Slain at Zuni and Cañon de Chelly,[1]
By the Mesa Black and at Santa Fe;
One of them killed by a Pecos clown,
One of them dropped by Walpi town.
—Song of the Spanish Bell
The Hopi live in northern Arizona, surrounded by the reservations of the Navajo. They speak a Shoshonian dialect, and are often miscalled Moqui. The Department for forty years libeled them under this misnomer. Moqui is a Hopi term, and has been used against them by Navajo to signify anything inert, unpleasant, cowardly, dead. The dignified Navajo has another distinct title for the [[196]]Hopi, and uses it when filled with courtesy. Moqui is probably a Keresan word originally, since it is found as “motsi” in Cochiti and San Felipe pueblos of the Rio Grande, whose warriors and rebels fled to the Hopi country for sanctuary after the rebellion of 1680.
Near the centre of that huge space on the Arizona map marked “Moqui Reserve” are the Hopi towns. These were known to the Spanish conquistadores as the Seven Cities of Tusayan. There are now nine pueblos.
In that early hour of geologic time when the receding waters carved the great gorges in the face of northern Arizona, the more resistant sandstones and clays and coals were left as shattered cliffs, and from these reach out many bony headlands—long fingers, at the crumbling tips of which, like villages clinging to a rocky coast, are the eyries of the Hopi. Below them, as sea-floors, are the sandy valleys and drifting dunes of the Painted Desert.
THE WALPI HEADLAND, SEEN FROM THE DESERT ORCHARDS