And if you let your mind slip back to still remoter eras, you are lost in a maze of antiquities older than the traditions of Egypt. Draw a line from the Manzano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and Laguna and Acoma and Zuñi and the three mesas of Arizona to Oraibi and Hotoville for 400 miles to the far west, and along that line you will find ruins of churches, temples, council halls, call them what you will, which antedate the coming of the Spaniards by so many centuries that not even a tradition of their object remained when the conquerors came. Some of these ruins—in the Manzanos and in western Arizona—would house a modern cathedral and seat an audience of ten thousand. What were they: council halls, temples, what? And what reduced the nation that once peopled them to a remnant of nine or ten thousand Hopi all told? Do you not see how the past of this whole Enchanted Mesa, this Painted Desert, this Dream Land, is more romantic than fiction could create, or than picayune historic disputes as to dates and broken crockery?
A Hopi wooing, which has an added interest in that among the Hopi Indians, women are the rulers of the household
There are prehistoric cliff dwellings in this region of as great marvel as up north of Santa Fe; north of Ganado at Chin Lee, for instance. But if you wish to see the modern descendants of these prehistoric Cliff Dwellers, you can see them along the line of the National Forests from the Manzanos east of Albuquerque to the Coconino and Kaibab at Grand Cañon in Arizona. Let me explain here also that the Hopi are variously known as Moki, Zuñi, Pueblos; but that Hopi, meaning peaceful and life-giving, is their generic name; and as such, I shall refer to them, though the western part of their reserve is known as Moki Land. You can visit a pueblo at Isleta, a short run by railroad from Albuquerque; but Isleta has been so frequently "toured" by sightseers, I preferred to go to the less frequented pueblos at Laguna and Acoma, just south of the western Manzano National Forests, and on up to the three mesas of the Moki Reserve in Arizona. Also, when you drive across Moki Land, you can cross the Navajo Reserve, and so kill two birds with one stone.
Up to the present, the inconvenience of reaching Acoma will effectually prevent it ever being "toured." When you have to take a local train that lands you in an Indian town where there is no hotel at two o'clock in the morning, or else take a freight, which you reach by driving a mile out of town, fording an irrigation ditch and crawling under a barb wire fence—there is no immediate danger of the objective point being rushed by tourist traffic. This is a mistake both for the tourist and for the traffic. If anything as unique and wonderful as Acoma existed in Egypt or Japan, it would be featured and visited by thousands of Americans yearly. As it is, I venture to say, not a hundred travelers see Acoma's Enchanted Mesa in a year, and half the number going out fail to see it properly owing to inexperience in Western ways of meeting and managing Indians. For instance, the day before I went out, a traveler all the way from Germany had dropped off the transcontinental and taken a local freight for the Hopi towns. When a tourist wants to see things in Germany, he finds a hundred willing palms out to collect and point the way; but when a tourist leaves the beaten trail in America, if he asks too many questions, he is promptly told to "go to—" I'll not say where. That German wasn't in a good mood when he dropped off the freight train at Laguna. Good rooms you can always get at the Marmons, but there is no regular meal place except the section house. If you are a good Westerner, you will carry your own luncheon, or take cheerful pot luck as it comes; but the German wasn't a good Westerner; and it didn't improve his temper to have butter served up mixed with flies to the tune of the landlady's complaint that "it didn't pay nohow to take tourists" and she "didn't see what she did it for anyway."
They tell you outside that it is a hard drive, all the way from twenty-five to thirty miles to Acoma. Don't you believe it! For once, Western miles are too short. The drive is barely eighteen miles and as easy as on a paved city street; but the German had left most of his temper at Laguna. When he reached the foot of the steep acclivity leading up to the town of Acoma on the very cloud-crest of a rampart rock and found no guide, he started up without one and, of course, missed the way. How he ever reached the top without breaking his neck is a wonder. The Indians showed me the way he had come and said they could not have done it themselves. Anyway, what temper he had not left at Laguna he scattered sulphurously on the rocks before he reached the crest of Acoma; and when he had climbed the perilous way, he was too fatigued to go on through the town. The whole episode is typically characteristic of our stupid short-sightedness as a continent to our own advantage. A $20 miner's tent at Laguna for meals, another at Acoma, a good woman in charge at the Laguna end to put up the lunches, a $10 a month Indian boy to show tourists the way up the cliff—and thousands of travelers would go in and come out with satisfaction. Yet here is Acoma, literally the Enchanted, unlike anything else in the whole wide world; and it is shut off from the sightseer because enterprise is lacking to put in $100 worth of equipment and set the thing going. Is it any wonder people say that Europeans live on the opportunities Americans throw away? If Acoma were in Germany, they would be diverting the Rhine round that way so you could see it by moonlight.
Being a Westerner, it didn't inconvenience me very seriously to rise at four, and take a cab at five, and drive out from Albuquerque a mile to the freight yards, where it was necessary to wet one's feet in an acequia ditch and crawl under a barb wire fence to reach the caboose. The desert sunrise atoned for all—air pure wine, the red-winged blackbirds, thousands of them, whistling sheer joy of life along the overflow swamps of the irrigation canals. The train passes close enough to the pueblo of Isleta for you to toss a stone into the back yards of the little adobe dwellings; but Isleta at best is now a white-man edition of Hopi type. Few of the houses run up tier on tier as in the true pueblo; and the gorgeous skirts and shirts seen on the figures moving round the doors are nothing more nor less than store calico in diamond dyes. In the true Hopi pueblo, these garments would be sun-dyed brown skin on the younger children, and home-woven, vegetable-dyed fabric on the grown-ups. The true Hopi skirt is nothing more nor less than an oblong of home-woven cloth, preferably white, or vegetable blue, brought round to overlap in front under a belt, with, perhaps, shoulder straps like a man's braces. A shawl over nature's undergarments completes the native costume; and the little monkey-shaped bare feet cramped from long scrambling over the rocks get better grip on steep stone stairs than civilized boots, though many of the pueblo women are now affecting the latter.
The freight train climbs and climbs into the gypsum country of terrible drought, where nothing grows except under the ditch, and the cattle lie dead of thirst, and the wind blows a hurricane of dust that almost knocks you off your feet.