Colonel Roosevelt (66 page)

He noted the next morning that one of Wetherill’s two Indian helpers would not ride beneath the Bridge. The man was a Navajo, and took the long way around, rather than follow the rest of the party down the canyon. “His creed bade him never pass under an arch, for the arch is the sign of the rainbow, the sign of the sun’s course over the earth, and to the Navajo it is sacred.”

SO FAR IN ARIZONA
, Roosevelt had gazed with little pity at the dark, dirt-poor sheepherders who crossed his trail, emerging like Africans from the most inhospitable crooks of the landscape. The blankets they wove might be superior to the designs of Duchamp, yet they seemed to have no desire to better themselves economically or socially. It was clear to him that until they forgot about their nomadic past, and listened to what the white man could teach them about ranching and stock-raising, they would languish in primitive poverty. He knew that a debate was dragging out in Congress over
proposals to cut up and sell parts of the overpopulated Navajo reservation, for the benefit of white stockmen and railroad land grabbers.
Although he held no brief for outside developers, his belief in a social “Square Deal” (first offered, ironically, to the Southwestern tribes, when he spoke at the Grand Canyon on 6 May 1903) persuaded him that aboriginals clinging to an antiquated way of life had no power to resist the facts of economics. “With Indians and white men alike it is use which should determine occupancy of the soil.”

Roosevelt’s attitude toward “red” Americans differed from that of most of his kind only in that he had been willing, over the years, to moderate what had once been the harshest prejudice. As a young ranchman in Dakota Territory, he had blustered, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Later, however, while researching
The Winning of the West
, he had developed a respect for Indian military heroes, and as a civil service commissioner touring reservations in the early 1890s, he had been shamed to anger at the government’s infliction of the spoils system on “a group of beings who are not able to protect themselves.” Some of his beloved Rough Riders had been Indians, and were therefore among the bravest of the brave.

As President, he had struggled against constant Congressional opposition to reorganize and moralize the underfunded Bureau of Indian Affairs. A passionate young musicologist, Natalie Curtis, made him see that its suppression of Indian songs and Indian art in government schools was impoverishing the
national culture.
He had protected Miss Curtis from official harassment when she went into the reservations with a cylinder recorder, and coaxed nervous bards to sing for her. (“Be at rest, my friend, the great chief at Washington is father of all the people in this country.… He has given his permission for the writing of Hopi songs.”) As a result she was able to publish
The Indians’ Book
(1907), a luxury anthology of two hundred native lyrics, transcribed word for word and note by note. Roosevelt had contributed a short preface to it: “
These songs cast a wholly new light on the depth and dignity of Indian thought, the simple beauty and strange charm—the charm of a vanished elder world—of Indian poetry.”

AFTER FIVE DAYS
the excursion party returned to Kayenta. Roosevelt spent a couple more nights under Louisa Wetherill’s hospitable roof before he and the boys set out for Walpi.
He talked to her about the Navajo, and found that her expertise was not just to do with pots and cliff dwellings. Like Natalie Curtis, she was a scholar of the aboriginal soul. She copied out her own translation of a tribal poem for him to carry in his saddlebag across the Black Mesa:

The poem was as moving as any in
The Indians’ Book
in its acceptance of the universe as a whole, spherical, yet infinite space of many dimensions—the circle of the horizon, the bowl of the sky, the complementary curves of sun, rainbow, moon, and arch—and in its concept of existence as a journey.
Roosevelt decided that when he wrote about his stay in Kayenta, he would recommend the establishment there of a cultural halfway house for aspiring young Navajos, where Mrs. Wetherill could realize her dream of bridging the nation’s ancient and modern cultures.

At mid-morning on Tuesday, 19 August, the Hopi mesa rose out of the flat desert ahead, a ridge perforated with seven pueblo villages. Nicholas, Archie, and Quentin spurred their horses toward Walpi, leaving Roosevelt to plod along alone. When he rode up a sandhill below the village he was surprised to see, coming over the crest, a woman with a cup of gasoline in her hand. She was wearing clothes almost as dusty as his, and there was a black smear of
axle grease on the front of her skirt. Her face was familiar, as was her voice when she called out to him, “Hail to the chief!”

It was Natalie Curtis, embarrassed to have been discovered in the act of cleaning herself up for his arrival. Roosevelt did not know that his announcement, some weeks back, that he would attend the Hopi Snake Dance festival had become a news sensation throughout the Southwest. Walpi was thronged with white visitors, and accommodations in the town were so scarce that Miss Curtis had been forced to camp out in a peach orchard. The cup of gasoline—vaporizing even as she explained her presence—was intended to cut the grease on her skirt.

“
SHE CALLED OUT TO HIM
, ‘
HAIL TO THE CHIEF
!’ ”
Natalie Curtis in Indian dress
.
(photo credit i14.1)

She could not help thinking, as she looked the Colonel over, that he could have used some of it as well. His khaki riding clothes were stained, and his face under a big Stetson was burned as red as the bandanna around his throat. But he was still the overwhelming presence she recalled from White House days, with a combination of drive and curiosity that had him quizzing her about the Hopi even before they moved on into town.

He told her he was writing some articles about his travels in Arizona, and wanted them to be full of information. “I am going to South America shortly, and I can stay here only a few days, so the sooner we talk the better.”

Natalie was only too willing to help. He was unaware that she had come to Walpi deliberately to waylay him and plead her continuing cause, against “the tide of Anglo-Saxon iconoclasm” that was sweeping away what was left of pre-Columbian culture. Nobody in government had ever been able to answer her question, “How much longer will the American people go to Europe for inspiration and destroy the art that is at their own door?”

Roosevelt had asked much the same thing himself, in his review of the Armory Show. Much as he had admired the quasi-American art of Robert Chanler (including representations of the Arizona desert and the Snake Dance), there was something effete about it, in comparison with the vibrant reality that now confronted him.

“Tell me what I ought to see,” he said to Natalie. “I always like to find students who have made a life study of certain subjects.… And I am glad to put forward ideas, for somehow people
do
listen to me. I have at least the faculty of making myself heard!”

They made a date to meet for an information session the following morning, before
Chu’tiva
, the Snake-Antelope ceremonials, got under way.
Roosevelt then gave himself over to the local officials who were to be his hosts over the next two days. He was flattered to hear that as “a former great chief,” he would receive privileges rarely accorded to white men. After lunch he climbed down a ladder festooned with eagle feathers into the
kiva
, an antechamber of the underworld where the snake priests were preparing themselves for Thursday’s dance.

THE SENSE OF THE
strangeness that had possessed him ever since his stay in Kayenta mounted as he stepped off the ladder and found himself in a spacious skylit room, one end of which—the end nearest his ankles—undulated with rattlesnakes. Cigar-puffing priests kept them at bay by stroking them with feather wands. He was intrigued by the sinuous movements of both man and reptile. They seemed to share a temporary accord in which, however, the threat of sudden violence lurked. He was made to sit on the floor with his back to the snakes, about eight feet away, and did not feel at all comfortable. A pot nearby imprisoned—he hoped—some dangerous-looking ribbon snakes. There were about forty rattlers along the line of the wall, some writhing in a tangle, the others free to move at will. One wriggled toward him, and he had to ask for it to be stroked away.

Meanwhile, near-naked acolytes, their coppery bodies daubed with splotches of white paint, were stitching and beading dance costumes. Their moccasins
respectfully avoided a sandpainting of a coyote, framed with rainbow lines and pinned at each corner with black thunder-sticks. A priest who spoke some English informed Roosevelt that the east wall beyond it was an altar of sorts, that the prayers offered before it were for “male and female rain,” and that the snakes were being courted as “brothers of men,” who through their soft bellies would telegraph to the underworld gods that the Hopi craved water.

He had seen tribal ritual before—in Africa, on Döberitz Field, in the Chicago Coliseum, at Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue balls when he was fresh out of Harvard. But nothing as mystic as this, nothing as symbolic of “an almost inconceivably remote and savage past.”