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Read Ebook: Indians of the Enchanted Desert by Crane Leo
Font size: Background color: Text color: Add to tbrJar First Page Next PageEbook has 1640 lines and 111378 words, and 33 pagesPAGE Announcing the Snake Dance Frontispiece Walpi, the Pueblo of the Clouds 12 The Valley and Its Headlands A Navajo Flock and Its Shepherds 16 Ca?on de Chelly, Seen from the Rim Crossing the Desert below Chimney Butte 58 The Oraibi Wash in Flood-Time Navajo on Their Way to a Dance 70 A Navajo Hogan and Its Blanket Loom Outfit of a Well-Digger, the Desert "Water-Witch" 84 Drying Bed of the Little Colorado River The Hopi Ceremonial Corn-Planting 92 Hopi Gardens in a Spring-Fed Nook of the Desert Hopi Indian Agency at Keams Ca?on 106 Hopi Indian Hospital at Keams Ca?on A Busy Day at the Trading-Post, Keams Ca?on 118 Ready for the 105-Mile Trek to the Railroad Hostin Nez, Navajo Chief and Medicine Man 124 Judge Hooker Hongave of the Indian Court 132 Youkeoma, Antelope Priest and Prophet 162 A Mesa Road--Old Trail to Hotevilla 170 A Pretentious Home at Hotevilla A Hopi Schoolgirl 178 A Hopi Youth Who Is Preparing for College The Walpi Headland, Seen from the Orchards 196 The Walpi Stairway, A Rock-Ladder to the Sky 202 The Author, in the Enchanted Desert 230 Old Glory and the Bond Flag at the Agency Albert Yava: Interpreter 234 Tom Pavatea: Hopi Merchant and Patriot The Corn Rock, an Ancient Bartering-place 238 Opening the Walpi Snake Dance 250 Dramatic Entry of the Snake Priests The Gatherer, Handling a Rattlesnake 266 A Patriarch of Snakes The Chief Snake-Priest 272 The Enchanted Desert and the Moqui Buttes 282 In the Twin-Butte Country 294 Silversmith Jim: a Typical Navajo Billa Chezzi: Chief of the Northern Navajo 316 Nelson Oyaping: Tewa Chief of Police A Navajo Boy Who Has Never Been to Any School 322 A Hopi Range-Rider 336 Blue Ca?on: A Study in Blue-and-White A Hopi Shrine 338 A Hopi Weaver of Ceremonial Robes A Katchina Dance Hopi Mother in Gala Dress, with Her Child 340 Navajo Mother with Child in Cradle A New Son of the Desert 344 Hopi Girls Arrayed for a Dance Hopi Wedding Costume 352 A Hopi Beauty 358 INDIANS OF THE ENCHANTED DESERT NOLENS VOLENS It is well for a man to respect his own vocation, whatever it is, and to think himself bound to uphold it and to claim for it the respect it deserves. --Charles Dickens They were good fellows, cordial, modest, although somewhat shy in manner, the sort that would have been more at home perhaps among fewer men. They came out of the West, at infrequent intervals, to visit the Chief, who in those days did not keep them waiting. The course of business, filtering down through the red-taped labyrinth, brought some of them to my desk and within my survey. I wonder now what they thought of me, especially as I am about to relate how I viewed them. Imbued as I was then with the rare efficiency of bureaucracy, I sympathized with their apparent helplessness in the transaction of Departmental business. They were always wanting to do promptly things that weren't done. Aside from that, I found them interesting, they being from what an Easterner would term the "hinterland," had he vision enough to know that his country has one. I thought they would have tales to tell--a hope that never materialized. When one came to know them better, as I sometimes did, they would relate their problems in a constrained, half pathetic manner, as if, seeking something and finding it not, they were confused. The idea came to me that they were awed, if not actually bewildered, by their uncommon experiences in the big city. I did not dream that they were struggling manfully, as indeed they could, to restrain a just wrath; that their seeming pathos was a sort of crude pity, inspired by the artificialities and cheap bluff that they saw around them. Their manner of ill-at-ease, I know now, was a mighty urge to get away from that which distressed them, and to return whence they came--into the broader, franker places. I knew that they were "out of the West," and this meant--of course it did--beyond--well, beyond the Mississippi. "The West" is a general term, and brings to mind the buffalo days, an unpolished period of a dim past. Therefore I did not know that this one's bailiwick contained five troublesome barriers across a coveted valley, where men of three different races met and snarled at each other, as they had for nearly four hundred years; that another's domain included six thousand square miles of God's most wonderful creation, having the Marble Ca?on of the Colorado for its western fence; that four States met in a third's territory, while a treacherous river gave it a name and, at times, breaking the harness he had constructed, rolled its hissing flood through his very dooryard; that grizzlies and wild turkey tracked the solitudes of mountain parks within sight of this one's home; that still another had explored a dozen dead cities, lost, forgotten, in the silence of uncharted ca?ons. No. I did not meet these men in the Smithsonian offices at Washington; nor were they lecturers before the National Geographic Society. They were Indian Agents. They came to Washington, hoping for additional allotments of funds with which to construct roads and bridges, to harness torrents, build mills and housing, equip and maintain schools, and, what is more important, establish hospitals. Their general talk was of cement and queer machinery, when it did not turn on gasoline and blasting-powder. They wanted things necessary to fix civilization on the last of the frontiers. Indian Agents! a much-maligned class of officials, although recognized as part of the National Government since 1796, clouded somewhat in their efforts by the memory--fact and fiction--of the "ration" days. They might have spoken proudly of the traditions of their Service, a Service that has had little recognition and possesses no chronicle other than a dry-as-dust Annual Report compiled by unknowing clerks. The reason for these officials' existence has produced much sound and fury. The very title seems to have infuriated the ablest writers of the past, and still causes some of the present to see red. When sentimentalists--and God knows the ignorance of them is astounding--take pen in hand to picture the fabled glories and the believed miseries of the savage, they usually begin by attacking those very men I met and have in mind. They forget, if indeed they have ever known, that they are privileged to view the savage because of these men; that the miserable actualities of the "glorious past" would long since have engulfed the idealized prot?g? but for them. Indian Agents may not vie with painters and poets; but tubes of color, Strathmore board, dreams, and rhyming dictionaries produce small knowledge of tuberculosis, trachoma, smallpox, measles, syphilis--scourges of the Indian people, whose long train of evils reach grimly down through the generations of an ignorant and devitalized race. No one feels this so keenly as the official who daily faces the unromantic task, charged with the duty of alleviating the miseries of the present. Unlike the Spanish explorers, these men have no historian, and but for prejudice and libel would probably be unknown. Yet this one had succeeded to the task Custer left unfinished among the unrelenting, sullen Sioux; had checked a second rebellion; had faced and quelled and buried Sitting Bull, the last of the great savage charlatans. That one had built a city in the pines to shelter the children of murderer Geronimo; a third had tracked and mapped a region few civilized men had known. Now came one who had chained a river without an appropriation; now came another who had fought pestilence in winter, among a superstitious people, crippled by distances and lack of transport, without sufficient health-officers, to learn in the end that his mortality records were lower than those of enlightened civilization. Occasionally a fancied uprising brought one to unpleasant notice; occasionally, too, one was killed. These unromantic facts, having no camouflage of feathers and war paint, nothing in them of the beating of tom-toms or the chanting of legends, do not invite a sentimental record; and, it is true, few such things occur in the "dude season," when sentimentality, accompanied by its handmaiden ignorance, takes its neurasthenic outing in the wild. One of them, a man whose dress spoke rather of the club and office, invited me thus:-- "Come out with me for a leave. There are deer, and trout streams, and a hunting-lodge up in the hills." He was the chap who claimed to have a census of the grizzlies. "It'll do you good, and you look as if you needed a bit of the outside." I thanked him casually, and turned aside his invitation with-- "What's this I hear about the Chief offering you an inspectorship? That would give you some travel too, and--" "An inspectorship! Travel!" he snorted. "Why, good God, man! I am the boss of the Switzerland of America. I wouldn't trade my post for a seat in the Cabinet." That is the way they talked, and a few of them undoubtedly meant it. Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page |
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