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“Yes,” you are startled to hear him comment aloud; “The advanced class in idiocy will now recite. Required: 2000 tons of coal, now mined within two miles of the bunkers, costing $1.50 per ton. Would it not be efficacious, not to say superb and miasmic, to purchase at Gallup, ship in cars one hundred miles to Holbrook, and thence haul eighty miles in wagons at one cent per pound cartage? Total cost, $27.00 per ton delivered, plus handling-losses and slackage. Ask me?”
But this inane query, signed by the Commissioner without reading, as he talked of the November elections with Congressman Grampus, must be answered. The record must be fixed in the mausoleum of files. The Agent will finally deny himself to Indians having real business requiring his attention, will neglect other duties, while he laboriously composes a fulsome answer, figuring the cost to five decimal places, and proving that $1.50 per ton in hand, supervised, is cheaper than $27.00 per ton on the road. He recommends—of course respectfully—that he be authorized to continue mining the coal God gave the Indians, until such time as the field may be leased to a syndicate; and then, with true official loyalty to those who arrange leases, to purchase from the syndicate, thus maintaining a perfect parity between whites who need money and Indians who do not need coal.
Before you harshly judge this desert pessimist, reflect a bit. He will be found sufficiently educated to issue you a permit. In the long nights of winter he has time for reading and reflection. The ignorance of the Desert is slowly disappearing before education; but no one has endowed a grammar school for the relief of those you place in Washington.
Classes in simple geography and numbers would help. [[248]]
Each season more and more people come to view the Prayer for Rain. Not all are strangers. Many Navajo ride in from the ranges, tribal differences for the moment forgotten, just as they attend the fiestas of the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico; and the Hopi are equally hospitable with food and fruit at this their gala time. Many white guests repeat, year after year. Next to our trading friends, the Hubbells, father and son, who undoubtedly hold the record as to regular attendance, there is an engineer of the Indian Service who has viewed more Snake Dances than any other seriously engaged man. My own record is not insignificant. But this class is at home in the country, with business or duties or friendship to excuse it.
It is the sort of outing that true sons of Arizona enjoy. Carl Hayden, of Congress, has kept one eye on a Snake Dance and both ears open to Hopi conditions. Governors Hunt and Campbell have been found there repeatedly, and Governor Hunt has sought to preserve its record in pictures for the State Capitol at Phoenix and the museum of the University of Arizona at Tucson. In these men the Hopi have had good friends, and at least one Moungwi found them filled with understanding of the Desert and its peculiar conditions.
At Walpi one has a fit setting for a theatrical ceremony. Roosevelt wrote of it, “In all America there is no more strikingly picturesque sight.”
The place of the dance is a narrow shelf at the very edge of the mesa. The houses of the people, tier on tier, terraced into little balconies, form a back-drop. Through these houses, and leading from the shelf, a tunnel gives on to another street. The ledge is simply a continuation of the rock roadway that skirts the brink of the village, [[249]]overhanging the wide First Mesa Valley. There is a sheer drop from this edge, straight down at least sixty feet, to the masses of shattered stone and drifted sand that buttress the mesa and shelve off hundreds of feet more into the orchards. At each end of this shelf is an underground kiva, marked by its projecting ladder-poles. A curiously eroded rock seems to balance at one end of the little plaza, between the houses and the precipice. Before Walpi was evolved for purposes of defense, this rock existed. Probably it was because of this freak that the place was selected for the rites of the tribe.
The ground-area available to spectators and dancers measures about ninety feet in length and not more than thirty in width. This approximate twenty-seven hundred square feet must contain about forty Indian actors and a large percentage of the mob, to say nothing of the snakes, a most important and active feature of the meeting, among which are many rattlers. It is like staging a nervous ballet on the cornice of the Woolworth Building, knowing that fifty mice will be turned loose on signal.