By January 23rd, General Price had marched out at the head of five companies, from old Fort Marcy at Santa Fe for Taos. He had 353 men and four cannon. You can see the marks yet on the old Mission at Taos, where the cannon-balls battered down the adobe walls. The Indians did not wait his coming. They met him 1,500 strong on the heights of a mesa at Santa Cruz. The Indians made wild efforts to capture the wagons to the rear of the artillery; but when an Indian rabble meets artillery, there is only one possible issue. The Indians fled, leaving thirty-six killed and forty-five wounded. No railway led up the Rio Grande at that early date; and it was a more notable feat for the troops to advance up the narrowing cañons than to defeat the foe. At Embudo, six or seven hundred Pueblos lined the rock walls under hiding of cedar and piñon. The soldiers had to climb to shoot; and again the Indians could not withstand trained fire. They left twenty killed and sixty wounded here. Two feet of snow lay on the trail as the troops ascended the uplands; and it was February 3rd before they reached Taos. Every ladder had been drawn up, every window barricaded, and the high walls of the tiered great houses were bristling with rifle barrels; but rifle defense could not withstand the big shells of the assailants. The two pueblos were completely surrounded. A six pounder was brought within ten yards of the walls. A shell was fired—the church wall battered down, and the dragoons rushed through the breach. By the night of Feb. 4th, old men, women and children bearing the cross came suing for peace. The ringleader, Tomas, was delivered to General Price; and the troops drew off with a loss of seven killed and forty-five wounded. The Pueblos loss was not less than 200. Thus ended the last attempt of the Pueblos to overthrow alien domination; and this attempt would not have been made if the Indians had not been spurred on by Mexican revolutionaries, with counter plots of their own.
We motored away from Taos by sunset. An old Indian woman swathed all in white came creeping down one of the upper ladders. They could not throw off white rule—these Pueblos—but for four centuries they have withstood white influences as completely as in the days when they sent the couriers spurring with the knotted cord to rally the tribes to open revolt.
CHAPTER XIII
SAN ANTONIO, THE CAIRO OF AMERICA
If you want to plunge into America's Egypt, there are as many ways to go as you have moods. You explain that the ocean voyage is half the attraction to European travel. There may be a difference of opinion on that, as I know people who would like to believe that the Atlantic could be bridged; but if you are keen on an ocean voyage, you can reach the Egypt of America by boat to Florida, then west by rail; or by boat straight to any of the Texas harbors. By way of Florida, you can take your fill of the historic and antique and the picturesque in St. Augustine and Pensacola and New Orleans; and if there are any yarns of rarer flavor in all the resorts of Europe than in the old quarters of these three places, I have never heard of them. You can drink of the spring of the elixir of life in St. Augustine, and lose yourself in the trenches of old Fort Barrancas at Pensacola, and wander at will in the old French town of New Orleans. Each place was once a pawn in the gambles of European statesmen. Each has heard the clang of armed knights, the sword in one hand, the cross in the other. Each has seen the pirate fleet with death's head on the flag at the masthead come tacking up the bays, sometimes to be shattered and sunk by cannon shot from the fort bastions. Sometimes the fort itself was scuttled by the buccaneers; once, at least, at Fort Barrancas, it suffered loot at terrible, riotous, drunken hands, when a Spanish officer's daughter who was captured for ransom succeeded in plunging into the sea within sight of her watching father.
But whether you enter the Egypt of America by rail overland, or by sea, San Antonio is the gateway city from the south to the land of play and mystery. It is to the Middle West what Quebec is to Canada, what Cairo is to Egypt—the gateway, the meeting place of old and new, of Latin and Saxon, of East and West, of North and South. Atmosphere? Physically, the atmosphere is champagne: spiritually, you have not gone ten paces from the station before you feel a flavor as of old wine. There are the open Spanish plazas riotous with bloom flanked by Spanish-Moorish ruins flush on the pavement, with skyscraper hotels that are the last word in modernity. Live oaks heavy with Spanish moss hang over sleepy streams that come from everywhere and meander nowhere. You see a squad of soldiers from Fort Sam Houston wheeling in measured tread around a square (only there isn't anything absolutely square in all San Antonio) and they have hardly gone striding out of sight before you see a Mexican burro trotting to market with a load of hay tied on its back. A motor comes bumping over the roads—such roads as only the antique can boast—and if it is fiesta time, or cowboy celebration, you are apt to see cowboys cutting such figure eights in the air as a motor cannot execute on antique pavement.
You enter a hotel and imagine you are in the Plaza, New York, or the Ritz, London; but stay! The frieze above the marble walls isn't gilt; and it isn't tapestry. The frieze is a long panel in bronze alto-relievo. I think it is a testimonial to San Antonio's sense of the fitness of things that that frieze is not of Roman gladiators, or French gardens with beringed ladies and tame fawns. It is a frieze of the cowboys taking a stampeding herd up the long trail—drifting and driving but held together by a rough fellow in top boots and sombrero; and the rotunda has a frieze of cowboys because that three million-dollar hotel was built out of "cow" money. Old and new, past and present, Saxon and Latin, North and South, East and West—that is San Antonio. You can never forget it for a minute. It is such a shifting panorama as you could only get from traveling thousands of miles elsewhere, or comparing a hundred Remington drawings. San Antonio is a curious combination of Remington and Alma Tadema in real life; and I don't know anywhere else in the world you can get it. There are three such huge hotels in San Antonio besides a score of lesser ones, to take care of the 30,000 tourists who come from the Middle West to winter in San Antonio; but remember that while 30,000 seems a large number of tourists for one place, that is only one-tenth the number of Americans who yearly see Europe.