Corn is the mother of the Pueblos, ancient and modern. Around it the Indian’s whole existence centers, and the prevalent prayers for rain have corn as the motive, for corn is life. Given corn and rain or flowing water, even in small amount, and the Indian has no fear of hard times, but prospers and multiplies in the sanitorium where his lot is cast.
If we travel backward into the Ancient Southwest we must leave behind many things that came to the people since the Spaniards sallied from Mexico to the new land of wonders. Sheep, goats, chickens, burros, horses, cattle there are none, and the children of the sun have no domestic animal except the turkey. The coyote-like dog haunted the pueblos, but his ancient enemy, the cat, was not there to dispute with him. No peaches or apricots were on the bill of fare, and the desert must be scoured for small berries and the fruit of the yucca and prickly-pear. Corn, beans, melons, and squashes there were, but wheat, oats, and alfalfa came from other hands. What would be the deprivation if sugar, coffee, flour, and baking powder were cut off from the present Indians. The ancients had none, nor were the useful vessels of tin and iron for cooking dreamed of. The agave of the South furnished a sweet in the roasted leaves, which took the place of sugar and went far and wide by early commerce. Tobacco always grew wild around the pueblos, but the ancients never knew the fascination of the modern leaf.
Before the trader’s cotton stuffs, were those of native cotton and before woolen stuffs there were warm blankets of strips of rabbit fur interwoven with cord, feather garments, mats of yucca, and blankets of mountain goat and buffalo wool, with girdles and stockings of the same textile. Perhaps more in use than these for clothing were the tanned skins of the elk, deer, and antelope, ornamented with native colors before aniline dyes came into existence. Buffalo skins were a part of the belongings of the ancients secured through trade with the people of the plains. There were sandals of plaited yucca and moccasins of turkey feathers. For jewelry there were seeds of the pine, shells, beads, and ornaments of turquoise and colored stones, quite enough to satisfy the love of ornament and quite suitable to the dusky skins of the Indians, as anyone may verify, if he will travel to the pueblos.
About the houses every vestige of metal and glass is absent. The windows may have been glazed with irregular plates of selenite, and the marks of fire and the rude stone axe are upon the beams. Instead of the gun, curved clubs, the bow, and stone-tipped arrows hang from the rafters with the lance thrown by the atlatl. In the corner stands a hoe of stone and a digging stick; pottery, gourds, and basketry are the sole utensils, the knife is a chipped stone blade set with pine gum in a wooden handle, and the horns of the mountain sheep are formed into spoons.
The rooms are smoky and dark, since the chimney is not yet, and the fire on the floor must be nursed, for, when it goes out, it must be rekindled by the friction of two pieces of wood or borrowed from a neighbor in the manner of primitive times, not yet forgotten among the advanced sharers of civilization. Much might be added to this picture of the early life of the Pueblos, and the exploration of the ruins will tell us yet more to excite our interest and admiration.
Among the inhabited Hopi pueblos are many seats of the ancient people now become mounds or fallen walls and their memory a tradition. There were four mission churches; hardly a vestige of them remains, and a few of the carved beams support the roofs of pagan kivas. This bears strong testimony to the completeness of the weeding out of the foreign missions by the Hopi more than two centuries ago. The Hopi have always been free and independent, even when the search for gold by the Conquistadores had been turned to the search for souls to the subjugation of most of the other Pueblos in the Southwest.
Several of the interesting ruins in Tusayan have been explored. Sikyatki, or “Yellow House,” lying on the sand hills four miles east of Walpi, has yielded many strange and beautiful relics of pottery and stone, as has Awatobi, a large town on a mesa ten miles southeast of Walpi, destroyed about the year 1700 by the other villagers. Here may be traced the walls of the mission of San Bernardino de Awatobi, a large church built of blocks of adobe mixed with straw. The church stood on the mesa commanding a superb view of the lava buttes to the south and must have been in its time an imposing building. The old town of Kisakobi, near Walpi, has yielded relics in profusion of a later period than the sites mentioned, and it is here that we must look for the arts of the Hopi just before they came into the light of history.
The prevalence of ruins around the Hopi mesas is in keeping with the movements of the tribes in the Pueblo region. Of the seven Hopi towns, Oraibi is the only one now on the site it occupied when the Spaniards came to Tusayan.
Not long ago, according to Hopi traditionists, some clans withdrew from Tusayan and rebuilt cliff-houses in the Canyon de Chelly, where before some of the clans that finally settled in Tusayan lived for a time.
Without doubt the connection between the early Hopi clans and the people who lived in the cliff-dwellings was close at a former period, and there is reason to believe that the older clans who are said to have come in from the North possessed the black-and-white pottery and the arts of the cliff-dwellers. Other clans coming from the South must have worked considerable changes in Hopi arts. While the southern clans brought yellow pottery, it remained for the great influx of peoples from the Rio Grande to introduce the artistic ware with complicated symbolic decoration that rendered the Tusayan ceramics superior to all others in northern America.