Near enough to Santa Fé to be reached in a day by motor and somewhat longer by pack-train, lies the enchanting valley locally called “The Pecos.” One mounts the piñon-scented red trail, studded with spring flowers, to the heights above, where to breathe the air of dew and fire is to acquire the zip of a two year old colt and the serenity of a seraph. In this least known corner of our country, the Pecos is the least traveled district, known only to a few ranchmen, and old guides with tall, “straight” stories, and short, twisted legs,—mighty hunters who have wrestled barehanded with bears, and stabbed mountain lions with their penknives. Sportsmen are only beginning to know what the streams of the Pecos produce in trout, and its wilderness in big game. Given a good horse, a good guide, good “grub” and a comfortable bedding roll, a month free from entangling alliances with business, and the Pecos provides sound sleep, mighty appetites, and air two miles high, so different from the heavy vapor breathed by the city-dweller that it deserves a name of its own.
Nobody can stay long in Santa Fé, without becoming aware of the Rio Grande’s influence on the dwellers in its valley. It furnishes not only their livelihood, but little daily happenings, “So and So’s car got stuck crossing at Espanola, and had to stay in the river two days,”—“The river rose and tore down the bridge at Buckman, and they say there will be two more bridges down by night.”—“You can’t get out at Pojoaque, this week.” But to see the river in its magnificence, one should drive over the canyon of the Rio Grande, following along the precipitous road to Taos.
The day we started for Taos, rain invoked by the prayerful Pueblos had reduced the road-bed to a sticky red plaster which more than once slid our car gently toward the edge and a drop of a hundred feet or more. Like the foolish virgins we were, we had forgotten our chains. To put on the brakes would invite a skid; not to do so meant a plunge over the bank. The road, like an afterthought, clung for dear life to the edge of a series of hills, now dipping like a swallow to the river bed, then after the usual chuck-hole at the bottom, rising in dizzy turns to the top of the next hill, unwinding before us sometimes for miles. Steep cliffs, and narrow gorges at times shut us completely from the world. Far below, the river frothed turbulently.
Occasionally as we took a turn, a bit of bank caved in with us, and left one wheel treading air. On sharp curves a long wheel base is a great disadvantage. The earth is liable to crumble where rain has softened it in gullies, and one must learn to keep close enough to the inside edge in turning to prevent the back wheels from skimming the precipice, and yet not drive the front wheels into the inside bank. Add to this a surface of slick mud on which the car slides helplessly, heavy ruts and frequent boulders, steep graded curves with gullies at the bottom, and it will seem less surprising that the mail driver who takes his own car and his life over this road twice a week to Santa Fé receives about three times the wage of a Harvard professor.
A few miles before reaching Taos we left the canyon and came out on a broad plain. The first sight of Taos takes one’s breath,—it is so alien to America. Ancient of days, it suggests Jerusalem or some village still more remote in civilization. Houses terraced to five and even seven stories are banked against purple mountains, thirteen thousand feet in the air. A little stream winds to the walls of the village, dividing it in two. On the banks women wash clothes, and men draw primitive carts to the water, or gallop over the plain like Arabs in the flowing white robes characteristic to Taos. The roofs of the square plaster houses, terraced one above the other, are peopled with naked babies. Women wrapped in shawls of virgin blue or scarlet outlined against the sky, again suggest the Orient. Constantly in these Pueblos one is reminded of the Far East and it is easy to believe these Indians of the Southwest, of sleek round yellow cheek and almond eyes are of Mongolian stock. The Grand Canyon old-timer, William Bass, tells of seeing a distinguished Chinese visitor talk with ease to some Navajos of the Painted desert, who, he reported, used a rough Chinese dialect. In the Shoshone country, I myself saw Indians enter a Chinese restaurant, and converse with the slant-eyed proprietor. When I asked whether they were speaking Shoshone or Chinese, I was told that they used a sort of lingua franca, and had no difficulty in understanding each other. Oriental or not, the origins of Taos are clouded with antiquity.
Coronado was the first Aryan to visit this ancient pueblo, and we, to date, were the last. The same gentle courtesy met us both. We were given the freedom of the village, invited into the houses, and allowed to climb to the roof-tops, with the governor’s pretty little daughter as our guide. Taos, like all pueblos, has a republican form of government, and a communal life which works out very peaceably. Annually the two candidates for governor run a foot-race, one from each division of the town, and the political race is indeed to the swift. Perhaps they get as good governors by that method as by our own.
Taos, like all Gaul, is divided into tres partes, quarum unam the Cubists incolunt. No place could be more ideal for an artist’s colony, with scenery unsurpassed, air clear and sparkling, living inexpensive, picturesque models to be had cheaply, and little adobe houses simply asking to become studios. San Geronimo de Taos, on the Pueblo Creek belongs to the Indians. Ranchos de Taos, where a fine old mission church, bulwarked with slanting plaster buttresses has stood since 1778, at the lower end of the straggling town, is given over to Mexicans. The middle section, once famous as the home town of Kit Carson, proclaims by its blue and lavender doorways, mission bells, fretted balconies and latticed windows, the wave of self-consciousness that had inundated American Taos. But it has its own charm and adapts itself admirably to the native dwellings. Kit Carson’s old home, facing a magnificent view over the river, has become a sumptuous studio; and scaling down from that to the most humble loft over a stable, every available nook in the town is commandeered by artists, where every style of art is produced from canvasses out-niggling Meissonier to the giddy posters of the post-post-impressionists. Regardless of results, they are lucky artists who have the pleasant life and brisk ozone of Santa Fé in the winter, enjoy the picturesque Indian dances in spring and fall, and in summer paint and loaf in the purple glory of the Taos mountains, cooled by frosty air blowing from the two and a half mile snow line.
ARTIST’S STUDIO IN TAOS, NEW MEXICO.
No place could be more ideal for an artist colony.