“Now, my dear Mr. Shelton,” the tourist would ask hopefully, “Doesn’t that sign indicate the rabbit-foot following the lightning?”
“Make up your own story,” he would gravely reply, “and then you won’t forget it.”
So with Hopi secrets. The little of their history that is known I have already related. The rest is speculation. The believed facts of their ethnology may be had in Smithsonian Reports, moisture proof, dessicated. The bones of their ceremonies have been diagrammed and painted, [[193]]their chants recorded in scaled notebooks, their odd ceremonial objects looted and catalogued. Sentimental word-pictures one can procure from those journalists who flitted rapidly in and out seeking impressions, and who never failed to get them.
But I am not one whit more ignorant than any other white man. Despite reams of theories, no one has learned anything of Hopi lore that the Hopi did not want him to know. “Make up your own story, and you won’t forget it.” When certain Christianized worthies of the tribe have pretended to expose their knowledge, I have paid little attention, since I knew the mental calibre of such fellows before conversion, and the depth of their gray matter was never impressive. The last who gave evidence proceeded well in his story until, with a foreign fervor, he began to lie about the Oraibi happenings within my own time, and as I had taken his testimony under oath in Hopi trials, I knew just how many Bibles to trust him on.
Moreover, being the recognized Moungwi or Chief of the Hopi, and having some instinctive conception of the manner in which an alien and suspicious people should be governed, I respected their privacy and reticence, to gain and hold their own respect. One cannot play with an Indian in the morning, and expect to summon him to judgment after noon. The poorest stick of an Indian Agent I have seen is he whom Indians address by his first name, or familiarly without a title. When one lowers himself to an alien’s social level, he seldom achieves more than the privilege of dipping his food out of the same dish. It was my job to manage all things for their best interests, against their strenuous efforts otherwise if that were necessary—as it often was; and I hoped to restore to them a confidence in white men, whereas they had come to believe that all [[194]]white men were a mixture of abnormal curiosity and treachery, coupled with an astounding rudeness.
As for their psychology, no itinerant will ever grasp the subtlety of these people. It is something elemental and therefore indescribable. Those who have lived among Asiatics will know what I mean. Fatalists, they are as patient and immutable as the Pleiades. Much of this is vanishing with the elders as they wend their ways from the mesa stages to the Great Place of Ceremonies that Youkeoma has told me of. The pastoral peace and solemnity of the desert shrines is passing before the roar of motors and the harangues of “dude wranglers.”
Now I remember a curious red-haired visitor who came into the Agency one drowsy afternoon, herding a squad of burros. He looked a figure from a Conrad novel, and would have graced any one of them. His animals were packed with matting hampers having an Oriental touch. His flaming head was bare to the summer sun, his worn and rusty boots of cordovan preceded war-time styles and spoke of long journeys. The seat was absent from his trousers. An astonishing man.
His first question of me was: “Who is the new French Premier?”
It just happened that I could tell him. He handed me his credentials, and I found that this dilapidated tramp represented the French Government in his wanderings after strange cacti and other plant life. He strewed the contents of his hampers over my quarters and forgot to sort the wreckage for a week. Meantime—in my bath—he was analyzing Hopi corn and rare Indian dyes.
And he related to me strange things. He had been to Lhasa with the Younghusband expedition. He said that the Hopi were duplicates of the Tibetans, and that he [[195]]believed the languages contained similarities. That fellow knew how to reach the heart of a secretive people. He had procured seventeen distinct varieties of Hopi corn, and other seed, as well as old dye-formulæ and samples of ceremonial cotton.