WORKS BY George Wharton James In and Around the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona. The Indians of the Painted Desert Region. The Missions and Mission Indians of California. Indian Basketry. In the Heart of the Painted Desert. The Indians of the Painted Desert Region Hopis , Navahoes , Wallapais , Havasupais By George Wharton James Author of "In and Around the Grand Canyon," etc. With Numerous Illustrations from Photographs Boston Little, Brown, and Company 1903 1903 Copyright, 1903 ,

W ild , weird, and mystic pictures are formed in the mind by the very name—the Painted Desert. The sound itself suggests a fabled rather than a real land. Surely it must be akin to Atlantis or the Island of Circe or the place where the Cyclops lived. Is it not a land of enchantment and dreams, not a place for living men and women, Indians though they be? It is a land of enchantment, but also of stern reality, as those who have marched, unprepared, across its waterless wastes can testify. No fabl

C ivilization and barbarism obtrude themselves delightfully at every turn in this Wonderland of the American Southwest, called the Painted Desert Region. Ancient and modern history play you many a game of hide-and-seek as you endeavor to trace either one or the other in a study of its aboriginal people; you look upon a ceremony performed to-day and call it modern. In reality it is of the past, so old, so hoary with antiquity that even to the participants it has lost its origin and much of its me

O f the flora and fauna of the Painted Desert Region I have made no study. That they are fascinating the works of Hart Merriam, Coville, Lemmon, Hough, and others of later days, and of the specialists of the earlier government surveys, abundantly testify. There are cacti of varieties into the hundreds, sagebrush, black and white grama, bunch grass, salt grass, hackberry, buck-brush, pines, junipers, spruces, cottonwoods, and willows, besides a thousand flowering plants. There are lizards, swifts

T hree great fingers of rock from a gigantic and misshapen hand, roughly speaking, pointing southward, the hand a great plateau, the fingers mesas of solid rock thrust into the heart of a sandy valley,—this is the home of the Hopi, commonly and wrongly termed the Moki. The fingers are from seven to ten miles apart, and a visitor can go from one finger-nail to another either by descending and ascending the steep trails zigzagged on the fingers' sides, or he can circle around on the back of the ha

T he province of Tusayan is dotted over in every direction with ruins, all of which were once inhabited by the Hopi people. Indeed, even in the "pueblo" stage of their existence they seem to have retained much of the restlessness and desire for change which marked them when "nomads." Traditionary lore among modern Hopis asserts that the well-known ruin of Casa Grande was once the home of their ancestors, and Dr. Fewkes has conclusively shown a line of ruins extending from the Gila and Salt River

T o know any people thoroughly requires many years of studied observation. The work of such men as A. M. Stephen, Dr. Fewkes, Rev. H. R. Voth, and Dr. George A. Dorsey reveals the vast field the Hopis offer to students. To the published results of these indefatigable workers the student is referred for fuller knowledge. There are certain things of interest, however, that the casual observer cannot fail to note. The costume of the men is undoubtedly a modification of the dress of the white man. T

T he Hopi is essentially religious. As a ritualist he has no superior on the face of the earth. From the ceremonial standpoint the Hopi people are the most religious nation known. From four to sixteen days of every month are employed by one society or another in the performance of secret religious rites, or in public ceremonies, which, for want of a better name, the whites call dances. So complex, indeed, is the Hopi's religious life that we have no complete calendar as yet of all the ceremonies

W hile perhaps no more important than others of the many ceremonies of the Hopis, the Snake Dance is by far the widest known and most exciting and thrilling to the spectator. There have been many accounts of it written, yet no less an authority than Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution asserts that the major portion of them are not worth the paper they are written on. Inaccurate in outline, faulty in detail, they utterly fail, in the most part, to grasp the deep importance of t

M isunderstood , maligned, abused, despised, the Navaho has never stood high in the estimation of those whites who did not know him. Yet he is industrious, moral, honest, trustworthy, fairly truthful, religious, and good to his wife and children. Not a weak list of virtues, even though one has to detract from it by accusing him of ingratitude. There are noble exceptions, of course, to this charge, but from what I know and have seen, I am inclined to believe that many, if not most, Navahoes have

T he Navaho reservation, embracing nearly four million acres, or eleven thousand square miles, was established by treaty with the Navahoes of June 1, 1868, and has been modified or enlarged by subsequent executive orders of October 29, 1878, January 6, 1880, May 17, 1884, April 24, 1886, November 19, 1892, and January 6, 1900. The major portion is in Arizona, but about six hundred and fifty square miles are in New Mexico. Its average elevation is about six thousand feet, though near the Colorado

W hen the Spaniard came into Arizona and New Mexico three hundred and fifty years ago, he found the art of weaving in a well-advanced stage among the domestic and sedentary Pueblo Indians, and the wild and nomad Navahoes. The cotton of these blankets was grown by these Arizona Indians from time immemorial, and they also used the tough fibres of the yucca, and agave leaves, and the hairs of various wild animals, either separately or with cotton. Their processes of weaving were exactly the same th

I t is hard to conceive of a people, numbering nearly a thousand souls, lodged within the borders of the United States, of whom nothing has been written. The only references to the Wallapais are to be found in the casual remarks of travellers or soldiers, and later, the agent's reports to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Perhaps the earliest reference to them is in Padre Garcés' Diary, where, in describing the Mohaves, he says the Wallapais (spelling the name Jaguallapais) are their enemies o

I n the days of the long ago, when the world was young, there emerged from Shi-pá-pu two gods, who had come from the underworld, named To-cho-pa and Ho-ko-ma-ta. When these brothers first stood upon the surface of the earth, they found it impossible to move around, as the sky was pressed down close to the ground. They decided that, as they wished to remain upon the earth, they must push the sky up into place. Accordingly, they pushed it up as high as they could with their hands, and then got lon

O f no people of the Southwest, perhaps, has so much utter nonsense been written as of this interesting People of the Blue Water, the pai (people) of the vasu (blue) haha (water)—the Havasupais. As far as we know, Padre Garcés was the first white man to visit them in their Cataract Canyon home, and he speaks of his visit in his interesting Diary translated and annotated by the lamented Elliott Coues shortly before his death. Captain Sitgreaves, Lieutenant Ives, Captain Palfrey, Major J. W. Powel

I n almost every case one finds a variety of differing legends related by the Indians of any tribe upon the same subject. As the Wallapais and Havasupais are cousins, one would naturally expect their legends to have some things in common. How much this is so will be seen by a comparison of the following story with that of the Wallapai Origin Legend. "The two gods of the universe," said O-dig-i-ni-ni´-a, the relator of the mythic law of the Havasupais, "are Tochopa and Hokomata. Tochopa he heap g

F rom the cradle to the grave the life of a Havasupai is practically an out-of-door life. Their hawas—even the best of them—are partially exposed and open, and in the summer hawas there is no pretence at what among civilized peoples is essential privacy. The games of the Havasupai children seem very few. I have seen only three. Of the first importance is shinny, or, as they call it, tha-se-vi'-ga . The goals are go-ji-ga' , the ball, ta-ma-na'-da , and the playing stick ta-so-vig'-a . The boys e

T he Havasupais do not occupy a high place in the scale of religious life. They are very different from the Hopis and Navahoes. They have few ceremonies, few prayers, and few ideas connected with the world of spirits. If evil comes upon them they seek to propitiate the power that caused it. They dance and pray. But there is no system, no recurrence of elaborate ceremonials year after year. Indeed, the only regular dance that I have personally seen is that of the annual harvest, and that is occas

On the Navahoes consult the full list prepared by Professor Frederick Webb Hodge in Washington Matthews' "Navaho Legends," published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., for the American Folk-Lore Society. Coues, Elliott. On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer. The Diary and Itinerary of Francisco Garcès in his Travels through Sonora, Arizona, and California. 2 vols. Francis P. Harper, New York, 1900. Dorsey, George A., and Voth, H. R. The Oraibi Soyal Ceremony. (Field Columbian Museum, publication 55