Next morning, when Mother Josephine, of Miss Drexel's Mission School, drove us back to the Franciscan's house, we saw proofs of a second volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a combined glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and crafts and legends and religion; a work of which a French academician would be more than proud. Then he shows us what will easily prove the masterpiece of his life—hundreds of drawings, which, for the last ten years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for their legends, of all the authentic, known patterns of their blankets and the meanings, of their baskets and what they mean, and of the heavenly constellations, which are much the same as ours except that the names are those of the coyote and eagle and other desert creatures instead of the Latin appellations. Lungren and Burbank and Curtis and other artists, who have passed this way, suggested the idea. Someone sent Father Berrard folios of blank drawing boards. Sepia made of coal dust and white chalk made of gypsum suffice for pigments. With these he has had the Indian medicine men make a series of drawings that excels anything in the Smithsonian Institute of Washington or the Field Museum of Chicago. For instance, there is the map of the sky and of the milky way with the four cardinal points marked in the Navajo colors, white, blue, black and yellow, with the legend drawn of the "great medicine man" putting the stars in their places in the sky, when along comes Coyote, steals the mystery bag of stars—and puff, with one breath he has mischievously sent the divine sparks scattering helter-skelter all over the face of heaven. There is the legend of "the spider maid" teaching the Navajos to weave their wonderful blankets, though the Hopi deny this and assert that their women captured in war were the ones who taught the Navajos the art of weaving. There is the picture of the Navajo transmigration of souls up the twelve degrees of a huge corn stalk, for all the world like the Hindoo legend of a soul's travail up to life. You must not forget how similar many of the Indian drawings are to Oriental work. Then, there is the picture of the supreme woman deity of the Navajos. Does that recall any Mother of Life in Hindoo lore? If all ethnologists and archæologists had founded their studies on the Indian's own account of himself, rather than their own scrappy version of what the Indian told them, we should have got somewhere in our knowledge of the relationships of the human race.
Father Berrard's drawings in color of all known patterns of Navajo blankets are a gold mine in themselves, and would save the squandering by Eastern buyers of thousands a year in faked Navajo blankets. Wherever Father Berrard hears of a new blanket pattern, thither he hies to get a drawing of it; and on many a fool's errand his quest has taken him. For instance, he once heard of a wonderful blanket being displayed by a Flagstaff dealer, with vegetable dyes of "green" in it. Dressing in disguise, with overcoat collar turned up, the priest went to examine the alleged wonder. It was a palpable cheat manufactured in the East for the benefit of gullible tourists.
"Where did your Indians get that vegetable green?" Father Berrard asked the unsuspecting dealer.
"From frog ponds," answered the store man of a region where water is scarce as hens' teeth.
Father Berrard has not yet finished his collection of drawings, for the medicine men will reveal certain secrets only when the moon and stars are in a certain position; but he vows that when the book is finished and when he has saved money enough to issue it, his nom de plume shall be "Frog Pond Green."
If we had been a party of men, we should probably have been put up at either the Franciscan Mission, or Day's Ranch; but being women we were conducted a mile farther down the arroyo to Miss Drexel's Mission School for Indian boys and girls. Here 150 little Navajos come every year, not to be transformed into white boys and girls, but to be trained inside and out in cleanliness and uprightness and grace. There are in all fourteen members of the sisterhood here, much the same type of women in birth and station and training as the polished nobility that founded the first religious institutions of New France. Perhaps, because the Jesuit relations record such a terrible tale of martyrdom, one somehow or other associates those early Indian missions with religions of a dolorous cast. Not so here! A happier-faced lot of women and children you never saw than these delicately nurtured sisters and their swarthy-faced, black-eyed little wards. These sisters evidently believe that goodness should be a thing more beautiful, more joyous, more robust than evil; that the temptation to be good should be greater than the compulsion to be evil. Sisters are playing tag with the little Indian girls in one yard; laymen helpers teaching Navajo boys baseball on the open common; and from one of the upper halls comes the sound of a brass band tuning up for future festivities.
We were presently ensconced in the quarters set aside for guests; room, parlor and refectory, where two gentle-faced sisters placed all sorts of temptations on our plates and gathered news of the big, outside world. Then Mother Josephine came in, a Southern face with youth in every feature and youth in her heart, and merry, twinkling, tender, understanding eyes.
Presently, you hear a bugle-call signal the boys from play; and the bell sounds to prayers; and a great stillness falls; and you would not know this was Navajo Land at all but for the bright blanketed folk camped on the hill to the right—eerie figures seen against the pink glow of the fading light.
Next morning we attended mass in the little chapel upstairs. Priest in vestment, altar aglow with lights and flowers, little black-eyed faces bending over their prayers, the chanting of gently nurtured voices from the stalls—is it the Desert we are in, or an oasis watered by that age-old, never-failing spring of Service?