It lies to the left of the city Plaza—a long, low, one-story building flanking the whole length of one side of the Plaza, with big yellow pine pillars supporting the arcade above the public walk, each pillar surmounted by the fluted architrave peculiar to Spanish-Moorish architecture. It is yellow adobe in the sunlight—very old, very sleepy, very remote from latter-day life, the most un-American thing in all America, the only governor's palace from Athabasca to the Gulf of Mexico, from Sitka to St. Lawrence, that exists to-day precisely as it existed one hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, four hundred years ago—back, back beyond that to the days when there were no white men in America. Uncover the outer plaster in the six-foot thickness of the walls in the Governor's Palace of Santa Fe, and what do you find? Solid adobe and brick? Not much! The walled-up, conical fireplaces and meal bins and corn caves of a pueblo people who lived on the site of modern Santa Fe hundreds of years before the Spanish founded this capital here in 1605. For years it has been a dispute among historians—Bandelier, Hodge, Twitchell, Governor Prince, Mr. Reed—whether any prehistoric race dwelt where Santa Fe now stands. Only in the summer of 1912, when it was necessary to replace some old beams and cut some arches through the six-foot walls was it discovered that the huge partitions covered in their centers walls antedating the coming of the Spaniards—walls with the little conical fireplaces of Indian pueblos, with such meal bins and corn shelves as you find in the prehistoric cave dwellings.
We have such a passion for destroying the old and replacing it with the new in America that you can scarcely place your hand on a structure in the New World that stands intact as it was before the Revolution. We somehow or other take it for granted that these mute witnesses of ancient heroism have nothing to teach us with their mossed walls and low-beamed ceilings and dumb, majestic dignity.
The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe, New Mexico, within the walls of which are found the conical fireplaces of the Indians who lived here hundreds of years before the Spaniards came
To this, the Governor's Palace of Santa Fe is the one and complete exception in America. It flanks the cottonwoods of the Plaza, yellow adobe in the sunlight—very old, very sleepy, very remote from latter-day life, but with a quaint, quiet atmosphere that travelers scour Europe to find. Look up to the vigas, or beams of the ceiling, yellowed and browned and mellowed with age. Those vigas have witnessed strange figures stalking the spacious halls below. If the ceiling beams could throw their memories on some moving picture screen, there would be such a panorama of varied personages as no other palace in the world has witnessed. Leave out the hackneyed tale of General Lew Wallace writing "Ben Hur" in a back room of the Palace; or the fact that three different flags flung their folds over old Santa Fe in a single century. He who knows anything at all about Santa Fe, knows that Spanish power gave place to Mexican, and the Mexican régime to American rule. Also, that General Lew Wallace wrote "Ben Hur" in a back room of the Palace, while he was governor of New Mexico. And you only have to use your eyes to know that Santa Fe, itself, is a bit of old Spain set down in the modern United States of America. The donkeys trotting to market under loads of wood, the ragged peon riders bestriding burros no higher than a saw horse, the natives stalking past in bright serape or blanket, moccasined and hatless—all tell you that you are in a region remote from latter-day America.
But here is another sort of picture panorama! It is between 1680 and 1710.
A hatless youth, swarthy from five years of terrible exposure, hair straight as a string, gabbling French but speaking no Spanish, a slave white traded from Indian tribe to Indian tribe, all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the interior of New Spain, is brought before the viceroy. Do you know who he is? He is Jean L'Archevêque, the French-Canadian lad who helped to murder La Salle down on Trinity Bay in Texas. What are the French doing down on Trinity Bay? Do they intend to explore and claim this part of America, too? In the abuses of slavery among the Indians for five years, the lad has paid the terrible penalty for the crime into which he was betrayed by his youth. He is scarred with wounds and beatings. He is too guilt-stricken ever to return to New France. His information may be useful to New Spain; so he is enrolled in the guards of the Spanish Viceroy of Santa Fe; and he is sent out to San Ildefonso and Santa Clara, where he founds a family and where his records may be seen to this day. For those copy-book moralists who like to know that Divine retribution occasionally works out in daily life, it may be added that Jean L'Archevêque finally came to as violent a death as he had brought to the great French explorer, La Salle.
Or take a panorama of a later day. It is just before the fall of Spanish rule. The Governor sits in his Palace at Santa Fe, a mightier autocrat than the Pope in Rome; for, as the Russians say, "God is high in His Heavens," and the King is far away, and those who want justice in Santa Fe, must pay—pay—pay—pay in gold coin that can be put in the iron chest of the viceroy. (You can see specimens of those iron chests all through New Mexico yet—chests with a dozen secret springs to guard the family fortune of the hidden gold bullion.) A woman bursts into the presence of the Viceroy, and throws herself on her knees. It is a terrible tale—the kind of tale we are too finical to tell in these modern days, though that is not saying there are not many such tales to be told. The woman's young sister has married an officer of the Viceroy's ring. He has beaten her as he would a slave. He has treated her to vile indecencies of which only Hell keeps record. She had fled to her father; but the father, fearing the power of the Viceroy, had sent her back to the man; and the man has killed her with his brutalities. (I have this whole story from a lineal descendant of the family.) The woman throws back her rebozo, drops to her knees before the Viceroy, and demands justice. The Viceroy thinks and thinks. A woman more or less! What does it matter? The woman's father had been afraid to act, evidently. The husband is a member of the government ring. Interference might stir up an ugly mess—revelations of extortion and so on! Besides, justice is worth so much per; and this woman—what has she to pay? This Viceroy will do nothing. The woman rises slowly, incredulous. Is this justice? She denounces the Viceroy in fiery, impassioned speech. The Viceroy smiles and twirls his mustachios. What can a woman do? The woman proclaims her imprecation of a court that fails of justice. (Do our courts fail of justice? Is there no lesson in that past for us?) Do you know what she did? She did what not one woman in a million could do to-day, when conditions are a thousand fold easier. She went back to her home. It was just about where the pretty Spanish house of Mr. Morley of the Archæological School stands to-day. She gathered up all the loose gold she could and bound it in a belt around her waist. Then she took the most powerful horse she had from the kraal, saddled him and rode out absolutely alone for the city of Old Mexico—900 miles as the trail ran. Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, beset the way. She rode at night and slept by day. The trail was a desert waste of waterless, bare, rocky hills and quicksand rivers and blistering heat. God, or the Virgin to whom she constantly prayed, or her own dauntless spirit, must have piloted the way; for she reached the old city of Mexico, laid her case before the King's representatives, and won the day. Her sister's death was avenged. The husband was tried and executed: and the Viceroy was deposed. Most of us know of almost similar cases. I think of a man who has repeatedly tried for a federal judgeship in New Mexico, who has literally been guilty of every crime on the human calendar. Yet we don't at risk of life push these cases to retribution. Is that one of the lessons the past has for us? Spanish power fell in New Mexico because there came a time when there was neither justice nor retribution in any of the courts.
Other panoramas there were beneath the age-mellowed beams of the Palace ceiling, panoramas of Comanche and Navajo and Ute and Apache stalking in war feathers before a Spanish governor clad in velvets and laces. Tradition has it that a Ute was once struck dead in the Governor's presence. Certainly, all four tribes wrought havoc and raid to the very doors of the Palace. Within only the last century, a Comanche chief and his warriors came to Santa Fe demanding the daughter of a leading trader in marriage for the chief's son. The garrison was weak, in spite of fustian and rusty helmets and battered breastplates and velvet doublets and boots half way to the waist—there were seldom more than 200 soldiers, and the pusillanimous Governor counseled deception. He told the Comanche that the trader's daughter had died, and ordered the girl to hide. The only peace that an Indian respects—or any other man, for that matter—is the peace that is a victory. The Indian suspected that the answer was the answer of the coward, a lie, and came back with his Comanche warriors. While the soldiers huddled inside the Palace walls, the town was raided. The trader was murdered and the daughter carried off to the Comanches, where she died of abuse. When these tragedies fell on daughters of the Pilgrims in New England, the Saxon strain of the warrior women in their blood rose to meet the challenge of fate; and they brained their captors with an ax; but no such warrior strain was in the blood of the daughters of Spain. By religion, by nationality, by tradition, the Spanish girl was the purely convent product: womanhood protected by a ten-foot wall. When the wall fell away, she was helpless as a hot-house flower set out amid violent winds.