If the United States of America was born during the final quarter of the eighteenth century, it became a toddler during the opening decades of the nineteenth century, and progressed to early adolescence by mid-century. And if toddlers begin to exert a wary independence from their parents, and if teenagers often grapple with ideas of identity—that is, determining the kind of person they wish to become—then it was during the first half of the nineteenth century that the United States initiated the transition from infancy to adulthood.

Three interrelated events framed this half century of American history. The first is westward expansion that changed the United States from a country isolated on the eastern seaboard to one spanning the entire continent. The second was the conflict with Great Britain during the War of 1812 and later, the Mexican-American War, both military skirmishes that reaffirmed the increasing presence of the United States on the world’s stage. The final issue is the continuation and expansion of slavery, a problem that had begun to tear the fabric of the country apart.

The Louisiana Purchase Treaty

Rhode Island—the last of the original colonies to ratify the United States Constitution—was officially admitted to the union on 29 May, 1790. Over the next thirteen years, four additional states—Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792), Tennessee (1796), and Ohio (1803)—joined the United States, bringing the number of states to seventeen.

The date when Ohio was admitted—1 March—is particularly interesting. Less than two months later, on 30 April 1803, Robert R. Livingston (the American minister to France from 1801–04) and James Monroe (who had earlier served in that post from 1794–96) met with their French counterpart, François Barbé-Marbois, to sign the Louisiana Purchase Treaty.

The treaty was a pact that greatly increased the land holdings of the United States though at the expense of the numerous Native American nations already there. At the conclusion of the negotiations, Livingston is reported to have said, “We have lived long, but this is the noblest work of our whole lives…From this day the United States take their place among the first powers of the world.”

Indeed, with several strokes of a quill, Livingston and Monroe nearly doubled the recognized landmass of the United States. The final ledger suggests that the Louisiana Purchase added nearly 828,000 square miles at a cost of about $18.10 per square mile.

“Ocean in view! O! the joy”

The landmass the United States purchased from France was truly colossal, and contains what is now South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and parts of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and, of course, Louisiana.

Months after the treaty was signed, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned two men—Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark—to lead the Corps of Discovery in the exploration of this newly purchased land.

Lewis, Clark, and their intrepid colleagues departed Camp DuBois, located at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, on the afternoon of 14 May 1804. Over the next 18 months, the Lewis and Clark Expedition explored westwards, chronicling the waterways, flora, and fauna of this vast tract of land.

After arriving at the Pacific Ocean on 7 November (“Ocian in view! O! the joy,” Clark wrote in his journal), the expedition explored the nearby environs before eventually wintering at Fort Clatsop in Oregon. They departed eastward on 22 March 1806 and arrived in St. Louis on 23 September 1806.

Manifest destiny to overspread and possess

In this 8,000-mile round-trip adventure, the Lewis and Clark Expedition tapped into what would become the zeitgeist for much of the nineteenth century: the westward exploration and settling of the North American continent.

The expression that became synonymous with this progression was Manifest Destiny, a phrase first coined by John L. O’Sullivan, the publisher of the New York Morning News. On 27 December 1845, when discussing a boundary dispute between Great Britain and the United States over land in what is now the state of Oregon, O’Sullivan wrote, “And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”

Although this remark dates from the end of 1845, O’Sullivan’s phrase—Manifest Destiny—succinctly captured an idea that had been a part of the American ethos of expansion for almost a half of a century: that the North American continent was there for the taking, and that it was the divinely mandated obligation of the United States to settle this land.

Free states, slave states, and sad compromise

With land acquired and subsequently explored, the federal  government began to admit new states into the Union. Between 1812 and 1850, 14 states joined the United States, areas that ranged from Maine (1820) to California (1850). The admittance of Maine played a particularly pivotal role in the development of the history of the United States.

On 3 March 1820, the sixteenth congress of the United States passed the so-called Missouri Compromise, an act that prohibited slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel, excluding the state of Missouri, a state north of that designation. Maine was admitted as a free state less than two weeks later, and in order to keep the ratio of slave states to free states in balance, Missouri was admitted as a slave-holding state on 10 August 1821.

In the Missouri Compromise lay the foundation of the continuation of slavery in the United States of America, and the genesis of the American Civil War that would tear the country apart between 1861 and 1865. As states were added to the union in the decades that followed this important act of legislation, it further reinforced a geographical divide between the free states in the north and the slaveholding states to the south.

It also all but guaranteed a political stalemate as it pertained to the abolishing of slavery, for when a free state was admitted to the union, another slave holding state was added, too. Arkansas joined as a slave state in 1836; Michigan was admitted as a free state less than eight months later. Florida and Texas were admitted as a slave states in March and December 1845; Iowa and Wisconsin joined as free states in 1846 and 1848. The divide—both in numbers and in geography—that existed at the opening of the nineteenth century had only deepened and expanded fifty years later.

The Second War for American Independence

The opening years of the nineteenth century were turbulent and exciting for the new nation. The first decade was not yet over when the Louisiana Purchase essentially doubled the landmass of the United States. In doing so, the United States quite suddenly became a world power in mass if not yet in might. Immediately following the signing of the Treaty of the Louisiana Purchase, Napoleon is noted to have said, “The accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States and I have given England a maritime rival who will sooner or later will humble her pride.” Napoleon was correct.

The American victory in the War of 1812, a conflict sometimes called The Second War for American Independence, provided the young country with a great sense of confidence in relation to the world at large. So much so that that in 1823, President James Monroe created a policy that in time has come to bear his name, the Monroe Doctrine. In it, the United States created a policy that all but barred European countries from intervening in North America.

In essence, the Monroe Doctrine suggested what O’Sullivan wrote two decades later: the land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans belonged to the United States, and it was our obligation—and no one else’s—to  settle it. At the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, the United States took possession of what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

A new (old) world

It can be said that the acquisition of territory and the prohibition of European influence upon that land was the United States growing up and away from its old-world parents. But wrestling with the profound issues of slavery was the true adolescence of the United States, the moment in its history when it collectively decided what kind of country it wished to become in the full maturation of its adulthood.

Nothing had yet been determined at midcentury, but the breeze of discontent that had whispered through the wilderness at the beginning of the century had become a tornado of unrest fifty years later. In moving towards adulthood in the second half of this turbulent century, it would take the Civil War for the United States to (attempt to) live up to the lines Thomas Jefferson wrote in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ”

In this, progress—slow though it may have been—was being made.

Source: Dr. Bryan Zygmont, “1800–48 in the United States, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, June 25, 2024, accessed July 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/1800-48-in-the-united-states-an-introduction/.

Summer snow covering Fremont Peak, Wind River Range, Wyoming (photo: summitburger, CC BY-SA 2.0)

After ascending a peak on June 13, 1844, explorer John C. Fremont wrote: “With joy and exultation we saw ourselves once more on the top of the Rocky Mountains and beheld a little stream taking its course towards the rising sun.” Fremont led a federally-commissioned expedition surveying the western landscape to locate routes for emigrants traveling westward to the Pacific. The narrative of his travels, penned along with his wife, Jessie Benton Fremont, became a best-seller and his map guided the flood of wagons soon to hit the Oregon Trail.

Fremont’s report offered both information and inspiration for a growing population. As the nation added land west of the Mississippi River, published maps, and built infrastructure, citizens flocked towards new possibilities. These settlers caused conflict as they did so. American Indians already living on the landscape fought back. Mexico sought to protect its borders from further encroachment by the United States. Meanwhile, Northern and Southern Americans debated the spread of enslaved labor into new territories.

Industrialization & Reform

While industrialization began earlier, the pace quickened during the middle decades. Steam power began to replace water power and factories streamlined labor through the use of interchangeable parts, making goods easier and less expensive to produce. Isaac Singer used this system (sometimes referred to as the “American System”) to mass produce sewing machines, which led to the increasing availability of store-bought clothing. Similarly, Samuel Colt employed an assembly line for the first time, training laborers in a single task in order to speed the manufacture of his pistols.

Immigrant labor fueled much of the industry driving the nation. In the 1850s, 2.6 million people came to the U.S. for opportunity or relief from revolution, inequality, and poverty. Along with the Irish and Chinese, Germans, Scandinavians, and Italians crossed oceans to find employment in agriculture or industry. Some Americans resented this influx of immigrants—the largest wave by population percentage—forming the Know-Nothing Party which sought to suppress immigrant votes, sometimes through violence.

Industrialization and increasingly dense urban centers created labor strife, deteriorating relations between economic classes, health crises, and environmental degradation. Some began to question the very idea of progress, while others sought to alleviate the ills society now faced. Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau left the city to “live deliberately” at Walden Pond, about 20 miles from Boston, seeking a closer connection to self through nature. Frederick Law Olmsted designed New York City’s Central Park as a pastoral retreat for city dwellers. Reformers advocated for the improvement of many aspects of society. Women gathered at Seneca Falls, New York penned a Declaration of Sentiments restating the famous first words of the Declaration of Independence to be inclusive: “All men and women are created equal.” Abolitionists lectured and published on the horrors of slavery, including narratives by former slaves, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Others, like John Brown took a more radical approach, using violence in an effort to free the enslaved.

In 1850, nine thousand miles of railroad track lie scattered across the eastern states. Track tripled in a decade and the growth of western markets demonstrated the need for a Transcontinental Railroad linking the coasts. The laborers who built this track were primarily recent immigrants. In addition to Civil War veterans, Irish crews began in the East and worked westward; Chinese laborers moved in the opposite direction. Both were groups that experienced discrimination in the United States, and the Chinese in particular did not earn recognition for the arguably more grueling work of blasting through the Sierra Mountains (they were even excluded from photographs celebrating the rail’s completion in 1869). Nevertheless, the nation celebrated the railroad as the pinnacle of American achievement and a symbol of national unity.

Westward Expansion

Before a railroad connected the coasts, Americans pushed the nation’s frontier further into lands inhabited by American Indians and claimed by other nations. Through both war and treaties, the U.S. claimed its current continental boundaries by mid-century. Multiple gold rushes and other mining opportunities, farmland, and enterprise enticed waves new immigrants and migrants creating a diverse mixture of peoples and cultures.

Opportunity and ideology settled the West. In 1845, journalist John O’Sullivan coined the phrase “manifest destiny” to embody the spirit of the movement. The phrase implied an inevitable and even divinely-ordained process of Anglo-American culture replacing Native American culture, which was seen by many as less civilized. Yet the landscapes they viewed as wilderness had been the home of American Indian civilization for thousands of years. Tribal alliances became more complicated with American involvement. The Pawnee, for example, allied with the U.S. seeking protection from the neighboring Lakota, yet lost land and independence when removed to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma.

Many who saw the immense mountains and valleys of the West celebrated the landscape. In 1871 when geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden explored an area known as Yellowstone, he remarked that it should be preserved from settlement. In just a few decades, the impact of expansion was threatening nature’s nation. Following Fremont’s lead, government-sponsored scientific expeditions traversed the continent, making maps and identifying resources that could be exploited. But many also employed artists. The Hayden expedition took along both a photographer and an artist (William Henry Jackson and Thomas Moran respectively). The photographer Carlton Watkins, likely supported by the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, created images of the Columbia River that urged businessmen to invest and people to move and settle the region, while his photographs of the Yosemite Valley pushed Congress to preserve it as a national park.

Civil War & Civil Rights

As new territories applied for statehood, the issue of slavery took center stage. The federal government embroiled itself in a series of compromises and failed to resolve the issue of slavery’s spread. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) laid bare regional differences among political parties leading to their reorientation. The new anti-slavery Republican party successfully ran Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860.

Before President Lincoln even took office, southern states began to quit the Union and ultimately formed the Confederate States of America with its own constitution and president. Lincoln refused to recognize this claim of independence. When Confederates attacked an unarmed supply ship at Fort Sumter, war followed.

Bloody and deadly battles saw heart-wrenching casualties. A military draft was enacted on both sides. The South, who thought their cotton crops would earn them international support, found themselves unable to secure allies, especially after Lincoln explicitly made the war about slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. Slavery was already illegal in most European countries. In addition, most railroad track and industry (as well as the ability to produce firearms and ammunition—not to mention food crops) were located in northern states. The Confederates found themselves without the resources needed to win the war. Cotton may have been king, but that raw material wasn’t enough to win the war.

During the Civil War questions of how to integrate former slaves into American society remained. After the Civil War, Reconstruction placed federal troops throughout the South forcing state governments to assure black freedoms. The Freedmen’s Bureau helped African-Americans gain access to education and employment, though too often that meant sharecropping while the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the 13th–15th amendments to the Constitution legally established rights.

Efforts at government control over race relations were undermined by deep-seated racism and were constantly challenged through intimidation and violence. The Ku Klux Klan was organized immediately after the war ended in order to ensure control over formerly enslaved people through violence and terror. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, southern states passed segregation laws establishing what is known as Jim Crow, a system that maintained the oppression of African-Americans for nearly one hundred years.

Conclusion

These middle decades of the nineteenth century saw drastic changes wrought by both compromise and conflict.

The Civil War ended the conversation and compromises of previous decades and, though it ultimately freed the enslaved, people’s minds and hearts did not change overnight. The process to true freedom was slow and incomplete.

The Civil War ended the conversations and compromises of previous decades and, though it ultimately freed the enslaved, people’s minds and hearts did not change overnight and prejudice, intimidation, and violence has continued ever since. African-American men earned the right to vote (at least in theory), but women had not. Industry had produced great wealth, but its impact on people’s lives and health was becoming a serious matter. Similarly, the effect of human activity upon the environment was increasingly visible as Americans simultaneously exploited and and preserved the land..

After John Fremont’s death, his wife Jessie wrote: “Railroads followed the lines of his journeyings—a nation followed his maps to their resting place—and cities have risen on the ashes of his lonely campfires.” Whether one saw this as a positive or negative was a matter of opinion that fueled national identity and one’s idea of progress through to the next century.

See also:

A timeline of the territorial history of the United States

Source: Dr. Kelly Enright, “1848–77 in the United States, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, June 25, 2024, accessed July 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/1848-77-in-the-united-states-an-introduction/.

CALIFORNIA AND THE GOLD RUSH

The United States had no way of knowing that part of the land about to be ceded by Mexico had just become far more valuable than anyone could have imagined. On January 24, 1848, James Marshall discovered gold in the millrace of the sawmill he had built with his partner John Sutter on the south fork of California’s American River. Word quickly spread, and within a few weeks all of Sutter’s employees had left to search for gold. When the news reached San Francisco, most of its inhabitants abandoned the town and headed for the American River. By the end of the year, thousands of California’s residents had gone north to the gold fields with visions of wealth dancing in their heads, and in 1849 thousands of people from around the world followed them. The Gold Rush had begun.

Word about the discovery of gold in California in 1848 quickly spread and thousands soon made their way to the West Coast in search of quick riches.

The fantasy of instant wealth induced a mass exodus to California. Settlers in Oregon and Utah rushed to the American River. Easterners sailed around the southern tip of South America or to Panama’s Atlantic coast, where they crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific and booked ship’s passage for San Francisco. As California-bound vessels stopped in South American ports to take on food and fresh water, hundreds of Peruvians and Chileans streamed aboard. Easterners who could not afford to sail to California crossed the continent on foot, on horseback, or in wagons. Others journeyed from as far away as Hawaii and Europe. Chinese people came as well, adding to the polyglot population in the California boomtowns.

This Currier & Ives lithograph from 1849 imagines the extreme lengths that people might go to in order to be part of the California Gold Rush. In addition to the men with picks and shovels trying to reach the ship from the dock, airships and rocket are shown flying overhead. (credit: Library of Congress)

Once in California, gathered in camps with names like Drunkard’s Bar, Angel’s Camp, Gouge Eye, and Whiskeytown, the “forty-niners” did not find wealth so easy to come by as they had first imagined. Although some were able to find gold by panning for it or shoveling soil from river bottoms into sieve-like contraptions called rockers, most did not. The placer gold, the gold that had been washed down the mountains into streams and rivers, was quickly exhausted, and what remained was deep below ground. Independent miners were supplanted by companies that could afford not only to purchase hydraulic mining technology but also to hire laborers to work the hills. The frustration of many a miner was expressed in the words of Sullivan Osborne. In 1857, Osborne wrote that he had arrived in California “full of high hopes and bright anticipations of the future” only to find his dreams “have long since perished.” Although $550 million worth of gold was found in California between 1849 and 1850, very little of it went to individuals.

Observers in the gold fields also reported abuse of Native Americans by miners. Some miners forced Native Americans to work their claims for them; others drove them off their lands, stole from them, and even murdered them as part of a systemic campaign of extermination. Some scholars view the resulting loss of Native American life as a clear example of genocide in the United States. Foreigners were generally disliked, especially those from South America. The most despised, however, were the thousands of Chinese migrants. Eager to earn money to send to their families in Hong Kong and southern China, they quickly earned a reputation as frugal men and hard workers who routinely took over diggings others had abandoned as worthless and worked them until every scrap of gold had been found. Many American miners, often spendthrifts, resented their presence and discriminated against them, believing the Chinese, who represented about 8 percent of the nearly 300,000 who arrived, were depriving them of the opportunity to make a living.

Source: P. Scott Corbett, et.al, U.S. History, OpenStax publishing, 2024

1877–1898 in the United States, an introduction

On the sidewalks of Pearl Street in late 1882, New Yorkers could peer into the windows of homes and businesses glowing with the light of four hundred electric lamps powered by the first commercial central power plant in the nation. While neither electricity nor electric lamps were entirely new, what Thomas Edison achieved was the integration of elements into a single working system. Although Edison had earned the nickname The Wizard of Menlo Park a few years earlier when his phonograph recorded the human voice, his laboratory at Menlo Park, NJ involved the work of many men experimenting endlessly to find the best materials and methods to make technologies commercially successful.

With more than half a million patents granted, the end of the nineteenth century was an era of invention and innovation. People saw skyscrapers begin to tower over city streets while suspension bridges, electric street cars, and elevators facilitated movement through them. Telephones allowed communication across miles. All of these new systems were driven by cooperation between investors, inventors, and city leaders. Part of Edison’s genius was navigating that system, but no less significant was his recognition of the emerging consumer culture that swept America from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.

Gilded Age

This time period earned the term the Gilded Age for seemingly beautiful and ambitious advances that masked corruption and exploitation beneath the surface. Even as technology promised to connect people, the nation remained socially, economically, and racially divided.

“Taylorism,” a specialized system of labor introduced by an engineer named Frederick W. Taylor, advocated the study of worker productivity and developed a more efficient system of specialized tasks meant to speed production and increase profits. Unregulated businesses thrived, giving rise to a wealthy elite, that resulted in monopolies like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company which controlled 90% of the industry in 1885.

Industrialization and urbanization brought wealth to some, but left many behind. Workers organized in order to protest their conditions, hours, and wages through strikes and boycotts. Progressive reformers studied social problems and sought resolutions to safety and health in homes and factories. As a reporter and reformer, Jacob Riis saw first-hand the destitute living conditions of the urban poor. He used photography to share what he observed in tenement sweatshops, using the power of images to communicate the inequities of the thriving garment industry and the lives of laborers. Riis himself was an immigrant who had come from Denmark seeking opportunities promised by America’s industry and urbanization.

Liberty and destiny

Between 1877 and 1890 more than six million immigrants arrived in the U.S. Many found roads not as open as they had hoped. Anglo-Americans increasingly sought to maintain the nation as both white and Protestant and sought to restrict the right to vote by establishing literacy and residency requirements, poll taxes, and immigration restrictions. The arrival of Catholic and Jewish immigrants was seen as conflicting with mainstream values and the economic successes of Chinese immigrants in the West challenged the idea of Manifest Destiny.

Many groups established towns or sections of cities where they could retain some of their native culture. Germans in the upper Midwest, for example, had strong communities and the language of instruction in schools was German.

In 1886, the dedication of the Statue of Liberty drew one million people. A powerful symbol of freedom and international cooperation, the statue was celebrated for its ideals. But the statue was almost a failure. While the French paid for the statue itself, the Americans were to provide its pedestal. Without the support of enough wealthy donors, funds ran dry. It was not until Pulitzer raised funds through his newspaper with ads calling upon individual citizens to donate small amounts that the statue found its footing. Its torch—illuminated by electric lamps—shone as a symbol of the power of the people.

Reconstruction

In the South, industry and urbanization lagged in the decades after the Civil War (1861 – 65). Reconstruction policies attempted to foster equal opportunity but resentments boiled beneath the surface.

In the contested 1876 presidential election, Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, walked away the victor after an electoral committee decided the outcome. As a concession to the Democrats, Hayes ordered federal troops away from state houses throughout the South. When federal troops pulled out, bi-racial governments and the rights of former slaves deteriorated. Southern states enacted discrimination laws, collectively known as “Jim Crow”—a pejorative term derived from an early-nineteenth century song popularized by a blackface performer. Separation of blacks and whites pervaded spaces throughout the South from restaurants and parks to hospitals and prisons. Interracial marriage was outlawed. The end of Reconstruction marked the spread of legally-sanctioned segregation.

While these laws did not go unchallenged, the federal government’s laissez faire policies enabled these restrictions to freedom. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was allowed, as long as some accommodations for both races existed. This “separate but equal” doctrine cemented segregation practices and laws. For freed blacks, these power structures limited opportunities. Those who sought to own and operate their own farms struggled with a system of tenant farming that trapped them in debt.

The end of the western frontier

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, so too did the western frontier. By 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s analysis of census data led him to declare the era of expansion that had defined American individuality and ideas of progress, had ended. Turner announced his Frontier Thesis at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition where the nation was displaying the newest technologies alongside monumental buildings meant to demonstrate American greatness in an area known as the White City.

By contrast, progress as it related to “others” was trivialized. Native Americans were essentially put on display on the fair’s Midway wearing traditional dress and surrounded by tipis and totem poles, while model schools at the Exposition showcased government programs to teach trades and establish boarding schools for their children.

This ambiguity between education and entertainment was also on display in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (staged outside the Exposition) which recounted the famous battles that had driven Native American culture to near extinction. Beyond the battlefield, the Dawes Act of 1887 which established a land allotment system and boarding schools meant to erase native culture, language, and traditions, and advance assimilation, had adversely impacted Native American society. Intended as a measure to “civilize,” this act took away traditions of communal land ownership and undermined tribal authority and identity.

The western landscape, too, had changed dramatically. Cattle had replaced bison as the key bovine residents of the plains. The cattle boom reached a peak from 1880-1885, but by the middle of that decade, the ecosystem could not support increased grazing. Open range and cattle driving collapsed causing corporations to move in, build fences, and turn enterprising cowboys into hired hands. Railroads connected agricultural and ranching lands with major urban production centers, bringing technology to a place that had once symbolized its absence.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, technologies, such as electric lighting, first brought to the marketplace for practical uses, became increasingly common, illuminating not just offices and homes, but even trivial items such as Christmas trees. In the new social atmosphere of amusement parks like Coney Island, technology provided distraction and thrills rather than progress and industry. Such places also offered a space where Americans of different classes could mix outside the segregation of urban centers. Leisure, escape, and entertainment increasingly connected Americans with a sense of common identity in the absence of its earlier myth of manifest destiny, which had lost its unifying concept as the American population became more diverse and its social problems more complex.

Source: Dr. Kelly Enright, “1877–1898 in the United States, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, June 25, 2024, accessed July 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/1877-1898-in-the-united-states-an-introduction/.

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”—John Brown, shortly before his execution, 1859

Who was John Brown?

Martyr. Murderer. Prophet. Madman. All of these words have been used to describe John Brown, the fiery abolitionist who led violent attacks against supporters of slavery in the years before the U.S. Civil War. A white man born into a deeply religious family of Connecticut abolitionists in 1800, Brown dedicated his life to a holy war against slavery. He scorned the tactic of moral suasion then in vogue among northern abolitionists, believing that only armed uprising could counter the evil of slavery. In 1859, he and a group of followers attempted to seize the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) and distribute weapons to enslaved people so they could rise up against slaveholders. The plan failed and Brown was captured, tried, and executed amidst a media frenzy.

From some perspectives, Brown could be considered a failure: his plan to bring about a massive uprising of enslaved people never came to fruition, and he was hanged for treason years before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery. But from other perspectives, Brown succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: his execution elevated him to the level of an abolitionist martyr, garnering sympathy for the cause he was willing to die for. His actions contributed to such paranoia among slaveholders about the future of slavery in the United States that slave states seceded when anti-slavery candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president, putting in motion the events that ultimately would lead to slavery’s downfall.

The growing sectional divide of the 1850s

In the first half of the 19th century, the U.S. government worked to maintain the balance of political power between free and slave states by ensuring that their numbers remained equal. But, as the country expanded west to territories across the Mississippi River, with American settlers displacing the Indigenous inhabitants and forming new states, that balance began to falter. Several events in the 1850s contributed to a growing belief among anti-slavery activists that the “Slave Power,” as they called it, had gained control of the U.S. government: the introduction of a brutal Fugitive Slave Law (1850) required northern citizens to assist in the capture of enslaved people who had escaped; the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) repealed an earlier ban on slavery in new territories north of the Missouri Compromise line; and the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) ruled that Black Americans were not U.S. citizens.

John Brown first became a nationally known figure in 1856 through his actions in the Kansas Territory, three years before the raid on Harpers Ferry. Kansas was then the site of a territorial civil war known as Bleeding Kansas, the result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s provision allowing the residents of the territory to vote on whether to allow slavery. Pro- and anti-slavery settlers attempting to sway the vote flooded the region, and quickly came to blows. Among the ranks of “Free-Staters” were John Brown and five of his sons, who had come to Kansas to take up arms in defense of abolition.

In May 1856, Brown led his sons and three other men in what came to be known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, a three-day rampage during which they murdered five members of the pro-slavery territorial district court in front of their families, hacking them to death with broadswords. Brown was enraged by two recent attacks on abolitionists by pro-slavery forces—the violent attack on the town of Lawrence, Kansas, then an abolitionist center, and the caning of abolitionist Charles Sumner on the Senate floor.The Pottawatomie Massacre escalated the violence in Kansas to a fever pitch, drawing federal troops to the territory. Brown and his allies engaged in battle with pro-slavery forces throughout the summer of 1856, becoming a ruthless leader whom southern slaveholders feared and northern abolitionists admired.

The raid at Harpers Ferry

Although he was under indictment for the Pottawatomie murders, Brown managed to evade capture and make his way to the northeast, where he was received enthusiastically by abolitionists. Brown had long cherished the idea of leading a large-scale rebellion of enslaved people, like the Haitian Revolution or Nat Turner’s rebellion, and he spent several years traveling through New England and Canada, raising money, gathering weapons, and preparing for battle.

Brown eventually determined that he would lead a team of men to the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, distributing its weapons as he marched south to liberate enslaved Black people from plantations. Harpers Ferry was a strategic location not only because of its firearms cache but also for its position as a major rail and river junction (railroads and rivers were then the easiest ways to transport people and goods long distances). Brown believed that he would grow an ever larger army as the freed people joined him. He consulted with notable Black abolitionists about his plan, including Frederick Douglass—who counseled him against the action—and Harriet Tubman, who helped him recruit participants.

In October 1859, Brown and a group of twenty-one Black and white men captured the armory and took hostages, alerting the enslaved residents nearby of their plan. However, most of the enslaved people near Harpers Ferry were loath to trust an unknown white man, and to Brown’s surprise, the massive uprising that he had predicted failed to materialize. A train conductor raised the alarm, local militias pinned Brown and his men inside the armory, and by the following day U.S. Marines under the command of Robert E. Lee (the future Confederate general) arrived and demanded their surrender. Brown refused, and the Marines stormed the armory, wounded Brown, and took him and his seven remaining men (the others had died or escaped) prisoner.

The subsequent trial of Brown and his men for murder, inciting slave rebellion, and treason was widely reported in the national press. His speech upon conviction, in which he proclaimed that “if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!” was printed in 50 newspapers, including on the front page of The New York Times.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. The story that he paused to kiss a Black infant on his way to the gallows was first circulated by Brown’s friend and supporter, journalist James Redpath, in a biography published just months after the execution to raise money for Brown’s widow and children.

John Brown in American memory

Although abolitionists praised Brown, many Republican politicians—including Abraham Lincoln—sought to distance themselves from him. [2] But once the Civil War was underway, Brown’s courageous fight against slavery took on new resonance. The song “John Brown’s Body,” a Civil War marching song, provided the inspiration for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Brown’s complex legacy has been viewed in different lights in the century and a half since his death. Frederick Douglass, who had to flee to England to escape possible retribution for his knowledge of Brown’s plans, later gave a speech praising him, saying that “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.” [3] During the Jim Crow era, when mainstream American memory of the Civil War downplayed the importance of emancipation, many white historians portrayed Brown as a zealot and a madman, although Black intellectuals and artists, like W.E.B. DuBois and Jacob Lawrence, portrayed him sympathetically. Controversy over John Brown’s actions, and whether it’s acceptable to use violence to challenge social injustice, remains with us today.

African slavery as it exists amongst us . . .  [is] the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. . . . Our new government[’s] . . . corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America, March 21, 1861 [1]

Historians today widely agree that slavery was the single most important cause of the Civil War. There is an abundance of textual evidence to support this, perhaps most famously an address given by Alexander Stephens known as the “Cornerstone Speech.” Stephens, the Vice President of the newly formed Confederate States of America (also known as the Confederacy) delivered the address to a crowd in Savannah, Georgia, at a critical moment: March 1861, just weeks after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States. Georgia was one of seven southern states that had recently seceded (separated) from the United States with the intent of forming a new nation. Called to remark on the Confederacy’s new constitution, Stephens bluntly outlined the reasons that southern states had seceded and what they hoped to achieve as an independent nation: the preservation of slavery and perpetuation of white supremacy.

A “positive good”

Stephens was far from the only person to voice this reasoning. “Secession commissioners” who urged southern states to secede by speaking at legislatures and state conventions repeatedly cited their desire to protect slavery. [2] In fact, white southerners were not ashamed that millions of Black people were enslaved in their states; they proudly proclaimed that slavery was a “positive good.” [3] Although Abraham Lincoln—an antislavery Republican—had disavowed any intent to interfere with slavery where it already existed, slaveholders seized the opportunity of his election to break with the U.S. government and create a new nation where slavery could be protected forever. [4]

Thanks to the new technologies of lithography and photography (lithography was invented in 1796, and the first photograph was taken in 1826), we have images of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens (both slaveholders), as president and vice president respectively, of the rebel break-away states. These images remind us of the importance of new technologies in disseminating images in the second half of the 19th century, but they also remind us that all images (even photographs) adopt a point of view and therefore must be approached critically.

If we consider these two images of the inauguration—one a photograph and the other a color lithograph—we see people of all ages including some Black figures gathered around the Capitol building in Montgomery, Alabama. Davis and Stephens stand in the center of the podium facing the crowd. The chromolithograph on the right, made more than a decade after the end of the war, was based on the earlier photograph (left), but collapses the middle ground and narrows the composition to consolidate the crowd and focus on the grand portico, its balconies and the clock tower. We also see more clearly the faces of the figures and their interactions than we do in the early photograph. For these reasons, the lithograph condenses and heightens the importance of this moment. Which image is true? The answer is both and neither.

The power of these images and the moment they depict has echoed to the present day. A star embedded in the paving at the top of the steps of the Alabama State Capitol marks the location where Jefferson Davis stood during his inauguration as the President of the Confederacy, and a statue of him still stands nearby.

The war begins at Fort Sumter

A month or so after the inauguration, and just three weeks after Stephens delivered his Cornerstone Speech, the U.S. Civil War began at Fort Sumter in South Carolina (the first state to secede from the Union).

When it became clear that the United States intended to hold the fort despite the secession of South Carolina, Confederate forces attacked it. This was the first military action of the Civil War. Confederate forces reduced the fort to a ruin, and U.S. soldiers evacuated. The photographs of the aftermath of the battle at Fort Sumter stressed the destruction of the site and helped to strengthen the resolve of the Confederacy. This image, and others like it became powerful symbols—here was photographic evidence of the Confederacy’s strength.

By end of the war, the United States had defeated the Confederacy, more than 750,000 Americans had died, and slavery had been banned everywhere in the United States through a Constitutional amendment. [5]

Denial and the Lost Cause

After the war, white southerners fashioned a narrative (often referred to as the Lost Cause) that denied that slavery had any role in bringing about the Civil War, despite the evidence to the contrary. In the decades that followed Reconstruction and into the 20th century, memorials were erected to Confederate leaders, many of which still stand despite recent calls for their removal.

Memorials to Stephens, who had said the Confederacy’s “corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man” still stand in public and civic spaces, including one in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., erected in 1927 during the Jim Crow era. The impressive space of National Statuary Hall in the Capitol, under a dome and surrounded by marble columns, was set aside in 1864 to serve as a hall to honor those who were “illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services such as each State may deem to be worthy of this national commemoration.” [6]

The artist who created the sculpture of Stephens, Gutzon Borglum, also worked on the enormous memorial celebrating the Confederacy carved on the side of Stone Mountain and the carving at Mount Rushmore. But the sculpture of Stephens may not remain in the U.S. Capitol for much longer. In an open letter to the Governor of Georgia in 2017, Stephens’s descendants wrote: “Confederate monuments need to come down. Put them in museums where people will learn about the context of their creation, but remove them from public spaces so that the descendants of enslaved people no longer walk beneath them at work and on campus.” [7] In June 2021, the House of Representatives voted to remove statues that honor Confederate leaders.

The causes of the Civil War in art

What do works of art reveal about the deep divisions that led to the Civil War? The collections of museums and archives, as well as public monuments, show us how artists captured the many issues that divided the nation in the years leading up to the Civil War, from the abolitionist movement to westward expansion, in photography, painting, sculpture, and popular prints. Visual arguments for and against slavery proliferated in 19th-century America, as defenders and opponents of human bondage sought to sway the opinions of the broader public. The new medium of photography, capable of capturing the visible world as never before, proved a valuable tool in this.

Paintings, too, often addressed the issues of both prewar and wartime emotion using landscape as a metaphor—as the art historian Eleanor Harvey put it, “American audiences seemed eager to ascribe patriotic sentiments to the landscape as a means of channeling wartime emotions.” [8] For example, Frederic Church’s 1860 painting, The Meteor of 1860, depicts a meteor streaking through the night sky and its reflection in water below. Critics at the time saw the double fireball of the meteor as akin to shots being fired from artillery, and saw it and other atmospheric phenomena that appeared in the sky that year, through the lens of a war that was seeming more and more unavoidable.

When we examine the visual record of the Civil War, it is best to immediately ask who an image was made for, who made it, what it aimed to achieve, how it was understood at the time it was made, and how its meaning has changed. We must also consider what the visual record does not contain. For example, enslaved people rarely had an opportunity to create images; what they did create (such as textiles, baskets, carvings, dolls, and pottery) was less likely to be preserved than the works of free artists.

Extraordinary exceptions however do exist. Elizabeth Keckley overcame her brutal enslavement in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri, and became the dressmaker to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. She was able to purchase her own freedom and that of her son in 1852 using $1,200 she earned from her sewing and that she was able to borrow from her wealthy clientele. [9] Her 1861 purple velvet dress with satin piping and mother-of-pearl buttons was made for Mrs. Lincoln to convey that she was both “dignified and competent,” characteristics that had important political and diplomatic functions in the early months of the Civil War (the gown was worn in late 1861–early 1862).

Although the path from the founding of the United States in 1776 to its war of disunion 85 years later was tortuous, slavery—its past, present, and particularly its future—was at the heart of the conflict at every turn.

See also:

Learn more about Alexander H. Stephens’ “Cornerstone” Speech

Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868)

Frederic Edwin Church at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Adapted from:

Dr. Kimberly Kutz Elliott, ““The Immediate Cause of the Civil War,” an introduction,” in Smarthistory, April 20, 2023, accessed July 12, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/the-immediate-cause-of-the-civil-war-an-introduction/.

A forgotten war with unforgettable consequences

A tourist visiting the National Mall in Washington, D.C. today is likely to see monuments commemorating American involvement in several foreign wars, including the striking Vietnam Memorial, with its reflective surface naming the war dead, or the squadron of stainless steel soldiers honoring veterans of the Korean War. That same tourist might be surprised to learn that the United States had fought another foreign war whose toll on the American population was greater than either of those conflicts: the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). [1]

There is no memorial to the Mexican-American War in Washington, D.C., and only about 30 monuments across the whole of the United States pay tribute to a war in which more than 15,000 American soldiers lost their lives. By comparison, there are at least 13,000 historical markers commemorating the U.S. Civil War. [2] In fact, the Mexican-American War has been overlooked in both U.S. and Mexican popular culture. The war is rarely depicted in film, and no images of the War of Northern Invasion (as the war is named in Mexico) were made by Mexican artists. A war of conquest conducted by a land-hungry U.S. government against ill-supplied Mexican soldiers did not generate much pride for either nation.

Timeline of significant events 

Nevertheless, the Mexican-American War had far-reaching consequences for both the United States, Mexico, and the Indigenous peoples whose land both nations claimed. First among these was the cession of about one third of Mexico’s territory to the United States, a landmass of over 338,000,000 acres. Redrawing the border added to American economic prosperity at Mexico’s expense. The war also contributed to the outbreak of later civil wars in both countries: the Civil War in the United States (1861–1865) and the War of Reform in Mexico (1857–1860).

Lastly, the war’s outcome left many residents of the ceded territory worse off than they had been under Mexican rule, which had guaranteed people of African and Indigenous descent some rights and protections. Not only did the U.S. government permit slavery (which had been outlawed in Mexico for years) but the annexation of these lands sent large numbers of white American settlers west, where they displaced and often killed Indigenous people.

Comparing Mexican and American societies before the war

Both the United States and Mexico were young republics that had recently gained independence after centuries of European colonization. The process had been considerably easier for the United States, which had had French aid in defeating Great Britain, as well as bountiful natural resources to fuel its economy. In the early nineteenth century, the people of the United States were awash in patriotism, Protestant religious fervor, and enthusiasm for rapid expansion. Jacksonian Democracy, ushered in by the presidency of Andrew Jackson, extolled the virtues of the “common man,” extending the franchise to all white men regardless of their social standing.

But citizenship in the United States became more entwined with constructions around racial difference at the same time it became less tied to class. The “white man’s republic” championed by Jacksonian Democrats categorically excluded women and people of color from the body politic. This was particularly evident in Jackson’s policy of “Indian Removal”: where once white Americans had committed to christianize and assimilate Indigenous people for their own good, many now declared Indigenous people savages who must either be expelled to distant western lands or face extinction.

By contrast, Mexico had won independence after 300 years of Spanish colonization without outside help, but the conflict had left the nation in a difficult economic state, with its mining, industrial, and agricultural capacity significantly reduced. The Mexican government was unstable, with 50 different governments in the 30 years after independence, most installed by military coup. Conservatives wanted to maintain a version of the colonial system that privileged social elites, the army, and the Catholic Church, while Liberals wanted to implement republican reforms.

Although Mexican society did make sharp distinctions of race and class in the years leading up to the war, nonwhites had more political power and social mobility than in the United States. Centuries of racial and cultural mixing between the descendants of Spanish settlers, enslaved Africans, Indigenous inhabitants, and Asian immigrants of the region had created a diverse populace. After independence from Spain, the Mexican government removed racial identifiers from official documents to promote equality in the new republic, and in 1829 abolished slavery altogether.

Cotton, Texas, and Manifest Destiny

Many Americans believed that the key to their prosperity was relentless expansion. The U.S. government had purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803, and newspaper editors spread the idea that it was the “Manifest Destiny” of the United States to possess North America from the Atlantic to Pacific Ocean. The ideology of Manifest Destiny justified U.S. imperialism by claiming that the nation had a divine mission to spread democracy and Protestant Christianity across the continent.

Expansion was particularly crucial for the cotton planters who dominated the southern United States. Cultivating cotton quickly depleted soil, and plantation owners were eager to obtain more fertile land. They relied on the forced labor of enslaved people of African descent, and sought to expand slavery along with the borders of the American south. Many cotton planters crossed the border into the Mexican territory of Coahuila y Tejas, where they were initially welcomed as a stabilizing force that would help to repel raids from the powerful Comanche (Nʉmʉnʉʉ) nation. But the Mexican government soon grew frustrated with the American settlers, who disregarded the ban on slavery and showed no intention of assimilating into Mexican society.

The war begins

In 1836, American and Mexican residents who wanted to introduce enslaved laborers to the area to farm cotton took advantage of the Mexican government’s tenuous hold on the country’s periphery by declaring Texas an independent republic. The Texians triumphed, despite their storied defeat at The Alamo, a Spanish mission (San Antonio de Valero) that had been converted into a fortress. But the Mexican government did not accept the treaty granting Texas independence since it had been signed under duress. For nearly ten years, the Mexican government considered Texas a rebel territory, while the United States recognized it as a sovereign nation.

In fact, Texians wanted to join the United States and applied for annexation shortly after the rebellion. But the U.S. Congress, unwilling to upset the delicate balance between states that permitted slavery (“slave states”) and states that did not (“free states”), declined to consider the matter. All of that changed when James K. Polk was elected president in 1844. Polk was a Democrat, closely tied to Andrew Jackson, and he favored territorial expansion. Consequently, the United States annexed Texas in 1845 (leading Mexico to sever diplomatic relations), and Polk negotiated with Britain for a portion of the Oregon Territory in 1846.

Polk also sent an envoy to Mexico to offer to purchase California, then coveted for its Pacific ports and fertile farmland, but the Mexican government refused. Finally, in April 1846, Polk sent U.S. soldiers under the command of General Zachary Taylor to disputed territory south of the Nueces River, hoping to provoke conflict.

The progress of the war

Polk’s gamble paid off; after a U.S. patrol marched into the disputed territory, a Mexican cavalry unit attacked, killing 11 American soldiers. When news reached Washington, D.C. two weeks later, Polk went to Congress to ask for a declaration of war, claiming that Mexico had shed “American blood on the American soil.” Many U.S. lawmakers, especially those of the opposition Whig party, were suspicious of Polk’s claims—Abraham Lincoln, then a young Congressman, would later ask the president for evidence of the exact “spot” where the hostilities had begun—but conscious that fighting was already underway, the Whigs ultimately voted to support the war.

General Taylor commanded just one of many American military forces in what would become a two-year-long, multi-front war. In northern Mexico, Taylor fought inland to Monterrey and secured the region for the United States in the Battle of Buena Vista.

Farther north (see map below), the U.S. army captured Santa Fe, in what is now New Mexico, without firing a shot (although Mexican and Indigenous Puebloan residents later rebelled against U.S. occupation in the Taos Revolt). Naval campaigns targeted the west coast of Mexico from Mazatlán to Yerba Buena (present-day San Francisco), and wrested control of the ports and pueblos of California along with several ground units.

The most devastating campaign, however, was in southeastern Mexico (see inset in map above). In 1847, U.S. General Winfield Scott conveyed a force of more than 13,000 men by sea to Veracruz. He deliberately followed the same path of conquest to Mexico City that Hernán Cortés had taken more than 300 years earlier to the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan (which became Mexico City). In September 1847, the U.S. army invaded the nation’s capital, Mexico City. Despite months of guerrilla warfare, Mexicans could not expel the occupying army.

In February 1848, the two nations negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo to end the war. The treaty’s terms gave the United States most of what is now the southwestern United States, including the modern-day states of Texas, California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and portions of Colorado and Wyoming, in exchange for $15 million and the forgiveness of Mexican debts to American citizens. Mexicans who chose to remain in the territory would receive American citizenship.

“A wicked war”

“I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico.”—Ulysses S. Grant, 1879

Ulysses S. Grant, who would go on to command the victorious forces in the Civil War nearly twenty years later, not to mention serve as president of the United States, was a 24-year-old lieutenant during the Mexican-American War. Grant believed that in the Mexican-American War, a stronger nation had unjustly made war on a weaker one. [3] Indeed, the United States government had expected a quick win against an inferior opponent, and the extent of Mexican resistance came as a surprise. Racial and religious prejudice influenced American attitudes toward Mexicans. Officers wrote about the depredations committed by volunteers, who frequently stole from and sometimes killed Mexican civilians.

Most American soldiers and volunteers were Protestants, rife with anti-Catholic prejudice, and they disdained Mexican religiosity as superstition and ignorance. In some cases, American soldiers deliberately defiled churches or religious objects. Their behavior so disgusted German and Irish Catholic volunteers that several hundred switched sides and fought for the Mexicans as the St. Patrick’s Battalion, or San Patricios.

New technologies of communication and representation brought news of the war home to civilians faster and more vividly than ever before. The first photographs of war anywhere in the world emerged from this conflict: a series of 50 daguerreotypes, now housed at the Amon Carter Museum, which were created in 1847 by an unknown photographer in Saltillo, Mexico. Daguerreotypists followed the U.S. troops, taking portraits of officers, landmarks, and grave sites as souvenirs. [4] The Mexican-American War was also the first war in which U.S. journalists accompanied the army as foreign correspondents, and the updates they sent home to newspapers by telegraph generated great interest and patriotism among the public.

But the war and its expansionist aims did not enjoy universal support in the United States. Just three months into the conflict anti-slavery politicians introduced a bill into Congress, the Wilmot Proviso, that would outlaw slavery in any territory that might be gained from Mexico.

In addition, the first anti-war movement in the United States arose in response to the conflict; many northeastern intellectuals protested what they saw as an unprincipled land-grab aimed at increasing the power of slaveholders. Henry David Thoreau, a leading Transcendentalist writer, was jailed for refusing to pay taxes to support the war. His essay on the duty of citizens to refuse to cooperate with immoral government actions, “Civil Disobedience,” inspired the nonviolent resistance tactics of later civil rights leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Consequences of the Mexican-American War

The war’s human cost is difficult to quantify. Historians estimate that 25,000 Mexican soldiers died, as well as 15,000 American soldiers. The vast majority of American men died from disease, not battlefield injuries, as the volunteer soldiers failed to implement necessary measures for sanitation. As many had feared, the addition of land suitable for cotton farming meant the extension of slavery, along with the human misery of the enslaved men and women who cleared and farmed the land. White settlers who moved to the west did not respect the rights of the Indigenous people or Mexican-Americans (those who had received U.S. citizenship at the war’s end) living there, often forcibly removing them from their land.

The political and social consequences of the war are easier to see. For Mexico, the defeat demonstrated the weakness of the country. Debates over the proper role of the army and the Catholic Church in politics led to the Reform War, and later the installation of a French emperor in Mexico. For the United States, the acquisition of western lands proved both a blessing and a curse. Their rich resources, including the gold discovered in California just weeks before the end of the war, contributed to growing American economic power. But the addition of new territory upset the fragile balance of power that had kept free and slave states bound together in an uneasy union. In 1861, the tensions over the expansion of slavery into the west led to the U.S. Civil War.

Footnotes:

[1] War dead as a percentage of total U.S. population. .057% of the U.S. population died as a result of the Mexican-American War.

[2] See the Historical Marker Database for estimates.

[3] For Grant’s quote concerning the “wicked war,” see John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant (New York: American News, 1879), pp. 447–48.

[4] James Oles, Art and Architecture in Mexico (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), p. 155.

See also:

View the text of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo at the Library of Congress

See more Mexican-American War daguerreotypes from Google Arts & Culture 

Political cartoons and prints relating to the Mexican-American War at the Library of Congress 

Samuel Chamberlain’s Mexican-American War watercolors at the San Jacinto Museum 

Source: Dr. Kimberly Kutz Elliott, “The Mexican-American War,” in Smarthistory, December 16, 2020, accessed July 10, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/the-mexican-american-war-19th-century-american-art-in-context/.

LITERATURE

Codex Canadensis

Codex Canadensis, c. 1700, ink on paper, 33.7 x 21.6 cm (Gilcrease Museum)  URL: https://youtu.be/nglTrDWbySI

Additional resources

This work at the Gilcrease Museum

Mató Nájin/Standing Bear (Minneconjou Lakota/Teton Sioux), Battle of Little Bighorn, c. 1920, pencil, ink, and watercolor on muslin, 91.4 × 268 cm, made in Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, United States (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)   URL:  https://youtu.be/wJa8BXX-29c

Source:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Standing Bear (Mató Nájin), Battle of Little Bighorn,” in Smarthistory, March 8, 2021, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/mato-najin-standing-bear-battle-little-bighorn/.

Studying art during a pandemic

As many of us find ourselves working and studying from home while social distancing during the world-wide spread of COVID-19, let us think about the impact other pandemics and epidemics have had on world populations and their arts. Visual records open a window into such events, as we see in depictions of leprosy in European medieval illuminated manuscripts or in pictographic accounts of smallpox epidemics that spread across the Great Plains of North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[1] Northern plains groups experienced 36 epidemics between 1714 and 1919, which were documented in chronological order in winter counts.[2] A winter count depicted the most important events that occurred in any given year. Community elders would meet each year to discuss what had occurred since winter started (denoted by the first snowfall), and would select the most important event to name the year, after which a symbol (or pictograph) would be created and added to a hide painting.

One example is the 1837–38 smallpox epidemic which was catastrophic for the Mandan Nation.[3] According to historian Clay Jenkinson “In two waves of smallpox on the Upper Missouri, separated by 56 years, the Mandan had been reduced from a proud nation of more than 15,000 individuals to a pathetic remnant of 145.”[4]  With so much loss we must consider the dramatic impact such events had on the transmission of Indigenous knowledge, but also celebrate these communities’ perseverance, and ability to adapt. Today the population of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) have again risen to around 15,000 citizens who live on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota.[5]

Understanding this history of pandemic and loss provides us with a lens through which to see artworks from the upper Missouri River region. The scarcity of existing objects, and as a result, limited visual references create significant challenges in making specific attributions and comparisons from this region and period of time.

Still, some of the defining features of northern plains groups (at the time of contact) formed as a response to disease and the resulting loss of life. One scholar notes that “The social fluidity whereby tribes or divisions of tribes split apart and regrouped may have developed as a means of coping with catastrophic population loss.”[6] Epidemics affected all aspects of life for plains groups. For example, warriors could not train and military technology could not be developed if the group was sick and dying.[7]

Museum collections and the paintings of Catlin and Bodmer

We see evidence of the enormous population loss in men’s shirts from this time period. In this context, men’s shirts refer to a shirt worn by a warrior into battle or during festivals (so not daily use), and which are decorated with hair fringes (human and horse), ermine tails, quillwork, and beadwork. While we may know they were made by artists from this region, assigning an attribution to a particular community is difficult for several reasons. Few pre-1850 arts by Indigenous artists from any region exist in U.S. museums, although some can be found in international museums (including in the Paul Kane collection in the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg and the collections of Prince Maximiliam of Wied in museums located in Berne, Berlin, and Stuttgart). Some collections exist from Lewis and Clark’s expedition from 1804–1806, but William Clark’s personal collection, once housed in his home in St. Louis until his death in 1838, went missing around this time and its whereabouts remains unknown to this day.[8] The total number of works of American Indian arts from the Plains before 1850 remains quite small.

When you narrow down these early nineteenth-century arts to shirts, and those exclusively from the upper Missouri River region, there are few examples with which to compare, and even fewer with documentation. Of the 40 shirts in the collection of the Denver Art Museum from the Plains and Plateau regions, only two date to around 1830 or before. One is attributed to an Assiniboine artist and the other is dated to 1800–1820, and is the focus of this discussion.

With limited examples, great losses in the continuity of Indigenous knowledge, and works that predate photography by decades, the main way to identify these shirts is through the written reports of fur traders and explorers, as well as the paintings of George Catlin and Karl Bodmer who traveled in the region in the 1830s.

Interpreting what the shirt says about the man who wore it

In December of 2019 the Denver Art Museum received two shirts from the Upper Missouri region of the Plains as gifts from a private collector: one dating to around 1800–1820 and the other to around 1855. The earlier of these two shirts is without question the single most significant work to come into DAM’s Native arts collection in decades.

It is exceedingly rare and among the earliest shirts from the Upper Missouri River region in existence. The shirt’s lack of beadwork, minimal use of Bayetta trade wool, and quilled design elements point to its early creation date and connection to this region.

This fringed “poncho” style shirt with red trade wool rectangular “bibs” was made using Native tanned mountain sheep hides and sewn using sinew (animal tendons or ligaments used as thread). On both the front and back of the shirt are saw-tooth edged medallions (rosettes) and over each shoulder and along each sleeve are three quilled lanes with geometric patterning.

While little was recorded about the meanings of such elements, the medallions are commonly considered representations of forces of nature, such as the sun or powerful winds. It has also been suggested that the designs on medallions, such as those seen on this shirt and many others from this region, may represent the wings of a Thunderbird, a sacred being for many Plains tribes.

The central medallions are made from porcupine quills, likely plant material, and possibly also bird quills. Porcupine quillwork is a technique Indigenous to North America and was prevalent prior to the trade of European manufactured glass trade beads. Today this technique is experiencing a resurgence among many Native artists. The materials used on this shirt (as well as materials not used, such as glass beads) suggest it was made just as trade between fur trappers and Native people began in the central part of North America.

What is among the most exciting elements of this shirt are a series of pictographic and geometric drawings found on either side. If you look closely you will see faint indigo drawings of six heads, above which are floating lines. Below the heads is a row of four bear paws, and to the right are three pipes. The exact meaning of these elements was not recorded; however, based on Indigenous knowledge and with the help of Dr. Timothy McCleary, a colleague from Little Bighorn Tribal College at Crow Agency in Montana, we believe we know what they mean.

The heads with floating lines likely refer to counting coup, or striking an enemy with a stick. When a warrior touched his enemy with his coup stick, it was regarded as an act of extreme bravery because he had to get close to his opponent. The pipes may suggest how many times the shirt’s owner led successful war parties. The bear paws show how many Plains grizzlies the owner of the shirt had killed. Drawings and explanations in American ethnologist Garrick Mallery’s 1889 publication Picture Writing of the American Indians demonstrates how widespread such imagery was among Plains artists in the late nineteenth century. Mallery’s text reproduces a drawing and accompanying explanation by an Oglala Lakota man that explains the meaning of pipes depicted similarly to what we see in the shirt, as well as other design elements recorded on it.

The designs on the front of the shirt tell even more specific stories about the owner. Here, we find drawings of five X-like forms arranged below the medallion. These are war honor marks. From left to right, we can read these to recount the original owner’s achievements in war. The first shows that the warrior was the third person to touch a live enemy in battle (counting coup). The next shows that after he had dismounted an enemy, the owner of the shirt captured the enemy’s horse. The next two Xs show he was the fourth person to count coup on an enemy during battle. Then the last shows that he was again the third to count coup on an enemy. Mallery recorded variations of these designs and meanings as told to him by Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara consultants.

These marks were common ways to record war deeds among the Native people of the Upper Missouri River region and are found on clothing, tipis, and in rock art. The Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Crow people are well known for their use of this X to represent an enemy. While a few other tribes also used this imagery, this form with the associated hash marks (denoting the number of coups) and horse hoof prints are all from one of the Upper Missouri River tribes.

Ongoing challenges

Indigenous people have faced countless challenges to their ways of life since the arrival of settler-colonial people. Sickness and disease took its toll, but so did forced relocation, land allotment that broke up clan and society structures, prohibitions against ceremonies and religions, traumatic boarding school experiences, broken treaties, and institutional and structural racism, to name a few. Each of these created seemingly insurmountable hurdles for Indigenous people to overcome.

Many of these challenges still exist. The Navajo Nation has been hit hard by COVID-19. Two Lakota reservations are under attack from the governor of South Dakota for the medical checkpoints they put up on their own roads to protect their citizens from the spread of this disease. Generational trauma from past experiences warns them to protect themselves. Elders are the keepers of knowledge and they are most at risk. The transmission of intergenerational knowledge of all forms, visual arts included, is difficult during such times. But this knowledge still exists in communities. These art forms are still being created by brilliant and innovative Indigenous youth. And this should give us hope for the future.

Animal hide painting

Painting on animal hides is a longstanding tradition of the Great Basin and Great Plains people of the United States, including the Kiowa, Lakota, Shoshone, Blackfeet, Crow, Dakota, and Osage. While the earliest surviving hide paintings date to around 1800, this tradition was undoubtedly practiced much earlier along with other forms of painting like petroglyphs (rock engravings).

Painting, in tandem with oral traditions, functioned to record history. Often artists like Cotsiogo (Eastern Shoshone; pronounced “co SEE ko”), who is also known by his Euro-American name, Cadzi Cody, painted on elk, deer, or buffalo hides using natural pigments like red ochre and chalk, and eventually paints and dyes obtained through trade. Usually, artists decorated the hides with geometric or figural motifs. By the later 19th century certain hide artists like Cotsiogo began depicting subject matter that “affirmed Native identity” and appealed to tourists. The imagery placed on the hide was likely done with a combination of free-hand painting and stenciling.

Men and women both painted on hides, but men usually produced the scenes on tipis (tepees), clothing, and shields. Many of these scenes celebrated battles and other biographical details. The Brooklyn Museum’s hide painting by Cotsiogo may have functioned as a wall hanging and has also been classified as a robe.

The artist

Cotsiogo (also Codsiogo, Katsikodi, or Cadzi Cody), a member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe, painted many hides in addition to the two shown above. They represent his experiences during a period of immense change for the Shoshone people. During his lifetime, Cotsiogo was placed on the Wind River Reservation in central western Wyoming.

The Wind River Reservation is the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined and had  been established by the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868. Prior to their placement on the Wind River Reservation, the Shoshone moved with the seasons and the availability of natural resources. Many Shoshone traversed the geographic regions we now call the Great Plains and Plateau regions.

Cotsiogo likely created the Brooklyn Museum hide painting for Euro-American tourists who visited the reservation. It might explain why there is a scene of buffalo hunting, a scene which was thought to be desirable to tourists. Its production helped to support him after the Shoshone were moved to the reservation. With newly established trade markets and the influx of new materials, artists like Cotsiogo sometimes produced work that helped support themselves and their families.

Subject matter

Cotsiogo’s Brooklyn Museum hide painting combines history with the contemporary moment. It displays elements of several different dances, including the important and sacred Sun Dance and non-religious Wolf Dance (tdsayuge or tásayùge). The Sun Dance surrounds a not-yet-raised buffalo head between two poles (or a split tree), with an eagle above it. Men dressed in feather bustles and headdresses—not to be confused with feathered war bonnets—dance around the poles, which represents the Grass Dance. With their arms akimbo and their bodies bent, Cotsiogo shows these men in motion. Men participating in this sacred, social ceremony refrained from eating or drinking.

The Sun Dance was intended to honor the Creator Deity for the earth’s bounty and to ensure this bounty continued. It was a sacred ceremony that tourists and anthropologists often witnessed. However, the United States government deemed it unacceptable and forbid it. The U.S. government outlawed the Sun Dance until 1935, in an effort to compel Native Americans to abandon their traditional ways. Cotsiogo likely included references to the Sun Dance because he knew tourist consumers would find the scene attractive, but he modified the scene combining it with the acceptable Wolf Dance, perhaps to avoid potential ramifications. The Wolf Dance eventually transformed into the Grass Dance which is performed today during powwows.

The hide painting also shows activities of daily life. Surrounding the Sun Dance, women rest near a fire and more men on horses hunt buffaloes. Warriors on horses are also shown returning to camp, which was celebrated with the Wolf Dance. Two tipis represent the camp, with the warriors appearing between them. Some of the warriors wear feathered war bonnets made of eagle feathers. These headdresses communicated a warrior acted bravely in battle, and so they functioned as symbols of honor and power. Not just anyone could wear a feathered war bonnet!

Cotsiogo shows the warriors hunting with bows and arrows while riding, but in reality Shoshone men had used rifles for some time. Horses were introduced to the Southwest by Spaniards. Horses made their way to some Plains nations through trade with others like the Ute, Navajo, and Apache. By the mid-18th century, horses had become an important part of Plains culture.

Buffaloes were sacred to the Plains people because the animals were essential to their livelihood. Some scenes display individuals skinning buffaloes and separating the animals’ body parts into piles. All parts of the buffalo were used, as it was considered a way of honoring this sacred animal. At the time Cotsiogo painted this hide, most buffalo had either been killed or displaced. Buffaloes had largely disappeared from this area by the 1880s. Cotsiogo’s hide thus marks past events and deeds rather than events occurring at the time it was created.

Editor’s note on the contemporary situation on the Wind River Reservation:

According to The New York Times, the 14,000 current residents of the Wind River Reservation suffer a crime rate more than five times the national average, a life expectancy of only 49 years, and an unemployment rate that may be above 80 percent.

Additional resources

Information on Cotsiogo, University of Wyoming

Hide with history of Eastern Shoshone Chief Washakie’s combats

A Song of the Horse Nation: Horses in Native American Cultures, an exhibit at the NMAI

Source:  Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, “Eastern Shoshone: Hide Painting of the Sun Dance, attributed to Cotsiogo (Cadzi Cody),” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/eastern-shoshone-hide-painting-of-the-sun-dance-attributed-to-cotsiogo-cadzi-cody/.

Henry Oscar One Bull/Tȟatȟáŋka Waŋžíla (Hunkpapa Lakota), Custer’s War, c. 1900, 39 x 69 inches (irregular), pigments, ink on muslin (Minneapolis Institute of Art)   URL: https://youtu.be/OtDT_WcIEgo

See also:

This painting at Mia

Statements by Henry Oscar One Bull, University of Oklahoma Library

Source:  Dr. Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Minneapolis Institute of Art and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Henry Oscar One Bull, Custer’s War,” in Smarthistory, December 16, 2018, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/one-bull-custers-war/.

 

Myths of the Cherokee

Cherokee (Native America)

Compiled by James Mooney (1861-1921 C.E.)

Published in 1900 C.E.

The Cherokee are a group of North American Indians of Iroquoian lineage and were one of the largest tribes when Europeans colonized the Americas. It is estimated that in 1650 about 22,500 Cherokee Indians controlled approximately 40,000 square miles of the Appalachian Mountains, the areas that are now northern Georgia, east- ern Tennessee, and the western Carolinas. A typical Cherokee town had between 30 and 60 log-cabin houses and a council house; they used deer, bear, and elk for meat and clothing, made baskets and pottery, and grew corn, beans, and squash. The Spanish, French, and English all attempted to colonize parts of the Southeast of North America, including Cherokee territory. After 1800, the Cherokee quickly assimilated aspects of American settler culture in such areas as farming, weaving, and home building; they also developed their own government, modeling it after the United States, and invented a writing system for the Cherokee language. Despite their adaptive efforts, however, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 under President Andrew Jackson forcibly moved Cherokee Indians to Oklahoma; about 4,000 Cherokee died on the Tail of Tears, during the fall and winter of 1838–39. As of the twenty-first century, there are more than 730,000 individuals of Cherokee descent living in the United States. Myths of the Cherokee was compiled by James Moony, an early twentieth-century ethnographer who lived with the Cherokee for several years, but these stories can be traced back to the time of or even before the arrival of the Europeans.

Written by Kyounghye Kwon

Selections from Myths of the Cherokee

Compiled by James Mooney

License: Public Domain

Cherokee Cosmogonic Myths

1. How the World Was Made

The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hang- ing down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again. The Indians are afraid of this.

When all was water, the animals were above in Gälûñ’lätï, beyond the arch; but it was very much crowded, and they were wanting more room. They wondered what was below the water, and at last Dâyuni’sï, “Beaver’s Grandchild,” the little Water-beetle, offered to go and see if it could learn. It darted in every direction over the surface of the water, but could find no firm place to rest. Then it dived to the bottom and came up with some soft mud, which began to grow and spread on every side until it became the island which we call the earth. It was afterward fastened to the sky with four cords, but no one remembers who did this.

At first the earth was flat and very soft and wet. The an- imals were anxious to get down, and sent out different birds to see if it was yet dry, but they found no place to alight and came back again to Gälûñ’lätï. At last it seemed to be time, and they sent out the Buzzard and told him to go and make ready for them. This was the Great Buzzard, the father of all the buzzards we see now. He flew all over the earth, low down near the ground, and it was still soft. When he reached the Cherokee country, he was very tired, and his wings began to flap and strike the ground, and wherever they struck the earth there was a valley, and where they turned up again there was a mountain. When the animals above saw this, they were afraid that the whole world would be mountains, so they called him back, but the Cherokee country remains full of mountains to this day.

When the earth was dry and the animals came down, it was still dark, so they got the sun and set it in a track to go every day across the island from east to west, just overhead. It was too hot this way, and Tsiska’gïlï’, the Red Crawfish, had his shell scorched a bright red, so that his meat was spoiled; and the Cherokee do not eat it. The conjurers put the sun another hand-breadth higher in the air, but it was still too hot. They raised it another time, and another, until it was seven handbreadths high and just under the sky arch. Then it was right, and they left it so. This is why the conjurers call the highest place Gûlkwâ’gine Di’gälûñ’lätiyûñ’, “the seventh height,” because it is seven hand-breadths above the earth. Every day the sun goes along under this arch, and returns at night on the upper side to the starting place.

There is another world under this, and it is like ours in everything—animals, plants, and people—save that the seasons are different. The streams that come down from the mountains are the trails by which we reach this under- world, and the springs at their heads are the doorways by which we enter it, but to do this, one must fast and go to water and have one of the underground people for a guide. We know that the seasons in the underworld are differ- ent from ours, because the water in the springs is always warmer in winter and cooler in summer than the outer air.

When the animals and plants were first made—we do not know by whom—they were told to watch and keep awake for seven nights, just as young men now fast and keep awake when they pray to their medicine. They tried to do this, and nearly all were awake through the first night, but the next night several dropped off to sleep, and the third night others were asleep, and then others, until, on the seventh night, of all the animals only the owl, the panther, and one or two more were still awake. To these were given the power to see and to go about in the dark, and to make prey of the birds and animals which must sleep at night. Of the trees only the cedar, the pine, the spruce, the holly, and the laurel were awake to the end, and to them it was given to be always green and to be greatest for medi- cine, but to the others it was said: “Because you have not endured to the end you shall lose your, hair every winter.”

Men came after the animals and plants. At first there were only a brother and sister until he struck her with a fish and told her to multiply, and so it was. In seven days a child was born to her, and thereafter every seven days another, and they increased very fast until there was danger that the world could not keep them. Then it was made that a woman should have only one child in a year, and it has been so ever since.

2. The First Fire

In the beginning there was no fire, and the world was cold, until the Thunders (Ani’-Hyûñ’tïkwälâ’skï), who lived up in Gälûñ’lätï, sent their lightning and put fire into the bottom of a hollow sycamore tree which grew on an island. The animals knew it was there, because they could see the smoke coming out at the top, but they could not get to it on account of the water, so they held a council to decide what to do. This was a long time ago.

Every animal that could fly or swim was anxious to go after the fire. The Raven offered, and because he was so large and strong they thought he could surely do the work, so he was sent first. He flew high and far across the water and alighted on the sycamore tree, but while he was wondering what to do next, the heat had scorched all his feathers black, and he was frightened and came back without the fire. The little Screech-owl (Wa’huhu’) volunteered to go, and reached the place safely, but while he was looking down into the hollow tree a blast of hot air came up and nearly burned out his eves. He managed to fly home as best he could, but it was a long time before he could see well, and his eyes are red to this day. Then the Hooting Owl (U’guku’) and the Horned Owl (Tskïlï’) went, but by the time they got to the hollow tree the fire was burning so fiercely that the smoke nearly blinded them, and the ashes carried up by the wind made white rings about their eyes. They had to come home again without the fire, but with all their rubbing they were never able to get rid of the white rings.

Now no more of the birds would venture, and so the little Uksu’hï snake, the black racer, said he would go through the water and bring back some fire. He swam across to the island and crawled through the grass to the tree, and went in by a small hole at the bottom. The heat and smoke were too much for him, too, and after dodging about blindly over the hot ashes until he was almost on fire himself he managed by good luck to get out again at the same hole, but his body had been scorched black, and he has ever since had the habit of darting and doubling on his track as if trying to escape from close quarters. He came back, and the great blacksnake, Gûle’gï, “The Climber,” offered to go for fire. He swam over to the island and climbed up the tree on the outside, as the blacksnake always does, but when he put his head down into the hole the smoke choked him so that he fell into the burning stump, and before he could climb out again he was as black as the Uksu’hï.

Now they held another council, for still there was no fire, and the world was cold, but birds, snakes, and four-footed animals, all had some excuse for not going, because they were all afraid to venture near the burning sycamore, until at last Känäne’skï Amai’yëhï (the Water Spider) said she would go. This is not the water spider that looks like a mosquito, but the other one, with black downy hair and red stripes on her body. She can run on top of the water or dive to the bottom, so there would be no trouble to get over to the island, but the question was, ‘How could she bring back the fire?’ “I’ll manage that,” said the Water Spider; so she spun a thread from her body and wove it into a tusti bowl, which she fastened on her back. Then she crossed over to the island and through the grass to where the fire was still burning. She put one little coal of fire into her bowl, and came back with it, and ever since we have had fire, and the Water Spider still keeps her tusti bowl.

3. Kana’tï and Selu: The Origin of Game and Corn

When I was a boy this is what the old men told me they had heard when they were boys.

Long years ago, soon after the world was made, a hunter and his wife lived at Pilot Knob with their only child, a little boy. The father’s name was Kana’tï (The Lucky Hunter), and his wife was called Selu (Corn). No matter when Kana’tï went into the wood, he never failed to bring back a load of game, which his wife would cut up and prepare, washing off the blood from the meat in the river near the house. The little boy used to play down by the river every day, and one morning the old people thought they heard laughing and talking in the bushes as though there were two children there. When the boy came home at night his parents asked him who had been playing with him all day. “He comes out of the water,” said the boy, “and he calls himself my elder brother. He says his mother was cruel to him and threw him into the river.” Then they knew that the strange boy had sprung from the blood of the game which Selu had washed off at the river’s edge.

Every day when the little boy went out to play the other would join him, but as he always went back again into the water the old people never had a chance to see him. At last one evening Kana’tï said to his son, “Tomorrow, when the other boy comes to play, get him to wrestle with you, and when you have your arms around him hold on to him and call for us.” The boy promised to do as he was told, so the next day as soon as his playmate appeared he challenged him to a wrestling match. The other agreed at once, but as soon as they had their arms around each oth- er, Kana’tï’s boy began to scream for his father. The old folks at once came running down, and as soon as the Wild Boy saw them he struggled to free himself and cried out, “Let me go; you threw me away!” but his brother held on until the parents reached the spot, when they seized the Wild Boy and took him home with them. They kept him in the house until they had tamed him, but he was always wild and artful in his disposition, and was the leader of his brother in every mischief. It was not long until the old people discovered that he had magic powers, and they called him I’näge-utäsûñ’hï (He-who-grew-up-wild).

Whenever Kana’tï went into the mountains he always brought back a fat buck or doe, or maybe a couple of tur- keys. One day the Wild Boy said to his brother, “I wonder where our father gets all that game; let’s follow him next time and find out.” A few days afterward Kana’tï took a bow and some feathers in his hand and started off toward the west. The boys waited a little while and then went after him, keeping out of sight until they saw him go into a swamp where there were a great many of the small reeds that hunters use to make arrow shafts. Then the Wild Boy changed himself into a puff of birds down, which the wind took up and carried until it alighted upon Kana’tï’s shoulder just as he entered the swamp, but Kana’tï’ knew nothing about it. The old man cut reeds, fitted the feath- ers to them and made some arrows, and the Wild Boy—in his other shape—thought, “I wonder what those things are for?” When Kana’tï had his arrows finished he came out of the swamp and went on again. The wind blew the down from his shoulder, and it fell in the woods, when the Wild Boy took his right shape again and went back and told his brother what he had seen. Keeping out of sight of their father, they followed him up the mountain until he stopped at a certain place and lifted a large rock. At once there ran out a buck, which Kana’tï shot, and then lifting it upon his back he started for home again. “Oho!” exclaimed the boys, “he keeps all the deer shut up in that hole, and whenever he wants meat he just lets one out and kills it with those things he made in the swamp.” They hurried and reached home before their father, who had the heavy deer to carry, and he never knew that they had followed.

A few days later the boys went back to the swamp, cut some reeds, and made seven arrows and then started up the mountain to where their father kept the game. When they got to the place, they raised the rock and a deer came running out. Just as they drew back to shoot it, another came out, and then another and another, until the boys got confused and forgot what they were about. In those days all the deer had their tails hanging down like other ani- mals, but as a buck was running past the Wild Boy struck its tail with his arrow so that it pointed upward. The boys thought this good sport, and when the next one ran past the Wild Boy struck its tail so that it stood straight up, and his brother struck the next one so hard with his arrow that the deer’s tail was almost curled over his back. The deer carries his tail this way ever since. The deer came running past until the last one had come out of the hole and es- caped into the forest. Then came droves of raccoons, rabbits, and all the other four-footed animals-all but the bear, because there was no bear then. Last came great flocks of turkeys, pigeons, and partridges that darkened the air like a cloud and made such a noise with their wings that Kana’tï, sitting at home, heard the sound like distant thunder on the mountains and said to himself, “My bad boys have got into trouble; I must go and see what they are doing.”

So he went up the mountain, and when he came to the place where he kept the game he found the two boys standing by the rock, and all the birds and animals were gone. Kana’tï was furious, but without saying a word he went down into the cave and kicked the covers off four jars in one corner, when out swarmed bedbugs, fleas, lice, and gnats, and got all over the boys. They screamed with pain and fright and tried to beat off the insects, but the thousands of vermin crawled over them and bit and stung them until both dropped down nearly dead. Kana’tï stood looking on until he thought they had been punished enough, when he knocked off the vermin and made the boys a talk. “Now, you rascals,” said he, “you have always had plenty to eat and never had to work for it. Whenever you were hungry all I had to do was to come up here and get a deer or a turkey and bring it home for your mother to cook; but now you have let out all the animals, and after this when you want a deer to eat you will have to hunt all over the woods for it, and then maybe not find one. Go home now to your mother, while I see if I can find some- thing to eat for supper.”

When the boys got home again they were very tired and hungry and asked their mother for something to eat. “There is no meat,” said Selu, “but wait a little while and I’ll get you something.” So she took a basket and started out to the storehouse. This storehouse was built upon poles high up from the ground, to keep it out of the reach of ani- mals, and there was a ladder to climb up by, and one door, but no other opening. Every day when Selu got ready to cook the dinner she would go out to the storehouse with a basket and bring it back full of corn and beans. The boys had never been inside the storehouse, so wondered where all the corn and beans could come from, as the house was not a very large one; so as soon as Selu went out of the door the Wild Boy said to his brother, “Let’s go and see what she does.” They ran around and climbed up at the back of the storehouse and pulled out a piece of clay from between the logs, so that they could look in. There they saw Selu standing in the middle of the room with the basket in front of her on the floor. Leaning over the basket, she rubbed her stomach—so—and the basket was half full of corn. Then she rubbed under her armpits—so—and the basket was full to the top with beans. The boys looked at each other and said, “This will never do; our mother is a witch. If we eat any of that it will poison us. We must kill her.”

When the boys came back into the house, she knew their thoughts before they spoke. “So you are going to kill me?” said Selu. “Yes,” said the boys, “you are a witch.” “Well,” said their mother, “when you have killed me, clear a large piece of ground in front of the house and drag my body seven times around the circle. Then drag me seven times over the ground inside the circle, and stay up all night and watch, and in the morning you will have plenty of corn.” The boys killed her with their clubs, and cut off her head and put it up on the roof of the house with her face turned to the west, and told her to look for her husband. Then they set to work to clear the ground in front of the house, but instead of clearing the whole piece they cleared only seven little spots. This is why corn now grows only in a few places instead of over the whole world. They dragged the body of Selu around the circle, and wherever her blood fell on the ground the corn sprang up. But instead of dragging her body seven times across the ground they dragged it over only twice, which is the reason the Indians still work their crop but twice. The two brothers sat up and watched their corn all night, and in the morning it was full grown and ripe.

When Kana’tï came home at last, he looked around, but could not see Selu anywhere, and asked the boys where was their mother. “She was a witch, and we killed her,” said the boys; “there is her head up there on top of the house.” When he saw his wife’s head on the roof, he was very angry, and said, “I won’t stay with you any longer; I am going to the Wolf people.” So he started off, but before he had gone far the Wild Boy changed himself again to a tuft of down, which fell on Kana’tï’s shoulder. When Kana’tï reached the settlement of the Wolf people, they were holding a council in the townhouse. He went in and sat down with the tuft of bird’s down on his shoulder, but he never noticed it. When the Wolf chief asked him his business, he said: “I have two bad boys at home, and I want you to go in seven days from now and play ball against them.” Although Kana’tï spoke as though he wanted them to play a game of ball, the Wolves knew that he meant for them to go and kill the two boys. They promised to go. Then the bird’s down blew off from Kana’tï’s shoulder, and the smoke carried it up through the hole in the roof of the town- house. When it came down on the ground outside, the Wild Boy took his right shape again and went home and told his brother all that he had heard in the townhouse. But when Kana’tï left the Wolf people, he did not return home, but went on farther.

The boys then began to get ready for the Wolves, and the Wild Boy—the magician—told his brother what to do. They ran around the house in a wide circle until they had made a trail all around it excepting on the side from which the Wolves would come, where they left a small open space. Then they made four large bundles of arrows and placed them at four different points on the outside of the circle, after which they hid themselves in the woods and waited for the Wolves. In a day or two a whole party of Wolves came and surrounded the house to kill the boys. The Wolves did not notice the trail around the house, because they came in where the boys had left the opening, but the moment they went inside the circle the trail changed to a high brush fence and shut them in. Then the boys on the outside took their arrows and began shooting them down, and as the Wolves could not jump over the fence they were all killed, excepting a few that escaped through the opening into a great swamp close by. The boys ran around the swamp, and a circle of fire sprang up in their tracks and set fire to the grass and bushes and burned up nearly all the other wolves. Only two or three got away, and from these have come all the wolves that are now in the world.

Soon afterward some strangers from a distance, who had heard that the brothers had a wonderful grain from which they made bread, came to ask for some, for none but Selu and her family had ever known corn before. The boys gave them seven grains of corn, which they told them to plant the next night on their way home, sitting up all night to watch the corn, which would have seven ripe ears in the morning. These they were to plant the next night and watch in the same way, and so on every night until they reached home, when they would have corn enough to supply the whole people. The strangers lived seven days’ journey away. They took the seven grains and watched all through the darkness until morning, when they saw seven tall stalks, each stalk bearing a ripened ear. They gathered the ears and went on their way. The next night they planted all their corn, and guarded it as before until daybreak, when they found an abundant increase. But the way was long and the sun was hot, and the people grew tired. On the last night before reaching home they fell asleep, and in the morning the corn they had planted had not even sprouted. They brought with them to their settlement what corn they had left and planted it, and with care and attention were able to raise a crop. But ever since the corn must be watched and tended through half the year, which before would grow and ripen in a night. As Kana’tï did not return, the boys at last concluded to go and find him. The Wild Boy took a gaming wheel and rolled it toward the Darkening land. In a little while the wheel came rolling back, and the boys knew their father was not there. He rolled it to the south and, to the north, and each time the wheel came back to him, and they knew their father was not there. Then he rolled it toward the Sunland, and it did not return. “Our father is there,” said the Wild Boy, “let us go and find him.” So the two brothers set off toward the east, and after traveling a long time they came upon Kana’tï walking along with a little dog by his side. “You bad boys,” said their father, “have you come here?” “Yes,” they answered, “We always accomplish what we start out to do—we are men.” “This dog overtook me four days ago,” then said Kana’tï, but the boys knew that the dog was the wheel which they had sent after him to find him. “Well,” said Kana’tï, “as you have found me, we may as well travel together, but I shall take the lead.”

Soon they came to a swamp, and Kana’tï told them there was something dangerous there and they must keep away from it. He went on ahead, but as soon as he was out of sight the Wild Boy said to his brother, “Come and let us see what is in the swamp.” They went in together, and in the middle of the swamp they found a large panther asleep. The Wild Boy got out an arrow and shot the panther in the side of the head. The panther turned his head and the other boy shot him on that side. He turned his head away again and the two brothers shot together—tust, tust, tust! But the panther was not hurt by the arrows and paid no more attention to the boys. They came out of the swamp and soon overtook Kana’tï, who was waiting for them. “Did you find it?” asked Kana’tï. “Yes,” said the boys, “We found it, but it never hurt us. We are men.” Kana’tï was surprised, but said nothing, and they went on again.

After a while he turned to them and said, “Now you must be careful. We are coming to a tribe called the Anäda’dûñtäskï. (“Roasters,” i.e., cannibals), and if they get you they will put you into a pot and feast on you.” Then he went on ahead. Soon the boys came to a tree which had been struck by lightning, and the Wild Boy directed his brother to gather some of the splinters from the tree and told him what to do with them. In a little while they came to the settlement of the cannibals, who, as soon as they saw the boys, came running out crying, “Good, here are two nice fat strangers. Now we’ll have a grand feast!” They caught the boys and dragged them into the townhouse, and sent word to all the people of the settlement to come to the feast. They made up a great fire, put water into a large pot and set it to boiling, and then seized the Wild Boy and put him down into it. His brother was not in the least frightened and made no attempt to escape, but quietly knelt down and began putting the splinters into the fire, as if to make it burn better. When the cannibals thought the meat was about ready they lifted the pot from the fire, and that instant a blinding light filled the townhouse, and the lightning began to dart from one side to the other, striking down the cannibals until not one of them was left alive. Then the lightning went up through the smokehole, and the next moment there were the two boys standing outside the townhouse as though nothing had happened. They went on and soon met Kana’tï, who seemed much surprised to see them, and said, “What! Are you here again?” “O, yes, we never give up. We are great men!” “What did the cannibals do to you?” “We met them and they brought us to their townhouse, but they never hurt us.” Kana’tï said nothing more, and they went on.

* * * * * * *

He soon got out of sight of the boys, but they kept on until they came to the end of the world, where the sun comes out. The sky was just coming down when they got there, but they waited until it went up again, and then they went through and climbed up on the other side. There they found Kana’tï and Selu sitting together. The old folk received them kindly and were glad to see them, telling them they might stay there a while, but then they must go to live where the sun goes down. The boys stayed with their parents seven days and then went on toward the Dark- ening land, where they are now. We call them Anisga’ya Tsunsdi’ (The Little Men), and when they talk to each other we hear low rolling thunder in the west.

After Kana’tï’s boys had let the deer out from the cave where their father used to keep them, the hunters tramped about in the woods for a long time without finding any game, so that the people were very hungry. At last they heard that the Thunder Boys were now living in the far west, beyond the sun door, and that if they were sent for they could bring back the game. So they sent messengers for them, and the boys came and sat down in the mid- dle of the townhouse and began to sing.

At the first song there was a roaring sound like a strong wind in the northwest, and it grew louder and nearer as the boys sang on, until at the seventh song a whole herd of deer, led by a large buck, came out from the woods.

The boys had told the people to be ready with their bows and arrows, and when the song was ended and all the deer were close around the townhouse, the hunters shot into them and killed as many as they needed before the herd could get back into the timber.

Then the Thunder Boys went back to the Darkening land, but before they left they taught the people the seven songs with which to call up the deer. It all happened so long ago that the songs are now forgotten—all but two, which the hunters still sing whenever they go after deer.

Wahnenauhi Version

After the world had been brought up from under the water, “They then made a man and a woman and led them around the edge of the island. On arriving at the starting place they planted some corn, and then told the man and woman to go around the way they had been led. This they did, and on returning they found the corn up and grow- ing nicely. They were then told to continue the circuit. Each trip consumed more time. At last the corn was ripe and ready for use.”

* * * * * * *

Another story is told of how sin came into the world. A man and a woman reared a large family of children in comfort and plenty, with very little trouble about providing food for them. Every morning the father went forth and very soon returned bringing with him a deer, or a turkey, or some other animal or fowl. At the same time the mother went out and soon returned with a large basket filled with ears of corn which she shelled and pounded in a mortar, thus making meal for bread.

When the children grew up, seeing with what apparent ease food was provided for them, they talked to each other about it, wondering that they never saw such things as their parents brought in. At last, one proposed to watch when their parents went out and to follow them.

Accordingly, the next morning the plan was carried out. Those who followed the father saw him stop at a short distance from the cabin and turn over a large stone that appeared to be carelessly leaned against another. On looking closely they saw an entrance to a large cave, and in it were many different kinds of animals and birds, such as their father had sometimes brought in for food. The man standing at the entrance called a deer, which was lying at some distance and back of some other animals. It rose immediately as it heard the call and came close up to him. He picked it up, closed the mouth of the cave, and returned, not once seeming to suspect what his sons had done.

When the old man was fairly out of sight, his sons, rejoicing how they had outwitted him, left their hiding place and went to the cave, saying they would show the old folks that they, too, could bring in something. They moved the stone away, though it was very heavy and they were obliged to use all their united strength. When the cave was opened, the animals, instead of waiting to be picked up, all made a rush for the entrance, and leaping past the frightened and bewildered boys, scattered in all directions and disappeared in the wilderness, while the guilty offenders could do nothing but gaze in stupefied amazement as they saw them escape. There were animals of all kinds, large and small—buffalo, deer, elk, antelope, raccoons, and squirrels; even catamounts and panthers, wolves and foxes, and many others, all fleeing together. At the same time birds of every kind were seen emerging from the opening, all in the same wild confusion as the quadrupeds—turkeys, geese, swans, ducks, quails, eagles, hawks, and owls.

Those who followed the mother saw her enter a small cabin, which they had never seen before, and close the door. The culprits found a small crack through which they could peer. They saw the woman place a basket on the ground and standing over it shake herself vigorously, jumping up and down—when lo and behold!—large ears of corn began to fall into the basket. When it was well filled she took it up and, placing it on her head, came out, fastened the door, and prepared their breakfast as usual. When the meal had been finished in silence the man spoke to his children, telling them that he was aware of what they had done; that now he must die and they would be obliged to provide for themselves. He made bows and arrows for them, then sent them to hunt for the animals which they had turned loose.

Then the mother told them that as they had found out her secret she could do nothing more for them; that she would die, and they must drag her body around over the ground; that wherever her body was dragged corn would come up. Of this they were to make their bread. She told them that they must always save some for seed and plant every year.

4. Origin of Disease and Medicine

In the old days the beasts, birds, fishes, insects, and plants could all talk, and they and the people lived togeth- er in peace and friendship. But as time went on the people increased so rapidly that their settlements spread over the whole earth, and the poor animals found themselves beginning to be cramped for room. This was bad enough, but to make it worse Man invented bows, knives, blowguns, spears, and hooks, and began to slaughter the larger animals, birds, and fishes for their flesh or their skins, while the smaller creatures, such as the frogs and worms, were crushed and trodden upon without thought, out of pure carelessness or contempt. So the animals resolved to consult upon measures for their common safety.

The Bears were the first to meet in council in their townhouse under Kuwâ’hï mountain, the “Mulberry place,” and the old White Bear chief presided. After each in turn had complained of the way in which Man killed their friends, ate their flesh, and used their skins for his own purposes, it was decided to begin war at once against him. Someone asked what weapons Man used to destroy them. “Bows and arrows, of course,” cried all the Bears in cho- rus. “And what are they made of?” was the next question. “The bow of wood, and the string of our entrails,” replied one of the Bears. It was then proposed that they make a bow and some arrows and see if they, could not use the same weapons against Man himself. So one Bear got a nice piece of locust wood and another sacrificed himself for the good of the rest in order to furnish a piece of his entrails for the string. But when everything was ready and the first Bear stepped up to make the trial, it was found that in letting the arrow fly after drawing back the bow, his long claws caught the string and spoiled the shot. This was annoying, but someone suggested that they might trim his claws, which was accordingly done, and on a second trial it was found that the arrow went straight to the mark. But here the chief, the old White Bear, objected, saying it was necessary that they should have long claws in order to be able to climb trees. “One of us has already died to furnish the bowstring, and if we now cut off our claws we must all starve together. It is better to trust to the teeth and claws that nature gave us, for it is plain that man’s weapons were not intended for us.”

No one could think of any better plan, so the old chief dismissed the council and the Bears dispersed to the woods and thickets without having concerted any way to prevent the increase of the human race. Had the result of the council been otherwise, we should now be at war with the Bears, but as it is, the hunter does not even ask the Bear’s pardon when he kills one.

The Deer next held a council under their chief, the Little Deer, and after some talk decided to send rheumatism to every hunter who should kill one of them unless he took care to ask their pardon for the offense. They sent notice of their decision to the nearest settlement of Indians and told them at the same time what to do when necessity forced them to kill one of the Deer tribe. Now, whenever the hunter shoots a Deer, the Little Deer, who is swift as the wind and can not be wounded, runs quickly up to the spot and, bending over the blood-stains, asks the spirit of the Deer if it has heard the prayer of the hunter for pardon. If the reply be “Yes,” all is well, and the Little Deer goes on his way; but if the reply be “No,” he follows on the trail of the hunter, guided by the drops of blood on the ground, until he arrives at his cabin in the settlement, when the Little Deer enters invisibly and strikes the hunter with rheumatism, so that he becomes at once a helpless cripple. No hunter who has regard for his health ever fails to ask pardon of the Deer for killing it, although some hunters who have not learned the prayer may try to turn aside the Little Deer from his pursuit by building a fire behind them in the trail.

Next came the Fishes and Reptiles, who had their own complaints against Man. They held their council to- gether and determined to make their victims dream of snakes twining about them in slimy folds and blowing foul breath in their faces, or to make them dream of eating raw or decaying fish, so that they would lose appetite, sicken, and die. This is why people dream about snakes and fish.

Finally the Birds, Insects, and smaller animals came together for the same purpose, and the Grubworm was chief of the council. It was decided that each in turn should give an opinion, and then they would vote on the ques- tion as to whether or not Man was guilty. Seven votes should be enough to condemn him. One after another de- nounced Man’s cruelty and injustice toward the other animals and voted in favor of his death. The Frog spoke first, saying: “We must do something to check the increase of the race, or people will become so numerous that we shall be crowded from off the earth. See how they have kicked me about because I’m ugly, as they say, until my back is covered with sores;” and here he showed the spots on his skin. Next came the Bird—no one remembers now which one it was—who condemned Man “because he burns my feet off,” meaning the way in which the hunter barbe- cues birds by impaling them on a stick set over the fire, so that their feathers and tender feet are singed off. Others followed in the same strain. The Ground-squirrel alone ventured to say a good word for Man, who seldom hurt him because he was so small, but this made the others so angry that they fell upon the Ground-squirrel and tore him with their claws, and the stripes are on his back to this day.

They began then to devise and name so many new diseases, one after another, that had not their invention at last failed them, no one of the human race would have been able to survive. The Grubworm grew constant- ly more pleased as the name of each disease was called off, until at last they reached the end of the list, when someone proposed to make menstruation sometimes fatal to women. On this he rose-up in his place and cried: “Wadâñ’! [Thanks!] I’m glad some more of them will die, for they are getting so thick that they tread on me.” The thought fairly made him shake with joy, so that he fell over backward and could not get on his feet again, but had to wriggle off on his back, as the Grubworm has done ever since.

When the Plants, who were friendly to Man, heard what had been done by the animals, they determined to defeat the latter’s evil designs. Each Tree, Shrub, and Herb, down even to the Grasses and Mosses, agreed to furnish a cure for some one of the diseases named, and each said: “I shall appear to help Man when he calls upon me in his need.” Thus came medicine; and the plants, every one of which has its use if we only knew it, furnish the remedy to counteract the evil wrought by the revengeful animals. Even weeds were made for some good purpose, which we must find out for ourselves. When the doctor does not know what medicine to use for a sick man the spirit of the plant tells him.

5. The Daughter of the Sun

The Sun lived on the other side of the sky vault, but her daughter lived in the middle of the sky, directly above the earth, and every day as the Sun was climbing along the sky arch to the west she used to stop at her daughter’s house for dinner.

Now, the Sun hated the people on the earth, because they could never look straight at her without screwing up their faces. She said to her brother, the Moon, “My grandchildren are ugly; they grin all over their faces when they look at me.” But the Moon said, “I like my younger brothers; I think they are very handsome” —because they always smiled pleasantly when they saw him in the sky at night, for his rays were milder.

The Sun was jealous and planned to kill all the people, so every day when she got near her daughter’s house she sent down such sultry rays that there was a great fever and the people died by hundreds, until everyone had lost some friend and there was fear that no one would be left. They went for help to the Little Men, who said the only way to save themselves was to kill the Sun.

The Little Men made medicine and changed two men to snakes, the Spreading-adder and the Copperhead, and sent them to watch near the door of the daughter of the Sun to bite the old Sun when she came next day. They went together and bid near the house until the Sun came, but when the Spreading-adder was about to spring, the bright light blinded him and he could only spit out yellow slime, as he does to this day when he tries to bite. She called him a nasty thing and went by into the house, and the Copperhead crawled off without trying to do anything.

So the people still died from the heat, and they went to the Little Men a second time for help. The Little Men made medicine again and changed one man into the great Uktena and another into the Rattlesnake and sent them to watch near the house and kill the old Sun when she came for dinner. They made the Uktena very large, with horns on his head, and everyone thought he would be sure to do the work, but the Rattle- snake was so quick and eager that he got ahead and coiled up just outside the house, and when the Sun’s daughter opened the door to look out for her mother, he sprang up and bit her and she fell dead in the doorway. He forgot to wait for the old Sun, but went back to the people, and the Uktena was so very angry that he went back, too. Since then we pray to the rattlesnake and do not kill him, because he is kind and never tries to bite if we do not disturb him. The Uktena grew angrier all the time and very dangerous, so that if he even looked at a man, that man’s family would die. After a long time the people held a council and decided that he was too dangerous to be with them, so they sent him up to Gälûñ’lätï, and he is there now. The Spreading-adder, the Copperhead, the Rattlesnake, and the Uktena were all men.

When the Sun found her daughter dead, she went into the house and grieved, and the people did not die any more, but now the world was dark all the time, because the Sun would not come out. They went again to the Little Men, and these told them that if they wanted the Sun to come out again they must bring back her daughter from Tsûsginâ’ï, the Ghost country, in Us’ûñhi’yï, the Darkening land in the west. They chose seven men to go, and gave each a sourwood rod a hand-breadth long. The Little Men told them they must take a box with them, and when they got to Tsûsginâ’ï they would find all the ghosts at a dance. They must stand outside the circle, and when the young woman passed in the dance they must strike her with the rods and she would fall to the ground. Then they must put her into the box and bring her back to her mother, but they must be very sure not to open the box, even a little way, until they were home again.

They took the rods and a box and traveled seven days to the west until they came to the Darkening land. There were a great many people there, and they were having a dance just as if they were at home in the settlements. The young woman was in the outside circle, and as she swung around to where the seven men were standing, one struck her with his rod and she turned her head and saw him. As she came around the second time another touched her with his rod, and then another and another, until at the seventh round she fell out of the ring, and they put her into the box and closed the lid fast. The other ghosts seemed never to notice what had happened.

They took up the box and started home toward the east. In a little while the girl came to life again and begged to be let out of the box, but they made no answer and went on. Soon she called again and said she was hungry, but still they made no answer and went on. After another while she spoke again and called for a drink and pleaded so that it was very hard to listen to her, but the men who carried the box said nothing and still went on. When at last they were very near home, she called again and begged them to raise the lid just a little, because she was smothering. They were afraid she was really dying now, so they lifted the lid a little to give her air, but as they did so there was a fluttering sound inside and something flew past them into the thicket and they heard a redbird cry, “kwish! kwish! Kwish!” in the bushes. They shut down the lid and went on again to the settlements, but when they got there and opened the box it was empty.

So we know the Redbird is the daughter of the Sun, and if the men had kept the box closed, as the Little Men told them to do, they would have brought her home safely, and we could bring back our other friends also from the Ghost country, but now when they die we can never bring them back.

The Sun had been glad when they started to the Ghost country, but when they came back without her daughter she grieved and cried, “My daughter, my daughter,” and wept until her tears made a flood upon the earth, and the people were afraid the world would be drowned. They held another council, and sent their handsomest young men and women to amuse her so that she would stop crying. They danced before the Sun and sang their best songs, but for a long time she kept her face covered and paid no attention, until at last the drummer suddenly changed the song, when she lifted up her face, and was so pleased at the sight that she forgot her grief and smiled.

6. How They Brought Back the Tobacco

In the beginning of the world, when people and animals were all the same, there was only one tobacco plant, to which they all came for their tobacco until the Dagûl`kû geese stole it and carried it far away to the south. The people were suffering without it, and there was one old woman who grew so thin and weak that everybody said she would soon die unless she could get tobacco to keep her alive.

Different animals offered to go for it, one after another, the larger ones first and then the smaller ones, but the Dagûl`kû saw and killed every one before he could get to the plant. After the others the little Mole tried to reach it by going under the ground, but the Dagûl`kû saw his track and killed him as he came out.

At last the Hummingbird offered, but the others said he was entirely too small and might as well stay at home. He begged them to let him try, so they showed him a plant in a field and told him to let them see how he would go about it. The next moment he was gone and they saw him sitting on the plant, and then in a moment he was back again, but no one had seen him going or coming, because he was so swift. “This is the way I’ll do,” said the Hum- mingbird, so they let him try.

He flew off to the east, and when he came in sight of the tobacco the Dagûl`kû were watching all about it, but they could not see him because he was so small and flew so swiftly. He darted down on the plant—tsa!—and snatched off the top with the leaves and seeds, and was off again before the Dagûl`kû knew what had happened. Before he got home with the tobacco the old woman had fainted and they thought she was dead, but he blew the smoke into her nostrils, and with a cry of “Tsâ’lû! [Tobacco!]” she opened her eyes and was alive again.

Second Version

The people had tobacco in the beginning, but they had used it all, and there was great suffering for want of it. There was one old man so old that he had to be kept alive by smoking, and as his son did not want to see him die he decided to go himself to try and get some more. The tobacco country was far in the south, with high mountains all around it, and the passes were guarded, so that it was very hard to get into it, but the young man was a conjurer and was not afraid. He traveled southward until he came to the mountains on the border of the tobacco country. Then he opened his medicine bag and took out a hummingbird skin and put it over himself like a dress. Now he was a hummingbird and flew over the mountains to the tobacco field and pulled some of the leaves and seed and put them into his medicine bag. He was so small and swift that the guards, whoever they were, did not see him, and when he had taken as much as he could carry he flew back over the mountains in the same way. Then he took off the hummingbird skin and put it into his medicine bag, and was a man again. He started home, and on his way came to a tree that had a hole in the trunk, like a door, near the first branches, and a very pretty woman was looking out from it. He stopped and tried to climb the tree, but although he was a good climber he found that he always slipped back. He put on a pair of medicine moccasins from his pouch, and then he could climb the tree, but when he reached the first branches he looked up and the hole was still as far away as before. He climbed higher and high- er, but every time he looked up the hole seemed to be farther than before, until at last he was tired and came down again. When he reached home he found his father very weak. but still alive, and one draw at the pipe made him strong again. The people planted the seed and have had tobacco ever since.

7. The Journey to the Sunrise

A long time ago several young men made up their minds to find the place where the Sun lives and see what the Sun is like. They got ready their bows and arrows, their parched corn and extra moccasins, and started out toward the east. At first they met tribes they knew, then they came to tribes they had only heard about, and at last to others of which they had never heard.

There was a tribe of root eaters and another of acorn eaters, with great piles of acorn shells near their houses. In one tribe they found a sick man dying, and were told it was the custom there when a man died to bury his wife in the same grave with him. They waited until he was dead, when they saw his friends lower the body into a great pit, so deep and dark that from the top they could not see the bottom. Then a rope was tied around the woman’s body, together with a bundle of pine knots, a lighted pine knot was put into her hand, and she was lowered into the pit to die there in the darkness after the last pine knot was burned.

The young men traveled on until they came at last to the sunrise place where the sky reaches down to the ground. They found that the sky was an arch or vault of solid rock hung above the earth and was always swinging up and down, so that when it went up there was an open place like a door between the sky and ground, and when it swung back the door was shut. The Sun came out of this door from the east and climbed along on the inside of the arch. It had a human figure, but was too bright for them to see clearly and too hot to come very near. They waited until the Sun had come out and then tried to get through while the door was still open, but just as the first one was in the doorway the rock came down and crushed him. The other six were afraid to try it, and as they were now at the end of the world they turned around and started back again, but they had traveled so far that they were old men when they reached home.

8. The Moon and the Thunders.

The Sun was a young woman and lived in the East, while her brother, the Moon. lived in the West. The girl had a lover who used to come every month in the dark of the moon to court her. He would come at night, and leave before daylight, and although she talked with him she could not see his face in the dark, and he would not tell her his name, until she was wondering all the time who it could be. At last she hit upon a plan to find out, so the next time he came, as they were sitting together in the dark of the âsi, she slyly dipped her hand into the cinders and ashes of the fireplace and rubbed it over his face, saying, “Your face is cold; you must have suffered from the wind,” and pretending to be very sorry for him, but he did not know that she had ashes on her hand. After a while he left her and went away again.

The next night when the Moon came up in the sky his face was covered with spots, and then his sister knew he was the one who had been coming to see her. He was so much ashamed to have her know it that he kept as far away as he could at the other end of the sky all the night. Ever since he tries to keep a long way behind the Sun, and when he does sometimes have to come near her in the west he makes himself as thin as a ribbon so that he can hardly be seen.

Some old people say that the moon is a ball which was thrown up against the sky in a game a long time ago. They say that two towns were playing against each other, but one of them had the best runners and had almost won the game, when the leader of the other side picked up the ball with his hand—a thing that is not allowed in the game—and tried to throw it to the goal, but it struck against the solid sky vault and was fastened there, to remind players never to cheat. When the moon looks small and pale it is because someone has handled the ball unfairly, and for this reason they formerly played only at the time of a full moon.

When the sun or moon is eclipsed it is because a great frog up in the sky is trying to swallow it. Everybody knows this, even the Creeks and the other tribes, and in the olden times, eighty or a hundred years ago, before the great med- icine men were all dead, whenever they saw the sun grow dark the people would come together and fire guns and beat the drum, and in a little while this would frighten off the great frog and the sun would be all right again.

The common people call both Sun and Moon Nûñdä, one being ‘Nûñdä that dwells in the day” and the other “Nûñdä that dwells in the night,” but the priests call the Sun Su’tälidihï’, “Six-killer,” and the Moon Ge’`yägu’ga, though nobody knows now what this word means, or why they use these names. Sometimes people ask the Moon not to let it rain or snow.

The great Thunder and his sons, the two Thunder boys, live far in the west above the sky vault. The lightning and the rainbow are their beautiful dress. The priests pray to the Thunder and call him the Red Man, because that is the brightest color of his dress. There are other Thunders that live lower down, in the cliffs and mountains, and under waterfalls, and travel on invisible bridges from one high peak to another where they have their town houses. The great Thunders above the sky are kind and helpful when we pray to them, but these others are always plotting mischief. One must not point at the rainbow, or one’s finger will swell at the lower joint.

9. What the Stars Are Like

There are different opinions about the stars. Some say they are balls of light, others say they are human, but most people say they are living creatures covered with luminous fur or feathers.

One night a hunting party camping in the mountains noticed two lights like large stars moving along the top of a distant ridge. They wondered and watched until the light disappeared on the other side. The next night, and the next, they saw the lights again moving along the ridge, and after talking over the matter decided to go on the morrow and try to learn the cause. In the morning they started out and went until they came to the ridge, where, after searching some time, they found two strange creatures about so large (making a circle with outstretched arms), with round bodies covered with fine fur or downy feathers, from which small heads stuck out like the heads of terrapins. As the breeze played upon these feathers showers of sparks flew out.

The hunters carried the strange creatures back to the camp, intending to take them home to the settlements on their return. They kept them several days and noticed that every night they would grow bright and shine like great stars, although by day they were only balls of gray fur, except when the wind stirred and made the sparks fly out. They kept very quiet, and no one thought of their trying to escape, when, on the seventh night, they suddenly rose from the ground like balls of fire and were soon above the tops of the trees. Higher and higher they went, while the wondering hunters watched, until at last they were only two bright points of light in the dark sky, and then the hunters knew that they were stars.

10. Origin of the Pleiades and the Pine

Long ago, when the world was new, there were seven boys who used to spend all their time down by the town- house playing the gatayû’stï game, rolling a stone wheel along the ground and sliding a curved stick after it to strike it. Their mothers scolded, but it did no good, so one day they collected some gatayû’stï stones and boiled them in the pot with the corn for dinner. When the boys came home hungry their mothers dipped out the stones and said, “Since you like the gatayû’stï better than the cornfield, take the stones now for your dinner.”

The boys were very angry, and went down to the townhouse, saying, “As our mothers treat us this way, let us go where we shall never trouble them anymore.” They began a dance—some say it was the Feather dance—and went round and round the townhouse, praying to the spirits to help them. At last their mothers were afraid something was wrong and went out to look for them. They saw the boys still dancing around the townhouse, and as they watched they noticed that their feet were off the earth, and that with every round they rose higher and higher in the air. They ran to get their children, but it was too late, for then, were already above the roof of the townhouse—all but one, whose mother managed to pull him down with the gatayû’stï pole, but he struck the ground with such force that he sank into it and the earth closed over him.

The other six circled higher and higher until they went up to the sky, where we see them now as the Pleiades, which the Cherokee still call Ani’tsutsä (The Boys). The people grieved long after them, but the mother whose boy had gone into the ground came every morning and every evening to cry over the spot until the earth was damp with her tears. At last a little green shoot sprouted up and grew day by day until it became the tall tree that we call now the pine, and the pine is of the same nature as the stars and holds in itself the same bright light.

11. The Milky Way

Some people in the south had a corn mill, in which they pounded the corn into meal, and several mornings when they came to fill it they noticed that some of the meal had been stolen during the night. They examined the ground and found the tracks of a dog, so the next night they watched, and when the dog came from the north and began to eat the meal out of the bowl they sprang out and whipped him. He ran off howl- ing to his home in the north, with the meal dropping from his mouth as he ran, and leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call to this day Gi`lï’-utsûñ’stänûñ’yï, “Where the dog ran.”

12. Origin Of Strawberries

When the first man was created and a mate was given to him, they lived together very happily for a time, but then began to quarrel, until at last the woman left her husband and started off toward Nûñâgûñ’yï, the Sun land, in the east. The man followed alone and grieving, but the woman kept on steadily ahead and never looked behind, until Une’`länûñ’hï, the great Apportioner (the Sun), took pity on him and asked him if he was still angry with his wife. He said he was not, and Une’`länûñ’hï then asked him if he would like to have her back again, to which he eagerly answered yes.

So Une’`länûñ’hï caused a patch of the finest ripe huckleberries to spring up along the path in front of the wom- an, but she passed by without paying any attention to them. Farther on he put a clump of blackberries, but these also she refused to notice. Other fruits, one, two, and three, and then some trees covered with beautiful red service berries, were placed beside the path to tempt her, but she still went on until suddenly she saw in front a patch of large ripe strawberries, the first ever known. She stooped to gather a few to eat, and as she picked them she chanced to turn her face to the west, and at once the memory of her husband came back to her and she found herself unable to go on. She sat down, but the longer she waited the stronger became her desire, for her husband, and at last she gathered a bunch of the finest berries and started back along the path to give them to him. He met her kindly and they went home together.

13. The Great Yellow-jacket: Origin of Fish and Frogs

A long time ago the people of the old town of Kanu’ga`lâ’yï (“Brier place,” or Briertown), on Nantahala river, in the present Macon County, North Carolina, were much annoyed by a great insect called U’la`gû’, as large as a house, which used to come from some secret hiding place, and darting swiftly through the air, would snap up children from their play and carry them away. It was unlike any other insect ever known, and the people tried many times to track it to its home, but it was too swift to be followed.

They killed a squirrel and tied a white string to it, so that its course could be followed with the eye, as bee hunt- ers follow the flight of a bee to its tree. The U’la`gû’ came and carried off the squirrel with the string hanging to it, but darted away so swiftly through the air that it was out of sight in a moment. They killed a turkey and put a longer white string to it, and the U’la`gû’ came and took the turkey, but was gone again before they could see in what direction it flew. They took a deer ham and tied a white string to it, and again the U’la`gû’ swooped down and bore it off so swiftly that it could not be followed. At last they killed a yearling deer and tied a very long white string to it. The U’la`gû’ came again and seized the deer, but this time the load was so heavy that it had to fly slowly and so low down that the string could be plainly seen.

The hunters got together for the pursuit. They followed it along a ridge to the east until they came near where Franklin now is, when, on looking across the valley to the other side, they saw the nest of the U’la`gû’ in a large cave in the rocks. On this they raised a great shout and made their way rapidly down the mountain and across to the cave. The nest had the entrance below with tiers of cells built up one above another to the roof of the cave. The great U’la`gû’ was there, with thousands of smaller ones, that we now call yellow-jackets. The hunters built fires around the hole, so that the smoke filled the cave and smothered the great insect and multitudes of the smaller ones, but others which were outside the cave were not killed, and these escaped and increased until now the yel- low-jackets, which before were unknown, are all over the world. The people called the cave Tsgâgûñ’yï, “Where the yellow-jacket was,” and the place from which they first saw the nest they called A`tahi’ta, “Where they shouted,” and these are their names today.

They say also that all the fish and frogs came from a great monster fish and frog which did much damage until at last they were killed by the people, who cut them up into little pieces which were thrown into the water and after- ward took shape as the smaller fishes and frogs.

14. The Deluge

A long time ago a man had a dog, which began to go down to the river every day and look at the water and howl. At last the man was angry and scolded the dog, which then spoke to him and said: “Very soon there is going to be a great freshet and the water will come so high that everybody will be drowned; but if you will make a raft to get upon when the rain comes you can be saved, but you must first throw me into the water.” The man did not be- lieve it, and the dog said, “If you want a sign that I speak the truth, look at the back of my neck.” He looked and saw that the dog’s neck had the skin worn off so that the bones stuck out.

Then he believed the dog, and began to build a raft. Soon the rain came and he took his family, with plenty of provisions and they all got upon it. It rained for a long time, and the water rose until the mountains were covered and all the people in the world were drowned. Then the rain stopped and the waters went down again, until at last it was safe to come off the raft. Now there was no one alive but the man and his family, but one day they heard a sound of dancing and shouting on the other side of the ridge. The man climbed to the top and looked over; every- thing was still, but all along the valley he saw great piles of bones of the people who had been drowned, and then he knew that the ghosts had been dancing.

Source:  A. Turlington, et.al., World Literature.  Nova Online.    Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike

 

Aw-Aw-Tam Indian Nights: The Myths and Legends of the Pimas

Compiled by J. William Lloyd (1857-1940 C.E.)

Published in 1911 C.E.

Pima (Native America)

The Pima are North American Indians who traditionally lived along the Gila and Salt rivers in Arizona, U.S., which was the location of the Hohokam culture (200 to 1400 C.E.). Pima Indians call themselves the “River People,” speak a Uto-Aztecan language, and are usually considered to be the descendants of the Hohokam whose settle- ments were abandoned probably because of the Great Drought (1276-99) and the subsequent sparse and unpredict- able rainfall that lasted until 1450. The Pima were traditionally sedentary farmers utilizing the rivers for irrigation and supplementing their diet with some hunting and gathering. The active farming led the Pima to develop larger communities than their neighboring tribes, along with complex political organizations. From the time of their early encounter with European and American colonizers, Pima Indians have been seen as a friendly people. As of the early 21st century, there are about 11,000 Pima descendants. J. William Lloyd, an amateur ethnographer who lived with the Pima people for two months in 1903, collected and transcribed Comalk-hawk-kih (Thin Buckskin)’s tradi- tional Pima stories via the interpretation of Edward Hubert Wood, but these stories can be traced back to the time of or even before the arrival of the Europeans. The stories are organized as Stories of the First Night, the Second Night, the Third Night, and the Fourth Night.

Written by Kyounghye Kwon

Selections from Aw-aw-tam Indian nights: Being the Myths and Legends of the Pimas of Arizona

J. William Lloyd

License: Public Domain

The Story of These Stories

WHEN I was at the Pan-American Fair, at Buffalo, in July, 1901, I one day strolled into the Bazaar and drifted naturally to the section where Indian curios were displayed for sale by J. W. Benham. Behind the counter, as salesman, stood a young Indi- an, whose frank, intelligent, good-natured face at once attracted me. Finding me interested in Indian art, he courteously invited me behind the counter and spent an hour or more in explain- ing the mysteries of baskets and blankets.

How small seeds are! From that interview came everything that is in this book.

Several times I repeated my visits to my Indian friend, and when I had left Buffalo I had earned that his name was Edward Hubert Wood, and that he was a full-blooded Pima, educated at Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Afterward we came into a pleasant correspondence, and so I came to know that one of my Indian friend’s dreams was that he should be the means of the preservation of the ancient tales of his people. He had a grand-uncle, Comalk-Hawk-Kih, or Thin Buckskin, who was a see-nee-yaw-kum, or professional traditionalist, who knew all the ancient stories, but who had no successor, and with whose death the stories would disappear. He did not feel himself equal to putting these traditions into good English, and so did not quite know what to do.

We discussed this matter in letters; and finally it was de- cided that I should visit the Gila River Reservation, in Arizona, where the Pimas were, and get the myths from the old seeneeyawkum in person, and that Mr. Wood should return home from Pyramid Lake, Nevada, where he was teaching carpentry to the Pai-utes, and be my host and interpreter.

So, on the morning of July 31st, 1903, I stepped from a train at Casa Grande, Arizona, and found myself in the desert land of which I had so long dreamed. I had expected Mr. Wood to meet me there, but he was not at the station and therefore I took passage with the Irish mail-carrier whose stage was in daily transit between Casa Grande and Sacaton, the Agency village of the Pima Reservation.

We had driven perhaps half the distance, and my Irish friend was beguiling the tedium by an interminable series of highly spiced yarns, calculated to flabbergast the tenderfoot, when my anxious eyes discerned in the dis- tance the oncoming of a neat little open buggy, drawn by two pretty ponies, one of which was a pinto, and in which sat Mr. Wood. Just imagine: It was the last day of July, a blazing morning in the open desert, with the temperature soaring somewhere between 100 and 120 degrees, yet here was my Indian friend, doubtless to do me honor, arrayed in a “pepper-and-salt” suit, complete with underclothes; vest buttoned up; collar and necktie, goggles and buckskin driving gloves. And this in an open buggy, while the Irishman and I, under our tilt, were stripped to our shirts, with sleeves rolled above elbows, and swigging water, ever and anon, from an enormous canteen swathed in wet flannel to keep it cool. Truly Mr. Wood had not intended that I should take him for an uncivilized Indian, if clothes could give the lie; but the face was the same kindly one of my “Brother Ed,” and it did not take me long to greet him and transfer myself to his care.

We came to Sacaton (which Ed said was a Mexican name meaning “much tall grass”—reminding me that Em- ory, of the “Army of the West,” who found the Pimas in 1846, reported finding fine meadows there—but which the Pimas call Tawt-sit-ka, “the Place of Fear and Flight,” because of some Apache-caused panic) but we did not stop there, but passed around it, to the Northwest, and on and over the Gila, Akee-mull, The River, as the Pimas affectionately call it, for to them it is as the Nile to Egypt. The famous Gila is not a very imposing stream at any time, and now was no stream at all, but a shallow dry channel, choked with desert dust, or paved with curling flakes of baked mud which cracked like bits of broken pottery under our ponies’ feet. But I afterwards many times saw it a turbid torrent of yellow mud, rushing and foaming from the mountain rains; perilous with quicksand and snag, the roaring of its voice heard over the chapparal for miles to windward.

The Pimas live in villages, each with its sub-chief, and we were bound for the village of Lower San-tan. But in these villages the houses are now seldom aggregated, as in old days of Apache and Yuma war, but scatter out for miles in farm homesteads.

Brother Ed had lately sold his neat farmstead, near Sacaton, and when I came to his home I found he was temporarily living under a vachtoe (pronounce first syllable as if German), or arbor-shed, made of mezquite forks, supporting a flat roof of weeds and brush for shade. Near by he was laying the foundations of a neat little adobe cottage, which was finally completed during my stay.

Ed introduced me to his mother, a matronly Indian woman of perhaps fifty-five, who must have been quite a belle in her day, and whose features were still regular and strong, and his step-father, “Mr. Wells,” who deserves more than a passing word from me, for his kindness was unremitting (bless his good-natured, smiling face!) and his solicitude for my comfort constant. These were all the family, for Ed himself was a widower. Fifty yards or so to the northwest were the huts of two old and wretchedly poor Pimas (the man was blind) who had been allowed to settle there temporarily by Mr. Wood, owing to some difficulty about their own location on their adjoining land. One or two hundred yards in the other direction were two old caw-seens, or storehouses, square structures of a sort of wattlework of poles, weeds and brush, plastered over with adobe and roofed with earth. In one of these I placed my trunk, and on its flat roof I slept, rolled in my blankets, most of the nights of the two months of my stay. I came to know it as “my Arizona Bedstead,” and I shall never forget it and its quaint, crooked ladder.

My Indian brother was not slow in shedding his dress-parade garments, and in getting down to the comfort of outing shirt and overalls, neck handkerchief and sombrero. Then I had my first meal with Indians in Arizona. Mrs. Wells, or as I prefer to call her, Sparkling-Soft-Feather (her Indian name) was a good cook of her kind, and gave us a meal of tortillas, frijole beans, peppers (kaw-awl-kull), coffee, and choo-oo-kook or jerked beef. Ed and I were given the dignity of chairs and a table, but the elder Indians squatted on the ground in the good old Pima way, with their dishes on a mat. There were knives and spoons, but no forks, and the usefulness of fingers was not obsolete. A waggish, pale-eyed pup, flabbily deprecative and good-natured, and a big-footed Mexican choo-chool, or chick- en, were obtrusively familiar. Neither of the older Indians could speak a word of English, but chatted and laughed away together in Pima. The hot, soft wind of the desert kissed our faces as we ate, and off in the back ground rose the stately volcanic pile of Cheoff-skaw-mack, the nearest mountain, and all around the horizon other bare volcanic peaks burned into the blue. Sometimes a whirlwind of dust travelled rapidly over the plain, making one ponder what would happen should it gyrate into the vachtoe.

The old woman from the near-by kee slunk by as we ate, going to the well. She wore gah-kai-gey-aht-kum-soosk (literally string-shoes), or sandals, of rawhide, on her feet, and was quite the most wretched-looking hag I ever saw among the Pimas. Her withered body was hung with indescribable rags and her gray hair was a tangled mat. Yet I came to know that that wretched creature had a heart and a good one. She was kind and cheerful, industrious and uncomplaining, and devotion itself to her old blind husband; who did nothing all day long but move out of the travelling sun into the shade, rolling nearly naked in the dust.

After dinner we got our guns and started out to go to the farm of old Thin Buckskin (“William Higgins,” if you please!) the seeneeyawkum I had come so far to see. Incidentally we were to shoot some kah-kai-cheu, or plumed quails, and taw-up-pee, or rabbits, for supper.

We found the old man plowing for corn in his field. The strong, friendly grasp he gave my hand was all that could be desired. Tall, lean, dignified, with a harsh. yet musical voice; keen, intelligent black eyes, and an impressive manner, he was plainly a gentleman and a scholar, even if he could neither read nor write, nor speak a sentence of English.

The next afternoon he came, and under Ed’s vachtoe gave me the first installment of the coveted tales. It was slow work. First he would tell Ed a paragraph of tradition, and Ed would translate it to me. Then I would write it down, and then read it aloud to Ed again, getting his corrections. When all was straight, to his satisfaction, we would go on to another paragraph, and so on, till the old man said enough. As these Indians are all Christianized now, and mostly zealous in the faith, I could get no traditions on Sunday. And indeed, when part way thru, this zeal came near balking me altogether. A movement started to stop the recovery of these old heathen tales; the sub-chief had a word with Comalk, who became suddenly too busy to go on with his narrations, and it took increased shekels and the interposition of the Agent, Mr. J. B. Alexander, who was very kind to me, before I could get the wheels started again.

Sometimes the old man came at night, instead of afternoon, and I find this entry in my journal: “Sept. 6.—We sat up till midnight in the old cawseen getting the traditions. It was a wild, strange scene-the old cawseen interior, the mesquite forks that supported the roof, the poles overhead, and weeds above that, the mud-plastered walls with loop-hole windows; bags, boxes, trunks, ollas, and vahs-hrom granary baskets about. Ed sitting on the ground, against the wall, nodding when I wrote and waking up to interpret; the old man bent forward, both hands out, palms upward, or waving in strange eloquent gestures; his lean, wrinkled features drawn and black eyes gleaming; telling the strange tales in a strange tongue. On an old olla another Indian, Miguel, who came in to listen, and in his hand a gorgeously decorated quee-a-kote, or flute, with which, while I wrote, he would sometimes give us a few wild, plaintive, thrilling bars, weird as an incantation. And finally myself, sitting on a mattress on my trunk, writing, fast as pencil could travel, by the dim light of a lantern hung against a great post at my right. Outside a cold, strong wind, for the first time since I came to Arizona, bright moonlight, and some drifting white clouds telling the last of the storm.”

Again, on Sept. 12th: “Traditions, afternoon and until midnight. I shall never forget how the half-moon looked, rising over Vah-kee-woldt-kee, or the Notched Cliffs, toward midnight, while the coyotes laughed a chorus some- where off toward the Gila, and we sat around, outdoors, in the wind, and heard the old seeneeyawkum tell his weird, incoherent tales of the long ago.”

My interpreter was eager and willing, and well-posted in the meaning of English, and was a man of unusual intelligence and poetry of feeling, but was not well up in grammar, and in the main I had to edit and recast his sentences; yet just as far as possible I have kept his words and the Indian idiom and simplicity of style. Sometimes he would give me a sentence so forceful and poetic, and otherwise faultless, that I have joyfully written it down exactly as received. I admit that in a very few places, where the Indian simplicity and innocence of thought caused an almost Biblical plainness of speech on family matters, I have expurgated and smoothed a little for prudish Cau- casian ears, but these changes are few, and mostly unimportant, leaving the meaning unimpaired. And never once was there anything in the spirit of what was told me that revealed foulness of thought. All was grave and serious, as befitted the scriptures of an ancient people.

Occasionally I have added a word or sentence to make the meaning stand out clearer, but otherwise I have taken no liberties with the original.

As a rule the seeneeyawkum told these tales in his own words, but the parts called speeches were learned by heart and repeated literally. These parts gave us much trouble. They were highly poetic, and manifestly mystic, and therefore very difficult to translate with truthfulness to the involved meanings and startling and obscure metaphors. Besides they contained many archaic words, the meaning of which neither seeneeyawkum nor interpreter now knew, and which they could only translate by guess, or leave out altogether. But we did the best we could.

The stories were also embellished with songs, some of which I had translated. They were chants of from one to four lines each, seldom more than two, many times repeated in varying cadence; weird, somber, thrillingly passion- ate in places, and by no means unmusical, but, of course, monotonous. I obtained phonograph records of a number, and the translations given are as literal as possible.

As to the meaning of the tales I got small satisfaction. The Indians seemed to have no explanations to offer. They seemed to regard them as fairy tales, but admitted they had once been believed as scriptures.

My own theory came to be that they had been invented, from time to time, by various and successive mah- kais to answer the questions concerning history, phenomena, and the origin of things, which they, as the reputed wisest of the tribe, were continually asked. My chief reason for supposing this is because in almost every tale the hero is a mahkai of some sort. The word mah-kai (now translated doctor, or medicine-man) seems to have been applied in old time to every being capable of exerting magical or supernatural and mysterious power, from the Creator down; and it is easy to see how such use of the word would apparently establish the divine relationship and bolster the authority of the medicine men, while the charm of the tale would focus attention upon them. The temp- tation was great and, I think, yielded to.

I doubt if much real history is worked in, or that it is at all reliable.

All over the desert, where irrigation was at all practicable, in the Gila and Salt River valleys, and up to the edge of the mountains, among the beautiful giant cactus and flatbean trees, you will ride your bronco over evidences of a prehistoric race:—old irrigating ditches, lines of stone wall; or low mounds of adobe rising above the grease, wood and cacti, and littered over profusely with bits of broken and painted pottery, broken cornmills and grinders, per- haps showing here and there a stone ax, arrowhead, or other old stone implement. These mounds (vah-ahk-kee is the Pima word for such a ruin) are the heaps caused by the fallen walls of what were once pueblos of stone and clay. In some places there must have been populous cities, and at the famous site of Casa Grande one finds one of the buildings still standing—a really imposing citadel, with walls four or five feet thick, several stories high, and habit- able since the historic period.

Now according to these traditions it was the tribes now known as Pimas, Papagoes, Yumas and Maricopas, that invaded the land, from some mythic underworld, and overthrew the vahahkkees & killed all their inhabitants, and this is the most interesting part of the tales from a historic point of view. Fewkes, and other ethnologists, think the ancestors of the Pimas built the Casa Grande & other vahahkkees, but I doubt this. Is it reasonable to suppose that if a people as intelligent & settled as the Pimas had once evoluted far enough in architecture & fortification to erect such noble citadels and extensive cities as those of Casa Grande & Casa Blanca, that they, while still surrounded by the harassing Apaches, would have descended to contentment with such miserable & indefensible hovels as their present kees and cawseens? To me it is not. They are as industrious as any of the pueblo-building Indians, not otherwise degenerate, and had they once ever builded pueblos I do not think would have abandoned the art. But it is easy to understand that a horde of desert campers, overthrowing a more civilized nation, might never rebuild or copy after its edifices. So far, then, I am inclined to agree with the traditions and disagree with the ethnologists.

But these traditions are evidently very ancient. They appear to me to have originated from the aborigines of this country; people who knew no other. land. Every story is saturated with local color. From the top of Cheoffskaw- mack, I believe I could have seen almost every place mentioned in the traditions, except the Rio Colorado & the ocean, and the ocean was to them, I believe, little more than a name. They never speak of it with their usual sketchy & graphic detail, and the fact that in the ceremony of purification it is spoken of as a source of drinking water shows they really knew nothing of it. The Indian is too exact in his natural science to speak of salt water as potable. And these stories certainly say that the dwellers in the vahahkkees were the children of Ee-ee-toy, created right here. And that the army that carried out Ee-ee-toy’s revenge upon his rebellious people were the children of Juhwerta Mahkai, who had been somewhere else since the flood, but who were also originally created here.

Now, for what it is worth, I will give a theory to reconcile these differences. I assume that their flood was a real event, but a local one, and the greater part of the people destroyed by it. A minority escaped by flight into the desert, and neither they nor their descendants, for many generations, returned to the place where the catastrophe occurred. Another remnant escaped by floating on various objects & climbing mountains. The first were those of whom it is fabled that Juhwerta Mahkai let them escape thru a hole in the earth. These became nomadic, desert dwellers. The second remained in the Gila country, became agricultural & settled in habit, irrigating their land & building pueblos, growing rich, effeminate & inapt at war. At length the desert fugitives, also grown numerous, and warlike & fierce with the wild, wolf-like existence they had led, and moved by we know not what motives of revenge or greed, returned & swept over the land, in a sudden invasion, like a swarm of locusts; ruthlessly destroying the vahahkees and all who dwelt therein; breaking even the ma-ta-tes & every utensil in their vandal fury; dividing the region thus taken among themselves. According to these traditions the Apaches were already dwellers in the outly- ing deserts & mountains, and were not affected especially by this invasion.

Is it now unreasonable to suppose that some of the invaders kept up, to a great extent, their old habits of desert wandering (Papagoes for instance), and that others adopted to some extent the agricultural habits of those they had conquered, and yet retained, with slight change, the little brush & mud houses & arbors they had grown accus- tomed to in their wanderings? These last would be our present Pimas.

If it is considered strange that these adopted the habits, to any extent, of those they supplanted it may be urged that they almost certainly, in conquering the vahahkkee people, spared and married many of the women, and adopted many of the children; this being in accordance with their custom in historic times. And this infusion of the gentler blood may have been very large. And these women would naturally go on, and would be required by their new husbands to go on, with the agricultural methods to which they were accustomed & would teach them to their new masters. And their children, being wholly or partly of the old stock, would have a natural tendency to the same work, to some extent.

This theory not only explains & agrees with the main parts of the old traditions, but seems confirmed by other things. Thus the Pimas, Papagoes, Quojatas, and the “Rabbit-Eaters” of Mexico, speak about the same language, which would seem to prove them originally the same people. But some have kept the old ways, some have become agricul- tural, and some are in manners between, and thus have become classed as different tribes. And, judging from the remains, the life of the old vahahkkee dwellers was in many ways like that of the modern Pima, only less primitive.

But the real value of these stories is as folklore, and in their literary merit. They throw a wonderful side-light on the old customs, beliefs and feelings. I consider them ancient, in the main, but do not doubt that in coming down thru many seeneeyawkums they have been much modified by the addition of embellishment, the subtraction of forgetfulness. As proof I adduce the accounting for the origin of the white people, who use pens & ink, in the story of Van-daih. The ancient Pimas knew neither white men, nor pens, nor ink, therefore this passage is clearly an interpolation by some later narrator, if the story is really ancient, as I suppose it is. In the story of Noo-ee’s meeting the sun, the word used by old Comalk, for the sun’s weapon, was vai-no-ma-gaht (literally iron-bow) which is the modern Pima’s name for the white man’s gun, and it was translated as gun by my interpreter. But iron and guns were both unknown to ancient Pimas, therefore this term must have been first used by some seeneeyawkum after the white man came, who thought a gun more appropriate than a bow for the sun’s shooting.

How much has been lost by forgetfulness we can never know; but at least I found that the meaning of many ancient words had disappeared, that the mystic meaning of the highly symbolic speeches seemed all gone, and I felt certain that the last part of the Story of the Gambler’s War had been lost by forgetting; for it stops short with the pre- liminary speeches, instead of going on with a detailed account of the battles as does the Story of Paht-ahn-kum’s war.

Another proof that these tales were changed by different narrators is afforded by the variants of some of them published by Emory, Grossman, Cook, and other writers about the Pimas.

As to the mystic meaning I can only guess. The mystic number four, so constantly used, probably refers to the four cardinal points, but my Indians seemed not aware of this. In the stories, West is black, East is white or light, South is blue, North is yellow, and Above is green. Of course the west is black because there night swallows up the sun, and the east is light because it gives the sun, but why south is blue and north is yellow I do not know. But south is the nearest way to the ocean, and as in one story the word ocean seems used in place of south, I infer the blue color was derived from that. And the desert lying north of the ocean may suggest the desert tint, yellow, as the color of the north. As to the sky being green, I find this in my journal: “August 29-Last evening, after sunset, there were the most wonderful sky effects-there was a line of light clouds across the sky, in the west, about half way up to the zenith, and suddenly the white part of these was washed over, as tho by a paint brush, with a strong but delicate pea-green, while under this spread a mist or haze of dainty pink, changing to a rich, delicate mauve. Lasted quar- ter of an hour or more. Never saw anything like it in nature before.” Again, on September 6, I saw nearly the same phenomenon. The green was very strong and vivid, and could not fail to attract an Indian’s eye, and something of the sort, I fancy, made him make the strange choice of green for the sky color.

Those who like to compare myths and folktales and ancient scriptures will find a rich field here. And the in- teresting thing is that these tales come straight from a line of Indians who could neither read nor write nor speak English, therefore adulteration by white man’s literature seems improbable.

As to the literary merit of these tales, after all that is lost by a double interpretation, I consider it still very high. You must come to them as a little child, for they are intensely child-like, and to expect them to be like a white man’s narrative is absurd. But they are sketched in such clear, bold lines, with such a sure touch and delicate expressive- ness of salient points; there are such close-fitting, shrewd bits of human nature; such real yet startling touches of poetry in metaphor; such fertile and altogether Indian imagination in plot and incident, that the interest never fails. No two stories are alike, and if surprise is a literary charm of high value, and I think it is, then these tales are certainly charming, for they constantly bring surprise.

And the, poetry, in Eeeetoy’s speech for example, is so rich and strong; and in such parts as the story of the Nah-vah-choo the mysticism seems to challenge one like a riddle.

When these old tales were told with all proper ceremony and respect, they were told on four successive nights. This could not be in the giving of them to me, for many practical reasons, but I have endeavored to give them that form for my reader and hence the title of my book. But I did not discover how many or what ones were told on any one night, so my division is arbitrary, and only aims at reasonable equality. The naming, too, of the different stories is try own, for the old man did not appear to have any set names for them. I fancy the old man was rusty and out of practice, and forgot some of the tales in their proper sequence, and brought them in afterward as they recurred to him.. For instance, the story of Tcheu-nas-set Seeven’s singing away another chief ’s wives evidently belongs among the early stories of the vahahkkee people, and before the account of his death, when the vahahkkees were destroyed. But I have given the stories in the order in which they were told to me, leaving all responsibility on the old see- neeyawkum’s shoulders.

I lived a little more than two months with these Indians, collecting these stories, enjoying their kindly hospitality, living as they lived, eating their food, riding their ponies, sleeping on their roofs under the splendid Arizona stars.

I shall never forget that day, before I left, when Ed and I saddled our ponies in the early morning and rode twenty milts to the Casa Grande ruins. On the way we crossed the dry bed of the Gila; and passed thru the Agen- cy village of Sacaton and the village of Blackwater; skirting the Maricopa Slaughter mountains, where once some unfortunate Maricopias were waylaid and massacred by a band of Apaches, almost in sight of Sacaton. The Casa Grande ruins are imposing enough, but sadly belittled in effect by the well-meant roof which the government has erected over them to preserve them. This kills all the poetry and gives them the ludicrous aspect of a museum spec- imen. Had the old walls been skillfully capped with a waterproof cement and the walls coated with some weath- erproof and transparent wash, all necessary security could have been effected with perhaps less expense than this absurd roof, and all the romance of impression preserved. Let us hope the genial and manly young custodian, Mr. Frank Pinckly, to whose warm-hearted hospitality and that of his parents I owe grateful thanks, will consider this suggestion favorably and earn the blessing of future travellers. A storm broke on us while we were at the ruins, and riding home that evening we found the Gila flooded. I shall always remember how its muddy torrent looked to me, plunging along at my feet, where that morning I had crossed dry shod; its yellow waves shot with blood-red reflec- tions from the last colors of sunset.

“You better see that Pinto’s cinch is tight, or she may try to get you off in the river,” warned Ed, in my ear, as he jumped off to cinch. up “Georgie.”

It was always exciting to me to ford the treacherous Gila, the tawny waters were so sweeping, and the ponies plunged so when their feet felt the quicksands, but we got across all right, and galloped home on the slippery, mud- dy roads.

When I left these people it was with a genuine regard for their virtues. I found them in the main kind, honest, simple-minded, industrious, surprisingly clean, considering their obstacles of scant water and ever-present dust., and the calmest tempered people I have ever known.

I remember the second day of my stay we were going to ride to the Casa Blanca ruins. In watering the ponies at the well, “Georgie’s” loosened saddle turned and swung under his belly. Such bucking and frantic kicking as that half-broken colt indulged in for a few moments would have made a congress of cow-boys applaud, and when it was over the beautiful colt stood exhausted on the far side of a twenty acre field, with the saddle fragments somewhere between. Now to poor Indians the loss of a saddle is not small, and I fancy most frontiersmen, under the provo- cation, would have made the air blue with oaths, but Ed only sadly said: “I’m afraid that spoils Georgie,” and the stepfather laughed and started patiently out on the trail of the colt “to save the pieces,” while the mother took one of her bowl-shaped Pima baskets, with beans in it, and coaxed the colt till she caught him. Then he was patted and soothed and fed with sugar, the saddle patched up and replaced, and we rode eighteen miles that day and never another mishap. And from first to last never a harsh or complaining word.

I at no time encountered a beggar among the Pimas, and tho they were mostly very poor I had not a pin’s worth stolen. I never heard an oath, or saw a brutal or violent act, or a child slapped or scolded, or a woman treated with disrespect or tyranny, nor any drunkenness or cruelty to animals. Perhaps I was especially fortunate, but I can only speak of what I saw. Their self-respect and serenity continually aroused my admiration.

I must say that they appeared to me to excel any average white neighborhood in good behavior.

It is a strange land, that in which the Pimas dwell; a desert overgrown with strange soft-tinted weeds, “salt weeds,” pink, red, green, gray, blue, purple; the rich-green yellow-flowering greasewood; odd cacti, and all manner of thornbearing bushes. The soil is inexhaustibly rich, were there water enough, but the white people, settling above the Indians, on the Gila, have so withdrawn the water that crop failures from lack of sufficient irrigation are the rule, now, instead of the exception, and the once ever-flowing Gila is more often a dry channel, as sun-baked as the desert around it.

All around their valley, and rising here and there from the plain, are low volcanic peaks, mere dead masses of rock except where in places a giant cactus stands candelabra-like among the slopes of stone. About the feet of these mountains, and along the channels where the torrents rush down in times of rain, are weird forests of desert growths, mesquite, cat-claw, flat-beans, screw-beans, greasewood, giant-cactus, cane-cactus, white-cactus, chol- la-cactus, and a host of others, almost everything bristling with innumerable thorns.

On this strange pasture of weed and thorn the Indian’s ponies & his few cattle graze.

Here in summer the sun beats down till the mercury registers 118 to 120 degrees in the shade, and dust storms & dust whirlwinds travel over the burning plain.

Stories of the First night

The Traditions of the Pimas

The old man, Comalk Hawk-Kih, (Thin Buckskin) began by saying that these were stories which he used to hear his father tell, they being handed down from father to son, and that when he was little he did not pay much attention, but when he grew older he determined to learn them, and asked his father to teach him, which his father did, and now he knew them all.

The Story of Creation

In the beginning there was no earth, no water—nothing. There was only a Person, Juh-wert-a-Mah-kai (The Doctor of the Earth).

He just floated, for there was no place for him to stand upon. There was no sun, no light, and he just floated about in the darkness, which was Darkness itself.

He wandered around in the nowhere till he thought he had wandered enough. Then he rubbed on his breast and rubbed out moah-haht-tack, that is perspiration, or greasy earth. This he rubbed out on the palm of his hand and held out. It tipped over three times, but the fourth, time it staid straight in the middle of the air and there it remains now as the world.

The first bush he created was the greasewood bush.

And he made ants, little tiny ants, to live on that bush, on its gum which comes out of its stem.

But these little ants did not do any good, so be created white ants, and these worked and enlarged the earth; and they kept on increasing it, larger and larger, until at last it was big enough for himself to rest on.

Then he created a Person. He made him out of his eye, out of the shadow of his eyes, to assist him, to be like him, and to help him in creating trees and human beings and everything that was to be on the earth.

The name of this being was Noo-ee (the Buzzard).

Nooee was given all power, but he did not do the work he was created for. He did not care to help Juhwerta- mahkai, but let him go by himself.

And so the Doctor of the Earth himself created the mountains and everything that has seed and is good to eat. For if he had created human beings first they would have had nothing to live on.

But after making Nooee and before making the mountains and seed for food, Juhwertamahkai made the sun. In order to make the sun he first made water, and this he placed in a hollow vessel, like an earthen dish (hwas-hah-ah) to harden into something like ice. And this hardened ball he placed in the sky. First he placed it in the North, but it did not work; then he placed it in the West, but it did not work; then he placed it in the South, but it did not work; then he placed it in the East and there it worked as he wanted it to.

And the moon he made in the same way and tried in the same places, with the same results.

But when he made the stars he took the water in his mouth and spurted it up into the sky. But the first night his stars did not give light enough. So he took the Doctor-stone (diamond), the tone-dum-haw-teh, and smashed it up, and took the pieces and threw them into the sky to mix with the water in the stars, and then there was light enough.

And now Juhwertamahkai, rubbed again on his breast, and from the substance he obtained there made two little dolls, and these he laid on the earth. And they were human beings, man and woman.

And now for a time the people increased till they filled the earth. For the first parents were perfect, and there was no sickness and no death. But when the earth was full, then there was nothing to eat, so they killed and ate each other.

But Juhwertamahkai did not like the way his people acted, to kill and eat each other, and so he let the sky fail to kill them. But when the sky dropped he, himself, took a staff and broke a hole thru, thru which he and Nooee emerged and escaped, leaving behind them all the people dead.

And Juhwertamahkai, being now on the top of this fallen sky, again made a man and a woman, in the same way as before. But this man and woman became grey when old, and their children became grey still younger, and their children became grey younger still, and so on till the babies were gray in their cradles.

And Juhwertamahkai, who had made a new earth and sky, just as there had been before, did not like his people becoming grey in their cradles, so he let the sky fall on them again, and again made a hole and escaped, with Nooee, as before.

And Juhwertamahkai, on top of this second sky, again made a new heaven and a new earth, just as he had done before, and new people.

But these new people made a vice of smoking. Before human beings had never smoked till they were old, but now they smoked younger, and each generation still younger, till the infants wanted to smoke in their cradles.

And Juhwertamahkai did not like this, and let the sky fall again, and created everything new again in the same way, and this time he created the earth as it is now.

But at first the whole slope of the world was westward, and tho there were peaks rising from this slope there were no true valleys, and all the water that fell ran away and there was no water for the people to drink. So Juhwer- tamahkai sent Nooee to fly around among the mountains, and over the earth, to cut valleys with his wings, so that the water could be caught and distributed and there might be enough for the people to drink.

Now the sun was male and the moon was female and they met once a month. And the moon became a mother and went to a mountain called Tahs-my-et-tahn Toe-ahk (sun striking mountain) and there was born her baby. But she had duties to attend to, to turn around and give light, so she made a place for the child by tramping down the weedy bushes and there left it. And the child, having no milk, was nourished on the earth.

And this child was the coyote, and as he grew he went out to walk and in his walk came to the house of Juhwer- tamahkai and Nooee, where they lived.

And when he came there Juhwertamahkai knew him and called him Toe-hahvs, because he was laid on the weedy bushes of that name.

But now out of the North came another powerful personage, who has two names, See-ur-huh and Ee-ee-toy.

Now Seeurhuh means older brother, and when this personage came to Juhwertamahkai, Nooee and Toehahvs he called them his younger brothers. But they claimed to have been here first, and to be older than he, and there was a dispute between them. But finally, because he insisted so strongly, and just to please him, they let him be called older brother.

Juhwerta Mahkai’s Song Of Creation

Juhwerta mahkai made the world—

Come and see it and make it useful!

He made it round—

Come and see it and make it useful!

Notes on “The Story of Creation”

The idea of creating the earth from the perspiration and waste cuticle of the Creator is, I believe, original. The local touch in making the greasewood bush the first vegetation is very strong.

In the tipping over of the earth three times, and its standing right the fourth time, we are introduced to the first of the mystic fours in which the whole scheme of the stories is cast. Almost everything is done four times before finished.

The peculiar Indian idea of type-animals, the immortal and supernatural representatives of their respective an- imal tribes, appears in Nooee and Toehahvs, and here again the local color is rich and strong in making the buzzard and the coyote, the most common and striking animals of the desert, the particular aides on the staff of the Creator.

Might not the creation of Nooee out of the shadow of the eyes of the Doctor of the Earth be a poetical allusion to the flying shadow of the buzzard on the sun-bright desert?

In the creation of sun and moon we find the mystic four referred to the four corners of the universe, North, South, East and West, and this, I am persuaded, is really the origin of its sacred significance, for most religions find root and source in astronomy.

In the dropping of the sky appears the old idea of its solid character.

In the “slope of the world to the Westward” there is something curiously significant when we remember that both the Gila and Salt Rivers flow generally westward.

Nooee cuts the valleys with his wings. It would almost appear that Nooee was Juhwertamahkai’s agent in the air and sky, Toehahvs on earth.

The night-prowling coyote is appropriately and poetically mothered by the moon.

And here appears Eeeetoy, the most active and mysterious personality in Piman mythology. Out of the North, apparently self-existent, but little inferior in power to Juhwertamahkai, and claiming greater age, he appears, by pure “bluff ” and persistent push and wheedling, to have induced the really more powerful, but good-natured and rather lazy Juhwertamahkai to give over most of the real work and government of the world to him. In convers- ing with Harry Azul, the head chief ’s son, at Sacaton, I found he regarded Eeeetoy and Juhwertamahki as but two names for the same. And indeed it is hard to fix Eeeetoy’s place or power.

The Story of the Flood

Now Seeurhuh was very powerful, like Juhwerta Mahkai, and as he took up his residence with them, as one of them, he did many wonderful things which pleased Juhwerta Mahkai, who liked to watch him.

And after doing many marvelous things he, too, made a man.

And to this man whom he had made, Seeurhuh (whose other name was Ee-ee-toy) gave a bow & arrows, and guarded his arm against the bow string by a piece of wild-cat skin, and pierced his ears & made ear-rings for him, like turquoises to look at, from the leaves of the weed called quah-wool. And this man was the most beautiful man yet made.

And Ee-ee-toy told this young man, who was just of marriageable age, to look around and see if he could find any young girl in the villages that would suit him and, if he found her, to see her relatives and see if they were will- ing he should marry her.

And the beautiful young man did this, and found a girl that pleased him, and told her family of his wish, and they accepted him, and he married her.

And the names of both these are now forgotten and unknown.

And when they were married Ee-ee-toy, foreseeing what would happen, went & gathered the gum of the grease- wood tree.

Here the narrative states, with far too much plainness of circumstantial detail for popular reading, that this young man married a great many wives in rapid succession, abandoning the last one with each new one wedded, and had children with abnormal, even uncanny swiftness, for which the wives were blamed and for which suspicion they were thus heartlessly divorced. Because of this, Juhwerta Mahkai and Ee-ee-toy foresaw that nature would be convulsed and a great flood would come to cover the world. And then the narrative goes on to say:

Now there was a doctor who lived down toward the sunset whose name was Vahk-lohv Mahkai, or South Doctor, who had a beautiful daughter. And when his daughter heard of this young man and what had happened to his wives she was afraid and cried every day. And when her fattier saw her crying he asked her what was the matter? was she sick? And when she had told him what she was afraid of, for every one knew and was talking of this thing, he said yes, he knew it was true, but she ought not to be afraid, for there was happiness for a woman in marriage and the mothering of children.

And it took many years for the young man to marry all these wives, and have all these children, and all this time Ee-ee-toy was busy making a great vessel of the gum he had gathered from the grease bushes, a sort of olla which could be closed up, which would keep back water. And while he was making this he talked over the reasons for it with Juhwerta Mahkai, Nooee, and Toehahvs, that it was because there was a great flood coming.

And several birds heard them talking thus—the woodpecker, Hick-o-vick; the humming-bird, Vee-pis-mahl; a little bird named Gee-ee-sop, and another called Quota-veech.

Eeeetoy said he would escape the flood by getting into the vessel he was making from the gum of the grease bushes or ser-quoy.

And Juhwerta Mahkai said he would get into his staff, or walking stick, and float about. And Toehahvs said he would get into a cane-tube.

And the little birds said the water would not reach the sky, so they would fly up there and hang on by their bills till it was over.

And Nooee, the buzzard, the powerful, said he did not care if the flood did reach the sky, for he could find a way to break thru.

Now Ee-ee-toy was envious, and anxious to get ahead of Juhwerta Mahkai and get more fame for his wonderful deeds, but Juhwerta Mahkai, though really the strongest, was generous and from kindness and for relationship sake let Ee-ee-toy have the best of it.

And the young girl, the doctor’s daughter, kept on crying, fearing the young man, feeling him ever coming nearer, and her father kept on reassuring her, telling her it would be all right, but at last, out of pity for her fears & tears, he told her to go and get him the little tuft of the finest thorns on the top of the white cactus, the haht-sahn- kahm, and bring to him.

And her father took the cactus-tuft which she had brought him, and took hair from her head and wound about one end of it, and told her if she would wear this it would protect her. And she consented and wore the cactus-tuft. And he told her to treat the young man right, when he came, & make him broth of corn. And if the young man should eat all the broth, then their plan would fail, but if he left any broth she was to eat that up and then their plan would succeed.

And he told her to be sure and have a bow and arrows above the door of the kee, so that he could take care of the young man.

And after her father had told her this, on that very evening the young man came, and the girl received him kindly, and took his bows & arrows, and put them over the door of the kee, as her father had told her, and made the young man broth of corn and gave it to him to eat.

And he ate only part of it and what was left she ate herself.

And before this her father had told her: “if the young man is wounded by the thorns you wear, in that moment he will become a woman and a mother and you will become a young man.”

And in the night all this came to be, even so, and by day-break the child was crying.

And the old woman ran in and said: “Mossay!” which means an old woman’s grandchild from a daughter.

And the daughter, that had been, said: “It is not your moss, it is your cah-um-maht,” that is an old woman’s grandchild from a son.

And then the old man ran in and said: “Bah-ahm-ah-dah!” that is an old man’s grandchild from a daughter, but his daughter said: “It is not your bah-ahm-maht, but it is your voss-ahm-maht,” which is an old man’s grandchild from a son.

And early in the morning this young man (that had been, but who was now a woman & a mother) made a wawl-kote, a carrier, or cradle, for the baby and took the trail back home.

And Juhwerta Mahkai told his neighbors of what was coming, this young man who had changed into a woman and a mother and was bringing a baby born from himself, and that when he arrived wonderful things would hap- pen & springs would gush forth from under every tree and on every mountain.

And the young man-woman came back and by the time of his return Ee-ee-toy had finished his vessel and had placed therein seeds & everything that is in the world.

And the young man-woman, when he came to his old home, placed his baby in the bushes and left it, going in without it, but Ee-ee-toy turned around and looked at him and knew him, for he did not wear a woman’s dress, and said to him: “Where is my Bahahmmaht? Bring it to me. I want to see it. It is a joy for an old man to see his grandchild.

I have sat here in my house and watched your going, and all that has happened you, and foreseen some one would send you back in shame, although I did not like to think there was anyone more powerful than I. But never mind, he who has beaten us will see what will happen.”

And when the young man-woman went to get his baby, Ee-ee-toy got into his vessel, and built a fire on the hearth he had placed therein, and sealed it up.

And the young man-woman found his baby crying, and the tears from it were all over the ground, around. And when he stooped over to pick up his child he turned into a sand-snipe, and the baby turned into a little teeter-snipe. And then that came true which Juhwerta Mahkai had said, that water would gush out from under every tree & on every mountain; and the people when they saw it, and knew that a flood was coming, ram to Juhwerta Mahkai; and he took his staff and made a hole in the earth and let all those thru who had come to him, but the rest were drowned.

Then Juhwerta Mahkai got into his walking stick & floated, and Toehahvs got into his tube of cane and floated, but Ee-ee-toy’s vessel was heavy & big and remained until the flood was much deeper before it could float.

And the people who were left out fled to the mountains; to the mountains called Gah-kote-kih (Superstition Mts.) for they were living in the plains between Gahkotekih and Cheoffskawmack (Tall Gray Mountain.)

And there was a powerful man among these people, a doctor (mahkai), who set a mark on the mountain side and said the water would not rise above it.

And the people believed him and camped just beyond the mark; but the water came on and they had to go higher. And this happened four times.

And the mahkai did this to help his people, and also used power to raise the mountain, but at last he saw all was to be a failure. And he called the people and asked them all to come close together, and he took his doctor-stone (mahkai-haw-teh) which is called Tonedumhawteh or Stone-of-Light, and held it in the palm of his hand and struck it hard with his other hand, and it thundered so loud that all the people were frightened and they were all turned into stone.

And the little birds, the woodpecker, Hickovick; the humming-bird, Veepismahl; the little bird named Ge-ee- sop, and the other called Quotaveech, all flew up to the sky and hung on by their bills, but Nooee still floated in the air and intended to keep on the wing unless the floods reached the heavens.

But Juhwerta Mahkai, Ee-ee-toy and Toehahvs floated around on the water and drifted to the west and did not know where they were.

And the flood rose higher until it reached the woodpecker’s tail, and you can see the marks to this day.

And Quotaveech was cold and cried so loud that the other birds pulled off their feathers and built him a nest up there so he could keep warm. And when Quotaveech was warm he quit crying.

And then the little birds sang, for they had power to make the water go down by singing, and as they sang the waters gradually receded.

But the others still floated around.

When the land began to appear Juhwerta Mahkai and Toehahvs got out, but Ee-ee-toy had to wait for his house to warm up, for he had built a fire to warm his vessel enough for him to unseal it.

When it was warm enough he unsealed it, but when he looked out he saw the water still running & he got back and sealed himself in again.

And after waiting a while he unsealed his vessel again, and seeing dry land enough he got out.

And Juhwerta Mahkai went south and Toehahvs went west, and Ee-ee-toy went northward. And as they did not know where they were they missed each other, and passed each other unseen, but afterward saw each other’s tracks, and then turned back and shouted, but wandered from the track, and again passed unseen. And this happened four times.

And the fourth time Juhwerta Mahkai and Ee-ee-toy met, but Toehahvs had passed already.

And when they met, Ee-ee-toy said to Juhwerta Mahkai “My younger brother!” but Juhwerta Mahkai greeted him as younger brother & claimed to have come out first. Then Ee-ee-toy said again: “I came out first and you can see the water marks on my body.” But Juhwerta Mahkai replied: “I came out first and also have the water marks on my person to prove it.”

But Ee-ee-toy so insisted that he was the eldest that Juhwerta Mahkai, just to please him, gave him his way and let him be considered the elder.

And then they turned westward and yelled to find Toehahvs, for they remembered to have seen his tracks, and they kept on yelling till he heard them. And when Toehahvs saw them he called them his younger brothers, and they called him younger brother. And this dispute continued till Ee-ee-toy again got the best of it, and although really the younger brother was admitted by the others to be Seeurhuh, or the elder.

And the birds came down from the sky and again there was a dispute about the relationship, but Ee-ee-toy again got the best of them all.

But Quotaveech staid up in the sky because he had a comfortable nest there, and they called him Vee-ick-koss- kum Mahkai, the Feather-Nest Doctor.

And they wanted to find the middle, the navel of the earth, and they sent Veeppismahl, the humming bird, to the west, and Hickovick, the woodpecker, to the east, and all the others stood and waited for them at the starting place. And Veepismahl & Hickovick were to go as far as they could, to the edge of the world, and then return to find the middle of the earth by their meeting. But Hickovick flew a little faster and got there first, and so when they met they found it was not the middle, and they parted & started again, but this time they changed places and Hickovick went westward and Veepismahl went east.

And this time Veepismahl was the faster, and Hickovick was late, and the judges thought their place of meeting was a little east of the center so they all went a little way west. Ee-ee-toy, Juhwerta Mahkai and Toehahvs stood there and sent the birds out once more, and this time Hickovick went eastward again, and Veepismahl went west. And Hickovick flew faster and arrived there first. And they said : “This is not the middle. It is a little way west yet.”

And so they moved a little way, and again the birds were sent forth, and this time Hickovick went west and Veepismahl went east. And when the birds returned they met where the others stood and all cried “This is the Hick, the Navel of the World!”

And they stood there because there was no dry place yet for them to sit down upon; and Ee-eetoy rubbed upon his breast and took from his bosom the smallest ants, the O-auf-taw-ton, and threw them upon the ground, and they worked there and threw up little hills; and this earth was dry. And so they sat down.

But the: water was still running in the valleys, and Ee-ee-toy took a hair from his head & made it into a snake— Vuck-vahmuht. And with this snake he pushed the waters south, but the head of the snake was left lying to the west and his tail to the east.

But there was more water, and Ee-ee-toy took another hair from his head and made another snake, and with this snake pushed the rest of the water north. And the head of this snake was left to the east and his tail to the west. So the head of each snake was left lying with the tail of the other.

And the snake that has his tail to the east, in the morning will shake up his tail to start the morning wind to wake the people and tell them to think of their dreams.

And the snake that has his tail to the west, in the evening will shake up his tail to start the cool wind to tell the people it is time to go in and make the fires & be comfortable.

And they said: “We will make dolls, but we will not let each other see them until they are finished.”

And Ee-ee-toy sat facing the west, and Toehahvs facing the south, and Juhwerta Mahkai facing the east.

And the earth was still damp and they took clay and began to make dolls. And Ee-ee-toy made the best. But Juhwerta Mahkai did not make good ones, because he remembered some of his people had escaped the flood thru a hole in the earth, and he intended to visit them and he did not want to make anything better than they were to take the place of them. And Toehahvs made the poorest of all.

Then Ee-ee-toy asked them if they were ready, and they all said yes, and then they turned about and showed each other the dolls they had made.

And Ee-ee-toy asked Juhwerta Mahkai why he had made such queer dolls. “This one,” he said, “is not right, for you have made him without any sitting-down parts, and how can he get rid of the waste of what he eats?”

But Juhwerta Mahkai said: “He will not need to eat, he can just smell the smell of what is cooked.”

Then Ee-ee-toy asked again: “Why did you make this doll with only one leg—how can he run?” But Juh- werta Mahkai replied: “He will not need to run; he can just hop around.”

Then Ee-ee-toy asked Toehahvs why he had made a doll with webs between his fingers and toes—”How can he point directions?” But Toehahvs said he had made these dolls so for good purpose, for if anybody gave them small seeds they would not slip between their fingers, and they could use the webs for dippers to drink with.

And Ee-ee-toy held up his dolls and said: “These are the best of all, and I want you to make more like them.” And he took Toehahv’s dolls and threw them into the water and they became ducks & beavers. And he took Juhwer- ta Mahkai’s dolls and threw them away and they all broke to pieces and were nothing.

And Juhwerta Mahkai was angry at this and began to sink into the ground; and took his stick and hooked it into the sky and pulled the sky down while he was sinking. But Ee-ee-toy spread his hand over his dolls, and held up the sky, and seeing that Juhwerta Mahkai was sinking into the earth he sprang and tried to hold him & cried, “Man, what are you doing? Are you going to leave me and my people here alone?”

But Juhwerta Mahkai slipped through his hands, leaving in them only the waste & excretion of his skin. And that is how there is sickness & death among us.

And Ee-ee-toy, when Juhwerta Mahkai escaped him, went around swinging his hands & saying: “I never thought all this impurity would come upon my people!” and the swinging of his hands scattered disease over all the earth. And he washed himself in a pool or pond and the impurities remaining in the water are the source of the malarias and all the diseases of dampness.

And Ee-ee-toy and Toehahvs built a house for their dolls a little way off, and Ee-ee-toy sent Toehahvs to listen if they were yet talking. And the Aw-up, (the Apaches) were the first ones that talked. And Ee-ee-toy said: “I never meant to have those Apaches talk first, I would rather have had the Aw-aw-tam, the Good People, speak first. “

But he said: “It is all right. I will give them strength, that they stand the cold & all hardships.” And all the differ- ent people that they had made talked, one after the other, but the Awawtam talked last.

And they all took to playing together, and in their play they kicked each other as the Maricopas do in sport to this day; but the Apaches got angry and said: “We will leave you and go into the mountains and eat what we can get, but we will dream good dreams and be just as happy as you with all your good things to eat.”

And some of the people took up their residence on the Gila, and some went west to the Rio Colorado. And those who builded vahahkkees, or houses out of adobe and stones, lived in the valley of the Gila, between the mountains which are there now.

Juhwerta Mahkai’s Song Before The Flood

My poor people,

Who will see,

Who will see

This water which will moisten the earth!

The Song Of Superstition Mountains

We are destroyed!

By my stone we are destroyed!

We are rightly turned into stone.

Ee-Ee-Toy’s Song When He Made The World Serpents

I know what to do;

I am going to move the water both ways.

Notes on “The Story of the Flood”

In the Story of the Flood we are introduced to Indian marriage. Among the Pimas it was a very simple affair. There was no ceremony whatever. The lover usually selected a relative, who went with him to the parents of the girl and asked the father to permit the lover to marry her. Presents were seldom given unless a very old man desired a young bride. The girl was consulted and her consent was essential, her refusal final. If, however, all parties were satisfied, she went at once with her husband as his wife. If either party became dissatisfied, separation at once constituted divorce and either could leave the other. A widow or divorced woman, if courted by another suitor, was approached directly, with no intervention of relatives. Of course, on these terms there were many separations, yet all accounts agree that there was a good deal of fidelity and many life-long unions and cases of strong affection.

Polygamy was not unknown.

Grossman says that the wife was the slave of the husband, but it is difficult to see how a woman, free at any moment to divorce herself without disgrace or coercion, could be properly regarded as a slave. Certainly the men appear always to have done a large part of the hard work, and as far as I could see the women were remarkably equal and independent and respectfully treated, as such a system would naturally bring about. A man would be a fool to ill-treat a woman, whose love or services were valuable to him, if at any moment of discontent she could leave him, perhaps for a rival. The chances are that he would constantly endeavor to hold her allegiance by special kindness and favors.

But today legal marriage is replacing the old system.

So far as I saw the Pimas were very harmonious and kindly in family life.

The birds, gee-ee-sop and quotaveech, were pointed out to me by the Pimas, and as near as I could tell quotaveech was Bendire’s thrasher, or perhaps the curve-bill thrasher. It has a very sweet but timid song. I did not succeed in identifying gee-ee-sop, but find these entries about him in my journal: “Aug. 5—I saw a little bird which I suppose to be a gee-ee-sop in a mezquite today, smaller and more slender than a vireo, but like one in action, but the tail longer and carried more like a brown thrasher, nearly white below, dark, leaden gray above, top of head and tail black.” Again on Sept. 1: “What a dear little bird the gee-ee-sop is! Two of them in the oas-juh-wert-pot tree were looking at me a few minutes back. Dark slate-blue above and nearly white below, with beady black eyes and black, lively tails, tipped with white, they are very pretty, tame and confiding.”

The faith of the Aw-aw-tam in witchcraft appears first in this story and afterwards is conspicuous in nearly all. Almost all diseases they supposed were caused by bewitching, and it was the chief business of the medicine-men to find out who or what had caused the bewitching. Sometimes people were accused and murders followed. This was the darkest spot in Piman life. Generally, however, some animal or inanimate object was identified. Grossman’s account in the Smithsonian Report for 1871 is interesting. In the stories, however, witchcraft appears usually as the ability of the mahkai to work transformations in himself or others, in true old fairy-tale style.

Superstition Mountain derives its name from this story, It is a very beautiful and impressive mountain, with terraces of cliffs, marking perhaps the successive pausing places of the fugitives, and the huddled rocks on the top represent their petrified forms. Some of the older Indians still fear to go up into this mountain, lest a like fate befall them.

What beautiful poetic touches are the wetting of the woodpecker’s tail, and the singing of the little birds to subdue the angry waters.

The resemblances to Genesis will of course be noted by all in these two first stories. Yet after all they are few and slight in any matter of detail.

In Ee-ee-toy’s serpents, that pushed back the waters, there is a strong reminder of the Norse Midgard Serpent.

The making of the dolls in this story is one of the prettiest and most amusing spots in the traditions.

The waste and perspiration of Juhwerta Mahkai’s skin again comes into play, but this time as a malign force instead of a beneficent one. It would also appear from this that the more intelligent Pimas had a glimmering of the fact that there were other causes than witchcraft for disease.

I have generally used the word Aw-aw-tam (Good People, or People of Peace) as synonymous with Pima, but it is sometimes used to embrace all Indians of the Piman stock and may be so understood in this story.

And perhaps this is as good a place as any to say a few descriptive words about these Pimas of Arizona, and their allies, who have from prehistoric times inhabited what the old Spanish historian, Clavigero, called “Pimeria,” that is, the valleys of the Gila and Salt Rivers.

Their faces seemed to me to be of almost Caucasian regularity and rather of an English or Dutch cast, that is rather heavily moulded. The forehead is vertical and inclined to be square; and the chin, broad, heavy and full, comes out well to its line. The nose is straight, or a little irregular, or rounded, at the end, but not often very aq- uiline, never flat or wide-nostriled. The mouth is large but well shaped, with short, white, remarkably even teeth, seldom showing any canine projection. The whole face is a little heavy and square, but the cheek bones are not especially prominent. The eyes are level, frank and direct in glance, with long lashes and strong black brows. In the babies a slight uptilt to the eye is sometimes’ seen, like a Japanese, which indeed the babies suggest. The head of almost all adults is well-balanced and finely poised on a good neck.

Another type possesses more of what we call the Indian feature. The forehead retreats somewhat, so does the chin, while the upper lip is larger, longer, more convex and the nose, above is more aquiline, with wider nostrils. Consequently this face in profile is more convex thru out. The cheek-bones are much more prominent, too, and the head not generally so well-balanced and proportional.

While I have seen no striking beauty I believe the average good looks is greater than among white men, taken as they come.

The women as a rule, however, do not carry themselves gracefully, are apt to be too broad, fat and dumpy in figure, with too large waists, and often loose, ungracefully-moving hips. This deformity of the hips, for it almost amounts to that, I observe among Italian peasant women, too, and some negresses, and, I take it, is caused by car- rying too heavy loads on the head at too early an age. There seems to be a settling down of the body into the pelvis, with a loose alternate motion of the hips. There are exceptions, of course, and I have seen those of stately figure and fine carriage Sometimes the loose-hip motion appears in a man.

A slight tattooing appears on almost all Pima faces not of the last generation. In the women this consists of two blue lines running down from each corner of the mouth, under the chin, crossing, at the start, the lower lip, and a single blue line running back from the outer angle of each eye to the hair.

In the men it is usually a single zigzag blue line across the forehead.

The pigment used is charcoal.

The men are generally erect and of good figure, with good chests and rather heavy shoulders, the legs often a little bowed. Strange to say I never saw one who walked “Pigeon-toed.” All turned the toes out like white men. The hands are often small and almost always well-shaped; and the feet of good shape, too, not over large, with a well- arched instep.

Emory and his comrades found the Pimas wearing a kind of breech-cloth and a cotton serape only for gar- ments; the women wearing only a serape tied around the waist and falling to the knee, being otherwise nude. Today the average male Pima dresses like a white workman, in hat, shirt, trousers and perhaps shoes, and his wife or daughter wears a single print gown, rather loose at the waist and ruffled at the bottom, which reaches only to the ankles. Both sexes are commonly barefooted, but the old sandals, once universal, are still often seen. These gah-kai- gey-aht-kum-soosk, or string-shoes, as the word means, were made in several different ways, and often projected somewhat around the foot as a protection against the frequent and formidable thorns of the country.

Sometimes a wilder or older Indian will be seen, even now, with only a breech-cloth on, and some apology for a garment on his shoulders.

The skin is often of a very beautiful rich red-bronze tint, or perhaps more like old mahogany.

Except the tattooing both sexes are remarkable for their almost entire absence of any marked adornment or ornament of person. Even a finger-ring, or a ribbon on the hair, is not common, and the profuse bead-work and embroidery of the other tribes is never seen.

The exceedingly thick and intensely black hair was formerly worn very long, even to the waist, being banged off just over the eyes of the women and over the eyes and ears of the men and allowed to hang perfectly loose. But the women seldom wore: as long hair as the men. This long hair is still sometimes seen and is exceedingly pictur- esque, especially on horseback, and it is a great pity so sightly a fashion should ever die out. I have seen Maricopas roll theirs in ringlets. Sometimes the men braided the hair into a cue, or looped up the ends with a fillet. But the Government discourages long and loose hair, and now most men cut it short, and women part theirs and braid it. Like all Indians, the men have scant beards, and the few whiskers that grow are shaved clean or resolutely pinched off with an old knife or pulled out by tweezers.

Their hair appears to turn gray as early as ours, tho I saw no baldness except on one individual. In old times (and even now to some extent) the hair was dressed with a mixture of mud and mezquite gum, at times, which was left on long enough for the desired effect and then thoroly washed off. This cleansed it and made it glossy and the gum dyed the gray hair quite a lasting, jet black, tho several applications might be needed.

Women still carry their ollas and other burdens on their heads and are exceedingly strong and expert in the art, balancing great and awkward weights with admirable dexterity.

The convenient and even beautiful gyih-haw (a word very difficult to pronounce correctly), or burden basket, of the old time Pima woman, seems to have entirely disappeared. It was not only picturesque, but an exceedingly useful utensil.

The wawl-kote, or carrying-cradle for the baby, is obsolete, too, now. Strange to say, tho in shape like most pap- poose-cradles, it was carried poised on the head, instead of slung on the back in the usual way.

The Pimas are fond of conversation and often come together in the evening and have long talks. Their voices are low, rapid, soft and very pleasant and they laugh, smile and joke a great deal. They are remarkable for calmness and evenness of temper and the expression of the face is nearly always intelligent, frank, and good-natured.

They are noticeably devoid of hurry, worry, irritability or nervousness.

Unlike most Indians these have not been removed from the soil of their fathers and, indeed, such an act would have been cruelly unjust, for, true to their name, the Pimas have maintained an unbroken peace with the whites.

Lieutenant Colonel W. H. Emory, of “The Army of the West,” who visited them in 1846, was perhaps the first American to observe and describe these people. He says: “Both nations (Pimas and Maricopas) cherished an aver- sion to war and a profound attachment to all the peaceful pursuits of life. This predilection arose from no incapacity for war, for they were at all times able and willing to keep the Apaches, whose hands are raised against all other people, at a respectful distance, and prevent depredations by those mountain robbers who held Chihuahua, Sonora and a part of Durango in a condition approaching almost to tributary provinces.”

As observed by Emory and the other officers of the “Army of the West” they were an agricultural people rais- ing at that time “cotton, wheat, maize, beans, pumpkins and water melons.” I found them raising all these in 1903, except cotton, and I think he might have added to his list, peppers, gourds, tobacco and the pea called cah-lay-vahs.

Emory says: “We were at once impressed with the beauty, order, and disposition of the arrangements made for irrigating the land . . . the fields are subdivided by ridges of earth into rectangles of about 200×100 feet, for the con- venience of irrigating. The fences are of sticks, matted with willow and mezquite.” I found this still comparatively correct. The fields are still irrigated by acequias or ditches from the Gila, and still fenced by forks of trees set closely in the ground and reinforced with branches of thorn or barbed wire. Some of these fences with their antler-like effect of tops are very picturesque.

From the description given by Emory, and Captain A. R. Johnson of the same army, of their kees or winter lodges, they were essentially the same as I found some of them still inhabiting. There is the following entry in my journal: “I have been examining the old kee next door, since the old couple left it. It is quite neatly and systematical- ly made. Four large forks are set in the ground, and these support a square of large poles, covered with other poles, arrow-weeds, chaff and earth, for the roof. The walls are a neat arrangement of small saplings, about 10 inches apart curving up from the ground on a bending slant to the roof, so that the whole structure comes to resemble a turtle-shell or rather an inverted bowl. These side sticks arc connected by three lines of smaller sticks tied across them with withes, all the way around the kee. Against these arrow-weeds are stood, closely and neatly, tops down (perhaps thatched on) and kept in place by three more lines of small sticks, bound on and corresponding to those within. Then the whole structure is plastered over with adobe mud till rain-proof. No window, and only one small door, about 2½ feet square, closed by a slat-work.”

This kee of the Pima was not to his credit. The most friendly must admit it dirty, uncomfortable and unpictur- esque. It was too low to stand erect in, the little fire was made in the center, the smoke escaping at last from the low doorway after trying everywhere else and festooning the ceiling with soot.

The establishment of the Pima was most simple. He sat, ate and slept on the earth, consequently a few mats and blankets, baskets, bowls and pots included his furniture. A large earthen olla, called by the Pimas hah-ah, stood in a triple fork under the shade of the vachtoe and being porous enough to permit a slight evaporation kept the drinking water cool.

The arbor-shed or vachtoe pertains to almost every Piman home and consists of a flat roof of poles and ar- row-weeds supported by stout forks. Sometimes earth is added to the roof to keep off rain. Sometimes the sides are enclosed with a rude wattle work of weeds and bushes, making a grateful shade, admitting air freely; screening those within from view, while permitting vision from within outward in any direction. Sometimes this screen of weeds and bushes, in a circular form, was made without any roof and was then called an o-num. Sometimes after the vachtoe had been inclosed with wattle work the whole structure was plastered over with adobe mud and then became a caws-seen, or storehouse. All these structures were used at times as habitations, but now the Pima is com- ing more and more to the white man’s adobe cottage as a house and home. But the vachtoe, attached or detached, is still a feature of almost every homestead.

Under the vachtoe usually stood the matate, or mill (called by the Pimas mah-choot) which was a large flat or concave stone, below, across which was rubbed an oblong, narrow stone (vee-it-kote), above, to grind the corn or wheat. Other important utensils were a vatcheeho, or wooden trough, for mixing, and a chee-o-pah, or mortar, of wood or stone, for crushing things with a pestle. The nah-dah-kote, or fire-place, was an affair of stones and adobe mud to support the earthern pots for cooking or to support the earthern plates on which the thin cakes of corn or wheat meal were baked. These were what the Mexicans call tortillas. Perhaps the staple food of the Pima even more than corn (hohn) or wheat (payl-koon) is frijole beans—these of two kinds, the white (bah-fih) the brown (mohn). A sort of meal made of parched corn or wheat; ground on the mahchoot and eaten, or perhaps one might say drank, with water and brown sugar (panoche) was the famous pinole, the food carried on war trips when nutrition, light- ness of weight and smallness of bulk were all desired. It has a remarkable power to cool and quench thirst. Taw- mahls, or corn-cakes of ground green corn, wrapped in husks and roasted in the ashes, or boiled, were also favor- ites. Peppers (kaw-aw-kull) were a good deal used for seasoning and relishes.

Today the country of the Pima is very destitute of large game but he adds to the above bill of fare all the small game, especially rabbits, quail and doves, that he can kill. In the old days when the Gila always had water it held fine fish and the Indians caught them with their hands or swept them up on the banks by long chains of willow hurdles or faggots, carried around the fish by waders. I could not learn that they ever had any true fish-nets or fish-hooks; nor any rafts, canoes or other boats. But owing to the frequent necessity of crossing the treacherous Gila the men, and many of the women, were good swimmers.

The Toe-hawn-awh Aw-aw-tam, or Papagoes, whose reservation is in Pima County, near Tucson (and called St. Xavier) are counted “blood brothers” of the Pimas, speak essentially the same language, are on the most cordial terms with them, and are under the same agency.

The Maricopas are a refugee tribe, related to the Yumas, who once threatened them with extermination because of an inter-tribal feud. They were adopted by the Pimas and protected by them, and have ever since lived with them as one people, having however a different language, identical with that of the Yumas.

The Quojatas are a small tribe, of the Piman stock, living south of the Casa Grande.

The total number of Pimas, Papagoes and Maricopas in the U. S. is now estimated at about 8000, the Pimas alone as 4000.

I am not a linguist, or a philologist, and my time was short with these people, and I did not go to any extent into their language, or study its grammar. Their voices were soft and pleasant, and I was continually surprised at the low tones in which they generally conversed and the quickness with which they heard. But their words were most awk- ward to my tongue. There were German sounds, and French sounds, too, I would say, in their language, and there were letters that seemed to disappear as they uttered them, or never to come really forth, and syllables that were swallowed like spoonfuls of hot soup. But I trust that I am substantially correct in the words that I have retained in the stories and that I have written them so that the English reader can pronounce them in a way to be understood.

The accent is generally on the first syllable.

The Story of Ah-Ahn-He-Eat-Toe-Pahk Mah-Mahkai

And there was an orphan named Ah-ahn-he-eat-toe-pahk Mahkai (which means Braided-Feather Doctor) who lived at a place called Two Reservoirs (Go-awk-Vahp-itchee-kee) north of Cheoff-Skawmack, or Tall Gray Mountain.

And his only relative was an old grandmother. And she used to go and get water in earthern vessels, a number of them in her carrying basket. And when she neared home she would call to her grandson, saying: “Come, help me wrestle with it!” meaning to help her down with her load. And he would jump and run, and wrestle so roughly he would break all the vessels in her basket.

And thus was he mean and mischievous, a bad boy in many ways. And one day his grandmother sent him to get some of the vegetable called “owl’s-feathers,” which the Awawtam cook by making it into a sort of tortilla, baked on the hot ground where a fire has just been. And he went and found an owl and pulled its feathers out & brought them to the old woman, and she said: “This is not what I want! It is a vegetable that I mean!”

And so he went off again and got the vegetable owl’s-feathers for her.

After that she sent him for the vegetables named “crow’s-feet” and “black bird’s-eyes,” saying to him that they were very good cooked together. And the mischievous orphan went & got the feet of some real crows and the eyes of real blackbirds and brought them to her. And she said: “This is not what I mean! I want the vegetables named after these things!”

And the boy, who was then about twelve years old, went and got what she wanted and she cooked them.

And this orphan boy had a dream which he liked and wished to have come true, and went to a dance that was being danced in the neighborhood, a ceremonial dance such as is celebrated when a young girl arrives at woman- hood, and he went to see it, hoping it would in some way be like his dream, but when he saw it he was disgusted.

And he went to hear the song of a singing doctor, a mahkai or medicine-man, but when he heard his singing he was disgusted with that too.

And he left his home and on his way found a little house, or kee, made of rough bushes. And the one who lived therein invited him to stay awhile and see all the different people who would arrive there.

And he did so, and in the early evening they came—all the fiercest animals, cougars, bears, eagles, and they were bewitching each other, but nobody bewitched him, and in the morning he went on.

And he went along until he came to another kee, and the owner invited him to stay over night and see all the people who came there. And he did so, and in the early evening came the same creatures and did the same as before, but he was not bewitched.

And he went on again till he came to a desert place, utterly barren, without trees or bushes and there a wind came to meet him, a whirlwind, Seev-a-lick, and it caught him up and carried him to the East & then back again, and to the North and back again; and to the West & back again; and then South & back again. And so it got posses- sion of his soul and carried it off to its own place.

And Seevalick, the whirlwind, said to him: “You shall be like me.”

And there his dream. came true and he said: “This is what I was looking for; this it is for which I was travelling.”

And he wished to go back, and the wind took his soul back again into his body, and so he returned to his home.

And after his return he was the best young man in the country, kind to everybody, and everybody liked him.

But he did not care to be with boys of his own age, but liked better to be with the wise old men, and went where they came together at nights. And he would sit and listen to them, but did not attempt to make any speeches him- self. His reasons were that the young were often vicious, thieves, beggars, murderers, and he would rather be with the old who followed what was better.

And in the evening he would often hear the old people say: “We will go rabbit-hunting in such a place,” but he stayed at home and did not go with them.

But one night, after a while, when they said: “Tomorrow we will go jack-rabbit hunting,” he went home as they did, but the next morning, when they went hunting, he went and made himself a bow & arrows, as Seevalick had told him and placed them where he could find them.

And the next evening they were talking again of hunting, and appointed a place to meet, and the following morning, when they were getting ready, he got his bows & arrows, but he did not come quite up to the meeting place, but sat a little way off.

And as he sat there the people came up to him and made fun of him and asked him if he expected to kill any- thing with his weapons, for he had made a big bow & arrows as the Whirlwind had done. And the people handed these about among themselves, laughing, and when they were thru ridiculing them they brought back the bow and arrows and laid them down before him. But he said nothing, and when the people were thru he left the bow & arrows there, and went home and went again to look for a suitable stick to make a bow from.

And he made a new bow & arrows and left them where he could find them, and went home.

And again he went in the evening to the old people’s gathering and heard them appoint a place for the hunting, and went home when they did. And in the morning, when he heard the signal cry for hunting, he went and got his bow & arrows and followed after them again, but again stayed some distance off. And again the people came about him and handled his bow & arrows and laughed at them. And again he left them lying there on the ground and went home to make a new bow & arrows.

And the fourth time this happened he was late at the place of meeting, and before he came the one at whose house the meeting was said to the others: “There is a young man who has been several times with us to the place where we come together for the hunting, and I suppose he has made a new bow & arrows today, for he has to do that whenever you handle his weapons. Now I want you not to handle his weapons any more, but to let him be till we see what he will do, for it appears to me that he is some kind of a powerful personage (mahkai).

And Toehahvs, who was listening, said: “You yourself, were the very first to handle his weapons.”

And the next morning when Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai heard the signal yells for the hunting, he went to the meeting place, with his bow and arrows, and sat away off, as before, but this time nobody came to him.

And then the hunting began, and in it some one called to him: “There is a jack-rabbit (choo-uff) coming your way!” and he shot the rabbit with his arrow; but when he came to it he did not pick it up, but grasped the ar- row and with a swinging motion threw the rabbit from it to the man nearest him.

And thus he went on all day, killing rabbits and giving them to others, keeping none for himself.

And again he was late at the place of meeting, and the man who had spoken the night before said: “Now you see what he has done! This is the fourth bow that he has made. If you people had left him alone before, he would, before. this, have been killing game for you. And now if you do not disturb him I am sure he will go on, and you will have jack-rabbits to eat all the time.”

And so he killed rabbits at every hunt, and gave them away, especially to the old. Whenever he killed one he would pick it up and give it to an old man, and keep on that way.

And one night at the place of meeting the spokesman said: “Tomorrow we will surround the mountain and hunt deer, and we will put him at the place where the deer will run, and we will see how many he will kill!”

And in the morning, at the mountain, they placed him at the deer-run, and told him to “shut the valley,” mean- ing for him to head-off and kill any deer which might run toward him. But the young man began to get big rocks and try to make a wall to close the valley up, and paid no attention to the deer running past him, and when the people came, and asked him about his shooting he said: “You did not tell me to kill the deer, you told me to ‘shut the valley.’”

(Not but what he understood them, but he was acting again as he had once done with his grandmother.)

And the next day they tried another mountain and said: “We will see if the young man will kill us any deer there.” So when they came to this mountain they told him to go to a certain valley, on the other side, and hang himself there. This is a form of speech which means to hang around or remain at a place; but the young hunter went there and left his bow & arrows on the ground, and hung himself up by his two hands clasped around the limb of a tree.

And after they had chased many deer in his direction they said: “Let us go now & butcher-up the deer the young man has killed, for he must have killed a good many by this time.”

But when they came to where the young man was, there he hung by his hands, and when they asked him how many he had killed, he said: “I have not killed any. You did not tell me to kill any, only to hang myself here, which I did, and I have hung here and watched the deer running past.

And they tried him again, on another morning, at another valley, and this time they told him if he saw a doe big with fawn, “snon-ham,” which is also the word used for a woman soon to become a mother, he should kill her. And he went to his place, and there came by such a woman and he shot her down and killed her.

And the next day they took him to another mountain and told him to kill the “kurly,” which means the old, but they meant him to understand old deer. And when they came to him later to butcher-up the deer he had killed, and asked him where they were, he replied: “I have not killed any deer, you did not tell me to kill deer, but to kill the kurly, and there is the kurly I have killed!”

And it was the old man who goes ahead whom he had shot with his arrow.

And after they had buried the old man they returned to the village, and that night the man who owned the meeting place said: “Tomorrow we must give him another trial, and this time I want you to tell him straight just what you want. Tell him to kill the deer, either young or old, and he will do it. If you had done this before he would have killed us many deer. You should have understood him better by this time, but you did not tell him straight, and now he has killed two of us.”

And the next morning they took him to another mountain, and placed him in a low place, and told him to kill all the deer which came his way. And, when they went after a while, after chasing many deer toward him, they asked him where the deer were which he had killed, and he replied: “Down in the low place you will find plenty deer.” And they went there and found many dead deer of all kinds, and butchered them up.

Notes on “The Story of Ah-Ahn-He-Eat-Toe-Pahk Mah-Mahkai”

In the story of Ah-ahn-he-eat-toe-pahk Mahkai we are introduced to the Indian faith in dreams and to more witchcraft. We come, too, to the national sport of rabbit-hunting, with its picturesqueness and excitement.

In the transaction between Seevalick and the boy we have a reappearance of the world-wide belief that there is a connection between the wind and the human soul.

The strange quality of savage humor, labored, sometimes gruesome, and often tragic, appears in the latter part of the tale.

It is noticeable that they buried the old man, but no mention is made of burying the woman who was shot. The Pimas of old time buried their dead in a sitting posture, neck and knees tied together with ropes, four to six feet under ground, and covered the grave with logs and thorn-brush to keep away wolves. The interment was usually at night, with chants, but without other ceremony. Then, immediately after, the house of the deceased was burned, and all personal effects destroyed, even food; the horses and cattle being killed and eaten by the mourners, excepting such as the deceased might have given to his heirs. After the prescribed time of mourning (one month for a child or distant relative, six months or a year for husband or wife) the name of the dead was never more mentioned and everything about him treated as forgotten.

The Maricopas burn their dead.

It is noticeable, too, that no one appears to have punished the slayer for his murderous practical jokes. Indeed, while the Awawtam appear to have been people of exceptionally good character, it also appears that they seldom punished any crimes except by a sort of boycott or pressure of public disapproval.

The Story of Vandaih, the Man-Eagle

And thus Ahahnheteatoepahk Mahkai became famous for the killing of game; and there was another young man, named Van-daih, who wanted to be his friend, So one day Vandaih made him four tube-pipes of cane, such as the Indians use for ceremonious smoking, and went to see the young hunter. But when he entered the young man was lying down, and he just looked at Vandaih and then turned his face away, saying nothing,

And Vandaih sat there and when the young man became tired of lying one way and turned over he lit up one of his pipes. But the young man took no notice of him. And this went on all night. Every time there was a chance Van- daih tried his pipe, but Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai never spoke, and in the morning Vandaih went away without the friend he desired having responded to him.

The next evening Vandaih came again and sat there all night, but the friend he courted never said a word, and in the morning he went away again.

And he slept in the daytime, and when evening came he went again, and sat all night long, but the young man spoke to him not at all.

And the third morning that this happened the wife of Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai said to him: “Why are you so mean to Vandaih as never to speak to him? Perhaps he has something important to say. He comes here every night, and sits the whole night thru before you, and you do not speak to him. And maybe he will come tonight again, and I feel very sorry for him that you never say a word to him when he comes.”

And the young man said: “I know it is true, what you have said, but I know, too, very well, that Vandaih is not a good man. He gambles with the gains-skoot, he is a liar, thief, licentious, and is everything that is bad. I wish some other boys would come to see me instead of him, and better than he, for I know very well that he will repeat things that I say in a way that I did not mean and raise a scandal about it.”

And the next night Vandaih came again and sat in the same place; and when Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai saw him he just looked at him and then turned over and went to sleep. But along in the night he awoke, and when Vandaih saw he was awake he lit one of his pipes. Then Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai got up. And when he got up Vandaih buried his pipe, but the other said: “What do you bury your pipe for? I want to smoke.”

Vandaih said: “I have another pipe,” and he lit one and gave it to Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai, and then he dug up own pipe, and relighted it, and they both began to smoke.

And Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai said: “When did you come?” And Vandaih replied: “O just a little while ago.”

And Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai said: “I have seen you here for four nights, now, but I know you too well not to know you have a way to follow,” (“a way to follow” means to have some purpose behind) “but if you will quit all the bad habits you have I will be glad to have you come; but there are many others, better than you, whom I would rather have come to see me.

And now I am going to tell you something, but I am afraid that when you go away from here you will tell what I have said and make more of it, and then people will talk, and I shall be sorry.

I will tell you the habits you have—you are a liar, a gambler with the dice-game and the wah-pah-tee, a beggar, you follow after women and are a thief.

Now I want you to stop these bad habits. You may not know all that the people say about you: They say that when any hunter brings in game you are always the first to be there, and you will be very apt to swallow charcoal if you are so greedy.

Wherever you go, when the people see you coming, they say: ‘There comes a man who is a thief,’ and they hide their precious things. When you arrive they are kind to you, of course, but they do not care much about you.

I don’t know whether you know that people talk thus about you, but it is a great shame to me to know, when I have done some bad thing, that people talk about it.

Now if you quit these things you will be happy, and I want you to stop them. I am not angry with you, but I want you to know how the people are talking about you.

Now I want you to go home, but not say anything about what I have told you. Just take a rest, and tomorrow night come again.”

And the next night Vandaih came again, and Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai was in bed when he came, but he got right up and received him, and said: “Now after this I mean to tell you what is for your good, but I want you to keep quiet about it. There are many people that gamble with you. If they ask you again to gamble with them, do not do it. Tell them you do not gamble any more. And if they do not stop when you tell them this, but keep on asking you, come to me, and tell me, first, that you are going to play. And if I tell you, then, that I do not want you to gamble, I want you not to do it, but if I tell you you may gamble & you win once, then you may bet again, but I do not want you to keep on after winning twice. Twice is enough. But if the other man beats you at first, then I do not want you to play any more, but to quit gambling forever.”

And after this a man did want to gamble with Vandaih, but Vandaih said: “I have nothing to wager, and so can- not play with you.”

And still another man wanted to gamble with him, and he made him the same answer, but this man kept on asking, and at last Vandaih said: “Perhaps I will play with you, I will see about it. But I must have a little time first.” And he came to Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai and said: “There is a man who keeps on asking me to gamble with him, and I have come to tell you about it as you told me to do.”

And Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai told him to gamble, and gave him things to wager on the game, but said: “If he beats you I do not want you to gamble any more.”

And Vandaih took the things which had been given him, and went & played a game with this man who was so persistent, and won a game. And he played another game and won that, and then he said, “That is enough, I do not want to play any more;” but the other man kept on asking him to play.

But Vandaih refused & took the things which he had won to Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai and gave them all to him.

And the next morning he gambled again, and won twice, and he stopped after the second winning, as before.

And thus the young man kept on winning and Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai made gainskoot (dice-sticks) for him, and this was one reason why he won, for Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai was a powerful doctor & the dice were charmed.

And he beat every one who played against him till he had beat all the gamblers of his neighborhood, and then distant gamblers came & he beat them also. And so he won all the precious things that were in the country and gave all to Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai & kept nothing back. But one man went to Ee-ee-toy, who was living at the Salt River Mountain (Mo-hah-dheck) and asked him to let him have some things to wager against Vandaih. And Ee-ee- toy said: “You can have whatever you want, and I will go along to see the game.”

But when Ee-ee-toy got there he found the dice were not like common dice, and it would be difficult for any one to win against them, they were made by so powerful a man.

And Ee-eetoy went westward and found a powerful doctor who had a daughter, and said to the father: “I want your daughter to go around to all the big trees and find me all the feathers she can of large birds, not of small birds, and bring them here. And I will come again & see what she may have found.”

And her father told her, and the very next morning she began to hunt the feathers, and when Ee-eetoy came again she had a bundle, and Eeeetoy took them and took the pith out of their shafts and cleansed every feather which she had brought him.

And Ee-ee-toy threw away the pith and cut the shafts into small pieces and told the girl to roast them in a broken pot over a fire; and she got the broken pot & roasted them, and they curled up as they roasted till they

looked like grains of corn. And then he told her to roast some real corn & mix both together and grind them all up very fine, And Ee-ee-toy told her to take some ollas of this pinole in her syih-haw to the reservoirs.

And she did so, and passed by where Vandaih was going to play, and Vandaih said: “Before I can play I must drink.” But the man who was playing with him said: “Get some water of some one near,” but Vandaih said, “I would rather go to the reservoir.”

And Ee-ee-toy had prepared the girl before this, telling her that when she passed the players Vandaih would follow her to the reservoir and want too marry her. “Be polite to him,” he said “and ask him to drink some of the pinole, and to see your parents first.”

And the man who was going to gamble with Vandaih asked him not to go so far, for he wanted to gamble right away, but Vandaih replied: “I would rather go there. I will come right back. You be making holes till I get back.”

So the girl went to the reservoir, and Vandaih followed her and asked her to be his wife, and she said: “I want you to drink some of this pinole, and in the evening you may go and see my folks and ask them about it.”

So Vandaih mixed some pinole and drank it, and it made him feet feverish, like one with a cold; and the second time he drank the gooseflesh came out on his skin; and the third time he drank feathers came out all over him; and the fourth time long feathers grew out on his arms, and the fifth time he became an eagle and went and perched on the high place, or bank of the reservoir.

Then the girl went to the place where the other man was waiting to play the game and told all the people to come and see the terrible thing which had happened to Vandaih.

And the people, when they saw him, got their bows and arrows and surrounded him and were going to shoot him.

And they fired arrows at him, and some of them struck him, but could not pierce him, and then all were afraid of him. And first he began to hop around, and then to fly a little higher, until he perched on a tree, but he broke the tree down; and he tried another tree and broke that down; and then he flew to a mountain and tumbled its rocks down its side, and finally he settled on a strong cliff. And even the cliff swayed at first as if it would fall;—but finally it settled and stood still.

And this was foretold when the earth was being made, that one of the race of men should be turned into an eagle. Vandaih was a handsome man, but he had a bad character, and ever since the beginning parents had warned their children to practice virtue lest they be turned into eagles; because it had been foretold that some good-looking bad person should be thus transformed, and it was to be seen that good-looking people were often bad and homely ones good characters.

And Vandaih took that cliff for his residence and hunted over all the country round about, killing jack-rabbits, deer and all kinds of game for his food. And when the game became scarce he turned to men and one day he killed a man and took the body to his cliff to eat. And after this manner he went on. Early in the morning he would bring home a human being, and sometimes he would bring home two.

Then the people sent a messenger to Ee-eetoy, to his home on Mohahdheck, asking him to kill for them this man-eagle. And Ee-ee-toy said to the man: “You can go back, and in about four days I will be there.” But when the fourth day came Ee-eetoy had not arrived, as he had promised, but Vandaih was among the people, killing them, carrying them away to -the cliff.

And the people again sent the messenger, saying to him: “You must tell Ee-ee-toy he must come and help his people or we shall all be lost.”

And the man delivered his message and Ee-ee-toy said, as before, that he would be there in four days.

And this went on, the people sending to Ee-ee-toy, and Ee-ee-toy promising to come in four days, until a whole year had passed. And not only for one year, but for four years, for the people had misunderstood him, and when he said four days he meant four years, and so for four years it went on as we have said.

(Now Ee-ee-toy and Vandaih were relatives, and that was one reason why Ee-ee-toy kept the people waiting so long for his help and worked to gain time. He did not want to hurt Vandaih.)

But when the fourth year came Ee-ee-toy did go, and told the people to get him the “seed-roaster.”

And the people ran around, guessing what he meant, and they brought him the charcoal, but Ee-ee-toy said: “I did not mean this, I meant the ‘seed-roaster’!”

So they ran around again, and they brought him the long open earthen vessel with handles at each end, used for roasting, and with it they brought the charcoal which is made from ironwood. But he said: “I did not mean these. I mean the ‘seed-roaster.’”

And they kept on guessing, and nobody could guess it right. They brought him the black stones of the nah- dahcote, or fire place, and he said: “I do not want these. I want the ‘seed-roaster.’”

And the people kept on guessing, and could not guess it right, and so, at last, he told them that what he wanted was obsidian, that black volcanic stone, like glass, from which arrow heads are made. And this was what he called the “seed-roaster.”

So the people got it for him.

Then he told them to bring him four springy sticks. And they ran and brought all the kinds of springy sticks they could find, but he told them he did not mean any of these.

And for many days they kept on trying to get him the sticks which he wanted. And after they had completely failed Ee-ee-toy told them what he wanted. It was a kind of stick called vahs-iff, which did not grow there, therefore they had not been able to find it. And beside vahsiff sticks were not springy sticks at all, but the strongest kind of sticks, very stiff.

So they sent a person to get these, who brought them, and Ee-ee-toy whittled them so that they had sharp points. And there were four of them.

And Ee-ee-toy said: “Now I am going, and I want you to watch the top of the highest mountain, and if you see a big cloud over it, you will know I have done something wonderful. But if there is a fog over the world for four days you will know I am killed.”

When he started he allowed one of the dust storms of the desert to arise, and went in that, so that the man-ea- gle should not see him.

For many days he journeyed toward the cliff, and when sunset of the last day came he was still a good way off; but he went on and arrived at the foot of the cliff after it was dark, and hid himself there under a rock.

About daybreak the man-eagle got up and flew around the cliff four times and then flew off. And after he was gone Ee-ee-toy took one of his sticks and stuck it into a crack in the cliff, and climbed on it, and stuck another above it and so he went on to the top, pulling out the sticks behind him and putting them in above.

And when he got to the home of the man-eagle, Vandaih, on the top of the cliff, he found a woman there. And she was the same woman who had given Vandaih the pinole with eagles’ feathers in it. He had found her, and car- ried her up there, and made her his wife.

When Ee-ee-toy came to the woman he found she had a little boy, and he asked her if the child could speak yet, and she replied that he was just beginning to talk; and he enquired further when the man-eagle would return, and she said that formerly when game was plenty he had not stayed away long, but now that game was scarce it usually took him about half a day, so he likely would not be there till noon.

And Ee-ee-toy enquired: “What does he do when he comes back? Does he sleep or not? Does he lie right down, or does he go looking around first?”

And the wife said: “He looks all around first, everywhere. And even the little flies he will kill, he is so afraid that some one will come to kill him. And after he has looked around, and finished eating, he comes to lay his head in my lap and have me look for the lice in his head. And it is then that he goes to sleep.”

So Ee-ee-toy turned into a big fly and hid in a crack in the rock, and asked the woman if she could see him, and she said: “Yes, I can see you very plainly.”

And he hid himself three times, and each time she could see him, but the fourth time he got into one of the dead bodies, into its lungs, and had her pile the other dead bodies over him, and then when he asked her she said: “No, I cannot see you now.”

And Ee-ee-toy told her: “As soon as he goes to sleep, whistle, so that I may know that he is surely asleep.”

At noon Ee-ee-toy heard the man-eagle coming. He-was bringing two bodies, still living & moaning, and dropped them over the place where Ee-ee-toy lay. And the first thing the man-eagle did was to look all around, and he said to his wife: “What smell is this that I smell?” And she said: “What kind of a smell?” And he replied: “Why, it smells like an uncooked person!” “These you have just brought in are uncooked persons, perhaps it is these you smell.”

Then Vandaih went to the pile of dead bodies and turned them over & over, but the oldest body at the bottom he did not examine, for he did not think there could be anyone there.

So his wife cooked his dinner, and he ate it and then asked her to look for the lice in his head. And as he lay down he saw a fly pass before his face, and he jumped up to catch it, but the fly got into a crack in the rock where he could not get it.

And when he lay down again the child said: “Father! come!” And Vandaih said: “Why does he say that? He never said that before. He must be trying to tell me that some one is coming to .injure me!” But the wife said: “You know he is only learning to talk, and what he means is that he is glad that his father has come. That is very plain.” But Vandaih said: “No, I think he is trying to tell me some one has come.”

But at last Vandaih lay down and the woman searched his head and sang to put him to sleep. And when he seemed sound asleep she whistled. And her whistle waked him up and he said: “Why did you whistle! you never did that before?” And she said: “I whistled because I am so glad about the game you have brought. I used to feel bad about the people you killed, but now I know I must be contented & rejoice when you have a good hunt. And after this I will whistle every time when you bring game home.”

And she sang him to sleep again, and whistled when he slept; and waked him up again, and said the same thing again in reply to his question.

And the third time, while she was singing, she turned Vandaih’s head from side to side. And when he seemed fast asleep she whistled. And after she had whistled she turned the head again, but Vandaih did not get up, and so she knew that this time he was fast asleep.

So Ee-ee-toy came out of the dead body he had hidden in, and came to where Vandaih was, and the woman laid his head down & left him. And Ee-ee-toy took the knife which he had made from the volcanic glass, obsidian, and cut Vandaih’s throat, and beheaded him, and threw his head eastward & his body westward. And he beheaded the child, too, and threw its head westward and its body eastward.

And because of the killing of so powerful a personage the cliff swayed as if it would fall down, but Ee-ee-toy took one of his sharpened stakes and drove it into the cliff and told the woman to hold onto that; and he took an- other and drove that in and took hold of that himself.

And after the cliff had steadied enuf, Ee-ee-toy told the woman to heat some water, and when she had done so he sprinkled the dead bodies.

The first ones he sprinkled came to life and he asked them where there home was & when they told him he sent them there by his power.

And he had more water heated and sprinkled more bodies, and when he learned where their home was he sent them home, also, by his power.

And this was done a third time, with a third set of bodies.

And the forth time the hot water was sprinkled on the oldest bodies of all, the mere skeletons, and it took them a long time to come to life, and when they were revived they could not remember where their homes were or where they had come from.. So Ee-ee-toy cutoff eagles’ feathers slanting-wise (pens) and gave them, and gave them dried blood mixed with water (ink) and told them their home should be in the East, and by the sign of the slanting-cut feather they should know each other. And they are the white people of this day. And he sent them eastward by his power.

And in the evening he & the woman went down the cliff by the aid of the sharpened stakes, even as he had come up, and when they reached the foot of the mountain they stayed there over night. They took some of the long eagle feathers and made a kee from them, & some of the soft eagle feathers and made a bed with them. And they stayed there four nights, at the foot of the cliff.

And after a day’s journey they made another kee of shorter eagle feathers, and a bed of tail feathers. And they staid at this second camp four nights.

And then they journeyed on again another day and build another kee, like the first one, & stayed there also four nights.

And they journeyed on yet another day and built again a kee, like the second one, and stayed there four nights.

And on the morning of each fourth day Ee-ee-toy took the bath of purification, as the Pimas have since done when they have slain Apaches, and when he arrived home he did not go right among the people but stayed out in the bushes for a while.

And the people knew he had killed Vandaih, the man-eagle, for they had watched and had seen the cloud over the high mountain.

And after the killing of Vandaih, for a long time, the people had nothing to be afraid of, and they were all happy.

Notes on “The Story of Vandaih”

In the story of Vandaih we are given a curious glimpse into Indian friendship. The reference to smoking, too, is interesting. The Pimas had no true pipes. They used only cigarettes of tobacco and corn-husk, or else short tubes of cane stuffed with tobacco. These I have called tube-pipes. They smoked on all ceremonial occasions, but appear to have had no distinctive pipe of peace. The ceremonial pipes of cane had bunches of little birds’ feathers tied to them, and in my photo of the old seeneeyawkum he holds such a ceremonial pipe in his hand.

“He gambles with the gain-skoot:” The gain-skoot were the Pima dice—two sticks so marked and painted as to represent the numerals kee-ick (four) and choat-puh (six), and two called respectively see-ick-ko, the value of

which was fourteen, and gains, the value of which was fifteen. These were to be held in the hand and knocked in the air with a flat round stone. At the same time there was to be on the ground a parallelogram of holes with a sort of goal, or “home,” at two corners. If the sticks all fell with face sides up they counted five, If all fell with blank sides up it was ten. If only one face side turned up it counted its full value, but if two or three turned up then they counted only as one each. If a gain was scored the count was kept by placing little sticks or stones (soy-yee-kuh) in the holes as counters. If the second player overtook the first in a hole the first man was “killed” and had to begin over. Among all Indians gambling was a besetting vice, and there was nothing they would not wager.

Sometimes instead of the gain-skoot they used waw-pah-tee, which was simply a guessing game. They guessed in which hand a certain painted stick was held, or in which of four decorated cane-tubes, filled with sand, a certain little ball was hidden and wagered on their guess. These tubes were differently marked, and one was named “Old Man,” one “Old Woman,” one “Black Head,” and one “Black in the Middle.” Sticks were given to keep count of winnings.

The moral advice which Ahahnheeattoepahk Mahkai gives Vandaih, is very quaint, and the shrewd cunning with which he loads the dice, pockets the proceeds, and yet finally unloads all the blame on poor Vandaih, is quite of a piece with the confused morals of most folk-lore in all lands. On these points it is really very hard to understand the workings of the primitive mind. Here is certain proof that the modern conscience has evoluted from something very chaotic.

It will be noticed that Vandaih drinks the pinole, which bewitches him, five times instead of the usual four. Whether this is a mistake of the seeneeyawkum, or significant I do not know. Perhaps four is a lucky and five an unlucky number. Another variation in the numerical order is in the woman whistling only three times, in putting Vandaih to sleep.

As I have before pointed out the reference to white men, and pens and ink, is evidently a modern interpolation, not altogether lacking in flavor of sarcasm.

There are suggestions in this story of Jack the Giant Killer, of the Roc of the Arabian Nights, of the harpies, and of the frightful creatures, part human, part animal, so familiar in all ancient folk-lore.

The latter part of this tale is particularly interesting, as perhaps throwing light on the origin of that mysterious process of purification for slaying enemies, so peculiar to the Pimas.

It seems to have been held by the Awawtam that to kill an Apache rendered the slayer unclean, even tho the act itself was most valiant and praiseworthy, and must be expiated by an elaborate process of purification. From old Comalk Hawk Kih I got a careful description of the process.

According to his account, as soon as an Apache had been killed, if possible, the fact was at once telegraphed to the watchers at home by the smoke signal from some mountain. This custom is evidently referred to in E-ee-toy’s cloud over a high mountain as a signal of success. The Indians apparently regarded smoke and clouds as closely related, if not the same, as is shown in their faith in the power of tobacco to make rain.

As soon as the Apache has been killed the slayer begins to fast and to look for a “father.” His “father” is one who is to perform all his usual duties for him, for be is now unclean and cannot do these himself. The “father,” too, must know how to perform all the ceremonial duties necessary to his office, as will be explained. If a “father” can be found among the war-party the slayer need only fast two days, but if not he must wait till he gets home again, even if it takes four or more days. It appears that this friend, who has charge of the slayer, is humorously called a “father” because his “child” is usually so restless under his long fast, and keeps asking him to do things for him and divert him.

It there is no “father” for him in the war-party, as soon as possible a messenger is sent on ahead to get some one at home to take the office for him, and to make the fires in the kee, that being a man’s special duty. And the wife of the slayer is also now unclean by his act, and must purify herself as long as he, tho she must keep apart from him. And she also must have a substitute to do her usual work. She must keep close at home, and her husband, the slayer, remain out in the bushes till the purification is accomplished.

For two days the fast is complete, but on the morning of the third day the slayer is allowed one drink of pinole, very thin, and no more than he can drink at one breath. The moment he pauses he can have no more at that time.

When presenting this pinole. the “father” makes this speech:

“Your fame has come, and I was overjoyed, and have run all the way to the ocean, and back again, bringing you this water.

On my return I strengthened myself four times, and in the dish in which I carried the, water stood See-vick-a Way-hohm, The Red Thunder Person, the Lightning, and because of his force I fell down.

And when I got up I smelled the water in the dish, and it smelled as if something had been burned in it.

And when I got up I strengthened myself four times, and there came from the sky, and stood in the dish, Tone- dum Bah-ahk The Eagle of Light. And he turned the water in the dish in a circle, and because of his force I fell down, and when I rose up again and smelled the water in the dish it was stinking.

And when I had started again I strengthened myself four times, and Vee-sick the Chicken Hawk, came down from the sky and stood in the dish. And by his force I was thrown down. And when I stood again and smelled the water in the dish, it smelled like fresh blood.

And I started again, strengthening myself four times, and there came from the East our gray cousin, Skaw-mack Tee-worm-gall, The Coyote, who threw me down again, and stood in the dish, and turned the water around, and left it smelling as the coyote smells.

And when I rose up I started again, and in coming to you I have rested four times; and now I have brought you the water, and so many powerful beings have done wonderful things to it that I want you to drink it all at one time.”

After the third day the “father” brings his charge a little to eat every morning and evening, but a very little.

On the morning of the fourth day, at daybreak the slayer takes a bath of purification, even if it is winter and he has to break the ice and dive under to do it. And this is repeated on the morning of each fourth day, till four baths have been taken in sixteen days.

The slayer finds an owl and without killing him pulls long feathers out of his wings and takes them home. The slayer had cut a little lock of hair from the head of the Apache he had killed. (for in old times, at least, the Pimas often took no scalps) and now a little bag of buck-skin is made, and a ball of grease-wood gum is stuck on the end of this lock of hair which is placed in the bag, and on the bag are tied a feather of the owl and one from a chicken hawk, and some of the soft feathers of an eagle, and around the neck of the bag a string of blue beads.

(And during this time the women are carrying wood in their giyh-haws to the dancing place.)

Now the Apaches are contemptuously called children, and this bag represents a child, being supposed to con- tain the ghost of the dead Apache, and the slayer sits on the ground with it, and takes it in his hands as if it were a baby, and inhales from it four times as if he were kissing it. And when it is time for the dance the slayers who are a good ways off from the dancing place start before sunset, but those who are close wait till the sun is down. And the “father” goes with the slayer, through woods and bushes, avoiding roads. And before this the “Father” has dug a hole at the dancing place about ten inches deep and two feet wide, just big enough for a man to squat in with legs folded, and behind the hole planted a mezquite fork, about five feet high, on which are hung the weapons of the slayer, his shield, club, bow, quiver of arrows, perhaps his gun or lance.

(The shield was made of raw hide, very thick, able to turn an arrow and was painted jet black by a mixture of mezquite gum and charcoal, with water, which made it glossy and shiny. The design on it was in white, or red and white. The handle was of wood, curved, placed in the centre of the inside, bound down at the ends by raw. hide, and the hand fended from the rough shield by a piece of sheepskin.)

In this hole the slayer sits down and behind him and the fork lies down his dancer, for the slayer himself does not dance but some stranger who represents him perhaps a Papago or a Maricopa, drawn from a distance by the fame of the exploit. Nor do the slayers sing, but old men who in their day have slain Apaches. These singers are each allowed to sing two songs of their own choice, the rest of the veterans joining in. And as soon as the first old man begins to sing, the dancers get up, take the weapons of the men they represent, and dance around the fire, which the “fathers” keep burning, keeping time with the song.

And the women cook all kinds of good things, and set them before the singers, but the bystanders jump in and snatch them away. But sometimes the wife of an old singer will get something and save it for him.

And the relatives of the slayers will bring presents for the dancers, buckskin, baskets, and anything that an Indi- an values. And as soon as presented some relative of the dancer runs in and takes the present and keeps it for him.

And while this big war-dance is going on the rest of the people are having dances in little separate groups, all around. And as soon as the dance is over the weapons are returned to the forks they were taken from.

By this time it is nearly morning, and the slayers get up and take their bath in the river, and return and dry themselves by the expiring fire. Then returning to the bushes they remain there again four days, and that is the last of their purification.

As this dance is on the eve of the sixteenth day, there were twenty days in all.

Grossmans account differs considerably from this, and is worth reading.

During the time of purifying, the slayers wear their hair in a strange way, like the top-knot of a white woman, somewhat, and in it stick a stick, called a kuess—kote to scratch themselves with, as they are not allowed to use the fingers. This is alluded to in the Story of Paht-ahn-kum’s War. A picture of a Maricopa interpreter, with his hair thus arranged, is in the report of Col. W. H. Emory, before alluded to. This picture is interesting, because it shows that the Maricopas, when with the Pimas, adopted the same custom. When I showed this picture to the old see-nee- yaw-kum he was much interested, saying he himself had known this man, who was a relative of his, there being a dash of Maricopa blood in his family, and that he had been born in Mexico and had there learned Spanish enough to be an interpreter. His Mexican name, he said, was Francisco Lucas, but the Pimas called him How-app-ahl Tone- um-kum, or Thirsty Hawk, a name which has an amusing significance when we recall what Emory says about his taste for aguardiente, and that Captain Johnston says of the same man, “the dog had a liquorish tooth.”

Source:  A. Turlington, et.al., World Literature.  Nova Online.    Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike

Until relatively recently, houses at the Southern Tiwa Pueblo of Isleta in New Mexico were replastered every year using a mixture that contained mica from a culturally significant site in the southwestern United States. In the bright sunlight of the southwest, mica’s natural shimmer adds a reflective, lustrous quality to these homes. Yet using the mica to create this shimmering quality was not done simply because it is pleasing to look at, but because its appearance paralleled the transformative qualities that feature so prominently in Pueblo stories and songs. It is one of the many ways that Pueblo architecture reveals a close connection to the surrounding landscape and to Pueblo culture.

Pueblo people

The Pueblo people are one of many Native American cultural groups living in the southwestern United States. Contemporary Pueblo villages are located throughout the north-central and western regions of New Mexico and in northeastern Arizona and are often broadly divided into two distinct geographical groups. These include:

• the Eastern (or Rio Grande) pueblos of Cochiti, Isleta, Jemez, Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, Picuris, Pojoaque, Sandia, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Taos, Tesuque, and Zia; and
• the Western pueblos of Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, and villages of the Hopi Mesas.

In addition to referring to the Pueblo people, the word “pueblo” is Spanish and  means “town.” In this context it refers to the shared architectural style that early Spanish colonists encountered in many of the villages in the region (after they began colonizing the area after the late 16th century). While people living in Pueblo villages share a common form of architecture and communal life, as well as overlapping ancestries, they are also quite diverse—culturally, ethnically, and linguistically. Although interrelated, distinct customs and forms of social organization are found within the various Pueblo villages. Individuals’ participation in various social groups may reflect familial ties, ceremonial responsibilities, access to ritual knowledge, gender affiliations, and differences in migration histories and relationships to place. Throughout their lifetimes, Pueblo community members are affiliated with various social and ritual groups, frequently spanning across multiple villages.

Some contemporary Pueblo villages have been occupied continuously for a period of 1,000 years or longer. Ancestral Pueblo occupation within the larger region extends back even further. We know this through both Puebloan oral tradition and archaeological sites—better referred to as “footprints”—that dot the landscape throughout the region. Examples of such “footprints” include rock art sites and ancestral villages that are no longer actively occupied but embody traces of the ancestors who came before.

A powerful example of such a “footprint” is the ancestral site of Pueblo Bonito, one of the “Great Houses” of the Chaco Canyon cultural area in northwestern New Mexico. Construction began on Pueblo Bonito in approximately 850 C.E. and continued, in stages, until approximately 1150 C.E. The sheer enormity of Pueblo Bonito and the richness of the archaeological record at the site indicate that it was an important ceremonial center for a period of approximately three hundred years, and it remains a culturally and spiritually significant site for Pueblo people today.

Main characteristics of Pueblo architecture

Characteristics of Pueblo architecture include large multi-level buildings, numerous contiguous rooms (rooms that touch one another or share a boundary wall), terraced design, and open-air plazas. Traditional Pueblo architectural design did not include doors, and in traditional buildings, each level was accessible by exterior and interior rooftop ladders. Contemporary Pueblo villages incorporate modern architectural elements and infrastructure (such as electricity, plumbing, glass windows, and exterior doors).

Late 19th-century photographs of Zuni and Taos Pueblos show many ladders raised against the walls of multi-leveled adobe buildings, as well as ladders emerging from interior rooms. We see the same design feature today at Acoma Pueblo.

Contiguous rooms have many different uses, both public and private, and they are easily accessed via the ladders. Outer rooms, terraces, and other accessible rooms were used as common living spaces. Lower levels, interior rooms, and other more difficult-to-reach rooms were used for food storage and ceremonial purposes.

Plazas and kivas 

Open-air plazas and terraces are significant architectural components in Pueblo villages. They served as sites for participation in public ritual and also facilitated multiple forms of daily household and village activities, such as harvest storage (as we see in the photograph of Santa Clara Pueblo), food preparation, and ceramics production.

In each Pueblo, various groups are responsible for the performance of culturally significant activities in accordance with the ceremonial calendar. Activities include public components such as songs and dances that take place in the village plazas and private components that take place within the kivas. Kivas are ceremonial structures, usually located in close proximity to the open-air plazas. Access to kivas is restricted to community members with the appropriate cultural and ritual authority to enter those spaces. Although many modern kivas may be built into the architecture of the contiguous surface room blocks or as free-standing structures, many ancestral kivas were built as subterranean or semi-subterranean spaces.

In the Pueblo world, a sense of place is connected to emergence and movement, an idea that Pueblo architectural forms embody. For example, rooftop entrances to kivas reinforce Pueblo cosmological ideas (or a knowledge system that explains the origin, development, and structure of the universe) about emergence and return. During special ceremonial performances, audience members can watch performances unfold from the terraces above rooms where kivas are located, yet performers may also emerge from upper-level terraces onto the plaza below. Similarly, the dances that are performed in the village plazas may reference movement and migration across the ancestral landscape.

Movement and the search for the middle place

Origin stories emphasize a long tradition of movement as the ancestors emerged from the underworld and searched for their “middle place,” the place where they were destined to live and perpetuate their cultural teachings. Mobility was characteristic of early Pueblo cultures as families and other small groups moved across the landscape, over the course of many generations. Santa Clara Pueblo scholar Tessie Naranjo writes that “the old people moved continuously, and that was the way it was.” Movement within fixed boundaries is a fundamental element of Pueblo thought and being and, she continues, “even these specific boundaries are not the important elements because as the people moved, their mountain boundaries also moved. The idea was to have boundaries to create a place—to fix a place—temporarily within a larger idea of movement.” [1]

The Tewa speak of two groups moving for many years along two mountain ranges before joining together to form one village. The Zuni speak of building villages in which to live for a period of four days and four nights, a phrase that may mean four years, four hundred years, or four thousand years. The Hopi speak of an ancestral promise to make footprints on their way to becoming Hopi. Pueblo ancestors carried a sense of cosmological place and situated-ness with them wherever they went on their path to the “middle place.”

Construction materials

Materials used in the construction of Pueblo architectural forms include clay, sand and silt, grasses and reeds, water, stone, and timber. Although building materials are often locally sourced, some materials travel great distances.

Depending upon availability, Pueblo room blocks are built using either sun-dried adobe or stone masonry, and sometimes both. Adobe is made from a mixture of clay, sand or silt, straw, and water, and is often formed into bricks that are held in place with a clay-based mortar. Stone masonry technology also employs mortar.

The Ancestral Pueblo sites of Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl at Chaco Canyon were built using a highly refined core-and-veneer stone masonry technique in which coarsely cut stones form the interior (or core) of a wall and finely shaped and fitted stones form the exterior (or veneer) of a wall. Extraordinary surface patterns are also made possible with such a technique. The stone walls built during the period of Chaco’s cultural heyday were covered in plaster.

Structures built using traditional Pueblo techniques are replastered each year to maintain their structural integrity. In a 1940 photograph of Chamisal we see a group of people in the process of replastering a wall.

While adobe and stone are used to build the vertical walls of Pueblo rooms, long lengths of timber known as vigas provide the horizontal stability necessary to support a room’s ceiling and multi-level construction. Spaced at regular intervals, vigas span a roomblock front to back and are visible from the exterior of the building, such as we see at Acoma Pueblo. Wooden slats called latillas are placed in a crosswise layer above the vigas, and together these components form the foundation for the floor or terrace above and transfer the weight to the outer load-bearing walls. In the arid climate of the Pueblo landscape, transporting trees over long distances is quite laborious, and the archaeological record reveals evidence of viga re-use as well.

Lumber is often not the only material to travel great distances. Family and clan lineages often develop special “recipes” for paint, plaster, adobe, and other components, and individuals may travel great distances to collect the necessary materials. A particular material may be important because of its association with an origin or migration story. Similarly, the materials found at a particular place in the landscape could be understood to have transformative or otherwise powerful qualities. Incorporation of these materials into Pueblo architectural forms imbues structures with their particular powers.

Mica, quartz, feldspar, and selenite are minerals that appear in ancient rocky outcroppings and other sites throughout the Puebloan cultural landscape. Highly reflective in nature and often appearing to shimmer and move in the abundant sunlight of the Southwest, such minerals are highly valued within a Pueblo cultural context for their transformative qualities—qualities that also describe many of the doings in Pueblo stories and songs. Customarily, only individuals with the appropriate knowledge and permission may collect and process such powerful and “lively” materials for use in special clay, paint, and plaster recipes.

A conceptual understanding of a Pueblo village

Metaphor is fundamental to Pueblo thought and being, and an understanding of the universe as a web of lively, dynamic, and interconnected beings are vital components of Pueblo architectural forms. The lower half of the Pueblo cosmos is often envisioned as a terraced bowl (the earth) with another bowl (the sky) inverted atop it. Together, the two bowls form the sphere of the universe within which all activity transpires. Naranjo writes:

All existence swirls around the center. The houses of the people, the hills, and mountains are in concentric circles around the center place. The sky and earth define the sphere within which the center is crucial to the orientation of the whole. The breath of the universe passes through this center place as did our people when they emerged into this level of life. [3]

The spatial organization of a typical Pueblo village is arranged to reflect the structure of the universe and to symbolize the ancestral search for the middle place. Located within the central village plaza is a small hole, or “earth navel,” that is considered to be the “true center of the village.” (Photographs are not permitted). Although often quite inconspicuous visually, the plaza earth navel functions as the site of the axis mundi—a sacred site of both emergence and return that joins the underworld, the middle place, and the upper world.

Connecting the village with the surrounding landscape, the plaza earth navel is nested within a landscape marked by other earth navels. Each earth navel designates a sacred shrine, hilltop, or mountaintop that corresponds to one of the four cardinal directions. Marked by a loose arrangement of stones forming an open keyhole shape pointing toward the village, these earth navels direct blessings inward, toward the village. Blessings arrive in the form of rain and a bountiful harvest. The village earth navel, on the other hand, is marked by a loose arrangement of stones forming a circle open on all sides to the earth navels surrounding the village, directing blessings outward and thereby ensuring that all sacred energy remains within the landscape. [4] Just as each village’s point of emergence is considered to be the true place of origin, so, too, is each village considered to be the true middle place. Rather than contradicting one another, however, Pueblo stories of emergence and migration both honor and reiterate the idea of multiple centers.

Notes:

[1] Tessie Naranjo, “Thoughts on Migration by Santa Clara Pueblo,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 14 (1995), 247–249.

[2] Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 28.

[3] Tessie Naranjo, Wall text from the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture exhibition, “Here, Now, and Always,” 2018.

[4] Alfonzo Ortiz, The Tewa World:  Space, Time, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 19–21.

URL: https://youtu.be/NcyS8WvfBX8

Additional resources

Read more about Pueblo architecture from the New Mexico Museum of Art

Source: Cassandra Smith, “Pueblo architecture and its relationship to place,” in Smarthistory, December 4, 2020, accessed July 15, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/pueblo-architecture-place/.

New Orleans, like many cities all around the world, is dotted with metal plaques marking sites associated with pivotal events or important figures. Visitors walking along Rampart Street and into Louis Armstrong Park will encounter one of these large red signs that deviates from this formula, commemorating neither a singular individual nor a specific date in history. Rather, the marker identifies the location where enslaved and free persons of African descent gathered for weekly community-building performances beginning in the 18th century.

Termed Congo Square, the communal activities undertaken here by largely unidentified artists gave rise to the greatest musical traditions of the United States: ragtime and jazz.

New Orleans

New Orleans became part of the United States in 1803 when the government bought the entire French colony of Louisiana (New Orleans was the capital). Nearly a century prior, in 1718, the French naval officer Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville had established a colony in the swamp at this bend in the Mississippi River where it flows into the Gulf of Mexico. European settlers drove out the original inhabitants, members of the Choctaw and Chitimacha nations, and began importing enslaved Africans to provide free labor shortly thereafter. The 1725 map above by an unknown cartographer shows how the newly established city of New Orleans appeared just a few years later. Built on a uniform, rectangular grid system, the town was protected by a narrow retaining wall and had a place d’armes (public square) that opened onto the river. Many of the buildings were for colonial administration (such as the prison and military barracks) and religious functions (such as the church and hospital).

A market where enslaved Africans could sell items including foodstuffs and small manufactured goods quickly developed just outside the city’s walls. What was initially a way for enslavers to shirk their legal responsibilities of feeding and clothing those held in forced labor—termed the Code Noir—eventually became a source of income and economic power for Africans and free people of color under French and Spanish rule. In 1760, during the middle of the so-called French and Indian War, New Orleans military engineers extended the boundaries of the city, bringing the market within the city limits. After the United States purchased Louisiana from the French government in 1803, these walls were dismantled allowing for further expansion.

In the map above, this market was labeled as place publique (Congo Square today), located just a few blocks north of place d’armes (Jackson Square today). By 1815, when this map was made, this area on the outskirts of the city had become a well-known gathering place for enslaved Africans and free people of color in both the immediate urban area and the surrounding plantation environs. These Sunday convenings quickly expanded from commercial activities into opportunities to spend time with friends and relatives, to exchange news, and—most notably—to maintain musical and dance traditions from their homelands as well as develop new forms of artistic expression. New Orleans’ Black community is unique insofar as the ethnic composition of its inhabitants in the early years of colonization was relatively homogenous, with the majority of the enslaved population arriving from the same general area in Central Africa, and often spoke the same language, namely Bambara. Following the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and the occupation of the island of Cuba by the United States shortly thereafter, refugees—both free and enslaved—from these conflicts arrived in New Orleans. By 1848, the year that slavery was abolished in France, the majority of enslaved people in New Orleans had been born in the colony, rather than in Africa or the Caribbean. The square’s name derived from its association with Afro-descended people, colloquially referred to as Kongos despite the ethnic diversity outlined above, as well as the arrival of the so-called Congo Circus led by Cuban man referred to as Monsieur Gaetano.

Written accounts and early illustrations

Written accounts of these performances by European colonists appear almost immediately after the founding of the city itself. The earliest reference occurs in Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz’s Histoire de la Louisiane, a memoir of the nearly two decades he spent in Louisiana between 1718 and 1734. He stated: “In a word, nothing is more to be dreaded than to see the negroes assemble on Sundays, since under pretense of Calinda or the dance, they sometimes get together to the number of three or four hundred, and make a kind of Sabbath….” The French words calinda and bamboula were used as catch-all terms to refer to Afro-Caribbean performances, sometimes conflated with the religious rituals associated with Vodùn.

While the term calinda referred to both the martial art and the music accompanying it, the bamboula is associated with transverse drumming—that is, the drums are lying on their side, the drummers sitting astride them, sometimes pressing one heel on the drumhead to change the pitch. The British architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe recorded his observations of the activities in the square in his journal entries during the month of February in 1819. He described the arrangement and included illustrations of so-called bamboula drums, writing that, “one drummer placed a drum on the ground and sat upon it as he played.” Eventually, the latter term—referring to both the small drum and the syncopated musical cadence developed by enslaved Africans trafficked to the Americas—gained popularity.

The preponderance of written commentary about the activities in Congo Square appearing after 1803 is due to the cultural differences between Anglo-American settlers and French and Spanish colonial authorities and their Creole descendants. Roman Catholics’ exuberant secular celebrations and acceptance of ritual in liturgical activities stands in sharp contrast to Protestants’ repressive socio-religious norms. This rigidity extended to the treatment of enslaved persons: the severe regulation and restrictions upon the activities of Black residents prevalent elsewhere in the United States arrived in the Crescent City in 1856 when the new city council adopted an ordinance making it illegal to beat a drum or blow a horn. While impossible to suppress, these regulations caused gatherings to relocate outside the city limits.

The writings of George Washington Cable and Lafcadio Hearn were influential in spreading awareness about cultural heritage of Black New Orleanians. Hearn’s essay, “The Scenes of Cable’s Romances,” published in the November 1883 issue of Century offers some valuable information and attests to the diffusion of the so-called Congo Dances:

Congo Square, the last green remnant of those famous Congo plains, where the negro slaves once held their bamboulas. […] Every Sunday afternoon the bamboula dancers were summoned to a wood-yard on Dumaine Street by a sort of drum-roll, made by rattling the ends of two great bones upon the head of an empty cask; and I remember that the male dancers fastened bits of tinkling metal or tin rattles about their ankles, like those strings of copper gris-gris worn by the negroes of the Sudan.Lafcadio Hearn in “The Scenes of Cables Romances” [1]

While undoubtedly exaggerating his own powers of recollection—Hearn lived in New Orleans for just two years as a child—his emphasis on the characteristics of the accouterments of the performers is valuable.

When E.W. Kemble created the lithograph above in 1886, these gatherings were already in the process of transforming. Combining elements of the accounts of Cable, Hearn, and their predecessor Latrobe, the central couple are encircled by a ring of participants whose mouths are open in song. Immediately above the four crouching drummers on the right of the composition is another figure, his right arm raised in exhortation and wielding a long staff with a gourd attached to the end. The drummer at the far left of the circle closest to us appears to be holding a femur bone, while the church spire and the roof of the town hall seen in the background above the wall situate us firmly within the city.

Kemble was a successful illustrator specializing in pen and ink caricatures. Today he is perhaps most well known as the illustrator for Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Huckleberry Finn and Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus—both notable for their racist portrayal of Afro-Americans. Kemble’s depictions of Black Americans and newly arrived immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were reproduced widely in serial publications such as Life and Century, and thus contributed to the normalization of dehumanization of non-white people. Kemble’s depiction of the so-called bamboula remains ambiguous—the open mouths of the participants and their energetic gestures edging just up to the line between satire and caricature, with only variations in attire and skin color to differentiate the participants from one another.

An area transformed

Unfortunately, little archaeological evidence of these gatherings remains today due to the extensive degree of landscaping following the end of the U.S. Civil War to transform the area into a public park. After the conclusion of the Civil War, the Southern Railroad laid down tracks alongside Carondelet Canal, further limiting Black residents’ access to the park. In 1897, the city created a so-called red-light district, Storyville, adjacent to the area in a futile attempt to control and contain sex work. At that time, the space was renamed Beauregard Square after General P.G.T. Beauregard, a leader of the Confederacy, as part of a large-scale campaign to maintain white supremacist social hierarchy by valorizing those who fought for slavery—and in which Kemble took part. In the late 1920s, the area was rezoned and demolished to make way for a public performing complex but the project was abandoned during the Great Depression. City officials were largely unable to regain momentum for the municipal resource until 1971, at which point they were galvanized by the death of Louis Armstrong, one of the city’s most influential native sons whose popular jazz music traces its roots to this very place. The name was officially changed to Congo Square—its more popular name—in 2011.

Dr. Hilary Whitham Sánchez, “Congo Square, New Orleans,” in Smarthistory, April 29, 2024, accessed July 15, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/congo-square-new-orleans/.

Before the Alamo

Few places in the U.S. conjure as many images and legends about heroism and nationhood as the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. The Alamo is an icon of American identity—like Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor—and as with these equally famous historic sites, our perception of the Alamo is malleable, as are the stories it purports to tell.

The site is firmly rooted in the popular imagination, having been the subject of countless works of literature, film, prints, paintings, cartoons, postcards, and even folklore. Long before it became an emblem of U.S. history though, the Alamo had been a Spanish mission that eventually became a ruin that was “repaired, rebuilt, and redefined.” [1] Yet a single event—the battle of 1836—overshadows the Alamo’s long and complex past. Today, visitors pay reverence to the Texians who died there while fighting the Mexican General Santa Ana—not to the holy Catholic saints who once filled the building’s niches nor to the Tejanos (Mexican settlers from Texas) who also died at the Battle of the Alamo. The current representation of the Alamo as the site of patriotic heroism and brave sacrifice eclipses Spain’s earlier colonial presence and the history of the site’s ruination, reconstruction, and reframing.

Mission San Antonio de Valero

Franciscan missionaries began to establish missions in what is today Texas beginning in the seventeenth century because this area was on the camino real (or royal road) that originated in the viceroyalty of New Spain’s capital, Mexico City. Forty missions originally dotted the Texan landscape, but only 9 survive today. None is more well-known than Mission San Antonio de Valero (which would later become the Alamo), established in 1718 on the west bank of the San Antonio River. Like the initial missionary centers constructed after the waves of conquest after 1521 in central Mexico, the San Antonio de Valero’s purpose was to convert local Indigenous people, including the Payayes, Ypanis, Xaranames, Zanas, and others. Soon after its establishment, the mission was moved across the river (to the east bank) and construction began in 1744 on a church (thought to be made of adobe) that would collapse. Construction eventually  began on the stone and mortar structure that partially remains today. Adobe was a more common building material in this area, so the decision to use stone and mortar possibly associated the building with more Europeanized building practices (such as Spanish imperial buildings constructed in other parts of New Spain) and a clear deviation from local building types.

An account in 1772 describes the building under construction as having a transept and cross-vaulted roof, complete with a dome. This building was never completed though. Friar Sáenz, who wrote the 1772 account, describes the façade as having scalloped-shell niches with sculptures of saints Dominic and Francis in them, each framed by solomonic (twisting) columns. Dominic and Francis are patron saints of the Franciscan and Dominican orders respectively—and were representatives of broader missionary efforts of the Spanish Crown. He notes the beauty of the façade and its carvings too. Decorative relief carvings also animated the rounded arch entryway on the façade.

On the second level, St. Clare of Assisi and St. Margaret of Cortona (both female Franciscans) were to be carved and inserted into the niches (although descriptions cast doubt as to whether they ever were installed). A sculpture of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception was intended for the central niche (but was never installed). The façade was originally flanked by two towers that, along with the barrel vault and the dome, collapsed circa 1762. Like most missions, the church was connected to a larger complex with a cloister, atrium, and more—today, only part of the church remains. The famous façade we know today was actually a chapel.

The Spanish conversion efforts involved in the missionary project in Texas, as elsewhere, involved dislocating, transforming, and converting local Indigenous communities, and the iconography of the façade may have played a role in this with its inclusion of saints associated with the evangelizing efforts of the Spanish Crown and religious orders.

Elaborate retablos (or altarpieces) once stood inside the mission as well. Unfortunately, they no longer remain and the sculptures once adorning them do not either (or were dispersed elsewhere without records that could tell us where they are now). Written inventories do list the images that once appeared on them. On the main altar, one apparently could have seen the Virgin of Sorrows, Saint Francis, Christ Crucified, John the Evangelist, Saint Clare, and Saint Joseph (among others). The wooden altarpiece was gilded, as was in style at the time, and retablos in churches like Santa Prisca and San Sebastián in Taxco, Mexico give us a sense of what this may have looked like.

The remains of the façade point to the classicizing forms employed by the architects of the church, including the rounded arch of the doorway flanked by niches. It is an adaptation of a Roman triumphal arch motif, which had become popular again during the Renaissance. In essence, it looks similar to a Roman triumphal arch in its design, and also had associations with power and conquest. It is interesting to consider this choice and its interpretation today. While such classical language was found at other missions, this was not the en vogue architectural language found in New Spain’s bigger and older cities, or even at other Texas missions (where ultrabaroque designs were preferred). It is possible that this more restrained, classicizing ornament was intended to call to mind visions of the early Church in its simplicity as well as its formation within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. With the initial waves of colonization, friars often modeled themselves and their built environment on the early church because they perceived it as purer and therefore more ideal.

Abandonment and transformation: The mission becomes the Alamo

Mission San Antonio de Valero was abandoned in 1793 when it was secularized—the first of the Texas missions where this occurred. Its altars were removed in 1824 and this is when many of its statues were relocated or lost. Most of the mission’s structures have also been lost. As noted earlier, the Alamo’s iconic façade that today graces tourist trinkets and postcards was actually the chapel attached to the larger mission church.

The mission served as barracks for the Alamo Company (a military unit that came from Alamo de Parras, a town on the other side of the Rio Grande river, and which gave its name to the building we see today) and for the Mexican army until 1835, when Texians temporarily took the Alamo. It was at this moment that the famous battle involving the Mexican General Santa Ana occurred, in which Mexican troops defeated the Texians who sought independence from Mexico. The Mexican victory was brief; shortly thereafter Mexico would lose the war and Texas in the Mexican-American War. An early view of the Alamo by José Juan Sánchez Navarro shows how the artist envisioned the space as a fortified space, with turrets and tall, thick walls. It does not look like this any longer (if it ever really did).

Throughout the nineteenth century, Mission San Antonio de Valero—now known as the Alamo—suffered neglect and vandalism. After the battle of the Alamo in 1836, most of what remained of the façade’s sculptures were gone, and the building was badly damaged, much of it rubble. After Texas was annexed by the U.S. in 1845, the Alamo’s surviving structure was eventually given a roof (the gable was added in 1850), and it functioned as a storage depot and commissary. A daguerreotype from 1849 shows the damage to the chapel’s façade before the gable was added. After the Catholic Church sold the building in 1883, there were plans to transform it into a hotel.

It was not yet the shrine it would come to be in the following century.

Restoring the Alamo

Restoration of the Alamo started at the end of the nineteenth century when the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) took over the care of the building (after controversial discussions regarding responsibility for its caretaking). What people see today is the result of restorations that began in 1915.

Much of what had been added after 1836 was removed, once again altering the site’s appearance and how people understood it. Newly created buildings would also participate in memorializing and historicizing the Alamo. The gift shop was built to look as if it were constructed centuries earlier, but in reality was made in 1937 as a Centennial Museum to honor the hundredth anniversary of Texas independence. It displayed artifacts until the DRT transformed it into a store to sell souvenirs. The Arcade was built in the 1930s as a WPA project to beautify the site and help people find work during the Great Depression. This simulated historical “authenticity” aids in the performance of the primary narrative—the battle of 1836—not the Spanish mission.

The arcades

Even the way that visitors engage with the space has dramatically changed, attesting to the importance of understanding both the site’s physical location and historical context. Where once a large mission structure stood, visitors now only see a remnant that occupies only one-third the original footprint. The Alamo sits in the middle of downtown San Antonio, below towering skyscrapers. The juxtaposition is jarring, although you’d be hard pressed to find commercial images that show the building in its present urban context.

The cultural memories of the mission/the Alamo

Drawings, prints, paintings, and photographs have participated in creating this cultural memory of the Alamo. Drawings and prints in the mid-nineteenth century use the ruined space as a backdrop for elites in their fine clothing and carriages, in line with other artistic and literary movements that glorified the ruin. History paintings depict the Battle of the Alamo, with the chapel serving as its own character within the story instead of a mere backdrop.

Early twentieth-century postcards often isolate the chapel, with little sense of the city around it gone. The longer history of the space as a mission is often obscured too. In the later twentieth and now in the twenty-first century, Latinx (including Chicanx) artists offer a new lens through which to remember the Alamo, with recent exhibitions such as “The Other Side of the Alamo: Art Against the Myth” in 2018. From César Martínez’s black and white photographs to Daniela Riojas’s digital photographic images, these artists draw attention to the ways this cultural icon signifies painful injustices and racial disparities. They are pushing back against the myth.

The complicated history of this place, a mission, ruin, battleground, emblem of patriotism, symbol of racial disparity, and tourist destination, has added yet one more layer to its story: in 2015, the Alamo became a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of the San Antonio missions.

View this site on Google Maps

View the interior on Google Maps

Source: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, “The Alamo (& Mission San Antonio de Valero),” in Smarthistory, February 12, 2021, accessed July 15, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/the-alamo/.

Seneca Village: the lost history of African Americans in New York

In the center of Manhattan Island lies a great expanse of sculpted nature. This large swath of greenery—Central Park—was the first great manifesto of a new urban vision that sought to introduce nature into the heart of commercial and industrial cities in the United States. As a measure of its tremendous success, the park quickly and enduringly became one of the most popular public attractions in New York City and an icon of a metropolis often famed more for its commercial power than for its art.

Nature and the city

A design of the magnitude and distinction of Central Park is necessarily the product of a fortuitous set of historical conditions. First, and broadly speaking, the park is an expression of the American fascination with the natural landscape that had defined the national character since colonial times. Although it was widely recognized that commercial cities had always been necessary, nineteenth-century American art, literature, politics, and popular culture all celebrated rural land as a central element of the nation’s “exceptionalism.” Henry David Thoreau, whose book Walden (1854) chronicled his retreat for self-renewal in rural Massachusetts, suggested every American city should be obliged to set aside land for a “primitive forest” in order to “preserve all the advantages of living in the country.”

The second crucial factor, by the middle of the nineteenth century, was the widespread awareness that industrial cities needed to be carefully planned. Reformers such as the poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant and the travel writer, horticulturalist, and co-designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted embraced the urban future, but they wanted to better the lives of all city dwellers by introducing nature as an antidote to what they saw as the unsafe and unsanitary qualities of large cities. Of course, these reformers knew that true rustic nature was impossible in the middle of cities. Instead, they sought to cultivate a man-made, pastoral landscape that captured the best qualities of nature as filtered through human invention and design. Large parks were to be “the lungs of the city.” The reformers professed a Romantic conviction that being surrounded by nature assuaged the nerves and mind and helped “unbend” certain physical and psychological tensions.

Some reformers, though, expressed their views in a more paternalistic manner, showing disdain toward the poor and working classes. They argued that Central Park’s bucolic scenery should serve as a setting to refine the coarse, impolite manners thought to characterize especially the new, often impoverished immigrants then found in large cities like New York. Olmsted himself wrote that “a large part of the people of New York are ignorant” of a park’s social purpose and needed “to be trained in the proper use of it.” Olmsted’s original objective was to direct visitors to stroll through Central Park and quietly admire the natural scenery; they were not to partake, as they often do today, in strenuous exercise, large festivals or concerts, or any other behavior that would disturb the park’s bucolic ambience. Early on, he and his design partner Calvert Vaux issued regulations to achieve the desired behavior among park visitors: a polite sociability that might then filter out into behavior in the city itself.

The English landscape

These social concerns relied on the aesthetics of the natural landscape pioneered earlier in England. The “English landscape gardens” of the eighteenth century, as well as the early nineteenth-century suburban cemeteries of Paris, especially Père-Lachaise, strongly influenced landscape design in the United States. In the 1830s, for example, the Rural Cemetery Movement produced important landscape designs including Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Green-Wood in Brooklyn (below), and Laurel Hill in Philadelphia. These suburban cemeteries were intended to provide a quiet retreat and confer physical and mental health benefits on visitors. They were designed according to the aesthetics of the English landscape garden (above), in which winding paths, open meadows, ponds, and occasional architectural “follies” created picturesque effects very different from the rigidly symmetrical or geometrical layouts of gardens in the Italian and French traditions, such as the Boboli Gardens in Florence or the royal gardens at Versailles.

Politics and Central Park

Political support was the third major factor in Central Park’s development. The land acquired for the park had been included in the city’s gridded urban plan of 1811, which was an early effort to take control of Manhattan Island’s development. The area was treeless, rocky terrain. On the west side it encompassed a small settlement that counted 264 residents in the 1855 census. About half of the modest houses in “Seneca Village,” as it was known, were owned by free African Americans, along with many German and Irish immigrants. There were at least two churches, cemeteries, and a school. City and state government used the legal power of eminent domain to claim the land as part of Central Park, forcibly evicting all the residents by 1857.

New York engineer Egbert Viele—who was responsible for the first, unbuilt plan for Central Park in 1856—described the land as a “pestilential spot” with “miasmatic odors” emanating from the untended ground. Unhealthy and unsightly, the land was ripe for reform as projections for Manhattan’s future growth pushed the boundary of built-up land further and further north. Reformers and politicians also soon realized that the 1811 plan had not sufficiently taken account of the need for recreational and other types of open space. Even the few parks provided by that plan had mostly been built over in the intervening decades as real estate interests trumped the public good.

In 1853, after more than a decade of agitation by Bryant, landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, and others, the state of New York authorized the creation of a large park in Manhattan, originally to be built and designed by Viele. However, his design was considered perfunctory, offering little in the way of artistry or ingenuity. The Central Park Commissioners, as the governmental body was known, appointed Frederick Law Olmsted as superintendent of works and called for an open competition for a new design.

Olmsted was not a designer or engineer. He had been a farmer and horticultural enthusiast on Staten Island for several years before traveling in northern Europe, Mexico, and elsewhere. His travels inspired him to take up writing and, later, magazine publishing. Calvert Vaux approached Olmsted about jointly submitting a design to the park competition. Vaux, an English architect, had earlier worked in partnership with Downing and eagerly took up the latter’s Romantic ideas about landscape. His partnership with Olmsted resulted in a pairing of like-minded, strong-willed individuals determined to mold the park to their shared vision.

The plan

Olmsted and Vaux won the design competition with their “Greensward Plan,” the last of thirty-two to be submitted. Two elements distinguished the Greensward design from those of their competitors. One was the sheer allure of their landscape features, conveyed in twelve before-and-after panels included in their submission. The other was the ingenious separation of pedestrian and cross-park carriage (now vehicular) traffic.

The competition brief had insisted that four roadways should connect the east and west sides of Manhattan through the park. All other submissions put those roads on the ground surface, effectively dividing the park into five zones separated by street traffic. However, Olmsted and Vaux submerged their “transverse” roads below ground level and created a continuous expanse of park differentiated by designed topography. As they discovered during construction, this critical invention gave them the chance to increase the park’s picturesque scenery since the many drives and walking paths that cross over the transverses and bridal paths could be embellished by attractive bridges.

From south to north, the park is laid out to create distinct visual experiences, helping the visitor navigate the vast space and creating picturesque variety in strong contrast to the rectilinearity of the gridded city around it. South of the reservoirs—there were originally three but today only the largest irregular one remains as a lake—the park is a series of pastoral areas, including the large glade called the Parade Ground (now the Sheep Meadow) surrounded by copses or small groves of trees (above).

In the southern end of the park, we find one area that departs from the naturalism: the long, tree- and bench-lined Promenade now know as the Mall (above) which leads to the Terrace and Bethesda Fountain (below).

The Terrace is divided into upper and lower sections, a remarkably classical environment with wide, symmetrical stairs and a sense of formality. Jacob Wrey Mould, an English architect who worked on the park for Olmsted and Vaux until 1874, designed its ornament. A surprising and elegant space, the Terrace is a delightful foil to the landscape around it. At its center is the much-photographed fountain surmounted by sculptor Emma Stubbins’ Angel of the Waters, installed in 1873 (left). Between the Terrace steps is the Arcade, a long subterranean space with a stunning ceiling decorated with tiles designed by Mould and manufactured by the Minton Tile Works in England. The formal but festive appearance of the Terrace is appropriate for a space conceived as the city’s “open air hall of reception.”

North of the Lake is the Ramble, a series of small, twisting paths along rocky outcroppings of the local stone, called schist, that can be seen throughout the park. At the northernmost edge of the park is the most rugged landscape with the densest foliage, then and now the park’s least visited section. But the area offers some of the park’s most stunning features, including the Ravine with its small brook, waterfalls, and tomb-like Glen Span Arch, made from massive, rough-faced stones. The quiet of the area is an almost haunting experience; it feels much more secluded than its actual distance from the busy surrounding streets would suggest.

The park’s influence

Central Park was very much a product of its particular moment in time, a combination of aesthetic ideas, urban concerns, and political will that coalesced in the decade before the Civil War. Its instant success led to other opportunities for Olmsted and Vaux to apply their approach to landscape design: a few of the important projects were Prospect Park in Brooklyn (1866-73), the Buffalo park system (begun 1868), and the suburb of Riverside, Illinois (1868).

Later, working apart from Vaux, Olmsted had a flourishing practice: he designed the campus of Stanford University (1889), the Druid Hills district in Atlanta (1892), and the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893)—just three among many projects. The landscape philosophy developed by Olmsted and Vaux and first expressed at Central Park had lasting influence, inspiring, for instance, Jens Jensen’s “prairie landscapes” in Chicago and elsewhere in the early twentieth century. It was arguably no exaggeration when Harper’s Magazine declared in 1862 that Central Park was “the finest work of art ever executed in this country.” It may still be.

See also:

The Central Park website

Industrialization and Conflict in America, 1840-70, on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Source: Dr. Paul A. Ranogajec, “Olmsted and Vaux, Central Park,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 15, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/olmsted-and-vaux-central-park/.

Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, installed 1886, conceived by Édouard Laboulaye, sculpture designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, engineered by Gustave Eiffel, pedestal designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Speakers: Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay and Dr. Steven Zucker   URL: https://youtu.be/z0E7fGFcCZY

Burnham and Root, The Monadnock Building, 1885–91 and Holabird & Roche south addition (Kearsarge) 1891–93, 53 West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois  URL: https://youtu.be/c2hie9nlx4M

Source:  Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, “Burnham and Root, The Monadnock Building,” in Smarthistory, September 7, 2022, accessed July 15, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/burnham-root-the-monadnock-building/.

Hancock Building, Chicago (photo: Steven Miller, CC BY 2.0)

Walking amidst the endless crowd of tall buildings in Chicago’s downtown neighborhoods, the twenty-first century viewer, overwhelmed by the colossal Hancock Tower (1970) almost misses the comparatively stocky, whole-block office buildings and stores in Chicago’s Loop that first gave rise to the term “skyscraper” in the late nineteenth century. At the intersection of State and Madison Streets, however, one building with large glass windows and a rounded corner entryway covered with lavish decoration stands out. In contrast to its relatively plain neighbors, the pedestrian’s eye is immediately attracted to the structure’s bronze-colored ground floor and broad white façade stretching twelve stories above it. This is Louis Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie, Scott building, a department store constructed in two stages in 1899 and 1903–04.

Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building, 1899 and 1903–04, Chicago (photo: Ken Lund, CC: BY-NC 2.0)

Sullivan’s building is an important example of early Chicago skyscraper architecture, and can also be seen as a fascinating indicator of the relationship between architecture and commerce. The firm of Adler & Sullivan first became known in Chicago in the early 1880s for the design of the Auditorium Building (see below) and other landmarks utilizing new methods of steel frame construction and a uniquely American blend of Art Nouveau decoration with a simplified monumentality.

Dankmar Adler & Louis Sullivan, Auditorium Building, 1889, Chicago (photo: JW Taylor, 1890, Library of Congress)

By the mid-1890s, Sullivan struck out on his own and wrote his treatise on skyscraper architecture, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” In it, Sullivan analyzed the problem of high-rise commercial architecture, arguing with his famous phrase “form must ever follow function” that a building’s design must reflect the social purpose of a particular space.

Sullivan illustrates this philosophy by describing an ideal tripartite skyscraper. First, there should be a base level with a ground floor for businesses that require easy public access, light, and open space, and a second story also publicly accessible by stairways. These floors should then be followed by an infinite number of stories for offices, designed to look all the same because they serve the same function. Finally, the building should be topped with an attic storey and distinct cornice line to mark its endpoint and set it apart from other buildings within the cityscape. For Sullivan, the characteristic feature of a skyscraper was that it was tall, and so the building’s design should serve that goal by emphasizing its upward momentum.

Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building, Chicago (while still Schlesinger & Mayer, with original cornice and before addition at right)

By the turn of the century, Sullivan adapted these ideas to a new context, a department store for the Schlesinger & Mayer company that was soon purchased by Carson, Pirie, Scott. In contrast to Sullivan’s earlier office buildings (like the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis—image right), Carson, Pirie, Scott in downtown Chicago was intended to meet its patrons’ needs in a much different way. Instead of emphasizing the beehive of identical windows meant to reflect the identical work taking place in each individual office, in the Carson Pirie Scott building, Sullivan highlighted instead the lower street-level section and entryway to draw shoppers into the store. This was done in a number of ways. The windows on the ground floor, displaying the store’s products, are much larger than those above. The three doors of the main entrance were placed within a rounded bay on the corner of the site, so that they are visible from all directions approaching the building.

Detail of corner entrance, Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building, 1899 and 1903–04, Chicago (photo: Chris Smith, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The corner entryway and the entire base section are differentiated from the spare upper stories by a unified system of extremely ornate decoration. The cast-iron ornament contains the same highly complicated, delicate, organic and floral motifs that had become hallmarks of Sullivan’s design aesthetic. For Sullivan, the decorative program served a functional project as well: to distinguish the building from those surrounding it, and to make the store attractive to potential customers.

Detail of corner entrance, Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building, 1899 and 1903–04, Chicago (photo: Dauvit Alexander, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building, 1899 and 1903–04, Chicago (photo: artistmac, CC BY-SA 2.0)

The upper parts of the Carson, Pirie, Scott building also reflect Sullivan’s adaptation of his skyscraper theory to a department store. Each successive story of the white terra-cotta façade contains identical windows, in this case the three-sectioned “Chicago” window common to late nineteenth-century skyscrapers in the city. There is an overhanging cornice at the very top that seems to signify the end of the building’s ascent, and makes the slightly set-back attic level distinct from the broad mid-section and the dark cast-iron decoration of the base level.

Unlike Sullivan’s office buildings, however, the building’s primary thrust is horizontal rather than vertical. Sullivan’s design emphasizes the long, uninterrupted lines running under each window from each side of the building towards the entry bay, while the decorative base at the bottom and the cornice line at the top flow seamlessly around the corner.

Louis Sullivan, Open floorplan of Carson, Pirie, Scott Building

The wide rectangular window frames and relatively squat twelve-story frame were intended to meet the specific requirements of a department store, whose mission called for expansive open spaces to display products to customers, not endless individual offices.

Some later critics like Lewis Mumford and Sigfried Giedion viewed the lower, ornamental section of Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott building as an uncomfortable disruption to the otherwise stripped-down, planar style they favored. Nevertheless, the building’s continuous operation well into the twenty-first century speaks not only to the prestige of Sullivan’s name, but also to the sustained value of architecture as a corporate symbol.

Terracotta detail, Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott, 1899, 1903-04,  Chicago (photo: Steve Minor, all rights reserved, by permission)

With its elaborate decorative program and attention paid to the functional requirements of retail architecture, Sullivan’s design was a remarkably successful display for the department store’s products, even if it diverged from the wholly vertical effect of his earlier skyscrapers.

Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” 1896

Louis Sullivan collection at the Art Institute of Chicago

Louis Sullivan and the invention of the skyscraper: the Bayard-Condict Building

See this building on Google Maps

Source: Dr. Margaret Herman, “Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 15, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/sullivan-carson-pirie-scott-building/.

Today, the massive New York Public Library lies amidst the bustle of some of the busiest streets in the city. Along 42nd Street to the west is Times Square, a tourist mecca filled with throngs of visitors at all hours. A few blocks to the east is Grand Central Terminal, one of the city’s gateways, and certainly the most elegant, built in a grandiose Beaux-Arts style almost simultaneously with the library. When construction on the library started in 1899, this area of the city had long been built up, but Fifth Avenue north of 42nd Street was still a mostly residential enclave, filled with the mansions of the newly-rich industrialists and bankers of recent generations. The tall skyscrapers that today hem in the library and the adjacent Bryant Park make the juxtaposition between the library’s insistent horizontality and its towering neighbors startling. Yet the staggering difference in scale may only serve to heighten the observant visitor’s appreciation for the consummate handling of details inside the library and out.

A new library for a major city

Officially, the name of the library is The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. The long name resulted from a merger in 1895 between two earlier private libraries in New York, the Astor (below) and the Lenox, as well as the Samuel J. Tilden Trust, created specifically to fund a public library in New York as a major part of the former governor’s philanthropic legacy. New York City (consisting only of Manhattan until 1898) grew dramatically in the nineteenth century. In 1800, the city had a population of about 60,000; in 1890, more than 1.5 million. As a result, civic leaders and philanthropists felt that new cultural and social institutions were needed in order to provide the modern services expected of a major city, especially one with so diverse a population. Further, the two earlier libraries that joined the Tilden Trust were small and too peripherally-located to serve the needs of the new library.

Beginning in 1901, the main building of the New York Public Library became the center of a larger network of public libraries being built throughout the city to better reach citizens in each of its neighborhoods. Andrew Carnegie provided the funds to build the first round of these libraries, 39 in total, with the understanding that the New York Public Library would cover their future operations and maintenance. Carrère & Hastings’ building on Fifth Avenue would be the administrative and symbolic center of this network.

Planning the library

An intensive public debate surrounded the selection of the best location for the new library. Within two years, the site of the old Croton Distributing Reservoir (above), slightly to the north of the city’s center at the time, had been chosen and, under the direction of the library’s first president John Bigelow, a competition held to select the architect. Prior to the competition, in 1892, Bigelow and architect Ernest Flagg anticipated the library’s formation and published ideal plans for the library in Scribner’s Magazine. Flagg’s drawings showed the library on the site of the reservoir, which had provided the city’s water since the 1840s, but which was obsolete already in the 1880s. Although the library as built by Carrère & Hastings would be very different, Flagg’s design set the parameters for a large Beaux-Arts-style building that would have a clear identity as a leading civic monument.

Among the designers invited to submit plans to a closed phase of the design competition, the favorites were McKim, Mead & White, a well-established firm that had trained both John Carrère and Thomas Hastings in the early 1880s. McKim, Mead & White had recently completed the Boston Public Library, a celebrated design that for the first time made the public library a commanding monument within an American city and that provided the most direct model for New York’s library.

Carrère & Hastings, however, won the competition, having submitted a design that was deemed practical and monumental, functional and beautiful. Their entry prevailed over other senior architects of the day, including George B. Post, Cyrus Eidlitz, and Peabody and Stearns. Carrère & Hastings’ design closely followed the competition brief, which had been drafted by the first director of the new institution, John Shaw Billings. His guidelines provided specific dimensions and set a demanding parti. In the French Beaux-Arts terminology that would have been familiar to architects at the time, parti refers to a schematic floor plan that represents a building’s primary functions as a series of figural spaces and sets the parameters for the whole design. In Billings’ guidelines, the library was to be a three-story building organized around a central circulation core—grand entry hall and stairs—with two courtyards and a large reading room on the third floor.

The location

The Croton Reservoir site was unusual in one important respect: it was a double block stretching between 40th and 42nd Streets with a large park on its western half. This small but very noticeable rift within the gridiron plan of Manhattan gave the library the great privilege of having a long frontage on Fifth Avenue with a park directly adjacent to it. This urban condition would have set apart any building at that location, but the architects took advantage of the rare opportunity afforded by the site to design a library that would make it a particularly visible landmark in the cityscape. As the architecture critic (and Progressive political theorist) Herbert Croly wrote in his review of the nearly-completed building in 1910, it was “essentially and frankly an instance of street architecture.”

By this, he meant that the architects had understood the importance of the broad street frontage along Fifth Avenue (above) and had adeptly configured the building to add to the variety and dignity of the streetscape. He perceptively described how the exterior “issues to the people an invitation to enter rather than a command.” It was, he said, an “ingratiating rather than imposing” building. On the side facing Bryant Park (below), below the round-arched windows of the reading room, the architects introduced tall, narrow rows of windows that articulate the seven levels of structural steel and cast-iron book stacks directly behind. The striping effect of the dark windows alternating with the white Vermont marble of the wall gives the park face of the library a strikingly modern look. Croly had a lukewarm reaction to the park façade, but other critics then and since have greatly admired the design, especially the strong contrast it provides to the more conventionally Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue front.

Design elements inside and out

One of the key means by which Carrère & Hastings took advantage of the double-block site was the terrace upon which they lifted up their building from street level. The terrace not only elevates the library, symbolically exalting the public that would use it, but also helps orchestrate a carefully calibrated sequence of movements into and through the building, starting with the approach from the street. As the visitor moves up the wide, inviting stairs of the terrace on Fifth Avenue, the main façade of the library expands horizontally and completely dominates the field of vision. Carrère & Hastings designed this long façade according to the five-part French palace type (central entry or frontispiece, recessed wings, and end pavilions). The central portico (a porch supported by columns) composed of three large, arched openings with a tall sculpted attic (wall) above recalls an ancient Roman triumphal arch, a symbolic reference suggesting a ceremonial welcome into the library.

Once inside, the modest but exquisitely-detailed lobby splits into two stairs, which take the visitor to the functional rooms of the second floor and then further to the spacious and stately reading room on the third floor. There, the visit culminates in this surprisingly large space, split in two by the book delivery pavilion. The richly decorative Renaissance-style ceiling, with coffered (sunken) panels and luminous murals of a colorfully cloudy sky, and with the bright natural light provided by the massively-scaled windows create an atmosphere of airy and serene openness that feels far from the bustle of the world outside, an atmosphere eminently conducive to serious study and writing.

This sequence of spaces, so clear that no guide map is needed by the visitor, is abundantly decorated with murals and sculpture, beginning most famously with the lions reclining atop the steps outside. Designed by Edward Clark Potter, the placid but attentive lions were nicknamed Patience and Fortitude (above) by former New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia during the Great Depression. Also among the outside sculptures are the allegorical fountains by Frederick MacMonnies, embedded in the walls adjacent to the portico: Truth (above) to the right and Beauty to the left. Above the latter is an inscription from a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier that begins, “Beauty old yet ever new,” which could be taken as the motto governing the aesthetic sensibility of the architects and artists who created the library. Inside, the numerous decorations include the large murals, not begun until 1938, by Edward Laning in the McGraw Rotunda on the third floor. Depicting the Story of the Recorded Word, they illustrate crucial periods of development in the history of books and printing. The ceiling is covered by the vast Prometheus Bringing the Gift of Fire, the mythological spark to human invention and knowledge, an appropriate symbolic reference to the library’s role in bringing all the world’s knowledge within reach of the city’s residents. Many more decorative features embellish nearly every corner of the interior public spaces.

Beaux-Arts style

As good Beaux-Arts architects, Carrère & Hastings knew how to create grandeur and drama in a building by directing movement and creating sight-lines. This ability was one of the strengths that the Beaux-Arts method of design cultivated in architects. The method also prized the study of ancient and Renaissance classical architecture. Originating at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, Beaux-Arts architecture was prevalent in the United States from the 1880s until World War II.

No city in the country has a greater concentration of Beaux-Arts-style buildings than New York, primarily due to the fact that many of the architects based in the city at the turn of the twentieth century, including Carrère and Hastings, had gone to Paris in order to gain a cosmopolitan education at the École. Many resident architects in New York shared the feeling that its architecture needed to reflect its new status as a major world city on par with Paris and London. The Parisian École welcomed foreigners, and its rigorous design method provided American architects with a set of skills and aesthetic ideas that helped make their practice more competent and professional. The school’s reliance on historical forms chiefly drawn from the classical tradition in Italy and France enhanced the trend toward eclecticism in nineteenth-century architecture, which many critics have found problematic. However, its rigorous design methods and attention to spatial planning contributed, as in Carrère & Hastings’ library, to a sense of modernity in productive dialogue with the past. Insofar as the New York Public Library is seen as a product of the École, it should be considered one of its most distinguished successes in the United States.

A special space in the city

For a large part of the twentieth century, Beaux-Arts architecture was held in low esteem by many architects, critics, and even historians. Yet the New York Public Library’s main building has always elicited a degree of reverence among its users—academics and other researchers, novelists and playwrights, cultural leaders and everyday citizens—who all seem to find things of special and enduring value in the building. Among these special things are, of course, its bountiful treasures: the books and documents that constitute its reason for being. But it also provides, by means of its beautiful halls, gracious and welcoming steps, and ambiance attuned to scholarly pursuits, a temporary refuge from the harshness of the world that great libraries, large and small, have always provided. Carrère & Hastings’ architectural dressing for the library has seemed to all these people, and even to the harshest critics today, to be an appropriate and enduring sign of the institution’s signal importance to the intellectual and cultural life of a world metropolis.

Additional resources:

The website of The New York Public Library

Source:  Dr. Paul A. Ranogajec, “Carrère & Hastings, The New York Public Library,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 15, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/carrere-hastings-the-new-york-public-library/.

William Van Alen, The Chrysler Building

by Dr. Paul A. Ranogajec

With its sky-piercing spire, its sleek, metallic ornament poking out over the streetscape, and its luxurious marble- and metal-lined interiors, the Chrysler Building epitomizes its time: an era of concentrated wealth, industrial power, and large-scale city building. It is often said that architecture is a measure of civilization. If so, there may be few better artifacts of the short-lived epoch called the Roaring Twenties than the Chrysler Building. Ironically, the Art Deco Chrysler Building also marked the end of that dizzying period.

Race to the top

In 1927, Architect William Van Alen received a commission for an office tower from real-estate developer William H. Reynolds. It was to be 808 feet tall with a crowning glass dome meant to “give the effect of a great jeweled sphere.” With mounting costs, Reynolds sold the lease in late 1928 to Walter P. Chrysler, who had formed his automobile manufacturing company in Detroit three years earlier and wanted to make a visible statement about his newfound prominence in business—he said the building would be “dedicated as a sound contribution to business progress.” Chrysler asked Van Alen to make his tower the tallest building in the world, but this was no singular act of hubris on Chrysler’s part. Both men had an interest in making the Chrysler Building as tall, glamorous, and unique as possible.

In the late 1920s, New York’s architects and developers were caught in a race to construct ever-taller buildings. By 1929, the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building on Wall Street (927 feet tall) was set to become the world’s tallest, displacing Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (792 feet tall), which had held the honor since 1913. Several other buildings going up in the late 1920s near Wall Street also aimed for distinction and height.

Stages in the design for the Chrysler building, Progressive Architecture, v. 10, July-Dec 1929, page 525

The competition for the tallest building was fiercest between Van Alen and his former business partner, Craig Severance (architect of the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building along with Yasuo Matsui). In the end, Van Alen triumphed: in secret, he had the 185-foot spire of the Chrysler constructed in sections and assembled inside the building, then hoisted up and through the top (diagram right) only after Severance’s Bank of Manhattan Trust tower had reached its full height in November 1929. With the spire, the Chrysler now reached 1,046 feet. It claimed the title of world’s tallest building from its official completion on May 27, 1930, until the completion of the Empire State Building on April 11, 1931.

 

See also:

NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report

1916 NYC Building Zone Resolution “set-back law”

Source: Dr. Paul A. Ranogajec, “William Van Alen, The Chrysler Building,” in Smarthistory, January 2, 2017, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/van-alen-the-chrysler-building/.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1500 (if unwound) x 15 foot spiral, basalt, sand, and soil ©Holt-Smithson Foundation. Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris.  URL: https://youtu.be/vrbNsHs7ptE

A monument to paradox and transience

A loud abrasive buzzing bellows from the nightstand and I raise my head, only to be blinded by the red light emanating from the small—in size, not volume—machine against a backdrop of pure blackness. 4:00 A.M. Oy. I’m immediately beset by the eternal morning conflict: ten more minutes of sleep vs. the rush of adrenaline that wants to start the adventures that await.

The latter quickly usurps the former as I realize today is September 25th, a day I’ve waited for my entire life (metaphorically speaking) and actually been counting down to since the spring. It’s Spiral Jetty day.

I bound out of bed, Gianfranco Gorgoni’s seminal photograph of Robert Smithson’s iconic earth work on repeat in my head as I shower and “pack” for the daylong adventure that will take me to a remote area of Utah. I meet the rest of my party at the gate at LAX and it’s immediately clear from the conversation that we’ve all arrived at this moment with decades of expectation accumulated. How would the experience compare to the visions (particular to each person) we had all conjured up over the years? Would the jetty “deliver” the transformative experience we all sought? Or would it fall victim to a case of excessively high and unattainable expectations? Time would tell.

But, it would indeed take time. An hour at the airport, followed by an hour plus on the plane, then a two plus hour bus ride over the bumpiest “trail”—it certainly wasn’t a road!—imaginable, and ultimately a fifteen-minute hike. Nearly eight hours after my day had begun, it came into view. At last, Spiral Jetty.

But… it was so… so… so small. That couldn’t possibly be it! Naturally the distance made the work appear smaller and it “grew” as we approached, but even as we stood perched on the rocks right above it, it seemed utterly dominated by the landscape. Yet another surprise, the water from the Great Salt Lake no longer permeated the rocks, but was a significant distance beyond. Between the jetty and the lake, there was a blanket of white—a picture-perfect postcard image of a quiet winter’s morn, and yet, the “snow” wasn’t melted by the sun blazing down from above. Upon closer inspection, the “snow” was actually crystallized salt that brilliantly reflected the sun’s rays and the nearby water.

We walked about the jetty with the sun hot upon our skin, the smell of the salt air filling our nose and lungs, and the feel of salt crystals on our fingers (having knelt to examine the minerals that carpeted the environ). An all-consuming, olfactory experience. We then decided to make our way across the white blanket to the water’s edge, fighting off fears that the salt—which had the distinct characteristics of ice—would “break” and we would plunge into the Great Salt Lake below (which was a physical impossibility since the water wasn’t below).  From a distance the water had appeared a brilliant blue, but as we neared, gradations of color began to appear—shades of blue, purple, pink, and red—a traveler’s mirage, of sorts, and undeniably picturesque.

We found our way up to a piece of land overlooking the jetty and sat down on the rocks to enjoy our sandwiches and “debate” Smithson’s intentions and ethical issues in conserving the work with several scholars. One of them compared Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series, which conveyed the same location at various times of day so that he could capture the specific lighting and other nuances of a particular moment. He said, “Smithson’s doing that here but he’s not doing it on canvas, he’s doing it out there in the elements themselves… it has that same type of specificity too it, and yet specificity that is subject to all kinds of permutations.” The question was raised about Smithson’s vision for the work, his view on its ephemerality, and whether he ever envisioned groups such as ours making the journey out to this incredibly remote location to experience his work.

We were reminded that the physical jetty is only part of the work, which is actually a triad of the “sculpture” in the landscape, an essay by Smithson, and a film documenting the project. [1] But, as time has marched on, the work has become embodied in the minds of the general public in a single photograph, the aforementioned image taken by Gorgoni who hovered about the work in a helicopter and captured the piece from the perfect angle so that it looked colossal, while the hills looked minuscule.

This is due, in large part, to the fact that the jetty became submerged only a few years after it was made, and remained that way for decades. Only in the past ten years has it resurfaced and been “available” for visitation. Though Smithson may not have ever intended or even considered that people would take the time (and trouble) to visit, which begs the question that art historian Hikmet Sidney Loe posed to us, “Who is this work for?” Matthew Coolidge, president of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, said the work was for Gorgoni, that Smithson had literally made it for the photograph. They all agreed that the sculpture itself is the “gesture,” but the documentation is every bit as much a part of it.

Up until that moment, the essay, the film, and the Gorgoni photograph were the entirety of my experience with Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which is probably true for all but a small population who’ve sought out the physical experience of the “gesture.” An object whose identity is so deeply intertwined with its documentation is fraught with complexities and paradox, but given interest in ephemerality and entropy, I’d imagine he’d be quite satisfied with the transient nature of his jetty—how it disappears and reappears at nature’s will. Such is the foundation for arguing against any conservation of the earth work, and allowing it to emerge and submerge with the tides. And yet, the thought of the work vanishing for another thirty years beneath the lake devastates me. With this debate reeling in my head, I made my way back down to the jetty. If I couldn’t be certain the work would be here waiting for my return in the distant future, I’d better take another promenade on the rocks.

This time I separated from my friends, put down my camera, and walked the spiral in absolute silence. Though physically alone, I felt the overwhelming presence of several invisible companions: Mother Nature herself, the spirit of Robert Smithson that is somehow pervades the rocks, and God. I thought about each of them in a way that the loud noise of my crowded, urban existence prohibits. I found the transcendental calm within that often only comes to me upon reading an Emerson poem, hearing a choir sing “Amazing Grace,” or staring into the floating color-field abyss of a Mark Rothko painting.

I began the walk back to the bus with my colleagues. We found ourselves humbled by the beauty of nature and the power of art, and hailed Smithson for giving us a reason to find our way to this breathtaking place.

On the bumpy ride back towards town, I realized that I had made a pilgrimage in search of a monument, an icon of culture and history, but found pleasure in the aesthetic of transience instead. Spiral Jetty looked nothing like I’d imagined—a.k.a. the Gorgoni photograph—and I’m grateful. Grateful because I saw the work on September 25, 2010 and no one will ever replicate the experience of seeing it on that day, for it reinvents itself with every change of light, tide, and weather.

See also:

Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972); Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt’s film on Spiral Jetty (Holt/Smithson Foundation).

Spiral Jetty at Dia Art Foundation.

Read a Reframing Art History chapter about Re-Mapping Land Art: Earthworks, Borderlands, Ecology.

Source: Rebecca Taylor, “Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty,” in Smarthistory, September 18, 2016, accessed July 18, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/robert-smithson-spiral-jetty/.

A powerful accumulation of names is inscribed on slabs of reflective stone that cuts into the earth on the Mall.

Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, granite, 2 acres within Constitution Gardens (National Mall, Washington, D.C.)   URL:  https://youtu.be/wuxjTxxQUTs

See also: “Making the Memorial” by Maya Lin

Source: : Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” in Smarthistory, December 11, 2015, accessed July 18, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial/.

David Drake (Lewis J. Miles Factory, Horse Creek Valley, Edgefield District, South Carolina), 1840, stoneware with alkaline glaze, 44.13 x 35.24 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts).  URL: https://youtu.be/sJaHggMHSCM

Additional resources

A face jug from Edgefield County, Smarthistory video

Jori Finkel, “The Enslaved Artist Whose Pottery Was an Act of Resistance,” The New York Times, 17 June 2021.

Robert Hunter and Oliver Mueller Heubach, “Visualizing the Stoneware Potteries of William Rogers of Yorktown and Abner Landrum of Pottersville,” Ceramics in America (2019).

Arthur F. Goldberg and James Witkowski, “Beneath his Magic Touch: The Dated Vessels of the African-American Slave Potter Dave,” Ceramics in America (2006).

Jill B. Koverman, I Made This Jar: The Life and Works of the Enslaved African-American Potter, Dave (McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina, 1998).

Leonard Todd, Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008).

Source: Dr. Susan J. Rawles and Dr. Steven Zucker, “David Drake, Double-handled jug,” in Smarthistory, December 6, 2021, accessed July 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/david-drake-double-handled-jug/.

Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, the Dakotas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming—all state names derived from Native American sources. Pontiac, moose, raccoon, pecan, kayak, squash, chipmunk, Winnebago. These common words also derive from different Native words and demonstrate the influence these groups have had on the United States. Pontiac, for instance, was an 18th century Ottawa chief (also called Obwandiyag), who fought against the British in the Great Lakes region. The word “moose,” first used in English in the early seventeenth century during colonization, comes from Algonquian languages.

Stereotypes

Stereotypes persist when discussing Native American arts and cultures, and sadly many people remain unaware of the complicated and fascinating histories of Native peoples and their art. Too many people still imagine a warrior or chief on horseback wearing a feathered headdress, or a beautiful young “princess” in an animal hide dress (what we now call the Indian Princess). Popular culture and movies perpetuate these images, and homogenize the incredible diversity of Native groups across North America. There are too many different languages, cultural traditions, cosmologies, and ritual practices to adequately make broad statements about the cultures and arts of the indigenous peoples of what is now the United States and Canada.

In the past, the term “primitive” has been used to describe the art of Native tribes and First Nations. This term is deeply problematic—and reveals the distorted lens of colonialism through which these groups have been seen and misunderstood. After contact, Europeans and Euro-Americans often conceived of the Amerindian peoples of North America as noble savages (a primitive, uncivilized, and romanticized “Other”). This legacy has affected the reception and appreciation of Native arts, which is why much of it was initially collected by anthropological (rather than art) museums. Many people viewed Native objects as curiosities or as specimens of “dying” cultures—which in part explains why many objects were stolen or otherwise acquired without approval of Native peoples. Many sacred objects, for example, were removed and put on display for non-Native audiences. While much has changed, this legacy lives on, and it is important to be aware of and overcome the many stereotypes and biases that persist from prior centuries.

Repatriation

One significant step that has been taken to correct some of this colonial legacy has been NAGPRA, or the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1992. This is a U.S. federal law that dictates that “human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony, referred to collectively in the statute as cultural items” be returned to tribes if they can demonstrate “lineal descent or cultural affiliation.” Many museums in the U.S. have been actively trying to repatriate items and human remains. For example, in 2011, a museum returned a wooden box drum, a hide robe, wooden masks, a headdress, a rattle, and a pipe to the Tlingít T’akdeintaan Clan of Hoonah, Alaska. These objects were purchased in 1924 for $500.

In the 19th century, many groups were violently forced from their ancestral homelands onto reservations. This is an important factor to remember when reading the essays and watching the videos in this section because the art changes—sometimes very dramatically—in response to these upheavals. You might read elsewhere that objects created after these transformations are somehow less authentic because of the influence of European or Euro-American materials and subjects on Native art. However, it is crucial that we do not view those artworks as somehow less culturally valuable simply because Native men and women responded to new and sometimes radically changed circumstances.

Many twentieth and twenty-first century artists, including Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Sioux), Alex Janvier (Chipewyan [Dene]) and Robert Davidson (Haida), don’t consider themselves to work outside of so-called “traditional arts.” In 1958, Howe even wrote a famous letter commenting on his methods when his work was denounced by Philbrook Indian Art Annual Jurors as not being “authentic” Native art:

Who ever said that my paintings are not in the traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art indeed. There is much more to Indian Art than pretty, stylized pictures. There was also power and strength and individualism (emotional and intellectual insight) in the old Indian paintings. Every bit in my paintings is a true, studied fact of Indian paintings. Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting, with no right for individualism, dictated to as the Indian has always been, put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the White Man knows what is best for him? Now, even in Art, ‘You little child do what we think is best for you, nothing different.” Well, I am not going to stand for it. Indian Art can compete with any Art in the world, but not as a suppressed Art….[1]

More terms and issues

The word Indian is considered offensive to many peoples. The term derives from the Indies, and was coined after Christopher Columbus bumped into the Caribbean islands in 1492, believing, mistakenly, that he had found India. Other terms are equally problematic or generic. You might encounter many different terms to describe the peoples in North America, such as Native American, American Indian, Amerindian, Aboriginal, Native, Indigenous, First Nations, and First Peoples.

Native American is used here because people are most familiar with this term, yet we must be aware of the problems it raises. The term applies to peoples throughout the Americas, and the Native peoples of North America, from Panama to Alaska and northern Canada, are incredibly diverse. It is therefore important to represent individual cultures as much as we possibly can. The essays here use specific tribal and First Nations names so as not to homogenize or lump peoples together. On Smarthistory, the artworks listed under Native American Art are only those from the United States and Canada, while those in Mexico and Central America are located in other sections.

You might also encounter words like tribes, clans, or bands in relation to the social groups of different Native communities. The United States government refers to an Indigenous group as a “tribe,” while the Canadian government uses the term “ban.” Many communities in Canada prefer the term “nation.”

Identity

In order to be legally classified as an indigenous person in the United States and Canada, an individual must be officially listed as belonging to a specific tribe or band. This issue of identity is obviously a sensitive one, and serves as a reminder of the continuing impact of colonial policy. Many contemporary artists, including James Luna (Pooyukitchum/Luiseño) and Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith (from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Nation), address the problem of who gets to decide who or what an Indian is in their work.

Luna’s Artifact Piece (1987) and Take a Picture with a Real Indian (1993) both confront issues of identity and stereotypes of Native peoples. In Artifact Piece, Luna placed himself into a glass vitrine (like the ones we often see in museums) as if he were a static artifact, a relic of the past, accompanied by personal items like pictures of his family. In Take a Picture with a Real Indian, Luna asks his audience to come take a picture with him. He changes clothes three times. He wears a loincloth, then a loincloth with a feather and a bone breastplate, and then what we might call “street clothes.” Most people choose to take a picture with him in the former two, and so Luna draws attention to the problematic idea that somehow he is less authentically Native when dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.

Even the naming conventions applied to peoples need to be revisited. In the past, the Navajo term “Anasazi” was used to name the ancestors of modern-day Puebloans. Today, “Ancestral Puebloans” is considered more acceptable. Likewise, “Eskimo” designated peoples in the Arctic region, but this word has fallen out of favor because it homogenizes the First Nations in this area. In general, it is always preferable to use a tribe or Nation’s specific name when possible, and to do so in its own language.

Interview with James Luna for the Smithsonian

The National Museum of the American Indian

NAGPRA explained by the NMAI

Source: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, “Terms and Issues in Native American Art,” in Smarthistory, January 21, 2016, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/terms-and-issues-in-native-american-art/.

From the 18th century and earlier, First Nation Wendat women of Wendake, Québec have been experts in the challenging techniques of moosehair and porcupine quill embroidery. They transform materials harvested from the land into exquisite embroidered works of art in brilliant colors and complex motifs on hide and birchbark. Beautifully worked items such as trays and moccasins can be seen in museums across the United States, Canada, and Europe.

The Elgin Trays served Wendat diplomacy as adapted to the Victorian era. French fur traders and settlers were the first Europeans to arrive in the region that is today known as Québec. Following the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Québec City on September 13, 1759, the region became a British colony. Lord Elgin was Governor General of Canada, the head of the British settler administration, from 1847 to 1854. During this period, he and Lady Elgin, his wife, each received a tray from the Wendat Nation. The trays, designed to honor the recipients, are primarily made of birch bark. Complex moosehair and porcupine quill-embroidered arrangements executed in vivid detail depict leaves and floral motifs that frame Lord and Lady Elgin’s initials and their family heraldry.

Though the trays are attributed to Wendat artist Marguerite Vincent “Lawinonkié,” there were many noted embroidery artists in Wendake, and she may have commissioned another woman to make the trays. Marguerite Vincent “Lawinonkié,” the half-sister of Grand Chief Nicolas Vincent “Tsawenhohi,” was from a family of hereditary chiefs, and she was the wife of Paul Picard “Hudawathont,” a prominent business leader from Wendake. She was born at the Bay of Quinte on the north shore of Lake Ontario in 1783. An outstanding artist and craftswoman, she mastered and taught moosehair and quill embroidery to other Wendat women and excelled at embroidery work on clothing and objects for sale.

The Wendat First Nation

Moosehair and porcupine quill embroidery have origins in the long history of the Wendat Nation, which consisted of a confederacy of several nearby nations. Their ancestral homeland was located in the area south of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay in what is today Ontario, Canada, as well as along the shores of the Saint Lawrence River. The Wendat grew corn, squash, and beans (the “Three Sisters”), as well as tobacco. In addition to hunting on their own, they also traded their agricultural produce for game, hide, and furs with allied Indigenous nations to the north. Today the Wendat Nation is known as the “Huron-Wendat Nation.” In the early 17th century, French explorer Samuel de Champlain named these semi-sedentary and agricultural people “Huron” from the French hure for a boar’s head, alluding to the hairstyle of Wendat men.

From the 1630s to 1650, following the arrival of French settlers, the Wendat Confederacy faced a number of challenges: there were diverging interests with the arrival of Christianity; there were conflicts and wars with the Haudenosaunee; and the unfathomable tragedy of two-thirds of the Wendat population dying from smallpox within a decade. As a result, the Wendat Confederacy split up into several groups. Some were adopted by the Haudenosaunee and other neighboring First Nations. Others made their way westward to the Petun (or Tionontati), a cousin nation, to later form the Wyandotte people. Meanwhile, Wendat converts to Christianity arrived in the Québec City area, finally settling in 1697 on the site currently known as Wendake. [1] According to Wendat oral tradition, the Wendat people originated from the region of the Saint Lawrence River valley before they lived on the Georgian Bay, and thus this relocation was seen as a return. [2] This Wendat community—those who converted to Christianity and were living in the Québec City area—produced the magnificent moosehair and quill embroidery so admired by European newcomers.

Upon settling in the Québec City region in 1650, the Wendat resumed their farming traditions. [3] However, by the early 18th century, they had begun shifting from their agricultural practices to hunting, fishing, and harvesting medicinal plants. From the 1700s, the Wendat continued their own cultural traditions and hunters traveled great distances over their territories. The community also adapted elements of French visual culture while using traditional Native materials, such as quill, moosehair, brain-tanned hide, and vegetable dyes. Wendat artists continued their ancient embroidery traditions and integrated European embroidery stitches into their repertoire, drawing on European church textiles and techniques used by the Ursuline convent nuns in Québec. The Elgin Trays are an extension of this practice.

At the start of the 19th century, European settlers and colonial authorities began appropriating Wendat lands. Wendat women realized their nation’s livelihood was threatened. They had already developed a European market for their embroidered arts in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and they expanded this market and their traditional arts in the 19th century. By drawing on their traditional forms, they created highly successful commercial wares and souvenir arts and brought new sources of income to their community. Located on the Saint Lawrence River, a major route to the Great Lakes, Québec City was one of the main port cities in North America and provided a steady community of European buyers. Located eight miles from Québec City, the village of Lorette, later known as Village des Hurons, and today known as Wendake, became a popular tourist spot for the many visitors who flocked to Québec City. The Wendat people responded by producing moccasins, mittens, snowshoes, ash baskets, and souvenirs, which they sold to visitors.

Wendat artists produced more and more elaborate work using leather, red or black fabric, and birch bark. They embroidered complex stylized and naturalistic floral motifs on men’s and women’s clothing for ceremonial use in their community and as souvenirs. Towards the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the spirit of initiative and entrepreneurship of Marguerite Vincent “Lawinonkié,” the production of tourist art increased, ensuring Wendat families a livelihood. She was instrumental in providing Wendat families with arts and crafts work at a time when Wendat people were struggling to survive due to settler encroachment on their lands and later, colonial government regulations prohibiting access to their traditional hunting territories.

The Elgin Trays and Wendat diplomatic traditions

The trays memorialized the formal visits made by Wendat delegations to Lord Elgin, Lord and Lady Elgin’s visit to Lorette, and the harmonious relations between Lord and Lady Elgin and the Wendat Nation. In addition, they acted as personal souvenirs to Lord and Lady Elgin, reflecting all aspects of Wendat ceremonial arts tradition.

In Wendat diplomatic protocols presentation gifts affirmed alliances with other Indigenous nations. The Elgin Trays continued this tradition in an innovative adaptation of Wendat diplomatic artwork, designed to meet the changing circumstances caused by European settlement. The trays’ use of the heraldic thistle (which is found in the coat of arms of James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin), is unusual in the tradition of Wendat moosehair-embroidered bark work. The iconography of the trays, the heraldry, and the association of motifs combining Wendat traditional beliefs with motifs symbolizing European nations place these trays within the sphere of Wendat diplomacy.

Lady Elgin’s tray

In Lady Elgin’s tray, the initials of her title appear in the center of the tray below a coronet. These initials may stand for Mary Lambton Elgin, Lambton being Lady Elgin’s family name before she married. A precisely placed border of maple leaves floats down each side panel, the leaves represent the colors of the seasons: pale green, dark green, and autumnal shades.

In the center of the tray, a border of small green leaves provides edging around a garland formed by groupings of blue morning glory, three strawberries (each at different stages of ripeness), a spray of white strawberry flowers, and what may be a rose. [4] The blossoms, stems, and leaves are balanced in a play of light and dark colors, with heavy and light forms that create rhythm through regular repetition, suggesting gentle, constant movement. Strawberries and strawberry flowers are an important sacred symbol of Wendat spiritual traditions and cosmology. Elements from Lord and Lady Elgin’s coat of arms, brought together with the strawberries, demonstrates the esteem and respect of the Wendat Nation toward the recipients, as well as an alignment of both cultures in this gift.

Lord Elgin’s tray

In Lord Elgin’s tray, each side has a border of small green leaves. In the center of the tray, the initials of his title, E & K, Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, are embroidered under an earl’s coronet. The initials are surrounded by a garland of lavender thistles and white and pink flowers, stitched with fine detail in an exquisite example of naturalistic floral style. The interconnected elements form harmonious color arrangements with a strong sense of life and movement. The thistle is the emblem of Scotland and of the Scottish Order of the Thistle. Lord Elgin, a Scotsman, was a member of this order of chivalry; by including the thistle motif the Wendat artist recognized and honored both Lord Elgin and his nation.

The coronets and initials demonstrate Wendat familiarity with European heraldry, and the association of thistle and strawberry suggests they were also familiar with the symbolic meanings Europeans associated with flowers. [5] Lord and Lady Elgin would have recognized the thistle motif and the coronets’ heraldic notation, and, as Wendat presentation speeches that accompanied gift giving often explained the symbolic meanings of gifts, they may also have had some understanding of the significations of the strawberry flowers, symbolizing understanding between two national identities. [6]

Diplomatic guests: Lord and Lady Elgin visit Chief Francois-Xavier Picard “Tahourenché” 

The trays, which were received by Lord and Lady Elgin between 1847 and 1854, were an important diplomatic gift at a pivotal time in relations between the British colonial government and Indigenous communities. Between 1837 and 1854 a major shift took place in colonial policy toward Indigenous peoples in Canada, the consequences of which are felt today. Colonial legislation attempted to move Indigenous peoples from a nation-to-nation relationship and a position as military allies essential to the stability of the British colony in North America, to a position as subjects. The British colonial government was focused on policies of assimilation and moving toward industrial schools, the forerunners of residential boarding schools. In this same period, late 18th-century educational strategies and early 19th-century land rights strategies initiated by Wendat chiefs moved forward, as community members worked to further Wendat interests and boundaries of geography and culture. Wendat and British interests were in opposition. The Elgin Trays, as diplomatic gifts, followed Wendat traditions to maintain good relations with allied nations.

Canadian Museum of History

Watch Linda Sioui, “The Huron-Wendat Craft Industry from the Nineteenth-Century to Today”

Course: Linda Sioui, M.A. Anthropologist and Dr. Annette de Stecher, “Embroidered diplomacy, the Elgin Trays,” in Smarthistory, May 9, 2024, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/embroidered-diplomacy-elgin-trays/.

Anishinaabe outfit, c. 1790, collected by Lieutenant Andrew Foster, Fort Michilimackinac (British), Michigan, Birchbark, cotton, linen, wool, feathers, silk, silver brooches, porcupine quills, horsehair, hide, sinew; the moccasins were like made by the Huron–Wendat people (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution), a Seeing America video

Speakers: Dr. David Penney, Associate Director for Museum Scholarship, Exhibitions, and Public Engagement, National Museum of the American Indian and Dr. Steven Zucker  URL: https://youtu.be/RKh6VxDULLA

When looking at photographs of what we today call a “bandolier bag” (in the Ojibwe language they are called Aazhooningwa’on, or “worn across the shoulder”), it is nearly impossible to see the thousands of tiny beads strung together that decorate the bag’s surface. This is an object that invites close looking to fully appreciate the process by which colorful beads animate the bag, making a dazzling object and showcasing remarkable technical skill.

What is a bandolier bag?

Bandolier bags are based on bags carried by European soldiers armed with rifles, who used the bags to store ammunition cartridges. While bandolier bags were made by different tribes and First Nations across the Great Lakes and Prairie regions, they differ in appearance. The stylistic differences are the result of personal preference as much contact with Europeans and Euro-Americans, goods acquired in trade, and travel.

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in New York City has a wonderful example of a bandolier bag, most likely made by a Lenape artist (the Lenape are part of the Delaware tribe or First Nation), who lived along the Delaware River and parts of what is today New York State).

Bandolier bags are often large in size and decorated with a wide array of colorful beads and ribbons. They are worn as a cross-body bag, with a thick strap crossing a person’s chest to allow it to rest on the hip.

These bags were especially popular in the late nineteenth-century in the Eastern or Woodlands region, which comprised parts of what is today Canada and the United States. The Woodlands area encompasses the Great Lakes Region and terrain east of the Mississippi River. This enormous geographic area has a long, complex history including the production of objects we today recognize as “art” that date back more than 4,000 years.

Bandolier bags were created across this vast expanse of land, and the NMAI has examples from the Upper Great Lakes region and Oklahoma. Due to events and laws like the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (signed by President Andrew Jackson), the Lenape were forcibly removed from these ancestral lands and relocated to areas of Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario, Canada. Despite these traumatic relocations, tribes like the Lenape continued to create objects as they had in ancestral lands. Bandolier bags are one example of this continued artistic production.

Material and design

While men most commonly wore these bags, women created them. Initially, bandolier bags did not have a pocket, but were intended to complement men’s ceremonial outfits. Men even wore more than one bag on occasion, dressing themselves in a rainbow of colors and patterns. Even those bags with pockets weren’t necessarily always used to hold objects.

Women typically produced bandolier bags using trade cloth, made from cotton or wool. It is often possible to see the exposed unembroidered trade cloth underneath the cross-body strap. The NMAI bag uses animal hide in addition to the cotton cloth, combining materials that had long been used among these groups (animal hides) with new materials (cotton trade cloth).

Beads and other materials were embroidered on the trade cloth and hide. The tiny glass beads, called seed beads, were acquired from European traders, and they were prized for their brilliant colors. Glass beads replaced porcupine quillwork, which had a longstanding history in this area. Before the use of glass beads, porcupine quills were acquired (carefully!), softened and dyed. Once they were malleable enough to bend, the quills were woven onto the surfaces of objects (especially clothing or other cloth goods like bags). Quillwork required different working techniques than embroidering with beads, so people adopted new methods for decorating the surfaces of bags, clothing, and other goods.

In addition to glass beads, the NMAI bag is decorated with silk ribbons—also procured via trade with Europeans. Much like the glass beads, silk ribbons offered a new material with a greater variety of color choices. Looking at the NMAI bag, we can see that the artists attached strips of yellow, blue, red, and green ribbons, like tassels, to the ends of the straps, as well as longer orange ribbons that fall below the bottom of the bag. Before the introduction of ribbons, women would paint the surface of hides in addition to decorating the bags with quillwork. Ribbons afforded women the opportunity to produce more textural variation, and to expand the surface of the bags in new ways. Imagine wearing this bag: the bright colors would attract attention and the sparkle of the beads would reflect sunlight as the ribbons fluttered in the wind or moved as one walked.

Further animating the surface of the NMAI bandolier bag is a red wool fringe, capped with metal cones that attach to the bag’s rectangular pouch. Like the ribbons and beads, the fringe and metal offered more colors and textures to the bag’s surface.

The designs on the bag are abstracted and symmetrical. White beads act as contour lines to help make the designs more visible to the naked eye. On the cross-body strap, we see a design that branches in four directions. Yet notice how the artist has actually made each side slightly different. The left portion of the strap displays a light blue background, and the repeating form is more rounded, with softer edges. On the right side of the strap, the blue is darker, the framing pink and green is varied, and the repeating form displays more straight lines. The small size of seed beads allowed for more curvilinear designs than quillwork.

It is possible that the contrasting colors represent the Celestial/Sky and Underworld realms. The abstracted designs on the sash may also be read in relation to the cosmos because they branch into four directions, which might relate to the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west) and the division of the terrestrial (earthly) realm into four quadrants.

Prairie Style

The NMAI bandolier bag relates to a broader array of objects that demonstrate the so-called “Prairie Style.” The artist of the NMAI bandolier bag borrowed from older Delaware traditions, as well as those of other Native peoples after they were forcibly relocated. Another bandolier bag in the NMAI collection by an Anishinaabe artist demonstrates the Prairie Style clearly in the upper section where a floral motif floats against a dark ground.

The Prairie Style used colorful glass beads fashioned in floral patterns. The patterns could be either naturalistic flowers or abstract floral designs. A Sac and Fox breechcloth in the NMAI collection is a clear example of the more abstract Prairie Style because the floral designs do not closely resemble flowers that you might see in nature. The Sacs or Sauks are an Eastern Woodlands group and the Fox tribe is closely related to them. They are both centered in Oklahoma today, though there are Sac and Fox tribes in Iowa and Kansas as well.

The Prairie Style is the result of peoples coming into contact with one another, particularly in the wake of removal from their ancestral homelands. Floral forms, combined with the use of ribbons and colorful glass beads, not only attest to the transformations in artistic production, but also testifies to the creativity of people as they adapted to new situations. Bandolier bags, as well as other objects and clothing, helped to express group identities and social status. In the wake of forced removals and threats to traditional ways of life, objects like the NMAI bandolier bag demonstrate the resilience and continued creativity of groups like the Lenape.

Today

Bandolier bags are still made and worn today—attesting to their rich and complex history and their continuing ceremonial and cultural functions. For example, in 2004 when the NMAI opened a new museum in Washington, D.C., Ojibwe men wore colorful bandolier bags during the opening festivities and ceremonies. Artists continue to innovate by creating new interpretations of bandolier bags. Maria Hupfield, who belongs to the Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario, Canada, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, made a bandolier bag from gray felt—an industrial material transformed into something beautiful and historically significant.

Additional resources

Adriana Greci Green and Dr. Steven Zucker, “The bandolier bag,” in Smarthistory, March 6, 2020, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/bandolier-bag-2/.

NMAI blog on Maria Hupfield.

Maria Hupfield’s artist website.

Global trade and an 18th-century Anishinaabe outfit.

From quills to beads: the bandolier bag.

Lakota life on a beaded suitcase.

Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center: Yazhwango’gen (Bandolier bag)

Nebraska State Historical Society: Native American bandolier bags of the prairies and lakes.

Source: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, “Bandolier Bag,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/bandolier-bag/.

Anishinaabe, possibly Mississauga Ojibwa, Shoulder bag (missing strap), c. 1800, tanned leather, porcupine quills, dye, glass beads, silk ribbon, metal cones, and deer hair, Possibly made in Ontario, Canada; possibly made in Michigan, United States; possibly made in Wisconsin, United States, 30.5 × 22.9 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)   URL: https://youtu.be/3i_yRMYk6co

Source:   The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Anishinaabe shoulder bag,” in Smarthistory, March 8, 2021, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/anishinaabe-shoulder-bag/.

More than an accessory (way more)

Today it might be fairly common to see feathered headdresses worn at outdoor music festivals as an attractive or visually powerful accessory. However, feathered headdress replicas in this context misuse important cultural and spiritual objects of the Native tribes of the Great Plains. These objects have become so popular in our contemporary cultural imagination (like in many Western movies) that we often assume that the feathered headdress was a prevalent item of Plains dress (and all First Nations and Indigenous groups)—especially as they were envisioned by nineteenth-century Euro-American artists such as Karl Bodmer or George Catlin.

Catlin’s Máh-to-tóh-pa (”Four Bears,” painted 1832), for instance, shows the Mandan chief standing in a war shirt with leggings and festooned with a feathered headdress that frames his head and extends down the length of his back.¹ Works like this one were often sent around North America to introduce unfamiliar people to Native peoples of the Great Plains, causing many to assume that such headdresses were commonplace items.

However, feathered headdresses, or more correctly, eagle-feather war bonnets, were and are objects of great significance for peoples of the Plains tribes. As described in a White River Sioux story about Chief Roman Nose, “He had the fierce, proud face of a hawk, and his deeds were legendary. He always rode into battle with a long warbonnet trailing behind him. It was thick with eagle feathers, and each stood for a brave deed, a coup counted on the enemy.”¹

A male warrior had to earn the privilege of wearing a war bonnet, like the Cheyenne or Sioux war bonnet in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection (left). This item of adornment, along with the warrior’s clothing, communicated his rank in a given warrior society. Someone could not just decide to wear one–it was decidedly not a fashion accessory. In fact, to acquire a war bonnet a warrior had to display great bravery in battle. On those occasions that a warrior accomplished great deeds or battle coups, he received an eagle feather. For this reason, feathers also recalled specific moments in time. When worn into battle, a warrior could not surrender his war bonnet, and so it acquired associations with bravery and valiancy. Warriors who had elaborate bonnets clearly possessed these desirable qualities in great quantities.

Only important chiefs and warriors could don a war bonnet, and they were typically worn during ceremonies; certain types of war bonnets would have been difficult to wear into battle, especially those that trailed down the length of the back. Regardless of when they were worn, imagine a warrior on horseback wearing a war bonnet: he would seem to be moving, as if he were a bird in flight—a striking and intimidating appearance. War bonnet feathers could take several different forms, they might stand straight-up, create a halo around the face, or trail down the back.

From the front, the Brooklyn Museum’s war bonnet fanned outwards and framed an individual’s head, almost like the rays of the sun. Eagle feathers—actually the tail feathers of golden eagles—rise upwards and outwards from a hide band decorated with colored glass beads. The beads, common on many mid-to late nineteenth-century war bonnets, were acquired from European and Euro-American traders, often replacing quillwork decoration (decorative element made with porcupine quills). Colorful and easy to manipulate, glass beads were used to create intricate decorative patterns on a variety of objects, including clothes. The Brooklyn Museum’s war bonnet shows a stepped-fret pattern that alternates between red and blue, with all the forms picked out by a thick contour line. These bead colors paired with the white and grey eagle feathers, yellow-dyed horse hair, and tiny red-pink downy tufts create a beautiful, colorful object, one that is also remarkable for the different textures presented to the eye. The materials of this object betray its date of creation in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Earlier war bonnets did not have the pink fluff, but would have had only horsehair at the tips.

This particular war bonnet was clearly for someone of great importance. This is evident because of the numerous feathers in the bonnet itself and because of the feathers that run down the length of the body. Women did not traditionally wear war bonnets, although occasionally after battle, when their male family members—say their husbands—returned, they might don the war bonnet while dancing to celebrate.

Warrior dress

It is important not to think of the feathered war bonnet alone or as the only dress item that demonstrated a warrior’s status and accomplishments. A warrior would also be wearing a war shirt, breastplate, and leggings to complete his outfit. Similar to the way in which a feather was earned for brave deeds, the stripes on a warrior’s leggings could designate specific exploits. War shirts also communicated a warrior’s status because locks of hair (horse or human) could be attached to a shirt to showcase accomplishments such as combat or capturing horses. Designs on war shirts, too, could note such accomplishments.

Tipi liners

Besides dress, other objects related triumphs in battle including narrative tipi liners (hides used to decorate the interior of a tipi, also teepee) or buffalo-hide robes. While the tipi itself would be fashioned by women, tipi liners with narrative scenes were created by men. These autobiographical and historical narrative scenes often depicted battle scenes that commemorated brave deeds in battle.

A muslin tipi liner in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection (above, and detail below), created during the early Reservation period (1880–1920) shows the battle exploits of the Lakota warrior Rain-In The-Face (Ité Omágaˇzu, who lived on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota) at a time when life for many people living on the Great Plains had been violently disrupted by Euro-American soldiers. Native peoples had been forcibly removed from their homes and lands and placed on reservations, and so their previous ways of life were in a moment of crisis and transition. As a result, prior deeds and acts of battle coups became important to remember as a source of cultural, historical, and ceremonial pride. Rain-In-The-Face’s tipi liner draws on earlier traditions commemorating a warrior’s battle exploits—in this case his own—but does so in a new medium (muslin, crayon and pencil rather than painted hide) and in a new context—living on the reservation. In some scenes on the liner, Rain-In-The-Face is shown on horseback, holding weapons and a shield and riding in battle.

Today people do not earn war bonnets from great battle accomplishments, but by helping a given community in some way. A war bonnet might also commemorate one’s deeds in the U.S. military, a different way to remember one’s strength and courage (versus the battles of the nineteenth century and earlier).

The war bonnet in popular culture

While the feathered headdress is common at many outdoor music festivals and makes a regular appearance in many popular culture films, images, and objects, there have been sustained attempts by many Native groups to end this appropriation for the problematic stereotypes and misunderstanding it conveys. In particular, the misconception that all Native American peoples wore and still wear feathered headdresses, rather than the male warriors and chiefs of the Great Plains who earned the right to wear them. The war bonnet as a contemporary fashion accessory perpetuates a lack of understanding of the postcolonial fate of Native groups across North America.

1. “Chief Roman Nose Loses His Medicine,” in American Indian Myths and Legends, edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 256.

Additional resources:

The war bonnet in the Brooklyn Museum

The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas (for more on George Catlin)

The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky

Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Plains Indian Museum 

Blog post from Native Appropriations, “But Why Can’t I Wear a Hipster Headdress?” 

Source: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, “Feathered war bonnet,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/feathered-war-bonnet/.

Headdress, late 19th–Early 20th century, Tsitsistas (Cheyenne) or Lakota Artist, bald eagle and other feathers, wool, buffalo and cow hide, horse hair, beads and pigments (Minneapolis Institute of Art)  URL; https://youtu.be/AwqeKwiwVRg

Source:  Minneapolis Institute of Art, “Headdress (Cheyenne or Lakota),” in Smarthistory, March 16, 2021, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/headdress-cheyenne-or-lakota/.

Meant to carry a baby and created by a community of women, this cradleboard is an expression of love.

Paukeigope (Kiowa), cradleboard, late 19th century, wood, hide, glass, metal, cloth, 25.4 x 113 cm (Gilcrease Museum)   URL: https://youtu.be/pkab-MPUFic

See also:

This cradleboard at the Gilcrease Museum

Learn more about Kiowa cradleboards from the Gilcrease Museum

Bear Claw Necklace (Pawnee), before 1870, grizzly bear claws and hide, otter pelt, beads, cedar, tobacco and other materials (Denver Art Museum), a Smarthistory Seeing America video   URL: https://youtu.be/cJkhGCwuRMg

Speakers: Dr. John Lukavic, curator of Native Arts, Denver Art Museum and Dr. Steven Zucker 

Additional historical narratives:

Matt Reed
Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Cultural Resource Division of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma notes that:

When the Lakota attacked, Sky Chief put the necklace and the family’s sacred bundle on his young daughter, put her on his horse, and told her to run. She made it to safety. Sky Chief died right after he killed his own little boy to prevent the child’s capture, torture, and death by the Sioux. When Sky Chief’s daughter eventually got back to Genoa, Nebraska (then the Pawnee Reservation), the little girl, now an orphan, was taken in by Bluehawk (Matt Reed’s grandfather), who raised her as his own. She grew up, married, and in 1987, her granddaughter, Elizabeth, gave the sacred bundle to the Earthlodge Museum in Republic, Kansas. More information on the bundle can be found here.

Roger Echo-Hawk
Pawnee tribal historian, notes that:

Stacy Matlock, a Chaui Pawnee chief, was said to have worn this necklace in 1925 during a visit to the Lakota when they formally apologized for the 1873 attack at Massacre Canyon. The Denver Art Museum acquired the necklace in 1973.

Source:  Dr. John P. Lukavic, Denver Art Museum and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Bear Claw Necklace (Pawnee),” in Smarthistory, January 10, 2018, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/bear-pawnee/.

Juana Basilia Sitmelelene, Coin (Presentation) Basket, Chumash, Mission San Buenaventura, c. 1815-22, sumac, juncus textilis, mud dye, 9 x 48 cm (National Museum of the American Indian).Speakers: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Dr. Steven Zucker    URL: https://youtu.be/Cdwrl6wSKK0

Learn about this beautiful basket—a luxury item made by a Chumash woman in California (then, New Spain) at the time of the Mexican War of Independence from Spain—with motifs derived from Spanish coins.

Source: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Juana Basilia Sitmelelene, Presentation Basket (Chumash),” in Smarthistory, December 13, 2016, accessed July 16, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/juana-basilia-sitmelelene-presentation-basket-chumash/.

Nellie Two Bear Gates (Iháƞktȟuƞwaƞna Dakhóta, Standing Rock Reservation), Suitcase, 1880-1910, beads, hide, metal, oilcloth, thread (Minneapolis Institute of Art)   URL: https://youtu.be/6zPr5UL-vXQ

Acoma polychrome water jar, c. 1890, from Acoma, clay and pigment, 25.1 x 29.8 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art); speaker: Brian Vallo, Director, Indian Arts Research Center School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico   URL: https://youtu.be/jCMo1hv52IQ 

See also:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Nampeyo, Polacca polychrome water jar,” in Smarthistory, March 8, 2021, accessed July 19, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/nampeyo-polacca-water-jar/.

Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Acoma polychrome water jar,” in Smarthistory, March 8, 2021, accessed July 19, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/acoma-polychrome-water-jar/.

Velino Shije Herrera (Ma Pe Wi), Design, Tree and Birds, c. 1930, watercolor on paper, 25.25 x 17.75 inches (Newark Museum of Art, Gift of Amelia Elizabeth White, 1937, 37.216). Speakers: Dr. Adriana Greci Green and Dr. Beth Harris.   URL:  https://youtu.be/A6vKcMdD0Fg

Born Maria Antonia Montoya, Maria Martinez became one of the best-known Native potters of the 20th century due to her excellence as a ceramist and her connections with a larger, predominantly non-Native audience. Though she lived at the Pueblo of San Ildefonso, about 20 miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, from her birth in 1887 until her death in 1980, her work and her life had a wide reaching importance to the Native art world by reframing Native ceramics as a fine art. Before the arrival of the railroad to the area in the 1880s, pots were used in the Pueblos for food storage, cooking, and ceremonies. But with inexpensive pots appearing along the rail line, these practices were in decline. By the 1910s, Maria Martinez found a way to continue the art by selling her pots to a non-Native audience where they were purchased as something beautiful to look at rather than as utilitarian objects.

Her mastery as a ceramist was noted in her village while she was still young. She learned the ceramic techniques that were used in the Southwest for several millennia by watching potters from San Ildefonso, especially her aunt Nicholasa as well as potters (including Margaret Tafoya from Santa Clara), from other nearby Pueblos. All the raw materials had to be gathered and processed carefully or the final vessel would not fire properly. The clay was found locally. To make the pottery stronger it had to be mixed with a temper made from sherds of broken pots that had been pounded into a powder or volcanic ash. When mixed with water, the elasticity of the clay and the strength of the temper could be formed into different shapes, including a rounded pot (known as an olla) or a flat plate, using only the artist’s hands as the potting wheel was not used. The dried vessel needed to be scraped, sanded, smoothed, then covered with a slip (a thin solution of clay and water). The slip was polished by rubbing a smooth stone over the surface to flatten the clay and create a shiny finish—a difficult and time-consuming process. Over the polished slip the pot was covered with designs painted with an iron-rich solution using either pulverized iron ore or a reduction of wild plants called guaco. These would be dried but required a high temperature firing to change the brittle clay to hard ceramics. Even without kilns, the ceramists were able to create a fire hot enough to transform the pot by using manure.

Making ceramics in the Pueblo was considered a communal activity, where different steps in the process were often shared. The potters helped each other with the arduous tasks such as mixing the paints and polishing the slip. Martinez would form the perfectly symmetrical vessels by hand and leave the decorating to others. Throughout her career, she worked with different family members, including her husband Julian, her son Adam and his wife Santana, and her son Popovi Da. As the pots moved into a fine art market, Martinez was encouraged to sign her name on the bottom of her pots. Though this denied the communal nature of the art, she began to do so as it resulted in more money per pot. To help other potters in the Pueblo, Martinez was known to have signed the pots of others, lending her name to help the community. Helping her Pueblo was of paramount importance to Maria Martinez. She lived as a proper Pueblo woman, avoiding self-aggrandizement and insisting to scholars that she was just a wife and mother even as her reputation in the outside world increased.

Maria and Julian Martinez pioneered a style of applying a matte-black design over polished-black. Similar to the pot pictured here, the design was based on pottery sherds found on an Ancestral Pueblo dig site dating to the 12th to 17th centuries at what is now known as Bandelier National Monument. The Martinezes worked at the site, with Julian helping the archaeologists at the dig and Maria helping at the campsite. Julian Martinez spent time drawing and painting the designs found on the walls and on the sherds of pottery into his notebooks, designs he later recreated on pots. In the 1910s, Maria and Julian worked together to recreate the black-on-black ware they found at the dig, experimenting with clay from different areas and using different firing techniques. Taking a cue from Santa Clara pots, they discovered that smothering the fire with powdered manure removed the oxygen while retaining the heat and resulted in a pot that was blackened. This resulted in a pot that was less hard and not entirely watertight, which worked for the new market that prized decorative use over utilitarian value. The areas that were burnished had a shiny black surface and the areas painted with guaco were matte designs based on natural phenomena, such as rain clouds, bird feathers, rows of planted corn, and the flow of rivers.

The olla pictured above features two design bands, one across the widest part of the pot and the other around the neck. The elements inside are abstract but suggest a bird in flight with rain clouds above, perhaps a prayer for rain that could be flown up to the sky. These designs are exaggerated due to the low rounded shapes of the pot, which are bulbous around the shoulder then narrow at the top. The shape, color, and designs fit the contemporary Art Deco movement, which was popular between the two World Wars and emphasized bold, geometric forms and colors. With its dramatic shape and the high polish of surface, this pot exemplifies Maria Martinez’s skill in transforming a utilitarian object into a fine art.

The work of Maria Martinez marks an important point in the long history of Pueblo pottery. Ceramics from the Southwest trace a connection from the Ancestral Pueblo to the modern Pueblo eras. Given the absence of written records, tracing the changes in the shapes, materials, and designs on the long-lasting sherds found across the area allow scholars to see connections and innovations. Maria Martinez brought the distinctive Pueblo style into a wider context, allowing Native and non-Native audiences to appreciate the art form.

See also:

This pot at the National Museum of Women in the Arts

The Art, Life and Legacy of Maria Martinez

Maria Martinez Pottery – San Ildefonso Pueblo

Maria Martinez: Indian Pottery of San Ildefonso (documentary video, 1972) 

Contemporary Pueblo pottery at Bandelier National Monument

Famous Pueblo pottery

As an artist, Julian Martínez from San Ildefonso Pueblo is best known for the ceramics he made with his wife, Maria Martínez. Together, they produced the matte-black on polished-black pottery for which they and their Pueblo colleagues gained international fame.

Maria formed the pots into elegant shapes and Julian painted the designs, both geometric and figurative, including historic motifs such as the feather pattern from Mimbres pottery and the avanyu, the horned serpent similar the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl.

Julian Martínez also worked at the Museum of New Mexico, where he took advantage of the opportunity to study the Museum’s collection of Southwestern pottery, and he learned more during the summers when he worked at the field school at the Pajarito Plateau (later renamed Bandelier National Monument). In addition to his work on pottery, Martínez drew on paper; he always kept a notebook where he sketched ideas and recorded what he had seen. Though most of his images were painted on paper, he created a few murals on walls and, on rare occasions, he painted on hide, as he did for his Buffalo Dancers from about 1930, now in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City (below).

Pueblo painting

Painting has long been part of Pueblo life; it can be found on the walls of the kivas (the round ceremonial structures usually partially underground) and on dance regalia such as wands, tablitas (ceremonial headdresses), clothing, and other items. A thriving art community developed around 1900 during a difficult time in Pueblo history: due to illness and outward migration, the population was reduced to less than 200. When the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway extended its track to the area in 1880, the economy of the Pueblo was transformed as more outside goods were purchased and more items, especially ceramics and paintings on paper, were made to sell to tourists traveling to the area.

An important group of Pueblo artists called the San Ildefonso Self-Taught Group, active from around 1900 to around 1930, included Julian Martínez, Tonita Peña, Crescencio Martínez, and Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal). Most of their work depicted scenes common to Pueblo life, mainly ceremonial dances and genre scenes.

The Buffalo Dance

Martínez was elected governor of San Ildefonso in 1925 and he served as a leader in ceremonies. Like other Pueblo painters, he refrained from depicting ritual objects, sites, and altars that were considered private, and focused instead on dances that were open to the public. The Buffalo Dance is one of the most commonly represented of all Pueblo dances by the Self-Taught Group.  Art historian J.J. Brody described it as one of the most “comprehensible to outsiders of all public ritual dances of the Pueblo people.” [1] Performed annually on January 23rd to honor the Pueblo patron saint, San Ildefonso, the Buffalo Dance enacts a hunting scene, with three dancers playing the roles of a hunter, buffalo, and a buffalo maiden (or buffalo mother) who has the power to induce the animals to sacrifice themselves to provide food and hide.

Early twentieth-century Pueblo paintings by artists including Tsireh, Peña, and Martínez all depict the Buffalo Dance in the same way, with the three figures in profile, facing the same direction as they would be during the dance.  The men wear a buffalo headdress and dance kilts with depictions of avanyu (a horned serpent), and their skin is painted black. The buffalo maiden wears an embroidered one-shouldered manta, or dress.

In this hide painting, Martínez gave all three figures the same facial features, focusing instead on varying details in their clothing and regalia. There is no sense of space; the figures lack modeling and do not cast shadows. The flatness of the figures and the lack of a background suggest the influence of early Modernist abstraction. The empty space might also symbolize an area that is sacred—unbound by place or time. Paintings of such dances might even portray a space where the viewers themselves also participate in the dance, because, as anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo has observed, everyone in the community dances in ceremonies.[2]

Though Martínez painted several versions of the Buffalo Dance, the NMAI version is unusual for its material: animal hide. More commonly used in art from the Plains, hide is stronger and suppler than paper as a base. This particular hide has small holes on three of its sides, suggesting that it was used to cover a portfolio or large book, with a string or leather cord run through the holes to attach it over a group of drawings.[3] Later, the image may have been unlaced and cut along one side, accounting for the smooth edge.

Pueblo painting continues

With its bright colors and strong forms, Julian Martínez’s Buffalo Dancers exemplifies the early period of Pueblo painting. In 1932, the Santa Fe Indian School (whose painting program became known as “The Studio School”) started teaching art, and developed the Santa Fe Indian School Style. This new style retained the earlier emphasis on dance and genre scenes with the same flatness and lack of modeling, but the work became more decorative and lost the intimacy of the earlier works.

During Martínez’s life, local artists, anthropologists, and ethnographers expressed their appreciation for his work, noting his radiant colors, technical skill, and mastery of form. Martínez’s Buffalo Dancers, like other paintings produced by the San Ildefonso Self-Taught Group, conveys a sense of movement and energy in its figures and shares the joy of the ceremonies.

See also:

This work in the Infinity of Nations exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian

Claremont Colleges Digital Library, “Pueblo and Plains Indian Watercolors.”

Mimbres Pottery (from the Smithsonian)