XVII
SERVICE TRADITION
When first, as an employee of the Government, I answered the grave salutation of the red man, the buffalo roamed at will over the great plains of the Sioux country; the iron horse had not crossed the Minnesota boundary; the dull, plodding ox was the courier and herald of the culture that was stowed in embryo in the prairie schooner; Chicago was just beginning to throw off its swaddling-clothes under a blanket of smoke; St. Paul was the frontier to the Northwest … and that was only a generation ago.—McLaughlin: My Friend, the Indian
The work of this reservation was that of a frontier. Until the late nineties, army officers, acting as agents, had administered affairs from Fort Defiance, distant about eighty-five miles from the First Mesa of the Hopi. The country between these points is rough, and in winter often impassable. The commanding officer did not make the two days’ journey frequently, and when he did, entertainment at trading-posts would occupy most of his time. There were no other local stations. Until 1887 no official of this Government resided permanently within the Hopi territory; so that, from Spanish times until that date, these Indians had received little attention.
In 1886 a petition, signed by twenty Hopi head-men, requested Washington to give them a school, that their children might “grow up good of heart and pure of breath.” But one of these men, Honani of Chimopovi, always a friendly chief, is now alive. Shupula, who signed [[211]]as Second Chief of the Moki, died, a benign old man, in 1917.
So in 1887 a school was started in Keams Cañon, at the site of one of Carson’s old camps, a picturesque alcove of the walls having a group of springs, and where Tom Keams, a trading Englishman, had long kept a post. Twelve years later a resident Agent, having authority to act as one in complete charge, was appointed.
Between the years 1890 and 1916, sub-Agents and the later Agents accomplished much permanent work for the people. The first school was succeeded by a modern training school in the lower Cañon. An Agency radiated orders and the tools of civilization. In the field at the pueblos were six day-schools to care for the younger children. Five hundred pupils attended regularly. The Indian youngsters advanced from the kindergarten and primary day-schools to the training school, where they received some knowledge of trades, and from thence to the larger non-reservation schools, patterned after Carlisle, such as are at Albuquerque, New Mexico; Phœnix, Arizona; Riverside, California.
But not only in point of education had there been progress. Tracks of the reserve had become roads, as the Indians were supplied wagons and implements; and ascending the rocky mesas, linking the different villages, were highways that had been cut from the solid rock, and that, considering the means and cost, were fair pieces of engineering. The Agents had built and enlarged the schools, and had opened mines to supply the winter fuel. The live stock of both tribes—for the Navajo came to this Agency—showed improvement. A most important advance had been made in medication. Three physicians attended the several districts. Trachoma had been greatly [[212]]reduced. There was no longer the dread of uncontrolled epidemics, such as that one of smallpox that nearly wiped out the Hopi in 1780. And after 1913 a well-appointed hospital received the serious cases, especially those requiring surgical treatment. Between 1911 and 1919 vaccines were freely used to combat smallpox, typhoid, tetanus, pneumonia, and influenza. The Pasteur treatment was given. Surgery, minor and major, was a matter of routine, and with low mortality.