CHAPTER II

THE UPPER RIO GRANDE, ITS PUEBLOS AND ITS CLIFF DWELLINGS

Of course you must make the trip—a half day will suffice for it—from Santa Fe to Tesuque, a village of the Pueblo Indians 9 miles to the north, and you should pronounce it _Te-soo´kay_. If your knowledge of Indians has been limited to the variety seen in Wild West Shows and historical pictures, you will be surprised at those you find at Tesuque. This is a quaint adobe village around a spacious plaza upon which an ancient, whitewashed Catholic church faces. The houses when of more than one story are built terrace-like, so that the roof of the first story forms a front yard to the second. Ladders lean against the outer walls, by which access is gained to the upper rooms. The population of about 150 live very much like their Mexican neighbors, raising by irrigation crops of corn, beans, peaches, melons, and alfalfa, accepting meanwhile from the liberal hand of Nature rabbits, _piñones_ and wild plums, and pasturing sheep and cattle on the communal pueblo lands which Spain granted them centuries ago and which our Government confirmed to them upon the acquisition of New Mexico. Their method of town building is not borrowed from the whites, but is their own; and because the Spanish Conquistadores of the sixteenth century found the region sprinkled with such permanent villages, called _pueblos_ in Spanish, they named the people Pueblo Indians—a term which well characterizes them in contra-distinction to the nomadic tribes, whose villages moved as the tribe moved.

Tesuque is a type of a score or so of pueblos scattered along a line of some 300 miles in northern New Mexico and Arizona. Formerly the dress of these Indians was quite distinctive, but association with the whites has modified its quality of late years, though it still retains some of the old features—particularly in the case of the women, who are more disposed than the men to conservatism. Their native costume is a dark woolen gown belted at the waist and falling a little below the knees, and a sort of cape of colored muslin fastened about the neck and hanging down the back. The lower part of the legs is often swathed in a buckskin extension of the moccasins in which the feet are encased. The hair is banged low upon the forehead and both women’s and men’s are clubbed at the back and bound with red yarn. The native attire of the men is a loose cotton shirt worn outside short, wide trousers. Instead of a hat a narrow _banda_ of colored cotton or silk is bound about the hair.

Each village has its local government—and a very competent sort it is—of a democratic nature, a governor, as well as a few other officials, being elected annually by popular vote. Besides these, there is a permanent council of old men who assist in the direction of affairs. Most of the Pueblo Indians are nominal adherents to Roman Catholicism, but have by no means lost hold of their pagan faith. On the patron saint’s day a public fiesta is always held. After mass in the church, there are native dances and ceremonies, accompanied by feasting continuing well into the night. November 12, St. James’s Day, is the day celebrated by Tesuque, and visitors are many.[6]

The Pueblos are as a class industrious, fun-loving, and friendly to white visitors. They are naturally hospitable and quickly responsive to any who treat them sympathetically and as fellow human beings. The lamentable fact that white Americans have too often failed in this respect, acting towards them as though they were animals in a zoo, is largely responsible for tales we hear of Indian surliness and ill-will. Pueblo women are skillful potters, and while Tesuque does not now excel in this art, one may pick up some interesting souvenirs both in clay and beadwork. At any rate, you will enjoy seeing these things being made in the common living-room of the house, while the corn is being ground on the _metates_ or mealing stones, and the mutton stew simmers on the open hearth. A knowledge of values first obtained at reputable traders’ shops in Santa Fe, is advisable, however, before negotiating directly with the Indians, as they are becoming pretty well schooled in the art of charging “all the traffic will bear.” Tesuque produces a specialty in the shape of certain dreadful little pottery images called “rain gods,” which must not be taken seriously as examples of sound Pueblo art.[7]

Thirty-three miles north of Santa Fe on the Denver and Rio Grande Railway is the village of Española, where a plain but comfortable hotel makes a convenient base for visiting several points of interest in the upper Rio Grande Valley. A mile to the south is Santa Clara pueblo,[8] long famous for its beautiful shining black pottery almost Etruscan in shape. The clay naturally burns red, but a second baking with the fuel (dried chips of cattle manure), pulverized finely and producing a dense black smoke, gives the ware its characteristic lustrous black. Seven miles further down the river but on the other side, is another pueblo, San Ildefonso, a picturesque village of 125 Indians, near the base of La Mesa Huérfana. This is a flat-topped mountain of black lava, on whose summit in 1693, several hundred Pueblos entrenched themselves and for eight months stubbornly resisted the attempts of the Spanish under De Vargas to bring them to terms. That was practically the last stand of Pueblo rebeldom, which thirteen years before had driven every Spaniard from the land. San Ildefonso has public fiestas on January 23 and September 6.

Six miles north of Española and close to the Rio Grande is San Juan pueblo, with a population of about 400 Indians. Here one is in the very cradle of the white civilization of the Southwest. At this spot in the summer of 1598, Don Juan de Oñate—he of the Conquest—arrived with his little army of Spaniards, his Franciscan missionaries, his colonist families, a retinue of servants and Mexican Indians, his wagons and cattle, to found the capital of the newly won “kingdom” later to be called New Mexico. The courtesy of the Indians there, who temporarily gave up their own houses to the Spaniards, was so marked that their pueblo became known as _San Juan de los Caballeros_ (Saint John of the Gentlemen). Oñate’s settlement—of which no vestige now remains—is believed to have been situated just across the Rio Grande from San Juan, about where the hamlet and railway station of Chamita now stands. San Juan pueblo is further distinguished as the birthplace of Popé, the Indian to whose executive genius is due the success of the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680. A picturesque figure, that same Popé, of the timber dramatic heroes are made of. It is said that, while meditating the rebellion, he journeyed to the enchanted lagoon of Shípapu, the place where in the dim past the Pueblos had emerged from the underworld and whither they return at death. There he conferred with the spirits of his ancestors, who endued him with power to lead his people to victory.[9] The San Juan women make a good black pottery similar to that of Santa Clara. On Saint John’s Day, June 24, occurs a public fiesta, with procession and dances, attracting visitors, white and red, from far and near.

Having got thus far up the Rio Grande, let nothing deter you from visiting Taos (they pronounce it _Towss_). By automobile it is about 50 miles northeast of Española or you can reach it quite expeditiously by Denver & Rio Grande train to Taos Junction and auto-connection thence about 30 miles to Taos.[10] Situated in a fertile plain, 7000 feet above the sea, in the heart of the Southern Rockies, Taos is one of the most charming places in America. It is in three parts. There is the outlying hamlet Ranchos de Taos; then the picturesque Mexican town Fernandez de Taos, famous in recent years for a resident artist colony whose pictures have put Taos in the world of art; and lastly, there is the pueblo of Taos. From very early times the pueblo has played an important role in New Mexican history. It was here the San Juaneño Popé found the readiest response to his plans of rebellion. Later the location on the confines of the Great Plains made it an important trading center with the more northern Indians. The annual summer fair for _cambalache_, or traffic by barter, held at Taos in the latter part of the eighteenth century, was a famous event, the Plains tribes bringing skins and furs and Indian captives to trade for horses, beads and metal implements. The commercial opportunities combined with the fertility of the soil and an unfailing water supply led to the founding of Fernandez de Taos by whites. In the days of Mexican supremacy part of the traffic over the Santa Fe Trail passed this way and a custom house was here. The ruins of a large adobe church in the pueblo form a memento of the troublous days of 1847, when a small rebellion participated in by Mexicans and a few Taos Indians took place here and the American governor, Bent, was murdered. At Fernandez de Taos, the famous frontiersman Kit Carson lived for many years, and here his grave may still be seen.

Taos pueblo, housing an Indian population of about 500, is the most northern in New Mexico, and perhaps the most perfect specimen existing of Pueblo architecture. It consists of two imposing pyramidal house clusters of 5 to 7 stories—aboriginal apartment houses—and between them happily flows the little Rio de Taos sparkling out of the Glorieta Cañon near whose mouth the pueblo stands. The three-mile drive or walk from Fernandez de Taos is very lovely, with the pueblo’s noble background of mountains before you, their purple and green flanks wonderfully mottled and dashed in autumn with the gold of the aspen forests. The men of Taos are a tall, athletic sort, quite different in appearance from the more southern Pueblos. They wear the hair parted in the middle and done at the side in two braids which hang in front of the shoulders. They are much addicted to their blankets; and one often sees them at work with the blankets fastened about the waist and falling to the knees like a skirt. In warm weather they sometimes substitute a muslin sheet for the woolen blanket, and few sights are more striking than a Taos man thus muffled to his eyebrows in pure white.

Annually on September 30th occurs the _Fiesta de San Gerónimo de Taos_, which is one of the most largely attended of all Pueblo functions. Crowds of Americans, Mexicans and Indians (a sprinkling of Apaches among Pueblos of several sorts) line the terraced pyramids and make a scene so brilliant and strange that one wonders that it can be in America. The evening before, near sundown, there is a beautiful Indian dance in the plaza of the pueblo, the participants bearing branches of quivering aspens. With the sunset light upon the orange and yellow of the foliage as the evening shadows gather, it is an unforgettable sight. Yes, you must by all means see Taos. There are hotel accommodations at Fernandez de Taos.[11]

But Española serves, too, as a base for outings of quite another sort. One of these is to the remarkable prehistoric cliff village known as the Puyé in the Santa Clara Cañon, about 10 miles west of Española. Here at the edge of a pine forest a vast tufa cliff rises, its face marked with pictographs of unknown antiquity and honeycombed with dwellings of a vanished people, probably ancestors, of some of the present-day Pueblos.[12] These cliff chambers are quite small, and their walls bear still the soot from prehistoric fires. Climbing by an ancient trail to the summit of the mesa of which the cliff is a side, you come upon the leveled ruins of what was once a magnificent, terraced community house, built of tufa blocks and containing hundreds of rooms. Rambling from room to room, picking up now a bit of broken pottery, now a charred corn-cob, poking into the ashes of fireplaces where the last embers were quenched before history in America began, you experience, I hope, a becoming sense of your youth as a white American. And the view from this noble tableland—a view those ancient people had every day of their lives! One wonders had they eyes to see it—the lovely valley of the Rio Grande, purple chain after chain of mountains on every side, the jagged peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, the Glorietas, the Jemes, and dim on the far horizon, the Sierra Blanca in Colorado.

Also dotting the same plateau (this region by the way, is now called Pajarito[13] Park) are numerous other prehistoric community houses—the Otowi (with its curious tent-like rock formations), the Tsánkawi, the Tchrega—all of absorbing interest to the archaeologic mind, but offering not much that seems new to the average tourist who has seen the Puyé. One, however, known as the Tyuonyi in the cañon of the Rito de los Frijoles[14] should not be missed. It may be reached via Buckman, a station on the D. & R. G. 12 miles south of Española. Thence it is about 15 miles over all sorts of a road to the brink of Frijoles Cañon. A steep foot-trail there leads you down, a thousand feet or more, into the gorge and after a short walk you are at the comfortable ranch house of Judge A. G. Abbott, custodian of the Bandelier National Monument, under which name the neighboring ruins are officially designated by the United States Government, which owns them.[15] Considered merely as scenery, the little, secluded cañon is one of the loveliest spots in New Mexico, with its stretches of emerald meadows, its perennial stream and its peaceful forest of stately pines. But it is the human interest given by the vacant houses of a forgotten race—the cavate dwellings of the pink and white tufa cliffs and the ruined communal dwellings on the cañon floor and on the mesa top near by—that brings most visitors. That noted ethnologist, the late Adolf F. Bandelier, wrote a romance with the scene laid here and at the Puyé. It is entitled “The Delightmakers,” and a reading of it will not only lend a living interest to these places, but yield a world of information as to the mind and customs of the Pueblo Indians. Visitors have the School of American Archaeology at Santa Fe to thank for the painstaking work of excavation extending over years, that uncovered many of these ancient dwelling places of their centuries of accumulated debris.

To return to Española. Ten miles to the eastward in the valley of the Santa Cruz river is the quaint little church of Santuario, a sort of New Mexican Lourdes, famous these many years for its miraculous cures. A trip thither makes a noteworthy day’s outing. It may be done by automobile over a road of many tribulations, but a horse and buggy are more satisfactory and far more in keeping with the primitive country. My own visit was achieved on foot, eased by a lift of a couple of miles from a kindly Mexican on horseback, who set me up behind him, _en ancas_, as they call it. It was mid-August—a season which in northern New Mexico is as sunshiny and showery as a sublimated Eastern April. The intense blue of the sky was blotted here and there with piled-up cloud masses, which broke at times in streamers of rain upon the purple ranges of the Sangre de Cristo ahead of me—and after that, descending shafts of light. As soon as I had crossed the Rio Grande and Española was behind me, I was in pure Mexico. The Santa Cruz Valley is an agricultural region, but it is the agriculture of centuries ago that is in vogue there. Wheat, for instance, is trodden out by horses, sheep or goats, on outdoor threshing floors of beaten earth, winnowed by tossing shovelfuls into the air, washed of its grit and dirt in the nearest _acéquia_, then spread out in the sun to dry, and finally ground in primitive little log mills whose rumbling stones are turned by tiny water wheels. Little New Mexican Davids, bare of foot and dreamy-eyed, loiter along behind their nibbling flocks in the stubble of the shorn fields or the wild herbage of the river bottom. Peaches and melons, onions and corn, lie drying on the roofs, and strips of meat hang “jerking” from stretched lines in the _plazitas_ of the houses. The cross is still a dominant feature in this land of yesterday. Now it glitters on the belfry of the family chapel among the trees of some ranch; now it is outlined against the sky on the crest of a hill, a _calvario_ of the Penitentes;[16] now it crowns a heap of stones by the wayside, where a funeral has stopped to rest.

Of the villages strewn along this delightful way, some are hamlets of half a dozen straggling little adobes drowsing under their rustling cottonwoods. Others are more important. One particularly I remember—Santo Niño. That means “village of the Holy Child,” and His peace that placid morning seemed to rest upon it. The streets were narrow shady lanes, where irrigation ditches running full made a murmuring music, flowing now by adobe walls, now by picket fences where hollyhocks and marigolds and morning-glories looked pleasantly out. It was a village not of houses merely, but of comfortable old orchards, too, and riotous gardens where corn and beans, chilis and melons locked elbows in happy comradery. I think every one I met was Mexican—the women in sombre black rebosos, the men more or less unkempt and bandit-appearing in ample-crowned sombreros, yet almost without exception offering me the courtesy of a raised hand and a _buenos dias, señor_. Santa Cruz de la Cañada—another of these villages—deserves a special word of mention, for next to Santa Fe it is the oldest officially established _villa_ (a form of Spanish organized town), in New Mexico, dating as such from 1695, though in its unincorporated state antedating the Pueblo Rebellion. Long a place of importance, its ancient glory paled as Santa Fe and Albuquerque grew. Today it numbers a scant couple of hundred inhabitants, but it is interesting to the tourist for its fine old church facing the grassy plaza of the village. The church interior is enriched with a number of ancient pictures and carvings of an excellence beyond one’s expectations.

Then there is Chímayo, into which you pass just before crossing the river to Santuario. To the general public Chímayo appeals because of its blankets and its apricots, but to me it remains a place of tender memory because of a certain hospitable _tienda de abarrotes_ (or, as we should say, grocery store). Entering it in the hope of finding crackers and cheese, wherewith to make a wayside luncheon, I was given instead a characteristic Mexican meal as exquisitely cooked as ever I had; yet it was but a couple of corn tortillas, a bowl of pink beans done to liquidity, and a cup of black coffee. As to the blankets of Chímayo, they are woven in sizes from a pillow-cover to a bed-spread, of Germantown yarn, and you find them on sale everywhere in the curio shops of the Southwest, competing in a modest way with the Navajo product. The weaving is a fireside industry, prosecuted in the intervals of other work both by women and men, and the bump-bump of the primitive looms is the characteristic melody of the place.

I had to ford the little river, shoes and stockings in hand, to reach Santuario, and was not sure when I got there. An old _paisano_, sitting in the shade of a wall, informed me, however, that the little cluster of adobes on a hillside, into which I soon came from the river, was really the place—“of great fame, señor. Here come people of all nations to be cured—Mexicans, Americans, Apaches—from far, very far.” The adobe church, half hidden behind some huge cottonwoods, was open—of crude construction without and within, but very picturesque. Passing within the wooden doors, which are curiously carved with a maze of lettering that I found it impossible to decipher, I was in a twilight faintly illumined by the shining of many candles set upon the floor in front of a gaudy altar. Upon the walls hung beskirted figures of saints in various colors and wearing tin crowns. There were, too, crude little shrines upon which pilgrims had scrawled their names. A figure of San Diego on horseback with a quirt on his wrist, cowboy style, was particularly lively, I thought. In a room adjoining the altar is a hole from which pilgrims take handfuls of earth—red adobe, apparently—the outward instrumentality that is depended upon for the cures.

The history of this queer chapel is interesting. Long before it was built the efficacy of that hole of earth was believed far and wide, and the place resorted to by health seekers. Finally in 1816 a pious _paisano_ named Bernardo Abeyta, who had prospered greatly in his affairs, was impelled to erect this church as a testimony of gratitude to God. Dying he bequeathed it to Doña Carmen Chaves, his daughter, who kept for all comers the church and its pit of healing, and lived in a modest way upon the fees which grateful pilgrims bestowed upon her. After her death, the property descended to her daughter, who maintains it in the same way. It is said the fame of the spot is known even in old Mexico, whence pilgrims sometimes come.[17] The earth is utilized either internally dissolved in water, or outwardly made into a mud wash and rubbed on the body. The chapel is dedicated to _El Señor de Esquipulas_—the Christ of Esquipulas—Esquipulas being a little village of Guatemala whose great church enshrines a famous image of the Lord believed to perform miraculous cures.

For a glimpse in small compass of the unsuspected picturesqueness of rural New Mexico, I know of nothing better than this little jaunt from Española to Santuario.

NOTE: Horseback tours through the Pecos and Santa Fe National Forests are practicabilities, with Santa Fe, Española or Buckman as a base. There is a company or two at Santa Fe that make a specialty of outfitting parties, furnishing riding and pack animals, cooks and all needful accessories, for a fixed sum. Trout fishing is good in many of the mountain streams. You may arrange your own itinerary, or if you do not know what you want, trips will be outlined to suit your particular interests. In the latter event, a consultation with the Supervisor of the Santa Fe National Forest, whose office is in Santa Fe, would be helpful. For people of sound wind who like to see the world from mountain tops, a trip over the Dalton Trail to the Pecos River and thence to the Truchas Peaks is repaying. From that elevation of about 13,000 feet, there is a magnificent outlook over much of New Mexico and some of Colorado and Arizona.