"No—Spanish women were not supposed to see, or be seen by, the outside world."
The pueblo proper lies about four miles out from the white man's town. Laguna, Acoma, Zuñi, the Three Mesas of the Tusayan Desert—all lie on hillsides, or on the very crest of high acclivities. Taos is the exception among purely Indian pueblos. It lies in the lap of the valley among the mountains, two castellated, five story adobe structures, one on each side of a mountain stream. In other pueblo villages, while the houses may adjoin one another like stone fronts in our big cities, they are not like huge beehive apartment houses. In Taos, the houses are practically two great communal dwellings, with each apartment assigned to a special clan or family. In all, some 700 people dwell in these two huge houses. How many rooms are there? Not less than an average of three to each family. Remnants of an ancient adobe wall surround the entire pueblo. A new whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the village, but you can still see the old one pitted with cannon-ball and bullet, where General Price shelled it in the uprising of the pueblos after American occupation. Men wear store trousers and store hats. You see some modern wagons. Except for these, you are back in the days of Coronado. All the houses can be entered only by ladders that ascend to the roofs and can be drawn up—the pueblo way of bolting the door. The houses run up three, four and five stories. They are adobe color outside, that is to say, a pinkish gray; and whitewashed spotlessly inside. Watch a woman draped in white linen blanket ascending these ladders, and you have to convince yourself that you are not in the Orient. Down by the stream, women with red and blue and white shawls over their heads, and feet encased in white puttees, are washing blankets by beating them in the flowing water. Go up the succession of ladders to the very top of a five storied house, and look out. You can see the pasture fields, where the herds graze in common. On the outskirts of the village, men and boys are threshing, that is—they are chasing ponies round and round inside a kraal, with a flag stuck up to show which way the wind blows, one man forking chaff with the wind, another scraping the grain outside the circle.
Glance inside the houses. The upstairs is evidently the living-room; for the fireplace is here, and the pot is on. Off the living-room are corn and meal bins, and you can see the metate or stone on which the corn is ground by the women as in the days of Old Testament record. Though there is a new Mission church dating from the uprising in the forties, and an old Mission church dating almost from 1540, you can see from the roof dozens of estufas, where the men are practicing for their dances and masked theatricals. Tony, the assistant governor, an educated man of about forty who has traveled with Wild West shows, acts as our guide, and tells us about the squatters trying to get the Indian land. How would you like an intruder to sit down in the middle of your farm and fence off 160 acres? The Indians didn't like it, and cut the fences. Then the troops were sent out. That was in 1910—a typical "uprising," when the white man has both troops and courts on his side. The case has gone to the courts, and Tony doesn't expect it to be settled very soon. In fact, Tony likes their own form of government better than the white man's. All this he tells you in the softest, coolest voice, for Tony is not only assistant governor: he is constable to keep white men from bringing in liquor during the festal week. They yearly elect their own governor. That governor's word is absolutely supreme for his tenure of office. Is there a dispute over crops, or cattle? The governor's word settles it without any rigmarole of talk by lawyers.
"Supposing the guilty man doesn't obey the governor?" we ask.
"Then we send our own police, and take him, and put him in the stocks in the lock-up," and he takes us around and shows us both the stocks and the lock-up. These stocks clamp down a man's head as well as his hands and feet. A man with his neck and hands anchored down between his feet in a black room naturally wouldn't remain disobedient long.
The method of voting is older than the white man's ballot. The Indians enter the estufa. A mark is drawn across the sand. Two men are nominated. (No—women do not vote; the women rule the house absolutely. The men rule fields and crops and village courtyard.) The voters then signify their choice by marks on the sand.
Houses are built and occupied communally, and ground is held in common; but the product of each man's and each woman's labor is his or her own and not in common—the nearest approach to socialistic life that America has yet known. The people here speak a language different from the other pueblos, and this places their origin almost as far back as the origin of Anglo-Saxon races. Another feature sets pueblo races apart from all other native races of America. Though these people have been in contact with whites nearly 400 years, intermarriage with whites is almost unknown. Purity of blood is almost as sacredly guarded among Pueblos as among the ancient Jews. The population remains almost stationary; but the bad admixtures of a mongrel race are unknown.
We call the head man of the pueblo the governor, but the Spanish know him as a cacique. Associated with him are the old men—mayores, or council; and this council of wise old men enters so intimately into the lives of the people that it advises the young men as to marriage. We have preachers in our religious ranks. The Pueblos have proclaimers who harangue from the housetops, or estufas. As women stoop over the metates grinding the meal, men sing good cheer from the door. The chile, or red pepper, is pulverized between stones the same as the grain. Though openly Catholic and in attendance on the Mission church, the pueblo people still practice all the secret rites of Montezuma; and in all the course of four centuries of contact, white men have never been able to learn the ceremonies of the estufas.
Women never enter the estufas.
Who were the first white men to see Taos? It is not certainly known, but it is vaguely supposed they were Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the Narvaez expedition, who wandered westward across the continent from Taos to Laguna and Acoma. As the legend runs, they were made slaves by the Indians and traded from tribe to tribe from 1528 to 1536, when they reached Old Mexico. Anyway, their report of golden cities and vast, undiscovered land pricked New Spain into launching Coronado's expedition of 1540. Preceding the formal military advance of Coronado, the Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza and two lay brothers guided by Cabeza de Vaca's negro Estevan, set out with the cross in their hands to prepare the way. Fray Marcos advanced from the Gulf of California eastward. One can guess the weary hardship of that footsore journeying. It was made between March and September of 1539. Go into the Yuma Valley in September! The heat is of a denseness you can cut with a knife. Imagine the heat of that tramp over desert sands in June, July and August! When Fray Marcos sent his Indian guides forward to Zuñi, near the modern Gallup, he was met with the warning "Go back; or you will be put to death." His messengers refusing to be daunted, the Zuñi people promptly killed them and threw them over the rocks. Fray Marcos went on with the lay brothers. Zuñi was called "cibola" owing to the great number of buffalo skins (cibolas) in camp.