Hopi Woman preparing Corn Meal for making Doughnuts.
Nor is this all. In days gone by they were surrounded by predatory foes. Physical endurance was an essential condition of national preservation. Without it they would long ago have been starved or hunted out of existence. The gods called upon them to preserve their national life, to live by cultivation of endurance, hence the imposition of physical tasks as a religious exercise.
And these morning runs of the young men were of ten, twenty, and even more miles, taken without any other food than a few grains of parched corn.
It is no uncommon thing for an Oraibi or Mashonganavi to run from his home to Moenkopi, a distance of forty miles, over the hot blazing sands of a real American Sahara, there hoe his corn-field, and return to his home, within twenty-four hours. The accompanying photograph of an old man who had made this eighty-mile run was made the morning after his return, and he showed not the slightest trace of fatigue.
For a dollar I have several times engaged a young man to take a message from Oraibi to Keam's Canyon, a distance of seventy-two miles, and he has run on foot the whole distance, delivered his message, and brought me an answer within thirty-six hours.
One Oraibi, Ku-wa-wen-ti-wa, ran from Oraibi to Moenkopi, thence to Walpi, and back to Oraibi, a distance of over ninety miles, in one day.
When I was a lad I got the impression somehow that Indians made fire by rubbing two sticks together. Once or twice I tried it. I got two sticks, perfectly dry, and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. But the more I rubbed, the cooler the sticks seemed to get. I got hot, but that had no effect on the sticks.
Later in life, when I began to make my journeys of exploration in the wilds of Nevada, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and I sometimes needed a fire, and didn't have a single match left, I tried it again; this time not as an experiment, but as a serious proposition. My rubbing of the two sticks, however, never availed me a particle. I might as well have saved my strength for sawing wood. Yet the Indians do get fire by the rubbing of two sticks together, and the occasion of their doing it is one of the greatest and most wonderful of the religious ceremonies of the Hopis. Dr. Fewkes has written for the scientific world a full account of it, and from that account I condense the following.
Few white men have ever seen the ceremony, and did they do so and tell the whole of what they saw they would not be believed.