With straight black Indian hair piled high under a lace mantilla, with necklaces of gold and silver and coral and turquoise as big as hens’ eggs, with her modern American dress barely showing under her Indian blanket of holiest red, her head pillowed against the mountains of the North, and her little pueblo feet in the high-heeled Spanish slippers stretched out upon the plains of the South, Santa Fé sits dreaming in the golden sunlight.
Sometimes she dreams idly of her girlhood when she ran about the mountains barefooted, her hair done in two squash-blossom whorls on either side of her dusky head, so long ago that no white man had ever set foot on the western continent. Or perhaps, half shutting her unfathomable eyes, she remembers the heroes who fought and died for her, or the pomp of her marriage with her Spanish first lord, Don Juan d’Onate—noble in estates rather than character, though he brought her a wedding-gift of white wooly animals, afterward called sheep, and furthermore, dressed her in fine clothes, put her in a palace, and made a lady of her. Her little bare feet were shod in scarlet slippers, and she had many skirts of silk and velvet, though never a bodice to one of them, but her breast was strung with necklaces and her arms with bracelets, and she had shawls of silk and mantillas of lace to wrap most of her face and all of her bare brown shoulders in. The palace had walls six feet thick; some say the thick walls were to hide the true palace already built by her own Indian forefathers. All the same, nobles in broadcloth embroidered in silver and gold crowded her audience room when the Island of Manhattan was a wilderness, and the wood of which the Mayflower was to be built was still growing in the forest of England.
But then the dream becomes a sad one of injustice and cruelty; of long, long miserable years under the oppression of a dissipated gambling tyrant who put her family to the sword or made them slaves. Then came revolt and savage warfare; massacres that made her palace steps run red, vivid days of flame, black ones of darkness until——And this is her dream of dreams! She forgets it all happened in the long ago. The quick blood leaps again in her veins, her heart beats fast, her pulses quiver at the magic name of her hero, her conqueror, her lover, Don Diego de Vargas! Again she sees him, surrounded by his panoplied soldiers, lances flashing, banners waving, marching victorious across the plaza, and planting his cross at her palace door in the name of the Virgin, demanding her glad surrender!
“Ah, to love was to live!” says Santa Fé. “Yet in all the world there was only one De Vargas—and he has passed!” And she wraps herself in her Indian blanket and falls again to dreaming.
Her alliance with the American Republic is what one might call a marriage of arrangement. Foreign in race, in sentiment, in understanding, she has never adopted the customs or manners of her new lord, but lives tranquilly, uneventfully, dreaming always of the long ago.
And even though Don Diego de Vargas has lain for two centuries in the grave of his forefathers, though Indians no longer go on the warpath, though the eight-horse wagon mile-long caravans of the traders and travelers from the far East beyond the Mississippi no longer come clattering down over the mountains, to the excited and welcoming shouts of the populace of, “Los Americanos! La Caravana!” crowding into the Plaza to receive them, if the streets of Santa Fé no longer riot in tumult and bloodshed, they at least still riot in color and picturesqueness, kaleidoscopic enough to vie with anything in Constantinople or Cairo. You might think yourself in the Orient or in a city of old Spain transported upon a magic carpet, but nothing less like the United States can be imagined. Along the narrow crooked streets, dwellings hundreds of years old stand shoulder to shoulder with modern houses that have wedged themselves between. Down a zigzag lane you may see an Indian woman hooded in a white cotton shawl, and balancing a jar of water on her head as in the Biblical pictures of Rebecca.
Besides big modern automobiles are Indians leading little burros so loaded down with firewood that their meek little faces are all there is to be seen protruding in front, little switching tails or kicking heels in the back, and the whole bundle supported by spindly tiny-footed legs. On a corner is an Indian wrapped in his bright blanket. Two Mexicans in high-crowned wide-brimmed sombreros lean against a door frame and smoke cigarettes. Cowboys in flannel shirts have vivid bandannas around their throats, and there is more color yet in women’s dresses, in flowers, in fruits, in awnings—color, color rioting everywhere. Over everything the sun bakes just as it does in Spain or Northern Africa, and the people all look as silent and dreamy as the town.
Only a few hundred miles away are typical striving American cities shouting to anyone who will hear, and assailing the ears of those who won’t, “Watch me grow—just watch me!” The big ones boom it, the little ones pipe it, but each and every one shouts to the earth at large, “Yesterday I was a community of nesters’ shanties; today I’m an up-to-date thriving town. Tomorrow—wait, and you shall see!”
Yet their little Indian and Spanish sister in the center of a vast domain of buried cities, of unmined treasures, dozes in the sun and cares not a bit how much the world outside may strive, or teem or grow. Can anyone fancy her waking from her reverie, dropping her indolent soft Spanish accent and shouting in strident tones, that she, too, will be a bustling growing town? Sooner fancy the Sphinx on the African desert urging, “Votes for women!”