Finding the Worth While in the Southwest

BY CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS Author of “Finding the Worth While in California,” “The Indians of the Terraced Houses,” etc.
WITH MAP AND ILLUSTRATIONS
“The Sun goes West,
Why should not I?”
Old Song.
NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1918
Copyright, 1918, by Robert M. McBride & Co.
Published May, 1918
TO M. H. R. Kinswoman most dear This little volume is affectionately inscribed.
No part of the United States is so foreign of aspect as our great Southwest. The broad, lonely plains, the deserts with their mystery and color, the dry water courses, the long, low mountain chains seemingly bare of vegetation, the oases of cultivation where the fruits of the Orient flourish, the brilliant sunshine, the deliciousness of the pure, dry air—all this suggests Syria or northern Africa or Spain. Added to this are the remains everywhere of an old, old civilization that once lived out its life here—it may have been when Nineveh was building or when Thebes was young. Moreover, there is the contemporary interest of Indian and Mexican life such as no other part of the country affords.
In this little volume the author has attempted, in addition to outlining practical information for the traveler, to hint at this wealth of human association that gives the crowning touch to the Southwest’s charm of scenery. The records of Spanish explorers and missionaries, the legends of the aborigines (whose myths and folklore have been studied and recorded by scholars like Bandelier, Matthews, Hough, Cushing, Stevenson, Hodge, Lummis, and others) furnish the raw material of a great native literature. Painters long since discovered the fascination of our Southwest; writers, as yet, have scarcely awakened to it.
Someone—I think it was that picturesque historian of our Southwest, Mr. Charles F. Lummis—has summed up New Mexico as “sun, silence and adobe;” and of these three components the one that is apt to strike the Eastern newcomer most forcibly is adobe. This homely gift of nature—hard as brick in dry weather, plastic as putty and sticky as glue in wet—is the bulwark of the New Mexican’s well-being. His crops are raised in it; he fences in his cattle with it; he himself lives in it; for of it are built those colorless, square, box-like houses, flat-roofed and eaveless which, on our first arrival in New Mexico, we declared an architectural abomination, and within a week fell eternally in love with. An adobe house wall is anywhere from two to five feet thick, a fact that conduces to coolness in summer, warmth in winter, and economy at all seasons. Given possession of a bit of ground, you grub up a few square yards of the earth, mix it with water and wheat chaff, and shovel the mixture into a wooden mold. You then lift the mold and lo! certain big, brown bricks upon the ground. These the fiery New Mexican sun bakes hard for you in a couple of days—bricks that are essentially the same as those of ancient Babylon and Egypt, and the recipe for which (received by the Spanish probably from their Moorish conquerors) is one of Spain’s most valued contributions to America. Old Santa Fe was built entirely of this material, and most of latter day Santa Fe still is, though there is a growing disposition on the part of the well-to-do to substitute burned brick and concrete.