Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
[Illustration: A PUEBLO GIRL SELLING CLAY IMAGES. (From a sketch by
Gen. Wallace.)]
THE LAND OF THE PUEBLOS.
BY
SUSAN E. WALLACE.
_Author of “The Storied Sea,” “Ginevra,” etc._
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.
NEW YORK:
JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER.
1888.
* * * * *
Copyright. 1888,
BY
THE PROVIDENT BOOK COMPANY.
* * * * *
THE LAND OF THE PUEBLOS.
CONTENTS.
Introduction. 5
I. The Journey. 7
II. Historic. 14
III. Laws and Customs. 37
IV. The City of the Pueblos. 58
V. Mexican Cottages. 62
VI. To the Turquois Mines. 69
VII. To the Turquois Mines, continued. 80
VIII. To the Turquois Mines, continued. 93
IX. To the Turquois Mines, continued. 101
X. Among the Archives.--Things New and Old. 108
XI. Among the Archives.--A Love Letter. 114
XII. Among the Archives, continued. 121
XIII. Among the Archives, continued. 127
XIV. Among the Archives, continued. 134
XV. The Jornada Del Muerto. 140
XVI. Something about the Apache. 152
XVII. Old Miners. 160
XVIII. The New Miners. 167
XIX. The Honest Miner. 175
XX. The Assayers. 180
XXI. The Ruby Silver Mine.--A True Story. 188
XXII. The Ruby Silver Mine, continued. 196
XXIII. Mine Experience. 203
XXIV. The Ruins of Montezuma’s Palace. 218
XXV. To the Casas Grandes. 234
XXVI. A Frontier Idyl. 248
XXVII. The Pimos. 261
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
A Pueblo Girl Selling Clay Images, Frontispiece
El Palacio, Santa Fé, 14
Living Pueblo (New Mexico), 44
Zuñi War Club, Dance Ornaments, etc., 46
Zuñi Basketry, and Toy Cradles, 130
Zuñi Water Vases, 132
Navajo Indian, with Silver Ornaments, 154
Zuñi Effigies, 200
Tesuke Water Vases, 234
Abandoned Pueblo, 238
Zuñi Paint and Condiment Cups, 244
Pueblo Wristlets, Moccasins, etc., 246
INTRODUCTION.
Some years ago these writings appeared in the _Independent_, _Atlantic
Monthly_, and _The Tribune_. My thanks are with the respective
editors by whose courtesy they assume this altered shape. Several
were published in a certain magazine which died young. I send cordial
greeting to its chief, and shed a few drops of ink over the nameless
one, loved of the gods. Fain would I believe no action of mine had
power to hasten that early and untimely end. The hurrying march in
which all must join, is so rapid, my first audience is quite out of
hearing; my first inklings have faded from the memory of readers except
the one, beloved of my soul, who asks why the old Pueblo papers have
not been reprinted. Ah, what exquisite flattery!
And just here I kiss the fair hands unseen which send such gracious
messages. Dropping flowers in my way, pansies for thoughts, rosemary
for remembrance, has made them the whiter and sweeter forevermore.
The Montezuma myth is so interwoven with the past and future of the
Indians that every allusion to their history and religion must of
necessity contain the revered name. The repetition in the compositions
now collected did not appear so glaringly when they were detached.
My first impulse was to omit such passages, but second thought sends
out the letters as when first offered to the public, with all their
imperfections (a good many), on their head.
It would be affectation to make secret what every writer understands:
(and what reader have I who is not a writer?) the pleasure with which
I gather my scattered children under a permanent cover. Family
resemblance is strong enough to identify them anywhere, but that is no
reason why they should not appear in shape which the world will little
heed nor long remember. They were written when the ancient Palace
I have tried to describe, was the residence of the Governor of New
Mexico; and, in turning the leaves after seven years, I am touched by
the same feeling which then moved me to pipe my little songs. Again I
feel the deep solitude of the mountains, taste the all pervading alkali
dust, and hear the sand-storm beating like sleet against the window
panes. The best reward they brought were friendly voices answering in
the blue distance across the Sierras, and cheering me with thought
that I had won the place of welcome visitor in happy homes my feet
may never enter; that through the bitter winter my room was kept by
warm firesides under the evening lamp--there where the treasured books
lie from day to day, looking like Elia’s old familiar faces. Dear to
the heart, beautiful and forever young, are the unseen friends whose
presence becomes an abiding consciousness to the writer.
CRAWFORDSVILLE, Indiana, March, 1888.
* * * * *
THE LAND OF THE PUEBLOS.
CHAPTER I. THE JOURNEY.
I am 6,000 feet nearer the sky than you are. Come to the sweet and
lonely valley in the West where, free from care and toil, the weary
soul may rest; where there are neither railroads, manufactures, nor
common schools; and, so little is expected of us in the way of public
spirit, we almost venture to do as we please, and forget we should
vote, and see to it that the Republic does not go to the “demnition
bow-wows.”
Santa Fé is precisely what the ancient Pueblos called it--“the
dancing-ground of the sun.” The white rays quiver like light on
restless waters or on mirrors, and night is only a shaded day. In our
summer camp among the foothills we need no tents. It is glorious with
stars of the first magnitude, that hang low in a spotless sky, free
from fog, mist, or even dew; not so much as a mote between us and the
shining floor of heaven.
The star-patterns of my coverlet are older than the figures which
delighted our grandmothers. They come out not one by one, as in our
skies; but flash suddenly through the blue. Day and night make a brief
parting. The short twilight closes, and lo! in the chambers of the
east Orion, belted with jewels, Arcturus and his sons, and even the
dim lost Pleiad, forgetting the ruins of old Troy, brightens again.
Wrapped in soft, furry robes, we lie on the quiet bosom of Mother Earth
in sleep, dreamless and restful as the slumber of those who wake in
Paradise. I cannot say, with the enthusiastic land-speculator: “Ladies
and gentlemen, in this highly-favored region the Moon is always at its
full.” But her face is so fair and bright I am her avowed adorer, and
many a thousand miles from
“‘a----’ the steep head of old Latmos,”
she stoops above the sleeping lover, to kiss her sweetest.
Old travelers tell you the country is like Palestine; but it is like
nothing outside of the Garden eastward in Eden. New Mexico is a slice
of old Mexico; that is, a western section of Spain. “Who knows but you
may catch sight of some of your castles there!” Such was the invitation
which came to me across the Rocky Mountains. I hearkened to the
voice of the “charmer, charming never so wisely,” and, “fleeing from
incessant life,” started on a journey of two thousand miles. It was
in the mild September, and the Mississippi Valley flamed with banners
crimson, golden, in which Autumn shrouded the faded face of the dead
Summer.
We sped through Ohio, land of lovely women; past Peoria, fair Prairie
City, the smoke of whose twenty-three distilleries obscures the spires
of her churches beautiful as uplifted hands at prayer; through the
bridge at St. Louis, where the fairies and giants once worked together,
making a crossing over the great Father of Waters; on we went,
journeying by night and by day.
Oh! the horror of the chamber of torture known to the hapless victims
as the sleeping-car. The gay conductor, in gorgeous uniform, told us,
in an easy, off-hand manner, a man had been found dead in one of the
top berths some weeks before. I only wondered any who ventured there
came out alive. “Each in his narrow cell forever laid” went through my
mind as I lay down to wakefulness and unrest in blankets filled with
vermin and disease. The passengers were the same you always journey
with: the young couple, tender and warm; the old couple, tough and
cool; laughing girls, in fluffy curls and blue ribbons, who found a
world of pleasure in pockets full of photographs; the good baby, that
never cried, and the bad baby, that cried at nothing; the fussy woman
everybody hated, who counted her bundles every half hour, wanted the
window up, and no sooner was it raised than she wanted it down again.
There, too, was the invalid in every train on the Pacific Road. A
college graduate of last year, poor, ambitious, crowded four years’
study into three, broke down, and now the constant cough tells the rest
of the old tale. He was attended by a young sister, warm and rosy as he
was pallid and chill, who in the most appealing way took each one of
us into her confidence, and told how Rob had picked up every step of
the road since they left Sandusky. When we entered the wide, monotonous
waste between Missouri and Colorado, how the brave girl would try to
cheer the boy with riddles, stories, games, muffle him in her furs,
slap his cold hands, and lay her red, ripe cheek to his, as if she were
hushing a baby. In the drollest way, she resisted the blandishments
of the vegetable ivory man, the stem-winder, the peanut vender, and
with tragic gesture waved off the peddler of the “Adventures of Sally
MacIntire, who was Captured by the Dacotahs. A Tale of Horror and of
Blood!” When the dazzling conductor illuminated the passage of the
car with his Kohinoor sleeve-buttons and evening-star breastpin, he
would stop beside the sick boy, and in a fresh, breezy way seemed to
throw out a morning atmosphere of bracing air, as well as hopeful
words. “Now,” he would say, twirling his thumb in a Pactolian chain
which streamed across his breast and emptied into and overflowed a
watch-pocket bulgy with poorly hid treasure--“now we are coming to a
place fit to live in. When you get to Pike’s Peak, you will be 7,000
feet above the level of the sea. It’s like breathing champagne. You’ll
come up like a cork; keep house in a snug cottage; go home in the
Spring so fat you can hardly see out of your eyes.” Vain words. The
poor boy knew, and we knew, he was fast nearing the awful shadow which
every man born of woman must enter alone. The mighty hand was on him.
He was going to Colorado Springs only to die. We parted at La Junta,
crowding the windows, gayly waving good-byes. I can never forget my
last sight of the sweet sister, with her outspread shawl sheltering him
from the crisp wind, which blew from every direction at once, as I have
seen a mother-bird flutter round her helpless nestlings. The good baby
held up its sooty, chubby hand saying, “ta, ta,” as long as they were
in sight, and the mothers smiled tearfully to each other when a rough
miner from the Black Hills said, softly, as if talking to himself: “I
reckon, if that young woman’s dress was unbuttoned, wings would fly
out.”
Five hundred miles across plains level as the sea, treeless, waterless,
after leaving the Arkansas River. Part of our road lay along the old
California trail, the weary, weary way the first gold-seekers trod,
making but twenty miles a day. Under ceaseless sunshine, against
pitiless wind, it is not strange that years afterward their march was
readily tracked by graves, not always inviolate from the prairie wolf.
The stiff buffalo-grass rose behind the first explorers, and even
horses and cattle left no trail. They took their course by the sun,
shooting an arrow before them; before reaching the first arrow they
shot another; and in this manner marched the entire route up to the
place where they found water and encamped.
Occasionally we saw a herdsman’s hut standing in the level expanse,
lonely as a lighthouse; nothing else in the blank and dreary desert
but the railroad track, straight as a rule, narrow as a thread, and
its attendant telegraph, precious in our sight as a string of Lothair
pearls. Not a stick or stone in a hundred miles. Only the sky, and the
earth, clothed with low grass-like moss, the stiff sage-brush, and a
vile trailing cactus, which crawls over the ground like hairy green
snakes. To be left in such a spot would be like seeing the ship sail
off leaving us afloat in fathomless and unknown seas.
After a day seeming long as many a month has, the fine pure air of
Colorado touched with cooling balm our tired, dusty faces; and against
the loveliest sunset sky, in a heavenly radiance, all amber and
carmine, the Spanish peaks majestically saluted us.
Oh! the glory of that sight! Two lone summits, remote, inaccessible;
the snowy, the far-off mountains of poetry and picture. Take all the
songs the immortal singers have sung in praise of Alpine heights and
lay them at their feet; it yet would be an offering unworthy their
surpassing loveliness. Now we lost sight of them; now they came again;
then vanished in the evening dusk, dropped down from Heaven like the
Babylonish curtain of purple and gold which veiled the Holy of Holies
from profane eyes. Fairest of earthly shows that have blest my waking
vision, they stand alone in memory, not to fade from it till all fades.
At Trinidad we left the luxury of steam, and came down to the
territorial conveyance. Think, dear reader, of two days and a night on
a buckboard--an instrument of torture deadly as was ever used in the
days of Torquemada, and had anything its equal been resorted to then
there would have been few heretics.
It is a low-wheeled affair floored with slats, the springs under
the seats so weak that at the least jolt they smite together with
a horrible blow, which is the more emphatic when over-loaded, as
when we crossed the line which bounds “the most desirable of all the
Territories.” Our night was without a stop, except to change horses.
Jolt, jolt; bang, bang; cold to the marrow, though huddled under
buffalo robes and heavy blankets. How welcome the warmth of the sun
on our stiffened limbs; and the early breeze, sweet and fresh as airs
across Eden when the evening and the morning were the first day! It
has a sustaining quality which almost serves for food and sleep. There
journeyed with us in the white moonshine spectres, shadowy, ghost-like.
Now the sun comes up, we see they are kingly mountains, wrapped in
robes of royal purple and wearing crowns of gold. The atmosphere is so
refined and clear, they appear close beside us; but the driver says
they are forty miles away. Noon comes on, hot and still, with a desert
scorch. We journey over a road surprisingly free of stones; across a
blank and colorless plain, bounded by mountain-walls which stand grim
and stark like bastions of stone. Another night and another long day.
The driver is not on his high horse now. He has no funny stories of
the grizzly and cinnamon bear, which he assures us can climb trees,
sticking their claws in the bark, easily as the telegraph-mender,
with clamps on his feet, goes up the pole. Along the roadside stretch
beautiful park-like intervales, studded with dwarf pines, that appear
planted at regular distances.
Will the day never end? I have no voice nor spirit, and begin to
think the wayside crosses mark graves of travelers, murdered, not by
assassins, but by the buckboard; and feebly clutch my fellow-sufferer,
and shake about in a limp, distracted way, pitying myself, as though
I were somebody else. I can hold out no longer. But wake up! Wake up!
This is the home-stretch. The horses know it and dash across a little
brook which they tell me is the Rio Santa Fé.
Pleasant the sound of running water; tender the light of the evening on
the mountains which encircle the ancient capital of the Pueblos. As we
approach, it is invested with indescribable romance, the poetic glamor
which hovers about all places to us foreign, new, and strange. We go
through a straggling suburb of low, dark adobe houses. How comfortless
they look! Two Mexicans are jabbering and gesticulating, evidently
in a quarrel. Swarthy women, with dismal old black shawls over their
heads, sit in the porches. I hear the “Maiden’s Prayer” thumped on a
poor piano. How foolish in me to think that I could escape the sound
of that feeble petition! Lights stream through narrow windows, sunk in
deep casements, and a childish voice, strangely at variance with the
words, is singing “Silver Threads among the Gold” to the twanging of a
weak guitar. Softly the convent-bells are ringing a gracious welcome to
the worn-out traveler. The narrow streets are scarcely wide enough for
two wagons to pass. The mud walls are high and dark. We reach the open
Plaza. Long one-story adobe houses front it on every side. And this is
the historic city! Older than our government, older than the Spanish
Conquest, it looks older than the hills surrounding it, and worn-out
besides. “_El Fonda!_” shouts the driver, as we stop before the hotel.
A voice, foreign yet familiar, gayly answers: “_Ah! Senora, a los
pieds de usted._” At last, at last, I am not of this time nor of this
continent; but away, away across the sea, in the land of dreams and
visions, “renowned, romantic Spain.”