Part 3
You must picture the Rito de los Frijoles as an immensely long and narrow cañon—so narrow that Rube Marquard could probably pitch a stone across—with walls as steep and smooth and twice as high as those of the Flatiron Building. Then you must picture the lower face of this rocky wall as being literally honeycombed by thousands—and when I say thousands I do not mean hundreds—of windows and doors and port-holes and apertures and other openings to caves hollowed from the soft rock of the cliffs. It is a city of the dead, silent as a mausoleum, mysterious as the lines of the hand, older than recorded history. This once populous city consisted of a single street, _twelve miles long_, its cave-dwellings, which were reached by ladders or by steps cut in the soft tufa, rising above each other, tier on tier, like some Gargantuan apartment building. Such portions of the face of the cliff as are not perforated with doors and windows are embellished with pictographs, many of them in an extraordinary state of preservation, which, if the sight-seeing public only knew it, are as interesting and far more perplexing than the wall-paintings in the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes. On the floor of the valley the archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community house which, when viewed from above, bears a striking resemblance to the ancient Greek theatre at Taormina, while on the Puyé to the north a communal building of twelve hundred rooms—larger than the Waldorf-Astoria—has been excavated. Farther down the Rito is the stone circle or dancing floor to which the prehistoric young folk descended to make merry, while their parents kept an eye on them from their houses in the cliff. (I doubt not that, when the sun began to sink behind the Jemez, some skin-clad mother would lean from the window of her fifth-story flat and shrilly call to her daughter, engrossed in learning the steps of the prehistoric equivalent of the tango on the dancing floor below: “A-ya, come up this minute! You hear me? Your paw’s just come home with a dinosaur and he wants it cooked for supper.”) Three miles up the cañon, half a thousand feet up the face of the cliff, is the arched ceremonial cave where, secure from prying eyes, this strange people performed their still stranger rites. Thanks to the energy of the American Archæological Society, this cave has been restored to the same condition in which it was when prehistoric lodge members worked their mysterious degrees and made the quaking initiates ride the goat. Though it is the aim of the society to year by year restore portions of the Rito until the whole cañon has returned to its original condition, such difficulty has been experienced in obtaining the necessary funds that at the present rate of progress it will take a century to effect a complete restoration. Yet our millionaires pour out their wealth like water to promote the excavation and restoration of the ruins of alien peoples in other lands. Though carloads of pottery and utensils have been carted away to enrich museums and private collections, the surface of the Pajarito has been scarcely scratched, _more than twenty thousand_ communal caves and dwellings remaining to tempt the seekers of lost cities. Where did the inhabitants of this strange city go—and why? What swept their civilisation away? When did the age-old silence fall? These are questions which even the archæologists do not attempt to answer. All that they can assert with any degree of certainty is that the caves which underlie the communal dwellings in the Pajarito yield ample evidence of having been occupied by human beings in the days of the lava flow, when the mastodon and the dinosaur roamed the land and the world was very, very young.
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Of the three great elemental industries of New Mexico—cattle raising, sheep raising, and mining—cattle raising was the first and, more than any other, gave colour to the country. The early Spanish and Mexican settlers were cow-men, and the old Sonora stock, “all horns and backbone,” may still be seen on some of the interior ranges, though they are now almost a thing of the past. Then came the great wagon-trains of Texans, California bound, many of whom, attracted by the wealth of pasturage, stopped off and turned their long-horned cattle out on the grass-grown desert. As Texas and the Middle West became fenced and civilised, the old-time cattlemen drove their herds farther and farther toward the setting sun. In those days there were no sheep to compete for the pasture; mountains and desert were clothed with grass so rich and long that they looked as though they were upholstered in green velvet; there was not a strand of barbed wire between the Pecos and the Colorado. New Mexico was indeed the cow-man’s paradise. Though the range has in many places been ruined by droughts and overstocking; though a woolly wave has encroached upon the lands which the cow-man had regarded as inalienably his own, there are, nevertheless, close to a million head of cattle within the borders of the State, by far the greater part of which are Herefords and Durhams, for the imported stock has increased the cow-man’s profits out of all proportion to the initial expense.
Feeding with equal right and freedom upon the same public domain are upward of five million head of sheep, for New Mexico is the home of the wool industry in America. The early Spanish settlers kept large flocks of the straight-necked, coarse-wooled Mexican sheep in the country around Santa Fé, and from them the Navajos and Moquis, those industrious weavers of blankets and workers in silver, soon stole or bartered for enough to start a sheep business of their own, it being said that a third of all the sheep in the State are now owned by Indians. Unlike cattle, sheep, in cool weather, can exist without water for a month at a time; so, when the desert turns from yellow to green in the spring, they drift out over it in great flocks which look for all the world like fleecy clouds. Each flock, which usually consists of several thousand sheep, is attended by a herder and his “rustler,” who cooks, packs in supplies, and brings water in casks from the nearest stream for the use of the herder and his dogs, the juicy browse providing all the moisture that the sheep require.
Owing to its warm, dry weather, New Mexico is one of the earliest shearing stations in the world, the work beginning the latter part of January and lasting until the first of May. In this time enough wool is clipped to supply a considerable portion of the people of the United States with suits and blankets. Until quite recently the shearing of the wool was a long and tedious task, even the more expert hand shearers seldom being able to average more than sixty or seventy fleeces a day. When machine shearing was introduced into New Mexico a few years age, however, this daily average was promptly doubled. Sheep-shearers are probably the best-paid and hardest-working class of men in the world, receiving from seven to eight and a half cents a head and averaging one hundred and twenty-five sheep a day. The best of them, however, shear from two to three hundred sheep in a single day, the record, I believe, being three hundred and twenty-five. As the shearing season only lasts through six months of the year, during which time they must travel from Texas to Montana, the unionised shearers demand and receive high wages, some of them making as much as twenty dollars a day. Yet, in spite of this and of the grazing fee of six cents a head for all sheep that feed on forest reserves, it is safe to say that the wool-growers are the most prosperous men in New Mexico.
* * * * *
The social fabric of New Mexico is a curious blending of Mexicans, Indians, and Americans. Of these elements the Mexicans are by far the most numerous, their customs, costumes, and language lending a decidedly Spanish flavour to the country. Living for the most part in scattered settlements along the mountain streams or in their own quarters in the towns, they enjoy a lazy, irresponsible, and not uncomfortable existence in return for their humble labour, not differing materially, either in their mode of life, manners, or morals, from their kinsmen below the Rio Grande. Shiftless, indolent, indifferently honest, the peons of New Mexico, like the South African Kaffirs and the Egyptian fellaheen, are nevertheless invaluable to the welfare of the State, for they perform practically all the labour on the ranches, mines, and railways. Politically they are an element to be reckoned with, about seventy-five per cent of the population of Santa Fé being Mexicans, while sixty per cent of the State Legislature is from the same race. As a result of this Latin preponderance in the population, practically all Americans in New Mexico are compelled to have at least a working knowledge of Spanish, which is really the _lingua franca_ of the country, it being by no means unusual to find one who speaks it better than the Mexicans themselves. Owing to the great influx of settlers during the last few years, the Mexican proportion of the population has been greatly reduced, as is confirmed by the increasing use of the English language and of English newspapers.
One of the strangest religious sects in the world—the Penitentes—are recruited from the Mexican element of the population. Although this dread form of religious fanaticism has its centre in the region about San Mateo, it permeates peon life in every quarter of the State. For the Penitente is not an Indian; he is a Mexican. The Indians of the Pueblos repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic, for the Church has fought his terrible rites tooth and nail, though thus far it has fought them in vain. He is really a grim survivor of those secret orders whose fanaticism and religious excesses became a byword even in the calloused Europe of the Middle Ages. The sect is divided into two branches: the Brothers of Light—_La Luz_—and the Brothers of Darkness—_Las Tinieblas_. Though they hold secret meetings with more or less regularity throughout the year in their lodges or _morados_, they are really active only during the forty days of Lent. During that period both men and women flog their naked backs with scourges of aloe fibre, wind their limbs with wire or rope so tightly as to stop the circulation, lie for hours at a time on beds of cactus, make pilgrimages to mountain shrines with their unstockinged feet in shoes filled with jagged flints, stagger torturing miles across the sun-baked desert under the weight of enormous crosses, while on Good Friday this carnival of torture culminates in one of their number, chosen by lot, actually being crucified. It has been a number of years, however, since a Penitente has died on the cross, for, since the law came to New Mexico, they have found it wiser to fasten their willing victim to the cross with rope instead of nails. Though sporadic efforts have been made to break up the sect, they have thus far been unsuccessful, as it is no secret that many men high in the political life of New Mexico bear on their backs the tattooed cross which is the symbol of the order.
Though the growth of the white population has heretofore been slow, it has begun to increase by leaps and bounds with the development of irrigation. Though New Mexico now contains representatives from every State in the Union and from pretty much every country in the world, the average run of society exhibits a tendency toward high-crowned hats that shows the dominating influence of Texas. They are, I think, the most hospitable folk that I have ever met; they are tolerant of other people’s opinions; have a tendency to ride rather than walk; are ready to fight at the drop of the hat; hate to count their money; lie only for the sake of entertainment; like a big proposition; and know how to handle it—there you have them, the gentlemen of New Mexico. But don’t go out to New Mexico, my Eastern friends, with the idea that you can butt into society with the aid of a good cigar—because you can’t. They are a free-born, free-living, free-speaking folk, are the dwellers out in the back country where the desert meets the mountains and the mountains meet the sky, and they don’t give a whoop-and-hurrah whether you come or stay away.
* * * * *
Such, in brief, bold outline, is the New Mexico of to-day. I have tried to paint you a picture, as well as I know how, of the progress, potentialities, and prospects of this, the youngest but one of the sisterhood of States. Though New Mexico, as a Territory, was willing enough to be a synonym for Indian villages and snake-dances and cavorting cowboys, the State of New Mexico stands for something very different indeed. Though it welcomes the tourists who come-look-see-spend-go, it prefers the settlers who are prepared to stay and make it their home. Unlike its sister State of Arizona, New Mexico does not suffer from that greatest of privations—lack of water—for the mountain-flood waters that now go to waste would store great reservoirs, there is the flow of numerous streams and river systems, and below the surface are artesian belts of water waiting only to be tapped by the farmer’s well. That the soil, once watered, is very fertile is best proved by the orchards, gardens, and meadows which cover the valleys of the Mimbres and the Pecos. Ten years ago the cattlemen of New Mexico used to say that it took “sixty acres to raise a steer”; to-day, thanks to irrigation, a single acre of alfalfa does the business. In gold, silver, coal, and copper the State is very rich—the largest copper mine in the world is at Silver City—while its turquoise deposits surpass those of Persia. And the people are as big-hearted and broad-minded and open-handed as you will find anywhere on earth. Taking it by and large, therefore, a man with some experience, a little capital, plenty of energy and ambition, and an intimate acquaintance with hard work should go a long way in New Mexico. He would find down there a big, new, unfenced, up-and-doing country and a set of sun-bronzed, iron-hard, self-reliant men of whom any country might be proud. These men are the modern _conquistadores_, for they have conquered sun and sand. To-day they are only commonplace farmers, but, when history has granted them the justice of perspective, they will be called the Pioneers.
II
THE SKYLANDERS
“Here still a lofty rock remains, On which the curious eye may trace (Now wasted half by wearing rains) The fancies of a ruder race.
...
And long shall timorous Fancy see The painted chief, and pointed spear, And Reason’s self shall bow the knee To shadows and delusions here.”
II
THE SKYLANDERS
Six minutes after midnight the mail-train came thundering out of nowhere. With hissing steam and brakes asqueal it paused just long enough for me to drop off and then roared on its transcontinental way again to the accompaniment of a droning chant which quickly dropped into diminuendo, its scarlet tail lamps disappearing at forty miles an hour, leaving me abandoned in the utter darkness of the desert. The Casa Alvarado at Albuquerque, with its red-shaded candles and snowy napery, where I had dined only four hours before, seemed very far away. Some one flashed a lantern in my face and a voice behind it inquired:
“Are you the gent that’s goin’ to Acoma?”
“I am,” said I, “if I can get there.”
“Well, I reckon you’ll get there all right, seein’ as how the trader at Laguna’s sent a rig over for you. Bob made a little money on a bunch o’ cattle a while back and he’s been pretty damned independent ever since ’bout takin’ folks over to Acoma. Says it’s too hard on his horses. But when Bob says he’ll do a thing he does it. Hi, Charlie!” he shouted, “you over there?”
A guttural affirmative came out of the blackness. As the loquacious station agent made no offer to light my footsteps, I cautiously picked my way across the rails, slid down a steep embankment into a ditch, scrambled out of it, and descried before me the vague outlines of a ramshackle vehicle drawn by a pair of wiry, unkempt ponies.
“How?” grunted the driver, who, as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw was an Indian, his hair, plaited in two long braids with strands of vivid flannel interwoven, hanging in front of his shoulders, schoolgirl fashion. I clambered in, the Indian spoke to his ponies, and, breaking into a lope, they swung off across the desert, the wretched vehicle lurching and pitching behind them.
It is an unforgettable experience, a ride across the New Mexican desert in the night-time. The sky is like purple velvet and the stars seem very near. The silence is not the peaceful stillness that comes with nightfall in settled regions, but the mysterious, uncanny hush that hangs over other ancient and deserted lands—Upper Egypt, for example, and Turkestan. Our way was lined with dim, fantastic shapes whose phantom arms seemed to warn or beckon or implore, but which, in the prosaic light of morning, resolved themselves into clumps of piñon, and mesquite, and prickly-pear. The ponies shied suddenly at a stirring in the underbrush—probably a rattlesnake disturbed—and in the distance a coyote gave dismal tongue. Slipping and sliding down a declivity so abrupt that the axles were level with the ponies’ backs, we rattled across the stone-strewn bed of an _arroyo seco_, as they term a dried-up watercourse in that half-Spanish region, and clattered into a settlement whose squat, flat-roofed hovels of adobe, unlighted and silent as the houses of Pompeii, showed dimly on either hand.
“Laguna?” I inquired.
“Uh-huh,” responded my taciturn companion, pulling up his ponies sharply before a dwelling considerably more pretentious than the rest. “Trader’s,” he added laconically.
As, stiff, chilled, and weary, I scrambled down, the door swung open to reveal a lean figure in shirt and trousers, silhouetted by the light from a guttering candle.
“I’m the trader,” said he. “I reckon you’re the party we’ve been expectin’. We ain’t got much accommodation to offer you, but, such as it is, you’re welcome to it. I’m afeard my youngsters’ll keep you awake, though. I’ve got six on ’em an’ they’ve all got the whoopin’-cough, so me an’ my old woman hain’t had a chanct to shet our eyes for the last week.”
It wasn’t the cough-harassed children who kept me wide-eyed and tossing through the night, however. It was Sheridan, I think, who remarked that had the fleas of a certain bed upon which he once slept been unanimous, they could easily have pushed him out. Had the tiny hordes which were in possession of my couch had an insect Kitchener to organise and lead them, I should certainly have had to spend the night upon the floor. I learned afterward that the Indians of the neighbouring pueblos have a name for Laguna which, in the white man’s tongue, means “Scratch-town.”
From Laguna to Acoma is a four hours’ drive across the desert. It is very rough and more than once I feared that I should require the services of an osteopath to rejoint my vertebræ. And it is inconceivably dusty, the ponies kicking up clouds of fine, shifting sand which fills your eyes and nose and ears and sifts through your garments until you feel as though you were covered with sandpaper instead of skin. The sun beats down until the arid expanse of the desert is as hot as the whitewashed base of a railway-station stove at white heat. Everything considered, it is not the sort of a drive that one would choose for pleasure, but it is a very wonderful drive nevertheless, for the New Mexican desert is a kaleidoscope of colour. It is a land of black rocks and orange sand, flecked with discouraged, hopeless-looking clumps of sage-green vegetation; of violet, and amethyst, and purple mountain ranges; and overhead a sky of the brightest blue you will find anywhere outside a wash-tub. The cloud effects are the most beautiful I have ever seen, great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed sheep, across the turquoise sky. Everywhere the colours are splashed on with a barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch. It is a regular back-drop of a country; its scenery looks as though it should have been painted on a curtain. When a party of Indians, with scarlet handkerchiefs twisted about their heads pirate fashion, lope by astride of spotted ponies, the illusion is complete. “You’re not really in New Mexico, you know,” you say to yourself. “This is much too theatrical to be real. You’re sitting in an orchestra chair watching a play, that’s what you’re doing.”
Swinging sharply around the shoulder of a sand-dune, a mesa—a table-land of rock—reared itself out of the plain as unexpectedly as a slap in the face. The driver pointed unconcernedly with his whip. “_La Mesa Encantada_,” he grunted. The Enchanted Mesa! Was there ever a name which so reeked with mystery and romance? Picture, if you can, a bandbox-shaped rock, almost flat on top and covering as much ground as a good-sized city square, higher than the Times Building in New York and with sides almost as perpendicular, set down in the middle of the flattest, yellowest desert the imagination can conceive. Seen from the distance, it suggests the stump of an inconceivably gigantic tree—a tree a thousand feet in diameter and sawed squarely off four hundred and thirty feet above the ground. On one side it is as sheer and smooth as that face of Gibraltar which looks Spainward, and when the evening sun strikes it slantingly it turns the monstrous mass of sandstone into a pile of rosy coral. It is one of the most impressive things that I have ever seen. Solitary, silent, mysterious, redolent of legend and superstition, older than Time itself, it suggests, without in any way resembling, those Colossi of Memnon which stare out across the desert from ruined Thebes.