CHAPTER XV
LAGUNA AND ACOMA
IN spite of Toby’s making the slight error of driving fourteen miles with the emergency brake on, we seemed to have placed misadventure behind us for a brief season at least. We coasted the twenty-three switch backs of La Bajada hill, now an old story, and returned for the night to the Harvey hotel at Albuquerque, where the transcontinental traveler gets his first notion of Western heat, and wonders if he is in any danger from the aborigines selling pottery on the railroad platforms, and speculates as to whether the legs of the squaws can possibly fill the thick buckskin leggins they parade in so nonchalantly. If it is his first visit West, he little realizes how Harveyized these picturesque creatures have become, and he snatches eagerly at what he thinks may be his last chance to pick up some curios. The pottery, from the village of Acoma, is genuine, though of a tourist quality. The white doeskin legs are also genuine, although many pueblo women have ceased to wear them except to meet the twelve o’clock. They always inspire in me an awed respect, worn under the burning sun with suchsang froid. The explanation for this indifference to discomfort lies in the fact that a lady’s social prominence is gaged by the number of doeskin wrappers she displays, as the Breton peasant is measured by her heavy petticoats, and a Maori belle by her tattooing:il faut souffrir pour être belle.
The Indians furnished the most entertaining spectacle of modern, prosperous Albuquerque, whose solid virtues intrigue the hobo but little. We took advantage of her porcelain bathtubs, and then hastened on into a more primitive region, which became wilder and wilder as we neared the Arizona boundaries. Only two little adventures befell; neither had a proper climax. A two day old lamb, wobbly and frightened, had lost its mother, and wandered bleating pitifully from one sheep to another, who treated it with cold disdain. It finally approached our car as if it had at last reached its goal; but asking for nourishment, it received gasoline, and seeking woolly shelter, it was startled by metal walls. Piteously weak and terrified, the thumping of its heart visibly stirring its coat, it fled away in distress, with us at its frail little heels. Yet run our fastest, we could not catch it, though we tried every subterfuge. We baa-ed as if we were its mother, and it approached cautiously, to scamper off when our hands shot out to catch it. Poor little fool! It had not the courage to trust us, though it longed to, and after a hot and weary hour, we had to leave it to starve. As we started off, another car shot past us, challengingly, its very tail light twinkling insolence. A dark and handsome face leered back at us, with a full-lipped, sinister smile. At the next settlement, where we stopped to buy food, this half-breed Mephisto was there lounging against the counter, and looking at us with the look that is like a nudge. When we left, he swaggered after, and kept his car for some miles close behind ours. The country was so wild that we saw a coyote sneaking through the sage, and not long after, a wildcat disappeared into a clump of piñon. Beyond the orange cliffs we saw in thedistance, we could expect no human assistance, and it was uncomfortably near nightfall. Then, to our relief, the road branched, one fork leading to a silver mine. Our Mexican shot into it, giving us a parting grimace. Slight enough, this was our first and last encounter with that particular sort of danger.
At sunset we came to Laguna, ancient and gray as the rocks on which it sprawled, its church tower picked out against a golden sky. This is the first Kersian pueblo met going from east to west. Ancient as it seems, it is the offspring of the parent pueblo of Acoma, which itself descended from an older town situated on the Enchanted Mesa. “Laguna” seems a sad misnomer for this waste of sand and rock. But years ago, what is now desert was a country made fertile by a great lake. When a dissension arose in old Acoma, as frequently happened among these “peaceful” Indians, the dissatisfied members of the tribe left Acoma, and settled near the lake. Here they stayed from habit long after the lake had dried and its green shores became barren sand-heaps, until the new town became as weather-beaten as its parent. This is why, unlike most pueblos, Laguna and Acoma share the same dialect.
binsPUEBLO WOMEN GRINDING CORN IN METATE BINS.The women are the millers who grind the varied colored corn in lava bins.
PUEBLO WOMEN GRINDING CORN IN METATE BINS.
The women are the millers who grind the varied colored corn in lava bins.
legginsPUEBLO WOMAN WRAPPING DEER-SKIN LEGGINS.A lady’s social prominence is gauged by the thickness of doeskin wrappers she displays.
PUEBLO WOMAN WRAPPING DEER-SKIN LEGGINS.
A lady’s social prominence is gauged by the thickness of doeskin wrappers she displays.
Laguna, built on a solid ledge of mother rock, attracts attention by the notched beauty of its skyline. It is entertainingly terraced on irregular streets, forced to conform to the shape of its rock foundation. A ramble about town brings unexpected vistas. You start on what seems to be the street, trail along after a shock haired little savage in unbuttoned frock, and suddenly find yourself in a barnyard, gazing with a flea bitten burro upon the intimacies of Pueblo family life on the roof of thehouse next door. Through the village come sounds of the leisurely tasks of the evening. The mellow, throaty boom of the tombé, and syncopated rhythm of the corn-grinding song come from the open doors, framed in the warm glow of firelight. A dead coyote, waiting to be dressed, hangs by the tail from avega. Children play in the streets. The shifting hills of shimmering sand, moonlight silver in the frosted air of morning, and golden at noon, turn from rose to violet. Above the village rise pencilled lines of smoke from ancient fireplaces. Towering above everything stands the white mass of the old mission, with a gleaming cross of gold cutting sharply against the glory of the west.
Laguna owns no hotel, so Toby and I sought out the missionary, whose ruddy, white-haired countenance and stalwart frame bespoke his Vermont origin, and whose hospitality bore the hearty flavor of Green Mountain farmhouses. At something less than what is called a pittance, he had worked for years among the Indians of the pueblo, and at the nearby tubercular sanitarium for government Indians. He seemed to feel no superiority over his charges, and showed none of the complacent cant and proselyting zeal which distinguishes too many reservation missionaries. He had retained with delightful fidelity the spirit of the small community pastor working on terms of equality with his flock,—raising the mortgage, furnishing the church parlor, encouraging the Sewing Circle exactly as he would have done back in Vermont. As he told us of his work the yellow waste and glaring sunshine, squat ’dobe houses and alien brown figures faded, and we seemed to see a white spire with gilded weathervane, and cottages with green blinds; wesmelled lilacs and ginger cookies, and walked in a lane of flaming maples.
“The work is slow here,” he said. “One needs patience. Yet looking back over the years results are gratifying. Gratifying. Souls who walked in darkness have been won to Christ. Only last night, I attended the bedside of a dear sister,—the oldest person I believe in the state. Her years number one hundred and twenty-six. She confessed her faith and will die in Christ.”
“Have you had many conversions?” we asked.
“Well,—as numbers go,—not so many. Perhaps forty, possibly more. They will go back to their own ways. Yet they are a splendid people to work with,—a delightful people. I have many real friends among them. The parish is slowly improving. We have paid off the mortgage, and are now putting an addition on the church. The men have erected the frame, and when the ladies of the parish finish planting, they will put the plaster on the walls.”
Thus imperceptibly had the good man merged New Mexico with New England. At the village school next morning we saw another phase of the white man’s standards grafted upon the red man. The teacher, a Pueblo Indian woman and a graduate of Carlisle, wife of a white man in the neighborhood, in spotless print dress and apron was showing twenty little Indians the locality of Asia Minor. They were neat and shining and flatteringly thrilled by the presence of visitors.
“And now,” said their beaming teacher, when we had heard their bashful recitations, “you must hear the children sing.”
We heard them. The difficulty would have been toavoid hearing them. Bursting with delight, each of the twenty opened their mouths to fullest capacity, and twenty throats emitted siren tones,—not the sirens of the Rhineland, but of a steel foundry. They began on “Come, Little Birdie, Come,” though it is doubtful if anything less courageous than a bald-headed eagle would have dared respond to the invitation. Toby clutched me, and I her, and thus we kept each other from bolting out of the door. We even managed a frozen smile of approbation as we listened to the discordant roar, like the voices of many hucksters, which issued from their mouths. A white child would have warped his throat permanently after such effort, but these roly-poly babies finished in better condition than they began.
“I am going to let them sing one more song,” said the teacher when we rose hastily. “They don’t have visitors every day.”
They sang “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” and if Sweet Afton had been Niagara it would have wakened Mary less than the stertorous warning which bellowed from that schoolroom. Then a dozen brown hands waved in the air, and a clamor arose for other bits of their repertoire to be heard. Teacher was smilingly indulgent, proud of her pupils and anxious to give them and the visitors a good time. So we were treated to Old Black Joe, and Juanita, and other sad ditties, which never seemed sadder than now.
“And now you must show these ladies you are all good Americans,” said the teacher. We all stood and sang the Star Spangled Banner. The children showed individuality; they did not keep slavishly to one key. Each child started on the one that suited him best, and held itregardless of the others. By the time they were well started, every note in the scale was represented, including most of the half notes. Our patriotism ended in a dismal polychromatic howl, and the sudden silence which followed nearly deafened us. We had forgotten there was such a thing as silence.
What a pity the government does not encourage the Indian to cultivate his own arts, instead of these alien and uncomprehended arts of the white man! In his ceremonial dances, he is lithe, graceful, and expressive; when he tries the one-step and waltz he is clumsy and ludicrous. His voice, strident, discordant and badly-placed when he attempts second-rate “civilized” music, booms out mellow and full-throated, perfectly placed in the nasal cavity, when he sings Indian melodies whose tantalizing syncopations, difficult modulations, and finely balanced tempo he manages with precision. His music fits his surroundings. To hear it chanted in a wide and lonely desert scene, to watch its savage, untamed vigor move feet and bodies to a climax of ecstatic emotion, until it breaks all bounds and produces the passion it is supposed to symbolize is to understand what music meant to the world, before it was tamed and harnessed and had its teeth extracted. To wean the Indian of this means of self-expression, and nurse him on puerile, anaemic melodies,—it is stupid beyond words, and unfortunately, it is of a piece with the follies and stupidities our government usually exhibits in its dealings with its hapless wards. If I seemed to laugh it was not at those enthusiastic brown babies, rejoicing in their ability to produce civilized discords, but at the pernicious system which teaches them to be ignorant in two languages.
We finally left the strains of patriotism behind us, as we drove across the level plain to Acoma. Two tracks in a waste of sand made the road to the Sky City. A day sooner, or a day later, the wind would shift the fine grained beach sand, left there by some long vanished ocean, and block the road with drifted heaps; today, by the aid of our guide Solomon’s shovel, we were just able to plough through it.
Dotting the lonely landscape, flocks of white sheep and shaggy goats were tended by Indian boys with bows and arrows. They fitted the pastoral scene; for a thousand years, perhaps, the ancestors of these same flocks were watched over by the ancestors of these boys in blue overalls. Suddenly to our left, rising from the flat plain, we saw blocked against the sky a shimmering tower of soft blue and gold, seeming too evanescent for solid rock. Its sheer walls thrust upward like the shattered plinth of a giant’s castle from a base of crumbling tufa, in itself a small mountain. It was the mesa of Old Acoma, called by the Indians the Enchanted Mesa.
I believe that two Harvard students of archæology once reached the summit of this perpendicular rock, by means of a rope ladder shot to the top. But no white man by himself has for centuries gained a foothold on its splintered walls. Yet once, from legend borne out by bits of broken pottery and household utensils found at the base of the mesa, a large and flourishing Indian village lived on its summit in safety from marauders. A stairway of rock, half splintered away from the main rock was the only means of access to the village. A similar stairway may be seen today in the Second Mesa of the Hopi villages.
Up these stairs, old women toiled with filledollason their heads, and little boys and men clambered down them to work in the fields below. It is their ghosts the Indians fear to meet between sunset and sunrise. For one day, while the men were absent plowing or tending their herds, a bolt of lightning struck the stairway and in a moment it lay the same crumbling heap of splintered rock one sees today at the base of the mesa. To envision the horrors that followed imagine a sudden catastrophe destroying all stairways and elevators in the Flatiron building, while the men were away at lunch, and the stenographers left stranded on the top floor. The case of Old Acoma was even more pitiful, for those left on the top were old men, helpless from age, women and babies. They lived, ghastly fear and despair alternating with hope as long as their supply of corn stored in the barren rock held out,—perhaps a month, perhaps longer. Then one by one they died, while their men on the plain below tried frantically to reach them, and at last gave up hope. No wonder that when the towering mass which is their monument fades from blue and gold to grayish purple, the Indians turn their ponies’ heads far to one side, and make a loop rather than be found in its neighborhood.
goatsACOMA, NEW MEXICO.Dotting the lonely landscape flocks of white sheep and shaggy goats were tended by Indianboys with bows and arrows.
ACOMA, NEW MEXICO.
Dotting the lonely landscape flocks of white sheep and shaggy goats were tended by Indianboys with bows and arrows.
burrosBURROS LADEN WITH FIRE-WOOD, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO.
BURROS LADEN WITH FIRE-WOOD, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO.
Across the plateau a few miles from the Enchanted Mesa stands another mesa, longer and lower than the other, reached from the ground by several paths. Here the survivors transferred their shattered lives, built a village like the old one, and in time became the ancestors of the present Acomans. While we drove toward it, listening to the story our guide told of that early tragedy in his exact Carlisle English, we nearly added threemore ghosts to those already haunting the plain. Ahead of us the road had caved in over night, as roads have a way of doing in this country, leaving a yawning canyon thirty feet deep, toward which we sped at twenty miles an hour. Our brakes stopped us at the edge. I hastened to back, and make a side detour around the chasm, where in time our tracks would become the road, until some other freshet should eat into and undermine the porous ground. Roads in New Mexico are here today and gone tomorrow, cut off in their flower by a washout or a sandstorm, or simply collapsing because they weary of standing up. A miss is always as good as a mile, and our close escape was worth singling out from a dozen others only because of its dramatic reminder of what happened in the dim past from almost the same cause, on that magnificent rock. Both the Enchanted Mesa and the gaping hole behind us pointed out the uncertainty of life, which seemed so eternal in that brilliant spring sunshine.
Less dominating than the haunted mesa, New Acoma, which is, by the way, the oldest continuously inhabited town in the United States, reveals its towering proportions only at closer range. To view it best, it should be approached from the direction of Acomita. It stands 357 feet above the floor of the desert. Under its buttressed cliffs, a sheep corral and a few herder’s huts help to measure its great height. In the lee of the rock we left the car to the mercy of a group of slightly hostile women filling their waterjars at the scum-covered spring. The Acomans are not noted for pretty manners or lavish hospitality. Probably if a second bolt of lightning were to approach Acoma, a committee from the Governor would refuse it admittance unless it paid a fee offive dollars. It is said that since the San Diego Exposition, when the Acomans acquired an inflated idea of the cash value of their picturesqueness, tourist gold must accompany tourist glances at their persons, their pottery, their village, their children, and even the steep, hard trail up to their little stronghold.
We thought we had almost earned the freedom of the town by our toilsome climb, first over a young mountain of pure sea sand in which we sank ankle deep, and then hand over hand up a steep ledge of rock, where ancient grooves were worn for fingers and toes to cling to. Centuries of soft shod feet had hollowed these footholds, and centuries of women and men had carried food and water and building materials over this wearisome trail. Yet the Acoman may be right in demanding toll. He has gone to infinite trouble through generations of hard labor to perfect the little stronghold where he preserves his precious individuality. The giant beams in his old church, the mud bricks and stone slabs for his houses, the last dressed sheep and load of groceries, the very dirt that covers his dead were brought to the summit on the backs of his tribe. Acoma to the native is not an insignificant village of savages, but by treaty with the United States an independent nation; proud of its past, serenely confident of its future. It is almost as large as Monte Carlo, or the little republic of Andorra; with the assertive touchiness which so often goes with diminutive size, both in people and nations. Being a nation, why should it not have the same right to say who shall enter its gates, and under what conditions, as the United States; that parvenu republic surrounding it?
acomaAT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL, ACOMA.(Enchanted Mesa in middle distance.)Less dominating than the haunted Mesa, New Acoma reveals its towering proportionsonly on nearer approach.
AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL, ACOMA.
(Enchanted Mesa in middle distance.)
Less dominating than the haunted Mesa, New Acoma reveals its towering proportionsonly on nearer approach.
mesaTHE ENCHANTED MESA, ACOMA, NEW MEXICO.A shimmering tower of blue and gold, seeming too evanescent for solid rock.
THE ENCHANTED MESA, ACOMA, NEW MEXICO.
A shimmering tower of blue and gold, seeming too evanescent for solid rock.
Nevertheless the Acoman is not popular, even amongIndians of other villages. Though neighboring towns, Laguna and Acoma always have swords drawn. The Acoman has a wide reputation for being surly and inhospitable, and I am willing to admit he does his best to live up to that reputation.
Many tourists have made the journey across the desert, and the climb to the mesa’s top, only to be turned back or admitted at exorbitant fees. Luck was with us. We arrived on a day when the governor and all the men of the village were at work in the fields of Acomita, and only the women and children, as on the fateful day when the Enchanted Mesa was struck, remained in the village. Our guide, being from Laguna, spoke the dialect of the Acomans, and proved a doughty aid. Hardly had our heads shown above the rocky stairs when the gray landscape was suddenly peopled by women and children; the children clad in one gingham garment, or, if of tender age, in nothing save the proverbial string of beads, for even the smile was missing from their faces. Most of the women, short-skirted, with brilliant floating scarves on their heads, carried babies slung in knotted shawls. Their clamor at sight of Toby’s camera required no knowledge of Acomese to be recognized as vituperative. They seemed as anxious to be photographed as a burglar is to have his thumb-prints taken. They were in fact so uncomplimentary that we recalled uneasily the Spanish monk who visited the town to make converts, and was hustled down to the plain by the short trail. No tourist uses this trail if he can help himself. It leads off the walled edge of the graveyard into space for three hundred odd feet, and ends on the rocks below. With great presence of mind the monk made a parachute of his flowingskirts, and alighted unhurt on the desert. Wearing khaki breeches, we closed the camera regretfully.
An Indian’s prejudice against the camera arises logically from his theological belief that nature abhors a duplicate. With keenest powers of observation, he has noted that no two trees, no two leaves, no animals, even no blades of grass are exactly alike. Hence, when he makes a rug, a basket or anolla, he never duplicates it absolutely. Therefore he fears the camera’s facsimile of Nature. If he allows himself to be photographed, he believes that something of himself passes into the black box, and thereafter his soul is halved of its power. If he afterward falls sick, undergoes misfortune or dies, he attributes it to this sin against an inexorable law of Nature. It all sounds childishly crude, yet a much respected man named Plato held a somewhat similar belief.
The difference between Plato and the Pueblo Indians lies less in their theology than in the ease with which a piece of silver changes its effectiveness. Among the river Pueblos, we could manufacture free-thinkers for a quarter apiece, but at Acoma, the process threatened to be as expensive as a papal dispensation. We appeased their gods by putting away our camera, but having satisfied the Church, we still had to deal with the State. The boldest and fattest citizeness of the Sky City, girt round with a sash of Kelly green, triumphantly produced a paper. Contrary to her manifest expectation, it did not shrivel us. It was written in sprawly Spanish on the reverse of a grocer’s bill, and even at present prices no grocer’s bill could intimidate us; we had seen too many of them. Solomon deciphered it as a commandin absentiafrom theGovernor to pay five dollars a head or decamp at once.
Meanwhile the women, from ten years up, had brought us offerings—at a price—of pottery, in the making of which the Acomans excel all other tribes. Seeing a chance for a strategic compromise, through our faithful and secretly sympathetic Solomon, we announced we would either buy their pottery or pay the governor’s toll, but we would not do both. We succeeded in maintaining an aspect of firm resolve, and after many minutes of debate, or what sounded like debate in any tongue, they wisely concluded that what was theirs was their own, and what was the governor’s was something else entirely. We instantly compounded a crime against the State, and acquired many barbaric and gorgeously designedollas.
We were now permitted to wander freely about the village, though the women after they sold their pottery retired to their houses and kept the doors closed. At the head of the village near where the trail enters, stands the old stone church, forbidding and bare as a Yorkshire hillside, built of giant timbers and small stones wedged hard together. It has stood there, looking off over the cliff, since 1699. Its ungracious front, unsoftened by ornament and eloquent of gruelling labor, fits the hard little village. Its really magnificent proportions tell a story of incredible effort; no wonder it looks proudly down on the desert from the height which it has conquered. Each timber, some large enough to make a burden for fifty men, each rock, each fastening and bolt, came up the trail we had taken nearly an hour to climb, on the shoulders of a little people hardly more than five feet tall. It is the only Indian mission I can remember built entirely of stone slabs, due perhaps to the difficultyof carrying up mud and water in sufficient quantities for the great eight foot thick walls and giant towers.
Between the church facade and the parapet which over-looks the desert is a crowded graveyard, containing in deep layers the bones of many generations of Acomans. Even the soil in which they rest was brought from the plain to form a bed over the mother rock of the mesa. Each year the level of the graveyard comes a trifle nearer the top of the parapet. Bits of pottery clutter the surface of the graveyard, not accidentally, as we at first imagined, but due to the Indian custom of placing choice ollas at the head and feet of the dead, to accompany them on their long journey. It is a bleak God’s Acre: not a tree shades the bare surface. The four winds of heaven sweep it mercilessly, and the hot sun beats down on it. Yet a few feet beyond it becomes glorious, “with the glory of God, whose light is like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.” For the desert below is not a waste of sand, arid and monotonous, but a filtered radiance of light broken into pure color. Those who know only the beauty of green fields and blue waters cannot vision the unreal and heavenly splendor we saw from the Acoma churchyard, as convincing to the inner self as if Earth, that old and dusty thought of God, dissolved before our eyes and crystallized again into a song of light and color, as it was at the beginning.
ducksA STREET IN ACOMA, NEW MEXICO.A flock of ducks splashed in a rainpool in the middle of the road.
A STREET IN ACOMA, NEW MEXICO.
A flock of ducks splashed in a rainpool in the middle of the road.
missionTHE ACOMA MISSION, NEW MEXICO.At the head of the village stands the old stone church, built with giant timbers.
THE ACOMA MISSION, NEW MEXICO.
At the head of the village stands the old stone church, built with giant timbers.
Acoma, different as it was, reminded me oddly of the New England nature. At its heart lay a spiritual beauty,—this intense beauty of the desert,—and wrapped about it a shell of hard, chill unloveliness. The three little streets, dribbling off to the edge of the rock, had no welcome for us. Its houses, two and three tiered, slabbedwith flint instead of the more pleasing adobe, closed tight to our approach. The windows were mean and tiny, made before the era of glass, of translucent slabs of mica, roughly set in the walls. The houses, bleak and blackened, were roughly masoned of the same flint-like stone as the church. The few interiors we saw were barely furnished; a few bowls on the dirt floor, a lava corn bin,—nothing more. A flock of ducks splashed in a rainpool in the middle of the road; a mangy mongrel yapped at us, and women on the housetops scolded whenever Toby ventured to produce her camera. With their colored veils, red skirts and bright sashes they gave the village its only animation, as they brought out more and more bits of pottery to tempt us, carrying it carelessly on their heads down the ladders of the houses.
Solomon, the only man in sight, took every opportunity to efface himself whenever the bargaining raised a cross-ruff of feeling. He even ducked around a corner when a very stout lady, having sold us all her pottery, again brought up the subject of our paying five dollars admission. We appeased her by offering her a bribe to carry our purchases down to the car. While we were still halfway down, lifting our feet laboriously from the heavy sand, we saw her, a tiny round dot, with theollasbalanced above her floating turquoise scarf, stepping blithely and lightly over the desert floor.
“What a pity we couldn’t get any pictures,” I said to Toby, as we raced a thunder-cloud back to Laguna.
“H’m!” said Toby. “I took a roll of pictures while you kept them busy selling pottery. I got a beauty of the fat woman who made such a fuss. I must say it would be an improvement if half ofherpassed into the camera.”