The smell of cooking arose from the houses, a muttony [[145]]odor,—although it may have been burro-haunch,—mingled with smoke and the thick incense of smouldering cedar. In and out of the doorways the women passed at their tasks, and one sat weaving a reed plaque. They were all indifferent, with a contemptuous sullen indifference, to the stranger. There was a perfect swarm of children, wary, watching children, ready to dart and hide, long-haired and dirty, and most of them as nude as Adam.
At one end of the village, and a little apart from it, stood a house with a peaked roof. This had been the station of the Mennonite Mission, but when last threatened, the good people departed. It required a brave spirit to live close to the hostile Hopi. One was likely to reflect on the fate of Fray Padre José de Espeleta, of the Kingdom of Navarre, and the difference in theological teaching lent very little comfort.
Until 1915 the Hotevilla mesa was a very lonely place. The nearest white neighbors were seven miles away, with rough cañons between, and no telephone wires; and the nearest authority of the Government, the Indian Agent, quite fifty miles distant, with no road-condition assuring speed of rescue in case of trouble. One brave white woman lived alone on that hilltop until the building of a Government school brought neighbors. This was Miss Sarah E. Abbott, a field matron. For many years she had been stationed at the First Mesa, where she had acquired a knowledge of the Hopi language. She received orders to confront the Hotevilla, and she did it. But it was necessary for me to send police several times to arrest those who sought to intimidate her, and the longest term of imprisonment ever given old Youkeoma himself, perhaps the longest ever given an Indian at an Indian Agency, was because of his threatening this woman. [[146]]
When it grew near to sunset the men began returning from the fields, plodding in with their sacks and staves and huge planters’ hoes. Many of them were aged, their long hair matted and snaky-looking; but there were enough of the burly, thickset fellows to give any official pause if he contemplated dictating to that outfit. Even those who closely observe these people wonder at this evidence of physique. The Hopi lives largely on a vegetable diet. His teeth are blunted and worn down like a horse’s from the eating of flint-like corn. Because of isolation and clan ceremonial exclusion they have become devitalized through centuries of inbreeding, and quickly succumb to disease. And yet these same Hopi are famed for two things requiring raw strength and sustained energy: they can lift and pack on their backs the heaviest burdens, and they are great long-distance runners. Many of their ceremonies include the foot race, notably the sunrise competition on the day of the Snake Dance. Given a long desert course, fifty to one hundred miles, and the Hopi runner will wear down a horse. Their ability to bear burdens comes from both sides of the house, since for ages the women have packed water from the springs to the heights, and the men the harvests, the firewood, and the rock for building. I have seen two moving piles of wood on a mesa-trail, to discover one a burro-load and the other covering a man, with small difference between them.
And they must have carried weight over distances that compared with their runs, for how else were the Spanish Missions roofed? The great timbers were brought on the backs of men. About 1629 the Hopi, obedient and enslaved, brought these timbers from the San Francisco Mountains to Oraibi and other points, a feat equaled only by the Acoma Indians, who built a huge mission atop [[147]]their penal height, the beams coming from San Mateo or Mount Taylor. Each of these packs was more than fifty miles. One of the unused timbers may be seen to-day in the convento part of the Acoma Mission. It is a log measuring more than thirty feet in length and two feet in thickness. Without mechanical equipment, the raising of it to the mesa-top would tax any man’s ingenuity.
Especially would an official pause in dictation at the time of which I speak, for the Hopi had defied two former superintendents and for several years had done exactly as they pleased, in utter disregard of all admonitions emanating by mail from Washington. Of course official Washington had not worried, and for the rest of the world the Hopi do not exist; but the example to about fifteen hundred other and disciplined Hopi and to several thousand unregulated and undisciplined Navajo, all in constant touch with these rebels, was not good. The Agents reaped the effect of this timid policy, and it had given them concern.
The Hopi had so acted at other times, and the methods adopted to correct them had not been of the happiest. Officials had threatened and, when the native did not stir, had offered bribes.
“Your bones will bleach in the sun!” one set had promised—to be followed by: “Won’t you come in and be good, for a nice new contract stove?” Now the bleaching process had affected only those so unfortunate as to die naturally, and the Hotevilla people were content with their piki stones and adobe fireplaces. The Indian does not respect those who seek to buy him. When a threat proves as empty as it is boastful, he is strengthened in no small degree. Washington has been given to bluffing, and buying. [[148]]
The Indian Service had not greatly concerned itself about these strange people until 1887. Between 1847, when the Hopi were acquired as one of the blessings of the Mexican War, and 1887, when the first school was planted in Keams Cañon—forty years—they had lived practically as undisturbed as since their coming from the cliff- and cavern-dwellings in the northern cañons of the Utah border. A few traders had visited them often enough to be known; and one of them, Mr. John Lorenzo Hubbell, has told me of his witnessing a Snake Dance in the seventies, a solitary white spectator where now several thousands congregate annually. The tourist was not in those days, and had he been, under the circumstances of the back-country, it is likely he would have been going away from a Snake Dance rather than attending one.