fortunate the trail-weary traveler who falls in with him. When
the fire kindles and savory meat seethes in the pot, when there is
a
drowsy blether from the flock, and far down the mesa the twilight
twinkle of
shepherd fires, when there is a hint of blossom
underfoot and a
heavenly whiteness on the hills, one harks back
without effort to Judaea and the Nativity. But one feels by day
anything but good will to note the shorn shrubs and cropped
blossom-tops. So many seasons' effort, so many suns and rains to
make a pound of wool! And then there is the loss of
ground-inhabiting birds that must fail from the mesa when few herbs
ripen seed.
Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills,
there is more sky than any place in the world. It does not sit
flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space
in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean
winey winds. There are some odors, too, that get into the blood.
There is the spring smell of sage that is the
warning that sap is
beginning to work in a soil that looks to have none of the juices
of life in it; it is the sort of smell that sets one thinking what
a long
furrow the
plough would turn up here, the sort of smell that
is the
beginning of new leafage, is best at the plant's best, and
leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There is the smell
of sage at
sundown, burning sage from campoodies and sheep camps,
that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell
that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon
long
acquaintance, and every Paiute and
shepherd smells of it
indubitably. There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust that
comes up from the
alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and
the smell of rain from the wide-mouthed canons. And last the smell
of the salt grass country, which is the
beginning of other things
that are the end of the mesa trail.
THE BASKET MAKER
"A man," says Seyavi of the campoodie, "must have a woman, but a
woman who has a child will do very well."
That was perhaps why, when she lost her mate in the dying
struggle of his race, she never took another, but set her wit to
fend for herself and her young son. No doubt she was often put to
it in the
beginning to find food for them both. The Paiutes had
made their last stand at the border of the Bitter Lake;
battle-driven they died in its waters, and the land filled with
cattle-men and adventurers for gold: this while Seyavi and the boy
lay up in the caverns of the Black Rock and ate tule roots and
fresh-water clams that they dug out of the slough bottoms with
their toes. In the interim, while the tribes swallowed their
defeat, and before the rumor of war died out, they must have come
very near to the bare core of things. That was the time Seyavi
learned the sufficiency of mother wit, and how much more
easily one can do without a man than might at first be supposed.
To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land
it is lived in and the
procession of the year. This
valley is a
narrow one, a mere
trough between hills, a
draught for storms,
hardly a crow's
flight from the sharp Sierras of the Snows to the
curled, red and ochre, uncomforted, bare ribs of Waban. Midway of
the
groove runs a burrowing, dull river, nearly a hundred miles
from where it cuts the lava flats of the north to its widening in
a thick, tideless pool of a lake. Hereabouts the ranges have no
foothills, but rise up steeply from the bench lands above the
river. Down from the Sierras, for the east ranges have almost no
rain, pour glancing white floods toward the lowest land, and all
beside them lie the campoodies, brown wattled brush heaps, looking
east.
In the river are mussels, and reeds that have
edible white
roots, and in the soddy meadows tubers of joint grass; all these at
their best in the spring. On the slope the summer growth affords
seeds; up the steep the one-leafed pines, an oily nut. That was
really all they could depend upon, and that only at the mercy of
the little gods of frost and rain. For the rest it was
cunningagainst
cunning,
caution against skill, against quacking hordes of
wild-fowl in the tulares, against pronghorn and bighorn and deer.
You can guess, however, that all this warring of rifles and
bowstrings, this influx of overlording whites, had made game
wilder and hunters
fearful of being hunted. You can
surmise also,
for it was a crude time and the land was raw, that the women became
in turn the game of the conquerors.
There used to be in the Little Antelope a she dog, stray or
outcast, that had a
litter in some
forsaken lair, and ranged and
foraged for them, slinking
savage and afraid, remembering and
mistrusting humankind,
wistful, lean, and sufficient for her young.
I have thought Seyavi might have had days like that, and have had
perfect leave to think, since she will not talk of it. Paiutes
have the art of reducing life to its lowest ebb and yet saving it
alive on grasshoppers, lizards, and strange herbs; and that time
must have left no shift untried. It lasted long enough for Seyavi
to have evolved the
philosophy of life which I have set down at the
beginning. She had gone beyond
learning to do for her son, and
learned to believe it worth while.
In our kind of society, when a woman ceases to alter the
fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the
crisis of
her experience. If she goes on crimping and uncrimping with the
changing mode, it is safe to suppose she has never come up against
anything too big for her. The Indian woman gets nearly the same
personal note in the pattern of her baskets. Not that she does not
make all kinds, carriers, water-bottles, and cradles,--these
are kitchen ware,--but her works of art are all of the same piece.
Seyavi made flaring, flat-bottomed bowls, cooking pots really, when
cooking was done by dropping hot stones into water-tight food
baskets, and for
decoration a design in colored bark of the
procession of plumed crests of the
valley quail. In this pattern
she had made cooking pots in the golden spring of her
wedding year,
when the quail went up two and two to their resting places about
the foot of Oppapago. In this fashion she made them when, after
pillage, it was possible to reinstate the housewifely crafts.
Quail ran then in the Black Rock by hundreds,--so you will still
find them in
fortunate years,--and in the
famine time the women cut
their long hair to make snares when the flocks came morning and
evening to the springs.
Seyavi made baskets for love and sold them for money, in a
generation that preferred iron pots for
utility. Every Indian
woman is an artist,--sees, feels, creates, but does not
philosophize about her processes. Seyavi's bowls are wonders of
technical
precision, inside and out, the palm finds no fault with
them, but the subtlest
appeal is in the sense that warns us of
humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl.
There used to be an Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck
trinket baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate
the design to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket
without
sensible disproportion, and so cleverly that you
might own one a year without thinking how it was done;
but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond cleverness. The
weaver and
the warp lived next to the earth and were saturated with the same
elements. Twice a year, in the time of white butterflies and again
when young quail ran neck and neck in the chaparral, Seyavi cut
willows for basketry by the creek where it wound toward the river
against the sun and sucking winds. It never quite reached the
river except in far-between times of summer flood, but it always
tried, and the willows encouraged it as much as they could. You
nearly always found them a little farther down than the
trickle of
eager water. The Paiute fashion of counting time
appeals to me
more than any other
calendar. They have no stamp of
heathen gods
nor great ones, nor any
succession of moons as have red men of the
East and North, but count forward and back by the progress of the
season; the time of taboose, before the trout begin to leap, the
end of the pinon
harvest, about the
beginning of deep snows. So
they get nearer the sense of the season, which runs early or late
according as the rains are forward or delayed. But
whenever Seyavi
cut willows for baskets was always a golden time, and the soul of
the weather went into the wood. If you had ever owned one of
Seyavi's golden russet cooking bowls with the pattern of plumed
quail, you would understand all this without
saying anything.
Before Seyavi made baskets for the
satisfaction of
desire,--for that is a house-bred theory of art that makes anything
more of it,--she danced and dressed her hair. In those days, when
the spring was at flood and the blood pricked to the mating fever,
the maids chose their flowers, wreathed themselves, and danced in
the twilights, young desire crying out to young desire. They sang
what the heart prompted, what the flower expressed, what boded in
the mating weather.
"And what flower did you wear, Seyavi?"
"I, ah,--the white flower of twining (clematis), on my body
and my hair, and so I sang:--
"I am the white flower of twining,
Little white flower by the river,
Oh, flower that twines close by the river;
Oh, trembling flower!
So trembles the
maiden heart."
So sang Seyavi of the campoodie before she made baskets, and in her
later days laid her arms upon her knees and laughed in them at the
recollection. But it was not often she would say so much, never
understanding the keen
hunger I had for bits of lore and the "fool
talk" of her people. She had fed her young son with meadowlarks'
tongues, to make him quick of speech; but in late years was
loath to admit it, though she had come through the period of
unfaith in the lore of the clan with a fine
appreciation of its
beauty and significance.
"What good will your dead get, Seyavi, of the baskets you
burn?" said I, coveting them for my own collection.
Thus Seyavi, "As much good as yours of the flowers you strew."
Oppapago looks on Waban, and Waban on Coso and the Bitter
Lake, and the campoodie looks on these three; and more, it sees the
beginning of winds along the foot of Coso, the
gathering of clouds
behind the high ridges, the spring flush, the soft spread of wild
almond bloom on the mesa. These first, you understand, are the
Paiute's walls, the other his furnishings. Not the wattled hut is
his home, but the land, the winds, the hill front, the stream.
These he cannot
duplicate at any furbisher's shop as you who live
within doors, who, if your purse allows, may have the same home at
Sitka and Samarcand. So you see how it is that the homesickness of
an Indian is often unto death, since he gets no
relief from it;
neither wind nor weed nor sky-line, nor any
aspect of the hills of
a strange land
sufficiently like his own. So it was when the
government reached out for the Paiutes, they gathered into the
Northern Reservation only such poor tribes as could
devise no other
end of their affairs. Here, all along the river, and south to
Shoshone Land, live the clans who owned the earth, fallen
into the
deplorable condition of hangers-on. Yet you hear them
laughing at the hour when they draw in to the campoodie after
labor, when there is a smell of meat and the steam of the cooking
pots goes up against the sun. Then the children lie with their
toes in the ashes to hear tales; then they are merry, and have the
joys of repletion and the nearness of their kind. They have their
hills, and though jostled are
sufficiently free to get some
fortitude for what will come. For now you shall hear of the end of
the basket maker.
In her best days Seyavi was most like Deborah, deep bosomed,
broad in the hips, quick in
counsel, slow of speech, esteemed of
her people. This was that Seyavi who reared a man by her own hand,
her own wit, and none other. When the townspeople began to take
note of her--and it was some years after the war before there began
to be any towns--she was then in the quick
maturity of primitive
women; but when I knew her she seemed already old. Indian women do
not often live to great age, though they look
incredibly steeped in