TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND AND ANCIENT CAPITAL OF THE SOUTHWEST
As Quebec is the shrine of historical pilgrims in the North, and Salem in New England; so Taos is the Mecca of students of history and lovers of art in the Southwest. Here came the Spanish knights mounted and in armor plate half a century before the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. They had not only crossed the sea but had traversed the desert from Old Mexico for 900 miles over burning sands, amid wild, bare mountains, across rivers where horses and riders swamped in the quicksands. To Taos came Franciscan padres long before Champlain had built stockades at Port Royal or Quebec. Just as the Jesuits won the wilderness of the up-country by martyr blood, so the Franciscans attacked the strongholds of paganism amid the pueblos of the South. Spanish conquistadores have been represented as wading through blood to victory, with the sword in one hand, the cross in the other; but that picture is only half the truth. Let it be remembered that the Spanish were the only conquerors in America who gave the Indians perpetual title, intact and forever, to the land occupied when the Spanish came—which titles the Indians hold to this day. Also, while rude soldiers, or even officers, might be guilty of such unprovoked attacks as occurred at Bernalillo in Coronado's expedition of 1540, the crown stood sponsor for the well-being and salvation of the Indian's soul. Wherever the conqueror marched, the sandaled and penniless Franciscan remained and too often paid the penalty of the soldier's crimes. In the Tusayan Desert, at Taos, at Zuñi, at Acoma, you will find Missions that date back to the expedition of Coronado; and at every single Mission the padres paid for their courage and their faith with their lives.
But Taos traditions date back farther than the coming of the white man. Christians have their Christ, northern Indians their Hiawatha, and the pueblo people their Bah-tah-ko, or grand cacique, who led their people from the ravages of Apache and Navajo in the far West to the Promised Land of verdant plains and watered valleys below the mighty mountains of Taos. Montezuma was to the Southwest, not the Christ, but the Adam, the Moses, the Joseph. Casa Grande in southern Arizona was the Garden of Eden, "the place of the Morning Glow;" but when war and pestilence and ravaging foe and drouth drove the pueblos from their Garden of Eden, the Bah-tah-ko was the Moses to lead them to the Promised Land at Taos. When did he live? The oldest man does not know. The pueblos had been at Taos thousands of years, when the Spanish came in 1540; and, it may be added, they live very much the same to-day at Taos as they did when the white man first came. The men wear store trousers instead of woven linen ones; some wear hats instead of a red head band; and there are wagons instead of drags attached to a dog in shafts. But apart from these innovations, there is little difference at Taos between 1912 and 1540. The whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the pueblo; but the old estufas, or kivas, are still used for religious ceremony, and election of rulers, and maintenance of Indian law. You can still see the Indians threshing their grain by the trampling of goats on a threshing floor, or the run of burros round and round a kraal chased by a boy, while a man scrapes away the grain and forks aside the chaff. There are white man's courts and white man's laws, down at the white man's town of Taos; but the Indian has little faith in, and less respect for, these white man courts and laws, and out at Taos has his own court, his own laws, his own absolute and undisputed governor, his own police, his own prison and his own penalties. The wealth of Midas would not tempt a Taos Indian to exchange his life in the tiered adobe villages for all that civilization could offer him. Occasionally a Colonel Cody, or Showman Jones, lures him off for a year or two to the great cities of the East; but the call of the wilds lures him back to his own beehive houses. He has plenty to eat and plenty to wear, the love of his family, the open fields and the friendship of his gods—what more can life offer?
Don't leave the Southwest without seeing Taos. It might be part of Turkey, or Persia, or India. It is the most un-American thing in America; and yet, it is the most typical of those ancient days in America, when there was no white man. Just here, before the ethnologist arises to correct me, let it be put on record that the Taos people do not consider themselves Indians. They claim descent rather from the Aztecs, or Toltecs of the South. While the Navajo and Apache and Ute legends are of a great migration from Athabasca of the North, the pueblo legend is of a coming from the Great Underworld of the South.
The easiest way to reach Taos is by the ancient city of Santa Fe. You go by rail to Servilleta, or Barrancas, then stage it out to the Indian pueblos. Better wire for your stage accommodation from the railroad. We did not wire, and when we left the railroad, we found seven people and a stage with space for only four. The railroad leads almost straight north from Santa Fe over high, clear mesas of yellow ocher covered with scrub juniper. There is little sign of water after you leave the Rio Grande, for water does not flow uphill; and you are at an altitude of 8,000 feet when you cross the Divide. You pass through fruit orchards along the river, low headed and heavy with apples. Then come the Indian villages, San Ildefonso, and Española, and Santa Clara, where the strings of red chile bake in the sunlight against the glare adobe. Women go up from the pools with jars of water on their heads. Children come selling the famous Santa Clara black pottery at the train windows; and on the trail across the river, you see Mexican drovers with long lines of burros and pack horses winding away into the mountains. Women and girls in bright blankets and with eyes like black beads and skin like wrinkled parchment stand round the doors of the little square adobe houses; and sitting in the shade are the old people—people of a great age, 104 one old woman numbered her years. As you ascend the Upper Mesas of the Rio Grande, you are in a region where nothing grows but piñon and juniper. There is not a sign of life but the browsing sheep and goats. Just where the train shoots in north of San Ildefonso, if you know where to look on the right, you can see the famous Black Mesa, a huge square of black basaltic rock almost 400 feet high, which was the sacred shrine of all Indians hereabouts for a hundred miles. On its crest, you can still see its prayer shrines, and the footworn path where refugees from war ran down to the river for water from encampment on the crest. Away to the left, the mountains seem to crumple up in purple folds with flat tops and white gypsum gashed precipices. One of these gashes—White Rock Cañon—marks Pajarito Plateau, the habitat of the ancient cave dwellers. On the north side of the Black Mesa, you can see the opening to a huge cave. This was a prayer shrine and refuge in time of war for the Santa Clara Indians.
Then, when you have reached almost the top of the world and see no more sheep herds, the trains pull up at an isolated, forsaken little station; and late in the afternoon you get off at Servilleta.
A school teacher, his wife and his two children, also left the train at this point. Our group consisted of three. The driver of the stage—a famous frontiersman, Jo. Dunn—made eight; and we packed into a two-seated vehicle. It added piquancy, if not sport, to the twilight drive to know that one of the two bronchos in harness had never been driven before. He was, in fact, one of the bands of wild horses that rove these high juniper mountains. Mexicans, or Indians, watch for the wild bands to come out to water at nightfall and morning, and stampede them into a pound, or rope them. The captive is then sold for amounts varying from $5 to $15 to anyone who can master him. It need not be told here, not every driver can master an unbroken wild horse. It is a combination of confidence and dexterity, rather than strength. There is a rigging to the bridle that throws a horse if he kicks; and our wild one not only kept his traces for a rough drive of nearly twenty miles but suffered himself to be handled by a young girl of the party.
The pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, whose inhabitants trace their lineage back centuries before the advent of the Spanish conquistadores