The Old Santa Fe Trail | Page 8

two-storied shingle-roofed house in
the place. There is one public house set apart for eating, drinking and
gambling; for be it known that gambling is here authorized by law.
Hence it is as respectable to keep a gambling house, as it is to sell rum
in New Jersey; it is a lawful business, and being lawful, and
consequently respectable and a man's right, why should not men
gamble? And gamble they do. The Generals and the Colonels and the
Majors and the Captains gamble. The judges and the lawyers and the
doctors and the priests gamble; and there are gentlemen gamblers by
profession! You will see squads of poor peons daily, men, women and
boys, sitting on the ground around a deck of cards in the Public Square,
gambling for the smallest stakes.
The stores of the town generally front on the Public Square. Of these
there are a dozen, more or less, of respectable size, and most of them
are kept by others than Mexicans. The business of the place is
considerable, many of the merchants here being wholesale dealers for
the vast territory tributary. It is supposed that about $750,000 worth of
goods will be brought to this place this year, and there may be
$250,000 worth imported directly from the United States.
In the money market there is nothing less than a five-cent piece. You
cannot purchase anything for less than five cents. In trade they reckon

ten cents the eighth of a dollar. If you purchase nominally a dollar's
worth of an article, you can pay for it in eight ten-cent pieces; and if
you give a dollar, you receive no change. In changing a dollar for you,
you would get but eight ten-cent pieces for it.
Yet, although dirty and unkempt, and swarming with hungry dogs, it
has the charm of foreign flavour, and like San Antonio retains some
portion of the grace which long lingered about it, if indeed it ever
forsakes the spot where Spain held rule for centuries, and the soft
syllables of the Spanish language are yet heard.
Such was a description of the "drowsy old town" of Santa Fe, sixty-five
years ago. Fifteen years later Major W. H. Emory, of the United States
army, writes of it as follows:[6]
The population of Santa Fe is from two to four thousand, and the
inhabitants are, it is said, the poorest people of any town in the
Province. The houses are mud bricks, in the Spanish style, generally of
one story, and built on a square. The interior of the square is an open
court, and the principal rooms open into it. They are forbidding in
appearance from the outside, but nothing can exceed the comfort and
convenience of the interior. The thick walls make them cool in summer
and warm in winter.
The better class of people are provided with excellent beds, but the
poorer class sleep on untanned skins. The women here, as in many
other parts of the world, appear to be much before the men in
refinements, intelligence, and knowledge of the useful arts. The higher
class dress like the American women, except, instead of a bonnet, they
wear a scarf over their head, called a reboso. This they wear asleep or
awake, in the house or abroad. The dress of the lower classes of women
is a simple petticoat, with arms and shoulders bare, except what may
chance to be covered by the reboso.
The men who have means to do so dress after our fashion; but by far
the greater number, when they dress at all, wear leather breeches, tight
around the hips and open from the knee down; shirt and blanket take
the place of our coat and vest.
The city is dependent on the distant hills for wood, and at all hours of
the day may be seen jackasses passing laden with wood, which is sold
at two bits, twenty-five cents, the load. These are the most diminutive
animals, and usually mounted from behind, after the fashion of

leap-frog. The jackass is the only animal that can be subsisted in this
barren neighbourhood without great expense; our horses are all sent to
a distance of twelve, fifteen, and thirty miles for grass.
I have interpolated these two somewhat similar descriptions of Santa Fe
written in that long ago when New Mexico was almost as little known
as the topography of the planet Mars, so that the intelligent visitor of
to-day may appreciate the wonderful changes which American thrift,
and that powerful civilizer, the locomotive, have wrought in a very few
years, yet it still, as one of the foregoing writers has well said, "has the
charm of foreign flavour, and the soft syllables of the Spanish language
are still heard."
The most positive exception must be