The railroad passes almost through the lower streets of Laguna; so that when you look up, you see tier upon tier of streets and three-story houses up and up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill. You get off at Laguna, but do not waste much time there; for the glories of Laguna are past. Long ago—in the fifties or thereabouts—the dam to the lagoon which gives the community its name broke, letting go a waste of flood waters; and since that time, the men of Laguna have had to go away for work, the women only remaining constantly at the village engaged herding their flocks and making pottery. Perhaps it should be stated here in utter contradiction to the Herbert Spencer school of sociology that among the Hopi the women not only rule but own the house and all that therein is. The man may claim the corn patch outside the town limits, where you see rags stuck on sticks marking each owner's bounds; or if he attends the flocks he may own them; but the woman is as supreme a ruler in the house as in the Navajo tribe, where the supreme deity is female. If the man loses affection for his spouse, he may gather up his saddle and bridle, and leave.
"I marry, yes," said Marie Iteye, my Acoma guide, to me, "and I have one girl—her," pointing to a pretty child, "but my man, I guess he—a bad boy—he leave me."
If the wife tires of her lord, all she has to do is hang the saddle and bridle outside. My gentleman takes the hint and must be off.
I set this fact down because a whole school of modern sex sociologists, taking their cue from Herbert Spencer, who never in his life knew an Indian first hand, write nonsensical deductions about the evolution of woman from slave status. Her position has been one of absolute equality among the Hopi from the earliest traditions of the race.
At Laguna, you can obtain rooms with Mr. Marmon, or Mr. Pratt; but you must bring your luncheon with you; or, as I said before, take chance luck outside at the section house. A word as to Mr. Marmon and Mr. Pratt, two of the best known white men in the Indian communities of the Southwest. Where white men have foregathered with Indians, it has usually been for the higher race to come down to the level of the lower people. Not so with Marmon and Pratt! If you ask how it is that the pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are so superior to all other Hopi communities of the Southwest, the answer invariably is "the influence of the two Marmons and Pratt." Coming West as surveyors in the early seventies the two Marmons and Pratt opened a trading store, married Indian women and set themselves to civilize the whole pueblo. After almost four years' pow-wow and argument and coaxing, they in 1879 succeeded in getting three children, two boys and a girl, to go to school in the East at Carlisle. To-day, those three children are leading citizens of the Southwest. Later on, the trouble was not to induce children to go, but to handle the hundreds eager to be sent. To-day, there is a government school here, and the two pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are among the cleanest and most advanced of the Southwest. Fifteen hundred souls there are, living in the hillside tiered-town, where you may see the transition from Indian to white in the substitution of downstairs doors for the ladders that formerly led to entrance through the roof.
Copyright by H. S. Poley
A Hopi Indian weaving a rug on a hand loom in a deserted cave
Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers perched sheer hundreds of feet straight as arrow-flight above the plain, you can count the number of doors on one hand. Acoma is still pure Hopi. Only one inhabitant—Marie Iteye—speaks a word of English; but it is Hopi under the far-reaching and civilizing influence of "Marmon and Pratt." The streets—1st, 2nd and 3rd, they call them—of the cloud-cliff town are swept clean as a white housewife's floor. Inside, the three story houses are all whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy the roof of the first story. Perhaps a burro may stand sleepily on the next roof; but then, the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the porthole of a ship looking out over the precipice across the rolling, purpling, shimmering mesas for hundreds and hundreds of miles, till the sky-line loses itself in heat haze and snow peaks. The inside of these third story rooms is spotlessly clean, big ewers of washing water on the floor, fireplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways opening to upper sleeping rooms and meal bins and corn caves. Fancy being spotlessly clean where water must be carried on the women's heads and backs any distance up from 500 to 1,500 feet. Yet I found some of the missionaries and government teachers and nuns among the Indians curiously discouraged about results.
"It takes almost three generations to have any permanent results," one teacher bewailed. "We doubt if it ever does much good."