Part 4
The survivors of the tribe chose as the site of their new town the top of a somewhat lower mesa, three miles or so from their former home. If the Enchanted Mesa resembles a titanic bandbox, the mesa on which the modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a gigantic billiard-table, three hundred and fifty-seven feet high, seventy acres in area upon its level top, and supported by precipices which are not merely perpendicular but in many cases actually overhanging. It presents one of the most striking examples of erosion in the world, does Acoma, the sand which has been hurled against it by the wind of ages, as by a natural sand-blast, having cut the soft rock into forms more fantastic than were ever conjured up by Little Nemo in his dreams. Battlements, turrets, arches, minarets, and gargoyles of weather-worn, tawny-tinted rock rise on every hand. There are two routes to the summit and both of them require leathern lungs and seasoned sinews. One, called, if I remember rightly, the “Padre’s Path,” is little more than a crevasse in the solid rock, its ascent necessitating the vigorous use of knees and elbows as well as hands and feet, it being about as easy to negotiate as the outside of the Statue of Liberty. The other path, which is considerably longer, suggests the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages—and, when you come to think about it, that is precisely what it is—the resemblance being heightened by the massive battlements of eroded rock between which it winds and the strings of patient donkeys which plod up it, faggot-laden. Though of fair width near the bottom, it gradually narrows as it zigzags upward, finally becoming so slim that there is not room between the face of the cliff and the brink of the precipice for two donkeys to pass. It was at this inauspicious spot that I first encountered one of these dwellers in the sky—“skylanders” they might fittingly be called. He was a low-browed, sullen-looking fellow, with a skin the colour of a well-worn saddle and an expression about as pleasant as a rainy morning. His shock of coarse black hair had been bobbed just below the ears and was kept back from his eyes by the inevitable _banda_; his legs were encased in _chaparejos_ of fringed buckskin, and his shirt tails fluttered free. He came jogging down the perilous pathway astride of a calico donkey and, with the background of rocks and sand, cut a very striking and savage figure indeed. “He’ll make a perfectly bully picture,” I said to myself, and, suiting the action to the thought, I unlimbered my camera and ambushed myself behind a projecting shoulder of rock. As he swung into the range of my lens I snapped the shutter. It was speeded up to a hundredth of a second, but in much less time than that he had dismounted and was coming for me with a club. I have read somewhere that the Acomas are a mild-mannered, inoffensive folk. Well, perhaps. Still, I was glad that I had in my jacket pocket the largest-sized automatic used by a civilised people, and I was still gladder when Man-That-Wouldn’t-Have-His-Picture-Taken, glimpsing its ominous outline through the cloth, moved sullenly away, shaking his stick and muttering sentiments which needed no translation. He was an artist in the way he laid on his curses, was that Indian. An army mule-skinner would have taken off his hat to him in admiration.
Of all the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, Acoma is the most interesting by far. Indeed, I do not think that I am permitting my enthusiasm to get the better of my discrimination when I class it with Urga, Khiva, Mecca, the troglodyte town of Medenine in southern Tunisia, and Timbuktu as one of the half dozen most interesting semicivilised places in existence. Where else in all the world can you find a town hanging, as it were, between land and sky and reached by some of the dizziest trails ever trod by human feet; a town of many-floored but doorless dwellings, which have ladders instead of stairs and whose windows are of gypsum instead of glass; a town where the women build and own the houses and the men weave the women’s gowns; where the husbands take the names of their wives and the children the names of their mothers; where the belongings of a dead man are destroyed upon his grave and the ghosts are distracted so that his spirit may have time to escape; a town where religious mysteries, as incredible as those of voodooism and as jealously guarded as those of Lhasa, are performed in an underground chamber as impossible of access by the uninitiated as the Kaaba? Where else shall you find such a place as that, I ask you? Tell me that.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“The massive battlements of eroded rock between which it winds ... suggest the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages.”
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“You gain access to the first floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as you gain access to the hold of a ship.”
ACOMA AS IT IS TO-DAY.]
Acoma has the unassailable distinction of being the oldest continuously inhabited town within our borders, though how old the archæologists have been unable to conjecture, much less positively say. Certain it is that it was ancient when the Great Navigator set foot on the beach of San Salvador; that it was hoary with antiquity when the Great Captain and his mail-clad men-at-arms came marching up from Vera Cruz for the taking of Mexico. One needs to be very close under its beetling cliffs before any sign of the village can be detected, as the houses are of the same color and, indeed of the same material as the rock upon which they stand and so far above the plain that, as old Casteñeda, the chronicler of Coronado’s expedition in 1540, records, “it was a very good musket that could throw a ball as high.” The lofty situation of the town and the effect of bleakness produced by the entire absence of vegetation and by the cold, grey rock of which it is built reminded me of San Marino, that mountain-top capital of a tiny republic in the Apennines, while in the startling abruptness with which the mesa rears itself out of the desert there is a suggestion of those strange monasteries of Metéora, perched on their rocky columns above the Thessalian plain. The village proper consists of three parallel blocks of houses running east and west perhaps a thousand feet and skyward forty. They are, in fact, primeval apartment-houses, each block being partitioned by cross-walls into separate little homes which have no interior communication with each other. Each of these blocks is three stories high, with a sheer wall behind but terraced in front, so that it looks like a flight of three gigantic steps. (At the sister pueblo of Taos, a hundred miles or so to the northward, this novel architectural scheme has been carried even further by building the houses six and even seven stories high and terracing them on all four sides so that they form a pyramid.) The second story is set well back on the roof of the first, thus giving it a broad, uncovered terrace across its entire front, and the third story is similarly placed upon the second. In Acoma, which has about seven hundred people, there are scarcely a dozen doors on the ground; and these indicate the abodes of those progressive citizens who, not satisfied with what was good enough for their fathers, must be for ever experimenting with some new-fangled device. Barring these cases of recent innovation, there are no doors to the lower floor, the only access to a house being by a rude ladder to the first terrace. If you are making a call on the occupants of the first story, you wriggle through a tiny trap-door in the floor of the second and literally drop in upon them—so literally that your hosts see your feet before they see your face. It is a novel experience ... yes, indeed. You gain access to the first floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as you gain access to the hold of a ship—by climbing a ladder to the deck and then descending through a hatchway. If you wish to leave your visiting-card at the third-floor apartment or if you have a hankering to see the view from the topmost roof, you can ascend quite easily by means of queer little steps notched in the division walls. The ground floor is always occupied by the senior members of the family, the second terrace is allotted to the daughter first married, and the upper flat goes to the daughter who gets a husband next. If there are other married daughters they must seek apartments elsewhere or live with grandpa and grandma in the basement.
Most writers about Acoma seem to be particularly impressed with the cleanliness of its inhabitants and the neatness of their homes. I don’t like to shatter any illusions, but it struck me that the much-vaunted neatness of these people consisted mainly in covering their beds with scarlet blankets and whitewashing their walls. I have heard visitors exclaim enthusiastically as they peered in through an open doorway: “Why, I wouldn’t mind sleeping there at all.” They are perfectly welcome to so far as I am concerned. As for me, I much prefer a warm blanket and the open mesa. All of the Pueblo Indians are as ignorant of the elements of sanitation as a Congo black. If you doubt it, visit one of these sky cities on a scorching summer’s day when there is no wind blowing. As an old frontiersman in Albuquerque confided to me: “Say, friend, I’d ruther have a skunk hangin’ round my tent than to have to spend a night to leeward o’ one of them there Hopi towns.”
Civilisation has evidently found the rocky path to Acoma too steep to climb, for when I was there not a soul in the place spoke a word of English. There was a daughter of the village who had been educated at Carlisle—Marie was her name, I think—but she was away on a visit. Perhaps she couldn’t stand the loneliness of being the only civilised person in the community. That is one of the deplorable features incident to our system of Indian education. A youth is sent to Carlisle or Hampton or Riverside, as the case may be, and after being broken to the white man’s ways is sent back to his own people on the theory that, by force of example, he will alter their mode of living. But he rarely does anything of the sort, for his fellow tribesmen either resent his attempts to introduce innovations or treat him with the same contemptuous tolerance with which the hidebound residents of a country village regard the youth who is “college l’arned.” So, after a time, becoming discouraged by the futility of attempting to teach his people something that they don’t want to know, he either goes out into the world to earn his own livelihood as best he may or else he again leaves his shirt tails outside his breeches, daubs his face with paint on dance days, and, forgetting how to use a fork and napkin, goes back to the manners and usages of his fathers. But you mustn’t get the idea that Acoma is wholly uncivilised, for it isn’t. One household has an iron bed with large brass knobs, another boasts a rocking-chair, and a third possesses a sewing-machine. But the most convincing proof that these untutored children of the sky possess a strain of culture is in the fact that Acoma can boast no phonograph to greet the visitor with the raucous strains of “Every Little Movement” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey._
ACOMA HUNTER HOME FROM THE HUNT.]
In many respects the most remarkable feature of Acoma is its immense adobe church, built upward of three centuries ago. It is remarkable because every stick and every adobe brick in it was carried up the heart-breaking, back-breaking trails from the plains three hundred feet below on the backs of patient Indians. There are timbers in that church a foot and a half square and forty feet long, brought by human muscle alone from the mountains a long day’s march away. And it is no tiny chapel, remember, but a building of enormous proportions, with walls ten feet thick and sixty feet high, and covering more ground than any modern church in America. As a monument of patient toil it is hardly less wonderful than the Pyramids; it was as long in building as the Children of Israel were in getting out of the wilderness. Above its gaudy altar hangs a royal gift, the town’s most treasured possession—a painting of San José, presented to Acoma two centuries and a half ago by his Most Catholic Majesty Charles the Second of Aragon and Castile. Faded and time-dimmed though it is, that picture once nearly caused an Indian war. Some years ago the neighbouring pueblo of Laguna, suffering from drought and cattle sickness and all manner of disasters, looked on the prosperity of Acoma and ascribed it to the patronage of the painted San José. So Laguna, believing that if the saint could bring prosperity to one pueblo, he could bring it to another, asked Acoma for the loan of the picture, and, after a tribal council, the request was granted. Their confidence in the saint was justified, for no sooner had the picture been transferred to the walls of Laguna’s bell-hung, mud-walled mission church than the rains came and the crops sprouted, and the cattle throve, and the tourists, leaning from their car windows, bought more pottery and blankets than they ever had before. After a time, however, Acoma gently intimated to Laguna that a loan was not a gift and asked for the return of the picture. Whereupon the Lagunas retorted that if possession was nine points of the law in the white man’s country, in the Indian country it was ten points—and then some, and that if the Acomas wanted the picture they could come and take it—if they could. For several weeks there was much sharpening of knives and cleaning of Winchesters in both pueblos, and at night the high mesa of Acoma resounded to those same war chants which preceded the massacre of Zaldivar and his Spaniards. But the saner counsels of the Indian agent prevailed, for these hill-folk are at heart a peaceable people, and they were induced to submit the dispute over the picture to the arbitrament of the white man’s courts. Perhaps it was well for the peace of central New Mexico that Judge Kirby Benedict, who heard the case, decided in favour of the plaintiffs and ordered the picture restored to Acoma forthwith. But when the messengers sent from Acoma to bring the sacred treasure back arrived at Laguna they found that the picture had mysteriously disappeared. But while riding dejectedly back to Acoma to break the news of the calamity they discovered under a mesquite bush, midway between the two pueblos—God be praised!—the missing picture. The Acomas instantly recognised, of course, that San José, released from bondage, had started homeward of his own volition and had doubtless sought shelter in the shade of the mesquite bush until the heat of the day had passed. He hangs once more on the wall of the ancient church, just where he did when he came, all fresh and shiny, from Madrid, and every morning the hill people file in and cross themselves before him and mutter a little prayer.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
The pottery painter.
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
The blanket weaver.
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
The turquoise driller.
ACOMA ARTISANS.]
In front of the church is the village graveyard, a depression in the rock forty feet deep and two hundred square, filled with earth brought on the backs of women from the far plain. It took them nearly forty years to make it. Is it any wonder that the patient, moccasined feet of centuries have sunk their imprint in the rock six inches deep? And the work was done by women! Imagine the New York suffragettes carrying enough dirt in sacks to the top of the Metropolitan Building to make a graveyard there. The bones lie thick on the surface soil, now literally a bank of human limestone. Dig down into that ghastly stratum and you would doubtless find among the myriads of bleached and grinning skulls some that had been cleft by sword-blade or pierced by bullet—grim reminders of that day, now three centuries agone, when Oñate’s men-at-arms carried Acoma by storm and put three thousand of its defenders to the sword, as was the Spanish custom. A funeral in Acoma’s sun-seared graveyard is worth journeying a long, long way to see. When the still form, wrapped in its costliest blanket, has been lowered into its narrow resting-place among the skeletons of its fathers; when upon the earth above it has been broken the symbolic jar of water; when the relatives have brought forth pottery and weapons and clothing to be broken and rent upon the grave that they may go with their departed owner; when all these weird rites have been performed the wailing mourners file away to those desolate houses where the shamans are blinding the eyes of the ghosts that they may not find the trail of the soul which has set out on its four days’ journey to the Land That Lies Beyond the Ranges. It is a strange business.
American dominion has not yet resulted in destroying the picturesque costumes of the Acomas, and I hope to Heaven that it never will. Civilisation has enough to answer for in substituting the unlovely garments of Europe for the beautiful and becoming costumes of China and Japan. In Acoma the people always look as though they were dressed up for visitors, although, as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the sort. Like all barbarians, they are fond of colours. The tendencies of a man may be pretty accurately gauged by the manner in which he wears his shirt. If he lets it hang outside his trousers he is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and you can make up your mind that he has no glass in _his_ windows or doors to _his_ ground floor. But if he tucks it into his trousers, white-man fashion, it may be taken as a sign that he is a progressive, an aboriginal Bull Mooser, as it were, in which case he usually goes a step further by hiding the picturesque _banda_, with its suggestion of the buccaneers, beneath a sombrero several sizes too large. On dance days, however, liberals and conservatives alike discard their shirts and trousers for the primitive breech-clouts of their savage ancestors, streak and ring their lithe, brown bodies with red and yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into very ferocious and repellent figures indeed. A Hopi in his dancing dress looks like the creature of a bad dream.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“DANCE MAD!”
“On dance days they streak and ring their lithe bronze bodies with red and yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into the creatures of a bad dream.”]
The women wear a peculiar sort of tunic, somewhat resembling that worn by their cousins on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which exposes the neck and one round, bronze shoulder. The garment is well chosen, for the Acomas have the finest necks and busts of any women that I know. This is due, no doubt, to the fact that they carry all the water used in their houses from the communal reservoir in _tinajas_ balanced on their heads, frequently up a ladder and two steep flights of stairs, thus unconsciously developing a litheness of figure and a mould of form that would arouse the envy of Gaby des Lys. Over their shoulders is drawn a little shawl, generally of vivid scarlet. Then there is more scarlet in the kilts which reach from the waist to the knees and a contrast in the black stockings which come to the ankle, leaving bare their dainty feet—the smallest and prettiest women’s feet that I have ever seen. The feet of all these hill-folk are abnormally small, the result, doubtless, of the constant clutching of the uneven rock. The picturesqueness of the women’s costumes is enormously increased by the quantities of turquoise-studded silver jewellery which they affect, which tinkles musically when they walk. This jewellery, which they hammer out of Mexican _pesos_, obtaining the turquoises from the rich and highly profitable local mines, forms one of the Acomas’ chief sources of revenue, for they sell great quantities of it to the agents of the curiosity dealers along the railway and these resell it to the tourists on the transcontinental trains at a profit of many hundred per cent. They make several other forms of decorative wares: blankets, for example—though the Hopi blankets are not to be spoken of in the same breath with the beautiful products of the looms of their unfriendly Navajo neighbours—and pottery jars which they patiently decorate in fine grey-black designs and burn over dung-fed fires. Everything considered, their work is probably the most artistic done by any Indians in America to-day.
But to return to the highway of narrative from which I find that I have inadvertently wandered. When a girl is old enough to get married, which is usually about the time that she reaches her twelfth birthday, she is expected to arrange her lustrous blue-black hair in two large whorls, like doughnuts, one on each side of her dainty head. The whorl is supposed to typify the squash blossom, which is the Hopi emblem of maidenhood. To arrange this complicated coiffure is a long day’s task, and after it is once made the owner puts herself to acute discomfort by sleeping on a wooden head-rest, so as not to disarrange it. When a girl marries, which she generally does very early in her teens, she must no longer wear the _nash-mi_, as the whorls are called. Instead, her hair is done up in two pendent rolls, symbolical of the ripened squash, which is the Hopi emblem of fruitfulness. And after you have seen the litters of fat, brown babies which gambol like puppies before every door, and the rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every sun-scorched housetop, you begin to think that there must be some virtue in this symbolical hair-dressing after all.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“When a girl is old enough to get married she is expected to arrange her lustrous, blue-black hair in two large whorls.”
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“Rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every sun-baked housetop.”
YOUNG ACOMANS.]