“They have,” said he, while a sheepish expression came over his aimless face. “They’re holding an inquiry into a white man’s fighting an Indian. You can’t lay a finger on these Hopis, they baby them so. Fact is,” he said in a burst of confidence, “I’m the man that did it. A buck called me something I wouldn’t stand from no one, so I jest lit into him. I was goin’ to kill him, but I kinder changed my mind,—and slapped him instead.”
He looked as if his mind would make such changes. He went on with much violence of expression to give his opinion of the white settlers on the reservations, especially the missionaries,—“they stay here so long they git all dried up, and jest nachally hate themselves and everybody else.”
His annoyance against the world was so large that we made haste to leave him. It was too hot to champion anyone’s grievances, and his seemed dubious. I felt sorry for the Indians who had to deal with him. Indian reservations, as we saw them, always seemed to harbor a certain proportion of white vultures who were not calculated to increase the Indian’s gratitude or respect for the Great Father, and some of them, unhappily, were in government employ.
We engaged a little boy to act as our guide to the villages on the mesa in which he lived, who thought more, we afterward discovered, of getting a ride in an automobile,—the delight of all Indians—than of his duties as guide. Not many white drivers, I dare say, have been up that rocky and primitive road which leads to the ancient village of Walpi. The natives told us we could do it, so we started. Two roads led to the wagon trail. Our little guide, who was as tongue-tied as most Indian children, was for directing us toward one, when a fat woman, hung with jewels, and clad in a cerise wrapper, leaned over a fence and argued the point with him. Polacca sees more strangers than any other Hopi village, owing to its position, and the importance of the snake dance which takes place there every September, yet visitors were rare enough for us and our car to be objects of interest. So we followed her advice and took the other road, and a few rods further, came to a dead stop in the deep beach sand which surrounds the town. It was only the third or fourth time it had happened, so that we did not despair, though we did not relish the thought of another half hour’s digging and shoving under the burning, sickening heat of the desert sun. Our guide took the inevitable quarter hour for reflection common to Indians, then he summoned his juvenile playmates, and they cut bush for us, and tramped it into the bad places until we were able to go on sooner than we expected. We branched on to a road, roughly paved with great rocks, and rutted by the cart wheels of three centuries, like the dead streets of Pompeii. The nose of the car began to point skyward, and climbed up, up, while the desert dropped away from us. To go over that road once is an experience, but I should not care to repeat it often. It wound up the side of the mesa, with sometimes a low parapet to keep us from dropping off, and sometimes nothing at all. A boulder now and then or rough ledge cropping across the road would tilt the old lady at an uncomfortable angle. Heights and climbs over dangerous switchbacks had become commonplaces of travel by now, and we had gained confidence from learning the tremendous flexibility of which a motor car is capable. We were willing, without taking credit for extraordinary courage, to undertake almost any road wide enough for our tracks. People who confine their driving to perfect boulevards and city roads have no idea of the exhilarating game motoring really is. My wrists were like iron, and I had developed a grip in my fingers it would have taken years to acquire otherwise. No grade seemed too steep for the “old lady,”—how we relied on her pulling power! Much of the climb we accomplished on high, though at the final grade, where she fairly stood on end, we shifted to low. And at last we were in the street of Walpi, looking down on a blue-gray sea several hundred feet below us, and surrounded by a group of interested natives, who with great presence of mind had filled their hands with pottery to sell.
What is commonly called Walpi is really three towns, Walpi, Sichomovi, and a Tewa village called Hano. The people in the last village, which is the first as you enter the towns from the road, have little traffic with the Walpi people, but the division line is well nigh invisible between Sichomovi and Hano. Beyond the second town the mesa narrows, and over a slender tongue of rock, part of which has fallen away in recent years during a severe storm, we looked across to the most interesting village of Walpi.
Against an intense blue sky it blocked its irregular outline high above the delicate desert, with gnarled sticks of ladders angling out from the solid mass of buildings. The crazy but fascinating stone houses merging into one another, now swallowing up the road and later disgorging it, made with their warm sandstone color an effective background for the people who came and went in the streets, or sat in the doorways in silver and scarlet. The housetops were lively with children and women in native costume, or, more comfortably and less picturesquely in the ginghams and plaid shawls beloved of Indians. The squat houses, the women bending their necks to great water jars, the desert, all suggested a new-world Palestine.
THE VILLAGE OF WALPI.
OLDEST HOUSE IN WALPI.