BOOK III
NEW MEXICO
CHAPTER VII AT SANTA FE
Judging the tropics in midsummer to be too tiring, I decided to postpone our journey to Panama and Mexico until autumn and winter. Balboa climbed that peak in Darien in September. That should be my month for going there. So we went, for the rest of the summer, to La Ciudad Real de Santa Fe, away in the Southern Rockies upon the borderland of Mexico. That was no small journey from Habana—two days in a fruit boat to New Orleans, then in a Gulf train to Houston and San Antonio, half across the Texan desert to a point nearer the Pacific than the Atlantic—burning El Paso where the street asphalt hisses when the water cart comes round. Then up country to Albuquerque, of which name, at least, there used to be Spanish dukes, the Dukes of Albuquerque. Then sixty miles through scrub and sand to Santa Fe which is some seven thousand feet up—about as high as Mexico City, though nothing like so verdant a place.
Here we hired a mud house, to be polite, "adobe built" from the Mexicans; three cool spacious rooms, a porch, a "corral." We bought two horses, Billy and Buckskin, to whom I must say we became much attached, so that it was a pity when the time came, after some months, to part with them. I bought my Billy from a cowboy for thirty dollars. "Shorty," who sold him to me, did not seem to think the transaction complete till sealed with a drink. He had in a saddle pocket of the horse he was riding a stout bottle of whisky, and, giving me a ferocious wink he turned his horse into a lane and poured into a little tin can a ration of what Uncle Sam forbids.
"I think he'll be a useful pony when he has had corn for a month," said I.
"He's all right," said Shorty, wiping his lips. "You carnt kill 'im."
That turned out to be true, as far as I could judge. Billy proved to be somewhat of an immortal. The adventures we had with these horses would make a book in themselves.
One thing was rather disappointing; New Mexico is not such a horse country as it was. Cross the border into Mexico proper, and every man except the Tarahumare Indians and the lowest of the peons is mounted. But on the American side Ford is surely conquering. It is more respectable to have a car than a horse. The cowboys and the Mexicans ride to their work, but pleasure is identified not with the horse, but with a car. The cowgirl is almost extinct, and the only women riders you see are visitors. In the Plaza at Santa Fe there is no longer any place to tie up a horse. Motors hold all the space. You have to seek out waste places in or about town, or else take the risk of tying to a telegraph pole in the midst of the traffic. Billy nearly pulled down several telegraph poles, and actually on one occasion broke his stout leather reins.
Outside the city horsemen are common enough, cowboys and Mexican farmers, and occasional mounted parties of polite Americans with hired horses and guides.
Santa Fe is, or was, the home of an artistic and literary colony. It is a health resort for people with lung disease, and it possesses an excellently well equipped sanatorium. A large number of residents are under doctor's orders. The driest air in America and a never failing morning sun makes Santa Fe ideal for consumptives. There have been many complete cures effected. The development of the place as a literary colony started no doubt with the coming there for her health of Alice Corbin from Chicago, one of the protagonists of the New Poetry movement, a sponsor of Lindsay and Sandburg and many others who rose to fame under the auspices of the Poetry Magazine. When she was "ordered South" poetry moved with her. It was no doubt owing to Vachel Lindsay's generous enthusiasm that we were tempted to go to Santa Fe. He saw in the little city in the mountains unbounded possibilities.
So in coming to Santa Fe we not only met the mountains but a number of writers and artists, amongst them my old acquaintance Witter Bynner who once diverted five chapters of Undiscovered Russia into verse which someone else, later, put to music. Bynner had quit the world in which he was somewhat of a king for a hermit's hut in the desert. Here we met Elizabeth Sergeant who wrote up life in the neighborhood in her amusing Letters from a Mud House; here as a visitor came William Allen White. Over the mountains at Taos lived D. H. Lawrence. A visitor also was Mrs. C. N. Williamson, gay and young despite her weeds and the score of novels and stories she and her late husband had written. The artists were as numerous, if more difficult to place, being rather jealous of one another. My favorite question was: "Who do you think is the greatest artist in Santa Fe?" But I never could get an answer beyond a faint blush and a slight personal embarrassment.
At seven thousand feet, however, literary and artistic people are apt to be very nervous, and those of poor health painfully so. There was more pleasure to be had riding in the hills than at the afternoon "teas" which were always being arranged. At these some beautifully gowned millionaire's wife "poured," the young men simpered in their well-ironed, ready-made clothes, the flappers, all curled and tinted, were like wax works, and middle-aged artists with long hair sat in corners musing on life like old frumps at a ball—very hard on them. To one of these gatherings a literary man and his wife came riding in one day. They walked in in sporting attire and the wife looked very striking in a gay white jumper and riding breeches.
I got into trouble at Santa Fe being supposed to have said it was "a shabby little town." Ladies whispered the blasphemy to one another at tea. I am to be remembered by that phrase. But in truth I think it a wonderful place and a wonderful district; something quite novel and fresh in American life. The cowboys, the Indians, and the Mexicans, make it very interesting. Its sun and air, its mountains, its horses, give it a marvelous possibility. The shabbiness lies in certain little things, such as the mean commercialism of the shops and the absence of a popular market for dairy products, fruit and vegetables. This is an Americanization of life. Every city of any size in Mexico has its popular market which furnishes fresh food at a cheap price. But La Ciudad Real de Santa Fe lives on canned milk, canned tomatoes, dried fruit, storage meat, coffee ground years ago in Chicago, eggs of uncertain origin and age. Fruit harvests fall to the ground and rot because they are plenty and the stores do not want the price reduced. There is something artificial and unpleasant in living in New Mexico on rations from Chicago. It militates against simple living, and it should be of the essence of a literary colony in the mountains to live simply. It raises a problem for Americans—how is one to escape from the American standardization of life?
Albuquerque, sixty miles away and many times larger, is even more artificial and standardized. Possibly El Paso on the frontier more so still. El Paso is like Kansas City in small, and that is the more remarkable as El Paso is as much in the desert as Luxor in Egypt or Merv in Turkestan; perhaps more so than Merv, for the Rio Grande is not to be compared to the Oxus River.
It prompts the thought that if America ever extended her territory to Chihuahua, the next large city in Mexico going southward, then Chihuahua also would become in a short time a replica of a hundred cities in the North. There might then be said of Chihuahua what Carl Sandburg said of Kalamazoo—
However, at Santa Fe my wife and I lived a free and happy life in our house of mud, and enjoyed the wild West, the "last West" as it has been happily called, to the full. It is all pine scrub and sand for another thousand feet up, loose sand and bowlders which have, however, no terrors for the horses. Billy and Buck are surefooted as goats and can be ridden up steep banks which English horses would merely regard as walls. But neither horse will jump anything. After a thousand feet you enter a region of tall pines and firs, and five hundred feet later you reach aspens, grass, wild flowers, wild fruits. Most of the little rain that falls seems to benefit the upper mountain region. Santa Fe itself is in constant danger of drought. Water is very freely supplied by the Water Company and the dwellers in the many villas let the hose play on their lawns all day and all night, till suddenly there is a warning note, the hose ceases, and the lawns wilt. There is perhaps too much waste of the water of the little Santa Fe river on which Santa Fe's reputation as an oasis depends. In a state of nature very few wild flowers bloom down below. But in June and early July, like wild roses, the cactus blossoms everywhere and its red flowers delight the eye. The eyes crave and thirst for flowers and greenery.
A feature of the country is the arroyo or dried-out river channel, dead, stony, and sandy, which wanders along in an irregular course as if it had once held a fair stream. Many of these have never known living water. The river they represent is flowing underneath the sand, and the channel is not truly a riverbed but a subsidence. In these cases no grass will grow, there is not the slightest pasture, the only green thing that flourishes is a deep-rooted yellow flowering weed of the desert, a sort of sage brush, called locally chimesa. Riding downward to the Rio Grande valley, the view opens grandly upon wide sweeping desert country bounded by strange, wind-carved pyramids of rock and little mountains wrought into fantastic shape. Vachel Lindsay, who like many others deplores the name of the State—New Mexico—wanted to call it "New Arabia" or "New Egypt" because of its natural pyramids, its prehistoric ruins, its hieroglyphics and the sacred dances of the Indians. But he felt also that it was first of all "Cowboy country"—it was, or had become, America, and it is difficult to confound the new with the old.
We met in Santa Fe Jack Thorp, sometimes called the Cowboy Poet, because of his collection of cowboys' songs, and for several songs he wrote himself—but a substantial man, bred with, and always living with, horses and full of lore of the Border. It is no doubt due in part to him that we went to the Cowboys' Reunion at Las Vegas which I here describe.
CHAPTER VIII COWBOYS
When Thorp took horses up to pasture we sometimes went also. That meant a ten-mile ride up into the greener heights of the mountains, the leaving of the horses in a roughly wired inclosure, a picnic lunch, and then a ten-mile ride back in the evening. On these occasions Jack would be in old weather-beaten chaparreras (leg aprons of leather) and there would be a ready coil of rope on the horn of his saddle. Five or six loose horses would be driven ahead of us, and as like as not a mare and foal. It was very pleasant, especially in the early morning. Mrs. Thorp accompanied us, a clever, smiling, Irish woman, nicknamed generally "Blarney." She added greatly to the general good humor, and would say with an expression of much mirth, as we sallied all together into some rough and bowlder-strewn defile—"Here we go, the last of Teddy's bunch!"
Apparently Jack in his earlier days had known Roosevelt, played polo with him, or it may be, sold him polo ponies. The great Theodore, New Yorker as he was, made a great impression on the minds of the cowboys. And again I suppose his make-up of cowboy and rough rider fired the imagination of the East. You still have to be something of a cowboy to be a real leader in America. Curious that the Republican President should masquerade as one of the Wild West?
A great nation entirely composed of clerks is unthinkable. It must have peasants, or highlanders, or cowboys, behind it; something of the wild and primitive, something of romance. Therefore it is that America clings to her conception of a glorious Wild West behind her drab clerical East. The multitudes of New York men and women gloating over Emerson Hough's The Covered Wagon at the cinema is forever characteristic of the East. It must have its real or imaginary covered wagons in the background as a part of its romance.
Nevertheless the number of cowboys and cattle ranchers has greatly decreased, driven back by farmers' wire. And the type is tamer than it was. There are still great herds. You may see the chuck-wagon going round, and meet many a wild-looking boy riding in full rig-out, but it is not denied that the old-time color has faded.
Perhaps the last ground of the real cowboy is the Mexican border, hence Las Vegas Reunion, which eclipses the show at 101 Ranch, Oklahoma, and is only to be compared with the round-up at Pendleton, Oregon, or Cheyenne in Wyoming. The spirit of the West still triumphs over the spirit of the East at Las Vegas, where in one week the "flivver" is routed by the horse, and no man who is worth his salt is seen wearing a crease in his trousers.
War whoops and colored silks and silver-studded saddles and goat-wool chaparreras and daring faces and happy horses make up Las Vegas during the days of the cowboys' gathering. Here comes Leonard Stroud on Diamond, and little Buster, aged ten, on Shetland Joe. Here comes the victor of the bronk riders, Buck Thompson, who will put the fear of God into Peggy Hopkins and Orphan Boy and Anarchist.
Here comes a cowboy with no legs, yet mounted on a mettlesome black steed and wearing a scarlet and gold shirt, full as a blouse. He is a veteran of cowboys. The parade of the cowboys forms up, led by a man in a dark chestnut shirt, with a belt full of cartridges and an ivory-mounted revolver sticking out above his hip; with him the chief judge of the riding and the races, carrying a purple and gold bannerette. Here comes the brothers Neafus on race horses. Here come a wonderful miscellany of riders, in turkey-red, in luminous purple, in unfaded pink and exuberant green; rough-necks with rough hats, hairy wrists, mighty shoulders and backs, rugged faces, and the sentimental, guileless eyes of good sportsmen and daring fellows.
There are cowgirls as well as cowboys—trim, modest, light—the wives and daughters of cowboys. Chief among them is Mayme Stroud, thin, almost hipless, with a waist like a wedding ring, high brown sombrero on her head, and hair hidden by voluminous red ribbons falling in big bows under the broad shadowy brim of her hat.
Idaho Bill brings up the tail of the procession in a ramshackle Ford car drawn by a horse. He is greatly encumbered by his camping outfit, and he has in the car with him a black bear which he caught in Mexico after it had killed his horse and badly bitten him. At least, so he says, and he will raise his trouser to show you the scars. He has buffalo horns tied to the radiator of the car; he wears his hair long, has a green coat and boots of alligator hide. Every year he goes into Mexico buying outlaw horses. Whenever he hears of a horse no Mexican can ride, he buys it to bring North for the cowboys. And he drove up this year a hundred or so of bucking horses. He is a sort of successor of Cody—a picturesque figure and a fitting living symbol of the flamboyant spirit of the West.
Some thousands of dollars have been subscribed as prizes for the cowboys in their noble sports of bronk riding, bull dogging, steer roping, relay racing, and the rest, and there are also scores of bets by cowboys on themselves. Curious, is it not, that there are few Mexican contestants and no Indians? The American cowboys can outride and outdare all Mexicans, all Indians, and are not afraid of any man or beast that breathes. As the legend of High Chin Bob narrates, if they met a lion in the hills, they'd rope him; they'd hold him fast and not let go of him till they'd dragged the spirit out of him.
"Ride 'em, cowboy!" "Hold 'em, cowboy!" cries one to another as the wild horses scream with rage and rear and kick and buck and bolt with the laughing boys on their backs.
Riding wild horses is the favorite sport of the cowboys, and the untamed horse is a fearsome and beautiful beast. And he is not ill treated. There is a great deal about the inclosure which reminds one of the bull ring, but not its cruelty. The men take a chance of death; the animals do not. In the bronk-riding competition the horse is beguiled into a heavily timbered narrow pen where a slip-saddle and halter are put on him without his knowing it. The rider gets down gently on to his back from the wooden wall. Then when the president gives the word "Turn him out!" a door swings free and out plunges the horse. The cowboy beats him to the one side and to the other with his felt hat, and spurs him forward, and the horse behaves like a mad dromedary, makes double humps of his back, leaps right in air, and turns about and about. When the cowboy has been on for one minute the man in the brown shirt fires his revolver in the air and five or six cowboys race to the rider to rescue him from the bolting, careening horse. This is often the most exciting part of the event. It may develop into a terrific race. Sometimes, before the rider can be lifted from the wild horse to another cowboy's horse, or safely dismounted, the bronco has crashed right through the wooden inclosure. That was what happened to Buck Thompson, on Orphan Boy, and the wild horse got rid of him on the fence as it pounded right through it.
The little town of Las Vegas, meaning The Meadows, was crowded with visitors, some of them of an outlandish type that seldom strays from home. One dame in a restaurant, dressed in the style of the early nineties, asked us what part we came from. When I said "England" she turned to her husband with—
"Lord's sake, what do you know about that?"
Then she turned to me and asked—
"Did you come all the way by car?"
The Secretary of the Reunion undertook to house most people who came, and he sat at a desk with a telephone and kept the town awake asking all and sundry for hospitality for visitors. This secretary, I discovered afterwards, was a poet.
My wife and I were happily accommodated in a house where beside ourselves were three very eager cowboys, and in the corral at the back were their horses. We naturally were deeply interested in their fortunes. The first day was not so good for them, but on the second morning with the roping and bull dogging they shone. I think all three won prizes.
I was very eager to see the bull dogging, which is a unique western sport. Jack Thorp and his wife and the artist Penhallow Henderson, who were with us at the round-up, were glowing in their pride in it, and told some amusing stories in connection with it. The cowboys, when they joined the Army, commonly said they were off to "bull dog the Kaiser." Bull dogging started in Texas, and a Negro named Pickett is sometimes reputed as the originator of the sport. Pickett one day entered the bull ring at Juarez on the other side of the Mexican line and interrupted a bull fight by bull dogging the bull.
Juarez is on the other side of the Rio Grande from El Paso. Americans go back and forth all the while, and on Sundays many are not averse to seeing a bull fight there. It is a rough-and-tumble city; the bull ring is just a stone amphitheater.
One Sunday some years ago Pickett bull dogged the bull. He was at the entrance to the ring with his horse, and he had had enough to drink. A number of white cowboys, Texans, were about him, encouraging him, and they wagered him to ride into the ring in the midst of the fight. Then the humorous and loquacious Pickett, who was a famous character, spurred his horse across the arena, got the bull a-running, and then, overtaking him at a gallop, leapt from his saddle on to the bull's horns. The impetus of the gallop he imparted to his wrists as he twisted the horns and laid the fierce animal with a thud flat on his flanks on the arena sand—to the uproarious cheers of the Americans present and the prolonged, angry hisses of the Mexicans.
Well, that is bull dogging, the Wild West's substitute sport for the Spanish corrida. I watched it and steer riding for hours in the cattle ring of the cowboys, and I suppose it would be difficult to find a sport with a greater thrill in it—to see a cowboy on a fine horse going full tilt after a frightened steer that has got the start of him—and how these clumsy animals can go it when once they think they are being chased!—neck to neck, horse and bullock, dark mane and long horn, dirt splashing upward as they go, cowboys looking on and laughing and shouting, "Let go that horse—on'm, cowboy!" and then the leap in air and the rider clutching the brown bovine neck or actually sitting with one thigh across a madly plunging horn, and the bullock going on with him, trailing him, wiping the ground with him for fifty yards or more, if the cowboy has not been able to impart the momentum of the galloping horse to the twist which he gives to the horns to bring the animal down.
Each rider is timed, and the one who performs the feat in the shortest time wins the prize. I saw it done in fifteen seconds—a turning over of the bull with the rapidity of a pistol shot; the leap from the horse and twist of horns and thud all consecutive. I saw it also done in two minutes and thirty seconds, where the bull dogger, holding on to the horns yet lying full length ahead of the bull, was rushed part way round the arena like a toboggan.
And besides this risky thrilling fun there was steer riding, which is also what might be called a part substitute for a bull fight. Riding at full pace on a rushing steer is a violent sport—clown's fun after the bull dogging. The bullocks are greatly enraged at being ridden, and they flounder and blunder and toss imaginary bundles in air and glare out of their eyes like searchlights while the wild boy above, with chaps on his legs, waves his sombrero in air and gives forth Indian war whoops all the while.
The great Western crowd laughs, so do the cowboys, so do the judges, and even the many horses ranged on all sides seem to look on with mirth. It hardly feels like this century—one thinks of medieval jollity, but comparisons are misleading. Such fun is of all time. The Athenians would have loved it. And bull dogging would have been a greater diversion in the Roman Coliseum than the Christians and the lions.
After the bull dogging there was roping of wild horses, saddling them and riding them. The horses were let loose in the arena and each cowboy had to catch his. As these had never been broken the excitement can be imagined, excitement of the horses, of the would-be riders, and of the crowd looking on. It was fully twenty minutes before even one cowboy had saddled and bridled a horse—and he could not make the animal go round the course.
Then we had a chuck-wagon race, wagons blundering round the course to given points where they had to stop, horses had to be taken out of shafts and put in imaginary corrals, rear flap of wagon to be let down, a fire lit on the ground and a pot of coffee boiled.
Then a Roman race and a relay race. And Idaho Bill in his alligator hide boots chewed his cigar all the while as if to him all the horses belonged, and the president of the reunion galloped from point to point of the arena judging the competitors in each race. And all the while a brass band played "I'm Nobody's Darling" and kindred airs.
In the evenings after all these doings there were cowboy dances and a rolling up and down Las Vegas' streets of a vaunting, leather-lined crowd. Some still rode about on their horses, but most had taken their steeds to their "corrals" and thrown them out their armfuls of green alfalfa for the night. The legless cowboy in his crimson shirt still rode his ebony horse and had evidently found liquor, for he rode into the main entrance of Las Vegas' only fine hotel, clattered round the stone hall and stood with his horse in the doorway of the main dining room, asking in a stentorian voice for a roast beef sandwich. The pallor in the faces of some Easterners who had "stopped off" on the way to California was most apparent. "Why don't they phone the police?" said one old man, mopping his brow with his handkerchief.
But the cowboy kept quite calm and, unloosing his rope, made a pass to rope the old man and roped a young girl with chestnut hair instead. She laughed, but was not a little alarmed, so the cowboy unloosed her and lassoed the cashier at the desk instead, and then the hotel manager. Then they brought him his beef sandwich, and with a splutter of hoofs he rode out of the hotel into the gay streets again.
CHAPTER IX INDIANS
The story of the Indians in America is the story of the weak in the presence of the strong. Despite the ideals which reign in capitals and cultural centers it is always the same with the main body of the human race—the strong may pity the weak but they will not forbear to use the advantage of their strength. There is little to choose between Spaniards and English. There is little to choose between any of the races; Belgians in the Congo, Portuguese in Brazil, Russians in Turkestan; they have dispossessed, enslaved, expelled, destroyed, without a mist upon their conscience. And it is difficult to think that mankind has improved. If a new world were discovered to-day, if the ocean delivered up a new continent, the first thought would be—Is there gold there? If we found people living on it, specimens would be brought to be shown to prime ministers and exhibited in places of amusement. And there would be a rush to that new world of gold seekers, pirates, adventurers, and Imperial administrators.
So it may be pardoned if at this stage in American history one refuses to wax indignant over how Spaniards and Anglo-Saxon forefathers of present Americans behaved toward the natural possessors of the soil.
The justification for the rapine of America—or at least of North America—is that it has been made into a "going concern." We believe in our curious self-complacence that an American humanity with factories, gilded by millionaires and mighty banks, towering heavenward in mighty cities, is a greater glory to God than the life of Hiawatha and his friends. We must confess that it seems so, and it is difficult to hear the ancient whisper—Where is thy brother Abel?
The Indians, however, are not forgotten. They are more remembered now that they are few. There comes a moment when the old race is mostly underground, or tucked safely away in wildernesses, remote from human ken, that the new race of conquerors becomes sentimental. It has destroyed all that it adored, and now it adores all that it has destroyed. It is so now in the United States, where the Indians have become the pets of tourists and the theme of poets.
You have to travel far to meet the Indians, so the railway companies have used the Indian as an advertisement, not only pictured but living. For at Las Vegas station or at Albuquerque, and many others, do you not see station Indians all bedizened, walking up and down before the delighted traveler's eyes. The Indian has become part of the romance of far travel.
The United States have left their own primitive past behind, and emerged from the mud and the smells and the roughness of pioneer days. All America treads paved sidewalks. All America goes in cars. All America is in clean linen and good clothes. There is electric light, sanitation. Baths have become more national than in Russia or Turkey. America indeed leads civilization and leads it forward. So the distance between the Indians and the citizens of the United States grows more and more remarkable. The gap is a sort of Grand Cañon in itself, a grand cañon in the continuity of human things.
The sentimental interest is therefore greatly intensified by the spectacular one, the paradoxical one, of one people standing still whilst all the rest of the world moves on, a people who refuse to budge from what they were in 1492.
I suppose those Indians were most lucky whose habitat was more remote; those who were furthest from the capital of New Spain; those who were furthest from the centers of population in the United States. Probably the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico were in that position. That is why they have survived so well. The deserts have been their protection.
An acquaintance, buying land near Ramah, New Mexico, found, when he took over a new estate, that there was behind his ranch-house a whole village of cliff dwellings. In a like manner when in 1848 America took over the new territory which was the spoil of the Mexican War she found she took with it the Pueblo Indians, living more or less untouched, unmolested, as they had lived for centuries. Remote from Aztec power, remote from Cortes' power, remote from Spanish power, remote from the seat of power of the Mexican Empire, now remote also from modern America and all that America means, the Pueblo Indians are still happy in their traditional homes, worshipping raingods in the desert, dancing ceremonial dances, dancing their sorrows and their ecstasies.
I was at the Indian pueblo of San Juan on St. John's Day. The Indians and the Mexicans were holding a fiesta. Broadly beat the sun on the mountainous deserts, on the wind-carved, pyramidal mountains and strange rocks, on the sandy waste of the river bed, and on the mud huts of the Indians.
Such a hubbub! The drums of the Indians are beating, throbbing; the many feathers of the war bonnets are bobbing over the sombreros of the dark-suited Mexican crowd which looks on. There is dancing. Let us climb on to the roofs of the mud huts and look down on it.
The drums that they are beating are shaped like sections of tree trunks, but adorned with rude swastikas. Indian warriors, all painted and bedizened and armed, are dancing to the tune of the drum beats, and beautiful women with long hair hanging down their backs, broad set faces, slightly lifting feet in white curl-toe boots, are balancing little feather-topped arrows in each hand.
The war chiefs' dance is a sort of war prance; an arrow-shooting gesture, a spear-holding gesture! And as they dance they jingle their belt bells and set earrings and rattles all atinkling. Their long hair is done up in twin pellicules of fur, and hangs in long tails over their shoulders—or it is inter-plaited with bright ribbons. Their faces are painted in various ways. The leading man, carrying a pink-melon-colored, scythe shaped banner, has black ladders on his cheeks climbing to his yellow-circled eyes. Another man has a striped face, stove black alternating with brightest orange; another has yellow star-rays round his eyes and the ruddiest blood-red over the rest of his face. One is painted top half yellow, lower half rose-red. Almost all wear war bonnets, brown or fawn felt hats, or buckskin caps trimmed with selected black and white feathers. All the feathers are white tipped except those which have been dipped in the war paint. On one warrior this headdress is adorned with small circular mirrors the size of watch lids; they circle his face and gleam in the sun, but they also continue downward at the bases of the long stream of feathers to his ankles. For these feathery bonnets, starting as a broad crest to the brows, finish only short of the ground—and how they dance in the wind as their owners dance!
All the men carry weapons and shields—spears with bright ribbons, imitation bayonets, revolvers, pistols, swords, bows and arrows. One, having on his shield a blood-red star and crescent, slews in the air with a great curved sword. Several are naked to the middle, but all are powdered or dabbed with white paint. They have large feminine-looking breasts, deep-cut navels, smooth skins and no hair. They perspire profusely, and fan themselves occasionally with feathers. One almost naked pagan has the stars and stripes for a loin cloth, and prances about with a sham rifle. Occasionally the seminaked ones seem to obtain furs from somewhere, and appear with their backs and bellies quite covered up.
The drummers are older looking men, very stern in their expression. They know nothing of tradition except its binding force. One of them has a crown of fresh-cut stems of the cottonwood tree. They beat their throbbing drum taps. They sing, they chant, they mumble—mumble, mumble, dum, dum, dum—it is hardly a tune but a sensual appeal. The men do the dance, plunging back and forth; the women throb and quiver, with their broad-booted feet, and short, broad, brightly enwrapped bodies, and wide, woodlike faces, and low, broad brows framed in sharp-cut ebony hair. Their front hair is cut Egyptian-wise, sphinx-wise, while down to where the waist should be behind hangs a great cloud of untrimmed waving tresses. They quiver, the men prance. All the dancers are in fours—the men and the women in alternate files, thirty men and thirty women.
The men are the fighters; the women serve them with arrows. The men prance in front of the women; the women are protected by them. The women scarcely change their positions the whole time, but the men diagonalize between files and prance forward in front of them, lifting high their weapons and emitting curious little cries and yelps. As they kill in the ritual they give the deathcry of the victims.
They dance six long dances, and after each, in a processional bacchanalia, leave the scene of the dance, and with splendor of waving color, file upward on ladders on to the roofs of the houses and disappear through holes in the roof into the two kivas, or council chambers of the men and of the women.
It is also a Mexican holiday, and near by goes a dilapidated "merry-go-round," worked by hand by two men, with the wretchedest burble of music, a torn canvas roof, and a flag. Somewhere, also, in the background, a cowboy is riding a bucking bronco while dark-eyed Mexican youth looks on.
But the mud huts of the Indians and the freshly made, green-branched street shrines of St. John and the Madonna are the real background of the fiesta. The last dance of the afternoon is danced bowingly and worshipfully into a green alcove, where stands a little silver and white Virgin, and an old Mexican is sitting beside her, playing dreamily on a violin. In one respect at least the Indians are not as they were. They have become Catholics. I am told that is merely a polite acquiescence on their part, and though with their faces they bow to the Madonna their hearts know her not.
In the course of the summer we rode to seven or eight Indian villages; sometimes to dances, sometimes just to see the villages themselves and the normal way of life in them. And we were much besought to buy turquoise rings and bracelets and brightly woven saddle blankets and rugs. Some visitors to Santa Fe bought great quantities of these things, and one of the poets disported five or six large silver and turquoise rings on his fingers and had more still in a drawer. Nearly all the ladies of Santa Fe had waist belts adorned with silver conches. The Indians work the same turquoise mines which have been theirs immemorially, and they mine also silver, though I think not a little of their silverware is now derived from molten dollars. Paper money seems always inacceptable to the Indians. So one always carries a weight of silver in one's pockets when traveling in these parts.
Each pueblo is a community and lives a communal life. Their land is held in common, and is inalienable. I believe their title derives from the King of Spain, legalized by the Mexican Republic and recognized by the United States when they conquered the country. Much of the best land, however, has been stolen from them. There are many squatters, both English- and Spanish-speaking. In many places their water has been diverted, and they have been left stranded on yellow sands. They have never been able to defend themselves in civilized courts, being incapable of grasping the procedure—and they have suffered accordingly. All this summer and autumn there raged a campaign fostered by the artists and literary colony in Santa Fe, for the protection of the Indians and the institution of new works of irrigation to give them back their lost water. Thanks to this campaign a spoliatory measure which passed the United States Senate, commonly called the "Bursum Bill," was recalled. The object of this Bill has been chiefly to give a legal title to the squatters. There is a good deal of hope that, having frustrated the passing of this bill, the Indian Committee of Santa Fe will have been able to introduce into Congress a highly practical measure which at the same time would help and protect the Indians, benefit the squatters, and pay for itself. This is a bill for new irrigation works and compensatory land grants to the Indians.
The great problem of living is that of water, and more than half the Indian dances are prayers to a nature god for rain. The description which I give here of our ride to Santo Domingo pueblo to their greatest festival may give some suggestion of the desert and the Indians praying for rain.
We rode down from the mountains with their green pastures to the parched valleys and plateaus, and were told irrigation had ceased for want of water. The river beds and channels and dykes were yellow and dry and scorching. Rivers, instead of broadening out, grew less as they flowed—attenuated. They became trickles, they became the mere wetness of the tongue in the mouth, they disappeared.
Even the cactus has withered. The roselike cactus blossoms of the higher mountains are no more. The fresh, green, spiny stalks are brown and frightful in death. There is no grass for the horses, and the only green things on the waste are rank, poisonous, deep-rooted weeds which draw their sustenance from the moisture which is far below.
The bones of dead cattle tell a melancholy tale of thirst. Woe to the herd of the cowboys who do not know where water is to be found. They are driving their herds over vast distances—from California into Texas or beyond; they are taking their time, feeding well as they go. Or they ought to be feeding well. And the cowboy's mind-map of the world is one of hidden springs and constant pastures. So they have driven the herds upwards, even though that be out of their way. For there is no water or pasture below.
Our horses would fain return. When we rest them at noon they trail their reins after them and start homeward and are not easily captured. We have found alkali water in the depths of an arroyo. The horses try to drink it but lap up bitter sand instead. They quit trying to drink it and lie down on it instead and try to roll in it.
We climb black, boulder-strewn cliffs and look painfully once more at the bleached bones of cattle. We walk our horses all the afternoon over a sun-blazing prairie toward a horizon that seems infinitely removed. And we see in the distance the bright, gleaming wheel of a water windmill, and the wheel is surely revolving. Though not our way, it means water, and we will go to it.
We are soon on a cow trail, a goat trail, a human trail—all making for the windmill. How gayly the wheel flashes in the sunlight. It is truly a delight—a token of happiness. But, alas, when we get to it we find the cisterns and the troughs all empty. The wheel is revolving, but it is drawing forth no water. All is desolate. We dismount and sit on the wall of the concrete reservoir, and the horses wonder why they are there.
But up above us revolves the wheel, once descried afar, now over our very heads and actual. And it cries as it revolves:
And all strewn around on the ground are discarded bottles and cans, and a cross of new wood marks somebody's grave.
"No waw ... ter!" Well, on to the horses again. We'll be on the great Rio to-morrow, far away, low down below this sun-cursed moor. The horses will drink deep when we get there. And we shall join the Indians who on the day of St. Dominic are going to intercede and dance for rain.
On the evening of the second day we rode into the mud-hut settlement of the Indians of Santo Domingo and admired their large new church with its external fresco of horses. The horse came to the Indians at the same time as the Cross, and perhaps to them is as holy.
We rode along the broad street, three times as broad as New York's Broadway, and hoof-marked and wheel-marked from wall to wall. The squaws were ascending and descending ladders to go in or come out at the doors which they have in their roofs. On strings along their roof-taps chunks of meat were dessicating in the sunlight. But in front of many houses were portals of green branches and boughs brought up from the woods along the bank of the river.
The Indians neither saluted us nor welcomed us. But their dogs barked at us and we passed on—away through their cornfields down to the Rio Grande-the great river. And there we camped, where the rapid flood rolls down from the Rockies, red with the color of Colorado.
It was the eve of the festival of St. Dominic. Indians in their covered wagons were coming from all parts—Jemez Indians, Tesuque Indians, Navajos ... Indians also on horseback, galloping along the opposite bank of the river and plunging their horses to the ford. All night long the moon among her clouds looked kindly down upon the river and listened, as it were, to the galloping of the horsemen and the crunching of the wheels of the wagons on the valley sand.
Indians encamped in the valley and let loose their horses, built fires beside ours and fried their corn and broiled their coffee; gay men and tittering squaws and wild-eyed little ones. Up in the settlement the guests slept in the streets on the roadways, though all night long music never ceased, nor the throb of the drums for the morning. On the white mud church where the horses were painted on the outside walls they lit seven flaming altars which blazed into the night sky. It looked then like an Aztec pyramid lit for human sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl—the god of the air. Perhaps to the Indians it was. Who knows their minds?
As for us, we slept in the bush on the verge of the red-flowing waters, and our horses neighed to one another and whinnied, the night long.
Next day, as on the night before, we swam in the river—its rapid current flattering our achievement. It was red and warm and mighty, rolling us in wave motion ten feet at a thrust. Yet it was weak. It would be a strong Indian who would swim the Rio Grande when it is in its strength. For it is then capable of washing away villages and towns as it goes. Has not the old church and half the pueblo of Santo Domingo been swept to limbo by the river?
Three beautiful youths come and sit by our camp fire and smile at us—one is in a black velvet coat and with a crimson ribbon in his long ebony hair—he is handsome and romantic as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Following him we ride up to Mass in the church of the painted horses, and we find the pueblo arrayed in the many colors of gorgeous Indian life. And on top of the kiva or council chamber is a banner crowned with a cluster of many-colored painted feathers. An Indian takes our horses into his yard and we go into the church.
What was there more impressive than the service in Latin, completely in Latin, with not a word of Spanish or of English! Or the Indians singing the chorus of praise and serving at the altar! A giant, as it seems, in terra cotta-colored coat and neatly tied, voluminous black hair standing constantly at the altar steps.
Saint Dominic is waiting—he lies prone on the ground. St. Dominic will be invoked at the Breaking of Bread; Sanctus, sanctus, "Oh Santo Domingo, where art thou at this hour—we'll reach thee." Tinkle, tinkle, goes the church bell, and then suddenly, dum-a-dum-dum-dum-keroah, go the drums and horns of the Indians, and spludge, spludge, they fire their rifles in air.
The bearers raise St. Dominic on high. He seems veritably to rise from the dead as he gradually ascends above the worshipers' heads. He is golden and patriarchal and benign, and they carry in front of him a little gilt dog. Domini canes, the dogs of the Lord, the Dominicans used to be called, and the pun has endured.
As St. Dominic is carried to every Indian house and byway of the gray mud built pueblo the horns and the drums accompany him, and spludge, spludge, goes the accompaniment of fired guns. And when all the visiting has been done the figure is placed in the alcove of green boughs—the street shrine before which two hundred Indians will dance a prayer for rain.
And now onward all the day the Indians dance. First come the Koshare, who represent the spirits of their ancestors. All but naked, they are painted a dull gray—to look either like corpses or invisible as ghosts. There are strange black bands and traceries on their limbs and bodies, and their faces are painted to affright; they grimace, they insinuate, they strike terror, and also they make mirth. They have corn stalks in their hair, and sandals on their feet.
As for the rest they all wear their long hair hanging so that men look like women, but the men have branches of green tassels on their heads and the women wear green wooden crowns. The men have armlets of green with pine twigs in them. The upper parts of their bodies are all exposed, but are painted dark brown and seem as of stone. The men wear fox skins hanging behind them, like tails. The drums beat, the men incant, the Koshare wave their hands to heaven and make every gesture that means falling rain.
The living dance in ranks, but the wild Koshare, the spirits of the dead, dance in and out at will and seem to improvise all they do. They lead the dance, they dominate. It becomes an orgy of marvelous beauty, dimpling, dazzling; a great moving phantasmagoria. It is like the manes of a hundred black horses plunging together on the prairie; it is like running shadows and sunshine over mountain meadows of flowers. And all the while the drums, and all the while the incantations—
Strangest of all is the body of earnest old men at one side, not dancing, and yet somehow contributing to the dance. They are all farmers. They want the rain for their crops. They are terribly intent. They never cease turning from the heavens to the earth and back again and making with their fingers the gesture of trickling water and dropping rain, calling all the while something like—
"Ukky-ukky-you-you, ukky-ukky-yah-yah, ukky-ukky-yum-yum, ukky-ukky-you-you!"
How they want it to rain! There's no doubt of the sincerity of their prayers.
The dance is in two sections; one represents Winter, the other Summer. They dance separately and then come in together in one grand bacchanalia, the Koshare exceeding themselves in yelling at visitors and sightseers, booing into their faces and kicking their shins.
Little children come bringing loaves to place at the feet of St. Dominic, who stands benignly in the silver and green shadowland of his bower in the village street. He seems to be listening to something. He is altogether remote from this time. He is thinking of something else, trying to remember something. But be that so or no, little loaves have been placed in front of him, and outside the shrine in an astonishing frenzy the dance goes on.
The beautiful Indian girls, so young, so dark and jewel-like, lift all their naked feet in perfect time, in a hypnotic time, and balance their bodies, balance to the rhythm of the great dance with half-closed eyes.
The Rio Grande, away below, rolls on in red waves from Colorado to the sea. The clouds that are above are merely messengers, fleet-footed Mercuries whose message is not to be delivered here.
And yet, what is that which is forming away to the North; surely a thundercloud. The mountains have stopped the clouds. It is raining. The clouds are broadening and enveloping.
"Ukky-ukky-you-you," the old men clamor, and point back to their crops. "Ukky-ukky-yah-yah" don't stop for a moment, "ukky-ukky-yum-yum."
The Koshare become the spirits of the storm, making the most astonishing leaps, and crying out and pulling the rain out of the heavens toward them. The ardor of the dance redoubles and there is no rest. And the heat, as of an oven, is not tempered by the breeze. Suddenly glimmering white ribbons are pulled through the clouds and it is lightning, a sign at least that the prayers are being heard.
These people know how to pray for rain. No idle "May it please Thee, O Lord" sitting on plush, but a terrific dynamic appeal by one force in nature to another. What wonder if year after year the Santo Domingo dance brings rain!
But what a drama! It rakes one's soul. You are torn by it. Will it rain, will it rain? See the dance, see the clouds approaching, see the old men, see the waving fields of green flowering corn, see the maidens like jewels, see the young men like princes, see the dreadful and marvelous Koshare all gray and stove-black with masklike faces, grimacing and simpering and yet somehow compelling! See the emblems of Christ, see the Church, see the Kiva, white magic and black magic, altogether, all toned up, all compelling, throb-throb-throb, dum-dum-dum, ukky-yah-yah, ukky-ukky-you-you!
Ah it comes, yes, a spot, a wind-carried token of a storm somewhere else, a black tooth-mark in the pueblo dust. See the Koshare drop to it, lick it up with their tongues, dust and all, and cry, "More, more, all hands to the sky, all hands to the earth, ukky-ukky-you-you, ukky-ukky-yah-yah!"
But it does not rain. It rains all around; it will rain. Cool airs creep in. The dance ends at last, and all who danced in it are exhausted. Candles on long poles are lit. St. Dominic is raised again, and he and the little gold dog are borne away to the church.
A bell rings quietly in the evening air and the streets begin to empty—of all but Mexicans and Americans. In the distance you hear the river rolling by, hear also the hoofs of the horses and the splashing of those who are fording the Rio Grande homing into the night.
CHAPTER X MEXICANS OF NEW MEXICO
New Mexico is the only Catholic State in the Union. Maryland has the tradition of Catholicism, but New Mexico has the verisimilitude of a Latin country in Europe. When, in 1848, it was annexed to the United States, or, let us say, in 1850, when it was organized as a territorial possession, or, in 1863, when it was reshaped,—it has had many birthdays—it was entirely Spanish-speaking and Catholic. The population now is five times as great as it was then. The Mexicans have prospered and multiplied; the Texans have colonized the South and East. State consciousness is remarkably undeveloped. Those of Texan origin are proud of Texas. No Anglo-Saxon or German-American seems ready to call himself a New Mexican. It is the Spanish-speaking people who are the real New Mexicans—and they do not care to be confounded with real Mexicans. The visitor, therefore, has a sense of being in a foreign State and one decidedly Catholic.
The atmosphere is rather that of Spain than of Mexico. For Mexico has been exposed to sixty-five years of anticlericalism wherein the Church has been fought by the State, shorn of its possessions, and greatly reduced in pride and power. It has meant much to the New Mexican that his Church has not been humiliated. In Mexico also the strain of race is much more mixed. Almost every Mexican has Indian blood, and the onslaught on the power of the Church was obtained by her great Indian President, Benito Juarez. The converted Indian is a much less faithful son of the Church than the Castilian, and it may be that the spirit of revolt in Mexico derives more from the aboriginal strain than from the Spaniard. In what is now New Mexico, however, there has never been much crossing with Indian blood. The Navajos, the Apaches, the Zunyis, and the rest, were never subjugated in the way the Aztec tribes were. Deserts lay between these races and the main bodies of armies; their wealth was not enough to tempt great numbers of adventurers. The Spaniards who settled were mostly peaceful colonists. They set up churches, they built new villages, they tilled the soil or herded cattle, and they were content to forget higher ambitions. They lived to themselves.
There is now a remarkable difference between the Mexican proper and the Mexican who has become a United States citizen. And that, although New Mexico only became a State and was admitted to the Union in 1912. It is not simply the moderation of the size of his sombrero and his abandonment of tight breeches, nor the disappearing of the mantilla as a headdress of the women. It seems first of all to be a difference in soul. The faces of the Mexicans are furtive, restless; their round, staring eyes tell of a primitive nature, simple, stupid, and violent. The New Mexican is of a much calmer countenance; he is steady, he does not fear his neighbors, he has civilized ambitions, and he does not drink. As Mexico and the United States might be called the Jungle and the Park, so the Mexican has the restlessness of wild nature, and the New Mexican the calm of an ordered and domestic life.
Prohibition has doubtless had a beneficent effect in New Mexico, but even before the "dry" régime the drinking of pulque had almost died out. But pulque, the juice of the maguey cactus, is a curse of Mexican life. In its effect it is more like a combination of alcohol and cocaine, and has a highly destructive effect on nerve and mental organism. Like tequila and mescal, the other cactus drinks, it is a strong provoker of violent lusts and is reputed to have destroyed whole civilizations before the Spaniards came. Legend tells of a virgin who brought some of it to the eighth King of the Toltecs, who took both it and her and had a "cactus-born" child, and all his people took to the new drink and were then fallen upon by the Chichimecs and destroyed. It was working havoc among the Aztecs in Cortes' time and is responsible for much from then until now. But from that evil power the Mexican of New Mexico is surely protected.
Blood is thicker than water, and it is therefore surprising that there is so little sympathy between the New Mexicans and their kindred over the Border. One must seek reasons not only in the better life under American rule but in the sparsity of the Mexican population on the other side of the line. There is no flood of people in Chihuahua or Coahuila or Sonora ready to overflow into what is now American territory. New Mexicans do not seem to have kith and kin on the other side. They do not read Mexican papers or take an interest in Mexican affairs. In the case of a new war with Mexico they would prove as loyal as the bold Texans themselves. The word "gringo" is not on their lips. They, for their part, show a marked dislike of being referred to as Mexicans, and if they must be "hyphenates" they would rather be called Spanish-Americans. They are proud of their citizenship, and are imitators of Anglo-Saxon America so far as their natural conservatism permits. They have fallen into the ways of American business, and have seized upon American politics with great enthusiasm, canvassing Republicans or Democrats with the same fervor as the most ardent politicians of the North.
In their religious life, however, they are not inclined to change. The piety of the State might be a pattern for the Church. The New Mexicans preserve the religious solemnity of Burgos or Seville. All the villages and little towns have beautifully kept churches. And the homes, mud built as they are, are all adorned with sacred pictures. Here one may see the remarkable "Santos"—pictures of Saints painted on wood, not unlike some of the domestic ikons of the old Believers in Russia, at least in their weird and strange conceptions of Godhead. Painted without art, smudged on to wood, these Santos nevertheless convey the deeply seated religiosity of a race.
In New Mexico there is not the extent of superstition that is to be found in Old Mexico. That is because Indian converts have been fewer. The Indians in Mexico have imported all manner of pagan ideas into current piety. That is natural, because they possessed elaborate nature rituals, fetish worships, diabolisms; and the missionaries seldom denied practice or belief if they could change its name to Christianity and induce the pagans to be baptized. But the Northern Spanish people kept their religion fairly pure. One remarkable phenomenon, however, in the State is the widespread prevalence of asceticism. Lent is observed with a rigor unknown elsewhere in America. There are thousands of people living in the mountains who practice self-flagellation and beat their bare backs with cactus or with whips till they are streaming with blood. They carry heavy crosses in procession. They even permit themselves to be tied in crucificial attitude and hung on a cross till they are exhausted. These are called the "Penitentes," apparently an offshoot of the Third Order of St. Francis, which was inaugurated in Mexico in the first year of Cortes' conquest. These are no longer safely in the bosom of Mother Church, neither are they excommunicated except by their own choice, but they are without priests, and practice their rituals in windowless chapels called moradas. Of these there are many on the mountain sides of the country near Santa Fe. The Penitentes cannot be considered popular—and they for their part do not ask the interest of outsiders. They are secretive, and some of the Texans are all for "cleaning them up." There is no "hundred per cent Americanism" in their practices, perhaps not one per cent, and I doubt that they can long endure. They are likely to be forced into the conventional orthodoxy of the Church within the century.
Santa Fe is in one way remarkable for its religious processions. Open-air rituals, ceremonies, processions, are forbidden in Mexico proper, and the monasteries and convents have mostly been dissolved. A monk is a rarity in Chihuahua, but a common figure in New Mexico. Sacred images repose in the churches in Old Mexico—but here nothing so usual as to bring them out into the streets in grand parade! When they carried out the little white De Vargas Madonna in memory of the succor given to the Spanish troops in the seventeenth century in the recovery of Santa Fe from the Indians who had risen, killed their priests, razed their churches, and sacked the country—the procession may easily have been a mile long. Brass bands, sacred banners, mounted candlesticks, choir boys and clergy, knights of Columbus led by some one with a long, bared sword. Indians wrapped in their blankets, squaws with black hair hanging in a cloud to their waists, children carrying garlands of flowers, Mexican men in their clumsy clothes, women in long array of black,—such a procession is a memorable and moving sight. It has a missionary power also, and draws converts who thirst for color and emotion in the dullness of the Protestant sects.
I was urged by some Americans to think that Romanism without the Pope might become the new religion of America, and that it might start its great evangelism and revival from Santa Fe itself. Perhaps I am too much of a European, but the idea of Romanism without a Pope seemed that of a tree without a root. "I used to go to the church of the Paulist Fathers in New York every day of my life," said Vachel Lindsay, who comes of an ardent Free Church stock. "I am seventy per cent with them. Get rid of their politics and the Pope, and I would be with them heart and soul."
Possibly as America swung free of England and Mexico of Spain, and as the whole of America to-day with its Monroe Doctrine has cut adrift from European politics, so also its Catholicism might one day say—We will build Rome afresh in the New World and put away the old Rome of Europe as something which has been outlived. There might be a religious war of Independence. The Roman adherence of the United States with its Irish, its Poles, its Czechs, its Southern Germans, Austrians, and Italians, and its Spanish-speaking peoples, is an enormous multitude. They obtain an increasing hold upon the control of America, and they are regarded at present by Protestants as an increasing danger. But that is due, not so much to the religious expression of Romanism as to what it implies politically.
Of course there is a very telling reproach to Catholicism, and that is, that in Catholic countries one always finds what Protestants call "backwardness." It is a common objection in New Mexico, where it is difficult to get enough money to carry out an advanced educational program, where natural ambition seems somehow thwarted by a satisfying religion, where the men do not think that their women can have opinions or use a vote, where ethical standards are low, and the conscience seems to be encased in proof. Inter-marriage is regarded with disfavor by Americans. Many are ready to say that these Spaniards are not Americans, that they cannot be till they become Methodists or Presbyterians and speak the language properly. Even those who emotionally admire the processions and rituals go home to cool off and become disparagingly critical of the people, as of foreigners. For such, a trip over the Border into Old Mexico would be the best medicine—that they might see how far New Mexico had progressed from what it used to be when it was part of New Spain.