If you are in a hurry you may “do” Santa Fe and its immediate environs in a carriage or an automobile in a couple of days, and departing secretly think it a rather overrated little old place. To get into the atmosphere of it, however, you should drop hurry at its gates and make up your mind to spend at least a week there, and longer if you can. Lounge in the Plaza and watch the ebb and flow of the city life that gathers here; drop into the Indian trading stores and get a taste for aboriginal art. White man’s schooling has brought about of late years a decline in the quality of Indian handicraft, but there is still a lot of interest in these Santa Fe curio shops—Navajo and Chímayo blankets, Pueblo pottery, Navajo silver jewelry, Apache baskets, moccasins, bead-work, quaint tobacco pouches, Spanish and Mexican things—serapes, mantillas, rusty daggers, old silver snuff boxes—and what not. Mount the hill at the city’s northern edge, and sit on the ruined walls of the old garita (where the Mexican customs used to be levied upon imports by the Santa Fe Trail). There you get a magnificent bird’s-eye view of the city in its mountain fastness, and if the day be waning you will have a sunset for your benediction, long to remember. Extend your rambles sometimes to the outskirts for unadvertised sights—the little ranches with their outdoor threshing floors of beaten earth where in August you may see the wheat tramped out by horses, sheep or goats, and winnowed by tossing in the breeze; paisanas washing their linen on stones by the brookside as in Italy or Spain; and the gaunt descansos or crosses of rest, marking stopping places of funerals, and carving in illiterate Spanish scrawled upon the wood, prayers for the repose of departed souls. If you are fortunate enough to have a little Spanish, your enjoyment will be enhanced by stopping at humble doorways for a bit of chat with Juan Bautista the woodchopper, or Maria Rosalía the laundress. You will be civilly welcome, if you yourself are civil, and be handed a chair, if there be one, and will be refreshed to learn something of the essential oneness and kindliness of the human family whether clothed in white skin or brown. It is this pervading air of Old Worldliness that makes the peculiar charm of Santa Fe for the leisurely traveler—its romance and its history are not altogether hidden away in books, but are an obvious part of its living present.
Moreover, Santa Fe is the starting point for numerous interesting out-of-town trips. These are story for another chapter.[5]
CHAPTER II
THE UPPER RIO GRANDE, ITS PUEBLOS AND ITS CLIFF DWELLINGS
Of course you must make the trip—a half day will suffice for it—from Santa Fe to Tesuque, a village of the Pueblo Indians 9 miles to the north, and you should pronounce it Te-soo´kay. If your knowledge of Indians has been limited to the variety seen in Wild West Shows and historical pictures, you will be surprised at those you find at Tesuque. This is a quaint adobe village around a spacious plaza upon which an ancient, whitewashed Catholic church faces. The houses when of more than one story are built terrace-like, so that the roof of the first story forms a front yard to the second. Ladders lean against the outer walls, by which access is gained to the upper rooms. The population of about 150 live very much like their Mexican neighbors, raising by irrigation crops of corn, beans, peaches, melons, and alfalfa, accepting meanwhile from the liberal hand of Nature rabbits, piñones and wild plums, and pasturing sheep and cattle on the communal pueblo lands which Spain granted them centuries ago and which our Government confirmed to them upon the acquisition of New Mexico. Their method of town building is not borrowed from the whites, but is their own; and because the Spanish Conquistadores of the sixteenth century found the region sprinkled with such permanent villages, called pueblos in Spanish, they named the people Pueblo Indians—a term which well characterizes them in contra-distinction to the nomadic tribes, whose villages moved as the tribe moved.
Tesuque is a type of a score or so of pueblos scattered along a line of some 300 miles in northern New Mexico and Arizona. Formerly the dress of these Indians was quite distinctive, but association with the whites has modified its quality of late years, though it still retains some of the old features—particularly in the case of the women, who are more disposed than the men to conservatism. Their native costume is a dark woolen gown belted at the waist and falling a little below the knees, and a sort of cape of colored muslin fastened about the neck and hanging down the back. The lower part of the legs is often swathed in a buckskin extension of the moccasins in which the feet are encased. The hair is banged low upon the forehead and both women’s and men’s are clubbed at the back and bound with red yarn. The native attire of the men is a loose cotton shirt worn outside short, wide trousers. Instead of a hat a narrow banda of colored cotton or silk is bound about the hair.
Each village has its local government—and a very competent sort it is—of a democratic nature, a governor, as well as a few other officials, being elected annually by popular vote. Besides these, there is a permanent council of old men who assist in the direction of affairs. Most of the Pueblo Indians are nominal adherents to Roman Catholicism, but have by no means lost hold of their pagan faith. On the patron saint’s day a public fiesta is always held. After mass in the church, there are native dances and ceremonies, accompanied by feasting continuing well into the night. November 12, St. James’s Day, is the day celebrated by Tesuque, and visitors are many.[6]
The Pueblos are as a class industrious, fun-loving, and friendly to white visitors. They are naturally hospitable and quickly responsive to any who treat them sympathetically and as fellow human beings. The lamentable fact that white Americans have too often failed in this respect, acting towards them as though they were animals in a zoo, is largely responsible for tales we hear of Indian surliness and ill-will. Pueblo women are skillful potters, and while Tesuque does not now excel in this art, one may pick up some interesting souvenirs both in clay and beadwork. At any rate, you will enjoy seeing these things being made in the common living-room of the house, while the corn is being ground on the metates or mealing stones, and the mutton stew simmers on the open hearth. A knowledge of values first obtained at reputable traders’ shops in Santa Fe, is advisable, however, before negotiating directly with the Indians, as they are becoming pretty well schooled in the art of charging “all the traffic will bear.” Tesuque produces a specialty in the shape of certain dreadful little pottery images called “rain gods,” which must not be taken seriously as examples of sound Pueblo art.[7]
Thirty-three miles north of Santa Fe on the Denver and Rio Grande Railway is the village of Española, where a plain but comfortable hotel makes a convenient base for visiting several points of interest in the upper Rio Grande Valley. A mile to the south is Santa Clara pueblo,[8] long famous for its beautiful shining black pottery almost Etruscan in shape. The clay naturally burns red, but a second baking with the fuel (dried chips of cattle manure), pulverized finely and producing a dense black smoke, gives the ware its characteristic lustrous black. Seven miles further down the river but on the other side, is another pueblo, San Ildefonso, a picturesque village of 125 Indians, near the base of La Mesa Huérfana. This is a flat-topped mountain of black lava, on whose summit in 1693, several hundred Pueblos entrenched themselves and for eight months stubbornly resisted the attempts of the Spanish under De Vargas to bring them to terms. That was practically the last stand of Pueblo rebeldom, which thirteen years before had driven every Spaniard from the land. San Ildefonso has public fiestas on January 23 and September 6.
Six miles north of Española and close to the Rio Grande is San Juan pueblo, with a population of about 400 Indians. Here one is in the very cradle of the white civilization of the Southwest. At this spot in the summer of 1598, Don Juan de Oñate—he of the Conquest—arrived with his little army of Spaniards, his Franciscan missionaries, his colonist families, a retinue of servants and Mexican Indians, his wagons and cattle, to found the capital of the newly won “kingdom” later to be called New Mexico. The courtesy of the Indians there, who temporarily gave up their own houses to the Spaniards, was so marked that their pueblo became known as San Juan de los Caballeros (Saint John of the Gentlemen). Oñate’s settlement—of which no vestige now remains—is believed to have been situated just across the Rio Grande from San Juan, about where the hamlet and railway station of Chamita now stands. San Juan pueblo is further distinguished as the birthplace of Popé, the Indian to whose executive genius is due the success of the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680. A picturesque figure, that same Popé, of the timber dramatic heroes are made of. It is said that, while meditating the rebellion, he journeyed to the enchanted lagoon of Shípapu, the place where in the dim past the Pueblos had emerged from the underworld and whither they return at death. There he conferred with the spirits of his ancestors, who endued him with power to lead his people to victory.[9] The San Juan women make a good black pottery similar to that of Santa Clara. On Saint John’s Day, June 24, occurs a public fiesta, with procession and dances, attracting visitors, white and red, from far and near.
Having got thus far up the Rio Grande, let nothing deter you from visiting Taos (they pronounce it Towss). By automobile it is about 50 miles northeast of Española or you can reach it quite expeditiously by Denver & Rio Grande train to Taos Junction and auto-connection thence about 30 miles to Taos.[10] Situated in a fertile plain, 7000 feet above the sea, in the heart of the Southern Rockies, Taos is one of the most charming places in America. It is in three parts. There is the outlying hamlet Ranchos de Taos; then the picturesque Mexican town Fernandez de Taos, famous in recent years for a resident artist colony whose pictures have put Taos in the world of art; and lastly, there is the pueblo of Taos. From very early times the pueblo has played an important role in New Mexican history. It was here the San Juaneño Popé found the readiest response to his plans of rebellion. Later the location on the confines of the Great Plains made it an important trading center with the more northern Indians. The annual summer fair for cambalache, or traffic by barter, held at Taos in the latter part of the eighteenth century, was a famous event, the Plains tribes bringing skins and furs and Indian captives to trade for horses, beads and metal implements. The commercial opportunities combined with the fertility of the soil and an unfailing water supply led to the founding of Fernandez de Taos by whites. In the days of Mexican supremacy part of the traffic over the Santa Fe Trail passed this way and a custom house was here. The ruins of a large adobe church in the pueblo form a memento of the troublous days of 1847, when a small rebellion participated in by Mexicans and a few Taos Indians took place here and the American governor, Bent, was murdered. At Fernandez de Taos, the famous frontiersman Kit Carson lived for many years, and here his grave may still be seen.