Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 6

Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 6

Abó, that other dead pueblo of the Piros, is about 12 miles southwest of

Mountainair, or 4 miles west of Abó station on the Santa Fe Railway.

Gran Quivira you see on its hilltop for miles before you reach it, but

of Abó your first view comes with the shock of an unexpected delight.

Your car climbs a hill through a bit of wooded wilderness, and, the

crest attained, there flashes on your sight from below, an exquisite

little sunlit valley. In the midst of it is a hillock, and on and about

this is scattered the desolated, roofless pueblo with its noble church,

ruined too, of San Gregorio de Abó. A thread of living water—the Arroyo

de Abó—cuts its way through the valley which is bounded on the west by

the lovely chain of the Manzanos. Unfortunately, the ruin of the old

church still goes on—the decay hastened, I believe, by the fact that

latter-day settlers have borne off much of its stone and timber for

their private use. As it now stands, the high, jagged walls of the

building resemble as much as anything a gigantic broken tooth, and

standing in this solitary place are picturesque to a degree. The

material is red sandstone and the edifice dates from about 1630—the

founder being the same Padre de Acevedo that is credited with

establishing Gran Quivira. He died here at Abó, and was buried in the

church on August 1, 1644. This pueblo, like Gran Quivira, is believed to

have been abandoned because of Apache raids, and was extinct before the

great rebellion of 1680.[28]

 

A few miles from the old pueblo, and close to the railway line there are

some low cliffs, forming one side of a gorge once called _El Cañon de la

Pintada_, or the Painted Rocks of Abó Cañon. This spot is a sort of

aboriginal picture gallery worth a visit by the curious in such matters.

The sheltered places on the cliff-face are adorned for a considerable

distance with drawings of evident antiquity in various colors—yellow,

green, red, white. They are mostly representative of human figures, one

or two apparently of the clowns who play prankish parts in many of the

present-day Pueblo ceremonies. Others are symbols that still survive in

the religious rites of the Pueblos.

 

Eight miles northwest of Mountainair (and a little more due north of

Abó) is Quaraí, another forsaken pueblo, the ruins of whose fine old

Mission church may be seen a mile away. My own first view of it was

dramatic enough, the red, sandstone walls 20 feet high or more, gaunt

and jagged, silhouetted sharply against a sky black with storm clouds

whence rain banners wavered downward, and athwart them now and then

forked lightnings shot and spit. Quaraí was a walled town, and some

excavation work, done recently by the Santa Fe archaeologists, has

brought to light among other things the remains of a round community

building resembling the Tyuonyi in the Cañon Rito de los Frijoles.[29]

Close at hand is a cottonwood grove refreshed by an abundant spring, a

favorite picnic ground for the country folk roundabout. Other ruins in

the vicinity and signs of ancient fields here and there indicate that

Quaraí was a place of importance in its day, and doubtless for a long

time before the Spanish occupation. Its church is believed to have been

built about 1628 and was dedicated to La Inmaculada Concepcion. This was

the Mission of that Padre de la Llana whose remains, after much travel,

are now at rest beneath the altar in the Cathedral at Santa Fe.

 

About 7 miles northward from Quaraí, nestling at the foot of Manzano

Peak,[30] is an excellent example of the old-fashioned plaza village,

called Manzano, which is Spanish for apple tree. The reason for the name

is the presence there of a couple of ancient apple orchards, which are

believed to date back to the time of the Franciscan Missions, and

doubtless were set out by the Fathers of Quaraí, some 250 years ago. The

village is of the typical adobe architecture of New Mexico, and though

not so old as it looks, having been settled about 1825, it is very

foreign of aspect. With its plaza, its old-fashioned flowers in the

gardens, its houses massed one above another on the side of a hill that

is topped by a great wooden cross, its murmurous _acéquia_, and its fine

old Spanish _torreon_ or tower of defense, Manzano holds features of

picturesqueness enough to be worth a trip in itself. A unique feature of

the place is the Manzano Lake which occupies a depression in the midst

of the village—a charming sheet of water, beautiful and fragrant in

season with water lilies. The source of the Lake is a magnificent spring

hardby. To reach it, one climbs the hillside a quarter-mile or so, and

then descends into a shaded hollow, where the cool water gushes up into

a colossal bowl, and brimming over quickly sinks into the ground to

re-appear below and form the village lake. The spring is locally known

as _El Ojo del Gigante_—the Giant’s Eye—and is famed throughout the

State as a very marvel among springs.

 

If one have time and inclination, the Estancia Valley, its lakes and

ruins and Mexican villages may be made the objective of a trip by

automobile from Santa Fe or Albuquerque. The roads in good weather are

fair, as unimproved roads go, and in the mountain part pass through a

wooded region of much loveliness—sunny park-like forests of pine and

oak, with numerous rivulets and charming wild gardens. From Albuquerque

to Mountainair by this route is about 75 miles.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER V

OF ACOMA, CITY OF THE MARVELLOUS ROCK, AND LAGUNA

 

 

The oldest occupied town in the United States, and in point of situation

perhaps the most poetic, is Acoma (_ah´co-ma_), occupying the flat

summit of a huge rock mass whose perpendicular sides rise 350 feet out

of a solitary New Mexican plain.[31] It is situated 15 miles southwest

of the Santa Fe Railway station of Laguna, where modest accommodations

are provided for travelers who stop over. The inhabitants of Acoma,

numbering about 700, are Pueblo Indians, whose ancestors founded this

rockborne town before the white history of the Southwest began. Coronado

found it here in 1540. _El Peñol Maravilloso_—the Rock Marvellous—the

old chroniclers called it. “A city the strangest and strongest,” says

Padre Benavides, writing of it in 1630, “that there can be in the

world.”

 

They will take you from Laguna to Acoma in an automobile over a road,

little better than a trail, whose traversability depends more or less on

weather conditions not only that day, but the day before.[32] It winds

through a characteristic bit of central New Mexico landscape, breezy,

sunlit and long-vistaed, treeless save for scattering piñon and juniper.

Wild flowers bespangle the ground in season; and mountains—red, purple,

amethystine, weather-worn into a hundred fantastic shapes—rise to view

on every hand. In July and August the afternoon sky customarily becomes

massed with cloud clusters, and local showers descend in long, wavering

bands of darkness—here one, there another. Traveling yourself in

sunshine beneath an island of clear turquoise in such a stormy sky, you

may count at one time eight or ten of these picturesque streamers of

rain on the horizon circle. Jagged lightnings play in one quarter of the

heavens while broken rainbows illumine others. Nowhere else in our

country is the sky so very much alive as in New Mexico and Arizona in

summer. Nowhere else, I think, as in this land of fantastic rock forms,

of deep blue skies, and of wide, golden, sunlit plains, do you feel so

much like an enchanted traveler in a Maxfield Parrish picture.

 

Though the cliffs of Acoma are visible for several miles before you

reach the Rock, you are almost at its base before you distinguish any

sign of the village—the color of its terraced houses being much the same

as that of the mesa upon which they are set. The soft rocky faces have

been cut into grotesque shapes by the sand of the plain which the winds

of ages have been picking up and hurling against them. There are strange

helmeted columns, slender minarets and spires that some day perhaps a

tempest will snap in two, dark, cool caverns which your fancy pictures

as dens of those ogreish divinities you have read of Indians’ believing

in.

 

Your first adventure at Acoma—and it is a joyous one—is climbing the

Rock to the village on top. There are several trails. One is broad and

easy, whereby the Pueblo flocks come up from the plains to be folded for

the night, and men ahorseback travel. Shorter is the one your Indian

guide will take you, by a gradual sandy ascent, to the base of the

cliff. There you are face to face with a crevice up which you ascend by

an all but perpendicular aboriginal stairway of stone blocks and

boulders piled upward in the crack. Handholes cut in the rock wall

support you over ticklish places, until finally you clamber out upon the

flat summit. In Coronado’s time you would have been confronted there by

a wall of loose stones which the Acomas had built to roll down on the

heads of the unwelcome. Today, instead, the visitor is apt to be greeted

by an official of the pueblo exacting a head-tax of a dollar for the

privilege of seeing the town, and picture-taking extra!

 

I think this precipitous trail is the one known as _El Camino del Padre_

(the Father’s Way), which is associated with a pretty bit of history.

The first permanent Christian missionary at Acoma was the Franciscan

Juan Ramirez. Now the Acomas had never been friendly to the Spaniards,

and it was only after a three days’ hard battle in 1599, resulting in

the capture and burning of the town by the Spaniards, that the Indians

accepted vassalage to that inexplicable king beyond the sea.[33]

Naturally, no friendly feeling was engendered by this episode; so when

this Padre Ramirez, years afterward, was seen approaching the Rock one

day—it was in 1629—quite alone and unarmed save with cross and breviary

(having walked all the way from Santa Fe, a matter of 175 miles) the

Acomas decided to make short work of him. The unsuspecting father

started briskly up the rocky stairway, and when he came within easy

range, the watching Indians shot their arrows at him. Then a remarkable

thing happened. A little girl, one of a group looking over the edge of

the precipice, lost her balance and fell out of sight apparently to her

death. A few minutes later, the undaunted padre whom the shelter of the

cliff had saved from the arrows, appeared at the head of the trail

holding in his arms the little child smiling and quite unharmed. Unseen

by the Indians, she had lit on a shelving bit of rock from which the

priest had tenderly lifted her. So obvious a miracle completely changed

the Indians’ feelings towards the long-gowned stranger, and he remained

for many years, teaching his dusky wards Spanish and so much of

Christian doctrine as they would assimilate. It was this Fray Juan

Ramirez, it is said, who had built the animal trail which has been

mentioned.

 

[Illustration]

 

AN ACOMA INDIAN DANCE

 

The dances of the Pueblo Indians are not social diversions but serious religious ceremonies.