The Delight Makers

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Transcriber's note:

The symbol [=a] is used to denote the sound of a in "hare,"
which was originally represented in the text using the
letter "a" with a macron.

Other punctuation has been normalized to contemporary standards.

THE DELIGHT MAKERS

by

ADOLF F. BANDELIER

With an Introduction by Charles F. Lummis

Illustrated

[Illustration: Portrait of the Author]

New York Dodd, Mead and Company
Publishers
Copyright, 1890
by Dodd, Mead and Company
Copyright, 1916
by Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc.
Copyright, 1918
by Mrs. Fanny R. Bandelier
Printed In U. S. A.

PREFACE

This story is the result of eight years spent in ethnological and
archaeological study among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. The first
chapters were written more than six years ago at the Pueblo of Cochiti.
The greater part was composed in 1885, at Santa Fe, after I had bestowed
upon the Tehuas the same interest and attention I had previously paid to
their neighbours the Queres. I was prompted to perform the work by a
conviction that however scientific works may tell the truth about the
Indian, they exercise always a limited influence upon the general
public; and to that public, in our country as well as abroad, the Indian
has remained as good as unknown. By clothing sober facts in the garb of
romance I have hoped to make the "Truth about the Pueblo Indians" more
accessible and perhaps more acceptable to the public in general.

The sober facts which I desire to convey may be divided into three
classes,--geographical, ethnological, and archaeological. The
descriptions of the country and of its nature are real. The descriptions
of manners and customs, of creed and rites, are from actual observations
by myself and other ethnologists, from the statements of trustworthy
Indians, and from a great number of Spanish sources of old date, in
which the Pueblo Indian is represented as he lived when still unchanged
by contact with European civilization.

The descriptions of architecture are based upon investigations of ruins
still in existence on the sites where they are placed in the story.

The plot is my own. But most of the scenes described I have witnessed;
and there is a basis for it in a dim tradition preserved by the Queres
of Cochiti that their ancestors dwelt on the Rito de los Frijoles a
number of centuries ago, and in a similar tradition among the Tehuas of
the Pueblo of Santa Clara in regard to the cave-dwellings of the Puye.

A word to the linguist. The dialect spoken by the actors is that of
Cochiti for the Queres, that of San Juan for the Tehuas. In order to
avoid the complicated orthography latterly adopted by scientists for
Indian dialects, I have written Indian words and phrases as they would
be pronounced in continental languages. The letter [=a] is used to
denote the sound of a in "hare."

To those who have so kindly assisted me,--in particular to Rev. E. W.
Meany of Santa Fe, and to Dr. Norton B. Strong, of the United States
Army,--I herewith tender my heartfelt thanks.

AD. F. BANDELIER

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO.

* * * * *

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The aim of our good and lamented friend in writing this book was to
place before the public, in novelistic garb, an account of the life and
activities of the Pueblo Indians before the coming of white men. The
information on which it is based was the result of his personal
observations during many years of study among the sedentary tribes of
New Mexico and in Spanish archives pertaining thereto in connection with
his researches for the Archaeological Institute of America. He spent
months in continuous study at the Tehua pueblo of San Juan and the
Queres pueblo of Cochiti, and the regard in which he was held by the
simple folk of those and other native villages was sincerely
affectionate. Bandelier's labors in his chosen field were commenced at a
time when a battle with hardship was a part of the daily routine, and
his method of performing the tasks before him was of the kind that
produced important results often at the expense of great suffering,
which on more than one occasion almost shut out his life.

Because not understood, _The Delight Makers_ was not received at first
with enthusiastic favor. It seemed unlike the great student of technical
problems deliberately to write a book the layman might read with
interest and profit; but his object once comprehended, the volume was
received in the spirit in which the venture was initiated and for a long
while search for a copy has often been in vain.

Bandelier has come unto his own. More than one serious student of the
ethno-history of our Southwest has frankly declared that the basis of
future investigation of the kind that Bandelier inaugurated will always
be the writings of that eminent man. Had he been permitted to live and
labor, nothing would have given him greater satisfaction than the
knowledge that the people among whom he spent so many years are of those
who fully appreciate the breadth of his learning and who have been
instrumental in the creation, by proclamation of the President, of the
"Bandelier National Monument," for the purpose of preserving for future
generations some of the archaeological remains he was the first to
observe and describe.

F. W. HODGE.

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION,
WASHINGTON, D. C.,
_September 25, 1916._

* * * * *

NOTE

A SPECIAL interest attaches to the illustrations, now first included in
this edition. Many of them are from photographs made by Chas. F. Lummis
in 1890, under the supervision of Bandelier, and with special reference
to "The Delight Makers," then being written. These two friends were the
first students to explore the Tyuonyi and its neighborhood. In rain and
shine, afoot, without blankets or overcoats, with no more provision than
a little _atole_ (popcorn meal) and sweet chocolate, they climbed the
cliffs, threaded the canons, slept in caves or under trees, measured,
mapped and photographed the ruins and landscapes with a 40-pound camera,
and laid the basis-notes for part of Bandelier's monumental "Final
Report" to the Archaeological Institute of America.

A few later photographs from the same hand show part of the excavation
done in the Tyuonyi by the School of American Archaeology--through whose
loving and grateful efforts this canon has been set apart as a National
Monument bearing the name of its discoverer and chronicler,

ADOLF F. BANDELIER.

Thanks are due also to Hon. Frederick C. Hicks, M.C., for six very
interesting photographs of the Zunis and their country.

* * * * *

IN MEMORY

One day of August, 1888, in the teeth of a particular New Mexico
sand-storm that whipped pebbles the size of a bean straight to your
face, a ruddy, bronzed, middle-aged man, dusty but unweary with his
sixty-mile tramp from Zuni, walked into my solitary camp at Los
Alamitos. Within the afternoon I knew that here was the most
extraordinary mind I had met. There and then began the uncommon
friendship which lasted till his death, a quarter of a century later;
and a love and admiration which will be of my dearest memories so long
as I shall live. I was at first suspicious of the "pigeon-hole memory"
which could not only tell me some Queres word I was searching for, but
add: "Policarpio explained that to me in Cochiti, November 23, 1881."
But I discovered that this classified memory was an integral part of
this extraordinary genius. The acid tests of life-long collaboration
proved not only this but the judicial poise, the marvelous insight and
the intellectual chastity of Bandelier's mind. I cannot conceive of
anything in the world which would have made him trim his sails as a
historian or a student for any advantage here or hereafter.

Aside from keen mutual interests of documentary and ethnologic study, we
came to know one another humanly by the hard proof of the Frontier.
Thousands of miles of wilderness and desert we trudged side by
side--camped, starved, shivered, learned and were Glad together. Our
joint pursuits in comfort at our homes (in Santa Fe and Isleta,
respectively) will always be memorable to me; but never so wonderful as
that companioning in the hardships of what was, in our day, the really
difficult fringe of the Southwest. There was not a decent road. We had
no endowment, no vehicles. Bandelier was once loaned a horse; and after
riding two miles, led it the rest of the thirty. So we went always by
foot; my big camera and glass plates in the knapsack on my back, the
heavy tripod under my arm; his aneroid, surveying instruments, and
satchel of the almost microscopic notes which he kept fully and
precisely every night by the camp-fire (even when I had to crouch over
him and the precious paper with my water-proof focusing cloth) somehow
bestowed about him. Up and down pathless cliffs, through tangled canons,
fording icy streams and ankle-deep sands, we travailed; no blankets,
overcoats, or other shelter; and the only commissary a few cakes of
sweet chocolate, and a small sack of parched popcorn meal. Our "lodging
was the cold ground." When we could find a cave, a tree, or anything to
temper the wind or keep off part of the rain, all right. If not, the
Open. So I came to love him as well as revere. I had known many
"scientists" and what happened when they really got Outdoors. He was in
no way an athlete--nor even muscular. I was both--and not very long
before had completed my thirty-five-hundred-mile "Tramp Across the
Continent." But I never had to "slow down" for him. Sometimes it was
necessary to use laughing force to detain him at dark where we had water
and a leaning cliff, instead of stumbling on through the trackless night
to an unknown "Somewheres." He has always reminded me of John Muir, the
only other man I have known intimately who was as insatiate a climber
and inspiring a talker. But Bandelier had one advantage. He could find
common ground with _anyone_. I have seen him with Presidents, diplomats,
Irish section-hands, Mexican peons, Indians, authors, scientists and
"society." Within an hour or so he was easily the Center. Not
unconscious of his power, he had an extraordinary and sensitive modesty,
which handicapped him through life among those who had the "gift of
push." He never put himself forward either in person or in his writing.
But something about him fascinated all these far-apart classes of
people, when he spoke. His command of English, French, Spanish, and
German might have been expected; but his facility in acquiring the
"dialects" of railroad men and cowboys, or the language of an Indian
tribe, was almost uncanny. When he first visited me, in Isleta, he knew
just three words of Tigua. In ten days he could make himself understood
by the hour with the Principales in their own unwritten tongue. Of
course, this was one secret of his extraordinary success in learning the
inner heart of the Indians.

I saw it proved again in our contact with the Quichua and Aymara and
other tribes of Peru and Bolivia.

I have known many scholars and some heroes--but they seldom come in the
same original package. As I remember Bandelier with smallpox alone in
the two-foot snows of the Manzanos; his tens of thousands of miles of
tramping, exploring, measuring, describing, in the Southwest; his year
afoot and alone in Northern Mexico, with no more weapon than a
pen-knife, on the trails of raiding Apaches (where "scientific
expeditions" ten years later, when the Apache was eliminated, needed
armed convoys and pack-trains enough for a punitive expedition, and
wrote pretentious books about what every scholar has known for three
hundred years) I deeply wonder at the dual quality of his intellect.
Among them all, I have never known such student and such explorer lodged
in one tenement.

We were knit not only thus but in the very intimacies of life--sharing
hopes and bereavements. My first son, named for him, should now be
twenty-two. The old home in Santa Fe was as my own. The truly wonderful
little woman he found in Peru for mate--who shared his hardships among
the cannibals of the Amazonas and elsewhere, and so aided and still
carries on his work--I met in her maiden home, and am glad I may still
call her friend.

Naturally, among my dearest memories of our trampings together is that
of the Rito, the Tyuonyi. It had never in any way been pictured before.
We were the first students that ever explored it. He had discovered it,
and was writing "The Delight Makers." What days those were! The weather
was no friend of ours, nor of the camera's. We were wet and half-fed,
and cold by night, even in the ancient tiny caves. But the unforgettable
glory of it all!

To-day thousands of people annually visit the Tyuonyi at ease, and camp
for weeks in comfort. The School of American Archaeology has a summer
session there; and its excavations verify Bandelier's surmises. Normal
students and budding archaeologists sleep in the very caves (identified)
of the Eagle People, the Turquoise, Snake and other clans. And in that
enchanted valley we remember not only the Ancients, but the man who gave
all this to the world.

During the six years I was Librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library,
far later, no other out-of-print book on the Southwest was so eagerly
sought as "The Delight Makers." We had great trouble in getting our own
copy, which slept in the safe. The many students who wished copies of
their very own were referred to dealers in Americana, who searched for
this already rare volume; and many were proud to get it, at last, at
ten, fifteen and even twenty times its original price. It will always be
a standard--the most photographic story yet printed of the life of the
prehistoric Americans.

CHARLES F. LUMMIS.

* * * * *

ILLUSTRATIONS

Portrait of the Author _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The East End of the Canon of the Tyuonyi 8
A Modern Indian Dance 18
An Estufa 18
Rito de los Frijoles: Cavate Rooms in Cliff; Ruins
of Talus Pueblo at the Foot of Cliff 38
A Westerly Cliff of the Habitations of the Tyuonyi,
Showing Second and Third Story Caves, and
Some High Lookout Caves 70
A Navajo Hogan 88
The Heart of the Tyuonyi: The Excavated Lower
Story of the Great Terraced Communal House 88
Rito de los Frijoles: A Cliff Estufa of the Snake-Clan 116
The Dance of the Ayash Tyucotz 140
Indian Pueblo Dances of To-day: Lining Up for the
Dance; The "Clowns" 164
Type of Old Indian Woman 186
Juanico: A Member of the Modern Village-Council 224
The Hishtanyi Chayan, or Chief Medicine Man 256
Looking Out from One of the Weathered Cave-Rooms
of the Snake-Clan 320
Rito de los Frijoles: Looking Out from the Ceremonial
Cave 384
Ruins of an Ancient Pueblo 472
A Modern Pueblo 486

* * * * *

THE DELIGHT MAKERS

CHAPTER I.

The mountain ranges skirting the Rio Grande del Norte on the west,
nearly opposite the town of Santa Fe, in the Territory of New Mexico,
are to-day but little known. The interior of the chain, the Sierra de
los Valles, is as yet imperfectly explored. Still, these bald-crested
mountains, dark and forbidding as they appear from a distance, conceal
and shelter in their deep gorges and clefts many a spot of great natural
beauty, surprisingly picturesque, but difficult of access. From the
river these canons, as they are called in New Mexico, can be reached
only by dint of toilsome climbing and clambering; for their western
openings are either narrow gaps, or access to them is barred by colossal
walls and pillars of volcanic rocks. The entire formation of the chain,
as far as it faces the Rio Grande, is volcanic, the walls of the gorges
consisting generally of a friable white or yellowish tufa containing
nodules of black, translucent obsidian. The rock is so soft that in many
places it can be scooped out or detached with the most primitive tools,
or even with the fingers alone. Owing to this peculiarity the slopes
exposed to the south and east, whence most of the heavy rains strike
them, are invariably abrupt, and often even perpendicular; whereas the
opposite declivities, though steep, still afford room for scanty
vegetation. The gorges run from west to east,--that is, they descend
from the mountain crests to the Rio Grande, cutting the long and narrow
pedestal on which the high summits are resting.

Through some but not all of these gorges run never-failing streams of
clear water. In a few instances the gorge expands and takes the
proportions of a narrow vale. Then the high timber that usually skirts
the rivulets shrinks to detached groves, and patches of clear land
appear, which, if cultivated, would afford scanty support to one or two
modern families. To the village Indian such tillable spots were of the
greatest value. The deep ravine afforded shelter not only against the
climate but against roving enemies, and the land was sufficient for his
modest crops; since his wants were limited, and game was abundant.

The material of which the walls of these canons are composed, suggested
in times past to the house-building Indian the idea of using them as a
home. The tufa and pumice-stone are so friable that, as we have said,
the rock can be dug or burrowed with the most primitive implements. It
was easier, in fact, to excavate dwellings than to pile up walls in the
open air.

Therefore the northern sides of these secluded gorges are perforated in
many places by openings similar in appearance to pigeon-holes. These
openings are the points of exit and entrance of artificial caves, dug
out by sedentary aborigines in times long past. They are met with in
clusters of as many as several hundred; more frequently, however, the
groups are small. Sometimes two or more tiers of caves are superimposed.
From the objects scattered about and in the cells, and from the size and
disposition of the latter, it becomes evident that the people who
excavated and inhabited them were on the same level of culture as the
so-called Pueblo Indians of New Mexico.

It is not surprising, therefore, that some traditions and myths are
preserved to-day among the Pueblos concerning these cave-villages. Thus
the Tehua Indians of the pueblo of Santa Clara assert that the
artificial grottos of what they call the Puiye and the Shufinne, west of
their present abodes, were the homes of their ancestors at one time. The
Queres of Cochiti in turn declare that the tribe to which they belong,
occupied, many centuries before the first coming of Europeans to New
Mexico, the cluster of cave-dwellings, visible at this day although
abandoned and in ruins, in that romantic and picturesquely secluded
gorge called in the Queres dialect Tyuonyi, and in Spanish "El Rito de
los Frijoles."

The Rito is a beautiful spot. Situated in a direct line not over twenty
miles west of Santa Fe, it can still be reached only after a long day's
tedious travel. It is a narrow valley, nowhere broader than half a mile;
and from where it begins in the west to where it closes in a dark and
gloomy entrance, scarcely wide enough for two men to pass abreast, in
the east, its length does not exceed six miles. Its southern rim is
formed by the slope of a timbered mesa, and that slope is partly
overgrown by shrubbery. The northern border constitutes a line of
vertical cliffs of yellowish and white pumice, projecting and
re-entering like decorations of a stage,--now perpendicular and smooth
for some distance, now sweeping back in the shape of an arched segment.
These cliffs vary in height, although nowhere are they less than two
hundred feet. Their tops rise in huge pillars, in crags and pinnacles.
Brushwood and pine timber crown the mesa of which these fantastic
projections are but the shaggy border.

Through the vale itself rustles the clear and cool brook to which the
name of Rito de los Frijoles is applied. It meanders on, hugging the
southern slope, partly through open spaces, partly through groves of
timber, and again past tall stately pine-trees standing isolated in the
valley willows, cherry-trees, cottonwoods, and elders form small
thickets along its banks. The Rito is a permanent streamlet
notwithstanding its small size. Its water freezes in winter, but it
never dries up completely during the summer months.

Bunches of tall grass, low shrubbery, and cactus grow in the open spaces
between rocky debris fallen from above. They also cover in part low
mounds of rubbish, and ruins of a large pentagonal building erected
formerly at the foot of a slope leading to the cliffs. In the cliffs
themselves, for a distance of about two miles, numerous caves dug out by
the hand of man are visible. Some of these are yet perfect; others have
wholly crumbled away except the rear wall. From a distance the
port-holes and indentations appear like so many pigeons' nests in the
naked rock. Together with the cavities formed by amygdaloid chambers and
crevices caused by erosion, they give the cliffs the appearance of a
huge, irregular honeycomb.

These ruins, inside as well as outside the northern walls of the canon
of the Rito, bear testimony to the tradition still current among the
Queres Indians of New Mexico that the Rito, or Tyuonyi, was once
inhabited by people of their kind, nay, even of their own stock. But the
time when those people wooed and wed, lived and died, in that secluded
vale is past long, long ago. Centuries previous to the advent of the
Spaniards, the Rito was already deserted. Nothing remains but the ruins
of former abodes and the memory of their inhabitants among their
descendants. These ancient people of the Rito are the actors in the
story which is now to be told; the stage in the main is the Rito itself.
The language of the actors is the Queres dialect, and the time when the
events occurred is much anterior to the discovery of America, to the
invention of gunpowder and the printing-press in Europe. Still the Rito
must have appeared then much as it appears now,--a quiet, lovely,
picturesque retreat, peaceful when basking in the sunlight, wonderfully
quiet when the stars sparkled over it, or the moon shed its floods of
silver on the cliffs and on the murmuring brook below.

In the lower or western part of its course the Tyuonyi rushes in places
through thickets and small groves, out of which rise tall pine-trees. It
is very still on the banks of the brook when, on a warm June day,
noon-time is just past and no breeze fans the air; not a sound is heard
beyond the rippling of the water; the birds are asleep, and the noise of
human activity does not reach there from the cliffs. Still, on the day
of which we are now speaking, a voice arose from the thicket, calling
aloud,--

"Umo,--'grandfather!'"[1]

"To ima satyumishe,--'come hither, my brother,'" another voice replied
in the same dialect, adding, "See what a big fish I have caught."

It sounded as though this second voice had issued from the very waters
of the streamlet.

Pine boughs rustled, branches bent, and leaves shook. A step scarcely
audible was followed by a noiseless leap. On a boulder around which
flowed streams of limpid water there alighted a young Indian.

He was of medium height and well-proportioned. His hands and feet were
rather small and delicate. He carried his head erect with ease and
freedom. Jet-black hair, slightly waving, streamed loose over temples
and cheeks, and was gathered at the back in a short thick knot. In front
it parted naturally, leaving exposed a narrow strip of the brow. The
features of the face, though not regular, were still attractive, for
large black eyes, almond-shaped, shone bright from underneath heavy
lashes. The complexion was dusky, and the skin had a velvety gloss.
Form, carriage, and face together betokened a youth of about eighteen
years.

His costume was very plain. A garment of unbleached cotton, coarsely
woven, covered the body as low as the knee. This garment, sleeveless and
soiled by wear, was tied over the right shoulder. A reddish-brown scarf
or belt of the same material fastened it around the waist. Feet, arms,
and the left shoulder were bare. Primitive as was this costume, there
was, nevertheless, an attempt here and there at decoration. The belt was
ornamented with black and white stitches; from each ear hung a turquoise
suspended by a cotton thread, and a necklace of coloured pebbles strung
on yucca fibre encircled the neck.

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