CHAPTER XIII
SANTE FÉ AND THE VALLEY OF THE RIO GRANDE
NOWHERE else did we find spring as lovely as at Santa Fé. Here, a mile and a half above sea level, was a crystal freshness of atmosphere, through which filtered a quintessence of the sounds and scents and colors that make a joyous season of spring even in downtown New York.
A bit of a surprise it was to find, dozing in the sun like a New England village, a town important enough to have given its name to a railroad; to mark the end of one trail, and be a station on another; to have been the capital of an ancient Empire of the New World; and now to be the capital of a state. Yet the world passes it by, leaving it on a railroad spur high and dry from transcontinental traffic. So much the worse, then, for the world; so much the better for Santa Fé. The town does not owe its personality to its railroad stations and Chambers of Commerce. The peaks guarding its high isolation have looked down upon many changes in its history. Yet it stays outwardly nearly unaltered; valuing material importance so little that it hides its Capitol down a grassy side street, while its Plaza still is dominated by the sturdy old Governor’s Palace, where Onate raised the Spanish flag in the early seventeenth century, and Kearny replaced it with the American flag in 1846.
The heart of Santa Fé is its Plaza. To its shadytrees, traders tied their horses when they had reached the end of the perilous Santa Fé Trail, glad enough to gain its shelter after being beset by the primitive dangers of hunger, thirst, wild beasts, Indians and robbers. The same Plaza where drowsy Mexicans now rest upon park benches, where processions of burros pass loaded with firewood, where shining automobiles flash by, has witnessed siege and countersiege, scenes of violence and heroism and romance. Richly laden caravans once came galloping into the town, sometimes closely beset by bandits or hostile Apaches, and weary adventurers from the land of Daniel Boone or Washington dismounted, and looked bewildered about them at this gay and alien civilization. Here the Pueblo Indians, in their final revolt, besieged the white settlers, and committed the only violences in their long career of patience, and here the conquering De Vargas finally overcame them, and surrounded by Franciscan monks, offered mass for his victory. Dominating the Plaza is the three century old Governor’s Palace, whose walls conceal prehistoric Indian foundations. It is a one-story building running half the length of the square, built in a day when hospitality demanded royal scope. Half inn, half fort, its six-foot thick walls stood for strength as well as coolness, and its mighty doors frequently knew the marks of assault. In modern times, until the beginning of this century it served as residence of the governor of the Territory. In a back room, Lew Wallace is said to have written chapters of Ben Hur.
No question but that the Palace might be made more interesting as a Museum, less a storehouse of half forgotten oddments. It might tell less spasmodically andwith greater dignity the story of its successive occupations, from the Royal Governor of Spain to the present time. It creates the impression now of having been forgotten, except as, at intervals, a legacy of antiquities was deposited wholesale, without selection. The exhibits should be pruned, gaps filled, and arranged with better proportion and consecutiveness.
It might well, indeed, take a leaf from the book of the new Museum, built on the same side of the Plaza. Its exterior skilfully assembles various parts of nearby buildings of Pueblo architecture. Its corners copy the towers of Laguna, Taos and Acoma. The warm stucco walls are studded with pinonvegas, and the doorways, windows and balconies are of cedar, deep-set in the thick walls. An infant art-gallery, fed from the local Santa Fé and Taos schools, sometimes according to Holt and sometimes on Cubist pickles and doughnuts, does the double service of giving the artist permanent exhibition-rooms, and illustrating local color for the tourist.
I mean no disparagement here against the Santa Fé school, which numbers several names of national reputation. The country cries to be painted in vividest colors; Nature here is in vermilion mood, and man tops her gayety with slouchinginsouciance, sky-blue shirts, and head-bands giving the needful splash of scarlet. Add skies as blue as a spring sun can stipple them, dash across them a blur of pink apricot bloom, bank them against cliffs of red-orange, pure gold where the light strikes it, and grape purple in the shadows, tone with the warm gray of a pueblo clustered about a sky-blue stream, and fringed yellow-green cottonwoods bordering it,—and what artist can paint with sobriety? That a few manageit is to their credit, nor can one wonder that this riot of color goes to the heads of others till their canvasses look like an explosion in a vegetable garden.
Tucked away in another street off the Plaza stands the old Cathedral, begun in 1612. As cathedrals go it is an unimpressive example of the worst period of church architecture: to the usual trappings of its interior is added the barbaric crudity of the Mexican in church art; an art like the French Canadian’s, naïve and literal. It must show the bleeding heart much ensanguined, the wounds of Christ fresh with gore, and its doll-faced saints covered with lace and blue satin, like fashion plates of Godey’s Ladies. What interests me in this as in other churches of the Southwest is the colossal ironic joke on the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans, whose contemporary efforts on the stern rock-bound eastern coast were just about offset by the equally earnest efforts of the Spanish padres on the cactus-ridden desert of the west. However, what each bequeathed of value has remained to build a vaster, freer, and perhaps better community than either unwitting opponent previsioned.
Quite Colonial, and oddly reminiscent of New England is the Governor’s mansion of today, across from the present Capitol, which like every Capitol in the United States rears a helmet shaped dome. In the houses of this New Mexican government occurs a phenomenon unknown to any other state: two languages are officially spoken, Mexican and English, with an interpreter to make each side intelligible to the other. I do not know whether this bilingual Assembly and Senate produces twice as much verbiage as the usual legislatureor whether the two tongues serve as a deterrent to oratory.
New Mexico, it must be remembered, is more Indian and Mexican than American by a proportion of three to one, and includes a sprinkling of negro and Chinese. The Indian lends a touch of the primitive; the Mexican brings Spain into the picture. In doorways painted sky blue or lavender, swarthy women gossip, in mantilla and fringed black shawl. Against a shady wall, in sash and sombrero, all but too lazy to light the inevitable cigarette, slouches a Mexican who should be working. On Sundays and fête days, the roads about Sante Fé are splashed with the vivid colors of the girls’ frocks,—pinks, purples and scarlet accenting the inevitable black of the women’s dress,—as they make their way under fringy cottonwoods to some country alberge. The sound of a jerky accordion usually follows them up the canyon roads.
Mostly the Mexicans are gregarious, keeping to their own quarters in Santa Fé, and their own villages further out in the country, often near an Indian pueblo of the same name, as at Taos and at Tesuque, famed for its grotesque Indian godlets. All about Santa Fé these little adobe towns, Chimayo, Teuchas, Cuamunque, Pojoaque, Espanola, Alcalde and Pecos, lie in some fertile river valley, surrounded by their fruit trees and alfalfa fields. The Mexicans, though indolent, understand truck farming thoroughly. Like their occupations, their recreations are primitive. They have their own dances, where the men sit on one side of the room and the girls, giggling and shoving, at the other, until some bold swain sets the ball rolling. Then it does not cease to roll, fastand furious, till morning, often ending in some tragic fray, where a knife flashes.
lazyAGAINST A SHADY WALL, ALL BUT TOO LAZY TO LIGHT THE INEVITABLECIGARETTE, SLOUCHES, WHEREVER ONE TURNS, A MEXICAN.
AGAINST A SHADY WALL, ALL BUT TOO LAZY TO LIGHT THE INEVITABLECIGARETTE, SLOUCHES, WHEREVER ONE TURNS, A MEXICAN.
They have their own schools and churches;—and almost always, at the end of the town, a little windowless house which looks like a church. The Americano is unwise who attempts to enter, or even ask questions concerning this building. It is the morado, or brotherhood house, of a secret sect called the Penitentes, who have been described briefly in certain books on this locality, but are almost unknown to the outside world. The sect is entirely Mexican, not Indian, as has frequently been misstated. Only a very few Indians have ever become Penitentes, and most of the race hold the idea in abhorrence. Survival of a cult which flourished in Spain four centuries ago, the practice was brought to Old Mexico, of which New Mexico was then a part, by some Franciscans who followed the conquistadores. In Lisbon, in 1801, a procession of flagellants went through the streets. This seems to have been the latest outbreak in Europe, yet in our own United States it stubbornly persists today, despite the utmost the Catholic church can do to discourage this horrible self-torture.
We had the very good fortune to enter Santa Fé during Holy Week. All along our route, through the little Mexican towns bordering the Rio Grande, church bells were ringing, and Mexicans in gala array riding to special services on pintos, burros, or in carts laden with entire families of eight or ten. When we reached our hotel, three miles out, for adequate hotels for some strange reason do not exist in Santa Fe, we were invited to go “Penitente Hunting.” The sport is not without its dangers. Strangers who venture too near the mysteriousprocessions have been shot, and only the most foolhardy would seek to go near the morado.
We learned that while the members are quiescent during the year, committing whatever laxities of conduct seem good to them, Holy Week heaps on them, voluntarily, the ashes of bitter atonement. On Monday, they gather in their morado, and enter on a week of fasting, ritual, and self-inflicted torture. To a few selected by the high priests of the order is given the honor, from their point of view, of taking upon themselves the sins of all. They endure incredible torments; some lie on beds of cactus the entire week, others wear the deadlychollabound on their backs or inserted under the flesh. Every Penitente bears on his back the mark of the Cross, slit into his skin with deep double gashes at his initiation into the sect. These wounds are re-opened each year. Weak from flogging, with blood raining from their backs till old wounds mingle with the new, eating only food brought to the morado at nightfall by their women, these vicarious sufferers come forth on Good Friday to the culmination of their agony.
Santa Fé was agog with rumors. At one town we heard the penitentes would not leave their morado, resenting the growing publicity their rites attracted. Another, further from civilization, was to show a crucifixion, with ghastly fidelity even to the piercing of hands and feet,—a fate for which the honored victim begged. Loomis has related this circumstance as a fact, and rumor of the year previous to our arrival gave it confirmation.
moradoA MEXICAN MORADO, NEW MEXICO.The Americano is unwise who attempts to enter or even ask questions concerning this building.
A MEXICAN MORADO, NEW MEXICO.
The Americano is unwise who attempts to enter or even ask questions concerning this building.
santaTHE MUSEUM OF SANTA FE.Its corners copy the towers of Laguna, Taos, and Acoma.
THE MUSEUM OF SANTA FE.
Its corners copy the towers of Laguna, Taos, and Acoma.
Early Good Friday morning, our party drove in and out the valleys, fording to our hubs streams that yesterdaywere mere trickles, and tomorrow, augmented by melting mountain snows, would be raging torrents. New Mexico has few working bridges. One fords a stream, if it seems sufficiently shallow, or waits a day or week at the nearest hotel for it to subside. Rivers were fast leaving their bounds this morning, but we managed to cross in time to arrive at Alcalde before ceremonies had begun.
Built like most adobe pueblos, Indian and Mexican, about a straggling square, this little village furnished a good vantage for Americans to see and to be observed,—watched with quiet hostility by idling natives. Cross-currents of ill feeling we sensed intangibly; not only did the village as a whole bristle toward us, but it contained two sects of flagellants, and two morados, whose families were fiercely partisan; and in addition these were opposed by the native element of strict Catholics who, obeying the mandates of the Church, frowned on the fanatic religionists. We were warned not to take pictures nor show our cameras, nor to follow the procession too closely. Our presence was barely tolerated, and our innocent attempts to become an inconspicuous part of the landscape met with scowls and uncomplimentary remarks. Perhaps they were justified; the desire to guard one’s religious rites from curious eyes is a high instinct, which, no matter how effacingly we “hunted penitentes,” we were violating.
The saints in the whitewashed church had been dressed for the occasion in new ribbons and laces. On a low wheeled platform stood a crudely painted figure of Christ, his eyes bandaged with the pathetic purpose of saving him from the sight of the agony to come to hisfollowers. With him were other figures; one I think was Judas, with his bag of silver and mean grimace. Soon from the morado came a short procession of men and boys, weak-kneed and trembling, clad only in cotton drawers and shirts which speedily became ensanguined from wounds made by hidden thorns. They walked with a peculiar swaying motion, as if their knees were broken. Three of them, no more than boys, bore great crosses of foot-square timber, about twenty feet long. The heavy ends dragged on the ground; the cross beams rested on bent backs, on which, the whisper went, were bound the spiky cactus whose every curved needle pressing on the flesh spells torture. Blood ran down their shaky legs, joining blood already crusted. Their faces were hooded.
A band of flagellants followed who as yet played a less active part. At wide intervals over the scorching desert were planted the fourteen stations of the cross, to which the three principals, barefooted, dragged their burdens. At each they rested while the drama of that station was enacted as crudely and literally as an early mystery play. A middle-aged penitente in store clothes, fiercely in earnest, read appropriate passages from the Mexican Bible, stumbling over the pronunciation. Then the procession chanted responses, and the brief respite, if respite it was for the cross-bearers, came to an end. At the proper station, three little black-robed Marys broke from the crowd, and played their tragic part.
We watched in suspense the slow progress, wondering if the martyrs would reach their goal alive. As they neared the fourteenth station, one of the “two thieves” tottered, and had to be supported, half-fainting, the restof the way. The other two barely managed to finish. Our dread was heightened lest the Mystery be carried to its bitter close.
No printed word could have aroused among its ignorant spectators the tense devoutness inspired by this medieval drama. Religion to many of us has become a denatured philosophy, a long step from this savage brutality. Yet have we any substitute which will so kindle our imagination and idealism that it could school the body to endure gladly even the supreme agony?
During the heat of the day, all was silence within the morado to which the actors had retreated. The sobbing Mexican women who followed the procession vanished with their black veils into their houses, some perhaps to await news of the death or collapse of their men, which not infrequently attends the Holy Week celebrants. Toward dark, over the country side, automobile phares began to converge toward the silent morado. The world outside had taken up “penitente hunting” as a cold-blooded sport. They came openly baiting the penitentes, who angered, refused to appear. Eight, nine, ten, eleven! We left our darkened car, and hid ourselves in the sand dunes near the graveyard, in the dark shadow of a clump of piñons.
We waited with cramped legs, while the blue sky became black, and mysterious shapes loomed up in an unspeakably vast and lonely country. The Flagellants were still sulking. At last, a light across the river flickered, swung, and started down a distant trail, whose route we traced by an occasional lantern glimmer through masses of trees. A sweet, weird wail floated over to us on a gust of wind. It was thepito, wild and high-pitchedflute, making a most dismal, shivery music. The procession twisted and turned toward the river. We crouched uncomfortably by our sand dunes, not daring to make a sound for fear it might be carried on the clear air. Suddenly came a chant, broken, taken up and dropped by voices too weak to modulate. It sounded unevenly, as spurts of energy forced it from tired throats; loud, then a whisper. The chant continued, with an ominous new sound added; a thud, thud, thud, regular and pitiless, the fall of thongs upon flesh. No outcry came; only the chant and the wail of thepitorose louder.
It was a neighboring sect on the way to pay a visit to our morado. Frequently the light was arrested, and the singing stopped. We knew then they were paying their devotions at one of the heaps of stone, rude wayside memorials seen everywhere in this locality, erected by the Mexicans to their dead, some of whom lie in battlefields of France. Then the chant continued, the thud, painful enough only to hear, and the shuffle of feet, in a sort of weary lockstep. Across the river another light flickered and started. Soon, from our hiding-place high over the valley, we could see half a dozen processions, wending up and down through the hills.
A movement from the direction of our morado, and thepitosounded close at hand, accompanied by the uneven creak of a rude cart, filling us with a delightful, terrifying suspense. So close that we could have touched them, passed chanting men, swinging lights. We heard the break of leaden whips on their bare backs, but no groans. It was the procession of the death wagon, on which a skeleton was strapped, a macabrememento moriborrowed from the Middle Ages. The gleaming lanternillumined its ribs as it tottered on its seat in grisly semblance of life.
Suddenly a motor drove up aggressively, and halted straight across the path of the death wagon. Thepitoand chanting stopped. A crowd quickly gathered, and angry voices made staccato demands. The car remained insolently unmoved, blocking the penitentes’ most private ceremony. The mob was angry beyond bounds at what to the most unsympathetic observer was gross rudeness, but to them was outrageous sacrilege. Pistols were drawn. The increasing numbers of penitentes surrounding the car buzzed like swarming hornets whose nest has been smashed, and who hunt the marauder with vicious intent. Then came a heavy voice from the car, a moment of confusion, and the crowd melted away, muttering but evidently cowed, while the car moved arrogantly forward. Puzzled, we asked for explanations.
“That fellow in the car owns the big store where all those greasers trade. They buy on credit, run in debt, and he takes a mortgage on their ranches or herds of sheep. Some of them owe him two or three thousand. They were all ready to make trouble when they recognized him. He told them he was going to see the show, and if they didn’t like it they could pay what they owed him tomorrow. So they slunk off. He is a German.”
Echt deutsch!
Barbarous as may be this custom of flagellating, there is devout belief behind it. To the ignorant Mexican stimulated by these annual reminders, it is as if, as is literally true, the torture and anguish had occurred to a neighbor in his home town. The faces of the men and women, even of little children witnessing the penitenterites, showed the reality to them of what to most of us is remote as the legend of Hercules. Faith so beautiful and unusual must command respect no matter what arouses it. Yet in black contrast to it is the political and moral corruption said to accompany this dangerous doctrine of expiation. Being especially saintly because of their endurance test, the penitentes during the rest of the year commit murder, adultery, theft and arson with cheerful abandon. Nobody dares oppose them or revenge their excesses, either from pious veneration, fear, or a knowledge of the uselessness of such a procedure. For the Penitentes are whispered to be potent politically. Membership in the sect is kept secret. Many prominent judges and state politicians are said to be Penitentes. If a fellow member is brought to justice, he gets off lightly or goes scot-free, and strange deaths are predicted for enemies, private or public, of the sect. I was even warned not to write of them, for fear their power should extend beyond the state’s borders. Doubtless much of this local fear is exaggerated.
But I predict that what church and legislature have failed to do, the ubiquitous tourist will accomplish. In the more remote hill towns, services still reproduce the incarnadined Passion with all its horrors. Nearer to Santa Fé, the flagellants withdraw closer and closer into their morados. Without an audience to sympathize, pain and torture become less tolerable. No man, however sincere he believes himself, turns Stylites unless his pillar stands in the market place.
Ten miles from this strange Good Friday we passed an equally strange Easter in the Indian pueblo of San Ildefonso, whose many generations of Catholicism donot prevent invoking the gods who have given service even longer than the Christian’s deities. They shake well and mix them, somewhat after the fashion of my colored laundress who confessed she always wore a hoodoo charm:—“Of course I’se a good Christian, too, but the Bible says, don’t it, the Law’d he’ps them as he’ps they-selves?”
Somewhat in this spirit, Easter Sunday was chosen for the Rain Dance which was to end a long drought. For miles we passed buckboards carrying large Indian families endimanchées with rainbow hues; Indian bucks on little neat-footed ponies, their square-chopped raven hair banded with scarlet or purple, wearing short gay velvet shirts, buttoned with silver shells bartered from the Navajos, white cotton trousers, or the more modern blue overalls, henna-colored moccasins, silver buttoned on their tiny feet. Their necks and waists were loaded with wampum and turquoise-studded silver, their faces rouged.
“Why do you paint your face?” we asked a visiting Santa Domingo dandy.
“Oh, to be na-ice,” he replied to our impertinence. “Why don’t you paint yours?”
Volumes have been written of the Pueblo Indians’ folklore and religion, much of it probably wrong, for the Indian has a habit of telling what he thinks you want to be told, and concealing exactly what he wishes to conceal. His religion is too sacred and intimate to be revealed to the first inquirer. While he has a sense of humor, which some people persist in denying, he is, like most practical jokers, extremely sensitive to ridicule, especially when directed against himself. Always a mystic, he finds his way easily where the Anglo-Saxongropes. The common lore of Strange Things, which he shares with the gypsy, the Hindu, and the Jew, races to whom he bears a certain physical resemblance, was his centuries before he adopted clothes. In ordinary learning he remains a child, albeit a shrewd child, yet his eyes are open in realms of the unknown. He hears the rush of mighty winds through the heavens, and is acquainted with the voice of the thunder. He can commune with unseen forces without the trumpery aid of ouija or the creaky mechanism of science. Though he can barely add and hardly knows his multiplication tables, I venture to guess that if the fourth dimension be ever demonstrated, the Indian will be found to have had a working knowledge of it, and will accept it as a commonplace to his tribe and his medicine men.
In the Casa Grande ruins is a tiny hole through which the sun shines the first day it crosses the vernal equinox. Like the lens of a telescope, this focusses into other tiny holes in other parts of the building. Why it is there nobody knows, but it indicates a knowledge of astronomy which places the prehistoric Pima on equal footing with modern scientists. Before the Zûni Indians knew a white race existed, according to Cushing, Powell and the musician Carlos Troyer, they had evolved the theory of prismatic rays coming from the sun, and had established a fixed relation between color and sound tones, anticipating by some centuries Mr. Henderson and others. Their medicine men took shells, found in their magic Corn Mountain, a giant mesa overshadowing the village, polished them to tissue thinness, and then painted each shell a pure color, corresponding to the colors of the prism. One by one they placed these shells over the ear,nearest the sun. The corresponding color ray from the sun would strike a musical note so powerful that care had to be taken to prevent the ear drum being broken. These absolute color-tones the medicine men noted, and used exclusively in sacred ceremonies, but did not permit their use in secular music. Are the red men more subtly attuned to rhythms of the universe than the superior white race? Has the dirty, half-naked medicine-man somehow found the parent stem of the banyan-tree of life, while we are still digging around its off-shoots?
But this is a long digression from the sunlit plaza, splashed with the scarlet Pendleton blankets and sky-blue jerkins of visiting chiefs, and the pink sateen Mother-Hubbard of the squaw next me, whose too solid flesh was anchored with pounds and pounds of silver and turquoise,—enough to pawn at the trader’s for a thousand or two ofbahanamoney. To our questions of the symbolism of the dance they made child-like answers: it is to “make rain,”—mucha agua(Spanish is the lingua franca of the Pueblo Indian). Babies in every state of dress from a string of wampum up, crowded shyly for our fast melting chocolates; aged crones, half-blind from the too prevalent trachoma, hospitably invited us into their neat white-washed living rooms, or offered us chairs at their doorways. Doors were wide open; the town kept open house. It gave us an opportunity to see their houses without prying. Our first reaction was surprise at their universal ship-shapeness. We saw dirt floors, on which two or three pallets were folded in neat rows, or in the grander houses, a white enamel bed with one sheet only, and a lace counterpane; a crucifix and two or three portraits of saints on the walls, next a gaylyflowered cover of some seed catalogue; a rafter hung with rugs, clothing, and strings of wampum and silver; slings in which the beds are suspended at night, and a blackened stone fireplace in the corner. And nearly always, a blooming plant in a tin can on the wide windowsill, and a lilac bush just outside.
Houses are strategically situated in a Pueblo village to permit of every one knowing everything which goes on. If a dog barks, or a stranger takes a snap-shot without toll, twenty women are at their doors shouting malediction. There can be no secrets,—gossip screamed cat-a-corners across a plaza with a face at every door and window and the roofs thronged loses much of its piquancy.
But before the dance a certain decorum prevailed. This Rain dance, we were told, was especially sacred. Then, whooping and performing monkey antics, two strange figures, mostly naked except for some horizontal stripes painted with grease paint on their legs and bodies, leaped down the outside stairway of the priesthouse. Horns adorned their heads, and a tail apiece eked out their scanty costume. They turned somersaults, seized women by the waist and waltzed with them, hit each other playfully over the head with sticks, rushed into houses, and came out with pails of food, whereat they squatted in the plaza, and ate with simulated gusto. They were thekoshari, or delight-makers,—the hereditary clowns who open the dance ceremonies. Like the ancient Lords of Misrule, they are king for the day, and all must obey their fantastic whims. They are licensed plunderers, privileged to rush into any house, which must be left open, and run off with anything which takes theirfancy. Possibly because thekoshariavailed themselves too enthusiastically of this part of their priestly office, it is now the custom to set out food for them, to which they are supposed to confine themselves.
womanSANTA DOMINGO WOMAN.
SANTA DOMINGO WOMAN.
womanTAOS WOMAN.
TAOS WOMAN.
danceKOSHARI: RAIN DANCE: SAN YLDEFONSO.
KOSHARI: RAIN DANCE: SAN YLDEFONSO.
Onekoshariwas tottering and blind, steering himself with a cane, and the brusque aid of his companion, a fat young rascal who would have been funny in any language. He, poor soul, no longer amusing, contented himself with rushing about on his withered legs, and uttering feeble yelps in concert with his colleague. The dancers followed, all young men,—some in their teens,—and began a solemn march around the village preceding the dance. Necklaces of evergreen wreaths comprised their costume from the waist up, two eagle feathers topped their hair, short white hand-woven skirts reached to the knee, with an occasional fox skin hanging behind, and at the side red, white and green tassels of wool. The limbs and bodies were painted; at the ankles tortoise shells rattled, and gourds in their hands shook with silvery precision. In moccasins edged with skunk fur, they stamped in light, unvarying rhythm, first on one foot, then the other, wheeling in sudden gusts, not together, but in a long rhythmic swell so accurately timed to undulate down the line that each foot was lifted a fraction higher than the one in front. They sang quietly, with the same shuddering little accent their gourds and feet maintained, at intervals stressing a note sharply, in absolute accord. Two women, young and comely, in the heavy black squaw dress and white doeskin leggins of the Pueblo woman, squatted midway before the line of lithe dancers, and beat, beat all through the day on their drums, while all through the day, lightly,sharply, the moccasined feet were planted and lifted, with a snap and re-bound as if legs and rippling bodies covered not sinews, but springs of finely tempered steel, timed to hair trigger exactness. Their lean faces wore an intent look, hardly heeding the antics of thekoshariwho gamboled around them, standing on their heads, tumbling, shouting, and pulling each other’s tails like monkeys. About evergreen trees planted in the center, they pivoted to all four points of the compass. The dance varied little. The song, the tombés, the shivery gourds and shells, the syncopated beat of each tireless foot on the earth became a background to the color and picnic movement of the village, drowsy in the sunshine, steaming with the odors of people, dogs, jerked beef, cedar smoke and buckskin, whiffs of lilac, fresh willow, snowy sprays of wild pear, and a wet breeze from the Rio Grande.
Because rain in that parched country is literally life, the Indians hold this rain dance too sacred to admit as participants any women save the two who beat the drums. “Tomorrow,” said the fat youngkoshari, “nice dance. We dance with the girls then.”
danceRAIN DANCE, SAN YLDEFONSO.They stamped in light, unvarying rhythm.
RAIN DANCE, SAN YLDEFONSO.
They stamped in light, unvarying rhythm.
I dare not claim any authority for the interpretation of the costumes of the Rain Dance. Several natives of the pueblo, including quiet-eyed Juan, the governor, gave us various versions which did not tally in every particular. We had learned that an Indian’s meaning of a lie, which he is fairly scrupulous in avoiding, does not include the answers to questions touching his cherished customs and the private code of his race. The evergreen, all agreed, stood for fertility or verdure; the eagle feathers, with their white and black tips, for the black and whiteof slashing rain and lowering clouds; the yellow fox-skins represented the yellow of ripe corn; the red and green tassels at the waist the flowers and grass of spring; the white tassels, snow or hail. The symbolism of the thunder clouds was repeated in the black and white of the skunk fur moccasins; the gourds echoed the swish of rain, and the drum-beats the rumble of the thunder; the tortoise shell rattles at the ankle meant either rain and wind, or were a symbol, like the shell necklaces most of them wore, of the ocean, which all desert tribes especially revere, as the Father of all Waters.
During the dance the fat and impudentkosharihonored me with a command,—“You take me and my chum for a ride?” Fat and very naked, covered with melting grease paint, and ferocious in horns and tail, he was not the sort of companion I would have chosen for a motor drive, but a refusal might have prompted him to expel us from the village. On a fête day, the lightest word of akoshariis law. He clambered in, and moved over to make room for his chum, a loathsome and mangy old fellow, with rheumy, sightless eyes, whose proximity filled me with disgust. Tottering with age and excitement, his first move was to clutch the steering wheel, and when I had disengaged his claws, he grasped the lever with an iron grip. Meanwhile, thirteen brown babies, some of whom had been bathed as recently as last year, climbed into the tonneau. We whirled around and around the plaza, the children shouting, dogs barking, the fatkosharibowing like visiting royalty to the cheering spectators, uttering shrieks in my ear to take me off guard, kicking his heels in the air, or sliding to the floor as a too-daring visitor tried to snap his picture,whilekosharisenior occasionally seized the levers and threw us into reverse, nearly stripping the gears.
A curious people! Childishly admiring of the white man’s automobiles, radium watches and canned foods, and gravely contemptuous of his civilized codes, morals and spiritual insight; unsanitary in daily life, yet with rituals of hospital cleanliness; believing in charms and “medicine,” yet with a knowledge of herbs, and mental therapy beyond our own; introducing buffoonery into their religious services, yet with a reverence for religion uncomprehended by the white man; unable to persuade the government to give him citizen rights,—but easily able to persuade the Lord to send him rain! For, two days after the dance, rain came in abundance in sheets, torrents and cataracts, after a drought which had lasted months. The Hopi snake dance they say never fails to bring rain. Other rain dances about Santa Fé have the same result. Is it coincidence,—or has the Indian a weather sense beyond ours;—or does he look the Deity more squarely and unflinchingly in the eye when he makes his demands? Jacob wrestled with his angel. The Indianknowshis prayers will bring rain. And however obtained, his percentage of correct answers seems higher than the white man’s.
A week later, when the town of San Felipe gave a “corn dance,” we found another instance of the thoroughness with which the Pueblo jumbles his religions. Through the old white plaza, dazzling with color, dividing its lively crowds impartially between the lemonade stand at one end, and the draped altar at the other, we made our way to the old church which looks through an avenue of blossoming cottonwood on to a gentle blue andgreen landscape picked out by the meanderings of the Rio Grande. Meanwhile the dance in the Plaza had begun. Almost within sight of the stamping, chanting rows of Squash and Turtle clans, the men naked to the waist with long hair flowing, the women’s black-clad bodies and bare arms swaying, the congregation slipped in to the cool interior of the church, and, dressed in the gorgeous clothes and jewels they wore to honor their native gods, listened respectfully to a visiting Bishop, and knelt in prayer with accustomed reverence. They saw no incongruity in it, and neither do I, so long as good Christians throw spilled salt over their left shoulder, or wish on the moon. Yet it made a delightful contrast,—the little brown boys in their white robes intoning with the nasality of altar boys the world over, plus the Indian’s special brand of nasality; the quiet attention of the drifting congregation, and outside, the noise, color and sunshine; the bands of giddy bucks sprawling on painted ponies, the cool lovely valley beyond, and at its heart, the power which brought all these elements together,—sluggish old Rio Grande, taking its time on its everlasting journey to the Gulf.
Within a short radius of Santa Fé, one can trace all the successive steps in the history of the Pueblo Indian. We go furthest back at Rito de los Frijoles, where a glance half way up a perpendicular cliff reveals black spots of pin-head size. An arduous climb up rough ladders and steps notched in crumbling yellow tufa shows these holes as large caverns hollowed by water under the shelving roof of the soft rock, and built up with a masonry which today would easily command ten dollars a day and a forty-eight hour week. “The Cloud City,Acoma,” on the Arizona road is built atop a high mesa, facing the still higher Enchanted Mesa, now peopled only by troubled ghosts. Doubtless the first Indians to advance from cave dwellings to mesas felt as emancipated as the first New Englander who left the old homestead for a modern apartment-house. Further east the rock-bastioned villages of the Hopis still carry on the customs of their kin, if not their ancestors. At Taos and Laguna the timid Pueblos finally ventured down to the ground, but retained the style of the mesas and cliff dwellings, of terraced receding houses, several stories high. The final and most modern adaptation are the one-story, squat little adobe houses of the river pueblos, whose dwellers have shaken off entirely the ancestral fear, and raise corn and alfalfa, melons and apricots on the rich irrigated soil.
The journey to Frijoles is worth risking a fall over precipices as one dashes over switchbacks of incomparable dizziness on roadbeds of unsanctified roughness. From Buckman, if the bridge is not washed away by the floods, like most bridges about Santa Fe, the ascent starts to the neat little, green little Rito de los Frijoles,—Bean Valley is its unpoetical English. No motorist should undertake this trip with his own car unless he thinks quickly, knows his machine thoroughly, and is inoculated against “horizontal fever.” The road climbs past orange hills up blue distances, through warmly scented forests of scrub piñon, with a vista of the river far below. At the top the car must be abandoned, for nothing wider than a mule can manage the descent into the canyon.
caveCAVE DWELLINGS IN THE PUMICE WALLS OF CANYON DE LOS FRIJOLES,SANTA FE.
CAVE DWELLINGS IN THE PUMICE WALLS OF CANYON DE LOS FRIJOLES,SANTA FE.
A precipitous and dusty trail drops to a refreshinglittle valley, long and narrow, grown with shady pines, and watered by a brook which was probably theraison d’êtrefor the city so many ages silent as the sphinx and dead as Pompeii. In a beautiful semi-circle, so symmetrical and tiny seen from above that it looks like a fantastic design etched on the valley floor, lie the ruined walls of a city whose people were the first families of North America. It is hard to believe this peacefully remote valley ever echoed the noise of playing children, of gossiping women and barking dogs. The dark-skinned Jamshyd who ruled here left speechless stone walls to crumble under the tread of the wild ass, and whether drought, pestilence or murder drove him and his race forth, forsaking their habitations to the eternal echoes, nobody knows. He was timid, or he would not have plastered his houses like swallows’ nests in the cliff, or huddled them together in this remote canyon, walled in against more aggressive tribes. He was agricultural, for traces of his gardens, dust these centuries, may be found. Shard heaps of pottery designed in the red and black pattern that dates them as from one to two thousand years old, and arrowheads of black obsidian prove he knew the same arts as the Southwestern Indian of today. Each tribal unit, then as now, had its kiva, or underground ceremonial chamber with the altar stone placed exactly as in every kiva in Utah, Colorado or Arizona.
Parenthetically, the kiva may have retained its popularity through the sunshiny ages because it offered the men of the tribe a complete refuge from their women-folk. Once down the ladder, they need not pull it after them, for custom forbade and still forbids a squaw ofany modesty from acting as if thekivawere within a hundred miles of her. Once inside, the men folk are at liberty to whittle their prayer sticks, gossip, swap stories, and follow whatever rituals men indulge in when alone. It is as bad form for a pueblo woman to invade the kiva as for us to enter a men’s club,—with the difference that no kiva had a ladies’ night. Besides furnishing shelter to the henpecked Benedicts, the kiva became a sort of Y. M. C. A. for the young bucks. In ancient times the bachelors of the tribe slept together in the kiva, their food being left outside the entrance. This very wise provision greatly protected the morals of the young people, forced to live in very close juxtaposition.
On the ridge opposite the caves of Frijoles lies an unexplored region believed to be the summer home of the race who lived here so secretly and vanished so mysteriously. In a few years the excavator may discover among the shard heaps at the top of this canyon the reason for the exodus, but at present more is known about lost Atlantis than these ruins in our “rawest” and newest corner of the States.
One need not thrill to the prehistoric, however, to enjoy Santa Fé, especially when the apricots blur the flaming green valley with a rosy mist. All trails from the sleepy little town lead to the perpetual snows of the hills through scented forests of pine, past roaring streams. A good horse will clamber up the bed of a waterfall, leap fallen logs, pick his way, when the forest becomes too tangled, over the slippery boulders of the river, canter over ground too rough for a high-school horse to walk upon, and bring his rider out to the top ofsome high ridge, where crests of blue notch against crests of paler and paler blue, without end.
Near enough to Santa Fé to be reached in a day by motor and somewhat longer by pack-train, lies the enchanting valley locally called “The Pecos.” One mounts the piñon-scented red trail, studded with spring flowers, to the heights above, where to breathe the air of dew and fire is to acquire the zip of a two year old colt and the serenity of a seraph. In this least known corner of our country, the Pecos is the least traveled district, known only to a few ranchmen, and old guides with tall, “straight” stories, and short, twisted legs,—mighty hunters who have wrestled barehanded with bears, and stabbed mountain lions with their penknives. Sportsmen are only beginning to know what the streams of the Pecos produce in trout, and its wilderness in big game. Given a good horse, a good guide, good “grub” and a comfortable bedding roll, a month free from entangling alliances with business, and the Pecos provides sound sleep, mighty appetites, and air two miles high, so different from the heavy vapor breathed by the city-dweller that it deserves a name of its own.
Nobody can stay long in Santa Fé, without becoming aware of the Rio Grande’s influence on the dwellers in its valley. It furnishes not only their livelihood, but little daily happenings, “So and So’s car got stuck crossing at Espanola, and had to stay in the river two days,”—“The river rose and tore down the bridge at Buckman, and they say there will be two more bridges down by night.”—“You can’t get out at Pojoaque, this week.” But to see the river in its magnificence, one should drive overthe canyon of the Rio Grande, following along the precipitous road to Taos.
The day we started for Taos, rain invoked by the prayerful Pueblos had reduced the road-bed to a sticky red plaster which more than once slid our car gently toward the edge and a drop of a hundred feet or more. Like the foolish virgins we were, we had forgotten our chains. To put on the brakes would invite a skid; not to do so meant a plunge over the bank. The road, like an afterthought, clung for dear life to the edge of a series of hills, now dipping like a swallow to the river bed, then after the usual chuck-hole at the bottom, rising in dizzy turns to the top of the next hill, unwinding before us sometimes for miles. Steep cliffs, and narrow gorges at times shut us completely from the world. Far below, the river frothed turbulently.
Occasionally as we took a turn, a bit of bank caved in with us, and left one wheel treading air. On sharp curves a long wheel base is a great disadvantage. The earth is liable to crumble where rain has softened it in gullies, and one must learn to keep close enough to the inside edge in turning to prevent the back wheels from skimming the precipice, and yet not drive the front wheels into the inside bank. Add to this a surface of slick mud on which the car slides helplessly, heavy ruts and frequent boulders, steep graded curves with gullies at the bottom, and it will seem less surprising that the mail driver who takes his own car and his life over this road twice a week to Santa Fé receives about three times the wage of a Harvard professor.
A few miles before reaching Taos we left the canyon and came out on a broad plain. The first sight of Taostakes one’s breath,—it is so alien to America. Ancient of days, it suggests Jerusalem or some village still more remote in civilization. Houses terraced to five and even seven stories are banked against purple mountains, thirteen thousand feet in the air. A little stream winds to the walls of the village, dividing it in two. On the banks women wash clothes, and men draw primitive carts to the water, or gallop over the plain like Arabs in the flowing white robes characteristic to Taos. The roofs of the square plaster houses, terraced one above the other, are peopled with naked babies. Women wrapped in shawls of virgin blue or scarlet outlined against the sky, again suggest the Orient. Constantly in these Pueblos one is reminded of the Far East and it is easy to believe these Indians of the Southwest, of sleek round yellow cheek and almond eyes are of Mongolian stock. The Grand Canyon old-timer, William Bass, tells of seeing a distinguished Chinese visitor talk with ease to some Navajos of the Painted desert, who, he reported, used a rough Chinese dialect. In the Shoshone country, I myself saw Indians enter a Chinese restaurant, and converse with the slant-eyed proprietor. When I asked whether they were speaking Shoshone or Chinese, I was told that they used a sort oflingua franca, and had no difficulty in understanding each other. Oriental or not, the origins of Taos are clouded with antiquity.
Coronado was the first Aryan to visit this ancient pueblo, and we, to date, were the last. The same gentle courtesy met us both. We were given the freedom of the village, invited into the houses, and allowed to climb to the roof-tops, with the governor’s pretty little daughteras our guide. Taos, like all pueblos, has a republican form of government, and a communal life which works out very peaceably. Annually the two candidates for governor run a foot-race, one from each division of the town, and the political race is indeed to the swift. Perhaps they get as good governors by that method as by our own.
Taos, like all Gaul, is divided into tres partes, quarum unam the Cubists incolunt. No place could be more ideal for an artist’s colony, with scenery unsurpassed, air clear and sparkling, living inexpensive, picturesque models to be had cheaply, and little adobe houses simply asking to become studios. San Geronimo de Taos, on the Pueblo Creek belongs to the Indians. Ranchos de Taos, where a fine old mission church, bulwarked with slanting plaster buttresses has stood since 1778, at the lower end of the straggling town, is given over to Mexicans. The middle section, once famous as the home town of Kit Carson, proclaims by its blue and lavender doorways, mission bells, fretted balconies and latticed windows, the wave of self-consciousness that had inundated American Taos. But it has its own charm and adapts itself admirably to the native dwellings. Kit Carson’s old home, facing a magnificent view over the river, has become a sumptuous studio; and scaling down from that to the most humble loft over a stable, every available nook in the town is commandeered by artists, where every style of art is produced from canvasses out-niggling Meissonier to the giddy posters of the post-post-impressionists. Regardless of results, they are lucky artists who have the pleasant life and brisk ozoneof Santa Fé in the winter, enjoy the picturesque Indian dances in spring and fall, and in summer paint and loaf in the purple glory of the Taos mountains, cooled by frosty air blowing from the two and a half mile snow line.