The Indians of the Painted Desert Region: Hopis, Navahoes, Wallapais, Havasupais — John Shaqi
The Indians of the Painted Desert Region: Hopis, Navahoes, Wallapais, HavasupaisJames, George Wharton
Religion
The Indians of the Painted Desert Region: Hopis, Navahoes, Wallapais, Havasupais
James, George Wharton
Indians of North America -- Southwest, New
Yonder is a group of men busy digging a deep pit. Watch them as it
nears completion. It is made with a narrow neck and "bellies" out to
considerable width below. Indeed, it is shaped not unlike an immense
vase with a large, almost spherical body and narrow neck. In depth
it is perhaps six, eight, ten, or a dozen feet. On one side a narrow
stairway is cut into the earth leading down to its base, and at the
foot of this stairway a small hole is cut through into the chamber.
Our curiosity is aroused. What is this subterranean place for? As we
watch, the workers bring loads of greasewood and other inflammable
material, kindle a fire in the chamber, and fill it up with the wood.
Now we see the use of the small hole at the foot of the stairway. It
acts as a draught hole, and soon a raging furnace fire is in the vault
before us. When a sufficient heat has been obtained, the bottom hole is
closed, and then scores of loads of corn on the cob are dropped into
the heated chamber. When full, every avenue that could allow air to
enter is sealed, and there the corn remains over night or as long as
is required to cook it,--self-steam it. It is then removed, packed in
sacks or blankets on the backs of the patient burros, and removed to
the corn-rooms of the houses on the mesa above.
Other fresh corn is carried up and spread out on the house-tops to dry.
All this is stored away in the corn-rooms, into which strangers
sometimes are invited, but oftener kept away from. It is stacked up in
piles like cord-wood, and happy is that household whose corn-stack is
large at the beginning of a hard winter.
Walpi--the place of the gap--though not a large town, is better
known to whites than any of the other Hopi towns. Here it was that
the earliest visitors came and saw the thrilling Snake Dance. Its
southeastern trail, with the wonderful detached rock leaning over on
one side and the cliff on the other, between which the steep and rude
stairway is constructed, has been so often pictured, as well as the
so-called "Sacred Rock" of the Walpi dance plaza, that they are now as
familiar as photographs of Trinity Church, New York, or St. Paul's,
London. As one stands on the top of one of the houses he sees how
closely Walpi has been built. It covers the whole of the south end of
the mesa, up to the very edges of the precipice walls in three of its
four directions, and, as already shown, the fourth is the narrow neck
of rock connecting Walpi with Sichumavi and Hano. The dance plaza is
to the east, a long, narrow place, at the south end of which is the
"Sacred Rock." It is approached from south and north by the regular
"street" or trail, and one may leave it to the west through an archway,
over which is built one of the houses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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