Westward hoboes

by Winifred Hawkridge Dixon

The gentle Pueblos, horrified by this act of personal treachery, which they regarded not only as a violation of their sacred laws of hospitality but as a crime against a medicine-man with powerful if strange gods, were in terror lest the approaching Spaniards should hear of the monk’s fate and avenge the double crime against their race and religion on the entire village. What the Spaniard could do on such occasions was only too well known to the Pueblo tribes. At nightfall the chiefs of the village placed the body, wrapped only in a sheet, on a litter, which four swift runners carried seventy miles south to Isleta.

There under the dirt floor of the old church, whose walls have since been destroyed and replaced by the present structure, they placed the padre without preparing his body for burial or his soul for resurrection. If they had only said a prayer for him, they might have spared much trouble to their descendants. But they were in a hurry. They buried the corpse deep, six feet before the altar and a little to one side of it, and pressed down the dirt as it had been. The Spaniards came and went, and never learned of the murder.

This prelude to the story came from Juan Pancho, one of the leading citizens of Isleta. The sand-storm which had turned the sky a dingy yellow gave signs of becoming more threatening, and a flat tire incurred as we stopped at his house for directions seemed to make it the part of wisdom to stop overnight in the little town. When we inquired about hotels, he offered us a room in his spotless adobe house, with the hospitality that is instinctive in that part of the country. We found him an unusual man with a keen and beautifully intellectual face. In his youth, he told us, he was graduated from one or two colleges, and then completed his education by setting type for an encyclopedia, after which he returned to his native village and customs. He can speak four languages—Spanish, English, baseball slang, and the Isleta dialect which is his native tongue. When he came home after his sojourn with the white man, he discarded their styles in clothing, and adopted the fine blue broadcloth trousers, closely fitting, the ruffled and pleated white linen shirt which the Indian had adopted from the Spaniard as the dress of civilized ceremony. On his feet he wore henna-stained moccasins, fastened with buttons of Navajo silver. He took pride in his long black hair, as do most Pueblo Indians, and, though he wore it in a chonga knot during business hours, in the relaxation of his comfortable adobe home he loosened it, and delighted in letting it flow free.

His house Mrs. Juan kept neat as wax. They ate from flowered china, with knife and fork, though her bread was baked, delicious and crusty, in the round outdoor ovens her grandmothers used as far back as B. C. or so. She had not shared Juan’s experience with the white man’s world, except as it motored to the doors of her husband’s store to purchase ginger ale or wrought-silver hatbands. But she had her delight, as did Juan, in showing the outside world she could put on or leave off their trappings at whim. She was a good wife, and how she loved Juan! She hung on his every word, and ministered to his taste in cookery, and missed him when he went away to his farms—just like a white woman.

HER BREAD WAS BAKED, DELICIOUS AND CRUSTY, IN THE ROUND OUTDOOR
OVENS HER GRANDMOTHERS USED AS FAR BACK AS B. C. OR SO.

Juan’s ranch is near the new church, which has stood above the foundations of the older church only a century and a half or less. It befits his rank as one of the leading citizens of the village that his property should have a prominent location on the bare and sand-swept little plaza. He loves his home and the life he has returned to.

“I have tried them both—you see I know English? I can talk books with you, and slang with the drummers that come to the trading-store? I have ridden in your trains and your motor-cars, and eaten at white men’s tables, and bathed in his white bathtubs. I have tried it all. I have read your religious books, and know about your good man, Jesus. Now I have come back to the ways of my people. Well! You know me well enough to know I have my reasons. What is there in your ways for me? I have tried them all, and now I come back to Great Isleta, where are none of those things you white men must have—and life is full as before. I have what is inside me—the same in Isleta as anywhere else.”

He fastened his piercing eyes on us, a trick he has when he is much in earnest. Those eyes see a little more than some people’s eyes. To him the aura that is hidden to most of us is a commonplace. He allows himself to be guided by psychic manifestations to an extent a white man might not understand. I heard him say of two men, strangers, who came to his ranch: “When they came in, I saw a light about the head of one. All was white and shining, and I knew I could trust him. But the other had no light. It was black around him. The first man can be my friend—but the other, never! I do not trust him.”

Moonshine? But the odd thing is that Juan’s judgment, so curiously formed, became fully justified by later events. The second man is not yet in jail, but there are people who know enough about him to put him there, if they cared to take the trouble. This trick of seeing the color of a man’s soul is not unique with Juan. Many Pueblo Indians share it, as a matter of course, but it is a thing which they take for granted among themselves, and seldom mention.