“Dead,” he replied, solemnly.
So much for expediency and Departmental delay.
Of those taken, nearly all had trachoma. It was winter, and not one of those children had clothing above rags; some were nude. During the journey of forty-five miles to the Agency many ragged garments went to pieces; the blankets provided became very necessary as wrappings before the children reached their destination. It was too late to attempt the whole distance that afternoon, so the outfit went into camp at the Oraibi day-school, where a generous meal was provided, and the next day their travel was completed.
Across the great Oraibi Valley was the pueblo of Chimopovi, perched on the highest of the mesa cliffs. And this place had a suburb, dominated by one Sackaletztewa, a direct descendant of the gentleman who had founded the original Hopi settlement after their emerging from the [[174]]Underworld. Sackaletztewa was as orthodox as old Youkeoma, and it was his following that had given battle to a former Agent and his Navajo police. I proposed to Colonel Scott that Chimopovi should be visited.
“Take the troop to-morrow morning, and finish it up yourself.”
So next day the same scene was enacted. It was a short job, only three children being found; but here occurred something like resistance. All the protestants congregated in the house of Sackaletztewa. When I entered, a man opened a little cupboard of the wall and produced a packet of papers. They were offered to me as documents of great value. And they were strange documents—letters from people of the country who had read in newspapers of Youkeoma’s visit to Washington, and his defiance of the Government. I suppose such persons have nothing better to do, and write letters of sympathy to the members of every Indian delegation that parades itself eastward in feathers and war-paint to present a fancied grievance. I recall the words of one of these papers, from some weak-minded woman:—
Chief Youkeoma: you are a noble man. Do not let the Government have your children. Their schools are not the place for your Indian lads who know only the hunt and the open spaces. Resist to the last gasp. Die rather than submit.
Very like, she is now writing scenarios. Of course this correspondent had read Fenimore Cooper, and was filled to the neck with the storybook idea of Indians—lithe, clean, untouched by disease, and painted by romance. The Southwest has no such Indians; and Indians, whether lithe or not, are seldom clean and never romantic. She knew nothing of filth and trachoma and child-prostitution, [[175]]while the Hopi had brought such things to a fine degree of perfection. And she lived in Indiana.
Now there is a wide difference between demanding the rights of Indians, rights that should be sacred under agreements,—and perhaps foreign treaties, such as those of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico,—and inciting them to warfare and rebellion when teachers and physicians are striving to recover them from ignorance and disease. There is a vast difference between the argument that a title confirmed by three sovereign Governments be not attacked for the sake of political loot—as in the case of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico—and denouncing the educational system of the United States and advising a group of benighted savages to kill in a distant and lonely desert. That writer from Indiana should have been a field matron for a little!
I have no sympathy with this type of sentimentalist. I deported some of them from the Hopi desert country when they appeared with their box of theoretical tricks.