Part 11 (1/2)

”Watch your partner and watch her close; And when you catch her, a double doze.”

”The c.o.c.k flies out and the hen flies in-- All hands round and go it agen.”

In fact, if you want to find the old True West, you'll find it undiluted and pristine on the trip to Taos.

CHAPTER XII

TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA

Taos, Santa Fe and El Paso--these were to the Southwest what Port Royal, Quebec and Montreal were to French Canada, or Boston, Salem and Jamestown to the colonists of the pre-Revolutionary days on the Atlantic. El Paso was the gateway city from the old Spanish Dominions of the South. Santa Fe was the central military post, and Taos was the watch tower on the very outskirts of the back-of-beyond of Spanish territory in the wilderness land of the New World.

Before Santa Fe became the terminus of the trail for American traders from Missouri and Kansas, Taos was the terminus of the old fur trader trail, in the days when Louisiana extended from New Orleans to Oregon.

Here, such famous frontiersmen as Jim Bridgar and Manuel Lisa and Jedediah Smith and Colonel Ashley and Kit Carson came to barter beads and calico and tobacco and firewater for hides and fur and native-woven blankets and turquoise and rude silver ornaments hammered out of Spanish bullion into necklace and bracelet. What Green's Hole and the Three Tetons were to the Middle West, Taos was to the Southwest. Mountains round Taos rise 14,000 feet from sea level. Snow glimmers from the peaks more than half the year; and mountain torrents water the valley with a system of irrigation that never fails. Coming out of the mountains from the north, Taos was the natural halfway house on the trail south to Old Mexico. Coming out of the Desert from the south, Taos was the last walled city seen before the plunge into the wilderness of forests and mountains in the No-Man's-Land of the north. ”Walled city,”

you say, ”before the coming of white men to the West?” Yes, you can see those very walls to-day, walls antedating the coming of Coronado in 1540 by hundreds of years.

No motor can climb up and down the steep switchback to the Arroyo Hondo of the Bridge. Cars taken over that trail must be towed; but from the Bridge, you can go on to Taos by motor. As you ascend the mesa above the river bed, you see the mountains ahead rise in black basalt like castellated walls, with tower and battlement jagged into the very clouds. Patches of yellow and red splotch the bronzing forests, where frost has touched the foliage; and you haven't gone very many miles into the lilac mist of the morning light--s.h.i.+mmering as it always s.h.i.+mmers above the sagebrush blue and sandy gold of the Upper Mesas--before you hear the laughter of living waters coming down from the mountain snows.

One understands why the Indians chose the uplands; while the white man, who came after, had to choose the shadowy bottoms of the walled-in canons. Someone, back in the good old days when we were not afraid to be poetic, said something about ”traveling on the wings of the morning.” I can't put in words what he meant; but you do it here--going up and up so gradually that you don't realize that you are in the lap, not of mountains, but of mountain peaks; breathing, not air, but ozone; uplifted by a great weight being taken off spirit and body; looking at life through rose-colored tints, not metaphorically, but really; for there is something in this high rare air--not dust, not moisture--that splits white light into its seven prismatic hues. You look through an atmosphere wonderfully rare, but it is never clear, white light. It is lavender, or lilac, or primrose, or gold, or red as blood according to the hours and the mood of hours; and if you want to carry the metaphor still farther, you may truthfully add that the hours on these high uplands are dancing hours. You never feel time to be a heavy, slow thing that oppresses the soul.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Climbing home over your neighbor's roof and bolting your door by pulling up the ladder is customary in Taos]

As the streams laugh down from the mountains, ranches grow more and more frequent. It is characteristic of the West that you don't cross the _acequias_ on bridges. You cross them on two planks, with risk to your car if the driver swerve at the steering wheel. All the houses are red earth adobe, thick of wall to shut out both heat and cold, with a smell of juniper wood in the fireplaces of each room. Much of this land--nearly all of it, in fact--is owned by the Taos Indians and held in common for pasturage and cultivation. t.i.tle was given by Spain four centuries ago, and the same t.i.tle holds to-day in spite of white squatters' attempt to break down the law by cutting the wire of the pasture fences and taking the case to the courts. It was in this way that squatters broke down the t.i.tle of old Spanish families to thousands and hundreds of thousands of acres granted before American occupation.

To be sure, an American land commission took evidence on these t.i.tles, in the quarrel between Yankee squatter and Spanish don; but the squatter had ”friends in court.” The old Spanish don hadn't. He saw t.i.tles that had held good from 1540 slipping from his neighbor's hands; and he either contested the case to lose out before he had begun, or sold and sold at a song to save the wreckage of his fortunes. Of all the Spanish land grants originally part.i.tioning off what is now New Mexico, I know of only one held by the family of the original grantee; and it is now in process of part.i.tion. It is an untold page of Southwestern history, this ”stampeding” of Spanish t.i.tles. Some day, when we are a little farther away from it, the story will be told. It will not make pleasant reading, nor afford a bill of health to some family fortunes of the Southwest.

Perjuries, a.s.sa.s.sinations, purchase in open markets of judges drawing such small pittances that they were in the auction mart for highest bid, forged doc.u.ments, incendiary fires to destroy true t.i.tles--these were the least and most decent of the crimes of this era. ”Ramona” tells what happened to Indian t.i.tles in California. Paint Helen Hunt Jackson's colors red instead of gray; multiply the crimes by ten instead of two; and you have a faint picture of the land-jockey period of New Mexican history. Something of this sort is going on at Taos to-day among the pueblos for their land, and down at Sacaton among the Pimas for water.

Treaty guaranteed the Indian his rights, but at Taos the squatter cut the pueblo fences and carried the case to court. At Sacaton, the big squatter, the irrigation company, took the Pimas' water; so that the Indian can no longer raise crops. If you want to know what the courts do in these cases, ask the pueblo governor at Taos; or the Pima chief at Sacaton.

It is late September. A parrot calls out in Spanish from the center of the patio where our rooms look out on an arcade running round the court in a perfect square. A mocking-bird trills saucily from his cage amid the cosmos bloom. Donkeys and burros amble past the rear gate with loads of wood strapped to their backs. Your back window looks out on the courtyard. Your front window faces the street across from a plaza, or city square. Stalwart, thick-set, muscular figures, hair banded back by red and white scarfs, trousers of a loose, white pantaloon sort, tunic a gray or white blanket, wrapped Arab fas.h.i.+on from shoulders to waist, stalk with quick, nervous tread along the plaza; for it is the feast of Saint Geronimo presently. The whole town is in festal attire. There will be dancing all night and all day, and rude theatricals, and horse and foot races; and the plaza is agog with sightseers. No, it is not Persia; and it is not Palestine; and it is not Spain. It is just plain, commonplace America out at Taos--white man's Taos, at the old Columbia Hotel, which is the last of the old-time Spanish inns.

As you motor into the town, the long rows of great cottonwoods and poplars attest the great age of the place. Through windows deep set in adobe cas.e.m.e.nt and flush with the street, you catch glimpses of inner patios where oleanders and roses are still in bloom. Then you see the roof windows of artists' studios, and find yourself not only in an old Spanish town but in the midst of a modern art colony, which has been called into being by the unique coloring, form and antiquity of life in the Southwest. A few years ago, when Lungren and Philips and Sharpe and a dozen others began portraying the marvelous coloring of the Southwestern Desert with its almost Arab life, the public refused to accept such spectacular, un-American work as true. Such pictures were diligently ”skied” by hanging committees, and a few hundred dollars was deemed a good price. To-day, Southwestern art forms a school by itself; and where commissions used to go begging at hundreds of dollars, they to-day command prices of thousands and tens of thousands. When I was in Taos, one artist was filling commissions for an Eastern collector that would mount up to prices paid for the best work of Watts and Whistler.

It is a brutal way to put art in terms of the dollar bill; but it is sometimes the only way to make a people realize there are prophets in our own country.

Columbia Hotel is really one of the famous old Spanish mansions occupying almost the entire side of a plaza square. From its street entrance, you can see down the little alleyed street where dwelt Kit Carson in the old days. His old home is almost a wreck to-day, and there does not seem to be the slightest movement to convert it into a shrine where the hundreds of sightseers who come to the Indian dances could brush up memories of old frontier heroes. There are really only four streets in Taos, all facing the Plaza or town square. Other streets are alleys running off these, and when you see a notary's sign out as ”alcalde,” it does not seem so very far back to the days when Spanish dons lounged round the Plaza wearing silk capes and velvet trousers and buckled shoes, and Spanish _conquistadores_ rode past armed cap-a-pie, and Spanish grand dames stole glances at the outside world through the lattices of the mansion houses. In some of these old Spanish houses, you will find the deep cas.e.m.e.nt windows very high in the wall. I asked a descendant of one of the old Spanish families why that was. ”For protection,” she said.

”Indians?” I asked.

”No--Spanish women were not supposed to see, or be seen by, the outside world.”

The pueblo proper lies about four miles out from the white man's town.

Laguna, Acoma, Zuni, the Three Mesas of the Tusayan Desert--all lie on hillsides, or on the very crest of high acclivities. Taos is the exception among purely Indian pueblos. It lies in the lap of the valley among the mountains, two castellated, five story adobe structures, one on each side of a mountain stream. In other pueblo villages, while the houses may adjoin one another like stone fronts in our big cities, they are not like huge beehive apartment houses. In Taos, the houses are practically two great communal dwellings, with each apartment a.s.signed to a special clan or family. In all, some 700 people dwell in these two huge houses. How many rooms are there? Not less than an average of three to each family. Remnants of an ancient adobe wall surround the entire pueblo. A new whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the village, but you can still see the old one pitted with cannon-ball and bullet, where General Price sh.e.l.led it in the uprising of the pueblos after American occupation. Men wear store trousers and store hats. You see some modern wagons. Except for these, you are back in the days of Coronado. All the houses can be entered only by ladders that ascend to the roofs and can be drawn up--the pueblo way of bolting the door. The houses run up three, four and five stories. They are adobe color outside, that is to say, a pinkish gray; and whitewashed spotlessly inside. Watch a woman draped in white linen blanket ascending these ladders, and you have to convince yourself that you are not in the Orient. Down by the stream, women with red and blue and white shawls over their heads, and feet encased in white puttees, are was.h.i.+ng blankets by beating them in the flowing water. Go up the succession of ladders to the very top of a five storied house, and look out. You can see the pasture fields, where the herds graze in common. On the outskirts of the village, men and boys are thres.h.i.+ng, that is--they are chasing ponies round and round inside a kraal, with a flag stuck up to show which way the wind blows, one man forking chaff with the wind, another sc.r.a.ping the grain outside the circle.

Glance inside the houses. The upstairs is evidently the living-room; for the fireplace is here, and the pot is on. Off the living-room are corn and meal bins, and you can see the _metate_ or stone on which the corn is ground by the women as in the days of Old Testament record. Though there is a new Mission church dating from the uprising in the forties, and an old Mission church dating almost from 1540, you can see from the roof dozens of _estufas_, where the men are practicing for their dances and masked theatricals. Tony, the a.s.sistant governor, an educated man of about forty who has traveled with Wild West shows, acts as our guide, and tells us about the squatters trying to get the Indian land. How would you like an intruder to sit down in the middle of your farm and fence off 160 acres? The Indians didn't like it, and cut the fences.

Then the troops were sent out. That was in 1910--a typical ”uprising,”

when the white man has both troops and courts on his side. The case has gone to the courts, and Tony doesn't expect it to be settled very soon.