We gave little thought to the ancient past of Oraibi, and certainly I did not dream that for more than eight years it would concern me personally. Pedro de Tovar, that adventurous lieutenant of the great conquistador Coronado, reached it in 1540, the first year of the Spanish exploration north of the Rio Grande; and in 1629, or perhaps a trifle earlier, zealous friars of the Franciscan order built a mission there and, surrounded by an always suspicious population, far removed from Spanish headquarters at Santa Fe, had worked and prayed and governed until the revolt of 1680, when they met martyrdom and the mission disappeared. Until recently Oraibi had been the largest pueblo-community in North America, having had more than one thousand inhabitants, thus exceeding any of the pueblos of New Mexico. But its leading citizens, one Tewaquaptewa and one Youkeoma, the first a politician and the second a natural prophet and witch-charmer, backed by devoted and fanatical adherents, had prophesied, conjured visions and interpretations of signs, wrangled among themselves, and defied the Government until carried into captivity. Their imprisonment had been brief, and they were now busy making new medicine. Tewaquaptewa’s portrait appears in that fine book of Indian chants, edited by Miss Natalie Curtis and published by the Harpers; and his singing countenance presents a rapt ecstatic expression as he yodels the Butterfly Song. The translation of his name is there given as “Sun-down-shining,” and is imperfect as most translations, but just as good as any other, providing you do not have to consider him on a Governmental basis. I never dealt with him on a musical scale, and his undoubted genius in this respect made no appeal to me. As his Indian Agent, however, I tried for eight long years to make a sensible human being of him, and failed, for lack of material. After having tried him as an Indian judge, and then as an Indian policeman, in the hope of preserving his dignity and authority as hereditary chief, he was found to be the most negatively contentious savage and unreconstructed rebel remaining in the Oraibi community, so filled with malicious mischief-making to his benefit that a group of his own people petitioned me to exile him from the mesa settlement, in the hope that they might then exist in peace. Of course, this had little to do with his “Sun-down-shining” or his Butterfly chanting; but when the folks at home cannot get along with father, there is something wrong.