The always cautious Hopi approached this experiment gingerly. He is suspicious of Greeks bearing gifts. When he promises to pay, he expects to pay; and too, I did not rush forth, laden with money and generosity, to crowd them into debt. Between 1914 and 1915, my scruples having been argued away by a squad of non-visioning clerks who now wish that they had possessed a little less enthusiasm, I did advance $10,627 to the Hopi Indians. This money was placed in wagons, harness, and livestock. Within four years they had repaid seventy-five per cent [[238]]of the advance, and of the remainder it was estimated that not more than $300 would be lost.
So the frontier work went on. We were building schools, quarters, and a hospital; fighting dirt, disease, and superstition; improving livestock, and selling it, and washing wool; experimenting with trees and plants; hawking bonds, and lending money, and holding court; checking traders’ prices and guaranteeing Navajo blankets; policing Snake Dances, trapping bootleggers, and offending tourists; meantime struggling with the summer floods, and the mud and quicksands afterward, and the winter drifts. When the roads were destroyed, we somehow rebuilt them—and then prepared to rebuild them again.
THE CORN ROCK: AN ANCIENT BARTERING-PLACE OF THE INDIANS
A Second Mesa landmark, seen for miles across the Desert
The Desert was a busy place. And when daylight failed, I reported it all to an unappreciative, often snarling Bureau, twenty-six hundred miles away, that understood little and corrected less, while it asked senseless questions that must be answered, made foolish decisions, and prepared for the field as many handicaps as distant ignorance and lack of sympathy could contrive.
There were compensations, however. Drives along the mesa ledges and across the wide vacant valleys gave time for planning; and each excursion was an adventure. At five miles the hour a sturdy team does not demand the alertness that an auto compels at twenty. Traffic did not bother one. Only an occasional flock of sheep, a straying pony, or a somnolent freight-team blocked the road. The drowsy hours of midday, filled with the humming noises of the Desert, blessed by sunshine and the wondrous panorama of the Empire, could make up for many frontier irritations.
Sometimes one caught vistas into forgotten ages. Far away across the lower plain, as at the edge of a greenish [[239]]sea, lifted those strange shapes, the Moqui Buttes. I had seen them frozen in a pallid sky; again half lost in the fog and swirls of dust-storms; and again as drifting mounds, with the one farthest west like a flat-headed Sphinx, touching the clouds; and always they had been somnolent headlands, half obscured. But one November day the sun burnt winter gold, and magic touched the Desert. It stretched a placid sea along their coast line of Parrish blue, that richest color of the fairies; and the many peaks were flat against a golden screen. Some lonely galley, heeling under old sails, was all it lacked; and I paused on the mesa-ledge to catch the sound of surf on enchanted beaches. The Coast of Romance! It would have ensnared that wanderer of the Greeks:—
My purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths