When anyone became ill, or when children fretted and cried, or the
young people became homesick the Coiyal Katcina (a youth and a
maiden) came and danced before them; then the sick got well,
children laughed, and sad ones became cheerful. We would continue
to travel until everyone was thoroughly worn out, then we would
halt and build houses and plant, remaining perhaps many years. One
of these places where we lived is not far from San Carlos, in a
valley, and another is on a mesa near a spring called Coyote Water
by the Apache.
When we came to the valley of the Little Colorado, south of where
Winslow now is, we built houses and lived there; then we crossed
to the northern side of the valley and built houses at Homolobi.
This was a good place for a time, but a plague of flies came and
bit the suckling children, causing many of them to die, so we left
there and traveled to Cipa (near Kuma spring). Finally we found
the Hopi, some going to each of the villages except Awatobi; none
went there.[15]
[15] Cosmos Mindeleff, 13th Annual Report of the Bureau of
American Ethnology, pp. 188-189.
The figure of a hand with extended fingers is very common, in the
vicinity of ruins, as a rock etching, and also is frequently seen
daubed on the rocks with colored pigments or white clay. These are
vestiges of a test formerly practiced by the young men who aspired for
admission to the fraternity of the Calako. The Calako is a trinity of
two women and a man from whom the Hopi obtained the first corn, and of
whom the following legend is told:
There was neither springs nor streams, although water was so near
the surface that it could be found by pulling up a tuft of grass.
The people had but little food, however, and they besought
Masauwuh to help them, but he could not.
There came a little old man, a dwarf, who said that he had two
sisters who were the wives of Calako, and it might be well to
petition them. So they prepared an altar, every man making a
_paho_, and these were set in the ground so as to encircle a sand
hillock, for this occurred before houses were known.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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