In late afternoon we crossed the sandy waste of the Jedito Wash, and passed out of it by a steep rocky road that ascended a high mesa. A short distance to the left were the ruins of Awatobi, that once important pueblo of Tusayan, where Tovar had his first view of and encounter with the “Mohoce or Mohoqui” of the Spanish chronicles. This meeting occurred twenty-five years before the settlement of St. Augustine, and eighty years before the gentlemen from Plymouth reached the historic New England Rock. He was accompanied by that intrepid soldier-priest, Fray Juan de Padilla, who later retraced Coronado’s trail into the mysterious and legendary country of Quivira, there to be martyred, the first white man to meet death in the present State of Kansas.
After the conquest of Cibola, or Zuni, Tovar was dispatched by Coronado to locate the seven cities of the Mohoqui. Notwithstanding the fighting in the Zuni provinces, [[103]]the coming of pale men who rode strange animals and carried sticks that discharged lightning, it would appear that the Hopi knew nothing of these happenings. Tovar, leading a company of cavalry and footmen, crossed into their country without discovery, and encamped one night before a Hopi pueblo. It is recorded that they approached close enough to hear the people talking in their homes. Morning revealed the Spanish spears.
A little later came Cardenas, searching for the great cañon of the West; and Espejo in 1583; and then Onate in 1598, who was the first to make permanent settlements among the Pueblo Indians. It was Onate who established the missions, and one was built at Awatobi between 1621 and 1630, so Fray Alonzo de Benavides, the first custodian of missions in these provinces of New Spain, reported to his King.
Before the founding of Boston by Winthrop, when Charles I was King of England and Laud was Archbishop of Canterbury, a Franciscan friar named Porras ministered to the Hopi in the Tusayan provinces. In June 1633 he died there by poison. In this same year Galileo appeared before the Inquisition. Strange contrasts!
When the great Pueblo rebellion occurred in 1680, the mission at Awatobi was destroyed by the Hopi, and its friar, Fray José de Figueroa, was killed.[1] When came De Vargas, bent on reconquering the Pueblo people, he halted before Awatobi on November 19, 1692. The friars [[104]]planned a return to their duties among the Hopi, and it would appear that the Awatobans, or a part of them, received these advances. Because of this the pueblo of Awatobi was suddenly destroyed in the latter part of 1700 by pagan Hopi from the other mesas. It is said that many of the warriors were stifled in the ceremonial kivas, and the women and children were carried off as captives. During the early years of the eighteenth century, Spanish officials and priests still contemplated a return to this territory, but the efforts were abortive, although as late as 1748 friars visited the Second Mesa country to return fugitive Indians of the Pueblos proper to their homes in the valley of the Rio Grande. Most of these were Sandias, the remnant of this band now living close to Albuquerque, New Mexico; and when I took charge of the Pueblo Indians in 1919, the Sandias above all others evidenced characteristics that were not new to one who had sat in council with their ancient hosts.
In 1911 only a series of low walls, the pueblo foundations, were discernible at Awatobi. The place of the old Spanish mission could not be determined. The blowing desert sand had quite nearly reclaimed the site to solitude and unbroken sterility. But following the sacred customs of their forefathers, the Hopi were still making trouble for their guardians.
My predecessor told me how he had sought to quiet this antagonism. At great expense he had taken the old chief, Youkeoma, and several of his retainers, on a trip to and through the East. At Washington they were honored by an audience with President Taft. The power and the glory of the American nation, it was thought, would overwhelm the savage. He might as well have taken a piece of Oraibi sandrock to see the Pope. Not even the [[105]]size of President Taft impressed the old spider-like Hopi prophet, as he afterward told me in diplomatic confidence. Youkeoma returned as sullen and determined as before, made some new medicine with corn meal and feathers, and then repudiated the whole hegira, including President Taft, telling his people that he had seen nothing of importance, received no counsel that contained wisdom, and that he sincerely doubted those men were chiefs of anything. Certainly they were not the mythical Bohannas that the Hopi—following their own version of the Messianic legend—expect to come and rule them. And then, having refused to do that which Washington had urbanely decreed, he sat down in his warren of a pueblo, amid the sand and the garbage, to await whatever the white man might see fit to do about it.
That was my inheritance.
Toward evening in the cañon country the sun grows a bit more burnishing. Ahead of us appeared a space in the cedars, and beyond that rift one could see a more distant desert, rising as a sunlit moor, but quite removed—as if one looked across a chasm. A little later the team tipped forward on a rocky ledge. With brakes applied, we began to grind downward—it seemed to me, straight down. On the left, walls of rock arose in sheer plane-faces, and to the right I gathered that there was nothing at all: just an empty hole, beginning two feet from the outer wheels, and nicely garnished with huge boulders awaiting some driver’s bad judgment.