mi ■iiiliiiiiii 'iiii tlUmHiit SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY y NAVAJO BLANKET. SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY THE WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST BY / / CHARLES F. LUMMIS AUTHOR OF'''"T£B-lVAHN FOLK-LORE," "A NEW MEXICO DAVWr "A TRAMP ACROSS THE CONTINENT," ETC. NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1892 SEP 19 1892 Copyriglit, 1891, 1892, by The Centukt Co. THE DE VfNNE PRESS. To MY Wife : Who has SHARED THE HARDSHIPS AND THE Pleasures of Exploring THE Strange Corners. CONTENTS II A Forest of Agate III The American Sahara IV The Rattlesnake Dance V Where they Beg the Bear's Pardon VI The Witches' Corner VII The Magicians VIII The Self-Crucifiers" . XX XXI An Odd People at Home XXII A Saint in Court PAGE I The Grandest Gorge in the World 1 20 28 43 58 66 75 90 IX Homes that were Forts 122 134 X Montezuma's Well XI Montezuma's Castle XII The Greatest Natural Bridge on Earth 142 XIII The Stone Autograph-Album 183 XIV The Rivers of Stone -lOQ XV The Navajo Blanket XVI The Blind Hunters XVII Finishing an Indian Boy XVIII The Praying Smoke XIX The Dance of the Sacred Bark 243 Doctoring the Year 208 219 228 235 255 262 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Navajo Blanket frontispiece Drawn by F. E. Lummis Initial W . 1 Drawn by C. T. Hill The Grand Canon of the Colorado. General View 3 Drawn by T. Moran. Engraved by W. J. Linton Another View of the Grand Canon 6 Drawn by William H. Holmes. Reduced from the large plate in the Second Annual Report of the U. S. Geologi- cal Survey Within the Grand Canon 9 Drawn by T. Moban. Engraved by W. J. Linton Head of the Grand Canon of the Colorado 12 Drawn by T. Moban. Engraved by J. A. BoGERT Climbing in the Grand Canon 13 Drawn by T. Moran. Engraved by P. Annin Another View of the Grand Canon 15 Drawn by T. Moban. Engraved by E. Bookhout Tree-trunk Petrified into an Agate Bridge 23 Drawn by T. Moran. Engraved by T. Schussleb The Great American Desert 29 Drawn by W. C. Fitleb. Engraved by E. Heinemann View Among the Cacti 34 Drawn by W. C. Fitleb Rev. J. W. Brier 39 Drawn by Malcolm Eraser End-piece 42 Drawn by W. Taber HuALPi — A MoQUi Village 44 Drawn by W. Taber The Dance-court and the Dance-rock 47 Drawn by W. Taber The Moqui Indian Snake-dance 51 Drawn by W. Taber Pueblo Prayer-sticks 62 Drawn by W. Tabeb Pueblo Hunting Fetiches 65 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Initial 75 Drawn by W. Taber *' Suddenly a Blinding Flash of Forked Lightning Shoots Across the Eoom" 81 Drawn by W. Taber "The Growing of the Sacred Corn" 87 Drawn by W. Taber Pueblo of Taos 96 Drawn by W. Taber An Ancient Cliff-dwelling 99 Drawn by T. Moran. Engraved by E. Bookhout Part of Canon de Tsay-ee 101 Drawn by J. A. Eraser. Engraved by Peter Aitken Cliff-Village on the Mancos 105 Drawn by W. Taber A Night Attack of Apaches upon the Cliff-fortress 106 Drawn by W. Taber Ruined Cave-village, Canon de Tsay-ee 109 Drawn by V. Perabd. Engraved by H. E. Sylvester The Cueva Pintada, or " Painted Cave " 112 Drawn by W. Taber Mummy Cave and Village, Canon del Muerto, Arizona 115 Drawn by J. A. Eraser. Engraved by H. E. Sylvester The White House, Canon de Tsay-ee 119 Drawn by J. A. Eraser. Engraved by C. Schwarzburger Initial 122 Drawn by W. Taber Montezuma's Well 126 Drawn by W. Taber "Montezuma's Castle," seen from Beaver Creek 135 Drawn by W. Tabeb "Montezuma's Castle," from the foot of the Cliff 139 Drawn by W. Taber Looking Through the South Arch of the Greatest Natural Bridge 145 Drawn by W, Taber Rough Ground-plan of Gowan's Valley 149 Drawn by F. E. Sitts Another View of the Great Bridge ' 151 Drawn by W. Tabeb Natural Bridge near Fort Defiance, New Mexico 157 Drawn by W. Taber The Eagle Fetich, actual size 160 Drawn by P. E. Sitts Some Leaves from the Stone Autograph- Album 162 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Fig. 1. Juan de Onate 170 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Fig. 2. Diego Martin Barba and Alferes Agostyn 172 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Fig. 3. Diego Lucero de Godoy 174 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Fig. 4. Juan Gonzales 175 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Fig. 5. Ramon Paez Hurtado 175 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Fig. 6. Juan Paez Hurtado 176 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Fig. 7. Don Francisco Manuel de Silva Nieto 177 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Fig. 8. Nieto 178 Drawn by J. M. Nugent Fig. 9. Lujan 180 Drawn by J. M. Nugent ^ SOME STEATsTGE CORKEES OF OUR COUI^TRY. THE GRAIs^DEST GORGE IN THE WORLD. 'E live ill the most wonderful of lauds ; and one of the most won- derful things in it is that we as Americans find so little to won- der at. Other civilized nations take pride in knowing their* points of natural and historic interest ; but when we have pointed to our mar- velous growth in population and wealth, we are very largely done, and hasten abroad in quest of sights not a tenth part so wonderful as a thousand won- ders we have at home and never di-eam of. It is true that other nations are older, and have grown up to think of something besides material matters ; but our youth and our achievements are poor excuse for this unpatriotic slighting 2 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. of our own country. There is a part of America, — a part even of the United States — of which Americans know as little as they do of inner Africa, and of which too many of them are much less interested to learn. With them "to travel" means only to go abroad; and they call a man a traveler who has run his superficial girdle around the world and is as ignorant of his own country (except its cities) as if he had never been in it, I hope to Hve to see Americans proud of hioiving America, and ashamed not to know it ; and it is to my young countrymen that I look for the patriotism to effect so needed a change. If we would cease to depend so much upon other countries for oiu* models of life and thought, we would have taken the first step toward the Americanism which should be, but is not, ours. We read a vast amount of the wonders of foreign lands ; but very few writers — and still fewer rehable ones — tell us of the marvelous secrets of our own. Every intelUgent youth knows that there are boomerang-throwers in Australia ; but how many are aware that there are thousands of aborigi- nes in the United States just as expert with the magic club as are the Bushmen ?* All have read of the astounding feats of the jugglers of India ; but how many know that there are as good Indian jugglers within our own boundaries? The curious "Passion Play" at Oberammergau is in the know- ledge of most young Americans ; but very few of them have learned the starthng fact that every year sees in the United * The Pueblo Indians, who annually kill countless thousands of rab- bits with these weapons. THE GRANDEST GORGE IN THE WORLD. 5 States an infinitely more dramatic Passion Reality, — a flesh and blood crucifixion, — wherein an ignorant fanatic repre- sents in fact the death of the Savior. How many young Americans could say, when some traveler recounted the ex- ploits of the world-famous snake-charmers of the Orient, " Why, yes, we have tribes of Indians in this country whose trained charmers handle the deadliest snakes with impunity," and go on to tell the astonishing facts in the case? How many know that there are Indians here who dwell in huge six-story tenements of their own building ? How many know that the last witch in the United States did not go up in the cruel smoke of old Salem, but that there is still within our borders a vast domain wherein witchcraft is as fuUy believed in as yesterday is, and where somebody is executed every year for the strange crime of "being a witch"? These are but a few of the strange things at home of which we know not. There are thousands of others ; and if it shall ever become as fashionable to wi'ite about America as it is about Africa, we shall have chance to learn that in the heart of the most civilized nation on earth are stiU sav- age peoples, whose customs are stranger and more interest- ing than those of the Congo. As to our scenery, we are rather better informed ; and yet every year thousands of un-American Americans go to Em-ope to see scenery infinitely inferior to om* own, upon which they have never looked. We say there are no ruins in this country, and cross the ocean to admu-e crumbling piles less majestic and less interesting than are in America. We THE GBANDEST GORGE IN THE WORLD. 7 read of famous gorges and defiles abroad, and are eager to see them, unknowing that in a desolate corner of the United States is the greatest natural wonder of the world — a canon in which all the world's famous gorges could be lost forever. And not one American in ten thousand has ever looked upon its a^^id gi'andeur. Of course, we know the Sahara, for that is not American ; but you will seek far to find any one who is familiar with an American desert as absolute and as fearful. We are aware of oiu' giant redwoods in Cahfornia, — the hugest trees in the world, — but did you ever hear of a petrified forest cov- ering thousands of acres ? There is one such in the United States, and many smaller ones. Do you know that in one territory alone we have the ruins of over fifteen hundred stone cities as old as Columbus, and many of them far older ? Have you ever heard of towns here whose houses are three- story caves, hewn from the solid rock ? It seems to me that when these and so many other won- ders are a part of America, we, who are Americans, should be ashamed to know absolutely nothing of them. If such tilings existed in England or Germany or France, there would be countless books and guides ovei'flowing with infor- mation about them, and we would hasten on excursions to them, or learn all that reading would tell us. There is no untruer proverb than the one which says, " It is never too late to learn." As we grow old we learn many things, indeed, and fancy ourselves enormously wise ; but that wisdom is only the skin of life, so to say, and what we 8 SOME STEANGE COENERS OF OUE COUNTEY. learn in yontli is the real bone and blood. I would rather interest one of my young countrymen than a thousand of the unconvertible older ones ; and if I could induce him to resolve that, whatever else he learned, he would learn all he could of his own country, I should he very happy indeed. Let me tell you briefly, then, of a few of the strange corners of our country which I have found — something of the won- derland of the southwest — which I hope you will some day be interested to see for yourselves. I have spoken of the Grand Canon of the Colorado as a gorge in which all the f anions gorges could be lost. Some of you have ridden through the " Grand Canon of the Arkan- saw," on the Denver and Rio Grande Railway in Colorado, and still more through the "White Mountain Notch and the Fran- conia Notch in New Hampshire. All three are very beauti- ful and noble ; but if any one of them were duphcated in the wall of the Grand Caiion of the Colorado, and you were looking from the opposite brink of that stupendous chasm, you would have to have your attention called to those scratches on the other side before you would notice them at all ! If 3'ou were to take the tallest mountam east of the Rockies, dig down aroimd its base a couple of thousand feet so as to get to the sea-level (from which its height is mea- sured), uj)root the whole giant mass, and pitch it into the deepest of the Grand Canon of the Colorado, its granite top would not reach up to the dizzy crests of the cliffs which wall the awful bed of that muddy river. If you were on the stream, and New York's noble statue of Liberty Enlighten- WITHIN THE GRAND CANON. THE GRANDEST GORGE IN THE WORLD. 11 ing the World were upon the cliff, it would look to you like the tiniest of dolls; and if it were across the canon from you, you would need a strong glass to see it at all ! The Grand Canon lies mostly in Arizona, though it touches also Utah, Nevada, and California. With its windings and side-canons of the first magnitude it is nearly seven hundred miles long ; and in many places it is over a mile and a quar- ter deep ! The width of this unparalleled chasm at the top is from eight to twenty miles ; and looked down upon from above, a larger river than the Hudson (and more than three times as long) looks like a silver thread. The Yosemite and the Yellowstone, wonderful as they are in their precipices, — and the world outside of America cannot match those won- di'ous valleys, — are babies beside this peerless gorge. The walls of the Grand Canon are in most places not per- pendicular; but seen from in front they aU. appear to be. They are mostly of sandstone, but in places of marble, and again of limestone, and yet again of volcanic rock ; generally "terraced" in a manner entirely peculiar to the southwest, and cleft into innumerable buttes, which seem towers and castles, but are infinitely more vast and more noble than the hand of man will ever rear. And when the ineffable sun- shine of that arid but enchanted land falls upon their won- drous domes and battlements with a glow which seems not of this world, the sight is such a revelation that I have seen strong men sit down and weep in speechless awe. There are no great falls in the Grand Canon ; but many beautiful and lofty ones in the unnumbered hundreds of side- HEAD OF THE GRAND CANON OF THE tOLORADO. THE GRANDEST GORGE IN THE WORLD. 13 canons wliicli en- ter the great one. I had ahnost said " httle eaiions/' for so they seem in the presence of theii' giant mother; bnt in reahty, abnost any one of them VAOuld shame any canon elsewhere. There is no snch thing as describing the Grand Canon, and I dare not try. But I shall borrow a few words from the man who has come nearer giv- ing in words a hint of the canon than has any one else — Charles Dudley Warner. He has said : 2 CLIMBING IN THE GRAND CANON. 14 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. " This region is probably tlie most interesting territory of its size on the globe. At least it is unique. In attempting to convey an idea of it the wi'iter can be assisted by no comparison. . . . The Vermilion Cliffs, the Pink Cliffs, the White Cliffs sui'pass in fantastic form and brilliant color anything that the imagination conceives possible in nature ; and there are dreamy landscapes quite beyond the most ex- quisite fancies of Claude and of Tm-ner. The region is full of wonders, of beauties, and sublimities that Shelley's im- aginings do not match in the ^Prometheus Unbound.' . . . Human experience has no prototj^^e of this region, and the imagination has never conceived of its forms and colors. It is impossible to convey an adequate idea of it by pen or pencil or brush. . . . The whole magnificence broke upon us. No one could be prepared for it. The scene is one to strike dumb with awe, or to unstring the nerves. ... It was a shock so novel that the mind, dazed, quite failed to compre- hend it. All that we could comprehend was a vast confusion of amphitheaters and strange architectural forms resplendent with color. The vastness of the view amazed us quite as much as its transcendent beauty. . . . We had come into a new world. . . . This great space is filled with gigantic archi- tectm'al constructions, with amphitheaters, gorges, precipices, walls of masonry, fortresses, temples mountain size, all brill- iant with horizontal lines of color — streaks of solid hues a thousand feet in width — yellows, mingled white and gray, orange, dull red, brown, blue, carmine, green, aU blending in the sunlight into one transcendent effusion of splendor. . . . ANOTHEK VIEW OF THE GKAND CANON. THE GRANDEST GORGE IN THE WORLD. 17 The vast abyss has an atmosphere of its owii . . . golden, rosy, gray, brilliant and somber, and playing a thousand fan- tastic tricks to the vision. . . . Some one said that all that was needed to perfect this scene was a Niagara Falls. I thought what figure a fall 150 feet high and 3000 long would make in this arena. It would need a spy-glass to discover it. An -adequate Niagara here should be at least three miles in breadth and fall 2000 feet over one of those walls. And the Yosemite — ah! the lovely Yosemite ! Dumped down into this wilderness of gorges and mountains, it would take a guide who knew of its existence a long time to find it. . . . Those who have long and carefully studied the Grand Caiion of the Colorado do not hesitate for a moment to pronounce it by far the most sulilime of all earthly spectacles." Very few Americans see the Grand Canon — shamefully few. Most of it lies in an absolute desert, where are neither people, food, nor obtainable water — for the river has carved this indescribable abyss of a trough through a vast flat up- land, from which in many places a descent to the stream is impossible ; and yet the canon is easily reached at some points. The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad comes (at Peach Springs, Arizona) within twenty-three miles of it, and one can take a stage to the canon. The stage-road winds down to the bottom of the Grand Caiion by way of the Diamond Creek Caiion, which is itself a wonderful chasm. The point whence Mr. Warner saw the canon was at the head of the Hance traU, in the Kaibab plateau ; and it is by far the sublimest part of the caiion that is accessible. It is 18 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. reached by a sixty-seven-mile ride from Flagstaff on the At- lantic and Pacific Railroad. Three hundi'ed and fifty years ago a poor Spanish lieutenant with twenty men penetrated that fearful wilderness and looked down upon the world's utmost wonder. And only now, for the fii'st time in its his- tory, is the Grand Canon easily accessible to the traveler at its noblest point. A good stage-line has just been started from Flagstaff, and I went out on the second trip, unwilling to advise travelers except from personal knowledge. Mi-. Clarke, of St. Nicholas, was with me. The road has been much improved since Mr. Warner's visit, and is now the best long mountain-road in the southwest. There are comfort- able hotels in Flagstaff, the stages are comfortable, the three relays of horses make the sixty-seven-mile journey easily in eleven hours, and there is nothing in the trip to deter ladies or young people. The drive is through the fine pine forests, with frequent and changing views of the noble San Fran- cisco peaks and the Painted Desert. It l^rings one to the very brink of this terrific gorge almost without warning ; and one looks *down suddenly upon all that matchless wonderland. The canon is here 6600 feet deep. One can explore it for miles along the rim, finding new wonders at every step. Even if one sits in one spot, one sees a new canon every horn- — the scene-changers are always shifting that divine stage- setting. One should not fail to descend the excellent trail to the river — seven miles — built by that interesting pioneer John Hance. It gives an altogether new idea of the canon — and if one stays a month and travels every hour of day- THE GEANDEST GOEGE IN THE WOELD. 19 light, one does not yet realize the canon. At the end of a lifetime, it wonld be more interesting than ever. The stage jonrney takes a day each way, and the fare for the round trip is twenty dollars. One should take as much time as possible at the canon ; but three days in all (includ- ing the stage-ride) is better than nothing — indeed, is better than anything anywhere else. Good meals and beds are there at one dollar each. This line can operate only from May 1st to December 1st, on account of the winter snows of that 7000-foot plateau; but from December to May one can go in by the Peach Springs route, which reaches the bottom of the canon, and is more comfortable in winter than in summer. 11. A FOREST OF AGATE, ROM the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad it is still easier to reach a great natural cm'iosity — the huge Petrified Forest of Arizona. Much the nearest point is the little station of Billings, but there are scant accommodations there for the traveler — only a railroad section-house and a ranch-house. Only a mile south of the track, at that point, one may see a low, dark ridge, marked l)y a single cotton-wood tree. Walking thither (over a valley so alive with jack-rabbits that there is some excuse for the cow-boy declaration that '' you can walk clear across on their backs ! ") one soon reaches the northern edge of the forest, which covers hundreds of square miles. Unless you are more hardened to wonderful sights than I am, you will almost fancy yourself in some enchanted spot. You seem to stand on the glass of a gigantic kaleidoscope, over whose sparkling surface the sun breaks in infinite rainbows. You are ankle-deep in such chips as I '11 warrant you never saw from any other woodpile. What do you think of chips from trees that are red moss-agate, and amethyst, and smoky topaz, and agate of every hue ? That is exactly the sort of A FOREST OF AGATE. 21 splinters that cover tlie grouud for miles here, around the huge prostrate trunks — some of them five feet tlii-ough — from wliich Time's patient ax has hewn them. I broke a specimen from the heart of a tree there, years ago, which had, around the stone pith, a remarkable array of large and ex- quisite crystals; for on one side of the specimen — which is not so large as my hand — is a beautiful mass of crystals of royal purple amethyst, and on the other an equally beautiful array of smoky topaz crystals. One can also get magnificent cross-sections of a whole trunk, so thin as to be portable, and showing every vein and even the bark. There is not a chip in all those miles wliich is not worthy a place, just as it is, in the proudest cabinet, and when pohshed I know no other rock so splendid. It is one of the hardest stones in the world, and takes and keeps an incomparable pohsh. In the curious sandstone hills a mile northeast of BilUngs is an outlying part of the forest, less beautiful but fully as strange. There you wiU find giant petrified logs, three and four feet in diameter, projecting yards from steep bluffs of a pecuhar bluish clay. Curiously enough, this " wood " is not agate, nor l)right-hued, Init a soft combination of browns and grays, and absolutely opaque — whereas all the "wood" across the valley is translucent and some of it quite trans- parent. It also ^' splits up " in an entirely different fashion. But if these half -hid den logs in the bluffs are less attractive to the eye, they are quite as interesting, for they tell even more clearly of the far, forgotten days when all this great upland (now five thousand feet above the sea) sank with aU 22 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. its forests, and lay for centuries in water strongly charged with, mineral, which tm^ned the iindecaying trees to eternal stone. These latter trunks project about a thii-d of the way up a bluff over one hundred feet high. They are packed in a twenty-foot deposit of fine clay ; and above them since the waters buried them there has formed a stratum of sohd sand- stone more than thirty feet thick! That shows what un- counted millenniums they have been there. The erosion which has carved the bluffs out of the general table-land, and thus at last exposed the ends of these stone logs, was of comparatively recent date. There is no knowing how much more earth and stone lay once above the logs, when erosion fu'st began to change the face of the whole country. Other logs are solidly imbedded in the rock chff itself. The most convenient way of reaching the Petrified Forest — and the most impressive part of it — is by a fifteen-mile drive from Holbrook station. In Chalcedony Park, as this part of the forest is called, is the largest number of huge pet- lified trees to be found in any one place in the world. One of them spans a deep arroyo forty feet wide, forming prob- ably the only bridge of solid agate on this globe. The inev- itable vandal has blown up a few of these superb stone logs with giant-powder, to get some sj)ecimens for his contempt- ible pocket; but there are thousands still spared, and the forest is now so guarded that a repetition of these outrages is not probable. In Tiffany's jewehy store, New York, jon can see some magnificent specimens of polished cross-sections from these logs, which command enormous prices. The man TREE-TRUNK FETRIFIED INTO AN AGATE BRIDGE. A FOREST OF AGATE. 25 in Sioux Falls who superintended the sawing of them told me that a steel saw, six inches wide and aided by diamond- dust, was worn down to a half-inch ribbon in going through thirty-six inches of that adamantine ''wood" — a process which lasted many days. This petrified forest was a very important thing in the economy of the brown fii*st Americans — long centuries before Europe dreamed of a New World. Its beautiful "woods" traveled all over the great southwest, and sometimes far out into the plains. Not that the Indians used it for jewelry as we are now doing ; but they made of it articles far more valuable than the little charms into which it is nowadays polished by the thousands of dollars' worth annually. Some of this agate was the very best material possible for their arrow-heads, spear-heads, knives, scrapers, and other material ; and they seem to have preferred it to the commoner volcanic glass. Many hundreds of miles from the Petrified Forest I have picked up these stone implements which were unmis- takably made from its "wood." I have hundreds of beautiful aiTOw-points, and many spear-heads of aU sorts of agate, and several scalping-knives of lovely moss agate, aU of which came from there originally, though all found at long dis- tances away. The Indians used to make excursions thither to get these prized chips ; and evidently traded them to very distant tribes. In the extreme eastern edge of Arizona, some forty miles southeast of the Petrified Forest, and about forty miles south- west of the remote and interesting Indian pueblo of Zuhi, 3 26 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. N. M., is a strange natural phenomenon — a great, shallow salt lake, at the bottom of a bowl-like depression some hundreds of feet deep and about three miles across. The basin is daz- zHng white with a criist of salt crystals. About in the center rises a small black volcanic peak ; and if you will take the trouble to ford the salt lake — which is disagreeable but not dangerous to do — and climb the peak, you will find its crater half -filled with a lakelet of pure, fresh water ! There are very many of these salt lakes in the southwest, and from them the Indians from time immemorial have procured their salt — and so did the Mexican colonists until within ten years. There is also a large river of salt water — the Salt Elver, in south- western Ai'izona. A very cuidous and disagreeable freak of nature found in some parts of the southwest is that treacherous pitfall known as the sumidero. These ugly traps are quite numerous in some valleys — particularly in the vicinity of San Mateo, N. M. There is no danger-signal to show their whereabouts ; and the fii'st warning one has of a sumidero is apt to be too late. These characteristic jnts are a sort of mud springs with too much mud to flow, and too much water to dry up. They are roundish, about the size of a well-hole, and some- times as deep— in fact, they are what we might call masked wells. There are quicksands at various points in nearly every stream of the southwest; but even these, frequently fatal as they are, are not nearly so dangerous as the smnideros. In fording a southwestern stream one expects, and is prepared for, quicksands. But there is no looking out for a sumidero. A FOREST OF AGATE. 27 These masked wells occm* in bare, alkali-covered flats. The mud upon their siu'face is baked dry, and there is absolutely nothing to distinguish them from the safe ground around. But man or horse or sheep or cow that once steps upon that treacherous surface slumps from sight in an instant. Many animals and some people perish in these sumideros, and the bodies are hardly ever recovered. The longest pole will not find bottom to one of these mud springs. A Mexican friend of mine is one of the few who ever got into a snmidero and got out again. He was loping across the dry plain when suddenly the horse disappeared in a great splash of mud. The rider was thrown from the saddle, and clutched the edges of the pit so that he was able to di"aw himself out. The pueblo of Zufii itself is well worthy of a visit. It has an important history, as you will see in the chapter on the Stone Autograph Album ; and its arcliitecture, its people, and its customs are full of keen interest to every intelligent Ajnericau. Among the least of its curiosities are several blonde Indians as genuine albinos as white rabbits are. They are pure-blooded Indians, but their skins are very light, their hair almost tow-color, and their eyes red. The people of Zuhi also make the handsomest pottery of all the Pueblos ; and some of their large old water-jars, painted with strange figm'es of elk and other animals, are really valuable. The best way to get to Zuhi is from the station of Gallup, where carriages and drivers can he procured. The road is too easily lost for the stranger to undertake it alone ; but the tireless horses of the country cover the lonely miles in a few horn's. III. THE AMERICAN SAHARA. JHE Great American Desert was almost better known a generation ago than it is to-day. Then thousands of the hardy Argonauts had tra- versed that fearful waste on foot with their dawdUug ox-teams, and hundreds of them had left their bones to bleach in that thirsty land. The survivors of those deadly jom-neys had a very definite idea of what that desert was; but now that we can roll across it in a day in Pull- man palace-cars, its real — and still existing — horrors are largely forgotten. I have walked its hideous length alone and wounded, and realize something more of it from that than a great many railroad journeys across it since have told me. Now every transcontinental railroad crosses the great desert whose vast, arid waste stretches up and down the con- tinent, west of the Rocky Mountains, for nearly two thousand miles. The northern routes cut its least gruesome parts; but the two which traverse its southern half — the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad and the Southern Pacific Railroad — pierce some of its gi'immest recesses. The first scientific exploration of this deadly area was Lieu- tenant Wlieeler's United States survey in the early fifties ; and THE AMERICAN SAHARA. 31 he was fii'st to give scientific assurance that we have here a desert as absohite as the Sahara. If its parched sands could speak then- record, what a story they might tell of unearth- ly sufferings and raving death ; of slow-plodding caravans, whose patient oxen lifted their feet ceaselessly from the blis- tering gravel and bawled with agony ; of dra^^al human faces that peered hungrily at yon lying image of a placid lake, and toiled frantically on to sink at last, hopeless and strengthless, in the hot dust which the mirage had painted with the hues and the very waves of water ; and whose were the ghastly relics that whiten there to-day, uncrumbled after a generation of exposui-e to the dryest air on the globe ! ■^""No one will ever know how many have laid their gaunt N forms to the long sleep in that inhospitable land; but the number runs up into the thousands. Not a year passes, even now, without record of many deaths upon that desert, and of many more who wander Imck, crazed with the delii'ium of thii'st, and are taken to a kindlier clime only to die there. Even people at the raih-oad stations sometimes rove off, lured by the strange fascination of the desert, and never come back; and of the adventurous miners who seek to probe the golden secrets of those barren and strange-hued ranges, there are countless victims. A desert is not necessarily an endless, level waste of burn- ing sand ; and the Great American Desert is far from it. It is full of strange, 1)urnt, ragged mountain ranges, with de- ceptive, sloping broad valleys between — though as we near its southern end the mountains become somewhat less nu- 32 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. merous, and the sandy wastes more prominent. There are countless extinct volcanoes upon it, and hundreds of square miles of black, bristling lava-flows. A majority of it is sparsely clothed with the hardy greasewood ; but in places not a plant of any sort breaks the sm'face, far as the eye can reach. The siunmer heat is inconceivable, often reaching 136° in the shade ; and a piece of metal which has lain in the sun can no more be handled than could a red-hot stove. Even in winter the midday heat is sometimes insufferable, while at night ice frequently forms on the water-tanks. The daily range of temperatm'e there is said to be the greatest ever recorded anywhere ; and a change of 80° in a few hours is not rare. Such violent variations are extremely trying to the human system ; and among the few people who live on the edges of the hottest of lands, pneumonia is the commonest of diseases ! The scattered telegraph-offices along the rail- road are all built with two roofs, a couple of feet apart, that the free passage of air may partially counteract the fearful down-beating of the sun. There are oases in the desert, too, chief of which are the narrow valleys of the Mojave River and the lower Colorado. It is a strange thing to see that soft green ribbon athwart the molten landscape — between lines as sharp-drawn as a fence, on one side of which all is verdant life, and on the other, but a foot away, all death and desolation. The contorted ranges, which seem to have been dropped down upon the waste, rather than upheaved from it, are very rich in gold and silver, — a fact which has Im-ed countless THE AMERICAN SAHARA. 33 victims to death. Theii" strange colors have given an appro- priate name to one of the largest silver-producing districts in the United States — that of Calico. The curiously blended browns and reds of these igneous rocks do make them strongly resemble the antiquated calicoes of our grand- mothers. As would be inferred from its temperature, the desert is a land of fearful winds. When that stupendous volume of hot a:r rises by its own lightness — as hot air always must rise, a principle which was the foundation of ballooning — other aii* from the surrounding world must rush in to take its place ; laid as the new ocean of atmosphere, greater than the Medi- terranean, pours in in stupendous waves to its desert bed, such winds result as few in fertile lands ever dreamed of. The Arabian simoom is not deadlier than the sand-storm of the Colorado Desert (as the lower half is generally called). Express-trains cannot make head against it — ^nay, they are even sometimes forced from the ti'ack ! Upon the crests of some of the ranges are hundreds of acres bmied deep in the fine, white sand that those fearful gales pluck up by car-loads from the plain and lift on high to fling upon the scowling peaks thousands of feet above. There are no snow-drifts to blockade trains there ; but it is sometimes necessary to shovel through more troublesome drifts of sand. Man or beast caught in one of those sand-laden tempests has little chance of escape. The man who will lie with his head tightly \sTapped in coat or blanket and stifle there until the fury of the storm is spent may survive ; but woe to the poor brute 34 SOME STRANGE (^ORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. whose swift feet cannot bear it betimes to a place of refug-e. There is no facing or breathing that atmosphere of alkaline sand, whose hghtest whiff inflames eyes, nose, and threat almost past endurance. The sand-storm suffocates its vic- VIEW AMONG THE CACTI. tims and buries them — perhaps to uncover them again only after the lapse of years. The few rivers of the American Desert are as strange and as treacherous as its winds. The Colorado is the only large stream of them all, and the only one which behaves like an ordinary river. It is always turbid — and gets its Spanish THE AMEEICAN SAHARA. 35 name, which means "the Red/' from the color of its tide. The smaller streams are ahnost invariably clear in diy weather ; but in a time of rain they become torrents not so much of sandy water as of liquid sand ! I have seen them roUing down in freshets with foui'-foot waves which seemed simply sand in flow ; and it is a fact that the bodies of those who are drowned at such times are almost never recovered. le strange river buries them forever in its own sands. All ^ ese rivers have heads ; but hardly one of them has a mouth ! ■ "^ 'ley rise in the mountains on the edge of some happier land, ■ / )w away out into the desert, making a green gladness ■ here their waters touch, and soon are swallowed up forever ^ 1'^ the thii'sty sands. The Mojave, for instance, is a beauti- tv,[ httle stream, clear as crj^stal through the summer, only a foot or so in depth, but a couple of hundred feet wide. It is fifty or sixty miles long, and its upper valley is a narrow paradise, gi'een with tall grasses and noble cotton- woods that recall the stately elms of the Connecticut VaUey. But lower down the grass gives place to barren sand-banks -, the hard- ier trees, whose roots bore deep to drink, grow small and straggling ; and at last it dies altogether upon the arid plain, and leaves beyond a desert as utter as that which crowds its whole bright oasis-ribbon on either side but cannot encroach thereon. It is a veiy curious fact that this American Sahara, over fifteen hundred miles long from north to south, and nearly liaK as wide, serves to trip the very seasons. On its one side the rains all come in the summer; but on the Pacific side 36 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. they are invariably in the winter, and a shower between March and October is ahnost as unheard of as the prover- bial thunder from a cloudless sky. In the southern portions of the desert are many stranj^-e freaks of vegetable life — huge cacti sixty feet tall, and as large around as a barrel, with singular arms which make them look like gigantic candelabra ; smaller but equally f ai tastic varieties of cactus, from the tall, lithe ocalilla, or whi" stock cactus, down to the tiny knob smaller than a china cu whose innocent-looking needles give it a roseate halo. Tl blossoms of these strange vegetable pin-cushions (whose pii all have their points outward) are invariably brilliant ana beautiful. There are countless more modest flowers, too, in the rainy season, and thousands of square miles are carpet(.;d thick with a floral carpet which makes it hard for the trav- eler to believe that he is really gazing upon a desert. There are even date-palms, those quaint ragged childi*en of the troll- ies ; and they have very appropriate company. Few people are aware that there are wild camels in North America, but it is none the less true. Many years ago a number of these " ships of the desert " were imported fi'om Africa by an en- terprising Yankee who purj^osed to use them in freighting across the American Sahara. The scheme failed ; the camels escaped to the desert, made themselves at home, and there they roam to-day, wild as deer but apparently prospering, and now and then frightening the wits nearly out of some ignorant prospector who strays into theii' grim domain. There are in this desert weird and deadly valleys which THE AMERICAN SAHARA. 37 are liimdreds of feet below the level of the sea ; vast depos- its of pure salt, borax, soda, and other minerals ; remark- able ''mud- volcanoes," or geysers; wonderful mirages and supernatural atmospheric effects, and many other wonders. The intensely dry ah' is so clear that distance seems annihi- lated, and the eye loses its reckoning. Objects twenty miles away look to be within an easy half-hoiu-'s walk. There are countless dry beds of prehistoric and accursed lakes — some of them of great extent — in whose alkaline dust no plant can gTOw, and upon which a puddle of rain-water becomes an almost deadly poison. In the mountain-passes are trails where the pattering feet of mangy and starveling coyotes for thousands of years have worn a path six inches deep in the solid limestone. Gaunt ravens sail staling over the wan plains; and hairy tarantulas hop ; and the side-winder — the deadly, horned rattlesnake of the desert, which gets its nick- name from its peculiar sideling motion — crawls across the burning sands, or basks in the terrific sun which only he and the lizards, of all created things, can enjo3^ The " Salton Sea," about which so much undeserved sensa- tion and mystery were made recently, is not a sea at all, but a huge puddle of " back water " from the Colorado River. It had been dry for a great while ; but the river in 1891, in a freshet, broke its banks and again filled the shallow basin. The water is brackish because the overflowed valley contains great salt deposits. The most fatally famous part of the Great American Desert is Death Valley, in California. There is on all the 4 38 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. globe uo other spot so forbidding, so desolate, so deadly. • It is a coucentratiou of the hideousness of that whole hideous area ; aud it has a bitter history. One of the most interesting and graphic stories T ever listened to was that related to me, several years ago, by one of the siu'vivors of the famous Death Valley party of 1849 — Rev. J. W. Brier, an aged Methodist clergyman no"w "^ ^ in California, who preached the first Protestant sen* Los Angeles. A party of five hundred emigrants / on the last day of September, 1849, from the southe: of Utah to cross the desert to the new mines of Calir There were one hundi'ed and five canvas-topped w • drawn by sturdy oxen, beside which trudged the shaggy men, rifle in hand, while under the canvas awnings rode the women and children. In a short time there was division of opinion as to the proper route across that pathless waste in front ; and next day five wagons and their j^eople went east to reach Santa Fe (whence there were dim Mexican trails to Los An- geles), and the rest plunged boldly into the desert. The party which went via Santa Fe reached California in December, after vast sufferings. The larger company traveled in com- fort for a few days until they reached about where Pioche now is. Then they entered the Land of Thirst; and for more than three months wandered lost in that inconceivable realm of horror. It was almost impossible to get wagons through a country furrowed mtli canons ; and presently they abandoned theii- vehicles, packing what they could upon the l>acks of the oxen. They struggled on to glittering lakes, THE AMEKICAN SAHAEA. 39 oiily to find them deadly poison, or but a mirage on barren sands. Now and then a wee spring in the mountains gave them new life. One by one the oxen dropped, day by day the scanty flour ran lower. Nine young men, who separated from the rest, beino' stalwart and unencumliered with fami- REV. J. \V. BRIER. lies, strayed into Death Valley ahead of the others, succumbed to its deadly thirst, and, crawhng into a little volcanic bowl to escape the cold winds of night, left their cuddled bones there — where they were found many years later by Gov- 40 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. ernor Blaisdell and his surveyors, who gave Death Valley its name. The valley lies in Inyo County, and is about one hundred and fifty miles long. In mdth it tapers from three miles at its southern end to thirty at the northern. It is over two hundred feet l)elow the sea-level. Most of Inyo County is a great plateau, averaging 5000 feet in altitude ; and in it, in the south end of the Sien-a Nevada range, tow- ers the loftiest peak in the United States — Mount Whitney, 15,000 feet. So, as you may imagine, there is a terrible " jumping-off-place " when one comes to the brink of this accursed valley. From 5000 feet ahove sea-level to 200 feet heloiv it is a good deal of a drop ; and in places it fairly looks as if one might take it at a single jump. The valley is walled on each side by savage and aj)palling cliffs which rise thou- sands of feet in apparently sheer walls. There are but few places where the valley can well be crossed from side to side ; for by the time one has trudged over those miles of alkali one is generally too far gone to climb up the fai-ther rocks to safety. It is the very last place. There is nothing so deadly even in the hottest parts of Africa.' Not even a bird flies across that liideous waste — nature is absolutely lifeless there. It is the dryest place in the world — the place where one will soonest die of thirst, and where the \'ictim soon becomes a perfect mummy. Wlien the melting snows of the Sierra Nevada come roaring down the slopes in great torrents, they do not reach the bottom of Death Valley. Long before the stream can get there it is swallowed up into the thirsty air and thirstier sands. The main party of pioneers crossed THE AMERICAN SAHARA. 41 Death Valley at about the middle, where it is but a few miles wide, but suffered frightfully tliere. With every day their tortures gi-ew worse. The gaunt oxen were so nearly dead that their meat was rank poison; and at last the starving band had no food for four weeks save ox-hide scorched and then boiled to a bitter jelly. Day by day some of their num- ber sank upon the burning sands, never to rise again. The skeleton survivors were too weak to help the fallen. One poor fellow named Isham revived enough to crawl four awful miles on his hands and knees in pursuit of his companions, and then died. The strongest of the whole j^arty was wee, nervous Mrs. Brier, who had come to Colorado an invahd, and who shared with her boys of four, seven, and nine years that indescriba- ble tramp of nine hundi-ed miles. For the last three weeks she had to lift her athletic husband from the ground every morning, and steady him a few moments before he could stand; and help wasted giants who a few months before could have held her upon their palms. At last the few d;yang survivors crossed the range which shuts off that most di'cadful of deserts from the garden of the world, and were tenderly nursed to health at the hacienda of a courtly Spaniard. Mr. Brier had wasted from one hundred and seventy-five pounds to seventy-five, and the others in proportion. When I saw him last he was a hale old man of seventy-five, cheerful a]id active, but with strange furrows in his face to tell of those by-gone sufferings. His heroic little wife was still living, and the boys, who had had a bitter ex- 42 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. perience such as perhaps no other boys ever siu'vived, are stalwart men. The Great American Desert reaches from Idaho to the Gulf of California and down into Mexico; and embraces portions of Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California. There have been numerous schemes to reclaim parts of it — even to turning the Colorado River into its southern basins — but all the ingenuity of man will never change most of it from the u'redeemable and fearful wil- derness it is to-day. IV. THE RATTLESNAKE DANCE. and about the edges of the Great American Desert are many of the strangest corners. It seems as if Nature has crowded her curiosities into that strangest and most forbidding of mu- seums, that they may not be too easily found. A hundred miles north of the Petrified Forest, and well into the edge of the Ai'izona desert, are the seven strange and seldom visited Pueblo cities of Moqui. They all have wildly unpronounceable names : Hualpi, Si-chom-ivi, Shim- o-pavi, Shi-paui-luvi, Oraibe, and Mishongop-avi ; and all are built on the summits of almost inaccessible mesas — islands of solid rock, whose generally perpendicular cliff-waUs rise high from the surrounding plain. They are very remarka- ble towns in appearance, set upon dizzy sites, with quaint terraced houses of abode, and queer little corrals for the ani- mals in nooks and angles of the cliff, and giving far outlook across the browns and yellows, and the spectral peaks of that weii-d plain. But they look not half so remarkable as they are. The most remote from civilization of all the Pueblos, the least affected by the Spanish influence which so wonder- THE RATTLESNAKE DANCE. 45 fully ruled over the enormous area of the southwest, and practically untouched by the later Saxon influence, the In- dians of the Moqui towns retain almost entirely their wonder- ful customs of before the couquest. They number eig-hteen hundred souls. Their languages are different from those of any other of the Puel)los ;* and their mode of life — though to a hasty glance the same — is in many ways unlike that of their brethren in New Mexico. They are the best weavers in America, except the once remarkable but now less skilfu? Navajos; and their nxnitds (tlie characteristic black w^ooleu dresses of Pueblo women) and dancing-girdles are so famous that the Indians of the Eio Grande valley often travel three hundred miles or more, on foot or on deliberate burros, simply to trade for the long-■v^'earing products of the rude, home-made looms of Moqui. The Moquis also make valu- able and veiy curious fur blankets by twisting the skins of rabbits into ropes, and then sewing these together — a cus- tom which Coronado found among them three hundred and fifty years ago, before there were any sheep to yield wool for such fabrics as they now weave, and when their only dress materials were skins and the cotton they raised. It is in these strange, cliff -perched little cities of the Hupi ("the people of peace," as the Moquis call themselves) that one of the most astounding l)arl3aric dances in the world is held ; for it even yet exists. Africa has no savages whose * Except that the one Moqui village of Tehua speaks the language of the Tehuas on the Rio Grande, whence its people came as refugees after the great Pueblo Rebellion of 1680. 46 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. mystic performances are more wonderful than the Moqui snake-dance — and as much may be said for many of the other secret rites of the Pueblos. The snake is an object of great respect among all uncivil- ized peoples ; and the deadlier his power, the deeper the rev- erence for him. The Pueblos often protect in theu* houses an esteemed and harmless serpent — about five or six feet long — as a mouse-trap ; and these quiet mousers keep down the little pests much more effectively than a cat, for they can foUow shee-id-deh to the ultimate corner of his hole. But Wilde all snakes are to be treated well, the Pueblo holds the rattlesnake actually sacred. It is, except the piehu- cudte (a real asp), the only venomous reptile in the southwest, and the only one dignified by a place among the ''Trues.'' The cli^ ali-rah-rdli-deli * is not really worshiped by the Pueblos, but they believe it one of the sacred animals which are use- ful to the Trues, and ascribe to it wonderful powers. Up to a generation ago it played in the marvelous and difficult su- perstitions of this people a much more important part than it does now ; and every Pueblo town used to maintain a huge rattlesnake, which was kept in a sacred room, and with great solemnity fed once a year. My own pueblo of Isleta used to support a sacred rattler in the volcanic caves of the Cerro del Aire,t but it escaped five years ago, and the patient search of the officials failed to recover it. Very truthful old * The Tee-wahn name is imitative, resembling the rattling. The Moquis call the rattlesnake dtu-ah. t Hill of the wind. 48 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. men here have told me that it was nearly as large around as my body ; and I can believe it with just a little allowance, for I myself have seen one here as large as the thickest part of my leg. There are many gi'uesome stories of human sacrifices to these snakes^ the commonest tale being that a baby was chosen by lot from the pueblo once a year to be fed to cJt'ah- rah-rdh-deJi. But this is of coui'se a foolish fable. There are no traces that the Pueblos ever practised human sacrifice in any shape, even in prehistoric times; and the very grand- father of all the rattlesnakes could no more swallow the smallest baby than he could fly. Tills snake-tending has died out in nearly — and now, per- hapS; in quite — all the New Mexican pueblos; but the em'i- ous trait still survives in the towns of Moqui. Every second year, when the August moon reaches a certain stage (in 1891 it occm'red on the 21st), the wonderful ceremony of the snake- dance is 23erf ormed ; and the white men who have witnessed these weii'd rites will never forget them. For sixteen days beforehand the professional " Snake-men " have been in solemn preparation for the great event, sit- ting in their sacred rooms, which are carved in the sohd rock. For many days before the dance (as before nearly aU such ceremonies with the Pueblos) no food must pass their lips, and they can drink only a bitter "tea," called mdh- qiie-be, made from a secret herb which gives them security against snake-poison. They also rub their bodies with pre- pared herbs. THE RATTLESNAKE DANCE. 49 Six days before the date of the dance the Snake-men go down the mesa into the phiin and hnnt eastward for rattle- snakes. Upon finding one, the hnnter tickles the angry rep- tile with the " snake- whip " — a sacred bunch of eagle feathers — until it tries to run. Then he snatches it up and puts it into a bag. On the next day the hunt is to the north ; the thii'd day to the west ; the foiu'th day to the south — which is, you must know, the only possible ordei' in which a Pueblo dares to " box the compass." To start fii"st south or north would be a di'eadful impiety in his eyes. The captured snakes are then kept in the hihi'a (sacred room called '' estufa " in the other pueblos), where they crawl about in dangerous freedom among the solemn deliberators. The night before the dance the snakes are all cleansed with great solemnity at an altar which the Snake-captain has made of colored sands drawn in a strange design. The place where the dance is held is a small open court, with the three-story houses crowding it on the west, and the brink of the cliff bounding it on the east. Several sacred rooms, hollowed from the rock, are along this court, and the tall ladders which lead into them are visible in the j)icture. At the south end of the court stands the sacred Dance-rock — a natural pillar, about fourteen feet high, left by water- wearing upon the rock floor of the mesa's top. Midway from this to the north end of the court has been constructed the Jcee-si, or sacred booth of cotton- wood branches, its opening closed by a curtain. Just in front of this a shallow cavity has been dug, and then covered with a strong and ancient 5 50 SOME STRANGE COENERS OF OUR COUNTRY. plank "with a liole in one side. This covered cavity repre- sents 81ii-pa-pH, the great Black Lake of Tears, — a name so sacred that few Indians will speak it aloud, — whence, accord- ing to the common belief of aU southwestern Indians, the human race fii-st came. On the day of the dance the Captain of the Snake-men places all the snakes in a large buckskin bag, and deposits this in the booth. All the other active participants are still in their room, going through their mysterious preparations. Just before sunset is the iiivaiiable time for the dance. Long before the hour, the housetops and the edges of the court are lined with an expectant throng of spectators : the earnest Moquis, a goodly representation of the Navajos, whose reservation hes just east, and a few white men. At about half -past five in the afternoon the twenty men of the Ante- lope Order emerge from their own special room in single file, march thrice around the court, and go through certain sa- cred ceremonies in front of the booth. Here their captain sprinkles them with a consecrated fluid from the tip of an eagle feather. For a few moments they dance and shake their gnajes (ceremonial rattles made of gourds) in front of the booth ; and then they are ranged beside it, with their backs against the wall of the houses. Among them are the youngsters that day admitted to the order in w^hich they will tljeuceforward receive life-long training — dimpled tots of from four to seven years old, who look extremely " cunning" in their strange regimentals. Now all is ready ; and in a moment a buzz in the crowd THE RATTLESNAKE DANCE. 53 annomices the coming" of the seventeen priests of the Snake Order through the roofed alley just south of the Dance-rock. These seventeen enter the court in a single fide at a rapid gait, and make the cu'cuit of the court four times, stamjjing hard with the right foot upon the sacred plank that covers Shi-pa-pii as they pass in front of the booth. This is to let the Cachinas (spirits, or divinities) know that the dancers are now presenting their prayers. When the captain of the Snake Order reaches the booth, on the fourth circuit, the procession halts. Tlie captain kneels in front of the booth, thrusts his right ann behind the curtain, unties the sack, and in a moment draws out a big, squirming rattlesnake. This he holds with his teeth al)out six inches back of the ugly triangular head, and then he rises erect. The Captain of the Antelope Order steps forward and puts his left arm around the Snake-captain's neck, while with the snake- whip in his right hand lie '^smooths" the A\Ti thing reptile. The two start forward in the peculiar hippety-hop, hop, hippety-hop of all Pueblo dances ; the next Snake-priest draws forth a snake froin the booth, and is joined by the next Antelope-man as partner ; and so on, until each of the Snake-men is dancing with a deadly snake in his mouth, and an Antelope-man accompanying him. The dancers hop in pairs thus from the booth to the Dance- rock, thence north, and circle toward the booth again. Wlien they reach a certain point, which completes about three-quarters of the circle, each Snake-man gives his head a sharp snap to the left, and thereby throws his snake to the 54 SOME STRANGE COENERS OF OUR COUNTRY. rock floor of the coiu't, inside the ring of dancers, and dances on to the booth again, to extract a fresh snake and make another round. There are tlu'ee more Antelope-men than Snake-men, and these three have no partners in the dance, but are intrusted with the duty of gathering up the snakes thus set free and putting them back into the booth. The snakes sometimes run to the crowd — a ticklish affair for those jammed upon the very brink of the precipice. In case they run, the three official gatherers snatch them up witliout ado ; but if they coil and show fight, these Antelope-men tickle them with the snake-whips until they uncoil and try to glide away, and then seize them with the rapidity of lightning. Frequently these gatherers have five or six snakes in their hands at once. The reptiles are as deadly as ever — not one has had its fangs extracted ! In the 1891 dance over one hundred snakes were used. Of these about sixty-five were rattlesnakes. I stood within six feet of the circle 5 and one man (a dancer) who came close to me was bitten. The snake which he held in his mouth suddenly turned and struck him upon the right cheek. His Antelope companion unlioolied the snake, which hung by its recurving fangs, and tlu'cw it uj)on the ground ; and the pair continued the dance as if nothing had happened ! An- other man a little farther from me, but plainly seen, was bit- ten on the hand. I never knew one of them to be seriously affected by a rattlesnake's bite. They pay no attention to the (to others) THE EATTLESNAKE DANCE. 55 deadly stroke of that hideous month, which opens flat as a palm and smites exactly like one, bnt dance and sing in ear- nest unconcern. There is in existence one photograph wliich clearly shows the dancers with the snakes in their mouths — and only one. Beginning so late, and in the deep shadow of the tall houses, it is almost imj)0ssible for the dance to be photographed at all ; but one year a lucky reflector of dense white cloud came up just before sunset and threw a light into that dark corner, and Mr. Wittick got the only perfect pic- ture extant of the snake-dance. I have made pictures which do show the snakes ; but they are not handsome pictures of the dance. The make-up of the dancers makes photography still harder. Their faces are painted black to the mouth, and white from that to the neck. Then* bodies, naked to the waist, are painted a dark lake-red. They wear curious danc- ing-skirts to the knee, with beautiful fox-skins dangling be- hind, but notliing on tlieii* legs except rattles and sacred tmgs at the ankle. At last all rush together at the foot of the Dance-rock and throw all their snakes into a horrid heap of threatening heads and buzzing tails. I have seen that hillock of rattlesnakes a foot high and four feet across. For a moment the dancers leap about the writhing pile, while the sacred corn-meal is sprinkled. Then they thrust each an arm into that squirming mass, grasp a number of snakes, and go running at top speed to the four points of the compass. Reaching the bot- tom of the great mesa (Hualpi,* where the chief snake-dance * Pronounced Wol-pL 5G SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. is held, is six hundred and sixty feet above the plain), they release the imharmed serjjents. These astounding rites last from half an hour to an hour, and end only when the hot sun has fallen behind the bald western desert. Then the dancers go to their sacred purifi- cation with the secret herb, and the awed on-lookers scatter to theii" quaint homes, rejoicing at the successful conclusion of the most important of all the public ceremonials of Moqui. It is l)elieved l)y the Hupi that the rattlesnake was one of then- first ancestors — the son of the Moqui Adam and Eve — and the}^ have a very long and comphcated folk-story about it. The snake-dance is therefore — among other superstitious aims — designed to please their divinities. In the "neck" or "saddle" which connects the fii'st of the Moqui " islands " of rock with the main table-land is a shrine of great importance. It is a little inclosure of slabs of stone surrounding a large stone fetich which has been carved into a conventional representation of the sacred snake. In two small natm'al cavities of the Dance-rock are also kept other large fetiches — both the latter being limestone concretions of peculiar shape. This snake-dance seems to have been common to all the Pueblo towns in ancient times. Espejo saw it in Acoma in 1581 ; and there are to this day in other towns customs which seem to be survivals of this strange ceremony. In Isleta there are still men who have " power of snakes," and know how to charm them by putting the sacred corn-meal and corn- pollen on their heads — a practice which figures extensively in their folk-lore. THE RATTLESNAKE DANCE. 57 The Moqiiis make great uumbers of remarkable-looking dolls for their children to play with; and in nearly every house some of these strange effigies are to be seen. They are toys for tlie youngsters, but not merely toys — they are also a sort of kindergarten course. They are called cachinas, and are supposed to represent the spirits in which the Mo- queiios believe. They are very clever representations of the outlandish figures of the masked men who take part in many ceremonial dances — these maskers, of coiu-se, being also sup- posed to look like the unseen but potent spirits. So a Moqui child very soon learns what the various spirits look like. One of the oddities which a stranger will first notice in Moqui is the fashion in which the women di-ess theii- hair. The young girls have their a1)undant black locks done up in two large and very peculiar coils, one behind each ear. These coils stand far out from the head, like huge black buttons, and give a startling appearance to the wearer. Sometimes you would fancy that she has a pair of short, ciu'ving horns. But on close inspection one of these coils is found to resemble nothing else so much as a lilack squash-blossom in its full bloom — and that is exactly what it is designed to typify. Among the Hu2)i the squash-blossom is the emblem of maidenhood. Before marriage a girl must always wear her hair thus ; but after marriage she must dress it in two pen- dent rolls, one by each ear. These rolls are supposed to re- semble — and do resemble — the long, closed squash-blossom. V. WHERE THEY BEG THE BEAR'S PARDON. is iiiterestiug to notice that the Navajo Indians, who are the nearest neighbors of the Moquis, have superstitions widely different though quite as benighted. They wall not touch a snake un- der any circumstances. So extreme are their prejudices that one of their skilled silversmiths was beaten nearly to death by his fellows for making to my order a sil- ver bracelet which represented a rattlesnake; and the ob- noxious emblem was promptly destroyed by the raiders — along with the offender's hut. Living ahnost wholly upon game as they do, the Navajos cannot be prevailed upon to taste either fish or rabbit. I have kno"wn some very ludicrous things to happen when meanly mischievous Americans deluded Navajos into eat- ing either of these forbidden dishes; and sometimes there have been very serious retaliations for the ill-mannered joke. Rabbits are wonderfully numerous in the Navajo country, bemg molested only by feathered and four-footed enemies ; but the Indian who would fight to the death sooner than touch a delicious rabbit-stew is greedily fond of the fat and WHERE THEY BEG THE BEAR'S PARDON. 59 querulous pi'aii-ie-dog". That whole region abounds in " dog- towns," and they are frequently besieged by their swarthy foes. A Navajo will stick a bit of mirror in the entrance of a bm-row, and He behind the little mound all day, if need be, to secure the coveted prize. When Mr. Tusa ventures from his bedroom, deep underground, he sees a famihar im- age mocking him at the front door ; and when he hiu'ries out to confront this impudent intruder, whiz ! goes a chal- cedony-tipped arrow through him, pinning him to the ground so that he cannot tumble back into his home, as he has a wonderful faculty for doing even in death ; or a dark hand darts from beliind hke lightning, seizes his chunky neck safely beyond the reach of his chisel-shaped teeth, and breaks his spine wdth one swift snap. But when the summer rains come, then is woe indeed to the populous communities of these ludicrous little rodents. As soon as the downpour begins, ever}^ adjacent Navajo be- tw^een the ages of three and ninety repairs to the fusa vil- lage. They bring rude hoes, sharpened sticks, and knives, and every one who is able to dig at all falls to work, unmind- ful of the drenching. In a very short time a lot of little trenches are dug, so as to lead the storm- water to the mouths of as many biurows as possible ; and soon a little stream is pouring down each. '' Mercy ! " says Mr. Tuscf to his fat wife and dozen chuliby youngsters ; ''I wish we coidd elect aldermen that would at- tend to the drainage of this town ! It 's a shame to have our cellars flooded like this ! " — and out he pops to see what can 60 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. be done. The only thing he can do is to swell the sad heap of his fellow-citizens, over which strange two-footed babies, far bigger than his, are shouting in wild glee. Such a rain- hunt often nets the Navajos many hundred pounds of prairie- dogs ; and then there is feasting for many a day in the rude, cold hogans, or huts of sticks and dirt which are the only habitation of these Indians. With the Pueblos, the mountain-lion or cougar is the king of beasts — following our civilized idea very closely; but with the Navajos the bear holds first rank. He is not only the greatest, wisest, and most powerfid of brutes, but even surpasses man ! The Navajo is a brave and skilled warrior, and would not fear the bear for its deadly teeth and claws, but of its supposed supernatural powers he is in mortal di'ead. I have offered a Navajo shepherd, who had accident- ally discovered a bear's cave, twenty dollars to show it to me, or even to tell me in what canon it lay ; but he refused, in a manner and with words which showed me that if I found the cave I would be in danger from more than the bear. The Indian was a very good friend of mine, too ; but he was sure that if he were even the indirect cause of any harm to the bear, the bear would know it and kill him and all his family ! So even my princely offer was no inducement to a man who was working hard for five dollars a month. There is only one case in which the NavajOs will meddle with a bear. That is when he has killed a Navajo, and the Indians know exactly which bear is the murderer. Then a strong, armed party, headed by the proper religious officers WHERE THEY BEG THE BEAR'S PARDON. 61 (medicine-meu), proceed to the cave of the bear. Halting- a short distance in front of the den, they go through a strange service of apology, which to us would seem entirely ludicrous, but to them is unutterably solemn. The praises of the bear, commander of beasts, are loudly sung, and his pardon is humbly invoked for the unpleasant deed to wliich they are now driven ! Having duly apologized beforehand, they pro- ceed as best they may to kill the bear, and then go home to fast and purify themselves. This aboriginal greeting, "I beg yom- pardon, and hope you will bear no resentment against me, but I have come to kill you," is quite as funny as the old farmer I used to know in New Hampshire, who was none too polite to his wife, but always addressed his oxen thus : '' Now, if you please, whoa hish, Bary ! Also Bonny ! There ! Thank you ! " The Navajos also nuike frequent prayers and sacrifices to the bear. Under no circumstances will a Navajo touch even the skin of a bear. The equally dangerous mountain-lion he hunts eagerly, and its beautif id, tawny hide is his proudest trophy outside of war, and the costliest material for his quivers, bow-cases, and rifle-sheaths. Nor will he touch a coyote. A Navajo will never enter a house in which death has been, and his wild domain is full of huts abandoned forever. Nor after he is mariied dare he ever see his wife's mother ; and if by any evil chance he happens to catch a glimpse of her, it takes a vast amount of fasting and prayer before he feels secure from dangerous results. The grayest and most 6 62 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. dignified chief is not above walking backward, running like a scared l)oy, or hiding his head in his Ijlanket, to avoid the dreaded sight. Feathers figure very prominently in the religious customs of most aborigines, and remarkably so in the southwest. Among Navajos and Pueblos alike these plume-symbols are N^ " PUEBLO PRAVER-STICKS. of the utmost efficacy for good or bad. They are part of al- most every ceremonial of the infinite superstitions of these tribes. Any white or bright-hued plume is of good omen — " good medicine," as the Indian would put it. The gay feathers of the parrot are particularly valuable, and some dances cannot be held without them, though the Indians have to travel hundreds of miles into Mexico to get them. A pea- WHERE THEY BEG THE BEAR'S PARDON. 63 cock is harder to keep in the vicinity of Indians than the finest horse — those brilliant plumes are too tempting. Eagle feathers are of sovereign value ; and in most of the pueblos gi*eat, dark, captive eagles are kept to furnish the coveted articles for most important occasions. If the bird of freedom were suddenly exterminated now, the whole Indian economy would come to a standstill. No witches could be exorcised, nor sickness cured, nor much of anything else accomplished. Dark feathers, and those in particular of the owl, buzzard, woodpecker, and raven, are unspeakably accm-sed. No one will touch them except those who " have the evil road," — that is, are witches, — and any Indian found with them in his or her possession would be officially tried and officially put to death ! Such feathei's are used only in secret by those who wish to kill or harm an enemy, in whose path they are laid with wicked wishes that ill-fortune may follow. How many of my young countrymen who have read of the " prayer- wheels " of Burmah, and the paper praj^ers of the Chinese, know that there is a mechanical prayer used by thousands of people in the United States f The Pueblo ''prayer-stick" is quite as curious a device as those of the heathen Orient ; and the feather is the chief part of it. Prowling in sheltered ravines about any Pueblo town, the curiosity-seeker will find, stuck in the ground, carefuUy whittled sticks, each with a tuft of downy feathers (generally white) l)ound at the top. Each of these sticks is a prayer — and none the less earnest 64 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. and sincere because so misguided. Around the remote pue- blo of Znni I have counted over three thousand of these strange invocations in one day's ramble ; but never a tithe as many by any other pueblo. According to the nature of the prayer, the stick, the feathers, and the manner of tying them vary. The Indian who has a favor to ask of the Trues prepares his feather- prayer with great solemnity and secrecy, takes it to a proper spot, prays to all Those Above, and plants the j)rayer-stick that it may coutinue his petition after he has goue home. This use of the feather is also shared by the Nav^jos ; and so is what may be called the smoke-prayer, in which the smoke of the sacred cigarette is blown east, north, west, south, up and down, to scare away the evil spirits and please the good ones. In a corner of the Navajo country, too, is another curiosity of which few Americans are aware — a catacomb of genuine mummies ! This is in the grim Canon de Tsay-ee, — igno- rantly called '' du Chelle," — which is lined along the ledges of its dizzy cliffs with the prehistoric houses of the so-called Cliff-dwellers. These were not an unknown race at all, but our own Pueblo Indians of the old days when defense against savage neighbors was the first object in life. These stone houses, clinging far up the gloomy precipice, were inaccessible enough at best, and are doubly so now that their ladders have crumbled to dust. In them are many strange relics of prehistoric times, and in some the embalmed bodies of their long-forgotten occupants. There is a still WHERE THEY BEG THE BEAR'S PARDON. 65 larger " deposit," so to speak, of ^Vmericau inunimies in the "ttdldly picturesque San Juan country, in the extreme north- western corner of New Mexico and adjacent parts of Colorado and Utah. They are in similar cliff-built ruins, and belong to the same strange race. So we have one of Egypt's famous wonders here at home. The largest Indian tribes of the Colorado desert have from time immemorial cremated their dead on funeral pyres, after the fashion of the classic ancients and of modern India. All the property of the deceased is burned in the same flames, and the mourners add their own treasures to the pile. So prop- erty does not accumulate among the Mojaves, and there is no contesting of wiUs. rUEBLO HINTING FETICHES. VI. THE witches' corner. [his very year at least one witch has been offi- cially put to death in the United States, after an official trial. Last year many witches were executed, and many the year before, and many the year before that — and so on back for centuries. Is n't that a strange corner of our own countiy of which you did not dream? I shall never forget the awe which filled me when, soon after coming to New Mexico, I found myself in a land of active witchcraft. Of all the marvelous things in the unwritten southwest, the superstitions of the na- tives impressed me most deeply. I thought to have settled in New Mexico, U. S. A. ; but it seemed that I had moved into another world and into the centmy before last. To liear my neighbors gravely discussing the condition of so- and-so, who "had been bewitched"; to have this and that person pointed out to me with the warning " Cindado de ella — es hruja! " * to learn that an unfortunate was put to death yesterday "for being a witch" — it often made me pinch my- self to see if I were not dreaming. But it was no dream. * " Look out for her — she is a witch ! " THE WITCHES' CORNER. G7 The belief iu witchcraft is a bitter reality in the wild south- west. There are some 175,000 souls iu New Mexico, of whom four fifths can neither read uor write, and about 30,- 000 of whom are Indians, 25,000 Americans, and the rest Mexicans. Of coiu-se the Americans have no faith in witches, nor do the educated Mexicans ; but all the Indians and probably ninety per cent, of the brave but ignorant Mexicans are firm believers in this astounding superstition. There are very few towns in this enormous territory most of whose people do not believe in and dread one or more re- puted witches among their own numljer ; and in the Pueblo towns and among the nomad Navajos and other Indians witches are so numerous as to be the greatest of all dangers. In my own pueblo of Isleta, which numbers over eleven hun- dred souls, nearly half the people are believed to be witches, and the only thing which prevents a bloody war upon them by the " True Believers " is fear of the Americans, of whom there are several thousands only twelve miles away. It is only a little while since a weU-known young Indian of this village was imprisoned and tortured (by the stocks and neck- yoke) on formal accusation that he was a witch ; and still less time since my neighbor two doors away was executed at mid- night, presumably for the same ^' crime " — since he was killed in the specific manner prescribed l^y Tigua customs for the slaying of witches. To keep down witchcraft is tlie foremost official duty of the medicine-men ; and when a witch is con- victed, on accusation and " proof," it is the office of one of the branches of medicine-men (the hum-pah-ivhit-lah-iven, or 68 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. guards) to execute liiin or her by shooting- with an arrow through the whole body from left side to right side. Isleta is now one of the most civihzed of the pueblos ; its people are the kindest parents and the best neighbors I know ; and yet the supernatural dread of supernatural harm turns them at times as far from then- real selves as were our own god- fearing forefathers in New England when they bui'ned poor old women ahve. Sandia — a pueblo of the same tribe as Isleta (the Tiguas, or Tee-wahn) — a few leagues north of here, has been so decimated by the official kiUing-off: of witches that it bids fair soon to become extinct ; and these executions still continue. The first business of all "medi- cine-makings" — which are not to compound remedies for sickness alone, though that is " cured " by i-emarkable means, but to avert all dangers and invoke all prosjjerities for the town, its people, its animals, its crops, etc. — is to drive away and punish all witches who can be reached. So in all prayers, all dances, and in fact in all ceremonies whatever, the first ser- vice is to disperse the evil spirits who may be hovering about. When a child is born there are numerous ceremonials to keep it from being appropriated by the witches. When a person dies, the four days which his soul wiU take to reach the other world are filled by the medicine-men with the most laborious and astounding incantations and charms, with smoke to l)lind the eyes of the witches, and mth false trails and othei- de- vices to throw them off the track of the journeying soul, lest they overtake it and swoop it away to the accursed land. It needs very little to lay an Indian open to the suspicion THE WITCHES' CORNEE. 69 of having '' the evil road." If he have red eyes, as though he had been awake o' nights, instead of sleeping peacefully as a good Indian should, he is at once looked upon with distrust. If he have an enemy, and that enemy l)ecomes sick, it is still more convincing. The medicine-men will proceed secretly to search the house of the suspected person ; and if they find any of the feathers of the accursed birds (the chief of which are the owl, raven, and woodpecker) or any other implements of witchcraft, his doom is sealed. To us it seems murder; but it is as judicial as our civilized punishments, for the sen- tence is pronounced by the recognized judges, and carried out by the official executioners. There are numerous charms against witches— quite as valuable as our own horseshoe over the door— and the l)oundless folk-lore of this strange people is full of the doings of " those of the evil road," and of the retribution with which they are always visited in the end. Witchcraft is a common faith to aU aborigines ; so it is somewhat less surprising that the Pueblos believe in it, though they are so difPerent from other Indians in so many important points.* But my first encounter with witches and witch-l^elievers was more astounding, for the people were actual citizens and voters of this enlightened republic ! Among the uneducated mass of Mexicans— who are the vast majority of their people here— the belief in hecliiseria or hrnjeria (witchcraft) is as strong as among the Indians, though * The Pueblos are, in fact, entitled to nil the rights of American citizenship, including the ballot, under the solemn pledges our govern- ment made to Mexico in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, more than lialf a century ago ; Init they liave never been given these rights. 70 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. their witches are less numerous. It is a remnant of the far past. We have still the official records of many trials of witches before Spanish courts in this territory, covering a couple of centui'ies. Sometimes a whole bunch of witches were tried at once, with all the solemnity of a high Spanish tribunal, and those found guilty were duly put to death, just as if they had been murderers. Of later years the intelligence of the educated Mexicans has rendered such trials no longer possible, and no Mexican would think now of bringing a witch into court ; but pro- ceedings outside the law are not entirely done with. In the year 1887, to my knowledge, a poor old Mexican woman was beaten to death in a remote town by two men who be- lieved they had been bewitched by her ; and no attempt was ever made to punish her slayers ! A few months later I had the remarkable privilege of photographing three '' witches " and some of the people they had '' bewitched." One Mexi- can, of whom I have also a picture, claims that he was per- manently crippled by these three poor women, and his right leg is sadly twisted — though most of us would see in it more of rheumatism than of witchci-aft. But you never could make Patapalo believe that. He had offended the women, and afterwai'd thoughtlessly drank some coffee they proffered; and his leg at once grew crooked — what could be plainer than that they had bewitched him ? A much more intelligent man than the poor town-butch- er, Patapalo, tells — and believes — a much more astounding story. He incurred the displeasure of a witch in San Mateo, THE WITCHES' CORNER. 71 and is ready to make oath that she turned him iuto a woman ! He had to pay another witch in the distant canon Juan de San Taf oya to turn him back to man again ! He is a person of whose sincere behef in this ridiculous statement there can be no doubt, and his intelligence in other matters emphasizes the depth of his superstitious ignorance in this. I know several other Mexicans who claim to have been bewitched in the same way ; and the stories of minor misfortunes at the hands of the witches are innumerable. They can be heard in any New Mexican hamlet. There is one good thing about Mexican witches — they never harm the dumb animals. Their sorceries are used only against human beings who have aroused theii- enmity. One who enjoys the rather dangerous reputation of being a witch is cordially feared and hated, but finds some compensations. Few Mexicans are reckless enough to refuse any gift or favor the supposed witch may ask. On the other hand, few dare eat anything offered by a witch, for in case they have un- wittingly offended her they are sure the food or drink will cause a Hve, gnawing animal to grow within them ! A favor- ite revenge of the -witches is to make strange sores upon the face of the offender, which mil not be healed until the wdtch is appeased by presents and draws out a stick or string or rag — somewhat after the fashion of the Pueblo wizards, of whom I will teU you presently. Other persons are made blind, or deaf, or lame. Indeed, almost any affliction which may befall one is very apt to be charged at once by these superstition-ridden people to some witch or other. 72 SOME STRANGE COENERS OF OUR COUNTRY. There are many very eurious details in the Mexican witch- faith. No witch, for instance, can pass a sign of the cross ; and a couple of pins or sticks placed in that shape effectually bars witches from entering the room or from emerging if the holy emblem is between them and the door. The spoken name of God or tJie Vii-gin Mary bi'eaks a witch's spell at once. It is soberly related by many people of my acquaint- ance that they employed witches to bear them pick-a-back to great distances ; but becoming alarmed at the enormous height to which the witches flew with them, they cried, '' God save me ! " or something of the sort, and instantly fell thou- sands of feet to the ground, but were not l^adly hurt ! Mexican witches do not fly about on broomsticks, like those in whom our forefathers believed, but in an even more remarkable fashion. B}^ day they are plain, commonplace people, but at night they take the shapes of dogs, cats, rats, or other animals, and sally forth to witch-meetings in the mountains, or to prowl about the houses of those they dislike. So when the average Mexican sees a strange cat or dog about his home at night he feels a horror which seems out of place in a man who has j^roved his courage in bloody Indian wars and all the perils of the frontier. Wlien witches wish to fly, they generally retain theii* hu- man form, but assume the legs and eyes of a coyote or other animal, leaving their own at home. Then saying (in Spanish, of course), " Without God and without the Virgin Mary," they rise into the air and sail away. A sad accident once befell a male witch named Juan Perea, whom I knew in San Mateo, THE WITCHES' CORNER. 73 but who died a couple of years ago. It was asserted that one night he went flying off with the eyes and legs of a cat, leaving his own on the kitchen table. His poor starved shepherd-dog overturned the table and ate the eyes, and Juan had to go through the rest of his hfe wearing the green eyes of a cat ! That the pigmies of Africa should believe such things would not be strange ; but what do yon think of them as articles of faith for American voters ? You have all watched the "shooting stars" with wonder — but with no such feehng as that with which the natives here see them ; for here those fiery hails are supposed to be witches, flying to their nightly meetings ! Any one bearing the blessed name of Juan (John) has the sole power of catching witches. All he has to do is to draw a nine-foot circle on the ground, turn his slm*t inside out, and call the witch, who must at once fall helpless into this cu-cle ! As there are innumerable Juans here, they doubtless would have exterminated all the witches long ago, except for the unpleasant "fact" that whenever a John exercised this re- markable power all the other mtches in the country fell upon him and beat him to death ! A drunken fellow in Cebolleta, a few years ago, kicked a witch. In revenge she caused a live mouse to grow in his stomach. The little rodent made its landlord's life miser- able for a long time before he could bribe the witch to coax it out through his mouth ! These are fair samples of unnumbered thousands of stories which illustrate the firm faith of my neighbors in witchcraft. 7 74 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. It seems fairly cliildish to speak of them soberly, and yet they are imphcitly believed by more citizens of the United States than there are in any New England city outside of Boston. In this strange corner of our country witchcraft is a concern of daily thought and di-ead, as it was in the older world a few centuries ago, when the same superstition splashed all Euroj^e with the blood of unfortunate wi'etches. I have had even more intimate concern with witchcraft, both as accused and as victim. My photographic and other mysterious work has more than once led suspicious Indians to view me as a hechicero; and it is still the common behef among my abo- riginal friends that I have been bewitched by some even more powerful wizard. A stroke of paralysis in 1888 rendered my left arm power- less for more than three years and a half. The cause was sunple enough — the breaking of a tiny blood-vessel in the brain. But my Indian friends — and even many Mexicans — smiled with a pitying superiority at this explanation. The)/ would never swaUow such a silly story — they knew well enough that I had been bewitched ! Some even suggested that I should accuse the witch, and have him or her properly dealt with ! My final complete recovery — thanks to a power- ful constitution and an out-door life — only confirmed their belief. Now they hieiv I had paid some other witch to cure me! VII. THE MAGICIANS. |UR civilized " mag:ieians," like Herrmann and his predecessors, earn their liveli- liood by exliibiting their mar- velous dexterity, but with- out any claim to superhuman powers. They avowedly rely only upon their hands, edu- cated to surpassing cleverness by tedious years of practice, and upon various ingenious machines and accessories. Per- haps this frankness, however, is partly due to the fact that any supernatural pretense would be laughed at by their in- telligent auditors; and if we were all prepared to accept them as real magicians, I am not at all sui-e that they would not wilhngly pose as such. Witli the aboriginal wizard there is no such stimulus to frankness. If his audiences have eyes incomparably less easy to be befooled than ours, their intellectual ^asion is less acute. To outdo even those matchlessly observant eyes, he 76 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. has only to be matchlessly adroit; and when the eyes are once over-matched, his auditors are ready to accept any ex- planation he may choose to give. He therefore claims super- natural powers, given to him by Those Above; and my studies convince me that he himself believes this as f idly as do any of his people — so easy is it for us all, in time, to im- pose upon ourselves even more than upon others. Superstition is the corner-stone of all the strange aborigi- nal religions. Everything which the Indian does not abso- lutely understand he attributes to a supernatural cause — and to a personified one. The rainbow is a bow of the gods ; the lightning, their arrows; the thunder, their drum; the sun, their shield. The very animals are invested with super- natural attributes, according to their power to injure man or to do him good. In such a system as this a man who can do or appear to do what others cannot is natiu-ally regarded as having superhuman gifts — in short, he is a wizard. The chief influence and authority with all aboriginal tribes lie in their medicine-men, and these are always magicians. They have gained their ascendancy by their power to do wonder- ful and inexplicable things; and this ascendancy is main- tained in the hands of a small, secret class, which never dies out, since it is constantly recruited by the adojjtion of boys into the order, to which their lives are thenceforth absolutely devoted. The life of a medicine-man is a fearfully hard one. The manual practice alone which is necessary to acquire that marvelous legerdemain is almost the task of a lifetime ; and there are countless enormous fasts and other self-denials, THE MAGICIANS. 77 which are so rigorous that these magiciaus sehlom attain to the great age which is common among their people. With the Indian magicians as witli ours, conjm-ing is the means of livelDiood, but in a different and indirect waj-. They neither charge an admittance-fee nor take up a collection, but receive less du-ect returns from the faith of their fellow-aborigines that they are "precious to The Trues," and that their favor should be cultivated by presents. Tlie jugglers of India, of whom we read so mucli, will exliil)it their marvelous tricks to any one for a consideration ; but no money in the world would tempt one of our Indian jugglers to adndt a stranger to the place where he was perfonning his wonders. To him, as to his people, it is a matter not of money but of religion. The aboriginal magicians with whom I am best acquainted are the medicine-men of the Navajo and Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, and astounding performers they are. It is impossible to say which are the more dextrous, though the Navajos have one trick which I have never seen equaled by the world's most famous prestidigitators. If these stern bronze conjurers had the civilized notion of nuxking money by exhibiting themselves, they could amass fortunes. They have none of the cabinets, mirrors, false-bottomed cases, or other appliances of our stage-wizards ; and they lack the greatest aid of the latter— the convenient sleeves and pock- ets. Their tricks are done in a bare room, with a hard clay floor under which are no springs or wires, with no accesso- ries whatever. Tlie principal occasions of Puel)lo and Navajo magic are 78 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. at the medicine-makings, when the people gather to see the shamans (medicine-men) heal sickness, foretell the year, or give thanks to The Trues for its prosperity, and perform other rites belonging to such ceremonials. These medicine- makings among the Pueblos are held in one of the medicine- houses — a great room sacred to the shamans and never to be profaned by any other use. There is one just behind the Indian house in which I live. The Navajos hold them in the medicine-lioganda — a large conical hut, equally devoted to this sole purpose. After the preliminary prayers to Those Above, the disper- sion of evil spirits, and other extremely curious and inter- esting ceremonies which I have no space to describe here, the business of the medicine-dance is to cure those who are sick or afflicted — that is, according to the Indian idea, be- witched. There is no giving of remedies, as we understand the phrase — all is magic. The "medicine" (ivahr, in the language of this pueblo) is rather mental and moral than physical ; and the doses are from nimble fingers and not from vials. An American '^ medicine-man " would open his eyes very wide if he coidd see how these swarthy doctors put up a prescription. The shamans dance during the whole of their professional duties, and most of the time have in each hand a long feather from the wing of an eagle. Earlier in the perform- ance these feathers have been used to toss up evil spirits so that the wind may bear them away ; but now they serve as lancets, probes, and in fact the whole surgical-case and medi- THE MAGICIANS. 79 cine-chest. A shaman dances iip to a sick person in the an- dience, puts the tip of the feather against the patient, and with the quill in his mouth sucks diligently for a moment. The feather seems to swell to a great size, as though some large ol)ject were passing through it. Then it resumes its natural size, the shaman begins to cough and choke, and directly with his hand draws from his mouth a large rag, or a big stone, or a foot-long branch of the myriad-bristling buckhorn-cactus — while the patient feels vastly relieved at having such an unpleasant lodger removed from his cheek or neck or eye ! No wonder he had felt sick ! Sometimes the magician does not use the feather at all, but with his bare hand plucks from the body of the sick man the remarkable " disease," which is waved aloft in triumph and then passed around to the audience for critical inspection. In the whole performance, it must be remembered, the wizards have not even the advantage of distance, but are close enough to touch the audience. Common to these same medicine-dances is the startling illusion of the witch-killing. In the bowl of sacred water which stands before him, the chief shaman is supposed to see as in a mirror everything that is happening in the whole world, and even far into the future. At times, as he bends to blow a delicate wreath of smoke from the sacred cigarette across the magic mirror, he cries out that he sees witches in a certain spot doing iU to some Indian. The Cum-pah-lmit- lali-iven (medicine-guards) rush out of the room with their bows and arrows — which are the insignia of then* office, 80 SOME STRANGE COENERS OF OUR COUNTRY. without wliicli they must never appear — to get the witches. In a short time they return, bringing their victims hy the long hair. These " dead witches " are in face, dress, and everything else exactly like Indians, except that they are no larger than a three-3'ear-old child. Each has the feathers of an arrow projecting under the left arm, while the agate or volcanic glass tip shows under the I'ight. Of course they are manikins of some sort; but the deception is sickeniugly perfect. The guards swing them up to the very faces of the audience to be looked at; and sometimes di'ops of apparent blood spatter upon the awed spectators. Another remarkable feat of these jugglers is to l:)uild upon the bare floor a hot fire of cedar-wood, so close as almost to roast the foremost of the audience. Then the dusky magi- cians, still keeping up their weird chant — which must never be stojiped during the services — dance bare-footed and bare- legged in and upon the fire, hold their naked arms in the flames, and eat hving coals with smacking lips and the utmost seeming gusto. There can be no optical illusion about this — it is as plain as daylight. Of course there must have been some preparation for the fiery ordeal, but what it is no one knows save the initiated, and it is certainly made many hours beforehand, for the jDcrformers have Ijcen in plain sight for a very long time. Another equally starthng trick is performed w^lien the room has been darkened by extinguishing the countless candles which gave al)undant liglit on the other ceremonies. The awed audience sit awhile in the u'loom in hushed ex- THE MAGICIANS. 83 pectancy. Then they hear the low growl of distant thunder, which keeps rolling nearer and nearer. Suddenly a blinding flash of forked lightning shoots across the room from side to side, and another and another, while the room trembles to the roar of the thunder, and the flashes show terrified women clinging to their husbands and brothers. Outside the sky may be twinkling with a million stars, but in that dark room a fearful storm seems to be raging. If one of these abo- riginal Jupiters would condescend to superintend the hght- nings for our theaters, we should have much more realistic stage-storms than we do. These artificial storms last but a few moments, and when they are over the room is lighted up again for the other ceremonies. How these effects are produced I am utterly unable to explain, but they are start- lingly real. The characteristic feature of one of the medicine-dances of the Beer-ahn here in Isleta is the swallowing of eighteen-inch swords to the very hilt, l)y the naked (except for the tiny breech-clout) performers. These swords are double-edged, sharp-pointed, and, as nearly as I can tell, about two inches wide. So far as I know, no other of the numerous classes of medicine-men here perform this feat. In the great Navajo medicine-dance of Dsil-yid-je Quacal, one of the most important ceremonies of the nine-days' " dance " is the swallowing of the " great plumed arrows " by the almost naked conjurers in similar fashion. After they have been withdrawn from the mouths of the magicians, the magical arrows (which have the ancient stone heads) are ap- 84 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. plied to the patient, being pressed to the soles of his feet, to liis knees, hands, stomach, back, shonlders, crown of head, and month. In this same remarkable and almost endless Navajo cere- monial, some of the magicians (generally in a band of ten or a dozen) perform the starthng fire-dance. The conjnrers are clad only in the l)reecli-c]ont, and each carries in his hands a long bundle of shredded cedar-bark. The dance is jjerformed around an enormous fire in a corral known as the Dark- Circle-of-Branches. Each lights his bark flaml)eau, and then they run at top speed around and around the bonfii-e. They hold their torches against then* own nude bodies, then against those of their companions, often for two or three minutes at a time ; they whip each other with these liurning scoui-ges, and rub each other down with them, taking and giving veritable baths of &re as they run madly around the circle, the flames streaming behind them in fiery banners. Dr. Washington Matthews, the foremost student of Navajo customs, has said officially : "I have seen many fire scenes on the stage, many acts of fire-eating and fire-handling by civilized jugglers, but nothing quite comparable to this." Another Navajo jugglery is to stand a feather on end in a flaring, pan-shaped basket, and dance with it as a partner. The Indian — in this case sometimes the dancer is a very young boy — dances in proper fashion around tke basket; and the feather dances too, hopping gently up and down, and swaying in the direction of its human partner. If he dances to the north, the feather leans northward ; if he moves to the THE MAGICIANS. 85 south, the feather tips southward, and so on, as if the quill were actually reaching out to him ! There is also " magic " in the foretelling of the year, which is done by the chief shaman and his two first-assistants. This medicine-dance is always hj or before the middle of March, many weeks before a green blade of any sort is to be found in this climate. These three offteials go out from the meeting to the banks of the Rio Grande, and presently return with stalks of green corn and wheat — which they declare was brought to them by the river direct from The Trues. These stalks are handed about among the audience, and then the chief shaman draws from them the omens for the crops of the coming season. The last service of the medicine-dance before the benedic- tion-song is the " seed-giving," which is itself a sleight-of-hand trick. The chief fetich of the shamans is "the Mother" — an ear of spotless white corn with a plume of downy white feathers bound to the head. It represents the mother of all mankind, and during the whole medicine-dance one of these queer objects has been sitting in front of each medicine-man. Now, as all in the audience rise, the chief shaman and his as- sistants shake their " Mothers " above the heads of the throng in token of blessing ; and out pours a perfect shower of ker- nels of corn, wheat, and seeds of all kinds, in a vastly greater quantity than I would undertake to hide in ten times as many of those little tufts. The most remarkal)le of the feats of the Pueblo magicians is one of which I cannot write in detail, for I have never 8 86 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. seen it ; but that the trick is performed, and so well done as to deceive the sharpest-eyed of the spectators, is a fact beyond doubt. The shamans are said at some special occasions to turn themselves at will into any animal shape ; and where a moment before had stood a painted Indian the audience sees a wolf, or bear, or dog, or some other brute ! This is in a hue with some of the most famous juggleries of India, and is quite as wonderful a deeejjtion as any of them. These are by no means the only tricks in the repertory of the Pueblo conjurers, but they are sufficient to illustrate the marvelous dexterity and adroitness of these swarthy won- der-workers, who produce such surprising results with none of the paraphernalia of more civilized jugglers, and whose magic has such a deep interest beyond its mere bewilderment of the eye. It is one of the potent factors in a religion so astonishing and so vastly complicated that whole volumes would hardly exhaust the interest of the subject. The Navajo magicians jiractise aU these tricks and numer- ous others. One of their manifestations which I have never found among the Pueblos is the '^ moving of the sun." This takes place in the medicine-lodge at night — the time of all official acts of the medicine-men. At the appointed time a sun rises on the east (inside the room) and slowly describes an arched course until at last it sets in the west side of the room, and darkness reigns again. Diu-ing the whole per- formance a sacred chant is kept up, and once started dare not be interrupted until the sun has finished its course. But the crowning achievement of the Navajo — and, in my THE MAGICIANS. 89 knowledge, of any Indian — magicians is the growing of the sacred corn. At sunrise the shaman plants the enchanted kernel before him, in full view of his audience, and sits sol- emnly in his place singing a weu*d song. Presently the earth cracks, and the tender green shoot pushes forth. As the magician sings on the young plant grows visibly, reaching upward several inches an hour, waxing thick and putting out its drooping blades. If the juggler stops his song the growth of the corn stops, and is resumed only when he recommences his chant. . By noon the corn is tall and vigorous and already tasseled-out ; and by sunset it is a mature and perfect plant, witli its tall staUv, sedgy leaves, and silk-topped ears of corn ! How the trick is performed I have never been able to form so much as a satisfactory guess ; l)ut done it is, as plainly as eyes ever saw anything done, and apparently with as little chance for deception. VIII. THE SELF-CRUCIFIERS. IROM the witches, and within the same strange corner of onr country where they still flourish, it is an easy step to a much more wonderful fanaticism, to the most wonderful, perhaps, in the limits of the civilized world. It is a relic of a barbarism so incredible that one can hardly blame those who could not believe it possible. I should have been as skeptical myself, though thousands of Americans have seen it, if I had not myself viewed the astounding sight. And in corroboration of my eyes there are beside me a score of photographs, which very nearly cost me my life in the taking, and several times since. You may have learned that in the Middle Ages nearly the whole of Europe had a strange epidemic — a fever of peni- tential self -whipping. The Flagellants, as they were called, paraded the streets lashing themselves with scourges, or used the whip at home. Even kings caught the infection, and abused their own royal backs. It took centuries to eradi- cate this remarkable custom. There is nothing left of it in Europe now ; and one who wishes to see so strange a sight THE SELF-CRUCIFIERS. 91 must go not .abroad but to a neglected corner of our own land. When I read in boyhood of the awful self-tortures of the Fakeers of India, I little dreamed that I should come to live among a class of men who fully parallel their worst self- cruelties, and men who are citizens of the United States, with votes as good as mine. The Penitentes or Penitent Brothers were once very nu- merous in New Mexico, but have been quietly stamped out by the Church until but few active bands remain, and they only in the most out-of-the-way hamlets. They are Mexicans, and of course very ignorant and fanatic ones. Their strange brotherhood — a remnant and perversion of the penitent orders of the Middle Ages — is active only forty days in the year, the forty days of Lent. At that time they flog their own naked backs with cruel scourges of aloe -fiber, carry enormous crosses, lie on beds of cactus, and perform simi- lar self-tortures, making pilgrimages thus. On Good Friday they redouble their ghastly efforts, and finally crucify, upon a real cross, one of their number who is chosen by lot. He does not always die under this awful torture, but when he does, nothing is done to his fanatical brethren. I shall never forget my first encounter with the Peni- tentes at San Mateo, N. M., in 1888, and there are very good reasons why I should not. Among them is a ball in my throat. If the discovery that I was living among witches had startled and aroused me, you may imagine my feelings when, some mouths later, I learned that a living man was to 92 SOME STRANGE COENEES OF OUE COUNTRY. be crucified in town in a few days. This was learning some- thing al>out my own country with a vengeance. The fii'st hint came one belated night as I retiu'ned from hunting in the mountains. Suddenly there rose upon the air the most awful soiind I ever heard. The hideous scream of the moun- tain-lion, the deadly war-whoop, are tame beside it. You may laugh at me for being scared at the simple whistle of a reed, but if ever you hear that unearthly ululation you will shiver too. Words cannot describe its piercing, wild, uncanny .shrill. The official pitero afterward taught me that simple aii-, and it sounds very flat indeed when whistled ; but blown from his shrieking reed, filling the air for miles so that one cannot tell whether it comes from above, below, or either hand, it is as ill a sound as you will ever wish to hear. When I got home to my courtly Spanish friends and asked the meaning of that unearthly too-oofle-tee-oo they told me about the Penitentes. It was Monday of Holy Week, and they were making their nightly pilgrimages; on Thursday and Friday I could see them. What, in daylight f Oh, yes. Hurrah ! Then I will photograph them ! For dios amigo, but they will kill you if you think of such a foolhardy thing ! But who ever knew an enthusiast to be a coward in the line of his hobby ? If I had been certain of being killed the next moment, it is not sure that I should not liaye tried to get the photographs first, so wrought up was I. And make the photographs I did, twenty-five of them, with my one useful hand quaking on the bulb of the Prosch shutter and now and then snapping an instantaneous picture at the marvelous sight, THE SELF-CRUCIFIEES. 93 with a cocked six-shooter lying on the top of the camera-box, and lion-hke Don Ireneo and a stalwart peon with revolvers in hand facing back the mnrderons mob. Perhaps the pic- tures were not worth the risk of that day and of the many subsequent months when repeated attempts were made to as- sassinate me ; but they are the only photographs that were ever made of that strangest of the strange corners of our country, and I have never grudged the price. I afterward got photographs of several of the chief Penitentes ; and have in my cabinet some of their blood-stained scourges, procured at equal risk. That was in 1888. The same year there were, to my know- ledge, crucifixions in two other New Mexican towns, and whipping and the other rites in twenty-three. In 1889, 1890, and 1891 there were again crucifixions in San Mateo and one other town that I know of, and there may have been more. Until within four years there were also women-Peni- tentes, but so far as I can learn they are no longer active. They used- to wind all their limbs with wife or ropes so tightly as to stop the circulation, bear crosses, and march for miles with unstockiuged feet in shoes half filled with sharp pebbles. And these are your fellow-citizens and mine ! Wliat do you think about going to Africa to find barbarous customs, or to Oberammergau for a Passion-play? IX. HOMES THAT WERE FORTS. N Indian who dwells in a house at all seems an anomaly to most of us, who know none too much of our own country. We picture him always as a nomad, living in his wigwam or tepee of bark or hide for a few days at a time, and theu moving his "town" elsewhere. The astounded look of the average traveler when he learns that we have Indians who build and inhabit permanent and good dwell- ings of many stories in height is never to be forgotten. There are some tribes of recently civilized aborigines in the Indian Territory who have learned to dwell in fairly good farm-houses within a generation, and other remnants of tribes elsewhere ; but these all learned the ha1)it from us, and re- cently. ' There is but one Indian tril)e in North America above Mexico which has always lived in permanent houses since history began, and that is one of om* very largest triljes, the Pueblos. When Columlnis was yet trying to beat a New World into the thick skull of the Old, these simple, unlettered " viUage Indians " were already Uving in their strange but comfortable and loftv tenements, and no man knows for how HOMES THAT WERE FORTS. 95 long before. And in very similar houses they dwell to-day, and in very mucli the same style as before the fii-st European eyes ever saw America. It took a great many generations for our forefathers to attain to any buildings of more than fifty rooms and three stories in this New World 5 but unknown centimes before the landing of the Pilgi'ims — or even of the Spaniards, who were more than a hundred years ahead of them — the ignorant Indians of the southwest built and occupied huge houses from four to six stories in height, and with some- times half a thousand rooms,* The influence of civilization has largely affected Pueblo architecture ; and most of the Indian towns along the Rio Grande nowadays have but one- and two-storied structures, more after the Spanish style. But there are hundreds of ruins of these enormous " community- houses" scattered over the two ten'itories of Arizona and New Mexico, and some in Colorado and Utah, and some stiU occupied towns of the same sort The most striking example among living towns is the pueblo of Taos,t in the extreme northern part of New Mexico. That wonderfidly picturesque town, looking at which the traveler finds it hard to realize that he is still in America, has but two houses ; but they are five and six stories high, and contain about three hundred rooms apiece. The pueblo of Acoma, in a western county, has six houses, each thi-ee stories taU , and Zuni, still farther * Pecos liad two liouses of five hundred and seventeen and five hun- dred and eighty-five rooms respectively. t Reached by a twenty-five-mile-wagon-ride from Embudo, on the Denver and Rio Grande Railway. HOMES THAT WERE FORTS. 97 west, lias a six-stoiy commuuity-lioiise covering many acres and containing many hundred rooms. The Moqui towns are three-storied. As for ruins of such buildings, they are every- where. Some years ago I found in a remote and dangerous corner of the Navajo country such a ruin — the tj-pe of a thousand others — in which the five-story community-house formed an entire rectangle, inclosing a public square in the middle. The outer walls of these houses never had doors or windows, so they presented to any marauding foe a blank waU of great height. On one side of this ruin is its most uncommon feature — a great tower, with part of the fifth story stiU standing, and still showing the loopholes by which the beleaguered Pueblos showered agate-tipped arrows upon their besiegers. This pueblo was a deserted and forgotten ruin when the first Spaniards entered this territory, three hundred and fifty years ago. All these great houses were of stone masonry very well laid. The builders had no metal of any sort, and therefore could not dress stone, as many superficial observers have supposed they did, but selected sandstones and limestones which broke naturally into rather regular shape, and laid these in mud mortar with remarkable skill. Down the un- crumbled masonry of those prehistoric walls one can slide the point of a spade as down a dressed plank. The architecture of the Pueblos is unique and character- istic, and their original houses look unlike anything else in the world. They are all terraced, so that the front of a building looks like a gigantic flight of steps. The second 9 98 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. story stands well back on the roof of the first, which thus gives it a sort of broad, uncovered porch its whole length. The third story is similarly placed upon the second, and so on up. There are no stairs inside even the largest of these buildings, except sometimes ladders to go down into the first story when that is built in the old fashion without doors. In Acoma, which has about seven hundred people, there were, when I first knew it, but six doors on the gi'ound, and there are but few more now. To get into the fii"st story of any of the hundreds of other tenements, one must go up a ladder to the fii\st roof, enter the second-story room, hft a wee trap-door in its floor, and back down another ladder to the first-floor room. All the ''stairs" are outside the house, and can be moved from place to place — a plan which has its advantages as well as its drawbacks — for they are all simply tall, clumsy ladders. All these architectural peculiarities were for purposes of defense. The lower story was a dead wall, into which no enemy with only aboriginal weapons could l)reak, and some of these walls have laughed at civilized field-pieces. The lad- ders could easily be drawn up, and the level roofs made an excellent position from which to rain stones and arrows upon a foe. Even if the enemy captured the first roof, the people had only to retire to the second, from which they could fight down with undiminished advantage. From these terraces the inhabitants could hold theii' own against a far superior force. Besides, the tenements were generally built around a square, so that their sheer back walls presented a cliif-like and AN ANCIENT CLIFF-DWELLING. 100 SOME STKANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. unbroken obstacle which no savage foe could scale, while then* fronts faced upon the safe inner inclosure. At Pecos (now deserted), which was the largest pueblo in the southwest, and at many smaller towns, an Indian could stej) from his door and walk around the whole town on any one of the tiers of roofs. Sometimes these community-houses were terraced on both sides ; and the two at Taos are like huge j^wamids, terraced on all four sides. These fine stone waUs were generally plastered inside and out with adobe clay, which made them very smooth and neat, particularly when brilliantly whitewashed, according to the Pueblo custom, witli g}^3sum. The rafters are the straight tnuiks of tapering pines stripped of then* bark, and above these is a roof of cross-sticks, straw, and clay, which is perfectly water-tight. The windows are all small — another relic of the old days of danger — and in the more j)rimitive houses the windows are only translucent sheets of gypsum. Nearly ever}- room has its queer southwestern fii-eplace, in which the sticks are biu-ned on end. Those for heating alone are very tiny, and stand m a corner ; but the cooking fh-e- places often fill one side of a room, and under one of their capacious "hoods" nearly a dozen people could sit. As you may imagine from what has been said of then- houses, the Pueblos are very peculiar and interesting Indians They live very neatly and comfortably, and their homes are generally as clean as wax. They are jDcaceable and indus- trious, good hunters and brave warriors when need be, but quiet farmers by profession, as they were when the outside HOMES THAT WERE FORTS. 103 world first found tliem. They have always elected their own officials, and they obey the laws l3oth of their own strange government and of the United States in a way which they certainly did not learn from us, for there is no American community nearly so law-abiding. They are entu-ely self- supporting, and receive nothing from our government. They are not poor nor lazy, and they do not impose servile tasks upon their wives. One of my Puelilo neighbors in Isleta lent the hard cash to pay off our troops in New Mexico during the civil war ! Quite as interesting and remarkable as the best ij\)Q'& of present Pueljlo communal houses are the ruins of their stOl more ancient homes. It was long supposed that the so-caUed " Cliff -builders " and *' Cave-dwellers " were of an extinct race ; and much more of silly and ignorant surmise than of common-sense truth has been wi'itten aliout them. But as soon as there was any really scientific investigation of the southwest, like Bandelier's wonderful researches, the fact was fully and finally established that the builders of these great ruins were nothing in the world but Puelilo Indians. They have not ''vanished," but simply moved, for a variety of reasons; and their descendants are living to tills day in later pueblos. Indeed, we now know the history of many of these ruins ; and the Indians themselves, that of all or nearly all. The Pueblos used always to build in places which Natm*e herself had made secure, and generally upon the top of mesas, or " islands " of rock. Those who settled among the peculiar 104 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. terraced caiions wliicli aliound iu some parts of the south- west usually built their towns upon the shelves of the cliff ; wliile those whose region furnished precipices of easily carved stone hollowed out caves therein for their dwellings. It all depended on the locality and the surroundings. A canon of the " Chff-builders " is a wonderfully pictu- resque and interesting place. The stratification was a great help to the builders of these strange chasm-towns, and doubt- less fii'st suggested to them the idea of putting their houses there. The cliffs are many times as far apart, in such a canon, at their tops as at the bottom, and a cross-section of the canon would look something like tliis : Sometimes there is a perennial stream at the bottom, but oftener, in this arid region, the dry season leaves only a chain of pools, which were, however, adequate for the water-supply of these communities. The several lower shelves of the gorge were never built upon, and the water was all carried several hundred feet up tlie cliff in earthen jars or tight- woven baskets on the heads of the industrious housewives. Such inconvenience of the water- works has never deterred the Puel)los, and it is a striking coramentaiy upon the sav- age dangers of their old life to see at what a fearful expense HOMES THAT WERE FORTS. 105 of toil they brought water any distance to a phice that was safe. At Acoma to this day every drop of di-inking- water is brought in jars half a mile over an enormously difficult cliff trail, and in some of the old-time pueblos the daily water- journey was even worse. They never brought water thus and filled tanks inside the town, as some have fancied, but stored it only in their earth- en tinajas. But safety was before water, and so the swarthy people built their homes far up the side of the cliff, and there was a great saving of labor in another way. As a rule the alternate strata in those canons are of differ- ent kinds of rock, and une- qually eroded. Between each pah" of harder strata the softer intermediate one had been so gnawed out by wind HOMES THAT WEEE FORTS. 107 and water that its neighbors above and below projected many feet beyond it, the lower one always farthest ; so there the '' Cliff -bnilder " fonnd that natiu'e had made ready to his hand three of the six sides of every room. The smooth, solid rock of the shelf was his floor, and a nari'ow bnt endless porch outside as well. The overhanging rock of the ledge above was his roof — frequently a very low one, but certainly water-tight — and the face of the intermediate stratum was his l^ack wall. He had only to Iniild three httle stone walls from stone floor to stone roof — a front wall and two end walls — and there was his house. These cliff-rooms were extremely small, varying according to the strata, but seldom more than a dozen feet long, eight or ten feet deep, and five to eight feet high. In many of them no ordinary person could stand erect. There were sel- dom any windows; and the doors, which served also as chimneys, were very low and Imt twelve to eighteen inches wide. An enemy at the very door would l^e so crouched and cramped in entering, that those within could take him at a disadvantage. Think of a town whose sidewalks were three or four feet wide, and more than that number of hundred feet apart, and between them a stupendous gutter five hundred feet deep ! Think of those fat, dimpled, naked brown babies, whose three-foot play-gi*ound had no fence against a tumlde of half a thousand feet ! There are several of these canons of the "Cliff-builders" easily accessible fi'om the A. & P. R. R. at Flagstaff, Arizona. 108 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. They are gigantic gashes in the level uplands ; one comes to their very brink withont the remotest snspicion that such an abyss is in front. One of these canons is over twenty miles long, and in places six hundred feet deep. It contains the ruins of about a thousand of these small cliff-houses, some of which are very well preserved. These are the easiest to reach of any of this class of ruins, being less than ten miles from the raih'oad station and hotels. There are hundi-eds of other canons in Aiizona, New Mexico, and the lower corners of Colorado and Utah presenting the same sort of cliff-houses ; but most of them are in the wilderness, at great distances from the railroad or any other convenience of civilization. In most of these houses there is little to be found. Furni- ture they never had, and most of the imjilements have been carried away by the removing inhabitants or by subsequent roving Indians. The floors are one and two feet deep with the dust of ages, mingled with nut- shells and thorns brought in by the rock-squirrels which are now the only tenants. Dig- ging is made painful by a thousand thorn-stabs and by sti- fling clouds of that flour-like dust ; but it is often rewarded. All about are strewn broken bits of prehistoric pottery, and the veriest mummies of corn-cobs, shrunken by centuries of that dry air to the size of a finger and hardened almost to flint. There are also occasional squash-stems, as wizened and as indurated. By digging to the bed-rock floor I have found fine stone axes, beautiful agate arrow-points, the puzzhng discoidal stones, and even baskets of yucca fiber exactly like the strange " plaques " made in Moqui to-day. The baskets < < ' I' »« 10 HOMES THAT WERE FOETS. Ill crumbled to dust soon after tliey were exposed to the aii*. There are few other countries so dry that a basket of slender vegetable threads would hold its patterns for foiu* hundi-ed years or more under a foot of soil. Between the small cliff-houses ah-eady described and the cave-dwelhngs there is a very curious link — houses, or even whole towns, l)uilt in a natui-al cave. '' Montezuma's Castle " is such a one, and there are many, many others, of which probably the best-known — tha,nks to Jackson's expedition — are the fine nuns on the Maucos. Most of the important ruins of the Canon de Tsay-ee and its tributaries, Canon del Muerto and Monumental Canon, are also of this class. These caves are not, like the Mammoth Cave, gi'eat subter- ranean passages, but great hollows, generally like a huge bowl set up on edge in the face of the cliif . They absolutely protect the inclosed town (which is frequently one building of enormous size) above, on both sides, and generally also below. They are usually high up from the bottom of the cliff, and between them and the foot is a precipitous ascent which no enemy could scale if any resistance whatever were made. Such towns could be captured only by surprise, as- we know that in very rare cases some were captured. Some observant but uninformed travelers have been sadly misled by the regular, round cavities which are found in the ground near these lofty pueblos, and have taken them for water-tanks. Such a notion could arise only from entire ignorance both of the history and the ethnology of the south- west. These circular cavities are the remains of the estufas, 'i^'U'l «BW \ \ ' \ I >\4 'l I ' 111 ' ||l '' ' THE CLEVA PINTADA, OR ' JAIN I ED CAVE HOMES THAT ^T:RE FORTS. 113 or sacred rooms of the men, which were generally made un- dergi'ound. The roofs have long ago disappeared, and only these pits are left. They never had anything more to do with water than the fireplaces' had ; the Pueblo reservoirs were something entirely different. These huge houses were generally far from regular, for the simple reason that there never was a "master-architect" to control the structure. Every family built its part of the tenement to suit itself. There could be no " bossing " in such things, for Indians are essentially tribal, and under that or- ganization anything like a feudal authority is an absolute impossibility. Still, the builders agreed fairly well as to the general plan, and the great structure was sometimes very symmetrical. The romantic Cueva Pintada,* which not a dozen white men have ever seen, is a very good tr^'pe of these caves on a smaller scale, being only some fifty feet in diameter. It looks very much like the bowl of a gigantic ladle set into the cliff fifty feet above its foot. It contains several cave-dwell- ings, but no houses of masonry, though these occur at other points of the cliff. To me the real cave-dwellings ai'e the most interesting of aU these strange sorts of prehistoric ruins. They ai'e prob- al)ly no older than the cliff-built houses ; as I have said, those differences were not of time, or development, or tribe, but merely of locality, but they seem so much farther from us. * "Painted Cave," so called from the strange pietogi'aphs in red oelier which adorn its concave walls. 11-t SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. To see lliein onrvies one liaek to the times when onv o"vm aneestors and all mankind dwelt in eaves and wore only the skins of wild beasts ; those far, dim days when there was not even iron, nor any other metal, and when fire itseK was new, and the savage stomach was all the eonseienee and all the brains that man knew he had. The most extensive and wonderful eave-commnnities in the world are in the great Coehiti upland, some fifty miles northwest of Santa Fe. The journey is a very laboi'ious one, but by no means dangerous ; and if you can get my good Indian conipadre* Jose Hdario Montoya, now governor of the pueblo of Coehiti, to guide you. you are apt to remember it as the most interesting expedition of your life. The coun- try itself is well worth a, long journey to see, for it is one of the wildest in North America. The enormous plateau is split with canons from the mountains to the deep-worn river; and the mesas which separate them are long triangles which break off in thousand-foot cliffs in the chasm of the Rio Grande, their narrow points looking like stupendous col- umns, whence they get their Spanish name poireros. The whole area is like the foot of some unspeakable giant with dozens of toes, set down beside the hoarse, gray river. The whole region for thousands of square miles — like the majority, indeed, of New Mexico — is volcanic. But here we see less of the vast lava-flows so common in other parts of the territory. Instead, tliere is an unpi-ecedentcd deposit of further-consumed matter from the forgotten fii-e-moimtains. " Chum. MUMMY CAVE AND VILLAGE, CANON DEL MUERTO, ARIZONA. HOMES THAT WEEE FORTS. 117 When I was a boy in New England, I thought the '^floating stone^^ with which I scrubbed my dingy fists was a great curiosity ; but in the gorges of the Cochiti upland are cliffs one thousand five hundred feet high, and miles long, of solid pumice. There is enough '' stone that will float " to take the stains from ah the boy hands in the world for all time. In this noble and awesome wilderness several tribes of Pueblo Indians dwelt in prehistoric times. It probably did not take them long to learn that in such a country of soft cliff it was rather easier to dig one's house than to build it, even when the carpenter had no better tools than a sharp splinter of volcanic glass. The volcanoes did some good, you see, in this land which they bm'ued diy forever ; for in the same cliff they put the soft stone from which any one could cut a house, and nuggets of the extremely hard glass which the same eruption had made, wherefrom to chip the preliistoric " knife." In the superbly picturesque canon of the Rito de los Frigoles* is the largest of all villages of caves, deserted for more than four hundred years. Outside its unnumbered cave-rooms were more rooms yet, of inasonry of " bricks " cut from the same cliff. A few miles farther up the Rio Grande, not down in a canon but on the top of the great plateau nearly two thousand feet above the river, are two huge castle-like buttes of chalky tufa, each some two hundred feet high. They stand one on each side of the dividing gulf of the Santa Clara canon, and are * "Brook of the beans." 118 SOME STKANGE C0RNEK8 OF OUR COUNTRY. known to the Indians respectively as the Pu-ye and tlie Shn- fin-ne. They are the most easily accessible of the large cave- villages of North America, being not over ten miles from the little railroad town of Espahola, on the Rio Gi-ande some thirty miles by rail from Santa Fe. Going np the lovely Santa C-lara canon, past the now inhabited jiueblo of that name, along the mnsical tront-brook to where an old mill once stood among the tall pines, one can clamber np a trail on either side of the canon to the plateau at the top, and thence less than an hour's walk will take one to either of these great aboriginal honeycomb homes. The Pu-ye, which is on the south side of the canon, is the largest, and has many hun- dreds of cave-rooms. They are burrowed out everywhere in the foot of the perpendicular white cliff, in tiers one above the other to a height of three stories. The caves are small, generally round rooms eight to twelve feet in diameter, with arched ceilings and l^arely high enough to allow a man to stand uprig-lit. The old smooth plaster on the walls remains to this day, and so do the little portholes of windows, and the niches for trinkets. In some places there is even a sec- ond cave-room back of the first. Here, and at the Rito, the estufas were carved out of the cliff, like the other rooms, but larger. Ujion the top of the cliff, and in an almost impreg- nable position, are the ridns of a large square pueblo built of blocks of tufa — e^ddently the fortress and retreat of the dwellei's in the caves in case of a very desperate attack. Against any ordinary assault, the masonry houses " down- stairs," so to speak, with their inner cave-rooms, were safe \ IHE WHllU HuUbL, C^NON DE fbAY-EE. i HOMES THAT WEEE FORTS. 121 enough. These houses of masonry at the foot of the chff have all fallen ; but in the rocks the mortises wliich held the ends of then' rafters are still plainly visible. In this same wild region are the only great stone idols (or, to speak more properly, fetiches) in the United States — the mountain lions of Cochiti. They are life-size, and carved from the solid bed-rock on the top of two huge mesas. To this day, the Indians of Cochiti before a hunt go to one of these almost inaccessible spots, anoint the great stone heads, and dance by night a wild dance which no white man has seen or ever will see. 11 X. MONTEZUMA'S WELL. F ^AR soiithwest of Moqui, and still in the edge of the great Dry Land, is what I am inclined to rank as the most remarkable area of its kind in the southwest — though in this wonderland it is dif&eidt enough to award that preeminence to any one locality. At least in its combination of archaBologic intei-est with scenic beauty and with some peerless natural curiosities, what may be called the Mogollon watershed is one of the most startling regions in America or in the world. The Mogollones* are not a mountain system as Eastern people understand the phrase. There is no great range, as among the Appalachians and the Rockies. The " system " is merely an enormous plateau, full three hundred miles across, and of an average height above the sea greater than that of any peak in the East : an apparently boundless plain, dotted only here and there wdtli its few lonely ''hangers-on" or "parasites" of peaks, — like the noble San Francisco triad * Spanish. '-'The hangers-on." i MONTEZUMA'S WELL. . 123 near Flagstaff, — which iu that vast expanse seem scarce to attain to the dignity of mounds. On the north this huge table-land melts into hazy slopes ; but all along its southern edge it breaks off by sudden and fearful cliffs into a country- of indescribable wildness. Tliis great territory to the south, an empire in size, but largely desert and almost entirely wil- derness, has nevertheless the largest number of considerable streams of any equal area in the tliirsty southwest. The Gila, the Rio Salado,* the Rio Verde, and others — though thej^ would be petty in the East, and though they are small beside the Rio Grande and the Colorado — form, with their tributaries, a more extensive water-system than is to be found elsewhere in om* arid lands. The Tontot Basin — scene of one of the brave Crook's most brilliant campaigns against the Apaches — is part of this wilderness. Though called a " basin," there is nothing bowl-like in its appearance, even as one sees down thousands of feet into it from the com- manding '■'■ Rim " of the Mogollones. It is rather a vast chaos of crags and peaks apparently rolled into it from the gi-eat breaking-off place — the wreck left by forgotten waters of what was once part of the Mogollon plateau. A])out this Tonto Basin, which is some fifty miles across, cluster many of the least-known yet greatest wonders of our country. South are the noble ruins of Casa Grande, and all the Gila Valley's precious relics of the prehistoric. The Salt River Valley is one of the richest of fields for archaeologic * "Salt River," a fine stream whose waters are really salt, t " Tonto " is Spanish for fool. 124 SOME STRANGE COENERS OP OUR COUNTRY. research ; and tlie country of the Verde is nowise behind it. All across that strange area of forbidding wildernesses, threaded with small valleys that are green with the outposts of civilization, are strewn the gray monuments of a civiliza- tion that had worn out antiquity, and had perished and been forgotten before ever a Caucasian foot had touched the New World. The heirlooms of an unknown past are everywhere. No man has ever counted the cnmibling ruins of all those strange little stone cities whose history and whose very names have gone from off the face of the earth as if they had never been. Along every stream, near every spring, on lofty lookout-crags, and in the faces of savage cliffs, are the long- deserted homes of that mysterious race — mysterious even now that we know their descendants. Thousands of these homes are perfect yet, thousands no more changed from the far, dim days when their swart dwellers hved and loved and suffered and toiled there, than by the gathered dust of ages. Very, very few Americans have ever at all explored tliis Last Place in the World. It has not been a score of years known to our civilization. There is hardly ever a traveler to those remote recesses ; and of the Americans who are settling the pretty oases, a large proportion have never seen the wonders within a few leagues of them. It is a far, toilsome land to reach, and yet there is no reason why any young American of average health should not visit this wonderland, which is as much more thrilling than any popular American resort as the White Mountains are more thrilling than Coney Island on a quiet day. MONTEZUMA'S WELL. 125 The way to reach this strangely fascinating region is by the Athintic and Pacific Raih-oad to Prescott Junction, Ari- zona, four hundred and twenty-eight miles west of Albu- querque. Thence a little railroad covers the seventy mUes to Prescott ; and from Prescott one goes by the mail-buck- board or by private conveyance to Camp Verde, forty-three miles. Camp Verde is the best headquarters for any who would explore the marvelous country about it. Comfertable accommodations are there j and there can be procured the needful horses — for thenceforward horseback travel, is far preferable, even when not absolutely necessary. There is no danger whatever nowadays. The few settlers are intelligent, law-abiding people, among whom the traveler fares very comfortably. The Verde* Valley is itself full of interest ; and so are all its half -valley, half -canon tributaries — Oak Creek, Beaver Creek, Clear Creek, Fossil Creek, and the rest. Away to the north, over the purple rim-rock of the Mogollones, peer the white peaks of the San Francisco range (one can also come to the Verde from Flagstaff, by a rough but interesting eighty-mile ride overland). All about the valley are mesas, ^ and cliffs so tall, so strange in form and color, so rent by shadowy caiions as to seem fau'ly uneartldy. And follow whatever canon or cliff you will, you shall find everywhere more of these strange ruins. They are so many hundreds, * Eio Verde, "Green River," — so called from the verdure of its val- ley, which is in snch contrast with its weird surroundings, t Table-lands. 12G SOME STRANGE CORNEES OF OUR COUNTRY. MONTEZUMA S WELL. that while all are of deep interest I can here describe only the more striking types. Beaver Creek enters the Rio Verde about a mile above the now abandoned fort. Its canon is by no means a large one, though it has some fine points. A long and rocky twelve miles uj) Beaver, past smihng little farms of to-day that have usurped the very soil of fields whose tiUing had been forgot- MONTEZUMA'S WELL. 127 ten when history was new, brings one to a wonder which is not " the greatest of its kind/' but the only. There is, I be- lieve, nothing else like it in the world. It has been named — by the class which has pitted the southwest with misnomers — "Montezuma's Well." It is hardly a well, — though an exact term is difficult to find, — and Montezuma* never had anything to do with it ; but it is none the less wonderful under its misfit name. There is a legend (of late invention) that Montezuma, after being conquered by Cortez, threw his incalculable treasui'e into this safest of hiding-places ; but that is all a myth, since Montezuma had no treasures, and in any event could hardly have brought the fabled tons of gold across two thousand miles of desert to this " weU," even if he had ever stuTed outside the pueblo of Mexico after the Spaniards came — as he never did. But as one looks into the awesome abyss, it is almost easy to for- get history and believe anything. At this point, Beaver Creek has eaten away the side of a rounded liill of stone which rises more than one hundi'ed feet above it, and now washes the foot of a sheer cliff of striking picturesqueness. I can half imagine the feelings of the first white man who ever climbed that hill. Its outer show gives no greater promise of interest than do ten thousand other elevations in the southwest ; but as one reaches a flat shoul- der of the hill, one gets a first glimpse of a dark rift in the floor-like rock, and in a moment more stands upon the brink * The war-chief of an ancient league of Mexican Indians, and not "Emperor of Mexico," as ill-iuformed liistorians assert. 128 SOME STRANGE CORNEES OF OUR COUNTRY. of an absolutely new experience. There is a vast, sheer well, apparently as cii'ciilar as that j)eculiar rock could be broken by design, with sides of cliffs, and with a glooiny, mysterious lake at the bottom. The diameter of this basin approximates two hundred yards ; and its depth from brink of cliff to surface of water is some eighty feet. One does not realize the dis- tance across until a powerful thrower tries to hmi a pebble to the farther wall. I believe that no one has succeeded in throwing past the middle of the lake. At fii'st sight one in- variably takes this remarkable cavity to be the crater of an extinct volcano, like that in the Zuiii plains already referred to ; but a study of the unburnt limestone makes one give up that theory. The well is a huge ^'sink" of the horizontal strata in one particular undermined spot, the loosened circle of rock di'opping forever from sight into a terrible subter- ranean abyss wliich was doubtless hollowed out by the ac- tion of springs far down in the lime-rock. As to the depth of that gruesome, black lake, there is not yet knowledge. I am assured that a sounding-hne has been sent down three hundred and eighty feet, in a vain attempt to find bottom ; and that is easily credible. Toss a large stone into that mid- night mirror, and for an hour the bubbles will struggle shiv- ering up from its unknown depths. The waters do not lave the foot of a perpendicular chff all around the sides of that fantastic well. The unfathomed " slump " is in the center, and is separated from the visiljle walls by a narrow, submerged rim. One can wade out a few feet in knee-deep water, — if one have the courage in that J MONTEZUMA'S WELL. 129 "creej)y" place, — and then, suddenly, as walking from a parapet, step off into the bottomless. Between this water- covered rim and the foot of the cliff is, in most places, a wild jumble of enormous square blocks, fallen successively from the precipices and lodged here before they could tumble into the lower depths. There are two places where the cliff can be descended from top to water's edge. Elsewhere it is inaccessible. Its dark, stained face, spUt by peculiar cleavage into the semblance of giant walls, frowns down upon its frowning image in that dark muTor. The whole scene is one of utter gi'imness. Even the eternal blue of an Arizona sky, even the rare fleecy clouds, seem mocked and clianged in that deep reflection. Walking around the fissured "brink of the well eastward, we become suddenly aware of a new interest — the presence of a human Past. Next the creek, the side of the well is nearly gone. Only a narrow, high wall of rock, perhaps one hundred feet tlu-ough at the base, less than a score at the top, remains to keep the well a well. On one side of this thin rim gapes the abyss of the well ; on the other the abyss to the creek. Upon this wall — leaving scarce room to step be- tween them and the brink of the well, and precariously ehng- ing down the steep slope to the edge of the chff that over- hangs the creek — are the tousled ruins of a strong stone building of many rooms, the t^^ical fort-home of the ancient Pueblos. Its walls are still, in places, six to eight feet high ; and the student clearly makes out that the building was of two and three stories. It was a perfect defense to the In- 130 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. dians who erected it; and was not only safe itself on that commanding perch, but protected the approach to the well. This is the only town I know of that was ever builded upon a natural bridge; as some houses in this same region are probably the only ones placed under such a cui'iosity. Leading from the center of this fort-house, the only easy trail descends into the well ; and if is so steep that no foe could prosper on it in the face of any opposition. This brings us to a tiny green bench six or eight feet above the level of the dark lake, where two young sycamores and a few live-oak bushes guard a black cavity in the overhanging cliff. We look across the dark waters to the western waU, and are startled to see in its face a perfect cliff-house, perched where the eagle might build his nest. A strange eerie for a home, surely ! There, on a dizzy little shelf, overhung by a huge flat rock which roofs it, stands this two-roomed type of the human dwelling in the old danger-days. From its window- hole a babe might lean out untd he saw his dimpled image in the somber sheet below. Only at one end of the house, where a difficult trail conies up, is there room on the sheK for a dozen men to stand. In front, and at its north end, a goat could scarce find footing. The roof and floor and rear wall are of the solid cHff, the other three walls of stone ma- somy, perfect and unbroken still. A few rods along the face of the rock to the north is another cliff-dweUing not so large nor so well preserved ; and farther yet is another. It is fairly appalling to look at those dizzy nests and remember that they were Jiomes ! Wliat eagle-race was this whose war- MONTEZUMA'S WELL. 131 riors strung their bows, and whose women wove their neat cotton tunics, and whose naked babes rolled and laughed in such wild lookouts — the scowling cliif above, the deadly lake so far below ! Or, rather, what grim times were those when farmers had to dwell thus to escape the cruel obsidian knife* and war-club of the merciless wandering savage ! But if we tm-n to the sycamore at our back, there is yet more of human interest. Behind the gray debris of the cb'ff gapes the low-arched mouth of a broad cave. It is a weu'd place to enter, under tons that threaten to fall at a breath j but there have been others here before us. As the eye grows wonted to the gloom, it makes out a flat surface beyond. There, forty feet back from the mouth, a strong stone wall stretches across the cave ; and about in its center is one of the tiny doors that were characteristic of the southwest when a doorway big enough to let in a whole Apache at a time was unsafe. So the fort-house balanced on the cliff -rim between two abysses and the houses nestled in crannies of the bald precipice were not enough — they must build far in the very caves ! That wall shuts off a large, low, dark room. Beyond is another, darker and safer, and so on. To our left is an- other wall in the front of another branch of the cave ; and in that wall is a little token from the dead past. Wlien I went there in June, 1891, my flash-light failed, and I lit a dry entranai to explore during the houi* it would take the lens * The only knives in those clays were sharp-edged flakes of obsidian (volcanic glass) and other stone. t The buckhorn-cactus, which was the prehistoric candle. 132 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. to study out part of the cave in that gloom. And suddenly the unaccustomed tears came in my eyes ; for on the flinty mortar of that strange wall was a print made when that mortar was fresh adobe mud, at least five hundred years ago, maybe several thousands, — the perfect imprint of a baliy's chubby hand. And of that child, whose mud auto- graph has lasted perhaps as long as Caesar's fame, who may have wrought as deep impression on the history of his race as Caesar on the world's, we know no more than that careless hand-print, nor ever shall know. This left-hand cave is particularly full of interest, and is probably the best remaining example of this class of home- making by the so-called " Cliff-dwellers." With its nmnerous windings and branches, it is hundreds of feet in length ; and its rooms, formed by cross-walls of masoniy, extend far into the heart of the hiU, and directly under the fort-house. It seems to have been fitted for the last retreat of the people in case the fortress and the chff -houses were captiu*ed by an enemy. It was well stored with corn, whose mummied cobs are stni there; and — equally important — it had abundant water. The well seems to have no outlet — the only token of one visible from within being a little rift in the water-mosses just in front of the caves. But in fact there is a mysterious channel far down under the cliff, whereby the waters of the lake escape to the creek. In exploring the main cave one hears the sound of running water, and presently finds a place where one may dip a drink through a hole in the limestone floor of a subterranean room. The course of this lonely little MONTEZUMA'S WELL. 133 brook can be traced for some distance through the cave, be- low whose floor it runs. Here and there in the rooms are hiva hand-mills and battered stone hammers, and other relics of the forgotten people. Returning to the creek at the foot of the hill, and follow- ing the outer cliff up-stream a few hundred feet, we come to a very picturesque spot under a fine little precipice whose foot is guarded by stately sycamores. Here is the outlet of the subterranean stream from the well. From a little hole in the very base of the cliff the glad rivulet rolls out into the light of day, and tumbles heels over head down a little ledge to a pretty pool of the creek. The water of the well is always warmish, and in winter a httle cloud of vapor hovers over the outlet. Between the cliff and the creek is pinched an irrigating-ditch, which car- ries the waters of the well half a mile south to irrigate the ranch of a small farmer. Probal)ly no other man waters his garden from so strange a som'ce. 12 XI. MONTEZUMA'S CASTLE. OMEWHAT more than half-way back from Montezuma's Well to Camp Verde, but off the winding road, is aijother cmiosity, ouly less important, known as "Montezuma's Castle." It is the best remaining specimen of what we may call the cave-pueblo — that is, a Pueblo Indian "com- munity-house" and fortress, built in a natural cave. The oft-pictured ruins in the Mancos canon are insignificant beside it. Here the tiny valley of Beaver Creek is very attractive. The long slope from the south bank lets us look far up to- ward the black rim of the MogoUones, and across the smil- ing Verde VaUey to the fine range beyond. On the north bank towers a noble limestone cliff, two hundred feet high, beautifully white and beautifidly eroded. In its perpendicu- lar front, half-way up, is a huge, circidar natural cavity, very much like a giant basin tilted on edge ; and therein stands the noble pile of " Montezuma's Castle." A castle it truly looks, as you may see from the illustration — and a much finer ruin than many that people rush abroad to see, along >>r%n£' *''>^^%': "Montezuma's castle," seen from beaver creek. MONTEZUMA'S CASTLE. 137 the historic Rhine. The form of the successive limestone ledges upon which it is bnilt led the aboriginal builders to give it a shape unique among its kind. It is one of the most pretentious of the Pueblo ruins, as it is the most imposing, though there are many hundreds that are larger. From the clear, still stream, hemmed in by giant sycamores that have doubtless grown only since that strange, gi-ay ruin was deserted, the foot of the cliff is some three hundred feet away. The lowest foundation of the castle is over eighty feet above the creek ; and from corner-stone to crest the building towers fifty feet. It is five stories tall, over sixty feet front in its widest part, and built in the form of a crescent. It contains twenty-five rooms of masonry; and there are, be- sides, many cave-chambers below and at each side of it — small natural grottos neatly walled in front and with wee doors The timbers of the castle are still in excellent pre- servation, — a durability impossible to wood in any other cli- mate, — and some still bear the clear marks of the stone axes with which they were cut. The rafter-ends outside the walls were " trimmed " hj burning them off close. The roofs and floors of reed thatch and adobe mud are stiU perfect except in two or three rooms ; and traces of the last hearth-fire that cooked the last meal, dim centuries ago, are still there. In- deed, there are even a few relics of the meal itself — corn, di'ied cactus-pulp, and the like. The fifth story is nowhere visible from below, since it stands far back upon the roof of the fom*th and under the 138 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. a hanging rock. In front it has a spacious veranda, formed by the roof of the fourth story, and protected by a parapet which the picture shows with its central gateway to which a ladder once gave access. It is only the upper story which can be reached by an outside ladder — aU the others were accessible only through tiny hatchways in the roofs of those below. So deep is the great uptilted bowl in which the castle stands, so overhanging the wild brow of cliff above, that the sun has never shone upon the two topmost stories. There is but one way to get to the castle, and that is by the horizontal ledges below. These rise one above the other (like a series of shelves, ')iot like steps), ten to fourteen feet apart, and fairly overhang. The aborigines had first to build strong ladders, and lay them from ledge to ledge ; and then up that dizzy footing they carried upon their backs the un- counted tons of stones and mortar and timbers to build that great edifice. What do you imagine an American architect would say, if called upon to plan for a stone mansion in such a place ? The original ladders have long ago disappeared ; and so have the modern ones once put there by a scientist at the fort. I had to climb to the castle by a crazy little frame of sycamore branches, dragging it after me from ledge to ledge, and sometimes lashing it to knobs of rock to keep it from tumbling backward down the cliff. It was a very ticklish ascent, and gave full understanding how able were the builders, and how secure they were when they had re- treated to this high-perched fortress and pulled up their lad- ders — as they undoubtedly did every night. A monkey |'*%:f 1 II 111 "Montezuma's castle, from the foot of the CLith. MONTEZUMA'S CASTLE. 141 coiild not scale the rock ; and the cliff perfectly protects the castle above and on each side. Notliing short of modern weai3ons could possibly affect this lofty citadel. Down in the valley at its feet — as below Montezuma's Well and the hundreds of other prehistoric dwellings in the canon of Beaver — are still traces of the little fields and of the acequias * that watered them. Even in those far days the Pueblos were patient, industrious, home-loving farmers, but harassed eternally by wily and merciless savages — a fact which we have to thank for the noblest monuments in om* new-old land. * The characteristic irrigating-ditches of the southwest. XII. THE GREATEST NATURAL BRIDGE ON EARTH. ^OU all know of the Natural Bridg:e in Virginia, and perhaps have heard how the fii'st and great- est president of the United States, in the ath- letic vigor of Ills youth, climbed and carved his name high on its chff. A very handsome and pictm'csque spot it is, too ; but if a score of it were thrown together side by side, they would not begin to make one of the Natural Bridge of which I am going to teU you — one in the western edge of the Touto Basin, Arizona, in the same general region as Montezuma's WeU. and Castle, but even less known than they. The Natural Bridge of Pine Creek, Arizona, is to the world's natural l)ridges what the Grand Canon of the Colorado is to the world's chasms — the greatest, the grandest, the most be- wildering. It is truly entitled to rank with the great natural wonders of the earth — as its baby brother in Virginia is not. Its gi'andem- is equally indescribable by artist and by writer — its vastness, and the peculiarities of its "architecture," make it one of the most difficult objects at which camera was ever leveled. No photograph can give more than a hint THE GREATEST NATURAL BRIDGE ON EARTH. 143 of its appalling majesty, no combination of photographs more than hints. There are photographs which do approxi- mate justice to bits of the Grand Canon, the Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Redwoods, Niagara * ; there never will be of the Natm'al Bridge of Arizona — for reasons which you will understand later. But perhaps with words and pictures I can say enough to lead you some time to see for yourscK this marvelous spot. From Camp Verde the Natural Bridge lies a long, hard day's ride to the southeast. There is a government road — a very good one for that rough country — to Pine, so one may go by wagon all but five miles of the way. This road is fif- teen miles longer to Pine than the rough and indistinct mail- trail of thirty-eight miles, which a stranger should not at- tempt to follow without a guide, and a weak traveler should not think of at all. About midway, this trail crosses the tre- mendous gorge of Fossil Creek — down and up pitches that try the best legs and lungs — and here is a very interesting spot. In the north side of Fossil Creek Canon, close to the trail and in plain sight from it, are lonely httle cave-houses that look down the sheer cliffs to the still pools below. Sev- eral miles down-stream there is a fort-house, also. Where the trail crosses the canon there is no running water except in the rainy season ; but a few hundred yards further down are the great springs. Like hundreds of other springs in the west, they are so impregnated with mineral that they are * Wliose majestic Indian name, Xee-ah-gdh-rah, is quite lost in oui flat coiTuptiou Ni(jh-dgg-ara. 144 SOME STEANGE CORNEES OF OUE COUNTEY. constantly building great round basins for themselves, and for a long distance flow down over bowl after bowl. But unlike other springs, those of Fossil Creek build theii- basins of what seems crude Mexican onyx. The fact that these waters quickly coat twigs or other articles with layers of this beautiful mineral gives rise to the name of Fossil — almost as odd a misnomer as has the ^' Petrified Spring " of which a New Mexico lady talks. Passing through lonely Strawberry Valley, with its log farm-houses among prehistoric ruins, one comes presently over the last divide into the extreme western edge of the Tonto Basin, and down a steep caiion to the stiff little Mor- mon settlement of Pine, on the dry creek of the same name. From there to the Natural Bridge — five miles down-stream — there is no road at all, and the trail is very rough. But its reward waits at the end. Leaving the creek altogether and taking to the hills, we wind among the giant pines, then across a wild, lava-strewn mesa, and suddenly come upon the brink of a striking canon fifteen hundred feet deep. Its west wall is an unspeakably savage jumble of red granite crags ; the east side a wooded, but in most places impassably steep bluff. The creek has split through the ruddy granite to our right a wild, narrow portal, l^elow which widens an almost circular httle valley, half a mile across. Below this the canon pinches again, and winds away by grim gorges to where the h\ne Mazatzals bar the horizon. In the wee oasis at our feet there is as yet no sign of a natural bridge, nor of any other colossal wonder. There is LOOKING THROUGH THE SOUTH AKCH OP THE GREATEST NATURAL HRIDGE. 13 THE GREATEST NATURAL BRIDGE ON EARTH. 147 a clearing amid the dense chaparral — a clearing with tiny honse and barn, and rows of frnit trees, and fields of corn and alfalfa. They are thirteen hundred feet below us. Clambering down the steep and sinuous trail, among the chapparo and the huge flowering columns of the maguey, we come quite out of breath to the little cottage It is a lovely sj)ot, bowered in vines and flowers, with pretty walks and arbors by wliich ripples the clear brook from a big spring at the very door. A straight, thick-chested man, with twinkling eyes and long gray hair, is making sham battle with a big rooster, while a cat blinks at them from the bunk on the porch. These are the only inhabitants of this enchanted valley — old " Dave " Gowan, the hermit, and his two mateless pets. A quaint, sincere, large-hearted old man is he who has wi"ought this little paradise from utter wilderness by force of the ax. Only those who have had it to do can faintly con- ceive the fearful toil of clearing off these semi-tropic jungles. But the result gives the hermit just pride. His homestead of one hundi'cd and sixty acres contains a farmlet which is not only as pretty as may be found, but unique in the whole world. It is well to have this capable guide, for there is nowhere an equal area wherein a guide is more necessary. Think of Gowan himself, familiar for years with his strange farm, being lost for three days within a hundred yards of his house. That sounds strange, but it is true. The old Scotchman is very tacitui'u at first, like all who have really learned the lessons of out-of-doors, but promptly 148 SOME STRANGE COKNEKS OF OUli COUNTRY. accedes to a request to be shown his bridge. He leads the way out under his little bower of clematis, down the terraced vineyard, along the corn-field, and into the pretty young or- chard of peach and apricot. Still no token of what we seek ; and we begin to wonder if a bridge so easily hidden can be so very big after all. There is even no sign of a stream. And on a sudden, between the very trees, we stand over a little water-worn hole and peer down into sjiace. We are on the bridge noiv ! The orchard is on the bridge ! Do you know of any other fruit-trees that grow in so strange a garden ? Of any other two-storied farm ? The rock of the bridge is at this one point less than ten feet thick ; and this odd little two-foot peep-hole, like a broken plank in the giant floor, was cut through by water. "Wait," chuckles the hermit, his eyes twinkling at our wonder ; " wait ! " And he leads us a few rods onward, tUl we stand beside an old juniper on the very bi-ink of a terrific gorge. We are upon the South Arch of the bridge, dizzily above the clear, noisy stream, looking down the savage canon in whose wilds its silver thread is straightway lost to view. The "floor" of the bridge here, as we shall also find it at the North Arch, has broken back and back toward its center, so that a bird's-eye view shows at each side of the In-idge a hori- zontal ai'cli. A ground plan of the valley would look some- thing like the sketch on the opposite page. Circling south along the southeast " pier," we start down a rugged, difficult, and at times dangerous trail. A projecting crag of the pier — destined to be a great obstacle, later, in THE GEEATEST NATURAL BRIDGE ON EARTH. 149 our photographic attempts — shuts the bridge from view till we uear the bottom of the gorge, and then it l^ursts upon us in sudden wonder. The hand of man never reared such an arch, nor ever shall rear, as the patient springs have gnawed here from eternal rock. Dark and stern, and faii-lv crushing ora^2^, 4. rliffS '500 ff^^. y^o^ 2oo ft deef ^^ pov t^^ of oo ROUGH GROUND-PLAN OF GOWAN's VALLEV. THE WHOLE IRREGULAR CIRCLE IS THE NEARLY LEVEL LIMESTONE BENCH WHICH IS OCCUPIED BY THE FARM. in its immensity, towers that terrific arch of rounded lime- stone. The gorge is wild beyond telling, choked with giant boulders and somber evergreens and bristling cacti until it comes to the very jaws of that grim gateway, and there even vegetation seems to shrink back in awe. Now one begins to 150 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. appreciate the magnitude of the bridge, a part of whose top holds a five-acre orchard. In its eternal shadow is room for an army. The South Arch, to which we have thus come, is the larger and in some respects the more imposing. From its top to the surface of the water is two hundred feet, and the pools are very deep. The span of the archway is over two hundred feet as we see it now from without ; but we shall soon find it to be really very much greater. The groined limestone is smoothly rounded; and the fanciful waters seem to have had architectural training — for the roof is wonderfully rounded into three stupendous domes, each flanked by noble flying buttresses of startling symmetry. A photograph of that three-domed roof would be a treasure ; but it is among the many impossibilities of this baffling place. Climbing up the water- worn bed-rock into the cool dusk of the bridge — for the sun has never seen one-tenth of the way through this vast tunnel — we stand under the first dome. Away up to our left, on the west side of the stream, there is a sheK at the top of an impressive wall ; and mounting by ledges and a tall ladder, we find this little shelf to be an enor- mous level floor, running back three hundred feet west. Here, then, we see the extreme span of the bridge, over five hundred feet ; and here we find the central pier — a stupendous column from this floor to the vaulted roof, a column more than one hundred feet in circumference. How strange that the Ijlind waters which ate out all the rest of this vast chamber should have left that one necessary pillar to support the roof ! /^.Vil^^;\\#);_ 'ANOTHER MEW OF THT GREAT BRIDGE THE GREATEST NATURAL BRIDGE ON EARTH. 153 About midway of the stream's course uuder the bridge is the Great Basin — a pool which would be a wonder anywhere. It is a solid rock bowl, some seventy-five feet in diameter and ninety in depth ; and so transparent that a white stone rolled down the strange natural trough over one hundred feet long in the side of the basin can be seen in all its bubbling course to the far bottom of that chilly pool. Fifty of the beautiful " Basin " in the Franconia Notch would not make one of this ; and the noble "Pool" itself, in the same mountain para- dise, does not match it. The clear stream pours into this basin in a white fall of thirty feet ; but, dwarfed by its giant company, the fall seems petty. The North Ai-ch — to which we may come under the bridge by a ticklish chmb around the Great Basin — is less regular but not less picturesque than the South Arch. It is more rugged in contour, and its buttresses, instead of being smooth, are wrought in fantastic figm-es, while strange sta- lactites fringe its top and sides. And now for the comparative magnitude of this greatest of natural bridges. Its actual span is over five hundr,ed feet — that is, about five times the span of the Vu-ginia Bridge. Its height from floor of bridge to surface of water is forty feet less than its smaU brother's; but to the bottom of erosion — the proper measurement, of course — it is fifty feet gi-eater. But in its breadth — that is, measiu'ement up and down stream — it is over six hundred feet, or more than twelve times as wide as the Virginia Bridge ! So you see one could carve, from this almost unknown wonder, some- 154 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. thing like sixty bridges, each equal to the greatest cm-iosity of Virginia ! In these vast proportions lies the impossibility of ade- quately photographing this bridge. There is no j^oint from which the eye can take it in at once. It is a wonder-book which must be tm-ned leaf by leaf. Miles of walking are necessary before one really understands. From the bed of the stream half the dignity of the arch is lost behind the boulders, if one gets off far enough to command the opening at a glance. If near enough for an unobstructed view, then the vast arch so overshadows us that neither eye nor lens can grasp it all. And the wing-cliff which projects from the southeast pier — as you may see in the chief picture of the South Arch — makes it almost impossible to find a point, at sufficient dis- tance for photographing, whence one can see clear tlu'ough the bridge. " Can't be done ! " reiterated the old hermit. "Been lots of professionals here from Phoenix with their machines, and aU they could get was pictures that look like caves. You can't show through with a picture, to prove it 's a bridge, at all ! " But it can be done ; and being bound to show you all that j)hotography can possibly show of this wonder, I did it. It cost about twenty-four soHd hours of painful and perilous climbing and reconnoissance, a good deal of blood-tribute to sharp rocks and savage cactus — to whose inhospitable thorns it was necessary to cling to get footing on some of those precipices — and the camera did its work from some of the dizziest perches that tripod ever had ; but here are the THE GREATEST NATURAL BRIDGE ON EARTH. 155 pictures which do " show through that it 's a bridge," When you look at the little far cii'clc of Hght, and realize that it is two hundi'ed feet in diameter, you will begin to feel the distance from South Arch to North Arch under that tei'rific rock roof. Following up the wild bottom of the canon from the North Arch, around gigantic boiilders and under hanging cliffs, we find many other interesting things. Directly we come to ''The First Tree" — one of the very largest sycamores in the United States. The canon here is strangely picturesque. Its west wall is fifteen hundred feet high, a wilderness of spHntered red gi-anite, not pei'pendicular, but absolutely un- scalable. The east wall is of gray limestone, perpendicular, often overhanging, but nowhere over two hundred feet high, Gowan's farm comes to the very trees that lean over its brink, and he now shows us the " lower story " of his unique homestead. Not only does his orchard stand two hundred feet in air, with room beneath for some of the largest build- ings in America, but the rest of his farm is as " up-stairs," though in a different way. This fantastic east wall of the canon is fairly honeycombed with caves, whose ghostly cham- bers, peopled with white visions in stone, run back un- known miles. His whole farm, his very house, is undermined by them. The old hermit has made many journeys of ex- ploration in these caves, but has merely learned the begin- ning of their labp'inth. It was in one of these subterranean tours that he was lost. His torches gave out, food he had noup, and foi' three days he faeed a frightful death — their, 156 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. close to liis own cottage, perhaps not a hundred feet from it. From several of these caves issue fine rivulets, that coat with limestone whatever comes in their way. Some time ago Gowan's pet pig fell off the edge of the up-stairs farm, and there it hes to-day in a clear pool, pink- white as the freshest pork, but fast turning into the most durable. It is an odd fact that Pine Creek as a visible stream starts at and depends upon Gowan's farm. It is nominally Pine Creek for ten miles above, but is only a dry wash, except in time of rains ; but the strong, clear stream which pours from under the South Arch of the bridge is large and permanent. How was the bridge built ? By the same peerless architect that buikled the greatest wonders of the earth — the architect of the Grand Caiion and the Yellowstone, and the Yosemite — by Water. It seems probable that Gowan's little round vaUey was once a lake, dammed by ledges at the south end which have since disappeared. The rich aUuvial soil found only here would indicate that. At all events, here was once a great round blanket of limestone, many hundi"ed feet thick, laid down flat upon the giant lap of the granite. From un- known storage-caverns of the Mogollon waterslied subterra- nean passages led hither, and through them flowed strong springs. In time the water — whether stored in a lake upon this limestone bench, or merely flowing over — began to bur- row " short cuts " through it, as water always will in lime- rock. As the west side of the vaUey was lowest, there toiled the greatest throng of water- workmen. Perhaps it was a little fellow no bigger than your fist who first made passage THE GREATEST NATURAL BRIDGE ON EARTH. 159 for himself through what is now the Natural Bridge. And he called his brother waters, and they crowded in after him ; and each as he passed gnawed with his soft but tii'eless teeth at the stone, and carried his mouthful of lime-dust off down the valley, chuckling as he ran. And slowly so the tunnel grew. If men were there then, the life of generations would have seen no change ; but time is the most abundant thing in creation (except for us) ; and time was there, and now the dark winding burrow of a rivulet has become one of the noblest passage-ways on earth. The hermit who owns it was born in Scotland, but has grown American in every fiber. He refuses to make a mercenary income from his wonder- land. It is free for all to see — and his kindly help with it. He wants to dedicate his homestead to the government, and to have it accepted, made accessible, and cared for as a na- tional park — as it is most worthy to be. I often wonder if there were not great poets among the Indians of the old days. Indeed, I am sure there must have been in the race which invented the poetry of the folk-lore I have gathered among them. And when one sees amid what noblest works of Nature they Hved in those days, one may weU believe that bronze Homers are buried in that buried past. Science has at last learned that there can be no real study of history without consideration of physical geography as its chief factor. A race grows into character according to the country it inhabits ; and the utmost savage would grow (in centuries) to be a different man when he had removed from the dull plains to the Grand Canon, the San 160 SOME STRANGE COENERS OF OUR COUNTRY. Juan, Acoiiia, the Verde cliffs, the Touto Basiu, or auy other spot where the Pueblos lived five hundred years ago. For here at the bridge they were, too. They tilled Gowan's two- story farm, and dwelt in the caves of his basement, perhaps while his ancestors were yet naked savages in old Scotia. Theu" rude implements and fabrics are everywhere ; and among many valuable relics from that region I brought home a fetich* which is quite priceless — a symbol of the eagle holding a rattlesnake in his talons, carved fi"om an un- known stone which baffles the file. Fancy the Pueblo boys and gh'ls of the Dark Ages with those giant domes of the Natural Bridge for a roof to their play-ground, the Great Basin for a " swimming-hole," and miles of stalactite caves to play hide-and-seek in ! There are countless minor natural bridges iii the south- west, including a very noble one in the labyi-inthine cliffs of Acoma. There is a curious natural bridge near Fort Defi- ance, N. M. It has an arch of only about sixty feet, but is remarkable because it was carved not by water but by sand- laden winds, as are some of the most beautiful and fantastic erosions of the dry southwest. * Not an idol, but the sacred symbol of some divine Power. ThicKness THE EAGLE FETICH, ACTUAL SIZE. 5^>r. C\ 'ti ' 4'r> ^'^'''■^y4£,^j^ ^^^>vo T)ie^onuv;2 M^o^ c. .M ■^ApJ^ i> ^ 6 SOME LEAVES FROM THE STONE AUTOGRAPH-ALBUM. XIII. THE STONE AUTOGRAPH-ALBUM. AM not SO siu'e about the present generation — for these years on the frontier have given me httle chance to know tlie new boys as well as an oldish boy would like to — but with most young Americans of my day the autograph- album was a cherished institution. It was a very pretty habit, too, and a wise one, thus to press a flower from each young friendship. Not that the autographs were always wise — how well I remember the boys who "tried to be funny," and the gii-ls who were dolefully sentimental, and the bud- ding geniuses who tottered under thoughts palpably too heavy for the unformed handwi'iting, in the thumbed red morocco books of twenty years ago ! But the older those grimy albums grow, the more fully I feel that they were worth while, and that it is a pity we do not keep more of the boy " greenness " into the later years ; for there are more plants than the inanimate ones whose life is dearest and most fragrant while they are gi*een. I shall never forget the supreme moments when the good gray Longfellow and cheerful, rheumatic " Mrs. Partington " 1G4 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. christened my last aiitogi'apli-albnm witli theii* names, which were for a long time my chief est treasures — until that dear- est hero of boyhood. Captain Mayne Reid, echpsed them all. That seems very far back ; but the crowded years between, with all their adventures and dangers, have brought no keener joys. And last summer the boyish triumph came back clear and strong as ever, when I stood under one of the noblest cliffs in America and read in its vast stone pages the autographs of some of the great first heroes of the New World. "The Stone Autograph-Album" lies in a remote and al- most unknown corner of western New Mexico. It is fifty miles southwest of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad from Grant's Station, and can be reached only by long drives through lonely but picturesque canons and great pine forests. It is but four miles from the half-dozen Mexican houses of Las Tinajas, where the traveler can find food and shelter. The journey from the railroad is not dangerous, and need not be uncomfortable ; but one should be careful to secure good horses and a guide, for the roads are not like those of the East. Climbing and descending the long slopes of the Zuhi range, we emerge at last from the forest to a great plateau, its southeastern rim crowded with extinct volcanoes, whose som- ber cones explain the grim, black leagues of lava-flows that stretch everywhere. To the southwest the plateau dips into a handsome valley, guarded on the north by the wilderness of pines, and on the south by a long line of those superb THE STONE AUTOGRAPH- ALBUM. 165 mesas of many-colored sandstone which are among the char- acteristic beauties of the southwest. Through this valley ran an ancient and historic road — now hard to trace, for so many generations has it been abandoned — from Zuhi to the Rio Grande. Many of you have already heard something of Zuhi, that strange gray pyramid of the adobe homes of fifteen hundred Pueblo Indians. It is what is left of the famous " Seven Cities of Cibola," whose fabled gold inspii-ed the dis- covery of New Mexico in 1539, and afterward the most mar- velous marches of exploration ever made on this continent. Coronado, that greatest explorer, and the first Caucasian sol- dier who ever entered New Mexico, marched from the Gulf of California almost to where Kansas City now is, in 1540, besides making many other expeditions only less astounding. And after his day, the most of the other Spanish world-find- ers came first to Zuhi and thence trudged on to the Rio Grande, and to the making of a heroic history which is quite without parallel. As we move west down the vaUey, the mesas grow taUer and more beautiful; and presently we become aware of a noble rock which seems to be chief of all its giant brethren. Between two juniper- dotted canons a long, wedged-shaped mesft, tapers to the valley, and terminates at its edge in a magnificent chff which bears striking resemblance to a titanic castle. Its front soars aloft in an enormous tower, and its sides are sheer walls two hundred and fifteen feet high, and thousands of feet long, with strange white battlements and wondrous shadowy bastions. Nothing without wings could 166 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. mount there ; but a few hundred yards south of the tower the mesa can be scaled — by a prehistoric trail of separate foot-holes worn deep in the sohd rock. At the top, we find that the wedge is hollow — a great V, in fact, for a canon from behind splits the mesa almost to its apex. Upon the arms of this V are the ruins of two ancient pueblos, which had been abandoned before our history began, facing each other across that fearful gulf. These stones "cities" of the prehistoric Americans were over two hundred feet square and four or five stories tall — great terraced human beehives, with sev- eral hundred inhabitants each. This remarkable and noble rock was known to the Spanish pioneers much more than two centuides before any of our Saxon forefathers penetrated the appalling deserts of the southwest; and even in this land full of wondrous stone monuments it was so striking that they gave it a name for its very own. They called it El Morro — the Castle — and for over three huudi-ed years it has borne that appropriate title, though the few hundred "Americans " who have seen it know it better as Inscription Rock. It is the most precious cliff, historically, possessed by any nation on earth, and, I am ashamed to say, the most utterly uncared-for. Lying on the ancient road from Zuui to the river — and about thirty miles from the former — it became a most im- portant landmark. The necessities of the wilderness tnade it a camping-place for all who jjassed, since the weak spring under the shadow of that great rock was the first water in a hard day's march. There was also plenty of wood near, and THE STONE AUTOGRAPH-ALBUM. 167 a fair shelter under tlie overhanging precipices. So it was that every traveler who came to the Morro in those grim cen- turies behind this stopped there, iind that included nearly every notable figiu-e among the iirst heroes who trod what is now our soil. And when they stopped, something else hap- pened — something which occurred nowhere else in the United States, so far as we know. The sandstone of the cliff was fine and very smooth, and when the supper of jerked meat and popcorn-meal porridge had been eaten, and the mailed sentries put out to withstand the prowhng Apaches, the heroes wi^ote their autographs upon a vast perpendicular page of stone, with their swords which had won the New World for pens ! You must not imagine that this came from the trait which gives ground for our modern rhyme about " fools' names, like their faces." These old Spaniards were as unbraggart a set of heroes as ever lived. It was not for notoriety that they wrote in that wonderful autogi-aph-album, not in vanity, nor idly. They were piercing an unknown and frightful wilder- ness, in which no civilized being dwelt — a wilderness which remained until our own times the most dangerous area in America. They were few — never was their army over two hundred men, and sometimes it was a tenth of that — amid tens of thousands of warUke savages. The chances were a hundred to one that they would never get back to the world — even to the half -savage world of Mexico, which they had just conquered and were Christianizing. No ! Wliat they wrote was rather hke leaving a headstone for unknown 168 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. gi'aves ; a word to say, if any should ever follow, " Here were tlie men who did not come back." It was a good-by like the " Ceesar, we, who are to die, salute you." Coronado, the first explorer, did not pass Inscription Rock, but took the southern trail from Zuni to the wondrous cliff- city of Acoma. But among those who came after him, the road l)y the Morro soon became the accepted thoroughfare from Old to New Mexico ; and in its mouse-colored cliffs we can read to-day many of the names that were great in the early history of America. Such queer, long names some of them are, and in such a strange, anci,ent hand- writing ! If any boy had some of those real autographs on paper, they would be worth a small fortune ; and if I were not so busy an old boy, I would trace some of them in one of my old autograph-albums, exactly as they are written in that lonely rock. But as it is, you shall have the photographic fac- similes which I made purposely for you, and do with them what you like. On the southeast wall of the Morro are some very hand- some autographs, and some very important ones. The pio- neers who passed in the winter generally camped under this ehff to get the sun's warmth, while those who came in sum- mer sought the eternal shade of the north side. All the old inscriptions are in Spanish — and many in very quaint old Spanish, of the days when spelling was a very elastic thing, and with such remarkable ablireviations as our own forefathers used as many centuries ago. AU around these brave old names which are so precious to the historian — and THE STONE AUTOGRAPH-ALBUM. 169 to all who admii'e heroism — are Saxon names of the last few decades. Alas ! some of these late-comers have been vandals, and have even erased the names of ancient heroes to make a smooth place for their "John Jones" and "George Smith." That seems to me an even more wicked and wanton thing than the chipping of historic statues for relics ; and I do not, anyhow, en\'y the man who could write his petty name in that sacred roster. » Near the tall, lone sentinel pine which stands by the south wall of the Morro is a modest inscription of great interest and value. It is protected from the weather by a little brow of rock, and its straggling letters are legible still, though they have been there for two hundred and eighty-six years ! It is the autogi-aph of that brave soldier and wise fii'st gov- ernor in the United States, Juan de Ohate. He was the real founder of New Mexico, since he established its government and built its first two towns. In 1598 he founded San Ga- briel de los Espaholes, which is the next oldest town in our country. St. Augustine, Florida, is the oldest, having been founded in 1565, also by a Spaniard. Next comes San Ga- briel, and third Santa Fe, which Ohate founded in 1005. But before there was a Santa Fe, he had made a march even more wonderful than the one which brought him to New Mexico. In 1604 he tiiidged, at the head of thirty men, across the fearful trackless desert from San Gabriel to the Gulf of California, and ])ack again ! And on the return from that marvelous "journey to discover the South Sea" (the Pacific) he camped at the Morro and wi'ote in its eternal 15 170 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. page. Here it is, just as he wi-ote it two years before om* Saxon forefathers had built a hut in America, even on the sea-coast — while he was fifteen hundred miles from the ocean. The inscriptions are nearly all of such antique lettering, and so full of abbreviations, that I shaU give you the Spanish f ■'^J'^' li.e(jH7 a ,^ ^t'^lM^'^^ text in type with an intei-lined translation, so that you may pick out the queerly written words and get an idea of sixteenth and seventeenth eentuiy "short-hand." Onate's legend reads : " Paso 2)or aqui el adelanfado* donJna de Ofiate al descnhri- Passed by here the officer Don .Juan de Ofiate to the discov- mento de la mar del snr a 16 de Ahril do. 1605." ery of the sea of the South on the 16th of April, year 1605. This is the oldest identified autograph on the Rock except one, which is not absolutely certain — that of Pedi'o Romero ; his date reads apparently 17580. Either some one has fool- ishly added the nought — which is very improbable — or the 1 is simply an ?, and the supposed 7 an old-fashioned 1. * We have no exact word foi' adclantado. He was the officer iu command of a new country. THE STONE AUTOGRAPH-ALBUM. 171 This is very likely. "And" — y or i, hi Spanish — was often written before the year; and the chances ai-e that this in- scription means " Pedi'o Romero and 1580." In that case, Romero was one of the eight companions with whom Fran- cisco Sanchez Chamuscado made his very remarkable march of exploration in that year. Just below Ohate's autogi*aph is one which some careless explorers have made eighty years earher than his. The sec- ond fignre in the date does look like a 5 ; but no white man had ever seen any part of New Mexico in 1526 ; and the fig- m-e is really an old-style 7. The autograph is that of Bas- conzelos, and reads : " For aqui pazo el Alferes D" Joseph de Payha Bascomelos el By liere passed the Ensign Don Joseph de Payba Basconzelos, the afio que trujo el Cavildo del Reyno a sii costa a 18 de Febo de year that he brought the to^\Ta-council of the kingdom (N. M. ) at his ovra expense 17;?6 anosP on the 18th of Feb., of 1736 years (the year 172«)). Not far away is the pretty autograph of Diego de Vargas — that dashing Ijut generous general who reconquered New Mexico after the fearful Pueblo Indian rebellion of 1680. In that rebellion twenty-one gentle missionaries and four him- dred other Spaniards were massacred by the Indians in one day, and the sur^dvors were driven back into Old Mexico. This inscription was written when Vargas made his first dash back into New Mexico — a prelude to the years of terrific fighting of the Reconquest. He ^vi*ote : " Aqui esfaha el Genl Dn. Do. de Vargas, quien conquisto a Here was the General Don Diego de Vargas, who conquered for 172 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. nuestra iSanta Fe y d la Heal Corona iodo el Nueco Mexico d sii our Holy Faith and for the Royal Crown (of Spain) all the New Mexico, at his casta, ano de 1G!)2." own expense (in the) year of 1693. A little uoi'tli of Vargas's valualjle iuscriptiuii is that (flg- ui'e 2) of the expedition sent by Goveiiior Francisco Mar- tinez de Baeza to arrange the troubles in Zuhi, on the urgent request of the chief missionary Fray Cristobal de Quii'os. It reads : " Pasamos 2)or aqiU el sargento mayor, y el capitan Jua. de We pass by here, the lieutenant-colonel, and the Captain Juan de ArecJmleta, y el amdante Diego Martin Barha, y el Alferes Arechuleta, and the lieutenant Diego Martin Barba, and the Ensign Ayostyn de Ynojos, ano de 1636." Augustin de Ynojos, in the year of 1636. Below this are some ancient Indian pictogi'aphs. The sar- gento mayor (literally "chief sergeant") who is not named fU' FIG. 2. DIECiO MARTIN BARBA AND ALFERES AGOSTVN. no THE STONE AUTOGRAPH- ALBUM. 173 was probably brave Francisco Gomez. The inscription is in the handwi'iting of Diego Martin Barba, who was the official secretary of Governor Baeza. In a little cavity neai* by is the inscription of "Juan Garsya, 163G." He was a menilier of the same expedition. The handsome autograph of Ynojos appears in several places on the rock. Two quaint lines, in tiny but well-preserved letters, recall a pathetic story. It is that of a poor common soldier, who did not write his year. But history supplies that. " 8oy de mano de Felipe de Arellano a IG de Setiembre, I am from the hand of Felipe de Arellano, on the 16th of September, soldado.^^ soldier. He was one of the Spanish " garrison " of three men left to guard far-off Zuhi, and slain by the Indians in the year 1700. Not far away is the autograph of the leader of the " force " of six men who went in 1701 from Santa Fe to Zuhi (itself a desert march of three hundred miles) to avenge that massa- cre, the Captain Juan de Urribarri. He left merely his name. An autograph nearly obhterated is that of which we can still read only : " Paso par aqui Fran'^. de An . . . Alma . . ." This was Francisco de Anaia Almazan, a minor but heroic officer who served successively under Governor Otermin, the gi'eat soldier C^ruzate, and the Reconqueror Vargas, and was in nearly every action of the long, red years of the Pueblo Rebellion. At the time of the great massacre in 1680, he was in the pueblo of Santa Clara. His three companions were 174 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. biitcliered by the savages, and Almazuii escaped alone l)y swiimniug the liio Grande. He probably wi'ote in the album of the Morro iu 1692, at the same time with De Vargas. An- other antograph of a member of the same expedition is that of Diego Lucero de Godoy (figure 3). He was then a mr- (jento mdijov, a very good and brave ofificer, who was with Governor Otermin in the bloody siege of Santa Fe by the Indians, and in that dire retreat when the bleeding Spaniards hewed their way through the swarming beleaguers and fought a passage to El Paso. He was also in nearly every battle of the Reconquest. Salvador Holguin, whose autograph is also on the rock, was another of Vargas's soldiers. Of about the same time were several Naranjos, of whom Joseph was the fii'st alcalde mayor (al)out equivalent to district judge) of Zuhi after the Reconquest. Of a much earlier date was the unknown soldier " Juan Gonzales, 1629 " (figure 4). A subse- quent Gonzales passed and wi-ote here seventy-one years later, in a very peculiar " fist " : " Pase 2^or aqiuj el am 1700 yo, Ph. Gonzales." I passed by here (in) the year 17(K), I, Felipe Gonzales. THE STONE AUTOGRAPH-ALBUM. 175 '^'^^'r-'^^haCi,. FIG. 4. JUAN GONZALES. A firnia as peculiar as tliat of oiu* own famous " puzzler," General Spinner, is appended to the entry (figure 5) : "A 5 del mes de Junyo desfe ano de 1709 })as6 par aqiuj ^Kira On the 5th of the month of June of this year of 1709 passed by here, bound Zufii Ramon Paez Jurfdo.^' for Zuiil, Ramon Paez Hurtado. FIG. 5. RAMON PAEZ HURTADO. 176 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR TOUNTRY. Another Hurtado wrote ou the other waU, in queer httle square characters (figure G) : ^'- El dia 14 de Julio de 1736 paso por aqui el Gen^ Juan Paez (On) the day 14th of July of 1736 passed by here the General Juan Paez Hurtado,Y'isitado)' — y en su comj)aTiia el caho Joseph Truxilloy Hurtado, Official Inspector, and in his company the corporal Joseph Truxillo. This one was a son of the great General Hurtado — the bosom friend of Vargas, repeatedly lieutenant-governor of the territory, and in 1704 acting governor. He was afterward greatly persecuted bj^ Governors Cubero and Martinez. The son also was a general, but not so prominent asJiis father. FIG. 6. JUAN PAEZ HURTADO. On the north side of the Morro are the longest and most elaborate inscriptions, the rock being there more favorable. The earliest of them are the two long legends of the then governor of New Mexico, Don Francisco Manuel de Silva Nieto. They were not written by him, but by some admiring officer in Tiis little force. A part has been effaced by the modern vandal, but enough remains to mark that very nota- ble journe}'. The first says (figure 7) : THE STONE vVUTOGKAni-ALBUM. 177 '■ ,„ ^^\' e mad or . Su BmccjyyncJubitoble^Su Bc^lof /^■^^--^'^f ^'^^'■OC d^'Hei ]Vuestrtv5er^0r -Cosa ^zsolo Cl Puso CnesfE fccto FIG. 7. UON I-RANCISCO MANUKL DE S1L\A NIETO. ^^Aqui . . . [^Jrtso eZ Gober] nador Don Francico Manuel (U Here passed the Governor Don Francisco Manuel de Sili'a Nieto que Jo ynpucibU tiene ya sujeto su Braco ynduhitabk Silva Nieto that the impossible has already (been) effected (by) his arm indom- y su Balor, con los Garros del Bei Nuestro Sefior; cosa que solo itable and his valor, with the wagons of the King Our Master; a thing which el Puso en este Efecto, de Abgosto 9, Seiscieiifos Beinte y only he put in this shape on August 9, (one thousand) six hundred, twenty and Xcuve^ que ... a Gufii Base y la Fe lleveP nine, that to Zuni I passed and the Faith carried. What is meant by Governor Nieto's " carrying the faith " (that is, Christianity) is that on tliis expedition he took along the lieroic priests wlio estahhshed tlie mission of Znhi, and who labored alone amid that savage flock. 178 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. "^ ^ ^ Nieto's other inscription (figiu'e 8), written on an- other journey, is in a more characteristic hanclwi-iting. It says : ^' M ninsirisimo Sefwr y The most Illustrious Sir and Cup. gen. cle las pros, del Captain-General of the provinces of nneho Mexco. For el Rey nro. the New Mexico for the King Our Mas- 8r. Paso por aqiii de hnelta de ter, passed by here on the return from los puelilos de Zuni a los 29 de the villages of Zuni on the 29th of Julio del afio de 1G29; y los July of the year of 1629 and them (the puso en paz a su pendhnto., Indians) ne put in peace at their pidiendole su fahor como ha- request, (they) asking his favor as saUos de su mag-K Y de nneho vassals of His Majesty. And anew dieron la ohediencia; todo lo they gave obedience; all of which que hiso con el agasaxe, selo, y he did with persuasiveness, zeal and prudencia, como tan christian- prudence, like such a most Chris- Isimo . . . tani imrticnlar y tian, such a careful and gallardo soldado de inacahable gallant soldier of tireless y . . . memoria . . ." and memory . . .■" THE STONE AUTOGKAPH-ALBUM. 179 Another long- inscription, not so handsomely written but very characteristic, is that of Governor Martinez, near by : ^'Ano de 1716 a los 26 de Agosto paso por aqui Don Feliz (In the) year of 1716 on the 26th of August, passed by here Don Feliz Mmiinez, GoverW. y Cap'^. GenK de este BeynOj a la reduczion Martinez, Governor and Captain-General of this Kingdom, to the reduction y co7iq'". de Moqui; y en su compama el Rdo. P. F. Antonio and conquest of Moqui ; and in his company the Reverend Father Fray Antonio Cmnargo, Custodio y Jucz Fclesiastico." Camargo, Custodian and Judge-Ecclesiastic. This was an expedition to reclaim to Christianity the lofty cliff-built pueblos of Moqui, which had slain their mission- aries; but it signally failed, and Martinez was recalled in disgrace from his governorship. He and Pedro Rodriguez Cubero were the worst governors New Mexico ever had after 1680, and no one was sorry for him. The Custodio was the local head of the Church in New Mexico. A curious flour- ish at the end of his autograph is the ruhrica much affected by writers of the past centimes. There are many character- istic ruhricas among the names on the Morro. The first visit of a bishop to the southwest is recorded in a very clear inscription, which runs : ''i>ia 28 de Sept. de 1737 afios llego aqui el Tllmo. (On the) day 28th of September of 1737 years, reached here the most illus- 8r. Dr. Dn. Mm. De ElizaecoeJiea, Ohpo. de Durango, y el trious Sir Doctor Don Martin de Elizaecochea, Bishop of Durango, and (on) the dia 29 paso a Z»hj." day 29th went on to Zuiii. New Mexico belonged to the bishopric of Durango (Mexico) until 1852. A companion autograph is that of the " Bachil- ler" (Bachelor of Arts) Don Ygnacio de Arrasain. He was 180 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. with the bishop on this journey — an ardnous and (hxngvrons jonrney, even a centnry later than 1737. One of the most puzzling inscriptions in this precious au- tograph all)um, and a very important one, is that of the sol- dier Lujan (figure 9). It is almost in hierogl^^ihies, and M^as never deciphered until I pnt it into the hands of a gi^eat FIG 9 Ll J \\ student of ancient writings — though after he solved the riddle it is clear enough to any one who knows Spanish. Its violent abbreviations, the curious capitals with the small final letters piled ^' overhead/' and its reference to a matter of his- tory of which few Americans ever heard, coinbined to keep it long a mystery. Reduced to long-hand Spanish, it reads : " Se pasaron a 23 de Marzo de 1032 afios a la henganza de They passed on the 23fl of March of 1033 years to the avenging of the Muerte del Padre Lefrado. Lujan." death of the Father Letrado. THE STONE AUTOGRAPH-ALBUM. 181 What a romance aud what a tragedy are hidden in those two lines ! Father Francisco Letrado was the first perma- nent missionary to the strange p;yTamid-pueblo of Zuhi. He came to New Mexico about 1628, and was first a missionary to the Jumanos — the tattooed savages who lived in the edge of the gi-eat plains, east of the Rio Grande. In 1629, you will remember, the mission of Zufii was founded, and he was sent to that lone, far parish and to his death. He labored earnestly with his savage flock, but not for long. In Febru- ary, 1630, they mercilessly slew him. Francisco de la Mora Ceballos was then Governor of New Mexico, and he sent this expedition "to avenge Father Letrado's death," under the lead of the maestro de campo (Colonel) Tomas de Albizu. Albizu performed his mission successfully and without blood- shed. The Zuhis had retreated to the top of their thousand- foot cliff, the To-yo-al-la-na, but were induced to return peaceably to their pueblos. Lujan was a soldier of the ex- pedition. There are a great many other old Spanish autographs on the sheer walls of the Morro ; but these are the principal ones so far deciphered. Of the American names only two or three are of any note at aU. The earhest date from 1849, and are those of Lieutenant Simpson and his scientific companion Kern — doubtless the first of us to visit the spot. All the other Saxon names are very recent and very unimportant. I am sure that if any of my readers had any one of those old autographs in his allium, he would guard it jealously; and it is a shame that we are neglecting that noble stone 16 182 SOME STRANGE CORNEES OF OUR COUNTRY. book of the Morro. A few more years and a few more van- dals, and notliing will be left of what now makes the rock so precious. The government should protect it, as it would be protected in any other civilized land ; and when some of you get into Congress, I hope you will look to this and other such duties. Otherwise the next generation will awake only 10 find that it has lost a unique and priceless treasm-e. XIV. THE RIVERS OF STONE. i)F a line were di-awn from Lake Manitoba to the GuK of Mexico at Galveston, approximately halving the United States, and we conld get these two halves on a small enough scale to compare them side by side, we should find that Nature herself had ah-eady made as striking a division. We should find such a difference between them as we now scarcely realize. Broadly speaking, we should discover the eastern half to be low, rather flat, wooded and wet ; the western half many times as high above sea-level, extremely mountain- ous, generally bare, and phenomenally dry. Its landscapes are more brown than green, its ranges barren and far more bris- tling than those of the east ; and its plains vast bleak uplands. Its very air is as different from that of the eastern half as white is different from gray. It is many times hghter and many times clearer, and incomparably drier. It is a sort of wizard air, which plays aU sorts of good-natm-ed tricks upon the stranger. Delicious to breathe, a real tonic to the lungs, a stimulant to the skin, it seems to delight in fooling the eyes. Through its magic clearness one sees three times as far as in the heavier atmosphere of the east, and the stranger's esti- 184 SOME STRANGE CORNEKS OP^ OUR COUNTRY. mates of distance have all to be made over. It is no uncom- mon thing for the traveler to deem an object but five miles off when it is really twenty miles or even more. And a still more startling trick of this strange atmosphere is that it very frequently makes one see things which do not exist at all ! It is a cm'ious paradox that this atmospheric freaky of which you know as the mu-age, is confined to dry countries — des- erts, in fact — and that the illusion it most commonly pre- sents is water ! Towns and mountains and animals are sometimes pictured, but oftenest it is a counterfeit of water that is shown the weary traveler in a land where there is no water, and where water means life. The very landscape under this wonderful air has an ap- pearance to be found nowhere else. Its barrenness seems en- chanted ; and there is an unearthly look about it all. Water- courses are extremely rare — in a quarter of a continent there are only three good-sized rivers, and it is in places hundreds of miles between brooks. In a word, the country seems to have been burnt out — it reminds one of a gigantic cinder. It is true that there are in this area a great many rivers of a sort not to be found in the East — and such strange rivers ! They are black as coal, and fuU of strange, savage waves, and curious curling eddies, and enormous bubbles. The springs from which they started ran dry centuries ago ; a mouth not one of them ever had ; and yet their black flood has not been soaked up by the thu'sty sands. There lies the broad, wild current, sometimes thirty feet higher than its banks, yet not THE RIVEES OF STONE. 185 overflowing tliem ; a ciu'rent across wliicli men walk without danger of sinking, but not without danger of another sort ; a cuiTent in which not fishes but wikl beasts hve — often even one river on top of another ! You will wonder what sort of rivers these can be. They are characteristic of the West — there are none of them in the East ; but in an area larger than that which holds three- fourths of the population of the United States they are a part of the country. They line hundreds of valleys. If the rest of the landscape suggests fire, they suggest it ten times more. And rightly enough, for they have seen fire — nay, they have heen fire. They are burnt rivers, that ran as fire and remain as stone. By this time you will have guessed what I mean — that these rivers of stone are neither more nor less than lava-flows. They are stranger than that African river of ink (made by the combination of chemicals soaked from the soil), and in- comparably more important, for they have to do with causes which much more nearly affect mankind. The great differ- ence between the East and West is that the latter is a vol- canic country, while the former is not; and nearly all the striking dissimilarities of air, climate, landscape, and even customs of the people, arise from this fact. The West has been heaved up by the fires within, and burned out and parched dry — so dry that even the sky feels it. The rainfall is far less than in the East ; and to make their crops grow the western farmers have to flood their fields several times in a season from some stream or reservoir. 186 SOME STEANGE COENERS OF OUE COUNTRY. As we go south this volcanic condition becomes more and more predominant. The vast southwest is a strongly vol- canic country, and covered with embers of its old fires. There are no active volcanoes in the United States, hut in the southwest there are thousands of extinct ones, each with its one to a dozen black rivers of stone. These volcanoes are not large peaks like the giants of Central and South Amer- ica; most of them are small cones rising but little above the sui-rounding plains, some not more than fifty feet. Yet so elevated is the whole country there that the top of such a cone is frequently much higher above the sea-level than the summit of Mount Washington. Of the many volcanic regions I have explored, one of the most interesting is in the Zuui Mountains of western New Mexico, and along their slopes. All through the range — whose tops are over eight thousand feet in altitude — are scattered scores of extinct volcanoes; and their lava-flows have overrun many thousands of square miles. The range is covered with a magnificent pine forest — a rare enough thing in the southwest — partly growing upon ancient flows, and cut in all directions by later ones. The soil everywhere is sown with jagged fragments of lava, which makes travel irksome ; and in the picturesque Zuhi canon which traverses the range is a singular sight — where the lava, too impatient to await outlet by a crater, boiled out in great waves from under the bottom of the canon's walls, which are sandstone precipices hundreds of feet high. The largest crater in this range is about two miles south THE EIVERS OF STONE. 187 of the lonely little raiicli-house at Agiia Fria. It is a great, reddish-brown, truncated cone, rising about five hundi-ed feet above the plateau, and from tlu-ee sides looks very regular and round. Around it are the tall pines, and a few have even straggled up its sides, as if to see what it all means. But they have found it hard climbing, and cHng upon its precipitous flanks as if disheartened and out of breath. Nor can one blame them. To the top of that crater is one of the very hardest climbs I know — the ascent of Pike's Peak did not tu'e me nearly so much. The whole cone is covered several feet deep with coarse, sharp volcanic ashes, or rather cinders — for each fragment is as large as the tip of one's finger. The slope is of extreme steepness, and this loose covering of scoriae makes ascent almost hopeless. The climber sinks calf -deep at every step ; and, worse still, at every step sets the whole face of the slope, for a rod around, to shding down-hill. No one can go straight up that ardu- ous pitch 5 one has to climb sidewise and in zigzags, and with frequent pauses for breath ; and it is a decided relief, mental as well as physical, when one stands at last upon the rim of that giant bowl. A strange, wild sight it is when we gain the edge of the crater. A fairly terrific abyss yawns beneath us ; an aliyss of dizzy depth and savage grandeur. Its bottom is far lower than the level of the country around the outside of the cone — from that rim to the bottom of the crater must be eight hundred feet. In shape the interior is less like a great bowl than a gi'eat funnel. The rim is very narrow — in many 188 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. places not more than six feet across — and terribly rough. The rock is cooked to an absolute cinder, and is more Jagged than anything famihar to the East. Imagine a mill- ion tons of rock exactly like one great "clinker" from a fm'nace, and you get some idea of it. Tall, weird cliffs of the same roasted rock surround the crater a few hundi'ed feet below the rim ; and l)elow these again is the long, swift slope of scorifB to the V-shaped bottom. Under the eastern cliff is a strange, misplaced little grove of cotton-woods, which seem ill enough at ease in that gruesome spot — theii* roots clutching amid the ashy rocks, their tops hundreds of feet below the rim. Here and there in the cliffs are wild, dark- mouthed caves; and from these long, curious lines lead across the slope of cinders. They look like tracks across a sand-bank — and tracks they are, though one would never look for footprints in such a forbidding chasm. But, oddly enough, this dead crater is the chosen retreat of more than one form of life. There are no other cotton-woods in a gi-eat many miles except those I have mentioned — outside the crater it is too cold for this shivering tree. And this same grim shelter has been chosen by one of the least delicate of animals — for those tracks are bear-tracks. Several of these big brutes live in the caves of the crater and of the lava-flows outside. The Agua Fria region is a great place for bear; and at certain times of the year they are an enormous nui- sance to the people at the rancho, actually tearing down quarters of beef hung against the house, and very nearly tearing down the house with the meat. Several have been THE RIVEES OF STONE. 189 killed right at the house. A few days before my last visit to the crater oue of the cowboys, a powerful young Ute Indian, was herding the horses near the foot of the cone, when he saw a huge black bear scrambling up the acclivity. A good shot at nearly five hundred yards brought Bruin rolling to the foot of the cone, quite dead. His skin was an imposing sight when tacked upon the outside of the log-house to dry, for it reached from the ridge-pole to the ground, and then had sev- eral inches to spare. Besides the bears, the coyotes, wild-cats, and mountain-lions which infest that region, all make their homes in the caves of the Dial pais or "bad lands," the gen- eral name in New Mexico for lava and other volcanic areas. It is noticeable that only such animals as these and the dog — some creature with cushioned feet — can live or travel in the mal pais. Anything with hoofs, like the deer or antelope which abound there, or the cattle and sheep which also range those mountains, cannot long tread those savage-edged rocks. The funnel of the crater is not perfect. On the south side the huge bowl has lost part of its run. The crater is about seven hundred yards across *the top, and nearly three hun- dred yards deep ; and you may imagine that it was a rather warm and weird time when this great caldron was full to the brim with boiling rocli. A terrific potful it must have been, and doubly fearful when that stupendous weight burst out the side of the pot and poured and roared down the val- ley a -flood of fii-e. Think of a lake of lava so heavy that it simply tore out a mountain-side eight hundred feet high and five hundred feet thick at the bottom! The break in the 190 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. ci'ater is in the shape of a huge irregular V, nearly a thou- sand feet across the top, and over five hundred from top to bottom ; and aU that great slice of solid rock, weighing mill- ions of tons (for it takes only a cubic yard to weigh a ton), was knocked out as unceremoniously as though a giant had cleft it out with an ax. That is the sort of spring in which the rivers of stone had their sonrce ; and this particular crater fed many enormous streams. Of course it is many centuries since this grim spring ran dry ; but we can judge very well how it acted when it sent out its strange hot floods. First, above the soughing of the pines rose deep, pent-up rumblings, and the solid earth rocked and shivered. Then there was a great explosion just where that still brown cone stands to-day, and this great wart was heaved up from the level plateau, and a vast cloud of steam and ashes sprung far into the sky. Then the molten flood of rock rose in the great bowl, and brimmed it, and ran over in places, and boiled and seethed. And suddenly, with a report louder than a hundred cannon, the wall of the crater broke, and that resistless deluge of fii-e rolled like an ava- lanche down the valley, plowing a channel fifty feet deep in the bed-rock at its outlet, mowing down giant pines as if they had been straws, sv/eeping along enormous boulders like di'iftwood, and spreading death and eternal desolation for leagues around. A flood of any sort is a fearful thing. I have seen a wall of water ninety feet high sweep down a nar- row pass, at the l)ursting of a great reservoir at Worcester, Mass. It cut ofl: oak-trees two feet in diameter and left THE RIVERS OF STONE. 191 of them only square, splintered stumps. A five-story brick building stood in the way, and quicker than you could snap a finger it was not. Iron pipes that weighed a thousand l)ounds floated on that mad flood for a moment ! And what must it be when the breaking dam lets out an avalanche of molten rock in a wave five hundred feet high ! That first outrush must have been a subhme thing. But even more than water, a lava stream begins to lose force as it gets away from its head. It is so much thicker than water at the start, and with every mile it grows thicker stiU. Soon it runs very much like cold molasses ; a sluggish, black, un- natural sort of stream, with its middle higher than its sides and the sides higher than the banks. The process of cooHng begins very quickly and goes on rapidly. The " river " runs more and more slowly; and along its upper course (if the eruption has ceased) a shell will begin to form witliin a fort- night. So here is the strange phenomenon of a river running inside a stone conduit of its own making. The sheU becomes hard enough, long before it is cool enough, to walk upon ; and within, the fiery flood still pours along. A great deal of gas and steam is imprisoned in the molten flow. Sometimes it only makes huge Inibbles, which remain frozen in the eter- nal stone. I have found these bubbles ten feet in diameter — curious arched caves, in which a whole party might camp. But if the volume of gas be too great, terrific explosions oc- cur ; and in places the top of the flow for a hundred acres is rent into a miUion fragments, so sharp-pointed that no crea- ture can cross them. 192 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. The chief river of stone fi'om this crater is about fifty-seven miles long, and its black, unmoving flood covers some four hundred square miles. It runs south for a few miles from the crater, then makes a great bend to the east, and, passing the beautifid rincon* of Cebollita, runs to the northeast nutil it unites with a smaller flow in the valley of the San Jose. In places it is a dozen miles wide, and in some narrow passes not more than a mile. At the bend the hot, sluggish current actually ran a couple of miles up-hill, in its reluctance to turn a corner. Not far from this elbow in the stone river is a very inter- esting spot. The Pueblo Indians have dwelt for unknown ages in that part of New Mexico ; and on a fine rock bluff at Cel3ollita is one of the handsomest of theii* prehistoric ruins — a large stone pueblo surrounded by a noble stone wall. This fortified town was already deserted and forgotten when Coronado came in 1540. The Queres Pueblos have still a legend of the ATw de la Lunihre, or "Year of Fire." They say theu' forefathers dwelt in these vaUeys when the lava floods came and made it so hot that all had to move away ; and there is a dumb but eternal witness to the truth of their story. A few miles from Cebollita were some of their small, separate farm-houses in the pretty valley, and through one of these a current of the stone river ran. There stands to this day that ancient house, long roofless but with strong walls stiU ; and through a gap in them and over the floor lies the frozen black tide. There are two islands in this peculiar river, and as pecidiar * Corner. I THE EI VERS OP STONE. 193 as itself. Instead of I'isiiig aliove the flood they are below it — lonely parks with grass and stately pines, walled with the black lava which stands twenty feet above then* level. The largest of these parks contains about twenty thousand acres. There is a narrow trail into it, and it is used as a pasture for the horses of the ninety-seven-thousand-acre A. L. C. ranch. There are only two trails by which this lava-flow can be crossed by men or horses. Everywhere else it is as much as one's life is worth to attempt a passage. No one inexperi- enced can conceive of the cruel roughness of these flows. The strongest shoes are absolutely cut to pieces in a short walk ; and then woe to the walker if he have not arrived at more merciful ground. Several years ago a band of horse-thieves, led by a desperado known as Charlie Ross, were fleeing from Gallup with several stolen animals. The officers were close at their heels, and to be overtaken meant a swift bullet or a long rope. The " rustlers " missed the trail, l)ut tried to cross a narrow part of the flow. It was a cruel and indescribable passage. They got across and escaped — for the pm\suers were not so foolhardy as to enter the lava — but on foot. Their horses, including a four-hundred-dollar thoroughljred, were no longer able to stand. The desperate riders had spurred them over that cruel surface until their hoofs were absolutely gone, and the poor brutes had no feet at all ! The robbers themselves came out barefoot, and the rocks were marked with their blood. I am glad to remember that the pursuers soon got around the mal pais, and put the horses out of their misery. 17 194 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OP OUR COUNTRY. This flow runs for several miles beside the track of the Atlantic and Pacific Railway, just west of McCarty, and comes to an abrupt end in a pretty little meadow there. The small bluish San Jose creek rises in a cold spring which pours foi'th from a cave in the lava, very much like the beautiful spring at Agua Fria. The creek evidently be- longed in the valley before the lava came, and despite that fearful invasion of fii'e it still holds its own. For miles it runs through the great black river of stone, now in winding channels, and again heard but unseen in long caves under the lava. There are also in this part of the flow a dozen or more nearly circular basins, some filled with water from the brook, and a favorite breeding-place for wild ducks. It is a very unsatisfactory place to hunt, however, for your duck is very liable to fall into one of the deep, narrow cracks in the lava, where he is lost forever. The wildest and most interesting part of this stone river is up near its head. Everywhere it keeps its old waves and its very eddies, frozen into enduring rock ; everywhere it has its upheavals and its dangerous fissures. But near the crater its surface is inconceivably wild and broken. It seems to have gouged out a tremendous channel for itself in its first mad rush. For a mile the flow is a succession of " slumps." The sohd rock beneath seems to have dropped out of sight, and when the fiery river cooled it dropped too, but only in places. I suppose that really the molten lava all ran out from that part of the conduit, and that finally the shell broke down in spots. But what a conduit it must have been ! THE RIVERS OF STONE. 195 For areas of five acres of this hardest rock, twenty feet thick, have simply dropped down and he at the bottom of a savage well seventy-five feet deep ! There are a dozen or more of these wild '' sink-holes," varying from half an acre in area to more than ten times as much ; and they are the most for- bidding, desolate, chaotic wrecks imaginable. Most of them are inaccessible, for then* rock walls are sheer ; but I have clambered down into some of them, and in every one which could be entered have found the dens of bears and other wild beasts. They are safe enough there from molestation even by the ubiquitous cowboy, who has to ride everywhere else in search of stray cattle. In one of these sinks I made a cm-ious discovery in the fall of 1891. Perj)etual snow is supposed not to exist in the southwest. We have several peaks over twelve thousand feet high, but that is not a sufficient altitude for eternal snow in this arid climate. The spring sun makes short work of the di'ifts, even at the greatest elevatiojis. But here I found perpetual snow at an altitude of eight thousand feet, in the strangest refrigerator nature ever built. It was in the largest of these sinks near the Agua Fria crater — a gruesome pit into which I descended with some misgivings, in quest of bear, and in company with the Ute cowboy. After exploring the various caves in vain, finding plenty of traces of bear but no bear, we went clambering over the chaos of lava blocks to a great, dark cavity at the head of the sink. Here the broken conduit showed plainly. It is a huge tunnel, with an arch of nearly fifty feet, and running 196 SOME STKANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. back under the lava no oue kuows how far. In the mouth of the tunnel, fully one huntli-ed feet below the surface of the flow, is a clear, cold pool of water, walled behind by a bank of snow twenty feet in visible thickness. It is flat as a floor on top, and sheer as a wall in front, and runs back nearly a hundred feet. The successive deposits are clearly marked. In the severe winter of those mountains a gi-eat deal of snow drifts into the tunnel. In summer this settles and hardens, and volcanic ashes blow in and form a thin layer upon it. The sun never enters beyond a point about ten feet back of a perpendicular from the top of the cliff, and as the cliff forms a sort of bay, this mass of snow is touched by the sun in a semicircle, and melts so that its face is in the shape of a cres- cent. This perpendicular wall of snow twenty feet high is very pretty, for, with its bluish strata interlined with the yel- low horizontal bands of dust, it looks for aU the world like a huge section of Mexican onyx. It is settled and solidified until it is half ice ; but the hottest summer makes no fur- ther impression upon it. A strange place for eternal snow, truly; a novel idea in ice-houses — this refrigerator in what was once the hottest place in the world! The contrast is noticeable enough, even now. In summer the sun beats down into the pit with great fury, and the black rocks ab- sorb its heat until a hand can hardly be laid upon them. But the instant one steps into the shade of the great arch there is a tremendous change in temperature. From being nearly broiled one passes in two steps to a chiU which can- not long be borne. Up under the gloomy rock arch twitter- THE EIVEES OF STONE. 197 ing swallows have their uests, and all the hot day they skim about in the mouth of the tunnel, now in sun and now in shade. Such volcanic ice-houses are sometimes useful, too. The city of Catania in Sicily is supplied with ice from a somewhat similar cavern in one of the lava-flows o;f ^tna. But I do not know how the ice-cave of the Zuhi Mountains can ever be made available, unless, indeed, the resident bears and wild- cats should take a notion to drag in a calf or deer and keep it in this unique cold-storage warehouse against a possible famine. Not only are there these stone rivers in so many of the valleys, but thousands of the great sandstone mesas (table- lands) of New Mexico and Ai-izona are capped with flat lava- flows from ten to fifty feet thick. In some places there are solitary buttes, one or two hundred feet high, standing alone in a plain. Their tops are solid lava, but there is not another sign of a flow for miles around. Those flows were extremely ancient, and erosion has cut down all the rest of the lava- covered upland and carried it away in sand, leaving only this one strange " island " in token of what once was. Very fre- quently, too, in such a mesa the underlying sandstone is so much softer that it has been worn away first, and the harder cap of lava projects everywhere like a great, rough cornice. XV. THE NAVAJO BLANKET. ]NE of tlie striking curiosities of one of our Strange Corners is the Navajo blanket. There is no other blanket like it. It is remarkable that half -naked savages in a remote wilderness which is almost a desert, unwashed nomads who never live in a house, weave a handsomer, more durable, and more valuable blanket than is turned out by the costly and intricate looms of Europe and America ; but it is true. The covers which shelter us nights are very poor affairs, artis- tically and commercially, compared to those superb fabrics woven by Navajo women in the rudest caricature of a loom. Blanket-wea\ing is the one domestic industry of this great tribe of twenty thousand souls, whose temporary brush shel- ters dot the northwestern mountains of New Mexico and the eastern ranges of Arizona ; but they do it well. The work of the men is stock-raising — they have a million and a half of sheep, a hundred thousand cattle, and several hundred thou- sand beautiful ponies — and they also plant a very little corn. The women have no housework to do, because they have no houses — a very different social condition from that of their THE NAVAJO BLANKET. 199 iieiglibors, the cleanly, industrious, farm-tending, home-lov- ing Pueblos. They make hardly any pottery, buying what they need from the expert Pueblos, in exchange for their own matcliless blankets, which tlie Pueblos no longer weave. The Navajo country is a very lonely and not altogether safe one, for these Indians are jealous of intruders ; but it is full of interest, and there is much to be seen in safe prox- imity to the raih'oad — particularly near Manuelito, the last station in New Mexico. It fairly takes one's breath away to ride up one of these barren mesas, among the twisted pihons, and find a ragged Indian woman squatted before a loom made of three sticks, a rope, and a stone, weaving a blanket of great beauty in de- sign and color, and with the durability of iron. But that is what one may see a thousand times in this strange territorj^ by taking the necessary trouble, though it is a sight that few white people do see. The Navajo is a seeker of seclusion, and instinctively pitches his camp in an out-of-the-way location. You may pass within fifty yards of his Iwgan and never sus- pect the proximity of human life, unless youi* attention is called by one of his wolfish dogs, which are very fond of strangers — and strangers raw. If you can induce the dog to save you for supper, and will follow his snarling retreat, this is what you may see : Under the shelter of a juniper, a semicircular wind-break built breast-high of brush, and about fifteen feet from point to point ; a tiny heap of smoldering coals ; a few greasy sheep-skins and blankets lying against the brush ; perhaps 200 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. the jerked meat of a sheep hanging to a branch, and near it pendent a few silver ornaments; a bottle-necked basket, pitched without and full of cold water; an old Spencer carbine or a Winchester leaning against the " wall " ; a few bare-legged youngsters of immeasurable mu*th, but diffident toward strangers ; mayhap the lord of the castle and a male companion or two playing cunqnimi with solemn faces and Mexican cards; the dogs, the lariated ponies — and the lady of the house at her remarkable loom. For simplicity of design, the Navajo "loom" — if it can be dignified by such a title — is unique. Occasionally the frame is made by setting two posts finnly in the ground al)out six feet apart, and lashing cross-pieces at top and bottom. So comphcated an affair as this, however, is not usual. Ordi- narily a straight pole is lashed between two trees, at a height of five or six feet from the ground. A strong rawhide rope, wound loosely round and round this, serves to susj^end the " supplementary yarn-beam," a straight bar of wood five or six feet long. To this in turn is attached a smaller bar, around which the upper ends of the stout strings which con- stitute the warp are tied. The lower ends of these strings are tied to a similar bar, which is anchored by stones at a distance of about two inches from the ground, thus keeping the string taut. And there is yom- loom. On the ground a foot away squats the weaver, bare-shinned and bare-armed, with her legs crossed tailor fashion. The warp hangs vertically before her, and she never rises while weaving. A stick holds the alternate cords of the wai-p THE NAVAJO BLANKET. 201 apart in opposite du-ections, and thus enables her to run the successive threads of the woof across without difficulty. As soon as a thread has been thus loosely introduced to its proper position, she proceeds to ram it down with the tight- ness of the charge in a Foiu'th-of-July cannon by means of a long, thin, hard-wood " batten-stick," frequently shaped some- thing like an exaggerated bread-knife. It is little wonder that that woof will hold water, or stand the trampling of a lifetime. Eveiy thread of it is rammed home with a series of vicious jabs sufficient to make it ''set down and stay sot." For each unit of the frequently intricate pattei'n she has a separate skein ; and the unhesitating skill with which she brings them in at their proper intervals is astonishing. Now, by the time her woof has. risen to a point twenty -five to thirty inches above the ground, it is evident that some new arrangement is essential to her convenience. Does she get up and stand to the job 1 Not at all. She simply loosens the spirally wound rope on the pole above so that its loops hang a foot or two lower, thus letting down the supple- mentary yarn-beam and the yarn-beam by the same amount. She then makes a fold in the loosened web, and tightly sews the upper edge of this fold to the cloth-beam below, thus making the web taut again. This is the Navajo patent for overcoming the lack of om* " revolving cloth -bearers." This operation is repeated several times before a full-sized blanket is completed. The smallest size of saddle blanket can be woven without changing the loom at all. All Navajo blankets are single ply, the pattern being the 202 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. same on both sides. I have seeu but two which had on one side a different pattern from that on the other. The range of quahty in Navajo blankets is great. The common blanket, for bedding and rough wear, is a rude thing indeed beside its feast-day brother. These cheap ones, almost always of full size — about six by five feet — are made of the native wool. The Navajos raise theii" own sheep, shear them, card, twist, and dye the wool. The prevaihug color of the blanket is natural — a whitish gray — and through this ground run cross-stripes, generally of blue, but sometimes of red, black, or yellow. These stripes are mostly in native dyes, the blue being now obtained from American indigo. They also dye in any color wdth dyes made by themselves from herbs and minerals. These wool blankets require a week or so for weaving, and sell at from two dollars and a half to eight dollars apiece. They are frequently half an inch thick, and are the warmest of blankets, theii- fuzzy softness making them much warmer than the higher-priced, tighter-woven, and consequently stiffer ones. In the second grade of blankets there is an almost endless variety. These are now made of Germantown yarn, which the Navajos buy in big skeins at the various stores and trad- ing-posts along the line of the Atlantic and Pacific Railway, which passes some twenty-five miles soutli of the whole line of their reservation. And remarkably fine blankets they make of it. Their abihty as inventors of neat designs is truly remarkable. The cheap blankets are very much of a piece ; but when you come up into patterns, it would be THE NAVAJO BLANKET. 203 difficult to find in the whole territory two blankets exactly ahke. The designs are ingenious, characteristic, and admira- bly worked out. Sometimes the weaver traces the pattern on the sand before beginning her blanket, but as a rule she composes it in her head as the work progresses. Circles or curved lines are never used in these blankets. The prevail- ing patterns are straight stripes, diagonals, regular zigzags, diamonds and crosses — the latter being to the Indians em- blems of the morning or evening star. The colors used are hmited in number. Scarlet is the favorite red, and indigo abnost the only blue in use. These and the white of the bleached wool are the original colors, and the only ones which appear in the very best blankets. It is curious that these savages should have chosen our own " red, white, and blue " long before we did — they were weav- ing already before the first European ever saw America. The Spanish conquerors brought the first sheep to the New World, and soon gave these valualjle animals to the Pueblo Indians. So wool came into New Mexico and displaced the Indian cot- ton, and the Navajos quickly adopted the new material. But of late there has been a sad deterioration in Navajo weaving — the Indians have learned one of the mean lessons of civilization, and now make their blankets less to wear than to sell. So an abominable combination of colors has crept in, until it is very difficult longer to get a blanket with only the real Indian hues. Black, green, and yellow are sometimes found in superb blankets, and so combined as not to lessen their value ; but as a rule these colors are to be 204 SOME STEANGE COENERS OF OUE COUNTEY. avoided But now some weavers use colors which to an In- dian are actually accursed — like violet, purple, dark brown, etc., the colors of witchcraft — and such blaukets are worth- less to collectors. With any Indian, color is a matter of religion, and red is the most sacred of hues. The amount of it in a blanket largely determines the price. An amusing instance of the Navajo devotion to red was brought to my notice some years ago. A post trader had received a ship- ment of prepared coffee, half in red papers and half in l^lue. In a month every red package was gone, and every l)lue package was left on the shelves; nor would the Indians accept the blue even then until long waiting convinced them that there was no present prospect of getting any more red. The largest of these Germantown-yarn l)lankets take sev- eral weeks to weave, and are worth from fifteen to fifty doUars. The very highest grade of Navajo blanket is now very rare. It is a dozen years since one of them has been made; the yarn blankets, which are far less expensive and seU just as weU to the ignorant traveler, have entirely supplanted them. Only a few of the precious old ones remain — a few in the hands of wealthy Pueblo Indians and Mexicans — and they are almost priceless. I know every such blanket in the south- west, and, outside of one or two private collections, the speci- mens can be counted on one's fingers. The colors of these choicest blankets are red, white, and blue, or, rai'ely, just red and white. In a very few specimens there is also a little black. Red is very much the prevailing color, and takes up THE NAVAJO BLANKET. 205 sometimes four-fifths of the blanket, the other colors merely drawing the pattern on a red ground. This red material is from a fine Turkish woolen cloth, called halleta. It used to be imported to Mexico, whence the Navajos procured it at first. Later, it was sold at some of the trading-posts in this territory. The fixed price of it was six dollars a pound. The Navajos used to ravel this cloth and use the thread for their finest blankets; and it made such blankets as never have been produced elsewhere. Their durability is wonderful. They never fade, no matter how frequently washed — an operation in which aniole, the sapo- naceous root of the palmilJa^ should be substituted for soap. As for wear, I have seen balleta blankets which have been used for rugs on the floors of populous Mexican houses for fifty years, which still retain their brilliant color, and show serious wear only at their broken edges. And they will hold water as well as canvas will. A balleta blanket like that shown in the frontispiece is worth two hundred dollars, and not a dozen of them could be bought at any price. It is seventy-three inches long hj fifty-six inches wide, and weighs six pounds. You can easUy reckon that the thread in it cost something, at six dollars a pound, and the weaving occupied a Navajo woman for many months. It is hardly thicker than the cover of this Ijook, and is almost as firm. It is too thin and stiff to be an ideal bed-blanket, and it was never meant to be one. All blankets of that quality were made to be worn upon the shoulders of chiefs ; and most of them were ponchos — that is, they 18 206 SOME STEANGE CORNEES OF OUE COUNTEY. had a small slit left in the center for the wearer to put his head through, so that the blanket would hang upon him like a cape. Thus it was combined overcoat, waterproof, and adornment. I bought this specimen, after weeks of diplo- macy, from Martin del Valle, the noble-faced old Indian who has been many times governor of the chff -built "city" of Acoma. He bought it twenty years ago from a Navajo war- chief for a lot of ponies and turquoise. He has used it ever since, bvit it is as brilliant, and apparently as strong, as the day it was finished. These finest blankets are seldom used or shown except upon festal occasions, such as councils, dances, and races. They are then brought forth with all the silver and beaded buckskin, and in a large crowd of Indians make a truly start- ling display. Some wear them the middle girt around the waist by a belt of hea\y silver disks, the lower end faUing below the knees, the upper end thrown loosely over the shoulders. Others have them thrown across the saddle, and others tie them in an ostentatious roll behind. The Navajos and Puel)los also weave remarkably fine and beautiful belts and garters, from two to eight inches wide and two to nine feet long ; and durable and pretty dresses for their women. The loom for weaving one of the handsome belts worn by Pueblo women is quite as simple as that of the Navajos for weaving blankets. One end of the warp is fastened to a stake driven into the gi'ound in front of the weaver, the other to a rod held in place by a strap around her waist ; so to tighten THE NAVAJO BLANKET. 207 the wai-p she has only to sit back a little. The device for separating the alternate threads of the warp so that the shut- tle can be pushed through looks like a small rolling-pin ; and in the weaver's right hand is the oak batten-stick for ramming the threads of the woof tightly together. The weaver sits flat upon the ground ; generally upon a blanket to keep her titanta clean, for the di*ess of a Pueblo woman is neat, hand- some, and expensive. These belts are always two-ply, that is, the pattern on one side is different from that on the other. It may also be news to you to learn that both Navajos and Pueblos are admirable silversmiths, and make all their own jewelry. Their silver rings, bracelets, earrings, buttons, belts, dress pins, and bridle ornaments are very well fashioned with a few rude tools. The Navajo smith works on a flat stone under a tree ; but the Pueblo artificer has generally a bench and a little forge in a room of his house. XVI. THE BLIND HUNTERS. |N these Strange Corners a great many things seem to be exactly reversed from what we are accus- tomed to. For instance, with us "a Imnter's eye " is a synonym for perfect sight, and we fancy that if any one in the world needs good vision it is he who follows the chase. But in the quaint southwest the most important hunters — and, in the belief of thousands of the natives, the most successful ones — can- not see at all ! They are stone-blind, which is not so out of keeping, after all, since they themselves are stones ! Very pretty stones are these famous little Nimrods — snowy quartz, or brilliant agate, or jasper, or a peculiar striped spar which is found in some parts of New Mexico. That is their body. Then their eyes are of coral, or blue turquoise from the pre- historic mines in Mount Chalchuhuitl near Santa Fe ; and their hearts are always of turquoise, which is the most pre- cious thing known to the aborigines of the southwest, for it is the stone which stole its color from the sky. '' But how can a blind stone with a turquoise heart be a hunter ? " you ask. WeU, that depends on the locality. I do THE BLIND HUNTERS. 209 not imagine he would count for much in a Queen's County fox-chase, but out here he can be a hunter very well. Here he is the very king of hunters; and no party of Indians would think for an instant of going out for deer or antelope, or even rabbits, except under his leadership and with his aid. These stone hunters are the hunt-fetiches of the Indians. They are tiny images of the most successful animals of prey — like the cougar, bear, eagle, and woLf — rudely carved from the hardest stone into a climisy but unmistakable likeness. The image alone is not enough. An arrow-head of agate or vol- canic glass is always bound with sinew to its right side, and under the turquoise heart is always a pinch of the sacred corn-meal. These little stone statues are supposed to com- municate to those who carry them all the hunter-craft of the animal which they represent. Every Indian carries a fetich when he hunts, and derives its power from it by patting its mouth to his own and drawing in liis breath — "drinking the breath" of the image. This ceremony is indispensable at the beginning of a hunt, and at various stages of its progress. The favorite hunt-fetich among the Pueblos is the mountain-Hon or cougar, Jceem-ee-deh, which they deem the king of animals. The hunter, when he strikes a trail, takes a forked twig and places it in front of a footprint, with the fork opening back- ward. This is to trip the fleeing game. Then he draws from his "left-hand bag" (the shoulder-pouch which serves the In- dian for a pocket) his fetich, inhales its " breath of strength," and prays to it — or rather to the animal spirit it represents 210 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. — to help him ; and then, before following the trail, imitates the roar of his patron-beast, to terrify and bewilder the game. He firmly believes that without these superstitious ceremo- nials he would stand no chance at all in the hunt, but that with them he is siu-e to succeed. It is difficult for us to realize the importance which the Indian attaches to all matters connected with game. We are at a point in civihzation where such things concern us only as pastimes, but to the Indian the hunt is still the corner- stone of life, or has been until so recently that he has not lost the old feehng. A matter so vital to the human race — in his eyes — has become the nucleus for a vast quantity of his most sacred beliefs. The animals which are successful hunters are objects of reverence, and he is careful to invoke their aid, that his own pursuit may be as fortunate as theirs. Indeed, the whole process of hunting is involved in an enor- mous amount of religious "red-tape" — for you must remem- ber that the Indian never does anything simply "for fun." He enjoys many things ; but he does them not for enjojonent, but for a superstitious end. Even my neighbors, the Pueblos, who have been farmers and irrigators for unknown centuries, preserve almost un- abated their ancient traditions and usages of the chase, and a hunt of any sort is a very religious affair, whether it be a simple foray of two or three men, or one of the great com- munal hunts in wliich many hundreds are engaged. One of their chief l)ranches of medicine-men are those who have ab- solute control of all matters pertaining to game. These are THE BLIND HUNTEES. 211 named, in the language of the Tigiia Pueblos, the Hoo-mah- I'oon ("those who have death in theh' arms"). According to thou- folk-lore the Hoo-mah-koon were created just after man- kind emerged from the bowels of the earth, and were the first of all branches of medicine, except only the KdJi-'pee-oo- nin (" those who are dying of cold," in allusion to the almost nakedness in which they always make their official appear- ance), who broke through the crust of the earth and led their people out to the light. In the sacred songs of the Hoo-mah-koon of the Pueblo of Isleta, where I lived for four years, it is declared that tliej^ came here first from the town of the Wolf's Den, one of the picturesque ruins in the great plains east of the Manzano Mountains. The order in Isleta numbers seven men. Be- ginning in May of every year there is always a series of com- munal rabbit hunts, one a week for seven weeks. The first of these hunts is under the command of the senior Hoo-mah- koo-ee-deh (the singular of Hoo-mah-koon), the second hunt under the next in rank, and so on until each of the captains of the hunt has had a day in the order of his seniority. The official crier of the village announces the night before that on the moiTow will be Kali-Tiu-ali-slul (the round-hunt), in stentorian tones which none but the deaf can fail to hear. That evening the Hoo-mah-koon and other dignitaries hold NdJi-ivheh (the drawing-dance), to charm the game. The danc- ing and singing are supposed (though conducted in a house) to reach and fascinate the ears of aU wild animals, so that they cannot hear the approach of the hunter on the mor- 212 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. row ; and in tlie intervals of the dance all who are present smoke vigorously the weer, or sacred cigarette, whose clouds blind the eyes of the game and make them less watchful. The songs sung at the drawing-dance vary according to the game to be hunted next day, and always begin with a refrain that has no meaning, but is an imitation of the cry of that animal. Before the great fall round-hunt for deer and ante- lope, the song is one which may be translated as follows : HUNTING SONG. Beh-eh eh-k'hay-roh, Beh-eh eh-k'hay-roh, Beh-eh eh-k'hay-roh. I am the mouutain-lion young man, I am the mountain-lion young man, I am the mountain-lion young man, Antelope thigh in my house hangs plenty, Antelope shoulder in my house hangs plenty, Antelope heart in my house hangs plenty, I am the mountain-lion young man. Deer head in my house hangs plenty, Deer liver in my house hangs plenty, All deer meat in my house hangs plenty, I am the mountain-lion young man. The dance and other services last most of the night. At the appointed time in the morning the Hoo-mah-koon repair to a certain sand-hill on the edge of the plains, about two miles from the pueblo, the invariable starting-point for all hunts to the westward, and thither follow several hundred of the men and grown boys of the village. At a certain sacred spot the chief of the Hoo-mah-koon starts a small fire with the most impressive ceremonies, singing meanwhile a chant THE BLIND HUNTERS. 213 which relates how fire was first discovered and how transmit- ted — both of which important deeds are credited to the Hoo- mah-koon. None outside that order — not even a member of one of the other branches of medicine-men — dare make that fire, and the chief H6o-mah-koo-ee-deh must light it only in the sacred way, namely, with the ancient fire-drill or with flint and steel. He would expect to be struck dead if he were to kindle it with the impious, new-fangled matches, which are now used by the Pueblos for all common uses, l)ut must not enter any sacred ceremony whatever. When the holy fire is well under way the Hoo-mah-koon stand around it with bowed heads, invoke the fetiches, and pray to Those Above to bless the hunt. Then their chief selects two men to lead the hunt, puts them in front of all the crowd, instructs them where to close the circle, and pushes them apart with the command " Go ! " These two start running in divergent lines. In a moment two more are started after them, and two more, and so on until all the hundi-eds of hunters are in motion along two files like the arms of a V, the knot of Hoo-mah-koon forming the apex. The two leaders run on for a designated distance, all the time getting farther apart, and then begin to converge toward one another until they meet at the appointed spot, frequently a couple of miles from the starting-point. Meeting, they hold theh' clubs in the right hand, pass each other on the same side and make cross-lines on the gi-ound, by wliich they stand. By this time a cordon of hunters in the shape of an ellipse has been formed by then- followers, and now at the signal 214 SOME STKANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. from tlie Hoo-mah-koon the cordon begins to shi'ink inward, the old men smoking continually to keep the game blinded. The hunters are armed only with boomerangs, wbich they hurl with force and precision that are simply marvelous. Very little game that lias been surrounded thus ever escapes, even to the swift- winged quail. A dozen or more of these big surrounds are made in the course of the day, and aU the game that is killed in the first two goes to the Hoo-mah-koo- ee-deh who is in command for that day. The Hoo-mah-koon get their peculiar name from the fact that as soon as an animal is killed they sit down and hug it upon theii* laps, sprinkling it with the sacred meal. In the evening, when the successful hunters return to the pueblo, heavily laden with game, they proceed to the house of the cacique (the chief religious official) and sing before it the following song, unchanged from the days when they hunted the lordliest game on the American continent : SONG AFTER THE HUNT. Ah, ee-yah, ee-yah, hay h'yah-ee-ah, Ah, ee-yah, ee-yah, liay li'yah-ee-ah, Ah, ee-yah, ee-yah, hay h'yah-ee-ah. Youder in the wee-ow-weew-bahn, [In Indian Territory] There stays the biiffalo, Commander of beasts, Him we are driving Hither from yonder, With him as prey We are arriving, With him as prey Now we come in. THE BLIND HUNTERS. 215 As the last Hue is sung, some of the hunters enter the house of the cacique, bearing a present of game. His own share each hunter carries to his home, and when the animal is cooked its head is invariably given to him who kills it. By eating this the hunter is supposed to acquire something from the animal itself which will make him suc- cessful in kiUing others of its kind. The Pueblos have a curious custom concerning rabbits, which are now more nu- merous than any other game, hundreds being killed in every round-hunt on the plain. They will not, under any circum- stances, fry them, nor touch one which has been thus cooked. The only way in which a True Believer will prepare rabbit is to ''make it as people." The animal is skinned and drawn. Then its long ears are twisted into a knot on top of its head ; the fore-legs are twisted so that their ankles are under the ''arm-pits," and the hind legs are crossed and pinned be- hind the back. Why this extraordinary distortion should be deemed to make poor bunny look " like people," I have never been able to learn ; nor yet the cause for this custom, except that it was given them "by those of old," and that the Trues order it to be continued. After it has been trussed up in this shape the rabbit is roasted in one of the quaint adobe out-door ovens, or stewed whole in a big earthen jar with home-ground corn-meal. No private party ever thinks of starting on a hunting trip without first securing the intercession of the Hoo-mah-koon with Those Above for their success and safety. When a number of men decide to go on a hunt, or on any other jour- 216 SOME STKANGE CORNEES OF OUR COUNTRY. ney, they meet and select the wisest among them to go to the Hoo-mah-koon and ask them to "give the road." The am- bassador chosen for this important and honorable mission at once bids his wife, mother, or sister to prepare the sacred meal, without which no such request would dare be made of the medicine-men. She selects and grinds the white or yel- low corn to meal, and wi-aps it in the ceremonial corn-husk wi'apper ; and the ambassador thus equipped goes with his request to the chief H6o-mah-koo-ee-deh. The medicine-man takes the sacred meal with his right hand and holds it all the time the ambassador is present, and names the night when he will come to a designated house (that of one of the party), foretell the fortunes of their journey, and "give the road." After eight o'clock on the appointed night, which is almost invariably the one before the hunters are to start, all the Hoo-mah-koon gather at that house, where the hunters are present with such of their friends as desire to be lienefited. The Hoo-mah-koon go through the usual jugglery of a medi- cine-dance, and then proceed to forecast the proposed jour- ney, taking their omens in any number of ways, somewhat after the fashion of the soothsayers of ancient Greece and Rome. In one case in my knowledge a prominent Indian here was going to travel horseback several hundred miles to trade with the Mesealero Apaches. The chief Hoo-mah-koo- ee-deh went out and combed the horse that was to he ridden, and returned with the combings, which he began to sort over with great solemnity. At last he handed to the traveler a lot of light hairs with one dark (me among them, and said : THE BLIND HUNTERS. 217 " You are on your way to break the rifle you carry, for the horse will fall and throw you as you go down a hill. And you win trade the broken rifle for this dark horse," pointing to the one dark hair. The traveler, who is a very reliable Indian, and who made one of the best governors the pueblo ever had, vows that it befell exactly so. His horse threw him, the rifle was broken in the fall, and he traded it for a horse the very color of that hair ! Who could ask more convincing proof that the medicine-man had indeed " the power"? After the fortunes of the journey have been thus fore- told all present join in the following chant. At the words " Hither ! Hither ! " those who are to travel draw their hands toward them repeatedly, and the others perform a similar in- cantation with their breath. This is intended to ''draw to " the traveler the game or other object of his journey. SONG BEFORE THE JOURNEY. Hither! Hither! This way ! This way ! [Pointing in the direction to be taken. 3 Life for-the-sake-of, Health for-the-sake-of, Our chiklren for-the-sake-of, Our animals for-the-sake-of. Game for-the-sake-of, Clothing for-the-sake of, Thus with empty hands Thus we go out. As the last two lines are sung all brush their left palms with their right. After this song the Hoo-mah-koon pray to 19 218 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. the Trues to bless the joiu'ney, and then " give the road" — that is, their official permission to start. The Pueblos have, by the way, a ''coyote telegraph," which is used in hunts, and used to be in war, by which they can impart news or commands several miles by yells which are a perfect imitation of the coyote Any one who had not learned the " code " would imagine it merely the usual concert of the cowardly little wolves of the prairie. The cry of the genuine coyote, too, is always a significant omen to the Pueblo. One short, sharp bark is a token of impending danger, and any party that hears that warning will at once tiu'u back, no matter how important its mission. Two short cries close to- gether mean that some one is dead in the village. Three short successive yelps, followed by the long wail, is under- stood as sure proof that the principals of the town have tried some person accused of witchcraft and have found a verdict of guilty ; and so on. XVII. FINISHING AN INDIAN BOY. MONG the countless oddities of custom whicli prevail in the southwest, perhaps none would strike my young countrymen as odder than the graduating exercises of a Pueblo lad. It is certainly a very different sort of graduation from any known to eastern schools ; and I fear a great many of our bright pupils would fail to pass to the satisfaction of the examiners. Among all Indian tribes there is a much more thorough course of home education than we generally imagine. Any observant man, if he be half as intelligent as the average Indian, cannot watch the latter without feeling that tliis brown f eUow has a remarkable scholarship of the senses. The education of eye and ear, and of the perceptive faculties, is nothing short of marvelous to us, who have not left of any of these senses a tithe ot the acuteness Nature meant us to have. But if the observer can get " on the inside of things " and really understand Indian life, he finds a much more re- markable education in the strange lore of a strange people. 220 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. Such memories are hardly ever found among '' civilized" people as are common to those who have no books nor writing to remember for fJiem ; and it takes such marvelous memories to retain all that the member of Indian society must carry in his head. I have found the study of the train- ing of my young Pueblo neighbors very interesting. The girls are taught little beyond their duties as home- makers and home-keepers — which is a considerable education in itself, for the Pueblo woman is a very good housewife. But the boys all go through a very serious and arduous train- ing to fit them for the responsibilities of Indian manhood. Every lad is expected to become an athlete of agility and en- dui-ance, to be expert in war and the hunt, to know and keep word for word the endless stories which embody the customs and laws of his people, and to be educated in many other ways. His training begins as soon as he can talk and be talked to ; and it continues, in greater or less degree, as long as he lives. As for the lad who is elected to foUow the unat- tractive life of a medicine-man, he has before him one long curriculum of toil. In all Indian tribes the shamans or medicine-men are the most important personages — the real "power behind the throne," no matter what the outward form of government. Upon them depends the success of the farmer, the hunter, the warrior ; they have to keep witches from swooping off the people, to give proper welcome to new- comers to this world, to cure the sick, and give safeguard to the departed on theii- long journey to the Other Country. Besides the extremely numerous societies of medicine-men. FINISHING AN INDIAN BOY. 221 there are many other secret orders among the Pueblos ; and initiation into one or more of these is part of the education of the young Indian boy. Some time ago a bright young neighbor and friend of mine, then twelve years old, was received into the important order of the Cum-pa-huit-la-wen — who are a sort of police against witches and armed guards of the Fathers of Medicine. In his infancy Refugio had been sickly, and to induce the Tiiies to spare his life his parents had "given" him to the gi"ay-headed chief of the Cum-pa-huit-la-wen. This old sha- man thus became Refugio's " medicine-father," and used to visit him regularly — for the boy continued to live with his real parents. This giving for adoption into an order or into another clan is common among the Pueblos. It does not at all break up the home ties, but merely gives the boy an extra godfather as it were. The first day after the adoption, the old shaman came in person, inquired as to the boy's health, held him awhile in his arms, prayed for him, and went away. Next day the second in authority of the Cimi-pa-huit-la-wen called and did likewise ; the third day, the third in rank ; and so on until every member of the order had made his ceremonial visit. Then the chief shaman began again, and after him day by day came his medicine-brothers in the order of their rank. These formal visits had been kept up daily, through all these years, with absolute punctuality, until Re- fugio was deemed old enough to become a full member of the lodge into which he had been adopted. All this time, of coui'se, he had been under the general tuition of the order ; 222 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. and his "brothers" had given him a general education — but had not intrusted him with their special secrets. Wlien at last his initiation was decided upon, he was made to keep a solemn fast for twenty-four hours. Then, after undown, he was led by his medicine-father to the medicine- house, where the whole order of Cum-pa-huit-la-wen were already assembled. Removing their moccasins at the door, the old chief and the lad entered the low, dark room — lighted only by the sacred fire, whose flickering embers flung ghostly shadows across the dark rafters — and stood before the solemn semi- circle of squatting men. Standing there with bowed head, the medicine-father prayed to the Trues of the East, the Trues of the North, the Trues of the West, the Trues of the South, the Trues Above and the Trues Here-in-the-Center. So punctilious is Pueblo superstition that it would be deemed an infamy to address their six cardinal points in any other order. Only a witch would ever think of naming fii'st North, then West, South, etc. Having thus invoked the blessing of all the deities, the old man took the trenibling lad by the liand and said to his fellows : '' Brothers, friends, this is my son. From now, he is to take our road. Receive him and teach him in the ways of tlie Cum-pa-huit-la-wen." "It is well," rephed the others. ^'Ah-hlai ! Sit down on what ye have." The old man and Refugio placed their moccasins and shoulder-blankets upon the bare adobe floor, and seated FINISHING AN INDIAN BOY. 223 themselves thereon. It would be an unheard-of sacrilege for an Indian to occupy a chair or bench upon any such sacred occasion. He must sit only "upon what he has" — and if it be summer, when no blanket is worn, his moccasins are his only seat. • Then the chief shaman's fii-st assistant — had the boy been adopted by any of the others, the chief himself would have officiated now — prepared and handed them the weer, or sacred cigarette. The ordinary cigarette of tobacco rolled in a bit of corn-husk or brown paper, which is commonly smoked for pleasure, is never used in a rehgious ceremony. The weer can be hghted only at the sacred fii*e ; and having kindled his at the coals, Refugio began to puff slowly, as he had been directed. This smoke-trying is always the fii-st duty of a candidate, and it is no mean test of the earnestness of his desire to " take the road." He must smoke the iveer down to its last whiff and inhale every particle of smoke, not a sus- picion of wliich must escape from his mouth. The ftrst three or four whiffs almost invariably make him deathly sick, but it is very rarely indeed that he fails to smoke to the end. In almost all folk-stories wherein the hero goes into the pres- ence of the Trues for any assistance — a very common part of the plot of these myths — he is tried with the weer first, to see if he be enough of a man for it to be worth the while of the Trues to attend to his case. Sometimes the trial of his faith is long-drawn and harrowing in its severity, but it always begins with the smoke test. 224 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. Refugio did bravely. "Very soou the soft olive of liis young face tiu'iied gray ; but lie puffed away impassively at the pun- gent reed until he had finished the last whiff. ^^ Ah-t'it-mee-Jiee ! He wins his com-se ! " said the first as- sistant shaman. Then, with prayers by all, the cleansing with warm water was given Refugio, and he was bidden to stand erect, while the master of ceremonies said encourag- ingly : "So far, you show that you will follow our road." Standing, now, the lad was ordered to make a praj^er to all the Trues — no small task, since their number is legion and they must be addressed only in the proper order of their rank. Whenever Refugio stumbled or was at a loss, the first assistant prompted him ; and he had to go over and over that enormous list until he knew it perfectly. Now he was made to sit down upon his moccasins, with his knees drawn up under his chin, to learn the songs of the order — which are of great number. He began with the great song to T'hoo-ree-deh, the Sun-Father — which he learned in less than half the time it afterward took me to master \i. It is a very important and impressive song, and is sung by the Cum-pa-huit-la-wen whenever they escort the cacique to a great ceremony. A translation of it is as follows (leaving out the many repetitions and meaningless refrains) : THE SONG OF THE SUN. O Sun, our Father, Sun-Man, Sun-Commander, Father, a prayer-stick we tie. FINISHING AN INDIAN BOY. 225 Father, on the road stand ready ; Father, take your way ; Father, arrive ; Father, come in ; Father, be seated. The learning of all those songs was a serious matter, and Refugio mastered only a few that night. The next day at sundown — after another fast — he resumed his labors, and so on every night until he had all the songs by heart. After the last one was learned came the ceremony of Tho-a-shur, the Receiving. The boy stood with bowed head in the center of the room, while the master of ceremonies gave him the cere- monial embrace — putting his right arm over Refugio's left shoulder, and his left arm under Refugio's right — and prayed that all the Trues would bless the new Cum-pa-huit-la-w^d- deh. Then Refugio was embraced in turn by his medicine- father and all the other members, and was given to drink of P^aJi-cniii-jfah, the Sacred Water — a secret mixture w^hich has a sweet smell but no taste. Now came the last severe test of Refugio's faith. He was seated, no longer in front of, but in, the semicircle of Cum- pa-huit-la-wen, who sat solemnly with their official bows and arrows in their hands. For all secidar purposes the Indians now use the latest and best fire-arms ; but only bows and arrows can be admitted to religious ceremonials. The oldest member of the lodge began to recite the history and customs of the Cum-pa-huit-la-wen, from the very beginning, when mankind came out from the Black Lake of Tears, down to the present day. For forty-nine hours this recital was con- 226 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. tinned without rest, the elder shamans taking turns in tell- ing ; and all that weary time the boy had to keep awake and intent, answering at the proper points " Tah-koon-nam — is that so ? " Once, when he nodded, the nearest man gave him a sharp punch in the ribs with the end of his bow. When Refugio had passed this last ordeal with credit, he .was again embraced, and the official announcement was made that he was now a full Cum-pa-huit-la-wid-deh. Had he failed in any of these tests — so hard upon the endiu-ance of a young boy — he would have been told to ''take the heart of a man " (be brave) and try again ; and the second trial would have been given him in a few days. The neophyte's struggles with his sickness and sleepiness are sometimes very comical; but the men never smile at him — indeed, their treatment of him is invariably very kind, as is their conduct toward children under all circumstances. Refugio was now technically " finished " or graduated, but his tasks were by no means done. He has before him a life- time of hard and patient study, infinite practice, and fre- quent self-denial. To acquire that marvelous legerdemain which gives the medicine-men their chief prestige is a matter of years of persevering practice. He will have, too, to go tlu'ough innumerable fasts — some of them for as long as eight days — and many other mortifications of the flesh. The life of a medicine-man is as far as possible from an easy one. The responsibility for the welfare of the whole pueblo — here nearly twelve hundred soids — rests upon his shoulders ; and at the cost of his own comfort and health he must secure FINISHING AN INDIAN BOY. 227 blessings for his people and avert all ill from them. His rewards are very few, and entirely disproportionate, except the universal respect wliich he commands. Refugio, by the way, has now earned the proud privilege of smoking. He often comes to me for the wherewithal to roll the little brown cigarettes of the country in his slender fingers. How rare a privilege this is for so young a boy, under the rigid Pueblo etiquette, you will understand better when I have told you something about theii- notions on the subject of smoking. XVIII. THE PRAYING SMOKE. HE use of the pipe of peace by the Indians of the East, who have disappeared before the el- bowing of our ancestors the earth-hungr}-, is f amihar to every reader ; but few are aware how widespread is still the importance of smoking among the surviving tribes of the continent. In the south- west, where the Indian has held his own since the more mer- eiful Spanish conquest — for the real history of later days proves that the Spaniards were not the merciless brutes they were so long termed — the calumet had never any real place, though a few stone pipes have been found here. The cigar- ette is the official form of the weed, and its importance is surprising. In religion, in war, in the chase, and in society it occupies a highly responsible position. It is more to the Indian than is salt to the Arab — equal as a hospitable bond, and extending to countless other uses to which the Ai*abian salt is never promoted. I shoidd not wish to be understood as saying these things of the abominable little white cylinders familiar to the East. Neither Indian nor Mexican has quite fallen to those. The THE PRAYING SMOKE. 229 cigarro of the southwest is not a pestilence. Its component parts are a pinch of granulated tobacco, a bit of sweet-corn husk, or (specially made) brown paper and a twist of the wrist. In my studies in New Mexico I have been much interested in the sacred smoke. It recurs everywhere. There is hardly a folk-story among the Pueblo Indians in which it does not figure prominently. Not a prayer is offered nor a ceremonial conducted without its aid. But for it the land woidd be burned up with drought, and the population harpied away bodily by evil spiiits. No one thinks of being born or dying without the intervention of the cigarette, and to aU the in- termediate phases of life it is equally indispensable. And as befits so vital an article of faith, it is surrounded by rigid restrictions. Thus much is common also to the Mexican population. A Mexican boy would as soon think of putting his head in the fli*e as of smoking before his parents, if he dared smoke at aU — which is very seldom. Many a time on a weary march I have offered the bit of com-husk and the pinch of tobacco to an old man, who accepted gratefully, and another to his grown-up son, who politely but firmly declined, though I could see he was dying for a smoke ; and he would deny himself till night, when he could sneak off up the canon with the precious luxuries and grunt with joy as he puffed away in loneliness and gloom. And many a time I have seen a full-grown man, with mature children of his own, burn his fingers in hastily pinching out his cigarette at the unexpected approach of his aged father or mother. Mexican women 20 230 SOME STEANGE COENERS OF OUE COUNTRY. may smoke after their marriage, but of course with the same restriction. With the Indians the lines are more closely drawn. A woman is not to think of smoking. I have known a case where an Indian girl, who had learned this and other bad habits from the superior race, was caught by her parents with a cigarette in her mouth ; and her tongue was slit at the tip as a warning against such unladylike tricks. The Pueblo lad dare not smoke even by himself before he is twenty-five years old, unless he has estabhshed his warlike prowess by taking a scalp,* or has been given " the freedom of the smoke " upon acquu'ing full membership in one of the branches of medicine-men, like Refugio. And even then he must not smoke in presence of his parents or any one who is his senior, without their direct permission, which is very sel- dom given. In aU Pueblo dealings with their brethren and other In- dians the cigarette is a flag of truce, a covenant, a bond whose sanctity was never violated. When a Pueblo meets any heathen Indian — for all Pueblos rank themselves as Christians — his fii'st act is to toss him the little guaje of tobacco with a corn-husk. He never hands it. If the stranger pick up the offering, there is unbreakable peace between them, and they sit down and smoke the sacred smoke in amity, though their respective people may be at war. If an Indian went out to slay his bitterest foe and * Of course it is now a great while since they have earned the pri\d- lege thus. THE PRAYING SMOKE. 231 in a thoughtless moment accepted a cigarette from him, he would have to forego the coveted scalp. It is only recently that I have been able to settle the mooted question whether the Indians of the southwest smoked before the Spaniards came, three hundred and fifty years ago, for these Indians did not have tobacco until after the conquest. This late but conclusive evidence establishes the fact that they did smoke. The ancient substitutes for tobacco were two herbs known in Tigua as ku-a-ree and ^>Ve- m-hleh. They are much more aromatic than tobacco, but do not, as the Indians observe, "make drunk so much" as our weed. I have been unable to get gi'een specimens of the plants for classification. The dried leaves are brought gi*eat distances from certain spots in the mountains. In the primitive cigarette, which the Tiguans call weer, no paper was used, of course, for this country was then inno- cent of paper ; nor were corn-husks. The iveer was made by punching out the pith of a reed common in the Rio Grande valley, and ramming the hoUow fuU of p'ee-en-hleh or ku-a- ree. All ceremonial cigarettes are so made still; for the browL paper or oja smoke is "not good" for religious mat- ters. The reed, however, may be filled with tobacco instead of the older weeds and stiU be efficacious. Himself an altogether matchless observer, the Indian is equally adept at eluding observation. If he has a secret duty to pei-form when you are around, he will do it be- fore your very face with such sang-froid and such wizardly sleight of hand that you will never dream, what he is doing, 232 SOME (STKANGE COENEKS OF OUK COUNTKY. or that he is doing anything out of the ordinary. I liad watched the sacred-smoke prayer ten thousand times with- out the remotest suspicion of it, and my observation was nei- ther indifferent nor without the sharpening which association with Indians must give the didlest senses. It was only after a hint, and when I came one day to see — myself unseen — an old Indian lighting his cigarette, and noticed that each of the first six puffs was sent in a different direction, that I began to suspect a ceremony and to watch for fm'ther proof. Then I saw that every smoker did the same thing, though, when in company, with an infinite precaution which made it almost imperceptible. The world is full of evil spii'its — nothing else is so ever-present in the Indian mind as the fear of witches — and these must be proj^itiated as weU as the Trues. This cardinal smoking at the outset of the cigarette is both an offering to the Trues and exorcism of witches. It is the collective smoke of the sacred iveer that forms the rain-clouds and brings the rain. Tobacco smoke has not this virtue. In the spring medicine-making, when the year is to be foretold, and at any special medicine-making that may be had to stave off a threatened drought, the whole junta indus- triously smokes weer, to help with its cloud-compelling vapor in the answer of their own prayers for rain. Since in the preparation for one of these ceremonials the medicine-men have to shut themselves up in the medicine-house for from four to eight days — never gomg out, nor eating, nor mo\dng from their appointed seats, and with no rehef save drinking water and smoking — their united efforts in that time make THE PEAYING SMOKE. 233 a cloud sm-ely sufficient iu volume, whatever may be its capacities for precipitation. I have ah*eady told you of the "drawing-dance" before every hunt, wherein the tveer is smoked to blind the eyes of the game ; and that in the hunt itself a steady smoking is kept up by the shamans of the chase for the same pm'- pose. The weer also figures in aU medicine-makings, to dispel witches and for other purposes. In looking into the magic cajete, the Father of All Medicine stoops and blows the sacred smoke slowly across the water in that important bowl, and it is then that he can see in that curious muTor (so he says) all that is going on in the world. The manner in which the film of vapor hovers upon the water or cuils up from it in hasty spirals indicates whether the year will be calm or windy. This smoke mirror is also particularly used in the detec- tion of witches, whom it reveals in their evil tricks, however hidden. When one is sick the male head of the family wraps a few pinches of tobacco in a corn-husk, ties the packet with a corn- husk string, and with this offering goes to the medicine-man and requests him to come and cure the invalid. And it is a sovereign fee — a shaman whose services you cannot hire by whatsoever present of inoney or valuables cannot refuse your request if you come to him with an offering of the weed. This certainly indicates a freedom from avarice which the professional men of more civilized races do not always imi- tate, for the Indian is as fond of his family as are any of us, and would pay his last pony and last silver necklace for the 234 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. curing of his sick if it were demanded. Indeed, tlie whole shaman code of ethics is a very creditable one. The ceremonial weer dare not be lighted with a match or at a common blaze. It can be ignited only from the sacred fii'e in the estufa, a coal from the cacique's house, a flint and steel, or the ancient frre-drUl, which is here a dry, round stick fitting tightly into a cavity in the end of another, and re- volved rapidly from right to left (even in so trivial a matter as this the wi-ong order must be avoided) until the hoUow is sufficiently hot to ignite the primitive tinder under a coaxing breath. Very old men who are True Believers still dislike to light even their pleasure cigarettes in the suspicious mod- ern ways, and will, if possible, pluck a coal in their skinny fingers to start the precious smoke. "When a person dies here, the medicine-men, who come to insure the safety of the departed on his four days' journey to the other world, perform very intricate and mysterious rites, very largely designed to hide his trail from the evil spirits, who would otherwise be sure to follow and harass him, and would very likely succeed in switching him off altogether from the happy land and into " the place where devUs are." Among other things the body is surrounded during these four days with the tracks of the road-runner * to lead the witches on a false trail, and the sacred smoke is continuously blown about that they may not see which way the departed went. * A suiiill phoasaiit. XIX. THE DANCE OF THE SACRED BARK. ^E woiild hardly look for refinements of language among Indians, but, like many of om- other notions about them, this is not fuUy correct. They do use euphemisms, and invent pleasant- sounding phrases for unpleasant things. One of the best examples of this is the manner in which they speak of one of their most savage customs. They hardly ever talk of scalps or scalping ; instead of those harsh words they have very innocent paraphrases. Among my Tigua neigh- bors this ghastly trophy is spoken of as " the sacred hair," or "the oak-bark," or "the sacred bark" — aU very natural Indian metaphors. An important folk-story of Isleta relates how two boys who smoked before they had proved themselves men were reproved by their grandfather, a wise old medicine- man. He told them that before they could be allowed to smoke they must go to the Eagle Feather Mountains (the Manzano range), and bring him some of the " bark of the oak." The youths went out in all innocence and peeled the bark from several trees, and were greatly chagrined when their grandfather sternly told them to go and try again. At 236 SOME STRANGE COENERS OF OUR COUNTRY. last a wise mole solved the riddle for them, and directed them against a band of marauding Navajos, from whose heads the boys got the *'bark" which entitled them thereafter to the privilege of smoking. It is a good many years since my kindly "friends and fellow-citizens" of the pueblo of Isleta have taken a scalp, and they were never universal snatcliers of " the sacred hair." All their traditions assure me that they never did have the habit of scalping Americans, Mexicans, or Pueblo Indians — no Christians, in fact — but only the heathen savages who surrounded them, and for so many bloody centm-ies harassed and murdered ceaselessly these quiet village people. More- over, it has always been against their rule to scalp the women of even these barbarous foes. Some eighteen years must have gone by since the last scalps were brought to Isleta. One of them came at the belt of my pleasant next-door neighljor, Bartolo Jojola. He is one of the official Delight-Makers, or K6-sha-re, and fully competent to hold his own with any civilized clown of the ring. A band of Comanches from over the mountains to the east stole silently into the pueblo one stormy midnight to steal what stock they might. A lot of horses were in a strong corral of pahsades, whose tops were bound with u-on- like ropes of rawhide. One Comanche climbed quietly into the inclosm'e, with the end of a lasso in his hand. He at that end, and a companion outside, sawed the rope back and forth until the rawhides were cut. Then several posts were uprooted, the horses were led out, and off went the robbers THE DANCE OF THE SACRED BARK. 237 and their booty without arousing any one. But at daybreak — for my friends are very early risers — the alarm was given. A posse was organized and followed the robbers across the Rio Grande, across the twenty-mile plateau east of us, and over the ten-thousand-foot Manzano Mountains. At last they overtook the raiders on the edge of the great plains, and there was a fierce fight. The Comanches, who were, as a tribe, the best horsemen America has ever seen, resorted to their favorite tactics of savage and repeated cavalry charges. The Isletehos, though admirable riders, were no match on horseback for these Centam*s of the plains, so they dis- mounted and received the charge on foot. So effective was the fii*e of their flint-locks that the Comanches took to flight. The Isleteiios recovered the stolen horses, besides capturing many new ones and a dozen scalps. Since then there have been none of these ghastly tropliies brought to Isleta ; and yet the scalp plays an important part in the ceremonials of the village, and in a secret niche in the wall of the dark, round estufa rests a priceless horde of the sacred '' barks," which are still taken out and danced over at their due season. The Indian does not take a scalp through cruelty, but just as civilized soldiers fight for and preserve the captured battle-flags of the enemy, as trophies and proofs of prowess in war. Not being refined enough to see the barbarity of taking a physical trophy, he does very much what civilized nations did not many centuries ago, when ghastly heads on pikes were no uncommon sight ; and he takes it chiefly be- 238 SOME STKANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. cause he believes that with it the valor and skill of the former possessor become his own. The scalp is taken by making a rough circle of slashes around the skull, and then tearing off the broad patch of skin and hair by main force. It is a very di'eadful opera- tion, never to be forgotten by those who have once seen it. The trophy must be cured by him who took it, which he pro- ceeds to do with the utmost care. Many magical powers are supposed to reside in the scalp. Even a third party who touches it, by accident or design, becomes possessed of some of its virtues, though he is thereby also forced to certain temporary self-denials. When a war-party returns to the pueblo with scalps it is a very serious matter. They cannot enter the town, nor can their anxious families come out to meet them. If they have been westward after the Apaches, Navajos, or Utes, they make a solemn halt on the center of the Hill of the Wind, a volcanic peak twelve miles west of here ; and if to the east after Comanches, they stop at a corresponding point on their retm'n on the east side of the Rio Grande. There they camp with the scalps, and send one-half their number forward to the pueblo, where they dare not go to their homes, but repair at once to the cacique, and make their report to him. For fourteen days the half who are out on the hills keep their camp, sending out scouts daily to the lookouts in the lava peaks to guard against the approach of an enemy ; and the half who have come to town are secluded in the estufa, fast- ing and forbidden any intercourse with their families. At THE DANCE OF THE SACRED BARK. 239 the end of this two weeks the warriors who have been shut up in the estufa march out and relieve theii* companions in camp, staying there with the scalps while the others come in to fast in the estufa. After fourteen days more the men in camp stai't toward town, those from the estufa meet them half-way, and all enter the pueblo singing " man-songs " (songs of war), and carry the scalps first to the cacique and then to the estufa. Then begins another period of fasting and self-pui'iflcation — twelve days for those who have touched a scalp in any way, and eight days for those who have not. Every act is regulated with the most minute and scrupulous care. The estufa is always smTounded with the utmost sacredness, and its etiquette is more punctilious than anything we know of. The estufa is a building by itself, round and low, with a diameter of from forty to fifty feet. It has no doors in the sides, but is reached by ladders from ground to roof, and fi'oni the roof by another ladder down through a trap-door to the interior. The interior of the estufa is a plain, circular room, mth walls bare, save for a few antlers and rude paint- ings of the sacred animals. One must not forget himself in entering the estufa. Reaching the roof, he must approach the trap-door from the west side, back down the ladder, turn to his right when at the bottom, and make a complete circuit of the room, a foot from the wall, ere he takes his seat in the semicircle around the sacred fire. If he were thoughtlessly to turn to the left in any of these maneuvers, it would be sure death ; for the Trues would let loose on him the ghost 240 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY, of the scalped man, who, clad only in a dark blue breech- clout and with a lasso coiled over his shoulder, would chase and touch him, whereupon he would fall dead ! When they come to leave the estufa they approach the foot of the lad- der from the left, and on reaching the roof turn to the right, walk around the roof, and finally descend to the ground backward, in hard-earned safety. The seat of the cacique is at the west side of the fii*eplace ; that of his fii'st assistant opposite him on the east, and the acolytes fill the semicircle between. In a semicircle around these are the Cum-pa-huit-la-wen, who are guards of the es- tufa ; and in successive semicircles come all the rest of the audience. All face away from the fire until the cacique rises and speaks, when all face toward it, and so remain through the rest of the session. This sacred fire is made only by the Hoo-mah-koon, and must be started with only the sacred fii-e-di'ill or flint and steel. Most of the men present smoke, but never use matches. Their cigarettes must be hghted only at the sacred fire. After the days of preparation in this punctilious spot, the scalp-takers and other warriors emerge to hold the T'li-a- fu-ar, or " Mad Dance," in commemoration of their victor}'. The dance — which is never allowed to be witnessed by strangers — is held in a small square near the estufa. The dancers are formed in two lines, facing each other, with alternate men and women. The men are in their war paint, and each carries a bow and arrow in his left hand, and in his right a single aiTow with the point upward. The women THE DANCE OF THE SACRED BARK. 241 wear theii* gayest dresses and silver ornaments, but carry notliing in their hands. All the dancers move in perfect rhythm to the monotonous chant of the singers and the thump, thump of the big aboriginal drum. The chant is a metrical account of the battle and the manner in which the scalps were taken. As soon as the dance is fau'ly under way, the " Bending Woman" makes her appearance. She is the official custo- dian of the scalps ; has taken them from tlieu" sealed hiding- place in the estufa, and brushed them carefully with a sacred broom made in the mountains ; and now carries them in a buckskin on her back, bending forward under the weight of their importance. As the dancers perform their evolutions she walks slowly and solemnly up and down between their lines with her precious burden. This Mad Dance lasts four entitle days. About seven o'clock on the evening of the last day comes KJiMr-slni-ar, the concluding Round Dance. A big bonfii'e is lighted, and the two parallel lines of dancers deploy around it until they form a large circle, the principal singers dropping out of the ranks, and clustering around the drummer beside the fii'e. The song of the Round Dance is one of the prettiest of all sung by the Pueblos. It really is melodious and " catching." At the end of every phrase the effect is heightened by a cho- rus of high yells, in imitation of the war-whoop or " enemy- yell." Some of the older dancers, to whom the ceremony recalls real memories of their own, add dolefid wails like those of the wounded. The whole performance is weird, but 21 242 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. not savage seeming. It has become merely a ritual — not a rehearsal of ferocity. The chant and the dancing are kept up all night, until sun- rise ends the celebration. All then repair to the estufa 5 the Bending Woman puts the scalps back in their niche, covers it with a jflat slab of stone, and seals it over with mud. The chief of the Cum-pa-huit-la-wen, after a solemn silence, says, "Brothers, friends, a road is given you" (that is, "You are free to depart "), and all file out, free to break their long abstinence, and enjoy themselves until the war-captain shall again summon them to the field. Now that no fresh scalps have been acquired for so long, the old ones are still brought forth at a fixed time, and do duty, as the inspiration of the T'u-a-fii-ar. Tliis dance, how- ever, like many of the other old customs, is not so well kept up in Isleta as in some of the more remote pueblos which have not been so much affected by civilization. The T'u-a- fii-ar which I witnessed here in the fall of 1891 was the first the Isletenos had had in four years, though it should be held yearly. There was another in 1892. XX. DOCTORESfG THE YEAR. ilTH the Pueblo Indians the sick are not the only ones in need of doctoring. The medicine- men — those most important of Indian person- ages — have for patients not only sick people but well ones, and even the crops and the whole year's success. It would seem to a civilized physician a ridiculous affair to prescribe for the seasons and to feel the pulse of the corn-fields ; but my aboriginal neighbors see no incongruity in it. On the contrary, they deem this profes- sional treatment of inanimate things as essential a matter as the care of the sick, and would have no hopes at aU for the success of any year which was not duly provided for at the start by a most solemn dose of " medicine." "Medicine" to an Indian has not merely the restricted sense in which we use it. WaJir (the word used by the Tig- uas) means almost every influence of every sort that affects the human race. The Indian has no idea of blind chance or unintelligent forces. To him everything is sentient ; every influence which is agreeable in its effects is a good spirit or 244 SOME STRANGE COENERS OF OUR COUNTRY. tlie work of a good spirit ; and every influence which harms hiin is, or comes from, an evil sj)U"it. All these influences ai'e "medicines;" and so also, in a secondary sense, are the material agencies used to invoke or check them. The med- ioine-men, therefore, are people with supposed supernatural powers, who use good influences (either visible remedies or spiritual means) to bring welfare to the people and avert evil from them. A medicine-man has also power over the bad influences ; but if he were to use that power to harm people he would be said to ''have the evil road," and would be regarded no longer as a medicine-man, but as a witch — for the obligation to do good deeds only is doubly strong upon those who have powers not given to other men. There are in the pueblo of Isleta countless medicine-mak- ings, little and great, general and special ; but the two most important ones of the year are the Spring Medicine-Making (or Medicine-Dance, as it is often called) to make the season prosperous, and the Medicine-Dance of thanksgi\dug to the good spirits, after the fall crops are harvested. The Spring Medicine-Making, which is called in this lan- guage Tu-shee-wim, is held generally about the middle of March, when the mild winter of the Rio Grande valley is practically done, and it is time to begin opening the great m'igating ditches, and other spring work. Every smallest detail is conducted with the utmost secrecy ; and gentle as these people are, the safety of an American who should be caught spying upon any of these secrets would be very small indeed. For personal reasons it is impossible for me DOCTOEING THE YEAE. 245 to divulge liow I learned the following facts, but I can per- sonally vouch for all of them. When it is felt to be time to forecast and propitiate the year, the first step in the matter is taken by the Chief Cap- tain of War and his seven sub-captains. They come together at his house ; and he sends out the sub-captains to notify all the different branches of medicine-men — of which there are many. Each branch of medicine sends a delegate to the meeting, which proceeds to consider the best manner of tak- ing the fii'st formal step — the presentation of the sacred corn- meal to the Kah-ahm Ch'oom-nin, the two Heads of All Medi- cine. The matter is fully discussed, and is finally put to vote of the meeting. As a rule the Chief Captain of War is chosen for tliis most important mission — unless he chances to be very ignorant of the necessary ceremonial songs, in which rare event one of the sub-captains is selected. On the day after this meeting — which can be held only after sundown — the chosen war-captain, with his associate next in rank, must perform the errand. During the day the wife, mother, or sister of the senior of them carefully selects the best ears from her store of corn, and in a dark room grinds a handfid into meal, on the metate (stone hand-mUl), all the time praying that the errand of the sacred meal may be successful. After sundown the ambassador wi-aps this l)it of meal carefully in a clean square of corn-husk, and ties the packet with a corn-husk string. With this in his right hand he walks gravely to the house of the Head of All Medicine. 24G SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. There are two of these dignitaries in this pueblo, one rep- resenting the Isletehos proper, and the other the Queres* colony here. They always begin as members of some special medicine order, but are promoted by degrees, until they leave their original orders altogether and become the two general and supreme heads of all the orders. To only one of these — the "Father of Here" — does the embassy go. Entering the house, the bearer of the meal and his assist- ant sit down by the fire with the Father of Here, smoke the sacred cigarette to ward off evil spirits, and talk awhile on general matters. After a cigarette or two, the visitors rise and pray to the Trues on all sides to grant them success. The Father of Here of course knows all the time what is coming, but pretends not to hear them at all. Having fin- ished their prayers, they tui'u to addi-ess him directly, teUing him he is desired to make Tu-shee-wim (medicine " for all the village "), to see if the year will be good, and to drive away evil spirits. Then the senior captain hands him the packet of sacred meal, which is always proffered and taken with the right hand only. For either of them to use the left hand in this (or any other) ceremonial would be sure death ! As long as the visitors remain, the Father of Here must hold the meal in his hand. After they are gone, he walks to the house of the Father of the Queres and shares it with him — unless it is already too late at night, in which case he does not go until after sundown the next day. The morning after both the Heads of All Medicine have * Pronounced Kuy-rcss. DOCTOEING THE YEAE. 247 the sacred meal, they meet before sunrise at a point in the sand-hills east of the river. As the sun comes up over the Eagle Feather Mountains, they pray to the Sun-Father long and earnestly. Each now holds the sacred meal in his left hand, and each as he invokes some blessing on the people takes with liis right hand a little pinch of the meal, breathes on it and tosses it toward the sun, until the meal is all gone. They pray that the Trues will send al^undant rain, make the crops large, give plenty of grass for the herds, send good health to the village, etc. And when the meal has all been blown away, they retm'n to the village and summon together their respective original medicine orders. With this morning be- gin the eight days of abstinence, pui'iiication, and preparation . for the gi'eat event. Only the two special branches of medi- cine-men have to keep this ceremonial. The fii'st four days are the "■ Outside Days," when the medicine-men may move about the pueblo and visit friends, but must keep their special fast. Then come the four " Inside Days," and with the beginning of these the medicine-men enter the medicine- house. There each is given a special seat, from which he must not move until the four days are over. In front of each stands a tinaja (jar) of water; and he may drink as much as he chooses, but must not touch a mouthful of food in all those days, nor must a ray of sunlight strike him. The Common Mother, Kai-kl-deh, the wife of the Head of AU Medicine, is the only other soul who can enter that solemn room ; and she sweeps it, brings them water and tobacco for cigarettes, and a sacred coal to light them. Day and night 248 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. the fasters sit and smoke, the older men rehearsing the tradi- tions of the order for the benefit of the younger, who must learn all these stories by heart. Dm-ing all this time, no other person dare even call at the door. At about ten o'clock in the morning of the f om'th Inside Day, any Americans or other strangers who may chance to be in town are sent out or shut up under a good-natm*ed but inflexible sentinel. Then the coast is clear for the Cum-pa-huit-la-wen. Four pairs of these marshals are sent out, one pair to each cardinal point. In passing through the village they wear blankets, but once outside, cast these off and go running swiftly, clad only in tlieii' moccasins and the breech-clout. Besides their inseparable bows and arrows — the insignia of then* office — each pair of guards carries a single "prayer-stick" which has been made that morning by the Head of All Medicine. This prayer-stick is a bit of wood about the size of a lead-pencil, with certain magical feathers bound to it in a certain way, varying according to the object to be prayed for. The guards carry these prayer-sticks a long distance, plant them upright in some lonely and sheltered spot east, north, west, and south of the village, pray over them, and then set out on a long, wild run across country. At last they re- turn to town across the fields and gardens (for these Indians are most industrious farmers) " blowing away the witches." Each guard carries a long feather in either hand, and as he runs homeward he is continually crossing these and snapping one over the other — which is supposed to toss up all evil spirits so that the winds will bear them away. DOCTOEING THE YEAR. 249 The medicine-making (or "dance") begins about eight o'clock that evening in the room where the fasters have kept theii* Inside Days. Before the doors are opened, the medi- cine-men remove their ordinary garments — for medicine- making mnst be done with only the dark -blue breech-clout — and paint theii" faces with yeso (a dingy whitewash made from gypsum) and ahnagre (a red mineral paint). The Father of All Medicine is marked with the ijeso print of a bare hand on the outside of each thigh, and on the chest ; and the two medicine-men who are to be the fu*st perform- ers — always the two who have last been received into the order — are indicated by yeso lightnings on their legs, as a symbol that they are the forerunners. When the door is opened, the people outside remove their moccasins and stand motionless. The medicine-men sing, and the Father of All Medicine goes out to the public. Then he chooses the principal man of them all — always the cacique if that functionary is present — turns his back to him, and puts the tips of the eagle-feathers he carries back over his own shoulders. The cacique takes these tips in his hands, and is thus led into the room followed in single file by the people. He is given the " seat of honor " nearest the medi- cine-men ; and the general public seats itself at will outside a line which has been drawn on the adobe floor about ten feet in front of the medicine-men, sitting only on moccasins and blankets. The shamans are seated in a semicircle, fac- ing the pulilic. The Father of All Medicine sits in the cen- ter, and the rest are ranged on either side of him in the order 250 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. of their rank, so that the two men at the ends of the semi- cii'cle are the newest in the order. In front of each medi- cine-man is the sacred " Mother," the chief implement of all medicine-branches — a flawless ear of white corn, with a tnft of downy feathers at the top, and turquoise ornaments.* And in front of the Father of All Medicine is the cajete (earthen bowl) of sacred water, in whose clear bosom he can see all that is going on in the world ! When the public is seated, the medicine-men sing a sacred song to make the people center theii- thoughts on nothing but the matter in hand. The Enghsh of this song would be about as follows : Now bring the Corn, Our Mother, And all the common corn ; In all our thoughts and words Let us do only good ; In all our acts and words Let us be all as one. While this song is being sung over several times, the two youngest medicine-men rise from their seats on the floor, and step to where a bowl of sacred corn-meal stands before the Father of All Medicine. Here they stand and pray, at each request picking up a pinch of the meal and. blowing part of it toward the Father of All Medicine and part toward the Mother-Corn. Then they go down the aisle, which is kept open, to the door, crossing and snapping their eagle-feathers to toss up and blow away any evnl thought that may be in the crowd. By the time they return to the open space the song * The emblem of the soul. DOCTOEING THE YEAR. 251 is ended and another is begun ; and now the next yomigest pah' of niedicine-nien rise and join the fii'st, going through the same performance. This is kept up till nearly all the medicine-men are on their feet together. Then begins the wonderful sleight of hand, which is the most startling feature of all, and the one which maintains the superstitious power of the shamans over their people. It is described in another chapter. This conjuring, which is the "Medicine-Dance" proper, continues through five songs. Then the performers take their seats for a rest, and smoke cigarettes which the Cum-pa-huit-la-wen roll for them, and presently rise to re- sume their magic. Wlien this medicine-making is done — which is only when all present are cured of all their real or imaginary diseases — comes the equally important Ta-win-Mor-shalm-mee-ee, the sacred "■ going-out-for-the-year." The Father of All Medicine rises, with the two next in rank to himself, and dances awhile. Then he puts on his left hand and arm a great glove of the skin of a liear's fore-leg, with the claws on ; and upon each foot a similar boot from the bear's hind-leg. In the glove he sticks his eagle-feathers ; but his two assistants, who do not have the bear-trappings, carry their feathers in their hands. WliUe these three shamans stand in a row before the assem- blage, the others sing for them a special song : Ai-ay, ai-ay, hyah ay-ah Ay-all, ay-ah, ay-ah ! After the Sun-Father We will follow, follow, follow ! 252 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. When this song is sung a second time, the Father of All Medicine goes behind his two assistants and looks in the sacred cajete, to find if it Ije time to go out. Seeing that it is, he starts on a half-run to the door, followed by the two others. There are always two Cum-pa-huit-la-wen at the door, and one of these accompanies the three shamans. They go to a certain point on the bank of the Rio Grande, and there receive the omens which they declare the river brings down to them from its source in the home of the Trues of the North. Among these tokens are always bunches of green blades of corn and wheat — many weeks before a spear of either cereal is growing out-of-doors within hun- dreds of miles of here. Last year " the river In-ought them " also a live rabbit — which is much more easily accounted for — as a sign that it would be a good year for game. Returning with these articles, they enter the medicine- house, and show them to the whole assemblage. If the leaves are green and lusty, it will be a good year for ci'ops ; but if they are yellow, there will be a drought. Then the three " Goers-Out " lay the articles before their medicine-seats and sit down for a rest. Then the medicine-making song is resumed, and the con- juring begins again, and is kept up almost all night. After a possible witch-chase (described in another chapter) comes the sacred water-giving. The two youngest shamans take the cajefes and carry them before the crowd. To each person they give a mouthful, praying the Trues to give him a clean heart, strength, and health. The recipient does not DOCTOEING THE YEAR. 253 swallow all the water, hut blows a little on liis hands and rubs it upon his body, believing that it will give him strength. After all have had the sacred water, the next ceremony is the Kd-Ji-ee-roon, the " Mother-Shaking." The Father of All Medicine takes up all the (corn) " Mothers," two at a time, and shakes them over the heads of the seated audience, rain- ing a shower of seeds. The people eagerly scramble for these seeds, for it is fii-mly believed that he who puts even one of them with his spring planting will secure a very large crop. All the audience who desii-e now go in front of the semi- circle of seated medicine-men and pray, scattering the sacred corn-meal on the row of ''Mothers." Then all sing a long song, of which the verse has the following meaning : Now ! Now ! Our Mother, Corn Mother ! Her Sun is coming up ! Our Mother, Corn Mother ! Her Sun is arriving ! Our Mother, Corn Mother ! Her Sun is entering ! She is the one who Gives us the road. She is the one who Makes the road. She is the one who Points the road to us ! This song is a sort of benediction, and is sung standing. It is begun when the morning sun is really coming up be- hind the mountains, and the Father of All Medicine can no longer delay to "give them the road" — that is, dismiss the 22 254 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. meeting. He rises and prays to the Trues to bless all present and those who were unable to attend, and to crown the year with success to aU. Then he says : "A road is given you," and the people all file out, and when once outside put on then- moccasins and hurry home. After they are gone, all the women bring to the door offer- ings of food, which are set before the medicine-men by the Common Mother, and they eat heartily after their long and trying fast. What is left is divided among them to be taken home. Having eaten and smoked, the medicine-men wash off the cei'emonial paint, resume their ordinary clothing, close the medicine-house, and return to their homes. That is the end of the Tn-sJiee-unm, and the year is now supposed to be safely started toward a successful issue — which wiU largely depend, however, upon later and special medicine- makings for special occasions and emergencies. XXI. AN ODD PEOPLE AT HOME. |iN this view of the Strange Corners we ought cer- tainly to include a glimpse at the home-life of the Pueblos. A social organization which looks upon children as belonging to the mother and not to the father; which makes it absolutely imperative that husband and wife shall be of different divi- sions of society ; which makes it impossible for a man to own a house, and gives every woman entire control of her home — with many other equally remarkable points of eti- quette — is surely different from what most of us are used to. But in the neglected corners of om* own country there are ten thousand citizens of the United States to whom these curious arrangements are endeared by the customs of im- memorial centuries. The basis of society in the twenty-six quaint town-republics of the Pueblos — communities which are by far the most peaceful and the best-governed in North America — is not the family, as with us, but the clan. These clans are clusters of families — arbitrary social divisions, of which there are from 25G SOME STRANGE COKNEKS OF OUR COUNTRY. six to sixteen in each Pueblo town. In Isleta there are six- teen clans — the Sun People, the Earth People, the Water- Pebble People, the Eagle People, the Mole People, the Ante- lope People, the Deer People, the Mountain-Lion People, the Turquoise People, the Parrot People, the White Corn People, the Red Corn People, the Blue Corn People, the Yellow Corn People, the Goose People, and the Wolf People. Every In- dian of the eleven hundred and fifty in the pueblo belongs to one of these clans. A man of the Eagle People cannot marry a woman of that clan, nor vice versa. Husband and wife 7)iust be of different clans. Still odder is the law of de- scent. With us — and aU ci\dlized nations — descent is from the father ; but with the Pueblos, and nearly aU aboriginal peoples, it is from the mother. For instance, a man of the Wolf Clan marries a woman of the Mole Clan. Their cliil- di-en belong not to the Wolf People but to the Mole Peoi:)le, by birth. But if the parents do not personally like the head man of that clan, they can have some friend adopt the chil- dren into the Sun or Earth or any other clan. There are no Indian family names ; but all the people here have taken Spanish ones — and the children take the name of their mother and not of their father. Thus, my landlady is the wife of Antonio Jojola. Her own name is Maria Gracia Chihuiliui ; and then- roly-poly son — who is commonly known as Juan Gordo, " Fat John," or, as often, since I once photo- gi'aphed him crawling out of an adobe oven, as Juan Biscocho, ''John Biscuit" — is Juan Chihuihui. If he grows up to marry and have children, they wiU not be Chiliuihuis nor Jo- AN ODD PEOPLE AT HOME. 257 jolas, but will bear the Spanisli last name of his wife. This pueblo, however, is changing from the old customs more than are any of the other towns ; and in some families the chil- di*en are divided, the sons bearing the father's name, and the daughters the mother's. In their own language, each Indian has a single name, which belongs to him or her alone, and is never changed. The Pueblos almost without exception now have their childi'en baptized in a Christian chm*ch and given a Spanish name. But those who are " True Believers " in " the Ways of the Old " have also an Indian christening. Even as I wi'ite, scores of dusky, dimpled babes in this pueblo are being given strange Tigua names by stalwart godfathers, who hold them up before the line of dancers who celebrate the spring open- ing of the great main irrigating-ditch. Here the christening is performed by a friend of the family, who takes the babe to the dance, selects a name, and seals it by putting his lips to the child's lips.* In some pueblos this office is performed by the nearest woman-friend of the mother. She takes the child from the house at dawn on the third day after its birth, and names it after the first object that meets her eye after the sun comes up. Sometimes it is Bluish-Light-of-Dawn, some- times Arrow-(ray)of-the-Sun, sometimes TaU-Broken-Pine — * My own little girl, born In the pueblo of Isleta, was formally christened by an Indian friend, one day, and has ever since been known to the Indians as T'hur-be-say, " the Rainbow of the Sun." For a month after her birth they came daily to see her. bringing little gifts of silver, calico, chocolate, eggs, Indian pottery, and the like, as is one of their customs. 258 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. and SO on. It is this custom wliicli gives rise to many of the Indian names which seem so odd to ns. When a child is born in a Pueblo town, a cui'ious duty devolves upon the father. For the next eight days he must keep a fire going — no matter what the weather — in the quaint little fogon or adobe fii^eplace, and see that it never goes out by day or night. This sacred birth-fire can be kin- dled only in the religious ways — by the fire-drill, flint and steel, or by a brand from the hearth of the cacique. If pater- familias is so unlucky as to let the birth-fire go out, there is but one thing for him to do. Wrapping his blanket around him, he stalks solemnly to the house of the cacique, enters, and seats himself on the floor by the hearth — for the cacique must always have a fii-e. He dare not ask for what he wants ; but making a cigarette, he lights it at the coals and improves the opportunity to smuggle a living coal under his blanket — generally in no better receptacle than his own tough, bare hand. In a moment he rises, bids the cacique good-by, and hurries home, carefully nursing the sacred spark, and with it he rekindles the birth-fire. It is solemnly believed that if this fire were relighted in any other manner, the child would not live out the year. The Pueblo men — contrary to the popular idea about aU Indians — take a very generous share in caring for theu' children. When they are not occupied with the duties of busy farmers, then fathers, grandfathers, and great-grand- fathers are generally to be seen each with a fat infant slung in the blanket on his back, its big eyes and plump face peep- I AN ODD PEOPLE AT HOME. 259 ing over his shoulder. The white-hau'ed Governor, the stern- faced War-Captain, the grave Principales — none of them are too dignified to " tote " the baby np and down the courtyard or to the public square and to solemn dances; or even to dance a remarkable domestic jig, if need be, to calm a squall from the precious riders upon their backs. A Pueblo town is the childi'en's paradise. The parents are fairly ideal in their relations to their children. They are uniformly gentle, yet never foolishly indulgent. A Pueblo child is almost never punished, and almost never needs to be. Obedience and respect to age are born in these brown young Americans, and are never forgotten by them. I never saw a "spoiled child" in all my long acquaintance with the Pueblos. The Pueblo woman is absolute owner of the house and all that is in it, just as her husband owns the fields which he tills. He is a good farmer and she a good housewife. Fields and rooms are generally models of neatness. The Pueblos marry under the laws of the chm'ch ; but many of them add a strange ceremony of their own — which was their custom when Columbus discovered America. The l^e- trothed couple are given two ears of raw corn ; to the youth a blue ear, but to the maiden a white one, because her heart is supposed to be whiter. They must prove their devotion by eating the very last hard kernel. Then they run a sacred foot-race in presence of the old councilors. If the gii-l comes in ahead, she " wins a husband " and has a little ascendancy over him ; if he comes in first to the goal, he *' wins a wife." 260 SOME STEANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. If the two come in together, it is a bad omen, and the match is declared off. Pueblo etiquette as to the acquaintance of young people is extremely strict. No youth and maiden must walk or talk together ; and as for a visit or a private conversation, both the offenders — no matter how mature — would be soundly whipped by their parents. Acquaintance between young peo- ple before marriage is limited to a casual sight of each other, a shy greeting as they pass, or a word when they meet in the presence of their elders. Matches are not made by the parents, as was the case with their Mexican neighbors until very recently — and as it still is in many European countries — but marriages are never against the parental consent. When a boy wishes to marry a certain girl, the parents con- duct all the formal " asking for " her and other preliminaries. The very cnrious division of the sexes which the Spanish found among the Pueblos three hundred and fifty years ago has now almost entirely disappeared — as have also the com- munity-houses which resulted from the system. In old times only the women, girls, and young children lived in the dwell- ings. The men and boys slept always in the estufa. Thither their wives and mothers brought their meals, themselves eating with the childi'en at home. So there was no family home-life, and never was until the brave Spanish mission- aries gradually brought about a change to the real home that the Indians so much enjoy to-day. When an Indian dies, there are many curious ceremonials besides the attempts to thi'ow the witches off the track of AN ODD PEOPLE AT HOME. 261 his spii'it. Food must be provided for the soul's four days' jouruey ; and property must also be sent on to give the de- ceased '' a good start " in the next world. If the departed was a man and had horses and cattle, some of them are killed that he may have them in the Beyond. His gun, his knife, Ms bow and arrows, his dancing-costume, his clothing, and other personal property are also " killed " (in the Indian phrase), by burning or breaking them ; and by this means he is supposed to have the use of them again in the other world — where he will eat and hunt and dance and farm just as he has done here. In the vicinity of every Pueblo town is always a "killing-place" — entirely distinct and distant from the con- secrated graveyard where the body is laid — and there the ground is strewn with countless broken weapons and orna- ments, earthen jars, stone hand-mills, and other utensils — for when a woman dies, her household furniture is " sent on " after her in the same fashion. The precious beads of coral, turquoise, and silver, and the other silver jewehy, of which these people have great quantities, is generally laid away with the body in the bare, brown graveyard in front of the great adobe church. XXII. A SAINT IN COURT. jHILE law in the abstract may deserve its repu- tation as one of the driest of subjects, the history of its developmentj provisions, and ap- plications contains much that is curious and interesting. There have been, among different nations and in different ages, laws remarkaljle for eccentri- city ; and as for the astonishing causes in which the aid of justice has been invoked, a mere catalogue of them would be of appalling length. Nor are these legal curiosities confined to bygone ages and half -civilized nations. Oui* own coun- try has furnished laws and lawsuits perhaps as renuirkable as any. Among these suits, none is more interesting than one of the few legal contests in which the Pueblo Indians have ever figured. With these quiet, decorous, kind, and simple-hearted children of the Sun, quarrels of any sort are extremely rare, and legal controversies still rarer ; but there was one lawsuit between two of the principal Pueblo towns which excited great interest among all the Indians and Mexicans of the territory, and the few Saxon -Americans who were then herej which I A SAINT IN COURT. 263 nearly made a war — a lawsuit for a saint ! It was finally ad- judicated by the Supreme Court of New Mexico in January, 1857. It figures in the printed reports of that hig-h tribunal, under the title, '^ The Pueblo of Laguna vs. The Pueblo of Acoma" — being an appeal in the case of Acoma vs. Laguna. Of aU the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, Acoma is by far the most wonderful. Indeed, it is probably the most re- markable city in the world. Perched upon the level summit of a great *' box " of rock whose perpendicular sides are nearly four Imndi'ed feet liigh, and reached by some of the dizziest paths ever trodden by human feet, the prehistoric town looks far across the wilderness. Its quaint terraced houses of gi'ay adobe, its huge church — hardly less wonderful than the pyra- mids of Egypt as a monument of patient toil — its gi-eat reservoir in the solid rock, its superb scenery, its romantic history, and the strange customs of its six hundred people, all are rife with interest to the few Americans who visit the isolated city. Neither history nor tradition tells us when Acoma was founded. The pueblo was once situated on top of the Mesa Encantada (Enchanted Table-land), wliich rises seven hundred feet in air near the mesa now occupied. Four hundred years ago or so, a frightful storm swept away the enormous leaning rock which served as a ladder, and the patient people — who were away at the time — had to build a new city. The present Acoma was an old town when the fii-st Eurojiean — Coronado, the famous Spanish explorer — saw it in 1540. With that its authentic history begins — a strange, weird history, in scattered fragments, for which we must 264 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. delve among the curious "memorials" of the Spanish con- querors and the scant records of the heroic priests. Laguna Ues about twenty miles northeast of Acoma, and is now a familiar sight to travelers on the A. & P. R. R., which skirts the base of the sloping rock on which the town is built. It is a much younger town than Acoma, of which it is a daughter colony, but has a half more people. It was founded in 1G99. One of the notable things about the venerable Catholic churches of New Mexico is the number of ancient paintings and statues of the saints which they contain. Some are the rude daubs on wood made by devout Indians, and some are the canvases of prominent artists of Mexico and Spain. It was concerning one of the latter that the curious lawsuit be- tween Laguna and Acoma arose. There is considerable mystery concerning this picture, arising from the lack of written history. The painting of San Jose* (St. Joseph) was probably the one presented by Charles II. of Spain. Entregas, in his "Visits," enumer- ates the pictures which he found in tlie Laguna church in 1773, and mentions among them " a canvas of a yard and a half, with the most holy likeness of St. Joseph with his blue mark, the which was presented by Oui' Lord the King." The Acomas, however, claim that the king gave the picture to them originally, and there is no doubt that it was in their possession over a hundred years ago. Wlien brave Fray Ramirez founded his lonely mission in * Pronoimced Sahii Ho-zdy. i A SAINT IN COURT. 265 Acoma in 1629, he dedicated the little adobe chapel " To God, to the Holy Catholic Church, and to St. Joseph." San Jose was the patron saint of the pueblo, and when the fine Spanish painting of him was hung on the dull walls of a later church, it became an object of peculiar veneration to the simple na- tives. Their faith in it was touching. Whether it was that the attacks of the merciless Apache might be averted, or that a pestilence might be checked, or that their crops might be abundant, it was to San Jose that they went with prayers and votive offerings. And as generation after generation was born, lived its quaint life, and was at last laid to rest in the wonderful graveyard, the veneration of the painting grew stronger and more clear, while oil and canvas were growing dim and moldy. Many years ago — we do not know the date — the people of Laguna found themselves in a very bad way. Several suc- cessive crops had failed them, winter storms had wrought havoc to house and farm, and a terrible epidemic had carried off scores of children. And all this time Acoma was pros- pering wonderfully. Acoma believed it was because of San Jose ; and Laguna began to believe so too. At last the gov- ernor and principal men of Laguna, after solemn council, mounted theii" silver-trapped ponies, wrapped their costliest blankets about them, and rode over valley and mesa to " the City in the Sky." A runner had announced their coming, and they were formally received by the principales of Acoma, and escorted to the dark estufa. After a propitiatory smoke the Laguna spokesman began the speech. They all knew 23 266 SOME STRANGE COENERS OF OUR COUNTRY. how his pueblo had suffered, while Laguna had no saint on whom they could rely. It was now the first of March. Holy Week was almost here, and Laguna desii'ed to celebrate it with unusual ceremonies, hoping thereby to secure divine favor. Would Acoma kindly lend San Jose to her sister pueblo for a season, that he might bring his blessing to the afilicted town ? A white-headed Acoma replied for his people. They knew how angry Tata Bios had been with Laguna, and wished to help appease him if possible. Acoma needed San Jose's pres- ence in Holy Week ; but she was prosperous and would do without him. She would lend him to Laguna for a month, but then he must be returned without fail. So next day, when the Laguna delegation started home- ward, two strong men carried the precious canvas carefully between them, and that night it hung upon the rudely deco- rated walls of the Laguna church, while hundreds of solemn Indians knelt before it. And in the procession of Holy Week it was borne in a little shrine about the town while its escort fired theii' rusty flint-locks in reiterant salute. Old men tell me that there was a change in the fortunes of Laguna from that day forth. At aU events, when the month was up the Lagunas did not return the boiTowed painting, and the Acoma messengers who came next day to demand it were informed that it would stay where it was unless Acoma could take it by force of arms. The Acomas then appealed to their priest, Fray Mariano de Jesus Lopez, the last of the Franciscans here. He cited the principales of both pueblos A SAINT IN COURT. 267 to appear before liini in Aconia on a certain day, bringing the saint. "When they were all assembled there, the priest ordered a season of prayer that God and San Jose would see justice done in the matter at issue, and after this held mass. He then suggested that they di-aw lots for the saint, to which both pueblos cordially agreed, believing that God would di- rect the result. It was a solemn and impressive sight when all were gathered in the gi'eat, gloomy chui'ch. Near the altar was a tinaja (earthen jar) covered with a white cloth. At each side stood a wee Acoma girl dressed in spotless white, from the pano over her shoulders to the queer, boot-like buck- skin leggings. Beside one of them was the old priest, who acted for Acoma ; and beside the other were Luis Saraceno and Margarita Hernandez, on behalf of Laguna. Twelve ballots were put in the tinaja and well shaken ; eleven were blank, the twelfth had a picture of the saint rudely drawn upon it. "Draw," said Fray Mariano, when all was ready; and Maria thrust her little arm into the jar and di*ew out a ballot, which she handed to the priest. " Acoma, blank ! Draw, Lolita, for Laguna." Lolita dived down and drew a blank also. Maria di-ew the third ballot, and Lolita the fom*th — both blanks. And then a devout murmur ran through the gathered Acomas as Maria drew forth the fifth paper, which bore the little picture of San Jose. " God has decided in favor of Acoma," said the priest, " and San Jose stays in his old home." The crowd poured 268 SOME STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. out of the church, the Acomas hugging each other and thanking God, the Lagunas walking surlOy away. Such a feast had never been in Acoma as the grateful people began to prepare ; but their rejoicing was short-hved. That very evening a strong armed force of Lagunas came quietly up the great stone "ladder" to the lofty town, and appeared suddenly in front of the church. " Open the door," they said to the frightened sacristan, " or we wiU break it down. We have come for the saint." The news ran through the httle town like wild-fire. All Acoma was wild witli gi-ief and rage ; and hopeless as a war with Laguna would have been, it would have commenced then and there but for the counsel of the priest. He exhorted his flock to avoid bloodshed and give the saint up to the Lagunas, leaving a final decision of the dispute to the courts. His advice prevailed ; and after a few houi-s of excitement the Lagunas departed with their precious booty. As soon thereafter as the machinery of the law could be set in motion, the Pueblos of Acoma filed in the District Court of the Second Judicial District of New Mexico a bill of Chancery vs. the Pueblo of Laguna, setting forth the above facts in detail. They also asked that a receiver be appointed to take charge of San Jose till the matter should be decided. The Lagunas promptly filed an answer setting forth that they knew noth- ing of Acoma's claim that the picture was originally given to Acoma ; that by their own traditions it was clearly the prop- erty of Laguna, and that Acoma stole it; that they went A SAINT IN COURT. 269 peaceably to reclaim it, and Acoma refused to give it up ; that Acoma proposed to draw lots for it, but they refused and took it home. Judge Ku'by Benedict, sitting as chancellor, heard tliis extraordinary case, and the evidence being overwhelmingly in favor of Acoma, decided accordingly. The Lagunas ap- pealed to the Supreme Court, wliich after most careful inves- tigation affirmed the decision of the chancellor. In rendering his decision the judge said : ''Having disposed of all the points, . . . the coui't deems it not improper to indulge in some reflections on this interest- ing case. The history of this painting, its obscure origin, its age, and the fierce contest which these two Indian pueblos have carried on, bespeak the inappreciable value which is placed upon it. The intrinsic value of the oil, paint, and cloth by which San Jose is represented to the senses, it has been admitted in argument, probably would not exceed twenty- five cents ; but this seemingly worthless painting has weU- nigh cost these two pueblos a bloody and cruel struggle, and had it not been for weakness on the part of one of the pueb- los, its history might have been written in blood. . . . One witness swore that unless San Jose is in Acoma, the people cannot prevail with God. All these supposed virtues and at- tributes pertaining to this saint, and the belief that the throne of Grod can be successfully approached only tlu'ough him, have contributed to make this a case of deep interest, involv- ing a portraiture of the feelings, passions, and character of these peculiar people. Let the decree below be affii'med." 270 SOME STRANGE jCORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY. This settled the matter, and Acoma sent a delegation to take the saint to his home. Half-way to Laguna they found the painting resting against a tree beside the road, the face toward Acoma. To this day the simple people believe that San Jose knew he was now free, and was in such haste to get back to Acoma that he started out by himself ! The dim and tattered canvas hangs beside the altar in the great church at Acoma still, and will so long as a shred is left. Fray Mariano, who thus averted a destructive war, met a tragic end in 1848. He went out one morning to shoot a chicken for dinner. His venerable pistol woidd not work till he looked into it to see what was the matter. Then it went off and blew out his brains. These are a few of the Strange Corners of our own coun- try. There are very many more, of which others can tell you much better than I. This book is meant to call your atten- tion chiefly to the southwest, which is the most remarkable area in the United States and the most neglected — though by no means the only one worth learning about and seeing. The whole West is full of wonders, and we need not run to other lands to gratify our longing for the curious and the wonderful. The trip abroad may at least be postponed until we are ready to tell those we shall meet in foreign lands something of the wonders of om- own. / iUlMHUJUiMifltlt««Ul*I4