THE END OF THE TRAIL
[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
THE PROMISED LAND.
Looking southward to the Gulf of California—and Mexico.]
BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
THE LAST FRONTIER: THE WHITE MAN’S WAR FOR
CIVILIZATION IN AFRICA. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50
GENTLEMEN ROVERS. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50
THE END OF THE TRAIL. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $3.00
THE
END OF THE TRAIL
THE FAR WEST FROM
NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA
BY
E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S.
AUTHOR OF “THE LAST FRONTIER,” “GENTLEMEN ROVERS,” ETC., ETC.
_WITH FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
AND A MAP_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1914
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published November, 1914
[Illustration]
TO
MY FRIEND AND FELLOW-ADVENTURER
ALBERT C. KUHN
OF
RANCHO YERBA BUENA
IN “THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT”
FOREWORD
In the dim dawn of history the Aryans, forsaking the birthplace of the
race upon the Caspian shore, poured through the passes of the Caucasus
and peopled Europe. By caravel and merchantman adventuring Europeans
crossed the western ocean and established a fringe of settlements along
this continent’s eastern rim. The American pioneers, taking up the
historic march, slowly but inexorably pressed westward, from the Hudson
to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Mississippi, from the Mississippi
across the plains, across the Rockies, until athwart the line of their
advance they found another ocean. They could go no farther, for beyond
that ocean lay the overpopulated countries of the yellow race. The white
man had completed his age-long migration toward the beckoning West; his
march was finished; in the golden lands which look upon the Pacific he
had come to the End of the Trail.
In the great march which substituted the wheat-field for the desert,
the orchard for the forest, the work was done by the hardiest breed of
adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation—the Pioneers.
And the pioneer has always lived on the frontier. Most people believe
that there is no longer any quarter of this continent that can properly
be called the frontier and that the pioneer is as extinct as the
buffalo. To prove that they are wrong I have written this book. Though
the gambler and the gun-fighter have vanished before the storm of public
disapproval; though the bison no longer roams the ranges; though the
express rider has given way to the express-train; in the hinterland of
that vast region which sweeps westward and northward from the Pecos to
the Skeena, and which includes New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon,
Washington, British Columbia, frontier conditions still endure and the
frontiersman is still to be found. In the unexplored and unexploited
portions of this, “the Last West,” white-topped prairie schooners—full
sisters of those which crossed the plains in ’49—creak into the
wilderness in the wake of the home seeker; the settler chops his little
farmstead from the virgin forest and rears his cabin of logs from the
trees which grew upon the site; mile-long pack-trains wend their way
into the northern wild; six-horse Concord coaches tear along the roads
amid rolling clouds of dust, their scarlet bodies swaying drunkenly upon
their leathern springs; out in the back country, where the roads run
out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher still rides the ranges in his
picturesque panoply of high-crowned Stetson and Angora chaps and vivid
shirt. But this is the last call. It is the last chance to see a nation
in the primeval stage of its existence. In a few more years, a very few,
there will be no place on this continent, or on any continent, that can
truthfully be called the frontier, and with it will disappear, never to
return, those stern and hardy figures—the pioneer, the prospector, the
packer, the puncher—who won for us the West.
The _real_ West—and by the term I do not mean that sun-kissed,
flower-carpeted coast zone, with its orange groves and apple orchards,
its palatial mansions and luxurious hotels, its fashionable resorts
and teeming, all-of-a-sudden cities, which stretches from San Diego to
Vancouver and which to the Eastern visitor represents “the West”—cannot
be seen from the terraces of tourist hostelries or the observation
platforms of transcontinental trains. Because I wished to visit those
portions of the West which cannot be viewed from a car-window and because
I wished to acquaint myself with the characteristics and problems and
ideals of the people who dwell in them, I travelled from Mexico to the
borders of Alaska by motor-car—the only time, I believe, that a car has
made that journey on its own wheels and under its own power. Because that
journey was so crowded with incident and obstacle and adventure, and
because the incidents and obstacles and adventures thus encountered so
graphically illustrate the conditions which prevail in “the Last West,”
is my excuse for having to a certain extent made a personal narrative of
the following chapters.
Without entering into a tedious recital of distances and road conditions,
I have outlined certain routes which the motorist who contemplates
turning the bonnet of his car westward might follow with profit and
pleasure. With no desire to usurp the guide-book’s place, I have deemed
it as important to describe that enchanted littoral which has become
the nation’s winter playground as to depict that back country which the
tourist seldom sees. Though I hold no brief for boards of trade and
kindred organisations, I have incorporated the more significant facts and
figures as to land values, soils, crops, climates, and resources which
every prospective home-seeker wishes to know. But, more than anything
else, I have tried to convey something of the spell of that big, open,
unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, glad-to-see-you land and
of the spirit of energy, industry, and determination which animates the
kindly, hospitable, big-hearted, broad-minded, open-handed men who dwell
there. They are the modern Argonauts, the present-day Pioneers. To them,
across the miles, I lift my glass.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 1
II. THE SKYLANDERS 33
III. CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 61
IV. THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 95
V. WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 123
VI. THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 155
VII. THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT 187
VIII. THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 211
IX. THE INLAND EMPIRE 237
X. “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON” 271
XI. A FRONTIER ARCADY 305
XII. BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 329
XIII. CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 351
XIV. BACK OF BEYOND 387
XV. THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 419
INDEX 455
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Promised Land _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
A Desert Dawn in New Mexico 4
Santa Fé: the Most Picturesque City between the Oceans 18
Remains of an Ancient Civilisation 24
The Land of the Turquoise Sky 38
Acoma: Supposed Ancient Site and Present Site 40
Acoma as It is To-Day 44
Acoma Hunter Home from the Hunt 48
Acoma Artisans 50
“Dance Mad!” 52
Young Acomans 54
The Education of a Young Hopi 56
The Pyramid-Pueblo of Taos 58
The Passing of the Puncher 64
Where the Roads Run Out and the Trails Begin 72
The Trail of a Thousand Thrills 88
Throwing the Diamond Hitch 90
Scenes in the Motor Journey Through Arizona 98
Not in Catalonia but in California 120
A Modern Version of the Sermon on the Mount 130
Santa Barbara, a City of Contrasts 168
The Mission of Santa Barbara 170
Lake Tahoe from the Slopes of the High Sierras 232
The Yosemite—and a Lady Who Didn’t Know Fear 250
Yosemite Youngsters, White and Red 252
The Greatest Oil Fields in the World 260
Over the Tehachapis 262
The Overland Mail 274
In the Oregon Hinterland 284
“Where Rolls the Oregon” 300
Where Rods Bend Double and Reels Go Whir-r-r-r 324
What the Road-Builders Have Done in Washington 332
The Unexplored Olympics 344
Where the Salmon Come from 348
Outposts of Civilisation 354
Breaking the Wilderness 356
Pack-Horses and a Pack-Dog 358
In the Great, Still Land 362
Sport on Vancouver Island 376
Life at the Back of Beyond 380
Transport on America’s Last Frontier 382
Transport on America’s Last Frontier 384
Scenes on the Cariboo Trail 400
Some Ladies from the Upper Skeena 422
Where No Motor-Car Had Ever Gone: Some Incidents of Mr. Powell’s
Journey Through the British Columbian Wilderness 428
Some Siwash Cemeteries 448
Heraldry in the Hinterland 450
A Land of Sublimity and Magnificence and Grandeur, of Gloom
and Loneliness and Dread 452
Map of the Far West, from New Mexico to British Columbia,
Showing the Route Followed by the Author _at end of volume_
THE END OF THE TRAIL
I
CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND
“The song of the deed in the doing, of the work still hot from the hand;
Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land.
While your merchandise is weighing, we will bit and bridle and rein
The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the plain;
And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired from that mighty race,
Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place;
And out of that subtle union, desert and mountain-flood,
Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no homes else had stood.”
I
CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND
“Isn’t this invigorating?” said a passenger on the Sunset Limited to a
lounger on a station platform as he inhaled delightedly the crisp, clear
air of New Mexico.
“No, sir,” replied the man, who happened to be a native filled with civic
pride; “this is Deming.”
The story _may_ be true, of course; but if it isn’t it ought to be,
for it is wholly typical of the attitude of the citizens of the
youngest-but-one of our national family. Indeed, I had not spent
twenty-four hours within the borders of the State before I had discovered
that the most characteristic and likeable qualities of its inhabitants
are their pride and faith in the land wherein they dwell. And this
despite the fact that their neighbours across the line in Arizona refer
to New Mexico slightingly—though not without some truth—as a State “where
they dig for water and plough for wood.”
Perhaps no region in the world, certainly none in the United States, has
changed so remarkably in the space of a single decade. Ten years ago the
only things suggested by a mention of New Mexico were cowboys, Hopi
snake-dances, Navajo blankets, and Harvey eating-houses. Five years ago
Deming was as typical a cow-town as you could find west of the Pecos.
Gin-palaces and gambling-hells were running twenty-four hours a day;
cattlemen in Angora chaps and high-crowned sombreros lounged under the
shade of the wooden awnings and used the sidewalks of yellow pine for
cuspidors; wiry, unkempt cow-ponies stood in rows along the hitching
rails which lined a street ankle-deep in dust. Those were the careless
days of “chaps and taps and latigo-straps,” when writers of the Wild West
school of fiction could find characters, satisfying as though made to
their order, in every barroom, and groups of spurred and booted figures
awaited the moving-picture man (who had not then come into his own) on
every corner.
All southern New Mexico was held by experts—at least they called
themselves experts—to be a waterless and next-to-good-for-nothing waste.
Government engineers had traversed the region and, without considering
it worth the time or trouble to sink test wells, had written it down in
their reports as being a worthless desert; and the gentlemen who make
the school geographies and the atlases followed suit by painting it a
speckled yellow, like the Sahara and the Kalahari. Real-estate operators,
racing westward to earn a few speculative millions in California, glanced
from the windows of their Pullmans at the tedious expanse of sun-swept
sand and, with a regretful sigh that Providence had been so careless as
to forget the water, settled back to their magazines and their cigars.
So the cattlemen who had turned their longhorns in among the straggling
scrub, to get such a living as they could from the sparse desert grasses,
were left in undisturbed possession, and if their uniform success in
finding water wherever they sank their infrequent wells suggested any
agricultural possibilities they were careful to keep the thought to
themselves.
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey._
A DESERT DAWN IN NEW MEXICO.]
One day, however, one of the men in the Pullman, instead of leaning
back regretfully, descended from the train, hired a horse, and rode out
into the mesquite-dotted waste. He told the liveryman that he was a
prospector, and, in a manner of speaking, he was. Being, incidentally,
the manager of one of the largest and most profitable ranches in
California, he was as familiar with the vagaries of the desert as a
cowboy is with the caprices of his pony; and, moreover, he understood
the science of irrigation from I to N. After a few days of quiet
investigation he dropped into the commissioner’s office in Deming one
morning and filed a claim for several hundred acres of land. Most of
those who heard about it said that he was merely a fool of a tenderfoot
who was throwing away his time and money and who ought to have a guardian
appointed to take care of him, but some of the wise old cattlemen looked
worried. Within a fortnight he had erected his machinery and was drilling
for water. And wherever his wells went down, there water came up: fine,
clear, sparkling water—gallons and gallons of it. It soused the thirsty
desert and turned its good-for-nothing sand into good-for-anything loam.
The seeds which the far-seeing Californian planted, sprouted, and the
sprouts became blades, and the blades shot into stalks of alfalfa and
corn and cane—and the future of all southern New Mexico was assured.
The news of the discovery of water in the Mimbres valley and of the
miracles that had been performed through its agency spread over the
country as though by wireless, and sun-tanned, horny-handed men from half
the States in the Union began to pile into Deming by every train, eager
to take up the land while it was still to be had under the hospitable
terms of the Homestead and Desert Land acts. It was in 1910 that the
Californian, John Hund, sunk his first well; when I was in the office of
the United States commissioner in Deming four years later I found that
the nearest unoccupied land was sixteen miles from the city limits.
Should you ever have occasion to fly over New Mexico in an aeroplane
you will have no difficulty whatever in recognising the Mimbres valley;
viewed from the sky it looks exactly like a bright-green rug spread
across one end of a vast hardwood floor. Most of the valley holdings
were, I noticed, of but ten or twenty acres, comparatively few of them
being more than fifty, for the New Mexican homesteader has found that
his bank-account increases faster if he cultivates ten acres thoroughly
rather than a hundred superficially. This lesson they have had hammered
into them not alone from experience but from observing the operations
of a couple of almond-eyed brethren named Wah, hailing originally,
I believe, from Canton, who own a twenty-three-acre truck-farm near
Deming. Those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads
clinging to the rocky hillsides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is
so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, seem but crude
and amateurish efforts in agriculture when compared with the efforts
to which these Chinese brothers have carried their intensive farming.
Though watered only by a small and primitive well, their farm graphically
illustrates what can be accomplished by paying attention to those
little things which the American farmer is accustomed contemptuously to
disregard, as well as being an object-lesson in the remarkable variety
of fruits and vegetables which the valley is capable of producing. These
Chinamen make every one of their acres produce three crops of vegetables
a year. Not a foot of soil is wasted. They even begrudge the narrow
strips which are used for paths. Fruit-trees and grape-vines border the
banks of the irrigation channels, and peas, beans, and tomatoes are grown
between melon rows. A drove of corpulent porkers attend voraciously to
the garden refuse and even the reservoir has had its usefulness doubled
by being stocked with fish. Were the New Mexicans notoriously _not_
lotus-eaters, the Brothers Wah would doubtless find still another use for
their reservoir by raising in it the Egyptian water-lily. It is paying
attention to such relatively insignificant details as these which makes
J. Chinaman, Esquire, the best gardener in the world. It pays, too,
for they told me in Deming that the Wahs, from their twenty-three-acre
holding, are increasing their bank-account at the rate of eight thousand
dollars a year. After noting the cordiality with which they were greeted
by the president of the local bank, I did not doubt it. I should like to
have a bank president greet me the way he did them.
I have seen many remarkable farming countries—in Rhodesia, for example,
and the hinterland of Morocco, and the Crimea, and the prairie provinces
of Canada, not to mention the Santa Clara and the Imperial valleys of
California—but I can recall none where soil and climate seemed to have
combined so effectively to befriend the farmer as in the valley of the
Mimbres. Imagine what a comfort it must be to do your farming in a region
where you will never have to worry about how long it will be before it
rains, nor to tramp about in the mud afterward. As the annual rainfall
in this portion of New Mexico does not exceed eight inches, there is
a generous margin left for sunshine. Instead of praying for rain, and
then cursing his luck because it doesn’t come, or because it comes too
heavily, the New Mexican farmer strolls over to his artesian well and
throws over an electric switch which sets the pump agoing. When his
fields are sufficiently irrigated he throws the switch back again. From
the view-point of health it would be hard to improve upon the climate
of the Mimbres valley, or, for that matter, of any other portion of
New Mexico, its elevation of four thousand three hundred feet, taken
with the fact that it is in the same latitude as Algeria and Japan and
southernmost California, giving it summers which are hot without being
humid or oppressive and winters which are never uncomfortably cold.
Like their neighbours in other parts of the Southwest, the farmers of
southern New Mexico have gone daft over alfalfa. To me—I might as well
admit it frankly—one patch of alfalfa looks exactly like another, and
they all look extremely uninteresting, but I suppose that if they were
netting me from fifty to seventy-five dollars an acre a year, as they
are their owners, I would take a more lively interest in them. I never
arrived at a town in New Mexico, dirty, hungry, and tired, but that there
was a group of eager boosters with a dust-covered automobile awaiting me
at the station.
“Jump right in,” they would say. “We have an alfalfa field over here that
we want to show you. It’s only about thirty miles across the desert and
we’ll get you back before the hotel dining-room is closed.”
They’re as enthusiastic about a patch of alfalfa in New Mexico as the
Esquimaux of Labrador are about a stranded whale.
If you have an idea that you would like to be a hardy frontiersman and
wear a broad-brimmed hat and become the owner of a ranch somewhere in
that region which lies between the Gila and the Pecos, it were well
to disabuse yourself of several erroneous impressions which seem
to prevail about life in the Southwest. In the first place, you can
dress just as much like the ranchmen whom you have seen depicted in
the magazines as you wish—fleecy _chaparejos_ and a horsehair hat
band and a pair of spurs that jingle like an approaching four-in-hand
when the wearer walks and all the rest of the paraphernalia—for they
are a tolerant folk, are the New Mexicans, and have become accustomed
to all sorts of queer doings by newcomers. In many respects they are
the politest people that I know. When I was in New Mexico I carried a
cane, and no one even smiled. But the newcomer must not imagine that
he can gallop madly across the ranges, at least in the vicinity of the
towns, for he is more likely than not to be hauled up before a justice
of the peace and fined for trespassing on some one’s alfalfa field or
cabbage patch. (Cabbages, though painfully prosaic, are about the most
profitable crop you can grow in New Mexico; they pay as high as three
hundred and fifty dollars an acre.) And the intending rancher must
make up his mind that he must begin at the beginning. New Mexico is no
place for the agriculturist _de luxe_ who expects to sit on the piazza
of his ranch-house and watch the hired men do the work. No, sirree! It
is a roll-up-your-sleeves-spit-on-your-hands-and-pitch-in land where
every one works and is proud of it. And there is always enough to do,
goodness knows! This is virgin soil, remember, and first of all it has
to be cleared of the _piñon_ and mesquite and chaparral which cover it.
This clearing and grubbing costs on an average, so I was told, about
five dollars an acre, but you get a supply of fire-wood in return—and
there’s nothing that makes a cheerier blaze on a winter’s night than a
hearth heaped with the roots of mesquite. In other countries you chop
down your fuel with an axe; in New Mexico you dig it up with a hoe.
Then there is the matter of well digging, which, including the cost of
boring, machinery, and housing, works out at from fifteen to twenty-five
dollars an acre. Since the construction of several large power-plants,
the cost of pumping has been greatly reduced by the use of electricity.
It is quite possible, of course, for the five or ten acre man to secure
tracts close to town with all the preliminary work done for him, water
being provided from a central pumping plant and his pro-rata share of the
capitalised cost added to the price of his land, which may be purchased,
like a piano or an encyclopedia, on the instalment plan. That will be
about all, I think, for facts and figures.
One of the most interesting things about the settlers with whom I talked
in southern New Mexico is that, so far as any previous knowledge of
agriculture was concerned, most of them were the veriest amateurs. One
man whom I met had taught school in Iowa for a quarter of a century, but
along in middle life he decided that there was more money to be made
in teaching corn and cabbages how to shoot than there was in teaching
the same thing to the young idea. Another was a Methodist clergyman
from Kentucky who told me that he had never had a real conception of
the hell-fire he preached about until he started in one scorching July
morning to sink an artesian well in the desert. Still a third successful
settler had been a physician in Oklahoma, while there are any number
of “long-horned Texicans,” as the Texan cattlemen are called, who have
moved over into New Mexico and become farmers. Scattered through the
country are a few Englishmen; not of the club-lounging, bar-loafing,
remittance-man type so common in Canada and Australia, but energetic,
hard-working youngsters who are earnestly engaged in building homes for
themselves in a new country and under an adopted flag. Not all of the
Englishmen who have come out to New Mexico have proven so steady or
successful, however, for a few years ago an English syndicate purchased
a Spanish land grant of some two million acres in the vicinity of Raton
and sent out a complete equipment of British managers, superintendents,
foremen, butlers, valets, men servants, lodge keepers, gardeners,
coachmen, and other functionaries, not to mention coaches, tandem carts,
a pack of foxhounds, and other paraphernalia of the sporting life. A man
who witnessed their detrainment at Raton told me that it was more fun
than watching the unloading of the Greatest Show on Earth. It was a great
life those Englishmen led while it lasted—tea at four every afternoon,
evening clothes for dinner, and then a few rubbers of bridge—but it
ended in the property being taken over at forced sale by a group of
hard-headed Hollanders, who harnessed the four-in-hands to ploughs, used
the tandem carts for hauling wood, set the hounds to churning butter, and
are making the big place pay dividends regularly.
Some two hundred miles north of Deming as the mail-train goes is
Albuquerque, the metropolis of the State—if the term metropolis can
properly be applied to a place with not much over twelve thousand
inhabitants—set squarely in the centre of the one hundred and twenty-two
thousand square mile parallelogram which is New Mexico. Albuquerque is
a railway centre of considerable importance, for from there one can
get through cars north to Denver and Pike’s Peak, south to the borders
of Mexico and its revolutions, and west to the Golden Gate. One of the
things that struck me most forcibly about Albuquerque—and the observation
is equally applicable to all the rest of New Mexico—is that instead of
having weather they enjoy climate. It is pretty hard to beat a land where
the moths have a chance to eat holes in your overcoat but never in your
bed blankets. Climate is, in fact, Albuquerque’s most valuable asset,
and she trades on it for all she is worth—and it is worth to her several
million dollars per annum. It is one of the few cities that I know of
where they want and welcome invalids and say so frankly. They could not
do otherwise with any consistency, however, for half the leading citizens
of the town arrived there on their backs, clinging desperately to life,
and were lifted out of the car window on a stretcher. These one-time
invalids are to-day as husky, energetic, up-and-doing men as you will
find anywhere. Heretofore Albuquerque has been much too busy catering
to the wants of the thousands of tourists and invalids who step onto
its station platform each year to pay much attention to agricultural
development; but bordering on the town are several thousand acres of as
fine, healthy desert as you will find anywhere outside of the Sahara.
They are enclosed, as though by a great garden wall, by the Manzano
ranges, and the gentleman who whirled me across the billiard-table
surface of the desert in his motor-car told me that the government now
has an irrigation project under consideration which, by damming the
waters of the Rio Grande, will reclaim upward of four hundred thousand
acres of this arid land. And the great government irrigation projects now
in operation elsewhere in the Southwest have shown that water can produce
as many things from a desert as the late Monsieur Hermann could from
a gentleman’s hat. So one of these days, I expect, the country around
Albuquerque, from the city limits to the distant foot-hills, will be as
green with alfalfa as Ireland is with shamrock.
They have a commercial club in Albuquerque that _is_ a club. At first I
thought I had wandered into a hotel by mistake, for, with its spacious
lobby, its busy billiard-tables, its handsome rugs and furniture, and
the mahogany desk with the solicitous clerk behind it, it is about as
distantly related to the usual commercial club as one could well imagine.
It gives those men in the community who are doing things, and the others
who want to be doing things or ought to be doing things, a place where
they can meet and discuss, over tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in
them, the perennial problems of taxes, pavements, irrigation, crops,
fishing, house building, automobiles, and the climate. I would suggest to
the club’s board of governors, however, that it take steps to remove the
undertaker’s establishment which flanks the entrance. When one drops into
a place to get some facts regarding the desirability of settling there,
it is not exactly reassuring to be greeted by a pile of coffins.
Whoever was responsible for the architecture of the University of New
Mexico buildings, which stand in the outskirts of Albuquerque, deserves
a metaphorical slap of commendation. New Mexico is a young State and not
yet overly rich in this world’s goods, so that if, with their limited
resources, they had attempted to erect collegiate buildings along the
usual hackneyed lines, with Doric porticoes and gilded cupolas and all
that sort of thing, the result would probably have looked more like a
third-rate normal school than like a State university. But they did
nothing of the sort. Instead, they erected buildings adapted from the
ancient communal cliff dwellings, constructing them of the native adobe,
which is durable, inexpensive, warm in winter and in summer cool. All
the decorations, inside and out, are Indian symbols and pictures painted
in dull colors upon the adobe walls. Thus, at a moderate cost, they have
a group of buildings which typify the history of New Mexico and are in
harmony with its strongly characteristic landscape; which are admirably
suited to the climate; and which are unique among collegiate institutions
in that they are modelled after those great houses in which the Hopi
lived and worked before the dawn of history on the American continent.
Santa Fé, the capital of the State, is, to my way of thinking, the
quaintest and most fascinating city between the oceans. Very old, very
sleepy, very picturesque, it presents more neglected opportunities than
any place I know. I should like to have a chance to stage-manage Santa
Fé, for the scenery, which ranks among the best efforts of the Great
Scene Painter, is all set and the costumed actors are waiting in the
wings for their cues. Give it the advertising it deserves and the curtain
could be rung up to a capacity house. Where else within our borders is
there a three-hundred-year-old palace whose red-tiled roof has sheltered
nearly five-score governors—Spanish, Pueblo, Mexican, and American? (In
a back room of the palace, as you doubtless know, General Lew Wallace,
while governor of New Mexico, wrote “Ben Hur.”) Where else are Indians
in scarlet blankets and beaded moccasins, their braided hair hanging in
front of their shoulders in long plaits, as common sights in the streets
as are traffic policemen on Broadway? Where else can you see groups of
cow-punchers on sweating, dancing ponies and sullen-faced Mexicans in
high-crowned hats and gaudy sashes, and dusty prospectors with their
patient pack-mules plodding along behind them, and diminutive burros
trotting to market under burdens so enormous that nothing can be seen of
the burro but his ears and tail?
Though at present it is only a sleepy and forgotten backwater, with the
main arteries of commerce running along their steel channels a score of
miles away, Santa Fé could be made, at a small expenditure of anything
save energy and taste, one of the great tourist Meccas of America. To
begin with, it is the only place still left in the United States where
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West could merge into the landscape without causing
a stampede. Those who know how much pains and money were spent by the
municipality of Brussels in restoring a single square of that city to
its original mediæval picturesqueness, whole blocks of brick and stone
having to be torn down to produce the desired effect, will appreciate the
possibilities of Santa Fé, where the necessary restorations have only to
be made in inexpensive adobe. Desultory efforts are being made, it is
true, to induce the residents to promote this scheme for a harmonious
ensemble by restricting their architecture to those quaint and simple
designs so characteristic of the country, the Board of Trade providing
an object-lesson in the possibilities of the humble adobe by erecting
a charming little two-room cottage, with an open fireplace, a veranda,
and a pergola, at a total expense of one hundred dollars, but every now
and then the sought-for architectural harmony is given a rude jolt by
some one who could not resist the attractions of Queen Anne gables or
Clydesdale piazza columns or Colonial red-brick-and-green-blinds.
Set at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Range, a mile above the level of
the sea, with one of the kindliest all-the-year-round climates in the
world, and with an atmosphere which is far more Oriental than American,
Santa Fé has the making of just such another “show town” as Biskra,
in southern Algeria, where Hichens laid the scene of “The Garden of
Allah.” If its citizens would wake up to its possibilities sufficiently
to advertise it as scores of Californian towns with not half of its
attractions are advertised; if they would restore the more historically
important of the crumbling adobe buildings to their original condition
and erect their new buildings in the same characteristic and inexpensive
style; if they would keep the streets alive with the colourful figures
of blanketed Indians and Mexican venders of silver filigree; and if the
local hotel would have the originality to meet the incoming trains with
a four-horse Concord coach, such as is inseparably associated with the
Santa Fé Trail, instead of a ramshackle bus, they would soon have so many
visitors piling into the New Mexican capital that they could not take
care of them. But they are a _dolce far niente_ folk, are the people of
Santa Fé, and I expect that they will placidly continue along the same
happy, easy, sleepy path that they have always followed. And perhaps it
is just as well that they should.
[Illustration: A dwelling.
A street.
_From a photograph copyright by Jess Nusbaum._ Interior of a room.
SANTA FÉ: THE MOST PICTURESQUE CITY BETWEEN THE OCEANS.]
“They call me Santa Fé for short,” the New Mexican capital might answer
if one inquired its name, “but my whole name is La Ciudad Real de la
Santa Fé de San Francisco,” which, translated into our own tongue,
means “The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis.” It is some
name—there is no denying that—but historically the town is quite able to
live up to it. Fifteen years before the anchor of the _Mayflower_ rumbled
down off New England’s rocky coast, Juan de Oñate, an adventurous and
gold-hungry gentleman of Spain, marching up from Mexico, had raised over
the Indian pueblo which had occupied this site from time beyond reckoning
the banner of Castile. In 1680 came the great Indian revolt; the Spanish
soldiers and settlers were surprised and massacred and the brown-robed
friars were slain on the altars of the churches they had built. For
twelve years the Pueblos ruled the land. Then came De Vargas, at the
head of a column of steel-capped and cuirassed soldiery and, after a
ferocious reckoning with the Indians, retook the city in the name of his
Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. With the overthrow of Spanish dominion
in Mexico, the City of the Holy Faith became the northernmost outpost of
the Mexican Republic, and Mexican it remained until that August morning
in 1846 when General Kearney and his brass-helmeted dragoons clattered
into its plaza and raised on the palace flagstaff a flag that was never
to come down. That episode is commemorated by a marble shaft which rises
amid the cottonwoods on the historic plaza. On its base are carved the
words in which General Kearney proclaimed the annexation of New Mexico
to the United States:
“_We come as friends to make you a part of the representative government.
In our government all men are equal. Every man has a right to serve God
according to his conscience and his heart._”
At the other end of the plaza another monument marks the end of the
famous Santa Fé Trail, over which, in prairie-schooners and Concord
coaches and on the backs of mules and horses, was borne the commerce of
the prairies. Santa Fé was to the historic trail of which it was the
end what Bagdad is to the caravan routes across the Persian desert. No
sooner would the lead team of one of these mile-long wagon-trains top
the surrounding hills than word of its approach would spread through
Santa Fé like wildfire. “_Los Americanos! Los Carros! La Caravana!_”
the inhabitants would call to one another as they turned their faces
plazaward, for the coming of a wagon-train was as much of an event as
is the arrival of a steamer at a South Sea island. By the time that the
first of the creaking, white-topped wagons, with its five yoke of oxen,
had come to a halt before the custom-house, every inhabitant of the
town was in the streets. A necessary preliminary to any trading was for
the chief trader to make a call of ceremony upon the Spanish governor
and, after a laboured interchange of salutes and compliments, to pay
him the enormous toll of five hundred dollars per wagon imposed by the
Spanish government upon wagon-trains coming from the United States.
It came out of the pockets of the Spaniards in the end, however, for
the American traders simply added it to the prices which they charged
for their merchandise, which were high enough already, goodness knows:
linen brought four dollars a yard, broadcloth twenty-five dollars a
yard, and everything else in proportion. It is no wonder that the
traders of the plains often retired as wealthy men. Stephen B. Elkins
came to New Mexico, where he was to found his fortune, as bull-whacker
in a wagon-train; one of the traders, Bent by name, came in time to sit
himself in the governor’s palace in Santa Fé; and Kit Carson’s earlier
years were spent in guiding these commercial expeditions. With the
driving of the last spike in the Union Pacific Railroad, however, the
importance of Santa Fé as a half-way house on the overland route to
California vanished, and since then it has dwelt, contentedly enough, in
its glorious climate and its memories of the past.
Up the Cañon of the Santa Fé, over the nine-thousand-foot Dalton Divide,
and down into the Cañon of the Macho, several hundred gentlemen, in
garments of a somewhat conspicuous pattern provided by the State,
are building what will in time take rank as one of the world’s great
highways. It is to be called the Scenic Highway, and when it is
completed it will form a section of the projected Camino Real from
Denver to El Paso. It promises to be to the American Southwest what the
Sorrento-Amalfi Drive is to southern Italy and the famous Corniche Road
is to the south of France. By means of switchbacks—twenty-two of them in
all—it will wind up the precipitous slopes of the great Dalton Divide,
twist and turn among the snow-capped titans of the Sangre de Cristo
Range, skirt the edges of sheer precipices and dizzy chasms, drop down
through the leafy solitudes of the Pecos Forest Reserve, and then stretch
its length across the rolling uplands toward Taos, the pyramid-city of
the Pueblos.
Within a hundred-mile radius of Santa Fé are three of the most wonderful
“sights” in this or any other country: the hill-city of Acoma, the
pyramid-pueblo of Taos (both of which are described at length in the
succeeding chapter) and the Pajarito National Park. The Pajarito
(in Spanish, remember, the j takes the sound of h) provides what is
unquestionably the richest field of archæological research in the United
States, the remains of the inconceivably ancient civilisation with which
it is literally strewn, bearing much the same relation to the history of
the New World that the ruins of Upper Egypt do to that of the Old. To
reach the Pajarito, where the ruins of the cave people exist, you can
ride or drive or motor. As the distance from Santa Fé is only about forty
miles, if you are willing to get up with the chickens you can make it in
a single day. Comfortable sleeping quarters and excellent meals can be
had at the hospitable ranch-house of Judge Abbott, or, if you prefer, you
can take along a pair of blankets and some provisions and sleep high and
dry in a cave once occupied by one of your very remote ancestors. The
very courteous gentlemen in charge of the American School of Archæology
at Santa Fé are always glad to furnish information regarding the best way
to enter the Pajarito. Twenty odd miles north of Santa Fé and, debouching
quite unexpectedly upon the flat summit of a mesa, you look down upon the
iridescent ribbon which is the Rio Grande as it twists and turns between
the sheer, smooth walls of chalky rock which form the sides of White
Rock Cañon. Coming into this great gorge at right angles are the smaller
cañons—chief among them the one known as the Rito de los Frijoles—in
whose precipitous walls the cave folk hewed their homes. Some of these
smaller cañons are hundreds of feet above the bed of the Rio Grande, with
openings barely wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through into
the river below.
You must picture the Rito de los Frijoles as an immensely long and
narrow cañon—so narrow that Rube Marquard could probably pitch a stone
across—with walls as steep and smooth and twice as high as those of
the Flatiron Building. Then you must picture the lower face of this
rocky wall as being literally honeycombed by thousands—and when I say
thousands I do not mean hundreds—of windows and doors and port-holes
and apertures and other openings to caves hollowed from the soft
rock of the cliffs. It is a city of the dead, silent as a mausoleum,
mysterious as the lines of the hand, older than recorded history. This
once populous city consisted of a single street, _twelve miles long_,
its cave-dwellings, which were reached by ladders or by steps cut in the
soft tufa, rising above each other, tier on tier, like some Gargantuan
apartment building. Such portions of the face of the cliff as are not
perforated with doors and windows are embellished with pictographs,
many of them in an extraordinary state of preservation, which, if the
sight-seeing public only knew it, are as interesting and far more
perplexing than the wall-paintings in the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes.
On the floor of the valley the archæologists have laid bare the ruins
of a circular community house which, when viewed from above, bears a
striking resemblance to the ancient Greek theatre at Taormina, while on
the Puyé to the north a communal building of twelve hundred rooms—larger
than the Waldorf-Astoria—has been excavated. Farther down the Rito is
the stone circle or dancing floor to which the prehistoric young folk
descended to make merry, while their parents kept an eye on them from
their houses in the cliff. (I doubt not that, when the sun began to
sink behind the Jemez, some skin-clad mother would lean from the window
of her fifth-story flat and shrilly call to her daughter, engrossed in
learning the steps of the prehistoric equivalent of the tango on the
dancing floor below: “A-ya, come up this minute! You hear me? Your paw’s
just come home with a dinosaur and he wants it cooked for supper.”) Three
miles up the cañon, half a thousand feet up the face of the cliff, is
the arched ceremonial cave where, secure from prying eyes, this strange
people performed their still stranger rites. Thanks to the energy of
the American Archæological Society, this cave has been restored to the
same condition in which it was when prehistoric lodge members worked
their mysterious degrees and made the quaking initiates ride the goat.
Though it is the aim of the society to year by year restore portions of
the Rito until the whole cañon has returned to its original condition,
such difficulty has been experienced in obtaining the necessary funds
that at the present rate of progress it will take a century to effect a
complete restoration. Yet our millionaires pour out their wealth like
water to promote the excavation and restoration of the ruins of alien
peoples in other lands. Though carloads of pottery and utensils have
been carted away to enrich museums and private collections, the surface
of the Pajarito has been scarcely scratched, _more than twenty thousand_
communal caves and dwellings remaining to tempt the seekers of lost
cities. Where did the inhabitants of this strange city go—and why? What
swept their civilisation away? When did the age-old silence fall? These
are questions which even the archæologists do not attempt to answer. All
that they can assert with any degree of certainty is that the caves which
underlie the communal dwellings in the Pajarito yield ample evidence of
having been occupied by human beings in the days of the lava flow, when
the mastodon and the dinosaur roamed the land and the world was very,
very young.
[Illustration: “The arched ceremonial cave where ... this strange people
performed their still stranger rites.”
“The archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community
house.”
REMAINS OF AN ANCIENT CIVILISATION.]
* * * * *
Of the three great elemental industries of New Mexico—cattle raising,
sheep raising, and mining—cattle raising was the first and, more
than any other, gave colour to the country. The early Spanish and
Mexican settlers were cow-men, and the old Sonora stock, “all horns and
backbone,” may still be seen on some of the interior ranges, though they
are now almost a thing of the past. Then came the great wagon-trains
of Texans, California bound, many of whom, attracted by the wealth of
pasturage, stopped off and turned their long-horned cattle out on the
grass-grown desert. As Texas and the Middle West became fenced and
civilised, the old-time cattlemen drove their herds farther and farther
toward the setting sun. In those days there were no sheep to compete for
the pasture; mountains and desert were clothed with grass so rich and
long that they looked as though they were upholstered in green velvet;
there was not a strand of barbed wire between the Pecos and the Colorado.
New Mexico was indeed the cow-man’s paradise. Though the range has in
many places been ruined by droughts and overstocking; though a woolly
wave has encroached upon the lands which the cow-man had regarded as
inalienably his own, there are, nevertheless, close to a million head
of cattle within the borders of the State, by far the greater part of
which are Herefords and Durhams, for the imported stock has increased the
cow-man’s profits out of all proportion to the initial expense.
Feeding with equal right and freedom upon the same public domain are
upward of five million head of sheep, for New Mexico is the home of the
wool industry in America. The early Spanish settlers kept large flocks
of the straight-necked, coarse-wooled Mexican sheep in the country around
Santa Fé, and from them the Navajos and Moquis, those industrious weavers
of blankets and workers in silver, soon stole or bartered for enough to
start a sheep business of their own, it being said that a third of all
the sheep in the State are now owned by Indians. Unlike cattle, sheep,
in cool weather, can exist without water for a month at a time; so, when
the desert turns from yellow to green in the spring, they drift out over
it in great flocks which look for all the world like fleecy clouds. Each
flock, which usually consists of several thousand sheep, is attended by a
herder and his “rustler,” who cooks, packs in supplies, and brings water
in casks from the nearest stream for the use of the herder and his dogs,
the juicy browse providing all the moisture that the sheep require.