CHAPTER VII AT SANTA FE
Judging the tropics in midsummer to be too tiring, I decided to postpone our journey to Panama and Mexico until autumn and winter. Balboa climbed that peak in Darien in September. That should be my month for going there. So we went, for the rest of the summer, to La Ciudad Real de Santa Fe, away in the Southern Rockies upon the borderland of Mexico. That was no small journey from Habana—two days in a fruit boat to New Orleans, then in a Gulf train to Houston and San Antonio, half across the Texan desert to a point nearer the Pacific than the Atlantic—burning El Paso where the street asphalt hisses when the water cart comes round. Then up country to Albuquerque, of which name, at least, there used to be Spanish dukes, the Dukes of Albuquerque. Then sixty miles through scrub and sand to Santa Fe which is some seven thousand feet up—about as high as Mexico City, though nothing like so verdant a place.
Here we hired a mud house, to be polite, "adobe built" from the Mexicans; three cool spacious rooms, a porch, a "corral." We bought two horses, Billy and Buckskin, to whom I must say we became much attached, so that it was a pity when the time came, after some months, to part with them. I bought my Billy from a cowboy for thirty dollars. "Shorty," who sold him to me, did not seem to think the transaction complete till sealed with a drink. He had in a saddle pocket of the horse he was riding a stout bottle of whisky, and, giving me a ferocious wink he turned his horse into a lane and poured into a little tin can a ration of what Uncle Sam forbids.
"I think he'll be a useful pony when he has had corn for a month," said I.
"He's all right," said Shorty, wiping his lips. "You carnt kill 'im."
That turned out to be true, as far as I could judge. Billy proved to be somewhat of an immortal. The adventures we had with these horses would make a book in themselves.
One thing was rather disappointing; New Mexico is not such a horse country as it was. Cross the border into Mexico proper, and every man except the Tarahumare Indians and the lowest of the peons is mounted. But on the American side Ford is surely conquering. It is more respectable to have a car than a horse. The cowboys and the Mexicans ride to their work, but pleasure is identified not with the horse, but with a car. The cowgirl is almost extinct, and the only women riders you see are visitors. In the Plaza at Santa Fe there is no longer any place to tie up a horse. Motors hold all the space. You have to seek out waste places in or about town, or else take the risk of tying to a telegraph pole in the midst of the traffic. Billy nearly pulled down several telegraph poles, and actually on one occasion broke his stout leather reins.
Outside the city horsemen are common enough, cowboys and Mexican farmers, and occasional mounted parties of polite Americans with hired horses and guides.
Santa Fe is, or was, the home of an artistic and literary colony. It is a health resort for people with lung disease, and it possesses an excellently well equipped sanatorium. A large number of residents are under doctor's orders. The driest air in America and a never failing morning sun makes Santa Fe ideal for consumptives. There have been many complete cures effected. The development of the place as a literary colony started no doubt with the coming there for her health of Alice Corbin from Chicago, one of the protagonists of the New Poetry movement, a sponsor of Lindsay and Sandburg and many others who rose to fame under the auspices of the Poetry Magazine. When she was "ordered South" poetry moved with her. It was no doubt owing to Vachel Lindsay's generous enthusiasm that we were tempted to go to Santa Fe. He saw in the little city in the mountains unbounded possibilities.
So in coming to Santa Fe we not only met the mountains but a number of writers and artists, amongst them my old acquaintance Witter Bynner who once diverted five chapters of Undiscovered Russia into verse which someone else, later, put to music. Bynner had quit the world in which he was somewhat of a king for a hermit's hut in the desert. Here we met Elizabeth Sergeant who wrote up life in the neighborhood in her amusing Letters from a Mud House; here as a visitor came William Allen White. Over the mountains at Taos lived D. H. Lawrence. A visitor also was Mrs. C. N. Williamson, gay and young despite her weeds and the score of novels and stories she and her late husband had written. The artists were as numerous, if more difficult to place, being rather jealous of one another. My favorite question was: "Who do you think is the greatest artist in Santa Fe?" But I never could get an answer beyond a faint blush and a slight personal embarrassment.
At seven thousand feet, however, literary and artistic people are apt to be very nervous, and those of poor health painfully so. There was more pleasure to be had riding in the hills than at the afternoon "teas" which were always being arranged. At these some beautifully gowned millionaire's wife "poured," the young men simpered in their well-ironed, ready-made clothes, the flappers, all curled and tinted, were like wax works, and middle-aged artists with long hair sat in corners musing on life like old frumps at a ball—very hard on them. To one of these gatherings a literary man and his wife came riding in one day. They walked in in sporting attire and the wife looked very striking in a gay white jumper and riding breeches.
I got into trouble at Santa Fe being supposed to have said it was "a shabby little town." Ladies whispered the blasphemy to one another at tea. I am to be remembered by that phrase. But in truth I think it a wonderful place and a wonderful district; something quite novel and fresh in American life. The cowboys, the Indians, and the Mexicans, make it very interesting. Its sun and air, its mountains, its horses, give it a marvelous possibility. The shabbiness lies in certain little things, such as the mean commercialism of the shops and the absence of a popular market for dairy products, fruit and vegetables. This is an Americanization of life. Every city of any size in Mexico has its popular market which furnishes fresh food at a cheap price. But La Ciudad Real de Santa Fe lives on canned milk, canned tomatoes, dried fruit, storage meat, coffee ground years ago in Chicago, eggs of uncertain origin and age. Fruit harvests fall to the ground and rot because they are plenty and the stores do not want the price reduced. There is something artificial and unpleasant in living in New Mexico on rations from Chicago. It militates against simple living, and it should be of the essence of a literary colony in the mountains to live simply. It raises a problem for Americans—how is one to escape from the American standardization of life?
Albuquerque, sixty miles away and many times larger, is even more artificial and standardized. Possibly El Paso on the frontier more so still. El Paso is like Kansas City in small, and that is the more remarkable as El Paso is as much in the desert as Luxor in Egypt or Merv in Turkestan; perhaps more so than Merv, for the Rio Grande is not to be compared to the Oxus River.
It prompts the thought that if America ever extended her territory to Chihuahua, the next large city in Mexico going southward, then Chihuahua also would become in a short time a replica of a hundred cities in the North. There might then be said of Chihuahua what Carl Sandburg said of Kalamazoo—
Kalamazoo, you ain't in a class by yourself;
I seen you before in a lot of places.
If you are nuts America is nuts.
However, at Santa Fe my wife and I lived a free and happy life in our house of mud, and enjoyed the wild West, the "last West" as it has been happily called, to the full. It is all pine scrub and sand for another thousand feet up, loose sand and bowlders which have, however, no terrors for the horses. Billy and Buck are surefooted as goats and can be ridden up steep banks which English horses would merely regard as walls. But neither horse will jump anything. After a thousand feet you enter a region of tall pines and firs, and five hundred feet later you reach aspens, grass, wild flowers, wild fruits. Most of the little rain that falls seems to benefit the upper mountain region. Santa Fe itself is in constant danger of drought. Water is very freely supplied by the Water Company and the dwellers in the many villas let the hose play on their lawns all day and all night, till suddenly there is a warning note, the hose ceases, and the lawns wilt. There is perhaps too much waste of the water of the little Santa Fe river on which Santa Fe's reputation as an oasis depends. In a state of nature very few wild flowers bloom down below. But in June and early July, like wild roses, the cactus blossoms everywhere and its red flowers delight the eye. The eyes crave and thirst for flowers and greenery.
A feature of the country is the arroyo or dried-out river channel, dead, stony, and sandy, which wanders along in an irregular course as if it had once held a fair stream. Many of these have never known living water. The river they represent is flowing underneath the sand, and the channel is not truly a riverbed but a subsidence. In these cases no grass will grow, there is not the slightest pasture, the only green thing that flourishes is a deep-rooted yellow flowering weed of the desert, a sort of sage brush, called locally chimesa. Riding downward to the Rio Grande valley, the view opens grandly upon wide sweeping desert country bounded by strange, wind-carved pyramids of rock and little mountains wrought into fantastic shape. Vachel Lindsay, who like many others deplores the name of the State—New Mexico—wanted to call it "New Arabia" or "New Egypt" because of its natural pyramids, its prehistoric ruins, its hieroglyphics and the sacred dances of the Indians. But he felt also that it was first of all "Cowboy country"—it was, or had become, America, and it is difficult to confound the new with the old.
We met in Santa Fe Jack Thorp, sometimes called the Cowboy Poet, because of his collection of cowboys' songs, and for several songs he wrote himself—but a substantial man, bred with, and always living with, horses and full of lore of the Border. It is no doubt due in part to him that we went to the Cowboys' Reunion at Las Vegas which I here describe.