Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [174]
“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