Part 2

One of the most interesting things about the settlers with whom I talked in southern New Mexico is that, so far as any previous knowledge of agriculture was concerned, most of them were the veriest amateurs. One man whom I met had taught school in Iowa for a quarter of a century, but along in middle life he decided that there was more money to be made in teaching corn and cabbages how to shoot than there was in teaching the same thing to the young idea. Another was a Methodist clergyman from Kentucky who told me that he had never had a real conception of the hell-fire he preached about until he started in one scorching July morning to sink an artesian well in the desert. Still a third successful settler had been a physician in Oklahoma, while there are any number of “long-horned Texicans,” as the Texan cattlemen are called, who have moved over into New Mexico and become farmers. Scattered through the country are a few Englishmen; not of the club-lounging, bar-loafing, remittance-man type so common in Canada and Australia, but energetic, hard-working youngsters who are earnestly engaged in building homes for themselves in a new country and under an adopted flag. Not all of the Englishmen who have come out to New Mexico have proven so steady or successful, however, for a few years ago an English syndicate purchased a Spanish land grant of some two million acres in the vicinity of Raton and sent out a complete equipment of British managers, superintendents, foremen, butlers, valets, men servants, lodge keepers, gardeners, coachmen, and other functionaries, not to mention coaches, tandem carts, a pack of foxhounds, and other paraphernalia of the sporting life. A man who witnessed their detrainment at Raton told me that it was more fun than watching the unloading of the Greatest Show on Earth. It was a great life those Englishmen led while it lasted—tea at four every afternoon, evening clothes for dinner, and then a few rubbers of bridge—but it ended in the property being taken over at forced sale by a group of hard-headed Hollanders, who harnessed the four-in-hands to ploughs, used the tandem carts for hauling wood, set the hounds to churning butter, and are making the big place pay dividends regularly.

Some two hundred miles north of Deming as the mail-train goes is Albuquerque, the metropolis of the State—if the term metropolis can properly be applied to a place with not much over twelve thousand inhabitants—set squarely in the centre of the one hundred and twenty-two thousand square mile parallelogram which is New Mexico. Albuquerque is a railway centre of considerable importance, for from there one can get through cars north to Denver and Pike’s Peak, south to the borders of Mexico and its revolutions, and west to the Golden Gate. One of the things that struck me most forcibly about Albuquerque—and the observation is equally applicable to all the rest of New Mexico—is that instead of having weather they enjoy climate. It is pretty hard to beat a land where the moths have a chance to eat holes in your overcoat but never in your bed blankets. Climate is, in fact, Albuquerque’s most valuable asset, and she trades on it for all she is worth—and it is worth to her several million dollars per annum. It is one of the few cities that I know of where they want and welcome invalids and say so frankly. They could not do otherwise with any consistency, however, for half the leading citizens of the town arrived there on their backs, clinging desperately to life, and were lifted out of the car window on a stretcher. These one-time invalids are to-day as husky, energetic, up-and-doing men as you will find anywhere. Heretofore Albuquerque has been much too busy catering to the wants of the thousands of tourists and invalids who step onto its station platform each year to pay much attention to agricultural development; but bordering on the town are several thousand acres of as fine, healthy desert as you will find anywhere outside of the Sahara. They are enclosed, as though by a great garden wall, by the Manzano ranges, and the gentleman who whirled me across the billiard-table surface of the desert in his motor-car told me that the government now has an irrigation project under consideration which, by damming the waters of the Rio Grande, will reclaim upward of four hundred thousand acres of this arid land. And the great government irrigation projects now in operation elsewhere in the Southwest have shown that water can produce as many things from a desert as the late Monsieur Hermann could from a gentleman’s hat. So one of these days, I expect, the country around Albuquerque, from the city limits to the distant foot-hills, will be as green with alfalfa as Ireland is with shamrock.

They have a commercial club in Albuquerque that _is_ a club. At first I thought I had wandered into a hotel by mistake, for, with its spacious lobby, its busy billiard-tables, its handsome rugs and furniture, and the mahogany desk with the solicitous clerk behind it, it is about as distantly related to the usual commercial club as one could well imagine. It gives those men in the community who are doing things, and the others who want to be doing things or ought to be doing things, a place where they can meet and discuss, over tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them, the perennial problems of taxes, pavements, irrigation, crops, fishing, house building, automobiles, and the climate. I would suggest to the club’s board of governors, however, that it take steps to remove the undertaker’s establishment which flanks the entrance. When one drops into a place to get some facts regarding the desirability of settling there, it is not exactly reassuring to be greeted by a pile of coffins.

Whoever was responsible for the architecture of the University of New Mexico buildings, which stand in the outskirts of Albuquerque, deserves a metaphorical slap of commendation. New Mexico is a young State and not yet overly rich in this world’s goods, so that if, with their limited resources, they had attempted to erect collegiate buildings along the usual hackneyed lines, with Doric porticoes and gilded cupolas and all that sort of thing, the result would probably have looked more like a third-rate normal school than like a State university. But they did nothing of the sort. Instead, they erected buildings adapted from the ancient communal cliff dwellings, constructing them of the native adobe, which is durable, inexpensive, warm in winter and in summer cool. All the decorations, inside and out, are Indian symbols and pictures painted in dull colors upon the adobe walls. Thus, at a moderate cost, they have a group of buildings which typify the history of New Mexico and are in harmony with its strongly characteristic landscape; which are admirably suited to the climate; and which are unique among collegiate institutions in that they are modelled after those great houses in which the Hopi lived and worked before the dawn of history on the American continent.

Santa Fé, the capital of the State, is, to my way of thinking, the quaintest and most fascinating city between the oceans. Very old, very sleepy, very picturesque, it presents more neglected opportunities than any place I know. I should like to have a chance to stage-manage Santa Fé, for the scenery, which ranks among the best efforts of the Great Scene Painter, is all set and the costumed actors are waiting in the wings for their cues. Give it the advertising it deserves and the curtain could be rung up to a capacity house. Where else within our borders is there a three-hundred-year-old palace whose red-tiled roof has sheltered nearly five-score governors—Spanish, Pueblo, Mexican, and American? (In a back room of the palace, as you doubtless know, General Lew Wallace, while governor of New Mexico, wrote “Ben Hur.”) Where else are Indians in scarlet blankets and beaded moccasins, their braided hair hanging in front of their shoulders in long plaits, as common sights in the streets as are traffic policemen on Broadway? Where else can you see groups of cow-punchers on sweating, dancing ponies and sullen-faced Mexicans in high-crowned hats and gaudy sashes, and dusty prospectors with their patient pack-mules plodding along behind them, and diminutive burros trotting to market under burdens so enormous that nothing can be seen of the burro but his ears and tail?

Though at present it is only a sleepy and forgotten backwater, with the main arteries of commerce running along their steel channels a score of miles away, Santa Fé could be made, at a small expenditure of anything save energy and taste, one of the great tourist Meccas of America. To begin with, it is the only place still left in the United States where Buffalo Bill’s Wild West could merge into the landscape without causing a stampede. Those who know how much pains and money were spent by the municipality of Brussels in restoring a single square of that city to its original mediæval picturesqueness, whole blocks of brick and stone having to be torn down to produce the desired effect, will appreciate the possibilities of Santa Fé, where the necessary restorations have only to be made in inexpensive adobe. Desultory efforts are being made, it is true, to induce the residents to promote this scheme for a harmonious ensemble by restricting their architecture to those quaint and simple designs so characteristic of the country, the Board of Trade providing an object-lesson in the possibilities of the humble adobe by erecting a charming little two-room cottage, with an open fireplace, a veranda, and a pergola, at a total expense of one hundred dollars, but every now and then the sought-for architectural harmony is given a rude jolt by some one who could not resist the attractions of Queen Anne gables or Clydesdale piazza columns or Colonial red-brick-and-green-blinds.

Set at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Range, a mile above the level of the sea, with one of the kindliest all-the-year-round climates in the world, and with an atmosphere which is far more Oriental than American, Santa Fé has the making of just such another “show town” as Biskra, in southern Algeria, where Hichens laid the scene of “The Garden of Allah.” If its citizens would wake up to its possibilities sufficiently to advertise it as scores of Californian towns with not half of its attractions are advertised; if they would restore the more historically important of the crumbling adobe buildings to their original condition and erect their new buildings in the same characteristic and inexpensive style; if they would keep the streets alive with the colourful figures of blanketed Indians and Mexican venders of silver filigree; and if the local hotel would have the originality to meet the incoming trains with a four-horse Concord coach, such as is inseparably associated with the Santa Fé Trail, instead of a ramshackle bus, they would soon have so many visitors piling into the New Mexican capital that they could not take care of them. But they are a _dolce far niente_ folk, are the people of Santa Fé, and I expect that they will placidly continue along the same happy, easy, sleepy path that they have always followed. And perhaps it is just as well that they should.

[Illustration: A dwelling.

A street.

_From a photograph copyright by Jess Nusbaum._ Interior of a room.

SANTA FÉ: THE MOST PICTURESQUE CITY BETWEEN THE OCEANS.]

“They call me Santa Fé for short,” the New Mexican capital might answer if one inquired its name, “but my whole name is La Ciudad Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco,” which, translated into our own tongue, means “The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis.” It is some name—there is no denying that—but historically the town is quite able to live up to it. Fifteen years before the anchor of the _Mayflower_ rumbled down off New England’s rocky coast, Juan de Oñate, an adventurous and gold-hungry gentleman of Spain, marching up from Mexico, had raised over the Indian pueblo which had occupied this site from time beyond reckoning the banner of Castile. In 1680 came the great Indian revolt; the Spanish soldiers and settlers were surprised and massacred and the brown-robed friars were slain on the altars of the churches they had built. For twelve years the Pueblos ruled the land. Then came De Vargas, at the head of a column of steel-capped and cuirassed soldiery and, after a ferocious reckoning with the Indians, retook the city in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. With the overthrow of Spanish dominion in Mexico, the City of the Holy Faith became the northernmost outpost of the Mexican Republic, and Mexican it remained until that August morning in 1846 when General Kearney and his brass-helmeted dragoons clattered into its plaza and raised on the palace flagstaff a flag that was never to come down. That episode is commemorated by a marble shaft which rises amid the cottonwoods on the historic plaza. On its base are carved the words in which General Kearney proclaimed the annexation of New Mexico to the United States:

“_We come as friends to make you a part of the representative government. In our government all men are equal. Every man has a right to serve God according to his conscience and his heart._”

At the other end of the plaza another monument marks the end of the famous Santa Fé Trail, over which, in prairie-schooners and Concord coaches and on the backs of mules and horses, was borne the commerce of the prairies. Santa Fé was to the historic trail of which it was the end what Bagdad is to the caravan routes across the Persian desert. No sooner would the lead team of one of these mile-long wagon-trains top the surrounding hills than word of its approach would spread through Santa Fé like wildfire. “_Los Americanos! Los Carros! La Caravana!_” the inhabitants would call to one another as they turned their faces plazaward, for the coming of a wagon-train was as much of an event as is the arrival of a steamer at a South Sea island. By the time that the first of the creaking, white-topped wagons, with its five yoke of oxen, had come to a halt before the custom-house, every inhabitant of the town was in the streets. A necessary preliminary to any trading was for the chief trader to make a call of ceremony upon the Spanish governor and, after a laboured interchange of salutes and compliments, to pay him the enormous toll of five hundred dollars per wagon imposed by the Spanish government upon wagon-trains coming from the United States. It came out of the pockets of the Spaniards in the end, however, for the American traders simply added it to the prices which they charged for their merchandise, which were high enough already, goodness knows: linen brought four dollars a yard, broadcloth twenty-five dollars a yard, and everything else in proportion. It is no wonder that the traders of the plains often retired as wealthy men. Stephen B. Elkins came to New Mexico, where he was to found his fortune, as bull-whacker in a wagon-train; one of the traders, Bent by name, came in time to sit himself in the governor’s palace in Santa Fé; and Kit Carson’s earlier years were spent in guiding these commercial expeditions. With the driving of the last spike in the Union Pacific Railroad, however, the importance of Santa Fé as a half-way house on the overland route to California vanished, and since then it has dwelt, contentedly enough, in its glorious climate and its memories of the past.

Up the Cañon of the Santa Fé, over the nine-thousand-foot Dalton Divide, and down into the Cañon of the Macho, several hundred gentlemen, in garments of a somewhat conspicuous pattern provided by the State, are building what will in time take rank as one of the world’s great highways. It is to be called the Scenic Highway, and when it is completed it will form a section of the projected Camino Real from Denver to El Paso. It promises to be to the American Southwest what the Sorrento-Amalfi Drive is to southern Italy and the famous Corniche Road is to the south of France. By means of switchbacks—twenty-two of them in all—it will wind up the precipitous slopes of the great Dalton Divide, twist and turn among the snow-capped titans of the Sangre de Cristo Range, skirt the edges of sheer precipices and dizzy chasms, drop down through the leafy solitudes of the Pecos Forest Reserve, and then stretch its length across the rolling uplands toward Taos, the pyramid-city of the Pueblos.

Within a hundred-mile radius of Santa Fé are three of the most wonderful “sights” in this or any other country: the hill-city of Acoma, the pyramid-pueblo of Taos (both of which are described at length in the succeeding chapter) and the Pajarito National Park. The Pajarito (in Spanish, remember, the j takes the sound of h) provides what is unquestionably the richest field of archæological research in the United States, the remains of the inconceivably ancient civilisation with which it is literally strewn, bearing much the same relation to the history of the New World that the ruins of Upper Egypt do to that of the Old. To reach the Pajarito, where the ruins of the cave people exist, you can ride or drive or motor. As the distance from Santa Fé is only about forty miles, if you are willing to get up with the chickens you can make it in a single day. Comfortable sleeping quarters and excellent meals can be had at the hospitable ranch-house of Judge Abbott, or, if you prefer, you can take along a pair of blankets and some provisions and sleep high and dry in a cave once occupied by one of your very remote ancestors. The very courteous gentlemen in charge of the American School of Archæology at Santa Fé are always glad to furnish information regarding the best way to enter the Pajarito. Twenty odd miles north of Santa Fé and, debouching quite unexpectedly upon the flat summit of a mesa, you look down upon the iridescent ribbon which is the Rio Grande as it twists and turns between the sheer, smooth walls of chalky rock which form the sides of White Rock Cañon. Coming into this great gorge at right angles are the smaller cañons—chief among them the one known as the Rito de los Frijoles—in whose precipitous walls the cave folk hewed their homes. Some of these smaller cañons are hundreds of feet above the bed of the Rio Grande, with openings barely wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through into the river below.

You must picture the Rito de los Frijoles as an immensely long and narrow cañon—so narrow that Rube Marquard could probably pitch a stone across—with walls as steep and smooth and twice as high as those of the Flatiron Building. Then you must picture the lower face of this rocky wall as being literally honeycombed by thousands—and when I say thousands I do not mean hundreds—of windows and doors and port-holes and apertures and other openings to caves hollowed from the soft rock of the cliffs. It is a city of the dead, silent as a mausoleum, mysterious as the lines of the hand, older than recorded history. This once populous city consisted of a single street, _twelve miles long_, its cave-dwellings, which were reached by ladders or by steps cut in the soft tufa, rising above each other, tier on tier, like some Gargantuan apartment building. Such portions of the face of the cliff as are not perforated with doors and windows are embellished with pictographs, many of them in an extraordinary state of preservation, which, if the sight-seeing public only knew it, are as interesting and far more perplexing than the wall-paintings in the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes. On the floor of the valley the archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community house which, when viewed from above, bears a striking resemblance to the ancient Greek theatre at Taormina, while on the Puyé to the north a communal building of twelve hundred rooms—larger than the Waldorf-Astoria—has been excavated. Farther down the Rito is the stone circle or dancing floor to which the prehistoric young folk descended to make merry, while their parents kept an eye on them from their houses in the cliff. (I doubt not that, when the sun began to sink behind the Jemez, some skin-clad mother would lean from the window of her fifth-story flat and shrilly call to her daughter, engrossed in learning the steps of the prehistoric equivalent of the tango on the dancing floor below: “A-ya, come up this minute! You hear me? Your paw’s just come home with a dinosaur and he wants it cooked for supper.”) Three miles up the cañon, half a thousand feet up the face of the cliff, is the arched ceremonial cave where, secure from prying eyes, this strange people performed their still stranger rites. Thanks to the energy of the American Archæological Society, this cave has been restored to the same condition in which it was when prehistoric lodge members worked their mysterious degrees and made the quaking initiates ride the goat. Though it is the aim of the society to year by year restore portions of the Rito until the whole cañon has returned to its original condition, such difficulty has been experienced in obtaining the necessary funds that at the present rate of progress it will take a century to effect a complete restoration. Yet our millionaires pour out their wealth like water to promote the excavation and restoration of the ruins of alien peoples in other lands. Though carloads of pottery and utensils have been carted away to enrich museums and private collections, the surface of the Pajarito has been scarcely scratched, _more than twenty thousand_ communal caves and dwellings remaining to tempt the seekers of lost cities. Where did the inhabitants of this strange city go—and why? What swept their civilisation away? When did the age-old silence fall? These are questions which even the archæologists do not attempt to answer. All that they can assert with any degree of certainty is that the caves which underlie the communal dwellings in the Pajarito yield ample evidence of having been occupied by human beings in the days of the lava flow, when the mastodon and the dinosaur roamed the land and the world was very, very young.

[Illustration: “The arched ceremonial cave where ... this strange people performed their still stranger rites.”

“The archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community house.”

REMAINS OF AN ANCIENT CIVILISATION.]

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