The little half-civilized children of Zuñi so aroused our curiosity that we drove through forty miles of sand and sage-brush, from the railroad at Fort Wingate, to pay them a visit. As the Indians do not provide for travelers, we took our hotel with us—tents, beds, and food—and camped just outside their village. The village looks like a huge beehive made of clay and stuck fast to the top of a sandy knoll. The hive is filled with a mass of cells—three hundred single rooms, placed side by side and piled in rows one on top of another. In each of these rooms lives a Zuñi family. There are no inside stairways leading from story to story, but if the boys and girls living in one row wish to pay a visit to a house above them, they must go outdoors and climb a ladder. On the slope between the village and the Zuñi River are a number of small vegetable-gardens, each one inclosed by a mud wall. Zuñi has no inns, no shops, no saloons, not even proper streets, but only narrow alleys that thread their way through the strange town. As we walked through the village, all the world came out to see us. Girls and boys clustered on the roofs or sat on the ovens,—queer little cones of mud which seem to grow up out of the house-tops,—while fathers, mothers, and babies peered out from dark doorways, to stare at the visitors. When we had finished our tour of the roofs and alleys, we were hospitably invited indoors; even there the children followed us, and as we glanced up to a hole in the ceiling which served as a window, a girl's laughing face filled the opening. We must have looked strange enough in our hats and gloves and long skirts.
The Zuñi child spends his early days in a cradle. But a cradle in Zuñi-land does not mean down pillows, silken coverlets, and fluffy laces; it is only a flat board, just the length of the baby, with a hood like a doll's buggy-top over the head. Upon this hard bed the baby is bound like a mummy—the coverings wound round and round him until the little fellow cannot move except to open his mouth and eyes. Sometimes he is unrolled, and looks out into the bare whitewashed room, blinks at the fire burning on the hearth, and fixes his eyes earnestly on the wolf and cougar skins that serve as chairs and beds and carpets in the Zuñi home.
A ZUÑI FAMILY ON THE MARCH
By the time he is two or three years old, he has grown into a plump little bronze creature, with the straightest of coarse black hair and the biggest and roundest of black eyes. He is now out of the cradle, and trots about the house and the village. When the weather is bad he wears a small coarse shirt, and always a necklace of beads or turquoise.
As he grows older, he adds a pair of loose cotton trousers to his costume, and, if anything more is needed to keep him warm, he girds on his blanket, just as his forefathers have done in all the three hundred years since white men first knew the Zuñis. His long hair, either flying loosely in the wind or tied back with a band of some red stuff, serves him both as hair and as hat.
His little sister, however, has a more elaborate dress. Her mama weaves it for her, as she does her own, in a rude loom. She makes two square blankets of black cotton, finishes them neatly across top and bottom, sews them together at the sides with red yarn, and the dress is ready to try on. It always fits perfectly, as the part which forms the skirt is simply held in place by a sash, and the waist is made by drawing two corners of the blankets up over the left shoulder. The sash, woven in gay colors, is also the work of Mama Zuñi. A long, narrow piece of cotton cloth is draped from the other shoulder, and swings easily about, serving as pocket, shawl, or pinafore. In cold weather, moccasins, leggings, and blankets are also worn. These articles, too, are made at home. While the mother is the dressmaker and tailor, the father is the family shoemaker. A few of the Zuñi girls have dresses like those of American girls. These clothes have come to them through the mission-school which adjoins the village.
The Zuñis have a language of their own—no very easy one for boys and girls to learn, judging from its many-syllabled, harsh-sounding words. They also speak a little Spanish, as does nearly everybody in New Mexico.
The little Zuñis amuse themselves with running, wrestling, jumping, and playing at grown folks, just as civilized children do. They have their bows and arrows, their rag-dolls,—strapped like real babies to cradles,—and their shinny sticks and balls. The children also make themselves useful at home. The older girls take care of their younger brothers and sisters, and the boys tend the goats. There are large herds of goats belonging to the village, and they must be taken every morning to graze on the plain, and brought home at night to be shut up in the corrals, or folds, safe from prowling wolves.