For an Agent who wishes to evade responsibility, the “judges” are an excellent smoke-screen. He can always say—“It was done by the prisoner’s own people”: Pilate’s method. Aside from its having all the elements of farce, it breeds dissatisfaction and ill will among the people, while teaching them nothing. I know of nothing more unjust, unless it be the trial of an unlettered Indian according to the strict letter of white man’s law and the unwavering standard of the white man’s boasted morality.
Thereafter I paid the salaries, and pleasantly chatted with the old gentlemen when they visited the Agency; but of their legal wisdom I wanted nothing. The Court proceeded to business without them.
So large an area of country, nearly four thousand square miles, occupied by two dissimilar tribes and these ancient enemies, should have some measure of control. The police force I found consisted of three individuals, two Navajo and one lonesome Hopi. The Agent had found things so peaceful that he did not need police; which is one way of saying that he did not bother himself about policing the Empire. And when the first serious bit of police work became necessary, after five years of peaceful neglect, the War Department, at the request of the Secretary of the Interior, detailed one hundred and twenty-five men of the Twelfth Cavalry as an “escort” to Colonel Hugh L. Scott. This officer of long experience at Indian diplomacy was sent to review the situation and conditions. The work completed, he recommended to the Secretary of the Interior that the Indian Agent should have a force of not less than twenty men, in charge of a white officer. The [[136]]Department, therefore, being unable totally to ignore the opinion of the famous Colonel Scott, increased my police to eight men, all natives, and left me to whatever success I could contrive. In 1921 Major-General Hugh L. Scott told me that he had not changed his opinion.
The Hopi do not make good policemen, and certainly not in a cohort of one. Their very name implies “the peaceful ones.” Their towns are ruled largely by pueblo opinion. If a resident acquires the reputation of being unreasonable and unfeeling, as a policeman often must, his standing in the outraged community may affect all other phases of his life. Therefore the Hopi is not likely to become a very zealous officer when operating alone. And too, the Hopi fear the Navajo, as it is said the Navajo fear the Ute, and are useless when removed from the neighborhood of their homes.
But many years ago, when the Hopi were sorely pressed by nomad enemies and had not even the consolation of telling their woes to an Indian Agent, they sent emissaries to their cousins, the Pueblo Indians of what is now New Mexico, and begged for a colony of warriors to reside with them. In response to this plea, and looking for something to their advantage, in 1700 came a band of the Tewa from Abiquiu on the Chama River, from that section where Onate found San Juan de los Caballeros. To these people the Hopi granted a wide valley west of the First Mesa, known as the Wepo Wash, providing they would stay and lend their prowess in future campaigns. They built a village atop the First Mesa, now called Tewa or Hano, where their descendants live to-day. Some intermarried with the Hopi, and a few with the near-by Navajo; but they have not been absorbed, and it is a curious fact that while all the Tewa speak Hopi and Navajo with more or [[137]]less fluency, after two centuries of living side by side few of the Hopi can speak the Tewa dialect.
The Hopi invited warriors, and the warriors have graduated into policemen, for one learns to police the Hopi districts, and even to discipline some of the Navajo, with Tewa officers. They are dependable and courageous, even belligerent; that is to say, they will fight when it is necessary and, strange thing among desert Indians, with their fists, taking a delight in blacking the opponent’s eye. But one has to learn that the Hopi as policemen are fine ceremonial dancers.
The Navajo cohort had been selected following a frontier fallacy. Many of the old Agents believed that a good police force could be built from the “bad men” of the community.
“The cattle-thief will know all other cattle-thieves,” was their reasoning. “The gambler will not be deceived as to those who waste their herds and silver playing monte. And the meaner an Indian among his own, the more respect and fear he will stimulate when garbed in a uniform and authorized to pack a gun.”
As reasonable as if New York officials should make a special deputy of Gyp the Blood.