Part 28

In crossing the creek before them they found two buffaloes mired in the mud. They humanely endeavored to assist one of the unfortunate animals out, and restore him to his free plains; but he was spent; and drowned notwithstanding their efforts to disengage him. On the opposite shore of the creek, the buffaloes covered the plains, as far as their eyes could reach. Wolves and antelopes were bounding among them in all directions. {263} In the distance were red sand hills, which reflected the sun's rays, and seemed like a burning wall, bounding this magnificent park of nature. On the 7th they passed several dog towns; fed upon buffaloe flesh; and found no other material for fuel, but the dried manure of the animal. On the 8th they reached the main Arkansas; which they found nearly half a mile wide, although it must have been, by its meanders, 1,200 miles from its mouth. The velocity of the river at this point was from three to three and a half miles an hour. The western reader will not need to be informed, that this is the full width, and more than the velocity of the river at its mouth. He found the waters potable; which it is well known, they are not in its lower courses.

An unpleasant accident occurred here. In firing upon droves of buffaloes, they turned them out of their direction upon the course of the caravan. Six pack horses broke from their ranks, probably in affright. After pursuing them ten miles, three were recovered. The other three, loaded with goods to the amount of three hundred dollars, and with clothing and provisions, were never recovered. A Mr. Andrews, of their company, who had gone out to hunt, was captured by the Indians; and after being detained unharmed eight days, escaped from them, and overtook his company.

On the 15th they crossed the Arkansas, to hunt, and lay in a stock of provisions, on the opposite shore. On the 18th they left the Arkansas; having thus far accomplished something more than twenty miles a day, on an average. Hence they travelled, part of the way over sand hills, forty-five miles; in which distance they found some water, though it is commonly destitute. This brought them to the small river called the Semirone.[135] The 23d brought them to a fine spring, surrounded with huge rocky knobs, on which were interesting, ancient, Indian fortifications. Small timber, wild plumbs, grapes and currants skirt the borders; affording a charming variety to the eye, after the long and dreary expanse of prairie, which they had traversed. They inhaled the fragrance of various aromatic flowers, and {264} listened to the singing of birds. They here left the small creek, called the Semirone, upon which they had been travelling since they left the Arkansas, and took their direction for the mountains. On the 24th the summits of the Rocky mountains visible in the distance. On the 29th, mountains in view, white with snow, and supposed to be distant 100 miles. Passed a creek, which they judged to be a water of Red river.

The last day of June, they began to ascend the mountains. The latitude of their point of ascent is not laid down. But we should suppose their general course to have been west from the point, whence they started. This was an interesting point of their journey. From a vast expanse of naked plains they now began to ascend high mountains. Alpine scenery surrounds them. They inhale a highly oxygenated atmosphere. The sighing of the wind in mountain pines and evergreens is heard, and they rapidly pass from the dominions of scorching summer to the cool and brisk spring breeze. The atmosphere is that of March, and the strawberries, and vegetation of a similar character, are in blossom.

They here perform a lustration, preparatory to entering into the Spanish settlements. They wash away the dirt and grease coated on them, during their long march over the hot and dusty plains, and put themselves in trim to show themselves in presence of people of a certain degree of civilization. Here they met a party of ten or twelve Spaniards, who had come out from Taos to prevent them from smuggling their goods.

Their reception by the people would not furnish much interest in the description. We presume the chief effort between the parties was, to determine which should be most dextrous in circumventing the other. Dr. Willard boarded with a Spaniard of the name of Pablo Sucero, at twelve dollars a month. The country hilly, mainly destitute of timber, and by no means fertile. The church is a large mud building; and the people do not seem to him to be very attentive to the ceremonial and duties of their religion.

We think, the article would not be destitute of interest, if we {265} were able to enter into ample details of Dr. Willard's residence among this people, where he remained two months, in the practice of physic. On the fourth of July, the American traders in that region, who then made a considerable of a showy concourse, turned out to celebrate the great festival of the natal day of their liberties. Dr. Willard prepared a flag with the American eagle. They went through their evolutions and firings much to the credit of their own patriotism; and no doubt, to the edification and delight of the good people, men, women and children, of Taos. The people received them in the different quarters of the town with shouts of '_Viva la Republica!_' Much of the journal is occupied with accounts of difficulties with the officers of the customs, in relation to the duties demanded by the Spaniards upon their goods.

Dr. Willard manifested a prudent regard to the observances of the Catholic ceremonial; and was soon in full practice of physic among the people. Among some hundreds of cases, which he records, there were all sorts of complaints, that flesh is heir to; and not a few bore evidence, that depravity had found its way, with its attendant penalties, to these remote recesses of the interior mountains, and among this simple and pastoral people, where such results ought not to have been expected. Among other patients, he prescribes for the acknowledged concubine of a priest; and in another case, a reverend personage, sworn of course to celibacy, hesitated not to admit the claims of his offspring. Some of his patients, as would be the case among us, disputed his charges. Others in gratitude repaid him far beyond his claims. He seems to us to have been a very discreet and sober faced young gentleman, prudently disposed to consult _Our Lady of good counsel_; in other words, to keep professional secrets; for the ladies trusted him. The old ladies, in particular, gave him the masonic and confidential grip, advised him to shrive and take a conversion, marry a young lady of the country and become one of them. These amiable _old Christians_ thought, no doubt, that a man can take a conversion when he chooses; and that nothing more is necessary, as many {266} of our enlightened friends here believe, than to feel, that it was a point of interest to become a good Catholic, really to become so. He very frequently attends _fandangoes_, which appear to be of a character similar to our country balls. His practice seems to have been constant and extensive. Among his patients, he numbers priests, the governor, the military; young and old, male and female; and not a few Indians, and among them some chiefs. He notes in his tablets very frequent attendance upon religious festivals; and they seemed to him poor and cheap shows, only capable of furnishing interest and curiosity for a people a little above the Indians in point of refinement. Though decent and respectful in his deportment, while among the people, and in view of the solemnities, he speaks of them with sufficient indifference, when away, and in communion with his own thoughts. He probably was not sufficiently aware of the influence of such a religion of forms and observances, in keeping in order a rude and ignorant people, who were incapable of a more spiritual service. However immoral they may have been with this superstition and these observances, we have no doubt, they would have been still more so without them.

While Dr. Willard shows an evident disposition to think kindly and respectfully of the people, among whom he sojourned, it is obvious from various incidental circumstances, noted in the journal, that the fandangoes and evening amusements were conducted in a style of the coarsest simplicity,--removed, it is true far above the intercourse of their red neighbors, but probably quite as far from that of our people in the same condition. Very few of the ladies were even tolerably pretty; and most of them were coarse, sufficiently forward, and not at all remarkable for attractions either of persons or manners. Some few were delicate, and some even beautiful.

From his recorded intercourse with the priests, it would seem, that he was almost uniformly treated with kindness and liberality. In fact, they evinced, so far as can be inferred from their deportment, a good degree of liberality. There can be little doubt, that the superstition of the people reacts upon them, {267} and compels them to a seeming devotion to the formal and ceremonial part of their worship, from which they would gladly escape. With the progress of free inquiry, we confidently anticipate a consequent gradual triumph over the influence of bigotry.

One trait among them is worthy of all praise--a simple, unostentatious and noble hospitality. It is recorded in Dr. Willard's tablets, that one day he dined with the governor; and on another was invited to spend the evening with some _donna_, or family of respectability; that his patients and friends often called upon him, to invite him to ride with them to this point and to that; and that a horse or carriage was always provided on such occasions. Such hospitalities, it is true, are unexpensive in a country, where farmers have six or eight thousand horses or mules, forty thousand cattle, and twice as many sheep. But churlish and boorish people will always be inhospitable, cost the efforts to be otherwise little or much. This single trait in their character went far with us to conciliate kind feeling and good will towards them.

Writers on this country have generally represented its climate as variable and unequal. Dr. Willard found Taos, Sante Fe and Chihuahua to possess a very agreeable climate. It was never so warm there, as in some days of our summer. The temperature seemed to him equable, and seldom falling much below, or rising far above our temperate summer heat. The country suffers much from aridity, and the want of the shelter of our trees and noble forests. A few miserable, stinted shrubberies of a diminutive growth, like that which covers our shrub-oak plains, called musqueto wood, is only found at intervals. These countries are so elevated, that beyond 28° north latitude, the ground is sometimes whitened with snow and frost. Muriates of soda and lime, and nitrate of potash, and other saline substances, abound on the surface, and often so encrust the soil, as to bid defiance to cultivation. The mountains at the sources of the Arkansas are sublime elevations. There are sometimes cultivable table summits on their peaks. That the soil is underlaid with strata of calcareous rock, is manifest from a very astonishing {268} recorded phenomenon. In 1752 the Rio del Norte became dry for an extent of 150 leagues. The water had sunk, and passed through subterranean channels, and so continued to flow for some weeks; when, no doubt, the chasm became choked, and the river resumed its former bed. Among the most important Indian tribes are the Commanche, Appache and Navijo. They live on horseback, and keep the inhabitants constantly on the alert and alarm. They are the Ishmaelites and Tartars of these deserts. It seldom rains; and when rains happen, the spring of that country may be said to have commenced. The naked, red and rolling surface of the wide prairies, only limited by rude and rugged mountains, become at once covered with a tender and deep verdure. This spring happens in September. The whole country becomes as an ocean of verdure. Few frosts occur. When the dry season returns, this grass may be said to be cured standing. The cattle feed and fatten upon it, when in its state of verdant tenderness. It afterwards sustains them as substantial hay. Hence, and from the mildness and salubrity of the climate, and its destitution of storms, its advantages for a grazing and a shepherd's country. Hence its infinite numbers of fine mules, horses, cattle and sheep; and hence, also, its innumerable droves of antelopes, deer and buffaloes.

All cultivation is carried on only by artificial irrigation; and it seems wonderful, how providence has adapted a country, which could produce but few of the edible cerealia without it, for irrigation. Abundant rains fall on the mountains; and the flush waters are collected in the Rio del Norte, which rolls down these arid plains in such a channel, and by such a gentle slope, that each of the inhabitants along this water course can command just as much water as his necessities of cultivation require. Where the soil is fertile, it will naturally be imagined, how delightful and luxuriant those fields and gardens will be, when the owners can command just as frequent waterings as they choose. Art works a miniature sample; but it has a neatness and finish, which we look for in vain in the great scale of nature's rough operations. In Chihuahua, their trees, planted for ornament and shade, require to be irrigated; and a person {269} is appointed by a municipality, whose business it is to take care of the trees, and see that they want not for water. Of course, native trees can only be expected on the misty and cool tops of the hills, and near the constant moisture of streams and ponds. It will not be difficult to imagine, that in a very windy climate--and this is such,--where, too, it rains moderately only a few days in the year, they will have ample opportunities to know what dust means. But it so happens, that there is little travel,--little cause to break the sward, or disturb the tranquil monotony of nature; and the people have become accustomed to look on the brown-yellow and sear surface, during a great portion of the year, with the same patient composure of endurance, with which we regard the mud, desolation and frost of winter.

These people live, as the honest Irishman said of his farm on Lake Erie, "a thousand miles from home, and five hundred from any place!" They are nearly a thousand miles from Matamoras, still farther from Mexico; and as far from the settled parts of our country. The mail goes and returns, so as that an answer can be had from Mexico in about two months. Our municipal arts are almost unknown to them. They make whiskey it is true; but all the saw they know, and all the water or steam power, for making building plank, is the human steam power of a broadaxe, or an awkward hatchet, applied to the cloven sections of a log. It seems incredible, that such can be the state of the mechanic arts among a policed people, living under a government; but such is the fact. Not a word need be said about the external improvement, the buildings, and finishings of dwellings, exterior and interior, when the plank are made with a broadaxe. Yet Dr. Willard mentions a splendid stone church at Chihuahua, which cost 300,000 dollars, was supported by Corinthian pillars, and glittered with gilding. The houses in the towns are generally built of unburnt bricks; in many instances in the form of a parallelogram, or hollow square, making the fronts at once mural defences, and the fronts of dwellings. The floors are, for the most part, brick or composition,--that is {270} to say, clay, lime, &c. pulverized, and cemented with blood, or other glutinous and sizy liquids.

Dr. Willard's narrative incidentally brings to light, with a great degree of _naivete_, many of the interior lights and shades of their social intercourse and manners. Nothing can well be imagined, more unlike ours; and yet there are many points of resemblance, in which all civilized people must possess a similarity of manners. It is wonderful, how, with their extreme bigotry, they could so readily have admitted an unknown stranger to their intimacy and confidence. They evidently are a dancing generation; for fandangoes are matters of very frequent occurrence. Our young physician generally noted the presence of the minister at these places, which a reverend gentleman here has denominated 'squeezes,'--a word which, however, seems more vulgar and less respectable than fandango.

Upon surveying the state of society, and the progress of improvement, cultivation and refinement in these countries, we can hardly forbear something like a feeling of exultation, on comparing our condition with theirs. What an immense distance between the state of society in this place and Chihuahua, a place of nearly half the size, and thrice the age, and the same distance from the sea! What would a Cincinnatian think of building a house, if the planks were to be hewed from our oaks by a broadaxe? What a spectacle would be the state of things here to a citizen of that place! What surprise and astonishment would the _don creole_ of that country experience, if transported to Lowell in Massachusetts, with its million wheels flying in dizzying, and at first view, inexplicable confusion! Yet they have mines innumerable, and ingots of silver; and one farmer owns ten thousand horses and mules,--and still sleeps under the puncture of fleas, on a wretched bed, supported upon an earth floor--without chairs, without hearths, and chimneys and fire places; in short, the lower classes dwell in habitations like the comfortless dens of Indians.

They want freedom. They want the collision of rival minds. They want liberty, that cannot be supplied either by constitutions, {271} or laws, or enactments. So long as bigotry reigns, so long as the terrors of perdition are held up as determents from all freedom of thinking, and all mental elasticity, their condition cannot ameliorate. Let a miserable, ignorant priest lay down the law, and prescribe just how men may think and act--when they shall go to church, and when stay at home--when they must stand, kneel, or sit, and we should soon be here the same mischievous grown up infants, that they seem to be, with all the appetites and passions and stubbornness of men, and all the mental laziness and imbecility of children. Our free institutions are, no doubt, attended with their disadvantages; and there may be some peculiar pleasures belonging to such a state of society as exists at Chihuahua. But with all the licentiousness of our press, with all the bitterness of the hundred tongues of calumny, with all our rivalry and competition, and disposition to pull each other down, that we may fill the vacancy, give us our free institutions, with all their scourges and all their curses; where men may be truly men; where the mind need not feel itself shut up between two adamantine walls; where no one need fear to think because a stupid doctor in divinity assures him he will be damned, if he dares to think. Give us freedom, with all its appendant drawbacks. Deliver us from the abominations of a dominant church establishment. Deliver us from a submission, and a cringing conformity, which is not enjoined by the voluntary movement of a free mind, but which is extorted by a creed maker, armed with a little brief and bad authority. It seems to us, as if even the sincere prayers of the people, who are compelled by law to pray, could not ascend acceptably to Him, whose only temple is the free heart. It is evident, that the hierarchy of New Spain has received an incurable shock from the revolution there. But it has been grafted on the ignorance and bigotry of centuries. It operates as cause and effect, acting and reacting for its own benefit; and it will be ages to come, before its bad predominance will pass away. We would not be understood to object to the Catholic church, as such. We believe it at present {272} among the most tolerant and liberal churches; and they are wretchedly mistaken, who think, that bigotry belongs exclusively to that profession. It is a cheering consideration in our country, that the bigotry of one denomination neutralizes that of another; so that "all nature's discord makes all nature's peace." Heaven defend us from a dominant religion, or a worship enforced by law!

Various Spanish writers, Malte-Brun, Humboldt, Gen. Pike, and others, have described this country superficially; Gen. Pike, perhaps, more satisfactorily, and more to the common apprehension, than any who preceded him. Baron Humboldt, only travelled it, and rapidly, in one direction.[136] Pike was a kind of a state prisoner, while in it, and was necessarily, much restricted in his means for making observations. Perhaps no person has had more ample chances of this kind, than Dr. Willard. Unfortunately, he was there with the feeling and temperament, which are usually appended to the people from his section of the country, and whose principle object is to secure, what the New Englander calls the main chance. He now bitterly regrets, that he did not more highly appreciate, while he was in that interesting, and in a great measure undescribed and unexplored country, his opportunities to have made a book of travels of very high interest.

As it was, he remained in the country nearly three years, made his first essays at operating on the living fibre among the New-Mexicans, traversed the whole extent of country from Taos to Matamoras, a distance by the travelled line, of more than 2000 miles. He travelled leisurely, and at intervals, through the country, practising physic at the more important towns, making some stay at Santa Fe, Chihuahua, Monterey, Saltilleo, Maspimi, Matamoras, &c. We note in his journal, which details the events and journeyings of each day, proofs of the hospitality of the higher classes of the citizens, and of the readiness of the people to trust themselves to an American stranger, who appears among them in the character of a physician, {273} although they consider him a heretic. This is evidence conclusive of their deep respect for the supposed learning, acuteness and talents of the people from our division of the continent. He made money rapidly, as a physician among them. But it seems, he looked from the 'leeks and fleshpots' of this distant and strange country, with a filial remembrance, towards the common mother of us all, the land of his birth; and preferred to return, and encounter the scramble and competition of an over crowded profession, certainly with inferior prospects of present pecuniary advantage. We admire that feeling, in our countrymen, which prompts them, in remote and foreign lands, still to turn their thoughts towards home, as the place of the charities, views and motives, that render life desirable. A true hearted American, living or dying, as long as pulsation lasts, _dulces reminiscitur Argos_. It will gratify the reader to learn, that our enterprising, modest and amiable traveller spoiled the Philistines, in an honorable and honest way, of a sum of dollars, which to a young, sober and calculating New-Englander, may be considered the embryo germ of a future fortune.