The Blood of the Conquerors | Page 4

his slaves. In the spring and summer every one worked in the fields,
though not too hard. In the fall the men went east to the great plains to
kill a supply of buffalo meat for the winter, and often after the hunt
they travelled south into Sonora and Chihuahua to trade mustangs and
buffalo hides for woven goods and luxuries.
There was a pleasant social life among the aristocrats of dances and
visits. Marriages, funerals and christenings were occasions of great
ceremony and social importance. Indeed everything done by the Dons
was characterized by much formality and ceremony, the custom of
which had been brought over from Spain. But they were no longer
really in touch with Spanish civilization. They never went back to the
mother country. They had no books save the Bible and a few other
religious works, and many of them never learned to read these. Their

lives were made up of fighting, with the Indians and also among
themselves, for there were many feuds; of hunting and primitive trade;
and of venery upon a generous and patriarchal scale. They were
Spanish gentlemen by descent, all for honour and tradition and
sentiment; but by circumstance they were barbarian lords, and their
lives were full of lust and blood.
Circumstance somewhat modified the vaunted purity of their Spanish
blood, too. The Indian slave girls who lived in their houses bore the
children of their sons, and some of these half-bred and quarter-bred
children were eventually accepted by the gente de razon, as the
aristocrats called themselves. In this way a strain of Navajo blood got
into the Delcasar family, and doubtless did much good, as all of the
Spanish stock was weakened by much marrying of cousins.
Dona Ameliana Delcasar, a sister of Don Solomon, was responsible for
another alien infusion which ultimately percolated all through the
family, and has been thought by some to be responsible for the unusual
mental ability of certain Delcasars. Dona Ameliana, a beautiful but
somewhat unruly girl, went into a convent in Durango, Mexico, at the
age of fifteen. At the age of eighteen she eloped with a French priest
named Raubien, who was a man of unusual intellect and a poet. The
errant couple came to New Mexico and took up lands. They were
excommunicated, of course, and both of them were buried in
unconsecrated ground; but despite their spiritual handicaps they raised
a family of eleven comely daughters, all of whom married well, several
of them into the Delcasar family. Thus some of the Delcasars who
boasted of their pure Castilian blood were really of a mongrel breed,
comprising along with the many strains that have mingled in Spain,
those of Navajo and French.
Don Solomon Delcasar played a brilliant part in the military activities
which marked the winning of Mexican Independence from Spain in the
eighteen-twenties, and also in the incessant Indian wars. He was a
fighter by necessity, but also by choice. They shed blood with grace
and nonchalance in those days, and the Delcasars were always known
as dangerous men.

The most curious thing about this r�gime of the old-time Dons was
the way in which it persisted. It received its first serious blow in 1845
when the military forces of the United States took possession of New
Mexico. Don Jesus Christo Delcasar, who was then the richest and
most powerful of the family, was suspected of being a party to the
conspiracy which brought about the Taos massacre--the last organized
resistance made to the gringo domination. At this time some of the
Delcasars went to Old Mexico to live, as did a good many others
among the Dons, feeling that the old ways of life in New Mexico were
sure to change, and having the Spanish aversion to any departure from
tradition. But their fears were not realized, and life went on as before.
In 1865 the peones and Indian slaves were formally set free, but all of
them immediately went deeply in debt to their former masters and thus
retained in effect the same status as before. So it happened that in the
seventies, when New York was growing into a metropolis, and the
factory system was fastening itself upon New England, and the middle
west was getting fat and populous and tame, life in the Southwest
remained much as it had been a century before.
Laws and governments were powerless there to change ways of life, as
they have always been, but two parallel bars of steel reaching across the
prairies brought change with them, and it was great and sudden. The
railroad reached the Rio Grande Valley early in the eighties, and it
smashed the colourful barbaric pattern of the old life as the ruthless fist
of an infidel might smash a stained glass