Finding the Worth While in the Southwest

by Charles Francis Saunders

Taos pueblo, housing an Indian population of about 500, is the most northern in New Mexico, and perhaps the most perfect specimen existing of Pueblo architecture. It consists of two imposing pyramidal house clusters of 5 to 7 stories—aboriginal apartment houses—and between them happily flows the little Rio de Taos sparkling out of the Glorieta Cañon near whose mouth the pueblo stands. The three-mile drive or walk from Fernandez de Taos is very lovely, with the pueblo’s noble background of mountains before you, their purple and green flanks wonderfully mottled and dashed in autumn with the gold of the aspen forests. The men of Taos are a tall, athletic sort, quite different in appearance from the more southern Pueblos. They wear the hair parted in the middle and done at the side in two braids which hang in front of the shoulders. They are much addicted to their blankets; and one often sees them at work with the blankets fastened about the waist and falling to the knees like a skirt. In warm weather they sometimes substitute a muslin sheet for the woolen blanket, and few sights are more striking than a Taos man thus muffled to his eyebrows in pure white.

Annually on September 30th occurs the Fiesta de San Gerónimo de Taos, which is one of the most largely attended of all Pueblo functions. Crowds of Americans, Mexicans and Indians (a sprinkling of Apaches among Pueblos of several sorts) line the terraced pyramids and make a scene so brilliant and strange that one wonders that it can be in America. The evening before, near sundown, there is a beautiful Indian dance in the plaza of the pueblo, the participants bearing branches of quivering aspens. With the sunset light upon the orange and yellow of the foliage as the evening shadows gather, it is an unforgettable sight. Yes, you must by all means see Taos. There are hotel accommodations at Fernandez de Taos.[11]

But Española serves, too, as a base for outings of quite another sort. One of these is to the remarkable prehistoric cliff village known as the Puyé in the Santa Clara Cañon, about 10 miles west of Española. Here at the edge of a pine forest a vast tufa cliff rises, its face marked with pictographs of unknown antiquity and honeycombed with dwellings of a vanished people, probably ancestors, of some of the present-day Pueblos.[12] These cliff chambers are quite small, and their walls bear still the soot from prehistoric fires. Climbing by an ancient trail to the summit of the mesa of which the cliff is a side, you come upon the leveled ruins of what was once a magnificent, terraced community house, built of tufa blocks and containing hundreds of rooms. Rambling from room to room, picking up now a bit of broken pottery, now a charred corn-cob, poking into the ashes of fireplaces where the last embers were quenched before history in America began, you experience, I hope, a becoming sense of your youth as a white American. And the view from this noble tableland—a view those ancient people had every day of their lives! One wonders had they eyes to see it—the lovely valley of the Rio Grande, purple chain after chain of mountains on every side, the jagged peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, the Glorietas, the Jemes, and dim on the far horizon, the Sierra Blanca in Colorado.

Also dotting the same plateau (this region by the way, is now called Pajarito[13] Park) are numerous other prehistoric community houses—the Otowi (with its curious tent-like rock formations), the Tsánkawi, the Tchrega—all of absorbing interest to the archaeologic mind, but offering not much that seems new to the average tourist who has seen the Puyé. One, however, known as the Tyuonyi in the cañon of the Rito de los Frijoles[14] should not be missed. It may be reached via Buckman, a station on the D. & R. G. 12 miles south of Española. Thence it is about 15 miles over all sorts of a road to the brink of Frijoles Cañon. A steep foot-trail there leads you down, a thousand feet or more, into the gorge and after a short walk you are at the comfortable ranch house of Judge A. G. Abbott, custodian of the Bandelier National Monument, under which name the neighboring ruins are officially designated by the United States Government, which owns them.[15] Considered merely as scenery, the little, secluded cañon is one of the loveliest spots in New Mexico, with its stretches of emerald meadows, its perennial stream and its peaceful forest of stately pines. But it is the human interest given by the vacant houses of a forgotten race—the cavate dwellings of the pink and white tufa cliffs and the ruined communal dwellings on the cañon floor and on the mesa top near by—that brings most visitors. That noted ethnologist, the late Adolf F. Bandelier, wrote a romance with the scene laid here and at the Puyé. It is entitled “The Delightmakers,” and a reading of it will not only lend a living interest to these places, but yield a world of information as to the mind and customs of the Pueblo Indians. Visitors have the School of American Archaeology at Santa Fe to thank for the painstaking work of excavation extending over years, that uncovered many of these ancient dwelling places of their centuries of accumulated debris.

To return to Española. Ten miles to the eastward in the valley of the Santa Cruz river is the quaint little church of Santuario, a sort of New Mexican Lourdes, famous these many years for its miraculous cures. A trip thither makes a noteworthy day’s outing. It may be done by automobile over a road of many tribulations, but a horse and buggy are more satisfactory and far more in keeping with the primitive country. My own visit was achieved on foot, eased by a lift of a couple of miles from a kindly Mexican on horseback, who set me up behind him, en ancas, as they call it. It was mid-August—a season which in northern New Mexico is as sunshiny and showery as a sublimated Eastern April. The intense blue of the sky was blotted here and there with piled-up cloud masses, which broke at times in streamers of rain upon the purple ranges of the Sangre de Cristo ahead of me—and after that, descending shafts of light. As soon as I had crossed the Rio Grande and Española was behind me, I was in pure Mexico. The Santa Cruz Valley is an agricultural region, but it is the agriculture of centuries ago that is in vogue there. Wheat, for instance, is trodden out by horses, sheep or goats, on outdoor threshing floors of beaten earth, winnowed by tossing shovelfuls into the air, washed of its grit and dirt in the nearest acéquia, then spread out in the sun to dry, and finally ground in primitive little log mills whose rumbling stones are turned by tiny water wheels. Little New Mexican Davids, bare of foot and dreamy-eyed, loiter along behind their nibbling flocks in the stubble of the shorn fields or the wild herbage of the river bottom. Peaches and melons, onions and corn, lie drying on the roofs, and strips of meat hang “jerking” from stretched lines in the plazitas of the houses. The cross is still a dominant feature in this land of yesterday. Now it glitters on the belfry of the family chapel among the trees of some ranch; now it is outlined against the sky on the crest of a hill, a calvario of the Penitentes;[16] now it crowns a heap of stones by the wayside, where a funeral has stopped to rest.

Of the villages strewn along this delightful way, some are hamlets of half a dozen straggling little adobes drowsing under their rustling cottonwoods. Others are more important. One particularly I remember—Santo Niño. That means “village of the Holy Child,” and His peace that placid morning seemed to rest upon it. The streets were narrow shady lanes, where irrigation ditches running full made a murmuring music, flowing now by adobe walls, now by picket fences where hollyhocks and marigolds and morning-glories looked pleasantly out. It was a village not of houses merely, but of comfortable old orchards, too, and riotous gardens where corn and beans, chilis and melons locked elbows in happy comradery. I think every one I met was Mexican—the women in sombre black rebosos, the men more or less unkempt and bandit-appearing in ample-crowned sombreros, yet almost without exception offering me the courtesy of a raised hand and a buenos dias, señor. Santa Cruz de la Cañada—another of these villages—deserves a special word of mention, for next to Santa Fe it is the oldest officially established villa (a form of Spanish organized town), in New Mexico, dating as such from 1695, though in its unincorporated state antedating the Pueblo Rebellion. Long a place of importance, its ancient glory paled as Santa Fe and Albuquerque grew. Today it numbers a scant couple of hundred inhabitants, but it is interesting to the tourist for its fine old church facing the grassy plaza of the village. The church interior is enriched with a number of ancient pictures and carvings of an excellence beyond one’s expectations.

Then there is Chímayo, into which you pass just before crossing the river to Santuario. To the general public Chímayo appeals because of its blankets and its apricots, but to me it remains a place of tender memory because of a certain hospitable tienda de abarrotes (or, as we should say, grocery store). Entering it in the hope of finding crackers and cheese, wherewith to make a wayside luncheon, I was given instead a characteristic Mexican meal as exquisitely cooked as ever I had; yet it was but a couple of corn tortillas, a bowl of pink beans done to liquidity, and a cup of black coffee. As to the blankets of Chímayo, they are woven in sizes from a pillow-cover to a bed-spread, of Germantown yarn, and you find them on sale everywhere in the curio shops of the Southwest, competing in a modest way with the Navajo product. The weaving is a fireside industry, prosecuted in the intervals of other work both by women and men, and the bump-bump of the primitive looms is the characteristic melody of the place.

I had to ford the little river, shoes and stockings in hand, to reach Santuario, and was not sure when I got there. An old paisano, sitting in the shade of a wall, informed me, however, that the little cluster of adobes on a hillside, into which I soon came from the river, was really the place—“of great fame, señor. Here come people of all nations to be cured—Mexicans, Americans, Apaches—from far, very far.” The adobe church, half hidden behind some huge cottonwoods, was open—of crude construction without and within, but very picturesque. Passing within the wooden doors, which are curiously carved with a maze of lettering that I found it impossible to decipher, I was in a twilight faintly illumined by the shining of many candles set upon the floor in front of a gaudy altar. Upon the walls hung beskirted figures of saints in various colors and wearing tin crowns. There were, too, crude little shrines upon which pilgrims had scrawled their names. A figure of San Diego on horseback with a quirt on his wrist, cowboy style, was particularly lively, I thought. In a room adjoining the altar is a hole from which pilgrims take handfuls of earth—red adobe, apparently—the outward instrumentality that is depended upon for the cures.

The history of this queer chapel is interesting. Long before it was built the efficacy of that hole of earth was believed far and wide, and the place resorted to by health seekers. Finally in 1816 a pious paisano named Bernardo Abeyta, who had prospered greatly in his affairs, was impelled to erect this church as a testimony of gratitude to God. Dying he bequeathed it to Doña Carmen Chaves, his daughter, who kept for all comers the church and its pit of healing, and lived in a modest way upon the fees which grateful pilgrims bestowed upon her. After her death, the property descended to her daughter, who maintains it in the same way. It is said the fame of the spot is known even in old Mexico, whence pilgrims sometimes come.[17] The earth is utilized either internally dissolved in water, or outwardly made into a mud wash and rubbed on the body. The chapel is dedicated to El Señor de Esquipulas—the Christ of Esquipulas—Esquipulas being a little village of Guatemala whose great church enshrines a famous image of the Lord believed to perform miraculous cures.

For a glimpse in small compass of the unsuspected picturesqueness of rural New Mexico, I know of nothing better than this little jaunt from Española to Santuario.