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The Hopi woman brings her clay with her from some pit or quarry in Hopiland, where experience has demonstrated a good pottery clay is found. After thoroughly washing, pulverizing and crushing, it is ready to be worked up into domestic and other utensils. Squatted upon the ground, the potter places in her lap a small basket, wood, or pottery base, upon which she places a "dab" of clay.
One hears a great deal about Hopi pottery, but the pottery center in Hopiland is the village of Hano, on First Mesa, and the people are not Hopi but Tewas, whose origin shall presently be explained. Not until recent years has pottery been made elsewhere in Hopiland than at Hano.
So they built houses adjoining ours and that made a fine large village. Then other Hopitah came in from time to time, and our people would say, 'Build here, or build there, and portioned the land among the new-comers." The foregoing tradition furnishes the answer to two things one asks in Hopiland.
A fascinating trip, not however connected with the Canyon, is suggested in the chapter on "An Historical Trail across the Grand Canyon Country." Arrange to go in mid-August, even though it be hot weather, if you have grown a little toughened, for then you will reach Hopiland at the time of the Snake Dance, which thrilling ceremony I have briefly, but truthfully, described in a special chapter.
It is a reversal of our conception of things to see the "gentler sex " engaged in building a house, as is often the case in Hopiland. Yet to the Hopi there is nothing strange in this scene, for the woman, and not the man, is the owner of the house. Hence, the Hopi reasons, why should she not build it? It is hers, so let her make it; and she does.
They speak a language allied to that of the Utes and more remotely to the language of the Aztecs in Mexico. According to their traditions the various Hopi clans arrived in Hopiland at different times and from different directions, but they were all a kindred people having the same tongue and the same fundamental traditions.
Her skin and hair and dress are all clean and neat; her little back is astonishingly straight, and her bare brown feet, so long used to the ladders of Hopiland, are surer than mine, if slower. She has lived all her life, as did her mother and grandmother before her, in this second story room, on whose clean clay floor we sat for the visiting and story-telling.
For instance, Grace, maker of excellent pottery, now living at Polacca, is a Tewa who lived in Hano twenty years ago, when the writer first knew her, and continued to live there until a couple of years ago. Nampeo, most famous potter in Hopiland, is an aged Tewa woman still living at Hano, in the first house at the head of the trail.
The Hopi is a good dry farmer on a small scale, and farming is a laborious business in the shifting sands of Hopiland. Their corn is their literal bread of life and they usually keep one year's crop stored. These people have known utter famine and even starvation in the long ago, and their traditions have made them wise.
The rocks of which the mesas are built, the sand of the desert, the peculiarly carved buttes which abound on every hand, are all strikingly colored, with such a variety of hues and tints that one does not wonder at the name the Painted Desert which is applied to the country through which we must travel to reach Hopiland. A Saddle Trip from El Tovar.
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