SANTE FÉ AND THE VALLEY OF THE RIO GRANDE
NOWHERE else did we find spring as lovely as at Santa Fé. Here, a mile and a half above sea level, was a crystal freshness of atmosphere, through which filtered a quintessence of the sounds and scents and colors that make a joyous season of spring even in downtown New York.
A bit of a surprise it was to find, dozing in the sun like a New England village, a town important enough to have given its name to a railroad; to mark the end of one trail, and be a station on another; to have been the capital of an ancient Empire of the New World; and now to be the capital of a state. Yet the world passes it by, leaving it on a railroad spur high and dry from transcontinental traffic. So much the worse, then, for the world; so much the better for Santa Fé. The town does not owe its personality to its railroad stations and Chambers of Commerce. The peaks guarding its high isolation have looked down upon many changes in its history. Yet it stays outwardly nearly unaltered; valuing material importance so little that it hides its Capitol down a grassy side street, while its Plaza still is dominated by the sturdy old Governor’s Palace, where Onate raised the Spanish flag in the early seventeenth century, and Kearny replaced it with the American flag in 1846.
The heart of Santa Fé is its Plaza. To its shady trees, traders tied their horses when they had reached the end of the perilous Santa Fé Trail, glad enough to gain its shelter after being beset by the primitive dangers of hunger, thirst, wild beasts, Indians and robbers. The same Plaza where drowsy Mexicans now rest upon park benches, where processions of burros pass loaded with firewood, where shining automobiles flash by, has witnessed siege and countersiege, scenes of violence and heroism and romance. Richly laden caravans once came galloping into the town, sometimes closely beset by bandits or hostile Apaches, and weary adventurers from the land of Daniel Boone or Washington dismounted, and looked bewildered about them at this gay and alien civilization. Here the Pueblo Indians, in their final revolt, besieged the white settlers, and committed the only violences in their long career of patience, and here the conquering De Vargas finally overcame them, and surrounded by Franciscan monks, offered mass for his victory. Dominating the Plaza is the three century old Governor’s Palace, whose walls conceal prehistoric Indian foundations. It is a one-story building running half the length of the square, built in a day when hospitality demanded royal scope. Half inn, half fort, its six-foot thick walls stood for strength as well as coolness, and its mighty doors frequently knew the marks of assault. In modern times, until the beginning of this century it served as residence of the governor of the Territory. In a back room, Lew Wallace is said to have written chapters of Ben Hur.
No question but that the Palace might be made more interesting as a Museum, less a storehouse of half forgotten oddments. It might tell less spasmodically and with greater dignity the story of its successive occupations, from the Royal Governor of Spain to the present time. It creates the impression now of having been forgotten, except as, at intervals, a legacy of antiquities was deposited wholesale, without selection. The exhibits should be pruned, gaps filled, and arranged with better proportion and consecutiveness.
It might well, indeed, take a leaf from the book of the new Museum, built on the same side of the Plaza. Its exterior skilfully assembles various parts of nearby buildings of Pueblo architecture. Its corners copy the towers of Laguna, Taos and Acoma. The warm stucco walls are studded with pinon vegas, and the doorways, windows and balconies are of cedar, deep-set in the thick walls. An infant art-gallery, fed from the local Santa Fé and Taos schools, sometimes according to Holt and sometimes on Cubist pickles and doughnuts, does the double service of giving the artist permanent exhibition-rooms, and illustrating local color for the tourist.
I mean no disparagement here against the Santa Fé school, which numbers several names of national reputation. The country cries to be painted in vividest colors; Nature here is in vermilion mood, and man tops her gayety with slouching insouciance, sky-blue shirts, and head-bands giving the needful splash of scarlet. Add skies as blue as a spring sun can stipple them, dash across them a blur of pink apricot bloom, bank them against cliffs of red-orange, pure gold where the light strikes it, and grape purple in the shadows, tone with the warm gray of a pueblo clustered about a sky-blue stream, and fringed yellow-green cottonwoods bordering it,—and what artist can paint with sobriety? That a few manage it is to their credit, nor can one wonder that this riot of color goes to the heads of others till their canvasses look like an explosion in a vegetable garden.
Tucked away in another street off the Plaza stands the old Cathedral, begun in 1612. As cathedrals go it is an unimpressive example of the worst period of church architecture: to the usual trappings of its interior is added the barbaric crudity of the Mexican in church art; an art like the French Canadian’s, naïve and literal. It must show the bleeding heart much ensanguined, the wounds of Christ fresh with gore, and its doll-faced saints covered with lace and blue satin, like fashion plates of Godey’s Ladies. What interests me in this as in other churches of the Southwest is the colossal ironic joke on the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans, whose contemporary efforts on the stern rock-bound eastern coast were just about offset by the equally earnest efforts of the Spanish padres on the cactus-ridden desert of the west. However, what each bequeathed of value has remained to build a vaster, freer, and perhaps better community than either unwitting opponent previsioned.
Quite Colonial, and oddly reminiscent of New England is the Governor’s mansion of today, across from the present Capitol, which like every Capitol in the United States rears a helmet shaped dome. In the houses of this New Mexican government occurs a phenomenon unknown to any other state: two languages are officially spoken, Mexican and English, with an interpreter to make each side intelligible to the other. I do not know whether this bilingual Assembly and Senate produces twice as much verbiage as the usual legislature or whether the two tongues serve as a deterrent to oratory.
New Mexico, it must be remembered, is more Indian and Mexican than American by a proportion of three to one, and includes a sprinkling of negro and Chinese. The Indian lends a touch of the primitive; the Mexican brings Spain into the picture. In doorways painted sky blue or lavender, swarthy women gossip, in mantilla and fringed black shawl. Against a shady wall, in sash and sombrero, all but too lazy to light the inevitable cigarette, slouches a Mexican who should be working. On Sundays and fête days, the roads about Sante Fé are splashed with the vivid colors of the girls’ frocks,—pinks, purples and scarlet accenting the inevitable black of the women’s dress,—as they make their way under fringy cottonwoods to some country alberge. The sound of a jerky accordion usually follows them up the canyon roads.