|IT HAS been my good fortune within the past ten years to witness a
number of the remaining landmarks left to indicate the trail of the
original inhabitant of this country. It has been a pleasure, and yet a
kind of sad pleasure, to examine the crumbling ruins of what was
once regarded, no doubt, as the very triumph of aboriginal taste and
mechanical ingenuity.
I can take but a cursory glance at these earmarks of a forgotten age,
for a short treatise like this cannot embrace minute details, of course.
We are told by the historian that there were originally two distinct
classes of Indians occupying the territory now embraced by the United
States, viz., the village Indians or horticultural Indians, and the
extremely rural Indians or nonhorticultural variety.
The village Indians or horticulturalists subsisted upon fruits and
grain, ground in a crude way, while the non-horticulturalists lived on
wild game, berries, acorns and pilgrims.
Of the latter class few traces remain, excepting rude arrow heads and
coarse stone weapons. These articles show very little skill as a rule,
the only indication of brains that I ever discovered being on a large
stone hammer or Mohawk swatter, and they were not the brains of the man
who made it either.
The village Indians, however, were architects from away up the gulch.
They constructed a number of architectural works of great beauty,
several of which I have visited. They were once, no doubt, regarded
as very desirable residences, but now, alas, they have fallen into
innocuous desuetude--at least that is what it looked like to me, and the
odor reminded me of innocuous desuetude in a bad state of preservation.
In New Mexico, over 300 years ago, there were built a number of pereblos
or villages which still stand up, in a measure, though some of them are
in a recumbent position. These pereblos or villages are formed of three
or four buildings constructed in the retrousse style of architecture,
and made of adobe bricks. These bricks are generally of a beautiful,
soft, black and tan color, and at a distance look like the first loaf
of bread baked by a young lady who has been reared in luxury but whose
father has been suddenly called away to Canada. The adobe brick is said
to be so indigestible, in fact, that I am confident the day is not far
distant when it will be found on every hotel bill of fare in our broad
sin-cursed land.
One of these dwellings was generally about 200 feet long, with no
stairways in the interior, but movable ladders on the outside instead.
This manner of reaching the upper floor had its advantages, and yet it
was not always convenient. One feature in its favor was the isolation
which a man could pull around himself by going in at the second-story
window and pulling the ladder up after him, as there was no entrance to
the house on the ground floor. If a man really courted retirement,
and wanted to write a humorous lecture or a $2 homily, he could insert
himself through the second-story window, pull in the staircase and go
to work. Then no one could disturb him without bribing a hook and ladder
company to come along and let him in.
But the great drawback was the annoyance incident to ascending these
ladders at a late hour in the night, while under the influence of Aztec
rum, a very seductive yet violently intoxicating beverage, containing
about eight parts cheer to ninety-two parts inebriate.
These residences were hardly gothic in style, being extremely
rectangular, with a tendency toward the more modern dry-goods box. It
is believed by abler men than I am, men who could believe more in two
minutes than I could believe in a lifetime if I had nothing else to do,
that those houses contained about thirty-eight apartments on the first
floor and nineteen on the second. These apartments were separated by
some kind of cheap and transitory partition, which could not stand
the climatic changes, and so has gone to decay; but these Indians were
determined to have their rooms separated in some way, for they were very
polite and decorous to a fault. No Aztec gentleman would emerge from his
room until he had completed his toilet, if it cost him his position.
I once heard of an Aztec who lived away down in old Mexico somewhere
several centuries ago and who was the pink of politeness. He wore
full-dress winter and summer, the whole year round, and studied a large
work on etiquette every evening. At night he would undress himself by
unhooking the german-silver ring from his nose and hanging it on the
back of a chair.
One night a young man from the capital, named Ozone, or something like
that, a relative of the Montezumas, came over to stay a week or two with
this Aztec dude. As a good joke he slipped in and nipped the nose-ring
of his friend just to see if he would so far violate the proprieties as
to appear at breakfast time without it.
Morning came and the dude awoke to find the bright rays of a Mexican sun
streaming in through his casement. He rose, and, bathing himself in a
gourd, he looked on the back of the chair for his clothing, but it was
not there. A cold perspiration broke out all over him. He called for
assistance, but no one came. He called again and again, louder and still
more loud, but help came not. He went to the casement and looked out
upon the plaza. The plaza did not turn away. A Mexican plaza is not
easily dashed.
He called till he was hoarse, but all was still in the house. Hollow
echoes alone came back to him to mock him.
At night, when the rest of the household returned from a protracted
picnic in the distant hills, young Ozone ascended the ladder which he
carried with him in a shawl-strap, and entering the room of the Aztec
dude gave him the nosering with a hearty laugh, but, alas! he was
greeted with the wild, piercing shriek of a maniac robbed of his
clothing; the man had suffered such mental tortures during the long,
long day, that when night came, reason tottered on her throne. It is
said that he never regained his faculties, but would always greet his
visitors with a wild forty-cent shriek and bury his face in his hands.
His friends tried to get him into society again, but he could not be
prevailed upon to go. He seemed to be afraid that he would be shocked
in some way, or that some one might take advantage of him and read an
immoral poem to him.