264

ears.

MEXICAN PEONAGE VERSUS SLAVERY.

[1859.

I encountered one dirty, cut-throat looking Mexican bearing the appelation Juan de Dios-John of God;' and received an

PENITENTES LASHING THEMSELVES.

invitation to a baile

at the house of Don Jesus Vigil. Jesus (pronounced He-soos) is very common; one native near Taos is called Jesus Christo.

Degenerate descendants of that strange race, whose 'gorgeous semicivilization' was once

the world's wonder,

modern Mexicans are

treacherous, effeminate, cowardly and superstitious, almost meriting John Randolph's bitter invective: 'a blanketed nation of thieves and harlots.'

With

Conceded to the southern Propagandists, New Mexico kept the word of promise to the ear and broke it to the hope. the most barbarous and rigid slave code in the entire Union, (shrewdly enacted by native legislators to secure favor from Buchanan's administration) the slaves within her borders numbered less than twenty. Peon labor was cheaper, and the Mexican would treat the African as an equal. A disgusted Southron complained to me:

'Before a nigger has been here a month he knows more than his master.'

Pueblo (Spanish: 'a village') is the name applied to a scattered race of half-civilized Indians who live in towns and claim to be unmixed descendants of the ancient Aztecs. They never intermarry with whites, and their women (almost the solitary exception to Indian tribes in general) are reputed inflexibly chaste. Each of their twenty villages is independent, with a democratic govern

1859.]

AMONG THE PUEBLO INDIANS,

265

ment. The largest nestles at the foot of the mountains two miles. from Taos. The huge adobe buildings which look like fortresses, are of five or six stories, each smaller than the one beneath, and forming a terrace, till one little chamber crowns the whole. There are no doors on the ground floor, but inmates ascend to the roof of the first story by a ladder-drawing it up at night, for security against intruders-and enter by a trap-door. They formerly kept sentinels upon the house-top, but in these piping times of peace the custom is discarded. Each dwelling contains many families.

One evening I saw a muscular Pueblo native in no clothing except a breech cloth, standing upon his roof apparently engaged in worship. Noticing me, he discontinued his orisons, and with pantomimic eloquence attempted to sell, first a plate of frijoles then a string of peppers, then some enormous squashes. Failing in all these he crowned his commercial attempts by pointing at the pony I bestrode and uttering his only English word:

'Swap ?'

My negative was the last grain of sand, and he turned despairingly away. Hard by stood the old church with crumbling walls, which one thousand five hundred insurgent Mexicans and Pueblos occupied as a fort after the massacres of 1847. The attacking Americans, numbering four hundred, were led by Kit Carson and Colonel St. Vrain. After skirmishing for an entire day the rebels retreated. The hindmost fifty were killed almost to a man, by a Government force lying in ambush near their road.

Though these anomalous Indians are professed Catholics, some vaguely worship a great Father who lives where the sun rises, and a great Mother whose home is where it sets. A few who adhere

to the Aztec faith, cherish a tradition that Montezuma established this Taos village, taught them to build pueblos, and kindled sacred fires for their priests to guard. That he also founded the pueblo at Pecos, where he planted a tree, predicting that after his disappearance there would be no rain, and a foreign race would subjugate them. But he commanded them to keep the sacred fires burning until the fall of the tree, when white men from the east would overwhelm their oppressors, rain would again increase and he would soon reëstablish his kingdom. They aver that the tree fell just as the triumphant Americans entered Santa Fe in 1846.

266

THEIR SUPERSTITIONS AND TRADITIONS. [1859. For years the Indians of that pueblo had been decreasing; and just then an old man the last in the long line of priesthood died at his post, and the holy fire was extinguished.

The country indicates that in former ages rain was much more abundant than now; and the Pueblos point triumphantly to the fact that it has increased since the advent of the whites. In the mountains they still burn the hallowed flames, and anxiously await the return of Montezuma. In some pueblos a sentinel. regularly climbs to the house-top at sunrise and looks toward the east for his coming.

Like the men of Mars Hill they believe in 'the unknown God,' whose name is too holy to be spoken. They hold sacred all animals living in or near water, which in their rainless climate is the choicest of blessings.

They have a tradition that at the flood a few faithful Zunians gathered upon a mountain top, and waited long but in vain for the waters to subside. At last, a youth of royal blood and a beautiful

1859.]

STRANGE OLD AZTEC RUINS.

267

virgin, decorated with feathers, were let down from the cliff as a propitiatory offering to the angry Deity. The waters soon fell, and youth and maiden were transformed into statues of stone, still pointed out to the credulous among the Zuni mountains.

A hundred miles southeast of Santa Fe are extensive saline lakes supplying the entire Territory with salt. Near them the ruins of a city contain the remains of an aqueduct twelve miles long, walls of churches, Castilian coats of arms and deep pits in the earth. It was probably a Spanish silver mining town destroyed in 1680, when the natives killed or drove out all the invaders. The ruins of several walled towns reveal pottery and other articles similar to those found in the city of Mexico. Ruins in Navajoe county include the remains of enormous houses, of imposing architecture. In some, explorers have counted the traces of one hundred and sixty distinct rooms upon the ground floor. The fallen beams and rafters were hewn with dull axes apparently of stone.

Nearly three hundred years ago, Spanish missionaries found in New Mexico half-civilized Indians who raised cotton, manufactured cloth, and lived in towns with regular streets squares and dwellings like those of the present Pueblos.

Dr. J. S. Newberry of the United States army, found remarkable ruins of old pueblos on the San Juan river, then in New Mexico now in the southwest corner of Colorado. One of these deserted human bee-hives was inclosed by sandstone walls five hundred feet long, twelve inches thick and thirty feet high, and as true and smooth as the walls of the Astor House. The marks on the few timbers still preserved, and implements found in the vicinity, indicate that logs and rocks were split and hewn with tools of hard stone. The huge edifice, six stories high, was divided into small rooms, very evenly and beautifully plastered with gypsum.

The San Juan valley contains many of these ruins which have. been deserted from three hundred to five hundred years. Once it swarmed with the busy life of half a million of people, now it has no human being. Dr. Newberry inquired the reason of this from an old and intelligent Pueblo chief, who replied that at the invasion by Cortez, Montezuma made such heavy drafts upon the able

268

GEOLOGICAL CHANGES IN THE COUNTRY. [1859.

bodied men of the province as to leave old men, women and children unable to defend themselves from the surrounding Utes, Apaches and Navajoes, and compeled the entire population to emigrate southward. This theory is supported by the fact that the most ancient pueblos, which were built in mountain fastnesses easily defensible against numbers and valor, are still inhabited, while those in the open country are deserted.

Hundreds of acres of large cedars, all dead from drowth, and the circumstance that no water is found within miles of many of these ruined cities, prove that the country was once far less dry than now. The elevation of the land for a few feet through some geological agency or the depression of the surface of the Gulf of California, would have been sufficient to produce the change.

The approach of winter forbade me to linger among the strange scenery, inhabitants, antiquities and traditions of this most interesting and least known of all our Territories. Three times larger than New England, it is all mountainous. Even the narrow valleys of the streams are tillable only with irrigation. It has no navigable rivers. Though the Rio Grande is two thousand miles long, vessels ascend only two hundred miles above its mouth.

Of the inhabitants, eighty thousand are Mexicans, two thousand Americans, ten thousand civilized Indians, and about fifty thousand fierce savages who roam the mountain ranges. Twice or thrice New Mexico has suffered from the frontier epidemic of constitution-making; but until new gold discoveries bring in thousands of immigrants to develop its rich and varied mineral resources, and revolutionize its industries and social life, it will not and should not be admitted to the Union as a sovereign State.