Nuts & Snow

With the first frost, the Zuni, Navajo and Mescalero Apache Indians of New Mexico go out to harvest the little pinion nuts which grow on stubby pines atop the two great mesas, Cerro Alto and Santa Rita, close to the Continental Divide. For the past three years the crop has been scant, but such a yield was promised this year that the Navajos quit hammering silver and weaving blankets in anticipation of selling tons of pinion nuts at 5-c- to 10-c- per lb. Last month 1,000 Navajos and 300 Zunis went a-nutting in small canvas-covered wagons. When the Zuni men had their wives and children established on the nutting grounds they returned to their fields. Navajo braves stayed with the womenfolk.

Early in Thanksgiving week the bright New Mexican sky suddenly darkened. The white men's thermometers fell far below Zero. Before nightfall snow had banked five ft. high across the down trails from Cerro Alto and Santa Rita mesas, where the nutters were camped. Within a few days the Indians' small supplies were exhausted. Hungry ponies hunched head-to-head in the icy blast. Families crouched over small fires or cowered in the protection of their thin canvas wagon tops. It was decided that as many as possible should take the weakened ponies down to the Zuni settlement near Gallup, there strengthen them and bring them back. Three hundred braves trudged into the Zuni pueblos last week, dropped exhausted on the warm earthen floors. As soon as they were informed of the peril of their red-skinned charges, U. S. Indian agents organized rescue parties, made off for the snow-bound mesas. At the end of the week 789 had been rescued or had straggled home alone. But 200 more pinion nut-hunters presumably subsisting on pony meat were still unaccounted for; eleven were found frozen, dead.

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