Through Our Unknown Southwest: The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted DesertLaut, Agnes C.
History
Through Our Unknown Southwest: The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted Desert
Laut, Agnes C.
Hopi Indians; Navajo Indians; Southwest, New -- Description and travel
And if you let your mind slip back to still remoter eras, you are lost
in a maze of antiquities older than the traditions of Egypt. Draw a line
from the Manzano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and
Laguna and Acoma and Zuni and the three mesas of Arizona to Oraibi and
Hotoville for 400 miles to the far west, and along that line you will
find ruins of churches, temples, council halls, call them what you will,
which antedate the coming of the Spaniards by so many centuries that not
even a tradition of their object remained when the conquerors came. Some
of these ruins--in the Manzanos and in western Arizona--would house a
modern cathedral and seat an audience of ten thousand. What were they:
council halls, temples, what? And what reduced the nation that once
peopled them to a remnant of nine or ten thousand Hopi all told? Do you
not see how the past of this whole Enchanted Mesa, this Painted Desert,
this Dream Land, is more romantic than fiction could create, or than
picayune historic disputes as to dates and broken crockery?
[Illustration: A Hopi wooing, which has an added interest in that among
the Hopi Indians, women are the rulers of the household]
There are prehistoric cliff dwellings in this region of as great marvel
as up north of Santa Fe; north of Ganado at Chin Lee, for instance. But
if you wish to see the modern descendants of these prehistoric Cliff
Dwellers, you can see them along the line of the National Forests from
the Manzanos east of Albuquerque to the Coconino and Kaibab at Grand
Canyon in Arizona. Let me explain here also that the Hopi are variously
known as Moki, Zuni, Pueblos; but that Hopi, meaning peaceful and
life-giving, is their generic name; and as such, I shall refer to them,
though the western part of their reserve is known as Moki Land. You can
visit a pueblo at Isleta, a short run by railroad from Albuquerque; but
Isleta has been so frequently "toured" by sightseers, I preferred to go
to the less frequented pueblos at Laguna and Acoma, just south of the
western Manzano National Forests, and on up to the three mesas of the
Moki Reserve in Arizona. Also, when you drive across Moki Land, you can
cross the Navajo Reserve, and so kill two birds with one stone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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