On their way to the rock his party overtook or passed many Indians going thither with burros heavy-laden with peaches, and on the summit the men urged the Americans to eat all they wished of this delicious fruit. It was carried to their _azoteas_, or roofs, where, cut in halves, it was spread to be dried in the sun. Compare such cordial friendliness and the spirit shown in the Indian agent’s report in 1919, and ask yourself, why this change? How ardently one wishes the Ácomas might believe in our sincere sympathy and would respond as the Zuñis and Hopis have done, who say they wish us to know about their beliefs and their rich legacy of tribal lore, if only we will record it “straight and true”; or, as the High Chief among the Cheyennes and the Dakotas is quoted in that delightful book by Natalie Curtis Burlin:[103] I want all Indians and white men to read and learn how the Indians lived and thought in the olden time. A little while and the old Indians will no longer be, and the young will be even as white men. When I think, I know it is the mind of the Great Mystery that white men and Indians who fought together should now be one people. Or, as Short Bull, a Dakota medicine man, phrased it (when the Federal government forbade the Ghost Dance movement and, in order to enforce this mandate, massacred three hundred men and women of that tribe), who would have thought that dancing could make such trouble. For the message I brought was peace. We went unarmed to the dance. We are glad to live with white men as brothers. But we ask that they expect not the brotherhood and the love to come from the Indian alone. I should like to incorporate here entire the splendid appeal of Commissioner Francis E. Leupp, for the development of the Indian along the lines of his own genius. His protest against the idea of the white philanthropist, that the Navajos should be supplied with power-looms to advance their particular industry of blanket-weaving, contains more irony than is often found in official reports. Mr. Leupp sums up the situation in the following words: The Indian is a natural warrior, a natural logician, a natural artist. We have room for all three in our highly organized social system. Let us not make the mistake in the process of absorbing them, of washing out of them whatever is distinctly Indian. Our aboriginal brother brings, as his contribution to the common store of character, a great deal which is admirable and which needs only to be developed along the right line. Our proper work with him is improvement, not transformation.[104]