A curious people! Childishly admiring of the white man’s automobiles, radium watches and canned foods, and gravely contemptuous of his civilized codes, morals and spiritual insight; unsanitary in daily life, yet with rituals of hospital cleanliness; believing in charms and “medicine,” yet with a knowledge of herbs, and mental therapy beyond our own; introducing buffoonery into their religious services, yet with a reverence for religion uncomprehended by the white man; unable to persuade the government to give him citizen rights,—but easily able to persuade the Lord to send him rain! For, two days after the dance, rain came in abundance in sheets, torrents and cataracts, after a drought which had lasted months. The Hopi snake dance they say never fails to bring rain. Other rain dances about Santa Fé have the same result. Is it coincidence,—or has the Indian a weather sense beyond ours;—or does he look the Deity more squarely and unflinchingly in the eye when he makes his demands? Jacob wrestled with his angel. The Indian knows his prayers will bring rain. And however obtained, his percentage of correct answers seems higher than the white man’s.
A week later, when the town of San Felipe gave a “corn dance,” we found another instance of the thoroughness with which the Pueblo jumbles his religions. Through the old white plaza, dazzling with color, dividing its lively crowds impartially between the lemonade stand at one end, and the draped altar at the other, we made our way to the old church which looks through an avenue of blossoming cottonwood on to a gentle blue and green landscape picked out by the meanderings of the Rio Grande. Meanwhile the dance in the Plaza had begun. Almost within sight of the stamping, chanting rows of Squash and Turtle clans, the men naked to the waist with long hair flowing, the women’s black-clad bodies and bare arms swaying, the congregation slipped in to the cool interior of the church, and, dressed in the gorgeous clothes and jewels they wore to honor their native gods, listened respectfully to a visiting Bishop, and knelt in prayer with accustomed reverence. They saw no incongruity in it, and neither do I, so long as good Christians throw spilled salt over their left shoulder, or wish on the moon. Yet it made a delightful contrast,—the little brown boys in their white robes intoning with the nasality of altar boys the world over, plus the Indian’s special brand of nasality; the quiet attention of the drifting congregation, and outside, the noise, color and sunshine; the bands of giddy bucks sprawling on painted ponies, the cool lovely valley beyond, and at its heart, the power which brought all these elements together,—sluggish old Rio Grande, taking its time on its everlasting journey to the Gulf.
Within a short radius of Santa Fé, one can trace all the successive steps in the history of the Pueblo Indian. We go furthest back at Rito de los Frijoles, where a glance half way up a perpendicular cliff reveals black spots of pin-head size. An arduous climb up rough ladders and steps notched in crumbling yellow tufa shows these holes as large caverns hollowed by water under the shelving roof of the soft rock, and built up with a masonry which today would easily command ten dollars a day and a forty-eight hour week. “The Cloud City, Acoma,” on the Arizona road is built atop a high mesa, facing the still higher Enchanted Mesa, now peopled only by troubled ghosts. Doubtless the first Indians to advance from cave dwellings to mesas felt as emancipated as the first New Englander who left the old homestead for a modern apartment-house. Further east the rock-bastioned villages of the Hopis still carry on the customs of their kin, if not their ancestors. At Taos and Laguna the timid Pueblos finally ventured down to the ground, but retained the style of the mesas and cliff dwellings, of terraced receding houses, several stories high. The final and most modern adaptation are the one-story, squat little adobe houses of the river pueblos, whose dwellers have shaken off entirely the ancestral fear, and raise corn and alfalfa, melons and apricots on the rich irrigated soil.
The journey to Frijoles is worth risking a fall over precipices as one dashes over switchbacks of incomparable dizziness on roadbeds of unsanctified roughness. From Buckman, if the bridge is not washed away by the floods, like most bridges about Santa Fe, the ascent starts to the neat little, green little Rito de los Frijoles,—Bean Valley is its unpoetical English. No motorist should undertake this trip with his own car unless he thinks quickly, knows his machine thoroughly, and is inoculated against “horizontal fever.” The road climbs past orange hills up blue distances, through warmly scented forests of scrub piñon, with a vista of the river far below. At the top the car must be abandoned, for nothing wider than a mule can manage the descent into the canyon.
CAVE DWELLINGS IN THE PUMICE WALLS OF CANYON DE LOS FRIJOLES,
SANTA FE.
A precipitous and dusty trail drops to a refreshing little valley, long and narrow, grown with shady pines, and watered by a brook which was probably the raison d’être for the city so many ages silent as the sphinx and dead as Pompeii. In a beautiful semi-circle, so symmetrical and tiny seen from above that it looks like a fantastic design etched on the valley floor, lie the ruined walls of a city whose people were the first families of North America. It is hard to believe this peacefully remote valley ever echoed the noise of playing children, of gossiping women and barking dogs. The dark-skinned Jamshyd who ruled here left speechless stone walls to crumble under the tread of the wild ass, and whether drought, pestilence or murder drove him and his race forth, forsaking their habitations to the eternal echoes, nobody knows. He was timid, or he would not have plastered his houses like swallows’ nests in the cliff, or huddled them together in this remote canyon, walled in against more aggressive tribes. He was agricultural, for traces of his gardens, dust these centuries, may be found. Shard heaps of pottery designed in the red and black pattern that dates them as from one to two thousand years old, and arrowheads of black obsidian prove he knew the same arts as the Southwestern Indian of today. Each tribal unit, then as now, had its kiva, or underground ceremonial chamber with the altar stone placed exactly as in every kiva in Utah, Colorado or Arizona.
Parenthetically, the kiva may have retained its popularity through the sunshiny ages because it offered the men of the tribe a complete refuge from their women-folk. Once down the ladder, they need not pull it after them, for custom forbade and still forbids a squaw of any modesty from acting as if the kiva were within a hundred miles of her. Once inside, the men folk are at liberty to whittle their prayer sticks, gossip, swap stories, and follow whatever rituals men indulge in when alone. It is as bad form for a pueblo woman to invade the kiva as for us to enter a men’s club,—with the difference that no kiva had a ladies’ night. Besides furnishing shelter to the henpecked Benedicts, the kiva became a sort of Y. M. C. A. for the young bucks. In ancient times the bachelors of the tribe slept together in the kiva, their food being left outside the entrance. This very wise provision greatly protected the morals of the young people, forced to live in very close juxtaposition.
On the ridge opposite the caves of Frijoles lies an unexplored region believed to be the summer home of the race who lived here so secretly and vanished so mysteriously. In a few years the excavator may discover among the shard heaps at the top of this canyon the reason for the exodus, but at present more is known about lost Atlantis than these ruins in our “rawest” and newest corner of the States.
One need not thrill to the prehistoric, however, to enjoy Santa Fé, especially when the apricots blur the flaming green valley with a rosy mist. All trails from the sleepy little town lead to the perpetual snows of the hills through scented forests of pine, past roaring streams. A good horse will clamber up the bed of a waterfall, leap fallen logs, pick his way, when the forest becomes too tangled, over the slippery boulders of the river, canter over ground too rough for a high-school horse to walk upon, and bring his rider out to the top of some high ridge, where crests of blue notch against crests of paler and paler blue, without end.