• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3325 0

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:

Dawn, beautiful dawn, the Chief,

This day, let it be well with me as I go;

Let it be well before me as I go;

Let it be well behind me as I go;

Let it be well beneath me as I go;

Let it be well above me as I go;

Let all I see be well as I go.

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