Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 5

Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 5

Northward from Albuquerque for 40 miles, the beautiful valley of the Rio

Grande contains much of appeal to the student of history and of Indian

life. That is the region called in the chronicle of Coronado’s

expedition, the Province of Tigüex (pronounced _tee-wesh_); and here

that doughty conquistador spent his first New Mexican winter (1540-41)

at a pueblo now vanished, in the neighborhood, it is believed, of the

picturesque town of Bernalillo[21] 17 miles north of Albuquerque. It was

a winter so marked with wanton deeds of deviltry by the soldiery towards

the peaceably disposed natives, that the whole region was soon seething

in revolt—but helpless revolt because of the guns and horses of those

profligate swashbucklers, who disgraced the Christianity they professed.

 

Several pueblos are still extant in that stretch. There is Sandia, a

moribund little place 10 miles from Albuquerque, and within walking

distance of Alameda Station on the railway, but hardly worth the trip.

North of Bernalillo a couple of miles is a summer pueblo, Ranchitos de

Santa Ana (the little farms of Santa Ana), occupied during the growing

season by Indians whose home pueblo, Santa Ana, is a dozen miles to the

northwest in a virtual desert overlooking the saline flats of the Jemes

River. Thither they go to dwell in winter and eat up the crops raised in

summer beside the great river. In the same direction 13 miles beyond

Santa Ana (25 from Bernalillo) is the important pueblo of the Jemes

(_Hay´-mes_) Indians, about 500 in number.[22] The village is

beautifully situated at the mouth of San Diego Cañon. Its public fiesta

is held on St. James’s Day, November 12, and is much attended by

Americans, Mexicans, Pueblos, Navajos and Apaches. The region nearby is

sprinkled with ruins of old pueblos which are the subject of

considerable literature of the antiquarian sort. A capital and reliable

popular article on the Jemes Indians by Mr. A. B. Reagan, appeared in

the April, 1917, issue of “El Palacio,” the journal of the

Archaeological Society of New Mexico. A few miles before reaching Jemes

the traveler passes the once powerful, but now small pueblo of Sia

(_See-a_), with a population of barely 100. Its decline is attributed in

part to remorseless inter-killing on suspicion of witchcraft, a sort of

superstition that the Pueblos, unlike ourselves, have not yet outgrown.

Its festival is on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady,

and is attended by many visiting Indians, especially Navajos, who give

it a special tinge of picturesqueness. From Albuquerque Jemes may be

reached directly by auto-mail stage which passes the pueblo and then

proceeds 13 miles further to Jemes Springs postoffice in San Diego

Cañon. Near this place are some medicinal springs of local repute—iron,

soda and sulphur—and a modest hotel of the country sort. The stage

leaves Albuquerque daily except Sunday, and if you do not mind a bit of

roughing it, the trip (about 50 miles to Jemes pueblo) will be an

experience to talk about.

 

Continuing up the Rio Grande from Bernalillo, you next come (10 miles

from Bernalillo, or 3 from Algodones Station on the Santa Fe) to the

pueblo of San Felipe at the foot of a long, black, treeless mesa on the

west bank of the river. Its fine, white Mission church, dating back some

200 years, is a prominent sight from the car windows of Santa Fe trains.

The ruins of a previous church and pueblo of the San Felipeños are

visible on the summit of the mesa, and a climb to them will reward you,

at least with a fine view of the Rio Grande valley. San Felipe’s

principal public fiesta is held May 1.

 

Another dozen miles up the river—but now on the east side—is the pueblo

of Santo Domingo, whose 800 Indians are about the most set-in-their-ways

of any in New Mexico. This conservatism serves, however, to make their

Green Corn Dance (held on August 4, the feast day of their patron Saint

Dominic), of especial worth, because the ceremony has been comparatively

little debased by the hybrid innovations which are spoiling many of the

native rites of the Pueblos. There are some preliminary ceremonies the

afternoon before, which it is interesting to view. The pueblo is easily

reached, as it is but a couple of miles from Domingo station on the

Santa Fe railway. The visitor is forewarned that there is a particularly

strong objection at Santo Domingo to picture-taking and cameras are

blacklisted. Even artists of the brush have been ejected from the

village. In passing, it should be stated that the dances of the Pueblos

are not jollifications as among white people, but religious

ceremonials—__EXPRESSION__s of thanksgiving to their supernal protectors for

blessings received and prayers for favors to come, as rain and bountiful

crops. Santo Domingo is famous for its beautiful pottery—a heavy ware,

but remarkable for an almost Greek grace of form, adorned with geometric

designs in black on pink or creamy white.

 

Still ascending the Rio Grande, you reach (by a pleasant drive of 10

miles from Domingo Station) the pueblo of Cochití (_co-chee-teé_), where

the ethnologist Bandelier once lived for a time, and studied the race he

came to know so well. It has more the appearance of a Mexican village

than of an Indian pueblo, for the houses are generally of one story and

detached one from another. The people, too (there are about 250), seem

more or less Mexicanized, but are hospitable and good-natured. The local

tradition is that it was the ancestors of the Cochiteños who occupied

the cliff dwellings of the Rito de los Frijoles. One who is robust

enough for horseback tours may secure a guide at Cochití and ascend to

that wild and beautiful region by immemorial trails through a rugged

mountain country dotted with ruins of several former homes and shrines

of the Cochití people, who in prehistoric times seem to have been

confirmed wanderers. The principal public fiesta at this pueblo occurs

on July 14, Saint Bonaventure’s Day, and is well worth attending, though

I know of no especial features distinguishing it. Pottery is made here,

too—some of it of a queer type running to animal forms, corpulent and

impossible. Both Cochití and Santo Domingo may be readily visited in one

day, if arrangements are made in advance through the Santa Fe agent at

Domingo. They are equally easy of access from Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV

THE DEAD CITIES OF THE SALINES

 

 

Southeasterly from Albuquerque some 20 miles the Manzano Mountains lift

their piny crests and drift southward to the Gallinas. From their feet

eastward stretches the wide treeless Estancia Valley, and in the lap of

it lies a noteworthy cluster of saline ponds and lagoons, whose bitter

waters, shining in the blistering sun, are a mockery to the thirsty.

These are “the accursed lakes”[23] of Pueblo tradition—originally fresh

and abounding in fish, they say, but now lifeless and undrinkable,

cursed of the ancient gods because of the sinfulness of a witch who

dwelt there once. If you would know how this change came about, you

should read the tale called “The Accursed Lake” in Mr. Charles F.

Lummis’s delightful book “Pueblo Indian Folk Stories.” These lakes are

all heavily alkaline except one and that is saline—a source of salt from

time immemorial to the Indians of the pueblos. Coming from near and far,

they would plant their prayer plumes by its white margin and sprinkle

its waves with sacred meal in recognition of the divine largesse they

were about to receive. For the Indian tradition is that this lake was

the abode of a divinity whom they called Salt Old Woman or Salt Mother,

and the salt was her free gift to men. She is circumstantially described

as wearing white boots and a white cotton dress, and carrying in her

hand a white abalone shell, which was so soft and pliable that she could

fold it like a handkerchief.[24] It is said the salt of this lake has

found its way through barter to Parral in Old Mexico.

 

To the tourist the attraction in the Estancia Valley is the presence of

some quaint old plaza villages dating from the days of the Spanish

occupation, and certain imposing ruins of Franciscan Mission churches of

seventeenth century construction standing in the midst of crumbled

Pueblo towns. These are not in the open valley but in the foothills of

the Manzanos and the Gallinas, and are easily visited from Mountainair,

an American town on the “Belén Cut-off” of the Santa Fe Railway. Here is

a small hotel, and automobiles may be hired.

 

The most famous of the ruins is the Gran Quivira at the edge of the

Gallinas foothills, 24 miles south of Mountainair. They are the remains

of a large pueblo of low, stone houses, covering altogether about 80

acres and once housing perhaps a couple of thousand souls. There are the

ruins of several _estufas_, of irrigation works, and of two Christian

churches. The pueblo occupies the narrow crest of a ridge overlooking a

vast, lonely, cedar- and piñon-dotted plain that reaches to far-off,

dreamy mountain ranges. It is in a solitude of solitudes wrapped in the

silence of death, and as almost everywhere in the plateau region of

northern New Mexico and Arizona, one has the feeling of being alone on

the roof of the world, though the elevation here is really but 6800

feet. The most conspicuous feature of this shattered town is the larger

of the two churches whose gaunt, gray, roofless walls of flat limestone

pieces laid in mortar and rising to a height of 30 feet, are visible to

the traveler long before he reaches the place. Seen “from the northeast,

through vistas of cedars and junipers,” to quote Bandelier, “the ruins

shine in pallid light like some phantom city of the desert.” Adjoining

the church, are the ruins of a _convento_ of several small rooms and a

refectory, built about an interior courtyard. The whole has an

unfinished appearance, and Bandelier believed that work on the building

was suddenly interrupted and never resumed.

 

Indeed, the whole place is shrouded in mystery—its beginning and its end

are alike in the twilight. No record has been left by the old

chroniclers of any mission called Gran Quivira; but there is frequent

mention by them of Tabirá, whose location fairly corresponds to this.

That was a town of the Piro Pueblos, where an important Mission was

established about 1630 by Padre Francisco de Acevedo. It ceased to be

heard of after half a century, and it is believed that repeated raids of

the barbarous Apaches—the red terror of the peacable Pueblos—caused the

abandonment of the village. In all human probability that Tabirá is this

Gran Quivira, but how the latter name became attached to these ruins has

never been satisfactorily explained; for, as has already been stated,

Quivira was Coronado’s name for the country of the Wichitas, far away in

Kansas. The Piro people, who are believed to have inhabitated this

pueblo (and that of Abó, of which something shortly), are about as

extinct as their towns. Only an insignificant remnant, and these

speaking an alien tongue, exist today, in the Mexican State of

Chihuahua.

 

The hill which the Gran Quivira ruins occupy is of limestone, and

underlaid, as limestone hills often are, with hollownesses that give

back in places an audible echo to one’s footfalls. Popular fancy has

been caught by these givings-off of the underworld, and all sorts of

fables have attached themselves to this desolate place. These have

mostly to do with buried treasure. It has been thought, for instance,

that here in the caverns of this hill is really the store of gold and

jewels, the hope of which, like a will-of-the-wisp, lured Coronado on

and ever on, to disappointment and a broken heart. Another tradition

(quoted by Mr. Paul A. F. Walter, in “The Cities That Died of Fear”[25])

tells of a hidden cave in the hill where the last Piros are said to have

retreated with their belongings, including vast treasure brought from

Mexico by the Franciscan Fathers,[26] and that an earthquake sealed them

and their treasure up together. Of course, such stories have brought

hither innumerable treasure seekers, who for years have gophered the

hill industriously but have got nothing but sore muscles, arrowheads,

and broken pottery. The most picturesque of these delvers was a blind

woman, a Mrs. Clara Corbyn, who acquired homestead rights on the north

end of Gran Quivira. Lacking the wherewithal to finance excavations, she

traveled the country over from the Pacific to the Atlantic, endeavoring

to procure money backing for her scheme, and to that end even wrote a

musical romance, which she called “La Gran Quivira.” Failing, she died

not long ago in Los Angeles—of a broken heart, it is said—and the Museum

of New Mexico eventually secured her homestead interest.[27] The major

portion of these ruins belongs to the United States, forming the Gran Quivira National Monument.