IN THE MESQUITE FOREST ON OUR WAY TO THE SALTON SEA.
The other day I went photographing on the Salton Sea. When the launch stopped twenty feet from the island covered with pelicans, where I wished to make photographs, I shouldered my camera, stepped out into the water, which came up to my thighs, and walked ashore. The engineer wondered. Why should he? Had I waited, the pelicans would have flown away. Speed was necessary. “Niceness” would have prevented my getting what I went for. When I stand on the lecture platform, or in the pulpit, or in the drawing-room; when I meet ladies in the parlor and go with them for an automobile ride, I dress as neatly as I can afford, and endeavor to look “nice;” but when I go into my garden to work, I put on blue overalls, a flannel shirt, and a pair of heavy shoes, and I try not to be nice. I roll around in the dirt, I feel it with my hands, I revel in it, for thus, I find, do I gain healthful enjoyment for body, mind, and soul. I owe many things to the Indian, but few things I am more grateful for than that he taught me how to value important things more than “looking neat” and being “nice.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE INDIAN AND PHYSICAL LABOR
Ministers and orators, teachers and statesmen, members of the W. C. T. U., as well as the Y. M. C. A., of the white race, all profess to believe that the white race believes in the dignity of physical labor.
That profession is often a lie.
We no more believe in the dignity of physical labor than we do in the refinement of a hog. Our actions give the direct lie to our words. I am writing with the utmost calmness, and say these strong words with deliberate intent. As a nation we are humbugs when we pretend to believe in the dignity of labor. Perhaps, after all, we do believe in it, but in most cases it is not for ourselves, but for “the other fellow.”
On the other hand, the Indian really and truly believes in the dignity of physical labor. A chief would just as soon be “caught” dressing buckskin, or sewing a pair of moccasins, or irrigating his corn-field as lolling on a Navaho blanket “smoking the pipe of peace.” With the white race this is not so. Men believe in the dignity of labor as much as they do in the brotherhood of man. They would no more be seen doing physical labor—wheeling a wheelbarrow, for instance, digging a ditch, building a wall, plowing a potato patch, or doing any other physical work, save the few things men are allowed to do without being thought peculiar, as, for instance, taking care of a small home garden, taking the ashes out of the furnace, and things of that kind—than they would be seen picking their neighbors’ pockets or burglarizing their houses. When they want to gain exercise they go to some indoor gymnasium, where the air is the breathed-over, dead air of a hundred people, and they swing dumb-bells, pull on weights, struggle frantically on bars, and do other similar and fool-like things, because, forsooth, these things are gentlemanly; or they go out and swing golf-clubs and pursue a poor innocent little ball over the “links,” while gaping caddies look on at their wild strokes, and listen to the insane profanity with which they try to compel themselves to believe that they are “gentlemen, bah Jove!”
A HAVASUPAI GIRL, WEAVER OF BASKETS.
Of all the contemptible, shuffling, and mean subterfuges the white race is capable of, this seems to me to be about the meanest and most contemptible. To pretend to believe in the dignity of labor, and then at any and all opportunities afforded to labor to dodge away and do these useless and selfish things that do not take off one ounce of the burden of physical labor we have imposed upon our fellows.