Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 1

Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 1

Finding the Worth While in the Southwest

Author: Charles Francis Saunders

PREFACE

 

 

No part of the United States is so foreign of aspect as our great

Southwest. The broad, lonely plains, the deserts with their mystery and

color, the dry water courses, the long, low mountain chains seemingly

bare of vegetation, the oases of cultivation where the fruits of the

Orient flourish, the brilliant sunshine, the deliciousness of the pure,

dry air—all this suggests Syria or northern Africa or Spain. Added to

this are the remains everywhere of an old, old civilization that once

lived out its life here—it may have been when Nineveh was building or

when Thebes was young. Moreover, there is the contemporary interest of

Indian and Mexican life such as no other part of the country affords.

 

In this little volume the author has attempted, in addition to outlining

practical information for the traveler, to hint at this wealth of human

association that gives the crowning touch to the Southwest’s charm of

scenery. The records of Spanish explorers and missionaries, the legends

of the aborigines (whose myths and folklore have been studied and

recorded by scholars like Bandelier, Matthews, Hough, Cushing,

Stevenson, Hodge, Lummis, and others) furnish the raw material of a

great native literature. Painters long since discovered the fascination

of our Southwest; writers, as yet, have scarcely awakened to it.

 

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

 

CHAPTER PAGE

I Santa Fe, the Royal City of St. Francis’s Holy Faith 1

II The Upper Rio Grande, its Pueblos and Cliff Dwellings 20

III Roundabout Albuquerque 43

IV The Dead Cities of the Salines 56

V Of Acoma, City of the Marvellous Rock; and Laguna 68

VI To Zuñi, the Center of the Earth, via Gallup 82

VII El Morro, the Autograph Rock of the Conquistadores 93

VIII The Storied Land of the Navajo 102

IX The Homes of the Hopis, Little People of Peace 116

X The Petrified Forest of Arizona 130

XI Flagstaff as a Base 137

XII The Grand Cañon of the Colorado River in Arizona 150

XIII Montezuma’s Castle and Well, Which Montezuma Never Saw 162

XIV San Antonio 176

XV In the Country of the Giant Cactus 188

XVI Southern California 204

A Postscript on Climate, Ways and Means 222

Index 227

 

 

 

 

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 

 

FACING PAGE

An Acoma Indian Dance 72

Laguna, the Mother Pueblo of Seven 73

Bead Maker, Zuñi Pueblo 82

A Street in Acoma Pueblo 83

Old Church, Acoma Pueblo 88

A Sunny Wall in Zuñi 89

Casa Blanca or White House 116

El Morro or Inscription Rock, N. M. 117

In the North Petrified Forest 135

A Corner in Santa Fe, N. M. 136

Old Governor’s Palace, Santa Fe, N. M. 162

Montezuma’s Castle 163

San José de Aguayo 184

San Xavier del Bac, Arizona 185

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER I

SANTA FE—THE ROYAL CITY OF SAINT FRANCIS’S HOLY FAITH

 

 

Someone—I think it was that picturesque historian of our Southwest, Mr.

Charles F. Lummis—has summed up New Mexico as “sun, silence and adobe;”

and of these three components the one that is apt to strike the Eastern

newcomer most forcibly is adobe. This homely gift of nature—hard as

brick in dry weather, plastic as putty and sticky as glue in wet—is the

bulwark of the New Mexican’s well-being. His crops are raised in it; he

fences in his cattle with it; he himself lives in it; for of it are

built those colorless, square, box-like houses, flat-roofed and eaveless

which, on our first arrival in New Mexico, we declared an architectural

abomination, and within a week fell eternally in love with. An adobe

house wall is anywhere from two to five feet thick, a fact that conduces

to coolness in summer, warmth in winter, and economy at all seasons.

Given possession of a bit of ground, you grub up a few square yards of

the earth, mix it with water and wheat chaff, and shovel the mixture

into a wooden mold. You then lift the mold and lo! certain big, brown

bricks upon the ground. These the fiery New Mexican sun bakes hard for

you in a couple of days—bricks that are essentially the same as those of

ancient Babylon and Egypt, and the recipe for which (received by the

Spanish probably from their Moorish conquerors) is one of Spain’s most

valued contributions to America. Old Santa Fe was built entirely of this

material, and most of latter day Santa Fe still is, though there is a

growing disposition on the part of the well-to-do to substitute burned

brick and concrete.

 

As a rule these adobe dwellings are of one story, and the more

pretentious are constructed partly or entirely about an inner court,

such as in Spain is called a _patio_, but in New Mexico a _plazita_,

that is, a little plaza. A cheerful sanctuary is this _plazita_, where

trees cast dappled shadows and hollyhocks and marigolds bloom along the

sunny walls. Upon it the doors and windows of the various rooms open,

and here the family life centers. By the kitchen door Trinidad prepares

her _frijoles_ and chili, while the children tease her for tidbits; upon

the grass the house rugs and _serapes_ are spread on cleaning days, in

kaleidoscopic array, and beaten within an inch of their lives; here, of

summer evenings Juan lounges and smokes and Juanita swings in the

hammock strumming a guitar, or the family gramophone plays “La

Golondrina.”

 

Comparisons are always invidious, but if there be among the cities of

the United States, one that is richer in picturesqueness, in genuine

romance, in varied historic, archaeologic and ethnologic interest, than

Santa Fe, it has still I think to make good its claims. The distinction

of being the oldest town in our country, as has sometimes been claimed,

is, however, not Santa Fe’s.[1] Indeed, the exact date of its founding

is still subject to some doubt, though the weight of evidence points to

1605. Nor was it even the original white settlement in New Mexico. That

honor belongs to the long since obliterated San Gabriel, the site of

which was on or near the present-day hamlet of Chamita, overlooking the

Rio Grande about 35 miles north of Santa Fe. There in 1598 the conqueror

of New Mexico, Don Juan de Oñate (a rich citizen of Zacatecas, and the

Spanish husband, by the way, of a granddaughter of Montezuma)

established his little capital, maintaining it there until the second

town was founded. To this latter place was given the name _La Villa Real

de Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís_—the Royal City of Saint Francis of

Assisi’s Holy Faith. Naturally that was too large a mouthful for daily

use, and it was long ago pared down to just Santa Fe, though Saint

Francis never lost his status as the city’s patron. In point of

antiquity, the most that can justly be claimed for it is that it is the

first permanent white settlement in the West.

 

The situation of Santa Fe is captivating, in the midst of a sunny,

breeze-swept plain in the lap of the Southern Rockies, at an elevation

of 7000 feet above the sea. Through the middle of the city flows the

little, tree-bordered Rio de Santa Fé, which issues a couple of miles

away from a gorge in the imposing Sierra Sangre de Cristo (the Mountains

of the Blood of Christ), whose peaks, often snow-clad, look majestically

down in the north from a height of 10,000 to 13,000 feet. The town is

reached from Lamy[2] by a branch of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe

Railway, which climbs due north for 18 miles through an uninhabitated

waste dotted with low-growing piñon, juniper and scrub. At the station a

small army of bus, hack and automobile men greet you with enthusiasm,

and to reach your hotel you have only the choice of them or your own

trotters, for street cars there are none. In Santa Fe, however, no place

is far from any other place—the population is but a scant 8500. Of these

a large percentage is of Spanish blood, and Spanish speech and Spanish

signs engage your attention on every hand.

 

The hub of the city is the Plaza—warm and sunny in winter, shady and

cool in summer. Seated here on a bench you soon arrive at a lazy man’s

notion of the sort of place you are in. Here the donkeys patter by laden

with firewood—dearest of Santa Fe’s street pictures; here Mexican

peddlers of apples and _dulces_, _piñones_ and shoe-strings ply their

mild trade, and Tesuque Indians, with black hair bound about with

scarlet _bandas_, pass by to the trader’s, their blankets bulging with

native pottery, or, in season, their wagons loaded with melons, grapes,

apples, and peaches. Of afternoons the newsboys loiter about crying the

papers, and you have a choice of your news in English or Spanish; and on

Sundays and holidays the band plays athletically in its little kiosk,

the crowd promenading around and around the while very much as in Old

Mexico, and strewing the ground behind it with piñon and peanut shells.