After no little wrangling, a sufficient number of spiritless quadrupeds were procured from the natives, and we turned our faces to the north. And right here let me advise the reader who may hereafter contemplate this pilgrimage, to address, in ample season, Mr. Henry Dibble, Fernandez de Taos, New Mexico, who will undertake to have a team in waiting at Embudo, thus saving the traveler much time and even more bad Spanish. The ride was thoroughly enjoyable, and formed a fitting prelude to the novel experiences that followed. I have said “ride,” though the statement is not altogether exact, since we took pity,—and largely from necessity,—on our miserable under-sized and under-fed ponies and ourselves, and walked a full third of the distance. Occasionally we passed small Mexican villages, which seemed as peacefully asleep in the afternoon sunshine as we could ever have pictured them. Flocks of ugly yellow-spotted goats, attended by dusky urchins in scanty attire, browsed on the near hill-slopes. Over the eaves of almost every one of the low adobe houses hung great ropes of red peppers,—the chili colorado of the Mexican,—that gave the one brilliant dash of color to a perspective whose tones were otherwise the most subdued. Not unfrequently, however, an entire family would be seen ranged along in a row on the shady side of the house, the women generally dressed in gay colors, solid red, blue, or green, and all as silent as the scene on which they looked. But for the dogs, these hamlets might have passed for the ruins they appeared. The caretta, or great, clumsy, two-wheeled cart, and the plow made of a pointed stick, were here and there reposing before the abodes, not seeming like implements of daily use, but as appropriate details in the worn-out landscape.
To pick one’s way through Taos valley, even by daylight, might be a task; in the darkness, which at length overtook us, success was a lucky chance. The very populousness of the locality was against us. How many times we took the divergent road and brought up against the fence of some ranchero’s threshing-floor; or crossed the stream not at the ford; or engaged in a broil with some awakened native who persisted in misunderstanding our gesticulated inquiries, may never be related. The houses, too, were a mystery. To find the front door of the rectangular heap of mud; to determine in what part of its cavernous recesses the inmates might now be residing; or to decide whether, after all, it was not the stable, taxed our ingenuity and tempers through several hours of that memorable evening. Finally, in the plaza of a great communistic ranch-house, that covered an area half as large as a city block, we managed to secure the services of a muchacho, who preceded us on horseback, and led us into one of the narrow and crooked streets of Fernandez de Taos, where we soon found the hostelry of “Pap” Dibble.
Taos valley is widest near its head, where the several streams that form the river issue from the Culebra range. About the center of the fertile expanse lies the old Mexican town of Fernandez de Taos, with a present population of 1,500. Two miles northeast of it, and under the shadow of Taos mountain, stand the two great buildings known as the Pueblo de Taos, and inhabited by about 400 Indians. Three miles south of Fernandez lies still another Mexican village, named Ranchos de Taos, in contrast with whose adobes the traveler finds a newly-erected flouring mill. The middle settlement has the greatest commercial importance, and is likewise possessed of considerable historic interest. Here was the seat of the first civil government of the territory by the United States, after it had been acquired as a result of the Mexican war of 1846. Here Bent, the first governor, was killed in the revolt of the following year, and the ruins yet remain of the old church on whose solid mud walls the howitzers of the troops could make no impression, and from which the band of insurgent Indians and Mexicans were only finally dislodged by means of hand-grenades. The widow of the murdered governor still lives in her modest adobe, and shows to visitors the hole in the wall made by the fatal bullet. Fernandez de Taos was likewise for years the residence of Colonel Kit Carson, and in the walled graveyard at the edge of town his body is buried.
All this and much more is communicated the following morning by the genial Dibble, who fills our idea of what a host should be. For twenty years has he lived in this quiet valley, among an alien people, leaving it only once for a trip to Santa Fe, content to preside over his curious aggregation of rambling adobes, and make each chance guest feel himself under paternal care.
But to us the great interest centers in the Indian carnival at the pueblo, which is to occur on the morrow. On the last day of September of each year the Taos Indians celebrate the festival of their patron saint, San Geronimo (the Spanish St. Jerome), by ceremonies altogether unique, and which few Americans have as yet witnessed. Some hours are still at our command, in which to study the country in its every-day aspect, and we early start out in the direction of the pueblo. Already the roads converging toward the old stronghold show signs of the assembling throng. Little bands of Indians, gaily blanketed and with uncovered heads, who have walked from pueblos perhaps fifty miles away, driving before them shaggy burros, with many-shaped packs; and Mexican fruit-vendors, their trains of donkeys laden with well-filled wicker baskets, form the vanguard of the unique procession. The valley across which we pass is all under cultivation, and the ground is now covered with the yellow stubble, while along the roadside we come upon the regulation threshing-places.
The Pueblo de Taos consists of two great mud buildings (of the larger of which an engraving is given) facing each other from opposite banks of a stream, and perhaps two hundred yards apart. They rise to a height of about fifty feet, and seem to have attained their present size by accretions during the ages since they were founded. They are of an irregular pyramidal form, and made up of about five stories or terraces. Each new story is built a distance from the edge of the one immediately beneath, so that both the length and breadth of the building diminish as the height is increased. To enter the rooms we must ascend one of the many ladders that lean against the wall, and then descend another ladder through a hole in the roof. Everything was quiet and silent about this great human wasps’ nest. Nude children tumbled on the ground in the warm rays of the sun; men strolled lazily hither and thither, their bodies wrapped in gaudy blankets and legs encased in close-fitting sheepskin leggings, while to their hair, black as jet and brought down in a lock on each side, hung great bunches of zephyr or other gay material; women, dressed in much the same manner, carried on their heads the earthen water-jars, or large baskets of bread, which had been baked in the oval mud ovens ranged in front of the pueblo. Everybody treated us with quiet respect, and seemed pleased to respond to our salutations. We climbed over one of the ancient piles, mounting to its topmost story on shaky ladders, peering into its rooms, which we were courteously invited to enter, and where we found sometimes as many as a dozen Indians sitting on the floor, engaged in adding some last touches to the holiday garments. We saw few young men, but afterwards learned that they were in the estufas, or underground council-chambers, preparing for the next day’s spectacle.
To give anything like an adequate account of the festival would require a small volume. Early on that resplendent September morning the human tide began to pour in, till, from our position on the summit of the north pueblo, we looked down to the plaza below on a surging mass of fully three thousand Indians and Mexicans, in every gay and fantastic garb. The fruit-vendors had established themselves in scores of little stalls scattered over the plaza, and with their burros standing patiently by, added a picturesque feature to the scene. Three hundred mad young Mexicans, mounted on excited ponies, charged among the crowd in a body, dared each other in feats of horsemanship, or “ran the gallo” on the opposite bank. The padre from Santa Fe first held service in the little church, after which came the event of the day. One hundred naked and painted Indians issued in solemn march from an estufa, and began the race, two by two, over the straight track a thousand feet long. For an hour and a half they sped up and down in front of the pueblo, amid the wildest excitement of the spectators. Then the march of the victors, to the music of a wild chant, while bread is showered upon them from one of the roofs of the pueblo under which they pass, closes the morning’s ceremonies.
The afternoon is consumed by the antics of seven unclothed and curiously painted clowns. For three hours do they amuse that motley crowd with their mimic cock and bull fights, and their semblance of plowing, threshing, and other familiar labors. As the sun nears the west, the rabble gather about a pole, fifty feet high, over the cross-piece at whose top has been hung a living sheep, together with garlands of fruit and a basket of bread. After many pretended failures, the pole is climbed, and the bread and fruit are thrown to the ground. Last of all, the sheep, in which a spark of life still lingers, is detached, and strikes the earth with a sickening thud. With yells and strange cries the Indians rush in, the sheep is torn limb from limb, and with this, the only revolting part of the entire celebration, the fête ends.