CHAPTER V

OF ACOMA, CITY OF THE MARVELLOUS ROCK, AND LAGUNA

The oldest occupied town in the United States, and in point of situation perhaps the most poetic, is Acoma (_ah´co-ma_), occupying the flat summit of a huge rock mass whose perpendicular sides rise 350 feet out of a solitary New Mexican plain.[31] It is situated 15 miles southwest of the Santa Fe Railway station of Laguna, where modest accommodations are provided for travelers who stop over. The inhabitants of Acoma, numbering about 700, are Pueblo Indians, whose ancestors founded this rockborne town before the white history of the Southwest began. Coronado found it here in 1540. _El Peñol Maravilloso_—the Rock Marvellous—the old chroniclers called it. “A city the strangest and strongest,” says Padre Benavides, writing of it in 1630, “that there can be in the world.”

They will take you from Laguna to Acoma in an automobile over a road, little better than a trail, whose traversability depends more or less on weather conditions not only that day, but the day before.[32] It winds through a characteristic bit of central New Mexico landscape, breezy, sunlit and long-vistaed, treeless save for scattering piñon and juniper. Wild flowers bespangle the ground in season; and mountains—red, purple, amethystine, weather-worn into a hundred fantastic shapes—rise to view on every hand. In July and August the afternoon sky customarily becomes massed with cloud clusters, and local showers descend in long, wavering bands of darkness—here one, there another. Traveling yourself in sunshine beneath an island of clear turquoise in such a stormy sky, you may count at one time eight or ten of these picturesque streamers of rain on the horizon circle. Jagged lightnings play in one quarter of the heavens while broken rainbows illumine others. Nowhere else in our country is the sky so very much alive as in New Mexico and Arizona in summer. Nowhere else, I think, as in this land of fantastic rock forms, of deep blue skies, and of wide, golden, sunlit plains, do you feel so much like an enchanted traveler in a Maxfield Parrish picture.

Though the cliffs of Acoma are visible for several miles before you reach the Rock, you are almost at its base before you distinguish any sign of the village—the color of its terraced houses being much the same as that of the mesa upon which they are set. The soft rocky faces have been cut into grotesque shapes by the sand of the plain which the winds of ages have been picking up and hurling against them. There are strange helmeted columns, slender minarets and spires that some day perhaps a tempest will snap in two, dark, cool caverns which your fancy pictures as dens of those ogreish divinities you have read of Indians’ believing in.

Your first adventure at Acoma—and it is a joyous one—is climbing the Rock to the village on top. There are several trails. One is broad and easy, whereby the Pueblo flocks come up from the plains to be folded for the night, and men ahorseback travel. Shorter is the one your Indian guide will take you, by a gradual sandy ascent, to the base of the cliff. There you are face to face with a crevice up which you ascend by an all but perpendicular aboriginal stairway of stone blocks and boulders piled upward in the crack. Handholes cut in the rock wall support you over ticklish places, until finally you clamber out upon the flat summit. In Coronado’s time you would have been confronted there by a wall of loose stones which the Acomas had built to roll down on the heads of the unwelcome. Today, instead, the visitor is apt to be greeted by an official of the pueblo exacting a head-tax of a dollar for the privilege of seeing the town, and picture-taking extra!

I think this precipitous trail is the one known as _El Camino del Padre_ (the Father’s Way), which is associated with a pretty bit of history. The first permanent Christian missionary at Acoma was the Franciscan Juan Ramirez. Now the Acomas had never been friendly to the Spaniards, and it was only after a three days’ hard battle in 1599, resulting in the capture and burning of the town by the Spaniards, that the Indians accepted vassalage to that inexplicable king beyond the sea.[33] Naturally, no friendly feeling was engendered by this episode; so when this Padre Ramirez, years afterward, was seen approaching the Rock one day—it was in 1629—quite alone and unarmed save with cross and breviary (having walked all the way from Santa Fe, a matter of 175 miles) the Acomas decided to make short work of him. The unsuspecting father started briskly up the rocky stairway, and when he came within easy range, the watching Indians shot their arrows at him. Then a remarkable thing happened. A little girl, one of a group looking over the edge of the precipice, lost her balance and fell out of sight apparently to her death. A few minutes later, the undaunted padre whom the shelter of the cliff had saved from the arrows, appeared at the head of the trail holding in his arms the little child smiling and quite unharmed. Unseen by the Indians, she had lit on a shelving bit of rock from which the priest had tenderly lifted her. So obvious a miracle completely changed the Indians’ feelings towards the long-gowned stranger, and he remained for many years, teaching his dusky wards Spanish and so much of Christian doctrine as they would assimilate. It was this Fray Juan Ramirez, it is said, who had built the animal trail which has been mentioned.

AN ACOMA INDIAN DANCE

The dances of the Pueblo Indians are not social diversions but serious religious ceremonies.

LAGUNA, THE MOTHER PUEBLO OF SEVEN

This pueblo, languishing while neighboring Acoma flourished, borrowed the latter’s picture of St. Joseph to change her fortune, prospered accordingly, and then refused to return the picture, thus precipitating a lawsuit unique in our annals.

Most visitors spend a couple of hours at Acoma, and return the same day to the railroad. This, at a pinch, suffices for a ramble about the streets, and for looking into doorways for glimpses of the primitive family life, chaffering with the women for the pretty pottery for which Acoma is famed,[34] and for a visit to the natural rock cisterns whence girls are continually coming with dripping ollas balanced on their heads. And of course, there is the old adobe church with its balconied _convento_, to be seen. It dates from about 1700. As the Rock was bare of building material, this had all to be brought up from below on the backs of Indian neophytes—the timbers from the mountains 20 miles away. The graveyard is a remarkable piece of work founded on the sloping rock by building retaining walls of stone (40 feet high, at the outer end) and filling in with sandy earth lugged patiently up from the plain.

A conspicuous feature in the view from the Rock of Acoma is a solitary mesa or rock-table, 3 miles to the northward, which the Acomas call Katzímo, and the Spaniards named _La Mesa Encantada_ (the Enchanted Mesa). Its flat top is 430 perpendicular feet above the plain, and can now be reached only with scaling ladders and ropes. Formerly there was a single trail up the side. The Indian tradition is that long, long ago, before the coming of the white invaders, the village of the Acomas occupied the summit. One day, while all the population except a few old people were working in the fields below, a tempest completely swept away the upper part of the trail; so that the inhabitants could never again reach their homes. They began life over again by building a new pueblo on the Rock of Acoma.[35]

The annual public fiesta of Acoma is held September 2, the day of San Estéban Rey—that is, of St. Stephen the King, Acoma’s patron saint and Hungary’s. It is attended by a picturesque crowd of Mexicans, Navajos and Pueblos, besides a sprinkling of Americans. Among the visitors are thrifty Isleteños, their farm wagons loaded with melons, grapes and peaches for sale and barter. As on all such occasions in the Rio Grande pueblos, there is first a great clanging of the church bells to get the people to mass; after which, the saint’s statue beneath a canopy is brought out from the church, and all the people march in procession behind it, the cross, and the padre, while to the accompaniment of a solemn chant the firing of guns and a wild clamor of discordant church bells, the image is carried to a booth of green boughs in the plaza, there to rest and receive the homage of the people. Throughout the day baskets heaped with fruit, loaves of bread, vegetables and candles are laid at the saint’s feet, and at intervals the edibles are handed out to the crowd, or tossed in the air to be scrambled for amid much hilarity. In the afternoon there is an Indian dance, participated in by men and women in colorful costumes, the women’s heads adorned with _tablitas_ (curious, painted boards set upright and cut into shapes symbolic of clouds and what not). A choir of men with a drum made of a section of cottonwood log, supplies the music, chanting in unison the ancient songs of thanksgiving efficacious long before St. Stephen was ever heard of in Acoma, and not to be lightly abandoned. At sundown the saint is returned to his place in the church, and the evening is given over to such jollity as personal fancy dictates, usually including a _baile_, or dance, by the Mexicans and such white folk as stay, and it must be confessed, too often a surreptitious bout with John Barleycorn smuggled in by bootleggers.

There are no accommodations for visitors at Acoma, but if you have a taste for mild adventure you will enjoy—in retrospect anyhow—lodging a night or two with some family in the village, if you have brought your own provisions. This gives you a leisurely opportunity to watch the people at their daily tasks, and to enjoy the exquisite outlook at evening and early morning from the Rock. A night on an Acoma housetop beneath the brilliant stars is like being transported to Syria. Take it as a rule that if you desire to learn anything worth while of Indian life, you must abandon hurry; and the more you pump an Indian, the less he will tell you. The best things in the Southwest come to the waiting traveler, not to the hustler. As to the language, in every pueblo there is someone who talks English enough to act as interpreter, but if you know a little Spanish, you may do without any intermediary in the Rio Grande villages.

The natural pendant to a visit to Acoma is one to Laguna pueblo, 2 miles from the station of the same name.[36] Like Acoma, it is built upon a rock, but Laguna’s is merely a low outcropping little above the level of the ground. The pueblo is full of picturesque bits, and the fall and rise of the streets continually give you skyey silhouettes, the delight of artists who like liberal foregrounds. The mature coloring of the houses in time-mellowed, pearly tones, coupled with the fact that the old trail leading from the outskirts of the pueblo to the spring is worn deep in the rock floor by the wear of generations of moccasined feet, gives one the impression that Laguna is of great antiquity. Nevertheless, it is not, having been founded about 1697. In 1699 it received its name San José de la Laguna—Saint Joseph of the Lake—the appropriateness of which is not now apparent as there is no lake there. In those days, however, there was a lagoon nearby, due largely to the damming of the little River San José by beavers. English is very generally spoken in this pueblo.

Some 60 years ago Laguna was the defendant in a curious lawsuit brought against it by Acoma. Fray Juan Ramirez—he of the _Camino del Padre_—had put Acoma under the patronage of Saint Joseph, spouse of Our Lady and patron of the Church Universal, and in the Acoma church the saint’s picture hung for many years, a source of local blessing as the Acomas firmly believed. Now while Acoma prospered Laguna had many misfortunes—crop failures, sickness and so on; and with a view to bettering matters Laguna asked Acoma for the loan of Saint Joseph. This request was granted with the understanding that the loan should be for one month only. But alas, recreant Laguna, once in possession, refused to give back the picture, which was proving as “good medicine” there as had been the case at Acoma. At last the padre was called on to settle the dispute and he suggested that lots be drawn for it. This was done and the picture fell to Acoma. The Lagunas proved poor losers, however, and made off with the painting by force—which enraged the Acomas to the fighting point, and war was only averted by the padre’s persuading them to do what a Pueblo Indian is very loth to do, submit the case to the white man’s courts. Lawyers were engaged by both pueblos, and after a hot wrangle involving an appeal to the Supreme Court of New Mexico, the picture was awarded to Acoma. Evidently the saint himself approved the judgment, for tradition has it that when the Acoma delegation appointed to fetch the picture back were half way to Laguna, their astonished eyes were greeted by the sight of it reposing under a mesquite bush. Evidently, upon receipt of the news, it had set out of its own accord for home!

In proof of which the traveler today may see the painting in the old church at Acoma.[37]

Laguna’s principal public fiesta is held annually on September 18, and adds to the usual ceremonies of the saint’s day at a pueblo the features of a country fair, for the Lagunas are notable agriculturists. The Mission church interior at Laguna, by the way, possesses features of interest in the way of Indian decoration and ancient Spanish paintings, particularly those of the altar done on stretched hide. Visitors may be accommodated in Indian houses, if they court that experience, or at the residence of a Protestant missionary near by. The National Old Trails transcontinental highway passes the pueblo.