Kalamazoo, you ain't in a class by yourself;
I seen you before in a lot of places.
If you are nuts America is nuts.
However, at Santa Fe my wife and I lived a free and happy life in our house of mud, and enjoyed the wild West, the "last West" as it has been happily called, to the full. It is all pine scrub and sand for another thousand feet up, loose sand and bowlders which have, however, no terrors for the horses. Billy and Buck are surefooted as goats and can be ridden up steep banks which English horses would merely regard as walls. But neither horse will jump anything. After a thousand feet you enter a region of tall pines and firs, and five hundred feet later you reach aspens, grass, wild flowers, wild fruits. Most of the little rain that falls seems to benefit the upper mountain region. Santa Fe itself is in constant danger of drought. Water is very freely supplied by the Water Company and the dwellers in the many villas let the hose play on their lawns all day and all night, till suddenly there is a warning note, the hose ceases, and the lawns wilt. There is perhaps too much waste of the water of the little Santa Fe river on which Santa Fe's reputation as an oasis depends. In a state of nature very few wild flowers bloom down below. But in June and early July, like wild roses, the cactus blossoms everywhere and its red flowers delight the eye. The eyes crave and thirst for flowers and greenery.
A feature of the country is the arroyo or dried-out river channel, dead, stony, and sandy, which wanders along in an irregular course as if it had once held a fair stream. Many of these have never known living water. The river they represent is flowing underneath the sand, and the channel is not truly a riverbed but a subsidence. In these cases no grass will grow, there is not the slightest pasture, the only green thing that flourishes is a deep-rooted yellow flowering weed of the desert, a sort of sage brush, called locally chimesa. Riding downward to the Rio Grande valley, the view opens grandly upon wide sweeping desert country bounded by strange, wind-carved pyramids of rock and little mountains wrought into fantastic shape. Vachel Lindsay, who like many others deplores the name of the State—New Mexico—wanted to call it "New Arabia" or "New Egypt" because of its natural pyramids, its prehistoric ruins, its hieroglyphics and the sacred dances of the Indians. But he felt also that it was first of all "Cowboy country"—it was, or had become, America, and it is difficult to confound the new with the old.
We met in Santa Fe Jack Thorp, sometimes called the Cowboy Poet, because of his collection of cowboys' songs, and for several songs he wrote himself—but a substantial man, bred with, and always living with, horses and full of lore of the Border. It is no doubt due in part to him that we went to the Cowboys' Reunion at Las Vegas which I here describe.
CHAPTER VIII COWBOYS
When Thorp took horses up to pasture we sometimes went also. That meant a ten-mile ride up into the greener heights of the mountains, the leaving of the horses in a roughly wired inclosure, a picnic lunch, and then a ten-mile ride back in the evening. On these occasions Jack would be in old weather-beaten chaparreras (leg aprons of leather) and there would be a ready coil of rope on the horn of his saddle. Five or six loose horses would be driven ahead of us, and as like as not a mare and foal. It was very pleasant, especially in the early morning. Mrs. Thorp accompanied us, a clever, smiling, Irish woman, nicknamed generally "Blarney." She added greatly to the general good humor, and would say with an expression of much mirth, as we sallied all together into some rough and bowlder-strewn defile—"Here we go, the last of Teddy's bunch!"