Traveling westward, there came to our view the first Placer Mountain;
behind it the melon-shaped Sandia, 13,000 feet in air; and far
southward the detached range of the Manzana Mountains. A plateau, the
highest of equal area on the globe, varied with sterile _vegas_ and
dreary sierras, which reminded the early adventurers of their own Old
Castile, and so like it one can imagine it had once been the home of
wandering tribes, which have long since taken up their spears, struck
their tents, and sought new camps in the furthest East.
The grama grass is low and dry, like wiry moss, and in the distance
takes a wan, ashen hue, more ghastly than white. The cactus is the only
shrub in sight. A gaunt, starved thing, the leper of the vegetable
world, forbidding our approach.
The lively prairie dog (who is no dog, but a marmot) saluted as
we passed. Having early learned the fifth beatitude, I suppress a
description of him. Nor shall we ask how he exists without water,
or seek to know if there is a snake at the bottom of his den, and a
strange bird dwelling there in peace and safety.
It was June; but not the leafy month of June. The only timber--dwarf
cedar--which can grow in this barren soil was cut away years ago; and
absence of trees includes absence of birds. The friendly trill and
flutter heard about nests in shady places are sadly missed. Now and
then a black wing flapped overhead, and a crow flew down in the road.
Living equally well on seed, roots, flesh, he thrives alike in all
places. And, except this one sign of life, we may journey in some
directions a whole day and see neither man nor beast, bird nor insect.
We missed the woodland scents, too; the forest fragrance of mint,
thyme, pennyroyal, and the beeches, whose shadows are the curtains of
the morning, holding its freshness against the power of the sun till
high noon. The eye soon wearies of the leaden hues, and longs for the
dark leafage which is the glory of the Mississippi Valley. The blank,
scorched plain, lying stark and still in the fierce, white light,
brought a sense of loneliness and depression impossible to shake off.
There was no rest for the sight or the soul.
But what is this apparition starting from a distant clump of
greasewood--a grisly animal, apparently neither brute nor human?
Rapidly coming toward us, we recognize a creature of the _genus homo_.
“In the desert no one meets a friend,” says the Oriental proverb; and
there was a general stir for arms among the defenders, and mute shaking
of the head, not intended to be seen, when nothing more serviceable
than a cactus cane was found in the ambulance.
Every reader knows the border is the chosen field of the dime-novel
hero; a safe refuge for cut-throats and desperadoes of the lowest
grades, who live by robbery and plunder, and that it is wise for the
tourist to put on his pistol with his watch, or, in the expressive
slang of the frontier, he may be blighted by lead fever before sundown.
Outlaws from Mexico and Texas haunt the mountain springs and prowl
about the cañons of the territories; and, in dread of them, hunters go
in parties, and look well to their arms when they enter narrow defiles
or a dark, lonesome gulch.
These vagabonds subsist on the fat of the land, where the country is
most sparsely settled, and are the only buyers who have credit and are
not crowded for payment by the Israelites who control the dry goods
business of the territory. The ranchero never refuses them milk, eggs,
or mutton; and the dark-eyed Mexican girl serves them with diligence,
under promise of payment when they come again. Given a voice in the
matter, this is not such a character as we like to encounter on an
empty plain, even in broad daylight; and, as he neared us, the ladies
involuntarily drew close together and scanned him thoroughly.
A powerful fellow, of giant frame and dangerous muscle, and, though
unarmed, a foe to dread in any fight. He wore a shoddy coat, probably
bought on compulsory credit of the Wandering Jew of Tularosa; buckskin
pants, with fringed side-stripes of Indian work, tucked inside of
heavy cavalry boots, ponderous brass spurs jingling as he walked; a
red cotton handkerchief knotted around his throat. An immense slouched
_sombrero_--in the style of the Mexican _caballero_--drab, with a
rosette and cord of red and tinsel, covered his forehead and shaded
eyes that were restless and penetrating like a blackbird’s. A shaggy,
unshorn mane, reddened with dust and sunburn, fell over the buffalo
neck and shoulders; matted beard, a very jungle, reached almost to the
cartridge-belt, and, blown aside by the wind, revealed the outline of
revolvers in his breast-pockets. He carried a Winchester rifle easily
as a gentleman carries his cane; a leather belt, buckled around his
waist, was filled with cartridges, and bore a murderous-looking knife
in its sheath.
When this shape, of aspect threatening and sinister, came within
friendly hail, we bowed with much suavity.
“Texas Jack! _Buenos dias!_” said Juan Fresco, who well became his
name; and serene as summer, he shifted the reins and laid his hand on
the _navaja_.
The frontiersman touched his hat-brim with his big forefinger, sunburnt
to a vermilion red, quietly passed on toward the Galisteo, and we saw
him no more. When fairly out of sight of the outlaw, we felt brave as
lions.
“A prospector,” said one, mildly.
“Yes, and never without a prospect,” said the antiquarian, bringing out
an old witticism.
“A black sheep without any white spots,” added another. “They always
spring up on the frontier.”
And, very hilarious under the sense of relief, we courageously debated
what we would have done had the robber attempted robbery and ordered
us to hold up our hands. The men of the pen would have been mere boys
in the grip of this son of the border; and we cheered ourselves with
telling tales of how “just such men” had gone out without pistols to
seek their fortunes, and had never been heard of afterward.
The weakest of weeklies is dull and insipid compared with the daily
experiences recounted in New Mexico; and restless souls who hate
trammels, who love danger for its own sake, and have looked death in
the face till they cease to fear it, find a special charm in the wild
“game flavor” of the frontier.
The borderer who crossed our path was the sort of soldier who in March,
1862, under the rebel General Sibley, came up from Texas, forded the
Rio Grande at a point below Fort Craig, fought the Union troops under
Gen. Canby at Valverde, and again at Cañon Glorietta, fifteen miles
from Santa Fé. In that narrow pass, where flanking was out of the
question, a severe fight between infantry and artillery occurred, in
which the rebels were victorious, and Sibley entered the capital city
without meeting further resistance.
His Texan Rangers, like Texas Jack, were half savage; a desperate
set, having no higher motive than plunder and adventure. Each one
was mounted on a mustang horse, and carried a rifle, a tomahawk, a
bowie-knife, a pair of Colt’s revolvers, and a lasso for catching and
throwing the horses of a flying enemy. Not valuing their own lives at a
pin’s fee, they gave no quarter and expected none.
About eleven o’clock the breeze dropped and the sun came up with a dry,
sultry scorch, like flame. Our spirits flagged, the stories ended,
laughter and song died away; nor could we rouse to the least interest
in a herdsman’s ranche--a mud-built hive, swarming with Mexican drones.
“What a weary land!” said Thalia.
“All lands are weary for women,” said her elder sister; and for a time
nothing was heard but the harsh grinding of wheels in the gravelly sand.
In such emptiness it was a stirring event to be overtaken by a Pueblo
Indian, who passed us with a swinging stride, rarely seen off the
boards of a country theatre. This
“Wild warrior of the Turquois Hills”
is tame enough now. Always a tiller of the soil, he is the original,
in fact, the aboriginal granger. A picturesque figure, in a handsome
striped blanket, with red girth around his waist and a crown of
green leaves, like the classic fillet, shading his forehead. We were
fortunate, too, in seeing a half-grown boy chase jack-rabbits with
a curved stick, hurling it with whirring sound, in the style of the
boomerang, till lately thought exclusively Australian. The stripling
appeared like the bird-hunter of the Nile, carved in _basso relievo_
on the oldest tomb at Thebes. Weapon and attitude of the Egyptian are
precisely the same as those of the boyish red hunter of North America.
The more we learn of Eve’s family, the surer the proofs of a common
parentage. Guided by the same instinct, the tools of various
nations, unknown to each other, are the same and the measure of
their advancement; showing how little depends on accident, and how
closely they are connected with the organism, and, therefore, with the
necessities of man. So striking is the parallel between aborigines in
every continent that with difficulty do we divest ourselves of the idea
that there must have been some direct intercommunication.
A band of tender green, restful to the sight, follows the course of a
poor, tired, sluggish stream, sixteen miles from Santa Fé; and a mile
or two down its soundless current we described a group of cotton-wood
trees--an oasis, indeed--shading a low adobe house. The green leaves
in restless flutter and the brook gave the spot an appearance of home
not often found in the square of brown mud wall which makes the Mexican
domicile.
Along the margin of the nameless stream is a border of alkali,
sprinkled in patches like salt over the ground. Of course, we were
struck with thirst at sight of running water; but prudently contented
ourselves with that in our canteens, rather than risk drinking alkali,
which abounds in New Mexico, so strong in some streams that fish cannot
live in them. In many places the ranchero digs, to find only a mocking
fluid, deadly alike to man, beast, and vegetation. And we comprehend
the Arabian saying: “The water provider is always blest, being daily
remembered in the prayers of the faithful.”
Our road was an easy descent all the way, the Cerillos being nearly
3,000 feet lower than Santa Fé. The founder of the antique city (Don
Antonio de Espego) described this country with Spanish exuberance, in
a letter to Philip Second: “The earth is filled with gold, silver, and
turquoises.” And the gallant adventurer threw such glowing light upon
it, the king at once sent a thousand men to colonize and possess the
province.
As we quietly journeyed along, I pondered on the very moderate basis
the heroic Cavaliers, those old Spanish filibusters, had for the
brilliant reports sent back to Spain. Leaving the ambulance within a
mile of the mines, we toiled wearily along the mountains, well named
the Rocky. Their surface is strewn with fragments, broken as if chipped
with hammers--a ragged pavement, which bruised our feet, tore our
shoes, and wore out our patience; and when at last we reached the first
mine, we thought it but a continuation of _Los Cerillos_. The most
ancient is much the largest, and to this we directed our steps. Under
the dizzy crags which overhang it is a sheltered recess, blackened
with smoke and bedded with ashes made by camp-fires of Indians, who
still frequent the spot, in search of the precious _chalchuite_. With
difficulty we reached this cave, and, leaning over the edge, looked
down and saw, not a narrow, black shaft, but half a mountain cut away.
Undoubtedly, the mineral lay here which, through countless generations,
furnished the Indian kings with their most valued ornaments. The
yawning pit is two hundred feet deep and more than three hundred in
diameter. Probably the work of aborigines before De Soto’s requiem
mingled with the voice of the rushing waters of his burial place; when
Columbus had seen the New World only in that vision of the night,
where the unknown voice whispered: “God will cause thy name to be
wonderfully resounded through the earth, and will give thee the keys
of the gates of the Ocean, which are closed with strong chains.” On
the walls of the great excavation Nature has gently, patiently done
what she could to smooth the rugged crags, and has thrown out of their
fissures a scant growth of shrubs, and trailed a scarlet blossom here
and there on a thread-like stem. At the bottom, on stones crumbling
with age, stained and weather-worn, are dwarf pines, the growth of the
centuries. In this close amphitheatre there is no breeze to stir their
tops, and their motionless foliage, with its somber shadows, adds to
the ever-present mountain-gloom.
Thousands of tons of rock have been crushed from the solid mass, and
thrown up in such a high heap it seems another mountain, overgrown
with old pines and dry gray mosses. On a few fragments we noticed the
turquois stain--“indication” of valuable mineral. When we consider
that all this digging, hewing, and hacking were done by hand-labor
alone, without knowledge of domestic animals, iron, or gunpowder, the
_débris_ carried away in sacks of skins, the enormity of the work is
the more impressive. The tradition is that the _chalchuite_ mines,
through immemorial ages known to the primitive race, were possessed
by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Indian slaves then worked
them, under the lash of the conqueror, until 1680, when, by accident, a
portion of the rock from which we had our first view fell, and killed
thirty Pueblos. The Spaniards immediately made a requisition on the
town of San Marcos for more natives to take their places; when, with
a general uprising, they drove the hated oppressor from the country
as far south as El Paso del Norte. I give the tale for what it is
worth. Mining atmospheres are the favorite haunts of fable, and a
spice of truth is enough to flavor whole volumes of stories, charming
but delusive. An airy legend hovers about Santa Fé that two stones
from “_La Canada de las Minas_”--“Glen of Mines”--are still among the
crown jewels of Arragon. But _chalchuites_ were valueless after being
once submitted to the jewelers of Spain; and the sparkling story, like
many another told by the camp-fire, loses its original brightness when
removed to the searching light of the student’s lamp.
Careful analysis shows the constituents of the _chalchuites_ are nearly
the same as those of the Persian turquoises, and their formation the
result of infiltration. Sometimes they are washed up by heavy rains;
but usually are discovered by digging in the sandstone or are broken
out from the body of the rock.
Not being disposed to dig, we retraced our path, and climbed around to
the top of the shelving crag above us, and looked over the plateau.
Eastwardly it stretches toward Santa Fé, beyond which the stony
mountains lift their high heads. On the southwest it opens toward
the Rio Grande in a measureless vista, where earth and sky appear to
meet. A plain, oppressive in its vastness, lying in the midst of a
stone wilderness, its sameness relieved by the solitary peaks, Sandia
and Albuquerque. In every direction stand mountains grim and fixed as
walls of adamant, apparently immovable as the throne of God. Low in the
horizon one feathery cloud hung moveless in a sapphire sky. The world
seemed stricken dead. No verdure to cool the parched grass; no water,
“the eye of the earth” glancing up toward heaven; no waving branches,
beckoning like friendly hands to cool shade and shelter: no wagon-road
or foot-path to mark the track of men; not a sound to break a
stillness which is not the hush of profound peace, but the everlasting
silence of death.
Save the one shining spot of gauzy vapor, the blue above was without
a blur. The sun was at meridian, and in its hard glitter the scorched
summits looked like they were at white heat. The sea is lonely; but
it has shifting color, sound, and motion. The silence of the land is
deeper. If there had been the note of a bird, the hum of bees, even
a grasshopper’s chirp, it had been a relief; but in the far-reaching
desolation I alone drew breath. All else was still as the breast when
the spirit has fled.
The influence was benumbing to the senses, and as I stood in infinite
solitude, a stone among stones, there came over me the feeling that
this melancholy waste is the skeleton of our Mother Earth; that the
dust of which all flesh is made has been blown away, scattered to the
four winds of heaven, leaving these gray old bones forlorn and unburied
through the long, slow centuries, till the coming of the Great Day for
which all other days were made.
The voices below were too remote for my hearing, and (how absurd it now
appears) it was “company” to spy a speckled chameleon, sunning himself
on a rock; and, as he quickly slipped between its cracks and vanished,
I was left the more alone. Listening to silence, as it were, there
swept across my memory the words of the hymn familiar in childhood as
the dear face which bent above my cradle:
“O’er all these wide-extended plains
Shines one eternal day.”
If the singer had ever faced the blinding glare of high noon on the
wide-extended plains of the Rocky Mountains, he would have tuned his
harp anew, and hymned the rivers of waters in a dry place, the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.
I soon sought that refuge from the desert scorch, and, snatching at
shrubs to keep from slipping, scrambled down the mountain by a dizzy,
winding way, the loosened stones rolling after me to the bottom of the
mine. How pleasant the smoke of the camp-fire! Its leaping flame and
crackle were a welcome back to life again. And never till then did I
know how much sweeter than harp or horn the sound of human voices can
be.
Long before I joined my companions I had heard shouts of exultation,
and, wondering what prospector had “struck it,” I learned that a piece
of _chalchuite_ had been brought out of the lining of a seam where it
had lain under the roots of a stunted shrub, in appearance not unlike
spicewood. It was near an inch in length, by half an inch in thickness;
a large and lovely specimen, the color sea-green, delicately shaded
into blue--the latter the result of decomposition, so the scientist
said.
The owner of this “regular bonanza” was our driver. He made no effort
to conceal his delight; and with reason, for it was a rare piece of
mineral, and he a lucky miner to obtain it with so little trouble, or
even to get it at all. Such a stone the gentle and gracious Montezuma
might have worn in his signet-ring or set in the clasp of his green
mantle of feather-work. Such a gift would have made still brighter
the bright eyes of his daughter, the laughing Princess Nenetzin, the
spoiled darling, whose death was the crowning horror of the _Noche
Triste_.
I had sniffed coffee from afar, and now we were ready to pass the cup
that not inebriates, sung by the temperate Cowper. Our cloth was laid
on a table-rock, the feast was spread, we ate, drank, and were merry.
The dumb spell of the desert snapt, only the peace of the perpetual
hills remained. Resting in the fragrant shade of the pines, we talked
of Montezuma, the saddest, proudest chief of Indian history, whose name
is still a majestic memory among the degraded, broken-hearted Pueblos.
Beautiful beliefs they cherish regarding him--the peculiar friend of
the red race, shadowy above all things, yet real above all things, who
dwelt among them as a god, yet a familiar friend. He was the brother
and equal of the Unseen One whose name it is death to utter; and the
chiefs still watch for him at sunrise beside the sacred fire in the
_estufa_, claiming his promise to come again from his throne in the
sun, and bring back the faded glories of his fallen people. All their
traditions point to the second advent of their beloved prophet, priest,
and king, who disappeared from the earth when it was young, and who
will not fail, in the fullness of time, to redeem the promise made to
his red children.
The ground was strewn with fragments of broken pottery, the unfailing
sign of the ancient Pueblo, the rightful owner of this soil. They
were colored maroon red, light clay, and dark brown, with markings
of black. At sight of them the antiquarian fell to wandering among
tombs, discoursing on fallen kingdoms, extinct races, wrecks of empire,
and columns voiceless as the gray stones of Pæstum. He was learned
and eloquent; but none of these things move me. Our little scraps
were but the elder and better counterparts of the poor potteries
the Pueblos make at this day; and merely prove, what I believe has
never been disputed, that North America has been inhabited from a
remote period. I know there are enthusiasts who insist there was a
prehistoric race, displaced by what we call aborigines, which had a
civilization comparing favorably with those of the Old World. What
that civilization was, let the stone hatchet, and the dingy pottery
with its graceless tracings testify, when laid beside relics from
Eturia the Beautiful. The Western fragments are in beggarly contrast
with the exquisite vases and jewel-work which are the model and despair
of the modern artist.
Several inferior bits of _chalchuite_ were dug out of the ancient
wastage; but the color was faint, as if they had not lain long enough
for a thorough dyeing. We added to our collection an arrowhead of
jasper and one of obsidian, nicely flaked and pointed; and gave a
dollar for the largest Indian hatchet I have ever seen, brought up by
the enterprising Juan Fresco from an abandoned silver mine hard by. It
was roughened and time-worn, and had lain there how long--ah! _Quien
sabe?_
It may interest some believer in the perishing theory of “Ages” to
know the Stone Age is not ended in New Mexico. Within the present
generation, it is said, remote tribes have used as a weapon, offensive
and defensive, the stone hatchet, tied by a thong of deer-skin to a
wooden handle. As Sir John Herschel said of something else, this is one
of those things which, according to received theories, ought not to
happen.
We lingered under the solemn pines, groping with shadows, visible and
unseen, loth to leave. The hoary hills, so lone and untrodden, began
to be possessed of strange enchantment. The place was ours by right of
discovery. We were a band of explorers, the first to break a silence
lasting since the morning stars sang at creation’s dawn. Perhaps the
witchery was a variation of the prevalent miner’s fever, for the day
was waning when we reluctantly gave over our search for precious
mineral.
In the shining of the loveliest afterglow this side of Heaven, we
sought the wagon, standing in the level expanse, like a ship at anchor.
A freshening breeze blew cheerily, and, turning back as we drove away,
we watched the swift-coming Night gather the mountains tenderly, one
by one, into her bosom, and touch their scarred, stern faces with
ineffable beauty.