Page 246 - TheHopiIndians

240 MESA FOLK OF HOPILAND

Perhaps not the least of his services lay in his unfail
ing good-humor expressed in cheering songs with
which he softened the trials of railroad pioneering
through that almost desert country.
The picturesque wickedness of the westward trav
eling construction camp with its fringe of saloons,
gambling hells, and camp followers seems never to
have taken Wupa in its snares. Of shooting irons and
drunken men he had the inborn terror shown always
by the Hopi, a feeling still kept alive among them by
that later incursion into New Mexico and Arizona, the
Texas cowboy. There was no fight in Wupa : the most
that could be gotten out of him was a disarming laugh
and a disappearance, as soon as that move could be
made. Picturesque as was the construction camp, the
stern side of life came very near, and the wonderful
hues of the landscape were but mockery to the tired
and thirsty men, who prepared the Santa Fe Trail for
the iron horse. Poor food, worse water, alkali dust.
parching heat and chilly nights of summer and the
severity of winter were living realities ; there were
health and vigor in the air of the mountains and ele
vated plateaus, though food and appetite did not al
ways strike a balance of compensation.
Wupa moved along with the camp, little realizing
the meaning of the struggle with the drifting sand,
the rocky canyons, and the dry rivers that became
torrents and in an hour swept away the work of a
month, burying ties and rails in the limbo of boiling