The Indians of Arizona and New Mexico: Nineteenth Century Ethnographic Notes of Archbishop John Baptist Salpointe

Copyright 2010, 2014 Patricia Fogelman Lange, Louis A. Hieb, Thomas J. Steele, S.J.

Published by Río Grande Books

925 Salamanca NW

Los Ranchos, NM 87107-5647

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Salpointe, John Baptist, 1825-1898.

The Indians of Arizona and New Mexico : nineteenth century ethnographic notes of Archbishop John Baptist Salpointe / edited and annotated by Patricia Fogelman Lange, Louis A. Hieb, and Thomas J. Steele.

p. cm.

Ethnographic notes on Southwestern Indians published here for the first time by Salpointe, written during the thirty-plus years he lived in Tucson, Arizona and Santa Fe, New Mexico, from the late 1860s until shortly before his death in 1898. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-890689-57-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 9781-936744-66-4 (ebook formats)

1. Indians of North America--Arizona--Social life and customs--19th century. 2. Indians of North America--New Mexico--Social life and customs--19th century.

3. Frontier and pioneer life--Arizona. 4. Frontier and pioneer life--New Mexico.

5. Salpointe, John Baptist, 1825-1898. I. Lange, Patricia Fogelman, 1939- II. Hieb, Louis A. III. Steele, Thomas J. IV. Title.

E78.A7S24 2010

979.004’97--dc22

2010004583

Cover: Procession of San Esteban, Ácoma Pueblo, September 2, 1889. Photograph by Charles F. Lummis. Braun Research Library, Autry National Center of the American West, Los Angeles, N.1980.

To Charles H. Lange

1917-2003

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

John Baptist Salpointe: From Priest to Archbishop

Indian Tribes of Arizona

Indians Tribes of New Mexico

Apaches of New Mexico

Historical Descriptions

Popular Tales and Superstitious Traditions Among the Indians

Bibliography

About the Editors

Preface

The ethnographic notes on Southwestern Indians published here for the first time were written by Archbishop John Baptist Salpointe, D.D. (1825-1898), during the thirty-plus years he lived in Tucson, Arizona and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although there are few dates given in the surviving materials, it appears that these sketches and essays were written in the late 1860s until shortly before his death in 1898 and that at some point Salpointe conceived them as being part of a book. They were created by a Frenchman who arrived in the Southwestern United States in the 1859 to dedicate himself to the missionary priesthood of the Catholic Church and assist his congregants by building churches, schools, and hospitals in remote parishes. Ultimately, Salpointe became Bishop of Tucson and subsequently the second Archbishop of Santa Fe. During his rise in the church hierarchy, he developed a deep interest in the history and people of the Southwest and acquired the necessary skills of tolerance and forbearance to observe and interact with peoples of cultures very different from those of his own European roots. Few late nineteenth century travelers to the southwest had any formal training in anthropology, and Salpointe was no exception.

In 1872 Salpointe, then in Tucson, received a letter from Archbishop François Norbert Blanchet of Oregon, urging him to persuade the Archbishop of Baltimore to appoint an agent or board representing Indian interests at an upcoming meeting with the Secretary of the Interior. Blanchet also asked Salpointe to compose a detailed account of the welfare of Catholic Indians and their missions within his Vicariate. This task was probably the driving force that motivated Salpointe for the remainder of his life. Unlike his more learned scientific peers such as Frank Hamilton Cushing and Herman ten Kate, he was not interested in describing traditional cultures thought to be on the brink of extinction but in documenting the people of his parishes for church records. As he traveled, he noted each town, describing its population, historical background, condition of the church, finances, crops, industry, and the number of confirmations. This in turn led to deeper investigation through interviews with army scouts, Indians, and other ethnologists.

In 1986, Fray Angélico Chávez, O.F.M., gave this collection of papers to the noted Southwestern anthropologist Charles H. Lange as a research source for his ongoing interest in Pueblo culture and the life of Adolph F. Bandelier, a contemporary and friend of Salpointe. In 1998, Lange’s wife Patricia discovered them languishing in a corner of their personal library and urged her husband to collaborate with her in their transcription, editing, and annotating. Unfortunately, Charles Lange passed away before he could accomplish much.

The essays in this manuscript were originally hand-written in pen and ink on lined paper which due to age became faded and some were partially chewed by rodents, thus creating a challenge to transcribe. Some were written in English while others were in French. He wrote on one side of ruled sheets, often making additions and revisions on the back. Several essays exist in more than one draft while others appear to have been copied over from a revised version, yet others seem hastily written first efforts. Many pages were out of order while some pages are missing.

After intensive reorganization, the editors were thrilled to read these materials. Some relatively short accounts described Salpointe’s immediate reactions, some expressed appreciation and others revulsion, but all vividly painted his experiences.We found Salpointe’s disrespectful comments towards native people to be unacceptable and to detract from otherwise valuable descriptions. Consequently we have deleted many gratuitous remarks. The rough notes stand in contrast to the ethnographic skills he eventually honed as evident in Soldiers of the Cross¹.

His euro-western religious upbringing was so deeply ingrained in his thought that his early essays lack the objectivity needed to portray the decidedly different indigenous populations he encountered. He clearly intended these vignettes to be reference material for another yet-to-be written book. One question continued to surface: how could a man of the cloth so eager to be benevolent be so negative in his thinking about the very people whose welfare was vital to him? While reading these pages, we came to the realization that these stories were written at different times in his life. For example, the earliest Hopi vignette was probably composed after he read sensationalistic newspaper accounts—that is, before he even visited those pueblos.

His essays in French on the Pima and Papago were superior in expression to the texts in his late-adopted English, reflecting a greater fluency in his mother tongue. The Navajo essay includes a well-organized central portion seemingly largely based on observation with material drawn from the exceptional work of Washington Matthews.

Salpointe possessed strong opinions on many topics, especially about the role of free schools or public schools, whose establishment he attributed to Protestant propaganda and which led to disagreements with the Indian Agent Reuben Wilbur at the Papago Indian Reservation.²

In writing about the Papago Indians at San Xavier del Bac, he expressed his belief that his role was to teach the Indian the way of salvation, but also how to pass from the miserable condition in which they had been found to the state of a civilized life (Salpointe 1880:7). Native conversion and education would play a great role towards acceptance of so-called civilized ideals.³

Characteristic of his time, he believed that literacy through education would induce detribalization and accomplishments equal to those of the civilized world. As might be expected, his writing⁴ has an overwhelming emphasis on the historical role of the Catholic Church. It is clear he wrote to further the interests of the Catholic Church in promoting correct belief and practice among those who were nominally Catholic and converting those who were not. Salpointe defended the sometimes harsh behavior of priests on the grounds that they preached with zeal according to the rules set forth by the Church, and in conformity with Spanish royal instructions to rebuke anyone criticizing Church practices.⁵

Salpointe expressed such views publicly in an open letter to a Constitutional Convention entitled What Catholics Expect from the Constitutional Convention in the Matter of an Organic School Law, which urgently stressed for the need of a religious atmosphere pervading schoolrooms since religion and morality could not be separated (New Mexico State Records Center & Archives, Clancy Papers).⁶

His opinions extended to the endorsement of local political candidates and delegates to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.⁷

As editors, we recognized that moral judgment played a major role in the priesthood; however the better acquainted Salpointe became with tribal people, the less judgmental his remarks. Upon reading his later narratives, a rather different man emerged, a more accomplished writer allowing observation rather than strong emotional reaction to guide his descriptions. In the Preface to Soldiers of the Cross Salpointe clearly recognized that the Indian does not take readily to civilized life.⁸ As a consequence, this book has a sub-text of the enlightenment of a man depicted through his writings.

We have organized Archbishop Salpointe’s manuscript so it moves historically within the time-frame and events of his life, beginning with vignettes of southern Arizona and then progressing to the Pueblos and other tribal peoples of New Mexico, with accounts of their ceremonies, legends, and historical events. The book concludes with Salpointe’s generalized overview of the character, religion, and customs of the people he encountered. Because English was not Salpointe’s first language,⁹ the editors have edited his grammar, added accents, reorganized some vignettes, and included introductions in italics while trying to maintain the flavor of his style and thinking.

Salpointe was a man of intelligence and uncommon interest who has provided us with unique accounts of cultures and events in late nineteenth century Arizona and New Mexico—an invaluable contribution to Southwestern ethnographic and historical literature.

The essays used in preparation of this volume have been given to the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The title is Guide to the John Baptist Salpoint Manuscripts, Collection Number AC417.

Acknowledgments

Many people have assisted us in gathering the materials needed to edit and annotate Salpointe’s manuscript and we wish to thank them all: in Santa Fe, Library of the Laboratory of Anthropology, Mina Murray and Maura Yarbrough; New Mexico State Archives and Records Center Southwest Room, Faith Yoman and Virginia López; Catherine McElvain Library at The School of Advanced Research, Laura Holt; Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, Tomas Jaehn and Patricia Hewett; in Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Library, Anderson Reading Room staff, and Albuquerque Geneology Library; in Phoenix, Arizona State Department of Library, Archives, and Public Records, Nancy Sawyer; in Tucson, Arizona Historical Society Library, Dave Tachenberg; The University of Arizona Library, Special Collections, Roger Myers; in Seattle, The National Archives and Records Center, Patti McNamee and Carol Burwell; Seattle Public Library, the Interlibrary Loan Staff; in Los Angeles, Autry National Center for the American West, Braun Research Library, Kim Walters. In addition, grateful acknowledgment is also given to Enrique Lamadrid, Charles M. Carrillo, Karl Kumli, Stanley Hordes, Andre Dumont, and Peter T. Furst.

List of Maps and Illustrations

Bishop John Baptist Salpointe, Tucson, ca. 1875

Bishop John Baptist Salpointe, Tucson, ca. 1875

Archbishop Salpointe and Coadjutor Archbishop Placide Chapelle, ca.1891

Maps of Tribal and Pueblo Areas in Arizona and New Mexico, ca. 1865.

Western Apaches in Camp, 1882

Tasap [Navajo] Katsina Dance, Walpi, February 28, 1893

Dance Court and Kivas, Walpi, August 21, 1891

Navajo Silversmith

Navajo Weaver, Canyon de Chelly, 1873

Pima Indians

Papago Village near Mission San Xavier del Bac, 1894

Ruins of the First Catholic Church, Taos Pueblo

Tablita Dance, Cochití Pueblo, July 14, 1888

Corn Dance, Santo Domingo Pueblo, 1888

Turquoise Kiva, Santa Ana Pueblo

Feast of San Diego, Jémez Pueblo

Dance of San Esteban, Ácoma Pueblo, 1892

Procession of San Esteban, Ácoma Pueblo, September 2, 1889

Mission Church, Laguna Pueblo

Kachina Dance (Navajo Yebichai), Zuni, 1898

Zuni Pueblo, Corn Drying on Rooftops, 1879

San Antonio Feast Day Race on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, 1898

Casa Grande, A Hohokam Great House, ca. 1880

Casa Grande Ruins, ca. 1887

SALPOINTE

Bishop John Baptist Salpointe, Tucson, ca. 1875. Arizona Historical Society,

Tucson, B93421.

SALPOINTE

Bishop John Baptist Salpointe, Tucson, ca. 1875. Photograph by Henry

Buehman. Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, B206543.

SALPOINTE

Archbishop J. B. Salpointe (seated), Coadjutor Archbishop Placide Chapelle,

ca.1891. Courtesy Photo Archives, Palace of the Governors (MNM/DCA),

Santa Fe, New Mexico. Neg. No. 050464.

John Baptist Salpointe: From Priest to Archbishop

John Baptist Salpointe was born in the parish of St. Maurice de Poinsat, Department of Puy-de-Dome, France, on February 25, 1825. As a young man, his early aspirations for the priesthood were encouraged by his middle-class family (Zerwekh 1962:6). Educated at the College of Riom and completing his training at the Seminary of Mont Ferrand, he was recognized for his scholarly skills and selected to hold the double position at the Seminary as procurator and professor of the natural sciences. He was ordained in 1851 and served as an assistant pastor in a small French parish. In 1859 when Father Peter Eguillon, the second Vicar General of the Right Reverend John Baptist Lamy, Bishop of the Diocese of Santa Fe, New Mexico, visited Mont Ferrand, Salpointe’s life changed radically.¹⁰ Lamy sent Father Eguillon to France in the hope of finding priests to serve his remote and distant mission in the American Southwest.¹¹ The Vicar described the hardships of life in New Mexico where the scarcity of priests in this large, expansive land caused visits to most congregations to be at best irregular, travel on horseback to be long and arduous, weather conditions to be harsh, and there was danger from hostile Indians groups. Such visits frequently took three to four days, requiring the provisioning of food and blankets (Salpointe 1967:210). Desirous of furthering the Kingdom of God on earth and greatly inspired by Father Eguillon, Salpointe agreed to travel to New Mexico (Zerwekh 1962:7). Along with thirteen other volunteers, some of whom were subdeacons, brothers, and young men studying to be priests, the group sailed from Le Havre, France, on August 17, 1859.

The priests arrived in New York after a two-week ocean voyage and traveled by rail to St. Louis and by boat up the Missouri River as far as Kansas City where they joined a larger wagon train with which they sometimes rode or walked for miles. On October 27, 1859, after seventy- one days from the start of their journey, they arrived in Santa Fe where Bishop Lamy welcomed the exhausted men and emphasized the necessity to learn Spanish, the language of the people, and/or English, the language of the government officials. Once settled, Salpointe was appointed teacher of the thirteen French volunteers who had not yet completed their classical studies. Additionally, his duties included weekly visits to the chapels of Pecos, Galisteo, and Tesuque pueblos (Salpointe 1967:221-2). After a year, he was appointed to the jurisdiction of Mora, northeast of Santa Fe, to establish schools and chapels in nearby towns and villages. There he requested the Sisters of Loretto teach the girls and the Christian Brothers the boys.

Salpointe proved to be an effective missionary, and in 1866 when Lamy requested volunteers to serve the missions near Tucson, Arizona,¹² and Salpointe agreed. The trip from Santa Fe to Tucson was fraught with danger from raiding tribes. Mail often brought news of people killed by Apaches, causing extreme apprehension among travelers (Salpointe 1967:255). Salpointe arrived on February 7th with two other priests and a schoolteacher to continue his work of establishing schools, chapels, helping the needy, and consoling the sick.

When Arizona was raised to a Vicariate Apostolic on September 25, 1868, Salpointe was appointed Bishop-elect. He decided to be consecrated in France but remained in Arizona until a replacement could be found and then traveled abroad early in 1869. Upon his arrival in France, the Bishop-elect went to Clermont-Ferrand where he asked Bishop Louis C. Feron to be his consecrator at a ceremony that took place on June 20, 1869. He did not return to Arizona until January of 1870, arriving with six new missionaries (Salpointe 1967:259-260). His work within his diocese involved teaching and traveling throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Mexico.¹⁴ It was during this period that Salpointe began making the notes and sketches published here. By 1874 the Catholic population and number of towns in the Vicariate of Arizona had expanded enormously. He spent the month of May 1877 visiting his missions in central Arizona and on July 2nd visited the Río Grande area of New Mexico and Texas (Zerwekh 1962:143).

John G. Bourke met Salpointe while stationed in Arizona and thought him to be a man of great learning, a good administrator, and devoted to his congregations. The only items Bourke observed in his house were a cross and a collection of manuscripts on the Apache and Papago Indians (1891:77). Salpointe was named coadjutor to Archbishop Lamy by Pope Leo XIII on October 11, 1884, but could not transfer to Santa Fe until February 19, 1885.¹⁵

It was not until the 18th of July that he formally succeeded Lamy as Archbishop. Realizing Lamy had been unsuccessful in obtaining government support for the education of the Indians in his diocese, Salpointe initiated the development of government-supported schools and teachers for New Mexico tribes. He met with John H. Oberly, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., in January 1886,¹⁶ in the hope of establishing Indian day-schools in four New Mexico pueblos and the promise of four more in the near future. Ultimately, Oberly surpassed Salpointe’s dream and sent contracts through the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions for day-schools at the pueblos of Isleta, Ácoma, Pahuate,¹⁷ Laguna, Santo Domingo, Jémez, San Juan, and Taos. An additional contract was sent for a boys boarding school to be built in Bernalillo, while a boarding school for Indian girls was to be established near the chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary in northern Santa Fe.¹⁸ With collections received from Catholic churches throughout the United States, Salpointe established additional day schools in the pueblos of Cochití, San Felipe, Santa Clara, and Zia in 1888.¹⁹ A year later, Salpointe became a naturalized citizen of the United States (Lange, Riley & Lange 1984:287n119).

Due to failing health at age 66, Salpointe requested Reverend Placid Louis Chapelle, D.D.,²⁰ to become his coadjutor on August 2, 1891. He retired to Tucson and devoted his remaining days to writing Soldiers of the Cross, a history of the Southwest and early Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries. After building schools, hospitals, and churches and making numerous contributions to the history and ethnology of southwestern peoples, John Baptist Salpointe died on July 15, 1898, at age 73. He was buried under the altar of St. Augustine Cathedral in Tucson, Arizona. In 1966, due to a renovation of the Cathedral, the body of Archbishop "was removed from a crude crypt in St. Augustine Cathedral and placed in the ‘priest’s plot’ in Holy Hope Cemetery on November 29th.²¹

J. B. Salpointe Among Ethnologists

When Archbishop Salpointe made the observations published in this book, anthropology was not yet an academic discipline. Ethnologists, as they were called then and are broadly defined here, came from many different backgrounds. Few had any formal training; most were self-taught. Some of those listed below had only brief encounters; some lived in Indian communities for several years. Of those who came to the Southwest in the latter part of the nineteenth century Adolph Bandelier (Salpointe’s friend) was a historian; William Henry Morgan, a lawyer; Washington Matthews, H. C. Yarrow, and Jeremiah Sullivan, physicians; Noël Dumarest, H. R. Voth, and Issac T. Whittemore, missionaries; Cosmos and Victor Mindeleff, cartographers and architects; Sylvester Baxter, Charles Fletcher Lummis, Helen Hunt Jackson, Edna Dean Proctor, and Susan E. Wallace, writers; Jesse Walter Fewkes, a zoologist; and Matilda Coxe Stevenson, an aspiring mineralogist. Several men had served in the Civil War, most notably John Wesley Powell, James Stevenson, and Alexander M. Stephen. Detailed accounts of brief encounters with Indians in the Southwest were written by members of the geographical and geological surveys, including E. A. Barber, E. O. Beaman, Francis Klett, and Oscar Loew. Members of the military, surgeons P. S. G. Ten Broeck and John Vance Lauderdale, published reports, as did John Gregory Bourke, whose Snake-Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (1884) was one of the most widely read books of the period. Many Indian agents and other government employees wrote useful accounts of social and ceremonial life among the native peoples of the Southwest, especially M. O. Davidson, Henry R. Poole, and Julian Scott. To this list may be added the names of the many photographers who documented vernacular architecture, dress, arts, and other forms of material culture, most notably William Dinwiddie, Camilius S. Fly, J. K. Hillers, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, A. C. Vroman, and Ben Wittick. The most famous ethnologist of the period, Frank Hamilton Cushing, was a self-taught replicator of Indian artifacts who had assisted in the development of exhibits in the National Museum and at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. James Mooney read about American Indians and later became an ethnologist and a career employee of the Bureau of [American] Ethnology. The only true anthropologist was H. F. C. ten Kate, who studied physical anthropology in Europe.²²

Early American anthropology—most of it, in fact, based in the Southwest—was interdisciplinary by reason of the diverse background of those who contributed to its development. However, for the most part the cross-cultural interest of these men and women was unintended. Various circumstances brought them into situations in which they were confronted with a diversity of cultures. The relationships between these ethnologists and the native peoples also served to shape their ethnographic writing. It is important to underscore the point that ethnologists of Salpointe’s time were not equipped as we are to examine the assumptions we bring with us and the situated nature of anthropological inquiry. Anthropology has become increasingly self-conscious regarding the biographical, epistemological, and political contexts in which fieldwork is undertaken. As Clifford Geertz made clear, anthropologists are hardly passive and objective observers but rather individual creators of narrative, with their own voice.²³ Perhaps more than any other ethnologist of the period, Salpointe’s fieldwork and ethnographic writing reveal the contexts of his calling as a Catholic missionary and his duties as Archbishop.

The products (writings) from the process (fieldwork) of Salpointe’s ethnography date from two quite different periods: the years between ca. 1866 and 1885 when he resided as Bishop in Tucson, Arizona, and the decade following 1885 when he was Archbishop in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Salpointe arrived in Tucson as hostilities between Anglo-Americans and Western Apaches that had begun in earnest in 1863 and were reaching a crisis point. The public outrage expressed on the streets and in the Tucson Citizen became contributing factors in the infamous Camp Grant Massacre on April 30, 1871.The hostilities continued until 1875 when General George Crook succeeded in defeating the Indians and moving most of them to San Carlos, Arizona. Of his experiences Salpointe writes,

from the time I visited them first in November 1871 up to 1885, I have always taken my notebook with me whenever I have been at San Carlos, Fort Apache, Fort Bowie, or any other place where I could find Indians. I have gathered notes observing those Indians. My repeated and frequent intercourse with Mexican captives who had seen during their period of slavery [Apache] habits, customs, and doings have been a source of valuable information to me.

Unfortunately, Salpointe’s field notes have been lost for when he speak[s] of the Apache Indians according to my views and those I established upon facts of experience we are left with little knowledge of Apachean culture and a biased view of the circumstances that led to the Apache wars. Nevertheless, among his more remarkable vignettes are his accounts of the Papago victory dance following their participation in the Camp Grant Massacre and what the Apaches told Salpointe of the murders of Lieutenant Stewart and Corporal Black in August 1872.

In December 1872 Salpointe received a request from Archbishop Francis Xavier Norbert Blanchet of Oregon to compose a detailed account of the welfare of Catholic Indians and their missions within his Vicariate, an event that undoubtedly motivated his efforts to document the Indian cultures beginning with his essays on the Papagos he knew at San Xavier del Bac, the Pimas, and a Papago narrative on Montezuma. These earliest pieces were written in French.

Blanchet’s letter to Salpointe also reflected a broader change in interest and concern for American Indians. During the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant a new approach to Indian affairs was developed, the peace policy, so named because one of its central tenets was the hitherto untried policy…of endeavoring to conquer by kindness. A citizen Board of Indian Commissioners whose members were nominated by various religious denominations was established to oversee the work of federal Indian policy. It was thought that Christian gentlemen could do what military generals could not—civilize Indian people. Writing about the Papagos, Salpointe said it was his role to teach the Indian the way of salvation, but also how to pass from the miserable condition in which they had been found to the state of civilized life—a theme repeated throughout his vignettes.

In 1870, under the concept of the religious administration of the Indian Bureau, agencies were distributed among Christian denominations excluding Mormons, on the basis of missionary work already done among respective tribes and the church’s ability to participate in the program. In the Southwest, the agents for the Camp Grant, Camp Verde, Colorado River, Pima and Maricopa, and White Mountain agencies in Arizona were to be nominated by the Dutch Reformed Church; the Moqui [Hopi] in Arizona and the Abiquiú, Mescalero Apache, Navajo, and Tularosa agencies in New Mexico were to be nominated by the Presbyterian Church; and, remarkably, the Pueblo Agency was to be nominated by the Christian Church. No agencies in Arizona or New Mexico were allocated to the Catholic Church. Catholics saw this as an effort to transfer Catholic Indians to Protestant mission-agencies under the pretense of surrendering all agencies to the various religious denominations according to a quota. Salpointe was soon in conflict with the Protestant agent assigned to the Papagos, and his lesser treatment of Pimas reflects the control of the Dutch Reformed Church of that agency. The failure of the Presbyterian Church to establish a mission among the Hopi in 1882 may account for Salpointe’s interest and visit there in 1889. Likewise the limited success of Presbyterians among the Navajo and the absence of a strong missionary presence among the Jicarilla Apaches may have motivated his extensive study of the Navajo and his later visits to the Jicarillas in the 1890s. During his tenure as Archbishop, Presbyterian missions were established at Zuni, Laguna, and Jémez, but in general the Río Grande Pueblos remained Catholic. By 1885 almost all the Río Grande Pueblos were both Catholic and Native by religion. Nevertheless, it required a concerted effort on his part to obtain government funds to subsidize Catholic Indian schools in New Mexico. These changes in Federal Indian Policy also shaped the focus of Salpointe’s work as a Catholic missionary and ethnologist.²⁴

Before Salpointe became Archbishop in Santa Fe in 1885, a number of other events took place that brought to the Southwest a circle of colleagues whose work served to transform to a degree the context of Salpointe’s work as an ethnologist—Adolph F. Bandelier, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Charles Fletcher Lummis, A. M. Stephen, and Washington Matthews. Ironically, in the 1870s, there was an increasing interest in documenting the vanishing American Indian although Federal Indian policy was concerned with civilizing.

At the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, the Smithsonian Institution, with Indian Bureau funding, mounted an exhibit on the past and present condition of the American Indian with, however, an emphasis on tribes which have had but little connection with the white race. On March 3, 1879, the Bureau of [American] Ethnology was established with John Wesley Powell as Director and in August an expedition under James Stevenson was sent to the Southwest charged to make collections and to engage in other ethnologic work. Powell explained the following year, Rapidly the Indians are being gathered on reservations where their original habits and customs disappear, their languages are being modified or lost, and they are abandoning their savagery, and barbarism and accepting civilization. If the ethnology of our Indians is ever to receive proper scientific study and treatment the work must be done at once (quoted in Fowler 2000:93).

Among Stevenson’s party was the young, flamboyant, egocentric, and brilliant Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857-1900) who stayed on at Zuni for the next four and a half years. Cushing learned Zuni and was able to understand the organization and ideology of a Native American society as no other non-Indian before him. Through his experiences in Zuni social and ceremonial life, Cushing became the example par excellence of the anthropologist as participant observer. However his representation of what he observed, his poetics, as Hinsley terms it, was often less the result of empirical description and more the product of his own imagination and intuition. Salpointe refers to Cushing’s work in several of his manuscripts, but it is not clear if he ever met Cushing (who left Zuni in 1884) or if he made direct use of Cushing’s articles in his draft essays on the Zuni. Cushing returned to the Southwest in 1886 as director of the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition and hired Bandelier who may well have shared his knowledge of Cushing with Salpointe.²⁵

In August 1880, a year after the first Bureau of Ethnology expedition to the Southwest, the Archaeological Institute of America sent the historian Adolph F. Bandelier (1840-1914) to Santa Fe where he spent most of a decade working in New Mexico and Arizona, surveying archaeological sites and visiting the Pueblo villages. During the summer of 1886, just a year after Salpointe succeeded Lamy, the Archdiocese of Santa Fe instituted plans to contribute a gift to the celebration of the Golden Jubilee of Pope Leo XIII’s priesthood on December 31, 1887. Earlier in 1886, Bandelier—always in need of money—approached Salpointe with a number of watercolor sketches of Indian artifacts, costumes, and ground plans of archaeological sites, too expensive to reproduce in reports he was writing.Salpointe recalled Bandelier’s art work, and by the end of the summer Bandelier was commissioned to create a multi-volume History of the Colonization and Missions of Sonora, Chihuahua, New Mexico and Arizona to the Year 1700, a work Salpointe presented to the pope in January 1888 (Rodack 1988). Salpointe also contributed funds for Bandelier’s work as the Spanish historiographer and librarian with the Hemenway Expedition and paid him to catalogue the library of the Santa Fe Diocese. In turn, Salpointe visited Bandelier frequently and borrowed books from his library. Bandelier’s work was largely ethnohistorical, especially his Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States (1890-1892), An Outline of the Documentary History of the Zuni Tribe (1892b), and the ethnohistorical novel, The Delight Makers (1890). Although opportunities existed, Bandelier’s journals do not indicate Salpointe ever attended any Pueblo feast day celebrations with Bandelier. An employment opportunity with the Villard Expedition to conduct archaeological studies in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia led to Bandelier’s departure from Santa Fe in May 1892.²⁶

In the same year Bandelier arrived in Santa Fe, 1880, Dr. Washington Matthews (1843-1905), an Assistant Surgeon in the United States Army, was assigned to Fort Wingate, New Mexico, on a four-year tour of duty. Matthews was an experienced linguist. With support from the Bureau of Ethnology he began a study of Navajo language, material culture, and religion. Salpointe made extensive use of Matthews’ account of a major Navajo chantway, the Mountain Chant, and may have drawn on Matthews’ accounts of Navajo weavers and Navajo silversmiths, all of which were published in the Annual Report(s) of the Bureau of [American] Ethnology. Matthews returned to Fort Wingate in 1890 for another four years, but there is no indication the two men ever met.²⁷

Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859-1928) lived at Isleta Pueblo from July 1888 until October 1892. From there he visited the other Pueblos from Taos to the Hopi villages where he attended the Snake Dance in 1891. During his life he was a writer of books, articles, stories, and poetry, a recorder of Indian and Spanish folklore and songs, a translator of Spanish documents, editor of The Land of Sunshine and Out West magazines, and a photographer. His tramp across the continent from Ohio to Los Angeles in 1884-1885 served as the springboard for a life of promotion and boosterism. Lummis recorded Isleta stories and wrote descriptions of feast day ceremonies at Ácoma, Cochití, and elsewhere. Surely Salpointe knew of Lummis’ A New Mexico David and Other Stories and Sketches of the Southwest (1891), Some Strange Corners of Our Country (1891), and The Land of Poco Tiempo (1893), but he may have found Lummis’ style one he could not draw from.²⁸ It is likely Salpointe met Lummis while visiting Father Anton Docher at Isleta Pueblo.

In 1889 Salpointe visited the Hopi and attended a Niman Katsina dance in the Hopi Second Mesa village of Mishongnovi. During his visit Salpointe met Alexander M. Stephen (1846-1894), a clerk in Thomas V. Keam’s trading post, ten miles east of the Hopi first mesa villages. After a decade or more as prospector and explorer, Stephen first arrived in Keams Canyon in 1879, and in the years before Salpointe’s visit, Stephen, like his colleague Washington Matthews, was primarily interested in the Navajo. In order to provide Salpointe with an account of Hopi religion, Stephen showed the Archbishop a manuscript written by a young doctor, Jeremiah Sullivan (1851-1916), who had lived among the Hopi from 1881 to 1888. Sullivan learned Hopi, participated in ceremonies and was initiated into a warrior society as was Cushing. Salpointe copied parts of Sullivan’s brief synopsis of the religious conceptions of the Hopi. Five years later Salpointe drew on Stephen’s own work on the Snake Dance written while Stephen was employed by the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition to document Hopi social and ceremonial life.²⁹

Although not a perfect circle of friends, Cushing, Lummis, Matthews, Stephen, and Sullivan all knew of each other, and it is likely that Salpointe learned of their work through Bandelier.

Each of these men had a distinctive narrative voice. As Hinsley points out, Cushing developed a unique poetic style of reporting that seemed to recognize that the distanced, scientific observation that he understood to be expected of him could not begin to describe or transmit the realities of Southwestern Native American life that he was experiencing (1999:372). Cushing’s ethnographic poetics—although imaginative, even fanciful—were expressed with conviction and were received by Salpointe and others as authoritative.

Quite a different voice is encountered in Stephen’s work. Stephen wrote, I constantly strive to keep to the legitimate path of the collector and stayed clear of the misty places and their meanings. Selecting, collecting, translating, describing (often seeking the scientific term for flora and fauna), classifying,and occasionally venturing into developmental and,as the occasion demanded, evolutionary frameworks were the mainstays of Stephen’s means of representation. His focus was observable behavior—material and ritual— and in this he sought to be scientific.

Sullivan, on the other hand, likened himself to Cushing in being interested in the inner Indian. Rather than developing his own voice, Sullivan’s surviving manuscripts consist almost entirely of Hopi narrative, privileging the authority of Hopi voices over his own. Sullivan’s involvement in Hopi daily life—from planting corn to participating in dances—led him to record the conceptual and moral, locating practices in the context of Hopi thought. Although Salpointe drew on the work of both men, the difference of Sullivan’s voice, as reflected in brief synopsis of Hopi religious conceptions from Stephen’s, is clear.³⁰

Lummis’ work was tainted, to use Goodman’s term, with romantic conceptions of Indians written for popular consumption by readers in the East. Lummis emphasized the exotic, the quaintness, and the strangeness of what he saw and heard. His introduction to an account of the Hopi Snake Dance is typical of his hyperbolic style: It is in these strange, cliff-perched little cities of the Hupi (‘the people of peace,’ as the Moquis call themselves) that one of the most astounding barbaric dances in the world is held…. Africa has no savages whose mystic performances are more wonderful than the Moqui snake-dance… (Lummis 1891b:45-46). In his promotional writing Lummis emphasized what might be found fascinating and in doing so contributed to the emerging commodification of the Southwest and its native people.

Matthews produced descriptive accounts of Navajo arts and ceremonies and transcriptions of prayers, songs, and narratives that are among the most accurate and objective of nineteenth century ethnographic literature. Matthews sought to be factual, and if by only facts we mean, Siegfried Nadel noted,a product of omission, selection, and inference,then Matthew’s only notable omissions were those brought about by his Victorian sense of propriety. Salpointe, in turn, selected and reframed some of Matthews’ most important work. Like Stephen’s exemplary work, Matthews’ appeared late in the period of Salpointe’s writing and served more as a source than an obvious influence. In the book he was preparing, Salpointe aimed at more of an apology for the failures of the Church to convert easily the various tribal groups of the Southwest than to make a contribution to the study of American Indians.

Salpointe’s most interesting and valuable vignettes are those based on his own observations—from the Papagos he met while a Bishop in Tucson to the Jicarilla Apaches he sought out during his last years as Archbishop in Santa Fe. Some accounts are of singular events, e.g., an Apache attack on a supply caravan on its way to Camp Grant in May 1869 and the Papago Dance of Victory following their participation in the Camp Grant Massacre. Others reflect the knowledge that comes from frequent attendance at an event, e.g., his descriptions of feast day dances at Santa Ana, Santo Domingo, and Isleta Pueblos. At the same time, Salpointe drew on ethnographic accounts of others published in books and articles, as well as in the Annual Report(s) of the Bureau of Ethnology and the Annual Reports(s) of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. The editors soon discovered that Salpointe often copied the work of others without any apparent indication in his drafts that he intended to credit his sources. These include his use of Hiram C. Hodge’s Arizona as It Is; or The Coming Country (1877), Patrick Hamilton’s The Resources of Arizona (1881), and W. G. Ritch’s Aztlan: The History, Resources, and Attractions of New Mexico (1885).

Over the more than twenty-five years Salpointe observed Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, there are noticeable changes in his attitude towards them. Salpointe arrived in Tucson at the height of public outrage over raids by Apache bands in southern Arizona, and his accounts of the Western Apache are clearly lacking in understanding and extremely negative. However, among the tribes he came to know more intimately through his office as a Catholic clergyman, e.g., the Río Grande Pueblos and the Jicarilla Apaches, there is not only a greater appreciation of what he saw but an increasing respect as well.

Finally it will be helpful to characterize briefly the contexts or frameworks of understanding that shaped Salpointe’s narrative voice. In the nineteenth century history was king—whether in the chronologically structured narrative of events of historyor in the grand narrative of evolutionary or developmental theories.³¹ It was one of the assumptions of progressive evolutionary thought that cultural similarities and differences could be measured against Euro- American (western) standards, qualitatively or morally. The West was seen as the culmination of progress. Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) made the implications of evolution and natural selection explicit for the human species; Herbert Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy