Covington Kids And An "Old Time Stage Driver In Taos"

It's a darn shame the way the students were treated by the drum-beater, the media, and entertainers who think they are important.  The kids did learn a lesson that many never do figure out.  Some people just are not worth fooling with.  Ernie Pyle could spot them, and he would be on thin ice for posting this today, but here it is!  Ernie and his traveling companion visited the Taos Pueblo during the 1930's and paid for a tour.  He wrote a couple pages about the very unsatisfactory visit.  You can see how it went in the last couple paragraphs.  From Home Country, by Ernie Pyle.

'And so we finished the one pueblo, and came to midway in our tour.  We had seen five curio shops and not one other thing.  We hadn't entered the pueblo proper; we hadn't see a room where anybody actually lived; we hadn't got an honest answer to a single question.

We started then to do the other pueblo.  I said to the guide, "What will we see in this pueblo?"

"Fine curio shops," he said.  "I show them you."

"No, you won't," I said.  And with that the entire party abandoned the guide, got in their cars, and drove away.  He stood there looking after us, in his pigtails and bed sheet, cut to the quick.  Or maybe not.  Of course the joke was on us.  We had paid to see something, and with a straight face we had been shown nothing.

"I guess it's all right," said my traveling partner at last.  "They're just getting even for what the white man did to the Indians in the first place."  And I guess that's right.

Some people out there get hepped, as they say, on Indian life and culture and philosophy.  But I am more inclined to throw my eggs in the basket of an old-time stage driver in Taos.  He had lived around there forty years, and knew the country like a book.

"Indians?" he said.  "Hell, no, I don't know any more about an Indian than you do.  And neither does any other white man.  Talking to an Indian is just like writing a note and putting it in a prairie-dog hole.  I don't pay any attention to them." ' That's a good one, Ernie.  I include just about all the so-called journalists of today with the old boy's assessment.