Part 10 (2/2)

CHAPTER XI

TAOS, THE PROMISED LAND AND ANCIENT CAPITAL OF THE SOUTHWEST

As Quebec is the shrine of historical pilgrims in the North, and Salem in New England; so Taos is the Mecca of students of history and lovers of art in the Southwest. Here came the Spanish knights mounted and in armor plate half a century before the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. They had not only crossed the sea but had traversed the desert from Old Mexico for 900 miles over burning sands, amid wild, bare mountains, across rivers where horses and riders swamped in the quicksands. To Taos came Franciscan _padres_ long before Champlain had built stockades at Port Royal or Quebec. Just as the Jesuits won the wilderness of the up-country by martyr blood, so the Franciscans attacked the strongholds of paganism amid the pueblos of the South.

Spanish _conquistadores_ have been represented as wading through blood to victory, with the sword in one hand, the cross in the other; but that picture is only half the truth. Let it be remembered that the Spanish were the only conquerors in America who gave the Indians perpetual t.i.tle, intact and forever, to the land occupied when the Spanish came--which t.i.tles the Indians hold to this day. Also, while rude soldiers, or even officers, might be guilty of such unprovoked attacks as occurred at Bernalillo in Coronado's expedition of 1540, the crown stood sponsor for the well-being and salvation of the Indian's soul.

Wherever the conqueror marched, the sandaled and penniless Franciscan remained and too often paid the penalty of the soldier's crimes. In the Tusayan Desert, at Taos, at Zuni, at Acoma, you will find Missions that date back to the expedition of Coronado; and at every single Mission the _padres_ paid for their courage and their faith with their lives.

But Taos traditions date back farther than the coming of the white man.

Christians have their Christ, northern Indians their Hiawatha, and the pueblo people their Bah-tah-ko, or grand cacique, who led their people from the ravages of Apache and Navajo in the far West to the Promised Land of verdant plains and watered valleys below the mighty mountains of Taos. Montezuma was to the Southwest, not the Christ, but the Adam, the Moses, the Joseph. Casa Grande in southern Arizona was the Garden of Eden, ”the place of the Morning Glow;” but when war and pestilence and ravaging foe and drouth drove the pueblos from their Garden of Eden, the Bah-tah-ko was the Moses to lead them to the Promised Land at Taos. When did he live? The oldest man does not know. The pueblos had been at Taos thousands of years, when the Spanish came in 1540; and, it may be added, they live very much the same to-day at Taos as they did when the white man first came. The men wear store trousers instead of woven linen ones; some wear hats instead of a red head band; and there are wagons instead of drags attached to a dog in shafts. But apart from these innovations, there is little difference at Taos between 1912 and 1540. The whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the pueblo; but the old _estufas_, or _kivas_, are still used for religious ceremony, and election of rulers, and maintenance of Indian law. You can still see the Indians thres.h.i.+ng their grain by the trampling of goats on a thres.h.i.+ng floor, or the run of burros round and round a kraal chased by a boy, while a man sc.r.a.pes away the grain and forks aside the chaff. There are white man's courts and white man's laws, down at the white man's town of Taos; but the Indian has little faith in, and less respect for, these white man courts and laws, and out at Taos has his own court, his own laws, his own absolute and undisputed governor, his own police, his own prison and his own penalties. The wealth of Midas would not tempt a Taos Indian to exchange his life in the tiered adobe villages for all that civilization could offer him. Occasionally a Colonel Cody, or Showman Jones, lures him off for a year or two to the great cities of the East; but the call of the wilds lures him back to his own beehive houses. He has plenty to eat and plenty to wear, the love of his family, the open fields and the friends.h.i.+p of his G.o.ds--what more can life offer?

Don't leave the Southwest without seeing Taos. It might be part of Turkey, or Persia, or India. It is the most un-American thing in America; and yet, it is the most typical of those ancient days in America, when there was no white man. Just here, before the ethnologist arises to correct me, let it be put on record that the Taos people do not consider themselves Indians. They claim descent rather from the Aztecs, or Toltecs of the South. While the Navajo and Apache and Ute legends are of a great migration from Athabasca of the North, the pueblo legend is of a coming from the Great Underworld of the South.

The easiest way to reach Taos is by the ancient city of Santa Fe. You go by rail to Servilleta, or Barrancas, then stage it out to the Indian pueblos. Better wire for your stage accommodation from the railroad. We did not wire, and when we left the railroad, we found seven people and a stage with s.p.a.ce for only four. The railroad leads almost straight north from Santa Fe over high, clear mesas of yellow ocher covered with scrub juniper. There is little sign of water after you leave the Rio Grande, for water does not flow uphill; and you are at an alt.i.tude of 8,000 feet when you cross the Divide. You pa.s.s through fruit orchards along the river, low headed and heavy with apples. Then come the Indian villages, San Ildefonso, and Espanola, and Santa Clara, where the strings of red chile bake in the sunlight against the glare adobe. Women go up from the pools with jars of water on their heads. Children come selling the famous Santa Clara black pottery at the train windows; and on the trail across the river, you see Mexican drovers with long lines of burros and pack horses winding away into the mountains. Women and girls in bright blankets and with eyes like black beads and skin like wrinkled parchment stand round the doors of the little square adobe houses; and sitting in the shade are the old people--people of a great age, 104 one old woman numbered her years. As you ascend the Upper Mesas of the Rio Grande, you are in a region where nothing grows but pinon and juniper. There is not a sign of life but the browsing sheep and goats. Just where the train shoots in north of San Ildefonso, if you know where to look on the right, you can see the famous Black Mesa, a huge square of black basaltic rock almost 400 feet high, which was the sacred shrine of all Indians hereabouts for a hundred miles. On its crest, you can still see its prayer shrines, and the footworn path where refugees from war ran down to the river for water from encampment on the crest. Away to the left, the mountains seem to crumple up in purple folds with flat tops and white gypsum gashed precipices. One of these gashes--White Rock Canon--marks Pajarito Plateau, the habitat of the ancient cave dwellers.

On the north side of the Black Mesa, you can see the opening to a huge cave. This was a prayer shrine and refuge in time of war for the Santa Clara Indians.

Then, when you have reached almost the top of the world and see no more sheep herds, the trains pull up at an isolated, forsaken little station; and late in the afternoon you get off at Servilleta.

A school teacher, his wife and his two children, also left the train at this point. Our group consisted of three. The driver of the stage--a famous frontiersman, Jo. Dunn--made eight; and we packed into a two-seated vehicle. It added piquancy, if not sport, to the twilight drive to know that one of the two bronchos in harness had never been driven before. He was, in fact, one of the bands of wild horses that rove these high juniper mountains. Mexicans, or Indians, watch for the wild bands to come out to water at nightfall and morning, and stampede them into a pound, or rope them. The captive is then sold for amounts varying from $5 to $15 to anyone who can master him. It need not be told here, not every driver can master an unbroken wild horse. It is a combination of confidence and dexterity, rather than strength. There is a rigging to the bridle that throws a horse if he kicks; and our wild one not only kept his traces for a rough drive of nearly twenty miles but suffered himself to be handled by a young girl of the party.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, whose inhabitants trace their lineage back centuries before the advent of the Spanish conquistadores]

Twilight on the Upper Mesas is a thing not to be told in words and only dimly told on canvas. There is the primrose afterglow, so famous in the Alps. The purple mountains drape themselves in lavender veils. Winds scented with oil of sagebrush and aroma of pines come soughing through the juniper hills. The moon comes out sickle-shaped. You see a shooting star drop. Then a dim white group of moving forms emerges from the pines of the mountains--wild horses with leader scenting the air for foe, coming out for the night run to the drinking pools. Or your horses give a little sidewise jump from the trail, and you see a coyote loping along abreast not a gun-shot away. This is a sure-enough-always-no-man's-land, a jumping-off place for all the earth--too high for irrigation farming, too arid for any other kind of farming, and so an unclaimed land. In the twenty-mile drive, you will see, perhaps, three homesteaders' shanties, where settlers have fenced off a square and tried ranching; but water is too deep for boring. Horses turned outside the square join the wild bands and are lost; and two out of every three are abandoned homesteads.

The Dunn brothers have cut a road in eighteen miles to the Arroyo Hondo, where their house is, halfway to Taos; and they have also run a telephone line in.

Except for the telephone wires and the rough trail, you might be in an utterly uninhabited land on top of the world. The trail rises and falls amid endless scented juniper groves. The pale moon deepens through a pink and saffron twilight. The stillness becomes almost palpable--then, suddenly, you jump right off the edge of the earth. The flat mesa has come to an edge. You look down, sheer down, 1,000 feet straight as a plummet--two canons narrow as a stone's toss have gashed deep trenches through the living rocks and with a whir of swift waters come together at the famous place known as the Bridge. You have come on your old friend the Rio Grande again, narrow and deep and blue from the mountain snows, an altogether different stream from the muddy Rio of the lower levels. Here it is joined by the Arroyo Hondo, another canon slashed through the rocks in a deep trench--both rivers silver in the moonlight, with a rush of rapids coming up the great height like wind in trees, or the waves of the sea.

What a host of old frontier worthies must have pulled themselves up with a jerk of amaze and dumb wonder, when they first came to this sheer jump off the earth! First the mailed warriors under Coronado; then the cowled Franciscans; then Fremont and Kit Carson and Beaubien and Governor Bent and Manuel Lisa, the fur trader, and a host of other knights of modern adventure.

I suppose a proper picture of the Bridge, or Arroyo Hondo, cannot be taken; for a good one never has been taken, though travelers and artists have been coming this way for a hundred years. The two canons are so close together and so walled that it is impossible to get both in one picture except from an airs.h.i.+p. It is as if the earth were suddenly rent, and you looked down on that underworld of which Indian legend tells so many wonder yarns. Don't mind wondering how you will go down!

The bronchos will manage that, where an Eastern horse would break his neck and yours, too. The driver jams on brakes; and you drop down a terribly steep grade in a series of switchbacks, or zigzags, to the Bridge. It is the most spectacularly steep road I know in America. It could not be any steeper and not drop straight; and there isn't anything between you and the drop but your horses' good sense. It is one of the places where you don't want to hit your horse; for if he jumps, the wagon will not keep to the trail. It will go over taking you and the horse, too.

But, before you know it, you have switched round the last turn and are rattling across the Bridge. Some Mexican teamsters are in camp below the rock wall of the river. The reflection of the figures and firelight and precipices in the deep waters calls up all sorts of tales of Arabian Nights and road robbers and old lawless days. Then, you pull up sharp at the toll house for supper, as quaint an inn as anything in Switzerland or the Himalayas. The back of the house is the rock wall of the canon.

The front is adobe. The halls are long and low and narrow, with low-roofed rooms off the front side only. From the Bridge you can go on to Taos by motor in moonlight; but the whole way by stage and motor in one day makes a hard trip, and there is as much of interest at the Bridge as at Taos. You don't expect to find settlers in this dim silver underworld, do you? Well, drive a few miles up the Arroyo Hondo, where the stream widens out into garden patch farms, and you will find as odd specimens of isolated humans as exist anywhere in the world--relics of the religious fanaticism of the secret lodges, of the Middle Ages--Penitentes, or Flagellantes, or Crucifixion people, who yearly at Lent re-enact all the sorrows of the Procession to the Cross, and until very recent years even re-enacted the Crucifixion.

After supper we strolled out down the canon. It is impossible to exaggerate its beauty. Each gash is only the width of the river with sides straight as walls. The walls are yellow and black basalt, all spotted with red where the burning bush has been touched by the frosts.

The rivers are clear, cold blue, because they are but a little way from the springs in the snows. Snows and clear water and frost in the Desert?

Yes: that is as the Desert is in reality, not in geography books. Below the Bridge, you can follow the Rio Grande down to some famous hot springs; and in this section, the air is literally spicy with the oil of sagebrush. At daybreak, you see the water ousels singing above the rapids, and you may catch the lilt of a mocking-bird, or see a bluebird examining some frost-touched berries. It is October; but the goldfinches, which have long since left us in the North, are in myriads here.

The second day at the Bridge, we drove up the Arroyo Hondo to see the Penitentes. It is the only way I know that you can personally visit a people who in every characteristic belong to the Twelfth Century. The houses of the Arroyo Hondo are very small and very poor; for the Penitente is thinking not of this world but of the world to come. The orchards are amazingly old. These people and their ancestors must have been here for centuries and as isolated from the rest of the world as if living back five centuries. The Penitente is not an Indian; he is a peon. Pueblo Indians repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic. He is really a relic of the secret lodge orders that overran Europe with religious disorders and fanatic practices in the Twelfth Century. Except for the Lenten processions, rites are practiced at night. There are the Brothers of the Light--La Luz--and the Brothers of the Darkness--Las Tinieblas. The meeting halls are known as Morados; and those seen by us were without windows and with only one narrow door. Women meet in one lodge, men in another. The sign manual of members.h.i.+p is a cross tattooed on forehead, chin or back. When a death occurs, the body is taken to the Morado, and a wake held. After Penitente rites have been performed, a priest is called in for final services; and up to the present, the priests have been unable to break the strength of these secret lodges. Members are bound by secret oath to help each other and stand by each other; and it is commonly charged that politicians join the Penitentes to get votes and doctors to get patients. Easter and Lent mark the grand rally of the year. On one hill above the Arroyo Hondo, you can see a succession of crosses where Penitentes have whipped themselves senseless with cactus belts, or dropped from exhaustion carrying a cross; and only last spring--1912--a woman marched carrying a great cross to which the naked body of her baby was bound. We pa.s.sed one cross erected to commemorate a woman who died from self-inflicted injuries suffered during the procession of 1907.

The procession emerges from the Morado chanting in low, doleful tune the Miserere. First come the Flagellantes, or marchers, scourging their naked backs with cactus belts and whips. Next march the cross carriers with a rattling of iron chains fastened to the feet; then, the general congregation. The march terminates at a great cross erected on a hilltop to simulate Golgotha. Why do the people do it? ”To appease divine wrath,” they say; but they might ask us--why have we dipsomaniacs and kleptomaniacs and monstrosities in our civilized life? Because ”Julia O'Grady and the Captain's lady are the same as two pins under their skins.” Because human nature dammed up from wholesome outlet of emotions, will find unwholesome vent; and these dolorous processions are only a reflex of the dark emotions hidden in a narrow canon shut off from the rest of the world.

They were not dolorous emotions that found vent as we drove back down Arroyo Hondo to the Bridge. Our driver got out a mouth organ. Then he played and sang s.n.a.t.c.hes of dance tunes of the old, old days in the True West.

”Allamahoo, right hand to your partner And grand hodoo.”

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