"He's all right," said Shorty, wiping his lips. "You carnt kill 'im."
That turned out to be true, as far as I could judge. Billy proved to be somewhat of an immortal. The adventures we had with these horses would make a book in themselves.
One thing was rather disappointing; New Mexico is not such a horse country as it was. Cross the border into Mexico proper, and every man except the Tarahumare Indians and the lowest of the peons is mounted. But on the American side Ford is surely conquering. It is more respectable to have a car than a horse. The cowboys and the Mexicans ride to their work, but pleasure is identified not with the horse, but with a car. The cowgirl is almost extinct, and the only women riders you see are visitors. In the Plaza at Santa Fe there is no longer any place to tie up a horse. Motors hold all the space. You have to seek out waste places in or about town, or else take the risk of tying to a telegraph pole in the midst of the traffic. Billy nearly pulled down several telegraph poles, and actually on one occasion broke his stout leather reins.
Outside the city horsemen are common enough, cowboys and Mexican farmers, and occasional mounted parties of polite Americans with hired horses and guides.
Santa Fe is, or was, the home of an artistic and literary colony. It is a health resort for people with lung disease, and it possesses an excellently well equipped sanatorium. A large number of residents are under doctor's orders. The driest air in America and a never failing morning sun makes Santa Fe ideal for consumptives. There have been many complete cures effected. The development of the place as a literary colony started no doubt with the coming there for her health of Alice Corbin from Chicago, one of the protagonists of the New Poetry movement, a sponsor of Lindsay and Sandburg and many others who rose to fame under the auspices of the Poetry Magazine. When she was "ordered South" poetry moved with her. It was no doubt owing to Vachel Lindsay's generous enthusiasm that we were tempted to go to Santa Fe. He saw in the little city in the mountains unbounded possibilities.
So in coming to Santa Fe we not only met the mountains but a number of writers and artists, amongst them my old acquaintance Witter Bynner who once diverted five chapters of Undiscovered Russia into verse which someone else, later, put to music. Bynner had quit the world in which he was somewhat of a king for a hermit's hut in the desert. Here we met Elizabeth Sergeant who wrote up life in the neighborhood in her amusing Letters from a Mud House; here as a visitor came William Allen White. Over the mountains at Taos lived D. H. Lawrence. A visitor also was Mrs. C. N. Williamson, gay and young despite her weeds and the score of novels and stories she and her late husband had written. The artists were as numerous, if more difficult to place, being rather jealous of one another. My favorite question was: "Who do you think is the greatest artist in Santa Fe?" But I never could get an answer beyond a faint blush and a slight personal embarrassment.
At seven thousand feet, however, literary and artistic people are apt to be very nervous, and those of poor health painfully so. There was more pleasure to be had riding in the hills than at the afternoon "teas" which were always being arranged. At these some beautifully gowned millionaire's wife "poured," the young men simpered in their well-ironed, ready-made clothes, the flappers, all curled and tinted, were like wax works, and middle-aged artists with long hair sat in corners musing on life like old frumps at a ball—very hard on them. To one of these gatherings a literary man and his wife came riding in one day. They walked in in sporting attire and the wife looked very striking in a gay white jumper and riding breeches.
I got into trouble at Santa Fe being supposed to have said it was "a shabby little town." Ladies whispered the blasphemy to one another at tea. I am to be remembered by that phrase. But in truth I think it a wonderful place and a wonderful district; something quite novel and fresh in American life. The cowboys, the Indians, and the Mexicans, make it very interesting. Its sun and air, its mountains, its horses, give it a marvelous possibility. The shabbiness lies in certain little things, such as the mean commercialism of the shops and the absence of a popular market for dairy products, fruit and vegetables. This is an Americanization of life. Every city of any size in Mexico has its popular market which furnishes fresh food at a cheap price. But La Ciudad Real de Santa Fe lives on canned milk, canned tomatoes, dried fruit, storage meat, coffee ground years ago in Chicago, eggs of uncertain origin and age. Fruit harvests fall to the ground and rot because they are plenty and the stores do not want the price reduced. There is something artificial and unpleasant in living in New Mexico on rations from Chicago. It militates against simple living, and it should be of the essence of a literary colony in the mountains to live simply. It raises a problem for Americans—how is one to escape from the American standardization of life?
Albuquerque, sixty miles away and many times larger, is even more artificial and standardized. Possibly El Paso on the frontier more so still. El Paso is like Kansas City in small, and that is the more remarkable as El Paso is as much in the desert as Luxor in Egypt or Merv in Turkestan; perhaps more so than Merv, for the Rio Grande is not to be compared to the Oxus River.
It prompts the thought that if America ever extended her territory to Chihuahua, the next large city in Mexico going southward, then Chihuahua also would become in a short time a replica of a hundred cities in the North. There might then be said of Chihuahua what Carl Sandburg said of Kalamazoo—