Acoma.
“Mr. S——, would you like to visit Acoma?” asked the commandant.
“Most assuredly,” I replied; “I came out here to see all I could see. But what or who is Acoma?”[227]
“A town built on the top of a rock rising from a level plain to a height of over two hundred feet is Acoma—the home of the Acoma Indians, a tribe of the great Pueblo family. I am ordered thither to have a talk with the principal men, and induce them to give up some Navajo children—captives—they are said to have taken in a recent skirmish.”
I had been enjoying the hospitality of the commandant for some days at old Fort Wingate, near the Ojo del Gallo, in the northwestern part of New Mexico. Acoma lies about fifty miles to the southeast of the fort, by a very rough trail across the mountains. It was somewhat further by the regular trail.
As we started, the sun was creeping over the brow of lofty San Mateo. The party consisted of the commandant, Don Juan Brown, a Castilianized American, who speaks Spanish like a native, and went with us as volunteer interpreter; Messrs. Jim Durden and Joe Smithers, gentlemen loafers; a sergeant and twenty cavalry as escort in case of unexpected and undesired rencounters with hostile Apaches or Navajoes; last, the writer, a denizen of the city of Gotham, general tourist, grand scribe and chronicler.
We all rode on horseback, except Don Juan Brown, who, being a trifle over 225 lbs., divided his weight between a pair of good horses attached to a light buggy. The order of march was: two cavalrymen five hundred yards in advance; the commandant, with Jim and Joe and the writer; the main body of the escort; Don Juan Brown with his buggy, and a rear guard of two cavalrymen five hundred yards behind.
A brisk trot of three miles brought us to the Puertocito, or Little Door, which leads from the Valley of the Gallo into the Mal Païs, a petrified sea of lava, which lies between the Puertocito and the mountains. The lava stream seems to have been suddenly turned to stone by a wave of some enchanter's wand while it was a raging, seething torrent.
We halted and dismounted, tightened girths, etc. Jim and Joe, unused to the equitating mood, and evidently disliking particularly the trotting tense, had fallen back to the rear guard, and looked somewhat shaken. The relief of a walk of some miles was in store for them, as the trail through the Mal Païs admitted only of that gait and of single file.
The Puertocito is formed by two rocks about twenty feet high. We wound our way through tortuous passages, through lava spires, at a slow walk. We could not see more than a few yards ahead. It was a dreary pathway. The knowledge that it was a haunt for Indians bound on robbery or revenge gave imagination an opportunity to put her darkest colors on the natural gloom. An hour's slow walking brings us to the Bajada, or Descent, [pg 704] where our path is up and down the steep sides of a lava rock thirty feet high. We dismount and lead our horses carefully down. Half a dozen men holding on to the buggy behind make sufficient drag to let it down in safety, though with some wrenching of the wheels in the channelled surface of the rock.