It was disappointing—a lonely, dreary place. No trees or hedges relieved the starved-looking site. There was little to be proud of. As for the natural beauties, one must grow to feel the majesty of worn rocks, tinted in all the shades of weathering sandstone, from saffron through gold to ruddy brown, toned to a thousand delicate hues by the stunted cedars and diversified cacti that struggled from every crevice. In the springtime there would be flowers in the crannies, winsome purple and pink flowers, with here and there the blazing scarlet of the Indian paintbrush; and in springtime too would come the great flocks of migratory birds. [[107]]
Why build in such a place? The answer is that stereotyped one affecting everything in the Desert—water. At the upper end of this cañon lived the springs. Water could be brought to the site without great expense. There was enough to furnish a small settlement, and more than could have been harnessed cheaply at any other point of the territory when the plant was built. Water in greater quantity has been discovered since; but there were no “water-witches” in the provinces of the Mohoqui prior to 1910.
All that day the thunder had muttered sullenly, and occasionally a few drops of rain had fallen on us. It was too early in the year to expect a shower of any consequence, so my guides told me. It was June, and the red-bellied clouds that the Snake priests watch for do not appear until late August, when they herald the Snake Dance and prove Hopi wisdom; then cloudbursts send torrents through these cañons, and flood the plains, and guarantee the harvest. But, just as we drove up the main road, came a sharp downpour that settled into a rare thing indeed—a steady summer rain.
A group of Indians stood close as we alighted. This was a delegation of welcome, for the tribes are very curious. A Navajo grunted, “Nahtahni.” And a Hopi said something that brought smiles to their faces; it was interpreted to me as we shook hands around. He said, “You must be a good Chief, for you bring the rain.”
The Agency consisted of an office and quarters and shops for the clerks, farmers, and mechanics, and there was a school for about one hundred and fifty pupils of the grammar grades. This was a boarding-school and, in addition to teachers, it had a corps of cooks, matrons, [[108]]laundress, and seamstress, all necessary to the work. In the field, close to the pueblos of the Indians, were five day-schools, serving from fifty to one hundred and twenty children each, and stations for physicians, field-nurses, and range men. Therefore the equipment, furniture, and stores of six small settlements had to be inventoried and receipted for at any change of directors.
The outgoing Agent was anxious to have his papers signed, that he might be off to his next post in further search of health. For two weeks we labored over those accounts, and it seemed that it would require another three months—as it did—to adjust and compare and reduce them to something approximating accuracy. So the major part of it was arranged conditionally between us, and I filed my official signature, together with bond for thirty thousand dollars, and we two shook hands as cordially as it was possible for men to do who had been debating for a fortnight.
In this manner I became Indian Agent for twenty-two hundred Hopi Indians of the Pueblo stock—maligned under a stupid Departmental label as “Moqui”—who would call me “Moungwi”; and for a trifle more of Navajo, the nomads of the desert, who would title me “Nahtahni,” very likely Nahtahni Yezzi, meaning Little Chief. They had undoubtedly named my predecessor Nahtahni Tso, Fat Chief.
That time of inventory I recall as a bad dream. Every conceivable article of useless equipment had been dumped and carefully preserved at that post. The greatest care had been taken of the most useless. Once, when the tailors of Chicago were long on swatches, they presented them to the Indian Service, and to save storage the warehouse custodian had promptly shipped them to the most distant [[109]]point, the Moqui Agency, in the hope and quite sure belief that they would never come back. Aside from transcontinental railroad charges, Indian wagoners had hauled such precious supplies from the receiving station, one hundred miles, at a cartage of one cent per pound. So it was with hundreds of lamp-chimneys that never fitted a lamp, clothing too small for infants or too large for giants, machetes that were needed in the Cuban cane-fields, tools that Noah would have spurned, and broadcast seeders for use where the Indians plant corn with ceremonial sticks. One warehouse was jammed with wagon-repair material, spokes, fellies, bolsters, and so on, of dimensions that must have been current in the period of the pioneers.
Some of this waste had been the result of stupid ordering, while much of it grew from the system of yearly contracts, neither of which has changed unto this day. Smith furnishes wagons one year, by virtue of being the lowest bidder, and one must have Smith’s repair-parts. Next year Brown has the contract, again by virtue of being the lowest and therefore cheapest bidder; and part of Smith’s material is a dead loss to the Service.