The Diaries of John Gregory Bourke Volume 5: May 23, 1881--August 26, 1881

Introduction to Volume 5

1 Introduction to V olume 5 T his volume, fifth in the series of John Gregory Bourke’s monumental diaries, represents his activities during a period of just over three months, beginning May 23, 1881, through August 26, 1881, and from about one-third of the way through Manuscript Volume 40 through the third-from-the-last page of Volume 45. At the end of published Volume 4, Bourke was at Fort Wingate, having done ethnological work with Frank Cushman among the Zunis. This volume opens at Wingate as he prepares to visit the Navajoes, then continue with more time among the Zunis and the Rio Grande pueblos, and finally, to attend the Hopi Snake dance. It concludes at Fort Apache, Arizona, which is astir with excitement over the activities of the Apache medicine man, Nakai’-dokli’ni, which he spelled Na Kay do Klinni. This would erupt into bloodshed less than a week later. This volume is particularly important because it is the first in this series to deal almost exclusively with Bourke’s ethnological research. Aside from a brief trip to the East Coast, most of the text involves his observations either during the Great Oglala Sun Dance of 1881, or among the pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona. Bourke’s account of the Sun Dance is particularly significant because it was the last held by the Oglalas.1 The Hopi material in this volume served as 1. Hyde, A Sioux Chronicle, 75. 2 IntroductIon to Volume 5 the basis of The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona,2 published three years later in 1884, and perhaps his best-known work after On the Border with Crook. Although the manuscript volumes are all classified as diaries, by 1881 they more resemble memoirs, or even manuscripts that could have been published on their own. Bourke often made his on-the-spot notes in little pocket notebooks as events occurred. Later—perhaps that night, or perhaps in months—he would transcribe these notes into the manuscript volumes that make up the bulk of the “diaries” as they exist today, filling in all the details and following up with new observations, using as much as twenty to thirty handwritten pages to cover the events of a single day. He acknowledged this in his commentaries on the Sun Dance, saying, “My rough notes hastily jotted down on the spot in the driving rain-storm or in the fierce rays of the sun, contain a number of lines reading ‘More dancing, singing and drumming’.”3 In a later passage, in Taos, New Mexico, he referred to the nightly “work of copying my notes and memoranda now swollen to huge proportions.”4 Some passages obviously were written sometime later, such as his description of the women of Santo Domingo Pueblo, who he said were “so clean and neat was each and every one, that I have never before or since seen such a pleasing procession of what might in all fairness claim the title of savage beauty.”5 Even more telling, in manuscript volume 43, he mentions visiting with Colonel Luther P. Bradley, who he remarks “had not yet retired.”6 Since Bradley retired in 1886, five years after 2. “Moqui” is a now-obsolete word used by outsiders to describe the Hopis. Bourke (Diary, 43:1866) pondered its origin, saying: The story is given me that the name Moqui, now borne by this tribe is a contraction for a whole phrase meaning the “dead people” and bestowed upon them by adjacent tribes in allusion to a former epidemic of this loathsome disease which almost extirpated the seven pueblos. Such a story, if true, must refer to some date beyond our history of the Moquis who are styled by their present name in the earliest Spanish American chronicles. More recent research suggests it apparently derives from the word “motsi” of the Keresan-speaking people who fled to Hopi country after the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico in 1680. The Navajo interpreted the word to imply sloth, cowardice, or unpleasantry, and applied it to the Hopis, with whom they were never particularly cordial. United States officials, upon encountering these tribes, adopted “Moqui” as the official term for the Hopis for some forty years. Crane, Indians of the Enchanted Desert, 195–96. 3. Bourke, Diaries, 40:1470. 4. Ibid., 41:1656. 5. Ibid., 43:1754. Emphasis added. 6. Ibid., 43:1778. IntroductIon to...