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PASSING THROUGH ALBUQUERQUE.

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woman I ever saw; and her little girl of two years had a face and figure which would have driven a sculptor mad with despair. The youthful matron, to enlarge my little vocabulary of Spanish, patiently repeated the names of objects about her house and court. Any dullard would acquire Castilian under such a teacher. She spoke no English. Some idea of New Mexico socially may be gathered from the statement made to me before leaving El Paso, that this lady was the only woman reputed chaste on the entire route to Santa Fe, three hundred and fifty miles through the most populous portion of the Territory.

We passed Albuquerque, (population, three thousand,) one of the richest and pleasantest towns, with a Spanish cathedral and other buildings more than two hundred years old. While we were halting, an enormous pile of patent office reports and other public documents sent hither by a member of Congress, at the public expense, was sold at auction for thirty-seven-and-a-half cents. The shrewd purchaser, an illiterate Mexican, declared that he wanted them for fire-wood. It showed one of the many beauties. of the franking privilege.

A disgusted immigrant from Pike's Peak also arrived with nine yokes of oxen, vowing that he wished himself back on the rich Nebraska prairies, that he would not exchange his cattle for all the land between Fort Kearney and Albuquerque, but would push on till he found a country fit for white men, whether it took him to the Gulf of Mexico or to the bottomless pit.

On the road beyond, farmers were treading out their wheat with horses and oxen precisely as did the children of Israel three thousand years ago. Others were cutting corn with a rude hoelike instrument, threshing wheat upon the ground with long, clumsy poles and mowing grass with sickles. The ruder and older the implements the better they suit the Mexican. His farming tools show no improvement upon those of his Aztec forefathers. His plow is only a crooked stick. Merchants endeavored to introduce iron plows but could not persuade the natives to adopt them. Threshing machines also were brought from the Missouri, but the ignorant farmers who hire ground, paying the rent with a portion of the crop, believed them a diabolical invention for cheating them out of their share of wheat!

250

ARRIVAL IN SANTA FE.

[1859.

After spending a night at Algondes we turned eastward from the Rio Grande. A lonely, mountain journey of a few hours brought us into Santa Fe.

All New Mexican settlements look venerable. The adobe build. ings with grated windows and low carved doors all suggest:

'The events

Of old and wondrous times,

Which dim tradition interruptedly teaches.'

Titles to estates, two hundred years old, are still preserved in the public archives, and in Taos there is a dwelling of Indian origin

which tradition declares was built three centuries ago. In the narrow, crooked streets one looks instinctively for the haughty Spaniard, in complete steel, striking terror to the hearts of the natives.

Santa Fe de San Francisco, (the city of the holy faith of St. Francis,) was begun in the fifteenth century. Its founders were of that wonderful Order whose unflagging zeal and perfect organi

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HIGHEST TOWN IN THE UNION.

251

zation almost achieved the conquest of the world. Traces of old Jesuit missions abound throughout California, Arizona, New Mexico, old Mexico, and Central America. These vast regions were converted to the Roman faith by patient life-long labors of the Society of Jesus, not by the furious zeal of Cortez and his fellow robbers who hurled the native idols down the steps of their temples, to replace them with the cross. New Mexico, thoroughly Roman Catholic, contains only one Protestant church and one Protestant school.

Santa Fe, the political and business metropolis, now boasted four thousand inhabitants, of whom three or four hundred were Americans. On the sunny side of the plaza sat dirty boys, shriveled, blanketed old men and hideous women vending tortillas, bread, mutton, onions, tomatoes, red peppers and candy. The buildings were all adobe save the unfinished capitol and the penitentiary-both of stone-and one frame edifice. None except the cathedral and a smaller church were more than one story high.

Santa Fe, the highest town of any importance in the United States, nestles among the mountains seven thousand feet above sea level. The overlooking peaks are white with snow. One summer all the ice in the city was bought by a hotel keeper, who refused to sell at any price to a rival house. This was ruin. Cold water and hard butter might be dispensed with, but no hotel could live here without sherry cobblers among its possibilities. In a moment of inspiration the landlord sent a train of donkeys twenty miles into the mountains. They came back loaded with huge blocks of ice; the cobbler trade revived and prosperity returned to the Napoleonic host.

As in every Spanish American country the natives are inveterate gamblers. Soon after he learns to walk, the child risks his first penny; and the gray haired man tottering into the grave, stakes his only coat or his last dollar. Americans too plunge into games of chance with their national recklessness. Though times were now dull, the city contained fifty American 'sporting men,' as professional gamblers are politely termed. At the Santa Fe hotel I often saw three monte banks in a single room in operation from daylight until midnight. They were attended by a motley crowd of Indians, Mexicans and whites, darkening the saloon with

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AN EXPERIENCE AT GAMBLING.

[1859.

tobacco smoke. The deep silence was broken only by the jingle of coins and the suppressed breath of players.

Enormous piles

of silver weighed down the tables, and frequently ten thousand dollars changed hands in ten minutes.

Business men would publicly lose or win a thousand dollars with the greatest nonchalance. One evening I saw a clerk with only five dollars sit down to the game. In a few hours he had won a thousand, but before morning he was penniless. A young surveyor after winning twelve hundred dollars, left the table, saying:

'When you have a good thing, keep it.'

During the previous winter, an American had enjoyed a rare 'run of luck.' Knowing nothing about the game, (and if it was honestly conducted no skill nor experience could have aided him,) he began betting at monte. The bank always began the evening with a capital of a thousand dollars. For a month he staked against it, breaking it every night, and then found himself the possessor of thirty thousand dollars. Now, his fortune had changed; every

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CURIOSITIES AND HORRID TROPHIES.

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evening he lost heavily, and doubtless he soon gained his old safe stand-point of beggary.

The Santa Fe cathedral is a huge 'adobe' with effigies of the Saviour and the Virgin, and lurid paintings of the sufferings on Calvary, decorating its walls. The Sunday congregation was chiefly women. Unlike the worshippers at El Paso many had adopted the European fashions, and appeared in shawls and bonnets. Many too had pleasing features, and all displayed the sparkling eyes of their race. Immediately after the services, at the church-yard gate, most of the masculines lighted their cigars.

The old men of Mexican towns look older than any others in the world. According to a local proverb, the region is so healthy that its aged inhabitants never die, but dry up and are blown away! Gaunt, attenuated, wrinkled and blanketed, their youthful hose a world too wide for their shrunk shanks, they totter about like re-vivified Egyptian mummies, or those uneasy ghosts which,

'In the most high and palmy state of Rome,

A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,

Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.'

In the establishment of William J. Howard, a Santa Fe jeweler, I found a long necklace of the first joints of human fingers, collected by the Utes from Apaches killed in war; and another horrid trophy in the form of an Indian scalp with coarse black hair two feet long. Among the living wonders were cat-fish with well defined legs, curious lizards, horned frogs and a venerable owl which subsisted upon live mice, swallowing them whole. There were Aztec battle axes of marble, Comanche pipes of slate, necklaces of bear claws, drinking cups and cooking utensils of Aztec and Apache pottery, bows and arrows, spears, shields, curious petrifactions of wood, and specimens of native lead, copper, silver, amethyst, alabaster, quicksilver and gold-the last very fine and beautiful. New Mexico abounds in mineral treasures; and before it was Americanized the Mexicans dug gold from its mountains to the amount of three hundred thousand dollars per year. Now most Americans are engaged in trading; but ere long a mining excitement will cause immigrants to pour in and revolutionize the country socially and politically.