Trespassers in Mesa Land

TRESPASSERS IN Mesa Land With Photography by Ansel F. Hall

From miles around the Navajo horsemen come to see the big plane that came to their mesa lands from out of the sky.

A comely Navajo miss with a saucy smile lives deep in the mesa lands of the Navajo Nation. To the traveler, no area, no people is more colorful.

ORDINARILY on Tuesday about this time I'd be driving home through the Broadway traffic, surging along in the noisy impatience of motor horns, traffic signals, and jockeying taxicabs, with the smell of city streets in my nostrils. Towering many-windowed blocks of concrete would slide past me, juggling their little glimpses of pale sky that are endlessly laced with telephone wires. Ordinarily, yes. But today is a different Tuesday. Today I look up to a turquoise heaven as innocent of electric wires as this desert settlement is innocent of clamor. Sparsely growing shadscale, squaw tea, and tumble weed reach off toward the horizon in infinite succession. Between me and those distant red mesas nothing hurries, nothing elbows for room; nothing jars the ineffable serenity. True, there is a smell! It is a mingled odor of leather and tobacco, of sheepskins and coffee and kercsene, distilled through the swinging screen door of the Wetherill Trading Post. And I don't mind it. I've been sniffing it off and on now for several weeks.

From east and west forty-five of us have descended upon this peaceful land, bringing evil looking weapons in our hands, albeit with the best intentions in our hearts. Forty-four are men. In their ranks are archeologists, botanists, paleontologists, entomologists, geologists and two I had to look up in Webster's, namely, herpetologists and ecologists. (Are you reaching for your dietionary? I thought so.) And one of 'em is the Other Person who, by virtue of his familiarity with all species of roads, long acquaintance with horses and erratic motors, and because of general resourcefulness, is here too. The "ologists" have long since chosen themselves camps and have set about digging, picking, scraping, and otherwisetheoretically and actually pulling the northeastern corner of Arizona to piecез. As for me, my sole assignment is to photograph everything and everybody. If I were not occasionally reminded of it from curious infrequent travelers I should almost forget that I am the only female in the group. The ologists have, perforce, accepted me, and we fraternize over beetles, sunburn, potsherds, ant bites, and letters from home.

Most of the men are encamped in the Tsegi area, but the geologists, the Other Person and I have pitched tent in Kayenta, where we are immensely privileged to know John Wetherill, first white settler hereabouts. As advance crusader for the knights of the trowel and brush, he is still exploring, still guiding the wayfarer to remote wild parts of this exciting land. Years ofpainstaking excavation and study have earned him an enviable knowledge of the successive cultures which have flourished for long periods on tops of mesas, in pit houses, and in the great caves.

But we did not find him a "rugged westerner" at all. He might rather have been one of our academicians were it not for a subtle quality that bespoke an induration grafted by harsh frontier living. John Wetherill had been cast in a mold at once gentle in outline and strong in singleness of purpose of malleable but intransigent stuff. One is mindful of his quiet force, while not forgetting the twinkle in his eye. Years ago he had become a sort of legend to me and therefore it was doubly heart warming to hear his courteous welcome, his assurance that we must use his home freely and in a softly spoken aside to me "Remember, you don't have to stay out in that damned old tent." The hospitality of the Wetherill family is a tradition among Southwest travelers.

It is as much a part of Kayenta as the very sand. Celebrated folk in surprising numbers have sat about the long table in the dining room to learn of the prehistoric cliff The land of the Navajocanyon, mountain, mesa and rolling hills of sand whose sparse vegetation bends before the wind.

Black Mesa in the land of the Navajo. Here the landscape is of infinite variety, and a mixture of many colors.

The Red Lake Trading Post in the land of the mesas. An Indian trading post is a picturesque part of the land.

A Navajo and his horses in the land of the mesas. The scene is a typical one in this empire of the nomadic people.

A Navajo mud dance in the primitive surroundings, deep in the heart of their country, is something to remember.

A lonely waterhole . . . a few sheep . . . burros . . . and a goat or two . . . all part and parcel of a region where time stands still.

dwellers from John, and of present day Indians from Louisa Wetherill. Forty years of proven friendship for the Navajos have knitted the latter closely into their cause, and in their time of need she is both parent and counsellor, speaking their unspeakable language as one of them.

Ben Wetherill, too, son of these eminent parents, is thoroughly wise in the ways of the Navajo, and is a valuable "reference" to those who would probe the riddles of this fabulous land.

Fanny and Betty are the two adopted Indian girls. Fanny is a plump girl who always bounces a little when she sits down. She is jolly too and has taken mightily to the ways of the white people. Betty is more serious. She is smaller, flexible, nicely modeled; and the racial reserve one feels about her is lightened often enough by friendly banter.

Inside the low, thick, red sandstone walls of their home, decorating living rooms and passageway is such a wealth of Indian craft as to make a collector look well to his tenth commandment. Irresistible Navajo rugs are everywhere. A row of kerosene lamps stands on a shelf in the kitchen; the refrigerator is a dug-out in the kitchen yard. It is one hundred sixty-five miles to town. And mail comes twice a week. It is a land where missionaries are sent and it is peopled by thousands of human beings, however widely scattered, who do not speak our language!

On my first afternoon I had climbed to a sandy terrace where I could look in all directions. I must see this Kayenta which, from fragmentary tales of early travelers, had long ago seized upon my imagination. To know its mesas and canyons and desert dwellers was, I suppose, one of those fondly cherished notions that busy persons store away and take out from time to time to sigh over. Yet Kayenta itself is only a tiny kickshaw in the vast pattern of the South-west.

The Navajos call it Todanestya, "where water runs like fingers out of a hill." In-different to form, its handful of buildings strew along a shallow depression in the desert. Serrated Comb Ridge, like a fallen picket fence, lays its last heap of rocks at the northeast outskirts, and monoliths may be seen to the north. Black Mesa, across an expanse of desert, becomes a familiar out-line on the south. The Warren store and Post-Office, the little schoolhouse, the Government hospital, and some ten or twelve houses, make up the "town."

Looking out from my upper level my exploring eye marked the roads which lead to Rough Rock, Chin Lee and Gallup in one direction, and Monument Valley, Oljeto, and Bluff City in another. Off in that direction is the only spot in our great nation where A day or two ago I wanted to mend a pink undergarment and at the same time listen in on a discussion of geologic findings from Black Mesa, so I sort of smuggled the pink under a pile of stockings in my lap and sat down on our porch to listen. Charlie Jeff sat beside me. Being deficient in appetite for higher learning, he became more inquisitive regarding my apparel than edified by the discourse and, at a pause in the ologistic utterances, he asked sharply, "Wha-zat?"-pointing to the pink article to which all the ologistic eyes turned in-quiringly.

"Oh, I'm just mending something," I frowned at him, and gathered up the socks. But you can't keep a good Indian down. Refusing to be put off, and raising his voice, Charlie Jeff repeated, "Wha-zat? Wha-zat? Baby's shirt?" The pink vanished again while my face took on a sympathetic hue, and an ologístic smile witnessed my complete confusion. Sometimes Navajo children also come to call. They sit shyly in a row on my porch, usually two or three without benefit of handkerchief and not seeming to mind it.

The Other Person has become inordinately popular with them, having established a sort of mutual confidence through that carnal appeal to the stomach-dispensing peanuts. Bill is our cook, who came out with the New York group. And he is a good cook. He has just baked a cake fit to hobnob only with silver and damask. He can't bear to cut it up and he backs off to beam at it like a bride. How he succeeded with his primitive oven I do not know, nor does he. Moreover, Bill is a one-tool genius. He employs a two-tine fork for every imaginable purpose. It flips the toast over, deftly hooks a towel off the line, spears the steaks, punch-es holes on cans, stokes the fire, jabs un-welcome beetles out of the stew, and points at us with hair-raising emphasis when Bill discourses. I know of no other fixture on the premises that is in such constant use unless it be the doorknob of the Wetherill bathroom.

Also, he is not above practicing a little deception now and then. Our dried apple pudding, for instance, has achieved sophistication by being renamed Apple Fluff á la Grit. And we get Fish Chowder Waldorf (Turn to Page 41) It's time to roll a smoke. The Navajo horsemen are fine riders, and spend much time in the saddle.

A pack train starting up the Tsegi. While roads are generally good, but limited, in the land of the mesas, you can pack in anywhere. four states come together at one point. One may jump-hopscotch fashion-into four states in as many seconds. The other day I had hoped (out loud) that our re-connaissance might take us hither, but was told firmly that the expedition agenda has allowed for no such childish whims. It is not in the canons of expeditions to go hop-scotching just for the fun of it. Shucks!

But let's get back to camp. You must meet Charlie Jeff. He is a Navajo who works for the Wetherills and comes often to sit beside me on my narrow tent porch. Be-yond earshot we call him Chief Moocher. When first approached, he would not be photographed under any circumstances; then, after a period of indifference on my part, suggested the picture himself, and posed with the condescension of a Robert Taylor. I almost requested his autograph. Or that he would endorse our brand of powdered milk.