The Indians of the Painted Desert Region: Hopis, Navahoes, Wallapais, Havasupais

by George Wharton James

Well, never mind what I, in my, what I still believe to be, just anger threatened. I turned away, went and secured an Indian's house, and that night we removed there.

But I wish I had the space to recount how those two unfortunates and misfortunates cooked their own meals and mine and Bass's. It is a subject fit for a Dickens or a Kipling. No minor pen can do justice to it. How they came and asked with quiet humility, "What are we going to have for supper?" and how I replied, "Raw potatoes, so far as I am concerned!" Neither knew whether a frying-pan was for skimming cream from a can of condensed milk or for making charlotte russes. Neither could boil water without scorching it. But surreptitiously (with my secret connivance) Bass gave the tyros gentle hints and finally "licked them" into fourth-rate cooks, so that I reaped the reward of their labors in selfishly and shamelessly taking some of the concoctions they had slaved over.

I know this plain, unvarnished tale reveals me a "bad man from Bodie," but I started out to give a truthful account of the Painted Desert and its storms, and this "tempest in a frying-pan" in camp cannot well be ignored by a veracious chronicler.

Last year, fate designed that we camp at exactly the same spot. The two wagons came to rest at about the same place where the ambulance stood, and exactly the same wind and sand-storm blew up before we had been there half an hour. I had with me a long, eight-feet-high strip of canvas belonging to a very large circular tent. To ward off the force of some part of the storm we stretched this canvas from the trunk of one cottonwood tree to another, and moved our camp to the sheltered side. That was an insult to the powers of the storm. The wind fairly howled with rage, and pulled and tugged and flapped that canvas in a perfect fury of anger. Then as we huddled in its shelter, a sudden jerk came, and up it was ripped, from top to bottom, in a moment, and the loose ends went wildly flying and flapping every way. In the blowing sand I fled with the ladies to Mr. Voth's ever-hospitable house, but it was as hot as—well! no matter—in there. Outside, the cottonwoods were bowed over in the fury of the wind, and the sand went flying by in sheets. It was easy then to understand the remark of one experienced in the ways of the Painted Desert Region: "If you ever buy any real estate here, contract to have it anchored, or you'll wake up some morning and find it all blown into the next county." The flying sand literally obliterated every object more than a few feet away.

Now in this last case I had the pleasure—as peculiar a pleasure as it is to watch the coming of a hurricane at sea—to see the oncoming of this storm. We were enjoying perfect calm. Suddenly over the Oraibi mesa there came a great brown mass that stretched entirely across the country. It was the tawny sand risen in power and majesty to drive us from its lair. It was so grand, so sublime, so alive, that just as I instinctively rush to my camera at sight of an interesting face, I dashed towards it to secure a photograph of this new, gigantic, living manifestation. But in its fierce fury it swept upon us with such rapidity that I was too late. We were covered with it, buried in it. As darkness leaps upon one and absorbs him, so did this storm absorb us. In an hour or so its greatest fury subsided; then we thought we would build our camp-fire and proceed to our regular cooking. How the wind veered and changed, and changed again as soon as the fire began to ascend. That is a point to watch in building a camp-fire. Be sure and locate it so that its smoke won't blow upon you when you sit down to eat. In this case, however, it would not have mattered. In my notebook I read: "We have changed the camp-fire three times, and no matter where we put it, the smoke swoops down upon us. Even now while I write I am half blinded by the smoke, which ten minutes ago was being blown in the opposite direction." So that if these few pages have an unpleasant odor of camp-fire smoke about them, the reader must charge it to the wilful ways of the wind on the Painted Desert.

Elsewhere I have spoken of the mystery brooding over the peoples of this land. It is also existent in the very colors of it, whether noted in early morning, in the glare of the pitiless Arizona noon, or at sunset; in the storm, with the air full of sand, or in the calm and quiet of a cloudless sky; when the sky is cerulean or black with lowering clouds; ever, always, the color is weird, strange, mysterious. One night at Walpi several of us sat and watched the colorings in the west. No unacquainted soul would have believed such could exist. To describe it is as impossible as to analyze the feelings of love. It was raining everywhere in the west; and "everywhere" means so much where one's horizon is not limited. The eye there roams over what seem to be boundless distances. In all this space rain was falling. The sun had but half an hour more to live, and it flooded the sky with an orange crimson. The rain came down in hairy streaks brilliantly illuminated. The sun could be discerned only as a dimly veiled face, with the light shed below it—none above—in graceful curves. Then the orange and crimson changed to purple, deepening and deepening into blackness until day was done.

Sometimes the lighting up of the desert in the early morning gives it the effect of a sea-green ocean, and then the illusion is indescribably wonderful. At such times, if there are clouds in the sky, the reflections of color are as delicate and beautiful as the tintings of the sea-shells.

One night standing on the mesa at Mashonganavi looking east and south, the vast ocean-like expanse of tawny sand and desert was converted by the hues of dying day into a gorgeous and resplendent sea of exquisite and delicate color. On the further side were the Mogollon Buttes,—the Giant's Chair, Pyramid Butte, and others,—with long walls, which, in the early morning black and forbidding, were now illumined and etherealized by the magic wand of sunset.

If, however, one would know another of the marvellous charms of this Painted Desert Region let him see it in the early summer, after the first rains. This may be the latter part of June or in July and August. Then what a change! One seeing it for the first time would naturally exclaim in protest: "Desert? Why, this is a garden!"

A thin and sparse covering of grass, but enough to the casual observer to relieve the whole land from the charge of barrenness; the black and white grama grasses, with their delicate shades of green; and a host of wild flowers of most exquisite colors in glorious combinations. Here masses of flaming marigolds and sunflowers; yonder patches of the white and purple tinted flowers of the jimson-weed, while its rich green leaves form a complete covering for the tawny sand or rocky desolation beneath. Here are larkspurs, baby blue-eyes, Indian's paint brush, daisies, lilies, and a thousand and one others, the purples, blues, reds, pinks, whites, and browns giving one a chromatic feast, none the less delightful because it is totally unexpected.