The land of the Pueblos

I am 6,000 feet nearer the sky than you are. Come to the sweet and lonely valley in the West where, free from care and toil, the weary soul may rest; where there are neither rai...

I used to think Fernandina was the sleepiest place in the world, but that was before I had seen Santa Fé. The drowsy old town, lying in a sandy valley inclosed on three sides by...

The number of Pueblo or Town Indians of New Mexico and Arizona has been variously estimated at from sixteen to twenty-five thousand. The dumb secrecy of the red race makes it di...

Ten generations of men have come and gone since Don Antonio de Espego distilled a subtle Spanish essence in _El Palacio_; and you may break, you may shatter those walls, if you...

Across the way are a dozen Mexicans, wrapped in greasy old blankets, sitting like four-and-twenty blackbirds all in a row. I know their faces, and have not missed one in a month...

Reader, are you the sort of person who rushes through life the first passenger on the earliest train; who hires the fastest coach at Niagara, to exhaust the Falls, the Whirlpool...

Traveling westward, there came to our view the first Placer Mountain; behind it the melon-shaped Sandia, 13,000 feet in air; and far southward the detached range of the Manzana...

North of the Placer Ridges and divided from them by the intervening valley of the Galisteo, are bold bluffs of trap, the cut edges of a plateau forming a _mesa_, from which rise...

At evening the gentle shepherd of New Mexico leads his flock from high pastures, where the precipitation of moisture is greatest and, therefore, grass is freshest, to the fold,...

North of El Palacio, is a waste spot of earth, covering perhaps half an acre. It contains neither grass, weeds, nor moss, not even a straggling sage-bush or forlorn cactus; noth...

One day, while mousing or, as President Lincoln used to say, browsing among the manuscripts, and musing about the dead and gone heroes, and how times have altered since they rod...

From the journal of Capitan-General Don Domingo Jeronso Petriz de Cruzate (what a Spanish ring there is in that name!), who was governor and military commandant of Nueva Mejico...

From Zuni dispatches were sent back to Count Galvas by a line of swift runners reaching to Mexico. Perhaps a letter to Seville from the faithful knight, who now had time for swe...

A few miles from Zuni, as we move eastward, there gradually comes to view a bold, high, sandstone rock, a quadrangular wall, white, veined with yellow, named Inscription Rock. I...

Near the southern boundary of New Mexico the Spanish explorers were opposed by a barrier of all on earth most to be dreaded--a shadeless, waterless plateau, nearly one hundred m...

The chase is the natural outlet for much savagery; but the wild tribes of North America are more hardly driven now than ever before, owing to the rapid disappearance of game, es...

Oblivion scattereth her poppies even in guarded chambers where the Muse of History holds sleepless watch, and the broken, disconnected annals of New Mexico in the seventeenth ce...

There is a legend across the waters that one morning, not a great while ago, the glorious angel who keeps the keys of the viewless gate gave Adam permission to come back and loo...

The man on the frontier who has no speculation in his eyes is dead as Banquo. The contagion of soul, says the ancient philosopher, is quicker than that of the body, and I have y...

A certain room in El Palacio is devoted to assaying the precious ores. Its blackened, time-stained rafters look as though they might fall any moment; but believers in luck rest...

Mining atmospheres are rife with stories, marvelous, startling, that would be incredible, did we not know it is always the incredible which happens. Of the many tales floating a...

Six months later, in the shade of a light umbrella, I sauntered along the beach at Cape May. Down by the summer sea, where lovers walk with lingering step, rapt, heedless as the...

The reader who graciously follows me to the end of this brief history will readily comprehend why it must be somewhat obscure. “I could a tale unfold” better worth the hearing,...

No American antiquities except, perhaps, the Old Mill at Newport, have figured so largely in imagination and in print as the pre-historic ruins along the Gila River, in Pinal Co...

The Casas Grandes on the Laguna de Guzman in Northwestern Chihuahua are similar in every respect to the ruined fortresses of New Mexico and Arizona. The points of resemblance ar...

Our picnic was in the month of May and we started from Santa Fé in the early morning. On three sides the drowsy old town is guarded by mountains royal with purple and glittering...

The minds of men untrained are strangely alike. There is such sameness of arts, customs, inventions, such likeness in their religious beliefs under like stages of development, w...