THROUGHOUT its long history, New Mexico has meant many things to many people. To the Pueblos, the Navajos, the Apaches, and the Spaniards who knew it when time and space were of a different dimension, the arid country along the Rio Grande was filled with mystery, unseen forces, and hidden terrors, but also with dreamlike days, summer and winter, when the clear and empty wilderness in its rugged beauty stirred the imagination and lifted men’s souls.
Early American settlers, even with a far different view of the world and the workings of nature, still were struck by New Mexico’s brooding silence, in which all things, physical and nonphysical, real and unreal, seemed encrusted by time.
Later, the descendants of those first settlers came to call New Mexico the “Land of Enchantment”—not with any overgrown sense of pride or out-of-hand boasting, but simply because the phrase fit so uncommonly well. Newcomers, especially in this fast-paced age of ours, often miss catching at first glance the shapes and tones and delicate pigments that combine to produce the full picture of enchantment. But that is understandable, and perhaps forgivable, for such things are elusive and not easily perceived.
“If this is the ‘Land of Enchantment’, you would have to prove it to me!” The man speaking was one of my fellow passengers, offering his opinion in loud voice as our airliner winged over mile after mile of dun-colored, cheerless New Mexican landscape.
“You call this enchanting?” a seat-mate on the Super Chief asked me in accusative tone on another occasion. He was pointing at the malpais, the lava beds, that cover so much country east of Grants like frozen waves of black rock.
I would be the first to admit that the casual visitor traveling the main road, rail, and air routes through New Mexico is not likely to be overwhelmed by ever-changing scenes of enchanting beauty. There are too many dust storms, too many stretches of monotonous brown wasteland, and now too many places where men have mishandled and abused the land.
Still and all, the words of the motto are apt. New Mexico has the power to enchant people the way Arizona and California and even Texas never can. I’m speaking here of reflective and imaginative persons; not everyone is equally susceptible to spells. But, one could reasonably ask, what is the source of this power, and why is it concentrated in lands bracketing the upper Rio Grande?
Artists and writers, those who have come here and found a congenial atmosphere, seem to understand the answer. They live in exile, if we can believe a remark once made by the novelist Conrad Richter. He wrote, “New Mexico is like that. You never know in what obscure canyon or on what sun-baked mesa you will find an artist or scholar in exile.”1 While “hid out,” they soak up the land’s enchantment, and in their several creative ways, try to communicate to others the spirit, the feel, and the meaning of New Mexico.
There’s no escaping it. New Mexico is different. Call that difference enchanting, if you will. But don’t stop there, as the impetuous chambers of commerce do, with their flashy folders and catchy phrases designed to snare the tourist and his dollar. Go beyond and get a glimmer of what that exiled artist in his canyon or that scholar on his mesa sees in his self-imposed solitude. With a little effort, the occasional rubbish staining the landscape can be overlooked. Then the human eye can reach beyond and get a clear, untarnished vision of mountain peaks rammed shoulder to shoulder, dark gorges where water rushes foaming and bright, high pancake plains tilting toward Texas and comprising one of the finest natural pasturelands in North America, islands of pine and spruce forest, and the blue vault of sky, best seen when autumn days are laced with sparkling air.
And if that is not enough, the mind’s eye can be stretched to even greater limits by merely looking backward, instead of forward, as we are so accustomed to do. That extraordinary instrument of vision can take in the pageantry and drama of the past and, by the happy process of blending imagination with mastery of fact, can even resurrect the men, great and small, who helped make New Mexico the enchanting, beguiling, seductive place that it is.
Men like Coronado, whose name will forever be linked to the myth of the Seven Cities of Cíbola; like the reconquistador Diego de Vargas and the Pueblo warrior-chiefs Popé and Tupatú. Like Governor Anza, whose army slew the Comanche leader Cuerno Verde; and Pedro Bautista Pino, the only New Mexican ever to sit in Spain’s parliament. Or men like Josiah Gregg, the Santa Fe trader, or the peerless Kit Carson, or young Captain Alexander McRae, who gallantly died defending his cannon at the battle of Valverde. Even men like Billy the Kid, and the land-grant leader Reies Tijerina—even they had a role in the shaping of New Mexico.
I sometimes wonder what unseen forces brought this extraordinary gallery of persons—and those just mentioned are a paltry sampling—to this gaunt and uncommon land. Perhaps it has to do with that same tug I felt when, as a schoolboy many years ago, I motored out of Texas and first saw Tucumcari Mountain. It’s not much, as mountains go, in the Southwest. But it is the first one you see, coming in off the tiresome Staked Plains. If you happen to be of the proper temperament and are heir to a romantic frame of mind, that flat-topped mound of rock and earth may speak to you and let you know, without equivocating, that New Mexico has just gained another loyal son.
Today my own small exile camp, made with adobe in the old style, lies tucked away in the badlands south of Santa Fe. Right where I put up a corral, burro shed, and blacksmith shop, Castaño de Sosa rode by in 1591, on his way to the Tano Pueblos in the upper Galisteo Basin. Awhile back, a neighbor stopped in and gave me a strange rusted horseshoe nail he had taken from a pack rat’s nest under a rock ledge. Its club head and thick shank identified it as Spanish. No question there. But who lost it and when? Since no one can dispute me, I like to think that one of Castaño de Sosa’s horses threw a shoe hereabouts, and this solitary nail remains as the only record of a little mishap nearly four hundred years old.
Mementos of New Mexico’s past, whether a small horseshoe nail or shard of Indian pottery, an imposing mission ruin or a crumbling cavalry fort, are plentiful—so much so that one is seldom far from some tangible reminder that history here is not remote and dead, but very close, and its effects still strongly with us. That too is an ingredient in the recipe for enchantment.
Nor are all the reminders merely inanimate museum specimens. Hidden away here and there amid mountains, mesas, and deserts can still be found a remnant of those picturesque and zestful folk who enlivened New Mexico’s last free-wheeling days before staid maturity and the beginnings of artereosclerosis set in. In their lives something of an earlier day remains.
Attend a native trade fair or ceremony far out on a reservation, off the main visitor route, and you will find them—a handful of authentic frontier types, spontaneously drawn together by an event that would have been familiar to their grandfathers. There will be elderly Indians of several tribes, stoop-shouldered and weathered, wearing bright blankets, braids, and beaded moccasins; Hispano ranchers and farmers with gnarled hands, with faces the color of saddle leather—an occasional one among them still sporting the conical sombrero fashionable a hundred years ago. And you’ll see Anglo cowboys in boots with two-inch heels—meant for riding, not show—and in hats that bear the marks of hard work and hard weather. In the way these persons look, and walk, and dress, and talk, it is plain that they are linked to the past in a way modern man never can be.
The wish to know such people better and to learn more about the land that bred them led me one October morning to stuff my saddlebags full of books and maps, load a packhorse with bedding and grub, and ride out of my camp, headed west. I had in mind to visit an isolated slice of New Mexico whose history has always fascinated me, the valley of the Rio Puerco. Here is a country that, for a brief spell in the middle colonial period and again in the nineteenth century, held a population several times larger than it has today. This valley of phantoms is now an eroded and tortured wasteland, scarred with washed-out roads and nearly deserted mud towns melting back to dust. It is a place of silent, empty spaces and buried hopes. Much of it can be seen only on foot or on horseback, which means that its haunting beauty is untouristed, unexploited, unlittered.
The first day, I rode down the narrow valley of the Galisteo, over the same route that Coronado used in the spring of 1541, when he went east to the plains seeking the mystery of Quivira. Late in the evening, I crossed the Rio Grande with tired horses and reached Cochití Pueblo on the west bank. I feasted on hot chile stew and afterward climbed a ladder to a mud roof that offered a likely place to spread bedroll and tarp. Under a sky washed white with stars, I listened to the muffled throb of a drum coming from one of the council houses and caught the faint perfume of piñon smoke left over from the evening’s cooking fires. In the last moments before I drifted off to sleep, the derisive words of that up-to-date fellow on the Super Chief skipped through my mind: “You call this enchanting?”
On the following day, I climbed over the Jemez Mountains and camped in a grassy glade ringed with kingly ponderosas. The next day saw me thoroughly lost, as a hundred-year-old trail descending the western slope gradually pinched out and then completely vanished. A good rule in such cases is to follow any canyon downstream to get out of the high country. The one I took led right down to Jemez Pueblo, precisely where I wanted to go, for I had friends to look up there.
It was late. The streets of the Indian town were inky dark, except where the glow from windows formed yellow pools in the dust. The clop-clop of my horses’ feet made little echoes and caused faces to peep from doorways to see who was passing. The shadow of a small girl wearing a shawl flitted by in the night. I threw a hurried question: “Could you point the way to my friend’s house?” Courtesy still flourished here, for the shadow turned aside and beckoned me through an alley that opened on another street. I followed and found the house.
My friend was home. In fact, he was holding court. The Pueblos, as they have always done, run their own internal affairs and dispense justice in time-honored ways. Elected as governor for the year, this gentleman had summoned other officials to hear the case of a fellow tribesman. I apologized for the intrusion.
“No matter! No matter!” he said, with a warmth and simple dignity that put me at ease. His little grandson would find a corral and feed for the horses and a room in the pueblo for me. Then, later, when official business was out of the way, I should come back for supper. Before I left next morning, his daughter favored me with a warm, round loaf of bread freshly drawn from an adobe oven. It traveled with the books in the saddlebags.
Beyond Jemez stretch twenty or so hard miles to the Rio Puerco. At one point, the route cuts across the concrete highway that angles up from Albuquerque, heading for Farmington and the Four Corners. But past that, the twentieth century is left behind. When the dry Puerco valley unfolds before you, it is suddenly a world where distance and history count for much, and time and the march of progress for very little.
The Puerco is properly a river when it rises in the San Pedro Mountains farther north, but by the time it reaches the middle valley here, the waters have seeped into the sand, leaving only a damp and deeply entrenched stream bed. The old floodplain, where Spaniards used to farm, extends on either side to the foot of sharp-edged mesas capped with basalt. Looking down from those heights, you can easily pick out the dim traces of fields and irrigation ditches. Who could believe now, seeing the thorny desert scrub and shifting dunes, that for a time, in the 1700s, acres of wheat, corn, and other grains greened this valley floor? Sheep and cattle in abundance once grazed behind the fields, and in the years of drought, they stripped away the ground cover down to the roots. When the rains came, then, nothing held the soil, and water ran in furious torrents through hundreds of little channels that sliced their way to the Puerco. Over-grazing and arroyo-cutting ruined the Puerco valley. Here, one of the tragic sides of history, man’s abuse and neglect of the land, is preserved in an open-air museum for anyone who cares to study it. It’s an old story, often repeated in the Southwest.
I steered my horses down the winding valley and through decaying towns whose only adornment lay in the sonorous names they still wore: San Luís, Cabezón, Guadalupe, Casa Salazar. One main street after another presented the stereotyped picture of a western ghost town complete with sagging doors on creaky hinges and banks of tumbleweeds blown up against rotting walls. Long ago, a good road had carried oxcarts, then stagecoaches, and finally even a few of Mr. Ford’s Model Ts. But the arroyos took that, too. The few ranchers who still enter, to tend property given their ancestors by Spain, have four-wheel-drive rigs. They make their own roads, twisting back and forth to avoid the cuts—after every rain, picking a new way.
I camped on a high spot with a view and staked out the horses. Alone in such a place, at dusk, the imagination, unbidden, tries to call up departed spirits of Spanish farmers and merchantmen, Navajo and Apache raiders, cowboys and cavalrymen. Each shifting shadow or shrill bark of a coyote raises a new apparition, and a determined act of will is needed to prevent a bad case of the dismals from developing. Good medicine is a friendly campfire of juniper sticks, accompanied by a bubbling coffee pot. That combination has served New Mexican travelers well for hundreds of years; and as a source of cheer, it has been nowise diminished by onslaught of the modern age.
Early in the morning, I prepared to cross the Rio Puerco. The channel’s quicksandy bed is notorious, but stories of humans, livestock, and even pick-up trucks disappearing into its devouring depths are probably exaggerated. Nevertheless, I took precautions at a likely-looking ford. Uncoiling my catch rope and tying it fast to the saddle horn, I had me a solid line to hang on to. As an added safety, I gathered up an armload of stones, and with the horses trailing a few feet behind, walked slowly across the soft bed. Casting the stones ahead and avoiding the places where they went under with a gentle sucking sound, I got my little caravan to the other side without mishap. Mountain men used the same trick when they moved through the Southwest hunting beaver long ago; I wondered if anyone but myself had recently benefited from it.
Leaving the Puerco, I ascended one of its western tributaries, the Rio Salado, a salty little stream that would be called a river only in New Mexico. On one of its bluffs, I came upon a small ranch that looked deserted. It sat alone and forlorn, a low rock-and-mud building with a scatter of pole corrals behind. No truck or jeep was in sight, though a few head of horses grazed in a small, fenced pasture. Then I saw smoke coming from the stovepipe.
Riding in, I took the two Hispano cowboys by surprise. They hadn’t seen another soul for weeks. One was old, the other young and brash, and they were starved for talk. I was starved for the beans and new-made tortillas they offered, so over a plank table in the house we made a fair swap. A jar of jam from my pack pinch-hit for dessert, disappearing faster than cake at a birthday party.
The patrón, they said, came once a month from Bernalillo to get a report on his cattle and to bring in grub and kerosene. He also hauled drums of drinking water, for the thin trickle in the Salado was too salty for humans, though the stock managed to get by on it. The nearest fresh spring lay miles away, too far to pack water conveniently on horseback.
The men had a tough bit of work cut out for the next day. Half a hundred cows had been grazing on the Mesa del Chivato for the summer, and they planned to make a gather and drive them down to a handy pasture near the ranch. Later in the month, the patrón would arrive and help move these and other cattle in easy stages to the upper Puerco, where trucks would be waiting to haul them to market. They could use help on the mesa, and they tempted me with descriptions of wild country. I could even take one of the horses out of their remuda, if I didn’t mind a little bucking, first thing in the morning.
The old man—small, energetic, with dark-socketed eyes and a set of thin gray whiskers—possessed an untapped well of lore concerning the Puerco Basin and surrounding country. He had listened to the stories, legends, and songs of this pocket-sized world apart and had known the men who saw it in better days. With only occasional prodding from me, he talked into the night, while I scribbled notes by the oil lamp. Later, before turning into our bunks, the pair asked me to read from an Old Testament. Both men were illiterate. The copy was coverless, tattered, and in Spanish. I read a half-dozen of my favorite Psalms; they thanked me and bid Buenas noches.
The trail to the summit of the Mesa del Chivato was the worst I ever encountered. My two companions lived by the old cowboy rule, Never walk when you can ride. But the last stretch before the top was too rough, even for them. We dismounted and climbed hand-over-hand, leaving the horses with loose reins to find their own way. I glanced back and saw them clamoring like goats, their shod hoofs ringing on the brittle rock. The vista at the end made the effort worth it.
A hundred square miles of broken and seamed country, riven by the Rio Puerco, sprawled beneath us. The cowboys, breathing hard, stared with me, though they had seen it all from this point many times before. Here, as elsewhere in New Mexico, the scene is forever changing, always volunteering new patterns of light that put old and familiar features of geography in different dress. For the first time I got a clear view of the basin’s most spectacular landmarks, the collection of volcanic plugs or necks, each one a column of congealed lava, rising mountainlike in splendid isolation above the valley floor. These geologic ghosts of extinct volcanoes are fitting monuments in the graveyard of the Puerco. The northernmost, Cabezón Peak, holds a Navajo shrine on its crest. Indians say that the peak was formed after the legendary War Twins killed a giant. When they cut off his monstrous head, it turned to black stone.
The cattle we wanted were scattered over several miles of mesa top. The elevation caught summer rains blown off Mount Taylor to the west and supported a healthy stand of pines interspersed with open grassy meadows. The spring calves had grown fat and sassy. As we made a gather and began working toward the south, they kept breaking from the bunch to frolic and throw their tails in the air.
On the lower end of the mesa, we came to an easy trail leading to the bottom. The cattle seemed to know they were leaving good grass, and they balked. We whooped and hollered at them, pelted rumps with our ropes, and rode back and forth like demons, trying to shove the leaders over the edge. All we managed to do was dissolve our neat herd into dispersed knots of threes and fours. It was gut-busting, sweaty, exhausting work, but this was the way it had always been on cattle ranges in the West.
The old man finally called a halt and let us know there was a better way to do the job than wearing out good horseflesh. We got together a parcel of ten head or so that we could handle, forced them on the trail, and moved about halfway down the mesa to a little pocket that formed a natural holding place. While the old man kept them checked there, the youngster and I rode back up to the rim. In less than an hour, we had the remaining cows grouped again. When they picked up the bawling of their herdmates down below, they took the trail so fast we had to push to keep up.
We bottomed out in a little canyon that descended toward the ranch, so that, even though dusk was closing in, it was a simple matter to reach the new pasture. After closing the gate on the cows, we still had a two-mile ride back to headquarters. I couldn’t see my saddle horn in the darkness and worried, knowing the tricky path ahead followed close to the edge of steep-walled arroyos. No te preocupes!—“Don’t worry,” the cowboys said. “These horses can see, even if we can’t. They’ll take us home.” And they did. I still wonder how.
A few days later, I caught up my own horses, preparing to leave the Rio Salado ranch. The younger fellow helped me throw a diamond-hitch on my pack. “If you’ll change your mind and stay,” he said earnestly, “we’ll put in a good word for you with the patrón. I think he’ll hire you.” I smiled at his eagerness and told him again that I was just riding through, getting a feel for enchanted country, tierra encantada. He looked a little puzzled … but let it go at that.
As I rode out, a jet streaked and roared across an otherwise flawless October sky, a reminder that the world of the machine had already displaced an older time when muscle and spirit weighed most in the human equation. But quickly the jet and its feathery tail of vapor were gone, and I was alone again, jogging eastward toward the distant Rio Grande and the blue-black shadow of Sandia Mountain.