Coast to Coast (15 page)

S
ide by side with the Spaniards of New Mexico live their predecessors, the Pueblo Indians. At Santa Fé you may see them in the shadow of the old palace of the Spanish Governors, squatting placid and impassive beside their wares—pottery and rugs and odd ornaments. They wear colourful blankets around their shoulders, and are cluttered with earrings and innumerable necklaces, not unlike carthorses in Regent’s Park. Their faces are a trifle lumpish and immobile, and they have no wild animation of gesture; for these are agricultural Indians, who have lived in their settled villages for centuries, occasionally fighting back at marauding Navajo and Apache, but never roaming the wide desert looking for blood and booty. I was once sitting in the lobby of a hotel at Taos, some way north of Santa Fé, when two men from a Pueblo tribe sauntered bashfully in, a little misty-eyed (for a
fiesta
was in progress) and walking hand in hand, for courage. They stood in the centre of the
lobby, surrounded by palm trees, in their blankets and turquoise necklaces; and it was as if two fossilized sprites from a distant past, stiffened by the slow process of petrification, had detached themselves from a rock somewhere and come in to see us. The Pueblos are a well-ordered, extraordinarily resilient people, good craftsmen and farmers; but they are too rooted in their ways, and too swamped by religious impositions, to possess much grace or splendour.

One of the most familiar sights in America is that of the most famous of the
pueblos,
at Taos; in country made celebrated by such diverse characters as Kit Carson and D. H. Lawrence, it stands a mile or two outside the old Spanish town, at the edge of the mountains, with green fields all about it and the desert proper not far away. The main part of it is a kind of adobe apartment block, a serried jumble of square buildings, all inter-connecting, like a box of bricks, with few windows but many square doors, and with ladders propped from parapet to parapet. When the Spanish
conquistadores
came this way in the sixteenth century, looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola, they saw such
pueblos
as this high on the desert horizon, and mistook them, for a few excited hours, for distant castles and minarets and battlements, stocked with gold, treasures and beautiful women. In fact, those who admire most fervently the culture of the Pueblo Indians can scarcely deny that this poor mud pile is dull work. The Pueblos produce some pleasant pottery; but no paintings brighten the walls of their drab structure; what sense of colour it has comes from the mountains and the desert. There is no intricate woodwork, no graceful courtyard, no latticed window, no delicacy of design. As their devotees proudly claim, the Pueblo Indians continue to live much as they did at the time of Columbus: as squalidly as ever.

These poor people work their smallholdings, or sell their textiles and pottery, with an air of dispirited dottiness; or, vacant of expression, they stand around the
pueblo
hopelessly, like idlers outside an employment office; or sometimes, they stagger, tipsy, down the road to the
pueblo,
not magnificently, like a rolling English drunkard, but furtively, as if they are going to be sick. When the occasion demands, it is true, some of them can put on quite a creditable war dance. A few Indians took part in the Taos fiesta while I was there, and enlivened its carnival  procession. They ranged in age from 5 to 40, and wore extraordinary  costumes of feathers and fittings, with necklaces, armlets, bangles,  bracelets, ornamented trousers, headbands and innumerable bells.  They walked placidly in the procession, out of step, among the usual Army lorries, policemen, floats of various organizations, children on
ponies and bands; but from time to time they would suddenly stop in their tracks, as if seized by some appalling thought, and launch themselves into a ferocious dance. There they would remain for a moment or  two in paroxysms of staccato movement, their bells jingling rhythmically, the little Indians nearly bursting with effort, the older ones fierce  and determined, before ending as abruptly as they began, and resuming  their shuffled march towards the refreshment stalls. Generally, though,  the Pueblos are as dull of movement as of visage, and little of the noble  savage remains in them.

I recall with particular odium a Corn Dance performed at the Taos
pueblo
one August afternoon. It had been widely advertised, and many cars streamed down the dusty road from the town. We were met in the open yard of the
pueblo
by an Indian who told us where to leave our car, and instructed us to report to a neighbouring office to pay the necessary parking fee. At the same time he advised us that if we wanted to take photographs, there would be an extra charge. Thus welcomed, we wandered on, to find the dance already in progress. We had been warned of the sacred significance of the performance, and were hushed, as though we were approaching the altar of St. Peter’s, or honouring some sublime and kindly figure of the Buddha. The
pueblo
performers, however, seemed to take their devotions lightly. They were arranged in rows, dressed in elaborate costumes, the details of which escape me, but which have left a vague impression of feathered bathtowels. A drum played in the background, and a male chorus droned a sad and repetitive dirge. Holding small bunches of corn, the dancers shuffled and hopped rhythmically round and round, often grimacing at each other, sometimes giggling, for all the world like the juniors at the kindergarten, pretending to be fairies and goblins, or senselessly enacting one of the verses of A. A. Milne. Sometimes they wriggled, but not lasciviously, and sometimes they skipped, and sometimes they kicked half-heartedly. The watching tourists looked understandably bored, but so impressed were they by the supposedly spiritual nature of the ceremony that most of them were rooted there, and had a distinctly chapter-one-verse-fourteen look on their faces.

It struck me that there were a great many more women participating in this dreary ritual than there were men, but. my guide book told me that participation in ceremonials was a communal duty and privilege. Were all the men dancing elsewhere, I wondered; or parading at some distant carnival; or struck by some epidemic; or hunting squirrels in the mountains? An Indian selling Coca-Cola at a nearby stall gave me my answer. They were away in their fields, and had ignored the summons
to the Corn Dance. Did he mean that they had deliberately shirked their communal duty and privilege? Certainly, he answered blandly, most of them did; was it not a total waste of time? “Well,” I said, consulting my guide book, “but it says here that the rhythm of movement of such dances is summoned to express in utmost brilliancy the vibrant faith of a people in the deific order of the world and in the way the ancients devised for keeping man in harmony with his universe.”

The Indian looked rather blank. That might be so, he said, and certainly his grandfather knew all about that stuff; but as for himself, and all his friends, and his wife, and her friends, well, they had not the faintest idea what the dance was all about, and if they could possibly avoid dancing it, they naturally would. I sympathized with them. The entire official life of the Pueblo revolves around such ceremonies, once, anyway, thought conducive to crop-fertility and rain-making; some experts say that the Pueblo Indians spend more than half their time propitiating rain-gods, making offerings to supernatural powers, and in other such strenuous activities of appeasement. Into this structure of piety they apparently find it easy to inject the Christian God, introduced to them (not without inducements) by the savage Spanish pioneers. One
pueblo
,
for example, celebrates Midnight Mass decorously enough on Christmas Day, and then immediately breaks into a riotously pagan fertility rite, all primitive drum-beats and savage motions, around a figure of the infant Christ.

Not all the Indians of New Mexico are so tamed and sedentary as the Pueblo people. If you drive across the great deserts to the west, on your way to California or the Grand Canyon, you will often see away in the wilderness the little encampments of the Navajo Indians, or glimpse a Navajo sheepherder riding by on his tall mare. Most of these Indians inhabit the Navajo reservation, 24,000 square miles of it, with less than 300 miles of paved roads. They are semi-nomadic herders, with large flocks of sheep. There are nearly 80,000 Navajos, and they are increasing at a rate of about 1,000 a year; their huge pastureland, much of it rocky and inhospitable, is rapidly becoming too small for them, and there are more Navajos now than there were when the white man first arrived in America.

They have never established anything that could be called a village. They build fairly permanent houses, of logs, mud and sometimes stone, but they frequently move about with their herds over huge tracts of land in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah, from the tribal capital at Window Rock, New Mexico (with a fine council chamber, a guest house, paved roads and official residences) to the remote desert country around
Monument Valley, uninhabited except by a few traders and by the lonely itinerant herds of these sheep-grazers. Often, though, you can see them in the towns when they are doing their shopping. A favourite Navajo rendezvous is the village of Ganado in Arizona, where the Presbyterians maintain a mission and a hospital. On the balcony of the trading-post there you may meet them any morning. They have come to Ganado on foot, on horseback or by truck across the desert, and between their shopping (in the store you can buy anything from a lipstick to a vacuum cleaner) they chat on the porch of the store, leaning gracefully against the lumber walls, or squatting beside the parapet.

They are a handsome, upright people, rather like gipsies of the old school, with fine aquiline features (sometimes with Oriental eyes) and expressions of confident independence; perhaps the most decorative and self-sufficient of all the American Indians. The men wear blue denim pants, secured by ornamental belts, with gay shirts, large felt hats, and cowboy boots. The women’s costume has been dictated by history. In 1864 the Navajos, then a bold raiding tribe, were rounded up by the United States Government, and their sheep and goats were destroyed. For five years some 8,000 of them were imprisoned at Fort Sumner, in New Mexico, and during that time the Government considerately re-clothed them in the fashion of the period. Thus to this day the Navajo women wear velvet blouses and long, full calico skirts, vividly coloured. They have high-topped boots, and around their shoulders, as often as not, they wear a blanket, exactly as the mid-Victorian woman (in New York or in London) would wrap a shawl around her to keep out the treacherous city damp.

The Navajos have their religious ceremonials, too (many of them borrowed in ancient times from the
pueblos),
but their spirit has not been blunted by an excess of devotionals; nor have they been perverted by the exactions of the tourist industry. They are still strangers, still generally aloof from the white man, still alone with their herds in the expanse of the desert. I remember clearly an old man who sat sipping a cup of coffee in Mrs. Martin’s Café at Ganado. I had been talking to a local politician who was standing for election as sheriff, and who was busy sticking up posters asking people to vote for him. I asked if he considered the Navajo vote important. “In this country,” he replied, “it’s the Indian vote we depend on. You want to see the Average Voter in this part of the world? Well, there he is,” and he pointed to the old Navajo at the counter. He sat on a high stool, with his legs crunched beneath the counter, and he drank his coffee delicately, genteelly, with a little finger crooked. His hair was worn in plaits and tied with pieces of
wool, and on top of it he sported a high-crowned conical hat. On his wrist were two turquoise bracelets, around his neck was a silver necklace. His face was wrinkled, reflective and composed. In spirit he looked infinitely nearer the totem pole than the polling booth; and indeed, sitting there at Mrs. Martin’s counter in the Arizona desert, he seemed representative of all those old mysterious things, of nature and folk loer, of forgotten cultures and practices, that the new Americanism can never satisfactorily replace.

T
hese were not the Indians who established the Indian legend. But the hard-riding, buffalo-hunting warriors also lived chiefly in the West, in the prairies bounded by the Rocky Mountains. Their names were Sioux, Cheyenne, Mandan, Blackfoot, Crow, Ute, Pawnee and Osage; and their descendants are still in the West today, more fortunate than their eastern brothers in that their reservations stand in ancestral country. (To the east these Plains Indians were bounded by the forest lands of the woodsmen tribes—Cherokee, Fox, Choctaw, Iroquois; on the north-west coast were the fishing tribes; south of them the seed-gathering Indians of California; and in the south-west the Navajos, Pueblos and the wild Apache, who lived in the desert, and who fought their last battle against the white men in the 1880’s.)

I stopped for a doughnut once at a small ranching town in South Dakota and noticed a number of drunken Indians leaning about on door-posts. I inquired about them at the coffee-shop, and was told that they came from a neighbouring Sioux reservation. I might like to visit it, because at Fort Yates, its headquarters, I would see the celebrated Standing Rock, the symbol of the fighting Sioux, which they defended furiously in many a bloody skirmish. The stone belonged originally to the Arikara tribe, living in adjoining territory, but was stolen from them by the Sioux, who regarded it with great veneration. It was said to look like a seated Indian woman, and the story was that a chief’s squaw developed such a jealousy of his second wife that one day she refused to move camp, sitting sulkily in front of the fire with her child while the tribal tepees were struck; whereupon, by some gross miscarriage of providential justice, she and her child were both turned to stone. Fort Yates is a collection of pleasant buildings surrounded by trees, a little tumble-down, like a British Army cantonment (if one may harp upon a subject) in some about-to-be-abandoned corner of the Empire. It was
a hot afternoon when we reached it, and there were few people about; those we asked seemed notably vague about the Standing Rock, but eventually we found the relic, mounted on a pedestal on the outskirts of the settlement. Its resemblance to a sitting squaw was no more than rudimentary, but it was interesting to think that so much angry energy had been expended, and presumably so many brave lives lost, in defence of so stodgy a symbol.

As we looked at it a middle-aged Indian approached us. “You don’t want to waste time with that thing,” he said. “That’s old business. We’ve forgotten all that now. Come with me, I’ll show you something better.” He led us down the path, and around a corner we found a large plaque in honour of all those Indians from the reservation who had fought in the Second World War. Their names included Percy Tree Top, Earl La Duke, F. Young Bear, Paul Young Eagle, Gilbert Two Bear, Evans Use Arrow, Lee Red Fox, Terry Many Wounds, Francis Hairychin, M. American Horse, Tom Holy Elk Face, and George Afraid of Hawk. Many of the American Indians had admirable war records. Their most remarkable contribution was in the field of communications, for in the Pacific several Indian native languages were used instead of codes. Few, indeed, were the Japanese scholars who understood the Navajo dialects, for example, and the Americans rightly thought it unlikely that many such lonely sages, summoned from scholarly backwaters or shady temple yards, would be available among the island battlefields. So messages were simply translated into an Indian language, broadcast, and re-translated into English by an attendant brave at the other end. Many suitable languages were used, and they never used the same one on Tuesday as had bafflingly gone over the air (inherited from dusty pueblos or solitary desert tents) on Monday.

“Come with me,” said our guide, “and I will show you the grave of the greatest Sioux warrior of all—Sitting Bull.” We tramped down the road silently, past an old store with a few Indian children playing on its porch, through a tangled thicket of brambles, until we reached a little clearing. “It’s not too clean now,” said the Indian. “It’s so long since he died and we forget easily.” The grave had evidently been opened, for the slab on top of it was displaced. I looked inside to see if any bones were visible, but there was nothing but a few old jam-jars, left behind by picnickers or by placers of posies, long since withered. Sitting Bull was among the most famous of all the Indians, and a life-long opponent of the white man. He was a great prophet and medicine man, and as chief of the Sioux he fought the battle of Little Big Horn, in which General Custer made his forlorn last stand. After that bloodthirsty
triumph (more than 200 Americans were killed) Sitting Bull fled to Canada, to return later on the promise of a pardon. In 1890 he rejoined the Sioux in the guise of a Messiah (they were expecting one) and whipped them into such a frenzy of dissatisfaction that an uprising was imminent. Police were sent to put an end to it; there was some violence; and in the mêlée several policemen and Sitting Bull himself were killed. He was a shabby hero by then, with an itching palm; and the authorities, no doubt with the Custer débâcle still in mind, buried him unceremoniously at Fort Yates, without marking his grave. There he lies still, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the roof of his sepulchre slipping a little, overgrown by scratchy briars, with only the jam-jars to pay him respect.

Fort Yates is near the big Sioux reservation of the Cheyenne River, where about 4,000 Sioux live in scattered settlements, doing a little farming and raising cattle. It is beautiful wide, open country, rolling grassland intersected by green gulleys, with occasional thickets and a few dusty, bumpy tracks. The reservation is a good sixty miles long, and forty miles deep, and is crossed by a highway and a railway line. I called at its headquarters, the Cheyenne Agency, and met the Agent. His office was in a building pleasantly shaded by big trees, and chock-a-block full of Indians, sitting on the doorstep, looking at notice-boards, chattering, laughing, asking innumerable questions, very like gipsies at a fair. The reservation has its own police and courts of justice, and the clerks and secretaries are all Sioux. Indeed, the aim of the United States Indian Service is to bring itself to an end, and there are very few white officials even in the great reservations. President Kennedy’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Mr. John O.Crow, is himself a Chippewa Indian.

The Indian tribes of America used to be classed as “domestic independentnations”, treaties were concluded with each of them (only the Seminole Indians, whose straw huts may sometimes be seen in the boggy fastnesses of the Florida Everglades, have never formally made their peace with Washington). To dispose of these troublesome people, the Federal Government first tried to concentrate them in the West—the advanced and talented nation of the Cherokees, for example, was forcibly removed from Tennessee and thereabouts to Oklahoma. Later the reservation system was established, and by 1870 all Indians except the Apache, who were still fighting under their bandit leader Geronimo, had been placed in reservations, and were forbidden to leave them. Every attempt was made to stifle Indian culture, to banish the native languages and crafts; but more recently the purpose (which has fluctuated wildly) has been to establish the Indians as citizens following
their own mores and inheriting their own traditions. They have been full citizens since 1924, though until very recently Arizona and New Mexico, which tend to regard them rather as the South regards its negroes, refused them the right to vote.

The Agent was an intelligent and sympathetic man, not unlike the best kind of British colonial officer, and he discussed very freely the situation of the Indians on his reservation. In general, Indians throughout the United States are still poor (though the Osage Indians of Oklahoma occupy land so rich in oil that since 1900 the tribe has earned more than 300 m. dollars from it). In the fifty-odd years before the war, the Indian population increased from about 240,000 to more than 400,000, but for one reason and another their lands shrank from about 138 m. acres to about 52 m. acres—and much of the land lost was good farming and timber country. Much of their present territory is sparse, dry land—on the Papago Reservation in Arizona, for example, 200 acres is needed to support one cow. As a result, in recent years the average Indian farmer’s income has been about a fifth of the average white farmer’s.

Indians can, of course, leave their reservations if they like and find work elsewhere, but many of them are handicapped by poor education. The more scattered and remote tribes, like the Navajos, do not insist too firmly on their children’s attendance at school, and because they see relatively few white people, they often speak their own languages rather than English. Some tribes take decidedly unkindly to the advent of new schools. The Seminoles, for example, would not have one at all until the 1930’s. Though there are three kinds of schools on the Indian reservations—schools run by the Indian Service, ordinary public schools, and private or mission schools—there are still many Indian children who are simply out of reach of a classroom. Indians also suffer from poor health, especially from tuberculosis, infant diseases and pneumonia. On the Papago Reservation, a quarter of the babies die within a year; nearly half die before they are seven. The life expectancy is seventeen years.

Much of the Cheyenne Creek Reservation is leased as cattle grazing ground to non-Indians; the few Indian villages are small and poor. The Agent showed me a map and suggested that I drive to one of the more remote settlements—Cherry Creek, near the Cheyenne River, where there was a Federal school, but which was a long way from white civilization: it was eighty or ninety miles from the agency, and the last thirty miles of the route lay along dusty tracks. We stopped at the last town on the paved road, called Dupree, to have some lunch. The main street
ran at right angles to the highway, and was very rough and bumpy; the pavements included the remains of the old board-walk, the raised wooden passage-way which was so familiar a feature of the frontier towns. There were a few Indians about and one or two cowboys. (Not far from the town was a characteristic spectacle of the modern West. They were improving the highway and the construction workers had established a little township of caravans and huts and tents, surrounded by parked bulldozers and earth-removers, clouded in dust, with some washing streaming in the breeze. These are the new American nomads, moving willingly wherever there is work to be found, whether it is building a dam in New York State or cutting a highway through some remote Arizona canyon. Often, in distant country districts, you will meet a cavalcade of them—trucks and cars and caravans, and the huge grotesque implements, all bumps and appendages, with which the Americans build their marvellous roads.)

We struck south from Dupree on a dirt road, across a featureless country. There were few people in sight; only an occasional farmer in an unenclosed field, or sometimes a rancher on horseback. The country was green and spacious, and looked limitless. Before long we reached Cherry Creek, an isolated hamlet far out in the prairies. There were a few dilapidated Sioux huts, pleasantly situated on the top of a ridge, and a fine new white school building, with swings outside it. We introduced ourselves to the schoolmaster, a good-looking young Creek Indian from Oklahoma, who was understandably proud of his school. Throughout our conversation (conducted during a tour of the classrooms, the cupboards, the kitchen, the dining-room, various corridors, closets, corners, landings and cubbyholes) we were jostled and crowded by a packed crowd of little Indians, boys and girls, with solemn round brown faces and bright dark eyes. Some of them looked sickly, some not very bright, some like little moles, some like young foxes; but almost all were infinitely attractive. The staff of the school consisted of the schoolmaster himself; his wife, a gay and gracious Indian girl who was busy cooking doughnuts; and an elderly lady who had just arrived, apparently not greatly disconcerted at the idea of living in a caravan in an isolated Indian village in the Great Plains.

We wandered around the village pursued by the more determined scholars. A few Indian women were washing clothes at a nearby well; by a happy geological stroke the well provides constant warm water, which makes the scrubbing easier. Outside the schoolmaster’s house there was a toy car and a tricycle; next door lived a white American and his wife, who ran a trading-post. Up on the hill we called at a Sioux hut
where two weathered men were sitting with two jolly old women. We sat on the ground or on low stools, and chatted pleasantly, the Indians’ command of English being limited, but their general bearing affable. I asked the men what knowledge they had of the Indian wars, fought in those regions not so very long ago. They answered with slow and restrained smiles (chiefly, I suspect, because they had never heard of the wars) and seemed to think it gently amusing, no more, when I suggested that their grandfathers might have taken a few white scalps in their time. There was no pretence about these Indians; they were far from the tourist routes, almost as simple in their outlook as they must have been in the days of the pow-wows and the slaughters.

As we sat and talked we noticed a large cloud of dark smoke across a neighbouring ridge, and before long a miscellaneous crowd of Indians of all ages ran out of the schoolhouse and the other buildings in the village and piled into a few old cars and trucks that were standing about. It was a bush fire. Soon there was a general frenzied movement away from the village. Our old Sioux friends got their hats. One or two horsemen galloped out of the village; little boys jumped up and down with excitement; and we leapt into the car and drove helter-skelter down a brutal track towards the smoke.

So we clattered off, men, boys, dogs and all, across the dried bed of a stream, swerving through a thicket of trees, along a heavily rutted path, until we found ourselves high on the open prairie, with a great wall of smoke in front of us. A few white ranchers had been first on the scene, and they were trying to prevent the fire from spreading too far by denuding a strip of ground, around the perimeter of the blaze, of all its grass. An athletic young man in a wide hat was running along with a blazing torch, stooping now and again to set fire to the grass. His little blaze was bounded on one side by the track, but it spread so fast in the dry praririe grass that he could barely outrun it. The fire had spread over wide acres of land and the heat was intense. What with the smoke, and the blank prairie, the wrinkled ranchers, the Indians, the horses, the battered cars and the smell of burning grass, this was a scene that might have been extracted from some pictorial text-book of the West. But there was nothing we could do, so we turned the car around and made our way westward across the open lands of the reservation, mapless and disorientated, but pleasantly wandering and meandering along little beaten paths and gullies. The smoke behind us, now Biblical in its posture, guided us roughly for thirty miles or more, and we eventually arrived at the hamlet of Hartley, one of the few places to be recorded in my American gazetteer as having a population of one.