Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 3

Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 3

Tesuque is a type of a score or so of pueblos scattered along a line of

some 300 miles in northern New Mexico and Arizona. Formerly the dress of

these Indians was quite distinctive, but association with the whites has

modified its quality of late years, though it still retains some of the

old features—particularly in the case of the women, who are more

disposed than the men to conservatism. Their native costume is a dark

woolen gown belted at the waist and falling a little below the knees,

and a sort of cape of colored muslin fastened about the neck and hanging

down the back. The lower part of the legs is often swathed in a buckskin

extension of the moccasins in which the feet are encased. The hair is

banged low upon the forehead and both women’s and men’s are clubbed at

the back and bound with red yarn. The native attire of the men is a

loose cotton shirt worn outside short, wide trousers. Instead of a hat a

narrow _banda_ of colored cotton or silk is bound about the hair.

 

Each village has its local government—and a very competent sort it is—of

a democratic nature, a governor, as well as a few other officials, being

elected annually by popular vote. Besides these, there is a permanent

council of old men who assist in the direction of affairs. Most of the

Pueblo Indians are nominal adherents to Roman Catholicism, but have by

no means lost hold of their pagan faith. On the patron saint’s day a

public fiesta is always held. After mass in the church, there are native

dances and ceremonies, accompanied by feasting continuing well into the

night. November 12, St. James’s Day, is the day celebrated by Tesuque,

and visitors are many.[6]

 

The Pueblos are as a class industrious, fun-loving, and friendly to

white visitors. They are naturally hospitable and quickly responsive to

any who treat them sympathetically and as fellow human beings. The

lamentable fact that white Americans have too often failed in this

respect, acting towards them as though they were animals in a zoo, is

largely responsible for tales we hear of Indian surliness and ill-will.

Pueblo women are skillful potters, and while Tesuque does not now excel

in this art, one may pick up some interesting souvenirs both in clay and

beadwork. At any rate, you will enjoy seeing these things being made in

the common living-room of the house, while the corn is being ground on

the _metates_ or mealing stones, and the mutton stew simmers on the open

hearth. A knowledge of values first obtained at reputable traders’ shops

in Santa Fe, is advisable, however, before negotiating directly with the

Indians, as they are becoming pretty well schooled in the art of

charging “all the traffic will bear.” Tesuque produces a specialty in

the shape of certain dreadful little pottery images called “rain gods,”

which must not be taken seriously as examples of sound Pueblo art.[7]

 

Thirty-three miles north of Santa Fe on the Denver and Rio Grande

Railway is the village of Española, where a plain but comfortable hotel

makes a convenient base for visiting several points of interest in the

upper Rio Grande Valley. A mile to the south is Santa Clara pueblo,[8]

long famous for its beautiful shining black pottery almost Etruscan in

shape. The clay naturally burns red, but a second baking with the fuel

(dried chips of cattle manure), pulverized finely and producing a dense

black smoke, gives the ware its characteristic lustrous black. Seven

miles further down the river but on the other side, is another pueblo,

San Ildefonso, a picturesque village of 125 Indians, near the base of La

Mesa Huérfana. This is a flat-topped mountain of black lava, on whose

summit in 1693, several hundred Pueblos entrenched themselves and for

eight months stubbornly resisted the attempts of the Spanish under De

Vargas to bring them to terms. That was practically the last stand of

Pueblo rebeldom, which thirteen years before had driven every Spaniard

from the land. San Ildefonso has public fiestas on January 23 and

September 6.

 

Six miles north of Española and close to the Rio Grande is San Juan

pueblo, with a population of about 400 Indians. Here one is in the very

cradle of the white civilization of the Southwest. At this spot in the

summer of 1598, Don Juan de Oñate—he of the Conquest—arrived with his

little army of Spaniards, his Franciscan missionaries, his colonist

families, a retinue of servants and Mexican Indians, his wagons and

cattle, to found the capital of the newly won “kingdom” later to be

called New Mexico. The courtesy of the Indians there, who temporarily

gave up their own houses to the Spaniards, was so marked that their

pueblo became known as _San Juan de los Caballeros_ (Saint John of the

Gentlemen). Oñate’s settlement—of which no vestige now remains—is

believed to have been situated just across the Rio Grande from San Juan,

about where the hamlet and railway station of Chamita now stands. San

Juan pueblo is further distinguished as the birthplace of Popé, the

Indian to whose executive genius is due the success of the Pueblo

Rebellion of 1680. A picturesque figure, that same Popé, of the timber

dramatic heroes are made of. It is said that, while meditating the

rebellion, he journeyed to the enchanted lagoon of Shípapu, the place

where in the dim past the Pueblos had emerged from the underworld and

whither they return at death. There he conferred with the spirits of his

ancestors, who endued him with power to lead his people to victory.[9]

The San Juan women make a good black pottery similar to that of Santa

Clara. On Saint John’s Day, June 24, occurs a public fiesta, with

procession and dances, attracting visitors, white and red, from far and

near.

 

Having got thus far up the Rio Grande, let nothing deter you from

visiting Taos (they pronounce it _Towss_). By automobile it is about 50

miles northeast of Española or you can reach it quite expeditiously by

Denver & Rio Grande train to Taos Junction and auto-connection thence

about 30 miles to Taos.[10] Situated in a fertile plain, 7000 feet above

the sea, in the heart of the Southern Rockies, Taos is one of the most

charming places in America. It is in three parts. There is the outlying

hamlet Ranchos de Taos; then the picturesque Mexican town Fernandez de

Taos, famous in recent years for a resident artist colony whose pictures

have put Taos in the world of art; and lastly, there is the pueblo of

Taos. From very early times the pueblo has played an important role in

New Mexican history. It was here the San Juaneño Popé found the readiest

response to his plans of rebellion. Later the location on the confines

of the Great Plains made it an important trading center with the more

northern Indians. The annual summer fair for _cambalache_, or traffic by

barter, held at Taos in the latter part of the eighteenth century, was a

famous event, the Plains tribes bringing skins and furs and Indian

captives to trade for horses, beads and metal implements. The commercial

opportunities combined with the fertility of the soil and an unfailing

water supply led to the founding of Fernandez de Taos by whites. In the

days of Mexican supremacy part of the traffic over the Santa Fe Trail

passed this way and a custom house was here. The ruins of a large adobe

church in the pueblo form a memento of the troublous days of 1847, when

a small rebellion participated in by Mexicans and a few Taos Indians

took place here and the American governor, Bent, was murdered. At

Fernandez de Taos, the famous frontiersman Kit Carson lived for many

years, and here his grave may still be seen.

 

Taos pueblo, housing an Indian population of about 500, is the most

northern in New Mexico, and perhaps the most perfect specimen existing

of Pueblo architecture. It consists of two imposing pyramidal house

clusters of 5 to 7 stories—aboriginal apartment houses—and between them

happily flows the little Rio de Taos sparkling out of the Glorieta Cañon

near whose mouth the pueblo stands. The three-mile drive or walk from

Fernandez de Taos is very lovely, with the pueblo’s noble background of

mountains before you, their purple and green flanks wonderfully mottled

and dashed in autumn with the gold of the aspen forests. The men of Taos

are a tall, athletic sort, quite different in appearance from the more

southern Pueblos. They wear the hair parted in the middle and done at

the side in two braids which hang in front of the shoulders. They are

much addicted to their blankets; and one often sees them at work with

the blankets fastened about the waist and falling to the knees like a

skirt. In warm weather they sometimes substitute a muslin sheet for the

woolen blanket, and few sights are more striking than a Taos man thus

muffled to his eyebrows in pure white.

 

Annually on September 30th occurs the _Fiesta de San Gerónimo de Taos_,

which is one of the most largely attended of all Pueblo functions.

Crowds of Americans, Mexicans and Indians (a sprinkling of Apaches among

Pueblos of several sorts) line the terraced pyramids and make a scene so

brilliant and strange that one wonders that it can be in America. The

evening before, near sundown, there is a beautiful Indian dance in the

plaza of the pueblo, the participants bearing branches of quivering

aspens. With the sunset light upon the orange and yellow of the foliage

as the evening shadows gather, it is an unforgettable sight. Yes, you

must by all means see Taos. There are hotel accommodations at Fernandez

de Taos.[11]

 

But Española serves, too, as a base for outings of quite another sort.

One of these is to the remarkable prehistoric cliff village known as the

Puyé in the Santa Clara Cañon, about 10 miles west of Española. Here at

the edge of a pine forest a vast tufa cliff rises, its face marked with

pictographs of unknown antiquity and honeycombed with dwellings of a

vanished people, probably ancestors, of some of the present-day

Pueblos.[12] These cliff chambers are quite small, and their walls bear

still the soot from prehistoric fires. Climbing by an ancient trail to

the summit of the mesa of which the cliff is a side, you come upon the

leveled ruins of what was once a magnificent, terraced community house,

built of tufa blocks and containing hundreds of rooms. Rambling from

room to room, picking up now a bit of broken pottery, now a charred

corn-cob, poking into the ashes of fireplaces where the last embers were

quenched before history in America began, you experience, I hope, a

becoming sense of your youth as a white American. And the view from this

noble tableland—a view those ancient people had every day of their

lives! One wonders had they eyes to see it—the lovely valley of the Rio

Grande, purple chain after chain of mountains on every side, the jagged

peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, the Glorietas, the Jemes, and dim on the

far horizon, the Sierra Blanca in Colorado.

 

Also dotting the same plateau (this region by the way, is now called

Pajarito[13] Park) are numerous other prehistoric community houses—the

Otowi (with its curious tent-like rock formations), the Tsánkawi, the

Tchrega—all of absorbing interest to the archaeologic mind, but offering

not much that seems new to the average tourist who has seen the Puyé.

One, however, known as the Tyuonyi in the cañon of the Rito de los

Frijoles[14] should not be missed. It may be reached via Buckman, a

station on the D. & R. G. 12 miles south of Española. Thence it is about

15 miles over all sorts of a road to the brink of Frijoles Cañon. A

steep foot-trail there leads you down, a thousand feet or more, into the

gorge and after a short walk you are at the comfortable ranch house of

Judge A. G. Abbott, custodian of the Bandelier National Monument, under

which name the neighboring ruins are officially designated by the United

States Government, which owns them.[15] Considered merely as scenery,

the little, secluded cañon is one of the loveliest spots in New Mexico,

with its stretches of emerald meadows, its perennial stream and its

peaceful forest of stately pines. But it is the human interest given by

the vacant houses of a forgotten race—the cavate dwellings of the pink

and white tufa cliffs and the ruined communal dwellings on the cañon

floor and on the mesa top near by—that brings most visitors. That noted

ethnologist, the late Adolf F. Bandelier, wrote a romance with the scene

laid here and at the Puyé. It is entitled “The Delightmakers,” and a

reading of it will not only lend a living interest to these places, but

yield a world of information as to the mind and customs of the Pueblo

Indians. Visitors have the School of American Archaeology at Santa Fe to

thank for the painstaking work of excavation extending over years, that

uncovered many of these ancient dwelling places of their centuries of accumulated debris.