My predecessor told me how he had sought to quiet this antagonism. At great expense he had taken the old chief, Youkeoma, and several of his retainers, on a trip to and through the East. At Washington they were honored by an audience with President Taft. The power and the glory of the American nation, it was thought, would overwhelm the savage. He might as well have taken a piece of Oraibi sandrock to see the Pope. Not even the size of President Taft impressed the old spider-like Hopi prophet, as he afterward told me in diplomatic confidence. Youkeoma returned as sullen and determined as before, made some new medicine with corn meal and feathers, and then repudiated the whole hegira, including President Taft, telling his people that he had seen nothing of importance, received no counsel that contained wisdom, and that he sincerely doubted those men were chiefs of anything. Certainly they were not the mythical Bohannas that the Hopi—following their own version of the Messianic legend—expect to come and rule them. And then, having refused to do that which Washington had urbanely decreed, he sat down in his warren of a pueblo, amid the sand and the garbage, to await whatever the white man might see fit to do about it. That was my inheritance. Toward evening in the cañon country the sun grows a bit more burnishing. Ahead of us appeared a space in the cedars, and beyond that rift one could see a more distant desert, rising as a sunlit moor, but quite removed—as if one looked across a chasm. A little later the team tipped forward on a rocky ledge. With brakes applied, we began to grind downward—it seemed to me, straight down. On the left, walls of rock arose in sheer plane-faces, and to the right I gathered that there was nothing at all: just an empty hole, beginning two feet from the outer wheels, and nicely garnished with huge boulders awaiting some driver’s bad judgment. I became more familiar with mesa trails thereafter, but this first one was a thrill. Sand had blown into the road, and the wheels crunched through it, and the brakes ground and screeched against the tires. “When the troops were here last,” said the driver cheerfully, “a pack-mule went over at this place, and he rolled until he fetched up against the bottom.” I silently wished he would attend to his driving. “And there is your Agency,” said the official, pointing. “You can see as far as you like from that place, if you look straight up.”