Cave of the Bells

Government's city, and modern Las Vegas, Nevada, 23 miles from Boulder, add much to the interest and enjoyment of a trip to the Boulder Dam-Lake Mead region.

Trout fishing is now a flourishing sport in the Colorado River below Boulder Dam. Willow Beach is the center of this sport.

Pierce Ferry on Lake Mead in Mohave County is a fishing and scenic center, destined to be one of the great recreation centers of the west. Here Lake Mead enters the western portals of Grand Canyon.

The desert silhouetted against an evening sky-a lasting portrait of Mohave County. Truly this expansive county is a colorful canvas of mines, mountains and desert majesty.

Lake Havasu, backed by Parker Dam, washes the southwestern shore of Mohave County for some fifty miles, and adds to the county's recreational possibilities.

At the present time another dam on the Colorado is being projected. This will be the Bullshead Dam, 30 miles west of Kingman, on the road to the Katherine Mine. This will not only be a power development, but a vast acreage in Mohave County will derive irrigation waters from the dam. It will further add to the vast recreational and scenic wealth of the county.

Mohave County's only national monument is the Pipe Springs National Monument in the northeast part of the county and reached via U.S. 89. There are two Indian reservations in the county, the Hualpai and the Kaibab reservations, the former a vast reservation on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.

Mines . . . great ranges of mountains, the desert of the majestic Joshua . . . Lake Mead, blue in the bright sun and reflecting great cliffs of color . . . Boulder Dam and the Colorado writing constructive history after a million years of destructive scribbling in Time's pages . . . a calendar of promising tomorrows . . . young and sturdy and growing . . . that's Mohave County. . . . R. C.

Magic of the Navajo Medicine Man

This young Navajo is studying to be a "hatali," or medicine man. He is taking lessons from one of the old medicine men, whom he pays in livestock, hides, blankets and silver jewelry. These ancient legends and arts have survived the ages.

DESERT twilight falls on northern Arizona, and beyond remote Kayenta trading post, the headlands of lofty Black Mesa appear like the prows of great ships plowing a purple sea. It is now that the "tchindis" come forth to bring disturbing aches and dreams and pains to John Navajo.

These devils, evil and unclean ghosts of the dead Navajos, must be dealt with in the ancient manner the "hatali," or medicine man, must be called upon to perform his magic.

Soon after darkness comes there rises the wild chant of the Yei-Be-Chai, sung by dancers weaving around the orange flames of a juniper fire. The song rises, swells, sinks to a low moan, ascends again to a wild, rhythmic chant, and ends in a yellprimitive, triumphant that echoes back again and again from the canyon walls.

If the "tehindis" are of no stronger stuff than I looking on from beyond the rim of red men seated about the fire, they will flee for the underworld where dwell all dreaded Nearly finished with the delicate task of sand painting, the "hatali" rests for a moment before adding the remaining symbols to the design. This painting represents a Yei or Navajo God, whose figure is symbolized by the central figure of the painting. The feathers are oriented to the cardinal directions. Throughout the long centuries they have managed to preserve their most sacred rituals unmolested and usually unseen by outsiders.

Source of these healing chants and sand paintings is lost in antiquity, their beginning hidden in the mists that surround the very origins of the North American Indian. How deep in the story of the wandering tribes do these ceremonies lie? How direct is their connection with the weird devil-chasing rites of Asiatic tribes, and with our own progenitors in Stone Age Europe? Every tribe in North America has its devil-chasing ceremony to cast out the ghosts of the dead. It is one link which binds all ancient people together.

The sand painting (or dry painting) is an important part of many rites, and has been carried in the memory of the medicine men for long years. As the legends were preserved by passing orally from man to man, so the sand paintings were never reproduced in any permanent form for future reference, and each painting is destroyed during its use in the ceremony.

Today color film and the fast photographic lens can perpetuate the paintings if the aversion of the Navajo to the “evil-eye” of the camera can be overcome. A few years ago I began making records of Navajo life. Slowly I gained the confidence of the clan leaders, learned something of their language and the rituals.

An old “hatali” or medicine man strongly believes in the magic of his medicine and has a firm influence over his people. When sickness comes to a family he is called in to perform his age-old rites to chase the evil spirits from the body of the ill.

supernatural beings. And flee they do, never to return, as any tribesman will insist if you press him for proof of the magic of the old medicine man with his feathers, gourd rattles, paints and herbs.

Missionaries long have preached to John Navajo, the WPA often has lured him far from his herds of sheep and goats, and the Indian Service doctor has introduced him to vaccines and prophylaxis with infinite patience. But out on the 15,000,000 acre Navajo Reservation, a land so vast that the civilization we know must be content to sit on the fringe of it, the tribesmen still believe that there is nothing better for a man aching in body and tormented in soul than a good old healing dance and a carefully prepared sand painting to speed the cure.

The Navajo have clung tenaciously to their native religion. Despite white men's efforts to replace the old rites, they permeate every part of their lives. The Navajo are a deeply religious people. They worship through symbol, but they are not so ignorant as to worship the symbol itself.

Feather bundles, rattles, medicine bags, prayer sticks. all have their part in the rituals. Here, with eyes and mind focused afar, the “hatali” invokes the spirits of the gods to forgive the sick man and stop troubling him.

Since the Navajo have never performed their most sacred rituals at tourist centers, I was anxious to record the making of the mystic sand paintings and went deep into the reservation at Oljato to do the work.

After several months of painstaking search for a medicine man who would permit me to photograph his rituals, I finally arranged with Noki Yozzi (Little Mexican, so-called because of his beard), to record the rites of a Devil-Chasing and Healing ceremony he was conducting for a patriarch of the tribe. This man was dying of tuberculosis, and the Navajo were going to try their own "medicine" to effect a cure before sending the patient to the white man's hospital at Kayenta, Arizona.

Already the family of the sick man had notified his relatives and clan members of the coming ceremonies, and from remote canyons and mesa tops the Navajo were riding to the gathering place-a great volcanic plug called by them "Agathla,"-"The Place of the Scraping of Hides." By the time of the ceremonies, more than 1200 Indians were encamped. These ceremonies have a four-fold function: healing, worship, perpetuation of the myths, and social gathering.

Any illness usually works an economic hardship on the family of the patient. First, the medicine man is paid a high fee for his services. The greater the fee the more potent the effect of Relatives of the patient brought to the medicine man for healing listen to the chants of the "hatali" as he works with the sick man in the "cha'o" (brush summer shelter) while the medicine hogan is purified for the sand painting His cure. Secondly, the family and relatives of the patient contribute to the feeding and entertainment of the assembled clansmen and friends. As many as sixty sheep from a family flock may be killed, and much flour, canned tomatoes and pears are purchased from a trader as well as gifts such as mirrors, cloth, and tobacco for immediate relatives, certain clansmen and friends.

The Navajo medicine men attempt a cure, no matter what the ailment, but must be paid in advance. For the ordinary all-night "sing" the usual fee is $6, payment for which is made in cash, goods, or livestock. The cost is much greater for the more elaborate rituals, which may last nine days and require as many as 150 paintings. If the patient does not recover after the healing incantations and sand paintings, the fault lies, not with the medicine man, but in the choice of rituals, and necessitates repeating the ceremony in full at another time.

Since the sand painting is done in the semi-darkness of the "medicine hogan," or conical house of brush and earth covered juniper logs, the only available light for my pictures came through the smoke-hole on top. I was not permitted to use flash bulbs since it is decreed that sunlight lessens the powers of the painting, and to the Indian a flash bulb is "bottled sunshine."

Only a few members of the patient's family are allowed to watch the "hatali" during the several hours they work to effect a cure. An apprentice shaman begins the sand painting under the guidance of the officiating medicine man, smoothing with a wood weaving bat the yellow sand of the hogan floor which serves as background to the painting. Five sacred dry-color pigments wrapped in buckskin bags lie beside Noki Yozzi.

No sound comes from the people grouped within the hogan, but keen eyes watch closely as the "hatali" painstakingly begins to trace the weirdly beautiful design. Pinches (Turn to Page 39) Before entering the "medicine" hogan, the ill person (in this case a Navajo suffering from tuberculosis) goes to the sweat house for songs and bathing and to be purified for the ritual.

The HOPI

THE Hopi Indians are the only pueblo dwellers in Arizona. Their villages are perched atop three high rocky mesas in the northeastern section of the state overlooking the Painted Desert. On the First or eastern Mesa are the villages of Walpi, Sichumovi, and Hano. The last named is not Hopi, but is made up of Tewa speak ing immigrants from the Rio Grande, who according to tradition came to help defend the Hopi of Walpi from their enemies, and were given land and permission to settle as a reward. On the second or Middle Mesa are the villages of Mishongnovi, Shipaulovi, and Shungopavi, and on the Third Mesa, Oraibi, Pakavi, and Hotevilla. Sixty miles to the west is the village of Moenkopi, composed of people from Oraibi who moved over there to farm since they could irrigate their fields from the waters of the wash. However, Moenkopi is still a part of Oraibi and its inhabitants return to Oraibi for every ceremony and recognize the Oraibi chief as their own.

The Hopi speak a language of the Ute Aztecan stock, which extends from southern Idaho to Mexico City, although it is not closely related to any of them in the sense that Havasupai and Hualpai are. The tribal name is Hopitu which means the “Peaceful Ones.” Our first written record of the Hopi dates from the Coronado expedition of 1540, when the Spanish conquistadores came to Hopiland from Zuni, and named the region the Province of Tusayan. At that time they left Franciscan missionaries behind to convert the Hopi to Christianity, but that attempt was destined to fail.

The results in political and religious spheres were negligible, but economically the Hopi acquired a great deal from the Spanish that has become an integral part of their present day life. Probably the most important were the domesticated animalscattle, horses, mules, burros and sheep. They also obtained new seeds, and fruit trees. wagons, and metal tools.

The agricultural people cling with religious fervor to their pueblos on sterile tablelands of stone, scorning the attempts of a well-meaning government to remove them to the comparative safety and comfort of dwelling places among their fields in the valley.

The food supply is based primarily on the traditional corn, beans, and squash supplemented by chili peppers, onions, melons and other foods acquired more recently. In former times whatever meat was added to their diet was obtained by hunting, but today the Hopi have a much more certain supply in their herds of sheep. Corn is still their staff of life and a greater dependence is placed upon it than is placed upon wheat in our civilization. It is ground by the girls and women. No other feature of the Hopi household is so interesting as the three slabs placed slantwise in stonelined troughs sunk in the floor. These are their mills. The corn passes through the three mills and comes out the finished product. The skill with which the women spread the meal over the grinding slab by a flirt of the hand as the mano is brought up for the return stroke is truly remarkable, and the rhythm of all the motion has the precision of a machine.

The weird song sung by the grinders and the rumble of the mill are characteristic sounds of the Hopi villages. Most of the corn meal is made into “paper bread,” called piki. Every household is equipped with a piki stone, a very smooth stone under which a fire is built. When the stone is hot, the women spread on it a thin batter of blue corn meal, mixed with a minute

DRAWINGS FOR ARIZONA HIGHWAYS BY ROSS SANTEE

quantity of wood ashes. The mixture is spread on the hot stone by hand, and soon becomes paper thin and dry. Frequently it is then rolled into eight-inch lengths, and is known as mupi.

Other foods prepared from corn meal are baked in the corn husks, boiled in corn leaves, mixed with rabbit meat and then baked, rolled into small pellets and then boiled. Often corn meal is mixed with dried ground peaches. Special dishes which are generally only prepared for feast days, when there are dances, or naming parties, or weddings are nuqkwivi and pik'ami. The first is a stew consisting of corn boiled until the hull comes off and the kernels swell up, to which is added boiled mutton. Pik'ami is prepared by grinding corn meal and sprouted wheat seeds together and then making them into a dough. The dough is baked until it steams and becomes a heavy mass of about the consistency of plum pudding.

In addition to grinding corn meal and cooking for her own family every woman has many obligations to different categories of relatives for whom she must work when they marry, or when there is a dance, or when their son is initiated, or when one of them has a work party for a new house.

Added to her other duties is the care of the house, for the adobe floors and the walls need to be replastered regularly to keep the surface hard enough so that it can be swept. All Hopi women are craftsmen, for they all make either basketry or pottery, depending upon which craft is practiced in their village. At First Mesa pottery is made, and the women spend many hours kneading and tempering their clay, moulding the vessels by adding coils of clay to a small flat base, and then smoothing the whole with a scraping stone. After the vessel has been set in the sun to dry she must paint it with the design that suits her artistic sense, and then fire it before it is completed.

Great credit is due Nampeyo, a Tewa potter of Hano, who toiled throughout her long life to bring the art of pottery making to the high state of development it held in pre-Spanish days.

During Nampeyo's girlhood Hopi pottery making reached its lowest ebb. But her opportunity to study the art of the past came when Dr. Walter J. Fewkes, of Smith sonian Institution, excavated a pre-Spanish ruin which yielded the finest collection of polychrome pottery unearthed on the North American continent.

While the excavating was in progress both Nampeyo and her husband, Lesu, spent days in the tents with colored crayons and pads, furnished by the kindly doctor, making careful drawings of forms and decorations of the best specimens before they were shipped to Washington.

At the Second Mesa villages, the women make coiled baskets and plaques, and at Third Mesa, woven baskets and plaques. The technique differs, but both involve gathering the plant materials from which they weave their baskets, and the plants for dyeing. The weaving materials are split and bleach ed, and finally dyed before the actual weaving begins. Unlike the potter who can make the form of her vessel first and consider the decoration later, the basket maker must have the form and design in mind constantly, for both are created at the same time out of the same materials.

Land among the Hopi is communal, given to the numerous clans and then apportioned to the various families who enjoy its use and hand it down to the daughters while the son must look to his wife's share of clan allotment for his future estate. However, when the Hopi acquired sheep, horses, wagons, etc., from the Spanish they took over also the Spanish system of ownership, where by a man owns such property individually and can dispose of it according to the needs not only of his wife's family, but of his own as well.

Each Hopi village (except Moenkopi) is a completely autonomous unit, and each tends to duplicate the others in its social and ceremonial organizations. Every village has a number of matrilineal clans, bearing odd names such as Rabbit, Bear, Sun, Spider, Snake, Squash, Parrot. According to tradition the Hopi emerged from the underworld long ago, and each group derived the clan name from some incident that befell it. More important, each clan brought to the village some sacred object and the knowledge of a ceremony having power to bring rain. Consequently, all the ceremonial offices must be filled from the membership of a given clan the Village Chief must be-long to the Bear clan, the Kachina chief to the Parrot clan, the Snake chief to the Snake clan, and so on. All of these offices are religious rather than political, and all Hopi chiefs are priests, rather than secular officers.

A Hopi clan consists of a group of people, all of whom are believed to be descended from a common maternal ancestor, all having a name in common. This is the blood relationship group, and everyone in it is related to everyone else. Consequently it is the rule that one must always marry outside of the clan. There are also ties with the father's clan, so that it it not considered proper to marry a woman in one's father's clan.

We are accustomed to counting blood relationship equally on both father's and mother's side of the family. This is not the case with the Hopi. For a Hopi, his mother, her sisters, or any woman of the same generation in her clan is considered as mother. Similarly the children of two sisters are all brothers and sisters to one another. The mother's brother is in many ways the most important relative for he is responsible for teaching his sister's children, and for disciplining them; if he is a priest, his sister's son will succeed him in office.

All of these relatives are an essential part of the organization of the family, but in Hopi life the women represent the stable part, while the affiliations of the men are changing. A man always considers his mother's house his real home, but after marriage he lives at his wife's house. However, none of his sacred objects are moved from the house in which he was born. Whenever he takes part in any religious ceremony, he returns to his mother's house, and stays there until it is over.

The different clans have certain regions where they go to trap eagles in the early summer, and this is very valuable property, for eagle feathers are most essential in making prayer sticks to carry the messages of the Hopi to their gods.

Each village is built around a rectangularplaza for dancing, and consists of a number of houses, formerly two or three stories high, but now usually only one. In addition to the houses there are several square underground rooms, entered by means of a ladder through the roof. These rooms are called the Kivas. The kiva is used as a sort of club room by the men, and for holding ceremonies, most of which are secret and exclude all but members of the cult.

The Hopi are the only Arizona Indians who do wood carving; they make but one product, kachina dolls, which represent masked gods and are distributed to the children by the kachinas during the Bean Dance in February and again when they return to their ancestral home in July. The kachinas are men dressed to represent gods.

The life of the Hopi is bound up in a continuous round of ceremonies and dances. From the time the kachinas come in February until the "going out" in July masked ceremonies are held constantly in all Hopi villages. During the Powamu ceremony the children and their ceremonial fathers all wait in the kiva until the kachinas arrive. Then each child is held by its ceremonial father while the kachinas whip them with yucca leaves. This is the Hopi revelation of the secret of life.

The Home Dance or "the going away of the gods," occurs in July, at which time each Hopi bride appears with her mother-inlaw, dressed in her wedding clothes. She has been barred from seeing any dance until this one and her attendance is a rite. Close on the heels of the Home Dance follows the preparation for the Snake ceremony and dance, the most widely advertised of all Hopi dances. In August of every other year, occur the simultaneous ceremonies of the Snake and Antelope societies. The Snake-Antelope rites take sixteen days from the time they are announced until they are completed. All that is ever seen by the white man is the public dance on the last day. As in other Hopi ceremonies the kiva activities are secret, but they involve familiar patterns and techniques making the altar, singing, smoking, sprinkling water over it. The purpose is the same as in other rites also the production of rain. For eight days the men gather snakes from first north, then east, then south and finally west. On the last day the snakes are placed in an enclosure of green cottonwood limbs in the plaza. The men of the Antelope Society come in first and line up before it, then the Snake Society men line up facing them. After singing four or five songs, the Snake men dance each snake around the plaza while the Antelope men sing for them. The snake is held in the mouth, and when released is picked up by another man who sprinkles it with sacred corn meal, and then holds it up in the four cardinal directions. When all the snakes have been danced, a circle of corn meal is made, the snakes are thrown into it, sprinkled again with meal, and finally picked up by the armful by the Snake men and carried down the mesa in the four directions and released. The snakes are the carriers of the Hopi plea for rain, to the powers in each direction.

The Antelope dance is held the day before the Snake dance; it is the same, except that the positions are reversed. The Snake Society sings and the Antelope Society dances with green corn stalks in their mouths instead of snakes.

In the year when the snake dance does not occur in a village, the Flute ceremony is held at the same time of the year, late August. The ceremonies of September and October are in the hands of two women's societies. They, too, consist of eight-day kiva ceremonies followed by a public dance on the ninth day.

In addition to the religious ceremonies each village usually has a buffalo dance in January and a butterfly dance during the summer. Both of these are social affairs, for the pleasure of dancing and have no religious significance.

When the chief of any of the different societies has decided by his observation of the sun, that it is time to hold his ceremony he calls a meeting with the Village Chief, the Crier, and other officers. They smoke and discuss the purpose for which the rites are to be held. The following morning at sunrise, the Crier announces from the housetop what ceremony is to be held, and when. The announcement is always made eight or sixteen days before the ceremony is to be held.

Practically every other Indian tribe in the Southwest has lost its original character to a greater extent than the Hopi. Some tribes have degenerated, others have entirely died out, some have been absorbed by inter-marriage or have gained a foothold in the civilization that overwhelmed them. However, the Hopi have remained much as they were. The reason is simple. The Hopi were a sedentary people when America was discovered. They had already built severalstoried communal apartment houses. They cultivated the land by a system which the white men have adopted from them. They made pottery and wove cloth, with a skill that reached the level of art.

These Indians were not warlike, but asked only to live in their strange houses and cultivate their lands. They resisted violently the invasion of the Spaniards and an enforced religion, and today the Hopi remain a curious and picturesque survival of primitive America.

The CAVE of the BELLS

Here is one of the many rooms in the sub-terranean fairyland. Hodgson poses in the center background while Henes is silhouetted in the foreground as he set off the flash gun.

I WOULDN'T recommend it for persons apt to become seized with claustrophobia, but if you want to test your daring and pioneering instincts, there's a strange new world nestled deep in a hidden hollow of the Santa Rita mountains in Southern Arizona. Before you set off in search of this subterranean fairyland, however, let me tell you that the courage and stamina of an explorer, in my estimation at least, merits only the greatest admiration. Cave exploring, especially. It is no easy task. It is risky business although certainly an adventure that will remain indelible in your memory. I speak from experience. And after that experience I no longer hold to be true that inexact conception of cave exoring which I had previously shared with the uninitiated. Somehow, I had believed that a person could go into a cave, walk about fairly safely, perhaps have to wedge oneself through narrow openings, but eventually emerge again as easily as he had entered. Believe me, that is not so. I had never considered that inky blackness that forever cloaks you, those narrow ledges and precipitous drops that seems to be everywhere, the slippery footing and the numerous tiny slots that one must negotiate.

With his light in hand, Lynn Hodgson, who first explored the cave, looks for the best method of approach through the opening