Leo Crane

“ But to them, people of no contrasts, was it not a wonderful inheritance—that all-embracing stage, from the Red Mesa where the tumbled rocks stood in rings, “Children at Play”; from the Sapphire Lakes and the restless river to the country of the Moqui, guarded by the lava buttes, those somber blue-clad gods of the northern sky? And was it not the Desert!
Perhaps—no doubt of it—that Great White Father had sent this curious Nahtahni from his own household. The world has four corner-posts, one the Desert and one that is Washington. ”

“ Dominating the foreground was Squash Blossom Butte, an inverted bloom that the storms of æons had carved and a million rare sunsets tinted. The Indians reverence the squash blossom as a symbol of fruition, and perhaps—who knows—in its delicate bell-shaped flower they see more than the mere promise of a harvest. It is found in Navajo silver-work, strung into those massive necklaces of which they are so proud; and when one goes into Hopi land he finds it imitated in the dressing of their maidens’ hair. ”

“ The night hush of the drowsy desert has succeeded all daylight bustle. The clatter of shops, the hum of machinery, the hiss of steam, have quieted. There are no more calls from children at play. One by one the lamps go out on campus and in quarters, and great Orion burns down the empty spaces to glimpse a scrap of feeble civilization gripped in the aged everlasting hills. Then, on the cold wind, stealthily, comes the eerie chant of a Navajo, riding across the mesa, calling on his gods. ”

“ It seldom rains in the Desert; but when it does!—One may drown in arroyos that carry tearing leaping torrents immediately after such cloud-bursts, and at the same point next day the sand will be steaming in the hot sunlight.
Within the space of three hours I have observed a beautiful sunset, an afterglow, twilight with a storm brewing, stars and night overhead; then the flood of water, lighted by crisp terrifying flashes and bringing the noise of Niagara; to be followed by calm night again, the stars returning to see their reflections in the desert pools. ”

“ Silver and turquoise are the jeweled wealth of the Navajo, the white metal contrasting with their sunburnt skins and the stone holding the color of their matchless skies.
The women wore velveteen bodices and curiously full skirts. They too were weighted with silver ornaments, one having the more of beads and bandeaux being the favorite wife or daughter. Some of the smaller girls moved about accompanied by the tinkling of little bells strung to their moccasins and belts.
All this in the brilliant flare of the cottonwood fire, above which fanned a mist of sparks like another Milky Way ”

“ The sun sinks to rest, the desert grows black and threatening, he is off the main-traveled road, and no candle-lights are gleaming through the dark. There he remains until morning, when, cold and cramped, having kindled a fire to warm a can of beans that a more sensible man had slung under the seat, he finds that he has invited in the whole Navajo tribe. Five minutes after the wisp of smoke and the aroma of the burnt beans, comes an Indian, and another, and another, each looking earnestly for breakfast. It never fails. ”

“ The place we’re in is always here,
The other place is there.
I have had something more to say of my Navajo friends, their ways and ceremonies; of the curious, shy, and altogether lovable Indian children and their schools; of that strange medley from the Civil Service grab-bag, the employees; of quarantines, and wars against disease; of the curse of the medicine-men; of the baronial traders and their frontier systems; of Indian art and industry; and too, something more of the Desert itself, its great cañons and monster monuments, the mammoth jewels of the Empire ”

“ These Hotevilla cliffs have little of dignity; they picture chaos, as it was left by the rending and scarring of some violent earthquake in the ages gone. To-day the ubiquitous Ford may ascend that wall on a wide and evenly graded roadway, because I grew tired of risking my neck there; but it was not so in 1911. My team had a tug of it up a dipping and winding trail that the Indians, under guard, no doubt, had crudely torn from the masses of tumbled sandstone.
The second steppe was dotted with thicket from which, on the winds of springtime, stirs the fragrance of heliotrope. ”

“ A trader’s train
Roosevelt was an exalted Indian Agent. He had no false ideas that the common people are filled with wisdom, that capitalism oozes virtue, that labor is sincere, that poverty is an assurance of honesty. But he did believe that the poor and helpless deserved fair dealing and protection from predatory interests of whatever kind; and that the mute required a fearless voice. It was his judgment that Indian country should be governed very much in line with those suggestions made by Colonel Kit Carson, who swept rebellion out of the Painted Desert and the Moqui cañons in 1863. ”

“ The man may disport himself, gaily dressed and agile as a panther, in the ceremonies; he may be a leader in the hunt; he may declaim in the kiva; but his authority ceases at the threshold of the Hopi home.
For has not this woman, during the first year of her married life, ground from one to two thousand pounds of corn meal in payment for her man and her wedding dress? She has, indeed. And since she has purchased him, she has the right to divorce him. He may slave in the hot fields and the sand-blows, running to and from the patches, hoe on shoulder, to charm a crop of corn. ”

“ Ten thousand ducks wheeled above the Lakes that year.
And reflected in the greenish mirror were the dull red walls of Monument Point, the end of the great Red Mesa that stretched northward, rising hugely from the sand dunes and the Desert, flanked and buttressed as some Babylonian city. Perhaps it was a city of the ancients, snuffed out as Pompeii. One longed for time to explore its dead streets. ”

“ Birth and baptism; marriage and divorce; many dances; a lifetime of endless toil and endless prayer; many harvests, rich and meagre. Then comes the time when he has planted his last crop, or she has finished the last of household labors. Something happens to end things, and to serve summons to the Judgment Seat, that lonely prominence overlooking the Oraibi-Dinnebito Washes in the west. The tireless feet will no longer cover the steep trails to the pueblo on the heights; the mesa and the valley will know them no more. Death, as to us all, comes as a surprise. ”

“ The Hopi chants are primitive, but have in them an echo of Catholic litanies. I have seen a Hopi priest anoint with and toss the sacred meal just as his forbears saw the padres bless the people. The Hopi is an assiduous adapter. And while listening to the chanting, I have often expected to catch the response: “Ora pro nobis.” The padres were sacrificed to the desert gods in that red revolt of 1680, but their peaches dry each season on the pueblo housetops, and Hopi ceremonies carry an unconscious echo of the black-robes who taught the solemnity of ritual. ”

“ At five miles the hour a sturdy team does not demand the alertness that an auto compels at twenty. Traffic did not bother one. Only an occasional flock of sheep, a straying pony, or a somnolent freight-team blocked the road. The drowsy hours of midday, filled with the humming noises of the Desert, blessed by sunshine and the wondrous panorama of the Empire, could make up for many frontier irritations. ”

“ To have watched Orion’s flaming signal through that crystal atmosphere, to have loved the placid jewels of the Pleiades, is to have received the Desert’s blessing, which is contentment—if not peace. One must spend whole days crossing its sun-baked emptiness, carry-on through the chill of twilight, feel the menace of its dark, and see its wondrous moon burst from black cedars on a mesa edge. ”

“ A long sustained note at times, now a crooning melody, now a sad, half-wild cry, filled with minor effects that would be the delight and the despair of any jazz artist, it is indeed a song of the Desert.
And the most astounding thing of all was the endurance of that aged vocalist, the old Medicine Man. The pitch of his drum simply encouraged him in new effects. There was an energy, a sustaining confidence in his efforts that must have had a rare effect on the ailing one within the hogan. ”

“ Each time they pass the kisi they stamp fiercely on the board. It gives back a hollow sound. And perhaps the snakes of former spectacles know that they will soon be wanted on deck. “All hands aloft!”
Then the Snake priests quiet down a bit and align themselves in a long row, facing the Antelope men. A chant is begun. It is low in tone and quite ceremonial in spirit. Their bodies sway. A curious waving motion is made with the hands, one dancer’s wrists engaging his partner’s. The gourds whir their singing sounds. And an old Indian, a feeble, aged man, passes down the line with a bowl of water. ”

“ His greatest [133] sacrifice in life has been the abandonment of tribal ceremonies. From his house below the mesa can be seen the famous Walpi dance-ledge, like a miniature stage high in the thin air, thronged on pagan festal days with multi-colored costumes, where faintly sound the chanting and the drums. But he never attends these feasts of rhythm and song, save at the biennial Walpi Snake Dance, when he joyfully receives a dispensation from the Agent to go as an official of the Government, he being a Judge and the authorized Crier. ”

“ Until we furnish something as good in place of the Indian social dance, why rave about it? We might easily have a large number of low-spirited, sullen, and even dangerous Indians on our hands if it were not for these joyous occasions. So long as the dances are clean, can any one quarrel with a Ya-be-chai of the Navajo, a Corn Dance of the Hopi, or one of the Pueblo spectacles, half pagan, half Catholic? ”