The Delight Makers Part 1

The Delight Makers.

by Adolf Bandelier.

PREFACE

This story is the result of eight years spent in ethnological and archaeological study among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. The first chapters were written more than six years ago at the Pueblo of Cochiti.

The greater part was composed in 1885, at Santa Fe, after I had bestowed upon the Tehuas the same interest and attention I had previously paid to their neighbours the Queres. I was prompted to perform the work by a conviction that however scientific works may tell the truth about the Indian, they exercise always a limited influence upon the general public; and to that public, in our country as well as abroad, the Indian has remained as good as unknown. By clothing sober facts in the garb of romance I have hoped to make the "Truth about the Pueblo Indians" more accessible and perhaps more acceptable to the public in general.

The sober facts which I desire to convey may be divided into three cla.s.ses,--geographical, ethnological, and archaeological. The descriptions of the country and of its nature are real. The descriptions of manners and customs, of creed and rites, are from actual observations by myself and other ethnologists, from the statements of trustworthy Indians, and from a great number of Spanish sources of old date, in which the Pueblo Indian is represented as he lived when still unchanged by contact with European civilization.

The descriptions of architecture are based upon investigations of ruins still in existence on the sites where they are placed in the story.

The plot is my own. But most of the scenes described I have witnessed; and there is a basis for it in a dim tradition preserved by the Queres of Cochiti that their ancestors dwelt on the Rito de los Frijoles a number of centuries ago, and in a similar tradition among the Tehuas of the Pueblo of Santa Clara in regard to the cave-dwellings of the Puye.

A word to the linguist. The dialect spoken by the actors is that of Cochiti for the Queres, that of San Juan for the Tehuas. In order to avoid the complicated orthography latterly adopted by scientists for Indian dialects, I have written Indian words and phrases as they would be p.r.o.nounced in continental languages. The letter [=a] is used to denote the sound of a in "hare."

To those who have so kindly a.s.sisted me,--in particular to Rev. E. W.

Meany of Santa Fe, and to Dr. Norton B. Strong, of the United States Army,--I herewith tender my heartfelt thanks.

AD. F. BANDELIER

SANTA Fe, NEW MEXICO.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The aim of our good and lamented friend in writing this book was to place before the public, in novelistic garb, an account of the life and activities of the Pueblo Indians before the coming of white men. The information on which it is based was the result of his personal observations during many years of study among the sedentary tribes of New Mexico and in Spanish archives pertaining thereto in connection with his researches for the Archaeological Inst.i.tute of America. He spent months in continuous study at the Tehua pueblo of San Juan and the Queres pueblo of Cochiti, and the regard in which he was held by the simple folk of those and other native villages was sincerely affectionate. Bandelier's labors in his chosen field were commenced at a time when a battle with hardship was a part of the daily routine, and his method of performing the tasks before him was of the kind that produced important results often at the expense of great suffering, which on more than one occasion almost shut out his life.

Because not understood, _The Delight Makers_ was not received at first with enthusiastic favor. It seemed unlike the great student of technical problems deliberately to write a book the layman might read with interest and profit; but his object once comprehended, the volume was received in the spirit in which the venture was initiated and for a long while search for a copy has often been in vain.

Bandelier has come unto his own. More than one serious student of the ethno-history of our Southwest has frankly declared that the basis of future investigation of the kind that Bandelier inaugurated will always be the writings of that eminent man. Had he been permitted to live and labor, nothing would have given him greater satisfaction than the knowledge that the people among whom he spent so many years are of those who fully appreciate the breadth of his learning and who have been instrumental in the creation, by proclamation of the President, of the "Bandelier National Monument," for the purpose of preserving for future generations some of the archaeological remains he was the first to observe and describe.

F. W. HODGE.

SMITHSONIAN INSt.i.tUTION, WASHINGTON, D. C., _September 25, 1916._

NOTE

A SPECIAL interest attaches to the ill.u.s.trations, now first included in this edition. Many of them are from photographs made by Chas. F. Lummis in 1890, under the supervision of Bandelier, and with special reference to "The Delight Makers," then being written. These two friends were the first students to explore the Tyuonyi and its neighborhood. In rain and shine, afoot, without blankets or overcoats, with no more provision than a little _atole_ (popcorn meal) and sweet chocolate, they climbed the cliffs, threaded the canons, slept in caves or under trees, measured, mapped and photographed the ruins and landscapes with a 40-pound camera, and laid the basis-notes for part of Bandelier's monumental "Final Report" to the Archaeological Inst.i.tute of America.

A few later photographs from the same hand show part of the excavation done in the Tyuonyi by the School of American Archaeology--through whose loving and grateful efforts this canon has been set apart as a National Monument bearing the name of its discoverer and chronicler,

ADOLF F. BANDELIER.

Thanks are due also to Hon. Frederick C. Hicks, M.C., for six very interesting photographs of the Zunis and their country.

IN MEMORY

One day of August, 1888, in the teeth of a particular New Mexico sand-storm that whipped pebbles the size of a bean straight to your face, a ruddy, bronzed, middle-aged man, dusty but unweary with his sixty-mile tramp from Zuni, walked into my solitary camp at Los Alamitos. Within the afternoon I knew that here was the most extraordinary mind I had met. There and then began the uncommon friendship which lasted till his death, a quarter of a century later; and a love and admiration which will be of my dearest memories so long as I shall live. I was at first suspicious of the "pigeon-hole memory"

which could not only tell me some Queres word I was searching for, but add: "Policarpio explained that to me in Cochiti, November 23, 1881."

But I discovered that this cla.s.sified memory was an integral part of this extraordinary genius. The acid tests of life-long collaboration proved not only this but the judicial poise, the marvelous insight and the intellectual chast.i.ty of Bandelier's mind. I cannot conceive of anything in the world which would have made him trim his sails as a historian or a student for any advantage here or hereafter.

Aside from keen mutual interests of doc.u.mentary and ethnologic study, we came to know one another humanly by the hard proof of the Frontier.

Thousands of miles of wilderness and desert we trudged side by side--camped, starved, shivered, learned and were Glad together. Our joint pursuits in comfort at our homes (in Santa Fe and Isleta, respectively) will always be memorable to me; but never so wonderful as that companioning in the hardships of what was, in our day, the really difficult fringe of the Southwest. There was not a decent road. We had no endowment, no vehicles. Bandelier was once loaned a horse; and after riding two miles, led it the rest of the thirty. So we went always by foot; my big camera and gla.s.s plates in the knapsack on my back, the heavy tripod under my arm; his aneroid, surveying instruments, and satchel of the almost microscopic notes which he kept fully and precisely every night by the camp-fire (even when I had to crouch over him and the precious paper with my water-proof focusing cloth) somehow bestowed about him. Up and down pathless cliffs, through tangled canons, fording icy streams and ankle-deep sands, we travailed; no blankets, overcoats, or other shelter; and the only commissary a few cakes of sweet chocolate, and a small sack of parched popcorn meal. Our "lodging was the cold ground." When we could find a cave, a tree, or anything to temper the wind or keep off part of the rain, all right. If not, the Open. So I came to love him as well as revere. I had known many "scientists" and what happened when they really got Outdoors. He was in no way an athlete--nor even muscular. I was both--and not very long before had completed my thirty-five-hundred-mile "Tramp Across the Continent." But I never had to "slow down" for him. Sometimes it was necessary to use laughing force to detain him at dark where we had water and a leaning cliff, instead of stumbling on through the trackless night to an unknown "Somewheres." He has always reminded me of John Muir, the only other man I have known intimately who was as insatiate a climber and inspiring a talker. But Bandelier had one advantage. He could find common ground with _anyone_. I have seen him with Presidents, diplomats, Irish section-hands, Mexican peons, Indians, authors, scientists and "society." Within an hour or so he was easily the Center. Not unconscious of his power, he had an extraordinary and sensitive modesty, which handicapped him through life among those who had the "gift of push." He never put himself forward either in person or in his writing.

But something about him fascinated all these far-apart cla.s.ses of people, when he spoke. His command of English, French, Spanish, and German might have been expected; but his facility in acquiring the "dialects" of railroad men and cowboys, or the language of an Indian tribe, was almost uncanny. When he first visited me, in Isleta, he knew just three words of Tigua. In ten days he could make himself understood by the hour with the Princ.i.p.ales in their own unwritten tongue. Of course, this was one secret of his extraordinary success in learning the inner heart of the Indians.

I saw it proved again in our contact with the Quichua and Aymara and other tribes of Peru and Bolivia.

I have known many scholars and some heroes--but they seldom come in the same original package. As I remember Bandelier with smallpox alone in the two-foot snows of the Manzanos; his tens of thousands of miles of tramping, exploring, measuring, describing, in the Southwest; his year afoot and alone in Northern Mexico, with no more weapon than a pen-knife, on the trails of raiding Apaches (where "scientific expeditions" ten years later, when the Apache was eliminated, needed armed convoys and pack-trains enough for a punitive expedition, and wrote pretentious books about what every scholar has known for three hundred years) I deeply wonder at the dual quality of his intellect.

Among them all, I have never known such student and such explorer lodged in one tenement.

We were knit not only thus but in the very intimacies of life--sharing hopes and bereavements. My first son, named for him, should now be twenty-two. The old home in Santa Fe was as my own. The truly wonderful little woman he found in Peru for mate--who shared his hardships among the cannibals of the Amazonas and elsewhere, and so aided and still carries on his work--I met in her maiden home, and am glad I may still call her friend.

Naturally, among my dearest memories of our trampings together is that of the Rito, the Tyuonyi. It had never in any way been pictured before.

We were the first students that ever explored it. He had discovered it, and was writing "The Delight Makers." What days those were! The weather was no friend of ours, nor of the camera's. We were wet and half-fed, and cold by night, even in the ancient tiny caves. But the unforgettable glory of it all!

To-day thousands of people annually visit the Tyuonyi at ease, and camp for weeks in comfort. The School of American Archaeology has a summer session there; and its excavations verify Bandelier's surmises. Normal students and budding archaeologists sleep in the very caves (identified) of the Eagle People, the Turquoise, Snake and other clans. And in that enchanted valley we remember not only the Ancients, but the man who gave all this to the world.

During the six years I was Librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library, far later, no other out-of-print book on the Southwest was so eagerly sought as "The Delight Makers." We had great trouble in getting our own copy, which slept in the safe. The many students who wished copies of their very own were referred to dealers in Americana, who searched for this already rare volume; and many were proud to get it, at last, at ten, fifteen and even twenty times its original price. It will always be a standard--the most photographic story yet printed of the life of the prehistoric Americans.

CHARLES F. LUMMIS.

THE DELIGHT MAKERS

CHAPTER I.

The mountain ranges skirting the Rio Grande del Norte on the west, nearly opposite the town of Santa Fe, in the Territory of New Mexico, are to-day but little known. The interior of the chain, the Sierra de los Valles, is as yet imperfectly explored. Still, these bald-crested mountains, dark and forbidding as they appear from a distance, conceal and shelter in their deep gorges and clefts many a spot of great natural beauty, surprisingly picturesque, but difficult of access. From the river these canons, as they are called in New Mexico, can be reached only by dint of toilsome climbing and clambering; for their western openings are either narrow gaps, or access to them is barred by colossal walls and pillars of volcanic rocks. The entire formation of the chain, as far as it faces the Rio Grande, is volcanic, the walls of the gorges consisting generally of a friable white or yellowish tufa containing nodules of black, translucent obsidian. The rock is so soft that in many places it can be scooped out or detached with the most primitive tools, or even with the fingers alone. Owing to this peculiarity the slopes exposed to the south and east, whence most of the heavy rains strike them, are invariably abrupt, and often even perpendicular; whereas the opposite declivities, though steep, still afford room for scanty vegetation. The gorges run from west to east,--that is, they descend from the mountain crests to the Rio Grande, cutting the long and narrow pedestal on which the high summits are resting.

Through some but not all of these gorges run never-failing streams of clear water. In a few instances the gorge expands and takes the proportions of a narrow vale. Then the high timber that usually skirts the rivulets shrinks to detached groves, and patches of clear land appear, which, if cultivated, would afford scanty support to one or two modern families. To the village Indian such tillable spots were of the greatest value. The deep ravine afforded shelter not only against the climate but against roving enemies, and the land was sufficient for his modest crops; since his wants were limited, and game was abundant.

The material of which the walls of these canons are composed, suggested in times past to the house-building Indian the idea of using them as a home. The tufa and pumice-stone are so friable that, as we have said, the rock can be dug or burrowed with the most primitive implements. It was easier, in fact, to excavate dwellings than to pile up walls in the open air.

Therefore the northern sides of these secluded gorges are perforated in many places by openings similar in appearance to pigeon-holes. These openings are the points of exit and entrance of artificial caves, dug out by sedentary aborigines in times long past. They are met with in cl.u.s.ters of as many as several hundred; more frequently, however, the groups are small. Sometimes two or more tiers of caves are superimposed.

From the objects scattered about and in the cells, and from the size and disposition of the latter, it becomes evident that the people who excavated and inhabited them were on the same level of culture as the so-called Pueblo Indians of New Mexico.

It is not surprising, therefore, that some traditions and myths are preserved to-day among the Pueblos concerning these cave-villages. Thus the Tehua Indians of the pueblo of Santa Clara a.s.sert that the artificial grottos of what they call the Puiye and the Shufinne, west of their present abodes, were the homes of their ancestors at one time. The Queres of Cochiti in turn declare that the tribe to which they belong, occupied, many centuries before the first coming of Europeans to New Mexico, the cl.u.s.ter of cave-dwellings, visible at this day although abandoned and in ruins, in that romantic and picturesquely secluded gorge called in the Queres dialect Tyuonyi, and in Spanish "El Rito de los Frijoles."