Smoki Museum

On May 26, 1921, a group of Prescott businessmen participated in a Wild West Show at the Prescott Fairgrounds to raise money to help the Annual Fourth of July Frontier Days Rodeo. Because they had a collection of snakes available, they decided to perform the Hopi Snake Dance, and a local resident, who had lived on the Hopi Reservation, taught them the steps. The performance evoked a very positive response, and the businessmen decided to repeat the show the following year. Continued success led to repeating the show once a year for the next seventy years.

This group decided to call themselves the Smoki People and created a organization that met regularly to plan the dances, prepare costumes and equipment and have family pot lucks and barbecues. In 1922, the group convinced Sharlot Hall to write a small 16 page book about the Smoki People giving them a history.

They dedicated themselves to keeping alive the cultures of the Southwest Indian tribes at a time when the government had outlawed tribal ceremonies and was compelling Indian children to attend boarding schools to learn non-Indian practices. Each year they put on one show that included three to five ceremonials and Navajo sand painting with the Hopi Snake Dance as the finale. The women in the organization usually did at least one of the dances including one that involved diving into a lake dug into the fairgrounds. In addition to the lake, they built a backdrop that looked like a large pueblo and entire families dressed in costumes to give the appearance of a village.

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