TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA
Taos, Santa Fe and El Paso--these were to the Southwest what Port Royal,
Quebec and Montreal were to French Canada, or Boston, Salem and
Jamestown to the colonists of the pre-Revolutionary days on the
Atlantic. El Paso was the gateway city from the old Spanish Dominions of
the South. Santa Fe was the central military post, and Taos was the
watch tower on the very outskirts of the back-of-beyond of Spanish
territory in the wilderness land of the New World.
Before Santa Fe became the terminus of the trail for American traders
from Missouri and Kansas, Taos was the terminus of the old fur trader
trail, in the days when Louisiana extended from New Orleans to Oregon.
Here, such famous frontiersmen as Jim Bridgar and Manuel Lisa and
Jedediah Smith and Colonel Ashley and Kit Carson came to barter beads
and calico and tobacco and firewater for hides and fur and native-woven
blankets and turquoise and rude silver ornaments hammered out of Spanish
bullion into necklace and bracelet. What Green's Hole and the Three
Tetons were to the Middle West, Taos was to the Southwest. Mountains
round Taos rise 14,000 feet from sea level. Snow glimmers from the
peaks more than half the year; and mountain torrents water the valley
with a system of irrigation that never fails. Coming out of the
mountains from the north, Taos was the natural halfway house on the
trail south to Old Mexico. Coming out of the Desert from the south, Taos
was the last walled city seen before the plunge into the wilderness of
forests and mountains in the No-Man's-Land of the north. "Walled city,"
you say, "before the coming of white men to the West?" Yes, you can see
those very walls to-day, walls antedating the coming of Coronado in 1540
by hundreds of years.
No motor can climb up and down the steep switchback to the Arroyo Hondo
of the Bridge. Cars taken over that trail must be towed; but from the
Bridge, you can go on to Taos by motor. As you ascend the mesa above the
river bed, you see the mountains ahead rise in black basalt like
castellated walls, with tower and battlement jagged into the very
clouds. Patches of yellow and red splotch the bronzing forests, where
frost has touched the foliage; and you haven't gone very many miles into
the lilac mist of the morning light--shimmering as it always shimmers
above the sagebrush blue and sandy gold of the Upper Mesas--before you
hear the laughter of living waters coming down from the mountain snows.
One understands why the Indians chose the uplands; while the white man,
who came after, had to choose the shadowy bottoms of the walled-in
canyons. Someone, back in the good old days when we were not afraid to be
poetic, said something about "traveling on the wings of the morning." I
can't put in words what he meant; but you do it here--going up and up so
gradually that you don't realize that you are in the lap, not of
mountains, but of mountain peaks; breathing, not air, but ozone;
uplifted by a great weight being taken off spirit and body; looking at
life through rose-colored tints, not metaphorically, but really; for
there is something in this high rare air--not dust, not moisture--that
splits white light into its seven prismatic hues. You look through an
atmosphere wonderfully rare, but it is never clear, white light. It is
lavender, or lilac, or primrose, or gold, or red as blood according to
the hours and the mood of hours; and if you want to carry the metaphor
still farther, you may truthfully add that the hours on these high
uplands are dancing hours. You never feel time to be a heavy, slow thing
that oppresses the soul.
[Illustration: Climbing home over your neighbor's roof and bolting your
door by pulling up the ladder is customary in Taos]
As the streams laugh down from the mountains, ranches grow more and more
frequent. It is characteristic of the West that you don't cross the
_acequias_ on bridges. You cross them on two planks, with risk to your
car if the driver swerve at the steering wheel. All the houses are red
earth adobe, thick of wall to shut out both heat and cold, with a smell
of juniper wood in the fireplaces of each room. Much of this
land--nearly all of it, in fact--is owned by the Taos Indians and held
in common for pasturage and cultivation. Title was given by Spain four
centuries ago, and the same title holds to-day in spite of white
squatters' attempt to break down the law by cutting the wire of the
pasture fences and taking the case to the courts. It was in this way
that squatters broke down the title of old Spanish families to thousands
and hundreds of thousands of acres granted before American occupation.
To be sure, an American land commission took evidence on these titles,
in the quarrel between Yankee squatter and Spanish don; but the squatter
had "friends in court." The old Spanish don hadn't. He saw titles that
had held good from 1540 slipping from his neighbor's hands; and he
either contested the case to lose out before he had begun, or sold and
sold at a song to save the wreckage of his fortunes. Of all the Spanish
land grants originally partitioning off what is now New Mexico, I know
of only one held by the family of the original grantee; and it is now in
process of partition. It is an untold page of Southwestern history, this
"stampeding" of Spanish titles. Some day, when we are a little farther
away from it, the story will be told. It will not make pleasant reading,
nor afford a bill of health to some family fortunes of the Southwest.
Perjuries, assassinations, purchase in open markets of judges drawing
such small pittances that they were in the auction mart for highest bid,
forged documents, incendiary fires to destroy true titles--these were
the least and most decent of the crimes of this era. "Ramona" tells what
happened to Indian titles in California. Paint Helen Hunt Jackson's
colors red instead of gray; multiply the crimes by ten instead of two;
and you have a faint picture of the land-jockey period of New Mexican
history. Something of this sort is going on at Taos to-day among the
pueblos for their land, and down at Sacaton among the Pimas for water.
Treaty guaranteed the Indian his rights, but at Taos the squatter cut
the pueblo fences and carried the case to court. At Sacaton, the big
squatter, the irrigation company, took the Pimas' water; so that the
Indian can no longer raise crops. If you want to know what the courts do
in these cases, ask the pueblo governor at Taos; or the Pima chief at
Sacaton.
* * * * *
It is late September. A parrot calls out in Spanish from the center of
the patio where our rooms look out on an arcade running round the court
in a perfect square. A mocking-bird trills saucily from his cage amid
the cosmos bloom. Donkeys and burros amble past the rear gate with loads
of wood strapped to their backs. Your back window looks out on the
courtyard. Your front window faces the street across from a plaza, or
city square. Stalwart, thick-set, muscular figures, hair banded back by
red and white scarfs, trousers of a loose, white pantaloon sort, tunic a
gray or white blanket, wrapped Arab fashion from shoulders to waist,
stalk with quick, nervous tread along the plaza; for it is the feast of
Saint Geronimo presently. The whole town is in festal attire. There will
be dancing all night and all day, and rude theatricals, and horse and
foot races; and the plaza is agog with sightseers. No, it is not Persia;
and it is not Palestine; and it is not Spain. It is just plain,
commonplace America out at Taos--white man's Taos, at the old Columbia
Hotel, which is the last of the old-time Spanish inns.
As you motor into the town, the long rows of great cottonwoods and
poplars attest the great age of the place. Through windows deep set in
adobe casement and flush with the street, you catch glimpses of inner
patios where oleanders and roses are still in bloom. Then you see the
roof windows of artists' studios, and find yourself not only in an old
Spanish town but in the midst of a modern art colony, which has been
called into being by the unique coloring, form and antiquity of life in
the Southwest. A few years ago, when Lungren and Philips and Sharpe and
a dozen others began portraying the marvelous coloring of the
Southwestern Desert with its almost Arab life, the public refused to
accept such spectacular, un-American work as true. Such pictures were
diligently "skied" by hanging committees, and a few hundred dollars was
deemed a good price. To-day, Southwestern art forms a school by itself;
and where commissions used to go begging at hundreds of dollars, they
to-day command prices of thousands and tens of thousands. When I was in
Taos, one artist was filling commissions for an Eastern collector that
would mount up to prices paid for the best work of Watts and Whistler.
It is a brutal way to put art in terms of the dollar bill; but it is
sometimes the only way to make a people realize there are prophets in
our own country.
Columbia Hotel is really one of the famous old Spanish mansions
occupying almost the entire side of a plaza square. From its street
entrance, you can see down the little alleyed street where dwelt Kit
Carson in the old days. His old home is almost a wreck to-day, and there
does not seem to be the slightest movement to convert it into a shrine
where the hundreds of sightseers who come to the Indian dances could
brush up memories of old frontier heroes. There are really only four
streets in Taos, all facing the Plaza or town square. Other streets are
alleys running off these, and when you see a notary's sign out as
"alcalde," it does not seem so very far back to the days when Spanish
dons lounged round the Plaza wearing silk capes and velvet trousers and
buckled shoes, and Spanish _conquistadores_ rode past armed cap-a-pie,
and Spanish grand dames stole glances at the outside world through the
lattices of the mansion houses. In some of these old Spanish houses, you
will find the deep casement windows very high in the wall. I asked a
descendant of one of the old Spanish families why that was. "For
protection," she said.
"Indians?" I asked.
"No--Spanish women were not supposed to see, or be seen by, the outside
world."
The pueblo proper lies about four miles out from the white man's town.
Laguna, Acoma, Zuni, the Three Mesas of the Tusayan Desert--all lie on
hillsides, or on the very crest of high acclivities. Taos is the
exception among purely Indian pueblos. It lies in the lap of the valley
among the mountains, two castellated, five story adobe structures, one
on each side of a mountain stream. In other pueblo villages, while the
houses may adjoin one another like stone fronts in our big cities, they
are not like huge beehive apartment houses. In Taos, the houses are
practically two great communal dwellings, with each apartment assigned
to a special clan or family. In all, some 700 people dwell in these two
huge houses. How many rooms are there? Not less than an average of three
to each family. Remnants of an ancient adobe wall surround the entire
pueblo. A new whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the
village, but you can still see the old one pitted with cannon-ball and
bullet, where General Price shelled it in the uprising of the pueblos
after American occupation. Men wear store trousers and store hats. You
see some modern wagons. Except for these, you are back in the days of
Coronado. All the houses can be entered only by ladders that ascend to
the roofs and can be drawn up--the pueblo way of bolting the door. The
houses run up three, four and five stories. They are adobe color
outside, that is to say, a pinkish gray; and whitewashed spotlessly
inside. Watch a woman draped in white linen blanket ascending these
ladders, and you have to convince yourself that you are not in the
Orient. Down by the stream, women with red and blue and white shawls
over their heads, and feet encased in white puttees, are washing
blankets by beating them in the flowing water. Go up the succession of
ladders to the very top of a five storied house, and look out. You can
see the pasture fields, where the herds graze in common. On the
outskirts of the village, men and boys are threshing, that is--they are
chasing ponies round and round inside a kraal, with a flag stuck up to
show which way the wind blows, one man forking chaff with the wind,
another scraping the grain outside the circle.
Glance inside the houses. The upstairs is evidently the living-room; for
the fireplace is here, and the pot is on. Off the living-room are corn
and meal bins, and you can see the _metate_ or stone on which the corn
is ground by the women as in the days of Old Testament record. Though
there is a new Mission church dating from the uprising in the forties,
and an old Mission church dating almost from 1540, you can see from the
roof dozens of _estufas_, where the men are practicing for their dances
and masked theatricals. Tony, the assistant governor, an educated man of
about forty who has traveled with Wild West shows, acts as our guide,
and tells us about the squatters trying to get the Indian land. How
would you like an intruder to sit down in the middle of your farm and
fence off 160 acres? The Indians didn't like it, and cut the fences.
Then the troops were sent out. That was in 1910--a typical "uprising,"
when the white man has both troops and courts on his side. The case has
gone to the courts, and Tony doesn't expect it to be settled very soon.
In fact, Tony likes their own form of government better than the white
man's. All this he tells you in the softest, coolest voice, for Tony is
not only assistant governor: he is constable to keep white men from
bringing in liquor during the festal week. They yearly elect their own
governor. That governor's word is absolutely supreme for his tenure of
office. Is there a dispute over crops, or cattle? The governor's word
settles it without any rigmarole of talk by lawyers.
"Supposing the guilty man doesn't obey the governor?" we ask.
"Then we send our own police, and take him, and put him in the stocks in
the lock-up," and he takes us around and shows us both the stocks and
the lock-up. These stocks clamp down a man's head as well as his hands
and feet. A man with his neck and hands anchored down between his feet
in a black room naturally wouldn't remain disobedient long.
The method of voting is older than the white man's ballot. The Indians
enter the _estufa_. A mark is drawn across the sand. Two men are
nominated. (No--women do not vote; the women rule the house absolutely.
The men rule fields and crops and village courtyard.) The voters then
signify their choice by marks on the sand.
Houses are built and occupied communally, and ground is held in common;
but the product of each man's and each woman's labor is his or her own
and not in common--the nearest approach to socialistic life that America
has yet known. The people here speak a language different from the other
pueblos, and this places their origin almost as far back as the origin
of Anglo-Saxon races. Another feature sets pueblo races apart from all
other native races of America. Though these people have been in contact
with whites nearly 400 years, intermarriage with whites is almost
unknown. Purity of blood is almost as sacredly guarded among Pueblos as
among the ancient Jews. The population remains almost stationary; but
the bad admixtures of a mongrel race are unknown.
We call the head man of the pueblo the governor, but the Spanish know
him as a _cacique_. Associated with him are the old men--_mayores_, or
council; and this council of wise old men enters so intimately into the
lives of the people that it advises the young men as to marriage. We
have preachers in our religious ranks. The Pueblos have proclaimers who
harangue from the housetops, or _estufas_. As women stoop over the
_metates_ grinding the meal, men sing good cheer from the door. The
chile, or red pepper, is pulverized between stones the same as the
grain. Though openly Catholic and in attendance on the Mission church,
the pueblo people still practice all the secret rites of Montezuma; and
in all the course of four centuries of contact, white men have never
been able to learn the ceremonies of the _estufas_.
Women never enter the _estufas_.
Who were the first white men to see Taos? It is not certainly known, but
it is vaguely supposed they were Cabeza de Vaca and his three
companions, shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the Narvaez
expedition, who wandered westward across the continent from Taos to
Laguna and Acoma. As the legend runs, they were made slaves by the
Indians and traded from tribe to tribe from 1528 to 1536, when they
reached Old Mexico. Anyway, their report of golden cities and vast,
undiscovered land pricked New Spain into launching Coronado's expedition
of 1540. Preceding the formal military advance of Coronado, the
Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza and two lay brothers guided by Cabeza de
Vaca's negro Estevan, set out with the cross in their hands to prepare
the way. Fray Marcos advanced from the Gulf of California eastward. One
can guess the weary hardship of that footsore journeying. It was made
between March and September of 1539. Go into the Yuma Valley in
September! The heat is of a denseness you can cut with a knife. Imagine
the heat of that tramp over desert sands in June, July and August! When
Fray Marcos sent his Indian guides forward to Zuni, near the modern
Gallup, he was met with the warning "Go back; or you will be put to
death." His messengers refusing to be daunted, the Zuni people promptly
killed them and threw them over the rocks. Fray Marcos went on with the
lay brothers. Zuni was called "_cibola_" owing to the great number of
buffalo skins (_cibolas_) in camp.
Fray Marcos' report encouraged the Emperor of Spain to go on with
Coronado's expedition. That trip need not be told here. It has been told
and retold in half the languages of the world. The Spaniards set out
from Old Mexico 300 strong, with 800 Indian escorts and four priests
including Marcos and a lay brother. What did they expect? Probably a
second Peru, temples with walls of gold and images draped in jewels of
priceless worth. What did they find? In Zuni and the Three Mesas and
Taos, small, sun-baked clay houses built tier on tier on top of each
other like a child's block house, with neither precious stones, nor
metals of any sort, but only an abundance of hides and woven cloth. When
the soldiers saw Zuni, they broke out in jeers and curses at the priest.
Poor Fray Marcos was thinking more of souls saved from perdition than of
loot, and returned in shamed embarrassment to New Spain.
Across the Desert to the Three Mesas and the Canyon of the Colorado, east
again to Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, up to the pueblo town now known
as the city of Santa Fe, into the Pecos, and north, yet north of Taos,
Coronado's expedition practically made a circuit of all the Southwest
from the Colorado River to East Kansas. The knightly adventurers did not
find gold, and we may guess, as winter came on with heavy snows in the
Upper Desert, they were in no very good mood; for now began that contest
between white adventurers and Pueblos which lasted down to the middle of
the Nineteenth Century. At the pueblo now known as Bernalillo, the
soldiers demanded blankets to protect them from the cold. The Indians
stripped their houses to help their visitors, but in the melee and no
doubt in the ill humor of both sides there were attacks and insults by
the white aggressors, and a state of siege lasted for two months.
Practically from that date to 1840, the pueblo towns were a unit against
the white man.
[Illustration: A fashionable metal-worker of Taos, New Mexico, who has
not adhered to the native costume]
The last great uprising was just after the American Occupation. Bent,
the great trader of Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, was governor. Kit
Carson, who had run away from the saddler's trade at sixteen and for
whom a reward of one cent was offered, had joined the Santa Fe caravans
and was now living at Taos, an influential man among the Indians.
According to Col. Twitchell, whose work is the most complete on New
Mexico and who received the account direct from the governor's daughter,
Governor Bent knew that danger was brewing. The Pueblos had witnessed
Spanish power overthrown; then, the expulsion of Mexican rule. Why
should they, themselves, not expel American domination?
It was January 18, 1847. Governor Bent had come up from Santa Fe to
visit Taos. He was warned to go back, or to get a military escort; but a
trader all his life among the Indians, he flouted danger. Traders' rum
had inflamed the Indians. They had crowded in from their pueblo town to
the plaza of Taos. Insurrectionary Mexicans, who had cause enough to
complain of the American policy regarding Spanish land titles, had
harangued the Indians into a flare of resentful passion. Governor Bent
and his family were in bed in the house you can see over to the left of
the Plaza. In the kraal were plenty of horses for escape, but the
family were awakened at daybreak by a rabble crowding into the central
courtyard. Kit Carson's wife, Mrs. Bent, Mrs. Boggs and her children
hurried into the shelter of an inner room. Young Alfredo Bent, only ten
years old, pulled his gun from the rack with the words--"Papa, let us
fight;" but Bent had gone to the door to parley with the leaders.
Taking advantage of the check, the women and an Indian slave dug a hole
with a poker and spoon under the adobe wall of the room into the next
house. Through this the family crawled away from the besieged room to
the next house, Mrs. Bent last, calling for her husband to come; but it
was too late. Governor Bent was shot in the face as he expostulated;
clubbed down and literally scalped alive. He dragged himself across the
floor, to follow his wife; but Indians came up through the hole and down
over the roof and in through the windows; and Bent fell dead at the feet
of his family.
The family were left prisoners in the room without food, or clothing
except night dresses, all that day and the next night. At daybreak
friendly Mexicans brought food, and the women were taken away disguised
as squaws. Once, when searching Indians came to the house of the old
Mexican who had sheltered the family, the rescuer threw the searchers
off by setting his "squaws" to grinding meal on the kitchen floor. Kit
Carson, at this time, unfortunately happened to be in California. He was
the one man who could have restrained the Indians.
The Indians then proceeded down to the Arroyo Hondo to catch some mule
loads of whiskey and provisions, which were expected through the narrow
canyon. The mill where the mules had been unharnessed was surrounded that
night. The teamsters plugged up windows and loaded for the fray that
must come with daylight. Seven times the Indians attempted to rush an
assault. Each time, a rifle shot puffed from the mill and an Indian
leaped into the air to fall back dead. Then the whole body of 500
Indians poured a simultaneous volley into the mill. Two of the Americans
inside fell dead. A third was severely wounded. By the afternoon of the
second day, the Americans were without balls or powder. The Indians then
crept up and set fire to the mill. The Americans hid themselves among
the stampeding stock of the kraal. Night was coming on. The Pueblos were
crowding round in a circle. The surviving Americans opened the gates and
made a dash in the dark for the mountains. Two only escaped. The rest
were lanced and scalped as they ran; and in the loot of the teams, the
Indians are supposed to have secured some well-filled chests of gold
specie.
By January 23rd, General Price had marched out at the head of five
companies, from old Fort Marcy at Santa Fe for Taos. He had 353 men and
four cannon. You can see the marks yet on the old Mission at Taos, where
the cannon-balls battered down the adobe walls. The Indians did not wait
his coming. They met him 1,500 strong on the heights of a mesa at Santa
Cruz. The Indians made wild efforts to capture the wagons to the rear of
the artillery; but when an Indian rabble meets artillery, there is only
one possible issue. The Indians fled, leaving thirty-six killed and
forty-five wounded. No railway led up the Rio Grande at that early date;
and it was a more notable feat for the troops to advance up the
narrowing canyons than to defeat the foe. At Embudo, six or seven hundred
Pueblos lined the rock walls under hiding of cedar and pinon. The
soldiers had to climb to shoot; and again the Indians could not
withstand trained fire. They left twenty killed and sixty wounded here.
Two feet of snow lay on the trail as the troops ascended the uplands;
and it was February 3rd before they reached Taos. Every ladder had been
drawn up, every window barricaded, and the high walls of the tiered
great houses were bristling with rifle barrels; but rifle defense could
not withstand the big shells of the assailants. The two pueblos were
completely surrounded. A six pounder was brought within ten yards of the
walls. A shell was fired--the church wall battered down, and the
dragoons rushed through the breach. By the night of Feb. 4th, old men,
women and children bearing the cross came suing for peace. The
ringleader, Tomas, was delivered to General Price; and the troops drew
off with a loss of seven killed and forty-five wounded. The Pueblos loss
was not less than 200. Thus ended the last attempt of the Pueblos to
overthrow alien domination; and this attempt would not have been made if
the Indians had not been spurred on by Mexican revolutionaries, with
counter plots of their own.
* * * * *
We motored away from Taos by sunset. An old Indian woman swathed all in
white came creeping down one of the upper ladders. They could not throw
off white rule--these Pueblos--but for four centuries they have
withstood white influences as completely as in the days when they sent
the couriers spurring with the knotted cord to rally the tribes to open
revolt.