbers of the public peace and promoters of trouble and the more determined among them were either put to hard labour for several months on the public roads of Arizona, or jailed for periods varying from a few months to three years. J Here, then, was something new in pueblos, and we felt a keen interest to see this little cradle of liberty. Oraibi was prehistoric in 1540; the vil lages of the First and Second Mesas, too, run well back in the centuries and look it; but here is a chance to see a pueblo only just out of its long clothes. But, when we announced our intention of making the trip thither, our host the trader, an Americanised gentleman of Spanish descent, married to a California Indian, lifted his arms in wonderment, and his half -consumed cigarette fell from his paralysed lips. He was a rotund, merry man, and spoke with such intensity that the perspiration stood out in beads on his face. "Hombre!" he cried, "and take the lady! Why s the reason you go there? It s just a wilderness, 1 Since the foregoing was written, a few families of the "Hostile party, who eventually consented to send their children to school and otherwise submit themselves to the Government s regula tions, have established a little village of their own, called Bacabi about five miles north-east of Oraibi. HOT A VILA 195 and the road there, my dear sir it is desert, desert, desert, and a very devil of a hill, deep to the hub in sand and then more desert, and what then? Nothing, my dear sir, you would not see better right here at Oraibi. Oh, yes, they are an all right kind of people, and independent as any Americans that ever were. Why, my dear sir, let me tell, when they want to do trading do you suppose they come to my store where the other Oraibis trade? No, my dear sir, you bet! They go right by with their burros and straight on seventy miles across the desert to Winslow, seventy miles, mind you, and seventy back! What do you know about that now, my dear sir, for spirit and in an Indian, too! Madre de Dios, it *s money out of my pocket and I like a silver peso as well as the next man; but say they re the stuff. "That s why you want to see them? Well, of course, that s different. Oh, you can t miss the road, my dear sir. It runs between two hills like, and you could n t get off it if you tried. If you must spend a quarter, I 11 send a Moqui runner along to start you right; but it s just giving the money away, my dear sir, just giving it away." I 9 6 HOT A VILA And he shook his head bitterly at the thought of such American waste. We had travelled enough to be skeptical of the road that cannot be missed ; so we bespoke the Moqui runner for sunrise the next morning, and when we got him, we raised his wages and kept him all the way to Hotavila and back again. Never was money better invested; for the road, so called, was, in many places, hardly more than a faint waggon-track in the sand, with many di vergencies to corn lands and melon patches; and, moreover, the new pueblo was, by its position, so cleverly hidden from the direction of our ap proach to it that we had no hint of its existence until we were immediately upon it, clinging like a swallow s nest to the mesa edge, overlooking the Painted Desert. If this little adobe town were a ruin like a bit of ancient Rome, if it had behind it some heroic legend as of another Horatius filled with the love of country defending with his life the birthright of a people now long dead and buried, I suppose it would not be considered sentimental to do reverence to the spot, or unpatriotic to sympathise with its people s stand for liberty. But, being HOT A VILA 197 only an Indian village on a hot, hot hillside in twentieth-century Arizona, the case is essentially different, is it not? For almost the first time in a long acquaintance with Pueblos, we found ourselves distinctly unwel come visitors. Frightened women gathered their children into the houses at the sight of our white faces; a few men, with averted looks, strode past us on their way to cultivate their crops of beans, corn, and melons, which we had seen growing on the mesa; others watched us suspi ciously from the shadow of doorways and street corners. It goes against the grain, however, with the Pueblo Indian to be inhospitable; he is by nature a sociable, happy-hearted being, and though tenacious of his own ways, he likes to make strangers welcome in his home. So, as the day wore on, and we neither attempted to kidnap children nor to open negotiations for a day school, the atmosphere cleared. We had shells and candy, coloured magazine pictures and tobacco, and as we were neither insistent nor aggressive nor flip pant, and remained contentedly in the streets while closed doors confronted us, smiles by degrees took the place of scowls and considerable interest I 9 8 HOT A VILA centred in us as bearers of such delectable pre sents and probable buyers of the flat baskets in the making of which the Third Mesa women have long been specialists. So, after all, we had a happy day at Hotavila, and drove off, at last, with many pleasant memories. But we could not forget the black looks of the first hour or two, and, stopping shortly afterwards at the pleasant home of the Government Field Matron below Oraibi, we asked to know something further concerning the relations of the whites to the separation of the two factions at Oraibi. She was glad of our interest a sweet -faced woman, dwelling in the neatest and cleanest of houses, which, if an Indian were to be moved by ex ample, would surely have been an irreproachable object-lesson of American household ideals. She offered us comfortable rocking-chairs and brought a pitcher of cool water, and as we sat on the shady porch with the pleasant rustle of cottonwood leaves in our ears, and looking up at the grey, old pueblo on its sunny heights far above us ? she answered our questions in her soft -toned voice. "I certainly am glad you got over to Hotavila. They are nice people over there. In fact, all 3P J*.; A *;, .- A Beau Brummel of Hotaville. HOT A VILA 199 these Indians are nice. I am very fond of them. I was really sorry when they had to separate. But, after all, it was better. You see those people over at Hotavila are very obstinate and won t let us do a thing for them. They keep saying that they do not want any help; but really, you know, they ought to have it. The Commissioner says it is due to the Indian children to have the same chance as the white children have; and I think the Government ought to make the people take what is best for them. You see, they don t like the white people at all, though I can t see why, when we want to uplift them and do the best for their own welfare. "The great trouble came after the separation, when the troops were sent over to make the children go to school. The Hostiles, as they call them, had just been put out of the old village, which had always been their home, and had started in to live at this new place, and they had not more than got it under way when it was decided by the Washing ton authorities to send some of the men to prison and put most of the rest to hard labour on the roads over beyond Ream s Canon, because of their rebelliousness. That left hardly anybody 200 HOT A VILA but women and children in the new village, and it was hard enough times for them to get along, with winter coming on soon; but, about that time, as the women would not put the children to school, as, of course, they should have done, the troops were sent to bring them by force. I had to go and help the soldiers, as I knew all the people, and it was about as disagreeable a piece of work as ever I had to do. The mothers were perfectly frantic. They hid the babies and children in inside rooms and under flour sacks and beneath beds, and shook their fists in my face, actually, and told me they had thought I was their friend, but that I was nothing but a traitor, and held on to the children until the soldiers had to pull them away. Of course, poor things, they did not know where they were going, and they certainly do love their children. It did seem too bad." There was a soft cry in the house. The Field Matron excused herself and went in. Presently she came out holding in her arms a beautiful baby of, perhaps, a year old. The tiny arms clasped her neck, the little head, with its loose curls, lay on her shoulder in satisfied content. HOT A VILA 201 One motherly arm held him firmly, and with the other she stroked the child s head, as she said: "Must you go? Well, come again before you leave these parts. It is real pleasant to see some new white faces now and then." We understood better now the black looks at Hotavila. The white visitor to Moqui is quite at liberty, if he so desire, to drive his panting team up the interminable, sandy hill to Hotavila, and walk about the neat streets of this little pueblo of independence, the last stand of conservative Moqui, still looking off upon the immemorial mystery of the Painted Desert out of which, ages ago, the fathers of the Hopis came; but he must not be surprised if he meets with sullen looks from barred doorways and if women hide their babies away as he passes. And it is a trip well worth the taking; for here at Hotavila, and only less so at the neighbouring pueblo of Shimopovi, its close second in conservativeness, one sees the best of Hopi life to-day. The peaceful, happy simplicity of their ancient way of living, poor in material advantages though it be, makes a remarkable contrast to the conditions at some of 202 HOT A VILA the other villages where Government influence has undisputed sway as, for instance, in the Government s "model settlement" under the Oraibi cliffs, where the unrest, sickness, aimlessness of purpose, and general misery which were pain fully apparent among its people when the writer visited it, were more suggestive of the slums of a great city than anything that seemed possible in the sweet air and under the turquoise sky of Arizona. CKapter XX Of Wulpi, and the SnuKe Dance TKere. WERE it not for the annual Snake Dance of the Hopis, it is probable that few travellers except those of the fireside would have any knowledge of these people. As it is, the Snake Dance has been so industriously written up and talked over that it has become a magnet which, every August, draws more or less of a crowd of tourists and holiday-makers across the desert sands to witness this most entrancing and most dramatic half -hour entertainment that America has to offer. I use the word "enter tainment" hesitatingly, knowing that is all it is to the average white onlooker ; but it should be borne in mind that, to the Indian, it is a solemn and religious rite the public denouement of a nine- days secretly-conducted intercession for the divine favour. It is in the snake element that the attraction centres; for there are countless other 203 204 THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE public dances in Moqui which, to the casual visi tor, would be even more picturesque and pleas ing as spectacles than this ; but hardly any white person sees them. There is reason to believe that, at one time, Snake Ceremonies were a part of the religious rites among all the pueblos; but, at this date, the ob servance is confined to five or six of the Hopi towns. It is an annual ceremony, but all villages do not hold it the same year. The most elaborate presentations are at Walpi and Oraibi, occurring on alternate years at Walpi on the uneven years, 1911, 1913, etc., and at Oraibi on the even years, 1912, 1914, etc. The specific day of the month varies, being determined afresh each year by some secret sacerdotal formula that keeps the white man guessing until the priests descend to their underground rites in the kivas or council rooms, which always begin nine days before the public dance with the serpents. The railroad company arranges to be posted as to this at the earliest pos sible moment, and to its agents one should apply for information respecting the exact date of the dance, which one may be reasonably certain will not be earlier than August tenth nor later than THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE 205 August twenty-fifth. It takes place just before sundown and consumes about thirty-five minutes. So little interest has the generality of our people in the native home-life of our Indians that most visitors time their attendance to the one day on which the dance occurs, or, at most, from the evening before until the morning after. For Sylvia and myself, however, interesting as most ceremonies at the pueblos proved to be, an even greater interest attached to the domestic side of their life; and, keeping ourselves as much in the background as possible, we liked to watch the village activities as the preparations for the great events were carried busily forward. There are, for instance, the moulding and burning of pottery knickknacks cups and little pitchers, ash trays and shaving mugs later to be set alluringly in the house windows to catch the visi tors eyes; for Moqui has already acquired the traders trick of manufacturing down 10 the buyers taste and has been quick to learn that, among the tourists whom curiosity brings to them, there are comparatively few who care enough and know enough to buy the beautiful native art -ware that conforms to Hopi ideas, when they can get 206 THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE for a picayune some useless gimcrack made in poor imitation of the white man s utensil. To such Philistine sense is it not " pretty good for Indian work"? Then, there is a house-cleaning indus triously going on in every home the sprinkling of the floors with the precious water from the desert well and the vigorous brooming and brush ing with little grass whisks. The babies of the household, in the meantime, are sent forth in the sunshine on the willing backs of larger sisters to be out of the way. Old men, sitting in sunny doorways, are mending cloaks of mottled rabbit- skin and sewing up worn moccasins; young men (the few that are visible, for many are in the kivas) are killing and skinning sheep and pegging the skins out on the rocks to dry, laughing and joking together the while; girls are grinding meal within doors in an atmosphere fragrant with crushed grain, and their mothers are making wafer- bread and green corn pudding; other women are plastering anew the fronts of their homes a cherished privilege of Pueblo women everywhere; burros come clattering along the rocks, laden with fire-wood from the mesa or corn from far-away fields, and women with water- jars slung on their Mealing stones on which Pueblo women grind their corn. THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE 207 backs pass and repass with noiseless tread on the deeply worn trail that leads to the mesa water-holes. At the open door of a house we paused to look in at two stout women cutting up the meat of a recently killed sheep. Their hair had lately been washed in yucca suds and was clubbed up in a picturesque topknot that stood upright and bobbed above the forehead. One of them looked at us and said something in her native tongue. "What does she say?" we asked of a young girl with her hair done up in the squash blossoms that we had often seen in photographs, and whom we suspected of understanding English. "She say she glad to see you. Take seat and sit down." Entering, we discovered another young woman seated upon a sheepskin spread on the adobe floor and surrounded by small pieces of unburned pottery upon which she was painting designs with a strip of yucca leaf. Her hair hung down in strings and her countenance lacked the welcome of the others. Her pottery was poor and on American models roosters and pigs mostly. "Is she your sister?" we asked of the smiling 208 THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE Squash Blossoms, who was preparing to take her position at the mealing stones to resume the grinding which our entrance had interrupted. She nodded brightly. "Why doesn t she wear the pretty squash blossoms of old times?" we asked reprovingly. "We think the squash blossoms a pretty way for young women to wear their hair." "Because she married and must n t wear them no more," said Squash Blossoms shyly, her smile breaking bounds into a giggle. Then she said something in Hopi evidently a translation of our little sermon and all the women laughed merrily. And so we learned that squash blossoms stand for maidenhood in Hopi symbolism. 1 As we rose to go, we noticed a male figure, clad in white man s attire, prone upon the floor. It slowly turned towards us, revealing the face of a young man chewing a straw. He raised his arms, stretched them, and, thrusting them under his head for a pillow, stared impudently at us. 1 This way of wearing the hair would seem to have been the fashion in former times at other pueblos, also. Thus an old Spanish chronicler, describing Zufii customs in Coronado s time, says: "The women wear their hair gathered about the ears like little wheels." THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE 209 Without rising and without preamble, he proceeded to catechise us. "Where you come from? California, eh? Whereabouts California? You come Snake Dance? How long you came? * et cetera und so wetter. "You have been to school, haven t you?" we observed, when his ideas had run out. "Sure," he replied with a yawn. "Did you study at Carlisle?" "No." "Where then?" "Grand Junction, Colorado." We pointed to the rooster and pig pottery. "Who taught her to do that?" "Do what?" he asked. "To make those miserable forms of animals." "Her brain, I guess," he said sullenly. "You tell her not to do that, but to make the beautiful bowls and jars that the old people al ways used to make. It is not good to make those pigs and roosters. That is not Indian work- it is just copying Americans." The young man yawned again and muttered evilly, " You don t have to buy them." 14 210 THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE With which Parthian shot, he turned over on his face. We could not but note that this youth, gratui tously endowed by our Government with the education which is expected to make him an up lifting influence among his benighted people," was the only idle figure in the busy home, and his was the only voice that was unresponsive to our parting " Good-bye. " In all Moqui there is no more picturesque setting for a Snake Dance than the little plaza at Walpi. A wall of terraced houses shuts in one entire side and part of another. The south side is dominated by a towering rock, spread out at the summit like a great, petrified mushroom. Along the eastern edge, where there is an uninterrupted view across the desert for scores of miles, it is but a step into eternity a sheer drop down the face of a perpendicular cliff to waiting rocks thirty or forty feet below. There is no bar rier of any sort along this dizzy edge, and the fact that spectators at the dance do not back off it, and Hopi children, at other times, do not roll over it, witnesses doubtless to the red gods con tinued care of Moqui and of Moqui s friends. Snake Rock, Walpi. " Boy-af raid-of-the-Camera " and his grandmother. THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE 211 Now and again, as we rambled about Walpi in the days preceding the dance, the solemn, chorused chant of priests would flow up from the underground kivas near the plaza and hold us spellbound. Down there were the snakes, and great was our curiosity to descend to them. We asked Percy if that were possible of accomplish ment; but that astute son of peace would not encourage us. Yes, people had been down people from Washington to see that everysing was being done all ri , and Mr. Curtis, the picture man, he had been down, yes; but it cost very much money seventy dollar , he sought. Of course, we might spoke to some Snake people; but maybe we no want to pay seventy dollar ? We certainly did not and, upon second thought, we did not feel easy, anyhow, to attempt, from motives of mere curiosity, to force ourselves into the midst of a religious ceremonial the par ticipants in which plainly did not want our presence. A quiet request, however, did gain us admittance to a kiva where, in the dim under ground, illumined only by the daylight coming through a door in the roof, some dancers were engaged in making up for the dance, painting 212 THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE their cotton kilts with lightning symbols, string ing bracelets and necklaces of shells, colour ing their bodies, and tying feathers in their hair. No children preparing for a party could be more garrulous but in whispers always or more vain, as, each ornamentation finished, its wearer showed it off admiringly to a neighbour and, lighting a cigarette, rested awhile before beginning on another. The day of the Snake Dance is ushered in by an early-morning foot-race of young men, starting at certain traditional points out on the plain and ending within the pueblo. As the sunrise tints the desert mesa with red, the windows and roofs of the houses and the rim of the mesa on which the pueblo stands are crowded with eager spec tators, their eyes all turned toward the north. Every rocky cape and promontory that offers an advantageous view is pre-empted by Indians who, silhouetted picturesquely against the blue, are gazing intently toward one distant spot in the desert. Suddenly hands are shot up here and there and then a shout from the housetops. The runners are in sight mere specks of brown on the yellow plain a scattering band of fifteen THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE 213 or twenty with one lithe fellow already well in the lead. In and out, over and around sand dunes and rocks, he runs like an antelope, now plunging at full speed down an arroyo, then leaping up its precipitous sides beyond slowly here, but still running, the rest surging after him pelted by corn stalks and melon vines, thrown by laughing boys and girls, gaily dressed and painted, and jingling with bells, awaiting the runners among the rocks. The other racers prove bad seconds all except one who, by her culean spurts, manages to get close to the leader s heels for a few minutes ; but the pace is too much for him and he drops back just as the whole pack, now close to the foot of the mesa, is lost to view under the cliffs. The crowd of spectators run along the dizzy mesa edge, towards the south point where the trails from the foot come up, in order to catch first sight of the winner as he emerges from the rocks below. There are some minutes of suspense, then a cheer from an excited American with a flutter ing, red necktie, and the nude runner, glisten ing with perspiration, his head thrown back, and his long black hair borne splendidly on the 214 THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE breeze, leaps up into the level sunbeams. The crowd falls back; there is the click of kodaks; dogs bark and yelp; and Hopi throats split the air with shouts of appreciation as the tense figure bounds through the covered passageway that is Walpi s southern portal, flashes by the kivas of the Antelope and Snake people, and disappears within an open door. The rest of the racers follow at intervals of a few minutes, the crowd breaks up, and everybody goes home to breakfast. It is a busy day in Moqui this of the Snake Dance. All the morning the rock-ribbed streets resound to the clatter of hoofs and the shuffle of human feet. Navajos come riding in on their tough little ponies, keen to trade their blankets and silver trinkets for American dollars and rent their horses for trips on the trail. Hopis from other villages, some from distant Moenkopi, have urged their tired teams, drawing laden, creaking waggons, with canvas tops, up the steep road cut in the mesa s side, and are hobnobbing with old friends. White visitors stroll about, snapping kodaks in people s faces, inspecting Hopi home life, chaffering for pottery, sampling piki bread and other Indian cookeries, and outspokenly THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE 215 marvelling at the squash blossoms of Hopi maiden hood. Some of the ladies have even bargained with a native hairdresser to do their hair in that engaging fashion and are admired accordingly. The children of the pueblo are in a high state of excitement, and are decked out in gala attire, ranging all the way from orthodox little squaw dresses of native weave to flour sacks and Unite.d States flags. Besides Hopi delicacies principally dripping slices of melon they are recipients of candy from such experienced white visitors as ( > know the value of sweetmeats to reach the In dian heart. Brother Sim, the photographer and ex-priest from Gallup, who carries an enormous camera, and whose rotund countenance wears an all-embracing smile, has brought two or three buckets of candy in his outfit and, like a mid summer Santa Claus, throws handfuls of it high in the air for the children to scramble for he meantime photographing the scrimmage. As the afternoon shadows lengthen, the air of expectancy thickens, and the visitors begin to congregate about the plaza and pick out their seats a preference being noticeably shown by many for the roofs and upper stories; for rattle- 216 THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE snakes, like elephants, are poor climbers. Pro fessional photographers and moving-picture men take their places, and a yellow-clad squad of United States troopers, who arrived and camped on the plain last night, stroll in in a blas6 way, carbines on shoulder and toothbrushes in their hatbands, and come to a stand about the Snake Rock. By five o clock the outskirts of the lit tle plaza are packed with expectant humanity. The housetops are a rainbow of colour: Pueblo women, in bright, fiesta attire; girls from Indian schools in new-starched calicos and hats of the latest Flagstaff style ; Navajos in brown velveteen shirts and red head-bands ; a contingent of Ameri can ladies with their escorts in corduroy and khaki, and, here and there, a girl of the Golden West type, in spurred riding-boots, flaming ban danna neckerchief, and Texas sombrero, jammed down on the back of her head. About the plaza, besides Indians of various sorts, are cow-men with long love-locks curling about their ears, cartridge belts around their waists, and glittering spurs clinking at their high heels. There are helmet ed tourists from England, New York, Australia, and Denmark, and there are enthusiastic young THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE 217 Easterners on a vacation, roughing it under weather-beaten sombreros and marvellous hat bands and various sorts of Navajo adornments bracelets, silver rings, and wrist-guards. A dash of returned Hopi students in dinky hats, some even with cameras, and a sprinkling of Government officials and teachers from territorial Indian schools help to round out as picturesque and motley an assembly as the traveller often runs across in America. Who can do justice in words to the Snake Dance itself? The silent, swinging entrance of the priests in single file, decked in a remarkable har mony of sombre tones, from the copper-coloured tuft of feathers in their hair to the tawny, fringed moccasins, relieved only by a few lines and zig zags of white lightning painted on the semi-nude bodies and on the kilts; their rapid striding four times around the plaza and stamping with resound ing foot blows upon the plank that symbolises Shipapu, the entrance to the underground world; the humming chant of the Antelope priests, ac companied by rattles, that never ceases before the leafy prison of the snakes; the mouthing and lightning-like handling of the writhing serpents 2i8 THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE by the successive trios of celebrants; the tossing of the reptiles into a squirming pile within the mystic circle of scattered meal outlined for them at the foot of the Dance Rock; and the final act of the priests, snatching up the snakes by the handful and fleeing with them, some to the north, some to the west, some to the south, and some to the east, down the precipitous trails to the open desert, there dropping them to carry the people s supplications for rain to the gods of the waters all this without pause in the movement, makes an unflagging crescendo of dramatic action that baffles description. Being a real religious act, there is no self-consciousness on the part of the participants they are not playing to the galleries ; the activity of the venomous snakes makes that impossible, even if the desire existed; and, from start to finish, the attention of the spectators is tensely held. Not only is there no levity hard, indeed, to subdue in an American white crowd but, on the contrary, one sometimes sees among the more emotional onlookers twitching faces and eyes wet with tears. As Sylvia and I joined the crowd on their way down the trail to the camps and the horses, we THE WALPI SNAKE DANCE 219 suddenly stopped and looked at each other, struck with a common thought. The perman ganate of potash we had forgotten to bring it! "Is it not too bad?" Sylvia mourned. "Emily was so anxious for us to have it with us, and, of course, the snakes might have bitten us." 1 1 What is the Snake Dance all about, you ask? It is an elaborate invocation to the divinities of Moqui, entrusted to the serpents, which, it is believed, will convey the prayers to the gods and bring the blessing of rain in return. This explains why the snakes are never hurt by the priests. It is also a dramatisation of an ancient myth concerning the origin and early history of the Snake and Antelope fraternities the two clans which conduct the ceremony. See The Moki Snake Dance by Walter Hough, for a condensed statement of the snake legend, or J. Walter Fewkes s detailed account in the Journal of American Ethnology and Archtzology, vol. iv. Chapter XXI Of the Arts of tKe Pueblos, Especially the Ceramic. C^G before the interloping Spaniard and the later Anglo-Saxon had penetrated into their country, the Pueblo Indians had developed a fair kind of civilisation of their o.wn, and with it arts that were a vital expression of Pueblo life. The wonderful beauty of that land most of it semi-desert, and some of it pure desert, sublime in its colour and natural conformation is an inspiration to every artist who visits it, and it is not strange that these dwellers in it from prehistoric times should be an artist people, working into their various arts the conventions of natural objects and the symbolism of the pagan faith given to their forefathers in the dawn of time. Among such arts are the weaving of woollen and cotton garments on rude looms set up in the rooms of their homes 1 ; the making of 1 It was from the Pueblos that the Navajos, the best known of 220 Xampeyo of Tewa moulding a water-jar. No wheel is ever used by Pueblo potters. (Copyright by A. C. Vroman.) PUEBLO ARTS 221 basketry of varied forms from native plants; the manufacture of necklaces from beads wrought with infinite care from shells broken up, ground into disks by hand on a wet stone, and pierced with a curious pump drill an entirely different art, by the way, from the latter-day work of the Plains tribes, using the glass beads of American factories. Among the minor arts, too, I like to include the chipping of arrow-points. This is now practically extinct, since guns have replaced the bow; but the work of dead-and-gone makers is continually offered to visitors and forms a feature in Pueblo curio collections. A really good assortment of arrow-points is a revelation of the hidden beauty of stone. They are made of various minerals moss agate, flint, chalcedony, sardonyx, lava, obsidian and hold wonderful charm of colour. In form they are often exquisite, some, for small game, being quite tiny, but all revealing in every patiently wrought line the love of an artist for his art. At the present time, the Pueblo art par excellence our aboriginal weavers, learned this art. Among the Pueblos to-day only the Hopis and Zunis do any all-round weaving, though sashes and chongo ties are woven in other pueblos as well. 222 PUEBLO ARTS is pottery-making, which is done invariably by the women. The form which it takes is varied; but principally water- and storage- jars, canteens, bowls, and cooking vessels. It is fashioned entirely by hand, no wheel or mechanical device being employed, and in one of the preceding chapters of this book, the process has been described in some detail. In the prehistoric days of Pueblo art, as evidenced by the pottery found in ancient cliff-dwellings, glazing was practised, but that art has been lost and the modern Pueblo ware is unglazed. In the case of water-jars, this is a distinct advantage, as the porosity of the vessel causes a "sweating" which tends to keep the water cool. The designs of the Pueblo pottery are a study in themselves and of exceeding interest. They are handed down from mother to daughter, and being traditional, their significance may not always be understood by the artist herself. In the main they are conventionalised forms of certain features of her little world and of the phenomena of nature the mountains, the birds, and animals, the clouds, the falling rain, the wind, the lightning- flash; or of her religion such as the creatures of PUEBLO ARTS 223 her people s origin myths, the faces of the gods of the Pueblo pantheon, or the suggestion (rarely absent from the work of the older potters) of the mystic gateway of Shipapu, through which the souls of the new-born enter this world and the spirits of the dead pass out of it. Usually three colours red, white, and black are employed, though occasionally only two are used, and in some few of the pueblos the pottery is solid black or solid red, unornamented. In the last-named pottery the dependence for beauty is entirely on the grace and dignity of the shape. Pottery for cooking is invariably without decora tion. The accompanying illustrations of Pueblo pot tery are from examples in the writer s collection, bought, in many cases, directly from the potter herself. As will be noted, the work of different villages has characters of its own, distinguishing it from the work of others, yet has a certain harmony with the rest that holds all together in the bond of a common art. The collection of Moqui is almost entirely the work of Nampeyo, the most famous of the Pueblo potters, and her daughter. To see Nampeyo 224 PUEBLO ARTS at work is to the art lover one of the most interest ing sights in Moqui. She is a simple-hearted, unpretentious squaw, who sits on the floor of her dwelling moulding her vessels of clay or adorning them with her wonderful lines, and rising now and then to stir the mutton stew as it cooks upon the fire or lift the baby out of reach of the flame. Though her work, in the words of Dr. George A. Dorsey, "has gone far and wide over the curio- loving world," she is apparently unconscious that her gift is anything out of the common, and has all the shy modesty that distinguishes the women of her race. The Moqui ware is very distinct from other Pueblo pottery, both in form and decoration. The most common shapes are a low flat bowl and a shallow, wide-spreading water-jar, both adorned with remarkable designs in red and black on a white ground designs frequently suggested by the masks of the Katchinas, or dancers of the Moqui religious ceremonials. The best Moqui ware is particularly appealing in its colour, the white ground upon which the decoration is laid being distinguished by a soft, creamy tone, flushed usually with red. In marked contrast to the work of Moqui is A collection of Moqui ware very distinct from all other Pueblo pottery both in form and decoration. "Water-jars of San Ildefonso and Cochiti with bird decorations symbolical of lightness. PUEBLO ARTS 225 the pottery of Zufii. A feature of the Zufii decoration is the frequent incorporation of real istic animal forms in the design deer, ducks, frogs, butterflies, tadpoles. As with the Moqui ware, the colours used by the Zunis are custom arily red and black upon a white surface, but a notable exception is a red ware upon which the decoration is laid on in white. The colour would appear to be an integral feature of any particu lar form or decoration that is, given a particular design, it should be painted on in one, particular colour established by tradition. If other colours are wanted, the design must be changed! Flower forms are rarely used by the Zufiis, though a very striking design sometimes met with is a conventionalised sunflower. The potters of Acoma pueblo, on the contrary, whose work is noteworthy for its exceptional lightness, have made rather a specialty of floral and leaf adorn ment, and some suggestion of plant life is intro duced into almost every design. This is the more remarkable as their town is built upon a bare rock that rises almost perpendicularly three or four hundred feet from a great, sandy plain a singularly barren, inhospitable situation where is 226 PUEBLO ARTS there is scarcely earth enough to afford a flower a foothold. In the Indian s art work, however, he loves to preserve the suggestion of that which is most dear and precious to his poetic mind; so, from his standpoint, it is entirely fitting that the leaves and flowers of the plain and mountain, brought from a distance to this rock-founded village of the sky and employed in many secret, religious rites, as well as in the public dance cere monials, should find representation on the pottery. Intermingled with these on the Acoma ware are the vertical or slanting parallel lines, which in Pueblo symbolry represent the falling rain, and the terraces and steps which conventionalise the clouds of heaven. A peculiar, checker-board design is also not uncommon in the Acoma work, but its especial significance is unknown to the writer. Bird forms were common in the older work of the Acomas, as well as of other Pueblos, though now less frequent. As a bird in flight is the embodiment of airy lightness, the adornment of the water vessels with the pictures of birds would, in the Indian s fancy, add lightness to the clay a great desideratum, as the jars, which when filled are borne upon the carriers heads, Zufri ware, a feature of which is the frequent use of animal forms in the designs deer, frogs, butterflies, etc. The jar decorated in curves and lines, depicts, as explained by the potter who made it for the author, a pueblo (blocks against which rest poles with cross-pieces representing ladders) and rain (vertical lines) descending from clouds (arches) above. Black, lustrous ware of Santa Clara and San Juan. The only ornamentation used is a slight moulding, as along the bulging edge of the double-necked jar in the foreground. PUEBLO ARTS 227 often contain a weight of water equal to thirty pounds or more, and to this the vessel s weight is additional. At Santo Domingo a very superior grade of Pueblo pottery is made a rather heavy ware, but one distinguished in many cases by an almost Greek grace of shape. The decoration used is a series of triangles, circles, and other geometric forms in black on white that are little short of marvellous in their variety. The chalky white of Zuni and the creamy white of Acoma are replaced in the Santo Domingo ware with a pinkish tint. Quite recently there has been developed there a deep red jar with pink and black decorations, extremely interesting as a variant of the original, geometric designs of this place in white and black. The Santa Clara potters, until recently, were pre-eminent among the Pueblos as makers of a lustrous, black ware, the colour being produced by the smudging of the fire so that the black smoke was absorbed into the clay. The pot was then rubbed by hand until the desired lustre was produced. Unfortunately American influ ences have done much of late to lower the art standards of these people, who in some instances 228 PUEBLO ARTS now use a cheap varnish for their effects. The clay used at this town naturally burns red, if there is no smudging, and Santa Clara ware is accordingly often to be had in solid, unorna- mented red, as well as black. The neighbouring Pueblo town, San Juan, has taken up the "black art" of Santa Clara, and is conservatively disposed to hold to the tried ways which made Santa Clara s reputation. Their ware, however, still lacks the grace of outline which has long distinguished the Santa Clara pottery. A double-necked water-jar is a charac teristic shape of both those pueblos, though not peculiar to them, as some form of double mouth appears to have been made at times by other pueblos. As the two mouths are joined by a bar, convenience in handling may have had something to do with this shape. The San Juan pottery is thin and light, and it will be interesting to see whether it will eventually gain the crown of excellence which Santa Clara, because of too much American kindergartening, has lost. A rougher black ware used in cooking at Taos, Picuris, and Nambe represents another sort of Pueblo art. Where the proper kind of clay is not Water-jars of Acoma. The prevalent designs are suggested by flower and leaf forms. The older potters often introduced figures of birds, as in the upper right-hand jar, symbolising lightness. Water-jars of Santo Domingo. This ware is distinguished by an especial grace of shape and a remarkable scheme of decoration in triangles, circles, and other geometric forms. PUEBLO ARTS 229 readily obtainable near the village, or where the activities of the people find more congenial exercise in other lines than the potter s, the people are con tent to make only cooking vessels, crude in form and bare of design, obtaining by trade from other Pueblos the carefully moulded and decorated ware which is the delight of every Pueblo household. Besides the commoner shapes of Pueblo pottery employed in the every-day business of the house hold, there are some forms especially designed for use in connection with religious ceremonials. Among such are the bowl-like vessels for holding the sacred meal, which is sprinkled upon parti cipants in religious rites and dances. In some of these ceremonial pieces the rim is moulded to represent ascending and descending steps sym bolising clouds. Upon others are painted forms of frogs, tadpoles, or butterflies showing how im portant a part the element of water that ever- present need in desert life plays in the prayers of these people. A characteristic Zufii design is the moulded form utilised as a handle of Koloo- wissi, the sacred serpent which in the myths of that people is represented as having brought seeds from the gods to ancient Zufii. 230 PUEBLO ARTS Although this native American art, thanks to a few discriminating traders scattered through the Pueblo country of Arizona and New Mexico, still survives in its beauty, it bids fair to pass out of existence within another decade. The quickening cause is to be found in the system of American schooling which the United States Government compels the children to accept, and in which instruction in drawing is part of a gen eral educational scheme. The Pueblos are a gen tle, biddable race, unconscious of the marvels of their own artistic gifts, and in the hands of a push ing, inartistic schoolmistress from New England or the Middle West the children produce feeble copies in bright-coloured crayon of the white man s art, which their ignorant teacher shows with pride to visitors as examples of "what an Indian can do when he is taught." Meantime such a teacher is utterly unappreciative of the superiority of the beautiful examples of native pottery, gifts from her timid pupils, which gather dust in corners of the schoolhouse. I The natural 1 The obtuseness of this kind of mind was illustrated in another way by an American dweller in a district of New Mexico distant from the pottery-makers. He had a beautiful jar of San Ilde- PUEBLO ARTS 231 result of this pseudo-education is that the young generation of Pueblo women are growing up in comparative ignorance of the art of their mothers and of the art symbols and traditions of their race. The idea that there is an Indian art worth at tention did get dimly into the mind of a former head of the Government s Office of Indian Affairs, but such attempts as he instituted, with the view of condescendingly fostering the art, have been in the hands of employes who seem to be quite incapable of intelligently handling the case. It appears impossible for the average American to dispossess himself of the conceit that his nation s way is the only really correct way. It does not occur to him that to Americanise Pueblo art is as absurd as to ask Japanese artists to learn kindergarten methods. The truth is, the Pueblos are to be learned from, not taught. Their art is the expression of their nature and of a long, traditional past, and to set such a people to drawing copy-book designs can teach them no thing, while it does stifle absolutely the real art fonso make, which he showed us admiringly, with the naive remark, "That must surely have been done by a girl who had gone to school." 232 PUEBLO ARTS sense in them. They are a body of conservative artists, who can be trusted, if not interfered with, to develop in their own way the inherited gift of centuries, and to perpetuate the one native Amer ican art of to-day. Cannot the more enlightened minds of the country realise that the only right policy for this nation to pursue toward such a people is that of "hands off," and to begin it at once before the old generation of potters is dead and their traditions dead with them? Chapter XXII Of tHe Native Government of tKe Pueblos, and THeir Political Status vinder O\rs. TWENTY-SIX little republics in the bosom of our great republic that, in a phrase, is the political case of the Pueblo commun ities. Each is an independent political entity, and while, of course, the authority of the United States is over them all and acknowledged by all, each prefers to manage its own affairs without reference to our Government or to one another. There is, however, no occasion for any one else even the United States to interfere; for the Pueblo governmental method is a good one for Pueblos, and life and property under it are as safe as anywhere in the land. The Pueblo form of government is essentially republican, but conjoined with a theocracy, the latter under the headship of the Cacique, or Chief Priest. People who have much to do with 233 234 NATIVE GOVERNMENT Pueblo authorities are inclined to the view that the Cacique is the real power behind the throne; or to put it in the picturesque figure of a Govern ment official in Santa Fe, that "the old man holds the trump card in every deal, and the bunch goes along." While this may be so in the case of masterful minds in Caciques, as in the "bosses" of our own political system, the Cacique is by no means officially a dictator. He is the spiritual care-taker of the community and the keeper of its traditions. He is supposed to be able to reveal the mind of the Powers Above, and in order to keep his spiritual perceptions keen, he fasts and undergoes mortification of the flesh on occasion for the good of the people. His term of office is for life, and he educates an understudy to succeed him. Upon the death of the Cacique, there is usually a decent interregnum of a year or more before the new incumbent enters upon his duties. The executive department of the government consists of a governor, a lieutenant-governor (or teniente), a war-captain, an alguacil (or sheriff), and a few other officials all elected annually by the voice of the people. The officials are NATIVE GOVERNMENT 235 assisted in their administration by a permanent council of old men or junta de principales in some pueblos these being the ex-governors. With the Pueblos, the elective office does not dignify the man, as with us; an elected official is a public servant, in fact, and as such deserves no particular reverence. This was a surprise to the monarchical Spanish pioneers, who on one oc casion captured the war-captain of a pueblo and held him as hostage, thinking so great an official a noteworthy prize; but he was not in the Indian view he was just one man. So too, on our first visit to Taos, when we asked to see the Governor, who was not in his house, a little child was unceremoniously despatched to fetch him, and in quick time he came without any flourish of trumpets whatsoever. Sancta simpli- citas, indeed. The lands of each pueblo are held in common for all the people. Every head of a family makes application for what he needs to till, and this is set aside to him while he works it. Failure to use it for a certain period causes it to revert to the pueblo, to be parcelled out to a new applicant. What each man raises is his own, to be carried 23 6 NATIVE GOVERNMENT home to his wife ; and when beneath her roof, it is hers in trust for the family. It is well to bear this in mind, if you wish to make a present of eatables to a Pueblo man. Once at a certain pueblo, thinking to make a little acknowledgment to a man who had befriended us, we carried a basket of fruit for him to his home. We found him industriously at work by his fireside and handed him the fruit with a suitable speech. He took it, rather sheepishly, we thought, gave it a hungry look, and passed it on to his wife, who was standing confidently by and who promptly walked off with it. The public utilities of the pueblo the outdoor ovens, the corrals for animals, the grazing lands, the wells, and waters are enjoyed in common; but every family dwells strictly by itself in its own apartments, and lives of its own industry, independently of others. Knowing, from past experience, of the possibility of crop failures, it is the practice to hold over enough of each crop until the succeeding one is assured, and danger of a famine is past. If famine come, in spite of all, the Pueblo starves along as best he may until he can raise a new crop dies, if must be, and outfits for Shipapu, but does not beg. NATIVE GOVERNMENT 237 The political status of the Pueblo Indian is distinctly different from that of our other native races. He is not a "ward of the Government," but, from the beginning of our authority over him, a United States citizen. Under Mexican law, the Pueblos were citizens of the Republic of Mexico, and the treaty between the United States and Mexico, entered into at Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, whereby the south-west terri tories were ceded to this country, provided for the extension of those rights of citizenship under our law. The courts of New Mexico have several times affirmed that the Pueblos of that territory are citizens of the United States, and had there been no special legislation to the contrary, their right to vote at general elections could not have been denied. Luckily for the Pueblos, the exer cise of such a right was deemed inexpedient and the New Mexico Legislative Assembly in 1854 passed an Act excluding the Pueblo Indians "for the present and until they shall be declared by the Congress of the United States to have the right," from the privilege of voting, except in matters proper to their own pueblos, "according to their ancient customs." 238 NATIVE GOVERNMENT Moreover, the lands occupied by the New Mexico Pueblos are not Government Reserva tions, as in the case of other Indians ; but are the Pueblos own originally by grants of the Spanish crown, and later confirmed to them by United States patents, with some subsequent additions, in the case of certain pueblos, by Executive order. The Arizona Pueblos the Hopis have been less fortunate in the recognition of their political status. Their lands are theirs only by grace of an Executive order of December 16, 1882, creating the Moqui Reservation, and judging by past Indian history, the Hopi Pueblos of Moqui may be "moved on" whenever enough white people of necessary influence, who want the land, say so. At present, there is a Government allotting agent at work there, seeking to apportion lands to in dividuals under the terms of the general Allot ment Act of Congress. There seems also a curious disposition on the part of the Office of Indian Affairs to exclude the Hopis from the class of Pueblo Indians. They were, up to 1896, desig nated in the reports of the Indian Office as Moqui Pueblos; but since that, they figure therein shorn I A cupid of Shimo rovi. The very small children go unattired in summer in Moqui. NATIVE GOVERNMENT 239 of their Pueblo appendage. The Government s treatment of them is practically as of any Reserv ation Indians and their decadence is correspond ingly progressing. Chapter XXIII Of the Native Religion of the Pueblos. IF there is one thing more than another which forces itself upon the convictions of the sympathetic student of American-Indian character, it is that the Indian in his native estate is intensely religious. To this the Pueblo is no exception. His religion is so ingrained in his being that he gives it up only with life itself. It is not a matter of one day in seven with him, but of every day. By this, I do not mean his devotion to Roman Catholicism, to which seventeen out of the twenty-six Pueblo communities are nominal adherents, each with a padre to confess and pay tithes to. Every one who knows the Pueblo Indian, knows that, as a rule, so far as his profes sion of Christianity goes, it is his pastime; his real religion is that remarkable system of rites which his fathers have delivered him as a trust from the foundation of the world, in which he 240 NATIVE RELIGION 241 finds an explanation satisfactory to his poetic mind of the origin of his people and the destiny of the individual in the world to come. Of course, the. Pueblo s pagan conception of Deity differs widely in many particulars from that of the Christian, yet in certain fundamentals of vital religion that relationship which binds the spirit of a man to his Creator the Pueblo stands where all the rest of us stand. There is, for instance, an abiding sense of humanity s de pendence upon Higher Powers, that rule and uphold the world and the affairs thereof ; and there is faith in the continuance of their ancient care, if appealed to. So there is need of prayer contin ually to those Powers, and of thanksgiving to them for the favours of life; and whether the people starve or feast, mourn or frolic, labour or idle in the sun, the red gods of their fathers fathers get their due. It is the childlike attitude towards the Lord of the Harvests and the Shaper of Men s Destinies, innate in all primitive races but run out of civilised ones, save as the latter are individually converted and born anew into the kingdom of the little child and of God. There is a spot outside certain of the pueblos and, it 16 242 NATIVE RELIGION may be, of all where every morning at sunrise, some representative of the people stands and offers, one for all, an invocation to the Sun Father, and scatters sacred meal to the six mystical regions of the world, west, south, east, north, zenith, and nadir. Continually through the year prayers are being breathed upon feathers selected from various sorts of birds, according to a fixed ritual, and bound to especially prepared sticks a few inches long, and then deposited at immemorial shrines on mountain and plain and by certain sacred springs. So by a feather is the prayer borne to the ears of the gods. I The public dances, which white people find delight in attending as spectacles, besides countless others to which outsiders are not admitted, are with the Pueblos religious ceremonies, in many of which the par ticipants, masked and fantastically attired, repre sent divine personages of the people s elaborate 1 The sharp eyes of the early Spanish explorers detected these plumed prayer sticks here and there about the pueblos in their day, and wondered at them. Certain of them, cross-shaped, are minutely described by Castaneda, the chronicler of Coronado s expedition. "It certainly seems to me," he piously observes* "that in some way [the Indians] must have received some light from the cross of our Redeemer Christ, and it may have come by way of India, from whence they proceeded." NATIVE RELIGION 243 mythology. Some are in the nature of sacred dramas, akin, one may say, to the mystery plays of the Middle Ages, and when rendered in pueblos where the white inroads are least, are very im pressive, their effect heightened by the chanting of ancient songs and the accompaniment of gourd rattles and native-made drums. Personal purification, fasts, and abstinence attend these ceremonials, as well as being precedent to them. In the matter of spiritual belief, the Pueblo is an animist that is, he holds to a spiritual essence in all creation, even those things which we Christ ian folk call inanimate, such as trees, and rocks, and water, the corn plant of his own raising, and the jar which his potter- wife has moulded. He believes in the persistence of the spirits of all these companions of his earthly sojourn, as well as of his own spirit, in an unseen world to which physical death is the portal. It is not apparent, however, that he regards that future estate as one of reward and punishment for deeds done here in the flesh, but rather as another stage of life. Pagan as we may call such a faith, it has fos tered in the Pueblo virtues which all the civilised world applauds and very largely falls short of. 244 NATIVE RELIGION It inculcates kindliness to one another and gentleness of speech, hospitality to the stranger, though an enemy, reverence for old age, truth fulness, obedience to parents, tenderness to childhood, and the bringing up of children, as we would say, in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, as He is dimly perceived in that polytheistic twilight. It would seem that that universal grace of God, which Paul preached as appearing to all men, teaching the denying of ungodliness, has appeared to Pueblos, too. All this was very surprising to the Pueblos Spanish discoverers, and Castaneda, noting down his observations in Zuni in 1540, records his belief that the elders must "give certain commandments for the people to keep, for there is no drunkenness among them nor sodomy nor sacrifices, 1 neither do they eat human flesh, nor steal, but are usually at work." It is to the credit of the Spanish guardianship of the Pueblos through three centuries and the innate virility of the native faith that their moral code is still much as Coronado found it. 1 Referring doubtless to the practice of human sacrifices among the contemporary Aztecs of Old Mexico. There is no evidence that the Pueblos made such sacrifices. NATIVE RELIGION 245 A mythology as complex and fanciful as Greece s , involving a pantheon as numerous, goes with the native religion of the Pueblos; but the subject is too technical to be discussed here. Indeed, in spite of the efforts of our scientific dwellers among the Indians, comparatively few of their myths are understood. The aborigine is very loath to lay bare his inner heart to one of alien blood, and his religious beliefs come out only a little at a time to sympathetic friends who have been tried and found worthy of all confidence. A suspicion of contempt or ridicule, or even con descension, is enough to close his mouth. Each Pueblo community appears to have its own body of myths, accounting for its origin in the world and narrating its primitive wanderings and adven tures under the care of the gods. The stories of origin differ markedly, though certain features are common to many of them, as the Sun Father and Moon Mother of the race, the creation of the first people in a subterranean world up from which they were led by the Divine Ones through the opening Shipapu into this world of light, and the part played by the Twin Heroes, or Gods of War, in the early affairs of men. The curious 246 NATIVE RELIGION are referred to those delightful volumes Zuni Folk Tales, by F. H. Gushing, and Pueblo Indian Folk Stories, by Chas. F. Lummis ; as well as to the re ports of the American Bureau of Ethnology for more technical presentations. Chapter XXIV Of WHat tKe United States Possesses in tKe Pueblo Indian Being a Brief Summing Up. THE Pueblo is something more than just an Indian. He is something more than pic turesque. He represents a unique develop ment among the aborigines of the United States a native-born civilisation, or semi-civilisation, if you will, which, before the white man stumbled upon it, embodied a settled habitation with a dis tinctive architecture, a stable form of democratic government, a religious ritual free from human or animal sacrifices, the practice of monogamy, the equality of woman, an orderly pursuit of agriculture, well-developed arts, and the love of peace. He was our first apartment-house builder our first irrigationist, our first cotton-spinner, 1 1 A species of cotton grew indigenously in parts of the Pueblo country, and before the introduction of sheep by the Spanish the cotton fibre was used in weaving garments. 247 248 SUMMING UP and his wife was our first artist in ceramics. As the Pueblo was when history discovered him, so in essentials is he to-day. Between him and his neighbour, the Apache, for instance, there is as much difference, it has been well said, as between the Broadway merchant and the Bowery tough. Thanks to the literary habits of his Spanish conquerors, we possess of the Pueblo a more complete historic record than of any other ab origine of the United States; and the labours of our own archaeologists and ethnologists have very convincingly connected his ancestry with those fascinating monuments of a remote past, the ruined cliff dwellings of the Southwest. Under Spanish association, he added many amenities to his way of life; the indispensable burro, for instance; iron tools and carts; horses, sheep, and cattle; wheat, grapes, and peaches. He acquiesced though at first somewhat rebelliously in being Roman-Catholicised, his complaisant nature hospitably harbouring the new religion along with the old, which he has never surrendered. To Spain, also, he owes his present land-titles ; for the Spanish Indian policy was in the main one of humanity and common-sense, and recognising Husking corn on a Zuni housetop. Flush times for the burros. SUMMING UP 249 the Pueblo at something like his worth, secured to him by royal grant sufficient land to maintain him in his way of life. "It is fortunate," says a caustic historian J of the Pueblo, that the Spaniard was his brother s keeper. Had the Pueblo enjoyed sixteenth-century acquaintance with the Saxon, we should be limited now to unearthing and articulating his bones." As a citizen, the Pueblo is peaceable, self-sup porting, hospitable, honest, and merry-hearted, minding his own business. His wife, who is in no sense an inferior but his acknowledged equal, owns the home and is the trustee for the family of what the house contains. Old age is respected and its counsel courted. The children are obedi ent, well-behaved, and intensely beloved, not only by parents but by grandparents and all their kin 2 ; they are taught industry and obedience from the beginning of their years, the boys helping in the farming, wood-gathering, herding, and hunting; 1 C. F. Lummis in The Land of Poco Tiempo. 2 Compare this with what Mrs. Hugh Fraser says of Japanese childhood in her Letters from Japan: "Little children are called the treasure flowers of life, and that which ministers to their happiness is never considered trivial, but regarded as a necessary part of the family occupations." This might have been written of the Pueblo little folks. 250 SUMMING UP the girls in pottery-making, corn-grinding, cooking, and other domestic vocations. They are taught regard for one another, and the care of little folk of eight or ten over their younger brothers and sisters is a touching trait to be witnessed in any pueblo where white influence has not rooted out the aboriginal virtues. The contemporary life of the Pueblos has been invaluable beyond words in throwing light upon the endeavours of our archaeologists and ethnolo gists to explain the remarkable remains of pre historic human life in our great Southwest. It further assists to an understanding, by the com parative method, of much that concerns the past of the human race as a whole; for it helps us, to use the apt phrase of John Fiske, "in getting down into the stone age of human thought." Few Americans [says that same sterling historian] realise how highly our country is favoured in having within its limits such communities as those of the Moquis and Zunis. Our land is certainly lacking in such features of human interest as the ruins of mediaeval castles and Grecian temples. But we may be to some extent consoled when we reflect that, within our broad domain, we have surviving rem nants of a state of society so old-fashioned as to make SUMMING UP 251 that of the Book of Genesis seem modern by com parison. In some respects the Moquis and Zufiis may be called half civilised ; but their turn of thought is still very primitive. They are peaceful and self- respecting people: and in true refinement and be haviour are far superior to ourselves. We have still much to learn from them concerning ancient society, and we ought not to be in too great a hurry to civilise them, especially if they do not demand it of us. The Pueblo, being human, has his faults and shortcomings, of course. There is room for his improvement, just as for yours and mine; but the genius which enabled him to work up to the plane of civilisation where Spain found him and left him, is still his, and is quite capable of solving his twentieth-century problems in the Pueblo way. Unlike the Reservation tribes, who have been crowded off their native land by the advance of white civilisation, the Pueblo s foot is still on his ancestral heath, and the heath is capable of supporting him in his ab original way of living, which to him is a happy way. The features of that existence form an interesting and instructive object-lesson in the simple life for which the soul of our complex 252 SUMMING UP time is crying out. His is the last of our indige nous races which it is now possible to preserve in anything approaching its native estate ; and one would think it worth an effort to conserve it to put up a "no trespass" sign on its lands and guard it from molestation. One would think that such a people might be suffered to live out its destiny in its own harmless way by this great republic, which has made much advertisement of itself as standing for the right of all men to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. What is really happening in the matter is out lined in the next chapter. Chapter XXV Of What Our Government is Doing witH the Pueblo. IN considering the activities of the United States Government towards the Pueblos, it is necessary to bear in mind that the case of the Pueblos is essentially a different one from that of the at one time nomadic tribes of the plains and forests, that is, the Reservation tribes of to-day. The latter, the red men of Fenimore Cooper and the Wild West Show, have for gener ations been gradually pushed off their native hunting-grounds by the ever-advancing line of the white man s settlements, have been fought and cheated, bargained with and broken faith with, until now they are as men without a country in surroundings totally different from those in which nature placed them and in which nature fitted them to live. That this aboriginal remnant should have something done for it by the race that has 253 254 GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES crowded it off its earth is just, and that that some thing should be in the nature of an education to equip it to cope with alien conditions of life is reasonable. That, roughly summed up, is the theory of the Government s educational policy towards the Indian, and it is not within the province of this book to discuss it in practice. The Pueblo case, however, is not that at all. A sedentary people, advanced in the arts and practices of a native civilisation, the Pueblos, thanks to Spanish prevision, have not been dis possessed of their lands; they still inhabit their Syrian-like towns, that are older than anything of white men s building on this continent, and they still till the self same ground which their fathers fathers worked long ago, and which is hallowed to them with associations that reach back to the days when the gods walked the earth and the animals talked with men. Unlike the Plains Indians, whose main source of livelihood was the chase and who have to be taught to be farmers, the Pueblos are born agriculturists who, from inherited experience, are singularly capable of raising crops under the exacting climatic con ditions of their semi-desert home. They have, A man of Taos, in native dress. Sheets are worn in lieu of blankets in warm weather. GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES 255 of course, learned much from their association with Spaniard and Anglo-Saxon; from both they have adopted improvements, which they apply in their own way, and they are still in every respect in a position to live out their quiet, useful lives after the fashion of the red nature which the Lord of Life implanted in them. When unspoiled by too much white interference, their communities are entirely self-supporting and law-abiding, and as contented as humanity ever gets to be here be low the most picturesque and natural class of people in our artificial, dead-level, dollar-driven United States. In the mechanical application to the Pueblos of an Indian policy which was framed for all the Indians, the Government has to give the devil his due done some commendable things. It has, for instance, exempted the Pueblo lands from taxation; it has sought to keep the whisky-seller away from the pueblos; and it undertakes to provide medical care for the prevention of the epidemics of such diseases as smallpox, diph theria, measles, and the like, which, more than any other one cause, nowadays, keep down the growth of the population. On the other hand, 256 GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES however, and this is the crux of the case as between Government and Pueblo, the Indian Office lumps the Pueblo with the rest of the Indians and drops him into the common educational melting-pot prepared by Congress for all red men. Day schools have been established in most of the pueblos and the children are forced into them, unless the parents prefer to send them to some boarding-school. In the more important pueblos, field matrons are quartered for the purpose of teaching housekeeping to the Pueblo women, who have been skilful housekeepers from the dawn of time ; farmers, also, are sent to some to acquaint this race of farmers, who have no memory of a time when their ancestors were not farmers and who practised irrigation before any one in the United States ever heard of such a thing, how to raise corn and beans. At Santa Fe, at Albuquerque, at Black Rock, at Ream s Canon, large boarding-schools are maintained and paid for by the taxpayers of the United States, where white education, in part literary and in part industrial, is crammed down the young Pueblo throat in steam-heated rooms and in an atmosphere often foul to suffocation. GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES 257 The agents of more distant schools, as at Riverside in California, Grand Junction in Colorado, Carlisle in Pennsylvania, are busy in season drumming up recruits, that their institutions, too, may have part in the same educational game. It is the boarding-schools, the more distant from the pueblo the better, that nearest meet the ideal of the Indian educator; for thereby the child is most thoroughly separated from his "tribal relations and is more perfectly at the mercy of the Great White Father, who has so benevolently undertaken to undo the Creator s handiwork and turn these "benighted" red people into white. When you ask the .gentlemen of the Indian Office for the reason of this active onslaught of education, they will doubtless tell you, as they have told the present writer, that, in its capacity as a civilising agent, the Office has a special edu cational duty to discharge towards the children of these Indians, who must be prepared for the future and to adjust themselves finally as citizens to our modern civilisation. This statement ap pears to be part of the Office fixt tires, passed down from Commissioner to Commissioner and, so far as it is not buncombe, doubtless applies well enough 17 258 GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES to the Reservation Indian. It is not plain, how ever, that it does fit the case of the Pueblo, who is already a citizen, and quite as well able in his pueblo to take care of himself and be a useful member of society as a Shaker or a Dunkard, an Amishman, a Franciscan friar, or any other member of a score of peculiar sects in the United States who are given to clannishness of living and are freely conceded the right to do so. As a matter of fact, the Government s educa tional activities towards the Pueblos are making practically to this end: the destruction of the characteristic features of a very wonderful and in teresting communal life, racy of our soil, and the wiping of the Pueblos as a people out of existence. Such a proceeding is not only cruel and un- American, but it is needless; for the Pueblo has a very good system of education of his own, though it is not literary. In the normal life of the Pueblo, the native education of the child begins as soon as it can talk, and continues daily by precept and example until it is grown; for the children are constant companions of their elders, and having no thought but to respect them, are constantly learning GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES 259 from them. For instance, at an age when little white girls are making mud pies, their small Pueblo sisters are having just as much enjoyment in learning, of their own volition, to copy in clay the beautiful bowls and water- jars which their potter mothers are experts in making. The boys follow their fathers and grandfathers to the field, and gather with them in the estufas, or private council chambers of the men, and there little by little become familiar with the ancient traditions of their people. In the ceremonial dances which are one of the outward forms of worship practised by the Pueblos, boys and girls, sometimes hardly more than infants, take their little parts with earnestness and solemnity. So by degrees, the elements of the simple, sunny, wholesome life are acquired and the young fitted to carry it forward, if the Indian way is allowed to prevail. But, when the Pueblo children are sent to the white school, as by hook and by crook the Govern ment is seeing to it that they are, all this is changed as it is designed that it should be. The children are being taken at as near the age of four as they can be gotten hold of, and by being inhumanly kept away from their parents as long as possible, 2 6o GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES lose, during the most formative years of their life, the advantage of the parental training and companionship. As a nation, we have never been a success at raising children, and certainly the case of this Congressional fathering of the Pueblo youth has added no lustre to our crown. I have visited every one of the Pueblo communities and have lived in several for longer or shorter periods, and I can say unqualifiedly that their most disheartening feature to-day is furnished by returned scholars. One knows the young men of this class by their short hair, their slouchy ways, and their ill manners ; the girls are disposed to indolence, and distinguished by rats in their hair and peek-a-boo shirt-waists, unless they have resumed their native, comfortable, and suitable Pueblo dress. The minds of both sexes, bright enough on sub jects of Indian lore, are as a rule slow to stupid ity in matters of the white man s curriculum, and it is amazing to see how little has really been assimilated in the years of labour which their generally conscientious teachers have bestowed upon them. Far from "uplifting their people" the favourite dream of their educators they A "little mother" of the pueblo. It is a duty of the little Pueblo girls to attend their baby brothers and sisters, when the parents are busy. GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES 261 are not only lacking in initiative, but helpless to teach what they have but imperfectly learned, and they hang around the pueblo, a positive drag upon its busy life. Rare, indeed, is it to find one at all qualified to compete with the white man in any walk of life above that of day labourer; while they have lost irretrievably years of a native education that would really have helped them in the life for which nature has peculiarly adapted them. Furthermore, these educated ones are often handicapped by a substantial start in tuberculosis, contracted in the confined life of the school; are more or less pauperised by their years of being boarded and lodged gratis, and are pretty sure to be tinctured with an assortment of white vices. The lot of these young people is, indeed, hard. Unfitted by nature to meet the keen competition of the white man s world, and unfitted by education for the life of the pueblo, there is nothing for them but to begin afresh and learn to live as their fathers lived, or else go to the bad generally. As a matter of fact, some follow one course, and some the other ; but in either case, the net result of the American education to the Pueblo is a moral drop. The 262 GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES elders of the Pueblos, knowing from hard experi ence the inevitable result, seek persistently to keep their children from the contamination of the schools ; and in several instances have run the day schools from the pueblo. It is to no purpose, however, for the Government agents hunt down the children under the very skirts of their mothers, and by one argument or another secure them and pack them off to the boarding-schools. The Government still regarding the Pueblos as ignorant of the conditions of a fixed life as though they were Apaches or Comanches fresh from the warpath, instead of the peaceful, im memorial town-dwellers that they are assumes furthermore that they need the white point of view in their housekeeping. Hence the field matron referred to above. Her uplifting influence is directed at the women of the pueblo, whom she is expected to instruct in the care of the house, personal cleanliness, the adornment of the home, the care of the sick, and incidentally to brighten the darkness of the " benighted" by introducing among the little folks of the Pueblos "the sports of white children." In spite of some absurdities as regards the GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES 263 Pueblos in the Government regulations, there is some under current of sense in the field matron s office, if it were possible to have it administered by a woman of tact and experience, in sympathy with Indian nature; for the need of better know ledge of some fundamentals of sanitation, for instance, and the care of the sick, is a real need in the pueblos. In practice, however, the field matron is a more or less conscientious lady of mature age, who may or may not speak her native tongue grammatically, and who has, as likely as not, been transferred to her pueblo from the Comanche Reservation, or the Piutes, or some other distant place, and does not in the least know the essential difference between such tribes and the Pueblos. T 1 At a pueblo which the writer visited recently, he found a field matron of this sort in charge, transferred thither from an Okla homa Reservation. She was absolutely ignorant of the Pueblo manner of life, and had from the Government a printed blanket form of instructions, which, of course, gave no hint of one Indian s differing from another. The lady was low in her spirits as to the transfer. "They won t talk any English to me hardly," she complained of her new charges, "and I don t know any more Spanish than a goat." To a Pueblo man who came in to do some sewing on a sewing-machine, she granted permission, but added very distinctly, so he could catch the full import, "And if you break that machine, brother, I 11 string you up by the neck." It is not to be inferred that her bite would have been as bad 264 GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES Finding the Pueblo women leisurely with their work instead of rushing about it like victims of Americanitis, such an official sets them down as lazy; and because their dress bears the stain of the prevailing dust of the Southwest, they are, in her eyes, dirty. So, perfectly convinced that Pueblo women are as "benighted" as the authori ties in Washington think they are, she proceeds to revolutionise the Pueblo household. Take the matter of cooking, for instance : The Pueblo woman has inherited from her forbears a really admirable system of cookery, which, if the baking-powder and cheap coffee of the border whites can be kept out of it, produces results which are both simple and nutritious. There are in most households two meals a day, breakfast about ten or eleven in the morning, and supper or dinner about sunset or later, after the labours of the day are concluded. These meals are prepared in four principal ways: First: In the open fireplace which is an essential feature of the Pueblo living-room. as her bark, but it seems hardly needful to comment upon the "uplifting influence" of such association upon a sensitive, amiable race like the Pueblos. i ^ oj <u ,_ rl GJ H > GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES 265 Here all stews are set to simmer and beans to cook in a clay cooking-pot of native make. This fireplace serves further the double purpose of insuring good ventilation in the room, and of providing a means always at hand of doing away with scraps and dirt, which the Pueblo housewife many times a day sweeps with her broom of dried grasses into the blaze of the hearth. Secondly: Upon a large, flat stone resting on four short ones and heated by a fire beneath, she bakes as upon a griddle the wafer bread of cornmeal and water, known variously as piki, hewe, or wa-yah -vi. Folded in packets or rolled into sticks, this is a staple of Pueblo diet, sweet to the taste and not excelled in digestibility by the twice-baked breads of our modern hospitals. Thirdly: In the New Mexico pueblos, the dome-shaped, adobe bake-ovens are a striking feature, built always outdoors, either in front of the house or on the roof. This makes it im perative for the housewife to be in the health- giving air during the entire time of heating the oven and baking the bread. In these ovens yeast -risen wheat bread is baked in an even heat with the thoroughness that distinguished 266 GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES the loaves which our grandmothers baked in their great brick ovens. Fourthly: In the Arizona pueblos, there is a permanent pit, sunk to the depth of a couple of feet in the ground near the house. In this the housewife builds a hot fire, and when the sides and bottoms of the pit are thoroughly heated, she takes out the embers, sets a vessel within filled with cornmeal batter, covers the mouth of the pit with a flat stone, seals it up with adobe mud, and leaves it for hours. The result is a thoroughly cooked, nutritious mush, prepared exactly on the theory of the fireless cooker of our civilisation. No better system could be desired. The culinary methods above described serve two noteworthy ends they insure wholesome, thorough cooking, and they conserve that open- air life essential to Indian well-being, which ex istence in permanent towns is prone to curtail. Now, what generally happens when a field matron, acting under orders from Washington, gets under way, is the introduction of the American cook-stove an article in every way unsuited to that land whose almost perpetual sunshine Pueblo women baking wheaten bread at the outdoor ovens. GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES 267 is ever calling to life under the sky. Then the Pueblo woman closes up her indoor fireplace, abandons her outdoor cooking-pit, kindles a furious fire in her new stove indoors, and puts into the oven a quantity of bread, which scorches on the outside while still underdone in the middle. Upon this she feeds her family, as well as with other dyspeptic matters, which are sure to follow under the tuition of the dyspeptic nation which has undertaken the uplifting of the "benighted" Pueblos. The continually close air, following upon the overheating of the room and the clos ing up of the self -ventilating fireplace, develops coughs and colds. Expectoration is on the floor, which remains unswept longer now that there is no convenient fireplace to brush litter into, and consumption enters. So the national work of "civilising" the Indian out of existence is helped along. I have dwelt upon the cook-stove episode at considerable length, because it affords a concrete instance of what is persistently ignored by our nation, namely, the fact that the Pueblo Indians have as systematically developed a domestic economy as we ourselves have; one which is 268 GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES peculiarly fitted to their nature and environment ; and one to which white interference is distinctly prejudicial, besides being impertinent. What has been said of the cooking is true of other innovations which are stupidly being forced upon the Pueblos by our Government. Their distinctive dress, for instance, is as picturesque as that of the Swiss peasantry ; but it has, besides picturesqueness, a side of comfort and especial adaptation to the people s habit of life, not so apparent, until studied. It is really scientific in its looseness and openness, which besides allowing the free play of the limbs in exercise, admits between the body and clothing, in a way that our dress does not, the circulation of that wonderful south-western air to whose cleansing and antiseptic qualities the Indian largely owes his health. Yet white agencies are too dense to understand this, and must needs treat the Pueblo as though he were clothed in the conventional G string and paint of savagery. His dress must be Americanised, and the beginning is with the children, who, as fast as they are rounded up in the schools, have their hair shorn, and their bodies divested of Pueblo garb and are all put into A little maid of Taos in native attire. GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES 269 variously fitting abominations, including under clothing, of the one and only civilisation. In a community without bathtubs and laundries, living in a country where rain is the rarest of Heaven s gifts, is it any wonder that the result of such sartorial revolution is a degree of uncleanness both of body and clothing never known under the native regime, and at times unspeakable? There would be some sense in encouraging neatness and cleanliness in the native dress where laxity was apparent, but there is none at all in abolishing that perfectly adequate native attire for another designed for a people of other traditions, living under different conditions. In every other instance which I have seen of the attempt to make this people s customs con form to white standards, the result is equally detrimental. Assuming that there is only one right way and that is our way, we have taken it for granted that these communities are undis ciplined savages and, knowing nothing, must be taught what is good for them. Nobody better understands the fundamental error of this than the Government employes at the pueblos, when they think for themselves. 270 GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES Of course it is their business to carry out the Department regulations; but, time and time again, I have heard them deprecate the policy of sending teachers to a people like the Pueblos, who are already as good citizens as their neigh bour whites. "Yet," they add, "what can we do about it? The work means our bread and butter." It is not the purpose of this chapter to advocate holding back any Indians who really desire to participate in the white man s education. Now and then one finds a Pueblo whose native bent is such as to enable him to assimilate something from our present-day American civilisation, just as generations ago his ancestors adopted somewhat from their Spanish conquerors mode of life. While it is the present writer s conviction, based on observation, that even in such cases what the man loses in his lapse from native ways is greater than his gain, yet to such an one he would cordially say, "Go ahead, and if you can find anything to your liking, in jumpers and overalls and cowhide brogans, in simplified spelling and in ability to read about the latest murder in Chicago or the graft cases in San Francisco, and if with this GOVERNMENTAL ACTIVITIES 271 equipment you think you can beat the white man at his own trade, for goodness sake go to school and be educated. " The plea made is solely for those and they are the large majority who do not desire this whitewash on their red skin, who protest vehemently against being trained as white men when the Lord created them red for ever more, and yet on whom the United States Government is sedulously forcing an education which in practical results experience shows to be productive of more harm to the Pueblo than good an education which too often sharpens the young people s wits at the expense of their morals, so that they even overreach their parents. Is it any wonder that the old people resist the schools? Chapter XXVI Of tKe Future of the Pueblo, if He Has Any. IF the Pueblo Indian has a future, it rests with the rank and file of the people of the United States to assure it to him. New Mexico and Arizona ought to do it, but they are too busy with mining and sheep-herding to bother about an Indian who scalps nobody and steals no horses. Congress, as at present enlightened, cannot be expected to do it; for it is not in evidence that Congress ever heard of a Pueblo Indian. The Indian Office will not do it; for that Office is a machine grinding out a traditional cut-and-dried policy. 1 Strange Juggernaut of our boasted 1 "The Office appreciates the fact that, in their contact with modern civilisation, much of the value of the Pueblos as a picturesque factor in the national life is being sacrificed. Regarding their ancient laws and customs, although in some respects admirable, those which do not coincide with the national laws must inevitably give way. To the older Indians, who cling to these customs, this may seem a hardship, at times bringing them into more or less conflict with the representatives of the 272 FUTURE OF THE PUEBLO 273 free republicanism, this Indian policy of ours! Though our literature is full of denunciation of it, though ethnologists, even, of the Government, deplore the stupidity of it, though our text -books record its inhumanity, it goes stolidly on in its deadening work, and our complacent nation clips coupons, goes to church, and lets it! Yet, while the Indian betrayed by his Great White Father at Washington and dispossessed of his heritage is a stock figure of American history, and jeremiads a-plenty have been written bewail ing an irrevocable past gone to judgment, the nation has, in the Pueblos, one last chance to save a fine remnant of aboriginal life before the whole fabric is utterly gone. The procedure is simplicity itself : Stop our education of them ; or, if we must teach something, let it be only at day schools Government. But these matters are being gradually adjusted with as much tact and diplomacy as is consistent with a positive attitude towards the situation. "Thus the Office is confronted with conditions not altogether of its own making, and however desirable from an aesthetic point of view it might be to maintain this quaint, old, semi-civilisation in our midst, it is not altogether practicable." (From a letter dated September 29, 1910, from F. H. Abbott, Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to the author. This may be considered official notice that the death-warrant of Pueblo life has been signed.) 18 274 FUTURE OF THE PUEBLO within the pueblo, in the simplest rudiments and without interference in the native ways. Coincidently, the present wise law of exemp tion from taxation should be continued; for it will take a long time for the Pueblo mind, used to communal ways, to assimilate the Caucasian theory of taxation, and meantime inevitable de linquencies would speedily result in the Sheriff s sale of every pueblo in the South- West. Surely, the country has gotten land bargains enough out of its aborigines to warrant this item of generosity. Moreover, the matters of medical supervision and liquor regulation should continue increasingly to be of Government concern. This will not make good the harm already done to the Pueblos, but it will enable a naturally capable and contented people to work out their destiny in their natural way, which interferes with that of nobody else. They are a people worth saving and their arts are worth fostering, which, it is to be observed, does not mean Ameri canising. Unfortunately, many of their communities are hopelessly demoralised by this time, and can only be left to their fate; but others, where a FUTURE OF THE PUEBLO 275 considerable conservative element yet remains such, for instance, as the large pueblos of Zuni, Santo Domingo, Isleta, Jemez, and Taos in New Mexico, and the smaller but still virile Hopi villages of Shimopovi and Hotavila in Arizona can still be helped, if left to the inherent strength of their native institutions. Instead of consign ing them to the educational mill to be ground away between the upper and the nether millstones of school-teacher and field matron, it would seem a truer philanthropy to make easy for them the path of development along native lines a tried pathway on which they had themselves started before Washington took charge of them, and upon which they had wonderfully progressed. In that vast region of sunshine, desert, and elemental majesty where the Pueblos dwell, they supply a feature of contemporary human interest unique in the world. Their country, like our National Parks, is already part of our nation s holiday grounds and will be increasingly so used. We are intent enough, down there, upon exploring and protecting from desecration the remains of a remarkable prehistoric civilisation which once flourished where the Pueblos now live ; 276 FUTURE OF THE PUEBLO New Mexico has established a well equipped Institute of Archaeology and is spending money to maintain the crumbling homes of her ancient Cliff Dwellers; yet both nation and state have been incredibly blind to the greater living wonder of this Pueblo race, which is made up of descend ants of those vanished denizens of the cliffs and is pursuing to-day, in all essentials, the same kind of life. While we are thus busy conserv ing the material evidences of humanity dead and gone, is it not a better work to save a living people from extinction? .A Table of Approximate Population of Each Pueblo in 191O With the English pronunciation of its name and its nearest railroad station. A.rizona Pueblos NEAREST RAILROAD POPULATION STATION FIRST MESA Walpi (Wol pee) 250 {Winslow, Ariz., 80 miles. Sichum ovi IOO Holbrook, Ariz., 90 miles. Tewa (Ta -wah) or Han o 150 Gallup, N. M., 120 miles. SECOND MESA Mishong novi 250 f Winslow, Ariz., \ Shipaul ovi 125 j or > 90 miles. Shimo povi 225 Canon Diablo ) THIRD MESA Oraibi (Orf bee) ( Winslow, Ariz., \ (summer pueblo 500 j or > 75 miles. Moenkop i) ( Canon Diablo ) Hotavi la 400 f Winslow, Ariz., } < or > 80 miles. Bacabi (Bah -ca-bee) IOO (. Cafton Diablo ) Total population of Arizona pueblos, approximately 2100 277 278 POPULATION OF EACH PUEBLO J. L. Hubbell, of Ganado and Keam s Canon, Arizona, gives the following list of principal Hopi ceremonies and dances the exact days of the month are not fixed: November, New Fire Ceremony; December, War Dance; January, Buffalo Dance; February, Bean Planting; March, " Mystery Play"; May, Katcina Dances; July, Departure of Katcinas; August, Snake, Antelope, and Flute Dances; September, Basket Dance; October, Basket and Hand-Tablet Dances. New Mexico Pueblos PRINCIPAL Acoma (Ah coma) (inclusive of its summer pueblo, Acomi ta) TION 800 Cochiti (Cochi- tee ) Isleta (Iss-lett -a) Jemez (Ha -mess) Lagu na (including six farming vil lages) 300 1000 500 1500 NEAREST RAILROAD STATION. Sept. 2 Laguna, 15 miles. (McCarty sfor Acomi ta) July 14 Domingo, 8 Isleta, Sept. 19 Laguna. 10 miles. Nov. 12 Bernalillo, 25 miles. Nambe (Nam-ba ) 100 Oct. 4 | ^^ " ^ ( (Santa F6, 15 miles. POPULATION OF EACH PUEBLO 279 PRINCIPAL POPULA PUBLIC NEAREST RAILROAD TION FIESTA STATION. Picuris (Pic-oo- rees ) IOO Aug. 10 Embudo, 20 miles. Sandia (Sandee -a) 75 June 12 Alameda, i mile. Santa Ana (Sant- an a) 200 July 26 Bernalillo, 12 miles. Santa Clara 250 Aug. 12 Espanola, 2 miles. Santo Domingo 700 Aug. 4 Domingo, 2 miles. San Felipe (Fe- lee -pa) 500 t May i j Algodones, ( Bernalillo, 3 miles. 10 miles. San Ildefon so 200 i Jan. 23 Sept. 6 Espanola, 8 miles. San Juan (Hwahn) 500 June 24 j Chamita, ( Espanola, I mile. 6 miles. Sia (See -a) IOO Aug. 15 Bernalillo, 1 8 miles. Taos (Towss) 500 Sept. 30 Servilleta, or Barranca, 30 miles. Tesuque (Te-soo - ka) Zuni (Soo -n y e e, Span.-A m e r. ; Zoo -nee, Amer.) (Inclusive of its summer pueblos) 150 Nov. 12 Santa Fe", 9 miles. 1650 About Nov. 30 (different each year) Gallup, 40 miles. Total population of New Mexico pueblos, approx imately 9200 The hire of a double team and driver in the Pueblo country is from $5 to $8 a day, including 28o POPULATION OF EACH PUEBLO keep, and of a saddle pony with saddle $1.00 per day, exclusive of keep. For an extended trip a good way is to contract with a reliable man who knows Spanish and who can cook, to supply team, covered waggon, and services at a fixed rate per week or per month (a basis of $90 to $100 per month would be fair), the traveller to pay additionally for the animals feed and the provisions for himself and the man. This plan permits stopping where one pleases, with entire independence of local accommodations, which are sometimes exceedingly primitive in the Pueblo land. If one prefers horseback for a trip covering some weeks and knows enough about horseflesh to take the risk, it is economy to purchase a pony and saddle outright. The pony would cost from $15.00 to $50.00, according to age, size, condition, etc.; a saddle and bridle from $20.00 to $75.00. If bought with discretion and used not too hard, such an outfit could be resold at the end of the trip at little or no loss. After July I5th and until the beginning of winter, the cost of keep for the pony would not exceed twenty-five or fifty cents a day for grain feed, which should be given every POPULATION OF EACH PUEBLO 281 day the animal is being ridden; for, though wild forage then is sufficient to take the place of hay, so much time would be consumed grazing at night where growth is sparse that, if not grain-fed, the pony would not get proper rest. Scotch rolled oats is found by many riders a satisfactory feed to provide. If one travels in company, a pack animal for the baggage must be calculated upon. In hiring horses or teams in a country where it is sometimes a day s travel between water-holes, and where every man must be his own repairer of breaches, it is well to remember the old adage that "the best is the cheapest." Nowhere does it pay better to pay for responsibility in those with whom you deal. Glossary and Pronunciation of Span- isH-American and Indian Terms Adios (ah-de-ose ) , adieu. Algodones (al-go-do -ness) , sand dunes. Arro yo, bed of a stream, usually dry. Ban da, a band, usually a folded handkerchief, encircling the hair. Barato (bar-ah -to), cheap. Bar ran ca, a gully. Bueno (bwa -no, Mex. and Ind. wa-no), good. Buenos dias (dee-as), good-morning. Cabeza de Vaca (ca-ba -sa de vah -ca), cow head. Cabezon (cab-a-sone ) , big head, the name of a New Mexico mountain. Cacique (ca-see -ka), the spiritual chief in a pueblo. Cam po San to, holy ground, consecrated burial-place. Cerrillos (cer-ree -yose) , turquoises. Chon go, the clubbed queue in which Pueblos wear their hair. Cibola (see -bo-la) , old Spanish name for Zufii. Cin ta, a narrow band or ribbon for winding about the chongo or side locks. Co mo sta? How are you? Compadre (com-pah -dra), lit., godfather, but used colloquially for friend or brother. Compra melo nes, compadre? Will you buy some melons, brother? Corral , an enclosure, as for cattle. Durazno (doo-rahs -no), peach. En tra, come in. Estufa (es-too -fa), a special room, usually underground, where meetings of Pueblo men are held and secret religious rites performed. The word is Spanish for stove, or a warm room, 282 P RON UN CIA TION OF INDIAN TERMS 283 and was applied by the Conquistador es to such chambers because of their warmth. Faja (fah -ha), the sash worn about the waist by Pueblo women. Frijoles (free-ho -les) , beans. Kiva (kee -va), same as estufa the Hopi word. Malpais (mal -pl), a sort of volcanic rock, used for making metates. Mariana (man-yah -na) , to-morrow. Man ta, a woman s dress; lit., blanket. Mesa (ma -sa) , tableland, or flat-topped mountain. Metate (metah -ta), a stone on which corn is ground. Mucho (moo -cho), very; lit., much. Mucho Sabio (moo -cho sah -bio), one who knows much, a Pueblo councillor. Navajo (nav -a-ho), a large Indian tribe adjoining the Pueblos. Olla (oh -ya), a water -jar. Padre (pah -dra), a Catholic priest. Pasear (pah-sa-ar ) , to take a walk. Piki (pee -kee), wafer bread (Hopi); the same as Zufii he"- we" (ha-wa), and the wah-yah -vi of the Rio Grande Pueblos. Plazita (pla-see -ta), a dooryard, or interior court of a residence. Po co, little; po-co ti-emp o, in a little while. Pueblo (poo-eb -lo), a town; when capitalised, an Indian of the pueblos. Puerco (pwar -co), muddy; whence the S.-W.-Amer. term "perky" for a muddy creek. Quien sabe (kee-en sah -be), I do not know; lit., who knows? Quiero (ke-er -o), I want; quiere (ke-er -a), you want. Ranchito (ran-chee -to), a little farm. Real (ra-al ), 12^ cents. Eight of them made the old Spanish piece of eight. Used in multiples of two, as dos (2) reales, 25 cents; cuatro (4) reales, 50 cents, etc. Retrato (ra-trah -to) , any picture; strictly a portrait. Sandia (san-dee -a) , watermelon; sandia uena, treinte centavos, good watermelon, 30 cents. Shipapu (ship-a-poo ), gateway to the next world. Sombrero (som-bra -ro), a wide-brimmed hat. 284 PRONUNCIATION OF INDIAN TERMS Teniente (ten-ee-en -ta), lieutenant. Tienda (tee-end -a), a shop or store. Tinaja (tin-ah -ha), a water-jar. Tombe (tom -ba), an Indian drum. Tortilla (tor-tee -ya) f a pancake. Tusayan, (too say-an) an old Spanish name for Moqui. Vamos (vah -mos), begone; lit., let us go. A Partial Pueblo Bibliography The Pueblos have an important representation in general literature. The inquiring reader will find them entertainingly treated in the following works, among others, which have a place in public libraries: The Delight Makers, by Adolph F. Bandelier, New York, 1890 a romance of the Cliff Dwellers, embodying a treasury of information about Pueblo native customs, by one of the foremost American ethnologists. Pueblo Indian Folk Stories, by Charles F. Lummis, New York, 1910 a delightful sheaf of aboriginal tales, put into English by one who got them at first hand; originally published (1894) under the title The Man who Married the Moon. The Land of Poco Tiempo (1893), A New Mexico David (1891), Some Strange Corners of our Country (1892), and A Tramp across the Continent (1892) all by Charles F. Lummis contain many chap ters on the Pueblos and their ancestors, the Cliff Dwellers. 285 286 A PARTIAL PUEBLO BIBLIOGRAPHY The Journey of Coronado, edited by George Parker Winship, New York, 1904 a translation from Spanish documents of the Conquest, with many illuminating notes by the editor. This little volume depicts graphically the condition of the Pueblos, as seen by those who discovered them. Zuni Folk Tales, by Frank H. Gushing, New York, 1901 a collection of English translations by the poet-ethnologist, who understood the Pueblo heart as, perhaps, no other white man has ever known it. My Adventures in Zuni, by the same author three delightful articles in the Century Magazine, Dec., 1882, Feb., May, 1883. The Song of the Ancient People, by Edna Dean Proctor, Boston, 1893 a poem which, "as a rendering of Moqui-Zuni thought, is a contribution of great and permanent value to American literature." There are notes and preface by John Fiske, the historian, and a commentary by F. H. Gushing. Indians of the South-West, by George A. Dorsey a guide-book issued in 1903 by the Passenger De partment of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad; a compendium of authoritative in formation concerning the Pueblos, among others. The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, by Capt. John G. Bourke, U. S. A., New York, 1884 A PARTIAL PUEBLO BIBLIOGRAPHY 287 contains a vivacious account of the general features of Pueblo life a generation ago. Lolami in Tusayan, by Clara Kern Bayliss, Blooming- ton, 111., 1903 a child s story, portraying life in a Hopi pueblo before the white advent. Among the Pueblo Indians, by Carl and Lilian W. Eickemeyer, New York, 1895, an unpretentious travel tale of San Ildefonso, Santo Domingo, and Taos. The Flute of the Gods, by Marah Ellis Ryan, New York, 1909 an historical romance of the Spanish Conquest. Indian Love Letters, by Marah Ellis Ryan, Chicago, 1907 an idealistic presentation, with good local colour, of the case of a Hopi man educated in a Government school and "gone back to the blanket." The Indians of the Painted Desert Region, by Geo. Wharton James, Boston, 1903 includes informa tion as to Hopi life in recent years, with a detailed account of the Snake Dance. The Indians Book, by Natalie Curtis, New York, 1907 contains a section devoted to the Pueblos, with the music of a number of their songs. The Land of the Pueblos, by Susan E. Wallace, New York, 1888 a series of pleasant, old-time, home letters by the wife of the author of Ben Hur. 288 A PARTIAL PUEBLO BIBLIOGRAPHY The Destruction of our Indians, and three other articles by Frederick I. Monsen, with especial reference to the Hopis, finely illustrated from the author s photographs, in The Craftsman Magazine for March, April, May, and June, 1907. Indians of the Stone Houses, by Edward S. Curtis, in Scribner s Magazine, Feb., 1909, with beautiful illustrations from the author s photographs. For the scientific student of Pueblo life, the available material is very extensive. Mention may be made of the following titles among many : Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the South-Western United States, by Adolph F. Bande- lier. Papers of the Archaeological Institute of America, 1890, 1892. The Zuni Indians, by Matilda Coxe Stevenson. Bureau of American Ethnology, 1905. The Sia, by Matilda Coxe Stevenson, embodied in the Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Eth nology, Washington, 1889-90. The American Indian as Product of Environment, with Especial Reference to the Pueblos, by Arthur J. Fynn, Boston, 1907. The Gilded Man, by A. F. Bandelier, New York, 1893 includes historical papers on Zuni, Acoma, Santa Clara, etc. A PARTIAL PUEBLO BIBLIOGRAPHY 289 Pottery of the Ancient Pueblos, Fourth Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology, Washington. The Spanish Pioneers, by Charles F. Lummis, Chicago, 1893- The Discovery of America, by John Fiske, Boston, 1892 touches, in the light of modern ethnology, on the status of the Pueblos with relation to other Indians and to Old World peoples also. The Spanish Conquest of New Mexico, by W. W. H. Davis, Doylestown, Pa., 1869 contains a de tailed account from original Spanish sources of the conflicts between the Spaniards and the Pueblos prior to 1703. The Traditions of the Hopi, by H. R. Voth, Field Columbian Museum publication, Chicago, 1905. A Study of Pueblo Architecture in Tusayan and Cibola, by Victor Mindeleff, in Eighth Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology, Washington. Zuni Melodies, by Benjamin Ives Oilman, in Journal of American Ethnology and Archeology, vol. i. Hopi Songs, by the same, in same publication, vol. v. In addition to these, there are scores of contribu tions, touching upon every phase of Pueblo life, by trained scientific workers, such as Bandelier, Gushing, Dorsey, Fewkes, Hodge, Holmes, Hough, McGee, Mindeleff, Stevenson, etc., to be found in the bound 19 290 A PARTIAL PUEBLO BIBLIOGRAPHY volumes of the Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, the American Anthropologist, the Scien tific American, Science, the Journal of American Folk- Lore, and similar scientific periodicals. U-< Id! *4 2 <z Index PAGE Abiquiu ......... 92 Acoma . . . . . . 14 et seq., 225 Architecture ..... 5,50,79,101,132 Arts 85,135,220,231 Bacabi ......... 194 Basketry ......... 185 Bent, Governor, murder of . . . . . .104 Black Mesa, siege of ....... 90 Bouquet, Sefiora ........ 88 Chamita ......... 92 Character of Pueblos: Industry, 51, 64, 67, 172; good humour, 39, 40, 51,91; love of home, 58; love of children, 62, 96, 123, 146, 249; reticence, 68; joy of life, 73, 183; peaceableness, 103, 170; gentleness, 230; hospitality, 86, 91, 161, 185, 197; conservatism, 102, 184; naturally artistic, 231; dislike of camera, 12, 76, 120, 156 Cibola, see Zufii Civilisation, native . . . . . ,v, 247, 250 Cliff Dwellers, Pueblos relationship to . . . 250, 276 Cochiti . . 79 et seq. Cookery, Pueblo 145, 1 60, 264 Dances . . . 9, 65, 107, 203 Delight makers . . . . . . . .108 Dress 7, 78, 80, 100, 187, 268 Education, native 249, 258 Enchanted Mesa . . . , . , 16,37 Espafiola . . .91 291 292 INDEX PAGE Field matrons . . . . . . 198, 262 Fiestas: San Esteban, 25 et seq.; at Santo Domingo, 78; at Tesu- que, 86; San Ger<5nimo, 105 et seq. Also vide Shalako, Snake Dance Government, native ...... 233 et seq. Government s (U. S.) attitude towards Pueblos . 253 et seq. Hopis 167 et seq. Hotavila . . . . . .184, 192 et seq., 275 Intemperance . . . . . . .66,95,122 Isleta 46 et seq., 275 Jemez . . . . . . . 62 et seq., 275 Laguna 43 et seq. Land tenure 188,189,235,238 Mesa Encantada . . . . . . 16, 37 Mesa Huerfana ........ 90 Mexican encroachment ...... 88, 90 Mishongnovi . . . . . . . .184 Moenkopi ......... 184 Moqui ....... 167 et seq., 224 Nambe 87,228 Nampeyo ......... 223 Oraibi ........ 184, 192 Penasco . . . . . . . . 117 Penitentes . . . . . . . . .115 Picuris ........ 118 et seq. Plains Indians, how Pueblo case differs from that of, . iv, 254 Pojuaque ......... 88 Political status of Pueblos . . . . 237,238 Pope" . . .... 103 Population by pueblos . . . . . . .277 Pottery, . . . .85, 93, 122, 142, 207, 222 et seq. Prayer plumes ....... 151,242 Puye" .92 INDEX 293 PAGE Religion, native . . . 65,119,150,152,153,240^^. Rito de los Frijoles .82 Sanctuario -92 Sandia .69 San Felipe . 70 et seq. San Ildefonso 89 San Juan . . . . 95, 228 Santa Ana -57 Santa Clara 92 et seq., 227 Santo Domingo . . . . 75 et seq., 227, 275 Scholars, returned 85,208,217 School, U. S. Government . . . 186, 230, 256, 273 Shalako ceremonies . . . . . 140, 153 et seq. Shim6povi . . . . . . . . 184,275 Shipaulovi ......... 184 Sia 59 et seq. Sich6movi . ... . . . . . 184, 185 Sierra Sangre de Cristo 91,92 Snake dance, Hopi 203 et seq. Spanish guardianship ..... 244, 248, 249 Taos . 97 et seq., 228, 275 Teachers, U. S. Government . . .60, 119, 151, 190, 230 Tesuque . . . ... . 5 et seq., 84 et seq. Tewa . .184 Tiguex . . 54 Truchas, Las . . . . . . 91,92 Tuberculosis . . . . . . . .118 Tusayan . . . . . . . 169 Walpi . . . *"* ?*... 181 et seq., 203 et seq. Witchcraft, belief in ... . .. 57, 70, 87 Women, status of .... 128, 145, 236, 249 Zufii, discovery of . . . . . . 125 et seq. Zufii of to-day .... 130 et seq., 225, 229, 275 M69002 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY : ..,:; in;;;?. :