THE UPPER RIO GRANDE, ITS PUEBLOS AND ITS CLIFF DWELLINGS
Of course you must make the trip—a half day will suffice for it—from
Santa Fe to Tesuque, a village of the Pueblo Indians 9 miles to the
north, and you should pronounce it _Te-soo´kay_. If your knowledge of
Indians has been limited to the variety seen in Wild West Shows and
historical pictures, you will be surprised at those you find at Tesuque.
This is a quaint adobe village around a spacious plaza upon which an
ancient, whitewashed Catholic church faces. The houses when of more than
one story are built terrace-like, so that the roof of the first story
forms a front yard to the second. Ladders lean against the outer walls,
by which access is gained to the upper rooms. The population of about
150 live very much like their Mexican neighbors, raising by irrigation
crops of corn, beans, peaches, melons, and alfalfa, accepting meanwhile
from the liberal hand of Nature rabbits, _piñones_ and wild plums, and
pasturing sheep and cattle on the communal pueblo lands which Spain
granted them centuries ago and which our Government confirmed to them
upon the acquisition of New Mexico. Their method of town building is not
borrowed from the whites, but is their own; and because the Spanish
Conquistadores of the sixteenth century found the region sprinkled with
such permanent villages, called _pueblos_ in Spanish, they named the
people Pueblo Indians—a term which well characterizes them in
contra-distinction to the nomadic tribes, whose villages moved as the
tribe moved.
Tesuque is a type of a score or so of pueblos scattered along a line of
some 300 miles in northern New Mexico and Arizona. Formerly the dress of
these Indians was quite distinctive, but association with the whites has
modified its quality of late years, though it still retains some of the
old features—particularly in the case of the women, who are more
disposed than the men to conservatism. Their native costume is a dark
woolen gown belted at the waist and falling a little below the knees,
and a sort of cape of colored muslin fastened about the neck and hanging
down the back. The lower part of the legs is often swathed in a buckskin
extension of the moccasins in which the feet are encased. The hair is
banged low upon the forehead and both women’s and men’s are clubbed at
the back and bound with red yarn. The native attire of the men is a
loose cotton shirt worn outside short, wide trousers. Instead of a hat a
narrow _banda_ of colored cotton or silk is bound about the hair.
Each village has its local government—and a very competent sort it is—of
a democratic nature, a governor, as well as a few other officials, being
elected annually by popular vote. Besides these, there is a permanent
council of old men who assist in the direction of affairs. Most of the
Pueblo Indians are nominal adherents to Roman Catholicism, but have by
no means lost hold of their pagan faith. On the patron saint’s day a
public fiesta is always held. After mass in the church, there are native
dances and ceremonies, accompanied by feasting continuing well into the
night. November 12, St. James’s Day, is the day celebrated by Tesuque,
and visitors are many.[6]
The Pueblos are as a class industrious, fun-loving, and friendly to
white visitors. They are naturally hospitable and quickly responsive to
any who treat them sympathetically and as fellow human beings. The
lamentable fact that white Americans have too often failed in this
respect, acting towards them as though they were animals in a zoo, is
largely responsible for tales we hear of Indian surliness and ill-will.
Pueblo women are skillful potters, and while Tesuque does not now excel
in this art, one may pick up some interesting souvenirs both in clay and
beadwork. At any rate, you will enjoy seeing these things being made in
the common living-room of the house, while the corn is being ground on
the _metates_ or mealing stones, and the mutton stew simmers on the open
hearth. A knowledge of values first obtained at reputable traders’ shops
in Santa Fe, is advisable, however, before negotiating directly with the
Indians, as they are becoming pretty well schooled in the art of
charging “all the traffic will bear.” Tesuque produces a specialty in
the shape of certain dreadful little pottery images called “rain gods,”
which must not be taken seriously as examples of sound Pueblo art.[7]
Thirty-three miles north of Santa Fe on the Denver and Rio Grande
Railway is the village of Española, where a plain but comfortable hotel
makes a convenient base for visiting several points of interest in the
upper Rio Grande Valley. A mile to the south is Santa Clara pueblo,[8]
long famous for its beautiful shining black pottery almost Etruscan in
shape. The clay naturally burns red, but a second baking with the fuel
(dried chips of cattle manure), pulverized finely and producing a dense
black smoke, gives the ware its characteristic lustrous black. Seven
miles further down the river but on the other side, is another pueblo,
San Ildefonso, a picturesque village of 125 Indians, near the base of La
Mesa Huérfana. This is a flat-topped mountain of black lava, on whose
summit in 1693, several hundred Pueblos entrenched themselves and for
eight months stubbornly resisted the attempts of the Spanish under De
Vargas to bring them to terms. That was practically the last stand of
Pueblo rebeldom, which thirteen years before had driven every Spaniard
from the land. San Ildefonso has public fiestas on January 23 and
September 6.
Six miles north of Española and close to the Rio Grande is San Juan
pueblo, with a population of about 400 Indians. Here one is in the very
cradle of the white civilization of the Southwest. At this spot in the
summer of 1598, Don Juan de Oñate—he of the Conquest—arrived with his
little army of Spaniards, his Franciscan missionaries, his colonist
families, a retinue of servants and Mexican Indians, his wagons and
cattle, to found the capital of the newly won “kingdom” later to be
called New Mexico. The courtesy of the Indians there, who temporarily
gave up their own houses to the Spaniards, was so marked that their
pueblo became known as _San Juan de los Caballeros_ (Saint John of the
Gentlemen). Oñate’s settlement—of which no vestige now remains—is
believed to have been situated just across the Rio Grande from San Juan,
about where the hamlet and railway station of Chamita now stands. San
Juan pueblo is further distinguished as the birthplace of Popé, the
Indian to whose executive genius is due the success of the Pueblo
Rebellion of 1680. A picturesque figure, that same Popé, of the timber
dramatic heroes are made of. It is said that, while meditating the
rebellion, he journeyed to the enchanted lagoon of Shípapu, the place
where in the dim past the Pueblos had emerged from the underworld and
whither they return at death. There he conferred with the spirits of his
ancestors, who endued him with power to lead his people to victory.[9]
The San Juan women make a good black pottery similar to that of Santa
Clara. On Saint John’s Day, June 24, occurs a public fiesta, with
procession and dances, attracting visitors, white and red, from far and
near.
Having got thus far up the Rio Grande, let nothing deter you from
visiting Taos (they pronounce it _Towss_). By automobile it is about 50
miles northeast of Española or you can reach it quite expeditiously by
Denver & Rio Grande train to Taos Junction and auto-connection thence
about 30 miles to Taos.[10] Situated in a fertile plain, 7000 feet above
the sea, in the heart of the Southern Rockies, Taos is one of the most
charming places in America. It is in three parts. There is the outlying
hamlet Ranchos de Taos; then the picturesque Mexican town Fernandez de
Taos, famous in recent years for a resident artist colony whose pictures
have put Taos in the world of art; and lastly, there is the pueblo of
Taos. From very early times the pueblo has played an important role in
New Mexican history. It was here the San Juaneño Popé found the readiest
response to his plans of rebellion. Later the location on the confines
of the Great Plains made it an important trading center with the more
northern Indians. The annual summer fair for _cambalache_, or traffic by
barter, held at Taos in the latter part of the eighteenth century, was a
famous event, the Plains tribes bringing skins and furs and Indian
captives to trade for horses, beads and metal implements. The commercial
opportunities combined with the fertility of the soil and an unfailing
water supply led to the founding of Fernandez de Taos by whites. In the
days of Mexican supremacy part of the traffic over the Santa Fe Trail
passed this way and a custom house was here. The ruins of a large adobe
church in the pueblo form a memento of the troublous days of 1847, when
a small rebellion participated in by Mexicans and a few Taos Indians
took place here and the American governor, Bent, was murdered. At
Fernandez de Taos, the famous frontiersman Kit Carson lived for many
years, and here his grave may still be seen.
Taos pueblo, housing an Indian population of about 500, is the most
northern in New Mexico, and perhaps the most perfect specimen existing
of Pueblo architecture. It consists of two imposing pyramidal house
clusters of 5 to 7 stories—aboriginal apartment houses—and between them
happily flows the little Rio de Taos sparkling out of the Glorieta Cañon
near whose mouth the pueblo stands. The three-mile drive or walk from
Fernandez de Taos is very lovely, with the pueblo’s noble background of
mountains before you, their purple and green flanks wonderfully mottled
and dashed in autumn with the gold of the aspen forests. The men of Taos
are a tall, athletic sort, quite different in appearance from the more
southern Pueblos. They wear the hair parted in the middle and done at
the side in two braids which hang in front of the shoulders. They are
much addicted to their blankets; and one often sees them at work with
the blankets fastened about the waist and falling to the knees like a
skirt. In warm weather they sometimes substitute a muslin sheet for the
woolen blanket, and few sights are more striking than a Taos man thus
muffled to his eyebrows in pure white.
Annually on September 30th occurs the _Fiesta de San Gerónimo de Taos_,
which is one of the most largely attended of all Pueblo functions.
Crowds of Americans, Mexicans and Indians (a sprinkling of Apaches among
Pueblos of several sorts) line the terraced pyramids and make a scene so
brilliant and strange that one wonders that it can be in America. The
evening before, near sundown, there is a beautiful Indian dance in the
plaza of the pueblo, the participants bearing branches of quivering
aspens. With the sunset light upon the orange and yellow of the foliage
as the evening shadows gather, it is an unforgettable sight. Yes, you
must by all means see Taos. There are hotel accommodations at Fernandez
de Taos.[11]
But Española serves, too, as a base for outings of quite another sort.
One of these is to the remarkable prehistoric cliff village known as the
Puyé in the Santa Clara Cañon, about 10 miles west of Española. Here at
the edge of a pine forest a vast tufa cliff rises, its face marked with
pictographs of unknown antiquity and honeycombed with dwellings of a
vanished people, probably ancestors, of some of the present-day
Pueblos.[12] These cliff chambers are quite small, and their walls bear
still the soot from prehistoric fires. Climbing by an ancient trail to
the summit of the mesa of which the cliff is a side, you come upon the
leveled ruins of what was once a magnificent, terraced community house,
built of tufa blocks and containing hundreds of rooms. Rambling from
room to room, picking up now a bit of broken pottery, now a charred
corn-cob, poking into the ashes of fireplaces where the last embers were
quenched before history in America began, you experience, I hope, a
becoming sense of your youth as a white American. And the view from this
noble tableland—a view those ancient people had every day of their
lives! One wonders had they eyes to see it—the lovely valley of the Rio
Grande, purple chain after chain of mountains on every side, the jagged
peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, the Glorietas, the Jemes, and dim on the
far horizon, the Sierra Blanca in Colorado.
Also dotting the same plateau (this region by the way, is now called
Pajarito[13] Park) are numerous other prehistoric community houses—the
Otowi (with its curious tent-like rock formations), the Tsánkawi, the
Tchrega—all of absorbing interest to the archaeologic mind, but offering
not much that seems new to the average tourist who has seen the Puyé.
One, however, known as the Tyuonyi in the cañon of the Rito de los
Frijoles[14] should not be missed. It may be reached via Buckman, a
station on the D. & R. G. 12 miles south of Española. Thence it is about
15 miles over all sorts of a road to the brink of Frijoles Cañon. A
steep foot-trail there leads you down, a thousand feet or more, into the
gorge and after a short walk you are at the comfortable ranch house of
Judge A. G. Abbott, custodian of the Bandelier National Monument, under
which name the neighboring ruins are officially designated by the United
States Government, which owns them.[15] Considered merely as scenery,
the little, secluded cañon is one of the loveliest spots in New Mexico,
with its stretches of emerald meadows, its perennial stream and its
peaceful forest of stately pines. But it is the human interest given by
the vacant houses of a forgotten race—the cavate dwellings of the pink
and white tufa cliffs and the ruined communal dwellings on the cañon
floor and on the mesa top near by—that brings most visitors. That noted
ethnologist, the late Adolf F. Bandelier, wrote a romance with the scene
laid here and at the Puyé. It is entitled “The Delightmakers,” and a
reading of it will not only lend a living interest to these places, but
yield a world of information as to the mind and customs of the Pueblo
Indians. Visitors have the School of American Archaeology at Santa Fe to
thank for the painstaking work of excavation extending over years, that
uncovered many of these ancient dwelling places of their centuries of
accumulated debris.
To return to Española. Ten miles to the eastward in the valley of the
Santa Cruz river is the quaint little church of Santuario, a sort of New
Mexican Lourdes, famous these many years for its miraculous cures. A
trip thither makes a noteworthy day’s outing. It may be done by
automobile over a road of many tribulations, but a horse and buggy are
more satisfactory and far more in keeping with the primitive country. My
own visit was achieved on foot, eased by a lift of a couple of miles
from a kindly Mexican on horseback, who set me up behind him, _en
ancas_, as they call it. It was mid-August—a season which in northern
New Mexico is as sunshiny and showery as a sublimated Eastern April. The
intense blue of the sky was blotted here and there with piled-up cloud
masses, which broke at times in streamers of rain upon the purple ranges
of the Sangre de Cristo ahead of me—and after that, descending shafts of
light. As soon as I had crossed the Rio Grande and Española was behind
me, I was in pure Mexico. The Santa Cruz Valley is an agricultural
region, but it is the agriculture of centuries ago that is in vogue
there. Wheat, for instance, is trodden out by horses, sheep or goats, on
outdoor threshing floors of beaten earth, winnowed by tossing shovelfuls
into the air, washed of its grit and dirt in the nearest _acéquia_, then
spread out in the sun to dry, and finally ground in primitive little log
mills whose rumbling stones are turned by tiny water wheels. Little New
Mexican Davids, bare of foot and dreamy-eyed, loiter along behind their
nibbling flocks in the stubble of the shorn fields or the wild herbage
of the river bottom. Peaches and melons, onions and corn, lie drying on
the roofs, and strips of meat hang “jerking” from stretched lines in the
_plazitas_ of the houses. The cross is still a dominant feature in this
land of yesterday. Now it glitters on the belfry of the family chapel
among the trees of some ranch; now it is outlined against the sky on the
crest of a hill, a _calvario_ of the Penitentes;[16] now it crowns a
heap of stones by the wayside, where a funeral has stopped to rest.
Of the villages strewn along this delightful way, some are hamlets of
half a dozen straggling little adobes drowsing under their rustling
cottonwoods. Others are more important. One particularly I
remember—Santo Niño. That means “village of the Holy Child,” and His
peace that placid morning seemed to rest upon it. The streets were
narrow shady lanes, where irrigation ditches running full made a
murmuring music, flowing now by adobe walls, now by picket fences where
hollyhocks and marigolds and morning-glories looked pleasantly out. It
was a village not of houses merely, but of comfortable old orchards,
too, and riotous gardens where corn and beans, chilis and melons locked
elbows in happy comradery. I think every one I met was Mexican—the women
in sombre black rebosos, the men more or less unkempt and
bandit-appearing in ample-crowned sombreros, yet almost without
exception offering me the courtesy of a raised hand and a _buenos dias,
señor_. Santa Cruz de la Cañada—another of these villages—deserves a
special word of mention, for next to Santa Fe it is the oldest
officially established _villa_ (a form of Spanish organized town), in
New Mexico, dating as such from 1695, though in its unincorporated state
antedating the Pueblo Rebellion. Long a place of importance, its ancient
glory paled as Santa Fe and Albuquerque grew. Today it numbers a scant
couple of hundred inhabitants, but it is interesting to the tourist for
its fine old church facing the grassy plaza of the village. The church
interior is enriched with a number of ancient pictures and carvings of
an excellence beyond one’s expectations.
Then there is Chímayo, into which you pass just before crossing the
river to Santuario. To the general public Chímayo appeals because of its
blankets and its apricots, but to me it remains a place of tender memory
because of a certain hospitable _tienda de abarrotes_ (or, as we should
say, grocery store). Entering it in the hope of finding crackers and
cheese, wherewith to make a wayside luncheon, I was given instead a
characteristic Mexican meal as exquisitely cooked as ever I had; yet it
was but a couple of corn tortillas, a bowl of pink beans done to
liquidity, and a cup of black coffee. As to the blankets of Chímayo,
they are woven in sizes from a pillow-cover to a bed-spread, of
Germantown yarn, and you find them on sale everywhere in the curio shops
of the Southwest, competing in a modest way with the Navajo product. The
weaving is a fireside industry, prosecuted in the intervals of other
work both by women and men, and the bump-bump of the primitive looms is
the characteristic melody of the place.
I had to ford the little river, shoes and stockings in hand, to reach
Santuario, and was not sure when I got there. An old _paisano_, sitting
in the shade of a wall, informed me, however, that the little cluster of
adobes on a hillside, into which I soon came from the river, was really
the place—“of great fame, señor. Here come people of all nations to be
cured—Mexicans, Americans, Apaches—from far, very far.” The adobe
church, half hidden behind some huge cottonwoods, was open—of crude
construction without and within, but very picturesque. Passing within
the wooden doors, which are curiously carved with a maze of lettering
that I found it impossible to decipher, I was in a twilight faintly
illumined by the shining of many candles set upon the floor in front of
a gaudy altar. Upon the walls hung beskirted figures of saints in
various colors and wearing tin crowns. There were, too, crude little
shrines upon which pilgrims had scrawled their names. A figure of San
Diego on horseback with a quirt on his wrist, cowboy style, was
particularly lively, I thought. In a room adjoining the altar is a hole
from which pilgrims take handfuls of earth—red adobe, apparently—the
outward instrumentality that is depended upon for the cures.
The history of this queer chapel is interesting. Long before it was
built the efficacy of that hole of earth was believed far and wide, and
the place resorted to by health seekers. Finally in 1816 a pious
_paisano_ named Bernardo Abeyta, who had prospered greatly in his
affairs, was impelled to erect this church as a testimony of gratitude
to God. Dying he bequeathed it to Doña Carmen Chaves, his daughter, who
kept for all comers the church and its pit of healing, and lived in a
modest way upon the fees which grateful pilgrims bestowed upon her.
After her death, the property descended to her daughter, who maintains
it in the same way. It is said the fame of the spot is known even in old
Mexico, whence pilgrims sometimes come.[17] The earth is utilized either
internally dissolved in water, or outwardly made into a mud wash and
rubbed on the body. The chapel is dedicated to _El Señor de
Esquipulas_—the Christ of Esquipulas—Esquipulas being a little village
of Guatemala whose great church enshrines a famous image of the Lord
believed to perform miraculous cures.
For a glimpse in small compass of the unsuspected picturesqueness of
rural New Mexico, I know of nothing better than this little jaunt from
Española to Santuario.
NOTE: Horseback tours through the Pecos and Santa Fe National Forests
are practicabilities, with Santa Fe, Española or Buckman as a base.
There is a company or two at Santa Fe that make a specialty of
outfitting parties, furnishing riding and pack animals, cooks and all
needful accessories, for a fixed sum. Trout fishing is good in many of
the mountain streams. You may arrange your own itinerary, or if you do
not know what you want, trips will be outlined to suit your particular
interests. In the latter event, a consultation with the Supervisor of
the Santa Fe National Forest, whose office is in Santa Fe, would be
helpful. For people of sound wind who like to see the world from
mountain tops, a trip over the Dalton Trail to the Pecos River and
thence to the Truchas Peaks is repaying. From that elevation of about
13,000 feet, there is a magnificent outlook over much of New Mexico
and some of Colorado and Arizona.