Indian Stories… from the Pueblos [SOLD]

FOREWORD by Witter Bynner, Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 12, 1929:

“Whether these tales Mr. Applegate brings us from the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest relate to their early history or to their present-day doings and feelings, to the early history of Spaniards among them or to the intrusion of later comers from the white world, the substance of most of them and the telling of all of them make living folk-stories.  One who knows Pueblo Indians catches their true accent on page after page of Mr. Applegate’s homely and vivid record.  Bare as the style is, it exerts a spell like the bareness of Indians in one of their apparently simple dance-rhythms.  It is akin to the style of fairy-stories.  Much as one used to sit engrossed at a story-teller’s knee and listen to accounts of folk in whom children believe, so one listens now to these narratives of child-like faith. Devout adventure and humorous encounter on the part of a folk as enchanted in their way as ever was Jack the Giant-Killer or Br’er Rabbit and yet a folk living real lives among us grown-ups in New Mexico and Arizona, to the delight of artists and tourist and to the despair of the Indian Bureau.

“One wonders less at Mr. Applegate’s ability to make his informal paragraphs seem to be spoken in an Indian voice, when one knows of his intimate and sympathetic life among the Pueblos.  Not only is he a familiar in the Tewa villages around his home town, Santa Fe, but months at a time he has lived in Hopi villages, lived the Hopi life, felt Hopi feelings, studied and revived Hopi art among the native pottery-makers, painted Hopi persons and ceremonies and listened meantime to such stories as he has caught for us in this volume.  He has caught them as patiently, as gently, as surely, as I have seen an Indian pick up in gifted hands a live woodpecker from a tree-trunk or live trout from a stream. “

Condition: very good condition

Indian Stories… from the Pueblos By Frank G. Applegate with a Foreword by Witter Bynner

First Edition, 1929, hardback, fabric over boards covers, 178 pages

Illustrations from Original Pueblo Indian Paintings

Publisher: J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia & London, 1929

Table of Contents

Preface

Foreword by Witter Bynner

Ancestral Eagles

The Snake Priest’s Trousers

The Artists and the Snakes

San Juan de los Caballeros

Hopi Quarrel

A Hopi Affair

Ago Po

The A Little Fish of San Juan

The Holy Water

Turtle Shells

Cochiti Ancient Hunting Dance

The Hopi Famine

The Turk of Pecos

Estevan the Magnificent

Parrot Feathers

Montezuma

The Twelve Virgins of Pecos