Sometimes our course was deflected by a swollen river, or the wind had buried our tracks with sand. Sometimes the settlement we sought to guide us would be completely hidden by a dip in conformation of the country. Sometimes a mirage brought under our very noses a group of buildings really miles away, with a river between us. Occasionally a vicious chuck-hole jarred our engine to a standstill. Once our guide lost his bearings, and for nearly thirty miles we skipped lightly cross-country, taking pot-luck with the mesas and washes and sage thickets we encountered, finding our way only by a range of hills on our west.
I have always wondered what would have happened if Toby and I had attempted that journey alone, as we first intended. This Navajo desert was the wildest, most unfrequented district we saw from Galveston to Boston. Only a Dunsany could give an idea of its loneliness, its menace, its weird beauty. Our guide had the western sense for general direction, and had been to Kayenta before, yet even he lost his bearings once. To us, it was a tiny spot easily obscured by the tremendous wastes on all sides. Yet I should like to know if Toby and I could have managed it alone.
Something about the country, and in the swart faces of the supple Navajos on horseback, their flowing locks banded with scarlet, reminded me of old pictures of Thibetan plains and the fierce Mongolian horsemen with broad cheek-bones, slant eyes and piercing gaze. Kayenta is a gateway, like Thibet, to the Unknown. It is a frontier, perhaps the last real frontier in the States. Only Piutes and Navajos brave the stupendous Beyond.
Backed up against oddly-shaped monoliths and orange buttes are half a dozen small adobe houses, among them the vine-covered house and store of John Wetherell, the most famous citizen of Four Corners. A thousand sheep fill the air with bleatings like the tin horns of a thousand picnickers, as they are driven in from pasture by a little Navajo maid on a painted pony, her rope around her saddle horn. A stocky Indian in leather chaps gallops down to the corral, driving two score horses before him. Wagons come creaking in, laden with great bags of wool. A trader from the Hopi country or Chin Le rattles in to spend a few days on business, or stay the night in the hospitable adobe house. Government officials, visiting or stationed here, saunter in to chat or get information. Groups of Navajos bask in the sun. Every passing, every stir of life on the great expanse, is an event to be talked over from many angles.
At the Wetherell’s, we found homeliness, a bountiful table, and marvel of marvel, the bath-tub furthest from an express office in the States. A few miles further north, all traces of civilization drop out of sight, and you are living the Day after Creation.
John Wetherell, though supple as a lank cowpuncher and fifty years young, is already an “old-timer.” Henry Ford put him and his kind, as fine as this country ever bred, into the past generation, overnight. In this youth, he and his brothers rode down an unknown canyon hunting strayed cattle, and discovered the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, now the best known of all. From that moment, discovering cliff dwellings became a passion with the Wetherells. Shard heaps yielded up their treasures to them, and lonely canyons disclosed human swallow’s nests hitherto uncharted by the government. From Colorado, John Wetherell moved to Kayenta, where he gained the confidence of the Navajo as few white men have ever done.
In this achievement—and a difficult one, for the Navajo is a wary soul,—he was greatly helped by Mrs. Wetherell, who possesses an almost uncanny understanding and sympathy for the Navajo that make her a more trustworthy Indian student than many an ethnologist learned in the past, but little versed in Indian nature. She speaks their tongue like a native, and has their confidence as they seldom give it to any of the white race. They have entrusted to her secrets of their tribe, and because she keeps their secrets, they reveal others to her.
When the “flu” swept across the desert, it was particularly virulent among the Southwest Indians. They died like flies in their hogans, in carts on the road, and beside their flocks. Babies hardly able to talk were found, the only living members of their family. An appalling number of the tribe was lost. Government medical aid, never too adequate on an Indian reservation, could not cope with the overwhelming attack. Missionaries forgot creeds and dogma, and fought with lysol and antiseptic gauze. The “medicine men” shut the doors of the hogans, built fires to smoke out the bad spirits, filled the air with noises and generally made medicine more deadly to the patient than to the devils that possessed them. Mrs. Wetherell and her family hardly slept, but rode back and forth through the reservation, nursing, substituting disinfectants and fresh air for “medicine,” took filthy and dying patients to her own home till it became a hospital, and prepared the dead for burial.
Parenthetically, from this epidemic comes a piquant example of the way fact can always be bent to substantiate creed. Soon after the “flu” had reaped its harvest, a fatal distemper struck the horses and cattle on the reservation. Following the human epidemic, it was cumulatively disastrous. But the Navajo could explain it. In the old days, when a chief or warrior died, his favorite horse was buried beside him, so that he might ride properly mounted into the happy hunting ground. To the Indian mind it was only logical that when the influenza swept away hundreds of men, as many horses should go with them to Paradise.
When the United States entered the world war, Mrs. Wetherell saddled her horse, put food and a bedding roll on a pack-mule, and went far into the interior of the reservation, wherever a settlement of Navajos could be found. Most of them had never heard of the war. She told them of the government’s need for their help, till she aroused them from indifference to a patriotism the more touching because as a race they had little reason for gratitude toward a too-paternal government. Out of their flocks they promised each a sheep,—no mean gift at the war price. When the “flu” epidemic interrupted her work, she had already raised $3000 among a people as far from the Hindenburg line, psychologically, as the Eskimos or Patagonians.