THE HOPIS OF ALCATRAZ
On the rainy morning of January 3, 1895, a group of Hopi men waited on San Francisco’s Clay Street wharf for the prison boat to Alcatraz. Wrapped in striped blankets, the 19 Indians stood out, even in a city like San Francisco, filled with people from all over the world. Some of the Hopis were gray-haired and bowed with age; others, scarcely out of their teens. None of them spoke English, and although they all knew about a vast water world to the West, it’s unlikely that any of them had seen the ocean before. Their leader was Lomahongiwma, a sturdy-looking middle-aged man with a broad face; the older, more frail-looking Yukiwma was his right-hand man. Lomahongiwma and Yukiwma had been imprisoned together before for resisting U.S. rule, but Alcatraz represented the harshest sentence yet.
In San Francisco during the Gilded Age, horse-drawn trolleys arrived and departed carrying loads of passengers; vendors’ cries filled the air. The Ferry Building was under noisy construction, and ships loaded with merchandise pushed past the dock. San Francisco was the most important city in the West, four times bigger than sleepy Los Angeles.
The government’s boat, McDowell, steamed toward the pier. The ship docked, and soldiers motioned to the men to get on board.
The next morning, the San Francisco Call thrilled readers with the story of “nineteen Apache warriors” destined for the dungeons of Alcatraz. Leading with the headline “Ready Scalpers,” the article luridly described the cavalry’s hunt for and capture of “Rattlesnake Jack” and his men for “butchering Indians and white men alike.” That afternoon, the San Francisco Chronicle echoed this tale. “Nineteen murderous-looking Apache Indians were brought here under strong guard,” the newspaper announced, “condemned to spend time on the Rock.” The United States was winding down its Indian Wars, and in the consciousness of many Americans, only one kind of Indian loomed: bloodthirsty.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The men called themselves , or “all peaceful people named after the earth steward: Hopi,” and practiced a religion based on nonviolence that reached back millennia. The 19 prisoners came from Orayvi, a pueblo village in the high desert of northern Arizona
