ON THE RIO GRANDE. AN ABSTRACT OF THE AUTHOR'S GENEALOGY OF MATERNAL
LINEAGE
In the month of September I came to the end of my journey, as I arrived
on the Rio Abajo. Now I began the second chapter of my life's voyage.
No longer a precocious child, I was growing to young manhood and was
not lacking in those qualities which are essential in the successful
performance of life's continual struggle. I was heartily welcomed by my
uncle, my mother's brother. My aunt, poor lady, had, of course, given
me up as lost and greeted me with joyful admiration. But she did not
venture close to me, for in me she saw a strong, lusty young man,
bright eyed, alert-looking and carrying a deadly army revolver and
wicked hunting knife at his belt. To be sure, I was suntanned and
graybacked beyond comparison with the dust of a thousand miles of wagon
road.
As I had expected, I found my uncle in very prosperous circumstances,
in a commercial sense. And no wonder, for he was a tall, fine-looking
man, under forty and overflowing with energy and personal magnetism.
And my mother's little family tree did the rest--aye, surely, it was
not to be sneezed at, as will be presently seen.
Of course, mother traced her ancestral lineage, as all other people do,
to Adam and Eve in general, but in particular she claimed descent from
those ancient heroes of the Northland, the Vikings. These daring rovers
of the seas were really a right jolly set of men. In their small
galleys they roamed the trackless seas, undaunted alike by the terrors
of the hurricane as by the perils of unknown shores. On whatever coast
they chanced--finding it inhabited, they landed, fought off the men and
captured their women. They sacked villages and plundered towns, and
loading their ships with booty, they set sail joyfully, homeward bound
for the shores of the misty North Sea, the shallow German Ocean. Here
they had a number of retreats and strongholds. There was Helgoland, the
mysterious island; Cuxhaven, at the mouth of the river Elbe; Buxtehude,
notoriously known from a very peculiar ferocious breed of dogs; Norse
Loch on the coast of Holstein, and numerous other locker, or inlets,
hard to find, harder to enter when found and hardest to pronounce. In
the course of time these rovers were visited by saintly Christian
missionaries and, like all other Saxon tribes, they accepted the light
of the Christian Gospel. They saw the error of their way and eschewed
their vocation of piracy and devoted their energies to commerce and the
spreading of the Gospel of Christ.
Piously they decorated the sails of their crafts and blazoned their war
shields with the sign of the cross. They kidnapped holy priests (for
otherwise they came not), and taking them aboard their ships, they
sailed to their several ports. Then they forced the unwilling Fathers
to unite them in holy wedlock to the maidens of their choice. To many
havens they sailed, and in every one they had an only wife. They made
their priests inscribe texts from the holy Gospel on pieces of
parchment made from the skin of hogs, and instead of robbing people, as
of yore, they paid with the word of Holy Scripture for the booty they
levied. This, they said, was infinitely more precious than any worldly
dross. All hail to the memory of my gallant maternal ancestor, who,
when surfeited with the caresses of his Fifine of Normandy, flew to the
arms of Mercedes of Andalusia. Next, perhaps, he appeared in Greenland,
blubbering with an Esquimau heiress. Anon, you might have found him in
Columbia in the tolls of a princely Pocahontas. In Mexico he ate the
ardent chile from the tender hand of his Guadalupita, and later on he
was on time at a five o'clock family tea party in Japan, or he might
have kotowed pidgin-love to a trusting maid in a China town of fair
Cathay. In Africa--oh, horror!--here I draw the veil, for in my mind's
eye I behold a burly negro (yes, sah!) staring at me out of fishy, blue
eyes. It is said of these gallant rovers of the seas that they were
subject to a peculiar malady when on shore. It caused them to stagger
and swagger, use violent language, and deport themselves not unlike
people who are seized with mal de mer, or sickness of the sea. When
attacked by this failing, their wives would cast them bodily into the
holds of their ships and start them out to sea, where they soon
recovered their usual health and equilibrium and continued on their
rounds. They were the first of all commercial travelers and the
hardiest, jolliest and most prosperous--but they did not hoard their
earnings.
My uncle conducted a store, selling merchandise of every description.
Dutch uncle though he was to me, I must give him thanks for the careful
business training he bestowed on me. I say with pride that I proved to
be his most apt and willing pupil. He taught me how the natives, by
nature simple-minded and unsophisticated, had lost all confidence in
their fellow-men in general and merchants in particular through the, to
say the least, very dubious and suspicious dealings of the tribes of
Israel. My uncle said he was an old timer in New Mexico, but the Jew
was there already when he came and, added he, thoughtfully, "I believe
the Jews came to America with Columbus." With a pack of merchandise
strapped to his back, this king of commerce crossed the plains in the
face of murderous Indians and with the unexplainable, crafty cunning of
his race, he sold tobacco and trinkets to the warriors who had set out
to kill him, and to the squaws he sold Parisian lingerie at a bargain.
He swore that he was losing money and selling the goods below cost, not
counting the freight.
As the Indians had no money and nothing else of commercial value to
him, he bartered for the trophies of victory which the proud chiefs
carried suspended from their belts. Deprecatingly he called their
attention to the undeniable fact that these articles had been worn
before and had to be rated as second-hand goods. But he hoped that his
brother-in-law, Isaac Dreibein, who conducted a second-hand
hairdressing establishment in New York City, would take these goods off
his hands. This trade flourished for a time, until, as usual, Israel
fell off from the Lord, by opening shop on the Sabbath. An unlucky
Moses got into a fatal altercation with a Comanche chief, whom he
cheated out of a scalplock, as he was as baldheaded as a hen's egg.
Thereat the Indians became suspicious and refused to trade with the
Jews ever after.
With proverbial German thoroughness, uncle instructed me in all the
tricks and secrets of his profession. He had found that the Mexicans
were good buyers, if handled scientifically, for they would never leave
the store until they had spent all their money. Therefore, in order to
encourage our customers, we kept a barrel of firewater under the
counter as a trade starter. One or more drams of old Magnolia would
start the ball to roll finely. Our merchandise cost mark was made up
from the words, "God help us!" Every letter of this pious sentiment
designated one of the numbers from one to nine and a cross stood for
naught. When I said to uncle, "No wonder that our business prospers
under this mark--God help us!--but say, who helps our customers?" he
was nonplussed for a moment, and then he laughed heartily and said that
this had never worried him yet.
There was not much money in circulation in New Mexico at that time, as
the country was without railroads and too isolated to market farm
produce, wool and hides profitably. Mining for gold was carried on at
Pinos Altos, near the southern boundary, but the Apaches did not
encourage prospecting to any extent. During the period of the discovery
of gold in California, in the days of "forty-nine," the people of New
Mexico had become quite wealthy through supplying the California placer
miners with mutton sheep at the price of an ounce of gold dust per
head, when muttons cost half a dollar on the Rio Grande. At that rate
of profit they could afford the time and expense of driving their herds
of sheep to market at Los Angeles, even though the Apaches of Arizona
took their toll and fattened on stolen mutton.