As a rule these adobe dwellings are of one story, and the more pretentious are constructed partly or entirely about an inner court, such as in Spain is called a patio, but in New Mexico a plazita, that is, a little plaza. A cheerful sanctuary is this plazita, where trees cast dappled shadows and hollyhocks and marigolds bloom along the sunny walls. Upon it the doors and windows of the various rooms open, and here the family life centers. By the kitchen door Trinidad prepares her frijoles and chili, while the children tease her for tidbits; upon the grass the house rugs and serapes are spread on cleaning days, in kaleidoscopic array, and beaten within an inch of their lives; here, of summer evenings Juan lounges and smokes and Juanita swings in the hammock strumming a guitar, or the family gramophone plays “La Golondrina.”
Comparisons are always invidious, but if there be among the cities of the United States, one that is richer in picturesqueness, in genuine romance, in varied historic, archaeologic and ethnologic interest, than Santa Fe, it has still I think to make good its claims. The distinction of being the oldest town in our country, as has sometimes been claimed, is, however, not Santa Fe’s.[1] Indeed, the exact date of its founding is still subject to some doubt, though the weight of evidence points to 1605. Nor was it even the original white settlement in New Mexico. That honor belongs to the long since obliterated San Gabriel, the site of which was on or near the present-day hamlet of Chamita, overlooking the Rio Grande about 35 miles north of Santa Fe. There in 1598 the conqueror of New Mexico, Don Juan de Oñate (a rich citizen of Zacatecas, and the Spanish husband, by the way, of a granddaughter of Montezuma) established his little capital, maintaining it there until the second town was founded. To this latter place was given the name La Villa Real de Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís—the Royal City of Saint Francis of Assisi’s Holy Faith. Naturally that was too large a mouthful for daily use, and it was long ago pared down to just Santa Fe, though Saint Francis never lost his status as the city’s patron. In point of antiquity, the most that can justly be claimed for it is that it is the first permanent white settlement in the West.
The situation of Santa Fe is captivating, in the midst of a sunny, breeze-swept plain in the lap of the Southern Rockies, at an elevation of 7000 feet above the sea. Through the middle of the city flows the little, tree-bordered Rio de Santa Fé, which issues a couple of miles away from a gorge in the imposing Sierra Sangre de Cristo (the Mountains of the Blood of Christ), whose peaks, often snow-clad, look majestically down in the north from a height of 10,000 to 13,000 feet. The town is reached from Lamy[2] by a branch of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which climbs due north for 18 miles through an uninhabitated waste dotted with low-growing piñon, juniper and scrub. At the station a small army of bus, hack and automobile men greet you with enthusiasm, and to reach your hotel you have only the choice of them or your own trotters, for street cars there are none. In Santa Fe, however, no place is far from any other place—the population is but a scant 8500. Of these a large percentage is of Spanish blood, and Spanish speech and Spanish signs engage your attention on every hand.
The hub of the city is the Plaza—warm and sunny in winter, shady and cool in summer. Seated here on a bench you soon arrive at a lazy man’s notion of the sort of place you are in. Here the donkeys patter by laden with firewood—dearest of Santa Fe’s street pictures; here Mexican peddlers of apples and dulces, piñones and shoe-strings ply their mild trade, and Tesuque Indians, with black hair bound about with scarlet bandas, pass by to the trader’s, their blankets bulging with native pottery, or, in season, their wagons loaded with melons, grapes, apples, and peaches. Of afternoons the newsboys loiter about crying the papers, and you have a choice of your news in English or Spanish; and on Sundays and holidays the band plays athletically in its little kiosk, the crowd promenading around and around the while very much as in Old Mexico, and strewing the ground behind it with piñon and peanut shells.
Close to the Plaza, too, cluster many of the historied spots of Santa Fe; indeed, the Plaza itself is a chief one. On this bit of ground it is confidently believed that Oñate must have camped in 1605—if it was 1605—when the capital was transferred from San Gabriel; and there is no doubt whatever that here was the seething center of the famous Pueblo revolt of 1680, when 3000 infuriated Indians cooped the entire Spanish population of Santa Fe within the Governor’s Palace opposite, and kept them there for a week. Then the whites made a brave sortie, caught and hanged 50 Indians in the Plaza and escaped to Old Mexico—their exit being celebrated shortly afterwards in this same Plaza by the Indians’ making a bonfire of all Spanish archives and church belongings they could lay hands on. Here 13 years later came De Vargas, the re-conqueror of New Mexico (bearing it is said the very standard under which Oñate had marched in the original conquest), and with his soldiers knelt before the reinstated cross. And it was in this Plaza in 1846, during our Mexican War, that General Stephen Kearny ran up the Stars and Stripes and took possession of the territory in the name of the United States. It was the Plaza, too, that formed the western terminus of the Old Santa Fe Trail—that famous highway of trade that bound New Mexico with Anglo-Saxondom throughout the Mexican regime in the Southwest and until the iron horse and Pullman cars superseded mules and Conestoga wagons. At the old adobe hotel known as La Fonda, a remnant of which still stands at this writing just across from the southeast corner of the Plaza, travelers and teamsters, plainsmen and trappers found during half a century that boisterous brand of cheer dear to the pioneer soul—cheer made up quite largely of cards, aguardiente and the freedom of firearms, but gone now, let us trust, out of the world forever since the world has lost its frontiers.
Facing the Plaza on the north is the ancient Palacio Real or Governor’s Palace—a long, one-storied adobe building occupying the length of the block, and faced with the covered walk or portico (they call such a portal in New Mexico) which in former years was a feature of every building of importance in Santa Fe. Within its thick walls for nearly three centuries the governors of New Mexico resided—Spaniards, Pueblo Indians, Spaniards again, Mexicans and finally Americans.[3] In 1909 the building was set aside as the home of the Museum of New Mexico (since removed to a handsome edifice of its own in the New Mexico style of architecture across the street), and of the School of American Research.[4] Some careful restoration work was then done, necessary to remove modern accretions and lay bare certain interesting architectural features incorporated by the original builders, such as the handwrought woodwork, the fireplaces, doorways, etc., so that the edifice as it appears today is outwardly very much as it must have looked a century or two ago. The festoons of dried Indian ears, however, which are said to have been a rather constant adornment of the portal in old times, are now, to the relief of sensitive souls, humanely absent. Within, the Palace is a mine of information for the curious in the history, archaeology and ethnology of our Southwest, and a leisurely visit to it makes a useful preliminary to one’s travels about the State. The building is open to all without charge.
A short block from the Plaza is the Cathedral of San Francisco, whose unfinished trunks of towers are a prominent feature in Santa Fe’s low sky-line. You may or may not get something from a visit to it. It is a modern structure, still incomplete, built upon and about an older church believed to date from 1622. Beneath the altar reposes all that is mortal of two seventeenth century Franciscan missionaries to the New Mexico aborigines. Of one of these, Padre Gerónimo de la Llana, I cannot forbear a word of mention. He was a true brother of Saint Francis, and for many years ministered lovingly to the Indians of the long since ruined pueblo of Quaraí, a place of which more later. At Quaraí he died in 1659, and his body was interred in the old church there whose walls still stand, one of the most striking ruins in New Mexico. To his Indians he was no less than a saint, and when (under attacks from Apaches, doubtless) they abandoned their pueblos about 1670, they bore with them what remained of their dear padre santo to Tajique, a pueblo some 15 miles distant, and buried him there. But in those days Apaches never ceased from raiding, and from Tajique, too, some years later, those Pueblo folk were forced to flee—this time across the rugged Sierra Manzano to Isleta on the Rio Grande. That was a journey of too great hardship, I suppose, to admit of carrying the now crumbled padre with them; so he was left in his unmarked tomb in a savage-harried land, to be quite forgotten until 85 years later (in 1759) pious old Governor F. A. Marin del Valle heard of him. A search was speedily set on foot and after a long quest the bones of Padre Gerónimo were found, brought to Santa Fe, and becomingly once more interred. Then, alas! the poor brother dropped out of mind again until in 1880, when during some work upon the new Cathedral, the discovery of an inscription set in the wall 121 years before by Governor del Valle led to the finding of the grave. I think you will be interested to read the quaint Spanish epitaphs of this fine old friar, and of his companion, too, Padre Asencio de Zárate, sometime of Picurís pueblo. They may be found behind the high altar, which hides them.
Also in the Cathedral, it is believed, rests the mortality of Don Diego de Vargas, el Reconquistador, but unmarked. You will find many an echo of him in Santa Fe, for he it was who in 1692 re-conquered New Mexico for Spain after the Pueblo uprising of 1680 had swept the Spaniards out of the province and for twelve years kept them out. Every year in June Santa Fe celebrates its De Vargas Day, when a procession, bearing at its head an image of the Virgin, marches from the Cathedral to the little Rosario Chapel that is dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary (or as Santa Féans sometimes call her, La Conquistadora, the Lady Conqueror). It occupies the spot, on the city outskirts, where according to tradition De Vargas knelt on the eve of his second entry into the capital (December 16, 1693), and invoking the blessing of the Virgin upon his arms, promised her a chapel if she vouchsafed him victory on the morrow. It is a scant half-hour’s stroll thither from the Plaza, and you will enjoy the walk through the city’s half foreign scenes, though the building itself is disappointing because of its handling by tasteless renovators. Much more picturesque, though modernized with an astonishing steeple, is the little church of Guadalupe, standing amid Lombardy poplars on the south bank of the river. A quiet, reposeful, little temple, this, with beautifully carved ceiling beams and a curious, if crude, altar-piece representing the appearances of Mexico’s Heavenly Patroness to Juan Diego.
Of the churches in Santa Fe, however, the one that is made most of by visitors, is the square-towered adobe of San Miguel. It is a pleasant twenty-minute walk from the Plaza (and, by all means, do walk when you go, for the way thither is too picturesque to be whisked over in an automobile)—through quiet, unpaved streets lined with one-storied adobe houses and often too narrow to accommodate any but a mere thread of sidewalk, where you bump into burros and, like as not, have utter strangers tip their hats to you with a buenos dias, señor. You pass the Bishop’s sequestered gardens and the high-walled grounds of the Convent and Academy of the Sisters of Loretto, with glimpses through a postern gate of old-fashioned flower beds; and further on, the touching little cemetery of the Sisters, each simple grave marked by a cross whereon vines and fragrant flowers lean lovingly; and so, on stepping stones, to the south side of the little Rio de Santa Fe. Then mounting the hill past more gardens where hollyhocks—la barra de San José (St. Joseph’s rod) the New Mexicans call them—nod at you over the walls, and children prattle in Spanish and women sing at their work, there you are before old San Miguel.
Your first feeling is a bit of a shock, for the renovator’s hand has fallen heavily upon San Miguel and, frankly speaking, it is a rather hideous old church as viewed from the street. When, however, you have rung the sacristan’s bell and a Christian Brother from the adjoining Catholic college has come with the keys to usher you within, you pass in a twinkling into the twilight heart of the Seventeenth Century. Here are blackened, old religious paintings said to have been carried by the Conquistadores as standards of defense in battle; a wonderful old bell inscribed with a prayer to St. Joseph and bearing an all but illegible date that looks surprisingly like 1356, and maybe it is; a charming old wooden cross-beam supporting the coro, or choir gallery, its color mellowed by time and its surface carved with rude but beautiful flutings and flourishes by some long-vanished hand of the wilderness; and so on—all delightfully embellished by the naïve expositions of the kindly Brother who acts as cicerone. And do not leave without a glimpse through the side door of the sunny quiet garden close, that lies between the church and the college building. As to the age of San Miguel, there has been much misinformation given—claims of its dating from 1543 being quite groundless. The known fact is that it was established as a chapel for the Mexican (Tlascalan) Indians who were part of the original Santa Fe colony. It therefore dates from some time on the hither side of 1605. In 1680 it suffered partial destruction in the Pueblo uprising, though its walls survived; and, after some repairs by order of De Vargas, it was finally restored completely in 1710, by the Spanish governor of that time, the Marquis de la Peñuela. The record of this fact inscribed in Spanish upon the main beam of the gallery is still one of the interesting “bits” in the church. Probably it is safe to call San Miguel the oldest existing building for Christian worship in the United States.