Alamo Ranch Part 9

"This rich collection of gold and jewelry, wrought into many rare and fanciful forms, was captured on its road to Spain by a French privateer, and is said to have gone into the treasury of Francis the First.

Francis, we are told, looking enviously on the treasures drawn by his rival monarch from his colonial domains, expressed a desire to 'see the clause in Adam's testament, which ent.i.tled his brothers of Spain and Portugal to divide the New World between them.'

"The Aztec picture writing, rude though it was, seems to have served the nation in its early and imperfect state of civilization.

"By means of it, as an auxiliary to oral tradition, their mythology, laws, calendars, and rituals were carried back to an early period of their civilization.

"Their ma.n.u.scripts, the material for which has already been described, were most frequently made into volumes, in which the paper was shut up like a folding screen. With a tablet of wood at each extremity, they thus, when closed, had the appearance of books. A few of these Mexican ma.n.u.scripts have been saved, and are carefully preserved in the public libraries of European capitals. The most important of these painted records, for the light it throws on the Aztec inst.i.tutions, is preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The greater part of these writings, having no native interpretation annexed to them, cannot now be unriddled.

"A savant who, in the middle of the seventeenth century travelled extensively through their country, a.s.serts that, 'so completely had every vestige of their ancient language been swept away from the land, not an individual could be found who could afford him the least clue to the Aztec hieroglyphics.'

"Some few Aztec compositions, which may possibly owe their survival to oral tradition, still survive. These are poetical remains, in the form of odes, or relics of their more elaborate prose, and consist largely of prayers and public discourses, that show that, in common with other native orators, the Aztecs paid much attention to rhetorical effect. The Aztec hieroglyphics included both the representative and symbolical forms of picture-writing.

"They had various emblems for expressing such things as, by their nature, could not be directly represented by the painter; as, for example, the years, months, days, the seasons, the elements, the heavens, and so on.

"A serpent typified time, a tongue denoted speaking, a footprint travelling, a man sitting on the ground an earthquake.

"The names of persons were often significant of their adventures and achievement.

"Summing up this account of Aztec civilization, we find that, although of the countries from which Toltec and Aztec in turn issued tradition has lost the record, it is nevertheless affirmed, by so reliable an historian as Humboldt, that the former introduced into Mexico the cultivation of maize and cotton; that they built cities, made roads, and constructed pyramids. 'They knew,' says this authoritative historian, 'the uses of hieroglyphical paintings; they could work metals, and cut the hardest stones; and they had a solar system more perfect than that of the Greeks and Romans.'

"After their mysterious disappearance from the table-lands of Mexico, the Aztecs, who succeeded them, gradually amalgamated all that was best in their civilization, and, engrafting upon it their own, became as a nation what they were in the time of the second Montezuma, when Cortez and his conquering army treacherously swept their civilization from the face of the earth.

"A thoughtful traveller still finds in Mexico traces of this people, its early possessors.

"The Mexicans, in their whole aspect," he observes, "give a traveller the idea of persons of decayed fortune, who have once been more prosperous and formidable than now, or who had been the offshoot of a more refined and forcible people."

CHAPTER XII

It was but the day after the delivery of this most interesting paper by Mr. Morehouse, that the laggards from Hilton Ranch, who had missed it, and the preceding one, returned to their places at the dinner-table; and on that very afternoon Miss Paulina, with all due formality, announced the engagement of her niece to Mr. Roger Smith. Recovered from the first shock of surprise, the Koshare celebrated the betrothal by a pink afternoon tea, and made such slight engagement offerings as were found available, remote from silversmith, florist, and bric-a-brac dealer.

The ladies gave bureau scarfs, table doilies, and centre-pieces _ad infinitum_; the Antiquary bestowed a bit of Mexican pottery dating back to the "cliff-dwellers." Leon framed the photographs of the handsome pair in Mexican canes, as an engagement gift; and the most despondent "lunger" of them all had a kindly wish for their young and happy fellow-boarders, setting out on that beautiful life-journey to whose untimely end he, himself, was sadly tending.

Among the more observing of the Koshare, much wonder was expressed at the slow mending of Roger Smith's sprained ankle. It was at the engagement tea that Miss Paulina innocently said, in response to these strictures, "Yes, it _did_ take a long time to cure dear Roger's sprain.

Years ago," continued the good lady, "I had the same accident; and, if I remember rightly, in less than a fortnight after the sprain I was walking without any crutches. One would think now," she went on, "that in this lovely dry climate a sprain would mend rapidly; but, though I did my very best, the result was far less prompt than I had hoped."

"Sprains differ," interposed the audacious subject of these remarks, unawed by the disapproving glances of his betrothed; "the surgeons tell us that fractures are both simple and compound. Mine, dear Miss Hemmenshaw, was undoubtedly compound."

This he said by way of accounting to his friends for his tardy convalescence. To himself he thought, looking at this kind, unsuspicious new auntie, "Dear, delicious old goose!"

This is what the niece said when, later, she got this incorrigible lover to herself: "Roger, I am quite convinced that your conscience is seared with a hot iron, whatever that process, supposed to indicate utter moral callousness, may be."

"My dear girl," laughed the unabashed culprit, "I am, as you know and deplore, a good Catholic, and consequently hold with the astute Jesuit Fathers that the end justifies the means."

CHAPTER XIII

It was in the sunny, lengthened days of early March that the Antiquary, the Journalist, the star boarder, and the Grumbler undertook their long-projected trip to the Sacramento Mountains, there to visit the Government Reservation, nestled in the sheltered Mescalero Valley, which gives its name.

Well equipped with camping conveniences, the four Koshares set forth on their journey of one hundred and twenty-five miles.

It was their intention to "make haste slowly," and nothing could better have suited the leisurely pair of Mexican horses, and the equally easy-going Mexican driver, who, with his team, had been hired for the expedition. The first night of their journey was pa.s.sed beneath the open sky, with the rounded moon riding clear and fair above them, and the desert of sand and sage-brush all about them. On the second, they lodged at the solitary dwelling of a ranchman, whose nearest neighbor was thirty-five miles distant.

At the journey's end, they were cordially received by Lieutenant Stottler, Government Agent at the Mescalero Reservation, and throughout their visit were treated by him with a kindly hospitality and a genial courtesy beyond praise.

Of the Apache, now transformed by the iron hand of civilization from a blood-thirsty savage to a pa.s.sably decent and partially self-supporting member of the republic, it has been aptly said that Nature has given him "the ear of the cat, the cunning of the fox, and the ferocious courage and brutishness of the gray wolf."

The whole vast realm of his native ranges, desert though they seem, are known to teem with ever-present supplies for his savage menu.

There are found fat prairie mice, plump angle-worms, gray meat of rattlesnake and lizard, and of leathery bronco,--all easy-coming "grist for that 'unpernickety' mill," his hungry stomach.

Is he minded for a vegetable diet, for him the mescal lavishly grows; and the bean of mesquite, reduced to meal, makes him palatable cakes.

Fruit of Spanish bayonet dried in the sun, and said thus to resemble dates, is at hand for his dessert; and of mountain acorns alone he may make an excellent and nutritious meal.

From the primeval years this belligerent savage is said to have especially harried that dismal waste in New Mexico known as _Jornado del Muerta_, "Journey of Death."

This awful desert is declared to be literally "the battle-ground of the elements." In the winter it is made fearful by raging storms of wind and snow, in which frozen men and animals leave their bodies, as carrion prey, to the hungry mountain wolf. In later times it is "the skulking place of unscrupulous outlaws, and many a murdered traveller makes good the name it bears."

It is thus finely depicted by a modern traveller: "Near the southern boundary of New Mexico stretches a shadeless, waterless plateau, nearly one hundred miles long, and from five to thirty miles wide, resembling the steppes of northern Asia. Geologists tell us this is the oldest country on the earth, except, perhaps, the backbone of Central Africa; at least, the one which has longest been exposed to the influence of agents now in action. The gra.s.s is low and mossy, with a wasted look; the shrubs are soap-weed and bony cactus; the very stones are like the scoria of a furnace. It is sought by no flight of bird; no bee or fly buzzes on the empty air; and, save the lizard and horned frog, there is no breath of living thing. One might fancy that this dreary waste had served its time, had been worn out, unpeopled, and forgotten."

In the (not long past) day of his power and might, to steal and murder, under the show of friendship; to beat out the brains of unsuspecting men; to carry off to captivity, worse than death, the women and larger children, was, with the Apache, merely a question of opportunity.

In the Apache war--ending in October, 1880, and lasting but a year and a half,--it is estimated that more than four hundred white persons were scalped and tortured to death with devilish ingenuity.

The details of Indian fighting are everywhere much the same; but in strategy and cruelty that of the Apache surpa.s.ses all the sons of men.

Victorio, the chief who led the war with his band, was surrounded at last, and captured, and killed in the mountains of Mexico.

With the death of Victorio (whose only son, Washington, was shot in the fall of 1879, leaving no one to succeed him) the cause was lost.

His wife, we are told, after Victorio's death, cut off her hair, in the old Greek fashion, and buried it,--an offering to the spirit of this fallen chief, to whom (devil though he was) she was devoted.

It is told of Rafael, one of Victorio's band, that when maddened by _tiswin_ (an intoxicant made by the Indian from corn), he fatally stabbed his wife, and, after her death, overcome with penitence, sacrificed all his beads and most of his clothes to the "dear departed,"

cut his and his children's hair short, and sheared the manes and tails of his horses. These manifestations of anguish over, he went up into a high hill, and howled with uplifted hands.

Women are regarded by the Apaches as an inc.u.mbrance. They are of so little account that they are not even given a name. Mothers _mourn_ at their birth.

The Indians occupying a reservation of seven hundred square miles in southern New Mexico, and numbering, at the present writing, about four hundred and fifty souls, are typical Apaches, and closely related by blood to the other Apaches of Arizona and New Mexico. They exhibit the usual race characteristics,--of ignorance, stubbornness, superst.i.tion, cruelty, laziness, and treachery.

In December, 1894, Lieutenant Stottler first a.s.sumed the charge of these Indians. In spite of the fact that for many years a generous government had supplied them annually with rations, clothing, working implements, etc., they were then living in _tepees_, or brush shelters, on the side hills; clad in breech-clout and blanket, wearing paint, and long hair, and thanklessly receiving their rations of beef, flour, coffee, sugar, salt, soap, and baking-powder. A few of them condescended to raise corn and oats; but acres of tillable land on the reservation were still unused.

"They were," says Lieutenant Stottler, in an able and interesting report, "not only contented with this order of things, but desirous and determined to prolong it indefinitely."

Fifty per cent of their children were in school, but the parents were wholly opposed to their education. Among them were twenty strong, broad-shouldered Indian adults, educated at the expense of thousands of dollars, yet still running about the reservation in breech-clout and blanket, wilder than any uneducated Indian on it.