The Crook County Monitor

Land of the Papago
A Strange People Occupying a Little-Known Portion of Our Domain.

In a country so vast as ours, so diversified in topography and ranging in latitude from the sub-tropics to almost Arctic snows, affording, also, every possible climatic variation in its flora and fauna, there must remain many localities destined by their inhospitable environment to continue practically unknown save to the plainsman and pioneer.

Papagueria--"the Land of the Papago"--is one of those uninviting spots that hold out no inducements to settlers, and are seldom visited save by the explorer and the ethnologist. The name conveys no sense of locality to the mind of the general reader, to whom it is terra incognita. It is a term bestowed by the priestly pioneers of Mexican colonization upon the arid regions beyond the Sierra Madre Mountains, a district south of the Gila river, in what is now the territory of Arizona and Sonora, bounded on the southwest by the Gulf of California and on the south by that ill-defined region known as Seriland. It has an extent of over 50,000 square miles, or about the area of New York or Iowa. The larger part of the district lies in Mexico, though most of the aboriginal population is gathered in the northern portion, above the southern boundary of Arizona.

Papagueria is, perhaps, the most arid region on the continent. The surface slopes to the southwest from the Sierra Madre, and as the vapor-laden air drifts from the Pacific and the gulf over the sun-parched land it is heated to dryness. Consequently the average rainfall in Papagueria falls short of five inches. The greater part of the district is practically a desert, though animal and vegetable life maintain a feeble existence. The high Sierra is scantily clothed with pines; at lower levels thorny thickets of oak and chaparral occur sparingly. In the valleys the deep-rooted mesquite dots the surface, while cacti are abundant among the foothills. The distribution of life, in short, conforms to the distribution of water, and the struggle of animal and vegetable life against inorganic nature and alien organisms is severe and continuous.

The Papago Indians, who inhabit this tract, in distinctiveness and persistence of character if not in population, are the leading branch of the Piman family and claim relationship to the Nahuatlan of Mexico, the great family of the Montezumas. Though the Piman family includes several tribes, the Papagos alone remain distinct, and though a small number are domiciled in the San Xavier reservation near Tucson, the greater part of the tribe, which, according to the census of 1890, then numbered 5,163 individuals, retain their independence and essential autonomy.

In the August number of the National Geographic Magazine W. J. McGee, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and associate editor of the magazine, gives an exhaustive and valuable, as well as very entertaining account of these children of the desert, showing how remarkably they have adjusted their habits, food, clothing, industries and social organization to a peculiar and extremely unfavorable assemblage of conditions.

Three centuries ago, according to Mr. McGee, Spanish explorers came in contact with the Papago Indians, finding them fearless and dignified, yet kindly and hospitable-a character they still maintain. The Spaniards and the Papagos acquired from the invaders burros, goats, cattle, sheep and dogs, some garden and field plants, the costume of civilization, the adobe architecture and a few of the ceremonies of the Catholic religion. But they utterly refused to attach themselves to Spanish households, to intermarry with whites, to submit to any form of bondage, or to surrender their primitive philosophy. They have maintained, almost without exception, the purity of their blood. They are industrious and virtuous; brave, going out to meet their chief foe, the Apache, even in greatly superior numbers, and have protected their fatherland against all marauders. They are known in Mexico for their stubborn avoidance of peonage, to which neighboring tribes are subject. The tribe is characterized by exceptional force and stability of character, yet it is said of them that their habits and modes of thought are little changed since the white man came.

There is every reason, says Mr. McGee, for considering the Papagos descendants from a people of superior aboriginal culture. Throughout much of Papagueria there are abundant relics of a prehistoric population and agriculture. These relics comprise ruined houses and villages, extensive acequias and other irrigation works, canals containing reservoirs, and fragments of finer pottery than now made by the Papagos, with well-shaped stone knives, pestles, mortars, etc. The ancient villages are much more numerous and extensive than the modern Indian, Mexican and American villages together; and the ancient acequias were much larger than the modern ditches-that in Arivaca valley, in Arizona, the chief prehistoric acequia, being 150 feet wide, raised so as to flood the whole bottomland, and it was lined almost continuously with houses.

About a hundred families of Papagos now occupy the reservation at San Xavier, nine miles south of Tucson, and are under the control of an agent of the Indian bureau. Though they retain their primitive mode of house-building, cooking and other domestic operations, their habits and modes of thought have so altered that they are regarded as alien or semi-alien by the majority of the tribe. Another quarter of the tribe are located south of the Rio Altar or its tributaries in Mexico, in scattered rancherias or villages; the remainder, or fully half of the tribe, are roamers of the desert, living in a peculiar manner which is neither exactly nomadic nor exactly agricultural, but a unique combination of the two modes of life. It is this half of the tribe-the "wild" Papago-that is specially interesting to the ethnologist.

The life of the "wild" Papago is a round of migrations and wanderings, largely in search of the means of subsistence, of which the first and the second and the third requirements are water, water, water. During a considerable part of the year the migratory Papagos occupy rancherias or nominally permanent home villages; tributary to each rancheria there are several-sometimes but one or two-temporales or temporary farm domiciles, and many of the families or family groups have winter domiciles, either for hunting or pottery-making, in the mountains or valleys of Mexico.

"So far as the meager water supply of Papagueria permits," says Mr. McGee, "the household goods are enshrined about permanent springs, but since the family groups many times outnumber the continuously flowing springs, rancherias are frequently established round temporary springs, round water pockets in the bottoms of barrancas, or ponds produced by storms. Some villages on the eastern part of Papagueria were formerly located on fairly permanent though slender streams heading in the Sierra, but these sites have generally been taken by Mexican and American invaders. The rancheria includes a separate dwelling for each family, with one or more stock corrals, and, if the soil is fit, a few truck gardens adjacent to the houses of the more enterprising families. The dwellings are scattered; commonly each is several rods from the nearest neighboring domicile, and thus a village of fifty or more houses frequently extends over the greater part of a quarter section of land.

"The dwelling comprises an enclosed house, with usually an adjacent shelter and a cooking circle a few yards distant. The typical house consists of a dome-shaped framework of mesquite saplings, thatched with sacaton-or other coarse grass, or sometimes with leafy scrubs or bushes, or even with cornstalks, the thatch being sewn to the framework with slips of yucca stipes. Such a house is circular or elliptical in plan, 12 to 18 or 20 feet across and five to eight feet high; the roof portion is often flattened and covered with a layer of earth two or three inches in thickness, the doorway is a simple opening, two feet or less in width, and usually little more in height; sometimes a door made of sacaton lashed to light sticks is used, but ordinarily the aperture remains open. There are no smoke-holes or windows, and the interiors are begrimed and sooty. Frequently the house is protected from the ravages of cattle and horses by an armature of thorny ocotilla stems erected around it and attached by withes or yucca lashings. Sometimes the houses are rectangular and built of adobe, cajon (adobe mud molded into walls), or stone plastered with adobe mud, sacaton grass or ocotilla stems. The adobe construction is adapted from the Mexicans and has not been long in use. Such houses usually have smoke-holes; some even have rude chimneys and are provided with rain spouts.

"The adjacent shelter (vah-toh) consists of four, nine or more crotched posts of mesquite or palo verde, set in a rectangle and carrying stringers of mesquite and cross-sticks of ocotilla; sometimes thatched carelessly with sacaton, more frequently covered with leafy shrubbery, sticks, hides, blankets, etc. The cooking circle is primitive; it consists of a series of mesquite posts four or five feet high, set in a circle four to six yards in diameter, connected, save at one point, which serves for a doorway, by two or three horizontal binders to which a layer of sacaton grass is lashed. During fair weather-and nearly all days are fair in Papagueria-culinary operations are performed in this airy structure; it is only during stormy weather that fires are built in the houses. Toward mid-day men, women and children take refuge from the burning desert sun, whose rays are intense beyond imagining in humid lands, under the vah-toh, or in the house. At night the men usually sleep either out in the open or under the shelter, the women and children more commonly in the houses. It is to be remembered that the Papago house is primarily a place for storing properties and taking refuge from the sun, and only subordinately a protection from storm and cold.

"In the center of the house is a fireplace-nothing but the ash-covered spot reserved for the purpose, with three stones to support the pot. The metate-a slab of granular or vesicular stone commonly a little over a foot in width, and perhaps two feet in length, bolstered up on cobblestones or blocks of wood-and a grinding stone or two belong hard by the fireplace. About the walls of the house lie two or three beds consisting of agave-stipe mats, while between the beds are piled grain-filled or empty ollas, squashes, melons, and corn, with saddles, riatas, stray articles of apparel, and other domestic impedimenta, in such profusion as the season and family thrift permit. The cooking circle is like the enclosed house in respect to fireplace and culinary appurtenances, but the stores and other valuable property are kept in the house proper.

The temporale is the summer or temporary home of the Papago, which he inhabits during the season of growth and harvest. It is much like the permanent home, save that it is smaller and even more ephemeral in character, while around or near it are the narrow fields that the resident cultivates. These fields are usually enclosed by flimsy fences of mesquite and cactus. There may be but one field and that cropped but a single season; more often there are several fields cultivated through several successive seasons. The location of the temporale is determined primarily by the occurrence of water, secondarily by the nature of the soil.

In the vicinity of nearly every town in Sonora there is a Papago pueblo, which is commonly occupied during the winter and abandoned or left in charge of one or two families in summer. As the migratory birds fly southward, the Papagos drift after them to their pueblos. The men hunt deer and small game, the latter usually consumed by their families; the deer often taken to Mexican towns and sold or bartered. Meanwhile the women dig clay and make pottery, which they sell to the Mexicans. Thus the Indians obtain small quantities of money and goods, and at the same time acquire something of Mexican customs and language. The women and some of the men attend the church festivals; their skirts and rebozos differ in no wise from those of the Mexican senoritas, and the men out-Herod the Mexicans in mescal drinking.

While the late winter rains are bringing verdure to the mountains and sending slender streamlets into the arid valleys, the tribesmen gradually return to their rancherias, remove the barriers of stones and sticks from their door-ways, and await the first moistening of the soil at the temporales. At the proper day they go forth to plow and plant, and watch the rapid maturing of the crops. With the harvest time the temporale is normally abandoned and the produce transported to the rancheria. At about the same time the fruits of the sahuaro and other cacti ripen, and soon afterward the beans of the mesquite mature, and these uncultivated crops are in like manner gathered and stored. Then follows the southward flitting and a season of idleness and feasting, to be in turn succeeded by another migration when the rains come again. Thus the life of the Papago is a perpetual wandering.