_A little more of Zuni and its peo- 
ple and then to other places, and I 
state that this Indian village 
s been the most fascinating spot, 
from a newspaper viewpoint, that I 
ad ver tried to describe and the hard- 
| to make pen pictures of. Zuni 
and its strange people must be seen. 
Word’s can draw the pictures. 
“a a previous letter I stated that I 
s there during one of the Indians 
38 port days, and in relating the sports 
I neglected to tell of one novel and 
interesting foot race. 
_By white men it is called the 
stick race,’’ but the Indians have 
a gutteral handle for it, with several 
syllables, that a Yankee could never 
remember. 
Small sticks about the size and 
length of a lead pencil are prepared, 
oe the ends stained red, to make 
2 distinguishable, and then two 
sams of runners, as many on a side 
3 care to enter, start the race. 
each Indian has his particular 
stick and this he throws with his 
toes, and the race is won by the team 
nat can cover a certain number of 
aa the quickest, each runner carry- 
g his stick with him—or rather 
th hrowing it ahead of him with 
| hi feet. He must not t ouch 
it in any manner other than 
with his bare feet. Riders on 
P onies accompany the runners to 
keep watch where the sticks fall and 
point them out. Often they will 
_ drop in a bunch of cat-claw or cactus 
bed and the Indian must fish it out 
ith his bare feet. 
_ And it is simply wonderful how 
expert these half-naked youngsters 
of t wood with their toes. They would 
pick it up as quickly as I could with 
my hands and throw it as far. 
_ They run these races from five to 
fifteen miles, straight out and back, 
and over prairies covered with all 
kinds of vegetation that pierces and 
cuts and abounding in diamond rat- 
tlesnakes, tarantulas and lizzards. 
_ I saw only the send off of the race, 
for I could not keep up with the 
procession, and as there was not a 
white man or English speaking In- 
dian in the crowd I could not learn 
he distance or how soon they would 
return. It was over an hour before 
the first runner got in and the trader 
at the store told me my Indian won. 
come in handling this little piece- 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
BROWN’S SOUTHWEST STORIES. 
So nclusion of the Zuni Articles and Something about the 
- Famous Navajos.—A Man Greater than President Taft. 
(By M. J. Brown, Eprror Litrtz Vary, N. Y., Hus) 
About a mile from the Zuni pue- 
blo there rises a great cliff, one of 
those strange messas that “dot the 
southwest, shooting straight up from 
a pertectly level prairie. The idea 
that these places gives me is that 
once upon a time this country was a 
sea, and these messas islands. The 
waters subsided and the island stand. 
I was a full half hour gaining the 
top of this cliff. The sides were 
steep and the soil crumbling, sink- 
ing, shifting sand, where I stepped 
up twelve inches and fell back elev- 
en. 
But I made it and it was worth 
while. I judged the elevation was 
about five hundred feet, and on top 
of it were many acres of level, dried- 
up and cracked-open land, each 
crack the home of countless big, 
black, hairy tarantulas—the great 
spiders that almost defy you to mo- 
lest them. And I didn’t molest 
them. I well remember a little in- 
cident in Texas a few years ago, 
when I got one of these big fellows 
away from his hole and tantalized 
him with a long brush. I remember- 
ed of how he finally jumped at me— 
and I haven’t teased tarantulas much 
since. 
On top of this messa I found ruins 
of Indian life that must have dated 
far back of Zuni, ruins almost oblit- 
erated by simple time. The trader 
said he had lived there fifteen years 
but had never been on this top. He 
said the Indians called the cliff To 
yo-al-la-na, and their legend was 
that when the Great Spirit drowned 
the earth, the Zunis found refuge 
and safety there. But as Noah isn’t 
here to verify this, don’t date the 
foundation of Zuni before the flood, 
for there may not be anything au- 
thentic about it. 
When I left Zuni I well knew it 
was for the first and last time, for it 
is too far from the market places to 
be handy, and the weary stretches 
of sandy road don’t make one yearn 
for the second trip. And when we 
were out a half dozen miles I stop- 
ped the rig and looked back at Zuni, 
that grey, mysterious dobie village, 
and I took a farewell look of the 
most interesting odd spot I ever vis- 
ited. 
Remote from civilization and very 
little affected by the Spanish in- 
fluence of the old days and the 
31 
American influence of the present 
time, Zuni retains almost wholly the 
customs of the days before the econ- 
quest, and the weird, strange village 
makes an American pinch himself to 
know that he is not dreaming and to 
look at his note book to convince 
himself that he is not in some savage 
island, but is really almost in the 
center of his own country. 
And there it stands today, out in 
the edge of the Great Dry Land, in 
a valley of thousands of acres, and 
there its people live as they did long 
before the new world was dreamed 
of. It is one of the many wonder 
spots of which the southwest is fill- 
ed, and which our country neglects, 
and one need not travel to other 
lands to satisfy a longing for the 
curious. New Mexico and Arizona 
are filled with them—and Zuni is but 
one of hundreds of wonderful places 
of the southwest. 
North of Zuni, perhaps a hundred 
miles, is the Navajo land, and what 
a wonderful difference there is be- 
tween the Navajos and the Zunis. 
The government has given this 
tribe a large reservation, but if the 
whole state of Arizona was given 
them they wouldn’t stay within 
bonds. 
The Navajos are rovers, fighters, 
weavers, silversmiths and all that the 
Zunis are not. No bunching up with 
these fellows and no degeneration. 
They scatter and hide ail over their 
reservation and in the forest reserv- 
es. On the way to Zuni the driver 
went out of his way, and a half mile 
back from the road to show me a 
Navajo home. 
The stone house was hidden where 
one might pass it a dozen rods dis- 
tant and never know it was there. 
The family was away and the door 
was locked—the padlock showing 
that Lo was fast taking to the white 
man’s ways. Back of the house was 
the crude wooden frame where the 
squaw wove the world famous 
blankets, sitting on the ground for 
weeks and weeks. No doubt she and 
her master were then in Gallup ban- 
tering away the blankets she had 
worked on for three months—trading 
it off for ten dollars’ worth of the 
white man’s goods. 
The Navajos are a splendid tribe 
of our first Americans. Fighters, 
every man of them, proud as Italian 
counts, and a tribe that bends the 
knee very slowly and very stubborn- 
ly to the white man’s law. They scat- 
ter, hide their homes, and mix with 
other tribes, and they are rich in 
jewelry and stock. 
It is the Navajos who have made 
