USA > Arizona > Arizona, prehistoric, aboriginal, pioneer, modern; the nation's youngest commonwealth within a land of ancient culture, Vol. I > Part 4
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42
In 1692 there is Spanish record of normal submission of the tribe, which had rebuilt several settlements at higher levels on the mesas, where defense would be the easier. In that year they were visited in November by Governor Vargas, with a force of sixty-three soldiers and with two priests. After a showing of hostility, the Indians finally permitted the Spaniards to enter the plaza at Awatobi, where a cross was erected and 122 Indians were baptized. At other villages Vargas replaced the plaza crosses and assured the people of the pardon for their mis- deeds. But no priests or soldiers appear to have been left behind.
Despite their abandonment, the native Christians of Owatobi nominally remained in the faith, thereby gaining the enmity of the pagan villages. In the spring of 1700 the village was visited from Zuni by Padre Juan Garaychoechea, who found that the mission had been rebuilt and who baptized seventy-three Indians. This peaceful visitation brought on dire disaster, that with complete- ness stamped Christianity out of Tusayan. By falltime there had developed almost open warfare between the pagans and Christians, the latter being called "soreerers." In Awatobi one of the principal men, Tapolo, a pagan, turned against his own people, and, before dawn, through a door in a great wall that had been built by the Spaniards, admitted a host of the enemy from other villages. It was the time of the year for the sacred rites and it was known that nearly all the men would be in the underground kivas. So provision had been made by the invaders, besides weapons, of cedar-bark torches and bundles of inflammable
-
21
ARIZONA-THE YOUNGEST STATE
material. According to the native tale, the leading men of the village were found in the main kiva "engaged in sorcerers' rites." The ladders that furnished the only egress from the kivas were drawn up, down the openings were cast the torches and firewood and upon them armfuls of red peppers that had been torn from the walls on which they had been hung to dry. Then, while the main body ravaged the houses, arrows from above finished the work that suffocation had begun. Only a few of the men and elderly women were saved, individuals who had special knowledge concerning agriculture or valued rituals. The remaining captives were taken out on the sandhills and there tortured, killed and dismem- bered, in what must have been a hideous orgy of blood, quite unlike the usual characteristics of the people, led by the medicine men and by refugees from the Rio Grande pueblos. The children were distributed among the people of the other pueblos. It is told that no less than 600 victims were included in the mas- sacres within the village and on the plain without, where there is still pointed out a place known as the "Death Mound." Then the village, including the rebuilt mission church, was utterly destroyed, and to-day it is merely a rnin, one of the few to be found within a historic period.
That the Indian tale of early martyrdom was not overdrawn has been demon- strated by Dr. J. W. Fewkes, who, a few years ago, made careful investigation of the ruins of the village. Despite the protests of old Hopis, he dug down into the main kiva and there found the bones of the Christians who had perished 200 years before. At variance with the axiom that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church" is the history of the Hopi since that date.
In the following year Governor Cubero raided Tusayan but with little effect. In 1706 Captain Holguin was thrust back toward the Rio Grande by the hostile tribesmen and a similar result attended the campaign in 1715. In 1719, by the influence of the Franciscan priesthood, 441 Tiguas were brought back from Tusayan to repeople the old pueblo of Sandia. In this period there was a dispute between the Franciscans and Jesuits concerning the jurisdiction in which Tusayan should be placed. Though this dispute was settled in favor of the Franciscans, and though occasional priestly visitations seem to have been made, there was little of religious instruction. About 1775 Padre Escalante visited the tribe. The same priestly explorer came again the following year after the failure of his expedition to reach the misisons of California by a northern route. This trip ended necessarily in the deserts of Utah, after arrival at the Great Salt Lake. The outgoing route was by way of San Juan but the return was across the Colo- rado through the Hopi towns. From the west in July, 1776, came Padre Fran- cisco Garcés, whose offer of ministration was roughly repulsed.
In 1780 Governor Anza seized a time of great tribulation among the Hopi to offer assistance, suggesting that the tribe migrate to the Rio Grande valley. Only thirty families departed, seemingly swallowed up thereafter among the Pueblos. The previous years had been hard ones. No rain had fallen for three seasons. In 1775 smallpox is claimed to have taken 6,698 ont of a total village population of 7,494, and in the drouth had perished all but 300 of 30,000 sheep. These figures were gathered by Padres Fernandez and Garcia, who found that two of the pueb- los had been entirely abandoned. The smallpox epidemie was general also along the Rio Grande, where more than 5,000 Indians perished.
22
ARIZONA-THE YOUNGEST STATE
The first mention of American visitors was of the arrival in 1834 of a trapping party of 200 men of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, who entered Arizona by way of Bill Williams Fork. It is told that at the Hopi towns the trappers rohbed the gardens and shot about a score of the people.
After 1846 the tribe received much attention from the Mormons, who followed their traditional policy of making friends with the aboriginal Lamanites of the Book of Mormon, and who established Tuba City on Moencopie Wash, seventy miles northwest of Oraibi. At Tuba the Mormons erected a fine woolen mill, with the idea of there consolidating the wool trade of the Hopis and Navajos, but the enterprise proved unsuccessful.
There was a terrible smallpox epidemic in 1843-44, as told by Lieutenant Whipple in the journal of his Pacific railroad report. In May, 1858, the pueblos were visited by Lieut. J. C. Ives of the Corps of Topographical Engineers in the course of his survey of the Colorado River. Ives was warned by the Indians that he could not penetrate to the Colorado over the waterless desert and an effort made by him in this direction proved a failure, and the party had difficulty in reaching Fort Defiance.
About the time of the organization of the Territory of Arizona reports on the tribe were made by Indian Commissioner Chas. D. Poston and by Col. Kit Carson, telling of famine and poverty. Poston had most extraordinary information that he had found a linguistic connection between the Hopis and the Welsh, and that he was told by some intelligent Welsh Mormons "that the Moqui chiefs could pronounce any word in the Welsh language with facility but not the dialect now in use." Carson managed to divert some Navajo supplies to the Hopi.
With few exceptions the Hopi and Americans appear always to have been on good terms. There was trouble in the villages, however, in 1891 when Col. H. C. Corbin, then Assistant Adjutant-General of the Military Department of Arizona, had to be sent to Oraibi with four troops of cavalry to quell disturbances that had been started by possibly over-zealous employees of the Indian Bureau, who had been gathering school children in the pueblos. The leaders in the incipient insurrection were taken to Fort Wingate as prisoners of war.
Bravery of an unusual sort was called for in 1899 when Lieutenant McNamee was sent with a detachment of the Ninth Cavalry to enforce on the villagers an observance of health regulations prescribed by the Indian Agent. Many Indians had died of smallpox, largely due to the unsanitary conditions. The lientenant found the Indians prepared to die rather than clean up, and his job of sanitation was done only after capturing the red men and roping them securely. Half a dozen or more had to be knocked senseless with carbine butts. The colored troop- ers then drove the multitude to a place where they could be bathed and properly clothed, while the agent disinfected and fumigated. In the afternoon the hostiles were permitted to return after they had been cleaned and fumigated and after they had been given new clothing in place of the old rags that had been burned.
THE NAVAJO, PROSPEROUS AND FREE
The Navajo (Na'-va-ho) are to be considered the principal tribe of the South- west, if mere numbers gives right to that distinction. While it cannot be said that the tribe is advancing rapidly in acquirement of the knowledge of the whites, there is no touch of the decadence known in the Southwest among so
23
ARIZONA-THE YOUNGEST STATE
many of the aboriginal people of less sturdy stock and of less independent char- acter. Indeed, before many years the increasing population of the Navajo reser- vation will need more room than now afforded or the tribesmen will have to turn to some industry other than that of sheep rearing.
The name of the tribe very generally has been assumed to have been derived from the Spanish word "navája," applied to a knife, especially a clasp knife. There even has been reference in this connection to a mountain on the reservation where the Indians once secured obsidian for fashioning into cutting instruments. The real origin of the name, however, seems to lie in the Tewa word "Navajú," meaning "the place of large plantings," especially designating the Navajo corn- fields. The early Spanish explorers knew the tribe as the "Apache of Nabajoa."
There has been a general disposition, both among the scientists and the local population, to consider the Apache and their cousins, the Navajo, as among the most ancient of the aboriginal tribes of the Southwest, passing even back of the history of the Pima. This view seems a mistake, according to a report of Frederick Webb Hodge, than whom there is no more careful investigator and whose deductions seem always notable for common sense. He has looked into the subject from the inside, through Navajo tradition and tribal history, assisted by the deep researches of Dr. Washington Matthews, and finds the genesis of the Navajo only from 500 to 700 years agone. Then was the time of the creation of the original "House-of-the-dark-cliffs" people, the title readily to be interpreted as "cliff-dwelling." The stock plainly was Athapascan, not at all conjoined with that of the Apache, though various bodies of the latter, already resident in the Southwest (though not in the present Arizona), at the coming of the Navajo did join their small numbers with those of new arrivals. It is believed that the Apache did not occupy the region of southern Arizona or northern Sonora nor the plains of Texas as late as the middle of the sixteenth century, but more probably ranged over limited areas in northwestern and southwestern New Mexico. The Navajo were a composite people even before the eighteenth century, the tribe then embody- ing remnants of the Athapasean, Shoshonean, Tanoan, Keresan, Zuñian, Yuman and possibly other Indian linguistie stocks. The first acquisition of floeks, follow- ing the coming of the Spaniards, about 1542, utterly changed the character of the tribe.
The Navajo are destitute of any really central authority, though they have prominent men, who may be considered chiefs by courtesy, of large influence within circumscribed localities. Settlement within villages or in permanent houses could hardly be possible until the Indians have lost their horror of the dead, which leads them to pull down and abandon and even to set on fire the "hogan" in which a death occurs. While this is wasteful, undoubtedly it is sanitary. Living ont in the open, in small groups, in temporary homes, the Navajo appear to have almost escaped the recurrent visitations of smallpox that were so serious among the pueblo dwellers around them. There seems to have been a change in morality for the better. In the early days military authorities told of the wide spread of the most vicious diseases of the whites. The betterment may be accounted for by the fact that the tribe maintains a more generally isolated life than any other in the Southwest.
Little assistance is received by the tribe from the United States government, this consisting only in the gift of a few wagons and agricultural implements and
24
ARIZONA-THE YOUNGEST STATE
in the support of schools. Throughout, the Navajo have a healthy independence that is refreshing. While they have a history far from peaceful, the casual traveler across the reservation is as safe as he would be in a New England village. Prospectors they dislike, a failing shared by nearly all the southwestern tribes. But they appreciate fully the power of the great chief in "Wasitona" and rarely molest either fellow-tribesmen or whites. Rugged health is the attribute of almost every individual, and there is every indication that coming centuries will know the Navajo as one of the most considerable of the subdivisions of population in the Southwest. They have all reason for peace, for they have become rich in herds and silver.
Early in the period of contact with the Spaniards, the Indians commenced making woolen blankets, utilizing a knowledge of weaving that had come from the Rio Grande Pueblos. Many of the early blankets, of which highly valued samples are preserved unto this day, were made by unraveling the threads of a peculiar red cloth, brought from Europe and called "bayete." The early dyes were from the roots and from mineral oxides. With the coming of the railroad, the Navajos greeted with enthusiasm the advent of Germantown yarn and of Diamond dyes. Most of the Navajo blankets of to-day, however, are made of wool that has been grown on the reservation. For floor rugs they have few equals for beauty and durability. The Indian generally shows good taste in the use of colors and in the laying out of designs and uses nothing that would serve to depre- ciate the quality. While some imitations are made by carpet factories in the East, they look as little like a Navajo blanket as does a section of ingrain carpet.
Probably from the Spaniards was learned the art of working silver. The silversmithing industry to-day is an important one within the tribe, though the work usually is rude and is to be valued especially for its Indian associations.
It is a notable fact that among the Indians of the Southwest the Navajo are least notable for either basketry or pottery. There are a very few basketmakers among them, said to be descendants of Ute or Piute captives, and their products are close copies of the ordinary ceremonial baskets, which are bought in large numbers by the tribe from the Indians to the northward. The art of making pottery seems to have once been possessed by the tribe in large degree, but is in decadence.
NAVAJO WARFARE OF EARLY TIMES
The earliest of the Spaniards seem to have had little trouble with the tribe, which occupied itself in a desultory warfare with the Apache, apparently more by raiding parties than ever by any general tribal movement. In 1783 the Navajo sullenly resisted an attempt to put them under Spanish rule, though in the same year the Spanish governor reported that they had again become sub- missive after a fight in the Cañon de Chelly (Tsegi, "in the rocks"), wherein the Spanish forces were led by Lieut. Antonio Narbona, with a small force of Span- iards and a larger force of New Mexican Indians. There was occasional trouble between the Spaniards and Navajo for years thereafter, probably almost wholly due to the desire of the Indians to add to their flocks at the expense of the Pueblos of the valleys.
It is not improbable that some of the early-day troubles of the Indians were not altogether their own fault, as they had to do with Mexicans and whites of the
25
ARIZONA-THE YOUNGEST STATE
usual reckless frontier type. At one time it is told that no less than 1,500 Navajos . were being held as slaves in New Mexico. In 1834 fifty New Mexicans, led by José Chavez, were killed in Cañon de Chelly.
In 1846, following the advent of the American coastbound military expedi- tions, the Navajo were guilty of depredations among the pueblos of New Mexico and had to be visited by Col. Alex. W. Doniphan at the head of a considerable force of soldiery. Three years later Col. John M. Washington marched into the Navajo country to the Cañon de Chelly and he, like Doniphan, made a treaty. Either seems to have been the proverbial "scrap of paper." A military inspector in 1850 estimated that the Indians had stolen from the New Mexican Pueblos in eighteen months no less than 47,300 sheep. Like the Apache, the Navajo could not understand why the Americans should object to the spoiling of the Mexicans, whom the Americans and Indians alike had fought.
Fort Defiance, supposedly commanding the reservation, was established about 1849, and an effort was made, by gifts and kindly treatment, to bring the Indians into some semblance of order. But this was hard, owing to the lack of any general tribal authority, and isolated raids upon the surrounding Indians continued as theretofore. There appears to have been very little aggression directly concern- · ing the whites and very little of the Apache type of history that affected Amer- icans, though the Spanish-speaking people seemed by the Navajo to be generally classed with the Pueblos. An interesting instance of this general attitude was the hanging of a New Mexican captive, executed in 1854 by some Navajo chiefs, sur- reptitiously substituted in the very face of the military authorities for a Navajo murderer whose execution had been demanded.
A rather more serious condition started a couple of years later in the murder of a negro servant at Fort Defiance. The Indians refused to surrender the mur. derer and offered resistance to a number of military expeditions. It would appear that the Indians were too rich in live stock to sustain the military raids into their country, so this particular trouble was short lived. Yet in 1860 there was a rather serious Navajo attack upon Fort Defiance.
Nothing really effective appears to have been done until the arrival in New Mexico of the California volunteers under General Carleton. Then the Indians were closed in upon, great numbers of them were captured, their sheep and horses were seized or destroyed, 7,300 of the tribe, then estimated as 12,000 in number, were driven into captivity at Bosque Redondo, in the upper Pecos Valley, and the red men were made to appreciate the benefits of peace, at a governmental cost of $1,500,000 a year. It should be noted that Carleton's policy was not materially different, in the making of reconcentrado camps, from that which met with such American objection when put in force by General Weyler in Cuba before the war with Spain. There was an idea that the Indians could be made farmers. The people of New Mexico looked with disfavor, however, upon the settlement of this large and lawless tribe in their midst and upon the seizure for the Indians' benefit of any considerable extent of farming land. At last it was appreciated that concentration was good only as a war measure and the Indians were sent back home, in May, 1868, by way of Fort Wingate, which had been made the tempo- rary agency. The beneficent government, June 1, 1868, provided a reservation of 3,328,000 acres, within which land could be taken in severalty by the Indians, though this does not appear to have been done to any considerable extent. Seed, fol. 1-3
26
ARIZONA-THE YOUNGEST STATE
cattle, 30,000 sheep and 2,000 goats were given the tribesmen and provision was made of school houses at various sub-agencies, though this last does not appear to have been enthusiastically demanded by the Indians.
Col. Kit Carson, whose service against the Indians was most effective, was rather of the opinion that the Navajos on the whole had been badly treated and that the whites "while always cursing the Indians, are not willing to do them justice." He expressed confidence in his own ability to make a lasting peace with the tribe and referred to the fact that the Navajo really were not at war with the Americans, but had inherited warfare with the New Mexicans, and sadly he told, in the campaign of 1863, of destroying several thousand peach trees in Cañon de Chelly, of leveling fields of corn and of driving away great herds of sheep. The older Indians still remember Kit Carson as a friend, despite the stern circumstances that accompanied the execution of his military duty. His bravery was unquestioned and the Indians delightedly told how they surrounded him on the top of a rock near Fort Defiance, whereon he was kept for three days till he managed to make his escape.
In 1892, Lot Smith, a prominent Mormon, was killed by Navajos for fencing a spring.
Some trouble with the Navajo Indians was known in November, 1899. Large bands of Indians had been off the reservation hunting deer and antelope in defi- ance of the game laws and, incidentally, had maltreated E. M. Montgomery, a cowboy. Deputy Sheriff Hogan at the head of a posse that embraced himself, Montgomery and two others, found the offending Indians, six in number, at a point thirty-five miles southeast of Flagstaff. The members of the posse, expect- ing no trouble, left their horses with the rifles in the saddle scabbards and approached the Indians, who suddenly produced rifles from under their blankets and opened fire at short range. Montgomery was killed almost instantly. Morgan was shot three times and Deputy Hogan received one bad bullet wound. Their rifles gone with their stampeded horses, wounded as they were, the white men closed in on the Navajos. Hogan, his pistol emptied, wrested a rifle from one of the Indians and with it shot the chief of the band and another Indian. When the fight was done five Indians lay upon the ground, three dead and two wounded. Troops were sent out to round the Indians back into the reservation and the trouble did not spread further. When tried in the District Court, the Navajos showed the authorities that they had thought the officers bandits and hence had resisted. The chief of the band, Be-go-etin, though 70 years old and still suffering from a bullet wound in the body, rode all night to be in time for his trial. All were discharged.
In 1907, excitement was caused by a report of Navajo trouble in northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah, where an Indian agent declared his life had been threatened and that cattle had been stolen. The Indians were surprised by the sudden advent of two troops of cavalry. They offered resistance, two of them . were killed and the balance of the band were captured. The six ringleaders were sent hy the military authorities to technical imprisonment at Fort Huachuca, where Chief By-al-il-le and his companions were generally kept engaged in work around the post, their confinement being little more than nominal. They wanted to go home, however, and so, early in the fall of the year, in their behalf legal proceedings were started in Cochise County, attorneys alleging that they were
HOME IN THE NAVAJO COUNTRY
KITONI, NAVAJO CHIEF
HUBBELL TRADING POST AT GANADO
NAVAJO SUMMER HOME IN THE FOREST
NAVAJOS AT A "CHICKEN PULL" AT GANADO
27
ARIZONA-THE YOUNGEST STATE
confined without warrant of law. This contention failed in the District Court, but was sustained in the Supreme Court of the Territory. In the meantime about all the Indians had been sent home and so the incident passed, important mainly through the fact that the final decision also could have been applied in the case of Geronimo and other Arizona Indians who had been taken to Florida, and it might also have had application to the transfer of some of the southern Indians to Indian Territory. The Supreme Court denied the theory that a state of war existed with the Indians that authorized summary military action.
THE NAVAJO RESERVATION AND INDUSTRIES
The Navajo is the largest Indian reservation in the United States, generally desert in character, occupying a stony and barren expanse that is only too well drained by numerous deep cañons that lead toward the Colorado. The limits of the reservation have been extended from time to time and it is not improbable that the Government even yet will have to seek more ground for Navajo occupation. It now has lapped around the Hopi reserve and has its western boundary practi- cally along the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers, extending down to and embracing the station of Canon Diablo on the Santa Fe railroad. To the north- ward the reservation line extends to the San Juan River in Utah.
A part of the enlargement was the addition of land along Moencopie Creek, embracing the former Mormon village of Tuba City, where a school has been established. Not only was this purchase from the Mormons advisable as a benefit to the Indians, but served to eliminate friction that had been known there many years. The Navajo, who seem to consider the district as their own, had been guilty of petty depredations that at one time had caused the issuance in the District Court of Coconino County of an injunction, which it was proposed to have executed by a body of armed men under command of the sheriff. The Indians offered resistance and the matter was not carried very far.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.