The dwellers in the Southwest are brought squarely up against the “proposition,” as they call it, that one must work if he would live. The Mexicans, though reputed lazy, are on the contrary always anxious to work for wages, and the motley and wicked railroad camp had a large population of the dark-skinned believers in Montezuma recruited from long distances.
Wupa joined with the Albuquerque contingent. What his duties were it is not difficult to imagine; his skill in “rustling” wood and water in later years gives a good clue as to his work on the railroad. As messenger and general utility boy where steady labor was not required, he no doubt proved useful and picked up sundry pieces of silver for his señora. Perhaps not the least of his services lay in his unfailing good-humor expressed in cheering songs with which he softened the trials of railroad pioneering through that almost desert country.
The picturesque wickedness of the westward traveling construction camp with its fringe of saloons, gambling hells, and camp followers seems never to have taken Wupa in its snares. Of shooting irons and drunken men he had the inborn terror shown always by the Hopi, a feeling still kept alive among them by that later incursion into New Mexico and Arizona, the Texas cowboy. There was no fight in Wupa; the most that could be gotten out of him was a disarming laugh and a disappearance, as soon as that move could be made. Picturesque as was the construction camp, the stern side of life came very near, and the wonderful hues of the landscape were but mockery to the tired and thirsty men, who prepared the Santa Fé Trail for the iron horse. Poor food, worse water, alkali dust, parching heat and chilly nights of summer and the severity of winter were living realities; there were health and vigor in the air of the mountains and elevated plateaus, though food and appetite did not always strike a balance of compensation.
Wupa moved along with the camp, little realizing the meaning of the struggle with the drifting sand, the rocky canyons, and the dry rivers that became torrents and in an hour swept away the work of a month, burying ties and rails in the limbo of boiling sand. By night he rolled himself in his blanket and after his orisons slept under the brilliant stars, while his fellow Mexicans snored in strangely assorted heaps among the sage-clumps.
The rails came down the treacherous Puerco and along the banks of the Little Colorado. To the north the dark blue Hopi Domes reared their fantastic summits, signifying nothing to this expatriated Indian, though the mother who bore him and sold him into bondage waited for him there. To the west the San Francisco peaks stood always in view, but Wupa was ignorant of the traditions of his tribe that cluster around them. The rails left the river, stretched across a flat country, and halted at the edge of a tremendous chasm, whose presence could not be suspected until it yawned beneath the feet. Here the camp halted for months, while a spider’s web of steel was spun across the Devil’s Canyon.
One day several Hopi came to the camp, and after staring, open-mouthed, at the labors of the white man, wandered about, as if looking for someone. Soon they ran across Wupa, and the leader spoke to him in Hopi language to this effect: “You are a Hopi; we come to bring you to your house.” A doubtful shake of the head from Wupa, who did not understand the tongue of his people.
“Yes, come; they sit up there waiting for you.” This ought to have stirred in Wupa a desire to go at once, but he “no sabe.” Finally, after parleying in a mixture of Hopi, Zuñi, and Spanish, pieced out here and there with sign language, they persuaded him to desert the camp and set out with them for his native town a hundred miles to the north.
The home-coming of Wupa was a great affair, and his reintroduction to his mother was touching, for the Hopi are more demonstrative than other Indians. The event must have been a nine days’ wonder in the gossipy pueblo of Walpi. His education was taken up at once with the intention of eradicating the evil effects of Mexican training, especially on the side of his religious instruction. If the grave priests are satisfied with their labors in helping Wupa to begin anew as a Hopi, an outsider would consider the results as rather mixed. To this day Wupa is taunted with being a Mexican; these taunts he answers with silence and an air of superiority he knows so well how to assume; how, indeed, can they know what he has gone through in his remarkable experiences?
While Wupa was willing to desert and become a pagan, as were his ancestors, exchanging the quaint cathedral of Albuquerque with its figures of saints and grewsome Corpus Cristi in a glass case for a dimly lighted room underground and familiarity with rattlesnakes, his señora had other ideas. Wupa mourned that his señora would not cast her lot with the “Peaceful People” of Tusayan; but money was scarce and the distance too great for a personal interview; the letters written by a laborious Mexican scribe were productive of no results. Though the señora might have done worse, who will blame her? During the years that passed one might think that Wupa would have forgotten his wife on the Rio Grande, but it was always the dream of his life to bring her to him at Walpi. It was pathetic to hear his schemes and to see the way in which he treasured letters from her written in the scrawl of the town scribe and addressed to Señor Don José Padilla, which is Wupa’s high-sounding Castilian name. His constancy seemed admirable, for he did not take an Indian wife, granting that he could have secured one of the Hopi belles for spouse.
Still, with all this care Wupa was light-hearted, caroled with abandon Mexican or Hopi songs, or intoned solemn church music. Though a much-traveled man, he remained at his native place, the mainstay of his old mother who sold him aforetime, his father long since having traveled to the underworld. Hopi-Mexican, Pagan-Christian, he still occupies a somewhat anomalous position among his people, who have consistently hated the proud proselyting Spaniards during the more than two hundred years since they threw the “long gowns” from the rocky mesa.