Santa Fe (Holy Faith, in Spanish) was an old town when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. About 1606 according to Colonel R. E. Twitchell, the best authority on the early history of New Mexico, it was made the capital of one of the Spanish provinces, and had been built on the site of two small Indian pueblos. I believe if I had been dropped down in some town in the interior of China and had found a few Americans to talk to it would not have seemed more strange to me. The office of the chief medical officer of the district was located in a building on the plaza that someone told me was the old palace, but which I thought did not look much like a palace, and which I understand is now used as a museum in which are to be found the most remarkable collection of archaeological specimens in America.
Monday morning I started for Fort Selden on the Rio Grande, nearly three hundred miles away. We had a different type of stage coach, a small affair, more like a carriage, and drawn by two horses. Some eight or ten miles out of Santa Fe we almost literally dropped off into a canon that widened out into more of a valley as we continued our journey until we reached the Rio Grande some distance above Albuquerque. This town was at that time a straggling Mexican village of adobe houses along the east bank of the river. It is now a city of considerable size on the east side, with modern improvements and is a division point on the Santa Fe railway and a town of commercial importance.
The river was disappointing. I expected something bigger, and it wound around from one side of the valley to the other as though in doubt as to the best way to go. The valley was interesting because of its being occupied by an altogether different type of Indians. We had left the plains Indian at Trinidad and from there to Santa Fe had seen only Mexicans with a fair proportion of Americans whose business interests were in the country. The Plains Indian, Cheyennes, Commanches, and Kiowas and Arapahoes, were nomadic and warlike. Here was an agricultural people who lived in little villages called pueblos, a name also attached to the Indians themselves. Their villages were located at convenient distances apart and both men and women went to the fields to work. The land was divided off into little patches separated by irrigating ditches, called asacies, and there were no fences or lines to show individual ownership. It was seemingly a community interest, a kind of socialism. The Pueblo Isletta was the capital and principal town and was the place of meeting for the disposal of important questions of interest to the tribe, and for the observance of such religious services as was their wont. The hoe was the principal agricultural implement, both for making ditches and for cultivating the land. The people seemed to be kindly disposed, and in every way a contrast to the Plains Indian whose women do the work while the men do the hunting and fighting. They enter their houses by way of the roof, climbing a ladder from the ground to the roof and pulling the ladder up after them, then descending by way of an opening in the room to the room or rooms below. No doors, and only little peep-holes for windows, sometimes covered with a thin cloth of muslin. I suppose this was done in the first place as a protection against the Mountain Indians (Utes and Navajos) who in early times raided the valley and carried off anything they could lay their hands on. The valley was sparsely wooded except here and there when we would come to great groves or boscas as they were called, of immense cotton-wood trees which were very beautiful. The valley as described above was the same all the way down to Fort Selden.