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Title: The land of the Pueblos
Author: Susan E. Wallace
Release date: December 15, 2025 [eBook #77473]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: John B. Alden, 1888
Credits: Craig Kirkwood and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAND OF THE PUEBLOS ***
Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
[Illustration: A PUEBLO GIRL SELLING CLAY IMAGES. (From a sketch by
Gen. Wallace.)]
THE LAND OF THE PUEBLOS.
BY
SUSAN E. WALLACE.
_Author of “The Storied Sea,” “Ginevra,” etc._
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.
NEW YORK:
JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER.
1888.
* * * * *
Copyright. 1888,
BY
THE PROVIDENT BOOK COMPANY.
* * * * *
THE LAND OF THE PUEBLOS.
CONTENTS.
Introduction. 5
I. The Journey. 7
II. Historic. 14
III. Laws and Customs. 37
IV. The City of the Pueblos. 58
V. Mexican Cottages. 62
VI. To the Turquois Mines. 69
VII. To the Turquois Mines, continued. 80
VIII. To the Turquois Mines, continued. 93
IX. To the Turquois Mines, continued. 101
X. Among the Archives.--Things New and Old. 108
XI. Among the Archives.--A Love Letter. 114
XII. Among the Archives, continued. 121
XIII. Among the Archives, continued. 127
XIV. Among the Archives, continued. 134
XV. The Jornada Del Muerto. 140
XVI. Something about the Apache. 152
XVII. Old Miners. 160
XVIII. The New Miners. 167
XIX. The Honest Miner. 175
XX. The Assayers. 180
XXI. The Ruby Silver Mine.--A True Story. 188
XXII. The Ruby Silver Mine, continued. 196
XXIII. Mine Experience. 203
XXIV. The Ruins of Montezuma’s Palace. 218
XXV. To the Casas Grandes. 234
XXVI. A Frontier Idyl. 248
XXVII. The Pimos. 261
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
A Pueblo Girl Selling Clay Images, Frontispiece
El Palacio, Santa Fé, 14
Living Pueblo (New Mexico), 44
Zuñi War Club, Dance Ornaments, etc., 46
Zuñi Basketry, and Toy Cradles, 130
Zuñi Water Vases, 132
Navajo Indian, with Silver Ornaments, 154
Zuñi Effigies, 200
Tesuke Water Vases, 234
Abandoned Pueblo, 238
Zuñi Paint and Condiment Cups, 244
Pueblo Wristlets, Moccasins, etc., 246
INTRODUCTION.
Some years ago these writings appeared in the _Independent_, _Atlantic
Monthly_, and _The Tribune_. My thanks are with the respective
editors by whose courtesy they assume this altered shape. Several
were published in a certain magazine which died young. I send cordial
greeting to its chief, and shed a few drops of ink over the nameless
one, loved of the gods. Fain would I believe no action of mine had
power to hasten that early and untimely end. The hurrying march in
which all must join, is so rapid, my first audience is quite out of
hearing; my first inklings have faded from the memory of readers except
the one, beloved of my soul, who asks why the old Pueblo papers have
not been reprinted. Ah, what exquisite flattery!
And just here I kiss the fair hands unseen which send such gracious
messages. Dropping flowers in my way, pansies for thoughts, rosemary
for remembrance, has made them the whiter and sweeter forevermore.
The Montezuma myth is so interwoven with the past and future of the
Indians that every allusion to their history and religion must of
necessity contain the revered name. The repetition in the compositions
now collected did not appear so glaringly when they were detached.
My first impulse was to omit such passages, but second thought sends
out the letters as when first offered to the public, with all their
imperfections (a good many), on their head.
It would be affectation to make secret what every writer understands:
(and what reader have I who is not a writer?) the pleasure with which
I gather my scattered children under a permanent cover. Family
resemblance is strong enough to identify them anywhere, but that is no
reason why they should not appear in shape which the world will little
heed nor long remember. They were written when the ancient Palace
I have tried to describe, was the residence of the Governor of New
Mexico; and, in turning the leaves after seven years, I am touched by
the same feeling which then moved me to pipe my little songs. Again I
feel the deep solitude of the mountains, taste the all pervading alkali
dust, and hear the sand-storm beating like sleet against the window
panes. The best reward they brought were friendly voices answering in
the blue distance across the Sierras, and cheering me with thought
that I had won the place of welcome visitor in happy homes my feet
may never enter; that through the bitter winter my room was kept by
warm firesides under the evening lamp--there where the treasured books
lie from day to day, looking like Elia’s old familiar faces. Dear to
the heart, beautiful and forever young, are the unseen friends whose
presence becomes an abiding consciousness to the writer.
CRAWFORDSVILLE, Indiana, March, 1888.
* * * * *
THE LAND OF THE PUEBLOS.
CHAPTER I. THE JOURNEY.
I am 6,000 feet nearer the sky than you are. Come to the sweet and
lonely valley in the West where, free from care and toil, the weary
soul may rest; where there are neither railroads, manufactures, nor
common schools; and, so little is expected of us in the way of public
spirit, we almost venture to do as we please, and forget we should
vote, and see to it that the Republic does not go to the “demnition
bow-wows.”
Santa Fé is precisely what the ancient Pueblos called it--“the
dancing-ground of the sun.” The white rays quiver like light on
restless waters or on mirrors, and night is only a shaded day. In our
summer camp among the foothills we need no tents. It is glorious with
stars of the first magnitude, that hang low in a spotless sky, free
from fog, mist, or even dew; not so much as a mote between us and the
shining floor of heaven.
The star-patterns of my coverlet are older than the figures which
delighted our grandmothers. They come out not one by one, as in our
skies; but flash suddenly through the blue. Day and night make a brief
parting. The short twilight closes, and lo! in the chambers of the
east Orion, belted with jewels, Arcturus and his sons, and even the
dim lost Pleiad, forgetting the ruins of old Troy, brightens again.
Wrapped in soft, furry robes, we lie on the quiet bosom of Mother Earth
in sleep, dreamless and restful as the slumber of those who wake in
Paradise. I cannot say, with the enthusiastic land-speculator: “Ladies
and gentlemen, in this highly-favored region the Moon is always at its
full.” But her face is so fair and bright I am her avowed adorer, and
many a thousand miles from
“‘a----’ the steep head of old Latmos,”
she stoops above the sleeping lover, to kiss her sweetest.
Old travelers tell you the country is like Palestine; but it is like
nothing outside of the Garden eastward in Eden. New Mexico is a slice
of old Mexico; that is, a western section of Spain. “Who knows but you
may catch sight of some of your castles there!” Such was the invitation
which came to me across the Rocky Mountains. I hearkened to the
voice of the “charmer, charming never so wisely,” and, “fleeing from
incessant life,” started on a journey of two thousand miles. It was
in the mild September, and the Mississippi Valley flamed with banners
crimson, golden, in which Autumn shrouded the faded face of the dead
Summer.
We sped through Ohio, land of lovely women; past Peoria, fair Prairie
City, the smoke of whose twenty-three distilleries obscures the spires
of her churches beautiful as uplifted hands at prayer; through the
bridge at St. Louis, where the fairies and giants once worked together,
making a crossing over the great Father of Waters; on we went,
journeying by night and by day.
Oh! the horror of the chamber of torture known to the hapless victims
as the sleeping-car. The gay conductor, in gorgeous uniform, told us,
in an easy, off-hand manner, a man had been found dead in one of the
top berths some weeks before. I only wondered any who ventured there
came out alive. “Each in his narrow cell forever laid” went through my
mind as I lay down to wakefulness and unrest in blankets filled with
vermin and disease. The passengers were the same you always journey
with: the young couple, tender and warm; the old couple, tough and
cool; laughing girls, in fluffy curls and blue ribbons, who found a
world of pleasure in pockets full of photographs; the good baby, that
never cried, and the bad baby, that cried at nothing; the fussy woman
everybody hated, who counted her bundles every half hour, wanted the
window up, and no sooner was it raised than she wanted it down again.
There, too, was the invalid in every train on the Pacific Road. A
college graduate of last year, poor, ambitious, crowded four years’
study into three, broke down, and now the constant cough tells the rest
of the old tale. He was attended by a young sister, warm and rosy as he
was pallid and chill, who in the most appealing way took each one of
us into her confidence, and told how Rob had picked up every step of
the road since they left Sandusky. When we entered the wide, monotonous
waste between Missouri and Colorado, how the brave girl would try to
cheer the boy with riddles, stories, games, muffle him in her furs,
slap his cold hands, and lay her red, ripe cheek to his, as if she were
hushing a baby. In the drollest way, she resisted the blandishments
of the vegetable ivory man, the stem-winder, the peanut vender, and
with tragic gesture waved off the peddler of the “Adventures of Sally
MacIntire, who was Captured by the Dacotahs. A Tale of Horror and of
Blood!” When the dazzling conductor illuminated the passage of the
car with his Kohinoor sleeve-buttons and evening-star breastpin, he
would stop beside the sick boy, and in a fresh, breezy way seemed to
throw out a morning atmosphere of bracing air, as well as hopeful
words. “Now,” he would say, twirling his thumb in a Pactolian chain
which streamed across his breast and emptied into and overflowed a
watch-pocket bulgy with poorly hid treasure--“now we are coming to a
place fit to live in. When you get to Pike’s Peak, you will be 7,000
feet above the level of the sea. It’s like breathing champagne. You’ll
come up like a cork; keep house in a snug cottage; go home in the
Spring so fat you can hardly see out of your eyes.” Vain words. The
poor boy knew, and we knew, he was fast nearing the awful shadow which
every man born of woman must enter alone. The mighty hand was on him.
He was going to Colorado Springs only to die. We parted at La Junta,
crowding the windows, gayly waving good-byes. I can never forget my
last sight of the sweet sister, with her outspread shawl sheltering him
from the crisp wind, which blew from every direction at once, as I have
seen a mother-bird flutter round her helpless nestlings. The good baby
held up its sooty, chubby hand saying, “ta, ta,” as long as they were
in sight, and the mothers smiled tearfully to each other when a rough
miner from the Black Hills said, softly, as if talking to himself: “I
reckon, if that young woman’s dress was unbuttoned, wings would fly
out.”
Five hundred miles across plains level as the sea, treeless, waterless,
after leaving the Arkansas River. Part of our road lay along the old
California trail, the weary, weary way the first gold-seekers trod,
making but twenty miles a day. Under ceaseless sunshine, against
pitiless wind, it is not strange that years afterward their march was
readily tracked by graves, not always inviolate from the prairie wolf.
The stiff buffalo-grass rose behind the first explorers, and even
horses and cattle left no trail. They took their course by the sun,
shooting an arrow before them; before reaching the first arrow they
shot another; and in this manner marched the entire route up to the
place where they found water and encamped.
Occasionally we saw a herdsman’s hut standing in the level expanse,
lonely as a lighthouse; nothing else in the blank and dreary desert
but the railroad track, straight as a rule, narrow as a thread, and
its attendant telegraph, precious in our sight as a string of Lothair
pearls. Not a stick or stone in a hundred miles. Only the sky, and the
earth, clothed with low grass-like moss, the stiff sage-brush, and a
vile trailing cactus, which crawls over the ground like hairy green
snakes. To be left in such a spot would be like seeing the ship sail
off leaving us afloat in fathomless and unknown seas.
After a day seeming long as many a month has, the fine pure air of
Colorado touched with cooling balm our tired, dusty faces; and against
the loveliest sunset sky, in a heavenly radiance, all amber and
carmine, the Spanish peaks majestically saluted us.
Oh! the glory of that sight! Two lone summits, remote, inaccessible;
the snowy, the far-off mountains of poetry and picture. Take all the
songs the immortal singers have sung in praise of Alpine heights and
lay them at their feet; it yet would be an offering unworthy their
surpassing loveliness. Now we lost sight of them; now they came again;
then vanished in the evening dusk, dropped down from Heaven like the
Babylonish curtain of purple and gold which veiled the Holy of Holies
from profane eyes. Fairest of earthly shows that have blest my waking
vision, they stand alone in memory, not to fade from it till all fades.
At Trinidad we left the luxury of steam, and came down to the
territorial conveyance. Think, dear reader, of two days and a night on
a buckboard--an instrument of torture deadly as was ever used in the
days of Torquemada, and had anything its equal been resorted to then
there would have been few heretics.
It is a low-wheeled affair floored with slats, the springs under
the seats so weak that at the least jolt they smite together with
a horrible blow, which is the more emphatic when over-loaded, as
when we crossed the line which bounds “the most desirable of all the
Territories.” Our night was without a stop, except to change horses.
Jolt, jolt; bang, bang; cold to the marrow, though huddled under
buffalo robes and heavy blankets. How welcome the warmth of the sun
on our stiffened limbs; and the early breeze, sweet and fresh as airs
across Eden when the evening and the morning were the first day! It
has a sustaining quality which almost serves for food and sleep. There
journeyed with us in the white moonshine spectres, shadowy, ghost-like.
Now the sun comes up, we see they are kingly mountains, wrapped in
robes of royal purple and wearing crowns of gold. The atmosphere is so
refined and clear, they appear close beside us; but the driver says
they are forty miles away. Noon comes on, hot and still, with a desert
scorch. We journey over a road surprisingly free of stones; across a
blank and colorless plain, bounded by mountain-walls which stand grim
and stark like bastions of stone. Another night and another long day.
The driver is not on his high horse now. He has no funny stories of
the grizzly and cinnamon bear, which he assures us can climb trees,
sticking their claws in the bark, easily as the telegraph-mender,
with clamps on his feet, goes up the pole. Along the roadside stretch
beautiful park-like intervales, studded with dwarf pines, that appear
planted at regular distances.
Will the day never end? I have no voice nor spirit, and begin to
think the wayside crosses mark graves of travelers, murdered, not by
assassins, but by the buckboard; and feebly clutch my fellow-sufferer,
and shake about in a limp, distracted way, pitying myself, as though
I were somebody else. I can hold out no longer. But wake up! Wake up!
This is the home-stretch. The horses know it and dash across a little
brook which they tell me is the Rio Santa Fé.
Pleasant the sound of running water; tender the light of the evening on
the mountains which encircle the ancient capital of the Pueblos. As we
approach, it is invested with indescribable romance, the poetic glamor
which hovers about all places to us foreign, new, and strange. We go
through a straggling suburb of low, dark adobe houses. How comfortless
they look! Two Mexicans are jabbering and gesticulating, evidently
in a quarrel. Swarthy women, with dismal old black shawls over their
heads, sit in the porches. I hear the “Maiden’s Prayer” thumped on a
poor piano. How foolish in me to think that I could escape the sound
of that feeble petition! Lights stream through narrow windows, sunk in
deep casements, and a childish voice, strangely at variance with the
words, is singing “Silver Threads among the Gold” to the twanging of a
weak guitar. Softly the convent-bells are ringing a gracious welcome to
the worn-out traveler. The narrow streets are scarcely wide enough for
two wagons to pass. The mud walls are high and dark. We reach the open
Plaza. Long one-story adobe houses front it on every side. And this is
the historic city! Older than our government, older than the Spanish
Conquest, it looks older than the hills surrounding it, and worn-out
besides. “_El Fonda!_” shouts the driver, as we stop before the hotel.
A voice, foreign yet familiar, gayly answers: “_Ah! Senora, a los
pieds de usted._” At last, at last, I am not of this time nor of this
continent; but away, away across the sea, in the land of dreams and
visions, “renowned, romantic Spain.”
CHAPTER II. HISTORIC.
I used to think Fernandina was the sleepiest place in the world, but
that was before I had seen Santa Fé. The drowsy old town, lying in a
sandy valley inclosed on three sides by mountain walls, is built of
adobes laid in one-story houses, and resembles an extensive brick-yard,
with scattered sunburnt kilns ready for the fire. The approach in
midwinter, when snow, deep on the mountains, rests in ragged patches on
the red soil of New Mexico, is to the last degree disheartening to the
traveler entering narrow streets which appear mere lanes. Yet, dirty
and unkept, swarming with hungry dogs, it has the charm of foreign
flavor, and, like San Antonio, retains some portion of the grace which
long lingers about, if indeed it ever forsakes, the spot where Spain
has held rule for centuries, and the soft syllables of the Spanish
tongue are yet heard.
It was a primeval stronghold before the Spanish conquest, and a town of
some importance to the white race when Pennsylvania was a wilderness,
and the first Dutch governor was slowly drilling the Knickerbocker
ancestry in the difficult evolution of marching round the town pump.
Once the capital and centre of the Pueblo kingdom, it is rich in
historic interest, and the archives of the Territory, kept, or rather
neglected, in the leaky old Palacio del Gobernador, where I write, hold
treasure well worth the seeking of student and antiquary. The building
itself has a history full of pathos and stirring incident as the
ancient fort of St. Augustine, and is older than that venerable pile.
It had been the palace of the Pueblos immemorially before the holy
name Santa Fé was given in baptism of blood by the Spanish conquerors;
palace of the Mexicans after they broke away from the crown; and palace
ever since its occupation by El Gringo. In the stormy scenes of the
seventeenth century it withstood several sieges; was repeatedly lost
and won, as the white man or the red held the victory. Who shall say
how many and how dark the crimes hidden within these dreary earthen
walls?
[Illustration: El Palacio, Santa Fé. (From Pencil Sketch by Gen.
Wallace.)]
Hawthorne, in a strain of tender gayety, laments the lack of the
poetic element in our dear native land, where there is no shadow, no
mystery, no antiquity, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything
but commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight. Here is
every requisite of romance,--the enchantment of distance, the charm
of the unknown,--and, in shadowy mists of more than three hundred
years, imagination may flower out in fancies rich and strange. Many a
picturesque and gloomy wrong is recorded in mouldy chronicles, of the
fireside tragedies enacted when a peaceful, simple people were driven
from their homes by the Spaniard, made ferocious by his greed of gold
and conquest; and the cross was planted, and sweet hymns to Mary and
her Son were chanted on hearths slippery with the blood of men guilty
only of the sin of defending them.
Four hundred years ago the Pueblo Indians were freeholders of the vast
unmapped domain lying between the Rio Pecos and the Gila, and their
separate communities, dense and self-supporting, were dotted over the
fertile valleys of Utah and Colorado, and stretched as far south as
Chihuahua, Mexico. Bounded by rigid conservatism as a wall, in all
these ages they have undergone slight change by contact with the white
race, and are yet a peculiar people, distinct from the other aboriginal
tribes of this continent as the Jews are from the other races in
Christendom. The story of these least known citizens of the United
States takes us back to the days of Charles V. and the “spacious times
of great Elizabeth.”
About the year 1528 an exploring expedition set out, by order of
the king of Spain, from San Domingo to invade Florida, a name then
loosely given to the wide area between the bay of Fernandina and the
Mississippi River. It was commanded by Pamfilo de Narvaez; the same it
will be remembered, who had been sent by the jealous governor of Cuba
to capture Cortez, and who, after having declared him an outlaw, was
himself easily defeated. His troops deserted to the victorious banner,
and when brought before the man he had promised to arrest, Narvaez
said, “Esteem yourself fortunate, Señor Cortez, that you have taken me
prisoner.” The conqueror replied, with proud humility and with truth,
“It is the least of the things I have done in Mexico.”
This anecdote illustrates the haughty and defiant spirit of the general
who sailed for battle gayly as to a regatta, with a fleet of five
vessels and about six hundred men, of whom eighty were mounted. He
carried blood-hounds to track natives, chains and branding-irons for
captives; was clothed with full powers to kill, burn, plunder, enslave;
and was appointed governor over all the country he might reduce to
possession.
The leader and his command perished by shipwreck and disasters, all
but four. Among the survivors was one Alvar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca,
treasurer for the king and high sheriff, who is described in the
annals of that period as having the most beautiful and noble figure
of the conquerors of the New World; and in the best days of chivalry
his valor on the battle-field, his resolution in danger, his constancy
and resignation in hardship, won for him the proud title “Illustrious
Warrior.” Ten years he, with three companions, rambled to and fro
between the Atlantic and Gulf of California. The plain statement of
their privations and miseries must of necessity be filled with marvels;
that of Cabeça de Vaca, duly attested and sworn to, is weakened by wild
exaggerations, and the _Relacion_ of this Western Ulysses is touched
with high colorings and embellished with fantastic fables equal to the
moving accidents by flood and field of the heroic king of Ithaca. He
tells of famishing with hunger till they devoured dogs with relish;
of marching “without water and without way” among savages of giant
stature, dressed in robes, “with wrought ties of lion-skin, making a
brave show,--the women dressed in wool that grows on trees;”[1] of
meeting cyclopean tribes, who had the sight of but one eye; of being
enslaved and going naked--“as we were unaccustomed to being so, twice
a year we cast our skin, like serpents;” of his escape, and, after
living six years with friendly Indians, of being again made captive
by barbarians, who amused themselves by pulling out his beard and
beating him cruelly; of living on the strange fruits of mezquit and
prickly-pear; of mosquitoes, whose bite made men appear to have “the
plagues of holy Lazarus;” of herds of wonderful cows, with hair an
inch thick, frizzled and resembling wool, roaming over boundless plains.
Holding his course northwest, he came to a people “with fixed
habitations of great size, made of earth, along a river which runs
between two ridges;” and here we have the earliest record of Pueblo
or Town Indians, so named as distinguished from nomads or hunting
tribes, dwelling in lodges of buffalo-skin and boughs. It is difficult
to trace his course along the nameless rivers of Texas; he must have
ascended the Red River and then struck across to the Canadian, which
runs for miles through a deep cañon, in which are yet seen extensive
ruins of ancient cities. Undoubtedly he was then among the Pueblo
Indians, in the northwestern part of New Mexico. He described them as
an intelligent race, with fine persons, possessing great strength,
and gave them the name “Cow Nation,” because of the immense number
of buffaloes killed in their country and along the river for fifty
leagues. The region was very populous, and throughout were signs of a
better civilization. The women were better treated and better clad;
“they had shawls of cotton;[2] their dress was a skirt of cotton that
came to the knees, and skirts of dressed deer-skins to the ground,
opened in front and fastened with leather straps. They washed their
clothes with a certain soapy root which cleansed them well.[3] They
also wore shoes.” This is the first account of the natives of that
country wearing covering on their feet--doubtless the moccasins still
worn by them.
The gentle savages hailed the white men as children of the sun, and,
in adoration, brought their blind to have their eyes opened, their
sick that, by the laying on of hands, they might be healed. Mothers
brought little children for blessings, and many humbly sought but to
touch their garments, believing virtue would pass out of them. The
rude hospitality was freely accepted; the sons of the morning feasted
on venison, pumpkins, maize bread, the fruit of the prickly-pear; and,
refreshed by the banquet, made their worshipers understand that they
too were suffering with a disease of the heart, which nothing but gold
and precious stones could cure. The Pueblos were then as now a race
depending on agriculture rather than the chase, and were in distress
because rain had not fallen in two years, and all the corn they had
planted had been eaten by moles. They were afraid to plant again until
it rained, lest they should lose the little seed left, and begged the
fair gods “to tell the sky to rain;” which the celestial visitants
obligingly did, and, in answer to the prayers of the red men, breathed
on their buffalo skins, and bestowed a farewell blessing upon them at
parting.
They again pushed westward in search of riches, always further on,
crossed a portion of the _Llano Estacado_, or Staked Plain, and
traveled “for a hundred leagues through a thickly settled country, with
towns of earth abounding in maize and beans.” Hares were very numerous.
When one was started the Indians would attack him with clubs, driving
him from one to another till he was killed or captured.[4]
Everywhere they found order, thrift, friendly welcome. The Indians gave
Cabeça de Vaca fine turquoises, buffalo robes, or, as he calls them,
“blankets of cow skins,” and fine emeralds made into arrow-heads, very
precious, held sacred, and used only in dances and celebrations. They
said these jewels had been received in exchange for bunches of plumes
and the bright feathers of parrots; they were brought a long distance
from lofty mountains in the north, where were crowded cities of very
large and strong houses.[5]
It appears from his _Relacion_ that Cabeça de Vaca passed over the
entire territory of New Mexico, went down the Gila to a point near its
mouth, struck across to the river San Miguel, thence to Culiacan, and
so on to Mexico, where the four wanderers, worn by hardship, gaunt and
spectral by famine, were received with distinction by the Viceroy,
Mendoza, and Cortez, Marquis of the Valley.
The venturesome hero was summoned to Valladolid to appear before
Charles V., and hastened to lay at the feet of his imperial master the
gathered spoil which cost ten years of life: the hide of a bison, a
few valueless stones resembling emerald, and a handful of worthless
turquoises.
Before he set sail for Spain, Cabeça de Vaca told his marvelous story
to sympathetic and eager listeners; and, besides, airy rumors had
already floated down the valley of Anahuac of a land toward the north
where seven high-walled cities, “the Seven Cities of Cibola,” were
defended by impregnable outworks. They were least among the provinces,
where were countless greater cities of houses built with numerous
stories, “lighted by jewels,” and containing treasure stored away in
secret rooms, rich as Atahualpa’s ransom. Various rovers gave accounts
of natives clad in curious raiment, richer and softer than Utrecht
velvet, who wore priceless gems, whole ropes and chains of turquoises,
in ignorance of their actual value. One of these stragglers, an
Indian, reported that the houses “of many lofts” were made of lime
and stone; he had seen them “with these eyes.” The gates and smaller
pillars of the principal ones were of turquoise, and their princes were
served by beautiful girls, whom they enslaved; and their spear-heads,
drinking-cups, and ornamental vessels were of pure gold. There were
wondrous tales, too, of opal mountains,[6] lifted high in an atmosphere
of such amazing clearness that they could be seen at vast distances; of
valleys glittering with garnets and beryls; of clear streams of water
flowing over silver sands; of strange flora; of the shaggy buffalo;
of the fearful serpent with castanets in its tail;[7] of a bird like
the peacock;[8] and a _Llano_, broad as the great desert of Africa,
over which hovered a mirage more dazzling than the Fata Morgana, more
delusive than the spectre of the Brocken.
A friar named Niza, with one of the companions of Cabeça de Vaca, went
out “to explore the country” three hundred leagues away, to a city they
called Cibola,[9] clearly identified as old Zuni, on a river of the
same name, one hundred and eighty miles northwest of Santa Fé. This
flighty reporter testified to Mendoza that he had been in the cities of
Cibola, and had seen the turquoise columns and soft, feathery cloaks
of those who dwelt in king’s palaces. Their houses were made of stone,
several stories high with flat roofs, arranged in good order; they
possessed many emeralds and precious stones, but valued turquoises
above all others. They had vessels of gold and silver more abundant
than in Peru.
“Following as the Holy Ghost did lead,” he ascended a mountain, from
which he surveyed the promised land with a speculator’s eyes; then,
with the help of friendly Indians, he raised a heap of stones, set up
a cross, the symbol of taking possession, and under the text, “The
heathen are given as an inheritance,” named the province “El Nuevo
Regno de San Francisco” (the New Kingdom of St. Francis); and from that
day to this San Francisco has been the patron saint of New Mexico.
In our prosaic age of doubt and question it is hard to understand the
faith with which sane men trusted these bold falsehoods. They were mad
with the lust of gold and passion for adventure; and valiant cavaliers
who had won renown in the battles of the Moor among the mountains of
Andalusia, and had seen the silver cross of Ferdinand raised above the
red towers of the Alhambra, now turned their brave swords against the
feeble natives of the New World. Less than half a century had gone by
since the discovery of America; the conquests of Pizarro and Cortez
were fresh in men’s minds, and an expedition containing the enchanting
quality called hazard was soon organized. Illustrious noblemen sold
their vineyards and mortgaged their estates to fit the adventurers out,
assured they would never need more gold than they would bring back from
the true El Dorado. The young men saw visions; the old men dreamed
dreams; volunteers flocked to the familiar standards; and an army was
soon ready “to discover and subdue to the crown of Spain the Seven
Cities of Cibola.”
Francisco Vasquez Coronado, who left a lovely young wife and great
wealth to lead the romantic enterprise, was proclaimed captain-general;
and Castenada, historian of the campaign, writes, “I doubt whether
there has ever been collected in the Indies so brilliant a troop.” The
whole force numbered fifteen hundred men and one thousand horses; sheep
and cows were driven along to supply the new settlements in fairyland.
The army mustered in Compostella, under no shadow darker than the wavy
folds of the royal banner, and one fair spring morning, the day after
Easter, 1540, marched out in armor burnished high, with roll of drums,
the joyful appeal of bugles, and all the pomp and circumstance the old
Spaniard loved so well. The proud cavaliers, “very gallant in silk
upon silk,” kindled with enthusiasm, and answered with loud shouts the
cheers of the people who thronged the house-tops. The viceroy led the
army two days on the march, exhorted the soldiers to obedience and
discipline, and returned to await reports.
When the mind is prepared for wonders the wonderful is sure to appear,
and time fails to tell what prodigies the high-born gentlemen beheld:
the Indians of monstrous size, so tall the tallest Spaniard could reach
no higher than their breasts; a unicorn, which escaped their chase.
“His horn, found in a deep ravine, was a fathom and a half in length;
the base was thick as one’s thigh; it resembled in shape a goat’s horn,
and was a curious thing.” They were the first white men who looked down
the gloomy cañon of the Colorado to the black rushing river, walled by
sheer precipices fifteen hundred feet high. Two men tried to descend
its steep sides. They climbed down perhaps a quarter of the way, when
they were stopped by a rock which seemed from above no greater than
a man, but which in reality was higher than the top of the cathedral
tower at Seville. They passed places where “the earth trembled like a
drum, and ashes boiled in a manner truly infernal;” watched magnetic
stones roll together of their own accord; and suffered under a storm
of hail-stones, “large as porringers,” which indented their helmets,
wounded the men, broke their dishes, and covered the ground to the
depth of a foot and a half with ice-balls; and the wind raised the
horses off their feet, and dashed them against the sides of the ravine.
They fought many tribes of Indians, and were relieved to meet none who
were “man-eaters and none anthropophagi.”[10]
The route of Coronado is traced with tolerable clearness up the
Colorado to the Gila; up the Gila to the _Casa Grande_, called
Chichiticale, or Red House, standing more than three centuries ago,
as it does now, in a mezquit jungle on the edge of the desert; “and,”
writes his secretary, “our general was above all distressed at
finding this Chichiticale, of which so much had been said, dwindled
down to one mud house, in ruins and roofless, but which seemed to
have been fortified.” With true Spanish philosophy, he covered his
disappointment, and gave the place an alluring mystery, with the idea
that “this house, built of red earth, was the work of a civilized
people come from a distance.” And into the distance he went, through
Arizona, the lower border of Colorado, and turned southeast to where
Santa Fé now stands, then the central stronghold of the Pueblo empire.
They fought and marched, destroyed villages, leveled the poor temples
of the heathen, planted the cross, and sang thanksgiving hymns over
innumerable souls to be saved,--all very well as far as it went; but
the mud-built pueblos yielded neither gold nor precious metals.
Acoma, fifty miles east of Zuni, is thus accurately described by
Castenada, under the name of Acuco: “It is a very strong place, built
upon a rock very high and on three sides perpendicular. The inhabitants
are great brigands, and much dreaded by all the province. The only
means of reaching the top is by ascending a staircase cut in solid
rock: the first flight of steps numbered two hundred, which could only
be ascended with difficulty; when a second flight of one hundred more
followed, narrower and more difficult than the first. When surmounted,
there remained about twelve more at the top, which could only be
ascended by putting the hands and feet in holes cut in the rock. There
was space on this summit to store a great quantity of provisions, and
to build large cisterns.”[11]
The chiefs told Coronado that their towns were older than the memory
of seven generations. They were all built on the same plan, in blocks
shaped like a parallelogram, and were from two to four stories high,
with terraces receding from the outside. The lower story, without
openings, was entered from above by ladders, which were pulled up,
and secured them against Indian warfare. There was no interior
communication between the stories; the ascent outside was made from
one terrace to another. The houses were of sun-dried bricks, and for
plaster they used a mixture of ashes, earth, and coal. Every village
had from one to seven _estufas_, built partly underground, walled
over the top with flat roofs, and used for political and religious
purposes. As in certain other mystic lodges which date back to the days
of King Solomon, women were not admitted. All matters of importance
were there discussed; there the consecrated fires were kept burning,
and were never allowed to go out. The women wore on their shoulders a
sort of mantle, which they fastened round the neck, passing it under
the right arm, and skirts of cotton. “They also,” writes Castenada,
“make garments of skins very well dressed, and trick off the hair
behind the ears in the shape of a wheel, which resembles the handle
of a cup.” They wore pearls on their heads and necklaces of shells.
Everywhere were plenty of glazed pottery and vases of curious form and
workmanship, reminding the Spaniards of the jars of Guadarrama in old
Spain.
The gallant freebooters traversed deserts, swam rivers, scaled
mountains, in a three years’ chase after visionary splendors; but the
opal valley and the vanishing cities, with their sunny turquoise gates
and jeweled colonnades, faded into the common light of day. Though
the adventurers failed in their mocking “quest of great and exceeding
riches,” they explored and added to the Spanish crown, by right of
occupation, an area twelve times as large as the State of Ohio.
I dwell on these earliest records because it is the habit of travelers
visiting ruins, which in the dry, dewless air of New Mexico are almost
imperishable, to ascribe them to an extinct race and lost civilization,
superior to any now extant here. They muse over Aztec glories faded,
and temples fallen, in the spirit of the immortal antiquary, who saw
in a ditch “slightly marked” a Roman wall, surrounding the stately and
crowded prætorium, with its all-conquering standards bearing the great
name of Cæsar.
These edifices are not mysterious except to revered fancies, and
their tenants were not divers nations, but clans, tribes of one blood,
and civilized only as compared with the savages surrounding them--the
tameless Apache, the brutish Ute, the degraded Navajo, against whose
attacks they devised their system of defense, so highly extolled by
rambling Bohemians, and threw up “impregnable works,” which are only
low embankments wide enough for the posting of sentinels.
I have been through many abandoned and inhabited pueblos, examining
them with the utmost care, and can discover no essential in which they
differ from one another or from those of Castenada’s time. In each
one there is the terraced wall; the vault-like lower story, used as
granary, without openings, and entered from above by ladders; the small
upper rooms, with tiny windows of selenite and mica; the same round
oven; the glazed pottery; the circular estufa with its undying fire;
_acequias_ for irrigation, not built like Roman aqueducts, but mere
ditches and canals; and from the sameness of the remains I infer that
no important facts are to reward the search of dreaming pilgrim or
patient student.
Each village had its peculiar dialect, and chose its own governor. The
report of the Rev. John Menaul, of the Laguna Mission, March 1, 1879,
gives an abstract of their laws, identical with those framed by “the
council of old men,” the dusky senators described by Castenada; and
then, as now, the governor’s orders were proclaimed from the top of the
estufa, every morning, by the town-crier.
After the invasion of Coronado, New Granada, as it was then called, was
crossed by padres, vagabonds of various grades, and later by armies
of subjugation. The same tale is told: how the peace-loving Pueblo
was found, as his descendants are, cultivating fields along the rivers
or near some unfailing spring, living in community houses wonderfully
alike, and keeping alive the sacred fire under laws which like those of
the Medes and Persians, change not. The fair strangers were at first
graciously welcomed and feasted; but the red men soon learned that the
children of the sun, before whom they knelt, whose march-worn feet they
kissed in adoration, were come merely for robbery and spoil. The Indian
was condemned not only to give up his scanty possessions, and leave the
warm precincts of the cheerful day to work in dismal mines, but he must
put out the holy flame, and worship the God of his pitiless master.
Conversion was ever a main object of the zealous _conquistador_, and
Vargas, one of the early Spanish governors, applying for troops to
carry on the crusade, writes--and his record still stands--“You might
as well try convert Jews without the Inquisition as Indians without
soldiers.” The first revolt (1640), while Arguello was governor of the
province, grew out of the whipping and hanging of forty Pueblos, who
refused to give up their own religion and accept the holy Catholic
faith.
The Pueblos constantly rebelled, and escaped to the lair of the
mountain lion, the den of the grizzly and cinnamon bear, the hole of
the fox and coyote. They sought shelter from the avarice and bigotry
of their Christian persecutors in the steeps of distant cañons, and
found where to lay their head in the hollows of inaccessible rocks; and
this brings us to the cliff houses, latterly the subject of confused
exaggeration and absurd conjecture.
It is well known that the first foreign invasions were by far the
most merciless, and it appears reasonable that hunted natives made a
hiding-place in these fastnesses; that there they allied themselves
with the Navajo, who, from a remote period, had dwelt in the
northern plains, beat back the enemy, and, as Spanish rigor relaxed,
returned from exile to their fields and adobe houses as before.
Mud walls had been proof against arrow, spear, and battle-axe, but
could not withstand the finer arms of the fairer race. The cave or
cliff-dwellings of Utah, Colorado, and Arizona are exact copies of
the community tenements of Southern and Moquis pueblos, varying with
situation and quality of material used. The architecture of these human
nests and eyries--in some places seven hundred and a thousand feet
from the bottom of the cañon--has been magnified out of all bounds.
Eager explorers, hurried away by imagination, have even compared the
civilization which produced them with
“The glory that was Greece,
The grandeur that was Rome.”
I found nothing in them to warrant such flights of fancy, and, like
all castles in air, they lessen wofully at a near view. Those along
the Rio Mancos and Du Chelly are mere pigeon-holes in the sides of
cañons, roofed by projecting ledges of rock. The walls, six or eight
inches thick, are built of flat brook-stones hacked on the edge with
stone hatchets, or rather hammers, to square angles; in some cases
they are laid in mud mortar and finished with mud plaster, troweled,
Pueblo fashion, with the bare hand. Certainly, mortal never fled to
these high perches from choice, or failed to desert them as soon as the
danger passed. Whether we believe that the hunters were Christian or
heathen, we must admit that this was a last refuge for the hunted, made
desperate by terror. The masonry is smoothed, so none but the sharpest
eyes can notice the difference between it and the rock itself, and in
no instance is there trace of chimney or fire-place.[12] The whole idea
of the work is concealment.
One might well ask, with sight-seeing Niza strolling through fabled
Cibola, “if the men of that country had wings by which to reach these
high lofts.” Unfortunately for the romancers, “they showed him a
well-made ladder, and said they ascended by this means.” And well-made
ladders the cliff dwellers had--steps cut in the living rock of the
mountain, and scaling-ladders stout and light.
The solitary watch-towers along the McElmo, Colorado, and wide-spread
relics of cities in the cañon of the Hovenweep Utah, near the old
Spanish trail through the mountains from Santa Fé to Salt Lake, are
built on the same general plan, and divided into snug cells and
peep-holes, averaging six by eight feet. Perpendiculars are regarded;
stones dressed to uniform size are laid in mud mortar. A distinguishing
feature is in the round corners, one at least appearing in nearly every
little house. “Most peculiar, however, is the dressing of the walls
of the upper and lower front rooms, both being plastered with a thin
layer of firm adobe cement of about the eighth of an inch in thickness,
and colored a deep maroon red, with a dingy white band eight inches
in breadth running around floor, sides, and ceiling”[13]--ideas of
improvements probably derived from their enlightened conquerors. There
is a story that a hatchet found there would cut cold steel, but I have
not been able to learn its origin or trace it to any reliable authority.
In every room entered was the unfailing mark of the Pueblo--pottery
glazed and streaked, as manufactured by no other tribe of Indians and
invariably reduced to fragments, either through superstition or to
prevent its falling into the hands of the enemy. No entire vase or jar
has appeared among the masses strewed from one end to the other of
their ancient dominion. I have picked up quantities of this pottery
near old towns, where it covers the ground like broken pavement, but
have not seen one piece four inches square.
After their first experiments the Spaniards saw the policy of
conciliating a confederation so numerous and powerful as the Pueblos,
and as early as the time of Philip II. mountains, pastures, and waters
were declared common to both races; ordinances were issued granting
them lands for agriculture, but the title in no instance was of higher
grade than possession. The fee-simple remained in the crown of Spain,
then in the government of Mexico, by virtue of her independence, and
under the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, February 2, 1848, passed to the
United States.
When General Kearney took possession of the country the Pueblos were
among the first to give allegiance to our government, and, as allies,
were invaluable in chasing the barbarous tribes--their old enemies,
whom they tracked with the keen scent and swiftness of blood-hounds.
They now number not less than twenty thousand peaceful, contented
citizens, entitled to confidence and respect, and by decree of the
supreme court (1871) they became legal voters.
Without written language, or so much as the lowest form of
picture-writing, they usually speak a little Spanish, enough for
purposes of trade, and, less stolid and unbending than the nomads,
in manner are extremely gentle and friendly. Their quaint primitive
customs, curious myths, and legends afford rich material for the poet,
and their antiquities open an endless field to the delving archæologist.
Nominally Catholics, they are really only baptized heathen. A race
so rigidly conservative must by very nature be true to the ancient
ceremonials, and their religion is not the least attractive study
offered by this interesting people. Even the dress of the women (oh,
happy women!) has remained unchanged,--the same to-day as described by
Coronado’s secretary in 1541.
There passes my window at this moment a young Indian girl from Tesuque,
a village eight miles north of Santa Fé. Like the beloved one of the
Canticles, she is dark but comely, and without saddle or bridle sits
astride her little _burro_ in cool defiance of city prejudice. Always
gayly dressed, with ready nod and a quick smile, showing the whitest
teeth, we call her Bright Alfarata, in memory of the sweet singer
of the blue Juniata; though the interpreter says her true name is
_Poy-ye_, the Rising Moon. Neither of us understands a word of the
other’s language, so I beckon to her. She springs to the ground with
the supple grace of an antelope, and comes to me, holding out a thin,
slender hand, the tint of Florentine bronze, seats herself on the
window-sill, and in the shade of the _portal_ we converse in what young
lovers are pleased to call eloquent silence. Her donkey will not stray,
but lingers patiently about, like the lamb he resembles in face and
temper, and nibbles the scant grass which fringes the acequia. I think
his mistress must be a lady of high degree, perhaps the _caçique’s_
daughter, she wears such a holiday air, unusual with Indian women, and
is so richly adorned with beads of strung periwinkles. She wears loose
moccasins, “shoes of silence,” which cannot hide the delicate and
shapely outline of her feet, leggins of deer-skin, a skirt reaching
below the knee, and a cotton chemise. Her head has no covering but
glossy jet-black hair, newly washed with _amolé_, banged in front, and
“is tricked off behind the ears in the shape of a wheel which resembles
the handle of a cup”--the distinguishing fashion of maidenhood now
as it was more than three hundred years ago. Tied by a scarlet cord
across her forehead is a pendant of opaline shell, the lining of a
mussel shell, doubtless the very ornament called precious pearl and
opal which dazzled the eyes and stirred the covetous hearts of the
first _conquistadores_. Our Pueblo belle wraps about her drapery such
as Castenada’s maiden never dreamed of,--a flowing mantle which has
followed the march of progress. Thrown across the left shoulder and
drawn under her bare and beautiful right arm is a handsome red blanket,
with the letters U. S. woven in the centre.
One secret cause of the Pueblos’ ready adherence to our government is
their tradition that,
“Far away
In the eternal yesterday.”
Montezuma, the brother and equal of God, built the sacred city Pecos,
marked the lines of its fortifications, and with his own royal hand
kindled the sacred fire in the _estufa_. Close beside it he planted a
tree upside down, with the prophecy that, if his children kept alive
the flame till his tree fell, a pale nation, speaking an unknown
tongue, should come from the pleasant country where the sun rises, and
free them from Spanish rule. He promised the chosen ones that he would
return in fullness of time, and then went to the glorious rest prepared
for him in his tabernacle the sun.
I have seen the remains of that forsaken city, once a mighty fortress,
now desolate with the desolation of Zion. Thorns have come up in her
palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof. It is a
habitation for dragons and a court for owls. The site, admirably chosen
for defense, is on a promontory, somewhat in the shape of a foot, which
gave a broad lookout to the sentry. In the valley below, the waters of
the river Pecos flow softly, and park-like intervals fill the spaces
toward foot-hills which skirt the everlasting mountain walls. The
adobe houses have crumbled to the dust of which they were made, and
heaped among their ruins are large blocks of stone, oblong and square,
weighing a ton or more, and showing signs of being once laid in mortar.
The outline of the immense _estufa_, forty feet in diameter, is plainly
visible, sunken in the earth and paved with stone; but all trace of the
upper story of the council chamber has vanished. On the _mesa_ there is
not a tree, not even the dwarf cedar, which strikes its roots in sand,
and lives almost without water or dew; but, strange to see, across the
centre of the _estufa_ lies the trunk of a large pine, several feet in
circumference--an astonishing growth in that sterile soil. The Indian
resting in its fragrant shade, listening to the never-ceasing west wind
swaying slender leaves that answered to its touch like harp-strings
to the harper’s hand, clothed the stately evergreen with loving
superstition, which hovers round it even in death; for this is the
Montezuma tree, planted when the world was young.
When Pecos was deserted the people went out as Israel from Egypt,
leaving not a hoof behind. They destroyed everything that could be
of service to an enemy, and the ground is yet covered with scraps of
broken pottery marked with their peculiar tracery.
The Oriental Gheber built his temple over deep subterranean fires, and
the steady light shone on after altar and shrine were abandoned and
forgotten; but the fire-worshipers on the stony _mesa_ at Pecos had a
very different work. The only fuel at hand was cedar from the adjacent
hills; and, shut in the dark inclosure, filled with pitchy smoke and
suffocating gas, it is not strange that death sometimes relieved the
watch. When the chiefs, who had seen the kingly friend of the red man,
grew old, and the hour came for their departure to their home in the
sun, they charged the young men to guard the treasure hidden in the
silent chamber. Another generation came and went; prophecy and promise
were handed down from age to age, and the Pueblo sentinel, true to his
unwritten creed, guarded the consecrated place beside the miracle-tree,
daily climbed the lonely watch-tower, looked toward the sun-rising,
and listened for the coming of the beautiful feet of them that on the
mountain-top bring glad tidings. Their days of persecution ended, they
no longer ate their bread with tears, and a century of prosperous
content went by. Then they were shorn of their strength, and their
power was broken by inroads of warring nations. The cunning Navajo
harried their fields and trampled the ripening maize; the thieving and
tameless Comanche carried off their wives, and sold their children into
slavery, and their numbers were so reduced that the warriors were too
feeble to attempt a rescue. Hardly enough survived to minister in the
holy place; hope wavered, and the mighty name of Montezuma was but a
dim, proud memory.
Yet the devoted watchmen dreamed of a day when he should descend with
the sunlight--crowned, plumed, and anointed--to fill the dingy _estufa_
with a glory like that when the Divine Presence shook the mercy-seat
between the cherubim. The eternal fire flickered, smouldered in embers,
but endured through all change and chance, like a potent will; it was
the visible shadow of the Invisible One, whose name it is death to
utter. Sent by his servant and lawgiver, his word was sure; they would
rest on the promise till sun and earth should die.
At last, at last, constant faith and patient vigil had their reward. On
the wings of the wind across the snowy Sierras was heard a sound like
the rushing of many waters--the loud steps of the promised deliverer.
East, toward Santo Domingo, southward from the Rio Grande, there
entered Santa Fé an army of men with faces whiter than the conquered
Mexican. Their strange, harsh language was heard in the streets; a
foreign flag bearing the colors of the morning, white and red, blue
and gold, was unrolled above the crumbling palace of the Pueblos. The
prophecy was fulfilled, and at noon that day the magic tree at Pecos
fell to the ground.
After the American occupation, the remnant of the tribe in Pecos
joined that of Jemez, which speaks the same language. It is said the
_caçique_, or governor, carried with him the Montezuma fire, and in
a new _estufa_, sixty miles from the one hallowed by his gracious
presence, the faithful are awaiting the second advent of the beloved
prophet, priest, and king, who is to come in glory and establish his
throne forever and ever.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The hanging moss. _Tillandsia usneoides._
[2] Made of the fibre of the maguey, or American aloe.
[3] The root of the _Yucca aloifolia_, a spongy, fibrous mass,
containing gelatinous and alkaline matter. It grows in most parts of
New Mexico, where it is called _amolé_, and is used instead of soap for
washing.
[4] This is still a favorite sport among the Pueblos. They sally out
from their villages, mounted on _burros_, to the prairies, where
rabbits are started from their coverts, when the horsemen chase them;
using clubs, which they throw with great precision, like the boomerang
of the savage Australian. In this way they catch a great many. It is
very exciting, and is carried on amid yells and much good-natured
laughter.
[5] In the Navajo country between the San Juan and Colorado Chiquito,
are found quantities of beautiful garnets and a green stone resembling
emerald. It abounds in ruins of pueblos capable of holding many
thousand souls; in all probability the emeralds presented to De Vaca
came from that region.
[6] The name still attaches to a snowy range southwest of Santa Fé.
[7] Rattlesnake.
[8] Turkey.
[9] Indian name for buffalo. New Mexico was known to the early
Spaniards as the Buffalo Province.
[10] Castenada’s Narrative covered 147 MS. pages, written on paper in
characters of the times, and rolled in parchment. It was preserved in
the collection of D’Uguina, Paris, was translated and published in
French by H. T. Campans, in 1838, and now lies before me. It is wholly
free from the vice of the commonplace, being tinged with the warm
glow which precedes the morning light of history. Wild as the Homeric
legends, it serves like them to point the way.
[11] It is the same to-day that it was in 1540,--a place of great
strength; and the _Mesa_ can be ascended only by the artificial road.
The houses on top are of adobes, one and two stories in height. Water
is brought from the valley below by the women in jars of earthenware,
which they balance on their heads with wonderful ease as they ascend
the high steps and ladders. The present population numbers not over
four hundred souls.
[12] Cañon du Chelly, in Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, is a
passage through a mountain range, twenty-five miles in length, from one
hundred to five hundred yards in width, and is perhaps the strongest
natural citadel on the earth. There is but one narrow way by which a
horse can ascend its height, where a squad of soldiers could defy the
cavalry of the world.
[13] Hayden’s Survey, 1874.
CHAPTER III. LAWS AND CUSTOMS.
The number of Pueblo or Town Indians of New Mexico and Arizona has
been variously estimated at from sixteen to twenty-five thousand. The
dumb secrecy of the red race makes it difficult for the census-taker
to reach correct figures among them. They have a suspicion that the
Sagamore with medicine-book, ink and pen has come to question them
with wicked intent; that numbering the people means plotting for
mischief; and they secrete their children and give false figures, so
it is impossible to arrive at an accurate estimate of their numbers.
In the cultured East there is a popular superstition that the noble
aboriginal soul disdains artifice, and is open as sunlight to the
sweet influences of truth and straightforward testimony:--an illusion
rising from the misty enchantments of distance. Come among them,
and you will soon learn to make allowance for every assertion; and
as for vanity and self-love I have never seen any equal that of the
children of nature debased by contact with the white men. They cannot
be instructed, because they know everything, nor surprised, because
their fathers had all wisdom before you were born. Show them the
most curious and beautiful article you possess; they survey it with
stolid composure as an object long familiar. I once saw an officer,
thinking to floor a _Caçique_, unfold the wonders of a telescope to
the untutored mind, and explain how, by bending his beady eyes to a
certain point the child of the sun might see the spots on his father;
when the blanketed philosopher coolly observed that he had often
looked through such machines. We then gave it up. Like the Chinese
they so closely resemble, nothing can be named which they did not have
ages ago; and having so long possessed all knowledge, they steadily
resist your efforts to show them their ignorance. They think themselves
the envy of the civilized world. Among such a people one soon learns
to repress assumption of superiority or effort to impress the calm
listener with your grammatical sentences. The poverty of their language
is indescribable. Where there is no writing, and of course no standard
of comparison, the change in the sound of words goes on rapidly, while
the great principle of utterance or general grammar remains. Mere
change of accent under such circumstances produces a dialect. It is
not easy to catch the lawless Indian tongues; those of the wandering
tribes are peculiarly unmanageable, and it is wise to have a common
meeting-place in the little Spanish which they pick up. They have
no preposition, article, conjunction, or relative pronoun, and to a
great degree lack the mood and tense of the verb. A dual and negative
form runs throughout the languages, and sentences are often composed,
not of the words which the objects mentioned separately mean, but of
words meaning certain things in certain connections. The disheartened
student, groping in the dark for signs and rules, and finding none,
is glad to turn from his bewildering labor to the interpreter who has
learned by ear.
The Pueblos have nineteen different villages in New Mexico, numbering
in all nearly ten thousand souls. The towns are evidently smaller than
they were formerly, as is plainly proved by ruins of houses throughout
their ancient dominion, and old worn foot-paths, abandoned or almost
untrodden, that lead from town to town, beaten by centuries of
wayfaring in some period whereof there is no history.
They are slowly decreasing in numbers, and, says a gentleman resident
among them ten years, “why they should gradually disappear like the
nomadic and warlike tribes, is a question not easily solved except by
the hypothesis that their time has come. Their great failing is lack of
self-assertion. Conquered and brought down from freedom and peace two
centuries ago, to a condition of servitude and an enforced religion,
the power of ‘The Fair God’ has rested heavily on them ever since.”
There are singular characteristics among these Pueblos. Each village
is a separate domain or clan, self-supporting, entirely independent
of the government of the other Pueblos and the great world in the
country across the Sierras where the sun rises. There is no common bond
of union among them, and so little intercourse have they with each
other that their language, everywhere subject to great mutations, is
so altered that they communicate when needful through the Spanish, of
which most Indian men understand enough to make their wishes known.
There are three dialects among the tribes of New Mexico, and three or
four more among those of Arizona. Few Indians understand more than one.
In the seven Moqui villages of Arizona, within a radius of ten miles,
three distinct tongues are spoken. The inhabitants are identical in
blood, manners, laws and mode of life. For centuries they have been
isolated from the rest of the world, and it is almost incomprehensible
to the restless, aggressive, fairer race how these Pueblos refuse any
inter-communication. Tegua and the two adjacent towns are separated
by a few miles from Mooshahneh and another pair. Oraybe is not a
great distance from both. Each mud-walled community-house has so
little interest in the others that there is neither trade nor visiting
between them. One might think the women, at least, would sometimes
pick up their knitting and go out for a little social enjoyment and
the friendly gossip so dear to the feminine heart, or that crafty
hunters, tracking deer and coyote, would follow the abandoned trails
of the forefathers winding among the towns, but they do not; they are
too sluggish and dead, and it is the rarest thing for a man to marry
outside of his own little tribe. I have heard the assertion that so
far from dying out before the march of civilization the increase goes
steadily on--not in all the tribes, but in the aggregate. It is not
true. The prehistoric ruins plainly prove that in long forgotten days
the Pueblos were numerous and powerful; a nation and a company of
nations. The Rio Grande valley was then dotted with clusters of towns,
and Santa Fé was the centre of four confederacies, and among the most
populous of cities. Down the little Rio on both banks are remains
of villages, heaps of crumbling adobes, and the unfailing sign of
fleeing tribes, scraps of broken pottery, glazed and painted with their
peculiar markings. Thinking of the bold theories about population, one
naturally asks, Who took the census when De Soto went wandering up and
down the everglades of Florida seeking the alluring, ever vanishing
Fountain of Youth.
Every Pueblo, or village, has its own officers and government
independent of all the others, and exactly the same and according to
the ancient customs. First there is the _Caçique_, chief officer of
church and state, priest of Montezuma, and director of all temporal
affairs of the pueblo. It is not known how the _Caçique_ was originally
installed in his office, he alone having power to appoint his
successor--which duty is among the first he performs after succeeding
to his office; nor can the most inquiring mind of the most energetic
newspaper correspondent discover the origin of their judicial system.
The _Caçique_, aided by three _Principales_, selected by himself,
appoints the Governor “and all the officers.” The appointments are
communicated to the council of _Principales_, and then proclaimed to
the people. No matter how weak and shrunken in numbers the tribe, it
still has its full corps of officers, all sons of Montezuma, though
evidently many generations removed from the conquering chiefs who
reveled in the jeweled halls of their illustrious ancestor.
The Governor is appointed by the _Caçique_ for one year, and is the
executive officer of the town. He is chief in power and nothing can
be done without the order of the Governor, especially in those things
relating to the political government. The position is purely honorary
as regards salary, and the honors do not cease with the office, for
the dignified place of _Principal_ is awaiting him at the close of his
term, and there is no anti-third term rule to prohibit his holding the
place many times during his life.
Immediately after the Governor succeeds to his office he repairs
to Santa Fé and seeks the agent for the Pueblo Indians to receive
confirmation. This is an empty ceremony, the agent being without the
authority to object or remove, but it is followed in obedience to
precedent and custom, and there is no harm in humoring the ambition of
the gentle wards of the government. On such days of lofty state the
happy fellow, in paint and solemn dignity, brings a silver-headed cane,
and hands it to the agent, who returns it to the Governor, and the
august inaugural ceremony is ended. Under the Mexican rule, it is said,
the new incumbent knelt before the Governor of the Territory, and was
confirmed by a process of laying on of hands, and some simple formula
of Spanish sentences.
The _Principales_, or ex-Governors, compose a council of wise men, and
are the constitutional advisers of the Governor, deciding important
questions by their vote.
The _Alguacil_, or Sheriff, carries out the orders of the Governor, and
is overseer and director of the public works.
The _Fiscal Mayor_ attends to the ordinary religious ceremonies.
The _Capitan de la Guerre_, captain of war, with his under-captains and
lieutenants, has very light duty to perform in these piping times of
peace. He is head of the ancient customs, dances, and whatever pertains
to the moral life of the people. The several priests acting under him
order the dances, and enforce special obedience of those dedicated to
any particular god or ancient order. Each of the officers has a number
of lieutenants under him.
This is a gallant array of officials for such a tribe as Tesuque,
numbering less than a hundred, or Pojouque, in all twenty-six, or Zia
fifty-eight haughty aborigines. I have not been able to find if they
have badges and insignia of office, but I do know they strut along the
streets of Santa Fé as though they were at the head of tribes like
the sands of the sea-shore, like the leaves of the forest, the stars
of heaven, according to the swelling sentences of the proud speeches
which our early friend J. F. Cooper gave his heroes. The uniform worn
is usually buckskin pants, fringed leggins, moccasins, and, in lordly
defiance of the prejudices of civilization, with untaught grace the
_Caçique_ wears his pink calico shirt outside his pantaloons. It
breezily flutters in the eternal west wind, but the sun is his father,
the earth is his mother; he heeds not that cold breath though it blow
from heights of perpetual snow. The tenderness of romance invests the
degraded descendant of the noble Aztecan, and wherever he turns, the
shades of Cooper and Prescott attend him.
As a class the Pueblos are the most industrious, useful, and orderly
people on the frontier; at peace with each other and the surrounding
Mexicans. They raise large crops of grain, ploughing with a crooked
stick, the oriental implement in the days of Moses, and frequently
stirring the soil with a rude hoe, for where irrigation is necessary
constant work is required. Threshing is done by herds of goats or
flocks of sheep, the floor being a plastered mud ring enclosed in
upright poles. The wheat is piled up in the centre, the animals are
turned into the pen, and driven round and round until the grain is all
trampled out. Then the mass is thrown into the air; the wind carries
away the broken straw, leaving the grain mixed with quantities of
gravel, sand, etc. It is washed before being ground, but the flour is
always more or less gritty. They raise corn, beans, vegetables, and
grapes, the latter rich and sweet, and own large herds of cattle and
sheep. They possess in common much of the best land of the Territory
which, for cultivation, is parceled out to the various families who
raise their own crops and take their produce to market.
Paupers and drones are unknown among them, because all are obliged to
work and make contribution to the possessions of the community to which
they belong.
At Taos nearly four hundred persons live in two buildings over three
hundred feet in length, and about a hundred and fifty feet wide at the
base. They are on opposite sides of a little creek, said to have been
connected in ancient times by a bridge, a grim and threatening fortress
of savage strength, many times attacked by the Spaniards but never
captured. If there are family feuds and quarrels, the outside world has
no knowledge of them; men, women, and children, mothers-in-law and all,
live together in absolute harmony. On the highest story a sentinel is
posted. One might think this ancient custom could be dispensed with in
the generation of peace since the American occupation, but they hold
the wise Napoleonic idea, if you would have peace be always ready for
war.
[Illustration: LIVING PUEBLO. (NEW MEXICO).]
Each Pueblo contains from one to seven _estufas_, used as a
council-house and a place of worship, where they carry on their
heathen rites and ceremonies, and deliberate on the public weal; a
consecrated spot to which women are not admitted; a senate-chamber
where long debates on public affairs are maintained, and the business
of the tribe transacted by the council of wise men, cunning prophets,
and able warriors, whose duty it is to manage the internal affairs
of the town. The Governor assembles his constitutional advisers in
the lodge, where matters are discussed and decided by the majority.
One of their wise regulations is a secret police whose duty is to
prevent vice and disorder, and report in the under-ground _estufa_ the
conduct of suspected persons. The dingy little “temples of sin,” as the
old Catholics call them, are hung round with dim and fading legends
and shadowy superstitions. Their worshipers have not the slightest
approach to music in the horrible noises they make there--a kind of
sledge-hammer beating on rude drums and blowing of ear-splitting
whistles--nor have they any idea of rhythm or poetry. No correct
tradition is kept without one of these arts, and in the absence of
all recorded law a perfect devotion to custom carries their poor
civilization forward as it was in the beginning. It keeps the Pueblos
a separate and distinct people, bounded by a dead wall of conservatism
to this day. Says the Rev. Dr. Menaul of the Laguna mission, “Religion
enters into everything they do, _i. e._ everything is done according to
ancient custom. The new-born babe comes upon the stage of life under
its auspices, is fed and clothed, or not clothed, according to custom.
It is hushed to sleep with a custom-song, gets custom-medicine, and
grows up in the very bosom of religious custom. The father plants and
reaps his fields, makes his moccasins, knits his stockings, carries the
baby on his back, in fact does all that he does in strict conformity
to custom. The mother grinds the meal, makes the bread, wears her
clothing, and keeps her house, makes her water-pots, and paints them
with religious symbols, according to custom. The whole inner and outer
life of the Indian is one of perfect devotion to religious custom, or
obedience to his faith.” And this adoration of the past makes them the
most difficult of all people to be reached by outside influence, a
rigid unbending adherence to old time observances sets their faces as
a flint against everything new and foreign, and our mission-work seems
dashing against a dead wall. Nothing is subject to change among them
except language; they have the most shifting forms of human speech, so
the students tell us, and desiring no improvement or alteration, how
can we influence them by religious teaching? How plant new ideas where
there is no room to receive them?
Of all the millions of native Americans who have perished under the
withering influence of European civilization, there is not a single
instance on record of a tribe or nation having been reclaimed,
ecclesiastically or otherwise, by artifice and argument. Individual
savages have been educated with a fair degree of success, but there is
no tribe that is not savage. The Koran says, “Every child is born into
the religion of nature; its parents make it a Jew, a Christian, or a
Magian.” These North American Indians are more alike than the children
of Japhet. Our culture is a failure offered to them, unless one can be
detached from his tribe; return him to his people, and he goes back
to the dances and incantations, the mystic lodges and time-hallowed
ceremonials of the fathers. It seems as difficult to train him as to
teach the birds of the air a new note, or the beaver another mode of
making his dam; we cannot re-create the head or the heart of the red
man. He wants his freedom, his tribe, his ancient customs; he desires
no change, and his sense of spiritual things is instinctive like a
child’s.
This rigidity of organism makes sad waste of religious teaching.
Catholic and Protestant have been alike unsuccessful. Jonathan Edwards
failed as signally as the missionaries of the Territories who have
lived among them for generations. There is a scarce perceptible
progress. The young men have no wish to be better or different from
their fathers, and they are slightly changed (can we say for the
better?) since Columbus gave to Spain the gift of the New World.
Hardest of all is it to teach the Indian how divine a woman may
be made, and it is argued that women are best fitted to reach the
burden-bearing sisters of the red race. The Quakers succeeded no
better than the Puritans, and St. Mary of the Conception was not more
discouraged than the self-sacrificing bride from New England, who comes
to the land of sand and thorn to teach the dusky mothers how to sing
and sew, and broken in health and spirit, returns to her native hills
again.
[Illustration: Zuñi War Club, Dance Ornaments, etc.]
In winter the main industry of the Pueblos is practicing for the
public dances, a training pursued with anxious care by the priesthood
dedicated to the duty, as by the ambitious danseuse who fain would copy
the famous winged sylphide leap attained by the lithe limbs and flying
feet of Taglioni.
Their Te Deum after victories, and most sacred and beloved rite, is the
_cachina_ dance, which they celebrate at certain seasons of the year
with great rejoicings. I have never seen it but am told it is full of
contortions and fantastic leaps, ending in a jerky trot, unlike polka
or mazurka, and still less resembling the gliding, sinuous action of
the world-old Teutonic waltz, most delicate modulation of graceful
movement vouchsafed the children of men.
When the Spaniards first conquered this country and imposed their
religion on the natives, the idolatrous _cachina_ was prohibited
on pain of death. History records the natives held it so cruel a
deprivation, that the interdict was one of the main causes of the
great rebellion of 1680, when Don Antonio de Oterim was Governor and
Captain General of Nueva Espagna. Many of the night dances are held
in the deepest secrecy; of these the uninitiated may not speak; but
other holy days commemorative of abundant harvests are high festivals
to which citizens of Santa Fé are cordially invited. You-pel-lay, or
the green corn dance, is a national thanksgiving involving the deepest
interest and mighty preparation, besides fasting and _purification_.
Some weeks before the carnival we accepted an invitation from the
_Caçique_ of Santo Domingo, where unusual pomp and circumstance attend
the celebration of this harvest home.
It was in the mild September. Our ambulance was roomy and comfortable,
the mules were fresh, the party just such as the dear reader loves,
the breeze sweet as the unbreathed air of Eden. I will not tire your
patience with raptures about Rocky Mountain sunlight and scenery; the
glorious peaks are always in sight, the aerial tints from the hand
of the great Master are shifting and changeable as eastern skies at
sunset--floating veils of exquisite hue hinting of a viewless glory
beyond. The wagon road is always good, and with song and story we
beguiled the way and listened with eager interest to a delightful
legend, prettily told by a reporter from St. Louis, which he said he
had from one of the medicine men of the Pueblos. All about “a spirit
yet a woman, too,” who with bright green garments and silky yellow
tresses flits above the maize fields, and in the night, robed with
darkness as a garment, draws a magic circle round them to keep off
blight and vermin.
It had rather a familiar air and flavor, and when the story was ended,
one of the audience dryly inquired if the narrator had ever heard of
Longfellow. St. Louis then came down reluctantly and confessed to
having stolen the tradition from _Hiawatha_.
We missed our way, and in consequence had to jolt over one bad hill,
so steep and cut with steps it reminded me of the gigantic precipitous
stairs in the flight of Israel Putnam, a blood-curdling picture of
affrighted rider and steed, the delight and terror of my childhood.
But this was a mighty hill of adamant, on which the flood, earthquakes
and the centuries counted only in heaven have beaten and spent their
strength in vain. We did not care for delays. Time is no object on the
frontier. We lag along with exasperating slowness if you want to get
through; are not expected at any place, sleep where the night overtakes
us, and loiter at will in no fear of being behind time or caught in
a shower, a hap-hazard, good-for-nothing way of travel which gives a
mild, game flavor to the journey. If you have a drop of gypsy blood in
you it will come to the surface, strawberry-mark and all, in New Mexico.
As we neared the village we passed pilgrims going up to the jubilee:
men, women, children in holiday attire, for once moved out of their
stony rigidity of face and mien, smiling back to their last white
molars in answer to the courteous salutations exchanged by wayfarers
everywhere in that Territory. The natives step with an easy swinging
gait, apparently untired at the end of a day’s march as in the first
hours of the morning. Their figures in motion are not without artistic
grace, expressing strength and fleetness; and when interested an alert
intelligence lights the face, but ordinarily the cold, stony apathy of
the race is its ruling characteristic. One Pueblo marching beside us
that day I shall never forget. He was a very model of sinewy strength,
a perfect mountain prince, erect and stately in his crown of green
leaves, and striped Navajo blanket draping his shoulders, held in place
by one symmetric hand. The noblest Roman wore his imperial mantle
with no better grace. The attrition of civilization fails to make our
aborigines at all like “the white brother.” These peace-loving Pueblos,
a pastoral people pursuing their simple industries and trudging to
market with their poor products, are as thoroughly Indian as the
wildest Apache, with brandished knife and dripping scalp in hand,
dancing on the battle field and whooping in triumph over the banquet of
blood.
After leaving the Israel Putnam hill we crossed a _mesa_ or table-land,
and, descending into the valley of the Del Norte descried the village
of the Santo Domingo, a tribe which numbers in all 1,129 souls.
A little way off the main road, on the bank of the river, are the
adobe houses, two stories high with the usual terraces. The roofs are
supported by pine logs, are nearly flat and covered with bark and
earth. A few miles away are the ruins of ancient Pueblos, crumbling
walls whose thickness attests their age. Like all the prehistoric
buildings, they are on a high bluff two hundred feet above the
water. All ruins have a certain pathetic interest, but we did not
turn aside to visit these, knowing it would be only a repetition of
arrowheads, stone hatchets and the tiresome pottery fragments. The old
arrowheads are mainly obsidian (_iztli_), usually black, sometimes
a smoky or brown tint. They are strewed through the earth wherever
graves of men have been found. To borrow the forcible sentence of
Holmes, “Whether the arrowheads are a hundred or a thousand years old
who knows, who cares? There is no history to the red race, there is
scarcely an individual in it. A few instincts on legs and holding a
tomahawk;--there is the Indian of all time.”
We saw a party that day hunting rabbits with clubs which they throw,
making a whirring sound like the boomerang of eastern savages. It is
the one sport in which women are allowed to take part. If in whirling
his missile a warrior misses a rabbit, which is finally killed by a
squaw, he is obliged by law or custom, which is equally strong, to
change clothes with her, and they return to the pueblo, or village,
in that guise; Hercules and Omphale. He must also keep her in fresh
meat during the next winter, serving out his term of degradation in
feminine belongings, a target for aboriginal wit, and, for the season,
the village fool. Under such humiliating penalty for failure, we may
imagine the experts throw the club with wondrous care and skill when
women join in the chase.
This joke is immemorially old, handed down from the ancients or
fathers, and is immortally fresh and delightful, tickling the fancy of
the red man.
On both sides of the river run chains of hills, those on the west side
extending inland in extensive _mesas_; and not very far away to the
southeast we trace, in aerial tints of supreme beauty, the serrated
ridges of the Sandia mountains.
Properly speaking there are but two valleys in New Mexico; the Rio
Grande and the Pecos. Should either stream go dry, starvation and
famine would follow. They flow nearly parallel, from north to south,
fifty and sixty miles apart, till they reach Texas. Skirting their
banks are the cultivated fields, making a garden beauty with their
tender verdure in contrast with the dull green of dry plains.
By the city of the saint sat a feminine mummy selling grapes. Her head
was dressed by the hands of time and nature after the style of Elisha,
which so diverted the bad boys of Bethel, and she looked immovable as
the dead.
She and her store of fruitage, were sheltered from the sun blaze in
a booth of pine boughs; a little green bower called by the orientals
_succôth_, a refreshment to the eyes in the shadeless stretch of the
parched valleys. The wattle of twigs and leaves is such as Israel
made for himself in Canaan, and men of Galilee wove together of
thick foliage on the pleasant skirts of Olivet, when they came up to
Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover; such as the Sharon peasant
yet builds for his family at the Jerusalem gate of Jaffa. There was
much beside this shady spot to remind us of Bible pictures; the low
adobe houses, the flocks with the herdsman coming to drink at the
shallow stream, the clambering goats in scanty pastures high up
the rocks, shaking their beards at the passing strangers, the kids
bleating by their mothers, the Mexican women, straight as a rule,
carrying water-jars on head or shoulder, like maidens of Palestine.
Now and then an old black shawl, melancholy remnant of the gay rebosa,
shrouding an olive forehead, suggested the veiled face of the gentle
Rebecca. The lofty presence, the high eagle features of the Jewish
race, the lustrous eyes of the Orient are not here, nor is the barren
magnificence of New Mexico more than a suggestion of the land once the
glory of all lands, with its verdure of plumy palms, beauty of olive
orchards, the dark foliage of cypress trees, and white and scarlet
blooms of orange and pomegranate.
These thoughts pass through our mind as we wait in the wagon while the
driver, a Mexican boy, bargains with Pharoah’s daughter for the day’s
supply of grapes. We get three fine bunches for five cents, rich and
nourishing, grown in sandy river bottoms irrigated with alkali water.
They are sweet as the ripest Italian vintage in terraced vineyards,
warmed by the volcanic heat throbbing in the fiery heart of Vesuvius.
For market, the purple clusters are laid lightly in crates made of
pine branches thick as your thumb, bound together by green withes of
bark, lined with fresh leaves and packed on the backs of _burros_, the
scriptural ass. The vine is not allowed to run, but is kept trimmed
close to the ground. Every year the branches are cut near to the parent
stock, which is rarely more than four feet high.
The forlorn little town, built round a central plaza, was swept and
garnished ready for the holiday, and having shaken off its usual
drowse appeared quite lively. We were escorted with much dignity to
an honored seat on one of the flat roofs reached by a rickety ladder.
There the ancient patriarchs of the tribe, too old to take the field,
were gathered, and with them old witches without witching ways,
wrinkled, withered, graceless, seated in the favorite aboriginal pose
on their heels. The preliminary ceremony was held a few days before,
when the first ears of corn began to ripen. They were gathered by the
women, and, like the Jewish first fruits, the wave-offering in the
temple, were brought with solemn reverence to the high priest, who
alone has the right to husk them for ascertaining if the promise of a
fair harvest is assured. This done, criers were sent through the town
announcing to the people that, from his bright sun-house the god of the
Pueblos had smiled upon his children in bountiful crops, and they must
meet at high noon on a certain day and render unto him thanksgiving and
praise.
The burning sky of noon, where no cloud flings a cooling shadow,
scorches the valley with tropic fervor, but these children of the
wilderness love its parching heat and open the solemnities when the
flooding light is at meridian.
In the centre of the open plaza four large camp-kettles of boiling corn
were swung gypsy fashion over separate fires. The tops of the poles
were adorned with twelve ears of corn representing the twelve months
of the year. Each one was watched by four men, naked to the waist,
with bodies painted white, red, green, and blue. They are the four
seasons, and are elected for their skill in singing and great powers
of endurance. Their duty was to dance round the kettles, keep up the
fires, and sing songs to Montezuma and the unnamed god, keeping time
with a cornstalk on the edge of the kettle. Did my reader ever hear
Indian singing? He need never want to. It is a long-continued strain
of unearthly howls and yells of the sort to drive one crazy, to make
your flesh, aye, the very marrow of your bones creep.
At exactly noon the grand procession moved, led by three Sagamores,
holy heralds marching ahead, solemn and still as sphinxes. Then came
thirty-five men, the dancers proper, naked except a small embroidered
blanket, but appearing clad by reason of a coating of white paint
barred with blue. Their legs and arms were striped with red, white, and
blue; green hemlock wreaths mixed with red berries of the mistletoe
circled their arms above the elbow.
The same ornamentation served as bracelets, anklets and necklaces, and
resting on the thick black locks, newly washed with amolé and glossy
as a blackbird’s throat, were crowns of gray eagle plumes. The effect
of this adorning was that of a festal robe, unique and strikingly
picturesque. Around the knees of the main actors were bands of red
cloth to which hung small shells of the ground-turtle, eagle claws,
and antelope hoofs; and dangling from the back at the waist was a fox
tail or a fur robe, the skin of such wild animals as were killed by the
wearer during the year. They walked in Indian file, each appearing to
tread in the same track, bending forward as if weighted down with corn,
which fiction is part of the play.
The musicians were placed in a conspicuous part of the plaza in the
chief seats of the synagogue such artists love. One had a drum,
(_tombe_) which he beat unmercifully, another clashed clanging, banging
things like cymbals, and a castinet player dextrously rattled deer
hoofs after the manner of the jolly end man, our friend and brudder
Bones. One ambitious artist performed on an ornamented whistle made
from the bone of a wild turkey’s wing, blowing shrilly with unlimited
breath, as St. Louis observed, _sotto voce_, loud enough to split the
ears of corn. There was, besides, a heathenish instrument of torture,
whose name I failed to obtain, consisting of half a gourd with the
convex side up; on this was placed with the left hand a smooth stick
and across it the right hand drew backward and forward a notched stick
in a sawing manner, making a sound like the grinding of corn in the
_metate_. Luckily this machine does not make much racket, but what
there is, is of the quality calculated to turn one goose-flesh. The
sound of filing saws is rich melody in comparison.
The three sphinxes, members of the council who headed the procession,
made a short speech before each house, the occupants being outside
and waiting. At special places they joined the choral howling of the
trains, which proceeded with the dire monotony of everything Indian.
Thus they went from house to house till every one was serenaded, and
from each roof corn was handed and added to the common stock. My
knowledge of San Domingan being rather limited, I am unable to furnish
a correct report of the brief speeches. Doubtless they were like white
men’s public occasions; carefully prepared impromptu. These ended, they
sung and danced to the plaza, circling round the boiling kettles, in
one hand rattling a sacred gourd containing grains of corn, and covered
with tribal symbols and ancestral totems marked in red paint; in the
other swinging a quantity of _tortillas_ (rolls of corn bread) tied
together with thread, like a bunch of cigars.
The corn is a species of the very hard flint. The grains yellow or
bluish black and red, sometimes all three on one cob. The stalk is
perhaps four feet high, the ears growing near the ground. Thin corn
cakes, _tortillas_, are the principal food of Mexican and Indian, and
the women pride themselves on the skill and speed with which they
make them. The shelled grains are boiled in water with a little lime
to soften the skin so that it can be pulled off, then it is ground
into meal by mashing with a long round stone, like our rolling-pin,
against an oblong, slightly hollowed stone called a _metate_. A little
water is added, making it the consistence of gruel, and it is baked in
thin cakes on hot stones or griddles of tin or copper. When done they
are the color of a hornet’s nest and tasteless as white paper. Once
accustomed to them strangers become very fond of _tortillas_.
At an appointed signal the corn was taken from the kettle, burnt in the
consecrated fire, and the ashes sprinkled over the fields to insure
a good crop next year; then another fire was kindled, and kettles
re-filled with corn, and when boiled freely distributed to all the
people, who heartily enjoyed the banquet.
Such is the green corn dance; a yearly delight celebrated in the
changeless fashion set before these people in the primeval years. New
and startling figures are not in the program. Their ambition is to do
all according to the traditions of the elders. As the day advanced the
ecstacy increased, the dancers shuffled and hopped as if they would
shuffle off this mortal coil. Convulsive stamping and leaping made
with frantic gestures; the din of savage minstrelsy; the guttural,
unrhythmed voices and the hideous “_tombe_,” a hollow log covered at
the ends with dried hide, made a barbaric uproar that lingers long on
senses attuned to harmony.
I must not close without mention of the dogs of You-pel-lay. Admitted
to that equal sky, they were given the right to a voice in the matter
and toward evening they embarked in a tumultuous, unearthly fantasia.
As we scaled the Israel Putnam hill the soft night wind fell on our
hot, tired faces like the cool touch of holy water, and floated after
us the farewell symphonies of the revelry. And they were all pow-wow
and bow-wow.
Perhaps the classic reader, if I am so fortunate as to have one, may
be reminded in this festival of the haunted vale of Enna and its
lovely fables; mythic stories filled with hidden meaning veiled by the
splendors of the Eleusinian mysteries. It is the instinctive spirit
of gratitude to the Lord of the harvest, the keeper of the destinies;
and the poverty of this race and their rude rites are to the genius
and varied wealth of ancient Greece only the difference of blood and
civilization everywhere between the Old World and the New.
The squaws wear no wreaths and have no share in these ceremonials, but
adoring women are the same the world over, and out of their own hearts
create the glory and beauty of the shrines where they burn precious
incense and kneel for worship. They looked on in secret rapture with
love-light in their eyes, an expression I have seen in the face of a
listening wife in the senate gallery, when the man foremost of all
the world to her speaks the words which thrill the crowd to silence.
In Santo Domingo there is no noiseless telegraphy of swimming eye or
waving hand. Little does the sullen red sachem care for the subtle
flattery of loving admiration.
CHAPTER IV. THE CITY OF THE PUEBLOS.
Ten generations of men have come and gone since Don Antonio de Espego
distilled a subtle Spanish essence in _El Palacio_; and you may break,
you may shatter those walls, if you will, but the scent of Espagna will
hang round it still. Under the witchery of that fast-fading charm, a
troop of attendant graces hover about its _portal_. They bear musical
names of sweet meaning, as the discreet damsels who welcomed pilgrims
to the blessed rooms in the House Beautiful. Perfectio (perfection),
a worthless peon, in Navaho blanket, sweeps the sidewalk; Benito (the
good), a shambling Mexican boy, watching his chance for a spring at
the spoons, brings the daily mail; Mariposa (butterfly), the silliest
of Slowboys, pushes the baby-wagon; while Angellus, an angel whose
form has lost its original brightness, lazily watches her. Three old
witches, whom we familiarly call the Macbeths, were baptized some
centuries ago Feliciana, the Happy; Rosita, little Rose; Hermosa, the
Beautiful.
It is the month of July, and the cotton-wood trees of the Plaza are
a mass of tender leafage in restless flutter, giving color and cool
sound, most grateful in a land where sterility is the rule, fertility
the rare and marked exception. The _acequias_ are open, and they
moisten earth and air in the square of _alfalfa_, or Spanish clover,
knee-deep.
Quite out of reach of the shady trees, in the fiercest blaze of the
sun, sitting on a fragment of the Rocky Mountains, is a statuesque
figure, which might represent the oldest of the Fates, the most
furious of the Furies. It is Blandina, the fair one, the soft one,
of Santa Fé. Her face, like one of her own foot-hills, is worn into
gutters and seams. Not like them so moulded by the action of water,
but by exposure to sharp sunlight and withering wind, destructive
to beauty, which make even young persons appear old. Her skin is a
parchment, which looks as though it might date back to--I was about to
say the Flood; but that would imply that at some prehistoric era she
had felt the sanitary influence of a shower-bath, and I would not harm
an innocent fellow-creature by such an unjust suspicion. Her draperies
are a mere dissolving view. There sits the Mexican woman, day after
day, not begging, nor even reaching out her hand, but following the
passer-by with beseeching eyes, haunting as the eyes of the dead. Like
all the very poor, she keeps a dog and smokes incessantly.
The great mass of population here is very swarthy, and there are but
few who have no Indian blood in their veins. The traveller in New
Mexico may breakfast in a ranche where the occupants have the clear
cinnamon hue; dine at another where the faces are ashen, like the
Malay’s; and pass the night at a third where the courteous host will
show the deep Vandyke brown of the Negro. The explanation is easy. The
different inhabitants of the several places are sprung from various
tribes. The Ute has a dingy, tallow complexion, the Apache is a dirty
ashen gray, while the Mohave girls have cheeks of almost Spanish
transparency.
Besides the luxuries and refinements of the furthest East, the Moors
left behind them in Spain many descendants, the children of Spanish
marriages. Some of these were among the dauntless adventurers who
came to _Nueva Mejico_ in the XVIth century. They intermarried with
the Indians, mingling three strains of blood, which mixture is called
Mexican. The conquering foreigners were not all olive-skinned. Some
of the first who sailed the sea boasted, and evidently were, of the
_sangre azul_, brought into Spain by the wild Goths. The lover of
Prescott will remember his description of the watchful gray eyes of
Cortez, and the clear blue eyes of Alvarado, whose yellow locks, fair
forehead, and beard yellow as gold, gave him a peculiar expression
of sunniness, from which the Aztecs called him _Tonitiah_--“Child of
the Sun.” Scattered at long distances through New Mexico are a few
_ricos_, of almost Saxon fairness, remote descendants of the people
who brought the exquisite architecture of Asia to perfect flower in
the shades of the Alhambra--departing traces of the northern tribes to
which southern Europe owes some of its best elements of strength. Their
blue eyes, glancing from under the slouched _sombrero_, and sunburnt
hair, stringing down the _serape_, affect one strangely. It is like
finding Albinos among the Zuñi and Moqui Indians, and involuntarily
we ask: “What manner of men are these?” Tawny color is seen in every
grade of society and some of the highest citizens are plainly of Indian
extraction. The restless energy of the Spaniard, the quick perception
of the Moor, even the cunning of the roving Apache, appear to be lost
in the sluggish current which lazily beats in the pulses of the modern
Mexican.
Among the common people is one distinguishing trait, the utter lack of
beauty. I have frequented every day crowds, and haunted churches, where
they are to be seen at their best, and have found not one attractive
face. Nowhere on earth comes age so fast or in such repulsive shape.
A lovely baby changes to the plain young girl, somewhat comely, at
fifteen. At twenty-five not a vestige of freshness remains; not a line
to remind one of beauty vanished forever. And oh! the hideous hags
squatted against the walls! There is no speculation in those eyes,
fixed as the eternal gaze of the Sphinx. They look old as that grim
female, and I would as soon think stone lips could part into a company
smile, displaying false teeth, as that these could break into laughter
or song. I wonder what they are thinking about, if they think at all,
or if an earthquake would make them jump. Assuredly, they are the most
opaque of terrestrial bodies, and, under the old black shawl, they sit
immovable, as though all the forces of the universe (rarely heard from
in Santa Fé) could not start them from their secure poise.
Dr. Holmes says “the finest human fruit, and especially the finest
women, we get in New England are raised under glass. _Protection_ is
what the transplanted Aryan requires in this New England climate.” I
fancy “protection” is what the women need in the “excessive,” the
territorial climate analogous to that of Central Asia. On this bleak,
elevated plateau, where the dryness is so intense that meat is cured
without smoke or salt, the juices of the human body evaporate, leaving
early wrinkles. I have seen men in high health return from a month of
camping among the Rocky Mountains with crow’s feet wofully deepened and
the appearance of having “aged” in a very short time.
Perhaps dirt and low diet have helped to finish the completed ugliness
of the Santa Fé witches; but we know extremes of every sort waste
nervous force, and hasten the steps of the common enemy, who sharpens
his scythe for the faces of women, and shakes the sand in the glass
when he measures their years.
Moisture, when it does come, is not the gentle rain from Heaven,
swelling bud and flower, as well as human hearts, to thankfulness.
There is no dew; nor is there showering mist, like that which went
up from the earth and watered the garden eastward in Eden. We have,
instead, high wind-storms, rain streaming in torrents, preceded by an
atmosphere where men and animals are acting lightning-rods for electric
currents; keen, close lightning and the “_live_ thunder” of which Byron
sung. Suddenly the mighty music stops. The sun flashes out in unveiled
splendor, flooding the world with blinding light, and we are tempted
to tread a sun-dance in worship of the glittering God of the Pueblos,
who inhabits eternity, lord of Heaven and earth, son of the morning and
father of all the days.
CHAPTER V. MEXICAN COTTAGES.
Across the way are a dozen Mexicans, wrapped in greasy old blankets,
sitting like four-and-twenty blackbirds all in a row. I know their
faces, and have not missed one in a month. They live in condition
of body and mind hard for an American to realize. A kind of present
existence, without loving reference to the past; a passive waiting for
the future, without an inquiry or a wish, a fear or a hope. Small,
lank, dark-brown fellows; eight with high cheek-bones and thick
lips, betraying Indian blood; hair long, straight, black; eyes dark,
suspicious, wavering; habitually silent; when speaking, with gloomy
indifference, in a voice sad as memory. Elsewhere they would go as
tramps; but tramping is a grand fatigue. They prefer to sit round,
instead.
It is said this is the bearing of every conquered race; but such is
the average Mexican wherever he is found. About the hill of royal
Chapultepec, at the base of the pyramid of Cholula--last vestige of
Aztecan grandeur--he basks in the sun with the chameleons and lizards,
docile in temper, patient under abuse, idle as the wind that lifts his
long, black locks. Think you such men care for advantages, natural or
political--They know the joy of a splendid destiny fulfilled or the
anguish of such a destiny lost? They come of brave blood--Spaniard,
Moor, Indian--and how well they fight for their own, the United States,
France, and Austria may testify; but to us never did life appear so
empty, aimless, and joyless as the life of these sitters in the sun.
The puzzling question of to-day is: How do they keep soul and body
together? Let us find one in his home, if the dingy den he inhabits may
be called by that dear name. Leaving the Plaza, where vagrants most do
congregate, we pass the cottages of “the military” (on whose heads be
the blessing of those who entertain strangers), cross a sandy _arroya_,
through which in the rainy season a mountain torrent sweeps roaring.
Westward the straggling suburb stretches toward the foothills, and,
stumbling along a stony path, we suddenly come up against a wall. It
is about six feet high, made of mud mixed with ashes, coal, cow-horns,
hoofs, mule-bones, barrel-hoops, the wheels of a baby-wagon, cans,
broken bottles, boots, curry-combs, every refuse substance that may
swell the mass in a treeless region. The top of the wall bristles with
scraps of tin, which make it hard to climb. I doubt if Romeo would try
it, even to seize the white wonder of Juliet’s hand. The gate is made
of upright posts of dwarf cedar, thick as a man’s wrist, bound together
by rawhide strings, and groans and creaks in a dismal note as we push
it on wooden hinges. Not a trace of iron is to be seen.
This formidable outwork encloses three puppies, of the breed called
cast-iron, which look like magnified rats and act wonderfully like
cats. The proprietor of the estate and his spouse, in the doorway, sit
in the artistic pose called squat, at leisure profound, if not elegant.
He is evidently made of the same clay as his wretched mud shanty; might
have sprouted up from the ground or dropped down from the eaves.
As we enter, they rise in unembarrassed politeness. He removes his
slouch of a hat with decorous gravity, and the wife entreats us to
enter, saying, with the air of a princess in exile, we do her great
honor. The Spanish flavor is strong here, which may be the reason she
wears dragging bright calicoes all the year, and sits in the door even
when the snow falls. Her raven black hair and large, full eyes hint of
by-gone beauty; but it is by-gone. Premature wrinkles are worn deep by
the shriveling wind, her skin is swart and sunburnt, and the roses in
her cheek are only ashes of roses.
“Would she give us a drink of water?”
“With much pleasure, _Señora_.”
She diffuses an air of elegance over her pink calico toilet by throwing
a dreary old black shawl round her head; and, scorning to lift her
voluminous train (twelve yards for a dollar), hastens to the nearest
_acequia_, or irrigating ditch, fills a mug of Indian pottery, and
offers it with sweetness and grace. No new country exuberance about
her, nor revelling imagination, like Dick Swiveller’s; but a power of
enchantment and a lofty self-poise which no surprise can startle or
disturb. It is found alike in splendor or in squalor, the “grand air”
of Old Spain, descended to all who have a dash of her blood.
My hostess regrets the water is not wine, and so catching is the fine
charm that, ensnared and deluded, I am hardly sure it is not wine,
and drink their health in the miserable ditch-water and am cheered
by responsive _gracias_. I try to explain that I am under silken
bonds--ribbons red, blue, white--not to look upon wine when it is
red; but it is their first hearing of temperance, and they do not
understand. She invites me to a seat on the _colchon_--a wool mattress
folded against the wall and covered with a blanket, which serves the
double purpose of bed by night and sofa by day, an Oriental custom,
come down to them from the Moors. I excuse myself, being in mortal fear
of old settlers in the mattress. There a lovely baby, with no dress to
speak of, is tossing up its heels. I ask some questions, thinking of
bright eyes far away; and she prettily says baby has no year yet, and
her name is Lola Juanita Eloisa.
The earthen floor is swept with a bunch of broom, without handle,
leaning against the mud fireplace in the corner of the room. There
are no andirons, shovel, or tongs, and when fire is made the wood is
placed on end against the back of the fireplace. A chest, a few pieces
of crockery on a pine table, complete the furniture. Can you imagine
love in such a cottage? Undoubtedly there is love, and in the poorest
_jacal_ there is no brawling man, scolding, slapping wife, or crying
baby. If the walls crack, they are daubed by Magdalena Rosalia with a
fresh plaster of _yeso_, or gypsum, put on with a glove of sheepskin.
If the outside flakes and cracks too badly, it is smeared with a new
coating of soft mud. In the spring the ground floor has another layer
of clay, the fireplace a thin coating of _tierra amarilla_, or yellow
wash, and house-cleaning is ended. Does the roof leak, a dab of mud is
slapped on. Is the outer wall in holes, a lump of clay will stop the
wind away. There is no window, and when the door is closed the house
must be dark and stifling as a dungeon. Above the fireplace, done in
hectic chromo and framed in tin is a copy of the divine Madonna in
the Louvre, named “Queen of Heaven”; a band of blue stars across her
forehead, a tinsel crescent under her feet. Hanging below it is a
plaster crucifix, under glass. When the bell chimes, Magdalena Rosalia
will seek the old cathedral, whose vaulted interior is filled with
shadows and silence--among them a few figures, motionless as the dead
asleep under the floors--say her prayers across the rosary, confess,
and be absolved. But Trinidad Gonzalez Ribera, in the gauzy blanket and
vanishing pantaloons, will sit dozing in the sun, deaf to the ringing
music, unmindful of bell, book, or candle. I pass from under the
hospitable mud roof with repeated _adios_ and a feeling of unreality.
I look for a garden. There is none. There are no chickens, no pig, no
cow, no grass within the gravelly enclosure.
The only sign of life is a famished donkey, browsing on the strip of
grass which borders the _acequia_ by the roadside. He is the property
of our new friends, and occasionally the man of many names takes him
to the mountains, loads him with limbs of dead _piñones_, and sells
them for twenty-five cents a backload. Stopping on the plain, he digs
a few roots of _amolé_, or soap-weed; the _yucca aloifolia_, which we
cultivate for its rich cream-white blossoms. This is for the washing
done by Magdalena Rosalia.
Do not think she briskly knocks so early Monday morning or comes Sunday
night for the clothes, as wicked Protestants have been known to do.
No; this daughter of a proud line will not shame her high ancestry by
vulgar haste. She saunters along about noon, seats herself at ease,
makes affectionate inquiries as to every member of the household, with
a gift of continuance and native talent for rigmarole which would
do honor to a legislative body. She deliberately ties the bundle of
clothes, balances it on her head, and departs with sweeping courtesy
and majestic flirt of pink calico train.
After walking a few blocks, she stops for a rest, adjusts her bundle
into a cushion on the ground, takes from her pocket a little package of
corn-husks, fills one with fine-cut tobacco from a paper box, rolls it
into a _cigarrito_, and enjoys a smoke. A Monday picture in Santa Fé
is the long row of wash-women, with the everlasting black shawls over
their heads, sitting in the shade of mud walls, quietly gossiping and
smoking. To get the clothes home is exertion enough for one day.
Tuesday she repairs to the Rio Santa Fé weakened by irrigating ditches
to a shallow brook, and on its sandy bank makes a little fire for
washing. Her machine is one bucket and a square tin box. She pounds the
clothes between two stones. Flannels full, buttons fly, embroideries
are a dream of things that were. She boils them in the box, set on
granite; rinses in the pure snow-water of the Rio; and spreads them on
the rocks to dry, as the young Roman girls do along the Tiber. Friday,
in comes Magdalena Rosalia, with all beautifully white, folded in an
Indian basket shaped like a deep saucer.
The proceeds of this labor buy a bag of blue corn-meal and the
necessary tobacco. Twice a week they can afford a stew of _chili con
carne_ (our old friend hash, made fiery hot with red pepper) and the
living is made. As respects worldly goods, come he soon or late, Death
will find this pair exactly as they entered life, exactly as their
fathers lived and died, in the peaceful depths of contented poverty.
Magdalena Rosalia walks as though she was born in the purple, to
live like the lilies who toil not neither do they spin; and Trinidad
Gonzalez Ribera is free of care as though his old Navajo blanket was
a king’s coronation robe. At the grave’s edge it not unfrequently
happens that his mourning friends, too poor to spare his blanket, strip
it from his body, and lay him away in the dust from whence he sprung,
shroudless and uncoffined.
These are the happy people sighed for by weary poets in all the ages.
Simple souls who love the sun, live close to Nature, and in the dirt
house, to which nothing is added, where nothing is repaired except
by additional dirt, are serene as summer, filled with a measureless
content. Can we say so much for the eager, ambitious conqueror in a
struggle, a battle, and a race; always getting ready to live, looking
to the future when he may have time to rest and enjoy?
The Mexican does not wait for better times. There is no day but this.
He begins now and the future takes care of itself.
Oh! tired woman of “the States,” running on your nerve, trying to do
all the public demands of you and all you require of yourself, leave
the place where the door bell rings every half hour. Quit worrying
over goose-parties for the Sunday-school, Jarley’s wax-works for the
firemen; slip away from strawberry parties for the Gaboon Mission;
slacken the fevered rush; loosen the strings at concert pitch and ready
to snap; go to the Mexican woman, consider her ways, and learn how to
rest.
Of course, you, my precious reader, know many things she does not.
There never has been a woman’s meeting in this territory of 207,000
square miles; and, in consequence, the weak-minded creature is not
aware that men are great rascals, rob women of their rights, and bar
the avenues to wealth and fame against them. Sing the Iliad of your
woes, and it will fall on heedless ears. And, though you harp how
Juliet’s poetry flew up the kitchen-chimney and Portia’s eloquence
burnt out over the gridiron where her
----“red right hand grew raging hot,
Like Cranmer’s at the _steak_.”
she would quietly adjust the old black shawl (final remnant and
melancholy reminder of the gay _rebosa_) and count the days till the
next _fiesta_.
There are heights beyond her reach, and beyond your reach too, in spite
of mighty purpose. She does not strain after them, wearing herself to
skin and bone. While you, who have tasted bitter fruit from the tree of
knowledge, are ready to die in a losing struggle for the unattainable,
she loiters in happy valley, by good spirits tenanted, and in her easy
shoe wears the four-leaved clover of perpetual content.
CHAPTER VI. TO THE TURQUOIS MINES.
Reader, are you the sort of person who rushes through life the first
passenger on the earliest train; who hires the fastest coach at
Niagara, to exhaust the Falls, the Whirlpool, and Lundy’s Lane in
half a day, and are then ready to whiz off in the night express? If
you are, then are we no company for each other, and may as well part
at once. You are entirely unfit for frontier travel and may go this
minute. _Adios! Adios!_
But you who lingered by the Rapids; who have a kindly glance for
the smutty sentinel at the brake; who do not threaten to die when
the gentlemanly conductor fills the car full and corks it tight
as a champagne bottle, but live on in order to cheer a gasping
fellow-martyr; who help the mediæval lady, of convex outline, traveling
with two geraniums and a canary bird, yet keep a sympathetic eye for
the young pair in the new of the moon, murmuring, as they pass, I too
have dwelt in Arcadia.--You are the one I love. Yours are the feet,
beauteous on the mountain-top, that go gypsying with me through this
New World, which Agassiz tells us is the Old.
We travel in a hap-hazard way, varied with many a digression, following
no train but our own fancies. We stop to speak with the natives by the
way, try to sketch a Gifford sunset on a gritty scratch-book, and stray
from the road for bits of cheating mica, and for flowers which wilt in
the gathering, and change in our hands to dry stalks and grasses.
The mountains are eternally beautiful, always changing, forever new,
and all about us is picture. Walking for rest, the grama grass is soft
and pleasant under the pilgrim’s feet; the sun always shines; the days
are like the enchanted rooms in the fairy castle, each more beautiful
than every other; the air is balm, and oil, and wine.
There is nothing pleasanter than such travel, unless it be to float
between blue and blue among the Cyclades, and idly drift along the
tideless sea, to catch the far echo of the syren songs that wooed the
wandering Ulysses.
And now for the Turquois Mines.
To one who was an early and ardent admirer of _Lalla Rookh_, the
word turquois brings up memories of old or, rather, young days among
fragrant orchard trees, meadows pink and white with clover-blooms,
and a certain fine-printed, sight-destroying volume of the poet whose
hundredth birthday we have just celebrated. It is like a fading dream
to look from the shadowy half-way house at the girl embowered among
singing birds, reading, with dazzled eyes, of swords inlaid with rich
marquetry, talismans, and characters of the scimitar of Solomon. Arms of
“The wild warriors of the Turquois Hills,”
who rallied to the white veil and glittering banner of the False
Prophet.
The perfumed and sparkling poem which thrilled so many soft hearts at
life’s morning is not loved by lovers of this age. Only the setting
generation--and they mainly for the sake of old times--read “The Veiled
Prophet of Khorassan,” and in the twilight pensively sing “Araby’s
Daughter,” with voice not altogether fresh. In the days when that fond
farewell was first sung it was taught that turquoises belonged chiefly
to the Turkish and Persian Empires. Since then the ceaseless delving
of the antiquary has given to the world such treasure far removed from
the Shah’s dominions. There are mines of high antiquity in Mount Sinai,
and a bronze finger-ring, of unique pattern, set with turquoises, has
been discovered in the Wady Meghara of that peninsula. It dates back to
the vague, unreal period of the Fourth Dynasty; and amulets of the same
material are unearthed in the ruins of ancient Egyptian towns. They are
found in Arabia Petrea, in a stratum of red sandstone, of finer blue
and darker shade than the Persian, and the visitor of Roman museums
sees antique cameos and intaglios carved in Arabian turquois, sadly
faded and tarnished by long burial. Only a few in the Vatican still
retain their color.
Those of Khorassan are sold in Russia on sticks, tied in bunches
like quills, and are in demand by jewelers of St. Petersburg, for
enriching sword-hilts, handles of daggers, belts, pipes, etc. The Shah
is reported to have in keeping all the finest gems, allowing only the
inferior grades to leave the country.
In a curious old treatise on precious stones the turquois is described
as a delicate and sensitive jewel, which has an affinity for its
owner, changing color with his health and varying fortunes. The fact
that they do change color in a wholly unaccountable manner may explain
the fanciful notion. Human hearts are the same everywhere and in all
ages, and many a myth and superstition of the East is reproduced in
Mexico--plain testimony that Orientalism dwells not alone in its sky
and the palm trees of the valley.
It interested me greatly to find that the pretty legend of the Orient
attaches to the turquois of the New World, called by the ancient Aztec
_chalchuite_ (pronounced chal-chew-e-te).
Like the Asiatic, the Aztecan believed it brought good fortune to the
wearer, glowed in sympathy with the healthful beating of his pulse,
and ominously paled in prophecy of a coming misfortune. The power of
the Montezumas was absolute, as their dominion was vast; and wherever
the green banner of the king marked the limit of his realm, the
_chalchuite_ was, by imperial decree, forbidden to the commonalty--the
jewel sacred to the royal house. When the five ambassadors from Totonac
came to the tent of Cortez, at Vera Cruz, they defied the law (being
then at war with the fierce and bloody Aztec), and wore the proscribed
jewels--“gems of a bright blue stone, in their ears and nostrils.”[14]
Readers of Prescott will remember his picturesque page describing the
city of Tezcuco, where North American civilization reached its height.
In the royal palace was a hall of justice, called the “Tribunal of
God,” where the judge decided important causes and passed sentence of
death, seated on a throne of pure gold, inlaid with the consecrated
turquois.
The art of cutting gems was carried to high perfection by the Aztecs,
and the carved _chalchuite_ is noted by every writer on the Spanish
Conquest.
Father Sahagun calls it a jasper of very green color, “or a common
smaragdus,” so precious to the infidel that the use of them was
prohibited by royal edict to any but the nobility. “It represented
to them everything that was excellent in its kind; for which reason
they put such a stone in the mouth of distinguished chiefs who died,”
like the coin poetry offered to the grim ferryman of the souls of the
Greek dead.[15] They were valued by the heathen above all earthly
possessions, and, therefore, at first held in great estimation by the
Spaniards. The art of polishing them came from Heaven, the gift of
the god Quetzelcoatl, a gentle deity who instructed the Aztecs in the
use of metals, agriculture, and the arts of government. It was in the
golden age of Anahuac, when an ear of Indian corn was as much as one
man could carry, when the air was filled with the melody of birds, the
earth with flowers, and cotton in the field took of its own accord
the rich dye of cochineal. Cholula was his favorite city, where the
massy ruins of the temple dedicated to his worship form one of the
most interesting relics of ancient Mexico. By command of the superior
deities, he took leave of his worshipers on the shores of the Mexican
Gulf, under promise to return, and, entering his wizard skiff, made of
serpents’ skins, sailed away to the blooming shores of happy Tlapallan.
The earliest mention of this historic gem is made by the honest old
soldier, Bernal Diaz. Four _chalchuites_, counted the most precious
offerings from his treasury, were among the first presents sent by
Montezuma to Cortez. “A gift to our emperor, designed as a mark of
highest respect, as each of them, they assured us, was worth more than
a wagon-load of gold.” The covetous Spaniard was enraptured with the
gold-dust and jewels, and gave in exchange--a sorry return for the
munificence of the imperial present--a few Holland shirts, and a string
of trumpery beads, strongly perfumed with musk.
On sending the priceless Aztecan diamonds, “worth four wagon-loads
of gold,” to Valladolid, it turned out, rather awkwardly for the
Spaniards, that they were not worth so many wagon-loads of earth.
The gossiping Herodotus of the New World alludes to the _chalchuite_
again in his narrative of the first meeting of Montezuma and Cortez,
on the Causeway, at the entrance to Mexico, city of enchantment. That
fatal day, when the force of his own genius brought the representative
of the strongest empire of the Old World face to face with the
mightiest monarch of the New, its pale lustre shone dimly in the fringe
of the canopy held by the _Caciques_ above the hapless monarch’s head.
“A canopy of exceeding great value,” says the quaint chronicler,
“decorated with green feathers, gold and silver, _chalchuis_ stones
and pearls, which hung down from a bordering altogether curious to
look at.”
Its delicately-traced veins, occasionally of greenish hue, betray a
near kinship to malachite. This rich-tinted mineral is finer than
the dark-colored stone of Russia, and though by no means costly as
Shylock’s turquoise, the _chalchuite_ still holds its high repute among
the various tribes of the red race.
It is valued by the Navajo beyond the garnets and beryls of his own
country, and is used as currency among the half-civilized Pueblos of
New Mexico and Arizona. The Indian girls along the Colorado wear it as
a love-token in their necklaces; the roving and tameless Apache covets
a blue bead as an amulet; the degraded Ute loves its soft glimmer;
and when a Mohave chief would assume regal splendor, he sticks a
three-cornered piece of _chalchuite_ in his royal nose.
Such associations fresh in mind, it was with extreme pleasure I
prepared for an excursion to Los Cerillos, where these blue-eyed gems
are found, the only mines as yet discovered this side the Russian seas.
Twenty-six miles southwest of Santa Fé are the long, narrow ranges of
gold and silver-bearing mountains--Placer, Sandia, Manzana, etc.--which
form an unbroken chain on the eastern side of the Rio Grande. Among
them are three turquoise mines, which anciently supplied the Indian
market of North America.
A roomy ambulance, drawn by four mules; various delights, liquid and
solid, in a mess-chest; a party of choice spirits, like my reader; and
a morning such as breaks nowhere but over the hills of Paradise and New
Mexico--this was our start.
Our driver was a young Mexican, bearing a lengthy and musical name,
with which I shall not serenade you. Juan Fresco (Cool John) is a
minute fragment of it. He was very spruce in a brand-new suit of
kerseymere, of the sort sold throughout the frontier by Israelites in
whom there is much guile; a handsome Navajo blanket closely woven and
brightly striped; and was happy in possession of a limitless supply
of corn husks and powdered tobacco which he rolled into cigarettes
and smoked, without so much as saying, By your leave. Had he known it
was impolite, he would have implored pardon, with many sweet-sounding
words. Mexican women smoke constantly, as men do and he does not
know better. He can live and does live on a dollar a week; and, with
_tortillas_, onions, red pepper, and once in a great while a mutton
stew, thrives and drives the ambulance. They say that there is Indian
blood in him; that he is cold as death and treacherous as a tiger-cat;
but I do not believe it.
In this high, dry country, corresponding with Western Asia, the
tendency of the human body is to Arab leanness, and Juan Fresco, who
grew to man’s estate under this fierce Syrian sun, sitting against the
mud wall of a Syrian hut, has a soft Syrian face. No positive beauty
(I have never seen out-door people except Arabs who have), but comely
features, unchanging, melancholy eyes, and a gentle, passive voice,
very winsome.
The festal day found Juan Fresco highly embellished with a yellow sash
tied tightly around his waist, securing a long knife (_navaja_) in its
folds. Every Spaniard can use the knife with skill, and in his hands it
becomes a dreadful weapon. He can cast it with exact aim and unerring
certainty into a post or into the heart of an enemy at a considerable
distance away; and wherever there is Spanish blood the _navaja_ is the
favorite weapon, not always concealed about his person. Our muleteer
took his pleasure sadly as any Englishmen; but his sadness is only for
strangers. He is leader of the band which goes from house to house
playing under the windows--the sweet Spanish invitation to the ball;
gayly thrums the guitar at the light fandango; and can dance till
morning as well as hold his own in any affray that may grow out of the
wild license of the _baile_.
Occasionally he leaped from his seat for a pocketful of stones,
gathering them as the wagon moved on, and throwing them at the heads
of the mules; at the same time muttering, on the ledger lines below,
sacred words mixed with names of saints. The Mexican insists a mule
cannot be made to understand without such urging; and they have a
proverb: “An ass’s ears are made long in order to catch oaths.”
[N. B.--There is reason to believe that a like superstition attaches to
the Army of the United States.]
Leaving the venerable city of the Pueblos, we crossed the Santa Fé
River, which in Indiana would be called a spring branch. I have often
gone over it dry shod. But the poverty of the Spanish language allows
only one word for running water--_Rio_, translated river. The Santa Fé
Mountains round about us are a part of the great Rocky Mountain system,
connecting on the north with the Spanish Peaks and Raton Mountains,
including many whose summits are silvered with perpetual snow. A
series of high, picturesque chains, in the morning-glow robed with a
transparent purple haze, of such exquisite tint one can hardly realize
those airy pyramids in a fair border-land between us and heaven are,
indeed, upheavals of earth, veined with quartz and based on coarse red
granite.
Words cannot picture aught so fair. The faintest violet, the softest
heliotrope are coarse and hard beside the dreamy, poetic color, which
appeals to the eye as dim æolian soundings touch the ear, charming the
fancy with vague ideas of a viewless beauty within the floating veil.
I cannot make you understand. Come and see the transfiguration which
makes rock-ribbed hills appear like tents of light, lovely enough for
angels to rest in on their upward flight.
The plain was smooth as a prairie, and our road free of stone. The
reader must not imagine it lay among Alpine scenery, with huge peaks
towering to the sky, forbidding our advance, yielding at last to reveal
smiling valleys and hidden hamlets, nestling close to the hillsides in
narrow glens. Here all is on the same magnificent scale. The plains
are broad as the summits are high; the refined atmosphere so intensely
clear the light is like a reflection from snow. No such extensive
views are in Europe or any country where the air holds moisture, and
sometimes the landscapes seem absolutely limitless.
The Sierras are short, uneven spurs from the main line. They have
disturbed the overlying strata in the shape of _mesas_ (tables) of
solid rock, which are a distinguishing feature of Rocky Mountain
scenery, giving it a grotesque, fantastic beauty. The process of
erosion has formed in colossal size copies of the grandest structures
of man’s art, and towering columns, temples with sharp pinnacles,
scattered pillars rise abruptly from the centre of plains desolate and
forsaken as the wilderness of Engedi--strange and solemn sights. In the
Painted Desert are snow-white _mesas_, the _craie blanche_ composition
of the chalk cliffs on the south coast of England, which dazzle the
eye, reflecting the sunlight like palaces of alabaster or of ice. The
stone corridors of Karnak and Philae are the work of pigmies compared
with this noble architecture, wrought by slow processes in secret
places,
“Made by Nature for herself.”
Sometimes the _mesa_ shapes into a rose-red wall, with fluted columns
that uphold the sky. Again it is a group of gray pyramids, a thousand
or twelve hundred feet high; or an isolated, broken dome, worn smooth
by the weather, picturesque in the extreme.
Nothing affords such changes of coloring as the variegated marls, lying
in regular bands of red, orange, green, blue, of rainbow hue, striped
and interstratified with belts of purple, bluish white, and mottled
veins of exceeding richness.
Strangely enough, the traveler occasionally finds himself riding above
these singular formations, and looking _down_ on the “Painted Rocks.”
The sheer sides of a _mesa_ of gray limestone, mixed with blue clay
and capped with a rim of pillared basalt, are singularly like fabrics
of hewn stone. I have seen low walls of even height reaching long
distances, precisely like field-walls laid by skillful masons. These,
in the neighborhood of stately _façades_, with the fair finish at the
top, explain how an explorer, afraid to make near approach, should go
away and give accounts of vast cities, with gallant banners on the
walls enclosed in heavy outworks.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Prescott’s _History of the Conquest of Mexico_, Vol. I.
[15] Father Sahagun thus describes these precious stones: “_Las
chalchuites son verdes y no transparentes mezcladas de blanco, usanlas,
mucho las principales trayendolas las muñecas atadas en hilo, y aquello
es señal de que es persona noble el que las trae._”--_Hist. de Nueva
España_, Lib. ii. chap. 8.
CHAPTER VII. TO THE TURQUOIS MINES. (_Continued._)
Traveling westward, there came to our view the first Placer Mountain;
behind it the melon-shaped Sandia, 13,000 feet in air; and far
southward the detached range of the Manzana Mountains. A plateau, the
highest of equal area on the globe, varied with sterile _vegas_ and
dreary sierras, which reminded the early adventurers of their own Old
Castile, and so like it one can imagine it had once been the home of
wandering tribes, which have long since taken up their spears, struck
their tents, and sought new camps in the furthest East.
The grama grass is low and dry, like wiry moss, and in the distance
takes a wan, ashen hue, more ghastly than white. The cactus is the only
shrub in sight. A gaunt, starved thing, the leper of the vegetable
world, forbidding our approach.
The lively prairie dog (who is no dog, but a marmot) saluted as
we passed. Having early learned the fifth beatitude, I suppress a
description of him. Nor shall we ask how he exists without water,
or seek to know if there is a snake at the bottom of his den, and a
strange bird dwelling there in peace and safety.
It was June; but not the leafy month of June. The only timber--dwarf
cedar--which can grow in this barren soil was cut away years ago; and
absence of trees includes absence of birds. The friendly trill and
flutter heard about nests in shady places are sadly missed. Now and
then a black wing flapped overhead, and a crow flew down in the road.
Living equally well on seed, roots, flesh, he thrives alike in all
places. And, except this one sign of life, we may journey in some
directions a whole day and see neither man nor beast, bird nor insect.
We missed the woodland scents, too; the forest fragrance of mint,
thyme, pennyroyal, and the beeches, whose shadows are the curtains of
the morning, holding its freshness against the power of the sun till
high noon. The eye soon wearies of the leaden hues, and longs for the
dark leafage which is the glory of the Mississippi Valley. The blank,
scorched plain, lying stark and still in the fierce, white light,
brought a sense of loneliness and depression impossible to shake off.
There was no rest for the sight or the soul.
But what is this apparition starting from a distant clump of
greasewood--a grisly animal, apparently neither brute nor human?
Rapidly coming toward us, we recognize a creature of the _genus homo_.
“In the desert no one meets a friend,” says the Oriental proverb; and
there was a general stir for arms among the defenders, and mute shaking
of the head, not intended to be seen, when nothing more serviceable
than a cactus cane was found in the ambulance.
Every reader knows the border is the chosen field of the dime-novel
hero; a safe refuge for cut-throats and desperadoes of the lowest
grades, who live by robbery and plunder, and that it is wise for the
tourist to put on his pistol with his watch, or, in the expressive
slang of the frontier, he may be blighted by lead fever before sundown.
Outlaws from Mexico and Texas haunt the mountain springs and prowl
about the cañons of the territories; and, in dread of them, hunters go
in parties, and look well to their arms when they enter narrow defiles
or a dark, lonesome gulch.
These vagabonds subsist on the fat of the land, where the country is
most sparsely settled, and are the only buyers who have credit and are
not crowded for payment by the Israelites who control the dry goods
business of the territory. The ranchero never refuses them milk, eggs,
or mutton; and the dark-eyed Mexican girl serves them with diligence,
under promise of payment when they come again. Given a voice in the
matter, this is not such a character as we like to encounter on an
empty plain, even in broad daylight; and, as he neared us, the ladies
involuntarily drew close together and scanned him thoroughly.
A powerful fellow, of giant frame and dangerous muscle, and, though
unarmed, a foe to dread in any fight. He wore a shoddy coat, probably
bought on compulsory credit of the Wandering Jew of Tularosa; buckskin
pants, with fringed side-stripes of Indian work, tucked inside of
heavy cavalry boots, ponderous brass spurs jingling as he walked; a
red cotton handkerchief knotted around his throat. An immense slouched
_sombrero_--in the style of the Mexican _caballero_--drab, with a
rosette and cord of red and tinsel, covered his forehead and shaded
eyes that were restless and penetrating like a blackbird’s. A shaggy,
unshorn mane, reddened with dust and sunburn, fell over the buffalo
neck and shoulders; matted beard, a very jungle, reached almost to the
cartridge-belt, and, blown aside by the wind, revealed the outline of
revolvers in his breast-pockets. He carried a Winchester rifle easily
as a gentleman carries his cane; a leather belt, buckled around his
waist, was filled with cartridges, and bore a murderous-looking knife
in its sheath.
When this shape, of aspect threatening and sinister, came within
friendly hail, we bowed with much suavity.
“Texas Jack! _Buenos dias!_” said Juan Fresco, who well became his
name; and serene as summer, he shifted the reins and laid his hand on
the _navaja_.
The frontiersman touched his hat-brim with his big forefinger, sunburnt
to a vermilion red, quietly passed on toward the Galisteo, and we saw
him no more. When fairly out of sight of the outlaw, we felt brave as
lions.
“A prospector,” said one, mildly.
“Yes, and never without a prospect,” said the antiquarian, bringing out
an old witticism.
“A black sheep without any white spots,” added another. “They always
spring up on the frontier.”
And, very hilarious under the sense of relief, we courageously debated
what we would have done had the robber attempted robbery and ordered
us to hold up our hands. The men of the pen would have been mere boys
in the grip of this son of the border; and we cheered ourselves with
telling tales of how “just such men” had gone out without pistols to
seek their fortunes, and had never been heard of afterward.
The weakest of weeklies is dull and insipid compared with the daily
experiences recounted in New Mexico; and restless souls who hate
trammels, who love danger for its own sake, and have looked death in
the face till they cease to fear it, find a special charm in the wild
“game flavor” of the frontier.
The borderer who crossed our path was the sort of soldier who in March,
1862, under the rebel General Sibley, came up from Texas, forded the
Rio Grande at a point below Fort Craig, fought the Union troops under
Gen. Canby at Valverde, and again at Cañon Glorietta, fifteen miles
from Santa Fé. In that narrow pass, where flanking was out of the
question, a severe fight between infantry and artillery occurred, in
which the rebels were victorious, and Sibley entered the capital city
without meeting further resistance.
His Texan Rangers, like Texas Jack, were half savage; a desperate
set, having no higher motive than plunder and adventure. Each one
was mounted on a mustang horse, and carried a rifle, a tomahawk, a
bowie-knife, a pair of Colt’s revolvers, and a lasso for catching and
throwing the horses of a flying enemy. Not valuing their own lives at a
pin’s fee, they gave no quarter and expected none.
About eleven o’clock the breeze dropped and the sun came up with a dry,
sultry scorch, like flame. Our spirits flagged, the stories ended,
laughter and song died away; nor could we rouse to the least interest
in a herdsman’s ranche--a mud-built hive, swarming with Mexican drones.
“What a weary land!” said Thalia.
“All lands are weary for women,” said her elder sister; and for a time
nothing was heard but the harsh grinding of wheels in the gravelly sand.
In such emptiness it was a stirring event to be overtaken by a Pueblo
Indian, who passed us with a swinging stride, rarely seen off the
boards of a country theatre. This
“Wild warrior of the Turquois Hills”
is tame enough now. Always a tiller of the soil, he is the original,
in fact, the aboriginal granger. A picturesque figure, in a handsome
striped blanket, with red girth around his waist and a crown of
green leaves, like the classic fillet, shading his forehead. We were
fortunate, too, in seeing a half-grown boy chase jack-rabbits with
a curved stick, hurling it with whirring sound, in the style of the
boomerang, till lately thought exclusively Australian. The stripling
appeared like the bird-hunter of the Nile, carved in _basso relievo_
on the oldest tomb at Thebes. Weapon and attitude of the Egyptian are
precisely the same as those of the boyish red hunter of North America.
The more we learn of Eve’s family, the surer the proofs of a common
parentage. Guided by the same instinct, the tools of various
nations, unknown to each other, are the same and the measure of
their advancement; showing how little depends on accident, and how
closely they are connected with the organism, and, therefore, with the
necessities of man. So striking is the parallel between aborigines in
every continent that with difficulty do we divest ourselves of the idea
that there must have been some direct intercommunication.
A band of tender green, restful to the sight, follows the course of a
poor, tired, sluggish stream, sixteen miles from Santa Fé; and a mile
or two down its soundless current we described a group of cotton-wood
trees--an oasis, indeed--shading a low adobe house. The green leaves
in restless flutter and the brook gave the spot an appearance of home
not often found in the square of brown mud wall which makes the Mexican
domicile.
Along the margin of the nameless stream is a border of alkali,
sprinkled in patches like salt over the ground. Of course, we were
struck with thirst at sight of running water; but prudently contented
ourselves with that in our canteens, rather than risk drinking alkali,
which abounds in New Mexico, so strong in some streams that fish cannot
live in them. In many places the ranchero digs, to find only a mocking
fluid, deadly alike to man, beast, and vegetation. And we comprehend
the Arabian saying: “The water provider is always blest, being daily
remembered in the prayers of the faithful.”
Our road was an easy descent all the way, the Cerillos being nearly
3,000 feet lower than Santa Fé. The founder of the antique city (Don
Antonio de Espego) described this country with Spanish exuberance, in
a letter to Philip Second: “The earth is filled with gold, silver, and
turquoises.” And the gallant adventurer threw such glowing light upon
it, the king at once sent a thousand men to colonize and possess the
province.
As we quietly journeyed along, I pondered on the very moderate basis
the heroic Cavaliers, those old Spanish filibusters, had for the
brilliant reports sent back to Spain. Leaving the ambulance within a
mile of the mines, we toiled wearily along the mountains, well named
the Rocky. Their surface is strewn with fragments, broken as if chipped
with hammers--a ragged pavement, which bruised our feet, tore our
shoes, and wore out our patience; and when at last we reached the first
mine, we thought it but a continuation of _Los Cerillos_. The most
ancient is much the largest, and to this we directed our steps. Under
the dizzy crags which overhang it is a sheltered recess, blackened
with smoke and bedded with ashes made by camp-fires of Indians, who
still frequent the spot, in search of the precious _chalchuite_. With
difficulty we reached this cave, and, leaning over the edge, looked
down and saw, not a narrow, black shaft, but half a mountain cut away.
Undoubtedly, the mineral lay here which, through countless generations,
furnished the Indian kings with their most valued ornaments. The
yawning pit is two hundred feet deep and more than three hundred in
diameter. Probably the work of aborigines before De Soto’s requiem
mingled with the voice of the rushing waters of his burial place; when
Columbus had seen the New World only in that vision of the night,
where the unknown voice whispered: “God will cause thy name to be
wonderfully resounded through the earth, and will give thee the keys
of the gates of the Ocean, which are closed with strong chains.” On
the walls of the great excavation Nature has gently, patiently done
what she could to smooth the rugged crags, and has thrown out of their
fissures a scant growth of shrubs, and trailed a scarlet blossom here
and there on a thread-like stem. At the bottom, on stones crumbling
with age, stained and weather-worn, are dwarf pines, the growth of the
centuries. In this close amphitheatre there is no breeze to stir their
tops, and their motionless foliage, with its somber shadows, adds to
the ever-present mountain-gloom.
Thousands of tons of rock have been crushed from the solid mass, and
thrown up in such a high heap it seems another mountain, overgrown
with old pines and dry gray mosses. On a few fragments we noticed the
turquois stain--“indication” of valuable mineral. When we consider
that all this digging, hewing, and hacking were done by hand-labor
alone, without knowledge of domestic animals, iron, or gunpowder, the
_débris_ carried away in sacks of skins, the enormity of the work is
the more impressive. The tradition is that the _chalchuite_ mines,
through immemorial ages known to the primitive race, were possessed
by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Indian slaves then worked
them, under the lash of the conqueror, until 1680, when, by accident, a
portion of the rock from which we had our first view fell, and killed
thirty Pueblos. The Spaniards immediately made a requisition on the
town of San Marcos for more natives to take their places; when, with
a general uprising, they drove the hated oppressor from the country
as far south as El Paso del Norte. I give the tale for what it is
worth. Mining atmospheres are the favorite haunts of fable, and a
spice of truth is enough to flavor whole volumes of stories, charming
but delusive. An airy legend hovers about Santa Fé that two stones
from “_La Canada de las Minas_”--“Glen of Mines”--are still among the
crown jewels of Arragon. But _chalchuites_ were valueless after being
once submitted to the jewelers of Spain; and the sparkling story, like
many another told by the camp-fire, loses its original brightness when
removed to the searching light of the student’s lamp.
Careful analysis shows the constituents of the _chalchuites_ are nearly
the same as those of the Persian turquoises, and their formation the
result of infiltration. Sometimes they are washed up by heavy rains;
but usually are discovered by digging in the sandstone or are broken
out from the body of the rock.
Not being disposed to dig, we retraced our path, and climbed around to
the top of the shelving crag above us, and looked over the plateau.
Eastwardly it stretches toward Santa Fé, beyond which the stony
mountains lift their high heads. On the southwest it opens toward
the Rio Grande in a measureless vista, where earth and sky appear to
meet. A plain, oppressive in its vastness, lying in the midst of a
stone wilderness, its sameness relieved by the solitary peaks, Sandia
and Albuquerque. In every direction stand mountains grim and fixed as
walls of adamant, apparently immovable as the throne of God. Low in the
horizon one feathery cloud hung moveless in a sapphire sky. The world
seemed stricken dead. No verdure to cool the parched grass; no water,
“the eye of the earth” glancing up toward heaven; no waving branches,
beckoning like friendly hands to cool shade and shelter: no wagon-road
or foot-path to mark the track of men; not a sound to break a
stillness which is not the hush of profound peace, but the everlasting
silence of death.
Save the one shining spot of gauzy vapor, the blue above was without
a blur. The sun was at meridian, and in its hard glitter the scorched
summits looked like they were at white heat. The sea is lonely; but
it has shifting color, sound, and motion. The silence of the land is
deeper. If there had been the note of a bird, the hum of bees, even
a grasshopper’s chirp, it had been a relief; but in the far-reaching
desolation I alone drew breath. All else was still as the breast when
the spirit has fled.
The influence was benumbing to the senses, and as I stood in infinite
solitude, a stone among stones, there came over me the feeling that
this melancholy waste is the skeleton of our Mother Earth; that the
dust of which all flesh is made has been blown away, scattered to the
four winds of heaven, leaving these gray old bones forlorn and unburied
through the long, slow centuries, till the coming of the Great Day for
which all other days were made.
The voices below were too remote for my hearing, and (how absurd it now
appears) it was “company” to spy a speckled chameleon, sunning himself
on a rock; and, as he quickly slipped between its cracks and vanished,
I was left the more alone. Listening to silence, as it were, there
swept across my memory the words of the hymn familiar in childhood as
the dear face which bent above my cradle:
“O’er all these wide-extended plains
Shines one eternal day.”
If the singer had ever faced the blinding glare of high noon on the
wide-extended plains of the Rocky Mountains, he would have tuned his
harp anew, and hymned the rivers of waters in a dry place, the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.
I soon sought that refuge from the desert scorch, and, snatching at
shrubs to keep from slipping, scrambled down the mountain by a dizzy,
winding way, the loosened stones rolling after me to the bottom of the
mine. How pleasant the smoke of the camp-fire! Its leaping flame and
crackle were a welcome back to life again. And never till then did I
know how much sweeter than harp or horn the sound of human voices can
be.
Long before I joined my companions I had heard shouts of exultation,
and, wondering what prospector had “struck it,” I learned that a piece
of _chalchuite_ had been brought out of the lining of a seam where it
had lain under the roots of a stunted shrub, in appearance not unlike
spicewood. It was near an inch in length, by half an inch in thickness;
a large and lovely specimen, the color sea-green, delicately shaded
into blue--the latter the result of decomposition, so the scientist
said.
The owner of this “regular bonanza” was our driver. He made no effort
to conceal his delight; and with reason, for it was a rare piece of
mineral, and he a lucky miner to obtain it with so little trouble, or
even to get it at all. Such a stone the gentle and gracious Montezuma
might have worn in his signet-ring or set in the clasp of his green
mantle of feather-work. Such a gift would have made still brighter
the bright eyes of his daughter, the laughing Princess Nenetzin, the
spoiled darling, whose death was the crowning horror of the _Noche
Triste_.
I had sniffed coffee from afar, and now we were ready to pass the cup
that not inebriates, sung by the temperate Cowper. Our cloth was laid
on a table-rock, the feast was spread, we ate, drank, and were merry.
The dumb spell of the desert snapt, only the peace of the perpetual
hills remained. Resting in the fragrant shade of the pines, we talked
of Montezuma, the saddest, proudest chief of Indian history, whose name
is still a majestic memory among the degraded, broken-hearted Pueblos.
Beautiful beliefs they cherish regarding him--the peculiar friend of
the red race, shadowy above all things, yet real above all things, who
dwelt among them as a god, yet a familiar friend. He was the brother
and equal of the Unseen One whose name it is death to utter; and the
chiefs still watch for him at sunrise beside the sacred fire in the
_estufa_, claiming his promise to come again from his throne in the
sun, and bring back the faded glories of his fallen people. All their
traditions point to the second advent of their beloved prophet, priest,
and king, who disappeared from the earth when it was young, and who
will not fail, in the fullness of time, to redeem the promise made to
his red children.
The ground was strewn with fragments of broken pottery, the unfailing
sign of the ancient Pueblo, the rightful owner of this soil. They
were colored maroon red, light clay, and dark brown, with markings
of black. At sight of them the antiquarian fell to wandering among
tombs, discoursing on fallen kingdoms, extinct races, wrecks of empire,
and columns voiceless as the gray stones of Pæstum. He was learned
and eloquent; but none of these things move me. Our little scraps
were but the elder and better counterparts of the poor potteries
the Pueblos make at this day; and merely prove, what I believe has
never been disputed, that North America has been inhabited from a
remote period. I know there are enthusiasts who insist there was a
prehistoric race, displaced by what we call aborigines, which had a
civilization comparing favorably with those of the Old World. What
that civilization was, let the stone hatchet, and the dingy pottery
with its graceless tracings testify, when laid beside relics from
Eturia the Beautiful. The Western fragments are in beggarly contrast
with the exquisite vases and jewel-work which are the model and despair
of the modern artist.
Several inferior bits of _chalchuite_ were dug out of the ancient
wastage; but the color was faint, as if they had not lain long enough
for a thorough dyeing. We added to our collection an arrowhead of
jasper and one of obsidian, nicely flaked and pointed; and gave a
dollar for the largest Indian hatchet I have ever seen, brought up by
the enterprising Juan Fresco from an abandoned silver mine hard by. It
was roughened and time-worn, and had lain there how long--ah! _Quien
sabe?_
It may interest some believer in the perishing theory of “Ages” to
know the Stone Age is not ended in New Mexico. Within the present
generation, it is said, remote tribes have used as a weapon, offensive
and defensive, the stone hatchet, tied by a thong of deer-skin to a
wooden handle. As Sir John Herschel said of something else, this is one
of those things which, according to received theories, ought not to
happen.
We lingered under the solemn pines, groping with shadows, visible and
unseen, loth to leave. The hoary hills, so lone and untrodden, began
to be possessed of strange enchantment. The place was ours by right of
discovery. We were a band of explorers, the first to break a silence
lasting since the morning stars sang at creation’s dawn. Perhaps the
witchery was a variation of the prevalent miner’s fever, for the day
was waning when we reluctantly gave over our search for precious
mineral.
In the shining of the loveliest afterglow this side of Heaven, we
sought the wagon, standing in the level expanse, like a ship at anchor.
A freshening breeze blew cheerily, and, turning back as we drove away,
we watched the swift-coming Night gather the mountains tenderly, one
by one, into her bosom, and touch their scarred, stern faces with
ineffable beauty.
CHAPTER VIII. TO THE TURQUOIS MINES, (_Continued._)
North of the Placer Ridges and divided from them by the intervening
valley of the Galisteo, are bold bluffs of trap, the cut edges of a
plateau forming a _mesa_, from which rise the volcanic cones of Los
Cerillos. From these hills rushed the fiery lava-flow widespread over
the country, giving it a worn-out look, desert-like and depressing
to the last degree. Geologists assert that, at a very recent period
in the world’s changes, fire, ice, and water have, with tremendous
subterranean forces, left here marks of a storm more terrible than our
conceptions of the Deluge. The hot springs, now slowly dying out, are
the last of the series of events once performed on a scale which almost
baffles human conception. The faint departing remnants of once terrific
forces point to something which must be described by a broader word
than earthquake--a fiery convulsion, that altered the whole face of the
country, if we may judge by the marks the storm has left.
In order to avoid a rocky unheaval, thrown out by the expiring energies
of the volcanic epoch, not yet closed, we started back to Santa Fé by
a circuitous route, and soon came on signs of a camp--heaps of white
ashes, circled by burnt and blackened ends of piñon chips. The _vega_
is sere and parched as the plains of Arabia, and in dreamy mood we
could easily fancy the last tent of the Moslem had just been struck,
the heavy standard folded by slim figures in sweeping burnous; and we
glanced along the horizon for a gleam of slender spears, and the long
caravan, made spectral by distance, slowly vanishing into the mystic
silence of the desert.
Involuntarily we looked for valuables dropped by Haroun and Mohammed,
as they untethered the camels and packed the hampers; scattered spices;
a jeweled cup of gold, with the lump of ambergris at the bottom; a
white turban; a shawl of price.
No such thing.
There lay on the ground, instead, a battered sardine-box, a sliver
of wagon-tongue, the broken end of a saw (pocketed by Juan Fresco),
four greasy cards (also appropriated by Cool John), two used-up
paper collars, and an empty black bottle. Strong testimonials to the
high superiority of our arts, and the refinements of our boasted
civilization.
A little way from the road, fastened to a scrubby piñon tree, was a
fluttering white signal; and, thinking it might be a sign of distress,
we stopped the willing mules, and all got out to see what was the
matter. With the help of a match, we made out a rudely penciled hand
on canvas of flour-bag, pointing in the direction of Los Cerillos, and
below it read the bold legend,--
“SWEET HOME SALOON.”
Looking ahead, we hailed Sweet Home itself. A roofless pen of pine
boughs, fencing in narrow shelves of black bottles, and a camp-stool--a
dark puzzle made of mule-bones and cowhide, pronounced a relic of
the palæozoic age by the geologist. The establishment was guarded
by a wolfish dog, which the bravest of us did not care to examine;
so we hurried back to the ambulance, regardless of prickly pear,
and in the valley’s edge passed the white tents of the vanguard
of civilization--an army of laborers, working day and night on
the railroad track. They will not march till they have broken the
fascinating spell, the poetic glamor which the romantic Espego threw
over Nueva Espagna three hundred years ago, and which has rested on
it like an alluring mystery ever since. If you would dream dreams
and see visions, now is the time to come. If you would taste the
wild charm, hasten to catch it before the wear of every-day travel
tramples out the primitive customs. It is still to a good degree a
country apart from the rest of the United States; mountain-locked and
little known, severed, as it has been, from the great highways of
commerce. Its history is a romance and a tragedy, and, as in every
country imperfectly explored, it holds more or less of the mysterious.
Here are extensive ruins; unparalleled natural phenomena; mountains,
“flaunting their crowns of snow everlastingly in the face of the sun,”
that bear in their bosom undeveloped mines, dazzling the imagination;
cañons with perpendicular sides a mile in height; savages merciless and
bloodthirsty, who in undying hate still dispute the progress of foreign
civilization. But the civilizer is coming; is here. The waste lands of
the wandering tribes will be divided and sold by the acre, instead of
the league. The dozing Mexican will be jostled on the elbow, and will
wake from his long trance to find himself in the way.
A procession of phantoms is flying along “_El Camino del ferro
carril_”; whispering voices are drowned in the hiss of steam; and the
midnight hush of the black cañon is stirred by the whirr of beautiful
wings, unheard save by ears attuned to finest harmonies. By the time
this letter reaches the eyes so dear to the writer, there will be no
haunted solitudes along Los Cerillos. The pick and shovels of Mike
Brady and the O’Flannegans will have put to flight the finer fancies of
musing antiquary and dreaming pilgrim. You know certain boundaries mark
the limit of every created thing, be it real or imaginary.
Fairies never trip it on pavements. They are too delicate for such
footing. Ghosts haunt only houses where men have lived and died; and
the epic of history cannot abide the screech of the locomotive nor
its penetrating headlight. It requires broken, disconnected threads,
doubtful testimony, dim lights--above all, the misty lines of distance.
The locomotive brings the ends of the earth together, and dashes into
nothingness delicate tissues woven in darkness, like certain delicate
laces, whose threads break in the weaving by day.
And here is something brought by the locomotive.
In the luminous haze of the paling twilight appeared a peddler, lying
beside his pack, sheltered by a rock, under which he had crept, which
looked as though it might fall any moment and crush him to atoms. On
nearer view, we discovered, instead of peddler and pack, the pioneer
organ grinder, the first to set foot in New Mexico. His shoes were
ragged and travel-worn. He wore a cast-off uniform of army blue, and
a red handkerchief knotted round his throat. Sun-scorched gray hair
straggled round the edge of his black skull-cap, and mingled with the
dust of the ground. Overcome by heat and fatigue, he was dead asleep,
one hand resting on the rusty green curtain which draped the organ,
the other holding the neck of a little brown dog, about the size of a
pinch of snuff, curled up in his bosom. In the emptiness of the desert
every peaceful thing is welcome. We stopped, as a matter of course.
“A bad place for a tramp, unless he can eat rock and drink mirage,”
said our polyglott antiquary, as he jumped from the ambulance. He shook
the sleeper gently, and addressed him in Italian. The man slowly rose
to his feet. “Ah! excellenza,” said he, in the spoken music of Southern
Italy, “your voice is like the sound of fountains in the ear of the
thirsty. Tell me, is there no water in this land?”
“None within six miles; but we have a canteen left, which you may
have,” and the kindly antiquary produced the dirty frontier flask,
sewed up in flannel, to keep its contents cool--which it never does.
The musician unscrewed the lid, and took a long draught.
“It is better than wine,” he said, “for Victor can drink it too,” and
he poured the precious liquid in a tin cup. The little brute, who was
pretty much all tail, gave a friendly bark, and wagged himself almost
to pieces as he slaked his thirst.
“Where are you going?” we asked.
“To Albuquerque, to Bernalillo, to Las Lunas”--and he named the various
towns and stations on the route to Old Mexico.
“The country is overrun by Apaches--Indians who will torture you and
then kill you.”
“The banditti will not hurt,” said the old man, simply, “when I give
them this.”
He lifted the box to its one leg, raised the curtain, turned the crank;
a warning click, and lo! “Hear me, Norma.” How strangely the familiar
air sounded across that plain, so wide, so dim, so still! Through a
floating mist, not of the earth or of the sky, I saw, not the wanderer
and his wretched instrument, but a radiant vision of glittering lights,
the brilliant crowd in the horseshoe curve, hanging breathless on the
voice of the divine singer, now leading the starry choir of Heaven.
Surely, there is not another place in the world where a party of
sensible people would fool away an hour on an organ-grinder. Every
well-regulated mind (and I address no other) will perceive the
absurdity. But it was so long since we had heard one, he was such a
delightful reminder of bright days and brighter nights, that over and
over again we made the drowsy player drone his dull tunes. They brought
us serene and golden Italy, the racing shadows and glancing sunbeams of
the far Campania; and, best of all, the love-songs of home--that sweet
spot, toward which I look as the first woman, exiled forever, must have
looked toward the barred gates of lost Paradise.
When the wheezy machine rested, we gave the player a small (very small)
fortune in loose change and the remnants of our lunch. He had only
a cracker and two onions in his wallet, and the wayfarer would have
knelt for gratitude, had we allowed it, while he rained blessings on
our heads, in the name of the Queen of Heaven, the saints, and all the
angels.
“Where do you camp?” asked the antiquary, when the benediction slacked.
“Wherever the night finds me. I have a blanket, Victor is company, and
the sky is my tent.”
There was infinite pathos in the words and his glance up to the arch
overhead. The flash of hero’s armor in the changeful curtains of
the glorious tent warned us to go on; but we were slow to leave the
stranger, and would have taken him with us, but the ambulance was
already over-loaded.
He stood bareheaded long as we were in sight, lazily grinding “The
Last Rose of Summer,” as though he was falling asleep. Faint and clear
the music drifted after us, by distance mellowed into sweetness. Miles
away, now lost in the valley, now low on the hills, floated
“Tufts of tune like thistle-down,”
wafted along by the soft night-breeze. When the last wandering note
died away we took up the refrain “Oh! who would inhabit this cold world
alone?” and, looking at the sentinel stars, thought pityingly of the
exile, alone in his tent--a mighty pavilion of royal purple, which
deepening shadows widened into a solitude vast as eternity, mysterious
as death.
The singing was very soft, for Thalia was crying, as we discovered by
tiny sniffs muffled behind her hankerchief, and you know how contagious
home-sickness is, and the sweeping gloom was oppressive even with the
best company. The cheerful day, with all its trailing splendors, was
dead; the fine gold of sunset became dross. A pale, white shining
in the east announced the rising moon, and in its mystic glow the
mountains put on spectral shapes and journeyed with us. A solemn
stillness filled the night and rested on the party which had set out
so gayly in the morning. One by one the voices hushed, and silence
followed, so intense it was almost painful.
We will anticipate, as our friends the novelists say, and follow
the march of the minstrel--one of the last of the gentle race of
troubadours. We heard of his safe arrival at Albuquerque and at
Bernalillo. Two days’ journey southward, the mail-boy reported having
seen him, moving in a dazed, bewildered way, mourning for the little
doggie, which was missing. “There are no sausage factories here,” said
our informant, with a smile of ghastly significance. “But a big Mexican
dog could swallow that pup like a pill.”
A lively letter from a friend in Silver City recorded his passage
through the lower country. The Pueblo Indians gave him of their poor
substance, and made him at home in their mud hovels, regarding him as
a great medicine-man, with a magic box. In their childish curiosity,
they wanted to chop open the cage and see the singing-birds inside. At
a little village, whose name I do not now recall, the whole population
flocked round the itinerant. He was a choice item for the local editor
of the _Pharos of the Occident_, a miner living on imagination, who
fancied himself a brilliant writer and financier, and in a lurid
editorial he hailed the musician as the forerunner of Thomas and
Mapleson, and hinted it was high time to form a stock company for the
purpose of building an adobe opera-house. Everywhere the player was
well received, till he reached Socorro. On the edge of the Jornado,
from immemorial ages overrun by the Apache, the Western Bedouin, every
trace of him was lost.
The tameless warriors of Victorio’s band are deaf to “Hear me, Norma,”
and I greatly fear the gray scalp of the minstrel is a trophy in the
belt of the red chief, and that his poor old bones lie unburied in
the treeless, waterless, wind-swept desert, truly named, by the first
Spaniard who dared its perils, _Jornada del Muerto_--Journey of Death.
CHAPTER IX. TO THE TURQUOIS MINES, (_Continued._)
At evening the gentle shepherd of New Mexico leads his flock from
high pastures, where the precipitation of moisture is greatest and,
therefore, grass is freshest, to the fold, or corral, in the valley.
It is precisely the pattern of fold abounding in Palestine and still
to be seen on the outskirts of Alexandria--an enclosure made by
crooked stakes driven in the ground, poorly held together by strips of
rawhide. No two are of the same length. All were twisted and gnarled
in the growing, and lean out of the perpendicular. A shabby fence,
uglier than everything except a mud fence, which the reader knows
is the superlative ugliness. By the light of the moon we noted the
fashion of the shepherd’s Cain-and-Abel suit of goatskin; and, instead
of the classic crook, wreathed with garlands gathered in flowery
meadows, the Rocky Mountain Endymion guarded his flock with a shotgun
and bowie-knife, less fearful of the wolf than of his own thieving
countrymen.
We observe another Asian custom here, that of sleeping on the roofs in
summer. The heavenly nights invite one out, and the flat housetop is a
much pleasanter place to make one’s bed than the cellar-like interior,
with its earthly scents. The sluggard Mexican, who has killed the long
hours of the common enemy by dozing in the sun, rouses toward sunset
and spreads out the _colchon_, or wool mattress, if they are very poor,
or a bed of skins. The stairway is a rickety ladder, leaning against
the outer wall of the mud house, and the rapidity and ease with which
the natives go up and down is surprising. I have seen women carry jars
of water on their head, not spilling a drop, as they ascend the ladder,
touching it only with their feet. The old people--mummies of the
time of Cheops--go to bed at sunset; a little later the children and
chickens hop up the loose rounds; then the lord of the estate, and his
dusky spouse, with her cat; and lastly the ratty dogs, moving nimbly,
as the trained ones of the circus. Haul up the ladder, and the castle
is secure. There is no fear of rain. There is no dew, no fog or mist,
to blur the clear shining of the stars above. The low wind is the very
breath of heaven; the bright night is filled with sleep.
So slept the Saviour of the world on the housetop of Lazarus, at
Bethany, whither he had walked in the cool of the day. Looking from
that lowly bed toward the many mansions of his Father’s house, well
might the homeless guest utter the pathetic cry: “The foxes have holes
and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where
to lay his head.”
Near the City of the Pueblos, within sight of the graceful spire of
the Sisters’ Chapel, was a coyote tearing a stray lamb to pieces. We
had met the ninety-and-nine an hour before, returning to the fold from
the river. The wild, tameless creature there was in perfect keeping
with the continued newness of a country where white men have lived
nearly three centuries. He started, looked fearlessly out of the
sage-bush, and the clear moonlight outlined the true wolf’s head, with
its fox-like muzzle and sharp, forward-pointed ears. He glared at us
a moment, and then quietly and leisurely stalked away, amid a general
lament that we had neither gun nor pistol at hand. The beast was of the
“Æsop’s Fable” breed--a large, handsome fellow, whose pictorial pelt
would have made an elegant foot-rug.
Let me not close without idling what became of the “regular bonanza.”
The day after our return to Santa Fé, the many-named Mexican called,
bringing his fine _chalchuite_. He explained, with impressive gesture
and rhetorical flourish, he was too poor to own so rich a jewel,
fit for the king’s son, and would sell it, if _la Senora_ would pay
him--naming the price. At first I was appalled at the magnitude of the
sum; but the stone of inimitable hue, lying in the lean, brown hand,
had a sort of magnetism. The familiar tint was charming, matching as
it did a tiny ring long worn for remembrance, and with much cracked
Spanish and broken English, a bargain was made, and we parted, with
many a cordial _adios_. No, not even in the close confidence of print
will I tell you, beloved, the price of the princely jewel. The secret
will go with me to the grave. Enough that it was exhaustive. I am
blushing over it yet.
The following week I heard a low whisper that Juan Fresco did not
find the turquois at _Los Cerillos_; but got it in a trade with a
wild savage, ignorant of its worth. A Navajo, allowed to leave the
Reservation, under protection of a pass, and pay a stealthy visit to
his own hunting-grounds, had let it go for four yards of red flannel.
Cool John had slyly arranged the whole affair, and whisked the stone
out of his sleeve in the very nick of time. Fortune turned his head,
as she has many a stronger one. He retired from the box, and set up a
saloon, the “San Francisco,” under a bower of cedar boughs, in the near
mining camp. Being of a convivial turn, in spite of mournful eyes and
voice, at last accounts, Juan Fresco was his own best customer at the
bar.
However, I had my costly prize, and in the seclusion of my own room
gloated over it, and fearful of burglars, hid it at night under the
edge of the carpet behind the bureau. After much deliberation regarding
the shape in which it would best appear, I sent the _chalchuite_ to
the leading jeweler of New York. Too precious for the mail, it went
express, and I carefully held a receipt for its full value. In good
time the little lavender-box returned by mail. I untied the string with
nervous haste and lo! my pattern locket lapped in red cotton, and the
“regular bonanza.”
A brief note explained Messrs. B. & B’s “regret to state the sample of
turquois will not endure polish or cutting. The color is a mere surface
stain on gneiss, and easily scales off, exposing the brown stone, as
you may readily discover by trying it with your scissors-point. We
have received several such specimens from New Mexico. They have no
commercial value. This has none whatever, except to its owner.”
Then I felt like the tender poet who sends off a song that is his
heart’s delight, and receives next week a very precious letter, in
familiar handwriting, accompanied by a printed circular, bearing the
awful words, “Declined, with thanks.”
* * * * *
Yesterday I examined a collection of relics--not exquisitely beautiful,
but exquisitely old--from various points along the valleys of the San
Pedro, the Gila, and the Rio Grande. They were mainly broken potteries,
a few sacred whispering-stones from old _estufas_, rude arms of
_iztli_, and the familiar flint arrows, such as have been discovered
in every portion of the globe where there are graves of men. Among
many trinkets offered, I chose a little looking-glass of _iztli_, and
an amulet of _chalchuite_ from the ruins of a prehistoric city near
El Paso. It was close to the Texas line, and within the limit of the
mound-builders’ region. I selected these trifles because they were
feminine belongings, and brought me nearer than the pipes and hatchets
could bring me to my dead and gone sisters. The mirror, about half the
size of your hand, is made of _iztli_, or obsidian, an exceedingly
hard, vitreous substance, plentiful in volcanic countries, of smoky
tint, and capable of high polish. The art of working this intractable
material is practically lost in our times, but when wrought by the
Indigene was useful as iron or tempered steel.[16]
The amulet and twenty beads of _chalchuite_ were hidden in a black
glazed jar, of the shape made by natives to-day, buried in a cave
many feet below the surface of the ground. It was accidentally
opened, in 1878, by a party of miners digging for silver. Probably
a treasure-house, abandoned at the last moment, when the besieged
inhabitants fled before a victorious army. Stone hammers were found
near the cave, arrow-heads, hatchets, serrated swords of _iztli_, like
the Aztecan, and half a human skull, evidently broken by a blow of the
hatchet or tomahawk.
The amulet is perhaps half an inch long, one-eighth of an inch
thick--an irregular square, rudely carved and smoothed, probably by
rubbing with another stone. The veining on one side gives the semblance
of a star. A hard tool and patient hand must have been required to
drill a hole through this stubborn stone. The string which threaded it
has gone to dust; the hand which carved it and the race of which it
is a faint trace are vanished into the voiceless past. Long lines of
prostrate walls, miles of _acequias_, or irrigating ditches, broken
potteries, profusely scattered, indicate a dense population once
held the valley near El Paso, and lived in cities containing twenty
thousand or thirty thousand souls. There is no reason to believe the
modern inhabitants of this country belong to a proud line, shorn of its
ancient splendors. They have no sort of history, and among a people
without written language, poetry, or music, tradition soon becomes
confused. All their remains and three hundred years of continuous
history show they have steadily declined in power and numbers; but
they are and have always been miserably poor. Their fabrics, arms,
architecture are of the coarsest, most primitive description.
The vessels of silver and of gold described by early explorers to
a waiting and expectant world have not been found in this or any
other spot in New Mexico. They existed only in the fevered fancies
of adventurers, blinded by their own imaginings, drunk with their
own conceits. If metals we count valuable were concealed in the
ancient treasure-house, they are lost in the deep grave with the dead
centuries. Only these trifling memorials have escaped the common doom.
My amulet is a sorry love-token; yet, for the sake of the soft meaning
it once bore, I touch the trinket lightly. Rude in outline, utterly
lacking in grace and luster, it represents a Western idyl.
Young were the lovers, I know (for love is ever young), and to eyes
beloved each was beautiful and true. Perhaps she stood like Ruth among
the corn, as the warm blood flushed his face, when he bound it with his
love as a crown unto her, fastening it with vows, and promises, and
never-ending kisses. Or did he set it as a seal upon her arm, making
its pulses beat fast to a new music, under the secret magic of its
circle? Or was it hung on her neck, above the heart which fluttered
like a caught bird at its touch, in the hour which comes but once in
a lifetime? Ah, well you know, gentle reader, how she cherished the
keepsake, and pondered it over when his face was not there, little
dreaming how one of a race unheard of should, centuries afterward,
dream over it too, and call back her spirit from out the unrecorded
past, her gracious presence and tender words.
All, all gone now. My young mound-builders--if mound-builders they
were--sleep with the primeval giants. And, while a thousand wonderments
hover about the poor keepsake, this only we do know: that they walked
blindly along the path we call life; slowly, and with many a failure,
worked out their destiny. They loved, sinned and suffered, died, and
were forgotten. The surface of the country is altered since that old
love-making. Strong cities are leveled with the plains, tribes are
scattered, languages lost, whole races are extinct; but humanity
remains the same--the one thing that will outlast the world. These
dead-and-gone tribes were not foreign to us. They were of our own
blood, our elder brethren; and as their names and deeds are blotted
out, leaving not a memory, so we are moving forward in the resistless
march, holding in our hands messages appealing to futurity--messages
addressed to darkness, dropped into oblivion.
The relics from the Rio Grande were buried down deep. Perhaps my young
lovers whispered the sweet words which made Eden Paradise, before
the witching eyes of Marie Stuart turned the hearts of men; before
Cleopatra shone; before Lucretia spun. The _chalchuite_ might lie in
this rare, dry air till the crack of doom and suffer no change, as our
old earth swings through the constellations, year by year. Possibly,
its wearer was contemporary with the man of Natchez, whose bones were
exhumed not long ago, under the Mississippi bluffs, in strata said to
prove him not less than one hundred thousand years old.
If the story were told, we might not care to know what manner of man
the bygone mound-builder was. His history must have been one of wars,
and the struggles of the chiefs were trivial and petty to that of
mighty Hector and Agamemnon, if we accept the testimony of the remains
which still exist. Let us believe we lost no grand epic in the Iliad of
the lost race.
The great historian wisely says: “The annals of mankind have never
been written, can never be written, nor would it be within the limits
of human capacity to read them, if they were written. We have a leaf
or two torn from the great book of human fate, as it flutters in the
storm-winds ever sweeping across the earth; but we have no other light
to guide us across the track which all must tread, save the long
glimmering of yesterdays, which grows so swiftly fainter and fainter,
as the present fades off into the past.”
FOOTNOTE:
[16] It is said by Pliny to have been discovered first in Ethiopia,
by a man named Obsidius. Hence the name. Gems and whole statues were
made of it. He also speaks of four elephants of obsidian dedicated by
Augustus in the Temple of Concord.
CHAPTER X. AMONG THE ARCHIVES.--THINGS NEW AND OLD.
North of El Palacio, is a waste spot of earth, covering perhaps half
an acre. It contains neither grass, weeds, nor moss, not even a
straggling sage-bush or forlorn cactus; nothing but bare desert sand
and a solitary cotton-wood tree, whose luxuriant leafage gives no sign
of its struggle for life in a region waterless ten months of the year.
High adobe walls bound the sterile enclosure on two sides; the third
is occupied by government buildings; and the fourth is partly wall and
partly abandoned offices, always locked and unused since the brave days
when the Spaniards lorded it like princes in “The Palace.”
Ever a lover of lonesome places, I had often wistfully eyed
these mysterious apartments; and one day, being sadly in want of
entertainment, hunted up the keys and sallied across the back yard,
determined to explore the secret places. The first door I tried to
open was made of heavy double plank, studded with broad-headed nails.
I fitted a key into the rough, old-fashioned lock, and, pushing with
all my strength, it slowly swung on rusty hinges, into a room, perhaps
seventeen by twenty feet in size, barely high enough for a man to stand
upright in. As I stepped on the loose pine boards of the floor, a swarm
of mice scampered to their burrows in the walls, and the deathlike
smell of mildew and decay smote the afflicted sense. Well for the
chronicles is it there are no rats in the territory. Involuntarily
I paused at the entrance, to let the ghosts fly out; and several
minutes passed before my eyes, accustomed to the darkness of this
treasure-house, could see the shame of its neglect.
I had entered the historic room of New Mexico! Tumbled into barrels and
boxes, tossed on the floor in moist piles, lay the written records of
events stretching over a period of more than three hundred years, the
archives of a Province known as Nueva Espagña, large as France. In an
atmosphere less dry than this they would have rotted ages ago. Nothing
but the extreme purity of the air saved them from destruction.
It was mid-winter, and melted snow slowly trickled through the
primitive roofing of mud and gravel. The sun shone brightly, and,
though days had passed since the last white spot disappeared from the
surface of the earth, still a hideous ooze filtered through the ashes
and clay overhead, and dripped in inky streams down the pine rafters
and walls. I am told the house was anciently used as a stable. If the
first Spanish commandants and governor-generals kept their horses in
this windowless cave, sorry am I for the gallant steeds they professed
to love next to their knightly honor and the ladies.
The names of some of the _Conquistadores_ have faded from history, and
others live only in tradition. Nearly all the earlier important records
have been destroyed. They accumulated rapidly in immense masses, and
the heavy lumber was shifted from place to place by officials, to
make room for things more valuable. Careless hands and the slow wear
of time were not as effectual in blotting them out as a certain chief
executive--a lineal descendant of Genseric, appointed by President of
the United States--who made his administration memorable by building
a bonfire of parchments and papers, filled with priceless material,
never to be replaced. He also sold a quantity as waste paper. By happy
accident, a portion of this merchandise was afterward recovered, though
one might think it as well employed in wrapping tea and sugar as going
to decay in this neglected den. We grow indignant over the spirit which
could not spare one reader of the picture-writing of the Aztecs or the
_quippus_ of Peru. What shall we say of the man in authority who, in
the best age of culture and research, abuses a trust like this, who
deliberately fired whole wagon-loads of manuscripts of the deepest
interest to the archæologist, the historian, and student.
He had not even the excuse of the first Archbishop of Mexico, who burnt
a mountain of manuscripts in the market-place, stigmatizing them as
magic scrolls; and was more guilty than Cardinal Ximines, who in the
trial by fire alone could exercise the sorcery concealed in the Arabic
manuscripts of Granada.
The delusions of fifteen hundred years are not easily put to flight,
and there might be a drop of charity for the bigotry and intolerance
of the Spaniard; but the destroyer of history in New Mexico has no
defense. I suppress his name. An archæologist from New England is now
busy among a heap of the sold documents, piled away in the back room of
an old shop by a citizen of Santa Fé, who forsaw that they might one
day be of interest, possibly of value.
It was my pleasant work to help in overhauling the state papers, and
the quiet hours of careful work were well rewarded. All sorts of papers
were tossed together in the cavernous hole. I dug out quantities of
printed matter of recent date, mixed with the old and weather-stained
official documents, letters, copies of reports and dispatches,
marking political changes from 1580, when Santa Fé was founded by
Don Antonio de Espego, to the year 1879. The province at first was
ruled by military governors, appointed by the viceroys of Mexico, and
communication with them and with Spain was so rare they reigned as
despots, in haughty pride of place, and bitterly abused their power
to kill, enslave, plunder, and subdue the heathen claimed for an
inheritance.
The first MS. opened bore the date 1620. It was illuminated with heavy
seals and signed with strange, puzzling _rubricas_; but the signature
was completely effaced. It was part of a frozen chunk, tied with hempen
cord, and peeled off a block wet through and through. The excellence of
the parchment-like paper kept it from dissolving into a lump of sticky
pulp.
Some papers were soaked so it was necessary to spread them on boards,
to be dried in the sun, before being deposited in a place of safety.
Rich treasure for the mining of the future historian. The eternal west
wind fluttered mockingly among crumpled leaves torn from the book of
human fate, and a sudden gust whirled a yellow scrap high up in the
branches of the cotton-wood tree. With the help of a Mexican boy, I
rescued from ruin what proved a portion of the journal of Otervin,
military commandant of Nueva Espagña, who undertook to reduce the
Pueblos to subjection in 1681, and found them too many for him.
Mixed with high heaps of worthless trash were worn and water-stained
fragments, precious as the last leaves of the Sybil. These, pieced
together, were smoothed with care and laid by for after reference.
Poor, perishing records of ambitions baffled and hopes unfulfilled;
and, dreaming over the names of men who sought immortality on earth and
now sleep forgotten, I deeply felt their teaching--the law that any
lasting condition is impossible in the hurrying march we call life,
where nothing is constant but change, nothing certain but death.
Through the lazy Mexican afternoons I groped along the musty annals
with steady purpose, and in the shadowy history wandered back two
centuries. Among the MSS, I lived in the days when William of Orange
fought the grand battle which decided the fate of the Stuarts and
established English dominion over the seas; when the sun of Poland was
sinking in endless night with the dying Sobieski, our patriot hero of
early romance, whose name, consecrated by poetry and heroism, dwells
in memory with Emmet and Kossuth; when Madame de Maintenon, at the
court of the king, who was worshipped as a demigod, was writing long
letters of the fatigues of court, and how she worried from morning till
midnight, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, and amuse the old
tyrant, who was past being amused. Spain had been shaken by desperate
wars, and out of armies nursed in victories came a host of adventurers
to the New World, where glory and fortune were reported as waiting for
every newcomer. They were not colonists, emigrants, as with us, who
had everything to gain and nothing to lose; but men of the sword, used
to command, who loved no music so well as trumpet and drum, the rattle
and clang of arms. Reckless gamblers as Spaniards have been in all ages
everywhere, they were ready to stake vast possessions on a venture
in mines reported richer than ancient Ophir, and to risk assured
fame for possible conquest, among nations whose walled cities were
described as equal to the best strongholds of Islam. The rich mediæval
glow enveloping some of the reports charms the literary forager, not
overfond of statistics, who loves no figures so well as figures of
speech. Men in their summer prime organized roving expeditions in quest
of fortune, gallant freebooters, made ferocious by greed of gold, who
started gayly, as to a regatta, for the unexplored province of Nueva
Espagña.
They found the Promised Land one of which the greater part must
forever remain an uninhabitable magnificence. Yet everything reminded
them of old Spain, especially of the Castiles. The chain of snowy
peaks, accessible only to the untamable Apache, projected against the
speckless blue the blade of white teeth which suggested the name of
Sierra Nevada. The dry, scorched table-lands, league after league,
stretching away under the blazing sun a shadeless desert, were like the
_mesas_ in the dreariest portions of the kingdom of Philip--and the
mud hovels of adobe, with open apertures for windows, were a perpetual
reminder of the homeless habitations of the Castilian peasantry.
The few rich valleys (_pasturas_) capable of cultivation by irrigation
were not unlike the _vegas_ of the East, and little streams of melted
snow-water, filtered down from the “iced mountain-top,” cold as snow,
clear as glass, still bear the lovely names of the rills sparkling
along the Alpujarras.
The old hidalgos looked for better things than half-naked savages, mud
huts, and stunted cornfields. Sterile and forbidding as the country
appeared, they believed an inheritance was reserved for them behind
the gloomy mountain walls, beyond the awful cañon, where the black,
rushing river is shut in by sheer precipices fifteen hundred feet high.
Sustained by a faculty of self-persuasion equaled by no other people on
the face of the earth, they pushed on and on through the very heart of
the wilderness, nearly to the present site of Omaha. This was more than
three hundred years ago; yet are the novel-writers complaining that we
have no antiquity, no mystery, no dim lights and deep shadows, where
the imagination of the story-teller may flower and bear fruit.
CHAPTER XI. AMONG THE ARCHIVES.--A LOVE LETTER.
One day, while mousing or, as President Lincoln used to say, browsing
among the manuscripts, and musing about the dead and gone heroes, and
how times have altered since they rode out like Paladins of romance to
tempt Fortune in her high places, I came on a letter which differed
from the commonplace documents littered about, and was not emblazoned
with the splash of any great seal. It was very yellow and musty,
stained in one corner by a blue book thrown on it in the time of
President Johnson. It required the daintiest handling. Carefully I
unfolded the sheet, almost thick as vellum and in danger of dropping
to tatters, and marked a spot once sealed with wax, flaked off long
ago. The address was Antonio Eusebio de Cubero, Secretary of Gen. Don
Diego de Vargas, Governor of Nueva Mejico. I opened the quaint missive,
and lo! a love-letter, dated Seville, November, 1692. It began with
stately, sweet salute: “To my own true love and faithful knight, from
his Rosita de Castile.” Like the Dantean lovers,
“I turned no further leaf.”
Nearly two centuries the antique billet had lain entombed in this
earthy sepulchre; now would I bring it to the light again, and,
tenderly folding the sheet, I bore it to the quiet of my own room, for
reading at leisure.
This is the way it runs, written in diminutive hand, indistinct at
the beginning, now almost illegible. With tender words, not always
in correctest spelling, the little Rose of Castile writes to Eusebio
Antonio, that her father and big brother wage war in Algeria. She had
just learned to sing, with her mandolin, a madrigal, which she quotes
at length and will not bear translation. I cannot catch the subtle
essence, the exquisite Spanish-Arab perfume and prison it in harsh
English. I know nothing in our language so nearly approaching the
dainty love-ditty as the song of Burns, which will live till the last
lover dies:
“Had we never loved so kindly,
Had we never loved so blindly,
Never met and never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.”
She told how, when the young moon was shining, and the fat, cross
duenna was fast asleep, she had crept from her side and out of reach of
her snoring, to wander along the Guadalquivir where the citron shade
is deepest and the silver lilies shadow singing waters. She was tired
of dances and of flattery, and that odious Manuelita, and, lighted only
by the moon and the glow-worm, the maiden lingered by the fountain till
the bell in the tower rang two. “There, by the bed of sweet basil--dost
remember Eusebio caro?”
And what for, lady fair? _Ay de mi!_ Is there a reader so dull as not
to know, without telling, ’twas to dream, and to dream, and to dream?
Easy to picture her in graceful youth and all beautiful. The delicate
Murillo head; the Andalusian eyes glancing this way and that from the
arched window Moresque; shyly she flitted out the barred gate among the
myrtles, stepping so lightly she scarcely startled the dove who stirred
in her nest; the flower-like face draped by the veiling, envious
_rebosa_, held close by the rose-leaf hand; the one bright circlet
shining on the taper finger--can you not see her stealing along through
the golden orange orchard, the almond’s snow-white glitter? There, with
infinite love and longing, with lips waiting to be kissed, she listened
to the nightingale’s song to the rose, starting at the silken rustle
of her dress; and as the strokes of the bell shook the giant pillars
of the cathedral, fleeing like a guilty thing back to the snoring, fat
aunt. Only she lingered a moment to look up at the indigo sky and the
slim Giralda tower, there by the bed of sweet basil--“dost remember,
Eusebio caro?”
Such was the soft Rosita de Castile, and she asks the old question:
When dost thou dream of me, dearest? It is a sort of treachery to
publish the deep secret, and I beg pardon of the shade of the gentle
lady, if it lingers round the hard clay of which these walls are
made. O tender love! O fond young heart, that stopped beating nearly
two hundred years ago! I fear Don Antonio Eusebio was hardly so true
as thou wast. Knights-errant, tilting through the New World, had
no such quest as the blameless Sir Galahad, though they pushed the
“_pundonor_” to the very verge of nonsense. Cortez set an example which
his successors were quick to follow. Under the garb of gallantry, they
wedded _paramour_, and with high Castilian pride proclaimed their honor
bright when they were ready to fight dragons and die in steel harness
full knightly.
You remember, reader dear, Millais’s “Huguenot Lovers”? Of course,
you must, for you have often seen it, and even the poor prints retain
some hint of the lovely original. In all her long galleries Art has no
fairer creation. It is lovelier even than Ary Scheffer’s “Marguerite,”
than the fallen “Francesca di Rimini.” The loving arms clinging to
the handsome youth; the wistful, upturned face, so anxious, pale
and tearful, on the eve of parting, which her fears make sad as St.
Bartholomew’s--such charm was in the face of my Rosita de Castile; mine
by right of adoption, though she died more than a century before I was
born.
How he looked we know by the portraits of Velasquez. Tall and stately
was he, lithe and sinewy as one skilled in arms, manly sports, and fond
of hounds and hunting; a long lean hand, with blazing jewels--one a
precious fire-opal, the Girasol of Zimapan; olive skin and heavy brows;
eyes like sharp stilettos; peaked beard, curled mustachios, trimmed
and perfumed; black dress-coat, silken hose, silver shoe-buckles,
spotless neck-ruff; chains and ribbons of honor; golden cross richly
broidered on his mantle; jingling spurs, the mark of knighthood--this
was Don Antonio Eusebio de Cubero, who thought to swell his fortune
and fill the measure of his fame under the royal banner upheld by
Governor-General Vargas.
Nor must we forget to name the good long rapier, worn yet in old Spain,
where the sword forever stays the scepter. Add to this pictorial dress
the graces which wait on youth--refined courtesy and lofty presence,
come of the habit of command--and you have the secretary of the hero
who went, saw, and conquered Santa Fé for the crown of Spain.
The beloved Eusebio Antonio kept no copy of his vows and promises;
but I warrant, when there were none but the angels to hear, they were
given--made binding and strong. In fair Seville the young lovers stole
from the lights and the dancing, down by the bed of sweet basil to seal
their contract with solemn oaths.
“Mixed with kisses, sweeter, sweeter
Than anything on earth.”
The dear Eusebio was lured away from Rosita’s bower to that New World
which is the old. Across the sea had floated, faint and far, like dying
echoes coming near, stories of a land of wild men and beasts, strange
birds, and hissing serpents; of mountains of rock inscribed with mystic
hieroglyphs, and terraced pyramids, upholding undying fires--temples
the incense of whose altars ascended forever into a sky of speckless
sapphire. These were the regions of finest furs, of gold-dust and
ivory, of silver, pearls, and precious stones, all to be had for the
gathering. Such tales were as singing sirens, as airy hands beckoning
in the shadowy distances of dim and unknown shores.
What wonder the young men were fired with the idea of enriching
impoverished estates by the plunder of opulent cities, and old men
approved their resolution to grasp some portion of this wealth, to
march with triumphant banners through the length and breadth of the
land, all the while striking stout blows for Holy Cross?
In that age of few books, when writing was a clerkly accomplishment,
there had come down from the fathers many traditions of the hero who
had wrested the scepter from the hand of Atahualpa on the heights of
the Andes. The discoverer of the Mississippi was a century asleep under
its rushing waters. They had heard the name and fame of the peerless
Englishman--seaman, soldier, courtier, poet, historian--who sought
a city of gold on the banks of the Orinoco. Nor could they believe
that genius and valor died when the aged paralytic, beggared and
heart-broken, laid his head on the block, saying: “It matters little
how the head lieth, so that the heart be right,” the noblest head that
ever rolled in English dust.
The supernatural swayed men’s minds in those days, and myriads of
imaginary foes were to be fought, besides the beasts in their dens and
the naked, painted savage. No doubt that Antonio Eusebio de Cubero felt
equal to every danger he must face--the perilous voyage, and the many
miseries which Rosita’s fears magnified out of all bounds.
The parting for years so weary shook the heart of the little Rose.
Better than I can tell, my reader knows it. The lingering clasp of
hands, the yearning gaze, the tears, the vows, the prayers; the slow
ship (there was no steamer then), with gay pennons and fluttering
signals, sailing straight into the sunset, into eternity, away, away
out of the world; a fading sail on the flushed water, a speck on the
horizon’s edge; he is gone, taking with him her happiness, her smiles,
her passionate young heart.
But they would return, those _Caballeros_ on the deck of the
“Columella,” heroes every one, bringing the wealth of Pizarro and the
glory of Cortez. The thought was cheer and comfort to Rosita in the
long, slow waiting--one of the hardest things to be learned in the
lesson of loving. Men have a thousand objects to live for--the whole
world is theirs, and in their changeful, many-colored life love is only
one slender, shining thread; women have nothing but their hearts. He
went out to a field of limitless possibilities, filled with the charm
of novelty, variety, adventure; she to her maiden bower, her lute,
her embroidery, to dream over the love-words till his very name would
thrill and send the blood dancing through her veins; to wait through
the dull sameness of empty days, dropping one by one into weary, silent
nights; to watch the last light against the towers, the last sparkles
on the sea, making it a sea of glass mingled with fire, and entreat
the Mother of Sorrows with piteous prayers for the wanderer in the
vague, far-off country beyond them; to sicken for gracious messages and
letters that do not come, and yet be loyal in the belief they have been
written, they are somewhere--this is the sweet patience born of woman,
the brave, persistent faith, almost a religion.
It is the one who sails away who forgets; the one who stays at home who
remembers. He was a false teacher who said Paradise is in the shadow of
the crossing of cimeters. You and I know, dear reader, and our little
Rose of Seville knew, it is in the shadow of the one we love.
CHAPTER XII. AMONG THE ARCHIVES. (_Continued._)
From the journal of Capitan-General Don Domingo Jeronso Petriz de
Cruzate (what a Spanish ring there is in that name!), who was governor
and military commandant of Nueva Mejico from 1684 to 1689, we can form
some idea of the state of affairs in the province. But a few detached
pages of this important document survive. They appear the clearest
where all are confused.
The Spaniards had been driven from the country as far south as the
Texan line. Cruzate’s little army failed in the reconquest of the
liberty-loving Pueblos, and the service was finally entrusted to
General Vargas, or, as it was anciently written, Bargas, to whom the
faithful knight and true love was secretary.
The chronology of this period is some times in a hopeless tangle;
but the march of Governor-General Don Diego de Vargas is pretty well
connected. He lives in history as one of the most bigoted and brutal
of the Conquistadores. As has been written of the Duke of Alva: “His
vices were colossal, and he had no virtues.” From shreds and patches
of mouldy MSS. his march is traced with tolerable clearness, and the
conduct of the foreigners was so nearly alike that their stories are
much the same.
By and with consent of the royal audience, he left home and pleasures
in the City of Mexico for El Paso del Norte, to organize one hundred
friendly Indians and less than two hundred mounted men. Among the
latter was the secretary, Antonio Eusebio de Cubero, who on fiesta
days wore a light glove on his casque, a love-knot on his spear.
The country swarmed with a numerous and enraged enemy, and every
league of ground was contested. Vargas seemed awake to the perils of
the situation, and to have a wholesome fear of public opinion besides,
for on the night before marching he wrote to Count Galvas, Viceroy of
Mexico: “I have determined to risk life and all in the attempt, and am
prepared rather to be considered rash to being looked upon as a man
of too much caution, thereby exposing my reputation to remarks.” He
was successful from the very outset. The reader will remember that the
Pueblos lived in community houses, built in a hollow square. A whole
tribe sometimes inhabited one house, and one after another they were
reduced to submission.
The invading army found game in abundance; but the blessing of the
early and the latter rain is not for New Mexico, and the scarcity
of water made great suffering. “In roasting-ear time” the bold
land-robbers feasted in the cornfields; “hares like those of the
Castiles” furnished nourishing food; and in all their journeying
simple natives gave the fair visitants their choicest stores, for
paltry trinkets of glass, pewter, and tinsel. The blaze of their
camp-fires attracted large numbers of rattlesnakes--“the serpent with
tiger-colored skin and castanets in its tail;” the mountain cat’s green
eyes glared at them from the black rim of the illuminated circle; and
lovely gazelles shyly approached the springs, where they had hitherto
drank undisturbed, to sniff the tainted air and gaze at the strangers.
There survives one description of a large torpid lizard the explorers
encountered, striped with red, white and black bars--a hideous
creature; and a horned snake, kept in spirits, to be sent the viceroy.
Here, too, we hear first of the wonderful traveling stones, that within
the distance of a few feet of each other seek a common centre, roll
together, and lie close like eggs in a nest. They were in the bottom
of shallow basins in the levels, and their magnetism was a source of
wondering awe to the superstitious soldiery. The reporter, a naturalist
of some sort, whose name is lost, begs a moderate subsidy, that he
may employ natives to help capture the venomous beasts and assist in
making collections. The barbarians refused to work, even with wages,
and thus writes Vargas: “I have been obliged to raze whole villages to
the ground, in order to punish their obstinacy.” Possibly here we have
the secret of the uninscribed ruins now slowly crumbling down in the
valleys by the narrowing waters of the Pecos and the Rio Grande.
The chief burden is the Indian. The chronicles are heavily laden with
details of grievances the conquerors were obliged to bear from him. How
he refused to accept slavery as his best estate; and, worse than that,
how he rebelled against the power which would force him to worship the
unknown, unseen God, whose sign was the red cross, whose ambassadors’
march was tracked by the smoke of cities sacked and burnt, lands made
desolate, the widow’s cry, the orphan’s wail.
The Spaniards were disciples of the school of Narvaez, who on his
death-bed, being urged by his confessor to forgive his enemies: said
“Bless your heart, Father, I have none. I have killed them all.” In
those good old times--for as the poet sings,
“All times when old are good”--
the religion of the governor must be the religion of the governed.
The Pueblos were and still are sun worshipers; and every day their
deity--the peculiar friend of the red race--rose with unveiled face,
rejoicing the eyes and cheering the hearts of his children. Why should
they believe in One whose followers taught that sulphurous flames
were in waiting for all who had not money enough to pay for certain
mystic rites held over the dead body? Whenever there was chance of
escape, the Indians fled before the mailed and mounted warriors fast as
their own mountain antelopes, and the Pueblos were rapidly brought to
submission. To perfect the surrender of soul and body, after a city was
taken, Father Francisco Corvera baptized by thousands at a time. He was
attended by several Franciscan priests, charged with the reconversion
of those fallen from the true faith. They were forced to assemble
before a large cross in the plaza. There the red sinners were absolved
from their sins, and, on pain of death, forbidden their idolatrous
dances, especially the _cachina_, the delight of the aboriginal heart,
and, as the old MS. words it, “were to be obedient to the divine and
human majesty.”
Very devout was this Vargas. After the reduction of Jemez, he reported
to the Viceroy of Mexico, Count Galvas: “This action having been fought
the day before Santiago Day, I believe that glorious apostle and patron
saint interceded in our behalf, and which was the cause of our signal
success.”
Here are some of the mild requirements laid on the baptized heathen by
his order:
“They must keep crosses over their doors; treat ministers with love
and reverence; and, whenever they meet them, kiss the hem of their
habit, with submission and veneration. They must have their bows in
order and ten arrows, to offend and defend; and none shall dare use the
arms of the Spaniards, for the reason they are prohibited by the royal
ordinances.”
Fighting his way northward, near Zuni, he leveled a large pueblo, “the
size of a long horse-race;” but how long the horse-race was in that
time your correspondent has no means of knowing. By his own autograph
on the everlasting hills we know when and in what spirit the haughty
hidalgo passed that point for the recapture of La Villa Real de Santa
Fé, then in the hands of its rightful owners.
One hundred and ninety miles southwest of Santa Fé, ten miles from
the Arizona line, fifty miles west of the dividing ridge of the
continent--called, in consequence, Sierra Madre--is antique Zuni, a
city of memory. It is one of the seven vanishing cities sought by
Coronado in 1540, and by wandering knights from Spain and Portugal in
the time of Philip Second. Capital of the fabled kingdom of Cibola, it
is the most ancient and most interesting, because the least changed, of
all the pueblos of New Mexico.
When Governor-General Vargas and his gallant little army reached this
pueblo, they halted for rest and recruiting, before pressing on to the
City of Holy Faith. The General was accompanied by his secretary, the
beloved Antonio Eusebio, and they must have looked with the deepest
concern at the stout walls of the strange fortress. I have not been
able to learn whether he attacked it or not. Even a successful and
intrepid leader, with the help of the red allies, used to savage
warfare, would deliberate well before besieging that city set on a
hill, which must be carried by assault, in the face of arrows, slings,
lances, huge stones rolled from above, and burning balls of cotton
dipped in oil. The modern Zuni, a compact town of fifteen hundred
souls, stands in the centre of the valley of the Colorado Chichito
(Little Red River); but ancient Zuni, now in ruins, was several miles
away, on the top of a _mesa_, or precipice, one thousand feet high,
almost inaccessible from the valley. It was built in five stories, with
thick walls of stone laid in mud mortar, terraced from without and
fortified by towers. A formidable citadel.
The camp of the victorious army was probably in the present
camping-ground, a choice spot, where grass grows with tint of richest
green, lovely to the eye as fresh lilies--a garden beauty, skirting
the spring of cool, sweet water, about fifteen miles from old Zuni.
To reach it from Santa Fé, the traveler of to-day crosses a country
very beautiful and fertile, where rapid change of geological structure
makes varying change of scenery. Maize grows in the valley without
irrigation--not an _acequia_ in sight; and peaches, planted by the
Jesuit Fathers, are deliciously sweet. After straining over sand and
rock, in the hot, white sun-glare, with the fever-thirst which comes
from drinking alkali water, it must have been a deep pleasure for the
soldiery to leave the trackless plain, and lie in the cool, rich grass,
restful alike to jaded steed and war-worn rider; to feast their eyes
on the delicate enamel of green--the setting of this Diamond of the
Desert; and watch, as we have, the birds of strange note and plumage
coming and going, with merry twitter, flirt and flutter, to bathe and
drink in the sparkling fountain.
Enchanting effects of light and color vary the passing hours.
A rose-blush of exquisite haze greets the rising sun; and the
mirage--most marvelous of Nature’s mysteries--often swims in mid-air
in early morning, when the first warm flush has faded. The perfect
blue, curtaining the valley, is jeweled with opal and turquoise. That
ethereal brilliance allows no “middle tones.” The sun sets as on the
Nile, and when the flaring disc sinks low suddenly the hidden splendor
is unveiled--“a vision sent from afar, that mortals may feebly learn
how beautiful is Heaven.”
CHAPTER XIII. AMONG THE ARCHIVES. (_Continued._)
From Zuni dispatches were sent back to Count Galvas by a line of swift
runners reaching to Mexico. Perhaps a letter to Seville from the
faithful knight, who now had time for sweet thoughts of love, without
which this were the wilderness without the manna. I hope the reader
does not forget my young hero; for I love him dearly, and mean to stand
up for him to the last, through evil as well as through good report.
Skillful furbishers did what they could to restore the original luster
to dulled and dinted armor, and in the idlesse of camp the secretary
must often have looked up at two enormous pillars of sandstone towering
high on the sides of the _mesa_, appearing chiseled into human figures
of colossal size, fixed, immortal as the statues of Aboo Simbel. At
evening, while my Rosita walked through the drowsy Spanish city,
“Guarded by the old duenna,
Fierce and sharp as a hyena,
With her goggles and her fan
Waving on each wicked man,”
and Antonia Eusebio was smoothing his draggled plumes, he probably
heard from friendly Indians the wild legend still told there by the red
light of the camp-fires. The tradition runs that Zuni is the only city
on the earth which bore the weight of the Flood. Ages ago, an eternity
before white men came, rain fell in streams from the sky; adobe houses
melted away, and the whole world and everything in it was fast sinking
from sight. The neighboring tribes escaped from the rushing waters
to the top of this _mesa_; but the waves rose so fast nearly all
perished before reaching the summit of the cliff. In the midst of their
distress a black night (_noche triste_) fell on the land. Their God had
forgotten them, the sun turned his face away from his children, and
“darkness was the universe.” Still the waters rose higher and higher,
incessant, undiminished; still the people in blind panic pressed to the
topmost foothold, threatened with the fast-rising overflow. Above the
black abyss no light of sun or star, sign of promise, dove or olive.
In desperate extremity, they sought to avert the curse by sacrifice.
No time was there for song or prayer, altar-fire or incantation. They
snatched the children of the _cacique_ (a daughter lovely as light, a
smile of the Great Spirit, and a son beautiful as morning), adorned
them with a few gay feathers, and hurled them from the steep into
the boiling abyss--an offering to an offended Deity. The waters were
surging within a few feet of the top of the _mesa_. There the proud
waves were stayed. The victims were changed to the stone columns, a
sign from Heaven marking the mountain of refuge where the propitiatory
offering was accepted, and everlastingly commemorating the Deluge.
The _mesa_ is a mile across; an irregular figure, defined by abrupt
bluffs, almost perpendicular. On it are the remains of two pueblos,
whose outlines are clearly traceable--the dimensions of rooms and inner
walls. Like all ancient towns, they were fortified with an outer wall
in the shape of the letter V, to resist invasions of warlike tribes,
and watch-towers were placed at regular intervals. Crumbling walls,
made of little blocks of stone laid in mud-mortar, are scattered over
the ground in heaps from two to ten feet high. Here the fox and coyote
prowl by night, and the antiquarian haunts it by day. After careful
investigation, with Indian guides, they report the standing walls
rest on ruins of still greater age. The primitive masonry must have
been about six feet thick. In the more recent buildings the walls are
not over eighteen inches thick. The small sandstone blocks are laid
with neatness and regularity. Broken pottery is strewn about, and
arrow-heads of obsidian, flint, and jasper.
After the Deluge, when the waters abated off the face of the earth,
the tribes abandoned the hill city, and lived in the pleasant valley
till the Spanish invasion, when they again fled to the top of the
_mesa_. They turned at every place possible and fortified strongly
the two approaches by which the outworks could be assaulted, and held
out against the foe a long time. At last the heights were scaled. The
mail-clad warriors, with their swords of matchless temper, triumphed
over the rude arms of the feeble natives. From the highest watch-tower
the banner of the Cross was unfurled against the brilliant sky,
unflecked by cloud or shadow; and sun-lighted spears glittered in the
narrow streets of the devoted, the Holy City.
Imprinted in the solid rock, as in clay, is shown and may be seen this
day the foot-print of the first white man who reached the summit. When
you visit Zuni, the old guide, if you happen to get the right one, will
repeat this story, for a slight consideration.
The Zunis are the Yankees of the Pueblos--self-supporting, keen at a
bargain, thrifty, orderly, clean; that is, clean _for Indians_. I
presume every head in the Holy City could furnish numberless offerings
such as Diogenes (oldest of tramps) cracked on the pure altar of the
chaste Diana.
What Cholula was to the Aztec, Zuni is to the Pueblos; sacred as the
City of David to the sons of Israel. Touching the religion of this
people opens a subject so broad and so charming I am tempted to give
it more than a passing glance, but space forbids. They are pantheists
in the fullest sense of the word, and, though missions have been
established among them three hundred years, they, like all aborigines,
set their face as a flint against change, and still keep to the ancient
beliefs and customs. They worship the Supreme One, whose name it is
death to utter; Montezuma, his brother and equal; and the Sun to whom
they pray and smoke, because his eye is always open and his ear attends
the prayers of the red men. The Moon is the Sun’s wife, and eclipses
are family quarrels, that will result in disaster to the world if they
are not soon reconciled. The stars are their children; the largest is
the oldest.
Besides these superior deities, there is the great snake, to which they
look for life, by command of Montezuma.
Like our sea-serpent on the Atlantic Coast, he glideth at his own sweet
will, is seen at unexpected places, as suits his pleasure, is longer
than the tallest pine, and “thick as many men put together.”
[Illustration: Zuñi Basketry, and Toy Cradles.]
It has been well said the barbarian is the most religious of mortals.
His dependence on the elements for food and comfort makes the primitive
man regard Nature with eager interest. Powerless against her forces,
if there be something mysterious, threatening, the untutored soul
supplicates it in prayer, with the inborn faith down deep in every
breast that behind the visible lies close the Invisible, the Creator,
who rules the world he made.
They adore the rainbow, bright headband of the sky, rivers,
mountains, stones, trees, bears, and other animals. Their fables
appear meaningless to us; but we must not despise them, for many of
our beliefs are equally so to them. The aboriginal brain can never
comprehend why white men worship a sheet of bunting--white, red,
spangled blue, with the eagle totem--suffer for it, fight for it in
armies numberless as the sands of the desert, and die for it without
murmur.
The myths of the furthest West are wonderfully like the myths of the
furthest East. Studying them, one cannot fail in the conviction that
humanity, in all the ages and races, is the same, formed on one model,
unfolding under the influence of the same inspiration; that, left to
their own will, men do like things under like conditions, and that
certain religious ideas are born in every heart, sage or savage, making
worship a human necessity. Here, as in ancient Thessaly, the powers of
Heaven have haunts in the echoing mountain-sides, by pebbly springs, in
the gloomy shades of the whispering pines, and under the rushing river
and cataract.
In New Mexico, where the food supply depends so largely on the winds
and the uncertain rainfall, the savage is most anxious to conciliate
the gods who preside over these forces. There are altars for their
worship, mystic stones among the gnarled cedars of the Zuni _mesa_,
and a spring of sweet water, sacred to the rain god, rimmed with
pebbles precious as the oracular jewels on the breast of the Jewish
high priest. No animal is allowed to drink of the holy waters, and they
are purified every year, with vessels dedicated to the service--most
ancient jars, handed down through the generations since the evening and
the morning were the first day. No Zuni drinks from the consecrated
_ollas_, for the spirit of the spring is always watching, and will
avenge the indignity with instant death. Once a year, in August, the
_cacique_, with his chief counselors, visits the spring, and washes its
walls, with the elaborately-tinted vases, which were hallowed by the
first high priest. The jars are ranged in order on the rim of the well.
The frog, the rattlesnake, the tortoise are painted on them, animals
sacred to the presiding deity. Woe to the offender who shall profane
them by a touch! A fate awaits him like that of Uzza, when he put
forth his hand to hold the ark in the threshing-floor of Chidon. The
lightning of the dread god of storms will strike the sinner dead.
Somewhere near is a mysterious divine bird, kept in a secret shrine. As
Herodotus says of the Phœnix: “I have never seen it myself, except in a
picture.”
Like the old Greek, the Pueblo looks up and sees the dead among the
stars. When the Aurora flashes a strange, flickering light along
the northern sky, it is the mustering of the spirits of the mighty
warriors, whirling their spears and marching with proud steps, as
the shade of Agamemnon strode across the fields of Asphodel. The
earthquake’s rumble is the groaning and turning in sleep of a big old
giant, with voice of thunder, eyes of fire, and breath of flame. He was
so immense that he sprawled across the whole plain, and so powerful the
immortal gods, finding they could not kill him, tore up a high mountain
and laid it on him, to keep him quiet. What is this but Enceladus?
“Under Mount Etna he lies.
It is slumber, it is not death;
For he struggles at times to arise,
And above him the lurid skies
Are hot with his fiery breath.
“The crags are piled on his breast,
The earth is heaped on his head;
But the groans of his wild unrest,
Though smothered and half-suppressed,
Are heard, and he is not dead.”
[Illustration: Zuñi Water Vases.]
The best hope and strongest faith of the Pueblos are in the second
coming of the great King, who is to raise the dead, judge the world,
and reign in peace and righteousness. Struggling with shadows and weird
imaginings, working out their destiny with many a bitter failure, in
anguish of heart they instinctively reach through the darkness for the
almighty hand of the unseen helper. The sons of Montezuma, as they
love to call themselves, believe the fullness of time is come, and the
return of their Messiah at hand. He will leave his bright sun-house, to
right the wrongs and heal the woes of the race so mercilessly stricken
down by the Spaniards. Then there will be no more death, neither
sorrow, nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain. Their ideas
are vague and dim. Legends treacherous as memory, and growing fainter
from generation to generation, for their wise men are without open
vision, and their sagamores have neither written prophecy nor guiding
stars.
The view from the top of the _mesa_ is unspeakably beautiful. Twined
among multitudes of peaks, like tangled ribbons, are streakings
of azure and purple, beneath which, as we know by experience, are
outspread valleys, broad, treeless, scorched with a tropic heat, which
at noonday seems like quivering flame. The pre-historic ruins cover
about thirty acres, and are scattered in confusion on the level plateau
under the wind-whipped cedars. Here, until within a few years, was kept
the consecrated fire burning for centuries--the Montezuma fire; but
time fails to tell it all. Another day we will come again, and hear
the fanciful traditions, the misty old superstitions which hover about
the neglected shrines. They are given with an opulence of fancy which
throws mists before your eyes. In the hush of solitude, the effect of
the place is mysterious, and reflection drops easily into belief. Few
worshipers now sacrifice in the primeval temples, where of old they
must have flocked by hundreds, cherishing the promise of the second
coming of Montezuma from the pleasant land where the sun rises. The
chiefs crouch with faces toward the east as the morning star goes
softly out, and the gray dawn melts into the light of day, yearning as
human hearts have yearned in all ages, seeking a sign from Heaven. The
legend runs that he who shall first behold the King in his beauty shall
receive some great favor at his hand. Sometimes they wait in silence;
again they chant a hymn to their god, watching till he shakes his
“plumes of fire” above the mountain-tops and shoots his radiant spears
across the roseate sky. But the oracles are dumb. Well are they keeping
the mighty secret!
CHAPTER XIV. AMONG THE ARCHIVES. (_Continued._)
A few miles from Zuni, as we move eastward, there gradually comes to
view a bold, high, sandstone rock, a quadrangular wall, white, veined
with yellow, named Inscription Rock. It is nearly a mile in length and
more than two hundred feet in height. Approaching it, tower and turret,
architrave and pillar rise slowly into view. We see a mighty structure
Nature has wrought in noble architecture, and that no extravagant
coloring gave it the old Spanish name _El Moro_--The Castle. The
surface of the mountain-wall on the north and south faces is written
over with names otherwise lost to history, records that light the dark
way like shining torches. Some are deeply and beautifully cut into the
plane surface and reach back more than three hundred years. The older
inscriptions are Spanish, carefully graven upon the vertical faces,
about the height of a man’s head from the ground. Usually a date, a
brief memorandum of the purpose and line of march of the Castilian
soldiery, the names of travellers exploring the country, or Franciscan
friars going into the wilderness in search of the lost tribes of Israel.
At the foot of the towering steep is a gushing spring of sparkling
water, and fresh grass, such as is not often seen except in narrow
valleys among the arid plains of the territories. After rest, food,
siesta, the traveler, looking up to the immense table of stone before
him, naturally adds his own name to the constantly-increasing list
on the written mountain, which has now grown into a confused mass of
hieroglyphs--Indian signs, the favorite being the track of a moccasin,
indicative of marching; decayed and decaying inscriptions, and names
of old adventurers. Let us loiter awhile and read, for it is not often
such a register is laid open to any tourist.
Close to the left corner, almost hidden by brushwood, is the oldest
date, engraved in the rock nearly a century before the landing of the
Pilgrim Fathers--Don José de Basconzales, 1526. This is the sole record
of his expedition, at once his history and his cenotaph. He went with
an exploring party from the City of Mexico, and never returned; nor
were they heard of after leaving Zuni. Whether they perished in secret
defiles, cut off by the skulking Apache, who dogged every step of the
invader, or gave out through fatigue and thirst in the deep cañons and
sterile _vegas_, belongs to the voiceless past. In some unnamed spot
he sleeps with the silent majority--a mighty company.
In the moist air of England these letters would be mossed over and
wholly illegible; but the dry, dewless air of New Mexico holds decay
in check, and in this regard almost equals the atmosphere of Egypt.
Among recent inscriptions appear the autographs of the United States
explorers--Whipple, Simpson, and others; and still nearer our day the
signs manual of the Smiths, Joneses, Browns, and the rest. The sixth
name on the list is the one whose fortunes we are trying to trace out
and follow, less for the sake of his king and country than because he
was attended by the true love and faithful knight of the little Rose of
Castile.
It runs: Here passed Don Diego de Bargas, to conquer Santa Fé for the
royal crown, New Mexico, at his own cost, in the year 1692.
Many secrets we cannot guess are hidden in the silence there, with the
sands of ages drifted above them; but it is plain to see Vargas was
in high feather when he made his proud record on the wall of El Moro.
Observe the pert little crow, “at his own cost.”
Luckily, there is still extant a number of documents bearing on his
administration among the state papers at Santa Fé, or we might think
the princely fellow, going out conquering and to conquer, scattered
commissions and victories with a free hand.
How La Villa Real de Santa Fé was lost and won is an old tale and
often told, and details of battles, at least of Indian fighting, are
not interesting. Enough that, after the summer camp at or near Old
Zuni, Vargas with his army pressed on to the siege of the Capital. The
slayers were a few hundreds of white men, with red allies; the slain
were of a number that has never been reckoned.
Father Francisco Corvera administered absolution to the entire command
before battle, and, as the foreign army was preparing for a general
onslaught, the Pueblos stole out in the night, leaving the city in
possession of the fair race which left nothing but desolation in its
track.
The brutal instincts of this Vargas (whom I hate, and the judicious
reader must hate too) hardened and intensified with increasing power
and advancing years. One of the worst of his bad race, he labored
unceasingly for the conversion of the aborigines. His position allowed
immeasurable sweep for cruelty which we may be sure he enjoyed to the
utmost, and the cross became the object of bitter hatred to the heathen
he claimed for an inheritance. He it was who wrote to the viceroy of
Mexico, applying for more troops to carry on the crusade: “You might
as well try to convert Jews without the Inquisition as Indians without
soldiers.”
Notwithstanding his religious zeal and boast recorded on Inscription
Rock at Zuni, Vargas missed the high place at which he aimed, not,
like Columbus and Cortez, because he deserved too greatly, but because
the regiment in garrison and the corporation of Santa Fé, in 1695,
presented charges to the viceroy, Count Galvas, against him for
peculation. He was accused of using public money for private purposes;
of drawing on the public treasury for purchase of corn, mules, etc.
for settlers, and of selling them and pocketing the proceeds. “Also of
having drawn drafts and received moneys for expenses never incurred.”
He was removed from office 1697, and with him, doubtless, the faithful
knight and true love, Don Antonio Eusebio de Cubero, who we will
believe had the soul of a true knight, and no part or lot in these
ignoble transactions.
Whatever he was, Rosita saw him with eyes anointed; from the beginning
a hero predestined to triumph on every field he might enter. I do
believe that, in the rough campaigning through the land of sand and
thorn, he kept her lovely face--the Millais face--in his heart of
hearts. That he never vowed a vow nor kissed a kiss that was not hers,
and, loyal to his own Rose of Castile, as he was to his king, he
marched in the triumph through the streets of Seville. There minstrels
and troubadours hymned high praises (_romances_ they were called), and
bright lady-loves waved silken scarfs to the _conquistadores_, home
from the far New World. They were men in the bloom of youth, the very
flower of the Peninsula, and Antonio Eusebio de Cubero was proudest and
noblest where all were proud and many noble.
From the arched window, set in quaint fretwork and arabesques, Rosita
looked out and the banner over her was love. Perhaps the Millais
face--that eager, anxious, haunting face--flushed a little at sight of
the grand parade in the pomp and circumstance the old Spaniard loved so
well. The soft, dark eyes were not bewildered by the rich confusion of
color, the far-floating flags, the dazzle of steel and of silver. Swift
glances singled out one beneath the wavy folds of the royal standard,
brave as he was beautiful, whose prancing steed, flashing arms, crest,
and plume were familiar, whose sash her own soft hands embroidered.
Let us picture reunion after years of separation, joy after anguish,
the rapture of rescue from peril, and so leave them, walking with happy
feet by the bed of sweet basil, as the first lovers walked in the cool
of the day under the palms of Paradise.
While I write, the letter of the dear, dead woman lies on the table
before me; the fading sign from a rose-leaf hand that has been part
of the dust of old Spain so many and many a year. Frail thing, most
perishable, outlasting kings, thrones, the wrecks of states, the decay
of ages! Closing day finds me dreaming over it in the waning light.
I look to the purpling hills. As the sun sinks, they change to fairy
tents, under a line of exquisite color, pink, orange, pale sea green,
the changeful fringe on the banner of night, ending far up the zenith
in a field of spotless azure. In the farness of the distance the cold,
white peaks of the Stony mountains warm for one supreme moment in the
solemn beauty of the after-glow, their summits clear-cut against the
rainless blue.
Rapidly the shadows deepen. Violet changes to leaden hues, rose dims to
pearl gray, the flushed white foreheads pale, the fires of sunset burn
out, and the short twilight, ending in gloom, is the day’s burial.
Human phantoms flit across the dusky spaces. King and priest, savage
and Christian, knight and lady, shadows all, passing within the mighty
shadow. Under the low window I hear the tramp of feet pacing to and fro
like the ebb and flow of the tide. The hurrying feet are ghost-like,
too, chasing the flying specters’ gold and fame. History is but
repeating itself. The restless, dissatisfied souls of the New World
are the same brotherhood as those of the Castiles; the same as when
Solomon sent ships from Tarshish to bring back gold of Ophir; the same
jealous souls as when the king was wroth because the people shouted,
Saul has slain his thousands and David his ten thousands. Now, as then,
morning and evening bring their old beauty, the cooling balm of the
breeze follows the burning day. The west wind cools no fever of heart
or brain; still are men searching for signs of gold and fighting the
old battle against oblivion, and still do loving women sit by solitary
fires and wait for them to come. These things have not changed; they
will never change. Humanity remains the same.
The foreign charm which was the dower of the historic city is dying
fast, but not quite dead. The spell, long lingering, is slow to pass
away, though student and antiquary are blowing the dust from the books
of Chronicles and letting the white light of day into obscured and
darkened chambers.
In this dimness once glowed the poetic coloring of romance and
chivalry, in which the valorous Espego and his knights founded the City
of Holy Faith. If the ghosts of the venturesome heroes revisit the
field of their victories, they may yet be reminded of soft Andalusia.
There is a hint of Castilian grace in the vanishing _sombrero_, in
the folds of the ever-falling but never-fallen _rebosa_, a touch of
passing sweetness in the prolonged _adios_. Blent with the familiar
benediction, now in my ear, “_Vago usted con Dios que usted lo pase
bien_” (“May you depart with God and continue well”), the hovering
shades might hear the dreamy plash of bright fountains and the light
love song under the barred windows of fair Cordova.
CHAPTER XV. THE JORNADA DEL MUERTO.
Near the southern boundary of New Mexico the Spanish explorers were
opposed by a barrier of all on earth most to be dreaded--a shadeless,
waterless plateau, nearly one hundred miles long, from five to thirty
miles wide, resembling the steppes of Northern Asia. Geologists tell us
this is the oldest country on the earth, except, perhaps, the backbone
of Central Africa; at least the one which has longest exhibited its
present conditions, the one longest exposed to the influence of agents
now in action, and, hence, bearing the most deeply-marked records of
their power.
The portion I speak of appears to have served its time, worn out, been
dispeopled and forgotten. The grass is low and mossy, with a perishing
look--the shrubs, soap-weed, and bony cactus writhing like some grisly
skeleton; the very stones are like the scoria of a furnace. You vainly
look for the flight of a bird, such as cheered the eyes of Thalaba in
the desert; no bee nor fly hums the empty air; and, save the lizard
(the genius of desolation) and horned frog, there is no breath of
living thing.
Certain tribes of Arabia have no name for the sea, and, when they first
came to its shore, they asked, with a sad wonder: “What is this strange
desert of water, more beautiful than any land?” Standing on the edge of
the measureless waste, which is trackless as water, the first explorers
might ask: “What is this strange ocean of sand, with its stillness more
awful than any sea?”
In places the dead level of the plain sweeps with the exactness of a
sheet of water, encircling as with a shore-line mountain-walls which
on the west shut off the Rio Grande, and frequently insulating whole
peaks and ridges. Friendly showers fall there two months in the year,
and, instead of storms of rain, in spring it is burned by those of dust
and sand. They are caused by winds coming mainly from the northwest,
carrying before them, like mist, clouds of pulverized sand and dust,
and piling them in drifts when checked in their course. You can watch
their progress as they approach, beginning in a thin haze along
the horizon, for hours beforehand; and when they reach you the dust
penetrates everything. You eat it, you drink it, you breathe it, you
wear it like a coating, and the last handkerchief at the bottom of the
box in your trunk is gritty and smells of alkali. The sand-storms, as
they are called, usually last one, sometimes three days. Occasionally
they appear a procession of whirlwind columns, such as are seen in
autumn leaves, slowly moving across the desert in spectral dimness.
Rejoice and be thankful if the tempest passes without striking. It will
beat the mules without mercy and lash your face like a whip, if it
reaches you.
Stories are told how, after a day of intense heat and lifeless silence,
a dark cloud rapidly lowers from the sky of molten brass, and a sudden
wind whirls the sand in mounds, and so shifts it from place to place.
Horses and mules fall flat, with their noses to the ground; men lie
down under blankets, from which the sand must be shaken occasionally,
to escape being literally buried alive. Storms of such violence are
rare, but every old frontiersman can tell you of more than one. The
early Spaniards called the desert hot wind _solana_, in memory of
Mancha and Andalusia. It heats the blood terribly, produces the utmost
discomfort and nervous irritation. Hence the Castilian proverb: “Ask no
favor while the solana blows.”
A variation of the simoom of the Orient, it cracks the skin, creates
consuming thirst, and has been known to produce death.
The reader need hardly be reminded that the destruction of
Sennacherib’s host is supposed to have been caused by the simoom.
Undoubtedly, Byron had it in mind when he wrote the Hebrew melody,
which has the majestic thunder-roll of organ music,
“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.”
Once feel the parching, torrid heat; once face that suffocating
desert-wind, and you readily comprehend death was instantaneous. There
was no waste of miraculous force in the power which destroyed all the
mighty men of valor, and the leaders and captains, in the camp of the
king of Assyria
“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And _breathed_ in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved and forever grew still.”
The spot I am trying to describe is the battle-ground of the elements.
In winter it is made fearful by raging storms of wind and snow. There
men and animals have been frozen to death, their bodies left the lawful
prey of the mountain wolf. From the primeval years the Apache has
harried the hungry waste, hunting for scalps; and, besides the savagest
of savages, it is now the favorite skulking-place of outlaws, an asylum
for fugitives escaping justice in old Mexico and Texas.
In our times many a party cut off and many a traveler murdered makes
good the name it bears, given by the first white men who dared its
perils: _Jornada del Muerto_--“Journey of Death.”
Reports of sun-scorch and lava beds, sand, sirocco, maddening thirst,
and cheating mirage did not daunt the bold land-robbers from Spain.
They were pledged to wrest their secrets from the mountains, and bring
them to lay at the feet of their imperial master. Disciplined in the
hardships of foreign wars, they lived for glory and worshiped Fortune.
They had seen service in almost every clime. Some had tilted with the
Moor; some had fought the infidel on the blue Danube, and hunted the
Carib in Hispaniola; and later came captains whose waving plumes had
been the colors to rally on when the royal standards were fallen. The
mysterious country, mountain-locked and guarded by savage sentinels,
who seemed to require neither rest, food, nor sleep, and were so fleet
of foot they could outmarch the best cavalry horses, was a high stake,
involving heavy risks and not to be lightly won. From accounts of
Jesuit missionaries, who went with the cross, ready to die for their
faith, the heroes of the seventeenth century learned that Nature in
Nueva Espagña was not always in stormy mood. The fiery solana spent
its strength in three days, and the lull following it was like clear
shining after rain. If the snow of winter was deep, it was not lasting
(only a Christmas storm); and friendly natives taught them that the
stony Sierras could be brought to yield gold, silver, copper--all the
precious metals.
Along their sides were sparkling springs, and at their feet green
valleys, where Summer nestled long and lovingly--_pasturas_ in which
an abiding June encamped and ruled the year. They were tufted with the
short, delicate buffalo grass, lovely with its strange clusters of
pistillate flowers and bunches of rosy stamens, and so strongly and
closely matted it could well bear the tread of the monstrous Cibola
(buffalo). Over all, like the purple mountain veils, threaded with
fire, hung a delicious mystery.
The old-time heroes were deeply superstitious and well versed in
legendary lore. As they penetrated the _Jornada_, spectral illusions
haunted them. Demons lurked in the tall soap-weed, and glared over
their tops, grimacing threateningly.
When, weakened by long fastings, the sky spun round, goblins, “with
leathery wings like bats,” filled the air, and foul fiends, which
could be exorcised only by prayer, made every step a terror. Fearless
leaders, who regarded enterprise honorable in proportion to its peril,
and had looked death in the face as if they loved it, quailed before
the undiscovered country, the pathless _Jornada_.
In bivouac at sunset, there was much crossing of forehead and breast,
murmur of aves and amens; not whispered, but outspoken, as became the
“Swords of the Church.”
They set up their swords in the sand, knelt before the blessed sign
on their hilts, and fervently prayed the Holy Mother’s protection. So
comforted, they slept, perchance to dream of cool fountains in far
_plazas_; of glassy ponds, with white-breasted swans asleep among the
reeds and rushes on the margin; of rushing books, shaded by dripping
willows; and the low undertone of the halcyon sea, whose soft-beating
surf breaks on the shores of old Spain.
It is amusing to read of their superstitious dread of horned frogs,
which hopped out of the way, then “turned and faced them with basilisk
eyes.” The sameness of the scenes was sickening; the glare of the
fierce sunshine blinded them; and, with cracked lips and burning eyes
they hailed the mirage with shouts, and, horse and rider seeing eye
to eye, they dashed away for the mocking lake, to curse the cheat and
thirst the more.
Traversing the desert is not now what it was in the age of fable.
The delusions of the past vanished with the darkness to which they
belonged. We are living in better times. Summer, winter, moonbeam
or starbeam will never shine on goblins more. The “leathery wings”
have floated away from cactus thicket and mezquit jungle; ghost,
fairy, demon, genii all have fled into the listening silence. They
were phantoms following the century of credulity, whose foremost man,
clear-eyed and conscientious, aimed his inkstand at the Devil, and
whose veteran campaigner from the siege of Granada went wandering up
and down the everglades of Florida, seeking an enchanted fountain--an
ever-flowing spring, of which one draught would restore to his war-worn
body the freshness of youth, and add to his term of life years enough
to discover and conquer a third world.
The _Jornada_ still has its alarms; but men of the nineteenth century
see no angry eyes in the red glow of sunset; overhead hovers no evil
spirit of earth or air, under cover of night’s blue and starry banner.
The centre of the ninety-mile desert is now broken by a watering-place,
the cheering oasis which relieves the long strain on body and soul. In
1871 Major John Martin dug one hundred and sixty feet, and struck a
sweet, abundant fountain, deliciously cool, soft, with a slight taste
of sulphur. Its depth is forty feet, and the heaviest draughts have
never lessened the supply. It is pumped by a windmill, which the wind
sometimes makes his own; and the gurgle and plash as the stream falls
into the huge tanks, is a sound in the ear of the traveller sweet as
his first hearing of the nightingale. Before the well was made water
was hauled in barrels to the station from the Rio Grande, fifteen miles
away. The nearest fuel at that point is eighteen miles distant.
At Fort Craig, the southern terminus of the solitary place, the modern
tourist fills his water-kegs and canteens, tightens his cartridge-belt,
and looks carefully to the condition of his animals. The loss of a
breast-strap or horse-shoe would be a hindrance not easily overcome,
and supplies of every kind must be carried. The road is excellent, and,
if there is no accident, the well may be reached in one day’s journey.
Even in its best aspect it is entered the first time with forebodings,
a vague dread, like pushing out into an unknown sea. The sun-glare
is so hard to bear that night is often the accepted time for the
mournful crossing. As the sun declines, the lonesome dark falls like
a drop-curtain. The stars flash out; the sky above, intensely clear,
is a steel-blue shield, set thick with diamonds. A tropic brilliance
fills it with a glow like the mild twilight of other latitudes, and
the moon’s splendor makes beautiful even the seared and jagged cliffs
of the Sierra de los Organos. Three thousand feet above the level of
the river are their shafts, pale gray in the silvery light; masses of
granite up-heaved in some mighty convulsion, long stilled, standing
against the rainless blue like tombstones over a buried world.
If there is talk in the ambulance, it is in subdued tones. The
assumption of cheerfulness by humming snatches of old songs is a dreary
impertinence. Hour after hour we travel in silence, unbroken but by
the grind of wheels plowing through the sandy soil. In answer to your
utmost listening, you may catch the yelp of the red fox, or from the
far-off mountain the coyote’s shrill cry. Sometimes the driver drops to
sleep, and the wagon stops. Lift the canvas curtain, and look out. The
soft wind blows in even cadence and swell, but meets only the hushed
night and its burning lights. The Milky Way is a solid white gleam,
where the invisible gods are walking. The missing stars are here. How
low they swing in their serene and silent spaces. Beneath the solemn
grandeur of the heavens, the work of Him in whom is no haste, no rest,
no weariness, no failure, we bow in awe. What a little speck is our
wagon-train; what an atom is self, the object round which our weak
thoughts revolve.
The mountain-rim is restful to the sight. There are the gushing
springs, cool as snow; and the shady pines, whose never ceasing song
we cannot hear. How still it is! No ripple of water, no stir of leaf
or bough, grass or blossom, or any green thing. Ominous crosses by the
wayside mark the graves of travellers, scalped, tortured, and mangled.
The weight of the tragedy is on us. We feel a near kinship to the
sleepers below, and would not tremble to see them rise and shake their
gory locks at us. The vacant space lies stark and unmoved, as it lay
centuries ago, when the first gold-hunters, in fear and yet in triumph,
braved its unknown depths. The prostrate plain, the rigid outlines of
the naked landscape, the intolerable dumb lifelessness are indeed _del
Muerto_.
And here I pause to describe the weapons used by wild tribes of Indians
who infest the _Jornada_. On my wall, beside a victorious banner furled
and bruised arms hung up for monuments, are the full equipments of an
Apache chief, killed near Fort Stanton, New Mexico. The shield, made of
thick, tanned buffalo hide, is stiff and hard, and resounds under your
knuckles like a drum. In being made it was stretched over a light frame
of basket-work and dried. It is twenty inches across, and as round as
the shield of the elder Ossian.
An outer cover of dressed deer-skin envelops the buffalo hide, drawn
smooth and gathered round the edge on the under side with a leather
thread. Traced in blue-black ink on it are round figures, which may
represent the sun or a spring, and zigzags, which by straining one’s
fancy may be imagined to represent mountains.
At the upper rim of the shield are the decorations; three pea-fowl
feathers, probably amulets, and a medicine-bag of black muslin
containing a dry powder which the warrior rubs on his heart before
going into battle, “to make it big and brave.”
A scrap of iridescent shell is fastened to the centre, and there on
occasion, and around the edge, dangle bloody tufts, the reeking scalps
of the enemy. It was carried on the left arm by two straps slipped over
the hand, and was kept in motion while in action, by which means the
hostile arrows glanced off.
But it was not proof against the mightier arms of the white race, and
two bullet-holes through the shield show how the red chief came to his
death.
The spear is an ugly weapon six feet long, about as thick as a
broom-handle, and made of an extremely light wood, to me unknown,
painted red in one band three inches wide near the head. The point is a
piece of iron, probably an old Mexican bayonet, twenty-two inches long,
socketed into the pole, and further strengthened in its place by a cord
of deer-skin wrapped tightly round it many times.
Before Indians knew the use of iron, the spear, or lance, as it is
usually called, was pointed with obsidian, or some other flinty
substance, hammered and ground to a sharp edge. Sometimes the heel of
the shaft is balanced with eagle feathers, while others are caught
along the shaft, giving steadiness to the flight and gratifying the
taste of the owner.
The quiver is twenty-seven inches long, is made of white cow-skin
tanned with the hair on, sewed with a thread of deer-skin, and is large
enough to contain a sheaf of two dozen arrows. A fringe of the same
material dangles at each end of the quiver and adorns the waist-belt.
When it was in use a band of cow-skin, four inches wide, held it across
the shoulder.
The arrows are shafts two feet long, made of a species of yucca,
tipped with hoop-iron and old knife-blades, which are roughly ground on
each side, sharply pointed and edged, probably by rubbing with stone.
They are winged with three feathers of the wild turkey, stripped from
the quill and tied round the shaft at equal distances with very fine
tendons, like the E violin string. The iron points are all that betray
intercourse with white men, and were probably stolen from the refuse of
some camp.
An Apache boy, of ten or twelve years of age, will strike a cent
three times out of five at a distance of fifteen yards. Practice of
bow-shooting begins as soon as these boys are old enough to hold the
weapon, and ends only with death.
At fifty yards the well-pointed iron arrow is dangerous and sure, and
the strong-armed Indian easily drives it through a two-inch plank. He
can fire it more rapidly than an ordinary revolver, and even though he
possesses “a heap firing-gun,” as he calls a repeating rifle, he is
never without the silent, unerring and deadly iron-headed arrow.
It is far superior to the gun for night-surprises and taking off
sentinels, and on the hunt half-a-dozen animals may be killed before
the rest of the herd are alarmed. It is to be relied on when ammunition
fails, and so light as to be worn without the least encumbrance.
The wary Indian is careful of his arrows, although he has many, wasting
none in random shots, and keeping his quiver well filled. Sometimes a
thousand arrows are buried in the grave of a chief, a sign that his
death will be avenged by his tribe.
A narrow band of red on the feathered end of the shaft is the only
attempt at ornamentation.
A fringed leather arm-guard, or bracelet, is worn round the left wrist,
to defend it from the blow of the bow-string. Sometimes it is made of
gray eagle feathers and the vari-colored tips of humming-birds’ wings.
In shooting-matches the contest is carried on by men and boys; betting
is high and exciting, and sometimes entire fortunes such as a pair of
moccasins, a pink calico shirt and blanket, are staked upon the hazard.
The whole tribe, men, women and children, turn out as spectators. A bad
shot is received with yells of derision, though failures by experts
are rare. If the slender white wand aimed at is not touched, the shaft
generally lodges in the circle of loose earth thrown up about the
target to catch the arrows and prevent their blunting.
Said an old frontiersman to me, “I have never yet seen the Indian bow I
could not break across my knee.” I doubt if he could crack the one now
before me. Many a hand has tried to string it and failed, completely
as the suitors in the classic story. It is of Osage orange forty-two
inches long, bent in the graceful curvature poetry assigns to the bow
of the god of love.
Formerly to this ornament the wild tribes added a mighty war-club of
mezquit wood, flat and crescent-shaped, with a round ball at the end.
In all the Indian weapons there is no sense of grace in outline, except
the curved bow, no elegance in the winging, no brilliance in the rough
stains of poor color. They simply mean business; the effect of the
group now before me is savage in the extreme.
Arm the warrior with them, mount him on a half-wild mustang which he
guides with the knee, and he is a king of men. Place on his neck as
a crowning garniture the ornament taken from the body of the fallen
chief, and round his neck put a piece of doubled horsehide, with two
rattle-snakes’ tails, each containing eleven rattles dangling from it.
Imagine the brutish face painted in hideous stripes, vermilion and
blue; the buffalo-robe blanket, the wild hair flying, the long lance
whirling, brandished in air, and add, if you can, the war-whoop, a
yell--
--“As if the fiends from heaven that fell
Had pealed the banner cry of hell.”
Then you will have a picture of an Apache Indian.
CHAPTER XVI. SOMETHING ABOUT THE APACHE.
The chase is the natural outlet for much savagery; but the wild tribes
of North America are more hardly driven now than ever before, owing to
the rapid disappearance of game, especially the buffalo. Time was when
the _cibola_, as they called him, fed, warmed, and clothed the nomads.
Indians are now moved about as far west as they can go, and the buffalo
goes with them, but is disappearing much more rapidly than the Red Man
is.
The narrowing limits of his range make many a chase barren as that of
the English party in the Catskills, gayly hunting the great American
bison in the Summer of 1876.
He once ranged as far east as the Atlantic seaboard in Virginia and
the Carolinas. From Catesby we learn that, about the year 1712, herds
of buffalo were seen within thirty miles of Charleston, South Carolina.
The decrease of their main reliance for food and clothing alarmed the
tribes years ago; and in the last generation they brought forward the
fact in their pow-wows with commissioners: “The _cibola_ is dying,
and the red brother must keep peace with the pale face, and eat his
spotted buffalo.” (Indian for domestic cattle.) Such was the peaceful
and alluring speech of the war chief of the Apaches; but the promise
of peace was never kept. To steal and murder, and, under the show of
friendship beat out the brains of unsuspecting men; to carry off to
captivity worse than death the women and larger children, was merely a
question of _opportunity_.
The “spotted buffalo of the white brother” is hardier than the
ancient and lawful game which ranged in such vast herds along the
Arkansas, Republican and Platte Rivers, and the future geographers
will not regale ingenuous American youth with that blood-curdling,
hair-whitening picture of the shaggy and ferocious beasts rushing to
suicide over an awful precipice overhanging a bottomless abyss. The
bison will rather take his place in natural history with the extinct
dodo and the out-going cassowary.
The tanned skin of the buffalo is the best material for the manufacture
of “tepes,” and the “_bois de bache_” is as good fuel as the Indian
desires. It has been erroneously stated that only the white man kills
and wastes buffalo. They are, or have been frequently killed by war
parties, who take what may be needed as food; but the rest of the
carcass falls to the portion of wolves and ravens, never far off. Young
buffaloes fall a prey to the hungry gray wolf and coyotes, and a sick
or wounded buffalo has a long train attendant of wolves, thirsting for
his blood.
Coronado, the old Spanish explorer who crossed the Gila in 1540, wrote
a curious and accurate description of the _cibola_, of which I copy
a portion: “These oxen are the bigness and color of our bulls; but
their horns are not so great. They have a great bunch upon their fore
shoulders, and more hair upon their fore part than on their hinder
part; it is like wool. They have, as it were, a horse’s mane upon their
back-bone, and much hair and very long from the knee downward. They
have great tufts of hair hanging down their foreheads, and it seemeth
they have beards, because of the great store of hair hanging down at
their chins and throats. The males have very long tails, and a great
knob or flock at the end; so that, in some respects, they resemble
the lion, and, in some, the camel. Their masters have no other riches
or substance; of them they eat, they drink, they apparel, they shoe
themselves; and of their hides make many things, as houses and ropes;
of their bones they make bodkins; of their sinews and hair, thread;
of their horns, maws and bladders, vessels; and of their calf skins,
buckets, wherein they draw and keep water.”
[Illustration: Navajo Indian with Silver Ornaments.]
The whole living of the roving tribes is thus cut off with the buffalo.
The Apache love of meat is not fastidious, and they are fond of mule
and horse flesh. Deer, antelope--whatever the game may be--every
portion, except the bones, is consumed, the entrails being an especial
delicacy. They partially cook it, generally eating it extremely rare;
that is, about half raw. Fertile valleys in the territories bear a
small proportion to the extent of arid deserts, lava beds, and plains
of sand. Isolated peaks contain wood and springs, thus affording
protection for the sure-footed savage, who can outmarch our best
cavalry horses. The scant grass is soon exhausted, so he must move from
place to place, or starve, and thus necessity is added to inclination;
and they roam over immense tracts of country, seeking what they may
devour.
They have smoke signals by day and fire beacons at night, and systems
of telegraphy understood only by themselves. The displacement and
overturning of a few stones on a trail, or a bent or broken twig, is a
note of warning like the bugle call to disciplined troops. They cross
the _Jornada del Muerto_, “journey of death,” as the ninety mile desert
was called by the Spaniard, with an ease and fleetness no white man
can imitate, and, swooping down from refuges in the natural fortresses
of the mountains, pounce upon the travelers. The many crosses dotting
the roadsides of Southern Arizona and New Mexico mark the graves of
murdered men; indeed, the country seems one vast graveyard, if we
may judge by the frequency of these rude memorials. Trained by their
mothers to theft and murder from childhood, they are inured to all
extremes of heat and cold, hunger and thirst. They are cunning as
the red fox and insatiate as tigers, so ingenious in preparing for
surprises that they will envelop themselves in a gray blanket, sprinkle
it carefully with earth, to resemble a granite bowlder and be passed
within a few feet without suspicion. Again, they will cover themselves
with fresh grass, and, lying motionless, seem a natural portion of the
field, or hid among the yuccas, they imitate the appearance of the
tree, so as to pass for one of the plants.
Three-fourths of the Apache country consists of barren volcanic rocks
and sterile ridges, where no plow can be driven and no water found,
and campaigning in their country is exposure to severe privations and
dangers, aside from the attacks of the natives. There is no hope of
glory to cheer the soldier who upholds our flag in that dreary field;
there is no stimulus but duty. If he succeeds, the feeblest echo
reaches the ears of friends in the states; scant mention is made in
the papers; there is small honor in killing an Indian, still less in
falling before one. And the work is endless, fruitless. It is to be
recommenced every Spring, and as regularly stopped in the Fall by the
snows of Autumn. A passing interest is roused; but it is brief, because
the atrocities are so frequent and monotonous; always the same tale
of insult, torture, death; and every year the same inquiry is made at
Washington, and runs along the frontier, What can be done with the
Apaches?
They should be exterminated, you say.
Yes, dear reader; but, unfortunately for our gallant army,
extermination is a game two can play at.
Very few know, or care to know, that in the Apache War, ending October,
1880, more than four hundred white persons were scalped and tortured to
death with devilish ingenuity. The war began on account of the removal
of about four hundred Indians from their reservation at Ojo Caliente
(warm springs), New Mexico. This is the ideal of a happy hunting
ground. Standing on the parade ground at Fort Craig, you look toward
the Black Range mountains, clad in pine groves, abounding in game and
the precious stones so rare in New Mexico and Arizona. Morning and
evening wrap them in aerial tints of surpassing loveliness; and one can
well imagine such a spot would be very dear to any one calling it home,
be his color what it may. When the news came, the Indians received the
announcement with deep grief and bitter curses. The reason assigned by
our Government for the removal from this spot to the arid, volcanic
_mesa_ of Arizona was that two agencies might be consolidated, and the
expense of maintaining them lessened. They went unwillingly, because
this beautiful country was the land of their fathers, and because
they could not live peaceably with the Indians of the San Carlos
reservation, and only at the bayonet’s point would they march. Their
war chief was Victorio, successor to the renowned Magnus Colorado,
who was the most influential and successful statesman and warrior the
Apaches have had for a century. They left Ojo Caliente, with its green
fields and glorious mountains, in the Spring of 1877. In September,
of the same year, Victorio and his people stole away from San Carlos,
saying they would rather die than live there. They were pursued by our
cavalry, overtaken, and several of them killed; many women and children
were taken prisoners. The rest under Victorio, escaped, went to Fort
Wingate, and surrendered. They were sent back to Ojo Caliente, and held
as prisoners of war until the order came from Washington for them to
return to Arizona. Then they stole the cavalry horses and started on
the war-path.
The war was a series of ambuscades and retreats, lasting a year and a
half. The details of Indian fighting are much the same everywhere; but
Apaches surpass in cunning, strategy, secrecy, all the sons of men.
They are an enemy not to be despised, and as friends are _never_ to
be trusted. Their signal system is so perfect that by it they act in
perfect concert, and bands of fives, tens, and twenties, separated from
each other by twenty, thirty, even forty miles, manage to maintain
a perfect police intelligence over the vast region once their own
territory.
Victorio had one son named for the man who, beyond all men of the
civilized and even savage world, has had the confidence of his kind,
Washington; the one white man Indians admit to a place in their land
of happy spirits. He was shot near Fort Cummings, and his death was
a heavy blow to the chief, whose fame and blanket he was to inherit,
whose pride was centered in his son. In the Fall of 1879, Washington’s
body lay unburied in the deep defile where he fell; the long hair
matted and dried with blood, the flesh shrunken and skin tanned like
old leather. In the dry, dewless air of New Mexico, bodies are not
subject to decay as in the East, and will shrivel like a mummy by
exposure to sun and wind. Long before this time the flesh of the
chief’s son has probably been gnawed clean from the bones by the
ravening mountain wolf.
Washington had but one wife, contrary to the usual custom of his tribe,
and at twenty, wooed and won the “Princess,” as we used to call her,
because she was of the royal family of the illustrious Magnus Colorado.
She was a comely damsel, very young, who assumed some dignity and state
because of her high blood, and she never forgot the ancient splendors
of her line.
Victorio and his band were surrounded and killed in the Castillos
Mountains of Mexico, by troops under General Terassas (Mexican), and
the war ended with a grand parade in the city of Chihuahua. Cathedral
bells rang, bands played, and the victorious column marched the street
amid rousing cheers. Following General Terassas and his command came
prisoners, women and children on mules and ponies; they were to be
given away and find homes among their conquerors. Behind them were
seventy-eight Mexicans, carrying poles twenty feet high, on which were
scalps dangling like waving plumes. The whole head of hair was torn off
instead of one tuft, and the slayer of Victorio, a Farhumara Indian
bore aloft with pride a pole on which hung the gray scalp of the dead
chief. At sight of it the cheers of the Mexicans were redoubled, and I
could but think so barbaric a procession is rarely seen in one of the
oldest and wealthiest cities of the North American Continent. There
was great cause for rejoicing; the bravest and wiliest of the Apaches
was dead, and he had no son to succeed him, for with Victorio’s death
the cause was lost. His wife cut off her hair, as the old Greek wives
used to, and buried it, an offering to the spirit of the fallen chief
to whom she was devoted, yet said to be less slavish than most Indian
wives.
Victorio’s band were all stout fighters and _devilish_ when under the
influence of whiskey or _tiswin_, an intoxicating drink made from corn.
One of them, Rafael, split his child’s head open with an ax, when
drunk; another time stabbed his wife so that she died. He was then
overcome by penitence, sacrificed all of his beads and most of his
clothes to the dear departed, cut his and children’s hair short, and
sheared the horses’ manes and tails. These manifestations of anguish
over, he went up into a high hill, and howled with uplifted hands.
That shape, outlined against the intense azure of the sky, was a most
ridiculous sight. The funeral dirge was a long, slow, horrible wail.
There is no Apache law to touch such a criminal; and this case is less
distressing than one other which came under my notice in New Mexico.
An old Indian bought a young girl of her mother, paying her price in
ponies and blankets--much against her will--she, like a sensible girl,
preferring a younger man. She ran away, and hid in dark cañons and
pine woods, but the bridegroom tracked her and beat her on her head
with his gun for running off; and, worst of all, her mother thought
the son-in-law was exactly right in the matter. Finally, when her
skull was nearly broken, her spirit was entirely gone, and she yielded
to the inevitable, as so many women of the higher grade have done,
and silently took up the heavy burden of life allotted the wife of
the most barbarous of barbarians. Women are of so little account with
these people that few of their daughters are given a name, and even
their mothers often mourn at their birth, regarding them merely as an
incumbrance on the tribe. They are pretty as children, but the exposure
and hard work of their lot change them to wrinkled, muscular hags at
thirty, and when they die the Apache chief merely says: “It was only a
woman; no loss.”
CHAPTER XVII. OLD MINERS.
Oblivion scattereth her poppies even in guarded chambers where the Muse
of History holds sleepless watch, and the broken, disconnected annals
of New Mexico in the seventeenth century are like dreamy legends or
misty fables of the heroic ages.
The avaricious and despotic governors of the province made no secret
of their odious laws, and appalling atrocities are put on record in
business manner, without concealment or attempt at palliation. Many
details are trivial and there are long catalogues readable by no man
but Dr. Dryasdust. Running through dispatches is an appeal for money,
petitions for appropriation the keynote of official song, from the
Empress of India down to the lowest official of the youngest republic.
How could the commandants open mines, develop the resources of Nueva
Mejico, even with slave labor, without money or its equivalent? Beside
this familiar wail are found meager and detached accounts of long
marches among the peace-loving Pueblos, who hailed the fair strangers
as gods, and their horses as beautiful, immortal animals, tamed for the
service of their celestial visitants. These
----“most Gothic gentlemen of Spain”
were no believers in the rolling-stone theory. We think of them as
filled with restless energy; but in a half sheet of ancient MS. I
find this item, made probably by a peevish Churchman, soured because
he missed promotion: “Our captains were great enemies to all kinds of
labor. They taught that gold was good for sore eyes and disease of the
heart. Their desire for it was such they would enter into the infernal
regions and cross the three rivers of hell to obtain it.” One Captain
Salazar, in the Valley of the Del Norte, caught a _cacique_ [chief]
and chained him, to make him tell where certain treasure was hidden.
After holding the savage in confinement several months, the Christian
put him to torture; but without avail. “We then let him go,” said the
historian, dryly; “for the miserable heathen could not tell what he did
not know.”
The blood of the Christian of that age ran riot with the lust of gold
and power; the two passions swaying men of mature years, tempered in
youth by the soft influence of love. It is easy to understand that the
Pueblo Indians, who were making some approaches to civilization in the
midst of savagery, then wore a yoke to which the iron collar of thrall
worn by Gurth, the swineherd, was light as a lady’s necklace.
History holds no deeper tragedy than the record of foreign invasion
in North America. The man on horseback assumed that slavery was
necessary, therefore right, therefore just; and by the grace of God
(which meant the iron hand in the glove of steel) he rewarded captains
and corporals with lands wide as whole counties, as yet unmapped and
unsubdued. His first object was to pile high and yet higher the riches
which maintained the splendor of his house. The old Castilian had the
psychic identities of the modern one--pride, vanity, intolerance,
egotism, hatred of labor, and fondness for bloody sports. In the
irresponsible positions held by the local tyrants in Nueva Espagna
there was boundless sweep for gratification of these traits. Whatever
was not Romish or Spanish they regarded with haughty scorn. Adventurers
those colonists were, but adventurers of no common order. The spirit
of Crusades was yet alive, and each man felt himself a champion of
the Cross, and with his sword of matchless temper vowed to strike a
blow for Holy Church. Conversion was ever a prime object with the
_Conquistador_. The saintly Isabella had it always at heart, and one of
the latest acts of her reign was to commend to the fathers the souls
of her unbelieving subjects across the sea. The fanatic zeal of the
_padres_ reached through every grade, and the _hidalgos_ gloried in the
title “Swords of the Church.” The temples of sin, as the little mud
_estufas_, or chapels, of the Indians were called, must be leveled,
false gods and altar-fires overthrown, and the heathen brought to the
true faith, under their converting steel. The earliest revolt of the
Pueblos, after the first conquest, grew out of the whipping of forty
natives, because they refused to accept the new religion and bow to the
hated cross of the unseen God of the stranger.
The early colonists were all miners; but, owing to the care taken
in concealments of them by the natives, little is left to indicate
operations, except miles of earth cut into running galleries and
driven tunnels. Slavery everywhere, when applied to field labor, is
destructive to human life. What must it have been when directed to
mining, under taskmasters who did not value one life at a pin’s fee?
Even with the aid of science, machinery, and the many humanities of
the nineteenth century, it is still the most melancholy of trades. The
task of him who “hangs in midway air” to gather samphire is not half so
dreadful as work done in danger from every element.
The ruins of a large prison among the placers of the Mimbres Mountains,
abandoned mines reopened, and traditions of Indians clearly show that
the conquered races were treated as though they did not belong to the
human family. There is infinite pathos in the banishment of the untamed
Indian from the free Sierras and the glad sunshine to gloomy caverns,
where thousands were actually buried alive. They were driven to toil
under the lash and at the bayonets’ point; in peril from falling walls,
deadly gas, sudden floods, and the work was done by manual labor alone.
They broke the rocks with miserable tools and insufficient light, and
mixed the ores slowly and painfully with naked feet. Quartz was ground
in rude _arrastres_, or mills to which men and women were yoked like
cattle. Every ounce of precious metal was literally the price of blood.
So changeless are the Spaniard and the Indian that the description of
a miner near Chihuahua, written last year, will do tolerably well for
the Pueblo of the seventeenth century. Then, as now, the Spaniard was
the overseer. The peon is the slave of to-day. As a rule, Mexicans,
however intelligent and educated, have no genius for machinery. They
blow, crush, and drill as their fathers did before them, and for
transportation of ore they prefer a train of mules to a train of cars.
The miner in the sepulchral shades of San Domingo has never heard
of crushing-mills or cars. A yard-square piece of untanned hide,
stretched on two sticks, is his wheelbarrow. The drill, the pick, the
crowbar are his only tools. Out of the black door of the mine he steps
quickly, lightly, though weighted by a sack containing a hundred and
fifty pounds of ore. A broad band of rawhide attaches the burden to
his forehead. He is naked as when he came into the world. His neck and
limbs are like a prize-fighter’s. The perspiration streams from his
sooty face and body, and his breast heaves spasmodically. There are
no air-shafts, and for two hours he has been down in the hydrogen of
the mine. The path he has travelled, in ascending, winds hither and
thither; now up, then down; now in a chamber of whose extent he has
no conception; now through a gallery narrow as the cavity of a sugar
hogshead--so narrow that, to bear his cargo through, he must double and
crawl like a panther; now along a slippery ledge, where the slightest
error in the placement of a hand or foot is instant death, because on
one side is an abyss which for the matter of vision might as well be
fathomless. Now it turns a sharp corner; now it traverses rough masses
of rocks, which are not all _débris_ from blasting, for some of them
have tumbled from the roof, and may be followed by “companion pieces”
at any moment. Woe to him whom they catch! Thus for more than half an
hour the poor wretch has come. To such a feat, performed regularly six
times a day, what is crossing the rapids of Niagara on a wire? What
wonder that the breast heaves and the sweat pours? Have you not heard a
man escaped from drowning tell of the agony thrilling him the instant
the life-saving air rushed into the cells of his collapsed lungs?
Something like that this poor miner and his comrades say they suffer
every time they pass the door of the mine, suddenly into the rarefied
atmosphere of the upper world. Horrible life! And how wretchedly
rewarded! Between mining and morals there is no connection, still the
question comes: Was it for this God gave him a soul?
The man’s first act, on stepping into daylight, is to snatch the little
tallow-dip from its perch on his head and blow it out. It cost him a
_claco_ only; but it was such a friend down in Tartarus! Without it,
could he have ever risen to the light? As its glimmer came dancing up
the rugged way, how the darkness parted before him and the awaiting
gulfs revealed themselves! He proceeds next to the door of the roofless
house. A man meets him, helps him unload, takes the sack to a rough
contrivance and weighs it, giving a ticket of credit. Not a word is
spoken. They are like gliding ghosts. Resuming the emptied sack, the
naked wretch turns, walks quickly to the entrance of the mine, lights
the friendly taper, looks once
----“to sun, and stream, and plain,
As what he ne’er might see again,”
re-enters the rocky jaws, and wades back through the inner darkness.
Yet he is not alone. He is a type. He has comrades whom he will meet on
the way; comrades in the extremest pit, wherein the sounds of rueful
labor are blended with mournful talk.
The friction of the coming and going of miners has polished the
slippery floor to glassy smoothness. With the help of guides, we
descended the black pit, and deep in the heart of the mountain sought
the men at work. The wretched candle each one carried served not so
much to illuminate our way as it appeared to burn a little hole in
the darkness. Perspiration fairly rained from us; but we came to see,
and pushed on in the black solitude, till strength and courage almost
failed. At last we observed, far off to our right, a light dimly
reddening the rocky wall. Miners at work! Good! Just what we came
for. Slowly, carefully, painfully we drew near the beacon. There was
no sound of voices, no ring of hammers, nor echo of blows. A solitary
workman was playing the mystic art. He had not heard our approach, and
we stopped to observe him before speaking. A little basket at his left
contained a few tallow dips and some _tortillas_. Close by, in position
to illuminate brightly about two feet of the wall directly in front of
him, was his lighted candle. A pile of fine crushed ore, the result of
his labor, covered the floor to his right, and on it lay an iron bar
and a pick. Above him extended a vault in the darkness without limit.
He had come there about the break of day in the upper world. He came
alone, and alone he had remained. Not a word had he heard, not one
spoken. The candles not merely lightened his labor: but, since each one
would burn about so long--a certain number exhausting by noon, another
bringing the night--they also kept his time. The solitude was awful! In
the uncertain light the naked, crouching body seemed that of an animal.
We spoke to him. The voice was kindly, yet it sounded in his ears, so
long attuned to silence, like a pistol-shot. He started up in attitude
of defense. He may be squatted at the base of the same wall to-day.
Pity for him, wherever he is! Pity for all of his craft!
CHAPTER XVIII. THE NEW MINERS.
The modern Mexican is true to the traditions of old Spain--jealous of
foreigners, opposed to change, ever copying the past.
There is a legend across the waters that one morning, not a great
while ago, the glorious angel who keeps the keys of the viewless gate
gave Adam permission to come back and look after his farm. Watched by
Gabriel, chief of the guard angelic, the spirit (oldest of all created,
yet forever young) dropped through the silent starry spaces, among
rushing planets and blazing suns, numbered only in Heaven, poised above
the Alps, and looked over Germany. The men were smoking meerschaums,
drinking beer, and talking metaphysics. Disgusted, he fled in swift
flight toward France. There he saw nothing but polite frivolities. The
soul of our common ancestor was saddened. France was even worse than
Germany. He did not linger. Taking wing while morn still purpled the
east, he crossed the mountains into Spain, and, resting incumbent on
air, surveyed the kingdom. One glance across it sufficed. The spirit
folded his radiant wings. “Ah!” he cried, enraptured. “Home again!
Here all is just as I left it.” This old story well illustrates the
influence of Iberian aversion to change, which has been felt wherever
Spain has had a lasting foothold in the New World. The antiquated
mining implements of the by-gone generations of New Mexico are
the queerest things in the world to the Leadviller, used to the
ponderous quartz mills, driven by invisible power, moving like a free
intelligence.
When the mines in the Placer Mountains, thirty miles southwest of
the City of Holy Faith, were in operation, they were worked by the
old-fashioned Spanish _arrastre_, the rudest, most wasteful of mining
machines. It consists in nothing more than two large flat stones,
attached to a horizontal beam and drawn around by a mule (in the days
of slavery by men and women), upon a bed of flat stones. The process
of grinding the ore was slow, the amalgamation imperfect, and not more
than one-third of the gold could be separated from the quartz.
There is good reason for believing that mines near Santa Fé were worked
in this way before Hudson entered the river which bears his name. They
were probably _en bonanza_ in the years when the great Queen, steering
the English ship through stormy seas, paused amid the breakers to
listen to the wooing of Robert Dudley.
The Spaniard in that day mined with stone hammers, and it is surprising
to us they could sink deep shafts with such wretched appliances.
They were ignorant of carbonates of silver, and took nothing but the
argentiferous galena from the vein, throwing away nine-tenths of the
best-paying mineral. There is little statistical knowledge of the
working of any one mine in this territory, but old Church records are
said to show that the ten per cent. in tithes collected for it amounted
to about ten millions. This was realized from mines adjacent to Santa
Fé. In each of the ravines running into the Cañada de las Minas (Glen
of Mines) more or less of “float” is found. This is silver-bearing
galena ore, washed from lodes crossing the ravines, and is certain
indication of silver leads in close vicinity.
In 1846, when Gen. Kearney took possession of Santa Fé nearly all the
miners left the placers, never to return. Many reasons are given for
their hasty flight, one of which is that, being Mexicans, they feared
impressment into the American service, and escaped while they could.
It is believed that mining operations in the height of prosperity then
suddenly stopped, as the abandoned and decaying town of Francisco near
by shows; and but little has since been done to revive the business
until within the last few years.
Los Cerillos Mines, now being rapidly opened up, are in a chain of
low conical mountains north of the Galisteo, twenty miles from the
capital city. In these ranges are found syenitic rocks, carboniferous
limestone and sandstone formations, the latter containing coal. They
are traversed for thirty or forty miles with valuable lodes, the veins
running from the northeast to the southwest, and almost daily fresh
“Spanish traces,” old workings, come in sight, to cheer the heart of
the prospector. After the rebellion of 1680 the Indians returned to
their pueblos and submitted to the foreign yoke, on condition that
mines should not be reopened. It would appear the treaty was kept in
good faith, and that the very ancient mines remained untouched during
the subsequent period of Spanish rule. Some of these old diggings in
Los Cerillos have been so carefully concealed that it requires the
keenest scrutiny to find them. The shaft of the Santa Rosa Mine, on
reöpening, was found to have been sunk fifty-five feet. One shaft is
one hundred and sixty-five feet to water. How much deeper no man can
tell. The _débris_ and precious mineral were carried up on the backs of
_peones_, and the notched cedar trees which were their only ladders two
hundred years ago are still the means of descent to the venturesome
traveler, exploring the rediscovered galleries.
The early proprietaries followed no rules in prospecting. They were
led by whim, or most frequently by dreams, the medium of communication
preferable to the patron saints. The most prejudiced observer can
not help admiring the boldness and energy of their movements. And
the fields are just as rich to-day. If they paid under such feeble,
unskilled management, they must be much more profitable now, with the
help of science and delicate machinery. For three hundred years and
more the sands have been washed out at the base of Los Cerillos; but
not until very recently have those washing for precious grains of metal
thought of looking to the _source_, the core of the mountains, for the
best deposits. This was the process of experiment and experience in the
great California Gulch at Leadville.
In these volcanic hills, still bearing marks of the fiery lava
flow, are the Montezuma Turquoise Mines, which are marvels of deep
excavation. In one instance half a mountain is cut away by Indians of
the pre-historic period, in their search for the coveted, the priceless
_chalchuite_, the Aztecan diamond.
The tradition runs that anciently the gold and silver-bearing ores were
borne on the backs of _burros_ to Chihuahua, Mexico (six hundred miles
away), for reduction; that long trains of the patient creatures, lean,
thirsty, and beaten with many stripes, were perpetually coming and
going along the Valley del Norte, curtaining it with clouds of yellow
dust.
It seems a baseless tradition. If the gold-hunters could reduce their
ores in Chihuahua, why not in Santa Fé as well? In 1867 the larger
portion of El Palacio, then standing, was cleared away, and, among
many curious relics brought to light, after long burial, was a clumsy
smelting furnace, thoroughly bricked up on every side and worn with
long and hard usage. From its ashes were taken out bits of charcoal,
showing clearly that ages ago, time out of mind, the Spaniards
discovered and used it in smelting their ores.
The ancient method of washing for silver was a very simple process. The
operator required nothing but a crowbar, a shovel, and a tanned skin.
This last he fashioned into a water-tight basin by stretching it upon a
square frame. Filling it with water, he stood over it, rocking in it a
little tub holding sand and grit, from which, washed free of clay and
earth, he separated the worthless pebbles, and selected the valuable
particles.
In old ranches through the country we occasionally see an antique
candlestick of beaten silver, or a salt-cellar of hammered
_plata_--heirlooms proving that in long-gone generations silver was
found and in quantities.
Ask how old they are, and the ever-ready “_Quien sabe_” is the answer.
From the beginning of the seventeenth till the eighteenth century there
was a rapid succession of rebellions and civil wars, with Santa Fé as
the field and the important strategic point. In 1680 the Pueblos allied
with the Teguas--described as a nation of warriors--and routed the
Spaniards, driving them from the land as far south as El Paso del Norte.
Another army was mustered and sent up from the City of Mexico, but
feared to take the offensive, and for twelve years the land had rest,
was quiet, as before the foreign invasion. It was in this interval of
twelve years that the ancient mines were hidden. All the old mineral
workings were covered and carefully concealed, and death was the
penalty for any who should reveal to white men where precious metals
or stones were to be found. After 1692 mining in the province was
abandoned, and to this day it is the rarest thing for a Spaniard or an
Indian to engage in mining. They seem to have forsaken it forever.
It is said that in the whole compass of East Indian literature there
is not a single passage showing a love of liberty. The millions
appear created for the gratification of one man. If the West Indian
be, indeed, his brother, then were brothers never so unlike. To the
North American, freedom is the very breath of his nostrils, and the
degradation of slavery worse than slow torture or sudden death.
In irrepressible yearning for liberty the Pueblos escaped from mines,
such as I have attempted to describe, to inaccessible mountain
fastnesses, the steeps of distant cañons and hiding-places in dens of
animals. How many perished in these realms of silence and despair none
but the recording angel can testify. The polished armor of the invaders
covered hearts hard as triple brass, and silken banners floated over
knights whose avarice was equalled only by their cruelty. The fugitives
were tracked and hunted down with bloodhounds, as though they were
beasts of prey.
As has been written of the same tragedy then being enacted in Peru:
“It was one unspeakable outrage, one unutterable ruin, without
discrimination of age or sex. From hiding-places in the clefts of rocks
and the solitude of invisible caves, where there was no witness but
the all-seeing sun, there went up to God a cry of human despair.” The
Bishop of Chiapsa, himself a Spaniard, affirms that more than fifteen
millions were cut off in his time, slaves of the mines. On the Northern
Continent history is but an imperfect guide. That the rich valleys of
the Rio Grande and the Pecos once held a dense population is plainly
proved by the ruins of cities slowly crumbling away. We have only dim
glances into long, dark spaces; but there is light enough to see the
conqueror’s daily walk was on the necks of the conquered natives, who
swiftly declined to an abject and heart-broken race.
So great was the horror of the first conquest that the memory of it
has been kept alive through ten generations. The Pueblo mother still
shudders as she tells the story of ancient wrong and woe to her
children; and the unwritten law yet binds the red race to secrecy, and
is a hindrance in the opening of mines in the territories.
Princely fortunes were made, and, if tribes, whole nations, were swept
off the face of the earth; they were but so many heathen less to cumber
the ground and drag the march of conquest. To understand how valueless
human life was then, look down the steep sides of the old mines
reopened. Rows of cedar pegs serve, you see, as ladders along the black
walls, from the bottom to the entrance. Imagine a man climbing up,
weighted with a sack containing a hundred pounds of ore, fastened to
his back by a broad band of raw-hide across his forehead. The slightest
error in the placement of hand or foot must miss the hold, and the
burden-bearer be dashed to pieces; but it could have been no loss, else
better means would have been provided. There must have been hundreds at
hand to take his place.
When did Spain stretch forth her hand, except to scatter curses? It
is part of my faith, derived from the study of history--in fact, it
is the great lesson of history--that nations are punishable, like
individuals, and that for every national sin there is, soon or late, a
national expiation. Does not Spain place the doctrine beyond question?
No European power has had such opportunities for noble achievement; yet
what good has come through her? What grand idea or benign principle,
what wholesome impression upon mankind? She was the Tarshish of
Solomon; her mines were the subject of quarrel between the Roman and
Carthagenian; in the day of Christ she still supplied the world with
the royal metals. Such were her resources in the beginning. Afterwards,
when commerce reached out through the Pillars of Hercules and drew the
West in under its influences, a people of masterful genius sitting
where Europe bends down so close to Africa, would have stretched a gate
from shore to shore and by it ruled the earth.
Yet later she received the gift of the New World. Where is the trophy
marking her beneficent use of the gift? She had already ruined the
civilization which had its sea in the pillared shades of the Alhambra.
In her keeping were placed the remains of the Aztec and the relics of
the Incas, only to be destroyed. Drunk with the blood of nations, she
who ruthlessly subjected everything to the battle-ax, the rack, and the
torch is now dying of slow decay.
Could the breath blow from the four winds and breathe upon the Indians,
reckoned by millions, who perished under Spanish rule; if their dust
could but come together, and all those slain live again and testify,
alas! for Castelar, wisest of visionaries, awaiting the Republic of
Europe to bring about the resurrection of his country.
CHAPTER XIX. THE HONEST MINER.
The man on the frontier who has no speculation in his eyes is dead as
Banquo. The contagion of soul, says the ancient philosopher, is quicker
than that of the body, and I have yet to see the one with soul so dead
as to refuse a venture in mines, and wholly resist the fever which
spares neither age nor sex, yet is not fatal or even unpleasant. While
the craze lasts, it affects the brain, quickening the imagination and
distorting the vision. Under its powerful alchemy discolored stones by
the wayside become bowlders of ore, it seams bare cliffs with veins of
gleaming metal, plants mines in impossible places, converts vertical
strata into immense deposits. All the way it silvers the dreams of
night and lengthens them unbroken into the day. Knowledge comes to the
fever-smitten without study. One glance at a lofty mountain-range is
sufficient to determine if it be metalliferous, and, balancing a lump
of ore on his gritty forefinger, he can tell its exact per cent. of
silver.
The victim of the epidemic carries scraps of grimy stuff in his
pockets, wrapped in dirty cloths, and a small magnifying glass, into
which he puckers his fevered eyes many times in the twenty-four
hours, and surveys his uncoined treasure with doating glances. He
unselfishly allows confidential friends to look through the lens, and
expects enthusiastic admiration in return for the privilege. Unless
the confidential friend is an enemy in disguise, he will gloat over
the earthy specimens too. He talks little, if at all, apparently
in a generous burst of feeling about bonanzas. _En bonanza_ means
literally smooth sailing, a fair breeze, etc., and is used by Mexican
miners, applied to exceedingly rich ores or “shoots.” Free translation,
“booming.” His voice is pitched in a low key--a loud, impressive, I may
say distracting whisper. The delirium is pleasurable, for the man’s
hopes are indomitable, and a secret trust covers a dark stratum, so
to speak, of fear; but he is reticent, grave as though his shafts had
pierced to the very center of gravity.
The arithmetic man, who loves figures, has estimated that in the flush
times of Colorado the successful were one to every five hundred honest
miners. He has not brought in returns from the territories, and there
is, in consequence, broader sweep for imagination in the undeveloped
regions, where mining is yet partly experiment.
The fortunes of two or three millionaires balance the losses of
thousands, like the many deaths which go to make up a victory. Are
you the five hundredth or eight hundredth happy child of Destiny,
the victorious captain for whom the unnamed heroes fell? YOU? Of the
bonanza king we daily hear by telegraph, photograph, autograph. Of the
vast army of the defeated--nothing. Singly they tramp back home, steal
in darkly at dead of night, ravage the pantry, and, having slept off
fatigue, are ready to deny having thought of Leadville and Golden.
One of the cheapest and easiest ways of reaching a mine is by a
“grubstake.” This euphonious word means a certain sum (say one hundred
and eighty dollars) advanced to a man by another, with more money
and less time, and the prospector has an interest in whatever he may
find. You meet him on every road, every highway, every by-way, and
where there is no way in the territories. The prospective millionaire
generally wears an umbrageous hickory shirt, sleeves usually rolled
to the elbow, exposing arms not the fairest, buckskin or brown duck
pants, or a ready-made suit, ready to be unmade at the seams, and
a hat of superlative slouch. His head is shaggy as a buffalo’s,
with sun-scorched hair, and his face, lined with fierce sunbeat and
wrinkling wind, is a glossy red, as though it had been veneered,
sand-papered, and varnished. He carries a striking hammer, weighing
from five to eight pounds. Does it look like an enchanter’s rod?
In his hand it may prove a fairy wand, potent as the double-headed
hammer of Thor. His _burro_, or donkey, is not much larger than a
sheep, yet able to bear three hundred pounds’ weight. On the patient,
long-suffering brute is strapped a blanket. Above it are piled rations
of bacon, sugar, crackers, a pick and shovel, and a tin pot for boiling
a coarse brown powder, called in bitter (very bitter) sarcasm coffee.
In seeking claims, he is oftenest attended by a partner, familiarly and
affectionately called “my pard.” In this land of sudden death, where
every man carries pistols and loves to use them, one lone prospector
may be picked off almost anywhere, and his bones left in deep cañon or
lonesome gulch, and no questions asked. It is best to hunt in couples.
Like the intelligent and reliable contraband of other days, the honest
miner is forever bringing in good news. “Lee is just where we want
him!” “The latest find is prodigious, the best thing yet, and lacks
nothing but capital for development to equal anything in the Comstock
Lode or Santa Eulalia!” This last is a mine worth having, where the
early diggers set no value on common ore, but sought “pockets,” rich
with silver; a soft yellow clay, scooped out rapidly and easily with
horn spoons. Sometimes they were of immense extent, requiring years to
exhaust.
I have not been able to learn why the miner is always named the
honest miner; but such is the fact. To this well-worn adjective are
sometimes added reticent and successful, when the speaker wishes to be
unusually impressive. It has been written that mining speculations,
like transactions in horse-flesh, have a tendency to blunt moral
perceptions, and soured politicians insinuate it was first phrased by
ambitious patriots who were anxious to secure his suffrage. Be that as
it may, the honest miner is our man now. Though he does not pretend
to be a poet, his is the vision and faculty divine. He is attended by
presences to other eyes unseen, like the inspired sculptor, who in
a heavenly fervor of inspiration hewed the rough block of marble by
the roadside and let the prisoned angel out. By break of day, while
the warm valley still holds the night in its bosom, he is up and on
the march. The shadow of a great rock or a sighing pine has been his
shelter, the overarching blue canopy his tent, the world is his field.
For his unfailing appetite there are crackers, bacon, and coffee.
Like Macaulay’s fellow-traveler, he breakfasts as if he had fasted
the day before, and dines as though he had never breakfasted. His
_burro_ is happy as that melancholy beast can be on a little grama
grass (_Ætheroma oligistarchon_) or twigs and leaves of scrub oak. He
wanders from the borderline northward, among cold, sharp, icy crags,
where desolation dwells in matchless state; where, among treeless, bald
peaks, she holds and guards her Paradise, perfect even to the grim,
painted savage, who, with scalping-knife, instead of flaming sword,
does the duty of the sentinel-angel at the gate. Lava-beds do not stop
him, nor chaparral, mezquit, or cactus jungle, or the pricking “Spanish
bayonet.” In withering wind, in blinding snow and drifting sand, the
undaunted fellow pushes his search for rich leads. Such persistent
energy directed to any other business would command success; but will
it in prospecting? That depends. If he fails in finding a good thing
(say a lode worth a million or so) in a given district, it does not
shake his steadfast confidence. He makes a new deal, and begins again,
for he “is bound to spot the treasure.”
The claim-stake is usually a pine board, marked with certain
inscriptions in pencil, which ooze from within glazes over and makes
indelible. Pleasant and consoling to him is it to know that no wise man
from the East--no scientist, no geologist--has ever found a valuable
mine. “Them literary fellows have to take a back seat” when it comes to
locating a claim. Luck, chance, accident, and the prospector are the
powers to be depended upon then. But when he does strike the big lead,
and the crumbly ore, with its glittering white-and-yellow streakings,
is reported inexhaustible then these wholesome adages floor the honest
miner. A man cannot see very far underground. It takes a mine to work a
mine. Luck may find the lead, but science molds the silver brick; and
to these precious truths are added the proverb so dear to gentlemen of
the profession of the renowned Oakhurst: “There’s nothing certain about
luck, except that it’s bound to change.”
The old Spaniards had the national love of gambling--the gambler’s
unreasoning hope and his blind belief in luck. If Fortune frowned
to-day, she would brightly smile across the green cloth to-morrow. If
gold is not in this glittering, cheating mica, it is hidden elsewhere,
awaiting him who is bold enough to risk the chances of winning. The
same trait is deeply marked in the American of our generation. Mining
is a business to which all other occupations are dull and tame. The
lumps of soft, blue-looking rock, not much harder than clay, streaked
and spangled with shining threads, are dear to the American as they
were to the Castilian heart and eye.
A man undertaking a scheme in which the odds are five hundred to one
against success might be considered a simpleton elsewhere; but not so
on the frontier. Thousands, armed with pretended stoicism, fevered with
anxiety, rush West, “to look into mines a little,” dig deep, and find
at the bottom of the shaft what the gods of Olympus sent as underlying
all the ills--Hope.
It is as certain as the sun rises and sets that the gambling and not
the commercial instinct predominates in mining transactions. The
fascination is in the hazard. The spell, so binding usually, is not
of avarice, but lies in that delicious, feverish, intoxicating _charm
of chance_. To borrow the words of one who has tried it: “There is a
delight in its agony, a sweetness in its insanity, a drunken, glorious
intensity of _sensation_ in its limitless swing between a prince’s
treasures and a beggar’s death, which lend life a sense never known
before; rarely, indeed, once tasted, ever abandoned.”
CHAPTER XX. THE ASSAYERS.
A certain room in El Palacio is devoted to assaying the precious ores.
Its blackened, time-stained rafters look as though they might fall
any moment; but believers in luck rest in calm assurance that the
catastrophe will not occur in their time. Vainly is the tale told how
the very day Governor Merriwether took possession of the Palace, to
assume the executive duties of the territory, the roof of the room in
which he had once been a prisoner fell in. Nobody scares at that old
story now. The slanting beam overhead will not drop till we are out of
the way; the crumbling adobes will hold together awhile yet. No use
running till you are hurt. There is too much actual danger about us to
allow the sensationalist a chance to waken fears.
The mud walls of the room I speak of were once papered; but the hanging
has flaked off, revealing the brown ground, making splotches here and
there, like a disease. Cobwebs of pre-historic antiquity hang in lines,
like ropes of dirty rags. The one north window is obscured by dust and
fly-specks, the dull panes and deep walls letting in a dim and not
religious light. It was formerly a bedroom, I believe. Of the living
things which still may burrow in the walls, as the French women say, I
beseech you to suppose them. The bare floor is dusty and gritty with
sand. In one corner is a barrel of charcoal; beside it pine kindling
and old newspapers. A long pine table holds the assayer’s tools--the
many contrivances necessary to his vocation. Scales that weigh with the
delicate nicety of Portia’s, blow-pipes, bottles of acids, mortar and
pestles, little hammers, and sieves, beside waiting specimens, done up
in muslin, carefully separated and labeled. Such stones come in every
mail, every train, every ambulance, every pocket. “Blossom rocks” adorn
window-sill and mantelpiece, street-corners and counters, serve as
paper-weights and door-props, and are a stumbling-block and rock of
offense along the sidewalks.
I am not here to talk of chlorides, pyrites, sulphurets, silica, and
manganese; but only to remark, _en passant_, that free gold and ruby
silver are pretty terms--very pretty, indeed--and easily understood by
any lady in the land.
At this table presides the refiner and purifier of silver--the Man of
Destiny. It may be a Freiburg professor, with flowing beard and a name
in harsh discord with the mellifluous Spanish titles, or a graduate
of a New York school of mines. No matter. He understands his business
and on his fiat hang hopes high as the sky, for to him are submitted
samples of raw ores believed valuable, and now comes the question: Is
the deposit represented rich enough to justify deep digging--in other
words, to make a mine of? The honest miner’s flush of hope and sinking
of fear are comparable only to the tremor of the quivering aspirant for
literary fame, who, with darling MS. in hand, respectfully addresses
the torturer, and withdraws to await his doom.
The small, square furnace glows with fervent heat, and the room is
suffocating. With beaded forehead and dripping chin, the assayer
weighs, pulverizes, sifts the fine dust in the cupels, to undergo the
only sure test, the trial by fire. His hidden power revives the old
romantic ideas of scholars, to whom the ancient and secret science
of alchemy was a religion, part of the sublime, cabalistic wisdom
revealed unto Adam, to console him for the loss of Paradise; for which
study philosophers shut themselves up to lifelong toil in cells and
caves. He is of the order of mystics, who grew lean and pale pondering
brass-bound volumes of wicked-looking hieroglyphs; who understood
the charm of the burning belt and the ciphered girdle. He deals with
strange crucibles and subtle compounds; by a wizard spell masters the
forces of the earth, the transmutation of metals, and by magic numbers
discovers the golden secrets of Nature. While the cabala combination is
being applied, that laboratory is the center of many hopes.
How often, ah! _how_ often does it prove the gold is dull lead, the
silver is become dross. The waiting miner is “not in harmonization
with his environments.” He hovers about the Palace, trying to cover
his eager anxiety under the studied stoicism of the frontiersman.
Sometimes the sun looks down upon him, as it rises, and finds him a
patient watcher, waiting for the cooling of the metal. He has silently
outwatched the stars, only to learn that specimens believed very rich
(his darling promises) are worthless--not a speck, not a pinhead of
precious mineral to be seen in a dozen cupels. What he held was so much
fairy gold that turns to dust and dross.
The gold-seeker, in the first chill of disappointment, refuses to
credit the report; but the refiner’s furnace has spoken with tongues
of fire. There is the evidence of his own senses; he cannot doubt the
testimony. He quickly recovers his stolid composure, takes a square
meal, possibly a square drink, and, led by the spirit of unrest, is
ready to face the inevitable hardships of another long search for rich
leads.
He rises, after an adverse stroke of fate, buoyant as ever with
irrepressible hope--as Dr. Johnson says of second marriages, “the
triumph of hope over experience.” In the morning the disappointment
seems like something belonging to the vanished night. Five, eight, ten
years may have brought nothing but anxiety, excitement, ill-luck; but
his superior sagacity and daring _must_ win at last.
Away he goes, with _burro_ and “pard,” off on another prospecting tour,
across unmeasured wastes of sand, under a brassy sky, over alkali
plains, lava-beds, and waterless _pasturas_, which lead to springs that
may be poison.
A childish credulity weakens the judgment of the honest miner. He
accepts without reserve the pleasing myths which form a sort of
legendary history; the unwritten annals of gold and silver-bearing
mountains. Airy fables, poetic traditions are received as authentic
records. There are delightful touches in these tales, with which I
should love to embellish and enrich my page; but not to-day. They
belong to the mysteries and subtleties known only to the elect--the
chosen few who see behind the cloud spanned with promise, iris-hued and
glittering, the prize awaiting the venturesome Argonaut.
The pay-streak is possibly in a _vega_ of sea-like vastness and level;
but more likely in the stony mountain heart, threaded by shining lines,
as the crimson veins warm ours. Wherever it is, he is the man to strike
it. And this conviction abides with him, a constant happiness, as he
traverses the length and breadth of the mineral region.
Do you laugh at his fond delusions?
The mania for precious metals is not a modern craze. It is older than
the Pyramids.
Is he chasing a chimera?
No, dear reader, he is feeling his way in the checkered path which all
men at some period of their lives have sought ever since the first
prospector groped along the strand down by the storied Euphrates, that
dim and shadowy river, winding between myth and history, which waters
the old, old land Havilah, where there is gold.
If a cold-blooded newcomer advises the honest miner to settle down to
some good, steady, legitimate business, he rejects the idea with lofty
scorn. That is well enough for the cautious idiot, who does not know
a true fissure-vein when he sees it. The every-day trades, the tame,
beaten paths are not in the prospector’s line of march. He is for the
short cut to fortune. Familiar with dangers, there is one foe he cannot
fight. In lone hillsides and desolate cañons there is lying in wait for
him an enemy more deadly than the skulking Apache--a peculiar form of
intermittent fever, called mountain fever. It lurks in the air, ready
to lift the dread cloud hiding the mystery which forever enshrouds the
Unseen World.
The human race is nomadic, and the old Aryan blood is strong, and
crops out on the _vegas_ of the Rocky Mountains clearly as on the arid
plains of Mesopotamia. To be sure, in Adam we are all one, and he was
a quiet citizen of the world. In Noah we are all three, and after the
Deluge--but this is getting into deep water.
_Revenons._ Occasionally it happens that a sample of ore, “the
queer-looking stuff” on which moderate expectation is based, is brought
out of the furnace, and the button in the cupel is not silver, but a
lump of pure gold. O rapturous moment known to the few, the beloved
children of Fate! O day to be remembered under the coffin-lid! The
owner of such returns (not larger than a pea) treads on air. He tries
to hide his exultation; but the secret will out. He plans; he builds.
He is going to sail the seas; to start before many days to hear the
syrens of the Mediterranean; to visit the abiding-places of poetry and
history, the lands of undying summer; to see the kingdoms of the earth
and the glory of them. And well may he dream dreams and see visions!
Money is but another name for freedom. He who holds it has all the
world before him where to choose his place of rest.
My reader, familiar with “The Last of the Barons,” may remember the
picture of Adam Warner endeavoring to turn copper into gold. In the
solitude genius everywhere creates for itself, by night and by day,
hanging over the burning Eureka, stinting himself and child to feed the
devouring furnace, asking no sympathy in his lonely chamber, living
apart with his works and fancies, like a god amidst his creations, and
coming very near the grand discovery concealed for a later generation
to penetrate. The fascination of mining is what those elder sages
experienced in a lifelong witchery over minds bent to the study of
alchemy. What wonder men were devoted to a pursuit, in which even Bacon
and Newton wasted precious hours, which promised results so august?
Besides costly chemicals, there were thrown into the crucibles youth,
health, hope, love, yes, life itself, to vanish as vapor, slowly,
slowly, surely, surely.
The worst thing about mining, as formerly about alchemy, is that it
allures on its victims to destruction. One gets near and ever nearer
the object; so trifling a sum additional will complete the work and
secure the promise. Time, toil, expensive appliances are demanded; but
the glorious result justifies all these, and many another risk more
fearful.
Nature has done in the Rocky Mountains precisely what the ancient sages
tried to do. Here the last secret combination has produced the medium;
the striking hammer is smiting the rocks; in the death-like stillness
of remote solitudes the blow reverbates, and at its compelling stroke
the earth opens, and lo! the philosopher’s stone is discovered.
Prospero’s wand was not mightier.
At night the clear, red glow of the furnace reddens the walls of the
assayer’s room, coats with bright gilding gloomy rafters overhead, and
lends a sickly light to the flickering flame of the coal-oil lamp.
Then the place is suggestive of the great centre of the earth, where
doomed souls go wandering up and down in a joyless, endless wrestling
with fire. The silent men are like dismal ghosts. If they speak, it
is in repressed tones. Their low voices, the obscurity of the room,
the intense heat, the air of secrecy and mystery give the feeling that
some agony is conducting--a battle, a fire, a drama involving high
interests. The mighty cause is a tragedy; possibly a crime.
Sometimes a woman, a girlish shape, looks in with innocent eyes, as
though she thought the assayer in woeful peril. She flits away like a
spirit blest, wandering from the cool, sweet fields Elysian, to pity
for one moment the sad dwellers in the near purgatory.
Souls in torment are here, in fact, when “specimens” on which star-high
hopes were grounded prove to be fire-clay and galena, and the long,
slow dream is as a vision of the night.
The conduct of some “miner men,” after a claim has been located, and
the one hundred dollars’ worth of work which the law exacts is done,
is a study. In this age of doubt and question, their unwavering faith
gives us fresh confidence in skeptical, sorely-tried human nature.
They gaze into narrow prospect-holes, about the size of a seventy-five
barrel cistern, with a depth of trust, an immovable resting on the
promise in the future comparable with nothing I know, except the serene
complacency of the setting hen. She feels the stir of life beneath her
brooding wings, and he has visions
----“impalpable and unperceived
Of other’s sight.”
You see only a hole in the ground; a shallow cistern which holds no
water. Nature has revealed her secrets to him, as she does not to the
unbeliever. Hence his robust faith.
From that prospect-hole riches will roll up by the bucketful.
“How will they get up?” asks the uninspired tourist, heartlessly.
Honest miner, teetering a scrap of galena on his forefinger, stares
steadily at the faint mountain-line and murmurs: “Oh! I must bide my
time. One of these days capital will come along--capital will come
along--come along--along.”
It must be admitted that capital is often a good while on the road.
This hour, scores about us are prospecting, opening abandoned workings,
following the ancient Tegua-Spanish traces, with hopeful hearts. They
are enchanters. Hear them talk, and you behold the beauty of which they
dream. They have neither crucibles nor carpet, nor do they pour ink in
your palm, as Hassan did; yet are they prophets and seers, and their
visions all foreshow another Leadville.
The Lodestone Rocks are not far off. Come not near, unless you are
ready to be dashed against them.
Only fifty dollars laid out in work, and a mine possibly worth
thousands. _Quien sabe?_ “Who knows?” “Who knows?”
Taking a stern Methodist view of the business as now proceeding in
the territories, I should call mining a game of chance--exciting,
fascinating, bewildering--which defrauds no one but yourself.
CHAPTER XXI. THE RUBY SILVER MINE.--A TRUE STORY.
Mining atmospheres are rife with stories, marvelous, startling, that
would be incredible, did we not know it is always the incredible which
happens. Of the many tales floating about Santa Fé, I give one to you,
beloved, which shows how strangely things come round in this round
world of ours.
The patient reader who has graciously followed my rambling, scrambling
steps through New Mexico may possibly remember that a large portion of
the MSS. comprising the archives of the territory, was sold as waste
paper and found way into the various shops of the city. Santa Fé being
the largest town and commercial center of New Mexico, from it they were
widely dispersed in every direction, and on this accidental scattering
of leaves hangs my story and a fortune.
One night in the Autumn of 1879 I sat boring myself into inanity over
the _Pharos of the Occident_ (which is a misnomer, the newspaper being
anything but light reading), when a visitor was announced.
“_Me parece un minero_,” said Dolores Lucia Marina Feliciana Flores.
I was pleased at the thought of a visitor, even on business, and, in
dread of being left alone with _The Pharos_, insisted _el minero_
should not be interviewed in the Assay Office, but here. The “Palace”
halls are neither long nor lofty, being the length of two moderate
rooms on the ground floor, and in a few minutes there stood in the
deep doorway a figure, as revealed by the shaded student’s lamp,
unmistakably that of a miner. His face was sunburnt to a vermeil red
and made prematurely old by exposure. Wrinkled by drying wind and
pitiless sunbeat, his appearance was weather-worn, showing days of
wanderings without shelter and lodgings on the cold, cold ground.
The contagion of good manners is a happy thing. In Spanish-speaking
countries, though all else be lacking, there is ever the most exquisite
politeness, and the man removed his slouch of a hat with a profound
and sweeping bow. His uncovered head was thatched with a thick shock
of carrot-colored locks, which are the inheritance of “the sandy
complected,” to speak after the manner of the poke-berry districts of
our own Indiana. The strip of forehead shaded by his hat was dotted
with large, assertive freckles, which in the exposed portion of his
face were “in one red burial blent.” He closed the door carefully and,
with an air of secrecy, dropped his voice to a certain loud whisper,
peculiar to sick-rooms and miners in confidence, and his whisper
gradually sank to the ledger lines below, as he made his report; for,
though rather untimely, his call was not unexpected.
I spread _The Pharos_ on my table, and he slowly proceeded to unload
his pockets and his red handkerchief, and empty on the paper various
ores, kept separate, tied in rags and marked. To him they represented
all precious things, besides gold and silver; to me they appeared
formless, jagged lumps of dull-looking stone.
The story of the Argonaut was long--too long for any but a
frontiersman, with plenty of leisure to speak and to hear--and was
given in the style of oratory perfected by the Cousin of Sally Dillard.
He could not sit still, but started every few minutes, as at a calling
voice, and strode hurriedly up and down the room, restless, eager,
nervous, like one who, after long and exhaustive strain, suddenly
slackens the tension. With the utmost minuteness he gave the history
and described the locality of each particular sample, and tied them
again, one by one, each in its own grimy cloth and label. This done,
he hesitated, cleared his throat, rose from his chair, apologized for
trespassing upon our valuable time (as though we had anything _but_
time), opened the door, looked up and down the hall, as if he feared
some ear was airing at the key-hole. Satisfied with the reconnaissance,
he closed it again and with stealthy step returned to the table.
Evidently two hours of rigmarole had failed to free his soul. There
was something still unsaid. We silently awaited the revelation. “There
is one specimen left,” he began, doubtfully, and looked at me much as
to say: Can a woman keep or be trusted with a secret? Perhaps he read
assurance in my face, for he fumbled in his vest (from the Semitic shop
hard by, painfully new and pathetically cheap), and out of its deepest
corner produced a little bag of buckskin, tied with a leather string.
He untied it with nervous haste, and his wistful light blue eyes,
burned in deep hollows with miner’s fever, brightened as he spoke,
scarcely above his breath, in an awe-inspiring whisper: “Here we air.
Here’s the richest thing yet.” Shaking the bag, there dropped into the
palm of his left hand a reddish purple stone, without streakings or
glitter. “Ruby silver,” he said, softly. “Ruby silver, and plenty of
it. There’s no end to the lead.”
He reached it to me tenderly, as though it could break at a touch.
I did as was expected of me--scraped the fragment of mineral with a
pen-knife, peered at it through the magnifying glass, hefted it on
my forefinger, and made the sagacious observation: “It looks well. I
should say a very rich specimen.”
“It’s from the Cañon de los Angelos,” said the miner.
I remembered it as a dismal gorge, torn up and riddled by volcanic
action, a blasted wilderness of gashed and riven stone peaks, bearing
aloft gnarled and twisted firs, their utmost summits a region of ice,
lifted above the limit of life. The silence unbroken but by the howl
of wild beasts and the war-whoop of the savage; where only fresh
mountain-heaps of piled-up lavas, marking the throes of the earthquake,
vary the forbidding gloom which baffles the traveler, entering it
with a sense of approaching the Valley of the Shadow of Death. As soon
expect water in desert-sand as gold in that lava-flood, silver in those
melted rocks!
“How did you come to prospect in that dreadful cañon?” I asked.
“The strangest thing in the world,” said the miner, “how I first
lighted on it. I bought a plug of tobacco (it was six years ago), and
carried it home in a piece of an old letter, dated sixteen hundred and
something. I disremember the year. It was writ on thick yellow paper,
to one of the Spanish governors, when Arizona and New Mexico was one.
My wife was a-studyin’ Spanish (you can’t git along here without some),
and she brought the dictionary to bear and spelt the thing out. It told
about a rich lead in the Cañon de los Angelos; but the paper was tore
off in the very place I most wanted, so I couldn’t exactly spot it.
For nigh onto five years I’ve prospected. I’ve hunted off and on, in
hot and cold, wet and dry. I’ve been hungry and thirsty. I’ve scorched
and I’ve froze. Oncet I was nearly drowned by a sudden rise at night,
when I camped in an _arroya_. One winter I was snow-blind. Many and
many’s the week I’ve heard no voice, nothing but the yelp of the coyote
and the wind among the pines. Many and many a time I’ve smelt the
grizzlies; but, as luck would have it, I never run onto one. A lion or
a panther will run when he’s hurt and roar; but a grizzly doesn’t, and,
after bein’ hit, shot through the heart, instead of dyin’, he lives
long enough to chaw up the hunter.”
Dear reader, beware of starting the Rocky Mountaineer on bear stories.
You will feel the daisies growing over you before he slackens the
strain of his eloquence.
“Did you spend all these six years in the Cañon?” I inquired, by way of
bringing the prospector back to the subject in hand.
“Oh! no. By spells I went at other bizness; but the idee of a fortune
a-waitin’ for me in Los Angelos, and that old Spanish letter made me
sour on everything. You know it is in Valencia County.”
I did not, but made an amiable effort to look as though I did.
“There’s curious old things down there in them old lava-beds.”
“What things?” I asked, for the first time rousing to any interest, for
my antiquarian blood began to stir.
“Heaps of ruins, cities, ragged walls, sixty feet high and ten feet
thick, scattered over miles and miles. The rafters air charred with the
banked-up fire of the volcano; but I see one beam as sound as the day
it was laid up.”
“And how did the timber appear?”
“’Twas piñon, squared with a stone hatchet or hammer and covered with
markings--Indian signs, maybe--furrowed with a stone gouge. Then there
was a drawin’ of the sun, and a sort of a _neye_; the lava had buried
deep, and people who like old potteries can get a wagon-load there.
About four feet down I struck a room, about ten feet square, where
there was a big fireplace; and in it was a crane, with a clay hook,
and on the end of the hook was a bone. By the side of the fire was a
skeleton--the old man a-watchin’ his bone a-roastin’ on the hook, when
here comes the lava and seals him up tight. Over yonder, at the Fonda,
I’ve got his skull; and here” (he opened the revolver-pocket this
time)--“here’s the old fellow’s finger-bone. I’ve lots of the same old
arrowheads and a flint tomahawk.”
I was greatly interested in the still relics of remote generations; but
we had not reached the mine, and the evening was far spent. “These were
near your ruby silver mine?” I said, suggestively.
“Oh! no. As I was sayin’, I found the bones of a dog close to a spring
of sweet water, and I knowed then I was a-gettin’ warm. My time was
pretty nigh out. The snow was so deep I hid my tools, and give up for
the winter and hired out to the freighters. As soon as winter broke I
lit out one moonshiny night. Somehow the prospectors in Santa Fé got
wind of my moves. I don’t know how, unless I told in my sleep, for I
kept dumb as the dead, and I was afeered they’d track me. I hunted
round that Spring in a ring of five miles. First, I found the _acequia_
which kept the buried city in water. I followed it in a blind lead
for three-quarters of a mile, to a broken dam. The trail to the dam
came next. When I tell you cedars thick as my body air growin’ on that
trail, you have an idee how long it’s been since tracks has been made
in it.”
Just there I think the prospector drew on his imagination for his
facts; but his audience held their peace, and he continued:
“It was a mighty poor zigzag; but it led to smelters.”
“To smelters!” we both exclaimed, in a breath; then followed a
thrilling pause. The prospector had reached his climax, and he walked
up and down the floor excitedly, tossing the ruby silver back and forth
in his hands, like the hands of Esau.
“To old smelters!” he repeated, with emphasis. He struck the
Colossus-of-Rhodes pose on the wolf-skin rug and continued:
“They was made of adobes, and was raised some twenty foot above the
ground, and had saw hard service. I prowled around there a full month,
hackin’ and diggin’ alone; for I dassent tell anybody but a Pueblo
Indian, and threatened to kill him if he ever made sign to white man.
It was my last throw. I was hard up. My old pard was dead, give out
with rheumatism. My wife had went back to the States. My credit (never
anything to brag on) went after my wife” (he smiled, for the first
time), “and I see plain luck must come soon or never; but I never
lost my grip. I knowed I was a-gittin’ warm. There’s no sign like the
buried towns. It’s certain indication of diggin’s not far off. It’s
the rule all over the territories. I lived on venison, venison, till
it was worse than old mutton. About three mile away was a lake, where
I scooped up salt with my hands; but venison and salt gets monotonous
week in and week out. There was plenty of charcoal (had been used by
the miners, whoever they was), and I made out that the dam led the
water of the Abo to the works. From the old furnaces I found another
overgrown trail, that run to this mine.”
“What sort of mine is it?”
“One of the covered-up ones. It’s certain hundreds of years old, buried
under felled timber. Some of it had rooted. I was a month gettin’
through, and it took a sharp eye to sight it.” The speaker modestly
blinked the milky orbs under their pink lashes, and continued: “The
shaft is eighty feet deep or more, walled up with pine, and drifts
runnin’ to the right and left a hundred feet or so. I’ve set my stakes
and the papers is all made out. It’s mine, and no divide, and not a
soul on earth knows about it except you two and me.”
I have seen so many ruined prospectors hunting mines that are nothing
but myths, it was cheering to learn there could be no mistake about
this discovery.
“You have fairly earned all you have found,” I said, in sympathy.
“_Gracias, Señora_,” said the rich man, dramatically waving the Esau
hand, evidently enjoying his Spanish.
“You see this specimen will run twelve hundred to the ton, and there’s
no end to the lead.” He teetered the stone on his trembling forefinger.
“I’ve had a hard time! My wife never got done mournin’ she ever spelt
out the old letter. She’ll feel better now. I’ve struck it, and I guess
I’ve struck it rich.”
And he had. With a farewell toss up of the ruby silver specimen, till
it struck the muslin ceiling overhead, the fortunate man, haggard and
shaken, yet hilarious, took his leave.
CHAPTER XXII. THE RUBY SILVER MINE.--(_Continued._)
Six months later, in the shade of a light umbrella, I sauntered along
the beach at Cape May. Down by the summer sea, where lovers walk with
lingering step, rapt, heedless as the dead, of aught but tender glances
and soft words whispered under the sound of the surf. After the desert
silence and parching dryness of the territories, it was a deep pleasure
to breathe once more the salt, moist air, to hear the mighty monotone,
and watch the restless play of light and color on breakers rolling in
from the far Bermudas, beating against the shore like the tireless
heart of earth.
Thinking upon nothing but simple enjoyment of earth, sea, and sky,
I strolled in quiet sympathy with the unknown crowd, when suddenly
an open carriage, drawn by two horses, stopped near us. It was light
as a wicker toy, the airiest, fairiest thing manufactured since the
night Cinderella rode to the ball. So slight in construction one might
think it would scarcely bear the weight of one person, had we not seen
that every portion was perfectly wrought. The tempered steel and light
wheels would endure a severe strain. Ornate as burnish could make it,
gilding and varnish sparkled in the sunlight, gay rosette and flying
ribbon were not lacking. Instead of cloth, the lining was plaited
violet satin, of exquisite tint. I have never seen so elegant a turnout
elsewhere. The cushions were fit for an empress, laces and velvets to
trail on, a seat where a king might rest and keep the soil from the
ermine and velvet of his coronation robe.
The small horses seemed made for the fairy carriage. They were
coal-black, perfectly matched, without a white hair on them. Your
correspondent knows precious little about horses, except one ancient
pony, which lost an eye in a pre-historic raid on a corn-crib; but
ignorance itself could see these were of no common blood. The broad
faces and delicate ears, the luminous eyes, soft as an antelope’s, the
arching necks, veiled with silken manes like the fluffy hair of young
girls, come of no menial race, such as haul drays and drop on pavements
in the streets. The mettlesome, high-bred beauties, pawing impatiently
with hoofs like polished ebony, were such steeds as dash through
the Ouida novels or come home at the masters’ call under the black
tents, the Arab houses of hair. We had started for the light-house,
three miles away, and in the dazzle of all that luxury and ease the
brightness went out of the day. My walk suddenly became hard and long.
It required the entire skill and strength of the liveried driver to
manage the reins, while the occupant within leaped nimbly out to adjust
some portion of the harness. He was dressed in garments of finest
fabric and freshest cut, in which the tailor had missed the easy fit
so coveted by gentlemen. A Pactolian watch-chain streamed across his
breast, and lightish gloves on massive hands gave the wearer the aspect
of being pretty much all gloves. A host of idlers gathered in a moment,
and, with them, I stopped to admire the equipage, perfect in make and
ornament, costly as money can buy, and then and there broke the tenth
commandment.
Evidently the envied man felt fussy and grew fidgety under all those
staring eyes. I rubbed mine (not so young as they once were), to clear
a confused, bewildering recollection. Could it be? No! impossible!
To reassure myself, I looked toward the sea, then back again to the
sky, the town. It was no spirit of earth or air, no cheat of vision or
brain. The territorial sunburn had faded from his face, but lingered in
the scorched carrot hair, and Rocky Mountain wrinkles are not easily
ironed out. Well I knew those early crow’s feet at the corners of the
milky blue orbs. The owner of the princely establishment, with its
rare belongings, was none other than our frontier friend, once sole
proprietor of the Dives Mine, in the Cañon de los Angelos, which sold
for eighteen hundred thousand dollars.
The golden key opens many doors; but it takes time and some skill
to fit it into the lock. The lavender kids split as the Dives miner
hastily jerked them off, to fasten a harness-buckle; the flash of a
superb diamond ring followed the movement. He threw the delicately
tinted gloves on the ground, with words more emphatic than correct,
muttered under a scant fringe of pink moustache, then turned a
deprecating, apologetic glance toward the crowd.
An instant the ancient prospector held me with his glittering eye. It
said, plainly as whisper in my ear: I beg you do not tell on me.
I did not. He hurried back to his place. The Esau hand, with its
blazing diamond, closed the door with a heavy slam. It did not hold.
He banged it again, and yet once more, growing very red in the face,
before he could lean away from our gaze back on the violet cushions.
From that soft recess he called loudly to the driver to “git.” There
were a few significant nods as the night-black steeds sped with swift
grace over the wet beach, but nothing was said except by a very
charming young lady, fresh from Ollendorf. She released a loving arm
to bend forward a moment and wave her fine little handkerchief at the
vanishing show, exclaiming: “_Adieu, monsieur le nouveau riche._”
The sweet girl graduate had taken the sense of the meeting. When the
purple and gold passed from sight, the throng fell into line as before
the interruption, and in placid enjoyment yielded to the dreamy spell
of vesper sunlight and lulling sound. All was refined, serene, restful.
The mild ripples, changeful as the hues of the dolphin, came and went,
leaving their slight tracery in the sand, secret messages from hidden
depths far away. The blue waters murmured mystic music to fair and
gracious maidens and youths of gentle, graceful mien; tender cushats,
cooing and wooing and sighing, but not for the touch of vanished hands.
The rhythmic ebb and flow charmed the sense with hints of warbling
peris and dying cadences of mermaids’ songs. Earth and ocean in perfect
tune, the very air thrilled with a tremulous harmony, while youth and
beauty wove their low, sweet idyl. Lapwings glided along the sands,
where the sick lady rested in her invalid chair, under a gayly-striped
awning. White gulls screamed and circled round a ship lying at anchor
in the shining bay, her flag a wavy line of brilliant color against
the pale horizon. Beyond it, in dim perspective, a long procession of
vessels slowly sailing. An endless picture, suggestive of famous places
and unknown nations, gathered treasure of pearl and amber, spicery and
silks, and happy home, coming from voyages through halcyon seas, by
distant fragrant shores. The wind was warm, its breath was balm, the
world was lulled to rest.
A flush of pink fell from out the tranquil sky. It dropped fresh roses
on faded cheeks, and in its blush I saw the young face beside me as it
had been the face of an angel. Then I thought the beautiful is wealth,
the world over. My darling holds in her slender hand the keys of the
palaces.
The walk to the light-house was not so bad, after all.
[Illustration: Zuñi Effigies.]
My holiday ended, I returned to the City of Holy Faith, and exactly a
year from the date of this story took my constitutional walk in the
splendor of sunlight such as never falls on land or sea east of the
Rocky Mountains. No fear of rain to drive me indoors, no speculations
about clear or cloudy to-morrows, we know a radiant shining will
lighten the coming morning, just as it filled the sky of yesterday.
With the Pueblos, I am a devout sun-worshipper and love at his rising
to salute the lord of light and life, and again “under the sad passion
of the dying day” to watch his departure. Returning from my invisible
altar on old Fort Marcy, I threaded my way through cramped and
crooked streets, and, making the round of the Plaza, saw beside the
gate a _burro_ being loaded with a miner’s outfit. He was not much
larger than a dog; beyond compare the most wretched of his miserable
race, a pitiable wreck. He was mangy and sore-eyed, his tail tapered
to a stumpy point, the tuft at the end fallen beyond the reach of any
“restorer.” Patches of hair worn off in various portions of his body
exposed wrinkled, leathery hide, and the dark cross over the shoulders
was pitted with scars, like marks of small-pox. There was not enough
flesh on those protrusive bones to make one meal for the ravening
mountain wolf, or a respectable lunch for half a dozen carrion crows.
Arid and dusty, the creature looked like the mummy of some antediluvian
animal. Easy to see his portion had been kicks, scourge, goads, abuse;
no champagne savannah, no green meadow or lush blue grass in his line
of travel; but life-withering marches in snowy and sandy desert, where
scant herbage and meagre shrub were enough for the starving slave.
Yet the sorry beast was not senseless nor altogether broken in spirit.
A train of mules went by. Among them he recognized an old acquaintance,
a fellow-sufferer. He lifted his head and plucked up heart for a
passing salute, essaying a feeble bray. The unwonted sound was too
great an effort for the gaunt throat. It died in a hoarse rattle and
was buried in a succession of notes, the strangest mortal ear has heard
since that old day Jubal first struck the gamut.
Pick, shovel, bags of crackers, blanket, and coffee-pot were piled high
on the tough burden-bearer, and, watching the loading done by a Mexican
boy, a tall man lazily leaned against the diminutive brute, apparently
reckless of the danger of upsetting donkey and cargo, and sending them
sprawling across the sidewalk. There was nothing to draw attention in
his familiar uniform--high-top boots, cactus-proof buckskin pants,
hickory shirt, red neck-handkerchief; but under the broad slouch hat
were straggling locks that caught my eye--a peculiar tinge of reddish
bronze, the _cabello del oro_ of the Argonaut of ’79.
The never-resting wheel of fortune had made the downward curve. The
Dives miner had summered in Saratoga, betting on cards and horses,
had staked tens of thousands on the hazard of a dicer’s throw, lost
everything, and now was back to the starting-place, ready to try again.
I remembered the purple and gold, the dash and glitter of the rich man
at Cape May. The apparition of prancing steeds of matchless beauty,
with dainty limbs, too dainty for the sand they touched but to spurn,
flitted before me.
Gambler though he was and deserved it, the forlornness of the change
would touch a harder heart than yours or mine, dear reader. I stepped
toward the gate. At that moment Dives--perhaps I had best say
Lazarus--poked the poor _burro_ with a sharp stick and, in a high, gay
voice, struck up:
“Of all the wives you e’er can know,
There’s none like Nancy Lee, I trow.”
Then, as Bunyan hath it, he went on his way and I saw him no more.
This story sounds like a pure invention. Does it not? I confess to
trifling attempts in decorative art, a tiny dash of color, the least
bit of embroidery, just to round a corner and give a little life to
dullness, you know, but not now. My hero is to-day a day-laborer,
working in the great King Henry lead in the Shakespeare district of
New Mexico--the man who for one brief summer reckoned his money by
hundreds of thousands. You can see him when you go.
CHAPTER XXIII. MINE EXPERIENCE.
The reader who graciously follows me to the end of this brief history
will readily comprehend why it must be somewhat obscure. “I could a
tale unfold” better worth the hearing, but like the poor ghost I am
forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house. It need harrow up no
soul to hint that the scene was laid and drama played not a thousand
miles from Tucson, Arizona.
Imagine a _vega_ of sea-like vastness, in a rock-setting of ghostly
Sierras whose rent crags pierce through the rich blue air far above the
snow line. In the primeval years the Apaches possessed the country, and
with the poetic instinct which never quite forsakes the savagest of
savages they called this range the Mist-Befringed Mountains. To reach
the valley from the west, we leave the main road and cross rough masses
of lava which block the way. The seeming barrier ends in a narrow pass,
a mile or so from wall to wall,--a mighty stone corridor stately as
Karnak, and gloomy with the all-pervading silence of death. At the end
is a high natural gateway of red granite; passing under it we emerge
into a smooth expanse level as water, an amphitheatre whose blank
surface is relieved by scattered masses of lava upheaved in some fiery
earthquake long stilled their rigid outlines jagged and bristling.
There is no verdure to soften the foothills so savagely hacked and
split in yawning cracks. No tender moss, no shrub, no sparkling water
or waving branches brighten the leaden hues of the gray desert;
treeless, windless, waterless. If herbage ever grew there it is now
overdrifted with sand. The wonderful mirage--most marvelous of Nature’s
mysteries--swims over it in the dreamy haze of early morning. A deep,
dark coolness follows the burning day, and the jeweled sky, of opal and
turquoise, is unspeakably beautiful. Other change there is none.
It would seem a place for the unclean condor to lay her eggs on the
bare rocks, and the eagle to wheel and scream and stir up her nest with
wings which battle the storm; but there is no trace of bird or insect
life, no wolf or antelope, coyote or lizard.
It is the one place in which I have stood where the earth is as still
as the sky. Suppose we call the dreary region with its adamantine rocks
the Foothills of the Mountains of the Moon. There in the beginning
silence set her seal, unbroken till eighteen hundred and--some odd
years. For reasons obvious, I cannot be exact regarding dates.
In a memorable hour the death-like hush was startled by the ring of a
single hammer on the torn mountain wall at the west end of the _vega_.
Blow on blow against the riven clefts resounded through the warm blue
silence.
Was it a Bostonian seeking the Infinite? Did he see beyond the verge of
sight, like the young Aladdin led on by the Genii of the Cave?
All day the one man toiled, digging, hewing, breaking, scraping pieces
of stone with a pen-knife. What he sought he evidently found, put some
of it in his pockets, other portions in his haversack, and wound out of
the cavernous gloom at sunset through the narrow defile to the world
outside the lifeless plain. He is brave beyond the bravest who would
stay there till midnight,
“Alone in the terrible waste with God.”
A week passed, and one crisp and clear morning--owing to very high
altitude the nights here are always cool--three men passed under the
rock gateway, each with tools and determination of iron. Steadily they
worked in the long hot day, stopping for lunch and a short rest at
noon. Only the all seeing eye was upon them, no human ear was there
to hear, yet at intervals they looked around as though in an enemy’s
country, and their rare speech was in suppressed voices. They bent with
faces to the ground as children hunt for nuts. They peered into cracks
and crevices and pried up loose stones, scattered _débris_, broke them
open, and gazed at their interior under a hand mirror. Occasionally
the lightest man, a mere stripling, mounted the shoulders of the other
two and seized something above their heads. Were they a trio of poets
obeying the charge of the Bard of the Sierras, “Lean your ladder not
against the clouds, but against the solid Rocky Mountains and climb
there?” They saw something which thrilled their pulses, and bore off a
load in sacks just as the snow crowned peaks blushed with the ineffable
beauty of the afterglow. Then darkness leaped from the mountain walls
and held the valley, in the starry silence, lone as the land Havillah
before the first gold seekers crossed the river on their endless quest.
Another week brought a picnic party largely composed of ladies, two
gentlemen in army blue, girls made of roses and dimples, curls and
ribbons, young men with eager, handsome faces. Rocky Mountain ladies
are always well mounted and are fearless horsewomen. Diana Vernon might
envy their dash and daring, and in this rarified atmosphere horses are
mettlesome and endure as they cannot in the low countries. There was
much prancing and spurring through the rugged defile, and many a rider
less bold would have been unseated even on the sure-footed ponies. They
brought little twigs of _pinones_ from the _cañons_ and made fires
with matches scraped on boot heels; they unpacked hampers, opened
cans, played games, shouted, sung, wild with overflowing spirits; they
ate, drank and were merry, all the while hunting and hunting. Lovers
strayed in pairs to dusky recesses in the mountain rim, not on purpose
to be lost nor to find the four-leaf clover, nor yet to learn how to
make love dials of daisies. They sought something more than the hasty
charm of a stolen kiss. They looked for shining stones, gleaming metal,
precious clay, and every one carried in a pocket handkerchief minute
sections of the adamantine Foothills of the Mountains of the Moon.
Even uninstructed eyes can trace the rust colored, red-brown lines of
“blossom rock,” and it is following a captivating lead to yield one’s
self to its beguiling ways.
One youth and maiden tracked it far up the _cañon_ to a gnarled and
twisted pine which overhung the edge of a sheer crag to which it clung
by roots clutching like claws. In the dry, dewless air the needles
of the pine lay in soft carpeting undisturbed for ages. They sat and
rested beneath the skeleton tree, and listened to soft æolian airs
faintly stirring the bare branches overhead. Then she sang in the
sweetest voice:
“Is this a dream? Then waking would be pain.”
And in answer he tossed up his cap and it lodged in the pine, and they
clapped their hands in an impromptu chorus, “No, no, no! a thousand
times, no!” If there be elves in the Mist-Befringed Mountains they
must have laughed at this frolicsome glee, for such sounds are a new
revelation there. The young couple were not crazy, they had heaved up a
rough brown stone, and striking it with a heavy hammer they saw--_ay de
mi!_ the electric flash of wedding rings. The zigzag lines of “blossom
rock” held wreaths of orange flowers, hitherto unattainable, and now
they felt so near their sweetness they were filled with delight. The
poor young things had thought best to bear their poverty apart (he was
a second lieutenant), but now they could hear marriage bells in every
stroke of the magic hammer, in every throb of their happy hearts.
A stray dove, bewildered and lost, lighted at their feet, tame because
ignorant of men, and they hailed the gentle bird as an omen. Then
he called her his dove-eyed darling, talking the sweet foolery my
gray-haired reader laughs at, but would give a year of peaceful life to
hear again for one half-hour.
O day of bridal brightness whose splendor lives in the illuminated Book
of Chronicles!--let me linger a moment over its unfading beauty. The
lovers locked their happy arms together and trod lightly over enchanted
ground, in the silence of perfect happiness,--all that is left us of
the lost language of Eden. Wherever their sparkling glances fell,
myrtles sprung up. O never, on land, or in sea, grew flowers like those
which bloomed in their foot-prints along the sandy beds of “blossom
rock.”
The lieutenant was bare-headed, for he never got his cap, though he
stoned it valiantly and even shot his revolver at the limb where it
hung. A frontier lady is full of expedients as Robinson Crusoe, and
the girl he loved, with deft and tasteful fingers devised a cap from
her silken kerchief and trimmed it with a drooping feather from her
own riding hat. Very proud was the face beneath it, and he bowed in
admiration of her ingenuity and murmured some soft nonsense you do not
care to hear.
They joined the party in the plain with an assumption of indifference,
transparent as mica,--a flimsy ruse, old as the oldest lovers,--and of
course every one saw just how matters stood the instant they appeared.
He went to look after the pony, tied by a _lariat_ to a block of stone,
patted her never so gently, stroked her mane, and called her “Pretty
girl, pretty girl.” The maiden sat on a striped Navayo blanket and in
an arch bewitching way sang to an old Spanish air full of trills and
graces this song:
“QUIEN SABE?”[17]
I.
“The breeze of the evening that cools the hot air,
That kisses the orange and shakes out thy hair,
Is its freshness less welcome, less sweet its perfume,
That you know not the region from whence it is come?
Whence the wind blows, where the wind goes,
Hither, and thither, and whither--who knows? Who knows?
Hither and thither--but whither--who knows?
II.
“The river forever glides singing along,
The rose on the bank bends adown to its song,
And the flower, as it listens, unconsciously dips
Till the rising wave glistens and kisses its lips.
But why the wave rises and kisses the rose,
And why the rose stops for those kisses--who knows? Who knows?
And away flows the river--but whither--who knows?
III.
“Let _me_ be the breeze, love, that wanders along
The river that ever rejoices in song;
Be _thou_ to my fancy the orange in bloom,
The rose by the river that gives its perfume.
Would the fruit be so golden, so fragrant the rose,
If no breeze and no wave were to kiss them? Who knows? Who knows?
If no breeze and no wave were to kiss them? Who knows?”
Before the singer lay the desert grim and bare, girdled by scarred,
seamed mountains--a boundary wall touched with purplish tints of
supreme beauty. Behind her, a dim outline of snow and granite in the
far horizon, the Sierra Nevada projected against the rainless blue,
the blade of snow-white teeth which suggested its Castilian name. The
valley had a fascination from its absolute loneliness. Not a cloud
flecked the blue above, not a breath stirred the air while the song was
sung.
The elders gave it a divided attention, being intent on lumps of
treasure which they “hefted” in their palms, balanced on their
forefingers, and gazed at affectionately through a glass into which
they puckered their eyelids, making gathers of the crow’s feet quite
frightful to see. As each one passed the glass to his neighbor he
nodded in dumb approval, with a look of mystery smiling and smiling,
and the more enthusiastic winked and rubbed their hands as it went the
rounds.
Such witchcraft is there in one small hand mirror!
After lunch at picnics there is usually a period of “nooning” while
gentlemen smoke and ladies recline, or seek _siestas_ in friendly
shade; but there was no quiet here and to the last no flagging of the
high festivity.
A rose-blush of exquisite haze, a phantasm “mystic, wonderful,”
floating through the vapory architecture of the Sierras, seemed the
very soul of the halcyon day. The adorable girl who turned more than
one head by smoking cigarettes, waved her hand at the shade and called
loudly, “Look, see, the day is dying, its spirit is passing. Turn your
faces to the west and be attentive.”
Gaily they hastened to gather round the fair speaker. With low
mutterings and many tragic gestures she drew a circle in the sand,
stood in the centre and blew a whiff of smoke, north, south, east,
west, as Moqui Indians invoke the sun with their incantations.
“Now,” said the self-elected priestess, with solemn accent, “now watch
without speech or breath, and we will have a token and a sign from the
god of the Pueblos.”
Humoring her fancy, they waited in silence and lo! before their eyes
the shape darkened, glowed, transmuted into a mass of glittering gold.
“The oracles have answered,” she cried. “Good bye, O Sun, ruler of this
hour, take thanks from thy white children for the golden promise of
to-day. Believers, salute him.”
All obeyed, and with bare head and uproarious cheers waved hats and
handkerchiefs in good bye to the day and the friendly powers that be.
The merry cavalcade, laughing and shouting, rode straight into the
golden fire and flaming snow, each one carrying heavy weights of stone,
every heart beating lightly.
Rapidly the voices died away. The metallic luster of the sky melted
into opalescent pearl and purple. Day and night kissed and parted.
Suddenly the stars looked out in serene eternal beauty on the
smouldering fires, the vanishing trace of man, and the _vega_ alone
with the night,--the hushed desolation doubly drear for the apparition
of loveliness which endured but for a day.
The next morning brought more men with picks and hammers, mules laden
with kegs of water, shovels and various cooking utensils and traps.
There was a stir and bustle, two tents were pitched; a conspicuous
figure was a cook “come up from de Souf durin’ de wah,”--sign of a
permanent camp. Against stubborn clay and quartz rock work goes on
slowly, but it did go on in the Mist-Befringed Mountains. It took many
weeks to survey a certain district and make excavations, one deep as
a well. They were made against obstacles which daunt men of weak
will; lack of fuel, lack of water, torrid sun-heat, chill, benumbing
nights. The plain was dotted with holes very like graves, marked with
little pine head-boards bearing dates and figures. They have sweet
names: “Baby Mine,” “Golden Fleece,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Maud Muller,”
“Highland Mary,” “Daystar,” “The Fair Ophelia.” This last is the
deepest excavation.
Usually claim stakes, for such they are, in out-of-the-way places mark
the “Old Bourbon,” “The Right Bower,” “Dying Gasp,” “Wake up, Jake,”
“New Deal,” “Chance Shot,” “The Blue Pup,” and so on. The titles are
indication of the vein of tender sentiment which runs deep in the heart
of woman. Evidently gentle souls fluttered about the head-boards when
they were set in the ground. They were standing there to-day.
* * * * * * *
That row of stars, dear reader, means,
“Thoughts which do lie too deep for tears.”
* * * * *
Sometimes in quiet Sunday afternoons a party of lovely women, the
charmed number not less than the graces nor more than the muses, ride
out from Las Lunas, through the frowning avenue and lonesome gorge, and
haunt the silent valley as mourners are wont to linger about new-made
graves. To avoid trouble in remembering names I group them.
Allow me to present my charming friends the Pleiads. Years, tears, or
study, perhaps all combined, have dimmed the brilliance of one face.
They tread softly and slowly, are very depressed, and appear to find
a mourner’s consolation in reading the head-boards. Under the funeral
shadow cast by the overhanging pine (the Lieutenant’s cap is still
there) they sit on newly spaded earth and compare experience and
sorrows. A dove in the skeleton tree, listening, might hear subdued
laments: “O why did I touch the ‘Sleeping Beauty?’” “‘Of all the sad
words of tongue or pen,’” “‘All that glitters is not gold,’” and as
they bend above the “Highland Mary,” one hums an old song, beginning:
“Thou lingering star with lessening ray.”
Sung with tenderness and pathos it floats through the deathlike
stillness like a dirge. Can it be possible these sad-eyed mourners are
the bright spirits of the picnic, who made that shining day
----“a beauteous dream,
If it had been no more?”
’Twere vain to tell thee all.
Just when it matters not, these women pondered over maps, meaningless
to them as the fifteen puzzle which has proved the streak of idiocy in
the entire human family; over Miner’s Handbooks, over the “Prospector’s
Complete Guide to Wealth.” They grew familiar with frightful
engravings, flaming pictures of red hot underground machinery, lurid
as the Insurance Chromo. Light literature and the newspapers were
forsaken, and instead their tables were littered with such pamphlets
as “Treatises on the Patent Amalgamator,” “The best method of reducing
Argentiferous Ores,” and “The Hydraulic Ram,”--a horrible subject. The
feminine mind does not readily adjust itself to this sort of lore, and
though novel and highly instructive they were forced to confess it was
“trying.” The owner of “The Fair Ophelia” almost lost her reason in a
frantic and futile effort to master the workings of the diamond drill,
and to comprehend the advantages the double oscillating cylinder engine
has over the steel or percussive system of drilling.
While these exhaustive studies went on, the students discoursed of
fissure veins, of float, leads, developments, face rock, bed rock,
pyrites, chlorides, sulphurets. Alternating anguish and ecstacy shook
their slender frames; one day brought a dazzling promise, the next a
blank contradiction which told on their nerves with the force of a
blow. Everything was shifting and uncertain except the assessments.
There was a sense of security in having one thing to be relied on, and
they were brought in with exact regularity. The moon did not wax and
wane with more unvarying certainty, and obligations of all sorts were
met with unquestioning promptness, not to say alacrity.
How many months’ pay went into these rich experiences your historian
is unable to record. The Pleiads, though brilliant in the social
circle, were not trained to strict business habits, and it is
possible, indeed quite probable, no account of expense was kept. In
that time the battered old pun about lying on your oars (not to be
despised and able to bear a good deal of abuse yet) was dinned in
ears to which the antique witticism was already familiar. The note of
warning fell lightly as snow falls on snow, leaving no imprint; and
the toilsome excavating went bravely on. A judicious friend--merely a
looker-on--advised selling out. The old frontiersman was assailed with
indignant scorn. Much learning had made him mad.
“What! sell out now, _now_, in the face of such a prospect.”
“After all this outlay!”
“After holding on so long! Now!”
“Not if I know myself.”
“Nor I.”
“Nor I.”
“Nor I.”
Before the seven-fold chorus and harpings the dismayed counsellor
hastily retreated to his adobe office, and the Pleiads looked forth as
the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an
army with banners.
Patient investigation fails to show up (unconsciously one drops into
mining phrase in mining countries) any offer to buy, but the very
thought of selling out was rousing--a reflection on the fair owner of
“The Fair Ophelia.” Varying rapture and despair wore those lovely women
to faded spectres, for the long, slow lesson of waiting is a fearful
strain on tense nerves. Well for their balance is it that housekeeping
is so difficult on the barren frontier.
Despite the wholesome restraint of domestic duty, the daily task of
making something out of nothing, they wiled away long afternoons
telling stories worthy the best days of Monte Cristo, Captain Kidd and
the gallant Sinbad. A childish credulity overtook them. Though highly
intellectual and very superior, educated in modern “culture” (Boston
accent), they showed a capacity for belief that was amazing.
How diligently they groped along the tangled lines on the agonizing
maps! How glibly they talked of metalliferous foothills, of bonanza
kings, of “extracting” and “separating processes,” of running galleries
and driven tunnels. You know it is the amateur who is most sanguine in
every enterprise. The joint stock of enthusiasm owned by the Pleiads
lightened the way but was not inexhaustible. Notwithstanding enlivening
converse in learned phrase--a kind of foreign language--hope flickered,
the fever burned their eyes into hollows, and the judicious friend
shook his white head in secret, forecasting how long this sort of thing
was going to last.
When the crisis came Electra fainted dead away,--dropped as if shot
through the heart. She was a good deal reduced with study of secrets
hid in “The Smelter,” and the book slipped from her nerveless hand as
she reached out to receive the dispatch.
It came at the close of the short twilight of a day never to be
forgotten. She was sitting in the _portal_ to catch the last rays on
the printed page, for her eyes are not so young as they once were,
and in this land there is brief margin time of silver gray sky and
drowsing earth. There trotted along the sheep paths and through the
cramped and crooked streets a _burro_ with all the speed a _burro_
can make, goaded forward by a stick sharpened to that end. Mounted on
him without bridle, saddle, whip or spur, was a boy recognized as a
sort of messenger in the camp of the Mist-Befringed Mountains,--a boy
beautiful as a princess’ page, with real Murillo head and luminous
oriental eyes beaming with steady light in the olive face. There was
exceptional grace in the movement of his limbs as he dismounted; his
voice is always sad, and the soft “_Buenos dias Señora_,” conveyed no
hint whether the bearer brought tidings good or ill. Bareheaded, he yet
contrived to make the courtly Spanish bow, shook back his jetty locks,
and bending low delivered the letter. The boy’s lovely name is Rafael
Antonina Molino, and the dispatch was a leaf torn from a scratch-book,
scrawled in haste with a hand that evidently trembled in the writing.
It ran:
Near Las Lunas.
At last! About noon yesterday the digger in “The Fair Ophelia” struck
soft carbonates genuine Leadville carbonates, and are now down four
feet. They show up better and better.
Your own Jason.
P. S.--Send me a white shirt. I am to speak at the ratification
meeting to-night.
A thrilling pause--a scream, a bursting shower of tears, kisses,
embraces, a confusion of tongues in which the word “carbonate” was
the only one common to all. Such a sunshiny storm is possible only to
nervous women intensely wrought. In the _Mêlée_ a natty little jacket,
brought by mail from Altman’s and almost as good as new, was absolutely
ripped to pieces. When mines are _en bonanza_ (free translation,
“booming”) who cares for New York jackets?
I shrink from the attempt to picture what Carlyle might call the
resplendent weeks which followed, while a test ton of ore was sent
to Silver City for reduction. Still less can I venture to touch the
forlorn portrait of the judicious friend who advised selling out. He
repented in sack cloth and alkali dust, and meekly apologized three
times a day and again at bed time. So vanquished, he kept close in
his earth works and hardly took courage to share the general joy.
They are living yet who believe there was a dash of sarcasm in the
withered smile with which he modestly used to inquire after the wealth
of Denmark’s daughter. Through the resplendent weeks (I love that
exquisite word) the spectres scarcely lost sight of each other, and
they were very pallid. They mooned about like young lovers in a trance,
and like them saw with eyes anointed. A glory rested on our dull earth,
tinging it with rose-bloom and amethyst, as the wintry moon, looking
through pictured windows, warmed the snowy breast of Madeline, utterly
_tête montée_, a riotous prodigality possessed them. Their bank account
was a sight to see, and under the sweet influence of the Pleiads the
poor rejoiced and beggars thrived.
In happy nights, too sweet for sleep, they gathered lilies of Damascus
and drank from springs shaded by plumy palms of Judea. They painted
birds, long legged birds on panels, and sets of china containing a
thousand pieces each. Ever they whispered, murmured, dreamed. Soon as
the delirium passed and the fever cooled they resolved to flee “the
finest climate in the world,” beloved of reporters, which every one
rushes away from as soon as he has the money to go.
Take care! Take care! These are the shores of doom. Among other curious
formations in the adamantine Foothills of the Mountains of the Moon
are the Lodestone Rocks. Swiftly, swiftly, the ship was drawn to them.
The gilded argosy with its precious freightage, swelling sail and
triumphant banner went to pieces. Rosebloom and violet faded into the
light of common day. The poor headboards beside the open graves are the
last of the wreck, marking the spot where hopes rose so brightly they
appeared sure prophesies unrolled.
[Dear reader, on whom I lean in tender confidence, forgive this secret
tear over the lifeless clay of “The Fair Ophelia.” I sat by its cradle,
I followed its hearse.]
The judicious friend ventures abroad now. He smiles shrewdly and the
mourners dream no more. They see with cleared vision, and will take one
of the many roads which lead to the Golden Milestone, and their dreams
will all come true when galena sells for a dollar an ounce.
FOOTNOTE:
[17] I need hardly tell my reader the words “_Quien Sabe?_”--“Who
knows?”--are the unanswerable answer forever on the Spanish-speaking
tongue.
CHAPTER XXIV. THE RUINS OF MONTEZUMA’S PALACE.
No American antiquities except, perhaps, the Old Mill at Newport, have
figured so largely in imagination and in print as the pre-historic
ruins along the Gila River, in Pinal County, Arizona. More than
thirty years ago antiquarian hearts were deeply stirred by accounts
of travellers, then very rare, describing the Casas Grandes as great
cities of hewn stone built in a rich and noble architecture like that
of Egypt. Rhetorical flourishes and bold flights of fancy, colored
the pictures drawn before the days of photography. Communication
with this region was difficult, and travelling hundreds of miles the
stories naturally grew along the way, taking wider outlines and warmer
coloring. The gold seekers of California varied their explorations
by ascending the Gila, almost as unknown to them as the White Nile.
Rapturous reports came back, and for years the Casas Grandes ranked
with Veii and Karnak. I greatly regret having no copy of those Pacific
newspapers to compare the impressions of the last generation, groping
in the misty twilight of half-seen wonders, with plain facts come to
actual sight and touch in the light of to-day.
The walled cities, capable of holding many thousand souls, were
supplied with water by acequias leading from the river. They were
represented by enthusiastic Bohemians as aqueducts of solid masonry
and fairly equal in durability and strength to the Maxima Cloaca of
Rome. Charming traditions embellished the beguiling descriptions,
lovely myths and airy fables floated in the warm, blue silence above
the House of Montezuma, whose lordly name is itself a stimulus to
imagination. They were the work, so ran the tales, of lost races,
mysterious, invincible, all-conquering, vanished into the voiceless
past. They had reached a high civilization, as the magnificent remains
attest, and had passed from the earth leaving no sign but colossal
ruins, no records but strange hieroglyphs, which, engraven on rocks in
the neighborhood of the Casas, undoubtedly formed their history.
These mural records are heaps of weather-worn rocks and detached
boulders covered with figures rudely scratched or painted, bearing
signs of great age. They possibly served as boundary lines, the
hieroglyphs being tribal signs of treaties. One flighty romancer who
understood his own language imperfectly, testified that the “pictured
rocks” were written over with deeply carved inscriptions like the
Hebrew, Chaldean and Gothic characters. They have been foundation
stones for imaginary pyramids with sculptured facades, which were
compared to the temples of Palenque and Tuloom, “made of hewn stone so
admirably fitted they seem ‘born so’ and require neither mortar nor
clamps.” Pottery was found in profusion, glazed and painted, always
in fragments too small and scattered to be fitted together. Yet the
visionaries likened the miserable scraps to ceramics of antique India
and the inimitable vases of Etruria.
From the early times the Apache, savagest of savages--the red man
incurably wild--has swept the plains and has held the mountain
fastnesses, carrying terror and torture from the upper waters of the
Pecos far into old Mexico. The shadowy region, mountain-locked like
some vast stronghold guarded by naked sentinels, was a resistless
temptation to lovers of the marvellous. The deserted cities slowly
crumbling down by the shallow waters of the Gila must have been
the work of a people who maintained their supremacy in the face of
savagery. There was much to stir the fancy, ever strongest of flight
under skies most unknown, in the idea of walled and fortified cities
in the centre of barbarian hordes, able to withstand their warfare and
beat back their encroachments. Poet, sightseer, archæologist, reporter,
padre, missionary, rovers of every sort came by turns to the Casas
Grandes, and gave their impressions in poetic coloring; and over all,
like the dreamy mountain haze whose soft radiance purples hill and
plain, hung a delicious mystery. Who should lift the secret veil and
question the past till it gave back some answer? It was an alluring
borderland between civilization and barbarism; on the North American
Continent the last footing of phantoms peopling the unknown, till the
whistle of the locomotive, which has broken so many illusions, put the
pale shades to flight, and brushed away the cobweb and rose-bloom of
the old Spanish poets.
The Maricopa is a dreary country, arid and inhospitable. Even the
Mark Tapley of travellers observed, while there: “This is not a jolly
place.” The days are hot as the desert where the White Nile rises; so
hot the very lion’s manes are burnt off. The nights are heavenly.
The rivers are tricksy streams--sometimes wet, sometimes dry--but give
enough water to irrigate meagre cornfields. Occasionally they rise in
the very centre of barrenness, flow a mile or so, and are lost in the
sand; then rise unexpectedly and run again.
The season, I remember, was unusually dry. Every one described by
travellers and official papers for whole generations contain that
report. From this concurrent testimony it is safe to conclude that
every season is unusually dry. I testify that one party was made dry
as mummies; but, being under bonds to see all that was to be seen, we
were bound for the Casas Grandes.
To reach them, we must enter the fabled realm of the visionaries; where
the Indian emperor, garlanded by beauty, reclining on crimson and gold,
floated among opal mountains (the name still attaches to a snowy range)
and far-reaching valleys, sown thick with jewels--a region fearful to
land in, because of the one-horned rhinoceros and the monstrous Cibola
(buffalo).
As we walked about while waiting for the ambulance, the Indian men
tagged after us, eyeing the travellers with their intolerable fixed
stare; but the women sat still in their places. There was no breeze
to stir the air, no changing clouds enlivening the bare and brilliant
sky, no sound of wheels, no tramp of men audible in the sandy soil. The
isolation was perfect as that of a reef in mid-ocean.
The earth lay in stillness unbroken, and the mute and moveless Indian
woman was the type of a deadness which rests on the land forever.
Wonderful are the works of an inspired imagination! This is the region
where the West Indian king reveled as he sailed, and, like another
Antony, kissed away kingdoms and provinces. We had read the chronicles
and saw that day the favorite of the harem, whose voice was like
running water in the ear of the thirsty, her step like the bounding
fawn, her grace like the swaying reed, her smile a glance of the Great
Spirit. She is known in our times as the Pimo Squaw. She leaned against
a crazy mud wall, which she appeared to prop, and was so nearly the
same shade of clay that at first the statuesque shape seemed carved in
it. A stumpy figure, nude to the waist draped in one buckskin skirt.
The leathery skin, tanned by long exposure to the fierce sun’s beat
and roughening wind, was darkly veined and coarse. To eyes accustomed
to see in woman’s form the fairest of all fairness--
“A thing to dream of, not to tell”--
the sight is not alluring. She was scarcely twenty-five years of age;
but the pitiless climate (which we are constantly called upon to
admire) had worn wrinkles in her face deep enough to bury her youth in.
Her small, shapely feet were cased in moccasins; the slim hands, idly
resting in her lap, were burnt to a mahogany color (the cinnamon tint
entirely lost) and knotted with the hard work of corn-grinding. Her one
ornament was a sea-shell, tied round her throat by a deer-skin string.
Nourmahal had a Mongol cast of features--narrow button-hole eyes,
almost no eye-brows, high cheek-bones, thick lips, tattooed chin. As
the angelic portion of our party (delicately referring to the writer)
approached for nearer view, she made no sign, except to turn the dull
Chinese eyes, which a short study of inscriptions on tea-boxes would
give the right oblique, and fix them on us with a tireless, unwinking
gaze.
The ruins are twenty miles from the villages of the Pimos, a branch of
the Pueblo Indians, and only twelve miles from the town of Florence on
the South Pacific Railroad. The wagon road runs along the Gila Valley,
a level bottom of varying width with abrupt scarped banks of earth. The
plain is of a pale gray color, with a low mossy grass, its monotony
being relieved by groves of mezquit, a species of acacia resembling
our locust, but with foliage more delicate and almost shadeless. The
stunted trees grow branching from the ground so low as to be nearly
trunkless; knotted, gnarled, dwarfed, black of bark, vaster of root
than of top, yet with a certain grace derived from the small emerald
green leaves delicately set on trembling fronds. Occasionally a
val-de-verde appears, a peculiar and striking growth of green body,
bark, leaf and limb, never very large and not over eight inches in
diameter; and here and there is a prickly pear, twenty feet in height,
loaded with red, pear-shaped fruit.
The shifting outlines of the Tucson Mountains, never five minutes
the same, are drawn in perfect relief against a sky of unrivalled
brilliance; the purest sapphire, free from every taint of mist, fog, or
vapor. The exquisite fineness of the atmosphere shows clearly the high
and rugged peaks of the Sierra Catarina, and one picture-like summit,
called Pichaco, overlooks the chain of hills below through a veil of
dying blue. Close to the river’s brim the willow tosses its branches in
the eternal west wind, lightly as a lady’s plume, and bears a profusion
of lilac flowers rarely beautiful. On the sterile mesa appears the
suwarrow (Cereus Giganteus) of a peculiar and fantastic shape, and a
wild verbena repeats the shade of the far-off hill purples.
Miles away from the dead cities we struck the bed of an ancient
acequia, very large and perfectly defined, the main artery by which
the river bottom, only a mile or so wide here, was irrigated in former
times. Mezquit trees, apparently falling into decay from age, stand
in the dry, abandoned ditches, whose various branches may be traced
in every direction, a network of irrigating canals. Here and there
elevations in the plain proclaim the existence of fallen walls; and
depressions, from which the earth was used to make the adobe are close
by. Nearer the city of silence, immense quantities of broken pottery
strew the ground, an arrowhead or stone axe comes to light, and
the least excitable visitor must admit that the Gila Valley, where
desolation reigns supreme, was once densely populated. We have, in
addition, the strong testimony of adjacent artificial mounds, supposed
to have been burial places; but the mythical mines of silver and gold
laid down on the oldest maps, referred to by the oldest missionaries,
do not yet appear. A popular theory has been held that the Casas were
habitations of companies of miners who worked undiscovered placers hard
by. Happily this conceit has been exploded.
The ruins stand on a low, broad mesa, or table-land, rising slightly
from the main road, and are covered by a thicket of mezquit trees not
exceeding twenty feet in height, but concealing the dun-colored walls
till we were close on them. Passing beyond the leafy screen we saw,
within the space of one hundred and fifty yards, three buildings.
Two are battered and decaying, so ruinous as to baffle the effort of
the tourist to form an idea of their original size, the shape being,
as in all these remains, a parallelogram. Their walls were standing
sufficiently to trace the plan thirty five years ago.
We bent our steps to the main building, largest and best preserved, and
with a keen sense of disappointment beheld the structure so dear to
archæologists and known for three centuries as the House of Montezuma.
Though familiar by picture and description, I had thought to find some
display of regal power in architectural grace and finish; remnants of
mouldings, broken lines of cornices, and at least one lofty portal
through which the tawny courtiers might have filed in barbaric pomp to
salute the Rocky Mountain King. It is merely a tremendous mud house,
on which the centuries have spent their strength in vain, standing in
the hush of utter solitude, battling time and the elements. There is
nothing picturesque about it. No friendly lichen, running creeper or
trailing ivy can live in this dry dewless air and with tender verdure
clothe the nakedness of the ragged structure. Against the sand blast
no wreathing vine can cling, and in its embrace soften the mass of
ugliness harshly outlined against the bare and brilliant sky, unflecked
by cloud or shadow. Our spirits went down, down before the legendary
Palace of Montezuma we had come so far to see. For this we had strained
over lava beds, through the sunburnt ways of the wilderness, across
valleys of sand, sage desert, and greasewood plain, breathing, eating,
drinking alkali, and wearing its dust like a dingy travelling suit!
Instead of poetry here was certainty.
The mountain rim was a refreshment to the vision. There the aerial
hues, so like the stuff which dreams are made of, gave the only ideal
touch to a scene forbiddingly real. No hint of beauty or excellence of
workmanship is found in a near view of the Casa, which is entitled to
admiration only on account of its age, and to a hold on fancy because
its origin and uses are unknown. Desolate and isolated now, time
was when it was encircled by similar buildings grouped in villages
scattered broadly over the wide plateau. In every direction are broken
lines of fallen walls, oblong heaps crumbled down to the dust whence
they sprung; and the extent of irrigation must have made the valley a
cultivated garden, or a field of corn large enough to sustain a vast
population.
But there was little time for sentiment. Our surveys must be made in
haste. The walls are entirely adobe; in no portion is there any stone
used. Instead of the modern Spanish-American adobes, moulded to about
six times the size of our ordinary bricks, this aboriginal “palace” is
built of large blocks of concrete (called by Mexicans tapia), three
feet or more in length, by two feet in width and thickness. They are
of irregular size, indicating that a box or mould was used in the
manufacture into which the mortar was cast where it was to remain
in the walls; and as it dried the cases were moved along. A recent
chemical analysis of the concrete shows the secret of its durability
under the wasting and wearing of ages in a structure certainly a ruin
for three hundred years, and with a pre-Spanish existence of a century
and perhaps more. Seventeen per cent. of the mortar is carbonate of
lime. Probably lime was burned and mixed with the sand and gravel of
the country, which contains a very adhesive clay, tough and lasting.
The walls are perpendicular within, slightly tapering without, four
feet thick, facing the cardinal points of the compass, almost the true
meridian. The building was fifty-eight feet long and forty-three feet
wide, the highest point of the standing wall being thirty-five feet.
It was originally four or five stories high, being about eight feet
from floor to ceiling. In the centre of each wall were narrow doors for
entrance into the main compartments, three feet wide, five feet high,
and growing narrower at the top, except the one in the west front,
which is two feet by seven or eight. Over each door is a port-hole
whose dimensions I am unable to give. The Indian’s love of dark houses
is apparent here; the only light admitted into the small numerous rooms
was through these holes in the deep walls. The central room, with
only one opening, must have been as dismal as a dungeon. It has been
surmised that this was a sort of watch-tower, eight or ten feet higher
than the outer stories, probably one story above all the rest when the
Casa was entire. Some of the port-holes have been filled in with mortar
as though the window, if window it was, admitted too much light.
Father Font, who visited this ruin in 1776, writes: “It is perceptible
the edifice had three stories. The Indians say it had four; the last
being a kind of subterranean vault. For the purpose of giving light to
the rooms nothing is seen but the doors, and some round holes in the
middle of the walls which face to the east and west, and the Indians
said that the Prince, whom they called the ‘Bitter Man,’ used to salute
the sun through these holes (which are pretty large) at its rising and
setting. All the roofs are burnt out except that of one low room, in an
adjoining house, which had beams, apparently cedar, small and smooth,
and over them reeds of equal size and a layer of hard mud and mortar,
forming a very curious roof, or floor.”
The different stories are easily identified by the ends of beams
remaining in the walls, or by the holes into which the beams projected.
They are round rafters of cedar, or sabino, supporting the floors,
being perhaps six inches in diameter and half a foot apart. The nearest
mountain bearing such trees is many a weary mile away. The charred
ends of beams prove that the interior was destroyed by fire, but the
massive four-foot wall suffered no change by flaming floor, rafter,
or roof. The trees were hacked by a blunt tool, probably a stone
hatchet; evidently iron was unknown to the architect of Casas Grandes.
The Indigene substituted for it tempered copper and tools of wrought
obsidian. A few bone awls, or flakers, for making arrow heads, have
been dug out of the gravel, and a metate, or corn grinder, broken jars
and a tomahawk of flint, have been found, but there is no tracery made
by iron.
Adobe walls are wonderfully durable in this dry, equable climate, and
with slight repairs last a thousand years. Disintegration begins at the
base, where moisture gathers, and the walls, seamed and furrowed near
the earth by the action of heavy yearly rains, are held together merely
by their great thickness. Their inner surface is smoothly plastered
with lime cement, little wrinkled marks standing as they appeared when
first dried after the finish was laid on. There is no sign of stairway,
and ascent was probably made outside on scaling ladders, as the Pueblos
go up their terraced domiciles throughout New Mexico and Arizona. The
rough coating without is flaked off in some places by the continuous
action of warring winds which carry sand. Even more than rain, this
incessant agent is operating on the old dun-colored adobes, and unless
repairs are made in the scarred and furrowed foundations, this most
interesting of antiquities must before long become a shapeless wreck.
There can have been no considerable shock of earthquake in the period
during which it has been known to us; even a slight tremble would bring
the time-worn fabric down to hopeless destruction.
Standing on the mesa, the traveller sees in every direction heaps
of ruins, of which the Casas Grandes was the centre and principal.
About two hundred yards to the northwest is a circular inclosure,
also a ruin. It is supposed to have been a corral for cattle, which,
unless, as some assume, it was used as a menagerie, would make it of
more recent date, as the Indians were without domestic animals before
the conquest. Architectural remains have been well called the balance
wheels of tradition. After actual sight and touch there is no room for
dreams and visions. Temples and towers proclaim worship, sculptures
hint of refinement, wealth and elegant tastes. Coins tell of commerce,
and frescoes like those of Pompeii and Rome are illuminated books of
Chronicles.
This antique pile is expressive of a low condition of art. Its size is
impressive when we consider that it was completed without the aid of
domestic animals or iron, but by hand labor alone. The only idea left
in the mind of the visitor is that it was designed to accommodate great
numbers of persons; a cumbrous human hive. There is no forest growth
above it by which to date the passage of years; and the ceaseless
delving of the archæologist has failed to find a key, accepted by all
as the true one, to the age and purpose of so remarkable a building.
Excavations made on an appropriation by the Legislature of Arizona
resulted in nothing. A citizen of Florence reports finding a piece of
gold resembling coin in the debris, and it is said that a hollow sound
has been heard by those jumping on the floor of the inner room. Part
of the walls have fallen, which may account for the noise. That ghost
is laid and no voice or breath of living thing disturbs the dreaming
pilgrim and baffled antiquarian as in mournful procession they carry
off their relics--bits of broken plaster and pottery.
The earliest reporters describe eleven buildings in close proximity to
each other, and there can be no reason to doubt their record, judging
by the high heaps of mud and gravel lying in every direction about the
great Casa. Compassing it is a prostrate wall extending four hundred
and twenty feet from north to south, and two hundred and sixty feet
from east to west, which they believed was a part of the Casa itself--a
natural mistake which has given many a highly exaggerated idea of the
structure inclosed by it.
The first recorded mention of Casas Grandes is made in 1540, by
Captains Diaz and Saldibar, who with twelve intrepid men marched from
the city of Culiacan and ascended the Gila as far as Chichiticale, or
Red House, on the border of the Colorado Desert. They had from friendly
Indians glowing descriptions of the seven cities of Cibola, in which
whole streets were said to be occupied exclusively by workers in gold
and silver. “They had sculptured silver and spear heads and drinking
cups of precious metals.” Fired by these beguiling fables Coronado
led a little army of picked men, fifty soldiers, a few infantry,
his particular friends and the monks, in search of fairy land, the
vanishing seven cities of Cibola. His secretary records that when the
general passed through all the inhabited region to the place where the
desert begins and saw there was “nothing good,” he could not repress
his sadness notwithstanding the marvels which were promised further on.
The traveller of 1880 has much the same sensation as that which smote
the soul of the dashing Coronado of 1540. In the time of the latter
the whole of the North American Continent east of the Rio Grande was
called Florida. It is not surprising that much inaccurate information
prevailed regarding the geography of Nueva Espagna, but it is easy
to identify Casas Grandes with the “Red House” standing in a mezquit
jungle on the edge of the desert, the first ruin seen on the Gila
by one ascending from its mouth. In certain lights the walls have a
reddish tint, and again appear white on account of pebbles contained in
the plaster.
In 1694 Father Kino visited the Casas Grandes. He heard traditions of
the Pimos running back four hundred years; it had been a ruin for
ages, and was destroyed by fire in the war with the Apaches. “The
principal room in the middle is four stories, the adjoining rooms on
its four sides are of three stories, with walls so smooth and shining
that they appear like burnished tables. At the distance of an arquebuss
shot, twelve other houses were to be seen, also half fallen, having
thick walls, and all the ceilings burnt except in the lower room of one
house.” He mentions also canals for irrigation, “which had capacity for
carrying half the water of the river.” The good priest took peaceable
possession of the forsaken spot, set up the cross within the dreary
walls and made the place a holy shrine with the celebration of mass.
Of the old descriptions that of Father Font, who visited the scene in
1779, is most valuable. I regret not having space for a longer extract
from his journal: “The large house or Palace of Montezuma,” he says,
“according to the histories and meagre accounts of it which we have
from the Indians, may have been built some 500 years ago; for, as it
appears, this building was erected by the Mexicans when, during their
transmigration, the Devil led them through various countries until
they arrived at the promised land of Mexico; and in their sojourns,
which were long ones, they formed towns and built edifices.” He further
speaks of ruins in every direction. “The land is partially covered with
pieces of pots, jars, plates, etc.” He was the first one who discovered
that the outer wall was a fortification, “a fence which surrounded this
house and other buildings.” Within the last thirty years the Casa de
Montezuma has been often described, and so much speculation has been
expended as to its origin and uses that I hesitate to push out into
that dark sea.
There is a succession of ruined cities, forming a continuous chain
of evidence, from Utah to the City of Mexico. I have examined many
of these dead pueblos and can discover no essential in which they
differ from each other, from the living pueblos now inhabited, or from
the Casas Grandes. All are community houses, where a whole tribe may
dwell, built of adobe in the shape of an oblong square around an open
court. Inclosing this was an outer wall or fortification with towers
at regular intervals for the posting of sentinels. The old pueblos
were built on a table land so as to afford an outlook for sentries
and an opportunity for watching depredations on the corn lands in
the valleys below; and often at a distance are found the remains of
a circular watch-tower, a signal station near the city. Such are the
prehistoric vestiges along the McElmo, Colorado, San Juan and the Rio
Mancos, and the widely dispersed remains in the Ehaco and Mancho. Such
is the solitary watch-tower in the Cañon of the Hovenweep, Utah. The
northernmost buildings discovered in Arizona and Colorado are exact
copies of the Southern and Moqui pueblos, varying with situation and
with the quality of material used. Generally the earth of the country
was mixed with ashes and clay. The lack of individuality in the Indian
race gives you the feeling that if you see one you have seen all; so
it is in regard to their habitations. The sameness of the remains, and
their close likeness to the Casas Grandes and the modern buildings,
must strike the most careless observer. Yet they are not more alike
than the builders themselves.
There are few, if any antiquities, that have not been searched through
and through and reported on. The hunter, miner, scout, surveyor, priest
and sightseer have overlooked no hill or plain where there is a trace
of human dwelling. Undoubtedly the adobe houses wherever found are the
work of a semi-civilized, agricultural people with whom the Spaniards
came in conflict, and who are described by them as Pueblo, or Town
Indians, to distinguish them from the nomads or wandering tribes of the
primitive race. An immense amount of romance has been wasted on the old
mud houses, which makes them hardly less wonderful than the enchanted
city Tiahuanco, which was built in a single night by an invisible hand;
but the time is come to put out wavering lights and to banish shifting
shadows.
I am convinced that the Palace of Montezuma was designed as a fortress,
a centre from which many villages radiated and to which the inhabitants
fled for refuge in a last extremity. The lightness of the floor rafters
in the lower story precludes the possibility that the building was used
as a granary. Any one of the many rooms full of grain must have crushed
the floors, if not the walls themselves. Again, it has been declared
to have been a temple for the sun worshippers; but the smallness and
multiplicity of the rooms and the many doors and port holes oppose such
a surmise, though the dismal central room and the circular passages
between the rooms might suggest priestcraft, and heathen rites and
sorceries.
It may have been, like the castle of the middle ages, the nucleus
around which the city gradually grew up, but more probably it rose
from the needs of the citizens, many of whom must have toiled in its
erection. For many, many years the Apache has harried this land. It
is the Indian law to destroy all that he cannot carry away, and the
pottery is always broken, the interiors are always fired. The builders
of adobe houses, wherever found, were open to incursions of the same
enemy which still infests the Mexican border. To me these remains have
no new meanings. They merely prove that the North American Continent
has been inhabited from a remote period; something which I believe has
never been disputed.
The undated tradition is that the spot which I am trying to describe
is one of the stopping places of Montezuma on his southward march to
Anahuac. All legends point to an emigration from north to south. Coming
from the ends of the earth, or from fabled Azatlan, the first halt the
Montezumas made was at old Zuni; this was the second station; the third
was near Chihuahua, Mexico, where enormous ruins, exact reproductions
of these are standing isolated in a luxuriant valley, the tottering
monuments of a peculiar tribe or tribes of a bygone nationality.
Nothing is to be learned from the natives there, who, like all Pueblos,
love to call themselves sons of Montezuma, or from the Mexicans round
about. Whatever requires a moment’s thought is dismissed by the
ever-ready, meaningless, _Quien sabe?_ “Who knows?”
CHAPTER XXV. TO THE CASAS GRANDES.
The Casas Grandes on the Laguna de Guzman in Northwestern Chihuahua
are similar in every respect to the ruined fortresses of New Mexico
and Arizona. The points of resemblance are so close and so numerous
as to be decisive, proving them to be the work of the same people
under similar, though somewhat superior, institutions. On my table is
an unbroken vase unearthed from this most venerable ruin of North
America: a veritable antique, rare and valuable. It is of a light clay
color, glazed without and within. The shape, the peculiar markings in
geometrical lines, white, black and maroon red, prove the hand of its
manufacturer. I should recognize it instantly in any collection as a
Pueblo water jar of ancient workmanship, better made than any which we
have from the Pueblos now. It contains the following memorandum: “This
_olla_ or _tanaja_ was excavated from the ruins of the Montezuma Casas
Grandes in the State of Chihuahua in the year 1864, and according to
Indian tradition is 800 years old. These Casas Grandes (great houses)
were reduced to ruin, by siege, in 1070.” This is signed, “William
Pierson, American Consul in 1873.”
[Illustration: Tesuke Water Vases.]
It is the only whole jar and much the finest specimen I have ever
seen. Still it is greatly inferior to the coarsest Wedgwood china in
our shops. There has never appeared a monument or relic proving the
existence of a people of more advanced culture than the red race with
which the European came in contact. How the peculiar civilization which
this vase represents came from the North, as every tradition declares
it did, is a question that has been argued many times in many ways.
Among a vanquished, declining people, without even the lowest forms
of picture-writing, language rapidly alters; and philologists tell us
that American languages are the most changeful forms of human speech.
Legends soon become confused; the links of connection are easily
lost; and even in its best estate tradition is treacherous as memory.
Scholars have held that the adobe houses are traces of the Toltecs,
the polished predecessors of the fierce and bloody Aztecs, under whose
dominion the former broke and scattered. Plausible theories, more or
less conclusive, have perplexed the student of indigenous races. One
solution, as soon as it was suggested, touched me with the force of
absolute conviction, because it was so direct and simple an answer to
the puzzling questions following an examination of the antiquities of
North America.
The Pueblo or town-building Indians were the skirmish line of the Aztec
nation when the Mexican Empire was in the height of its greatness.
The Aztecs were restless, aggressive, greedy of power and insatiate
in their lust for dominion. To rove and to conquer was the national
pastime. The green banners of Anahuac floated defiantly in the tropic
airs of the remotest provinces on the Gulf of Mexico, and dauntless
warriors upheld their colors in pristine splendor along the extreme
coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua. They formed the unshackled, sovereign
nation, possessing the highest civilization in North America, speaking
a language by far the most finished and elegant of the native tongues,
said to be of exceeding richness.
The Pueblos, whom we believe to be a rough off-shoot of that stock,
degraded descendants of haughty princes, are yet a self-sustaining
people, independent of the Government, the only aborigines among us not
a curse to the soil. In some old time whereof history is silent and
about which there are no traditions, nor even the airy hand of a misty
legend to beckon us back and point the way, the half-civilized tribes
of Mexico must have sought fresh fields for conquest and occupation.
They probably marched in detached clans speaking different dialects,
but more or less united under one central government, and with the
arts and means of instruction brought from Anahuac they set forth to
colonize outlying countries to the north. A glance at the map shows
only one route by which they could advance. West of the Sierra Madre
and up the Gila and its tributaries, toward the great cañon of the
Colorado, colonies were planted along the river banks, and possibly
the emigrant fraternized with the native. Captain Fernando Alarcon
discovered the Rio Colorado in 1540, and passed various tribes without
being able to communicate with them, except by signs, until he reached
a people who understood the language of an Indian whom he had brought
from Mexico. From this tribe he learned of a similar people, far to the
eastward, who lived in great houses built of stone. From Mexico the
Southerners brought the art of building with adobe and with stones laid
in mud mortar, which alone distinguishes them from the tribes dwelling
in wigwams, shifting tents and lodges of buffalo skins and boughs.
There was a system of communication between their fortified towns,
worn footpaths betraying a constant coming and going, and deep trails
furrowed by the tread of busy feet through centuries.
The ancient builders invariably chose commanding positions overlooking
their cultivated fields for their pueblos, and added story after story
to the houses, usually terraced from without, where a few defenders
could defy almost any number of assailants with savage arms. Apaches
were treated as barbarian hordes. There is no mention of these Bedouins
until a century after Coronado’s day, from which fact we may infer that
they were kept at bay.
Gradually the tide of emigration pressed up to the Aztec Mountains and
San Francisco Peaks, but there the march of the victorious invader was
suddenly stopped by a barrier utterly impassable--the cañons of the
Colorado and Chiquito Rivers, which, united, form a gulf at least 300
miles long, and which in places are a mile in depth. It lay directly
across their course, a stupendous chasm which wings only would have
enabled them to cross. No sea or desert could so effectually have
hindered their progress northward. They turned toward the East, took
possession of the rich valleys of the Colorado and Chiquito, where
streets of towns and irrigating canals are still traceable for miles,
and followed its branches to their sources. All the towns are along
the river. The bottom lands are fertile with alluvial deposits. There
are large cotton-wood trees and impenetrable thickets of arrow and
greasewood among the numberless lagoons and sloughs which, at the
annual rise of the river, are filled to overflowing and irrigate the
soil. But no vegetation can live beyond the limit of these overflows.
A white efflorescence covers the ground, where it is useless to plant,
where nothing edible for man or beast will grow.
On the neighboring streams the chiefs founded the kingdom of Cibola,
where now we see extensive ruins attesting the size of the old towns,
all of which were fortified and built on the same general plan. Old
Tuni was the capital city, set on a hill of rock and reached only by
one zigzag path, where a handful of soldiers could defy the cavalry of
the world. In a similar condition the ruins of the seven Moqui villages
are found, and North of them is the site of an adjacent colony. To
the northeast they moved from the head of Flax River to the southern
tributaries of the San Juan, the Cañon de Chaco and the Valle de
Chelly, “where,” says Lieutenant McCormick, “half a million might have
lived,” being strewn with the ruins of dead cities.
[Illustration: ABANDONED PUEBLO.]
At last, by following up the headwaters of the Rio de San Juan
to the Colorado Mountains, they penetrated the Rio Grande Valley,
a fertile and widely extended region destined to be subdued and
colonized. From this point their imperious course was down the valley
from the north, as all traditions point; and, naturally, the conquerors
built a vast stronghold at Taos to protect that beautiful valley from
attacks of the wild tribes, mainly Utes--a gloomy, forbidding citadel
of savage aspect, set on a hill overlooking the Rio Grande. So strong a
retreat is it that in 1847, when the Mexicans of the modern village of
Taos could no longer defend themselves against the armies of the United
States, they fled to this abandoned pueblo, a few miles distant, and
there sustained a protracted siege, yielding finally when provisions
utterly failed. The grim and threatening fortress was never captured
by the Spaniards, though many times attacked. The terraces bristled
with spears and battle-axes, through the little windows arrows were
showered, and stones and burning balls of cotton dipped in oil were
hurled from slings. The lower story, a well-filled granary--and the
cisterns within the court, enabled the red men “to laugh a siege to
scorn.”
The route which we have rapidly sketched was discovered and maintained
by the armies of many generations; the changes described in a paragraph
were brought about by wars lasting through ages. Well did those
migratory tribes know the fierce delight of battle which thrills alike
the blood of the white man and the red, when once within the heat and
fury of its deadly charm.
In the course of time the entire valley of the Rio Grande from latitude
37° to latitude 32°, a distance of over 400 miles, was thickly settled.
It must have been a scene of constant activity, with its clusters of
towns, whose streets are yet plainly visible and may be followed for
miles; and becoming the dominant nation, in the main valley where the
villages are nearest to each other, the Aztecs found it unnecessary to
fortify their dwelling places. Out-lying settlements, such as Pecos
and Grand Quivira, in the country swept by Comanches and Arapahoes,
and Laguna and Acoma, near the Navajos, were defended by outworks like
those in the Colorado basin.
Near El Paso are widespread ruins of the prehistoric epoch, and it is
so short a march from that crossing to the lovely and productive valley
of Rio Corralites and its lake, the Laguna de Guzman, that it is most
reasonable to suppose the casas on this stream were built by a colony
from that region. The Indians and Mexicans of our day are exactly
right in asserting that the “great houses” are the work of Montezumas
who came from the North, and at various stations fortified themselves
against the roving tribes. So it comes that the Town Builders of
New Mexico and Arizona, who are without history or hieroglyphic
writing, have no record or even legend of the dim and distant starting
point when the exodus from Mexico began. They brought a species
of civilization quite foreign to the nomads who confronted them,
battled for supremacy, and disputed their sway. The civilization was
necessarily inferior to that of the source whence it sprung. This is
the condition in all migratory movements. The wealthy, cultured classes
are conservative, slow to change; the dissatisfied spirits, adventurers
with little to leave or to take, strike out of the beaten paths in hope
of bettering their fortunes.
The colonial beginnings were a poor representation of the splendors
of Tezcuco where North American civilization, under the commanding
genius of the second Montezuma, reached its height. But the pilgrims
brought with them glorious memories. They must have seen the sacred
city Cholula, with its 400 temples, its huge pyramid, wrought by the
giant Haloc, nearly 200 feet high, the sides measuring 450 yards at
its base. It was a terraced tower, a landmark, a beacon and a shrine
to all Anahuac, where the smoke from the undying altar-fires went up
as incense to the gods, new every morning and fresh every evening.
There were no writhing victims on that hill of sacrifice; the gentle
Quetzelcoatl delighted not in blood; his offerings were bread and
roses and all sweet perfumes. The townsmen in their new homes built
council-houses, meagre and poverty-stricken compared with the Southern
temples, and kindled the sacred fires. Each village had one or more of
these estufas, where holy rites were conducted in the utmost secrecy. A
priesthood of chosen warriors, consecrated to the ministry, watched the
altar-fire, and it was never suffered to die out.
In all probability the later emigrants brought with them the Montezuma
idol. Possibly some had been in the kneeling ranks of those who kissed
the earth at the sound of conch and atabal which heralded the approach
of the great king, the child of the sun. Hardly had they dared to lift
their eyes, before the splendor of the canopy of green featherwork
fringed with sparkling pendants, which shaded his jewelled plumes.
They could not fail to remember the floating robes of gorgeous dyes,
the blazing arms making the glance dizzy with the shining of precious
stones; and, best of all, that princely presence in the midst of
worshipping subjects, who held themselves but as dust beneath the
golden soles of the royal sandals. They could not forget the wall of
orbed shields about his sacred person, the keen sparkle of burnished
spear tips, the flying flags of various colors which the Indian loves
so well, and the shouts of thousands on thousands of loyal subjects who
counted not their lives dear unto themselves but for their service to
their emperor. The all-conquering Montezuma was at first only a proud
memory. By degrees a halo and a light appeared round the name of the
king of kings. Men love to trace their descent back to some storied
greatness, and all barbarous nations delight to associate their origin
with the deities. The yearning to be as gods is one of the instinctive
impulses of the human heart. It began in Eden and is as old as the
first man.
From reverence of the compelling spirit which left its imprint on
vast regions, various tribes and long periods of time, it is easy to
pass to adoration. The valley of the Rio Grande was once a valley of
gods; they breathed in the winds, frowned in the storms; their wrath
was the earthquake and their smile was fair weather. The central idea
ceaselessly recurring in the pantheistic religion of the Pueblos of
the nineteenth century is the shining figure of Montezuma, and their
belief in his return is the dearest of all their faiths. As in the
Greek legends, we cannot define the line between myth and history,
but we are forced to believe so widespread a religion must have had a
beginning remote from the degraded, broken-hearted creatures who pray
to him daily. The dim memories of a great past never quite fade away
from among any people. The dreamy, mythical, departed grandeur of their
ancestors has led the Pueblos to the hope of a restoration; for with
them the vague past and the indefinite future are both better than the
dull, tame present. The hope in every breast, slow to die, if indeed
it ever dies, looks to a regeneration, a lifting up of the bowed race
so mercilessly stricken down by the Spaniards. The caciques who guard
the sacred fires watch at the daybreak for the second coming of the
lawgiver, prophet and priest, and pray with faces toward the sun-house
where he takes his kingly rest in the abode of his fathers. In the
golden dawn of some morning, fairest where all are fair, he shall push
back the curtains of his tabernacle intolerably bright, and with roll
of drums, music of reeds and beauty of banners shall return to his own
again.
It is the tendency, even in carefully recorded annals, to make one man
the doer of all heroic deeds. The unnamed dead live in the life of one
king of men. The lesser lights wane and pale before its splendor, and
finally all mingle in a resplendent focus, and one immortal stands
forever the representative of the epoch, a sceptred deity. Such are
the demigods of Southern Europe: such is the fair-haired Odin of the
mead-drinking warriors in sheepskin and horsehide; such is King Arthur,
gone away under promise to return from
The island valley of Avilion,
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly.
And such is the Messiah of the Town Builders, brother of the sun, equal
of the one Omnipotent God, uncreated and eternal, whose name it is
death to utter.
Tried by the delicate test of language, there is no analogy between
the modern Town Builder and the Mexican of the South; but this is not
conclusive. Centuries of changing environment work miraculous changes
in any people. How much is the modern Briton like his ancestor, the
cave dweller, clad in skins of the beasts which almost shared his
den, living on roots and bowing down at strange altars? Even in the
same generation, in the best age of the most enlightened of kingdoms,
how much does the Irish gentleman resemble his degraded tenant, the
peat-digger? Nay, they can scarcely comprehend each other’s speech.
Of the heroes, numbered by hundreds of thousands, who upheld our
victorious banner during the great Rebellion, how many names will
remain at end of the year 2880? Possibly one. The least observant
traveller through the country of the Pueblos must notice that it has
changed for the worse since the “great houses” were built. They stand
on the rim of the Colorado Desert, and if we accept the theory of the
geologists that this is the dry bed of an inland sea, the climate must
once have been very unlike what it is now--waterless ten months of
the year, and at summer noon as hot and as stifling as the air of a
limekiln. Scientists unite in testifying that the rainfall west of the
Rio Grande is much less than formerly. The present streams are shrunken
threads of those which once flowed in their channels when forests were
more abundant. Northern Arizona has hills whose bases are covered
with dead cedar trees, immense belts untouched by fire, proving that
the conditions friendly to the growth of vegetation are restricted to
narrowing limits. Spots that have been productive are barren; springs
gushed from the ground which at present is dry and parched, and an
agricultural people has lived where now no living being could maintain
existence. Everything indicates that this region was formerly better
watered. Many rivers of years ago are now rivers of sand, and the Gila
at its best, after gathering the confluent streams, San Pedro and
Salado, is not so large in volume as an Indiana creek. Ethnologists
try to prove that the Town Builders came from the extreme North,
perhaps originally from Kamtchatka, and that the adobe houses and
Montezuma worship were of indigenous growth, founded by the monarch
who bears the proudest name in Indian history. There are no Pueblos
North of the thirty-seventh parallel, and the decline of the race began
long before the Spanish invasion. It will be remembered that the Casas
Grandes was a roofless, crumbling ruin, without a history more than 300
years ago. The Pueblos must have been a mighty nation in the prime of
their strength, and legends of their ancient glory before they passed
under the hated Spanish yoke are cherished among the different tribes.
Reduced as they were in numbers and power, their battle for freedom was
a long and gallant struggle. They were finally brought into subjection,
even to the Moquis who lived perched in tiny houses on scarred, seamed
cliffs of volcanic rock, where nature’s fires are burnt out, in a
barren country, arid and inhospitable, absolutely worthless to white
men.
[Illustration: Zuñi Paint and Condiment Cups.]
Never was life so lonely and cheerless as in the desolate hovels of
the Moquis. Their land is not a tender solitude, but a forbidding
desolation of escarped cliffs, overlooking wastes of sand where the
winds wage war on the small shrubs and venturesome grasses, leaving to
the drouth such as they cannot uproot. A few scrubby trees, spotting
the edge of the plain as if they had looked across the waterless waste
and crouched in fear, furnish a little brushwood for the fires of the
Moquis, who are fighting out the battle for existence that is hardly
worth the struggle. Fixed habitation anywhere implies some sort of
civilization. The flinty hills are terraced, and by careful irrigation
they manage to raise corn enough to keep body and soul together.
The seven villages within a circuit of ten miles have been isolated
from the rest of the world through centuries, yet they have so little
intercourse with each other that their tribal languages, everywhere
subject to swift mutations, are entirely unlike. Diminutive, low-set
men wrapped in blankets passively sitting on the bare, seared rocks in
the sun, are the ghastly proprietors of a reservation once the scene
of busy activities. They number only 1,600 souls; shreds of tribes
almost exhausted, surrounded by dilapidated cities unquestionably of
great antiquity. The sad heirship of fallen greatness is written in the
emptiness of their barren estates. Fragments of pottery are profusely
scattered about; and deeply-worn foot-paths leading from village
to village, down the river bank and winding up to the plain, mark
the ancient thoroughfares which are now slightly trodden or utterly
deserted.
How the Indians were enslaved and driven to the mines, and how they
perished there by thousands, is a matter of familiar history. They were
an abject and heart-broken people after the Conquest, and their decline
still goes steadily on. Whole tribes are extinct. Others have united
with each other for safety, and within the memory of citizens of Santa
Fé the feeble remnant of the tribe at Pecos joined that at Jemez, which
speaks the same language.
After all, the question is not so much whence they come as whither
they go. The human family is never at rest; its condition is one
of change. From the beginning nations and peoples have come and
gone--vanished, where? Who knows? Who cares? They moved forward in
the resistless march, served the end for which they were created,
died and were forgotten. They come like shadows, so depart. Across
these desolate Rocky Mountain ranges a turbulent stream of humanity
once ebbed and flowed in perpetual unrest. Then there were tribes
chasing, tribes fleeing, nation rising up against nation, scattering,
absorbing, driving each other into annihilation; and the hills echoed
the triumphant music of the scalp dances over the graves of slain
thousands. The history of those mighty turmoils and revolutions must
remain forever unwritten. The present aborigines are but a forlorn
wreck of what they were in the long ago, when mountain princes from the
South were supreme rulers in a realm of confederacies, whose boundaries
cannot be measured.
[Illustration: Pueblo Wristlets, Moccasins, etc.]
The civilization of the Town Builders is not so much overthrown as
it is worn out. Their bows are broken, their fires burn low; and the
sluggish, stolid sons of Montezuma creep at a petty pace “along the way
to dusty death.” The inroads of warring bands are not fatal as their
own system of communism. A closely-kept people must become effete;
and marriage within the forbidden degrees, for ages on ages, produces
a diminutive, emasculate growth. In the tribes most isolated, where
race distinctions are sharply drawn, this blood degeneration is most
apparent. Very many are scrofulous, and albinos with pink eyes and
wiry, white hair (strange sights!) are frequent among the Zunis and
Moquis. Physicians tell us that it is a species of American leprosy,
consequent on the poverty of blood through lack of alien infusion.
The weakening of this most interesting nationality resembles the
quiet decline of one stricken in years. As in the empire, so in the
individual; according to the predetermined doom it cannot last, another
must have its place. A peculiar people, utterly lacking in self
assertion, through whole decades living in servitude under an enforced
religion, they have run their race, worked out their destiny, and in
the decrepitude of extreme old age, ruins and tribes, the dead and the
dying, are crumbling away together.
CHAPTER XXVI. A FRONTIER IDYL.
Our picnic was in the month of May and we started from Santa Fé in
the early morning. On three sides the drowsy old town is guarded by
mountains royal with purple and glittering with gold. Thirty miles away
one snowy peak seemed an airy tent let down out of heaven, and across
it the breeze blows as freshly as airs across Eden when the world was
young.
The road wound beside the little river Santa Fé, whose waters go
softly, after rippling down in icy cascades from a lake pure as Tahoe,
formed by melting snows from the mountain top. Along its margin the
red willow tosses its branches lightly as a lady’s plume, and back in
the hill country the pine-trees sigh to each other their never ceasing
song. Over the rocks clambering goats look down and shake their beards
at the traveller, and the tinkle of a bell falls pleasantly on the ear
as Mexican boys drive their flocks to the river; and where the sheep
are drinking an Indian woman carrying a black jar on her head, erect
and stately, comes to wash her poor rags in the stream.
It is all like the old Bible pictures. The somber landscape though
sadly lacking color is serene and pastoral,--so filled with the beauty
of peace and restful silence we thought of the ancient pilgrims
journeying in the shining white light of the Delectable Mountains,
and their talk with loving shepherds by the wayside. No fear of rain
to spoil our pleasure; there will not be one drop, nor is there even
dew. Yesterday we breathed balm and incense; to-morrow we know will be
just like to-day. The south wind has “quieted the earth,” and the blue
overhead is without spot of cloud, vapory mist or fog.
Our party was quite large. In advance a well mounted Lieutenant, in
the glory of his first shoulder straps, rode close to the bridle rein
of a young girl whose flying veil gave short glimpses of a beautiful
face lighted with eyes of radiant hazel and the brightest smiles. They
were a pair of lovers, loved by us at first sight. In an ambulance
came a stout lady with color rather high than delicate, whose unhappy
bonnet would not stick to her head but kept slipping down her back.
Beside her sat a weak woman from Illinois, born tired and unable
to find time to rest since that wearisome date, having barely life
enough to be proud of her ten-year-old Rosa as though children were
the rarest things in the world. On a little _burro_, or donkey, was
a school teacher without special escort, but looked after by a dry
old bachelor who had one romance in his life and still wore the
miniature of a face, dearly loved and early lost, which has been only
dust thirty years. For the old love’s sake he treated all women with
delicate reserve, seeing in them kinship to the lost ideal they in
some sort represent. A dream unbroken, for where death sets his seal
the imprint is eternal and endureth forever. Then there rode along a
blonde and pensive artist, the author of many rejected manuscripts, who
carried sketching paper and a neat box of pencils. He wore his hair
long and boots small, smoked cigarettes incessantly, and eyed the gay
Lieutenant in bitterness of soul. Several light carriages whirled past
us; and Brown, the photographer, dashed by on his own buckboard drawn
by gallant gray mules. I had only time to notice the stranger beside
him had the blackest eyes and wore a diamond ring of unusual size and
brilliance which blazed in the sunlight as he courteously lifted his
hat. Among the last to appear was an alumnus from Colorado College, who
had electrified the whole board of trustees with his graduating speech
entitled, “The Centennial State--a Nation’s Benediction.” This callow
youth had made the eastern tour, had a nodding acquaintance with the
crowned heads of Boston, and in conscious superiority overshadowed his
companion, the Baptist minister, one of the meekest spirits that ever
starved its way to heaven.
The army ambulance moved slowly through the sandy red soil but we
did not care; the mountains--how grand they are!--were a perpetual
delight. The fineness of the atmosphere gave exquisite tints to the
near foothills and the vast horizon. Clusters of wild verbenas purpled
the plain--a deeper shade of the far away hill purples--and strange
flowers, yellow and pink, nestled in the short, moss-like grass. They
never felt dew or rain, yet they did not appear stunted or starved, but
looked up brightly in the sterile sand as from a garden bed.
Now and then a Pueblo Indian strode silently across our way, and a
Mexican in picturesque striped blanket saluted us in Spanish fashion
with a “_Buenos dias señoras_,” as he drove his cruelly loaded donkey
toward the city. Lazy Mexicans squatted in rows, sunned themselves
against the low walls of their houses; and on a chimney a flock of
pigeons tamely perched, and watched the movements of a mower cutting
the grass which grew scantily on the flat mud roof of his miserable hut.
When we reached the chosen ground a fire was already kindled from the
resinous boughs of the _piñon_, and lovers were straying off in shady
places to find out what words the daisies are saying to youth and
beauty.
Brown, the photographer, introduced his guest, a fine old Spaniard
named Oreto. He wore the easy air of a man familiar with good society,
and the lofty courtesy which marks the true Castilian, I may say the
true gentleman, anywhere. He claimed to be hidalgo--literally, son of
a Goth--by which is meant pure Catholic Spanish blood, without a taint
of Jew or Moor; was educated at Salamanca, and by training conservative
was quick to denounce Castelar and his politics as highly pernicious.
In a quiet way he was a great talker; the flashing eyes alone betrayed
the intensity of his feeling, and as no one entered into debate with
him, he fell to extolling the glory of old Castile. Gradually the whole
party was attracted to him, and he became the centre of a circle of
interested listeners.
The fair rider with fluffy curls blown by the mountain breeze against
the arm she leaned on, bent forward and asked, “Why leave your own
country for this wild New World?”
“It is long to tell the state troubles which drove me from home and
made me a wanderer, for out of Spain every land is exile; too long for
even a summer day.”
“But not too long for our interest,” she answered with a charming
animation; “you are alone in life,” she added with a glance at the band
of mourning crape on his _sombrero_.
“Catalina and my niñita are with the saints,”--he crossed his breast
reverently. “When I laid them in the vault at Valladolid my heart felt
heavy and cold. I thought the long voyage and sight of new places might
warm it, and I might find some diversion, or as our neighbors over the
Pyrenees say ‘distraction,’ by imitating my ancient countryman in a
chase after ‘the fountain of youth.’”
“That is in our own hearts,” said Romeo, with an arch glance at Juliet.
“Yes, so experience teaches. I am last of my name and house, and”--his
voice sunk mournfully--“I had buried the wife of my youth, whom I loved
with a great love, after we had lived together twenty years.”
He sighed and turned his eyes toward the mountain-top shining like
silver in the keen, clear light, and the artist fell to sketching
Oreto’s profile.
“Time is the great consoler,” said the languid Illinoisian, trying to
adapt her harsh English to the spoken music of the stranger. A southern
sky makes a gentle voice, and the Spanish tongue has a matchless trick
of melting all it touches into a melody.
“_La Señora_ is most kind, but it is too late; the heart has no second
spring. Do you see the white line down the mountain-side?” he asked,
abruptly changing the subject evidently painful to dwell upon.
“Yes, it is a brook rising in a spring, cold as ice, clear as glass.”
“Then, instead of my dull, sad story let me tell you the tradition of
the Blue Fountain, the name of the spring,--_Fontaine-bleu_, as the
French Fathers used to call it.”
“By all means; a story, a story!” the ladies cried in chorus.
“You do me proud,” said Oreto with a sweeping bow, “and since you
honor me with your attention I promise not to weary it.”
We disposed ourselves in various attitudes about the speaker. The
rising generation gathered in graceful groups under the stunted pines,
and the setting generation sat on buffalo robes and cushions against
the gnarled and twisted trunks of the _piñones_. Little Rosa was coaxed
to her mother’s lap, and the stout lady reclined on the back seat of
the ambulance, loosened her bonnet strings and made herself extremely
comfortable while we listened to the
LEGEND OF THE BLUE FOUNTAIN.
“Once upon a time,” the Spaniard began, with his grave smile, “away to
the North in the country you call Montana lived a young Indian hunter,
tall and straight and very handsome. From boyhood he had heard stories
of happy hunting-grounds where the _pasturas_ were always fresh and
game was always in sight. So one bitter cold morning he put on his
snow-shoes and fur mittens, wrapped himself in his warmest bearskin,
and struck southward, following the stony mountain ranges till he
reached this lonesome region.”
“Did he travel all alone?” asked little Rosa.
“Only the travelling winds went with him. But he did not know what fear
is, though at night he heard the coyote’s cry, the bellowing of the
bison and the howl of the prairie wolf. The sun, which he worshipped,
shone friendly all the way; gradually the breeze blew softer, the earth
grew warmer and greener. After one long day’s march he drank deep of
the spring in yon hillside, laid his bent bow and quiver of arrows on
the rock, and went to sleep in the soft warm sand by the Blue Fountain.
“An Indian warrior sleeps lightly, and in his slumber appeared a
form--a woman’s, such a shape as is seen nowhere but in dreams and
Andalusia.” The stranger paused and looked dreamily on the ground
like one busy with memory, and in sympathy I thought of the lost
Catalina and the little one lying in the gloomy vault of Valladolid. We
respected his silence, and after a moment he continued:
“The spirit spoke to the dreamer in words of infinite tenderness, and
appeared to watch and guard him. On waking he took a long draught of
the cool snow water, and gazed searchingly into its blue depths.”
“Was it really blue?” broke in Rosa.
“Sky blue and silver,” said the Castilian, adding one of the endearing
diminutives in which his language is so rich and which I did not quite
comprehend. “Many times he tried to catch a glance of the fairy face
which came into his sleep, making it better than any waking. Long he
gazed into the watery mirror; it reflected only his own tawny face and
the spotless sky above it. The white sand boiled from unknown depths
below, bubbles came to the top and broke on the stony brim, but the
ceaseless gush and flow of the waters was a chime in his ears without
meaning.
“He lingered about this spot, so runs the tale, many weeks, praying
for the appearance of the water maiden. She came into his sleep but
never blest his waking eyes, and when the rainy season, which is so
very dreary, set in, the disappointed youth went back to his tribe.
The vision haunted him; in vain he tried to shake it off; the _vega_,
so lone, so dim, so untrodden, was filled with strange enchantment.
The brook went flowing through his memory, glancing now in sun, now in
shadow, as it gushed from the mountain side, vanishing at last like
fairy gold in the sand. The laughing girls of the tribe tried to rouse
him from indifference, but could not stir him to join in their songs
and games. In the time of the corn harvest the present of a blood-red
ear, the Indian’s _rose d’amour_, did not move him to any feeling, and
he turned with glance averted from the flying feet in the bewitching
_cachina_ dance.
“‘He is moonstruck,’ said the girls; ‘give him the crooked ear, for the
fool is fit for nothing but to sit in the sun with the very old men.’”
He heeded neither jest nor laugh, and determined to come back to the
Blue Fountain. When he set out an airy figure seemed to go before and
beckon him on, as the swan maidens of the German lakes beckon young
knights into their little boats drawn by snowy swans harnessed with
silver chains.
“Southward, southward he strode, following the ancient march of
Azatlan, and, in sight of the beloved spring, he climbed the steep,
fleet and untired as the red deer, to find the same sparkling fountain,
and the shining brook below it running into the valley as it will run
on forever.
“Again he lay down on the soft, warm sand, and once more the delicate
phantom appeared to his closed eyes, whispered gently in his ear, and
bent above his head as if to kiss him.”
Here the lovers “changed eyes,” leaned a trifle closer together, and I
saw Romeo pick up a blue ribbon dropped from Juliet’s sleeve and slip
it into his watch pocket.
“Then a frantic love took possession of the hunter. Day after day,
night after night, his wasting form was laid beside the singing
cascade; ever he sighed, murmured, dreamed. The strength left his
limbs, his blood beat hotly: summer waned and cold winds blew, but
never cooled the fever of his brow. Sometimes after a day’s hunt,
returning at evening he fancied he saw a misty outline against the
dark steep, but it melted away as he neared it and instead of a living
woman he reached out to clasp the empty air. Then the warrior began
to understand this water spirit was of the race of Souls, and as such
could not wed a mortal; to possess her, therefore, he must be like
her--must die. So one day when the world was all bright and his soul
all dark, while she sung a song of wonderful music he stretched his
arms to reach the shadowy siren and plunged from the black ledge you
see yonder into the unknown depths below.”
“And was he never heard of afterward?” asked Juliet, while the roses on
her cheek deepened in betrayal of her thoughts.
“Never, _hermosura_,” said the Spaniard with an admiring gesture, “but
old Pueblos about here say two shapes rise out of the spring where
there used to be but one, float in the air and hover above it. They are
oftenest seen about dusk in the rainy season. I have never seen them
myself.”
“I wonder if they do show that way,” said Rosa with a puzzled face.
“_Quien sabe_,” said Oreto mysteriously, at the same time handing her
the kernel of a _piñon_ nut which he cracked in his white front teeth.
And here let me record that the words “_Quien sabe_,” “who knows,”
are the end of controversy, the finish of debate, the limit of human
understanding, having a very different meaning according to the persons
speaking. With Oreto it was as much as to say, there is room for
argument on both sides.
All this time our stew had been simmering, gypsy fashion, over the
fire, keeping a friendly and impatient knocking at the pot lid, and
was now pronounced done. The stout lady roused up from her nap, set her
bonnet bias across her eyebrows, said she was glad the young Comanche
came to his senses at last, and then addressed herself to the making of
coffee.
I met Oreto frequently, and never saw him unbend from the Hamlet
air--“Man delights not me, no, nor woman either,”--except on this one
holiday. So to speak, he flavored the whole picnic. He gayly insisted
on seasoning every dish. “I will not ruin the _olla_ for Americans,
with too much red pepper,” he said; “the merest _soupçon_, as the
French put it.” Then he contrived a nice, cool-looking salad from some
crisp leaves, to me unknown, and served it with a deftness and tact
that would have graced a courtier. To tell the whole truth, the elegant
Castilian had so much manner it was rather fatiguing to keep up with
him.
Dinner over, he took a large silk handkerchief and showed how two
prisoners of the Inquisition were once knotted together with ropes,
and allowed their freedom if they could untie them, trying the puzzle
on the lovers, who, of course, struggled violently to be free,--I need
hardly add without success. Had he experimented on some of the married
couples possibly the result might have been different. Following this
was a gay barcarole about strolling on the Prado, glancing eyes, winged
feet and envious veils. “It should have castanets in the chorus; if
Señor Brown will lend me his hat it will answer.”
Thus appealed to, the photographer could not choose but offer his brand
new stovepipe to his guest, who thumped it vigorously, greatly to
Señor Brown’s annoyance, who stood looking foolish, bareheaded in the
sunshine. And again I marked the size and lustre of the diamond ring.
The singer’s voice was a trifle cracked, but we were not fastidious,
the ladies hung on every word, and when the song ended, the applause
was hearty and genuine. The blonde artist produced a flute which
luckily for us had a missing joint, and insinuated he could be
prevailed upon to sing; but we knew “The Raven” would be his doleful
strain and upon the hint no one spoke.
“Now a thousand pardons,” said Oreto, “for consuming your time and
courtesy. I must have a _siesta_, without which you know a Spaniard
is lost forever and a day.” From under the seat of the buckboard
he unrolled a short cloak and threw it in Moorish style across his
shoulders, lifted his _sombrero_, revealing a nobly turned head with
dashes of gray in the blue-black hair, and his face resumed its
expression of habitual melancholy. As he walked off to the shadow of a
great rock the alumnus from Colorado college, who knows it all, said
in a loud whisper, “There goes Don Pomposo. He feels like the Corliss
engine at the Centennial.”
The old bachelor shot the fledgling a glance that should have killed
him, but the youth, though poor by nature and exhausted by cultivation,
was wiry and did not fall asunder. In fact he never flinched. My
thoughts wandered from the gay company and the man who had no respect
for “the stranger within the gates,” to the lone exile and the varied
fortunes at which he had hinted, and I said aloud, “The Señor Oreto
looks like a man who has a history.”
And he has.
I dismiss the picnic in the brilliant periods of the Pharos of the
Occident. The editor-in-chief, being also an insurance agent, naturally
dealt in large figures, and gave free rein to his warm, not to say
fiery imagination: “The picnic of last week was an event long to be
remembered. The day was beautiful, nature enchanting, woman divine.
Old Baldy lifted his rugged front and snowy crown before us, and the
river sung its sweetest cadence. Among distinguished guests present we
name the fascinating Gonzalez Felipe Oreto, a cosmopolitan born in old
Castile, the friend of our artist, James Brown. For æsthetic culture,
refinement of manner and general elegance the versatile Castilian has
few equals and no superiors. Rumor has it he will soon lead to the
altar a fair widow well known to our city, and we learn with extreme
pleasure that he has been prevailed on to cast in his lot with us and
become a citizen of the most desirable of all the territories.”
From this time the popularity of the delightful Gonzalez Felipe Oreto
steadily increased. The young ladies gazed at him with undisguised
admiration, the mothers smiled on him, but his attentions were too
evenly distributed to indicate the least preference. One day he dashed
all hopes by publishing in the _Pharos of the Occident_ the poem
given below. He told his landlady, in the deepest confidence, it was
addressed to a noble lady of Valencia, who had deigned to give him a
sweet souvenir in return for his verses and present.
My reader need hardly be told it was all over town before night--that
pretty secret of Oreto’s.
TO ISABELLA RASCON--WITH A SHELL.
The years have brought you many gifts
Since first you heard them tell
How the voice of the sea is hid
In the windings of a shell.
And where’er it may be exiled,
From its own warm Eastern main,
Bend your ear to the crystal cell,
And you hear the sea again.
I list to the murmurous sound
But it never shapes one word.
I cannot guess what it would tell,
That echo always heard.
Does it speak of the strange, rich life
Far down in the surging waves,
Where purple mullet and gold fish rove
The depths of coral caves?
Where Ocean’s throbbing heart is stilled,
And wandering Peri’s rest,
’Mid the pearl and amber jewels
He loves to wear in his breast?
Perchance the mellow strain was caught
From the song of mermaid fair,
Dreamily chanting, as she smoothed
The rings of her long, wet hair.
Or, lingering yet, the echo faint
Of a life once held within.
Some hidden shape that breathed and died
Afar from the breakers din.
Never had Sultan roof like this,
Never king such castle wall,
What was it wrought this wondrous dome
And filled this crystal hall?
Deserted now, but whispering low
The secret hid in the sea.
Ask what the mystic music means,
And it answers, ceaselessly,
With that weird song,--tender and low
As the voice of brooding dove
Who murmurs but a single note,
Keynote of life--it is Love.
Ah, when you hear that pleading sound,
Dream not of siren or sea.
Believe it the spirit of Love,
Forever singing--of me.
Some weeks after the picnic I sat working a highly useless lamp mat in
my parlor, which in pleasant Mexican fashion is divided from the office
by a curtained doorway. There passed the barred window a dapper little
man, whipping his boot with a short riding whip as he went along,
whom I recognized as a government agent from Los Indios. I heeded not
the conversation, easily overheard, or rather the monologue which
languished, till a sudden animation of voice betrayed the true purpose
of the visitor as he asked, “Was there a fellow hangin’ ‘round here not
long ago, calling himself Oreto; a sort of literary and sentimental
adventurer, pretending to be in heavy mourning?”
“Yes, he had quite a turn for story telling and amusing children. The
_caballero_ appears to have fallen on evil times--a sad face, wouldn’t
be a bad model for the Master of Ravenswood.”
“Exactly; his face is mighty sad about this time. Interested friends
have taken secure boarding for him and relieved him of his wig and
big diamond ring--the property of a lady in Zuloago. His real name is
Gomez, a gambler and murderer from the city of Mexico. He ran off to
Chihuahua, which soon got too hot to hold him and his little games,
moved on to Los Indios, where he played three card montè once too often
for even territorial morality, and the noble _hidalgo_ is now smiling
his melancholy smile behind the grated windows of the county jail.”
“He had rather an agreeable manner,” said the listener with a long
yawn, “but I never took much stock in the man.”
CHAPTER XXVII. THE PIMOS.
The minds of men untrained are strangely alike. There is such sameness
of arts, customs, inventions, such likeness in their religious beliefs
under like stages of development, we must reach the conclusions that
on subjects of deep human interest certain ideas are inherent in
human hearts, despite alien blood and long epochs of separation. All
barbarians have their priests or medicine men and prophets, are firm
believers in necromancy, incantations, the power of witchcraft, and
have deep faith in the great Spirit as the peculiar guardian of their
race. Some tribes have a fear of the devil who must be worshipped
in order to be propitiated. With them old times are best, and all
traditions run back to a golden age of innocency in a Region of Delight
where the rivers sparkled with sweet water, the maize was always
ripe, and high born warriors revelled and feasted on the game ever in
sight. There was no work, no disease, no old age. This Elysium was
lost by crime, and the Arcadian days ended forever. The sinful world
was destroyed by a Flood from which only one prophet and his family
escaped. Every Rocky Mountain tribe has its legend of the deluge and
belief in the second coming of the Divine Man who is to right all
wrongs, correct all miseries and mistakes; returning some bright
morning to renew the dull world to youth, and then Paradise will be
regained. For this revelation they wait, as the prophetic souls were
found waiting to be guided by the star which led to the divine child of
Mary.
The Pueblos jealously guard their wretched little chapels (_estufas_)
from the prying eyes of strangers, and the gentlest of visitors is
rebuffed by their dumb secrecy. In different ways I have gathered many
traditions. Some are childish and witless to my understanding; others
wearing symbolic veils are graceful as the Greek myths, and hold a
significance as rich. Fables of the nomads will do for another day. The
Pueblos take our attention first. The great variety of climate in North
America produces various habits of life which temper and color the
fables; and I believe there is no myth without some meaning. The vapory
conceits we treat so lightly were not empty phantasms to the brain that
shaped them in the beginning, and some heart has thrilled to each airy,
insubstantial legend.
Certain old instincts run in all bloods. The inborn desire of the
soul to account for its origin, to ask whence come I, what am I,
perplexes the bewildered savage burrowing in his cave as it did the
learned questioners, a mixed multitude crowding the Academy, reverently
listening to the wondrous maid of Alexandria--Hypatia the Beautiful.
What is truth? asked the Governor of Judea as truth Incarnate stood
before him in the Judgment Hall; and men are yet demanding of science,
nature, philosophy, the origin of being, the destinies, the soul and
its limitations. Turning from the seen to the unseen, from the outer to
the inner life, from the tangible to the unreal, longing to know the
beginning and the end of all. It is the old yearning to be as God; old
as the first man. To comprehend the stirring of the divinity within,
which neither feeds nor sleeps but lives on separate from the body,
opens endless questioning. This is the study of sages; about it the
wisest debate and ponder, and of it the savage, blanketless and naked,
where the soft seasons allow him to roam, asks with a blind ignorance
infinitely pathetic.
To him the hidden forces which rule the universe are divinities to
be entreated by prayer, propitiated by sacrifice and offerings. The
savage’s whole life is penetrated by religion, from the hard little
cradle to which he is swathed, to the shallow pit where he lies
uncoffined when life’s struggle is over.
The tribes near Santa Fé and the larger American towns of New Mexico
have mixed the religion of Christ with the old superstitions in a
curious, almost painful manner. I once visited Tesuque with a view
to gaining some knowledge of their primitive ceremonials. The usual
protracted smoking was indulged in; there followed a stupid meaningless
silence, considered the height of politeness; then we partook of
cold refreshments consisting of little apples carefully wiped on the
sheepskin which covered baby’s cradle as a blanket. We climbed the
rickety ladders, admired the excellence of the bearskins, counted the
bags of shelled corn and rough potteries baked in their mud furnaces,
surveyed a chromo in feverish colors named the Queen of Heaven, and
when the time was ripe I modestly inquired if we might be permitted to
visit the _estufa_. The head man of the tribe (cacique) whom we named
Hiawatha, smiled blandly, showing ivory white teeth without a flaw,
and said “Si, Sigñora,” with a cheerful alacrity quite foreign to the
usual aboriginal stoicism. We followed him into the courtyard and
Minnehaha followed us and stonily stared. The dusky maiden in the march
of progress is escaping from buckskin draperies. She wears the garment
called by the French _intimate_, skirt of Navajo blanket, black ground
with tracings of red embroidery, not unlike the familiar Greek pattern,
calico shawl gay as the scarf of Iris. She is without beauty of any
sort; is raw boned and high shouldered, inclining to fat; of an ashy
sunburnt skin, flat face, high cheek bones, thick lips, mannish gait,
harsh voice. She is nearly akin (if there’s anything in likeness) to
the Mongolian Ah Sin, and to ward off the sun that day carried a yellow
parasol over her heavy head. They all stared unmoved as we climbed a
ladder leaning against the side of a high pen made of pine logs and
mud plaster,--a roofless enclosure perhaps eighteen feet square. As we
looked down, a number of birds like swallows flew out, and save their
mud-built nests against the logs the ancient _estufa_ was empty. The
old arrow-maker was joking when he conducted us to the altar place;
the shrine was abandoned, the sacred fire was dead, the secret temple
with all its holy and guarded mysteries was laid open to women even!
It was plain the Queen of Heaven had usurped the place of the lord of
life and light. The chief smiled broadly and Minnehaha wrapped the pink
calico rebosa round her head and laughed as if she would die. I hate
to be beaten in this way, and while the gentlemen went off to look
at a bear skin, I approached the youthful princess in the attitude
of interviewer. “Gentle maiden,” I said, mustering my small stock
of Spanish, “do you remember when the Montezuma fire burned in this
deserted _estufa_?”
“Si, Sigñora.”
“Was it many years ago?”
“Si, sigñora.”
“Perhaps fifteen years?” (insinuatingly).
“Si, sigñora.”
“Ah, can you remember so long? What sort of wood was consecrated to the
shrine?”
“Si, sigñora.”
“Did it flame up to the roof, or was it merely a bank of coals; your
mother” (tenderly) “has told you of it I know.”
“Si, sigñora.”
“Then tell me all you know, if it will not trouble you too much, and I
promise you a beautiful string of blue beads.”
“Si, sigñora.”
This intellectual feast was broken up by an untimely giggle from a
gentle maiden not of aboriginal blood, and we made our adieux. I
afterward learned the sweet girl was only shamming; she understood
Spanish well enough, but chose this pretense to outwit strangers. A
distinguished success.
We were completely floored and made haste to cover our retreat by
leaving the mud-walled village for a nooning and lunch under a
clump of gnarled cedars hard by. The Indian is not disappearing at
a satisfactory rate before the march of civilization. A swarm of
children, the dirtiest and raggedest imaginable, followed us and
held out their hands for the remains of our lunch. The biscuits were
snatched by a youthful Indigene like the greedy boy of the First Reader
who refused to give his dear playmates a crumb of his cake, and I had
to fairly slap his hands to make him divide. He then swallowed the
lemon rinds and would have devoured the sardine boxes if he could. So
much alike are the sons of men!
To reach the old superstitions in their purity we must push away from
the track of the locomotive; far as possible from censer and cross,
parish priest and Protestant missionary. So we set out with the
determination of the mythic Roton, who resolved to go till he arrived
at the roof of heaven; away to the Moquis of the North and the Papagos
of the South. Below the Gila dwell in close neighborhood the Maricopas
and the Pimos, or as the old Spaniards wrote it Pimas, whom they found
three hundred years ago irrigating the lands and raising two crops of
corn a year, just as they do now. The Coco-Maricopas are a branch of
the Pueblos, and these tribes inhabit a large region, mostly perfect
desert, between the head of the Gulf of California and that extensive
cordillera of which the Sierra Catalina forms the most westerly range.
A volcanic country in which since the introduction of man, the surface
of the earth as well as the climate has undergone great changes.
After straining over scorching deserts, alkali plains, sage bush and
greasewood wastes, it was a deep pleasure to rest our tired eyes on
the bright corn lands on both sides of the river Gila, which runs
through the Pimo reservation about twenty-five miles. The three great
_acequias_ with their various branches comprise nearly five hundred
miles, and extend over a tract of land eighteen miles in length. The
fields are fenced with crooked sticks, wattled with brush, mainly
of the thorny cactus and mezquit. The Salic or rather Slavic law
prevails among the aborigines. Instead of studying graceful culture and
decorative art, the farming is done by the women. When harvest time
comes, the men turn into the fields and help, besides lightening the
labor by standing around in the shade and looking on, or sprawling on
the floor swinging the baby as it hangs suspended in a box, hanging by
a cord from the ceiling. Sometimes the mother carries a large basket
on her head and the papoose sitting on a sort of side-bustle astride
her hip. A civilized baby would tumble off instantly, but the native
infant holds on to her smooth, shining sides in an attitude wonderfully
like the missing link, our Simian ancestor, riding the calico pony in
gay circus ring. This baby does not cut monkey-shines, but stares at
the stranger as stolidly as his father and mother. The Pimo customs are
like the Coco-Maricopas in everything but burial rites. They bury their
dead but their neighbors burn them. The Maricopa bodies are placed on a
funeral pyre of resinous wood and utterly consumed, in classic fashion.
Reporters say the mourners go into a profound mourning of tar. On
inquiry I learned the “tar” is a portion of the ashes of the dear
deceased mixed with the dissolved gum of the mezquit, (a species of
acacia which yields a concrete juice like gum arabic). They smear their
faces with the hideous plaster, and let it remain as a mark of deep
grief till it wears away. A widow, the next day after her bereavement,
is offered in market by the town crier to any one who wants a wife. If
an able-bodied squaw, good at hoeing, and stout enough to balance the
baby on top of the basket of corn overhead, she is usually courted,
“wooed, won, married and all” within a few days, though custom allows
her to continue the periodic howling and tar deep-mourning several days
after the new honeymoon begins to shine.
I was charmed at thought of being among Pagans assisting at such
heathen obsequies, and felt it the spot to find the ancient lore I
sought, through many a weary mile of lava bed and tropic scorch. I
was among the changeless, unimpressible American Indians, living
among demons and goblins, spirits of earth, air, fire, water, whose
beliefs are untainted by mixture of Christian ideas. Here I discovered
the flickering, mythic lights which produce such lovely effects,
changing gods to men, and making demigods of heroes. Among these
untutored children of nature, every misty outline and vapory mountain
haze might be an aboriginal soul floated out into the unknown dark
on its wanderings toward the bright sun house. In the shadows of
vast cañons the block elves have their haunts, and lie in wait for
bewildered spirits, and hurl spectral missiles along the pathless
space surrounding “the dance house of the ghosts.” The Pueblos are all
sun-worshippers, and the Pimos tell us the road to the sun house is
beset with perils. In the darkness of the dread mystery of death, deep
waters are to be crossed, many-headed monsters bellow and roar, fire
flames before the eyes, and whirlwinds lift the affrighted spirit from
his feet and toss him in mid air. Four is a sacred number with them,
derived from adoration of the four cardinal points; the soul flutters
about the body four days, and sometimes stones are thrown across the
warrior’s grave to scare away the evil spirits. In the unlighted valley
the brave must be provided with a pipe for his solace, with weapons
suited to his rank, choice armor approved to fit him as he enters the
kingdom of souls. Lifeless, he may yet grope through the cold clay,
and touching with icy fingers the trusted arms, will not tremble in
defenceless march through the horror of the awful shades.
Is this not the instinct of the antique Scythian buried on the field
with the blade in which victory still lingers? The pathos of the singer
breaking his heart and harp together:
“Lay his sword by his side, it hath served him too well
Not to rest near his pillow below;
To the last moment true, from his hand ere it fell
Its point was still turned to a flying foe.
Fellow-lab’rers in life, let them slumber in death,
Side by side, as becomes the reposing brave,--
That sword which he loved still unbroke in its sheath,
And himself unsubdued in his grave.”
Four days the howlers howl, and further to cheer the dread passage
four nights a fire is kindled on the warrior’s grave to open a path
for the blinded footsteps in the fearful “dead man’s journey,” and
lead them to the sun, the safe, final resting place. There the chief
will take up his weapons again and spend a blissful eternity fighting
his old enemies, the Yumas, and we may be sure slaying his thousands
and revelling in blood, like the Viking in the halls of the Valhalla,
with his comrades hacked to pieces in many a morning fight, but always
ready with whole limbs and flashing, undinted armor, to appear at
dinner. Food is placed on the fresh earth, the best corn bread, flesh
of antelope and jars of water, that the lone one may be comforted by
gifts from the world he has left. These tender offerings bestowed, the
property of the hero is portioned out to the tribe, fields divided
among those who need land, his grain, chickens, dogs, bows, etc.,
fairly distributed. No wrangling among heirs, no lawyers to absorb
estates, all is done fairly and equitably, in a submission to precedent
worthy our imitation.
Nor do the Pimos refuse to be comforted. Cattle are driven up and
slaughtered, and deeply burdened with sorrow, every man loads down his
squaw with beef, and feasts whole days on funeral baked meats. Dare I
disgust my dear friend, the classic reader, by saying these barbarian
feasts are reminders of the tremendous banquet in the pavilion of
Agamemnon, where the “steer of full five years” was killed, skinned,
and cooked before the eyes of the Grecians.
Homeric champions--Trojan peers and sceptered kings of Greece--were not
made wretched by indigestion, and I suspect (low be it spoken!) they
took pepsin in the natural state. With their enviable appetites they
were ready to eat off-hand; the squarest of meals never came amiss, and
their capacity for tough beef, rare done, was prodigious and unfailing.
So far very like our Rocky mountaineers, but unhappily the red warriors
are not embalmed in verse by the imperishable poets.
When the Indian woman dies no high sepulchral feasts, no games and
honors, such as Ilion to her hero paid. With scant ceremony she is
wrapped in her poor shroud, the moccasins of her own make fastened to
her shapely feet; the carrying-strap worn across the forehead, and the
paddle go with the cold hands. Sad emblem of woman’s destiny in the
wilderness; pathetic tokens that even in the mystic land of shades she
must be the silent, uncomplaining slave of her brutish, savage lord.
This is the Pimo legend of the Creation: The world was made by an
earth prophet. In the beginning it stretched fair and frail as a line
of light across the darkness of empty space. A wise Sagamore lived
in the Gila valley, and one night a royal eagle came to the door and
warned him of a deluge close at hand. The prophet wrapped his mantle
of fur around him, for it was winter, and laughed the gray messenger
to scorn. The kingly bird shook his white head, spread wide his wings
and soared away to heaven. Again the eagle came with his warning cry,
the waters were near and would soon burst overhead; but the sachem
drowsily groaned at the wakening voice and turned on his bed of buffalo
skins and slept. Three times the broad wings shadowed the sleeper, and
the friendly voice entreated him to flee the wrath of the gods, but
the prophet gave no heed. Then quick as the eagle disappeared in the
blue and starry silence, there came thunder, lightning, and a mountain
of water like an earthquake overspread the valley of Gila, and the
morning sun shone on only one man saved from destruction by floating
on a ball of resin--Szeukha, the son of the Creator. He was enraged at
the royal bird, thinking him the mover of the flood, and made a rope
ladder of tough bark like the woodbine, climbed the naked, riven cliff
where the eagle lived, and slew him. He then raised to life the mangled
bodies of the slain on which the eagle had preyed, and sent them out to
re-people the world. In the centre of the vast eyrie he found a woman,
the eagle’s wife, and their child. These he helped down the rope ladder
and sent on their way, and from them are descended that race of wise
men called Hohocam, ancients or grandfathers, who were guided in all
their wanderings by an eagle. Southward they marched past forests of
oak, sycamore, cedar and flowering trees, past mountains of crystal and
gold, and rivers murmurous with song flowing over beds of stars, till
they reached a deep blue lake kissed by soft winds, sparkling in the
sunlight. On its borders they planted a city with streets of water--old
Tenochtitlan, which white men call Mexico. Through the uncounted
centuries since the deluge, Szeukha has not dropped out of Indian
memory.
Because he killed the bird of prophecy he had to do a sort of penance,
which was never to scratch himself with his nails but always with a
little stick. The custom is still adhered to by the unchanging Pimos,
and a splinter of wood, renewed every fourth day, is carried for this
purpose, stuck in their long coarse hair and plied with extreme energy
and enjoyment. Stern are the duties of the historian, and truth obliges
me to record the Pimos do not scratch their heads for nothing.
They are good fighters, and have been a wall of defence against the
incursions of Apaches, at one time the only protection for travellers
between Fort Yuma and Tucson. They appear comfortable in their
huts,--which are snug dens of oval shape made of mud and reeds thatched
with _tule_ or wheat straw,--quietly contented with their industrious
wives and their own lazy selves. They make a kind of wine like sour
cider, not nearly so good though, and quaff the vinegar bowl with
sombre hilarity after the corn bread and mutton are disposed at dinner.
The tributaries of the Gila bear sweet, soft, meandering Spanish names
which I forget. They are rivers of the leaky sort, disappearing by
fitful turns and capriciously starting up again in the deeply worn
channels. Even in its best strength the Gila (river of swift water) is
not so large as an Indiana creek which we would blush to call river. It
contains three kinds of fish; trout, buffalo, and humpback, all equally
mean, of slippery, muddy, flavor and most inferior quality.
Not far from the Pimo villages, eleven in number, are the written
rocks, mentioned in the oldest histories and described at length
by the early explorers and the modern traveller. At the base of an
immense bluff are heaps of boulders covered with figures of men and
animals, rudely carved with some coarse instruments. Uncouth shapes of
birds, footprints, snakes, and the ever recurring print of a moccasin,
indicative of marching. Many writers attach a value to these ancient
inscriptions; one old Spanish adventurer discerned in them letters like
the Gothic, Hebrew and Chaldean characters. They are not there to-day;
among hundreds of piled-up boulders and detached stones there is no
tracery like the letters of any known language. Some of the markings
are centuries old and partly effaced, others written over and over
again. The under sides of the rocks, also, are sculptured where it
would be impossible to cut them as they lie, and some weigh many tons.
These last must have fallen from the mountain after the hieroglyphs
were made. There can be no doubt of their great antiquity and the
large numbers of carved stones prove it to have been a resort ages on
ages ago, but I doubt the importance of the lines, to me meaningless
zigzags. Indians are the laziest of mortals, and in their childish way
love to scribble worthless signs, rude pictography on their skins and
the hides of animals, their walls and potteries. The “Pedros Pintados”
which took such hold on Spanish imagination were probably boundary
lines between tribes, and the tortoise, snake and so on are the ancient
tribal symbols, treaties possibly. If they had the deep significance
claimed by easily excited chroniclers the story would run like this:
The sons of the North have waded a lake of blood, have swept like the
whirlwind across the Sierras; the bow has rattled, the arrow flew. We
have broken the bones of the Apaches, scooped out their eyes and warmed
our hands in their smoking blood. We have scalped the proud warriors
and beaten out the brains of their children. Whoop la! Now let the
earth tremble, for the wolves are let loose on the slain!
There are widely scattered ruins in the Gila valleys showing it was
once densely populated, but the remains are so monotonous they command
little interest. The visitor who has seen one has the type of all.
A certain melancholy pathos invests every ruin; houses where men
have lived and died are more or less haunted, but the relics of New
Mexico and Arizona are destitute of anything like grace or comeliness.
The makers and builders never got beyond the rough adobe, the stone
hatchet and flint arrow-head, and nothing is proved by them except that
this country has been inhabited from a remote period by a people not
differing greatly from the Pueblos of to-day.
As we journeyed up the valley we saw herds of antelopes, always too
distant for a shot. The Rocky mountain antelope is a most beautiful
and graceful animal, of compact form and exceeding strength. The lithe
limbs are delicate and fleet, feet small and elegant, tail short and
tufted. It is light fawn color, under parts white; its luminous dark
eyes are like those of the gazelle of the Orient. Shy and not easily
approached the Indians domesticate them by trapping when very young.
They have the gentlest, most confiding way of laying their heads in
your lap, and looking up with the lustrous eyes which have furnished
poets with lovely imagery from the days of Solomon to the nights of
Byron. I know no creature with such an appealing manner and such swift
grace of movement; they speed across the still, wide plain, in the
farness of the distance appearing like low flying birds.
Though we are not in the Navajo country we see now and then their
famous blanket, striped in gayest blue, yellow and red, this last
color so dear to the Indian eye, made from ravelling out flannel which
they buy of the white traders. The dyes are vegetable and absolutely
fadeless. The blanket is coarse, hard and heavy; a good one will shed
water like rubber, and wear a great while as a horse or saddle blanket.
The Indian women spin wool in a slow, simple way by rolling in their
hands, and they spend all their spare time for months in making one
blanket which may sell for thirty-five dollars, or if very brilliant
in color and close in texture, for fifty or a hundred dollars. When
on the march even, the Navajo woman has her little contrivance for
weaving, on the mule with her, or across her shoulder if on foot, and
in five minutes after the halt is sounded she sits under a tree weaving
away as composedly as though she had been at it for hours. The loom is
nothing but sticks placed horizontally, one at top, two at bottom, far
enough apart to accommodate warp of the blanket’s length or breadth.
Between these the warp is stretched, and to one straps are attached
to throw over the limb of a tree. At the bottom are other straps, for
the feet to operate in beating up the filling. In her silent, joyless,
persevering fashion the work goes steadily on, and the weaver is
satisfied to see it grow at a rate incalculably slow.
A sufficient measure of civilization is the treatment of women, and
among Apaches we find the deepest degradation. The Pueblo wives are
incomparably better off than those of the nomads. The contrast between
them and their sisters of the fairer race is more painful than that
between men of the two races. I have seen young hunters with stately
forms, erect, lithe and sinewy, and one warrior who might have been a
model for Uncas, the favorite hero of our early friend Cooper.
We all remember the anecdote Galt tells of Benjamin West. When in Rome
his friends agreed that the Apollo of Vatican should be the first
statue shown to the young Philadelphia Quaker. It was enclosed in a
case, and to try the effect on him suddenly the keeper threw open the
doors. “A young Mohawk warrior,” exclaimed West.
But the likeness is only in the body. The ideal head of the Apollo with
its clustering locks, the exquisite sensitive face with its delicate
molding of lip and chin, the Phidian forehead and nose, are in highest
contrast with the sensual, sluggish lineaments of the red man.
Among the various tribes there is a dire monotony, and in nothing are
they more alike than in a lofty scorn of work. The man glories in his
laziness, the woman exults in her slavery. I have seen an Indian try
a heavy lift and set the bag of corn down again with a “Ugh! squaw’s
work.” If we insinuate he should do the little hoeing for their scant
supply of beans the woman resents the idea. “Would you have a warrior
work like a squaw?” is her indignant response to the suggestion.
I once saw a married couple trudging home, if their cold, smoky, dirty
den may be called by that dear name. The husband, perhaps twenty steps
in advance of the woman who bore on her back a bag of corn. The noble
red man (see J. F. Cooper), waited for her to come up to him, she
hastening her pace as she saw it. Then he slung his rifle on her pack,
folded his arms across his noble breast, and strode forward with easy
gliding step, in untrammeled dignity. How I longed to hand that noble
red man over to the mercies of a woman’s rights convention.
The husband may disfigure or insult the wife at pleasure, divorce
her without form or ceremony by a mere separation, and she has no
protection or appeal; sometimes his conduct drives her to suicide.
In divorce it is the unwritten law of the wilderness that children
go with their mother. Among the wandering tribes mother and baby are
not divided even in death. A merciful barbarity gives one blow with
the hatchet, and the little one rests with the best love it can know
on earth. They have few children; four are a large family, twins
are unknown, nearly all reach maturity. Among the wild tribes where
polygamy is the rule it is not a cause of complaint among the women,
from the fact that it implies a division of labor, and the latest wife
lords it over her predecessors. Even among savages there is no love
like the last love.
The Pimo Indians are not made of “rose-red clay,” they are dark brown,
differing in complexion from the Appalachians east of the Rocky
mountains and the olive hues of the California tribes. Historians say
they have ever been the most active and industrious of the Pueblos;
still that does not imply the energy and activity of the white race.
They sit for hours in front of their huts, motionless as a group of
petrifactions. In a mild climate their wants are few and simple, and a
little of this world’s goods obtained without much work and less worry
is sufficient for the calm philosophers who despise the arts of the
white race and steadily march in the paths of the forefathers.
I must not leave their country without mention of the wooing of the
young Pimo warrior. All Pueblos have but one wife, and no girl is
obliged to marry against her will, however eligible the parents may
consider any offer. If his bent of love be honorable, his purpose
marriage, Romeo first wins over the parents by making them presents,
such delicacies as pumpkins, beans, coyote skins, or if he is very
wealthy a pony. Then, in banged locks and straggling braids of hair,
he sits at the door of the lady of his choice serenading her for
hours, day after day, tooting with all his might on a flute of cane,
an instrument of torture with four holes in it. He hides himself in a
bush and like the nightingale “sings darkling.” Sometimes Juliet is a
coquette and takes no notice of the tender demonstration, leaving him
to keep up the plaintive, shrill noise till
“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”
If no notice is taken of the appeal there is no further sign; he
may hang up his flute, with its bright pencillings and gayly tufted
fringes, and there is no mortification in the rejection. Should she
smile on his suit she comes out of the coop-like den and the ceremony
is ended. Romeo takes her to his house and the bride is at home. If he
is a man of moderate means the house is built of four upright stakes,
forked at one end, driven into the ground; across these other sticks
are laid to support the roof, which may be of corn shucks, or straw
or rushes. If he is ambitious to have a lasting, palatial mansion
it will be walled round with stakes, plastered and roofed with mud.
An opening for a door is left about three feet high to creep in at.
These residences are from five to seven feet high, so one cannot stand
upright in every one. Adjoining the wigwam is a bower of boughs open on
all sides; in this shady lodge are the few potteries in which Juliet
does the cooking, and here the happy pair sit on their heels when at
rest, and Romeo smokes while she grinds the corn in the _metate_ of
stone.
It is expected that the bridegroom will pay the parents all his means
admit to compensate them for the loss of a hand in the cornfield. The
Indian wife never hears of protoplasm, equal suffrage, social science
and the like. She often builds the wigwam after Romeo has cut the
poles, always bears them on her shoulders in the march, plows the
fields with a crooked stick, raises the beans, hoes the corn, bakes
the cakes, without a complaint. If her beady, black eyes mark his
coming and look brighter when he comes I cannot tell why. He is sullen
and still, a dusky shape, the very perfection of gloomy indifference.
Perhaps if he eats the _tortillas_ with an appetite her soul is glad
and she has her reward. If she is content, why sow the seeds of
dissatisfaction by telling her she is a beast of burden and he is a
beast of prey?
The trip through the Pimo country was made memorable by my first
bivouac. ’Twere vain to tell thee all; how a mule drank alkali water,
swelled up and died in an hour, how part of the party had to push
forward with a disabled team, leaving a broken wagon and luggage to
wait the relief, and how a long, hot day brought us to a government
station. This was a mud shanty thatched with cedar boughs and plastered
with clay. The edifice was divided into three rooms, the first was a
stable where a gay little pony was pacing round and round without a
halter. The next was the guest chamber. As I approached, there issued
from it a fragrance, the triple extract of raw hide, burnt bacon and
old pipe. The apartment, perhaps sixteen feet square, was without door
or window. The “accommodations” were a mud fireplace in the corner
where one might make coffee and fry eggs, and a pile of sheepskins on
which the visitor might spread his blanket and sleep,--if he could. The
cedar and mud roof slanted as though it would tumble down any minute.
The clay floor was unswept, the walls fringed with cobwebs and adorned
with strings of red pepper, saddles and bridles. In one corner lay bags
of shelled corn; on a swinging shelf were newspapers, an odd volume
of Oliver Twist and sporting magazines. The third room was sacred to
herdsmen and _rancheros_. The keeper of this lodge in a vast wilderness
was a retired minstrel, and his photograph as jolly endman broadly
smiled upon us, dangling from enormous deer’s antlers which upheld
decorative art in lieu of a mantel piece. I took peaceable possession
of the only chair and my fellow traveller through life’s journey
lolled in luxurious ease on the end of a candlebox, while we surveyed
the “accommodations.” There were three chromos of Evangeline on the
walls: presumably the peddler closed out his stock there. One picture
of that melancholy maiden sitting on a nameless grave is depressing;
two are hardly endurable; three are heart-breaking. I gave way before
them and said, “We will try an Indian lodge under the open sky.” My
resolution made the idea at once become a pleasant thought. In a barren
country the householder, a pilgrim and a stranger, develops a versatile
genius second only to that of Bernini the Florentine sculptor, artist,
poet, musician, who gave an opera in Rome where he built the theater,
invented the engines, cut the statues, painted the scenes, wrote
the comedy and composed the music. In the spirit of communism which
pervades the Territories I rummaged the abandoned baggage and found
blankets, buffalo robes, a mattress, one attenuated pillow stuffed with
feathers pretty much all quill, made “riant” by a pink calico case
ruffled all round. No sham about that pillow.
A clump of stunted pines was the chamber, carpeted with the soft
needles undisturbed for ages. A Navajo blanket made a striped roof, its
weight a security against puffs of wind even if we had not fastened it
with strings and tent pins driven into the warm, gravelly sand. The
pretty recess, so like a play-house, had a fine charm; spicy with the
fresh scent of the pines, shadowed by a great rock, the pink pillow
looked rather lumpy but restful and inviting. I felt sure there were
pleasant dreams, or better yet, dreamless sleep in the unexpected
luxury.
While I smoothed its tumbled ruffles the gay troubadour came from high
pastures with his herds to let them drink at the precious spring, and
then fold them in a corral made of stakes of mezquit wattled with
cactus.
The grama grass on which they feed is described in the books as
incomparably the most nutritive in the world, which may account for
the grand development of bone in the animals throughout the region.
All the wild grasses of the country are peculiar in curing themselves
in the stalk. The grama bears no flower, shows no seed, but seems to
reproduce itself from the roots by the shooting up of young, green and
vigorous spires, which are at first inclosed within the sheaths of
their old and dried-up predecessors, which by their growth they split
and cast to earth, themselves filling their places. The vast region
swept from immemorial ages by the Apaches is covered with this sort of
low, mossy grass, and it enables those most savage of savages to make
their wonderful marches with their wiry little ponies, which endure
extraordinary fatigue so long as they have this feed in abundance, and
are allowed to crop it from native _pasturas_.
The troubadour who kept the wayside inn was a handsome scamp, a
captivating runaway from civilization, calling himself John Smith,
which I am sure is not his name. He apologized for the absence of
his cook (who had no existence on earth), and in festal mood, with
many flourishes, insisted on displaying his own skill in the culinary
science. He graduated under the celebrated Micawber many years ago, and
would like nothing better than a “hot supper of his own getting up.”
With the help of a Mexican _peon_, he deftly and rapidly concocted and
served in the Evangeline apartment various poisons, liquid and solid,
spreading them on a pine table covered with newspapers. Conspicuous
among the dishes were hot death-balls, with lightning zigzags of deadly
drugs, known on the frontier as “soddy biscuit.” Under the beguiling
name of spring lamb we had paid an exhaustive price for a section of
ancient ram which might have battered the walls of Babylon. Fire made
no impression on it, and the chops rebounded under the teeth like
India-rubber. However we had the usual reserve of crackers, ham, canned
fruit, and I drank to the general joy of the whole table in a glass of
withered lemonade. The gentlemen ate with cannibal appetite, and so far
from dropping dead, as I feared, seemed refreshed by the reflection.
The banquet ended, we insisted on music from the obscured, let me not
say fallen, star, and the banjo was brought forth from its case under
the festive board. Brudder Bones had a rich and delightful voice, and
we listened to him with unaffected enjoyment. One by one the herdsmen
came by leading their lean and thirsty sheep, making a picturesque
spectacle as they passed to the spring.
Back of the miserable hut stretched a plain, level as water, three
miles to the foot-hills; far beyond were the Sierras, purple to the
snow line, then a shining silver chain. Their unspeakable beauty haunts
me still like some enchanting vision in which I beheld a new heaven
and a new earth. Beyond the bower rose a heap of boulders, bare except
for the tall yucca’s cream-white blossoms which decked them in bridal
brightness, and a species of night-blooming cereus that with the
declining day unfolded every petal and filled the air with a fragrance
like white lilies. On a bench in front of the hut sat a prospector
and the belated travellers; lounging on blankets and skins were half
a dozen soldiers, a Pueblo Indian, a negro and a Mexican _peon_. The
banjo did its best for the musician occupying the candle box; I was
enthroned in the only chair. A mixed company, representative of the
border races.
What should we sing but “Tenting to-night boys,” and “Oft in the stilly
night,” the twilight song with its tender memories of the lost loves
buried many a year ago? Lastly, in the solemn beauty of the afterglow,
we gave “John Brown’s Body” with a rousing chorus in honor of the
graves forever green and glorious.
A line of crimson lights flamed along the mountain peaks, then the drop
curtain of violet and pearl gray fell softly through the speckless
sapphire and over the darkening hills. ’Twas time to say good-night;
most of the herdsmen wrapped themselves in blankets and rolled like
logs on the ground; the passive ragged _peon_ bowed in courteous grace
with gently spoken _adios_, and lay against the side of the hut, his
delicate face upturned to the sky. Old uncle Ned made a tiny fire of
pine cones “to toas my feet, missis,” as he muffled head and ears in an
army coat on which a shred of shoulder strap hinted of better days. We,
too, said “good-night.” Besides the old songs my ear was haunted with
dim æolian soundings mingling an evening strain from the Koran:
“Have we not given you the earth for a bed,
And made you husband and wife?
And given you sleep for rest,
And made you a mantle of night?”
But I could not sleep thus mantled in that Eden bower. The air was so
electric that five lines of fire followed my fingers as I drew them
across the buffalo robe. I was in that state known to most women and
a few men when my eyelids would _not_ close. I felt as if the seven
doors of the enchanted lantern were opened and I could see all over
the world. There was nothing to fear, but a sense of strangeness and
awe held me. The spangled arch which upholds the throne of God,--its
splendor robbed me of my rest; my spirit was not fitted to the
magnificent infinite palace. Of the exquisite beauty of that balmy
semi-tropic night I hardly trust myself to speak. Through the soft
perfumed dusk, through the leafy tent, the stars glowed resplendent.
None missing there; the lost Pleiad found her sisters; Aldebaran
shone in the East; Arcturus and his sons; Orion belted and spurred
with jewels. The blanket slipped from its fastenings and there was
no curtaining to veil the far-off mystery of my boundless bed-room.
The cool night breeze fanned my face as I watched the lofty spaces
so solemn, so wondrous fair. I had often slept in the ambulance with
curtains close-buttoned; that was a room. The walls of this apartment
were limitless.
Restlessly turning on the pink pillow I thought of eyes that are
looking down, not up at the starry hosts, and the voice now beyond them
which used to sing to the air of “Bonnie Doon,”
“Forever and forevermore,
The star, the star of Bethlehem.”
The goats and sheep were at rest, the hurt lamb had ceased its bleat,
the light in the ranche went out. In the stilly night silence all,
save the low wind soughing in the pines making midnight hush the
deeper. The long howl of a dog in the distance. Was he barking at the
silver boat in the blue bay overhead? What sailors manned that fairy
craft? Did they understand the mysteries and could they answer my
weary questionings? What saw they in the unfathomable depths? and what
meant that signal shot from the slender bow across the trackless blue,
dropping sparkles of fire through the dusk?
Good night, Good night!
THE END.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Footnotes have been moved to the end of each chapter and relabeled
consecutively through the document.
Illustrations have been moved to paragraph breaks, except for the
frontispiece.
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.
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Santa Fè has been changed to Santa Fé throughout.
p. 45: Taguna changed to Laguna (the Laguna mission,)
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