North of El Palacio, is a waste spot of earth, covering perhaps half
an acre. It contains neither grass, weeds, nor moss, not even a
straggling sage-bush or forlorn cactus; nothing but bare desert sand
and a solitary cotton-wood tree, whose luxuriant leafage gives no sign
of its struggle for life in a region waterless ten months of the year.
High adobe walls bound the sterile enclosure on two sides; the third
is occupied by government buildings; and the fourth is partly wall and
partly abandoned offices, always locked and unused since the brave days
when the Spaniards lorded it like princes in “The Palace.”
Ever a lover of lonesome places, I had often wistfully eyed
these mysterious apartments; and one day, being sadly in want of
entertainment, hunted up the keys and sallied across the back yard,
determined to explore the secret places. The first door I tried to
open was made of heavy double plank, studded with broad-headed nails.
I fitted a key into the rough, old-fashioned lock, and, pushing with
all my strength, it slowly swung on rusty hinges, into a room, perhaps
seventeen by twenty feet in size, barely high enough for a man to stand
upright in. As I stepped on the loose pine boards of the floor, a swarm
of mice scampered to their burrows in the walls, and the deathlike
smell of mildew and decay smote the afflicted sense. Well for the
chronicles is it there are no rats in the territory. Involuntarily
I paused at the entrance, to let the ghosts fly out; and several
minutes passed before my eyes, accustomed to the darkness of this
treasure-house, could see the shame of its neglect.
I had entered the historic room of New Mexico! Tumbled into barrels and
boxes, tossed on the floor in moist piles, lay the written records of
events stretching over a period of more than three hundred years, the
archives of a Province known as Nueva Espagña, large as France. In an
atmosphere less dry than this they would have rotted ages ago. Nothing
but the extreme purity of the air saved them from destruction.
It was mid-winter, and melted snow slowly trickled through the
primitive roofing of mud and gravel. The sun shone brightly, and,
though days had passed since the last white spot disappeared from the
surface of the earth, still a hideous ooze filtered through the ashes
and clay overhead, and dripped in inky streams down the pine rafters
and walls. I am told the house was anciently used as a stable. If the
first Spanish commandants and governor-generals kept their horses in
this windowless cave, sorry am I for the gallant steeds they professed
to love next to their knightly honor and the ladies.
The names of some of the _Conquistadores_ have faded from history, and
others live only in tradition. Nearly all the earlier important records
have been destroyed. They accumulated rapidly in immense masses, and
the heavy lumber was shifted from place to place by officials, to
make room for things more valuable. Careless hands and the slow wear
of time were not as effectual in blotting them out as a certain chief
executive--a lineal descendant of Genseric, appointed by President of
the United States--who made his administration memorable by building
a bonfire of parchments and papers, filled with priceless material,
never to be replaced. He also sold a quantity as waste paper. By happy
accident, a portion of this merchandise was afterward recovered, though
one might think it as well employed in wrapping tea and sugar as going
to decay in this neglected den. We grow indignant over the spirit which
could not spare one reader of the picture-writing of the Aztecs or the
_quippus_ of Peru. What shall we say of the man in authority who, in
the best age of culture and research, abuses a trust like this, who
deliberately fired whole wagon-loads of manuscripts of the deepest
interest to the archæologist, the historian, and student.
He had not even the excuse of the first Archbishop of Mexico, who burnt
a mountain of manuscripts in the market-place, stigmatizing them as
magic scrolls; and was more guilty than Cardinal Ximines, who in the
trial by fire alone could exercise the sorcery concealed in the Arabic
manuscripts of Granada.
The delusions of fifteen hundred years are not easily put to flight,
and there might be a drop of charity for the bigotry and intolerance
of the Spaniard; but the destroyer of history in New Mexico has no
defense. I suppress his name. An archæologist from New England is now
busy among a heap of the sold documents, piled away in the back room of
an old shop by a citizen of Santa Fé, who forsaw that they might one
day be of interest, possibly of value.
It was my pleasant work to help in overhauling the state papers, and
the quiet hours of careful work were well rewarded. All sorts of papers
were tossed together in the cavernous hole. I dug out quantities of
printed matter of recent date, mixed with the old and weather-stained
official documents, letters, copies of reports and dispatches,
marking political changes from 1580, when Santa Fé was founded by
Don Antonio de Espego, to the year 1879. The province at first was
ruled by military governors, appointed by the viceroys of Mexico, and
communication with them and with Spain was so rare they reigned as
despots, in haughty pride of place, and bitterly abused their power
to kill, enslave, plunder, and subdue the heathen claimed for an
inheritance.
The first MS. opened bore the date 1620. It was illuminated with heavy
seals and signed with strange, puzzling _rubricas_; but the signature
was completely effaced. It was part of a frozen chunk, tied with hempen
cord, and peeled off a block wet through and through. The excellence of
the parchment-like paper kept it from dissolving into a lump of sticky
pulp.
Some papers were soaked so it was necessary to spread them on boards,
to be dried in the sun, before being deposited in a place of safety.
Rich treasure for the mining of the future historian. The eternal west
wind fluttered mockingly among crumpled leaves torn from the book of
human fate, and a sudden gust whirled a yellow scrap high up in the
branches of the cotton-wood tree. With the help of a Mexican boy, I
rescued from ruin what proved a portion of the journal of Otervin,
military commandant of Nueva Espagña, who undertook to reduce the
Pueblos to subjection in 1681, and found them too many for him.
Mixed with high heaps of worthless trash were worn and water-stained
fragments, precious as the last leaves of the Sybil. These, pieced
together, were smoothed with care and laid by for after reference.
Poor, perishing records of ambitions baffled and hopes unfulfilled;
and, dreaming over the names of men who sought immortality on earth and
now sleep forgotten, I deeply felt their teaching--the law that any
lasting condition is impossible in the hurrying march we call life,
where nothing is constant but change, nothing certain but death.
Through the lazy Mexican afternoons I groped along the musty annals
with steady purpose, and in the shadowy history wandered back two
centuries. Among the MSS, I lived in the days when William of Orange
fought the grand battle which decided the fate of the Stuarts and
established English dominion over the seas; when the sun of Poland was
sinking in endless night with the dying Sobieski, our patriot hero of
early romance, whose name, consecrated by poetry and heroism, dwells
in memory with Emmet and Kossuth; when Madame de Maintenon, at the
court of the king, who was worshipped as a demigod, was writing long
letters of the fatigues of court, and how she worried from morning till
midnight, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, and amuse the old
tyrant, who was past being amused. Spain had been shaken by desperate
wars, and out of armies nursed in victories came a host of adventurers
to the New World, where glory and fortune were reported as waiting for
every newcomer. They were not colonists, emigrants, as with us, who
had everything to gain and nothing to lose; but men of the sword, used
to command, who loved no music so well as trumpet and drum, the rattle
and clang of arms. Reckless gamblers as Spaniards have been in all ages
everywhere, they were ready to stake vast possessions on a venture
in mines reported richer than ancient Ophir, and to risk assured
fame for possible conquest, among nations whose walled cities were
described as equal to the best strongholds of Islam. The rich mediæval
glow enveloping some of the reports charms the literary forager, not
overfond of statistics, who loves no figures so well as figures of
speech. Men in their summer prime organized roving expeditions in quest
of fortune, gallant freebooters, made ferocious by greed of gold, who
started gayly, as to a regatta, for the unexplored province of Nueva
Espagña.
They found the Promised Land one of which the greater part must
forever remain an uninhabitable magnificence. Yet everything reminded
them of old Spain, especially of the Castiles. The chain of snowy
peaks, accessible only to the untamable Apache, projected against the
speckless blue the blade of white teeth which suggested the name of
Sierra Nevada. The dry, scorched table-lands, league after league,
stretching away under the blazing sun a shadeless desert, were like the
_mesas_ in the dreariest portions of the kingdom of Philip--and the
mud hovels of adobe, with open apertures for windows, were a perpetual
reminder of the homeless habitations of the Castilian peasantry.
The few rich valleys (_pasturas_) capable of cultivation by irrigation
were not unlike the _vegas_ of the East, and little streams of melted
snow-water, filtered down from the “iced mountain-top,” cold as snow,
clear as glass, still bear the lovely names of the rills sparkling
along the Alpujarras.
The old hidalgos looked for better things than half-naked savages, mud
huts, and stunted cornfields. Sterile and forbidding as the country
appeared, they believed an inheritance was reserved for them behind
the gloomy mountain walls, beyond the awful cañon, where the black,
rushing river is shut in by sheer precipices fifteen hundred feet high.
Sustained by a faculty of self-persuasion equaled by no other people on
the face of the earth, they pushed on and on through the very heart of
the wilderness, nearly to the present site of Omaha. This was more than
three hundred years ago; yet are the novel-writers complaining that we
have no antiquity, no mystery, no dim lights and deep shadows, where
the imagination of the story-teller may flower and bear fruit.