The sleepy clerk at Green River was locking the hotel up for the night as we stopped before his door.
“My, you’re in luck,” said he. “If the midnight train hadn’t been late this hotel would have been closed up tight.”
Such incidents, happening almost daily, began to give us a reckless faith in our luck, or our guardian angels, or the special Providence said to look after certain types of people, whichever you may choose to call it. Ministering angels of the first calibre had perfected their system to give instant service day or night. They thought nothing of letting us run dry of gasoline on a road where all morning we had not passed a single car, and sending us within five minutes a truck carrying a barrel of the useful fluid. They delighted in letting us drive a bit too fast down a narrow canyon, where a blowout from our ragged tires would have mingled our bones forever with the “old lady’s,” arriving scatheless at the bottom simultaneously with a blowout which dragged us, standing, across the road. Once a Ford, driven by inexpert and slightly befuddled Elks, crashed into us on a narrow bridge, with no results beyond a bent canteen. When we broke four spring leaves at dusk in a lonesome hamlet, they placed across the street an expert German blacksmith of the old school, who did not object to night hours, and who forged us new springs which finally outwore the car. By happy mistake, they took us down pleasant by-paths less fortunate tourists who went by Bluebook never knew. Altogether, they were a firm of remarkable reliability, and if I knew their address I should publish it. But they preferred to do good anonymously.
I think it was they who directed us through the Shoshone reservation on the very day of the year when the tribe held its important ceremony, the Sun Dance. We reached Fort Hall, the Shoshone agency, one morning, and were told casually of a dance being held on the reservation, not a mile out of our way. When we reached it a magnificent Indian, the first we had seen who could be called a red man, (for the Southern Indians are brown and ochre colored), barred our path on horseback. He knew his cerise sateen shirt was becoming, even without the purple necktie he wore. It gave him confidence to demand an entrance fee of $2.00—an entirely impromptu idea inspired by our eagerness. The more I see of Lo the Poor Indian the more I am convinced that he is poor only for lack of opportunity to exercise his talents. However, the dance was worth the money,—far more than some other barefoot dances I have seen.
It had begun when we arrived on the scene, in fact, it had been going on for two days. Crowds of women, some dressed in long plaid shawls and high moccasins, others in starched muslins and straw hats; bright-eyed papooses slung on their mother’s backs in beautiful white doeskin cradles; majestic chiefs six feet tall and more in high pointed Stetsons, with long robes of cotton sheeting, giddily dyed, wrapped about them, circled about the dancers, who were partly screened from spectators by the green branches seen in so many Indian dances. These Shoshones are the Indians on the penny. Grave, surly giants with copper skin, coarse jet hair and high cheek bones, powerful, with a hint of ugliness, they were another race from the laughing brown tribes of the south. They frowned upon our camera, and finally forbade us, in no uncertain manner, to use it. Even the insouciant Toby paled and hastily stuffed her camera in her coat as a big chief made a threatening lunge at it. That is why all our photographs of the Shoshones are taken from the rear.
SHOSHONES AT SUN DANCE, FORT HALL, IDAHO.
All our photographs of the Shoshones are taken from the rear.
Old women trotted to and fro constantly with bunches of sweet grass and herbs, which they laid on the ground beside the resting dancers, who used them to dry and refresh their exhausted bodies. A group of old men in the corner beat the tom-tom, squatting to their task like gnomes. The dancers, naked to the waist, wore a short apron-like garment of calico or blanket below. Their bodies, old and young, were lithe and stringy,—hardly a fat man among them. They showed much exhaustion,—as much perhaps on this second day of the dance as white men not in training would after half an hour of similar exercise. Many of them were past middle age. One was white-haired and wrinkled, but with magnificent muscles on his bare chest and arms. They alternately rested and danced in groups, so that the dancing was continuous. Running at a jog trot to a great tree in the center, decorated with elk horns and a green branch, they touched this tree with reverent obeisances and a wild upward movement of body and head, then carried their hand from it, as if transferring its vitality to their knees, their breasts and their heads. For the three days and nights the dance was to last, they would neither eat nor drink.
“What does it mean?” I asked a very modern lady, dressed in flowered organdy. She smiled a superior smile, evidently holding no longer with the gods of her ancestors.