And I think it will kill me or cure,
So I think I will go there an’ see.
[[101]]
X
THE PROVINCES OF THE “MOHOCE OR MOHOQUI”
It now remains for me to tell about this city and kingdom and province, of which the Father Provincial gave your Lordship an account. In brief, I can assure you in reality he has not told the truth in a single thing that he said, but everything is the reverse of what he said, except the name of the city and the large stone houses.—Don Francisco Vasquez Coronado to Don Antonio de Mendoza, First Viceroy of New Spain, August 3, 1540
I am now glad that I went to the Painted Desert and entered Hopi-land before the advent of the automobile. The going then was a picturesque if toilsome journey. After two days in a farm-wagon loaded with my plunder, I reached the first back-country trading-post, and met the official I was to succeed. That old store at Indian Wells, with its back against the hills, seemed a fanciful place in the twilight of a summer’s day. Across a wide plain lifted purple mesas gashed with red clays, and Rabbit-ear Butte stuck its two inquisitive peaks into the evening sky. There was something far removed in the atmosphere and setting of Indian Wells, something of true desert solitude.
Next day we wended northward across Hauke Mesa, passing the White Cone, a solitary bleached-out pyramid that marks the southeast corner of the Hopi Reservation. Two huge white horses drew us; not a very fast pace, but decidedly a sure one. The vehicle was a mountain spring-wagon, [[102]]and its one wide seat served three of us, the driver and I simple figures in comparison with the gentleman I was to relieve. He was a large, pompous man, who had sought the Southwest for his health and had not found all of it, principally because he had not arrived soon enough, and also because he was continually fretted by the vision of his former importance. He had come from the East from a much larger Governmental position. In fact, he had been quite within the shadow of the Cabinet, and was bulwarked with political tradition. He knew the President personally, and immediately told one so; and when he came into the Desert he wore—Suffering Pioneers!—a top hat.
It takes a long time to make forty miles in a wagon of that type, whatever the entertainment of political conventions and presidential anecdotes.