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-shimmering as it always shimmers 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 canyons. 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.

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. Title was given by Spain four centuries ago, and the same title 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 title 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 titles, in the quarrel between Yankee squatter and Spanish don; but the squatter had “friends in court.” The old Spanish don hadn’t. He saw titles 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 partitioning 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 partition. It is an untold page of Southwestern history, this “stampeding” of Spanish titles. 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, assassinations, purchase in open markets of judges drawing such small pittances that they were in the auction mart for highest bid, forged documents, incendiary fires to destroy true titles-these were the least and most decent of the crimes of this era. “Ramona” tells what happened to Indian titles 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 fashion 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 casement 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 casement 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 assigned 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 shelled 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 washing 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 threshing, 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 scraping 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 assistant 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. In fact, Tony likes their own form of government better than the white man’s. All this he tells you in the softest, coolest voice, for Tony is not only assistant governor: he is constable to keep white men from bringing in liquor during the festal week. They yearly elect their own governor. That governor’s word is absolutely supreme for his tenure of office. Is there a dispute over crops, or cattle? The governor’s word settles it without any rigmarole of talk by lawyers.

“Supposing the guilty man doesn’t obey the governor?” we ask.

“Then we send our own police, and take him, and put him in the stocks in the lock-up,” and he takes us around and shows us both the stocks and the lock-up. These stocks clamp down a man’s head as well as his hands and feet. A man with his neck and hands anchored down between his feet in a black room naturally wouldn’t remain disobedient long.

The method of voting is older than the white man’s ballot. The Indians enter the estufa. A mark is drawn across the sand. Two men are nominated. (No-women do not vote; the women rule the house absolutely. The men rule fields and crops and village courtyard.) The voters then signify their choice by marks on the sand.

Houses are built and occupied communally, and ground is held in common; but the product of each man’s and each woman’s labor is his or her own and not in common-the nearest approach to socialistic life that America has yet known. The people here speak a language different from the other pueblos, and this places their origin almost as far back as the origin of Anglo-Saxon races. Another feature sets pueblo races apart from all other native races of America. Though these people have been in contact with whites nearly 400 years, intermarriage with whites is almost unknown. Purity of blood is almost as sacredly guarded among Pueblos as among the ancient Jews. The population remains almost stationary; but the bad admixtures of a mongrel race are unknown.

We call the head man of the pueblo the governor, but the Spanish know him as a cacique. Associated with him are the old men-mayores, or council; and this council of wise old men enters so intimately into the lives of the people that it advises the young men as to marriage. We have preachers in our religious ranks. The Pueblos have proclaimers who harangue from the housetops, or estufas. As women stoop over the metates grinding the meal, men sing good cheer from the door. The chile, or red pepper, is pulverized between stones the same as the grain. Though openly Catholic and in attendance on the Mission church, the pueblo people still practice all the secret rites of Montezuma; and in all the course of four centuries of contact, white men have never been able to learn the ceremonies of the estufas.

Women never enter the estufas.

Who were the first white men to see Taos? It is not certainly known, but it is vaguely supposed they were Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the Narvaez expedition, who wandered westward across the continent from Taos to Laguna and Acoma. As the legend runs, they were made slaves by the Indians and traded from tribe to tribe from 1528 to 1536, when they reached Old Mexico. Anyway, their report of golden cities and vast, undiscovered land pricked New Spain into launching Coronado’s expedition of 1540. Preceding the formal military advance of Coronado, the Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza and two lay brothers guided by Cabeza de Vaca’s negro Estevan, set out with the cross in their hands to prepare the way. Fray Marcos advanced from the Gulf of California eastward. One can guess the weary hardship of that footsore journeying. It was made between March and September of 1539. Go into the Yuma Valley in September! The heat is of a denseness you can cut with a knife. Imagine the heat of that tramp over desert sands in June, July and August! When Fray Marcos sent his Indian guides forward to Zuni, near the modern Gallup, he was met with the warning “Go back; or you will be put to death.” His messengers refusing to be daunted, the Zuni people promptly killed them and threw them over the rocks. Fray Marcos went on with the lay brothers. Zuni was called “cibola” owing to the great number of buffalo skins (cibolas) in camp.

Fray Marcos’ report encouraged the Emperor of Spain to go on with Coronado’s expedition. That trip need not be told here. It has been told and retold in half the languages of the world. The Spaniards set out from Old Mexico 300 strong, with 800 Indian escorts and four priests including Marcos and a lay brother. What did they expect? Probably a second Peru, temples with walls of gold and images draped in jewels of priceless worth. What did they find? In Zuni and the Three Mesas and Taos, small, sun-baked clay houses built tier on tier on top of each other like a child’s block house, with neither precious stones, nor metals of any sort, but only an abundance of hides and woven cloth. When the soldiers saw Zuni, they broke out in jeers and curses at the priest. Poor Fray Marcos was thinking more of souls saved from perdition than of loot, and returned in shamed embarrassment to New Spain.

Across the Desert to the Three Mesas and the Canyon of the Colorado, east again to Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, up to the pueblo town now known as the city of Santa Fe, into the Pecos, and north, yet north of Taos, Coronado’s expedition practically made a circuit of all the Southwest from the Colorado River to East Kansas. The knightly adventurers did not find gold, and we may guess, as winter came on with heavy snows in the Upper Desert, they were in no very good mood; for now began that contest between white adventurers and Pueblos which lasted down to the middle of the Nineteenth Century. At the pueblo now known as Bernalillo, the soldiers demanded blankets to protect them from the cold. The Indians stripped their houses to help their visitors, but in the melee and no doubt in the ill humor of both sides there were attacks and insults by the white aggressors, and a state of siege lasted for two months. Practically from that date to 1840, the pueblo towns were a unit against the white man.

The last great uprising was just after the American Occupation. Bent, the great trader of Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas, was governor. Kit Carson, who had run away from the saddler’s trade at sixteen and for whom a reward of one cent was offered, had joined the Santa Fe caravans and was now living at Taos, an influential man among the Indians. According to Col. Twitchell, whose work is the most complete on New Mexico and who received the account direct from the governor’s daughter, Governor Bent knew that danger was brewing. The Pueblos had witnessed Spanish power overthrown; then, the expulsion of Mexican rule. Why should they, themselves, not expel American domination?

It was January 18, 1847. Governor Bent had come up from Santa Fe to visit Taos. He was warned to go back, or to get a military escort; but a trader all his life among the Indians, he flouted danger. Traders’ rum had inflamed the Indians. They had crowded in from their pueblo town to the plaza of Taos. Insurrectionary Mexicans, who had cause enough to complain of the American policy regarding Spanish land titles, had harangued the Indians into a flare of resentful passion. Governor Bent and his family were in bed in the house you can see over to the left of the Plaza. In the kraal were plenty of horses for escape, but the family were awakened at daybreak by a rabble crowding into the central courtyard. Kit Carson’s wife, Mrs. Bent, Mrs. Boggs and her children hurried into the shelter of an inner room. Young Alfredo Bent, only ten years old, pulled his gun from the rack with the words-“Papa, let us fight;” but Bent had gone to the door to parley with the leaders.

Taking advantage of the check, the women and an Indian slave dug a hole with a poker and spoon under the adobe wall of the room into the next house. Through this the family crawled away from the besieged room to the next house, Mrs. Bent last, calling for her husband to come; but it was too late. Governor Bent was shot in the face as he expostulated; clubbed down and literally scalped alive. He dragged himself across the floor, to follow his wife; but Indians came up through the hole and down over the roof and in through the windows; and Bent fell dead at the feet of his family.

The family were left prisoners in the room without food, or clothing except night dresses, all that day and the next night. At daybreak friendly Mexicans brought food, and the women were taken away disguised as squaws. Once, when searching Indians came to the house of the old Mexican who had sheltered the family, the rescuer threw the searchers off by setting his “squaws” to grinding meal on the kitchen floor. Kit Carson, at this time, unfortunately happened to be in California. He was the one man who could have restrained the Indians.

The Indians then proceeded down to the Arroyo Hondo to catch some mule loads of whiskey and provisions, which were expected through the narrow canyon. The mill where the mules had been unharnessed was surrounded that night. The teamsters plugged up windows and loaded for the fray that must come with daylight. Seven times the Indians attempted to rush an assault. Each time, a rifle shot puffed from the mill and an Indian leaped into the air to fall back dead. Then the whole body of 500 Indians poured a simultaneous volley into the mill. Two of the Americans inside fell dead. A third was severely wounded. By the afternoon of the second day, the Americans were without balls or powder. The Indians then crept up and set fire to the mill. The Americans hid themselves among the stampeding stock of the kraal. Night was coming on. The Pueblos were crowding round in a circle. The surviving Americans opened the gates and made a dash in the dark for the mountains. Two only escaped. The rest were lanced and scalped as they ran; and in the loot of the teams, the Indians are supposed to have secured some well-filled chests of gold specie.

By January 23rd, General Price had marched out at the head of five companies, from old Fort Marcy at Santa Fe for Taos. He had 353 men and four cannon. You can see the marks yet on the old Mission at Taos, where the cannon-balls battered down the adobe walls. The Indians did not wait his coming. They met him 1,500 strong on the heights of a mesa at Santa Cruz. The Indians made wild efforts to capture the wagons to the rear of the artillery; but when an Indian rabble meets artillery, there is only one possible issue. The Indians fled, leaving thirty-six killed and forty-five wounded. No railway led up the Rio Grande at that early date; and it was a more notable feat for the troops to advance up the narrowing canyons than to defeat the foe. At Embudo, six or seven hundred Pueblos lined the rock walls under hiding of cedar and piñón. The soldiers had to climb to shoot; and again the Indians could not withstand trained fire. They left twenty killed and sixty wounded here. Two feet of snow lay on the trail as the troops ascended the uplands; and it was February 3rd before they reached Taos. Every ladder had been drawn up, every window barricaded, and the high walls of the tiered great houses were bristling with rifle barrels; but rifle defense could not withstand the big shells of the assailants. The two pueblos were completely surrounded. A six pounder was brought within ten yards of the walls. A shell was fired-the church wall battered down, and the dragoons rushed through the breach. By the night of Feth, old men, women and children bearing the cross came suing for peace. The ringleader, Tomas, was delivered to General Price; and the troops drew off with a loss of seven killed and forty-five wounded. The Pueblos loss was not less than 200. Thus ended the last attempt of the Pueblos to overthrow alien domination; and this attempt would not have been made if the Indians had not been spurred on by Mexican revolutionaries, with counter plots of their own.

We motored away from Taos by sunset. An old Indian woman swathed all in white came creeping down one of the upper ladders. They could not throw off white rule-these Pueblos-but for four centuries they have withstood white influences as completely as in the days when they sent the couriers spurring with the knotted cord to rally the tribes to open revolt.