It was a hot sweltering desert day in July when I proceeded westward from Oraibi to survey for the first time the contentious pueblo of Hotevilla, Chief Youkeoma’s retreat. I did not expect to meet this strange personality, but his very name caused me to have an interest in so rare a character: You-ke-o-ma, or “something quite nearly complete”—as one might say, “almost perfection.” An American Dalai Lama.
Several miles beyond the little grotto of the Oraibi war-gods, a concealed shrine of quaint images, passing that place where Youkeoma’s adherents lost the contest to decide their traditional rights in the town of Oraibi, one came to a wall of shattered rock. These Hotevilla cliffs have little of dignity; they picture chaos, as it was left by the rending and scarring of some violent earthquake in the ages gone. To-day the ubiquitous Ford may ascend that wall on a wide and evenly graded roadway, because I grew tired of risking my neck there; but it was not so in 1911. My team had a tug of it up a dipping and winding trail that the Indians, under guard, no doubt, had crudely torn from the masses of tumbled sandstone.
The second steppe was dotted with thicket from which, on the winds of springtime, stirs the fragrance of heliotrope. There were patches of deep sand, and more of rock [[143]]outcroppings, and then appeared the fields of the natives, irregular gardens of corn and beans and melons, growing profusely. These people can make a rock-quarry bloom and produce food. The Hotevilla are always one year ahead of famine. At some time in the past they must have suffered desperately from crop-failure, and that bitter lesson taught them never again to trust a single harvest.
The pueblo itself was on the westernmost edge of the mesa. There, where the rocks dropped away again in huge broken steps, overlooking the vast Dinnebito Wash country, they had built their curious little houses of stone and mud. If not balanced on the edge of a precipice, apparently the Hopi are not happy. Fatalists—when the aged or blind plunge over it is regretted, but not grieved about sufficiently to disparage the site. Alcoves of the mesa benches were fenced with cottonwood boughs, and served as hanging balconies for their burro stock. They had no cattle, few sheep, and fewer horses; in fact they were and are the poorest of the Hopi people, having rejected all tenders of acquisition and progress; but in those things that do not run counter to the traditions, such as cornmeal and burros, they have great wealth.
There was one man with me, and he advised against going down into the village. Indeed, I was not inclined to insist on it, for coincident with our topping the last rise the roofs of the highest houses had been posted with guards, watching, watching us in an ominous manner: a custom that prevailed for many years, and one that causes the stranger to feel a trifle less than comfortable.
“Very likely they feel that we slipped up on them,” I said to my companion.
“Not at all,” he replied. “They have been expecting you for days. They knew when you arrived at Oraibi [[144]]yesterday. Be sure of it, old Youkeoma has gone underground and will remain in hiding until the coast is clear. Those watching fellows simply want to know where you go and when you depart. If we sought to take off a kid or two to school, there’d be a fine row. They know we have no backing. I’ll bet they knew when you left the Agency and started out this way.”
All of which proved to be true, and I had later to learn to circumvent and deceive such mysterious methods of information.
We sat on a baking sand-hill and surveyed the place. It was simply a dirtier duplicate of the other pueblos I have described, without their picturesque setting. And if there is a place in America where aroma reaches its highest magnitude, then that distinction must be granted Hotevilla on a July afternoon. The sun broils down on the heated sand and rock ledges, on the fetid houses and the litter and the garbage, and all that accumulates from unclean people and their animals. Multitudes of burros and chickens and dogs. Hosts of dogs. Lank, slinking, half-starved, challenging dogs. Poisonous-looking dogs that would attack one.
Hotevilla’s sloping streets end at the mesa-edge, and below are the sacred spring and their sunlit fields. Far away in the northwest, as a dim blue sail on the horizon, showed Navajo Mountain, that peak of Indian mystery where the last of their secrets have found refuge. The Hopi had migrated from that country centuries past, south to the Little Colorado River; and then, like the back-wash of a wave, had drifted and settled in his present place of stagnation. Perhaps Hotevilla had proved his Promised Land.