SANTE FÉ AND THE VALLEY OF THE RIO GRANDE
Nowhere else did we find spring as lovely as at Santa Fé. Here, a mile
and a half above sea level, was a crystal freshness of atmosphere,
through which filtered a quintessence of the sounds and scents and
colors that make a joyous season of spring even in downtown New York.
A bit of a surprise it was to find, dozing in the sun like a New
England village, a town important enough to have given its name to a
railroad; to mark the end of one trail, and be a station on another; to
have been the capital of an ancient Empire of the New World; and now to
be the capital of a state. Yet the world passes it by, leaving it on a
railroad spur high and dry from transcontinental traffic. So much the
worse, then, for the world; so much the better for Santa Fé. The town
does not owe its personality to its railroad stations and Chambers of
Commerce. The peaks guarding its high isolation have looked down upon
many changes in its history. Yet it stays outwardly nearly unaltered;
valuing material importance so little that it hides its Capitol down a
grassy side street, while its Plaza still is dominated by the sturdy
old Governor’s Palace, where Onate raised the Spanish flag in the early
seventeenth century, and Kearny replaced it with the American flag in
1846.
The heart of Santa Fé is its Plaza. To its shady trees, traders tied
their horses when they had reached the end of the perilous Santa
Fé Trail, glad enough to gain its shelter after being beset by the
primitive dangers of hunger, thirst, wild beasts, Indians and robbers.
The same Plaza where drowsy Mexicans now rest upon park benches,
where processions of burros pass loaded with firewood, where shining
automobiles flash by, has witnessed siege and countersiege, scenes
of violence and heroism and romance. Richly laden caravans once came
galloping into the town, sometimes closely beset by bandits or hostile
Apaches, and weary adventurers from the land of Daniel Boone or
Washington dismounted, and looked bewildered about them at this gay and
alien civilization. Here the Pueblo Indians, in their final revolt,
besieged the white settlers, and committed the only violences in their
long career of patience, and here the conquering De Vargas finally
overcame them, and surrounded by Franciscan monks, offered mass for
his victory. Dominating the Plaza is the three century old Governor’s
Palace, whose walls conceal prehistoric Indian foundations. It is a
one-story building running half the length of the square, built in a
day when hospitality demanded royal scope. Half inn, half fort, its
six-foot thick walls stood for strength as well as coolness, and its
mighty doors frequently knew the marks of assault. In modern times,
until the beginning of this century it served as residence of the
governor of the Territory. In a back room, Lew Wallace is said to have
written chapters of Ben Hur.
No question but that the Palace might be made more interesting as
a Museum, less a storehouse of half forgotten oddments. It might
tell less spasmodically and with greater dignity the story of its
successive occupations, from the Royal Governor of Spain to the present
time. It creates the impression now of having been forgotten, except
as, at intervals, a legacy of antiquities was deposited wholesale,
without selection. The exhibits should be pruned, gaps filled, and
arranged with better proportion and consecutiveness.
It might well, indeed, take a leaf from the book of the new Museum,
built on the same side of the Plaza. Its exterior skilfully assembles
various parts of nearby buildings of Pueblo architecture. Its corners
copy the towers of Laguna, Taos and Acoma. The warm stucco walls are
studded with pinon _vegas_, and the doorways, windows and balconies are
of cedar, deep-set in the thick walls. An infant art-gallery, fed from
the local Santa Fé and Taos schools, sometimes according to Holt and
sometimes on Cubist pickles and doughnuts, does the double service of
giving the artist permanent exhibition-rooms, and illustrating local
color for the tourist.
I mean no disparagement here against the Santa Fé school, which numbers
several names of national reputation. The country cries to be painted
in vividest colors; Nature here is in vermilion mood, and man tops her
gayety with slouching _insouciance_, sky-blue shirts, and head-bands
giving the needful splash of scarlet. Add skies as blue as a spring
sun can stipple them, dash across them a blur of pink apricot bloom,
bank them against cliffs of red-orange, pure gold where the light
strikes it, and grape purple in the shadows, tone with the warm gray of
a pueblo clustered about a sky-blue stream, and fringed yellow-green
cottonwoods bordering it,--and what artist can paint with sobriety?
That a few manage it is to their credit, nor can one wonder that this
riot of color goes to the heads of others till their canvasses look
like an explosion in a vegetable garden.
Tucked away in another street off the Plaza stands the old Cathedral,
begun in 1612. As cathedrals go it is an unimpressive example of the
worst period of church architecture: to the usual trappings of its
interior is added the barbaric crudity of the Mexican in church art;
an art like the French Canadian’s, naïve and literal. It must show
the bleeding heart much ensanguined, the wounds of Christ fresh with
gore, and its doll-faced saints covered with lace and blue satin,
like fashion plates of Godey’s Ladies. What interests me in this as
in other churches of the Southwest is the colossal ironic joke on the
Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans, whose contemporary efforts on the stern
rock-bound eastern coast were just about offset by the equally earnest
efforts of the Spanish padres on the cactus-ridden desert of the west.
However, what each bequeathed of value has remained to build a vaster,
freer, and perhaps better community than either unwitting opponent
previsioned.
Quite Colonial, and oddly reminiscent of New England is the Governor’s
mansion of today, across from the present Capitol, which like every
Capitol in the United States rears a helmet shaped dome. In the houses
of this New Mexican government occurs a phenomenon unknown to any other
state: two languages are officially spoken, Mexican and English, with
an interpreter to make each side intelligible to the other. I do not
know whether this bilingual Assembly and Senate produces twice as much
verbiage as the usual legislature or whether the two tongues serve as
a deterrent to oratory.
New Mexico, it must be remembered, is more Indian and Mexican than
American by a proportion of three to one, and includes a sprinkling
of negro and Chinese. The Indian lends a touch of the primitive; the
Mexican brings Spain into the picture. In doorways painted sky blue or
lavender, swarthy women gossip, in mantilla and fringed black shawl.
Against a shady wall, in sash and sombrero, all but too lazy to light
the inevitable cigarette, slouches a Mexican who should be working.
On Sundays and fête days, the roads about Sante Fé are splashed with
the vivid colors of the girls’ frocks,--pinks, purples and scarlet
accenting the inevitable black of the women’s dress,--as they make
their way under fringy cottonwoods to some country alberge. The sound
of a jerky accordion usually follows them up the canyon roads.
Mostly the Mexicans are gregarious, keeping to their own quarters in
Santa Fé, and their own villages further out in the country, often
near an Indian pueblo of the same name, as at Taos and at Tesuque,
famed for its grotesque Indian godlets. All about Santa Fé these little
adobe towns, Chimayo, Teuchas, Cuamunque, Pojoaque, Espanola, Alcalde
and Pecos, lie in some fertile river valley, surrounded by their fruit
trees and alfalfa fields. The Mexicans, though indolent, understand
truck farming thoroughly. Like their occupations, their recreations are
primitive. They have their own dances, where the men sit on one side of
the room and the girls, giggling and shoving, at the other, until some
bold swain sets the ball rolling. Then it does not cease to roll, fast
and furious, till morning, often ending in some tragic fray, where a
knife flashes.
[Illustration: AGAINST A SHADY WALL, ALL BUT TOO LAZY TO LIGHT THE
INEVITABLE CIGARETTE, SLOUCHES, WHEREVER ONE TURNS, A MEXICAN.]
They have their own schools and churches;--and almost always, at the
end of the town, a little windowless house which looks like a church.
The Americano is unwise who attempts to enter, or even ask questions
concerning this building. It is the morado, or brotherhood house, of a
secret sect called the Penitentes, who have been described briefly in
certain books on this locality, but are almost unknown to the outside
world. The sect is entirely Mexican, not Indian, as has frequently been
misstated. Only a very few Indians have ever become Penitentes, and
most of the race hold the idea in abhorrence. Survival of a cult which
flourished in Spain four centuries ago, the practice was brought to
Old Mexico, of which New Mexico was then a part, by some Franciscans
who followed the conquistadores. In Lisbon, in 1801, a procession of
flagellants went through the streets. This seems to have been the
latest outbreak in Europe, yet in our own United States it stubbornly
persists today, despite the utmost the Catholic church can do to
discourage this horrible self-torture.
We had the very good fortune to enter Santa Fé during Holy Week. All
along our route, through the little Mexican towns bordering the Rio
Grande, church bells were ringing, and Mexicans in gala array riding
to special services on pintos, burros, or in carts laden with entire
families of eight or ten. When we reached our hotel, three miles out,
for adequate hotels for some strange reason do not exist in Santa Fe,
we were invited to go “Penitente Hunting.” The sport is not without its
dangers. Strangers who venture too near the mysterious processions
have been shot, and only the most foolhardy would seek to go near the
morado.
We learned that while the members are quiescent during the year,
committing whatever laxities of conduct seem good to them, Holy Week
heaps on them, voluntarily, the ashes of bitter atonement. On Monday,
they gather in their morado, and enter on a week of fasting, ritual,
and self-inflicted torture. To a few selected by the high priests of
the order is given the honor, from their point of view, of taking upon
themselves the sins of all. They endure incredible torments; some lie
on beds of cactus the entire week, others wear the deadly _cholla_
bound on their backs or inserted under the flesh. Every Penitente bears
on his back the mark of the Cross, slit into his skin with deep double
gashes at his initiation into the sect. These wounds are re-opened each
year. Weak from flogging, with blood raining from their backs till old
wounds mingle with the new, eating only food brought to the morado at
nightfall by their women, these vicarious sufferers come forth on Good
Friday to the culmination of their agony.
Santa Fé was agog with rumors. At one town we heard the penitentes
would not leave their morado, resenting the growing publicity their
rites attracted. Another, further from civilization, was to show a
crucifixion, with ghastly fidelity even to the piercing of hands and
feet,--a fate for which the honored victim begged. Loomis has related
this circumstance as a fact, and rumor of the year previous to our
arrival gave it confirmation.
[Illustration: A MEXICAN MORADO, NEW MEXICO. The Americano is unwise
who attempts to enter or even ask questions concerning this building.]
[Illustration: THE MUSEUM OF SANTA FE. Its corners copy the towers of
Laguna, Taos, and Acoma.]
Early Good Friday morning, our party drove in and out the valleys,
fording to our hubs streams that yesterday were mere trickles,
and tomorrow, augmented by melting mountain snows, would be raging
torrents. New Mexico has few working bridges. One fords a stream, if it
seems sufficiently shallow, or waits a day or week at the nearest hotel
for it to subside. Rivers were fast leaving their bounds this morning,
but we managed to cross in time to arrive at Alcalde before ceremonies
had begun.
Built like most adobe pueblos, Indian and Mexican, about a straggling
square, this little village furnished a good vantage for Americans
to see and to be observed,--watched with quiet hostility by idling
natives. Cross-currents of ill feeling we sensed intangibly; not only
did the village as a whole bristle toward us, but it contained two
sects of flagellants, and two morados, whose families were fiercely
partisan; and in addition these were opposed by the native element of
strict Catholics who, obeying the mandates of the Church, frowned on
the fanatic religionists. We were warned not to take pictures nor show
our cameras, nor to follow the procession too closely. Our presence was
barely tolerated, and our innocent attempts to become an inconspicuous
part of the landscape met with scowls and uncomplimentary remarks.
Perhaps they were justified; the desire to guard one’s religious rites
from curious eyes is a high instinct, which, no matter how effacingly
we “hunted penitentes,” we were violating.
The saints in the whitewashed church had been dressed for the occasion
in new ribbons and laces. On a low wheeled platform stood a crudely
painted figure of Christ, his eyes bandaged with the pathetic purpose
of saving him from the sight of the agony to come to his followers.
With him were other figures; one I think was Judas, with his bag of
silver and mean grimace. Soon from the morado came a short procession
of men and boys, weak-kneed and trembling, clad only in cotton drawers
and shirts which speedily became ensanguined from wounds made by hidden
thorns. They walked with a peculiar swaying motion, as if their knees
were broken. Three of them, no more than boys, bore great crosses of
foot-square timber, about twenty feet long. The heavy ends dragged on
the ground; the cross beams rested on bent backs, on which, the whisper
went, were bound the spiky cactus whose every curved needle pressing
on the flesh spells torture. Blood ran down their shaky legs, joining
blood already crusted. Their faces were hooded.
A band of flagellants followed who as yet played a less active part.
At wide intervals over the scorching desert were planted the fourteen
stations of the cross, to which the three principals, barefooted,
dragged their burdens. At each they rested while the drama of that
station was enacted as crudely and literally as an early mystery
play. A middle-aged penitente in store clothes, fiercely in earnest,
read appropriate passages from the Mexican Bible, stumbling over the
pronunciation. Then the procession chanted responses, and the brief
respite, if respite it was for the cross-bearers, came to an end. At
the proper station, three little black-robed Marys broke from the
crowd, and played their tragic part.
We watched in suspense the slow progress, wondering if the martyrs
would reach their goal alive. As they neared the fourteenth station,
one of the “two thieves” tottered, and had to be supported,
half-fainting, the rest of the way. The other two barely managed to
finish. Our dread was heightened lest the Mystery be carried to its
bitter close.
No printed word could have aroused among its ignorant spectators
the tense devoutness inspired by this medieval drama. Religion to
many of us has become a denatured philosophy, a long step from this
savage brutality. Yet have we any substitute which will so kindle our
imagination and idealism that it could school the body to endure gladly
even the supreme agony?
During the heat of the day, all was silence within the morado to which
the actors had retreated. The sobbing Mexican women who followed the
procession vanished with their black veils into their houses, some
perhaps to await news of the death or collapse of their men, which
not infrequently attends the Holy Week celebrants. Toward dark, over
the country side, automobile phares began to converge toward the
silent morado. The world outside had taken up “penitente hunting” as
a cold-blooded sport. They came openly baiting the penitentes, who
angered, refused to appear. Eight, nine, ten, eleven! We left our
darkened car, and hid ourselves in the sand dunes near the graveyard,
in the dark shadow of a clump of piñons.
We waited with cramped legs, while the blue sky became black, and
mysterious shapes loomed up in an unspeakably vast and lonely country.
The Flagellants were still sulking. At last, a light across the river
flickered, swung, and started down a distant trail, whose route we
traced by an occasional lantern glimmer through masses of trees. A
sweet, weird wail floated over to us on a gust of wind. It was the
_pito_, wild and high-pitched flute, making a most dismal, shivery
music. The procession twisted and turned toward the river. We crouched
uncomfortably by our sand dunes, not daring to make a sound for fear it
might be carried on the clear air. Suddenly came a chant, broken, taken
up and dropped by voices too weak to modulate. It sounded unevenly, as
spurts of energy forced it from tired throats; loud, then a whisper.
The chant continued, with an ominous new sound added; a thud, thud,
thud, regular and pitiless, the fall of thongs upon flesh. No outcry
came; only the chant and the wail of the _pito_ rose louder.
It was a neighboring sect on the way to pay a visit to our morado.
Frequently the light was arrested, and the singing stopped. We knew
then they were paying their devotions at one of the heaps of stone,
rude wayside memorials seen everywhere in this locality, erected by the
Mexicans to their dead, some of whom lie in battlefields of France.
Then the chant continued, the thud, painful enough only to hear, and
the shuffle of feet, in a sort of weary lockstep. Across the river
another light flickered and started. Soon, from our hiding-place high
over the valley, we could see half a dozen processions, wending up and
down through the hills.
A movement from the direction of our morado, and the _pito_ sounded
close at hand, accompanied by the uneven creak of a rude cart, filling
us with a delightful, terrifying suspense. So close that we could
have touched them, passed chanting men, swinging lights. We heard the
break of leaden whips on their bare backs, but no groans. It was the
procession of the death wagon, on which a skeleton was strapped, a
macabre _memento mori_ borrowed from the Middle Ages. The gleaming
lantern illumined its ribs as it tottered on its seat in grisly
semblance of life.
Suddenly a motor drove up aggressively, and halted straight across
the path of the death wagon. The _pito_ and chanting stopped. A
crowd quickly gathered, and angry voices made staccato demands.
The car remained insolently unmoved, blocking the penitentes’ most
private ceremony. The mob was angry beyond bounds at what to the most
unsympathetic observer was gross rudeness, but to them was outrageous
sacrilege. Pistols were drawn. The increasing numbers of penitentes
surrounding the car buzzed like swarming hornets whose nest has been
smashed, and who hunt the marauder with vicious intent. Then came a
heavy voice from the car, a moment of confusion, and the crowd melted
away, muttering but evidently cowed, while the car moved arrogantly
forward. Puzzled, we asked for explanations.
“That fellow in the car owns the big store where all those greasers
trade. They buy on credit, run in debt, and he takes a mortgage on
their ranches or herds of sheep. Some of them owe him two or three
thousand. They were all ready to make trouble when they recognized him.
He told them he was going to see the show, and if they didn’t like it
they could pay what they owed him tomorrow. So they slunk off. He is a
German.”
_Echt deutsch!_
Barbarous as may be this custom of flagellating, there is devout
belief behind it. To the ignorant Mexican stimulated by these annual
reminders, it is as if, as is literally true, the torture and anguish
had occurred to a neighbor in his home town. The faces of the men and
women, even of little children witnessing the penitente rites, showed
the reality to them of what to most of us is remote as the legend of
Hercules. Faith so beautiful and unusual must command respect no matter
what arouses it. Yet in black contrast to it is the political and moral
corruption said to accompany this dangerous doctrine of expiation.
Being especially saintly because of their endurance test, the
penitentes during the rest of the year commit murder, adultery, theft
and arson with cheerful abandon. Nobody dares oppose them or revenge
their excesses, either from pious veneration, fear, or a knowledge of
the uselessness of such a procedure. For the Penitentes are whispered
to be potent politically. Membership in the sect is kept secret. Many
prominent judges and state politicians are said to be Penitentes. If
a fellow member is brought to justice, he gets off lightly or goes
scot-free, and strange deaths are predicted for enemies, private or
public, of the sect. I was even warned not to write of them, for fear
their power should extend beyond the state’s borders. Doubtless much of
this local fear is exaggerated.
But I predict that what church and legislature have failed to do, the
ubiquitous tourist will accomplish. In the more remote hill towns,
services still reproduce the incarnadined Passion with all its horrors.
Nearer to Santa Fé, the flagellants withdraw closer and closer into
their morados. Without an audience to sympathize, pain and torture
become less tolerable. No man, however sincere he believes himself,
turns Stylites unless his pillar stands in the market place.
Ten miles from this strange Good Friday we passed an equally strange
Easter in the Indian pueblo of San Ildefonso, whose many generations of
Catholicism do not prevent invoking the gods who have given service
even longer than the Christian’s deities. They shake well and mix them,
somewhat after the fashion of my colored laundress who confessed she
always wore a hoodoo charm:--“Of course I’se a good Christian, too, but
the Bible says, don’t it, the Law’d he’ps them as he’ps they-selves?”
Somewhat in this spirit, Easter Sunday was chosen for the Rain Dance
which was to end a long drought. For miles we passed buckboards
carrying large Indian families endimanchées with rainbow hues; Indian
bucks on little neat-footed ponies, their square-chopped raven hair
banded with scarlet or purple, wearing short gay velvet shirts,
buttoned with silver shells bartered from the Navajos, white cotton
trousers, or the more modern blue overalls, henna-colored moccasins,
silver buttoned on their tiny feet. Their necks and waists were loaded
with wampum and turquoise-studded silver, their faces rouged.
“Why do you paint your face?” we asked a visiting Santa Domingo dandy.
“Oh, to be na-ice,” he replied to our impertinence. “Why don’t you
paint yours?”
Volumes have been written of the Pueblo Indians’ folklore and religion,
much of it probably wrong, for the Indian has a habit of telling what
he thinks you want to be told, and concealing exactly what he wishes
to conceal. His religion is too sacred and intimate to be revealed to
the first inquirer. While he has a sense of humor, which some people
persist in denying, he is, like most practical jokers, extremely
sensitive to ridicule, especially when directed against himself. Always
a mystic, he finds his way easily where the Anglo-Saxon gropes.
The common lore of Strange Things, which he shares with the gypsy,
the Hindu, and the Jew, races to whom he bears a certain physical
resemblance, was his centuries before he adopted clothes. In ordinary
learning he remains a child, albeit a shrewd child, yet his eyes are
open in realms of the unknown. He hears the rush of mighty winds
through the heavens, and is acquainted with the voice of the thunder.
He can commune with unseen forces without the trumpery aid of ouija or
the creaky mechanism of science. Though he can barely add and hardly
knows his multiplication tables, I venture to guess that if the fourth
dimension be ever demonstrated, the Indian will be found to have had
a working knowledge of it, and will accept it as a commonplace to his
tribe and his medicine men.
In the Casa Grande ruins is a tiny hole through which the sun shines
the first day it crosses the vernal equinox. Like the lens of a
telescope, this focusses into other tiny holes in other parts of the
building. Why it is there nobody knows, but it indicates a knowledge
of astronomy which places the prehistoric Pima on equal footing
with modern scientists. Before the Zûni Indians knew a white race
existed, according to Cushing, Powell and the musician Carlos Troyer,
they had evolved the theory of prismatic rays coming from the sun,
and had established a fixed relation between color and sound tones,
anticipating by some centuries Mr. Henderson and others. Their medicine
men took shells, found in their magic Corn Mountain, a giant mesa
overshadowing the village, polished them to tissue thinness, and then
painted each shell a pure color, corresponding to the colors of the
prism. One by one they placed these shells over the ear, nearest the
sun. The corresponding color ray from the sun would strike a musical
note so powerful that care had to be taken to prevent the ear drum
being broken. These absolute color-tones the medicine men noted, and
used exclusively in sacred ceremonies, but did not permit their use
in secular music. Are the red men more subtly attuned to rhythms of
the universe than the superior white race? Has the dirty, half-naked
medicine-man somehow found the parent stem of the banyan-tree of life,
while we are still digging around its off-shoots?
But this is a long digression from the sunlit plaza, splashed with
the scarlet Pendleton blankets and sky-blue jerkins of visiting
chiefs, and the pink sateen Mother-Hubbard of the squaw next me, whose
too solid flesh was anchored with pounds and pounds of silver and
turquoise,--enough to pawn at the trader’s for a thousand or two of
_bahana_ money. To our questions of the symbolism of the dance they
made child-like answers: it is to “make rain,”--_mucha agua_ (Spanish
is the lingua franca of the Pueblo Indian). Babies in every state of
dress from a string of wampum up, crowded shyly for our fast melting
chocolates; aged crones, half-blind from the too prevalent trachoma,
hospitably invited us into their neat white-washed living rooms,
or offered us chairs at their doorways. Doors were wide open; the
town kept open house. It gave us an opportunity to see their houses
without prying. Our first reaction was surprise at their universal
ship-shapeness. We saw dirt floors, on which two or three pallets were
folded in neat rows, or in the grander houses, a white enamel bed with
one sheet only, and a lace counterpane; a crucifix and two or three
portraits of saints on the walls, next a gayly flowered cover of some
seed catalogue; a rafter hung with rugs, clothing, and strings of
wampum and silver; slings in which the beds are suspended at night,
and a blackened stone fireplace in the corner. And nearly always, a
blooming plant in a tin can on the wide windowsill, and a lilac bush
just outside.
Houses are strategically situated in a Pueblo village to permit of
every one knowing everything which goes on. If a dog barks, or a
stranger takes a snap-shot without toll, twenty women are at their
doors shouting malediction. There can be no secrets,--gossip screamed
cat-a-corners across a plaza with a face at every door and window and
the roofs thronged loses much of its piquancy.
But before the dance a certain decorum prevailed. This Rain dance, we
were told, was especially sacred. Then, whooping and performing monkey
antics, two strange figures, mostly naked except for some horizontal
stripes painted with grease paint on their legs and bodies, leaped
down the outside stairway of the priesthouse. Horns adorned their
heads, and a tail apiece eked out their scanty costume. They turned
somersaults, seized women by the waist and waltzed with them, hit each
other playfully over the head with sticks, rushed into houses, and came
out with pails of food, whereat they squatted in the plaza, and ate
with simulated gusto. They were the _koshari_, or delight-makers,--the
hereditary clowns who open the dance ceremonies. Like the ancient
Lords of Misrule, they are king for the day, and all must obey their
fantastic whims. They are licensed plunderers, privileged to rush into
any house, which must be left open, and run off with anything which
takes their fancy. Possibly because the _koshari_ availed themselves
too enthusiastically of this part of their priestly office, it is now
the custom to set out food for them, to which they are supposed to
confine themselves.
[Illustration: SANTA DOMINGO WOMAN.]
[Illustration: TAOS WOMAN.]
[Illustration: KOSHARI: RAIN DANCE: SAN YLDEFONSO.]
One _koshari_ was tottering and blind, steering himself with a cane,
and the brusque aid of his companion, a fat young rascal who would
have been funny in any language. He, poor soul, no longer amusing,
contented himself with rushing about on his withered legs, and uttering
feeble yelps in concert with his colleague. The dancers followed, all
young men,--some in their teens,--and began a solemn march around the
village preceding the dance. Necklaces of evergreen wreaths comprised
their costume from the waist up, two eagle feathers topped their hair,
short white hand-woven skirts reached to the knee, with an occasional
fox skin hanging behind, and at the side red, white and green tassels
of wool. The limbs and bodies were painted; at the ankles tortoise
shells rattled, and gourds in their hands shook with silvery precision.
In moccasins edged with skunk fur, they stamped in light, unvarying
rhythm, first on one foot, then the other, wheeling in sudden gusts,
not together, but in a long rhythmic swell so accurately timed to
undulate down the line that each foot was lifted a fraction higher than
the one in front. They sang quietly, with the same shuddering little
accent their gourds and feet maintained, at intervals stressing a
note sharply, in absolute accord. Two women, young and comely, in the
heavy black squaw dress and white doeskin leggins of the Pueblo woman,
squatted midway before the line of lithe dancers, and beat, beat all
through the day on their drums, while all through the day, lightly,
sharply, the moccasined feet were planted and lifted, with a snap and
re-bound as if legs and rippling bodies covered not sinews, but springs
of finely tempered steel, timed to hair trigger exactness. Their lean
faces wore an intent look, hardly heeding the antics of the _koshari_
who gamboled around them, standing on their heads, tumbling, shouting,
and pulling each other’s tails like monkeys. About evergreen trees
planted in the center, they pivoted to all four points of the compass.
The dance varied little. The song, the tombés, the shivery gourds and
shells, the syncopated beat of each tireless foot on the earth became
a background to the color and picnic movement of the village, drowsy
in the sunshine, steaming with the odors of people, dogs, jerked beef,
cedar smoke and buckskin, whiffs of lilac, fresh willow, snowy sprays
of wild pear, and a wet breeze from the Rio Grande.
Because rain in that parched country is literally life, the Indians
hold this rain dance too sacred to admit as participants any women save
the two who beat the drums. “Tomorrow,” said the fat young _koshari_,
“nice dance. We dance with the girls then.”
[Illustration: RAIN DANCE, SAN YLDEFONSO. They stamped in light,
unvarying rhythm.]
I dare not claim any authority for the interpretation of the costumes
of the Rain Dance. Several natives of the pueblo, including quiet-eyed
Juan, the governor, gave us various versions which did not tally in
every particular. We had learned that an Indian’s meaning of a lie,
which he is fairly scrupulous in avoiding, does not include the answers
to questions touching his cherished customs and the private code of
his race. The evergreen, all agreed, stood for fertility or verdure;
the eagle feathers, with their white and black tips, for the black and
white of slashing rain and lowering clouds; the yellow fox-skins
represented the yellow of ripe corn; the red and green tassels at the
waist the flowers and grass of spring; the white tassels, snow or hail.
The symbolism of the thunder clouds was repeated in the black and white
of the skunk fur moccasins; the gourds echoed the swish of rain, and
the drum-beats the rumble of the thunder; the tortoise shell rattles at
the ankle meant either rain and wind, or were a symbol, like the shell
necklaces most of them wore, of the ocean, which all desert tribes
especially revere, as the Father of all Waters.
During the dance the fat and impudent _koshari_ honored me with a
command,--“You take me and my chum for a ride?” Fat and very naked,
covered with melting grease paint, and ferocious in horns and tail, he
was not the sort of companion I would have chosen for a motor drive,
but a refusal might have prompted him to expel us from the village.
On a fête day, the lightest word of a _koshari_ is law. He clambered
in, and moved over to make room for his chum, a loathsome and mangy
old fellow, with rheumy, sightless eyes, whose proximity filled me
with disgust. Tottering with age and excitement, his first move was
to clutch the steering wheel, and when I had disengaged his claws, he
grasped the lever with an iron grip. Meanwhile, thirteen brown babies,
some of whom had been bathed as recently as last year, climbed into the
tonneau. We whirled around and around the plaza, the children shouting,
dogs barking, the fat _koshari_ bowing like visiting royalty to the
cheering spectators, uttering shrieks in my ear to take me off guard,
kicking his heels in the air, or sliding to the floor as a too-daring
visitor tried to snap his picture, while _koshari_ senior occasionally
seized the levers and threw us into reverse, nearly stripping the gears.
A curious people! Childishly admiring of the white man’s automobiles,
radium watches and canned foods, and gravely contemptuous of his
civilized codes, morals and spiritual insight; unsanitary in daily
life, yet with rituals of hospital cleanliness; believing in charms and
“medicine,” yet with a knowledge of herbs, and mental therapy beyond
our own; introducing buffoonery into their religious services, yet with
a reverence for religion uncomprehended by the white man; unable to
persuade the government to give him citizen rights,--but easily able to
persuade the Lord to send him rain! For, two days after the dance, rain
came in abundance in sheets, torrents and cataracts, after a drought
which had lasted months. The Hopi snake dance they say never fails to
bring rain. Other rain dances about Santa Fé have the same result. Is
it coincidence,--or has the Indian a weather sense beyond ours;--or
does he look the Deity more squarely and unflinchingly in the eye when
he makes his demands? Jacob wrestled with his angel. The Indian _knows_
his prayers will bring rain. And however obtained, his percentage of
correct answers seems higher than the white man’s.
A week later, when the town of San Felipe gave a “corn dance,” we found
another instance of the thoroughness with which the Pueblo jumbles his
religions. Through the old white plaza, dazzling with color, dividing
its lively crowds impartially between the lemonade stand at one end,
and the draped altar at the other, we made our way to the old church
which looks through an avenue of blossoming cottonwood on to a gentle
blue and green landscape picked out by the meanderings of the Rio
Grande. Meanwhile the dance in the Plaza had begun. Almost within
sight of the stamping, chanting rows of Squash and Turtle clans, the
men naked to the waist with long hair flowing, the women’s black-clad
bodies and bare arms swaying, the congregation slipped in to the cool
interior of the church, and, dressed in the gorgeous clothes and
jewels they wore to honor their native gods, listened respectfully to
a visiting Bishop, and knelt in prayer with accustomed reverence. They
saw no incongruity in it, and neither do I, so long as good Christians
throw spilled salt over their left shoulder, or wish on the moon. Yet
it made a delightful contrast,--the little brown boys in their white
robes intoning with the nasality of altar boys the world over, plus the
Indian’s special brand of nasality; the quiet attention of the drifting
congregation, and outside, the noise, color and sunshine; the bands
of giddy bucks sprawling on painted ponies, the cool lovely valley
beyond, and at its heart, the power which brought all these elements
together,--sluggish old Rio Grande, taking its time on its everlasting
journey to the Gulf.
Within a short radius of Santa Fé, one can trace all the successive
steps in the history of the Pueblo Indian. We go furthest back at
Rito de los Frijoles, where a glance half way up a perpendicular
cliff reveals black spots of pin-head size. An arduous climb up rough
ladders and steps notched in crumbling yellow tufa shows these holes
as large caverns hollowed by water under the shelving roof of the soft
rock, and built up with a masonry which today would easily command ten
dollars a day and a forty-eight hour week. “The Cloud City, Acoma,”
on the Arizona road is built atop a high mesa, facing the still
higher Enchanted Mesa, now peopled only by troubled ghosts. Doubtless
the first Indians to advance from cave dwellings to mesas felt as
emancipated as the first New Englander who left the old homestead for
a modern apartment-house. Further east the rock-bastioned villages
of the Hopis still carry on the customs of their kin, if not their
ancestors. At Taos and Laguna the timid Pueblos finally ventured down
to the ground, but retained the style of the mesas and cliff dwellings,
of terraced receding houses, several stories high. The final and most
modern adaptation are the one-story, squat little adobe houses of the
river pueblos, whose dwellers have shaken off entirely the ancestral
fear, and raise corn and alfalfa, melons and apricots on the rich
irrigated soil.
The journey to Frijoles is worth risking a fall over precipices as
one dashes over switchbacks of incomparable dizziness on roadbeds of
unsanctified roughness. From Buckman, if the bridge is not washed away
by the floods, like most bridges about Santa Fe, the ascent starts to
the neat little, green little Rito de los Frijoles,--Bean Valley is
its unpoetical English. No motorist should undertake this trip with
his own car unless he thinks quickly, knows his machine thoroughly,
and is inoculated against “horizontal fever.” The road climbs past
orange hills up blue distances, through warmly scented forests of scrub
piñon, with a vista of the river far below. At the top the car must be
abandoned, for nothing wider than a mule can manage the descent into
the canyon.
[Illustration: CAVE DWELLINGS IN THE PUMICE WALLS OF CANYON DE LOS
FRIJOLES, SANTA FE.]
A precipitous and dusty trail drops to a refreshing little valley,
long and narrow, grown with shady pines, and watered by a brook which
was probably the _raison d’être_ for the city so many ages silent
as the sphinx and dead as Pompeii. In a beautiful semi-circle, so
symmetrical and tiny seen from above that it looks like a fantastic
design etched on the valley floor, lie the ruined walls of a city
whose people were the first families of North America. It is hard to
believe this peacefully remote valley ever echoed the noise of playing
children, of gossiping women and barking dogs. The dark-skinned Jamshyd
who ruled here left speechless stone walls to crumble under the tread
of the wild ass, and whether drought, pestilence or murder drove
him and his race forth, forsaking their habitations to the eternal
echoes, nobody knows. He was timid, or he would not have plastered his
houses like swallows’ nests in the cliff, or huddled them together in
this remote canyon, walled in against more aggressive tribes. He was
agricultural, for traces of his gardens, dust these centuries, may be
found. Shard heaps of pottery designed in the red and black pattern
that dates them as from one to two thousand years old, and arrowheads
of black obsidian prove he knew the same arts as the Southwestern
Indian of today. Each tribal unit, then as now, had its kiva, or
underground ceremonial chamber with the altar stone placed exactly as
in every kiva in Utah, Colorado or Arizona.
Parenthetically, the kiva may have retained its popularity through
the sunshiny ages because it offered the men of the tribe a complete
refuge from their women-folk. Once down the ladder, they need not pull
it after them, for custom forbade and still forbids a squaw of any
modesty from acting as if the _kiva_ were within a hundred miles of
her. Once inside, the men folk are at liberty to whittle their prayer
sticks, gossip, swap stories, and follow whatever rituals men indulge
in when alone. It is as bad form for a pueblo woman to invade the kiva
as for us to enter a men’s club,--with the difference that no kiva had
a ladies’ night. Besides furnishing shelter to the henpecked Benedicts,
the kiva became a sort of Y. M. C. A. for the young bucks. In ancient
times the bachelors of the tribe slept together in the kiva, their
food being left outside the entrance. This very wise provision greatly
protected the morals of the young people, forced to live in very close
juxtaposition.
On the ridge opposite the caves of Frijoles lies an unexplored region
believed to be the summer home of the race who lived here so secretly
and vanished so mysteriously. In a few years the excavator may discover
among the shard heaps at the top of this canyon the reason for the
exodus, but at present more is known about lost Atlantis than these
ruins in our “rawest” and newest corner of the States.
One need not thrill to the prehistoric, however, to enjoy Santa Fé,
especially when the apricots blur the flaming green valley with a rosy
mist. All trails from the sleepy little town lead to the perpetual
snows of the hills through scented forests of pine, past roaring
streams. A good horse will clamber up the bed of a waterfall, leap
fallen logs, pick his way, when the forest becomes too tangled, over
the slippery boulders of the river, canter over ground too rough for a
high-school horse to walk upon, and bring his rider out to the top of
some high ridge, where crests of blue notch against crests of paler and
paler blue, without end.
Near enough to Santa Fé to be reached in a day by motor and somewhat
longer by pack-train, lies the enchanting valley locally called “The
Pecos.” One mounts the piñon-scented red trail, studded with spring
flowers, to the heights above, where to breathe the air of dew and
fire is to acquire the zip of a two year old colt and the serenity of
a seraph. In this least known corner of our country, the Pecos is the
least traveled district, known only to a few ranchmen, and old guides
with tall, “straight” stories, and short, twisted legs,--mighty hunters
who have wrestled barehanded with bears, and stabbed mountain lions
with their penknives. Sportsmen are only beginning to know what the
streams of the Pecos produce in trout, and its wilderness in big game.
Given a good horse, a good guide, good “grub” and a comfortable bedding
roll, a month free from entangling alliances with business, and the
Pecos provides sound sleep, mighty appetites, and air two miles high,
so different from the heavy vapor breathed by the city-dweller that it
deserves a name of its own.
Nobody can stay long in Santa Fé, without becoming aware of the Rio
Grande’s influence on the dwellers in its valley. It furnishes not
only their livelihood, but little daily happenings, “So and So’s car
got stuck crossing at Espanola, and had to stay in the river two
days,”--“The river rose and tore down the bridge at Buckman, and they
say there will be two more bridges down by night.”--“You can’t get out
at Pojoaque, this week.” But to see the river in its magnificence, one
should drive over the canyon of the Rio Grande, following along the
precipitous road to Taos.
The day we started for Taos, rain invoked by the prayerful Pueblos had
reduced the road-bed to a sticky red plaster which more than once slid
our car gently toward the edge and a drop of a hundred feet or more.
Like the foolish virgins we were, we had forgotten our chains. To put
on the brakes would invite a skid; not to do so meant a plunge over the
bank. The road, like an afterthought, clung for dear life to the edge
of a series of hills, now dipping like a swallow to the river bed, then
after the usual chuck-hole at the bottom, rising in dizzy turns to the
top of the next hill, unwinding before us sometimes for miles. Steep
cliffs, and narrow gorges at times shut us completely from the world.
Far below, the river frothed turbulently.
Occasionally as we took a turn, a bit of bank caved in with us, and
left one wheel treading air. On sharp curves a long wheel base is a
great disadvantage. The earth is liable to crumble where rain has
softened it in gullies, and one must learn to keep close enough to the
inside edge in turning to prevent the back wheels from skimming the
precipice, and yet not drive the front wheels into the inside bank.
Add to this a surface of slick mud on which the car slides helplessly,
heavy ruts and frequent boulders, steep graded curves with gullies at
the bottom, and it will seem less surprising that the mail driver who
takes his own car and his life over this road twice a week to Santa Fé
receives about three times the wage of a Harvard professor.
A few miles before reaching Taos we left the canyon and came out on
a broad plain. The first sight of Taos takes one’s breath,--it is
so alien to America. Ancient of days, it suggests Jerusalem or some
village still more remote in civilization. Houses terraced to five
and even seven stories are banked against purple mountains, thirteen
thousand feet in the air. A little stream winds to the walls of the
village, dividing it in two. On the banks women wash clothes, and
men draw primitive carts to the water, or gallop over the plain like
Arabs in the flowing white robes characteristic to Taos. The roofs of
the square plaster houses, terraced one above the other, are peopled
with naked babies. Women wrapped in shawls of virgin blue or scarlet
outlined against the sky, again suggest the Orient. Constantly in these
Pueblos one is reminded of the Far East and it is easy to believe
these Indians of the Southwest, of sleek round yellow cheek and almond
eyes are of Mongolian stock. The Grand Canyon old-timer, William Bass,
tells of seeing a distinguished Chinese visitor talk with ease to some
Navajos of the Painted desert, who, he reported, used a rough Chinese
dialect. In the Shoshone country, I myself saw Indians enter a Chinese
restaurant, and converse with the slant-eyed proprietor. When I asked
whether they were speaking Shoshone or Chinese, I was told that they
used a sort of _lingua franca_, and had no difficulty in understanding
each other. Oriental or not, the origins of Taos are clouded with
antiquity.
Coronado was the first Aryan to visit this ancient pueblo, and we,
to date, were the last. The same gentle courtesy met us both. We
were given the freedom of the village, invited into the houses, and
allowed to climb to the roof-tops, with the governor’s pretty little
daughter as our guide. Taos, like all pueblos, has a republican form
of government, and a communal life which works out very peaceably.
Annually the two candidates for governor run a foot-race, one from each
division of the town, and the political race is indeed to the swift.
Perhaps they get as good governors by that method as by our own.
Taos, like all Gaul, is divided into tres partes, quarum unam the
Cubists incolunt. No place could be more ideal for an artist’s
colony, with scenery unsurpassed, air clear and sparkling, living
inexpensive, picturesque models to be had cheaply, and little adobe
houses simply asking to become studios. San Geronimo de Taos, on the
Pueblo Creek belongs to the Indians. Ranchos de Taos, where a fine old
mission church, bulwarked with slanting plaster buttresses has stood
since 1778, at the lower end of the straggling town, is given over
to Mexicans. The middle section, once famous as the home town of Kit
Carson, proclaims by its blue and lavender doorways, mission bells,
fretted balconies and latticed windows, the wave of self-consciousness
that had inundated American Taos. But it has its own charm and adapts
itself admirably to the native dwellings. Kit Carson’s old home, facing
a magnificent view over the river, has become a sumptuous studio; and
scaling down from that to the most humble loft over a stable, every
available nook in the town is commandeered by artists, where every
style of art is produced from canvasses out-niggling Meissonier to the
giddy posters of the post-post-impressionists. Regardless of results,
they are lucky artists who have the pleasant life and brisk ozone of
Santa Fé in the winter, enjoy the picturesque Indian dances in spring
and fall, and in summer paint and loaf in the purple glory of the Taos
mountains, cooled by frosty air blowing from the two and a half mile
snow line.
[Illustration: ARTIST’S STUDIO IN TAOS, NEW MEXICO. No place could be
more ideal for an artist colony.]
[Illustration: CORONADO WAS THE FIRST WHITE MAN TO VISIT THIS ANCIENT
PUEBLO AT TAOS, NEW MEXICO.]