Of the villages strewn along this delightful way, some are hamlets of half a dozen straggling little adobes drowsing under their rustling cottonwoods. Others are more important. One particularly I remember—Santo Niño. That means “village of the Holy Child,” and His peace that placid morning seemed to rest upon it. The streets were narrow shady lanes, where irrigation ditches running full made a murmuring music, flowing now by adobe walls, now by picket fences where hollyhocks and marigolds and morning-glories looked pleasantly out. It was a village not of houses merely, but of comfortable old orchards, too, and riotous gardens where corn and beans, chilis and melons locked elbows in happy comradery. I think every one I met was Mexican—the women in sombre black rebosos, the men more or less unkempt and bandit-appearing in ample-crowned sombreros, yet almost without exception offering me the courtesy of a raised hand and abuenos dias, señor. Santa Cruz de la Cañada—another of these villages—deserves a special word of mention, for nextto Santa Fe it is the oldest officially establishedvilla(a form of Spanish organized town), in New Mexico, dating as such from 1695, though in its unincorporated state antedating the Pueblo Rebellion. Long a place of importance, its ancient glory paled as Santa Fe and Albuquerque grew. Today it numbers a scant couple of hundred inhabitants, but it is interesting to the tourist for its fine old church facing the grassy plaza of the village. The church interior is enriched with a number of ancient pictures and carvings of an excellence beyond one’s expectations.
Then there is Chímayo, into which you pass just before crossing the river to Santuario. To the general public Chímayo appeals because of its blankets and its apricots, but to me it remains a place of tender memory because of a certain hospitabletienda de abarrotes(or, as we should say, grocery store). Entering it in the hope of finding crackers and cheese, wherewith to make a wayside luncheon, I was given instead a characteristic Mexican meal as exquisitely cooked as ever I had; yet it wasbut a couple of corn tortillas, a bowl of pink beans done to liquidity, and a cup of black coffee. As to the blankets of Chímayo, they are woven in sizes from a pillow-cover to a bed-spread, of Germantown yarn, and you find them on sale everywhere in the curio shops of the Southwest, competing in a modest way with the Navajo product. The weaving is a fireside industry, prosecuted in the intervals of other work both by women and men, and the bump-bump of the primitive looms is the characteristic melody of the place.
I had to ford the little river, shoes and stockings in hand, to reach Santuario, and was not sure when I got there. An oldpaisano, sitting in the shade of a wall, informed me, however, that the little cluster of adobes on a hillside, into which I soon came from the river, was really the place—“of great fame, señor. Here come people of all nations to be cured—Mexicans, Americans, Apaches—from far, very far.” The adobe church, half hidden behind some huge cottonwoods, was open—of crude construction without and within, but very picturesque.Passing within the wooden doors, which are curiously carved with a maze of lettering that I found it impossible to decipher, I was in a twilight faintly illumined by the shining of many candles set upon the floor in front of a gaudy altar. Upon the walls hung beskirted figures of saints in various colors and wearing tin crowns. There were, too, crude little shrines upon which pilgrims had scrawled their names. A figure of San Diego on horseback with a quirt on his wrist, cowboy style, was particularly lively, I thought. In a room adjoining the altar is a hole from which pilgrims take handfuls of earth—red adobe, apparently—the outward instrumentality that is depended upon for the cures.
The history of this queer chapel is interesting. Long before it was built the efficacy of that hole of earth was believed far and wide, and the place resorted to by health seekers. Finally in 1816 a piouspaisanonamed Bernardo Abeyta, who had prospered greatly in his affairs, was impelled to erect this church as a testimony of gratitude to God. Dying he bequeathed it toDoña Carmen Chaves, his daughter, who kept for all comers the church and its pit of healing, and lived in a modest way upon the fees which grateful pilgrims bestowed upon her. After her death, the property descended to her daughter, who maintains it in the same way. It is said the fame of the spot is known even in old Mexico, whence pilgrims sometimes come.[17]The earth is utilized either internally dissolved in water, or outwardly made into a mud wash and rubbed on the body. The chapel is dedicated toEl Señor de Esquipulas—the Christ of Esquipulas—Esquipulas being a little village of Guatemala whose great church enshrines a famous image of the Lord believed to perform miraculous cures.
For a glimpse in small compass of the unsuspected picturesqueness of rural New Mexico, I know of nothing better than this little jaunt from Española to Santuario.
NOTE: Horseback tours through the Pecos and Santa Fe National Forests are practicabilities, with Santa Fe, Española or Buckman as a base. There is a company or two at Santa Fe that make a specialty of outfitting parties, furnishing riding and pack animals, cooks and all needful accessories, for a fixed sum. Trout fishing is good in many of the mountain streams. You may arrange your own itinerary, or if you do not know what you want, trips will be outlined to suit your particular interests. In the latter event, a consultation with the Supervisor of the Santa Fe National Forest, whose office is in Santa Fe, would be helpful. For people of sound wind who like to see the world from mountain tops, a trip over the Dalton Trail to the Pecos River and thence to the Truchas Peaks is repaying. From that elevation of about 13,000 feet, there is a magnificent outlook over much of New Mexico and some of Colorado and Arizona.
NOTE: Horseback tours through the Pecos and Santa Fe National Forests are practicabilities, with Santa Fe, Española or Buckman as a base. There is a company or two at Santa Fe that make a specialty of outfitting parties, furnishing riding and pack animals, cooks and all needful accessories, for a fixed sum. Trout fishing is good in many of the mountain streams. You may arrange your own itinerary, or if you do not know what you want, trips will be outlined to suit your particular interests. In the latter event, a consultation with the Supervisor of the Santa Fe National Forest, whose office is in Santa Fe, would be helpful. For people of sound wind who like to see the world from mountain tops, a trip over the Dalton Trail to the Pecos River and thence to the Truchas Peaks is repaying. From that elevation of about 13,000 feet, there is a magnificent outlook over much of New Mexico and some of Colorado and Arizona.
Albuquerque is the metropolis and trade heart of central New Mexico, and the talk of its solid citizens runs naturally on cattle and wool, mines and lumber, grapes and apples and the agricultural glories of the Rio Grande valley. The average tourist gives it only the half-hour during which the train stops there, and remembers it mainly for the noteworthy Harvey Indian collection at the station (a liberal education, by the way, in the handicraft of the Southwestern aborigines) and for the snap-shots he tried to take (and was foiled in) of the picturesque Pueblo pottery sellers on the platform.[18]In itself, indeed, the busy little city has not a great deal that is distinctiveenough to interest tourists excepting the Spanish quarter known as Old Albuquerque, on the outskirts—a picturesque survival of the Hispanic regime. There stands the old church dedicated to the city’s patron saint, San Felipe. As a base to visit certain other places, however, Albuquerque is very convenient. For instance, there is the pueblo of Isleta, 12 miles south.
It is from Isleta that many of the pottery makers come whom you see offering their wares on the railway platform at Albuquerque, and a pleasant day may be put in rambling about the streets of the pueblo, chatting and trafficking with the hospitable people, who are a very wide-awake, independent sort of Indians. You may go thither by train; or you may drive (a much better way), following the west bank of the Rio Grande, and enjoying the beauty of a typical bit of rural New Mexico, now austere and sun-scorched, now relenting in vineyards, fields of corn and lush alfalfa, and orchards of apple and peach, sandwiched between sleepy little Mexican villages smothered in trees and old-fashioned flowers.Much of New Mexico is as foreign in aspect as Spain, and the flat-roofed, eaveless ranch houses, low and rambling, with enclosed plazitas, and high-walled corrals adjoining, into which the teams are driven at night and the gates shut to the outer world, bring to you the atmosphere of Don Quixote or Lazarillo de Tormes. Architecturally, Isleta differs widely from the orthodox pueblo type, its houses being usually of one story and extended over a liberal area, as must needs be to shelter its thousand or so of people. They are quite up-to-date farmers, these Isleteños, and the pueblo is as busy at harvest time as a beehive, what with fruit drying, corn husking, and alfalfa baling.[19]Their homes are generally neatly kept, often adorned within with bright-colored blankets, pretty water ollas, and the whitewashed walls hung with pictures of Virgin and saints—impressing you as homes of a thrifty and well-doing race. Indeed these people are reputed therichest of all the Pueblos. It is, I believe, a matter of record that in 1862, when a detachment of the United States army was stranded penniless in New Mexico, an Isleta Indian loaned it $18,000 cash, simply taking the commander’s receipt as evidence. After waiting patiently for twelve years for the government to have the politeness to return the money without being asked for it, and hearing nothing, he and the governor of Isleta, accompanied by the local United States Indian agent, made a trip to Washington to see about it. Through the personal interest of President Grant, the money was at last returned.
On August 28, St. Augustine’s Day, occurs the annual public fiesta, with the usual open air Indian dances after mass in the church. The large circularestufa, or native ceremonial chamber, entered by a ladder let down through an opening in the roof, is a conspicuous feature of the pueblo. You will find such places, in one form or another, in all the Pueblo villages, and in the Cliff Dwellers’ towns. They were originally used as the sleeping apartmentsof the men. Nowadays the men sleep at home, but theestufasare still resorted to by them as a sort of club-room or lounge when religious ceremonies are not going on inside. Despite membership in the Roman Catholic Church the average Pueblo’s main hold on the unseen that is eternal is through his primitive pagan faith, whose rites he still practices. Entrance to theestufasis not, as a rule, readily granted to white people, and should never be undertaken without permission first obtained. As a matter of fact, there is on ordinary occasions nothing to see but a dimly lighted chamber with bare floor and walls, and a small, boxed-in fire-pit near the base of the ladder.
To the big old adobe church of Saint Augustine in the center of the pueblo, there attaches a queer legend sure to delight the traveler whose interest is less in historical verities than in the fanciful flights of the human mind. I refer to the tradition of the Rising of Padre Padilla’s Coffin. Among the Franciscan friars who accompanied Coronado on his famous march to what hecalled Quivira—the country of the Wichita Indians in Kansas—was Padre Juan de Padilla. This intrepid servant of God (when Coronado turned homeward), remained with two lay brothers on the Kansas plains with the view of Christianizing those Indians. The outcome of the matter was that he was killed by them on November 30, 1544. Now tradition has it that somehow in the heavenly ordering, the body of the martyred padre got miraculously transferred from Kansas to a place under the church altar at Isleta; and it is firmly believed (and the belief is backed up by the circumstantial testimony of solid citizens) that periodically the coffin, which is a section of a hollowed cottonwood trunk, rises plainly to view in the church, disclosing to whomsoever may then be present, the padre rather mummified but still in his black whiskers. To prove it there are people who will show you bits of his gown nipped off surreptitiously by eye-witnesses and preserved as precious amulets.[20]
Northward from Albuquerque for 40 miles, the beautiful valley of the Rio Grande contains much of appeal to the student of history and of Indian life. That is the region called in the chronicle of Coronado’s expedition, the Province of Tigüex (pronouncedtee-wesh); and here that doughty conquistador spent his first New Mexican winter (1540-41) at a pueblo now vanished, in the neighborhood, it is believed, of the picturesque town of Bernalillo[21]17 miles north of Albuquerque. It was a winter so marked with wanton deeds of deviltry by the soldiery towards the peaceably disposed natives, that the whole region was soon seething in revolt—but helpless revolt because of the guns and horses of those profligate swashbucklers, who disgraced the Christianity they professed.
Several pueblos are still extant in that stretch. There is Sandia, a moribund littleplace 10 miles from Albuquerque, and within walking distance of Alameda Station on the railway, but hardly worth the trip. North of Bernalillo a couple of miles is a summer pueblo, Ranchitos de Santa Ana (the little farms of Santa Ana), occupied during the growing season by Indians whose home pueblo, Santa Ana, is a dozen miles to the northwest in a virtual desert overlooking the saline flats of the Jemes River. Thither they go to dwell in winter and eat up the crops raised in summer beside the great river. In the same direction 13 miles beyond Santa Ana (25 from Bernalillo) is the important pueblo of the Jemes (Hay´-mes) Indians, about 500 in number.[22]The village is beautifully situated at the mouth of San Diego Cañon. Its public fiesta is held on St. James’s Day, November 12, and is much attended by Americans, Mexicans,Pueblos, Navajos and Apaches. The region nearby is sprinkled with ruins of old pueblos which are the subject of considerable literature of the antiquarian sort. A capital and reliable popular article on the Jemes Indians by Mr. A. B. Reagan, appeared in the April, 1917, issue of “El Palacio,” the journal of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico. A few miles before reaching Jemes the traveler passes the once powerful, but now small pueblo of Sia (See-a), with a population of barely 100. Its decline is attributed in part to remorseless inter-killing on suspicion of witchcraft, a sort of superstition that the Pueblos, unlike ourselves, have not yet outgrown. Its festival is on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, and is attended by many visiting Indians, especially Navajos, who give it a special tinge of picturesqueness. From Albuquerque Jemes may be reached directly by auto-mail stage which passes the pueblo and then proceeds 13 miles further to Jemes Springs postoffice in San Diego Cañon. Near this place are some medicinal springs of local repute—iron, sodaand sulphur—and a modest hotel of the country sort. The stage leaves Albuquerque daily except Sunday, and if you do not mind a bit of roughing it, the trip (about 50 miles to Jemes pueblo) will be an experience to talk about.
Continuing up the Rio Grande from Bernalillo, you next come (10 miles from Bernalillo, or 3 from Algodones Station on the Santa Fe) to the pueblo of San Felipe at the foot of a long, black, treeless mesa on the west bank of the river. Its fine, white Mission church, dating back some 200 years, is a prominent sight from the car windows of Santa Fe trains. The ruins of a previous church and pueblo of the San Felipeños are visible on the summit of the mesa, and a climb to them will reward you, at least with a fine view of the Rio Grande valley. San Felipe’s principal public fiesta is held May 1.
Another dozen miles up the river—but now on the east side—is the pueblo of Santo Domingo, whose 800 Indians are about the most set-in-their-ways of any in New Mexico. This conservatism serves, however,to make their Green Corn Dance (held on August 4, the feast day of their patron Saint Dominic), of especial worth, because the ceremony has been comparatively little debased by the hybrid innovations which are spoiling many of the native rites of the Pueblos. There are some preliminary ceremonies the afternoon before, which it is interesting to view. The pueblo is easily reached, as it is but a couple of miles from Domingo station on the Santa Fe railway. The visitor is forewarned that there is a particularly strong objection at Santo Domingo to picture-taking and cameras are blacklisted. Even artists of the brush have been ejected from the village. In passing, it should be stated that the dances of the Pueblos are not jollifications as among white people, but religious ceremonials—expressions of thanksgiving to their supernal protectors for blessings received and prayers for favors to come, as rain and bountiful crops. Santo Domingo is famous for its beautiful pottery—a heavy ware, but remarkable for an almost Greek grace ofform, adorned with geometric designs in black on pink or creamy white.
Still ascending the Rio Grande, you reach (by a pleasant drive of 10 miles from Domingo Station) the pueblo of Cochití (co-chee-teé), where the ethnologist Bandelier once lived for a time, and studied the race he came to know so well. It has more the appearance of a Mexican village than of an Indian pueblo, for the houses are generally of one story and detached one from another. The people, too (there are about 250), seem more or less Mexicanized, but are hospitable and good-natured. The local tradition is that it was the ancestors of the Cochiteños who occupied the cliff dwellings of the Rito de los Frijoles. One who is robust enough for horseback tours may secure a guide at Cochití and ascend to that wild and beautiful region by immemorial trails through a rugged mountain country dotted with ruins of several former homes and shrines of the Cochití people, who in prehistoric times seem to have been confirmed wanderers. The principal public fiesta at this pueblo occurs on July 14, SaintBonaventure’s Day, and is well worth attending, though I know of no especial features distinguishing it. Pottery is made here, too—some of it of a queer type running to animal forms, corpulent and impossible. Both Cochití and Santo Domingo may be readily visited in one day, if arrangements are made in advance through the Santa Fe agent at Domingo. They are equally easy of access from Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
Southeasterly from Albuquerque some 20 miles the Manzano Mountains lift their piny crests and drift southward to the Gallinas. From their feet eastward stretches the wide treeless Estancia Valley, and in the lap of it lies a noteworthy cluster of saline ponds and lagoons, whose bitter waters, shining in the blistering sun, are a mockery to the thirsty. These are “the accursed lakes”[23]of Pueblo tradition—originally fresh and abounding in fish, they say, but now lifeless and undrinkable, cursed of the ancient gods because of the sinfulness of a witch who dwelt there once. If you would know how this change came about, you should read thetale called “The Accursed Lake” in Mr. Charles F. Lummis’s delightful book “Pueblo Indian Folk Stories.” These lakes are all heavily alkaline except one and that is saline—a source of salt from time immemorial to the Indians of the pueblos. Coming from near and far, they would plant their prayer plumes by its white margin and sprinkle its waves with sacred meal in recognition of the divine largesse they were about to receive. For the Indian tradition is that this lake was the abode of a divinity whom they called Salt Old Woman or Salt Mother, and the salt was her free gift to men. She is circumstantially described as wearing white boots and a white cotton dress, and carrying in her hand a white abalone shell, which was so soft and pliable that she could fold it like a handkerchief.[24]It is said the salt of this lake has found its way through barter to Parral in Old Mexico.
To the tourist the attraction in the Estancia Valley is the presence of some quaint old plaza villages dating from the days of the Spanish occupation, and certain imposingruins of Franciscan Mission churches of seventeenth century construction standing in the midst of crumbled Pueblo towns. These are not in the open valley but in the foothills of the Manzanos and the Gallinas, and are easily visited from Mountainair, an American town on the “Belén Cut-off” of the Santa Fe Railway. Here is a small hotel, and automobiles may be hired.
The most famous of the ruins is the Gran Quivira at the edge of the Gallinas foothills, 24 miles south of Mountainair. They are the remains of a large pueblo of low, stone houses, covering altogether about 80 acres and once housing perhaps a couple of thousand souls. There are the ruins of severalestufas, of irrigation works, and of two Christian churches. The pueblo occupies the narrow crest of a ridge overlooking a vast, lonely, cedar- and piñon-dotted plain that reaches to far-off, dreamy mountain ranges. It is in a solitude of solitudes wrapped in the silence of death, and as almost everywhere in the plateau region of northern New Mexico and Arizona, one has the feeling of being alone on the roof of the world,though the elevation here is really but 6800 feet. The most conspicuous feature of this shattered town is the larger of the two churches whose gaunt, gray, roofless walls of flat limestone pieces laid in mortar and rising to a height of 30 feet, are visible to the traveler long before he reaches the place. Seen “from the northeast, through vistas of cedars and junipers,” to quote Bandelier, “the ruins shine in pallid light like some phantom city of the desert.” Adjoining the church, are the ruins of aconventoof several small rooms and a refectory, built about an interior courtyard. The whole has an unfinished appearance, and Bandelier believed that work on the building was suddenly interrupted and never resumed.
Indeed, the whole place is shrouded in mystery—its beginning and its end are alike in the twilight. No record has been left by the old chroniclers of any mission called Gran Quivira; but there is frequent mention by them of Tabirá, whose location fairly corresponds to this. That was a town of the Piro Pueblos, where an important Mission was established about 1630 by PadreFrancisco de Acevedo. It ceased to be heard of after half a century, and it is believed that repeated raids of the barbarous Apaches—the red terror of the peacable Pueblos—caused the abandonment of the village. In all human probability that Tabirá is this Gran Quivira, but how the latter name became attached to these ruins has never been satisfactorily explained; for, as has already been stated, Quivira was Coronado’s name for the country of the Wichitas, far away in Kansas. The Piro people, who are believed to have inhabitated this pueblo (and that of Abó, of which something shortly), are about as extinct as their towns. Only an insignificant remnant, and these speaking an alien tongue, exist today, in the Mexican State of Chihuahua.
The hill which the Gran Quivira ruins occupy is of limestone, and underlaid, as limestone hills often are, with hollownesses that give back in places an audible echo to one’s footfalls. Popular fancy has been caught by these givings-off of the underworld, and all sorts of fables have attached themselves to this desolate place. These havemostly to do with buried treasure. It has been thought, for instance, that here in the caverns of this hill is really the store of gold and jewels, the hope of which, like a will-of-the-wisp, lured Coronado on and ever on, to disappointment and a broken heart. Another tradition (quoted by Mr. Paul A. F. Walter, in “The Cities That Died of Fear”[25]) tells of a hidden cave in the hill where the last Piros are said to have retreated with their belongings, including vast treasure brought from Mexico by the Franciscan Fathers,[26]and that an earthquake sealed them and their treasure up together. Of course, such stories have brought hither innumerable treasure seekers, who for years have gophered the hill industriously but have got nothing but sore muscles, arrowheads, and broken pottery. The most picturesque of these delvers wasa blind woman, a Mrs. Clara Corbyn, who acquired homestead rights on the north end of Gran Quivira. Lacking the wherewithal to finance excavations, she traveled the country over from the Pacific to the Atlantic, endeavoring to procure money backing for her scheme, and to that end even wrote a musical romance, which she called “La Gran Quivira.” Failing, she died not long ago in Los Angeles—of a broken heart, it is said—and the Museum of New Mexico eventually secured her homestead interest.[27]The major portion of these ruins belongs to the United States, forming the Gran Quivira National Monument.
Abó, that other dead pueblo of the Piros, is about 12 miles southwest of Mountainair, or 4 miles west of Abó station on the Santa Fe Railway. Gran Quivira you see on its hilltop for miles before you reach it, but of Abó your first view comes with the shock of an unexpected delight. Your car climbs a hill through a bit of wooded wilderness, and, the crest attained, there flashes on your sight from below, an exquisite little sunlitvalley. In the midst of it is a hillock, and on and about this is scattered the desolated, roofless pueblo with its noble church, ruined too, of San Gregorio de Abó. A thread of living water—the Arroyo de Abó—cuts its way through the valley which is bounded on the west by the lovely chain of the Manzanos. Unfortunately, the ruin of the old church still goes on—the decay hastened, I believe, by the fact that latter-day settlers have borne off much of its stone and timber for their private use. As it now stands, the high, jagged walls of the building resemble as much as anything a gigantic broken tooth, and standing in this solitary place are picturesque to a degree. The material is red sandstone and the edifice dates from about 1630—the founder being the same Padre de Acevedo that is credited with establishing Gran Quivira. He died here at Abó, and was buried in the church on August 1, 1644. This pueblo, like Gran Quivira, is believed to have been abandoned because of Apache raids, and was extinct before the great rebellion of 1680.[28]
A few miles from the old pueblo, and close to the railway line there are some low cliffs, forming one side of a gorge once calledEl Cañon de la Pintada, or the Painted Rocks of Abó Cañon. This spot is a sort of aboriginal picture gallery worth a visit by the curious in such matters. The sheltered places on the cliff-face are adorned for a considerable distance with drawings of evident antiquity in various colors—yellow, green, red, white. They are mostly representative of human figures, one or two apparently of the clowns who play prankish parts in many of the present-day Pueblo ceremonies. Others are symbols that still survive in the religious rites of the Pueblos.
Eight miles northwest of Mountainair (and a little more due north of Abó) is Quaraí, another forsaken pueblo, the ruins of whose fine old Mission church may be seen a mile away. My own first view of it was dramatic enough, the red, sandstone walls 20 feet high or more, gaunt and jagged,silhouetted sharply against a sky black with storm clouds whence rain banners wavered downward, and athwart them now and then forked lightnings shot and spit. Quaraí was a walled town, and some excavation work, done recently by the Santa Fe archaeologists, has brought to light among other things the remains of a round community building resembling the Tyuonyi in the Cañon Rito de los Frijoles.[29]Close at hand is a cottonwood grove refreshed by an abundant spring, a favorite picnic ground for the country folk roundabout. Other ruins in the vicinity and signs of ancient fields here and there indicate that Quaraí was a place of importance in its day, and doubtless for a long time before the Spanish occupation. Its church is believed to have been built about 1628 and was dedicated to La Inmaculada Concepcion. This was the Mission of that Padre de la Llana whose remains, after much travel, are now at rest beneath the altar in the Cathedral at Santa Fe.
About 7 miles northward from Quaraí,nestling at the foot of Manzano Peak,[30]is an excellent example of the old-fashioned plaza village, called Manzano, which is Spanish for apple tree. The reason for the name is the presence there of a couple of ancient apple orchards, which are believed to date back to the time of the Franciscan Missions, and doubtless were set out by the Fathers of Quaraí, some 250 years ago. The village is of the typical adobe architecture of New Mexico, and though not so old as it looks, having been settled about 1825, it is very foreign of aspect. With its plaza, its old-fashioned flowers in the gardens, its houses massed one above another on the side of a hill that is topped by a great wooden cross, its murmurousacéquia, and its fine old Spanishtorreonor tower of defense, Manzano holds features of picturesqueness enough to be worth a trip in itself. A unique feature of the place is the Manzano Lake which occupies a depression in the midst of the village—a charming sheet of water, beautiful and fragrant in season with water lilies. The source of the Lakeis a magnificent spring hardby. To reach it, one climbs the hillside a quarter-mile or so, and then descends into a shaded hollow, where the cool water gushes up into a colossal bowl, and brimming over quickly sinks into the ground to re-appear below and form the village lake. The spring is locally known asEl Ojo del Gigante—the Giant’s Eye—and is famed throughout the State as a very marvel among springs.
If one have time and inclination, the Estancia Valley, its lakes and ruins and Mexican villages may be made the objective of a trip by automobile from Santa Fe or Albuquerque. The roads in good weather are fair, as unimproved roads go, and in the mountain part pass through a wooded region of much loveliness—sunny park-like forests of pine and oak, with numerous rivulets and charming wild gardens. From Albuquerque to Mountainair by this route is about 75 miles.
The oldest occupied town in the United States, and in point of situation perhaps the most poetic, is Acoma (ah´co-ma), occupying the flat summit of a huge rock mass whose perpendicular sides rise 350 feet out of a solitary New Mexican plain.[31]It is situated 15 miles southwest of the Santa Fe Railway station of Laguna, where modest accommodations are provided for travelers who stop over. The inhabitants of Acoma, numbering about 700, are Pueblo Indians, whose ancestors founded this rockborne town before the white history of the Southwest began. Coronado found it here in 1540.El Peñol Maravilloso—the RockMarvellous—the old chroniclers called it. “A city the strangest and strongest,” says Padre Benavides, writing of it in 1630, “that there can be in the world.”
They will take you from Laguna to Acoma in an automobile over a road, little better than a trail, whose traversability depends more or less on weather conditions not only that day, but the day before.[32]It winds through a characteristic bit of central New Mexico landscape, breezy, sunlit and long-vistaed, treeless save for scattering piñon and juniper. Wild flowers bespangle the ground in season; and mountains—red, purple, amethystine, weather-worn into a hundred fantastic shapes—rise to view on every hand. In July and August the afternoon sky customarily becomes massed with cloud clusters, and local showers descend in long, wavering bands of darkness—here one, there another. Traveling yourself insunshine beneath an island of clear turquoise in such a stormy sky, you may count at one time eight or ten of these picturesque streamers of rain on the horizon circle. Jagged lightnings play in one quarter of the heavens while broken rainbows illumine others. Nowhere else in our country is the sky so very much alive as in New Mexico and Arizona in summer. Nowhere else, I think, as in this land of fantastic rock forms, of deep blue skies, and of wide, golden, sunlit plains, do you feel so much like an enchanted traveler in a Maxfield Parrish picture.
Though the cliffs of Acoma are visible for several miles before you reach the Rock, you are almost at its base before you distinguish any sign of the village—the color of its terraced houses being much the same as that of the mesa upon which they are set. The soft rocky faces have been cut into grotesque shapes by the sand of the plain which the winds of ages have been picking up and hurling against them. There are strange helmeted columns, slender minarets and spires that some day perhaps atempest will snap in two, dark, cool caverns which your fancy pictures as dens of those ogreish divinities you have read of Indians’ believing in.
Your first adventure at Acoma—and it is a joyous one—is climbing the Rock to the village on top. There are several trails. One is broad and easy, whereby the Pueblo flocks come up from the plains to be folded for the night, and men ahorseback travel. Shorter is the one your Indian guide will take you, by a gradual sandy ascent, to the base of the cliff. There you are face to face with a crevice up which you ascend by an all but perpendicular aboriginal stairway of stone blocks and boulders piled upward in the crack. Handholes cut in the rock wall support you over ticklish places, until finally you clamber out upon the flat summit. In Coronado’s time you would have been confronted there by a wall of loose stones which the Acomas had built to roll down on the heads of the unwelcome. Today, instead, the visitor is apt to be greeted by an official of the pueblo exacting a head-tax of a dollar for the privilege ofseeing the town, and picture-taking extra!
I think this precipitous trail is the one known asEl Camino del Padre(the Father’s Way), which is associated with a pretty bit of history. The first permanent Christian missionary at Acoma was the Franciscan Juan Ramirez. Now the Acomas had never been friendly to the Spaniards, and it was only after a three days’ hard battle in 1599, resulting in the capture and burning of the town by the Spaniards, that the Indians accepted vassalage to that inexplicable king beyond the sea.[33]Naturally, no friendly feeling was engendered by this episode; so when this Padre Ramirez, years afterward, was seen approaching the Rock one day—it was in 1629—quite alone and unarmed save with cross and breviary (having walked all the way from Santa Fe, a matter of 175 miles) the Acomas decided to make short work of him. The unsuspecting father started briskly up the rocky stairway, and when he came within easy range, the watching Indians shot their arrows at him. Then a remarkable thing happened. A little girl, one of a group looking over the edge of the precipice, lost her balance and fell out of sight apparently to her death. A few minutes later, the undaunted padre whom the shelter of the cliff had saved from the arrows, appeared at the head of the trail holding in his arms the little child smiling and quite unharmed. Unseen by the Indians, she had lit on a shelving bit of rock from which the priest had tenderly lifted her. So obvious a miracle completely changed the Indians’ feelings towards the long-gowned stranger, and he remained for many years, teaching his dusky wards Spanish and so much of Christian doctrine as they would assimilate. It was this Fray Juan Ramirez, it is said, who had built the animal trail which has been mentioned.
AN ACOMA INDIAN DANCEThe dances of the Pueblo Indians are not social diversions but serious religious ceremonies.
AN ACOMA INDIAN DANCE
The dances of the Pueblo Indians are not social diversions but serious religious ceremonies.
LAGUNA, THE MOTHER PUEBLO OF SEVENThis pueblo, languishing while neighboring Acoma flourished, borrowed the latter’s picture of St. Joseph to change her fortune, prospered accordingly, and then refused to return the picture, thus precipitating a lawsuit unique in our annals.
LAGUNA, THE MOTHER PUEBLO OF SEVEN
This pueblo, languishing while neighboring Acoma flourished, borrowed the latter’s picture of St. Joseph to change her fortune, prospered accordingly, and then refused to return the picture, thus precipitating a lawsuit unique in our annals.
Most visitors spend a couple of hours at Acoma, and return the same day to the railroad. This, at a pinch, suffices for a ramble about the streets, and for looking into doorways for glimpses of the primitive familylife, chaffering with the women for the pretty pottery for which Acoma is famed,[34]and for a visit to the natural rock cisterns whence girls are continually coming with dripping ollas balanced on their heads. And of course, there is the old adobe church with its balconiedconvento, to be seen. It dates from about 1700. As the Rock was bare of building material, this had all to be brought up from below on the backs of Indian neophytes—the timbers from the mountains 20 miles away. The graveyard is a remarkable piece of work founded on the sloping rock by building retaining walls of stone (40 feet high, at the outer end) and filling in with sandy earth lugged patiently up from the plain.
A conspicuous feature in the view from the Rock of Acoma is a solitary mesa or rock-table, 3 miles to the northward, which the Acomas call Katzímo, and the Spaniards namedLa Mesa Encantada(the Enchanted Mesa). Its flat top is 430 perpendicularfeet above the plain, and can now be reached only with scaling ladders and ropes. Formerly there was a single trail up the side. The Indian tradition is that long, long ago, before the coming of the white invaders, the village of the Acomas occupied the summit. One day, while all the population except a few old people were working in the fields below, a tempest completely swept away the upper part of the trail; so that the inhabitants could never again reach their homes. They began life over again by building a new pueblo on the Rock of Acoma.[35]
The annual public fiesta of Acoma is held September 2, the day of San Estéban Rey—that is, of St. Stephen the King, Acoma’s patron saint and Hungary’s. It is attended by a picturesque crowd of Mexicans, Navajos and Pueblos, besides a sprinkling of Americans. Among the visitors are thrifty Isleteños, their farm wagons loaded with melons, grapes and peaches for sale and barter. As on all such occasions in the RioGrande pueblos, there is first a great clanging of the church bells to get the people to mass; after which, the saint’s statue beneath a canopy is brought out from the church, and all the people march in procession behind it, the cross, and the padre, while to the accompaniment of a solemn chant the firing of guns and a wild clamor of discordant church bells, the image is carried to a booth of green boughs in the plaza, there to rest and receive the homage of the people. Throughout the day baskets heaped with fruit, loaves of bread, vegetables and candles are laid at the saint’s feet, and at intervals the edibles are handed out to the crowd, or tossed in the air to be scrambled for amid much hilarity. In the afternoon there is an Indian dance, participated in by men and women in colorful costumes, the women’s heads adorned withtablitas(curious, painted boards set upright and cut into shapes symbolic of clouds and what not). A choir of men with a drum made of a section of cottonwood log, supplies the music, chanting in unison the ancient songs of thanksgiving efficacious long before St.Stephen was ever heard of in Acoma, and not to be lightly abandoned. At sundown the saint is returned to his place in the church, and the evening is given over to such jollity as personal fancy dictates, usually including abaile, or dance, by the Mexicans and such white folk as stay, and it must be confessed, too often a surreptitious bout with John Barleycorn smuggled in by bootleggers.
There are no accommodations for visitors at Acoma, but if you have a taste for mild adventure you will enjoy—in retrospect anyhow—lodging a night or two with some family in the village, if you have brought your own provisions. This gives you a leisurely opportunity to watch the people at their daily tasks, and to enjoy the exquisite outlook at evening and early morning from the Rock. A night on an Acoma housetop beneath the brilliant stars is like being transported to Syria. Take it as a rule that if you desire to learn anything worth while of Indian life, you must abandon hurry; and the more you pump an Indian, the less he will tell you. The bestthings in the Southwest come to the waiting traveler, not to the hustler. As to the language, in every pueblo there is someone who talks English enough to act as interpreter, but if you know a little Spanish, you may do without any intermediary in the Rio Grande villages.
The natural pendant to a visit to Acoma is one to Laguna pueblo, 2 miles from the station of the same name.[36]Like Acoma, it is built upon a rock, but Laguna’s is merely a low outcropping little above the level of the ground. The pueblo is full of picturesque bits, and the fall and rise of the streets continually give you skyey silhouettes, the delight of artists who like liberal foregrounds. The mature coloring of the houses in time-mellowed, pearly tones, coupled with the fact that the old trail leading from the outskirts of the pueblo to the spring is worn deep in the rock floor by the wear of generations of moccasined feet, gives one the impressionthat Laguna is of great antiquity. Nevertheless, it is not, having been founded about 1697. In 1699 it received its name San José de la Laguna—Saint Joseph of the Lake—the appropriateness of which is not now apparent as there is no lake there. In those days, however, there was a lagoon nearby, due largely to the damming of the little River San José by beavers. English is very generally spoken in this pueblo.
Some 60 years ago Laguna was the defendant in a curious lawsuit brought against it by Acoma. Fray Juan Ramirez—he of theCamino del Padre—had put Acoma under the patronage of Saint Joseph, spouse of Our Lady and patron of the Church Universal, and in the Acoma church the saint’s picture hung for many years, a source of local blessing as the Acomas firmly believed. Now while Acoma prospered Laguna had many misfortunes—crop failures, sickness and so on; and with a view to bettering matters Laguna asked Acoma for the loan of Saint Joseph. This request was granted with the understanding that the loan should be for one month only.But alas, recreant Laguna, once in possession, refused to give back the picture, which was proving as “good medicine” there as had been the case at Acoma. At last the padre was called on to settle the dispute and he suggested that lots be drawn for it. This was done and the picture fell to Acoma. The Lagunas proved poor losers, however, and made off with the painting by force—which enraged the Acomas to the fighting point, and war was only averted by the padre’s persuading them to do what a Pueblo Indian is very loth to do, submit the case to the white man’s courts. Lawyers were engaged by both pueblos, and after a hot wrangle involving an appeal to the Supreme Court of New Mexico, the picture was awarded to Acoma. Evidently the saint himself approved the judgment, for tradition has it that when the Acoma delegation appointed to fetch the picture back were half way to Laguna, their astonished eyes were greeted by the sight of it reposing under a mesquite bush. Evidently, upon receipt of the news, it had set out of its own accord for home!