than this fellow does. He’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”
* * * *
Sandy and Ralph crawled out of their bunks shortly after sunrise, but they found that Hall had already departed. A note under their door read:
“Have located Chief Quail. Don and I have him cornered and are trying to talk him over to our side. You can use the jeep to explore the canyons this morning but be back by lunchtime, so we can hunt for Hopi Chief Ponytooth. He’s up in this neighborhood, Chief Quail says. Happy cliffhanging.”
After a brief argument with the Ranger, who repeated his warnings about flash floods and quicksand, Sandy and Ralph got under way.
“I know this territory like the palm of my hand,” the driller said as he drove carefully into dark gorges where the sun shone only around noon. “There really are four separate canyons, you’ll notice. From right to left they’re Monument Canyon, the Canyon de Chelly proper, Black Rock, and the famous Canyon del Muerto, which means Death Canyon. That’s the one where the Navajos made their last stand against Kit Carson.”
“How did he ever drive them out of a place like this?” Sandy marveled as he stared up at towering cliffs that rose almost straight up from the grass-covered canyon floor. “One man on a cliff should have been able to stand off a regiment by rolling rocks down on their heads.”
“That’s where your great-uncle was smarter than General Custer,” answered his guide. “He didn’t try to attack. If he had, the Navajos would have massacred his troops. Instead, Kit sent small raiding parties of cavalrymen down the centers of the canyons where they were fairly safe from rocks and arrows. They had orders to shoot every sheep, goat and cow in sight. After they did that, they retreated and blocked all exits to the canyons.”
“And the braves and their families just stayed inside and starved?” Sandy was really shocked.
“What else could they do? See that big blue-and-white picture of a cow drawn on the canyon wall over the cliff dwelling to your left? That’s a sort of monument which the poor old Navajos made to remind them of their slaughtered herds. After they finished it, they all came out and surrendered.”
“Gee whiz!” was all that Sandy could think of to say.
“We have time to explore just one cliff house,” Ralph continued. “It might as well be Standing Cow. Come on.”
They climbed a swaying ladder to reach one of the dwellings. This had been restored by archaeologists and looked as though its Indian inhabitants had departed the night before, instead of a long 400 years ago. There was the loom on which they had woven their cloth. Graceful pottery with decorations in glaze was stacked in a corner. A bedboard rested on two timbers cemented into the rear wall.
“These were deluxe apartments, probably occupied by the chief,” Ralph explained. “They have one big drawback—no hallways. You have to go through the living quarters to get to the other rooms. Come back here and I’ll show you one of their kivas, or ceremonial rooms.”
He led the way into a much larger cave that had a balcony overlooking a round hole some twenty feet across by six feet deep. Light filtered into the gloomy place through one small window in the cliff face.
The driller turned a flashlight beam into the hole. Sandy saw that its bottom could be reached by steep stone stairways. A wide bench ran around the sides of this strange pit. In its center stood several stone tanks about the size of bathtubs.
“When the cliff dwellers wanted to talk to their gods,” said Ralph, “they climbed down into a kiva hole like this and stayed for days without eating, drinking or sleeping. They practiced a kind of self-hypnotism, I guess.”
“Maybe,” Sandy guessed, “they just went down there to take their Saturday-night baths. I don’t see any gods—idols, I mean.”
“These people didn’t have idols—just those tub things,” Ralph answered. For a long time he stood staring down into the kiva, as though he were trying to picture his dead-and-forgotten ancestors there, conducting their silent worship.
“We’d better be getting back to the ranch,” he said at last, shaking his handsome head as though to clear it of dreams.
“That was a pretty grim thing Carson did to the Indians,” Sandy said as they drove back to Thunderbird.
“It was better than a massacre. Only twenty or so Navajos were actually killed by his troops, remember. And you should not forget, either, that Kit was acting under orders from Washington.”
“Those Nazi officers who killed innocent people in German concentration camps said they were acting under orders too,” Sandy pointed out grimly.
“Oh, but Carson never tried to excuse his actions. At first, he thought he was doing the right thing to move the tribe onto a fine new reservation. But as soon as he had herded several thousand of them over to Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River, he changed his mind. Bosque Redondo means Round Forest in Spanish, but he found there weren’t more than half a dozen trees on the whole place, while good grazing grass was almost as rare. It was a hellhole and the Navajos hated it. They ran away or, if they weren’t able to do that, they just sat down and pined. A thousand of them died there from hunger and homesickness.
“So Carson climbed on a train, went to Washington, and told the Great White Father just what was happening. When he warned that all the Navajos at Bosque Redondo would be dead in a few years, nobody seemed to mind very much. ‘Good Indian: dead Indian,’ you know. When he added that the government was spending a million dollars a year just to help them die, a few ears pricked up. But when he said that half the Navajos had never left Arizona and that they were threatening to go on the warpath to help their imprisoned brothers, Carson got action. He was ordered to return the tribe to its original reservation—this one—and was given money to help them get a new start.”
“I’d like to tell Miss Gonzales what you just told me,” said Sandy. “I don’t want her to dislike me because she thinks my great-uncle was a monster.”
“Well, why don’t you? Her school trailer is located only about twenty miles from our well. Drop in on her when you get a day off.”
“Gee, I’d like to, Ralph,” said Sandy as they approached the ranch gate where Hall, Donovan and Chief Quail were waiting for them, “but she seemed pretty angry that night at the motel.”
“Kitty’s a fine girl,” Ralph answered slowly, “even though she tries to be more Navajo than the Navajos. Fact is, I’ll let you in on a secret: My last oil royalty check from the wells in the Southern Ute reservation amounted to $12,000. When I get a few more of them in my bank account, so I can give her a big marriage gift, I’m going to ask my uncle to ask her uncle if she’ll have me for a husband.”
“What have uncles got to do with marriage?” Sandy stared at Ralph in amazement, realizing for the first time that he really was an Indian and had ways of doing things that were hard to understand.
“It’s just an old Navajo custom.” Ralph grinned uncomfortably. “And that reminds me: If Kitty gets uppity about Carson again, you tell her I said to be nice or I’ll ask my great-uncle to step on her great-uncle’s shadow. That will make her behave!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back of Beyond
After a hurried
