TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND AND ANCIENT CAPITAL OF THE SOUTHWEST
As Quebec is the shrine of historical pilgrims in the North, and Salem
in New England; so Taos is the Mecca of students of history and lovers
of art in the Southwest. Here came the Spanish knights mounted and in
armor plate half a century before the landing of the Pilgrims on
Plymouth Rock. They had not only crossed the sea but had traversed the
desert from Old Mexico for 900 miles over burning sands, amid wild, bare
mountains, across rivers where horses and riders swamped in the
quicksands. To Taos came Franciscan _padres_ long before Champlain had
built stockades at Port Royal or Quebec. Just as the Jesuits won the
wilderness of the up-country by martyr blood, so the Franciscans
attacked the strongholds of paganism amid the pueblos of the South.
Spanish _conquistadores_ have been represented as wading through blood
to victory, with the sword in one hand, the cross in the other; but that
picture is only half the truth. Let it be remembered that the Spanish
were the only conquerors in America who gave the Indians perpetual
title, intact and forever, to the land occupied when the Spanish
came--which titles the Indians hold to this day. Also, while rude
soldiers, or even officers, might be guilty of such unprovoked attacks
as occurred at Bernalillo in Coronado's expedition of 1540, the crown
stood sponsor for the well-being and salvation of the Indian's soul.
Wherever the conqueror marched, the sandaled and penniless Franciscan
remained and too often paid the penalty of the soldier's crimes. In the
Tusayan Desert, at Taos, at Zuni, at Acoma, you will find Missions that
date back to the expedition of Coronado; and at every single Mission the
_padres_ paid for their courage and their faith with their lives.
But Taos traditions date back farther than the coming of the white man.
Christians have their Christ, northern Indians their Hiawatha, and the
pueblo people their Bah-tah-ko, or grand cacique, who led their people
from the ravages of Apache and Navajo in the far West to the Promised
Land of verdant plains and watered valleys below the mighty mountains of
Taos. Montezuma was to the Southwest, not the Christ, but the Adam, the
Moses, the Joseph. Casa Grande in southern Arizona was the Garden of
Eden, "the place of the Morning Glow;" but when war and pestilence and
ravaging foe and drouth drove the pueblos from their Garden of Eden, the
Bah-tah-ko was the Moses to lead them to the Promised Land at Taos. When
did he live? The oldest man does not know. The pueblos had been at Taos
thousands of years, when the Spanish came in 1540; and, it may be added,
they live very much the same to-day at Taos as they did when the white
man first came. The men wear store trousers instead of woven linen ones;
some wear hats instead of a red head band; and there are wagons instead
of drags attached to a dog in shafts. But apart from these innovations,
there is little difference at Taos between 1912 and 1540. The
whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the pueblo; but the
old _estufas_, or _kivas_, are still used for religious ceremony, and
election of rulers, and maintenance of Indian law. You can still see the
Indians threshing their grain by the trampling of goats on a threshing
floor, or the run of burros round and round a kraal chased by a boy,
while a man scrapes away the grain and forks aside the chaff. There are
white man's courts and white man's laws, down at the white man's town of
Taos; but the Indian has little faith in, and less respect for, these
white man courts and laws, and out at Taos has his own court, his own
laws, his own absolute and undisputed governor, his own police, his own
prison and his own penalties. The wealth of Midas would not tempt a Taos
Indian to exchange his life in the tiered adobe villages for all that
civilization could offer him. Occasionally a Colonel Cody, or Showman
Jones, lures him off for a year or two to the great cities of the East;
but the call of the wilds lures him back to his own beehive houses. He
has plenty to eat and plenty to wear, the love of his family, the open
fields and the friendship of his gods--what more can life offer?
Don't leave the Southwest without seeing Taos. It might be part of
Turkey, or Persia, or India. It is the most un-American thing in
America; and yet, it is the most typical of those ancient days in
America, when there was no white man. Just here, before the ethnologist
arises to correct me, let it be put on record that the Taos people do
not consider themselves Indians. They claim descent rather from the
Aztecs, or Toltecs of the South. While the Navajo and Apache and Ute
legends are of a great migration from Athabasca of the North, the pueblo
legend is of a coming from the Great Underworld of the South.
* * * * *
The easiest way to reach Taos is by the ancient city of Santa Fe. You go
by rail to Servilleta, or Barrancas, then stage it out to the Indian
pueblos. Better wire for your stage accommodation from the railroad. We
did not wire, and when we left the railroad, we found seven people and a
stage with space for only four. The railroad leads almost straight north
from Santa Fe over high, clear mesas of yellow ocher covered with scrub
juniper. There is little sign of water after you leave the Rio Grande,
for water does not flow uphill; and you are at an altitude of 8,000 feet
when you cross the Divide. You pass through fruit orchards along the
river, low headed and heavy with apples. Then come the Indian villages,
San Ildefonso, and Espanola, and Santa Clara, where the strings of red
chile bake in the sunlight against the glare adobe. Women go up from
the pools with jars of water on their heads. Children come selling the
famous Santa Clara black pottery at the train windows; and on the trail
across the river, you see Mexican drovers with long lines of burros and
pack horses winding away into the mountains. Women and girls in bright
blankets and with eyes like black beads and skin like wrinkled parchment
stand round the doors of the little square adobe houses; and sitting in
the shade are the old people--people of a great age, 104 one old woman
numbered her years. As you ascend the Upper Mesas of the Rio Grande, you
are in a region where nothing grows but pinon and juniper. There is not
a sign of life but the browsing sheep and goats. Just where the train
shoots in north of San Ildefonso, if you know where to look on the
right, you can see the famous Black Mesa, a huge square of black
basaltic rock almost 400 feet high, which was the sacred shrine of all
Indians hereabouts for a hundred miles. On its crest, you can still see
its prayer shrines, and the footworn path where refugees from war ran
down to the river for water from encampment on the crest. Away to the
left, the mountains seem to crumple up in purple folds with flat tops
and white gypsum gashed precipices. One of these gashes--White Rock
Canyon--marks Pajarito Plateau, the habitat of the ancient cave dwellers.
On the north side of the Black Mesa, you can see the opening to a huge
cave. This was a prayer shrine and refuge in time of war for the Santa
Clara Indians.
Then, when you have reached almost the top of the world and see no more
sheep herds, the trains pull up at an isolated, forsaken little station;
and late in the afternoon you get off at Servilleta.
A school teacher, his wife and his two children, also left the train at
this point. Our group consisted of three. The driver of the stage--a
famous frontiersman, Jo. Dunn--made eight; and we packed into a
two-seated vehicle. It added piquancy, if not sport, to the twilight
drive to know that one of the two bronchos in harness had never been
driven before. He was, in fact, one of the bands of wild horses that
rove these high juniper mountains. Mexicans, or Indians, watch for the
wild bands to come out to water at nightfall and morning, and stampede
them into a pound, or rope them. The captive is then sold for amounts
varying from $5 to $15 to anyone who can master him. It need not be told
here, not every driver can master an unbroken wild horse. It is a
combination of confidence and dexterity, rather than strength. There is
a rigging to the bridle that throws a horse if he kicks; and our wild
one not only kept his traces for a rough drive of nearly twenty miles
but suffered himself to be handled by a young girl of the party.
[Illustration: The pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, whose inhabitants trace
their lineage back centuries before the advent of the Spanish
conquistadores]
Twilight on the Upper Mesas is a thing not to be told in words and only
dimly told on canvas. There is the primrose afterglow, so famous in the
Alps. The purple mountains drape themselves in lavender veils. Winds
scented with oil of sagebrush and aroma of pines come soughing through
the juniper hills. The moon comes out sickle-shaped. You see a shooting
star drop. Then a dim white group of moving forms emerges from the pines
of the mountains--wild horses with leader scenting the air for foe,
coming out for the night run to the drinking pools. Or your horses give
a little sidewise jump from the trail, and you see a coyote loping along
abreast not a gun-shot away. This is a sure-enough-always-no-man's-land,
a jumping-off place for all the earth--too high for irrigation farming,
too arid for any other kind of farming, and so an unclaimed land. In the
twenty-mile drive, you will see, perhaps, three homesteaders' shanties,
where settlers have fenced off a square and tried ranching; but water is
too deep for boring. Horses turned outside the square join the wild
bands and are lost; and two out of every three are abandoned homesteads.
The Dunn brothers have cut a road in eighteen miles to the Arroyo Hondo,
where their house is, halfway to Taos; and they have also run a
telephone line in.
Except for the telephone wires and the rough trail, you might be in an
utterly uninhabited land on top of the world. The trail rises and falls
amid endless scented juniper groves. The pale moon deepens through a
pink and saffron twilight. The stillness becomes almost palpable--then,
suddenly, you jump right off the edge of the earth. The flat mesa has
come to an edge. You look down, sheer down, 1,000 feet straight as a
plummet--two canyons narrow as a stone's toss have gashed deep trenches
through the living rocks and with a whir of swift waters come together
at the famous place known as the Bridge. You have come on your old
friend the Rio Grande again, narrow and deep and blue from the mountain
snows, an altogether different stream from the muddy Rio of the lower
levels. Here it is joined by the Arroyo Hondo, another canyon slashed
through the rocks in a deep trench--both rivers silver in the moonlight,
with a rush of rapids coming up the great height like wind in trees, or
the waves of the sea.
What a host of old frontier worthies must have pulled themselves up with
a jerk of amaze and dumb wonder, when they first came to this sheer jump
off the earth! First the mailed warriors under Coronado; then the cowled
Franciscans; then Fremont and Kit Carson and Beaubien and Governor Bent
and Manuel Lisa, the fur trader, and a host of other knights of modern
adventure.
I suppose a proper picture of the Bridge, or Arroyo Hondo, cannot be
taken; for a good one never has been taken, though travelers and artists
have been coming this way for a hundred years. The two canyons are so
close together and so walled that it is impossible to get both in one
picture except from an airship. It is as if the earth were suddenly
rent, and you looked down on that underworld of which Indian legend
tells so many wonder yarns. Don't mind wondering how you will go down!
The bronchos will manage that, where an Eastern horse would break his
neck and yours, too. The driver jams on brakes; and you drop down a
terribly steep grade in a series of switchbacks, or zigzags, to the
Bridge. It is the most spectacularly steep road I know in America. It
could not be any steeper and not drop straight; and there isn't anything
between you and the drop but your horses' good sense. It is one of the
places where you don't want to hit your horse; for if he jumps, the
wagon will not keep to the trail. It will go over taking you and the
horse, too.
But, before you know it, you have switched round the last turn and are
rattling across the Bridge. Some Mexican teamsters are in camp below the
rock wall of the river. The reflection of the figures and firelight and
precipices in the deep waters calls up all sorts of tales of Arabian
Nights and road robbers and old lawless days. Then, you pull up sharp at
the toll house for supper, as quaint an inn as anything in Switzerland
or the Himalayas. The back of the house is the rock wall of the canyon.
The front is adobe. The halls are long and low and narrow, with
low-roofed rooms off the front side only. From the Bridge you can go on
to Taos by motor in moonlight; but the whole way by stage and motor in
one day makes a hard trip, and there is as much of interest at the
Bridge as at Taos. You don't expect to find settlers in this dim silver
underworld, do you? Well, drive a few miles up the Arroyo Hondo, where
the stream widens out into garden patch farms, and you will find as odd
specimens of isolated humans as exist anywhere in the world--relics of
the religious fanaticism of the secret lodges, of the Middle
Ages--Penitentes, or Flagellantes, or Crucifixion people, who yearly at
Lent re-enact all the sorrows of the Procession to the Cross, and until
very recent years even re-enacted the Crucifixion.
After supper we strolled out down the canyon. It is impossible to
exaggerate its beauty. Each gash is only the width of the river with
sides straight as walls. The walls are yellow and black basalt, all
spotted with red where the burning bush has been touched by the frosts.
The rivers are clear, cold blue, because they are but a little way from
the springs in the snows. Snows and clear water and frost in the Desert?
Yes: that is as the Desert is in reality, not in geography books. Below
the Bridge, you can follow the Rio Grande down to some famous hot
springs; and in this section, the air is literally spicy with the oil of
sagebrush. At daybreak, you see the water ousels singing above the
rapids, and you may catch the lilt of a mocking-bird, or see a bluebird
examining some frost-touched berries. It is October; but the
goldfinches, which have long since left us in the North, are in myriads
here.
The second day at the Bridge, we drove up the Arroyo Hondo to see the
Penitentes. It is the only way I know that you can personally visit a
people who in every characteristic belong to the Twelfth Century. The
houses of the Arroyo Hondo are very small and very poor; for the
Penitente is thinking not of this world but of the world to come. The
orchards are amazingly old. These people and their ancestors must have
been here for centuries and as isolated from the rest of the world as if
living back five centuries. The Penitente is not an Indian; he is a
peon. Pueblo Indians repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the
Penitente a Catholic. He is really a relic of the secret lodge orders
that overran Europe with religious disorders and fanatic practices in
the Twelfth Century. Except for the Lenten processions, rites are
practiced at night. There are the Brothers of the Light--La Luz--and the
Brothers of the Darkness--Las Tinieblas. The meeting halls are known as
Morados; and those seen by us were without windows and with only one
narrow door. Women meet in one lodge, men in another. The sign manual of
membership is a cross tattooed on forehead, chin or back. When a death
occurs, the body is taken to the Morado, and a wake held. After
Penitente rites have been performed, a priest is called in for final
services; and up to the present, the priests have been unable to break
the strength of these secret lodges. Members are bound by secret oath to
help each other and stand by each other; and it is commonly charged that
politicians join the Penitentes to get votes and doctors to get
patients. Easter and Lent mark the grand rally of the year. On one hill
above the Arroyo Hondo, you can see a succession of crosses where
Penitentes have whipped themselves senseless with cactus belts, or
dropped from exhaustion carrying a cross; and only last spring--1912--a
woman marched carrying a great cross to which the naked body of her baby
was bound. We passed one cross erected to commemorate a woman who died
from self-inflicted injuries suffered during the procession of 1907.
The procession emerges from the Morado chanting in low, doleful tune the
Miserere. First come the Flagellantes, or marchers, scourging their
naked backs with cactus belts and whips. Next march the cross carriers
with a rattling of iron chains fastened to the feet; then, the general
congregation. The march terminates at a great cross erected on a hilltop
to simulate Golgotha. Why do the people do it? "To appease divine
wrath," they say; but they might ask us--why have we dipsomaniacs and
kleptomaniacs and monstrosities in our civilized life? Because "Julia
O'Grady and the Captain's lady are the same as two pins under their
skins." Because human nature dammed up from wholesome outlet of
emotions, will find unwholesome vent; and these dolorous processions are
only a reflex of the dark emotions hidden in a narrow canyon shut off
from the rest of the world.
They were not dolorous emotions that found vent as we drove back down
Arroyo Hondo to the Bridge. Our driver got out a mouth organ. Then he
played and sang snatches of dance tunes of the old, old days in the True
West.
"Allamahoo, right hand to your partner
And grand hodoo."
"Watch your partner and watch her close;
And when you catch her, a double doze."
"The cock flies out and the hen flies in--
All hands round and go it agen."
In fact, if you want to find the old True West, you'll find it undiluted
and pristine on the trip to Taos.