Sometimes the mescal is pounded and eaten raw, and again it is pounded, soaked in plenty of water, partially fermented, and the liquor used as a drink.
The fruit of the tuna (a-te-e) is sometimes pounded and rolled into a large mass, dried, and put away for future use. Thus prepared it will keep for a long time, very often being brought out a year after, when the new crop is nearly ripe.
Other natural vegetable foods of the Wallapais are a black grass seed (a-gua-va), white grass seed (i-eh-la), the acorn and the pinion nut (o-co-o).
The shamans and others sometimes take the jimson-weed (smal-a-ga-to´-a), pound it up, soak it, and drink the decoction. It is a frightful drink, producing results worse than whiskey. For a time the debauchee sees visions and dreams dreams, then he becomes crazy and frantic, and then, exhausted, tosses in a quieter delirium until restored to his senses, to be nervously racked for days afterwards. The Havasupais are so bitter against its use that their children are brought up to regard it as one of the most dangerous and evil of plants.
Until Miss Calfee, of the Indian Association, was sent to work among the Wallapais, they had so entirely neglected the art of basket weaving as to let it almost entirely die out amongst them. By her endeavors, however, it has been resuscitated, and now there are quite a number of fairly good Wallapai baskets made. The inordinate love of bright colors manifested by the average white tourist—note I say tourist, and not Indian—is so completely perverting the taste of the Wallapais as to render it almost impossible to buy a basket which contains only the primitive colors. These are mainly the white of the willow and the black of the martynia. A straw-color, a yellow, and a red are also native with them, the dyes being vegetable and mineral secured from plants, roots, and rocks close at hand. Some of the younger girls have set themselves to learn the art, and one of them is already most successful. She is a bright and cheerful maiden, and the basket she holds in her lap is of her own manufacture. The design is worked out in martynia. It represents the plateaus and valleys of her home, and the inverted pyramid is the tornado or cyclone. It is her prayer to Those Above to keep the cyclone in the centre of the plateaus so that no injury may be done to her parents' corn-fields, melon-patches, and peach-trees which are in the canyon depths.
The Wallapais have had the same trouble about the white man seizing the best land on their reservation that most other tribes have been subject to. When the reserve was set apart by executive order a man named Spencer was living on land included therein, and he claimed two of the finest of the springs, one, that of Mattaweditita, being their most sacred of places. He was soon murdered, whether by Indians or whites I am unable to say, and no one occupied these springs until a man named W. F. Grounds, regardless of the executive order, took possession of, and claimed, Mattaweditita to the exclusion of the Wallapais. This he sold to a man named J. W. Munn. Later he and Munn had quarrels about it and both claimed it. Then the Indian Agent interfered, and, finding that the Indians had always claimed it as their own, that it was on their reserve, and that they actually wished to continue to cultivate it, he ordered both men to leave. Grounds had about seventy-five head of cattle and Munn had a garden. The latter vacated quietly, but Grounds brought back his cattle after they were removed. In the meantime the Indians had planted their gardens, and when the cattle came in their crops were speedily demolished. Again the cattle were removed and again brought back. About this time some one generously gave to the Indians, or left where they could be picked up, some melons or cucumbers or both, of which fourteen of the Wallapais living in Mattaweditita Canyon partook. Of the fourteen, thirteen sickened and died. Of course there was no way of fastening this dastardly and cowardly crime upon any one, but whites as well as Indians are pretty generally agreed as to who was its perpetrator.
The few remaining Indians were now given wire to fence in the canyon, but the old animals of Grounds' herds pushed the wires down in their eagerness to get to and eat the Indians' wheat. The trails were now fenced, and this proved an effectual bar. Later this exemplary white man turned a band of saddle horses into an Indian's garden on the reservation for pasturage. This brought upon him an order of exclusion from the reservation and a command to entirely remove his stock within a year. Whether this has been done or not I am unable to say, although the Department at Washington confirmed the order and required that it be done.
During all this squabbling it can well be imagined how the crops of the Indian suffers; but what must be his conception of white men, their government, and their justice?