Through Our Unknown Southwest Part 6

They tell you outside that it is a hard drive, all the way from twenty-five to thirty miles to Acoma. Don't you believe it! For once, Western miles are too short. The drive is barely eighteen miles and as easy as on a paved city street; but the German had left most of his temper at Laguna. When he reached the foot of the steep acclivity leading up to the town of Acoma on the very cloud-crest of a rampart rock and found no guide, he started up without one and, of course, missed the way. How he ever reached the top without breaking his neck is a wonder. The Indians showed me the way he had come and said they could not have done it themselves. Anyway, what temper he had not left at Laguna he scattered sulphurously on the rocks before he reached the crest of Acoma; and when he had climbed the perilous way, he was too fatigued to go on through the town. The whole episode is typically characteristic of our stupid short-sightedness as a continent to our own advantage. A $20 miner's tent at Laguna for meals, another at Acoma, a good woman in charge at the Laguna end to put up the lunches, a $10 a month Indian boy to show tourists the way up the cliff--and thousands of travelers would go in and come out with satisfaction. Yet here is Acoma, literally the Enchanted, unlike anything else in the whole wide world; and it is shut off from the sightseer because enterprise is lacking to put in $100 worth of equipment and set the thing going. Is it any wonder people say that Europeans live on the opportunities Americans throw away? If Acoma were in Germany, they would be diverting the Rhine round that way so you could see it by moonlight.

Being a Westerner, it didn't inconvenience me _very_ seriously to rise at four, and take a cab at five, and drive out from Albuquerque a mile to the freight yards, where it was necessary to wet one's feet in an _acequia_ ditch and crawl under a barb wire fence to reach the caboose.

The desert sunrise atoned for all--air pure wine, the red-winged blackbirds, thousands of them, whistling sheer joy of life along the overflow swamps of the irrigation ca.n.a.ls. The train pa.s.ses close enough to the pueblo of Isleta for you to toss a stone into the back yards of the little adobe dwellings; but Isleta at best is now a white-man edition of Hopi type. Few of the houses run up tier on tier as in the true pueblo; and the gorgeous skirts and s.h.i.+rts seen on the figures moving round the doors are nothing more nor less than store calico in diamond dyes. In the true Hopi pueblo, these garments would be sun-dyed brown skin on the younger children, and home-woven, vegetable-dyed fabric on the grown-ups. The true Hopi skirt is nothing more nor less than an oblong of home-woven cloth, preferably white, or vegetable blue, brought round to overlap in front under a belt, with, perhaps, shoulder straps like a man's braces. A shawl over nature's undergarments completes the native costume; and the little monkey-shaped bare feet cramped from long scrambling over the rocks get better grip on steep stone stairs than civilized boots, though many of the pueblo women are now affecting the latter.

The freight train climbs and climbs into the gypsum country of terrible drought, where nothing grows except under the ditch, and the cattle lie dead of thirst, and the wind blows a hurricane of dust that almost knocks you off your feet.

The railroad pa.s.ses almost through the lower streets of Laguna; so that when you look up, you see tier upon tier of streets and three-story houses up and up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill. You get off at Laguna, but do not waste much time there; for the glories of Laguna are past. Long ago--in the fifties or thereabouts--the dam to the lagoon which gives the community its name broke, letting go a waste of flood waters; and since that time, the men of Laguna have had to go away for work, the women only remaining constantly at the village engaged herding their flocks and making pottery. Perhaps it should be stated here in utter contradiction to the Herbert Spencer school of sociology that among the Hopi the women not only rule but own the house and all that therein is. The man may claim the corn patch outside the town limits, where you see rags stuck on sticks marking each owner's bounds; or if he attends the flocks he may own them; but the woman is as supreme a ruler in the house as in the Navajo tribe, where the supreme deity is female. If the man loses affection for his spouse, he may gather up his saddle and bridle, and leave.

"I marry, yes," said Marie Iteye, my Acoma guide, to me, "and I have one girl--her," pointing to a pretty child, "but my man, I guess he--a bad boy--he leave me."

If the wife tires of her lord, all she has to do is hang the saddle and bridle outside. My gentleman takes the hint and must be off.

I set this fact down because a whole school of modern s.e.x sociologists, taking their cue from Herbert Spencer, who never in his life knew an Indian first hand, write nonsensical deductions about the evolution of woman from slave status. Her position has been one of absolute equality among the Hopi from the earliest traditions of the race.

At Laguna, you can obtain rooms with Mr. Marmon, or Mr. Pratt; but you must bring your luncheon with you; or, as I said before, take chance luck outside at the section house. A word as to Mr. Marmon and Mr.

Pratt, two of the best known white men in the Indian communities of the Southwest. Where white men have foregathered with Indians, it has usually been for the higher race to come down to the level of the lower people. Not so with Marmon and Pratt! If you ask how it is that the pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are so superior to all other Hopi communities of the Southwest, the answer invariably is "the influence of the two Marmons and Pratt." Coming West as surveyors in the early seventies the two Marmons and Pratt opened a trading store, married Indian women and set themselves to civilize the whole pueblo. After almost four years' pow-wow and argument and coaxing, they in 1879 succeeded in getting three children, two boys and a girl, to go to school in the East at Carlisle. To-day, those three children are leading citizens of the Southwest. Later on, the trouble was not to induce children to go, but to handle the hundreds eager to be sent. To-day, there is a government school here, and the two pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are among the cleanest and most advanced of the Southwest. Fifteen hundred souls there are, living in the hillside tiered-town, where you may see the transition from Indian to white in the subst.i.tution of downstairs doors for the ladders that formerly led to entrance through the roof.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright by H. S. Poley_

A Hopi Indian weaving a rug on a hand loom in a deserted cave]

Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers perched sheer hundreds of feet straight as arrow-flight above the plain, you can count the number of doors on one hand. Acoma is still pure Hopi. Only one inhabitant--Marie Iteye--speaks a word of English; but it is Hopi under the far-reaching and civilizing influence of "Marmon and Pratt." The streets--1st, 2nd and 3rd, they call them--of the cloud-cliff town are swept clean as a white housewife's floor. Inside, the three story houses are all whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy the roof of the first story. Perhaps a burro may stand sleepily on the next roof; but then, the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the porthole of a s.h.i.+p looking out over the precipice across the rolling, purpling, s.h.i.+mmering mesas for hundreds and hundreds of miles, till the sky-line loses itself in heat haze and snow peaks. The inside of these third story rooms is spotlessly clean, big ewers of was.h.i.+ng water on the floor, fireplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways opening to upper sleeping rooms and meal bins and corn caves. Fancy being spotlessly clean where water must be carried on the women's heads and backs any distance up from 500 to 1,500 feet. Yet I found some of the missionaries and government teachers and nuns among the Indians curiously discouraged about results.

"It takes almost three generations to have any permanent results," one teacher bewailed. "We doubt if it ever does much good."

"Doubt if it ever does much good?" I should like to take that teacher and every other discouraged worker among the Indians first to Acoma and then, say, to the Second Mesa of the Moki Reserve. In Acoma, I would not be afraid to rent a third story room and spread my blanket, and camp and sleep and eat for a week. At the Second Mesa, where mission work has barely begun--well, though the crest of the peak is swept by the four winds of heaven and disinfected by a blazing, cloudless sun, I could barely stay out two hours; and the next time I go, I'll take a large pocket handkerchief heavily charged with a deodorizer. At Acoma, you feel you are among human beings like yourself; of different lineage and traditions and belief, but human. At the Second Mesa, you fall to raking your memory of Whitechapel and the Bowery for types as sodden and putrid and degenerate.

Mr. Marmon furnishes team and Indian driver to take you out to Acoma; and please remember, the distance is not twenty-five or fifty miles as you have been told, but an easy eighteen with a good enough road for a motor if you have one.

Set out early in the day, and you escape the heat. Sun up; the yellow-throated meadowlarks lilting and tossing their liquid gold notes straight to heaven; the desert flowers such a ma.s.s of gorgeous, voluptuous bloom as dazzle the eye--cactus, blood-red and gold and carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert geranium, little shy, dwarf, miniature English daisies over which Tennyson's "Maud" trod--gorgeous desert flowers voluptuous as oriental women--who said our Southwest was an arid waste? It is our Sahara, our Morocco, our Algeria; and we have not yet had sense enough to discover it in its beauty.

Red-shawled women pattered down the trail from the hillside pueblo of Laguna, or marched back up from the yellow pools of the San Jose River, jars of water on their heads; figures in bronze, they might have been, or women of the Ganges. Then, the morning light strikes the steeples of the twin-towered Spanish mission on the crest of the hill; and the dull steeples of the adobe church glow pure mercury. And the light broods over the stagnant pools of the yellow San Jose; and the turgid, muddy river flows pure gold. And the light bathes the sandy, parched mesas and the purple mountains girding the plains around in yellow walls flat topped as if leveled by a trowel, with here and there in the distant sky-line the opal gleam as of a snow peak immeasurably far away. It dawns on you suddenly--this is a realm of pure light. How J. W. M.

Turner would have gone wild with joy over it--light, pure light, split by the s.h.i.+mmering prism of the dusty air into rainbow colors, transforming the sand-charged atmosphere into an unearthly morning gleam shot with gold dust. You know now that the big globe cactus s.h.i.+nes with the glow of a Burma ruby here when it is dull in the Eastern conservatory, because here is of the very essence of the sun. The wild poppies s.h.i.+ne on the desert sands like stars because, like the stars, they draw their life from the sun. And the blue forget-me-nots are like bits of heaven, because their faces s.h.i.+ne with the light of an unclouded sky from dawn to dark.

You see the countless herds of sheep and goats and cattle and horses belonging to the Indian pueblos, herded, perhaps, by a little girl on horseback, or a couple of boys lying among the sage brush; but the figures come to your eye unreal and out of all perspective, the horses and cattle, exaggerated by heat mirage, long and leggy like camels in Egypt, the boys and girls lifted by the refraction of light clear off earth altogether, unreal ghost figures, the bleating lambs and kids enveloped in a purple, hazy heat veil--an unreal Dream World, an Enchanted Mesa all of it, a Painted Desert made of lavender mist and lilac light and heat haze s.h.i.+mmering and unreal as a poet's vision.

It adds to the glamour of the unreal as the sun mounts higher, and the planed rampart mountain walls encircling the mesa begin to s.h.i.+mmer and s.h.i.+ft and lift from earth in mirage altogether.

You hear the bleat-bleat of the lambs, and come full in the midst of herds of thousands going down to a water pool. These Indians are not poor; not poor by any means. Their pottery and baskets bring them ready money. Their sheep give them meat and wool; and the little corn patches suffice for meal.

Then the blank wall of the purple mountains opens; and you pa.s.s into a large saucer-shaped valley engirt as before by the troweled yellow _tufa_ walls; a lake of light, where the flocks lift in mirage, lanky and unreal. Almost the spell and lure of a Sahara are upon you, when you lift your eyes, and there--straight ahead--lies an enchanted island in this lake of light, s.h.i.+mmering and lifting in mirage; sides vertical yellow walls without so much as a handhold visible. High as three Niagaras, twice as high it might be, you so completely lose sense of perspective; with top flat as a billiard table, detached from rock or sand or foothill, isolated as a slab of towering granite in a purple sea. It is the Enchanted Mesa.

Hill Ki, my Indian driver, grunts and points at it with his whip. "The Enchanted Mesa," he says.

I stop to photograph it; but who can photograph pure light? Only one man has ever existed who could paint pure light; and Turner is dead. Did a race once live on this high, flat, isolated, inaccessible slab of huge rock? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Are there pottery remnants of a dead city? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Both men climbed the rock, though Hill Ki tells me confidentially they "were very scare,"

when it came to throwing a rope up over the end of the rock, to pull the climber up as if by pulley. Marmon and Pratt have both been up; and Hill Ki tells me so have two venturesome white women climbers, whose names he does not know, but "they weren't scare." As we pa.s.s from the end to the side of the Enchanted Mesa, it is seen to be an oblong slab utterly cut off from all contact but so indented halfway up at one end as to be ascended by a good climber to within distance of throwing a rope over the top. The quarrel between Lummis and Hodge has waxed hotter and hotter as to the Enchanted Mesa without any finale to the dispute; and far be it from an outsider like myself to umpire warfare amid the G.o.ds of the antiquarian; but isn't it possible that a custom among the Acoma Indians may explain the whole matter; and that both men may be partly right? Miss McLain, who was in the Indian Service at Laguna, reports that once an Indian family told her of this Acoma ceremony. Before a youth reaches manhood, while he is still being instructed in the mysteries of Hopi faith in the underground council room or _kiva_, it is customary for the Acomas to blindfold him and send him to the top of the Enchanted Mesa for a night's lonely vigil with a jar of water as oblation to the spirits. These jars explain the presence of pottery, which Lummis describes. They would also give credence to at least periodic inhabiting of the Mesa. The absence of house ruins, on the other hand, would explain why Hodge scouted Lummis' theory. The Indians explained to Miss McLain that a boy could climb blindfolded where he could not go open-eyed, a fact that all mountain engineers will substantiate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A shy little Indian maid in a Hopi village of Arizona]

But what matters the quarrel? Is not the whole region an Enchanted Mesa, one of the weirdest bits of the New World? You have barely rounded the Enchanted Mesa, when another oblong colossus looms to the fore, sheer precipice, but accessible by tiers of sand and stone at the far end; that is, accessible by handhold and foothold. Look again! Along the top of the walled precipice, a crest to the towering slab, is a human wall, the walls of an adobe streetful of houses, little windows looking out flush with the precipice line like the portholes of a s.h.i.+p. Then you see something red flutter and move at the very edge of the rock top--Hopi urchins, who have spied us like young eagles in their eyrie, and shout and wave down at us, though we can barely hear their voices. It looks for all the world like the top story of a castle above a moat.

At the foot of the sand-hill, I ask Hill Ki, why, now that there is no danger from Spaniard and Navajo, the Hopi continue to live so high up where they must carry all their supplies sheer, vertical hundreds of feet, at least 1,500 if you count all the wiggling in and out and around the stone steps and stone ladders, and niched handholds. Hill Ki grins as he unhitches his horses, and answers: "You understan' when you go up an' see!" But he does not offer to escort me up.

As I am looking round for the beginning of a visible trail up, a little Hopi girl comes out from the sheep kraal at the foot of the Acoma Mesa.

Though she cannot speak one word of English and I cannot speak one word of Hopi we keep up a most voluble conversation by gesture. Don't ask how we did it! It is wonderful what you can do when you have to. She is dressed in white, home-woven skirt with a white rag for a head shawl--badge of the good girl; and her stockings come only to the ankles, leaving the feet bare. The feet of all the Hopi are abnormally small, almost monkey-shaped; and when you think of it, it is purely cause and effect. The foot is not flat and broad, because it is constantly clutching foothold up and down these rocks. I saw all the Hopi women look at my broad-soled, box-toed outing boots in amazement.

At hard spots in the climb, they would turn and point to my boots and offer me help till I showed them that the sole, though thick, was pliable as a moccasin.

The little girl signaled; did I want to go up?

I nodded.

She signaled; would I go up the hard, steep, quick way; or the long, easy path by the sand? As the stone steps seemed to give handhold well as foothold, and the sand promised to roll you back fast as you climbed up, I signaled the hard way; and off we set. I asked her how old she was; and she seemed puzzled how to answer by signs till she thought of her fingers--then up went eight with a tap to her chest signifying self.

I asked her what had caused such sore inflammation in her eyes. She thought a minute; then pointed to the sand, and winnowed one hand as of wind--the sand storm; and so we kept an active conversation up for three hours without a word being spoken; but by this, a little hand sought mine in various affectionate squeezes, and a pair of very sore eyes looked up with confidence, and what was lacking in words, she made up in shy smiles. Poor little Hopi kiddie! Will your man "be bad boy," too, by and by? Will you acquire the best, or the worst, of the white civilization that is encroaching on your tenacious, conservative race?

After all, you are better off, little kiddie, a thousand fold, than if you were a street gamin in the vicious gutters of New York.

By this, what with wind, and sand, and the weight of a kodak and a purse, and the hard ascent, one of the two climbers has to pause for breath; and what do you think that eight-year-old bit of small humanity does? Turns to give me a helping hand. That is too much for gravity. I laugh and she laughs and after that, I think she would have given me both hands and both feet and her soul to boot. She offers to carry my kodak and films and purse; and for three hours, I let her. Can you imagine yourself letting a New York, or Paris, or London street gamin carry your purse for three hours? Yet the Laguna people had told me to look out for myself. I'd find the Acomas uncommonly sharp.

That climb is as easy to the Acomas as your home stairs to you; but it's a good deal more arduous to the outsider than a climb up the whole length of the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, or up the Metropolitan Tower in New York; but it is all easily possible. Where the sand merges to stone, are handhold niches as well as stone steps; and where the rock steps are too steep, are wooden ladders. At last, we swing under a great overhanging stone--splendid weapon if the Navajos had come this way in old days, and splendid place for slaughter of the Spanish soldiers, who scaled Acoma two centuries ago--up a tier of stone steps, and we are on top of the white limestone Mesa, in the town of Acoma, with its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd streets, and its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd story houses, the first roof reached by a movable ladder, the next two roofs by stone steps.

I shall not attempt to describe the view from above. Take Was.h.i.+ngton's Shaft; multiply by two, set it down in Sahara Desert, climb to the top and look abroad! That is the view from Acoma. Is the trip worth while?

Is mountain climbing worth while? Do you suppose half a hundred people would yearly break their necks in Switzerland if climbing were not worth while? As Hill Ki said when I asked him why they did not move their city down now that all danger of raid had pa.s.sed, "You go up an' see!" Now I understood. The water pools were but glints of silver on the yellow sands. The flocks of sheep and goats looked like ants. The rampart rocks that engirt the valley were yellow rims below; and across the tops of the far mesas could be seen scrub forests and snowy peaks. Have generations--generations on generations--of life amid such color had anything to do with the handicrafts of these people--pottery, basketry, weaving, becoming almost an art? Certainly, their work is the most artistic handicraft done by Indians in America to-day.

Boys and girls, babies and dogs, rush to salute us as we come up; but my little guide only takes tighter hold of my hand and "shoos" them off. We pa.s.s a deep pool of waste water from the houses, lying in the rocks, and on across the square to the twin-towered church in front of which is a rudely fenced graveyard. The whole mesa is solid, hard rock; and to make this graveyard for their people, the women have carried up on their backs sand and soil enough to fill in a depression for a burying place.

The bones lie thick on the surface soil. The graveyard is now literally a bank of human limestone.

[Ill.u.s.tration: At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna, one of the pueblos in New Mexico]

I have asked my little guide to take me to Marie Iteye, the only Acoma who speaks English; and I meet her now stepping smartly across the square, feet encased in boots at least four sizes smaller than mine, red skirt to knee, fine stockings, red shawl and a profusion of turquoise ornaments. We shake hands, and when I ask her where she learned to speak such good English, she tells me of her seven years' life at Carlisle. It is the one wish of her heart that she may some day go back: another shattered delusion that Indians hate white schools.

She takes me across to the far edge of the Mesa, where her sisters, the finest pottery makers of Acoma, are burning their fine gray jars above sheep manure. For fifty cents I can buy here a huge fern jar with finest gray-black decorations, which would cost me $5 to $10 down at the railroad or $15 in the East; but there is the question of taking it out in my camp kit; and I content myself with a little black-brown basin at the same price, which Marie has used in her own house as meal jar for ten years. As a memento to me, she writes her name in the bottom.

Her house we ascended by ladder to a first roof, where clucked a hen and chickens, and lay a litter of new puppies. From this roof goes up a tier of stone steps to a second roof. Off this roof is the door to a third story room; and a cleaner room I have never seen in a white woman's house. The fireplace is in one corner, the broom in the other, a window between looking out of the precipice wall over such a view as an eagle might scan. Baskets with corn and bowls of food and jars of drinking water stand in niches in the wall. The adobe floor is hard as cement, and clean. All walls and the ceiling are whitewashed. The place is spotless.

"Where do you sleep, Marie?" I ask.

"Downstairs! You come out and stay a week with me, mebbee, sometime."

And as she speaks, come up the stone stairs from the room below, her father and brother, amazed to know why a woman should be traveling alone through Hopi and Moki and Navajo Land.

And all the other houses visited are clean as Marie's. Is the fact testimony to Carlisle, or the twin-towered church over there, or Marmon and Pratt? I cannot answer; but this I do know, that Acoma is as different from the other Hopi or Moki mesas as Fifth Avenue is from the Bowery.

All the time I was in the houses, my little guide had been waiting wistfully at the bottom of the ladder; and the children uttered shouts of glee to see me come down the ladder face out instead of backwards as the Acomas descend.

We descended from the Mesa by the sand-hills instead of the rock steps, preceded by an escort of romping children; but not a discourteous act took place during all my visit. Could I say the same of a three hours'