CHAPTER XXVII. THE PIMOS.
The minds of men untrained are strangely alike. There is such sameness of arts, customs, inventions, such likeness in their religious beliefs under like stages of development, we must reach the conclusions that on subjects of deep human interest certain ideas are inherent in human hearts, despite alien blood and long epochs of separation. All barbarians have their priests or medicine men and prophets, are firm believers in necromancy, incantations, the power of witchcraft, and have deep faith in the great Spirit as the peculiar guardian of their race. Some tribes have a fear of the devil who must be worshipped in order to be propitiated. With them old times are best, and all traditions run back to a golden age of innocency in a Region of Delight where the rivers sparkled with sweet water, the maize was always ripe, and high born warriors revelled and feasted on the game ever in sight. There was no work, no disease, no old age. This Elysium was lost by crime, and the Arcadian days ended forever. The sinful world was destroyed by a Flood from which only one prophet and his family escaped. Every Rocky Mountain tribe has its legend of the deluge and belief in the second coming of the Divine Man who is to right all wrongs, correct all miseries and mistakes; returning some bright morning to renew the dull world to youth, and then Paradise will be regained. For this revelation they wait, as the prophetic souls were found waiting to be guided by the star which led to the divine child of Mary.
The Pueblos jealously guard their wretched little chapels (_estufas_) from the prying eyes of strangers, and the gentlest of visitors is rebuffed by their dumb secrecy. In different ways I have gathered many traditions. Some are childish and witless to my understanding; others wearing symbolic veils are graceful as the Greek myths, and hold a significance as rich. Fables of the nomads will do for another day. The Pueblos take our attention first. The great variety of climate in North America produces various habits of life which temper and color the fables; and I believe there is no myth without some meaning. The vapory conceits we treat so lightly were not empty phantasms to the brain that shaped them in the beginning, and some heart has thrilled to each airy, insubstantial legend.
Certain old instincts run in all bloods. The inborn desire of the soul to account for its origin, to ask whence come I, what am I, perplexes the bewildered savage burrowing in his cave as it did the learned questioners, a mixed multitude crowding the Academy, reverently listening to the wondrous maid of Alexandria--Hypatia the Beautiful.
What is truth? asked the Governor of Judea as truth Incarnate stood before him in the Judgment Hall; and men are yet demanding of science, nature, philosophy, the origin of being, the destinies, the soul and its limitations. Turning from the seen to the unseen, from the outer to the inner life, from the tangible to the unreal, longing to know the beginning and the end of all. It is the old yearning to be as God; old as the first man. To comprehend the stirring of the divinity within, which neither feeds nor sleeps but lives on separate from the body, opens endless questioning. This is the study of sages; about it the wisest debate and ponder, and of it the savage, blanketless and naked, where the soft seasons allow him to roam, asks with a blind ignorance infinitely pathetic.
To him the hidden forces which rule the universe are divinities to be entreated by prayer, propitiated by sacrifice and offerings. The savage’s whole life is penetrated by religion, from the hard little cradle to which he is swathed, to the shallow pit where he lies uncoffined when life’s struggle is over.
The tribes near Santa Fé and the larger American towns of New Mexico have mixed the religion of Christ with the old superstitions in a curious, almost painful manner. I once visited Tesuque with a view to gaining some knowledge of their primitive ceremonials. The usual protracted smoking was indulged in; there followed a stupid meaningless silence, considered the height of politeness; then we partook of cold refreshments consisting of little apples carefully wiped on the sheepskin which covered baby’s cradle as a blanket. We climbed the rickety ladders, admired the excellence of the bearskins, counted the bags of shelled corn and rough potteries baked in their mud furnaces, surveyed a chromo in feverish colors named the Queen of Heaven, and when the time was ripe I modestly inquired if we might be permitted to visit the _estufa_. The head man of the tribe (cacique) whom we named Hiawatha, smiled blandly, showing ivory white teeth without a flaw, and said “Si, Sigñora,” with a cheerful alacrity quite foreign to the usual aboriginal stoicism. We followed him into the courtyard and Minnehaha followed us and stonily stared. The dusky maiden in the march of progress is escaping from buckskin draperies. She wears the garment called by the French _intimate_, skirt of Navajo blanket, black ground with tracings of red embroidery, not unlike the familiar Greek pattern, calico shawl gay as the scarf of Iris. She is without beauty of any sort; is raw boned and high shouldered, inclining to fat; of an ashy sunburnt skin, flat face, high cheek bones, thick lips, mannish gait, harsh voice. She is nearly akin (if there’s anything in likeness) to the Mongolian Ah Sin, and to ward off the sun that day carried a yellow parasol over her heavy head. They all stared unmoved as we climbed a ladder leaning against the side of a high pen made of pine logs and mud plaster,--a roofless enclosure perhaps eighteen feet square. As we looked down, a number of birds like swallows flew out, and save their mud-built nests against the logs the ancient _estufa_ was empty. The old arrow-maker was joking when he conducted us to the altar place; the shrine was abandoned, the sacred fire was dead, the secret temple with all its holy and guarded mysteries was laid open to women even! It was plain the Queen of Heaven had usurped the place of the lord of life and light. The chief smiled broadly and Minnehaha wrapped the pink calico rebosa round her head and laughed as if she would die. I hate to be beaten in this way, and while the gentlemen went off to look at a bear skin, I approached the youthful princess in the attitude of interviewer. “Gentle maiden,” I said, mustering my small stock of Spanish, “do you remember when the Montezuma fire burned in this deserted _estufa_?”
“Si, Sigñora.”
“Was it many years ago?”
“Si, sigñora.”
“Perhaps fifteen years?” (insinuatingly).
“Si, sigñora.”
“Ah, can you remember so long? What sort of wood was consecrated to the shrine?”
“Si, sigñora.”
“Did it flame up to the roof, or was it merely a bank of coals; your mother” (tenderly) “has told you of it I know.”
“Si, sigñora.”
“Then tell me all you know, if it will not trouble you too much, and I promise you a beautiful string of blue beads.”
“Si, sigñora.”
This intellectual feast was broken up by an untimely giggle from a gentle maiden not of aboriginal blood, and we made our adieux. I afterward learned the sweet girl was only shamming; she understood Spanish well enough, but chose this pretense to outwit strangers. A distinguished success.
We were completely floored and made haste to cover our retreat by leaving the mud-walled village for a nooning and lunch under a clump of gnarled cedars hard by. The Indian is not disappearing at a satisfactory rate before the march of civilization. A swarm of children, the dirtiest and raggedest imaginable, followed us and held out their hands for the remains of our lunch. The biscuits were snatched by a youthful Indigene like the greedy boy of the First Reader who refused to give his dear playmates a crumb of his cake, and I had to fairly slap his hands to make him divide. He then swallowed the lemon rinds and would have devoured the sardine boxes if he could. So much alike are the sons of men!
To reach the old superstitions in their purity we must push away from the track of the locomotive; far as possible from censer and cross, parish priest and Protestant missionary. So we set out with the determination of the mythic Roton, who resolved to go till he arrived at the roof of heaven; away to the Moquis of the North and the Papagos of the South. Below the Gila dwell in close neighborhood the Maricopas and the Pimos, or as the old Spaniards wrote it Pimas, whom they found three hundred years ago irrigating the lands and raising two crops of corn a year, just as they do now. The Coco-Maricopas are a branch of the Pueblos, and these tribes inhabit a large region, mostly perfect desert, between the head of the Gulf of California and that extensive cordillera of which the Sierra Catalina forms the most westerly range. A volcanic country in which since the introduction of man, the surface of the earth as well as the climate has undergone great changes.
After straining over scorching deserts, alkali plains, sage bush and greasewood wastes, it was a deep pleasure to rest our tired eyes on the bright corn lands on both sides of the river Gila, which runs through the Pimo reservation about twenty-five miles. The three great _acequias_ with their various branches comprise nearly five hundred miles, and extend over a tract of land eighteen miles in length. The fields are fenced with crooked sticks, wattled with brush, mainly of the thorny cactus and mezquit. The Salic or rather Slavic law prevails among the aborigines. Instead of studying graceful culture and decorative art, the farming is done by the women. When harvest time comes, the men turn into the fields and help, besides lightening the labor by standing around in the shade and looking on, or sprawling on the floor swinging the baby as it hangs suspended in a box, hanging by a cord from the ceiling. Sometimes the mother carries a large basket on her head and the papoose sitting on a sort of side-bustle astride her hip. A civilized baby would tumble off instantly, but the native infant holds on to her smooth, shining sides in an attitude wonderfully like the missing link, our Simian ancestor, riding the calico pony in gay circus ring. This baby does not cut monkey-shines, but stares at the stranger as stolidly as his father and mother. The Pimo customs are like the Coco-Maricopas in everything but burial rites. They bury their dead but their neighbors burn them. The Maricopa bodies are placed on a funeral pyre of resinous wood and utterly consumed, in classic fashion.
Reporters say the mourners go into a profound mourning of tar. On inquiry I learned the “tar” is a portion of the ashes of the dear deceased mixed with the dissolved gum of the mezquit, (a species of acacia which yields a concrete juice like gum arabic). They smear their faces with the hideous plaster, and let it remain as a mark of deep grief till it wears away. A widow, the next day after her bereavement, is offered in market by the town crier to any one who wants a wife. If an able-bodied squaw, good at hoeing, and stout enough to balance the baby on top of the basket of corn overhead, she is usually courted, “wooed, won, married and all” within a few days, though custom allows her to continue the periodic howling and tar deep-mourning several days after the new honeymoon begins to shine.
I was charmed at thought of being among Pagans assisting at such heathen obsequies, and felt it the spot to find the ancient lore I sought, through many a weary mile of lava bed and tropic scorch. I was among the changeless, unimpressible American Indians, living among demons and goblins, spirits of earth, air, fire, water, whose beliefs are untainted by mixture of Christian ideas. Here I discovered the flickering, mythic lights which produce such lovely effects, changing gods to men, and making demigods of heroes. Among these untutored children of nature, every misty outline and vapory mountain haze might be an aboriginal soul floated out into the unknown dark on its wanderings toward the bright sun house. In the shadows of vast cañons the block elves have their haunts, and lie in wait for bewildered spirits, and hurl spectral missiles along the pathless space surrounding “the dance house of the ghosts.” The Pueblos are all sun-worshippers, and the Pimos tell us the road to the sun house is beset with perils. In the darkness of the dread mystery of death, deep waters are to be crossed, many-headed monsters bellow and roar, fire flames before the eyes, and whirlwinds lift the affrighted spirit from his feet and toss him in mid air. Four is a sacred number with them, derived from adoration of the four cardinal points; the soul flutters about the body four days, and sometimes stones are thrown across the warrior’s grave to scare away the evil spirits. In the unlighted valley the brave must be provided with a pipe for his solace, with weapons suited to his rank, choice armor approved to fit him as he enters the kingdom of souls. Lifeless, he may yet grope through the cold clay, and touching with icy fingers the trusted arms, will not tremble in defenceless march through the horror of the awful shades.
Is this not the instinct of the antique Scythian buried on the field with the blade in which victory still lingers? The pathos of the singer breaking his heart and harp together:
“Lay his sword by his side, it hath served him too well Not to rest near his pillow below; To the last moment true, from his hand ere it fell Its point was still turned to a flying foe. Fellow-lab’rers in life, let them slumber in death, Side by side, as becomes the reposing brave,-- That sword which he loved still unbroke in its sheath, And himself unsubdued in his grave.”
Four days the howlers howl, and further to cheer the dread passage four nights a fire is kindled on the warrior’s grave to open a path for the blinded footsteps in the fearful “dead man’s journey,” and lead them to the sun, the safe, final resting place. There the chief will take up his weapons again and spend a blissful eternity fighting his old enemies, the Yumas, and we may be sure slaying his thousands and revelling in blood, like the Viking in the halls of the Valhalla, with his comrades hacked to pieces in many a morning fight, but always ready with whole limbs and flashing, undinted armor, to appear at dinner. Food is placed on the fresh earth, the best corn bread, flesh of antelope and jars of water, that the lone one may be comforted by gifts from the world he has left. These tender offerings bestowed, the property of the hero is portioned out to the tribe, fields divided among those who need land, his grain, chickens, dogs, bows, etc., fairly distributed. No wrangling among heirs, no lawyers to absorb estates, all is done fairly and equitably, in a submission to precedent worthy our imitation.
Nor do the Pimos refuse to be comforted. Cattle are driven up and slaughtered, and deeply burdened with sorrow, every man loads down his squaw with beef, and feasts whole days on funeral baked meats. Dare I disgust my dear friend, the classic reader, by saying these barbarian feasts are reminders of the tremendous banquet in the pavilion of Agamemnon, where the “steer of full five years” was killed, skinned, and cooked before the eyes of the Grecians.
Homeric champions--Trojan peers and sceptered kings of Greece--were not made wretched by indigestion, and I suspect (low be it spoken!) they took pepsin in the natural state. With their enviable appetites they were ready to eat off-hand; the squarest of meals never came amiss, and their capacity for tough beef, rare done, was prodigious and unfailing. So far very like our Rocky mountaineers, but unhappily the red warriors are not embalmed in verse by the imperishable poets.
When the Indian woman dies no high sepulchral feasts, no games and honors, such as Ilion to her hero paid. With scant ceremony she is wrapped in her poor shroud, the moccasins of her own make fastened to her shapely feet; the carrying-strap worn across the forehead, and the paddle go with the cold hands. Sad emblem of woman’s destiny in the wilderness; pathetic tokens that even in the mystic land of shades she must be the silent, uncomplaining slave of her brutish, savage lord.
This is the Pimo legend of the Creation: The world was made by an earth prophet. In the beginning it stretched fair and frail as a line of light across the darkness of empty space. A wise Sagamore lived in the Gila valley, and one night a royal eagle came to the door and warned him of a deluge close at hand. The prophet wrapped his mantle of fur around him, for it was winter, and laughed the gray messenger to scorn. The kingly bird shook his white head, spread wide his wings and soared away to heaven. Again the eagle came with his warning cry, the waters were near and would soon burst overhead; but the sachem drowsily groaned at the wakening voice and turned on his bed of buffalo skins and slept. Three times the broad wings shadowed the sleeper, and the friendly voice entreated him to flee the wrath of the gods, but the prophet gave no heed. Then quick as the eagle disappeared in the blue and starry silence, there came thunder, lightning, and a mountain of water like an earthquake overspread the valley of Gila, and the morning sun shone on only one man saved from destruction by floating on a ball of resin--Szeukha, the son of the Creator. He was enraged at the royal bird, thinking him the mover of the flood, and made a rope ladder of tough bark like the woodbine, climbed the naked, riven cliff where the eagle lived, and slew him. He then raised to life the mangled bodies of the slain on which the eagle had preyed, and sent them out to re-people the world. In the centre of the vast eyrie he found a woman, the eagle’s wife, and their child. These he helped down the rope ladder and sent on their way, and from them are descended that race of wise men called Hohocam, ancients or grandfathers, who were guided in all their wanderings by an eagle. Southward they marched past forests of oak, sycamore, cedar and flowering trees, past mountains of crystal and gold, and rivers murmurous with song flowing over beds of stars, till they reached a deep blue lake kissed by soft winds, sparkling in the sunlight. On its borders they planted a city with streets of water--old Tenochtitlan, which white men call Mexico. Through the uncounted centuries since the deluge, Szeukha has not dropped out of Indian memory.
Because he killed the bird of prophecy he had to do a sort of penance, which was never to scratch himself with his nails but always with a little stick. The custom is still adhered to by the unchanging Pimos, and a splinter of wood, renewed every fourth day, is carried for this purpose, stuck in their long coarse hair and plied with extreme energy and enjoyment. Stern are the duties of the historian, and truth obliges me to record the Pimos do not scratch their heads for nothing.
They are good fighters, and have been a wall of defence against the incursions of Apaches, at one time the only protection for travellers between Fort Yuma and Tucson. They appear comfortable in their huts,--which are snug dens of oval shape made of mud and reeds thatched with _tule_ or wheat straw,--quietly contented with their industrious wives and their own lazy selves. They make a kind of wine like sour cider, not nearly so good though, and quaff the vinegar bowl with sombre hilarity after the corn bread and mutton are disposed at dinner.
The tributaries of the Gila bear sweet, soft, meandering Spanish names which I forget. They are rivers of the leaky sort, disappearing by fitful turns and capriciously starting up again in the deeply worn channels. Even in its best strength the Gila (river of swift water) is not so large as an Indiana creek which we would blush to call river. It contains three kinds of fish; trout, buffalo, and humpback, all equally mean, of slippery, muddy, flavor and most inferior quality.
Not far from the Pimo villages, eleven in number, are the written rocks, mentioned in the oldest histories and described at length by the early explorers and the modern traveller. At the base of an immense bluff are heaps of boulders covered with figures of men and animals, rudely carved with some coarse instruments. Uncouth shapes of birds, footprints, snakes, and the ever recurring print of a moccasin, indicative of marching. Many writers attach a value to these ancient inscriptions; one old Spanish adventurer discerned in them letters like the Gothic, Hebrew and Chaldean characters. They are not there to-day; among hundreds of piled-up boulders and detached stones there is no tracery like the letters of any known language. Some of the markings are centuries old and partly effaced, others written over and over again. The under sides of the rocks, also, are sculptured where it would be impossible to cut them as they lie, and some weigh many tons. These last must have fallen from the mountain after the hieroglyphs were made. There can be no doubt of their great antiquity and the large numbers of carved stones prove it to have been a resort ages on ages ago, but I doubt the importance of the lines, to me meaningless zigzags. Indians are the laziest of mortals, and in their childish way love to scribble worthless signs, rude pictography on their skins and the hides of animals, their walls and potteries. The “Pedros Pintados” which took such hold on Spanish imagination were probably boundary lines between tribes, and the tortoise, snake and so on are the ancient tribal symbols, treaties possibly. If they had the deep significance claimed by easily excited chroniclers the story would run like this: The sons of the North have waded a lake of blood, have swept like the whirlwind across the Sierras; the bow has rattled, the arrow flew. We have broken the bones of the Apaches, scooped out their eyes and warmed our hands in their smoking blood. We have scalped the proud warriors and beaten out the brains of their children. Whoop la! Now let the earth tremble, for the wolves are let loose on the slain!
There are widely scattered ruins in the Gila valleys showing it was once densely populated, but the remains are so monotonous they command little interest. The visitor who has seen one has the type of all. A certain melancholy pathos invests every ruin; houses where men have lived and died are more or less haunted, but the relics of New Mexico and Arizona are destitute of anything like grace or comeliness. The makers and builders never got beyond the rough adobe, the stone hatchet and flint arrow-head, and nothing is proved by them except that this country has been inhabited from a remote period by a people not differing greatly from the Pueblos of to-day.
As we journeyed up the valley we saw herds of antelopes, always too distant for a shot. The Rocky mountain antelope is a most beautiful and graceful animal, of compact form and exceeding strength. The lithe limbs are delicate and fleet, feet small and elegant, tail short and tufted. It is light fawn color, under parts white; its luminous dark eyes are like those of the gazelle of the Orient. Shy and not easily approached the Indians domesticate them by trapping when very young. They have the gentlest, most confiding way of laying their heads in your lap, and looking up with the lustrous eyes which have furnished poets with lovely imagery from the days of Solomon to the nights of Byron. I know no creature with such an appealing manner and such swift grace of movement; they speed across the still, wide plain, in the farness of the distance appearing like low flying birds.
Though we are not in the Navajo country we see now and then their famous blanket, striped in gayest blue, yellow and red, this last color so dear to the Indian eye, made from ravelling out flannel which they buy of the white traders. The dyes are vegetable and absolutely fadeless. The blanket is coarse, hard and heavy; a good one will shed water like rubber, and wear a great while as a horse or saddle blanket. The Indian women spin wool in a slow, simple way by rolling in their hands, and they spend all their spare time for months in making one blanket which may sell for thirty-five dollars, or if very brilliant in color and close in texture, for fifty or a hundred dollars. When on the march even, the Navajo woman has her little contrivance for weaving, on the mule with her, or across her shoulder if on foot, and in five minutes after the halt is sounded she sits under a tree weaving away as composedly as though she had been at it for hours. The loom is nothing but sticks placed horizontally, one at top, two at bottom, far enough apart to accommodate warp of the blanket’s length or breadth. Between these the warp is stretched, and to one straps are attached to throw over the limb of a tree. At the bottom are other straps, for the feet to operate in beating up the filling. In her silent, joyless, persevering fashion the work goes steadily on, and the weaver is satisfied to see it grow at a rate incalculably slow.
A sufficient measure of civilization is the treatment of women, and among Apaches we find the deepest degradation. The Pueblo wives are incomparably better off than those of the nomads. The contrast between them and their sisters of the fairer race is more painful than that between men of the two races. I have seen young hunters with stately forms, erect, lithe and sinewy, and one warrior who might have been a model for Uncas, the favorite hero of our early friend Cooper.
We all remember the anecdote Galt tells of Benjamin West. When in Rome his friends agreed that the Apollo of Vatican should be the first statue shown to the young Philadelphia Quaker. It was enclosed in a case, and to try the effect on him suddenly the keeper threw open the doors. “A young Mohawk warrior,” exclaimed West.
But the likeness is only in the body. The ideal head of the Apollo with its clustering locks, the exquisite sensitive face with its delicate molding of lip and chin, the Phidian forehead and nose, are in highest contrast with the sensual, sluggish lineaments of the red man.
Among the various tribes there is a dire monotony, and in nothing are they more alike than in a lofty scorn of work. The man glories in his laziness, the woman exults in her slavery. I have seen an Indian try a heavy lift and set the bag of corn down again with a “Ugh! squaw’s work.” If we insinuate he should do the little hoeing for their scant supply of beans the woman resents the idea. “Would you have a warrior work like a squaw?” is her indignant response to the suggestion.
I once saw a married couple trudging home, if their cold, smoky, dirty den may be called by that dear name. The husband, perhaps twenty steps in advance of the woman who bore on her back a bag of corn. The noble red man (see J. F. Cooper), waited for her to come up to him, she hastening her pace as she saw it. Then he slung his rifle on her pack, folded his arms across his noble breast, and strode forward with easy gliding step, in untrammeled dignity. How I longed to hand that noble red man over to the mercies of a woman’s rights convention.
The husband may disfigure or insult the wife at pleasure, divorce her without form or ceremony by a mere separation, and she has no protection or appeal; sometimes his conduct drives her to suicide. In divorce it is the unwritten law of the wilderness that children go with their mother. Among the wandering tribes mother and baby are not divided even in death. A merciful barbarity gives one blow with the hatchet, and the little one rests with the best love it can know on earth. They have few children; four are a large family, twins are unknown, nearly all reach maturity. Among the wild tribes where polygamy is the rule it is not a cause of complaint among the women, from the fact that it implies a division of labor, and the latest wife lords it over her predecessors. Even among savages there is no love like the last love.
The Pimo Indians are not made of “rose-red clay,” they are dark brown, differing in complexion from the Appalachians east of the Rocky mountains and the olive hues of the California tribes. Historians say they have ever been the most active and industrious of the Pueblos; still that does not imply the energy and activity of the white race. They sit for hours in front of their huts, motionless as a group of petrifactions. In a mild climate their wants are few and simple, and a little of this world’s goods obtained without much work and less worry is sufficient for the calm philosophers who despise the arts of the white race and steadily march in the paths of the forefathers.
I must not leave their country without mention of the wooing of the young Pimo warrior. All Pueblos have but one wife, and no girl is obliged to marry against her will, however eligible the parents may consider any offer. If his bent of love be honorable, his purpose marriage, Romeo first wins over the parents by making them presents, such delicacies as pumpkins, beans, coyote skins, or if he is very wealthy a pony. Then, in banged locks and straggling braids of hair, he sits at the door of the lady of his choice serenading her for hours, day after day, tooting with all his might on a flute of cane, an instrument of torture with four holes in it. He hides himself in a bush and like the nightingale “sings darkling.” Sometimes Juliet is a coquette and takes no notice of the tender demonstration, leaving him to keep up the plaintive, shrill noise till
“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”
If no notice is taken of the appeal there is no further sign; he may hang up his flute, with its bright pencillings and gayly tufted fringes, and there is no mortification in the rejection. Should she smile on his suit she comes out of the coop-like den and the ceremony is ended. Romeo takes her to his house and the bride is at home. If he is a man of moderate means the house is built of four upright stakes, forked at one end, driven into the ground; across these other sticks are laid to support the roof, which may be of corn shucks, or straw or rushes. If he is ambitious to have a lasting, palatial mansion it will be walled round with stakes, plastered and roofed with mud. An opening for a door is left about three feet high to creep in at. These residences are from five to seven feet high, so one cannot stand upright in every one. Adjoining the wigwam is a bower of boughs open on all sides; in this shady lodge are the few potteries in which Juliet does the cooking, and here the happy pair sit on their heels when at rest, and Romeo smokes while she grinds the corn in the _metate_ of stone.
It is expected that the bridegroom will pay the parents all his means admit to compensate them for the loss of a hand in the cornfield. The Indian wife never hears of protoplasm, equal suffrage, social science and the like. She often builds the wigwam after Romeo has cut the poles, always bears them on her shoulders in the march, plows the fields with a crooked stick, raises the beans, hoes the corn, bakes the cakes, without a complaint. If her beady, black eyes mark his coming and look brighter when he comes I cannot tell why. He is sullen and still, a dusky shape, the very perfection of gloomy indifference. Perhaps if he eats the _tortillas_ with an appetite her soul is glad and she has her reward. If she is content, why sow the seeds of dissatisfaction by telling her she is a beast of burden and he is a beast of prey?
The trip through the Pimo country was made memorable by my first bivouac. ’Twere vain to tell thee all; how a mule drank alkali water, swelled up and died in an hour, how part of the party had to push forward with a disabled team, leaving a broken wagon and luggage to wait the relief, and how a long, hot day brought us to a government station. This was a mud shanty thatched with cedar boughs and plastered with clay. The edifice was divided into three rooms, the first was a stable where a gay little pony was pacing round and round without a halter. The next was the guest chamber. As I approached, there issued from it a fragrance, the triple extract of raw hide, burnt bacon and old pipe. The apartment, perhaps sixteen feet square, was without door or window. The “accommodations” were a mud fireplace in the corner where one might make coffee and fry eggs, and a pile of sheepskins on which the visitor might spread his blanket and sleep,--if he could. The cedar and mud roof slanted as though it would tumble down any minute. The clay floor was unswept, the walls fringed with cobwebs and adorned with strings of red pepper, saddles and bridles. In one corner lay bags of shelled corn; on a swinging shelf were newspapers, an odd volume of Oliver Twist and sporting magazines. The third room was sacred to herdsmen and _rancheros_. The keeper of this lodge in a vast wilderness was a retired minstrel, and his photograph as jolly endman broadly smiled upon us, dangling from enormous deer’s antlers which upheld decorative art in lieu of a mantel piece. I took peaceable possession of the only chair and my fellow traveller through life’s journey lolled in luxurious ease on the end of a candlebox, while we surveyed the “accommodations.” There were three chromos of Evangeline on the walls: presumably the peddler closed out his stock there. One picture of that melancholy maiden sitting on a nameless grave is depressing; two are hardly endurable; three are heart-breaking. I gave way before them and said, “We will try an Indian lodge under the open sky.” My resolution made the idea at once become a pleasant thought. In a barren country the householder, a pilgrim and a stranger, develops a versatile genius second only to that of Bernini the Florentine sculptor, artist, poet, musician, who gave an opera in Rome where he built the theater, invented the engines, cut the statues, painted the scenes, wrote the comedy and composed the music. In the spirit of communism which pervades the Territories I rummaged the abandoned baggage and found blankets, buffalo robes, a mattress, one attenuated pillow stuffed with feathers pretty much all quill, made “riant” by a pink calico case ruffled all round. No sham about that pillow.
A clump of stunted pines was the chamber, carpeted with the soft needles undisturbed for ages. A Navajo blanket made a striped roof, its weight a security against puffs of wind even if we had not fastened it with strings and tent pins driven into the warm, gravelly sand. The pretty recess, so like a play-house, had a fine charm; spicy with the fresh scent of the pines, shadowed by a great rock, the pink pillow looked rather lumpy but restful and inviting. I felt sure there were pleasant dreams, or better yet, dreamless sleep in the unexpected luxury.
While I smoothed its tumbled ruffles the gay troubadour came from high pastures with his herds to let them drink at the precious spring, and then fold them in a corral made of stakes of mezquit wattled with cactus.
The grama grass on which they feed is described in the books as incomparably the most nutritive in the world, which may account for the grand development of bone in the animals throughout the region. All the wild grasses of the country are peculiar in curing themselves in the stalk. The grama bears no flower, shows no seed, but seems to reproduce itself from the roots by the shooting up of young, green and vigorous spires, which are at first inclosed within the sheaths of their old and dried-up predecessors, which by their growth they split and cast to earth, themselves filling their places. The vast region swept from immemorial ages by the Apaches is covered with this sort of low, mossy grass, and it enables those most savage of savages to make their wonderful marches with their wiry little ponies, which endure extraordinary fatigue so long as they have this feed in abundance, and are allowed to crop it from native _pasturas_.
The troubadour who kept the wayside inn was a handsome scamp, a captivating runaway from civilization, calling himself John Smith, which I am sure is not his name. He apologized for the absence of his cook (who had no existence on earth), and in festal mood, with many flourishes, insisted on displaying his own skill in the culinary science. He graduated under the celebrated Micawber many years ago, and would like nothing better than a “hot supper of his own getting up.”
With the help of a Mexican _peon_, he deftly and rapidly concocted and served in the Evangeline apartment various poisons, liquid and solid, spreading them on a pine table covered with newspapers. Conspicuous among the dishes were hot death-balls, with lightning zigzags of deadly drugs, known on the frontier as “soddy biscuit.” Under the beguiling name of spring lamb we had paid an exhaustive price for a section of ancient ram which might have battered the walls of Babylon. Fire made no impression on it, and the chops rebounded under the teeth like India-rubber. However we had the usual reserve of crackers, ham, canned fruit, and I drank to the general joy of the whole table in a glass of withered lemonade. The gentlemen ate with cannibal appetite, and so far from dropping dead, as I feared, seemed refreshed by the reflection. The banquet ended, we insisted on music from the obscured, let me not say fallen, star, and the banjo was brought forth from its case under the festive board. Brudder Bones had a rich and delightful voice, and we listened to him with unaffected enjoyment. One by one the herdsmen came by leading their lean and thirsty sheep, making a picturesque spectacle as they passed to the spring.
Back of the miserable hut stretched a plain, level as water, three miles to the foot-hills; far beyond were the Sierras, purple to the snow line, then a shining silver chain. Their unspeakable beauty haunts me still like some enchanting vision in which I beheld a new heaven and a new earth. Beyond the bower rose a heap of boulders, bare except for the tall yucca’s cream-white blossoms which decked them in bridal brightness, and a species of night-blooming cereus that with the declining day unfolded every petal and filled the air with a fragrance like white lilies. On a bench in front of the hut sat a prospector and the belated travellers; lounging on blankets and skins were half a dozen soldiers, a Pueblo Indian, a negro and a Mexican _peon_. The banjo did its best for the musician occupying the candle box; I was enthroned in the only chair. A mixed company, representative of the border races.
What should we sing but “Tenting to-night boys,” and “Oft in the stilly night,” the twilight song with its tender memories of the lost loves buried many a year ago? Lastly, in the solemn beauty of the afterglow, we gave “John Brown’s Body” with a rousing chorus in honor of the graves forever green and glorious.
A line of crimson lights flamed along the mountain peaks, then the drop curtain of violet and pearl gray fell softly through the speckless sapphire and over the darkening hills. ’Twas time to say good-night; most of the herdsmen wrapped themselves in blankets and rolled like logs on the ground; the passive ragged _peon_ bowed in courteous grace with gently spoken _adios_, and lay against the side of the hut, his delicate face upturned to the sky. Old uncle Ned made a tiny fire of pine cones “to toas my feet, missis,” as he muffled head and ears in an army coat on which a shred of shoulder strap hinted of better days. We, too, said “good-night.” Besides the old songs my ear was haunted with dim æolian soundings mingling an evening strain from the Koran:
“Have we not given you the earth for a bed, And made you husband and wife? And given you sleep for rest, And made you a mantle of night?”
But I could not sleep thus mantled in that Eden bower. The air was so electric that five lines of fire followed my fingers as I drew them across the buffalo robe. I was in that state known to most women and a few men when my eyelids would _not_ close. I felt as if the seven doors of the enchanted lantern were opened and I could see all over the world. There was nothing to fear, but a sense of strangeness and awe held me. The spangled arch which upholds the throne of God,--its splendor robbed me of my rest; my spirit was not fitted to the magnificent infinite palace. Of the exquisite beauty of that balmy semi-tropic night I hardly trust myself to speak. Through the soft perfumed dusk, through the leafy tent, the stars glowed resplendent. None missing there; the lost Pleiad found her sisters; Aldebaran shone in the East; Arcturus and his sons; Orion belted and spurred with jewels. The blanket slipped from its fastenings and there was no curtaining to veil the far-off mystery of my boundless bed-room. The cool night breeze fanned my face as I watched the lofty spaces so solemn, so wondrous fair. I had often slept in the ambulance with curtains close-buttoned; that was a room. The walls of this apartment were limitless.
Restlessly turning on the pink pillow I thought of eyes that are looking down, not up at the starry hosts, and the voice now beyond them which used to sing to the air of “Bonnie Doon,”
“Forever and forevermore, The star, the star of Bethlehem.”
The goats and sheep were at rest, the hurt lamb had ceased its bleat, the light in the ranche went out. In the stilly night silence all, save the low wind soughing in the pines making midnight hush the deeper. The long howl of a dog in the distance. Was he barking at the silver boat in the blue bay overhead? What sailors manned that fairy craft? Did they understand the mysteries and could they answer my weary questionings? What saw they in the unfathomable depths? and what meant that signal shot from the slender bow across the trackless blue, dropping sparkles of fire through the dusk?
Good night, Good night!
THE END.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Footnotes have been moved to the end of each chapter and relabeled consecutively through the document.
Illustrations have been moved to paragraph breaks, except for the frontispiece.
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
The following changes were made:
Santa Fè has been changed to Santa Fé throughout.
p. 45: Taguna changed to Laguna (the Laguna mission,)