shearing stations in the world, the work beginning the latter part of
January and lasting until the first of May. In this time enough wool is
clipped to supply a considerable portion of the people of the United
States with suits and blankets. Until quite recently the shearing of the
wool was a long and tedious task, even the more expert hand shearers
seldom being able to average more than sixty or seventy fleeces a day.
When machine shearing was introduced into New Mexico a few years age,
however, this daily average was promptly doubled. Sheep-shearers are
probably the best-paid and hardest-working class of men in the world,
receiving from seven to eight and a half cents a head and averaging one
hundred and twenty-five sheep a day. The best of them, however, shear
from two to three hundred sheep in a single day, the record, I believe,
being three hundred and twenty-five. As the shearing season only lasts
through six months of the year, during which time they must travel from
Texas to Montana, the unionised shearers demand and receive high wages,
some of them making as much as twenty dollars a day. Yet, in spite of
this and of the grazing fee of six cents a head for all sheep that feed
on forest reserves, it is safe to say that the wool-growers are the most
prosperous men in New Mexico.
* * * * *
The social fabric of New Mexico is a curious blending of Mexicans,
Indians, and Americans. Of these elements the Mexicans are by far the
most numerous, their customs, costumes, and language lending a decidedly
Spanish flavour to the country. Living for the most part in scattered
settlements along the mountain streams or in their own quarters in the
towns, they enjoy a lazy, irresponsible, and not uncomfortable existence
in return for their humble labour, not differing materially, either in
their mode of life, manners, or morals, from their kinsmen below the
Rio Grande. Shiftless, indolent, indifferently honest, the peons of
New Mexico, like the South African Kaffirs and the Egyptian fellaheen,
are nevertheless invaluable to the welfare of the State, for they
perform practically all the labour on the ranches, mines, and railways.
Politically they are an element to be reckoned with, about seventy-five
per cent of the population of Santa Fé being Mexicans, while sixty per
cent of the State Legislature is from the same race. As a result of this
Latin preponderance in the population, practically all Americans in New
Mexico are compelled to have at least a working knowledge of Spanish,
which is really the _lingua franca_ of the country, it being by no means
unusual to find one who speaks it better than the Mexicans themselves.
Owing to the great influx of settlers during the last few years, the
Mexican proportion of the population has been greatly reduced, as is
confirmed by the increasing use of the English language and of English
newspapers.
One of the strangest religious sects in the world—the Penitentes—are
recruited from the Mexican element of the population. Although this
dread form of religious fanaticism has its centre in the region about
San Mateo, it permeates peon life in every quarter of the State. For the
Penitente is not an Indian; he is a Mexican. The Indians of the Pueblos
repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic, for
the Church has fought his terrible rites tooth and nail, though thus
far it has fought them in vain. He is really a grim survivor of those
secret orders whose fanaticism and religious excesses became a byword
even in the calloused Europe of the Middle Ages. The sect is divided
into two branches: the Brothers of Light—_La Luz_—and the Brothers of
Darkness—_Las Tinieblas_. Though they hold secret meetings with more
or less regularity throughout the year in their lodges or _morados_,
they are really active only during the forty days of Lent. During that
period both men and women flog their naked backs with scourges of aloe
fibre, wind their limbs with wire or rope so tightly as to stop the
circulation, lie for hours at a time on beds of cactus, make pilgrimages
to mountain shrines with their unstockinged feet in shoes filled with
jagged flints, stagger torturing miles across the sun-baked desert under
the weight of enormous crosses, while on Good Friday this carnival of
torture culminates in one of their number, chosen by lot, actually being
crucified. It has been a number of years, however, since a Penitente has
died on the cross, for, since the law came to New Mexico, they have found
it wiser to fasten their willing victim to the cross with rope instead of
nails. Though sporadic efforts have been made to break up the sect, they
have thus far been unsuccessful, as it is no secret that many men high in
the political life of New Mexico bear on their backs the tattooed cross
which is the symbol of the order.
Though the growth of the white population has heretofore been slow,
it has begun to increase by leaps and bounds with the development of
irrigation. Though New Mexico now contains representatives from every
State in the Union and from pretty much every country in the world, the
average run of society exhibits a tendency toward high-crowned hats that
shows the dominating influence of Texas. They are, I think, the most
hospitable folk that I have ever met; they are tolerant of other people’s
opinions; have a tendency to ride rather than walk; are ready to fight at
the drop of the hat; hate to count their money; lie only for the sake of
entertainment; like a big proposition; and know how to handle it—there
you have them, the gentlemen of New Mexico. But don’t go out to New
Mexico, my Eastern friends, with the idea that you can butt into society
with the aid of a good cigar—because you can’t. They are a free-born,
free-living, free-speaking folk, are the dwellers out in the back country
where the desert meets the mountains and the mountains meet the sky, and
they don’t give a whoop-and-hurrah whether you come or stay away.
* * * * *
Such, in brief, bold outline, is the New Mexico of to-day. I have
tried to paint you a picture, as well as I know how, of the progress,
potentialities, and prospects of this, the youngest but one of the
sisterhood of States. Though New Mexico, as a Territory, was willing
enough to be a synonym for Indian villages and snake-dances and cavorting
cowboys, the State of New Mexico stands for something very different
indeed. Though it welcomes the tourists who come-look-see-spend-go, it
prefers the settlers who are prepared to stay and make it their home.
Unlike its sister State of Arizona, New Mexico does not suffer from that
greatest of privations—lack of water—for the mountain-flood waters that
now go to waste would store great reservoirs, there is the flow of
numerous streams and river systems, and below the surface are artesian
belts of water waiting only to be tapped by the farmer’s well. That the
soil, once watered, is very fertile is best proved by the orchards,
gardens, and meadows which cover the valleys of the Mimbres and the
Pecos. Ten years ago the cattlemen of New Mexico used to say that it
took “sixty acres to raise a steer”; to-day, thanks to irrigation, a
single acre of alfalfa does the business. In gold, silver, coal, and
copper the State is very rich—the largest copper mine in the world is at
Silver City—while its turquoise deposits surpass those of Persia. And the
people are as big-hearted and broad-minded and open-handed as you will
find anywhere on earth. Taking it by and large, therefore, a man with
some experience, a little capital, plenty of energy and ambition, and an
intimate acquaintance with hard work should go a long way in New Mexico.
He would find down there a big, new, unfenced, up-and-doing country and
a set of sun-bronzed, iron-hard, self-reliant men of whom any country
might be proud. These men are the modern _conquistadores_, for they have
conquered sun and sand. To-day they are only commonplace farmers, but,
when history has granted them the justice of perspective, they will be
called the Pioneers.
II
THE SKYLANDERS
“Here still a lofty rock remains,
On which the curious eye may trace
(Now wasted half by wearing rains)
The fancies of a ruder race.
...
And long shall timorous Fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And Reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.”
II
THE SKYLANDERS
Six minutes after midnight the mail-train came thundering out of nowhere.
With hissing steam and brakes asqueal it paused just long enough for me
to drop off and then roared on its transcontinental way again to the
accompaniment of a droning chant which quickly dropped into diminuendo,
its scarlet tail lamps disappearing at forty miles an hour, leaving me
abandoned in the utter darkness of the desert. The Casa Alvarado at
Albuquerque, with its red-shaded candles and snowy napery, where I had
dined only four hours before, seemed very far away. Some one flashed a
lantern in my face and a voice behind it inquired:
“Are you the gent that’s goin’ to Acoma?”
“I am,” said I, “if I can get there.”
“Well, I reckon you’ll get there all right, seein’ as how the trader at
Laguna’s sent a rig over for you. Bob made a little money on a bunch o’
cattle a while back and he’s been pretty damned independent ever since
’bout takin’ folks over to Acoma. Says it’s too hard on his horses. But
when Bob says he’ll do a thing he does it. Hi, Charlie!” he shouted, “you
over there?”
A guttural affirmative came out of the blackness. As the loquacious
station agent made no offer to light my footsteps, I cautiously picked
my way across the rails, slid down a steep embankment into a ditch,
scrambled out of it, and descried before me the vague outlines of a
ramshackle vehicle drawn by a pair of wiry, unkempt ponies.
“How?” grunted the driver, who, as my eyes became accustomed to the
darkness, I saw was an Indian, his hair, plaited in two long braids with
strands of vivid flannel interwoven, hanging in front of his shoulders,
schoolgirl fashion. I clambered in, the Indian spoke to his ponies, and,
breaking into a lope, they swung off across the desert, the wretched
vehicle lurching and pitching behind them.
It is an unforgettable experience, a ride across the New Mexican desert
in the night-time. The sky is like purple velvet and the stars seem very
near. The silence is not the peaceful stillness that comes with nightfall
in settled regions, but the mysterious, uncanny hush that hangs over
other ancient and deserted lands—Upper Egypt, for example, and Turkestan.
Our way was lined with dim, fantastic shapes whose phantom arms seemed to
warn or beckon or implore, but which, in the prosaic light of morning,
resolved themselves into clumps of piñon, and mesquite, and prickly-pear.
The ponies shied suddenly at a stirring in the underbrush—probably a
rattlesnake disturbed—and in the distance a coyote gave dismal tongue.
Slipping and sliding down a declivity so abrupt that the axles were level
with the ponies’ backs, we rattled across the stone-strewn bed of an
_arroyo seco_, as they term a dried-up watercourse in that half-Spanish
region, and clattered into a settlement whose squat, flat-roofed hovels
of adobe, unlighted and silent as the houses of Pompeii, showed dimly on
either hand.
“Laguna?” I inquired.
“Uh-huh,” responded my taciturn companion, pulling up his ponies
sharply before a dwelling considerably more pretentious than the rest.
“Trader’s,” he added laconically.
As, stiff, chilled, and weary, I scrambled down, the door swung open to
reveal a lean figure in shirt and trousers, silhouetted by the light from
a guttering candle.
“I’m the trader,” said he. “I reckon you’re the party we’ve been
expectin’. We ain’t got much accommodation to offer you, but, such as it
is, you’re welcome to it. I’m afeard my youngsters’ll keep you awake,
though. I’ve got six on ’em an’ they’ve all got the whoopin’-cough, so me
an’ my old woman hain’t had a chanct to shet our eyes for the last week.”
It wasn’t the cough-harassed children who kept me wide-eyed and tossing
through the night, however. It was Sheridan, I think, who remarked that
had the fleas of a certain bed upon which he once slept been unanimous,
they could easily have pushed him out. Had the tiny hordes which were in
possession of my couch had an insect Kitchener to organise and lead them,
I should certainly have had to spend the night upon the floor. I learned
afterward that the Indians of the neighbouring pueblos have a name for
Laguna which, in the white man’s tongue, means “Scratch-town.”
From Laguna to Acoma is a four hours’ drive across the desert. It is very
rough and more than once I feared that I should require the services of
an osteopath to rejoint my vertebræ. And it is inconceivably dusty, the
ponies kicking up clouds of fine, shifting sand which fills your eyes
and nose and ears and sifts through your garments until you feel as
though you were covered with sandpaper instead of skin. The sun beats
down until the arid expanse of the desert is as hot as the whitewashed
base of a railway-station stove at white heat. Everything considered,
it is not the sort of a drive that one would choose for pleasure, but
it is a very wonderful drive nevertheless, for the New Mexican desert
is a kaleidoscope of colour. It is a land of black rocks and orange
sand, flecked with discouraged, hopeless-looking clumps of sage-green
vegetation; of violet, and amethyst, and purple mountain ranges; and
overhead a sky of the brightest blue you will find anywhere outside a
wash-tub. The cloud effects are the most beautiful I have ever seen,
great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed
sheep, across the turquoise sky. Everywhere the colours are splashed on
with a barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch. It is a regular back-drop
of a country; its scenery looks as though it should have been painted on
a curtain. When a party of Indians, with scarlet handkerchiefs twisted
about their heads pirate fashion, lope by astride of spotted ponies, the
illusion is complete. “You’re not really in New Mexico, you know,” you
say to yourself. “This is much too theatrical to be real. You’re sitting
in an orchestra chair watching a play, that’s what you’re doing.”
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
THE LAND OF THE TURQUOISE SKY.
“Great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed
sheep, across the turquoise sky.”]
Swinging sharply around the shoulder of a sand-dune, a mesa—a table-land
of rock—reared itself out of the plain as unexpectedly as a slap in
the face. The driver pointed unconcernedly with his whip. “_La Mesa
Encantada_,” he grunted. The Enchanted Mesa! Was there ever a name which
so reeked with mystery and romance? Picture, if you can, a bandbox-shaped
rock, almost flat on top and covering as much ground as a good-sized city
square, higher than the Times Building in New York and with sides almost
as perpendicular, set down in the middle of the flattest, yellowest
desert the imagination can conceive. Seen from the distance, it suggests
the stump of an inconceivably gigantic tree—a tree a thousand feet in
diameter and sawed squarely off four hundred and thirty feet above the
ground. On one side it is as sheer and smooth as that face of Gibraltar
which looks Spainward, and when the evening sun strikes it slantingly
it turns the monstrous mass of sandstone into a pile of rosy coral. It
is one of the most impressive things that I have ever seen. Solitary,
silent, mysterious, redolent of legend and superstition, older than Time
itself, it suggests, without in any way resembling, those Colossi of
Memnon which stare out across the desert from ruined Thebes.
Those disputatious cousins Science and Tradition seem to have agreed for
once that the original Acoma stood on the top of the _Mesa Encantada_,
or Katzimo, as the Indians call it, in the days when the world was
very young. Ever since Katzimo first attracted scientific attention
the archælogists have quarrelled like cats and dogs over this question
of whether it had ever been inhabited, just as they are quarrelling in
Palestine as to the site of Calvary. A few years ago the Smithsonian
Institution, desirous of settling the controversy for good and all,
despatched to New Mexico a gentleman of an inquiring turn of mind,
who succeeded in performing the supposedly impossible feat of scaling
the sheer cliffs which, from time beyond reckoning, have guarded the
secret of the mesa. On the plateau at the top he found fragments of
earthenware utensils, which would seem to prove quite conclusively that
it had been inhabited in long-past ages by human beings, thus supporting
the traditions which prevail among the Indians regarding this mighty
monolith. Whether the Enchanted Mesa has ever been inhabited I do not
know; no one knows; and, to tell the truth, it does not greatly matter.
According to the legend current among the Pueblos, this island in the air
was originally accessible by means of a huge, detached fragment leaning
against it at such an angle that it formed a precarious and perilous
ladder to the top. Its difficulty of access was more than compensated
for, however, by its security from the attacks of enemies, whether on
two feet or four, for Katzimo is supposed to have echoed to human
voices in those dim and distant days when the mastodon and the dinosaur
roamed the land. The Indian legend has it that, while the men of the
tribe were absent on a hunting expedition and the able-bodied women were
hoeing corn in the fields below, some cataclysm of nature—most probably
an earthquake—jarred loose the ladder rock and toppled it over into the
plain, leaving the town on the summit as completely cut off from human
help as though it were on another planet. The women and children thus
isolated perished miserably from starvation, and their spirits, so the
Indians will assure you, still haunt the summit of Katzimo. On any windy
night you can hear them for yourself, moaning and wailing for the help
that never came. That is why it were easier to persuade a Mississippi
darky to spend a night in a graveyard than to induce an Indian to linger
in the vicinity of the Enchanted Mesa after dark.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“A bandbox-shaped rock, higher than the Times Building in New York and
with sides almost as perpendicular.”
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“The mesa on which the modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a
gigantic billiard-table three hundred and fifty-seven feet high.”
ACOMA: SUPPOSED ANCIENT SITE AND PRESENT SITE.]
The survivors of the tribe chose as the site of their new town the top
of a somewhat lower mesa, three miles or so from their former home. If
the Enchanted Mesa resembles a titanic bandbox, the mesa on which the
modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a gigantic billiard-table,
three hundred and fifty-seven feet high, seventy acres in area upon its
level top, and supported by precipices which are not merely perpendicular
but in many cases actually overhanging. It presents one of the most
striking examples of erosion in the world, does Acoma, the sand which
has been hurled against it by the wind of ages, as by a natural
sand-blast, having cut the soft rock into forms more fantastic than were
ever conjured up by Little Nemo in his dreams. Battlements, turrets,
arches, minarets, and gargoyles of weather-worn, tawny-tinted rock rise
on every hand. There are two routes to the summit and both of them
require leathern lungs and seasoned sinews. One, called, if I remember
rightly, the “Padre’s Path,” is little more than a crevasse in the solid
rock, its ascent necessitating the vigorous use of knees and elbows
as well as hands and feet, it being about as easy to negotiate as the
outside of the Statue of Liberty. The other path, which is considerably
longer, suggests the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle
Ages—and, when you come to think about it, that is precisely what it
is—the resemblance being heightened by the massive battlements of eroded
rock between which it winds and the strings of patient donkeys which plod
up it, faggot-laden. Though of fair width near the bottom, it gradually
narrows as it zigzags upward, finally becoming so slim that there is
not room between the face of the cliff and the brink of the precipice
for two donkeys to pass. It was at this inauspicious spot that I first
encountered one of these dwellers in the sky—“skylanders” they might
fittingly be called. He was a low-browed, sullen-looking fellow, with a
skin the colour of a well-worn saddle and an expression about as pleasant
as a rainy morning. His shock of coarse black hair had been bobbed
just below the ears and was kept back from his eyes by the inevitable
_banda_; his legs were encased in _chaparejos_ of fringed buckskin, and
his shirt tails fluttered free. He came jogging down the perilous pathway
astride of a calico donkey and, with the background of rocks and sand,
cut a very striking and savage figure indeed. “He’ll make a perfectly
bully picture,” I said to myself, and, suiting the action to the thought,
I unlimbered my camera and ambushed myself behind a projecting shoulder
of rock. As he swung into the range of my lens I snapped the shutter.
It was speeded up to a hundredth of a second, but in much less time
than that he had dismounted and was coming for me with a club. I have
read somewhere that the Acomas are a mild-mannered, inoffensive folk.
Well, perhaps. Still, I was glad that I had in my jacket pocket the
largest-sized automatic used by a civilised people, and I was still
gladder when Man-That-Wouldn’t-Have-His-Picture-Taken, glimpsing its
ominous outline through the cloth, moved sullenly away, shaking his stick
and muttering sentiments which needed no translation. He was an artist
in the way he laid on his curses, was that Indian. An army mule-skinner
would have taken off his hat to him in admiration.
Of all the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, Acoma is the most interesting
by far. Indeed, I do not think that I am permitting my enthusiasm to get
the better of my discrimination when I class it with Urga, Khiva, Mecca,
the troglodyte town of Medenine in southern Tunisia, and Timbuktu as one
of the half dozen most interesting semicivilised places in existence.
Where else in all the world can you find a town hanging, as it were,
between land and sky and reached by some of the dizziest trails ever trod
by human feet; a town of many-floored but doorless dwellings, which have
ladders instead of stairs and whose windows are of gypsum instead of
glass; a town where the women build and own the houses and the men weave
the women’s gowns; where the husbands take the names of their wives and
the children the names of their mothers; where the belongings of a dead
man are destroyed upon his grave and the ghosts are distracted so that
his spirit may have time to escape; a town where religious mysteries, as
incredible as those of voodooism and as jealously guarded as those of
Lhasa, are performed in an underground chamber as impossible of access by
the uninitiated as the Kaaba? Where else shall you find such a place as
that, I ask you? Tell me that.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“The massive battlements of eroded rock between which it winds ...
suggest the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages.”
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“You gain access to the first floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as
you gain access to the hold of a ship.”
ACOMA AS IT IS TO-DAY.]