Finding the Worth While in the Southwest

by Charles Francis Saunders

Chin Lee, mentioned above, is not Chinese as it sounds, but the Navajo name of a spacious valley into which Cañon de Chelly debouches. If you have a taste for mythology, it will interest you to know that here, according to tradition, Estsán-atlehi (the chief goddess of the Navajo pantheon and wife of the Sun-god), traveling from the east once camped with her attendant divinities for a great ceremony and a footrace. She was on her way to her home in the great water of the west, where in a floating house she still lives, and receives her lord the Sun every evening when his daily work is finished.[47] There is a trading post at Chin Lee, and beyond the broad flat in front of it is the entrance to Cañon de Chelly. This is a narrow, tortuous rift in the earth, some 20 miles long, whose perpendicular sides of red sandstone rise 800 to 1000 feet. Opening into it are two side gorges, Monument and Del Muerto Cañons. A shallow stream of sweet water—sometimes, however, hidden beneath the sands—creeps along the cañon floor, widens in the plain into the Rio de Chelly, and flowing northward joins the San Juan in southern Utah. So in time does it contribute its bit to the tawny flood that pours through the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.[48]

The interests that hold the visitor in Cañon de Chelly are several. There is, first, the stupendous scenery. Men and animals traversing this level floor seem pygmies at the foot of the smooth, vertical walls, carved and stained by the master-artist Time working through who knows how many milleniums. The windings of the gorge keep one in perpetual expectancy of something going to happen just around the corner, and create an atmosphere of mystery that is little short of thrilling. In places the cañon widens out in sunlit coves and wild-grass meadows, where clustered reeds[49] rustle and wild flowers bloom. Quite as often, though, the walls are so close together that the sunshine never reaches the bottom and the grim surroundings suggest some overwhelming picture of Doré’s.

Then there are the ancient dwellings in the cliffs—little, crumbling cities of the dead. Perched high up in shallow cavities of the flat wall, some are inaccessible except by ladders; others, may be reached by scrambling up talus slopes. One famous one, known as Mummy Cave, in Cañon del Muerto, should by all means be visited; but even more striking is one in the main cañon called La Casa Blanca or the White House. The upper story of this majestic ruin, which strikingly resembles some medieval castle, is colored white; and the whole line of the immense edifice set high above the earth and projected against the dark background of a natural cavity in the enormous cliff, makes a dramatic picture. The effect is heightened when we learn that in Navajo folk-lore it plays a part as the abode of certain genii or minor divinities who, the faithful believe, still haunt the edifice.

In places the cliffs are prehistoric art galleries, adorned with pictographs of unheard-of birds and animals, human hands outspread, geometrical designs, and attenuated figures of men in various attitudes.

Lastly, there is the interest of a present-day Indian life, for the cañon is the free, joyous home of numerous Navajo families, that come and go as fancy dictates. Their hogans, often with a hand-loom for blanket weaving[50] swung from a nearby tree are set inconspicuously here and there at the base of the towering cliffs, wherever there is a bit of land suitable for the raising of corn, beans and melons. Peach orchards, too, are here, from seed of Spanish introduction centuries ago. Flocks of sheep and goats are continually on the move up and down the cañon, which is musical with their bleatings and the wild melody of the shepherds’ songs. It is a picturesque sight at evening to see the homing bands crowding into the primitive folds which sometimes are a mere crevice in the rock walls with a rude fence thrown across the opening.

During the wars which for many years marked the intercourse of the Navajos with the whites—both Spaniards and Americans—the Cañon de Chelly was a notable stronghold of the red men. It was here that in 1864 Kit Carson and his troopers at last succeeded in breaking the backbone of the Indian resistance. Today the Navajos are as peaceable as the Pueblos.

According to Navajo legends, the boundaries of their land were marked out for them by the gods who brought them up through the great reed from the lower world.[51] These landmarks were in the form of mountains especially created for the purpose of earth brought from the lower world, and were seven in number. Of these the Sacred Mountain of the East is believed to be Pelado Peak, 20 miles northeast of Jemes pueblo and it was made fast to the earth by a bolt of lightning; the Sacred Mountain of the South is known to be Mount San Matéo, 20 miles or so northwest of Laguna pueblo, held in place by a great stone knife thrust through it from summit to base; the Sacred Mountain of the West, is the San Francisco Mountain, 12 miles north of Flagstaff, Arizona, fastened down by a sunbeam; and the Sacred Mountain of the North is some one of the San Juan range, which a rainbow held in place. The other three are peaks of the mid-region, only one of which, Hosta Butte in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, has been identified.[52] Two of these mountains are plainly visible from the Santa Fe Railway trains and by motorists following the National Old Trails transcontinental highway—namely, the San Francisco Mountain (12,611 feet) and Mount San Matéo (11,389 feet). Both are extinct volcanoes. The vicinity of Mount San Matéo (which is also known as Mount Taylor)[53] is the scene of a thrilling tradition. There it was that the Navajo Gods of War (children of the Sun and of the Waterfall), mounted upon a rainbow, met and slew with lightning bolts the boy-eating giant, Ye-itso. The latter was a monster so huge that the spread of his two feet was a day’s journey for a man, his footfalls were as thunder, and when he drank his draught exhausted a lake. His head, cut off by the War-gods and tossed away, was changed into El Cabezon, a truncated cone of a mountain visible 40 miles northeast from San Matéo; and his blood flowing in a deluge to the south and west is what we white folk in our ignorance call a hardened lava-flow, as we watch it from the car window for miles westward from McCarty’s. Look at it again with the eyes of faith, and is not its semblance that of coagulated, blackened blood?

So you see in this glorious Southwest we may still follow in the very footsteps of the gods, and regard the world as it seems through the eyes of a primitive and poetic race—see in the lightning the weapon of the red gods, in the rainbows their bridges to traverse chasms withal, in the sunbeams their swift cars of passage. There is something rather exhilarating, I think, to know that in our materialistic America there is a region where the Ancient Ones still haunt as in the youth of the world. To be sure the white man’s schools are operating to break up this primitive faith; but the ingrained genius of a race is not made over in a generation. One may stumble still upon Navajo religious ceremonies, held in the open, with their picturesque rites and maskings and wild music. They differ markedly from the ceremonies of the Pueblos, and are, as a rule, undertaken under the charge of medicine men primarily for the cure of the sick. There are no fixed dates for any of these ceremonies, and casual travelers do not often see them, as they are most likely to be held during the cold weather, when few visitors care to penetrate into the country. An exceedingly interesting adjunct of many of the Navajo rites is the dry sand painting, of a symbolic character and often of striking beauty, made in color upon a prepared flooring of sand. The design is “drawn” on this by dribbling upon it the dry ground pigments—white, red, yellow, black and gray—from between the artist’s thumb and fore-finger. The picture must be done in one day, several men sometimes working upon it at once. When completed the sick man is placed upon it and treated; and after that, the picture is obliterated.[54]

CHAPTER IX
THE HOMES OF THE HOPIS, LITTLE PEOPLE OF PEACE

Now that the automobile has become a common mode of travel even in the desert, you may reach the pueblos of the Hopi Indians quite comfortably from Gallup.[55] The distance is about 130 miles to the first of the villages. The road is via St. Michael’s (where the Franciscan Brothers maintain a Mission for the Navajos); Ganado, where Mr. J. L. Hubbell’s trading post stands; and Keam’s Cañon, where Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell, hospitable son of a hospitable father, has another trading post. As far as Ganado (70 miles) the way is identical with the first part of one road to the Cañon de Chelly. From Ganado westward there are 60 miles of pure wilderness, semi-desert, treeless, but in summer and autumn splendid in places with sheets of wild flowers in purple and yellow. On every hand—sometimes near, sometimes afar—are the characteristic mesa formations of the Southwest carved by the elements into curious shapes to which the fancy readily suggests names. One that you will pass is a strikingly good model of a battleship’s dismantled hull, and goes by the name of Steamboat Rock—a pleasant conceit for this desert, which, the geologists tell us, was once a sea bottom. Nowhere is sign of humanity, save perhaps, some wandering Navajos or a chance traveler like yourself.