Part 7 (2/2)

You enter the silent hallway and ring a gong. A Navajo interpreter appears and tells you Father Webber has gone to Rome, but Father Berrard will be down; and when you meet the cowled Franciscan in his rough, brown ca.s.sock, with sandal shoes, you might shut your eyes and imagine yourself back in the Quebec consistories of three centuries ago. There is the same poverty, the same quiet devotion, the same consecrated scholars.h.i.+p, the same study of race and legend, as made the Jesuit missions famous all through Europe of the Seventeenth Century. Why, do you know, this Franciscan mission, with its three priests and two lay helpers, is sustained on the small sum of $1,000 a year; and out of his share of that, Father Berrard has managed to buy a printing press and issue a scholarly work on the Navajos, costing him $1,500!

Next morning, when Mother Josephine, of Miss Drexel's Mission School, drove us back to the Franciscan's house, we saw proofs of a second volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a combined glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and crafts and legends and religion; a work of which a French academician would be more than proud. Then he shows us what will easily prove the masterpiece of his life--hundreds of drawings, which, for the last ten years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for their legends, of all the authentic, known patterns of their blankets and the meanings, of their baskets and what they mean, and of the heavenly constellations, which are much the same as ours except that the names are those of the coyote and eagle and other desert creatures instead of the Latin appellations. Lungren and Burbank and Curtis and other artists, who have pa.s.sed this way, suggested the idea. Someone sent Father Berrard folios of blank drawing boards. Sepia made of coal dust and white chalk made of gypsum suffice for pigments. With these he has had the Indian medicine men make a series of drawings that excels anything in the Smithsonian Inst.i.tute of Was.h.i.+ngton or the Field Museum of Chicago. For instance, there is the map of the sky and of the milky way with the four cardinal points marked in the Navajo colors, white, blue, black and yellow, with the legend drawn of the ”great medicine man” putting the stars in their places in the sky, when along comes Coyote, steals the mystery bag of stars--and puff, with one breath he has mischievously sent the divine sparks scattering helter-skelter all over the face of heaven. There is the legend of ”the spider maid”

teaching the Navajos to weave their wonderful blankets, though the Hopi deny this and a.s.sert that their women captured in war were the ones who taught the Navajos the art of weaving. There is the picture of the Navajo transmigration of souls up the twelve degrees of a huge corn stalk, for all the world like the Hindoo legend of a soul's travail up to life. You must not forget how similar many of the Indian drawings are to Oriental work. Then, there is the picture of the supreme woman deity of the Navajos. Does that recall any Mother of Life in Hindoo lore? If all ethnologists and archaeologists had founded their studies on the Indian's own account of himself, rather than their own sc.r.a.ppy version of what the Indian told them, we should have got somewhere in our knowledge of the relations.h.i.+ps of the human race.

Father Berrard's drawings in color of all known patterns of Navajo blankets are a gold mine in themselves, and would save the squandering by Eastern buyers of thousands a year in faked Navajo blankets. Wherever Father Berrard hears of a new blanket pattern, thither he hies to get a drawing of it; and on many a fool's errand his quest has taken him. For instance, he once heard of a wonderful blanket being displayed by a Flagstaff dealer, with vegetable dyes of ”green” in it. Dressing in disguise, with overcoat collar turned up, the priest went to examine the alleged wonder. It was a palpable cheat manufactured in the East for the benefit of gullible tourists.

”Where did your Indians get that vegetable green?” Father Berrard asked the unsuspecting dealer.

”From frog ponds,” answered the store man of a region where water is scarce as hens' teeth.

Father Berrard has not yet finished his collection of drawings, for the medicine men will reveal certain secrets only when the moon and stars are in a certain position; but he vows that when the book is finished and when he has saved money enough to issue it, his _nom de plume_ shall be ”Frog Pond Green.”

If we had been a party of men, we should probably have been put up at either the Franciscan Mission, or Day's Ranch; but being women we were conducted a mile farther down the arroyo to Miss Drexel's Mission School for Indian boys and girls. Here 150 little Navajos come every year, not to be transformed into white boys and girls, but to be trained inside and out in cleanliness and uprightness and grace. There are in all fourteen members of the sisterhood here, much the same type of women in birth and station and training as the polished n.o.bility that founded the first religious inst.i.tutions of New France. Perhaps, because the Jesuit relations record such a terrible tale of martyrdom, one somehow or other a.s.sociates those early Indian missions with religions of a dolorous cast. Not so here! A happier-faced lot of women and children you never saw than these delicately nurtured sisters and their swarthy-faced, black-eyed little wards. These sisters evidently believe that goodness should be a thing more beautiful, more joyous, more robust than evil; that the temptation to be good should be greater than the compulsion to be evil. Sisters are playing tag with the little Indian girls in one yard; laymen helpers teaching Navajo boys baseball on the open common; and from one of the upper halls comes the sound of a bra.s.s band tuning up for future festivities.

We were presently ensconced in the quarters set aside for guests; room, parlor and refectory, where two gentle-faced sisters placed all sorts of temptations on our plates and gathered news of the big, outside world. Then Mother Josephine came in, a Southern face with youth in every feature and youth in her heart, and merry, twinkling, tender, understanding eyes.

Presently, you hear a bugle-call signal the boys from play; and the bell sounds to prayers; and a great stillness falls; and you would not know this was Navajo Land at all but for the bright blanketed folk camped on the hill to the right--eerie figures seen against the pink glow of the fading light.

Next morning we attended ma.s.s in the little chapel upstairs. Priest in vestment, altar aglow with lights and flowers, little black-eyed faces bending over their prayers, the chanting of gently nurtured voices from the stalls--is it the Desert we are in, or an oasis watered by that age-old, never-failing spring of Service?

CHAPTER VII

ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND (_continued_)

There are two ways to travel even off the beaten trail. One is to take a map, stake out pins on the points you are going to visit, then pace up to them lightning-flier fas.h.i.+on. If you want to, and are prepared to kill your horses, you can cross Navajo Land in from three to four days.

Even going at that pace, you can get a sense of the wonderful coloring of the Painted Desert, of the light lying in s.h.i.+mmering heat layers split by the refraction of the dusty air in prismatic hues, of an atmosphere with the tang of northern ozone and the resinous scent of incense and frankincense and myrrh. You can see the Desert flowers that vie with the sun in brilliant coloring; and feel the Desert night sky come down so close to you that you want to reach up a hand and pluck the jack-o'-lantern stars swinging so low through the pansy-velvet mist. You can even catch a flying glimpse of the most picturesque Indian race in America, the Navajos. Their _hogans_ or circular, mud-wattled houses, are always somewhere near the watering pools and rock springs; and just when you think you are most alone, driving through the sagebrush and dwarf juniper, the bleat of a lamb is apt to call your attention to a flock of sheep and goats scattered almost invisibly up a blue-green hillside. Blue-green, did you say? Yes: that's another thing you can unlearn on a flying trip--the geography definition of a Desert is about as wrong as a definition could be made. A Desert isn't necessarily a vast sandy plain, stretching out in flat and arid waste. It's as variegated in its growth and landscape as your New England or Old England hills and vales, only your Eastern rivers flow all the time, and your Desert rivers are apt to disappear through evaporation and sink below the surface during the heat of the day, coming up again in floods during the rainy months, and in pools during the cool of morning and evening.

But on a flying trip, you can't learn the secret moods of the Painted Desert. You can't draw so much of its atmosphere into your soul that you can never think of it again without such dream-visions floating you away in its blue-gray-lilac mists as wrapped the seers of old in clairvoyant prophetic ecstasy. On a flying trip, you can learn little or nothing of the Arab life of our own Desert nomads. You have to depend on Blue Book reports of ”the Navajos being a dangerous, warlike race” blasted into submission by the effulgent glory of this, that, and the other military martinet writing himself down a hero. Whereas, if you go out leisurely among the traders and missionaries and Indians themselves, who--more's the pity--have no hand in preparing official reports, you will learn another story of a quiet, pastoral race who have for three hundred years been the victims of white man greed and white man l.u.s.t, of blundering incompetency and hysterical cowardice.

These are strong words. Let me give some instances. We were having luncheon in the priests' refectory of the Franciscan Mission; and for the benefit of those who imagine that missionaries to the Indians are fat and bloated on three hundred a year, I should like to set down the fact that the refectory was in a sort of back kitchen, that we ate off a red table-cloth with soup served in a basin and bath towels extemporized into serviettes. I had asked about a Navajo, who not long ago went locoed right in Cincinnati station and began stabbing murderously right and left.

”In the first place,” answered the Franciscan, ”that Indian ought not to have been in Cincinnati at all. In the second place, he ought not to have been there alone. In the third place, he had great provocation.”

Here is the story, as I gathered it from traders and missionaries and Indians. The Navajo was having trouble over t.i.tle to his land. That was wrong the first on the part of the white man. It was necessary for him to go to Was.h.i.+ngton to lay his grievance before the Government. Now for an Indian to go to Was.h.i.+ngton is as great an undertaking as it was for Stanley to go to Darkest Africa. The trip ought not to have been necessary if our Indian Office had more integrity and less red-tape; but the local agency provided him with an interpreter. The next great worry to the Navajo was that he could not get access to ”The Great White Father.” There were interminable red-tape and delay. Finally, when he got access to the Indian Office, he could get no definite, prompt settlement. With this acc.u.mulation of small worries, insignificant enough to a well-to-do white man but mighty hara.s.sing to a poor Indian, he set out for home; and at the station in Was.h.i.+ngton, the interpreter left him. The Navajo could not speak one word of English. Changing cars in Cincinnati, hustled and jostled by the crowds, he suddenly felt for his purse--he had been robbed. Now, the Navajo code is if another tribe injures his tribe, it is his duty to go forth instantly and strike that offender. Our own Saxon and Highland Scotch ancestors once had a code very similar. The Indian at once went locoed--lost his head, and began stabbing right and left. The white man newspaper told the story of the murderous a.s.sault in flare head lines; but it didn't tell the story of wrongs and procrastination. The Indian Office righted the land matter; but that didn't undo the damage. Through the efforts of the missionaries and the traders, the Indian was permitted to plead insanity. He was sent to an asylum, where he must have had some queer thoughts of white man justice. Just recently, he has been released under bonds.

The most notorious case of wrong and outrage and cowardice and murder known in Navajo Land was that of a few years ago, when the Indian agent peremptorily ordered a Navajo to bring his child in to the Agency School. Not so did Marmon and Pratt sway the Indians at Laguna, when the Pueblos there were persuaded to send their children to Carlisle; and Miss Drexel's Mission has never yet issued peremptory orders for children to come to school; but the martinet mandate went forth. Now, the Indian treaty, that provides the child shall be sent to school, also stipulates that the school shall be placed within reach of the child; and the Navajo knew that he was within his right in refusing to let the child leave home when the Government had failed to place the school within such distance of his _hogan_. He was then warned by the agent that unless the child were sent within a certain time, troops would be summoned from Ft. Wingate and Ft. Defiance. The Indians met, pow-wowed with one another, and decided they were still within their right in refusing. There can be no doubt but that if Captain Willard, himself, had been in direct command of the detachment, the cowardly murder would not have occurred; but the Navajos were only Indians; and the troops arrived on the scene in charge of a hopelessly incompetent subordinate, who proved himself not only a bully but a most arrant coward. According to the traders and the missionaries and the Indians themselves, the Navajos were not even armed. Fourteen of them were in one of the mud _hogans_. They offered no resistance. They say they were not even summoned to surrender. Traders, who have talked with the Navajos present, say the troopers surrounded the _hogan_ in the dark, a soldier's gun went off by mistake and the command was given in hysterical fright to ”fire.” The Indians were so terrified that they dashed out to hide in the sagebrush. ”Bravery! Indian bravery--pah,” one officer of the detachment was afterwards heard to exclaim. Two Navajos were killed, one wounded, eleven captured in as cold-blooded a murder as was ever perpetrated by thugs in a city street. Without lawyers, without any defense whatsoever, without the hearing of witnesses, without any fair trial whatsoever, the captives were sentenced to the penitentiary.

It needed only a finis.h.i.+ng touch to make this piece of Dreyfusism complete; and that came when a little missionary voiced the general sense of outrage by writing a letter to a Denver paper. President Roosevelt at once dispatched someone from Was.h.i.+ngton to investigate; and it was an easy matter to scare the wits out of the little preacher and declare the investigation closed. In fact, it was one of the things that would not bear investigation; but the evidence still exists in Navajo Land, with more, which s.p.a.ce forbids here but which comes under the sixty-fifth Article of War. The officer guilty of this outrage has since been examined as to his sanity and brought himself under possibilities of a penitentiary term on another count. He is still at middle age a subordinate officer.

These are other secrets of the Painted Desert you will daily con if you go leisurely across the great lone Reserve and do not take with you the lightning-express habits of urban life.

For instance, in the account of the Cave Dwellers of the Frijoles reference was made to the Indian legend of ”the heavens raining fire”

(volcanic action) and driving the prehistoric Pueblo peoples from their ancient dwelling. Mrs. Day of St. Michael's, who has forgotten more lore than the scientists will ever pick up, told me of a great chunk of lava found by Mr. Day in which were embedded some perfect specimens of corn--which seems to sustain the Indian legend of volcanic outburst having destroyed the ancient nations here. The slab was sent East to a museum in Brooklyn. Some scientists explain these black slabs as a fusion of adobe.

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