"Allamahoo, right hand to your partner
And grand hodoo."
"Watch your partner and watch her close;
And when you catch her, a double doze."
"The cock flies out and the hen flies in—
All hands round and go it agen."
In fact, if you want to find the old True West, you'll find it undiluted and pristine on the trip to Taos.
CHAPTER XII
TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA
Taos, Santa Fe and El Paso—these were to the Southwest what Port Royal, Quebec and Montreal were to French Canada, or Boston, Salem and Jamestown to the colonists of the pre-Revolutionary days on the Atlantic. El Paso was the gateway city from the old Spanish Dominions of the South. Santa Fe was the central military post, and Taos was the watch tower on the very outskirts of the back-of-beyond of Spanish territory in the wilderness land of the New World.
Before Santa Fe became the terminus of the trail for American traders from Missouri and Kansas, Taos was the terminus of the old fur trader trail, in the days when Louisiana extended from New Orleans to Oregon. Here, such famous frontiersmen as Jim Bridgar and Manuel Lisa and Jedediah Smith and Colonel Ashley and Kit Carson came to barter beads and calico and tobacco and firewater for hides and fur and native-woven blankets and turquoise and rude silver ornaments hammered out of Spanish bullion into necklace and bracelet. What Green's Hole and the Three Tetons were to the Middle West, Taos was to the Southwest. Mountains round Taos rise 14,000 feet from sea level. Snow glimmers from the peaks more than half the year; and mountain torrents water the valley with a system of irrigation that never fails. Coming out of the mountains from the north, Taos was the natural halfway house on the trail south to Old Mexico. Coming out of the Desert from the south, Taos was the last walled city seen before the plunge into the wilderness of forests and mountains in the No-Man's-Land of the north. "Walled city," you say, "before the coming of white men to the West?" Yes, you can see those very walls to-day, walls antedating the coming of Coronado in 1540 by hundreds of years.