CHAPTER II.
SALTILLO AND THE PLATEAU.
FROM Monterey to Saltillo is sixty-seven miles as the crow flies, 5,300 feet in elevation as the barometer creeps, and fifty rise to the mile as the train runs. Up, up we go with two powerful engines to the train, and the ever-present query, “If the train should break in two, where would I land?”
This is no idle question either, and to reduce possibilities, the Pullmans follow the baggage, the first-class cars next, and the second and third-class last. This is very necessary in steep grades and sharp curves, where the heavy Pullmans with their momentum would always endeavor to strike off segments and chords across the arcs.
Up we go between mountains bare of vegetation, which enables you to see them in their naked grandeur and sublimity. You very soon conclude that the train is on the trail of the little river, and trying to track it out of the canon, and you also discover that it was impossible to have built the road over any other route than the bed of the noisy, fretful little San Juan. We pass through the canon with the little stream first on one side and then on the other, clinging to the side of the mountain by a path that hardly saves the train from destruction by the overhanging rocks, but ever upward. Indeed, railroad men say that when a car breaks loose from the yard in Saltillo, it runs all the way back to Monterey. I don’t believe it. It might come part of the way, but I think before it got half way down that grade, it would leave the track and make the rest of the journey in mid-air, and in considerable less than a mile a minute, too.
On the way up we pass the little puebla of Garcia, where a peak of the mountain has an opening through it, as though some Titanic cannon-ball had crashed its way through there, showing the sunlight on the other side. As we pass, all good Catholics take off their hats and cross themselves. Far up the peaks, tiny spirals of smoke show where the charcoal burners have found some isolated shrubs and are reducing them to merchantable form. In the cleft of the rocks are also to be seen the tuna-bearing cacti, which the half-clad Indian women are gathering for food. At last the grade is surmounted and we reach Saltillo, the capital of the State of Coahuila to which once also was attached the State of Texas.
One of the causes of the Texas revolution was that the Texans had to go to Saltillo, fully a thousand miles from Red River, to attend to their legal business. They asked for a separate state, and at the head of the Texas army they kindly persuaded Santa Anna to grant it. There is great persuasive power in a gun.
The train passes through a long street, lined on both sides with gardens of peaches and apples and oranges and bananas and figs. The altitude is a mile above sea-level, so that the heat of summer is never known, and one must sleep under blankets, even in July and August. It is a favorite summer resort for those who want a climate with no changes whatever. The city has a population of 20,000, but no horse-cars, so you take your foot in your hand and go off to see the town. There is but little to see, but of course there is the Grand Plaza, all Mexican cities have that, and of course the Cathedral faces the Plaza, there is no exception to that rule. The town is 300 years old, but the Cathedral was not begun till 1745, and the main body was completed in 1800.
The towers were begun in 1873, and may continue a hundred years longer. In keeping with the custom of the country, the churches must be as fine as time and money can make them, and the people give both, freely. The Alameda is as beautiful and as restful as one could wish, with fountains and flowers, and birds and trees to drive dull care away. I was honestly trying to do this when a school dismissed near by, and I called several of the “Kids” by to let me look at their text books, which consisted of a Catechism of the Catholic faith, and an Arithmetic. There must have been nearly a dozen boys around me, when all of a sudden they scattered like quails before a hawk, as a watchful policeman headed for us.
I suppose he thought the boys were about to kidnap me and came to my rescue, but he explained that it was a place of rest and pleasure and “Kids” were not allowed to flock there. I flocked by myself for a half hour, and the young ladies’ school dismissed and they all passed, dressed in black, and with bare heads generally, but several had lace mantillas. If ever I wanted to examine text-books, I thought now was the time, but to save my life I could not muster courage to ask that policeman if it was any harm for me to flock anywhere else but on that park bench, and while I hesitated the dream vanished—and so did I. I thought it was time to go see Alta Mira, the baths of San Lorenzo.
Beyond the city limits is a dismantled old fort, a relic of French occupation. It was a very rude affair of sun-dried bricks, and is now occupied by a hermit and a vicious dog who demanded backsheesh. The who refers to both man and beast, for, after looking at the persuasive face and teeth of that dog, you quite willingly pass over the coppers to the old man. I have never heard of the couple using force on travelers, but the argumentative look on that dog’s face showed that they understood each other, and especially since the isolation of the fort encourages the presumption.
Ten miles from Saltillo is the battle-field of Buena Vista, where General Taylor, after a two days’ fight, defeated the Mexicans. After the battle the Mexican women went among the wounded, ministering to the American as well as to the Mexican soldiers.
Whittier has made their name immortal in his beautiful poem:
“THE ANGELS OF BUENA VISTA.”
which closes with the following lines:
“Sink, O Night, among thy mountains, let thy cool, gray shadows fall;
Dying brothers, fighting demons, drop thy curtain over all!
Through the thickening winter twilight, wide apart the battle rolled,
In its sheath the sabre rested, and the cannon’s lips grew cold.
“But the noble Mexic women still their holy task pursued,
Through that long, dark night of sorrow, worn and faint and lacking food,
Over weak and suffering brothers, with a tender care they hung,
And the dying foeman blessed them in a strange and Northern tongue.
“Not wholly lost, O Father! is this evil world of ours;
Upward, through its blood and ashes, spring afresh the Eden flowers;
From its smoking hell of battle, Love and Pity send their prayer,
And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in our air!”
Near the old French fort is a narrow stream of water, precious as all water is on the plateau. Through irrigating ditches it winds around the hill to the valley, through a winding street, among adobe houses, serving each as it passes, as a laundry, fountain or bath-house. The people on the lower course did not seem to care how the water had been treated before it reached them, but they believe in the old saw: “Where ignorance is bliss,” etc.
Along the hard, sunbaked street we pass and look in upon more squalor than was ever dreamed of in a city. The hovels are built of sun-dried brick, with no windows nor chimneys for ventilation. Within is neither floor nor table nor chair nor bed nor any piece of furniture. The women and children and dogs and men all herd together on the bare floor, or at most on straw mats. Neither shoes nor stockings find a place here. The men wear a presentable suit of white cotton or coarse linen, and are bare-footed, or wear a pair of leather sandals on their feet. These are simply pieces of sole leather under the bottom, held on by thongs passed between the toes to the ankle. Every man is his own shoemaker. The women often wear only a chemisette and neither shoes nor stockings, and when they do wear shoes, they wear no stockings. Privacy is absolutely unknown, in this or any other Mexican city, except in the heart of the city or among foreigners, and it requires the utmost watchfulness on the part of the police to keep a semblance of public decency, even in the city of Mexico; and even then, the Indians are tacitly exempt from punishment for infractions. It must not be understood that this assertion includes everybody, but you must remember that five-sixths of the population is classed as low caste or peons, and strong enough numerically to imprint their influence upon every city in the country. Through almost every city flows a stream of water, and in this hundreds of men and women bathe promiscuously. Some cities require some garment to be worn, but while changing clothes and putting on the bathing suit, they are protected only by the blue sky and the Republic of Mexico.
These hovels are the centers of a great manufacturing industry; within, the women are pounding the fibre from the thick leaves of the aloe or maguey, and making brushes, mats, hammocks, rope and twine. The fibre is very much like the unraveled strands of our seagrass rope, and so strong that ordinary wrapping cord must be cut with a knife. The weaving apparatus is crude in the extreme. A post with a windlass and three wooden arms stands in the ground, and a boy turns the windlass. A man walks backwards with a basket of fibre hanging from his neck. Having fastened a thread to each of the arms of the crank, he slowly feeds each lengthening strand as it twists around the windlass. In ten minutes he can twist a thread fifty feet long. The threads are woven any desirable size, the most common being such as is used in making hammocks. As the husband prepares the thread, the wife weaves the mats or hammocks, and goes off to the market to sell. Within such hovels, all the manufacturing of Mexico is carried on, with no machinery anywhere. Of course, without wood, steam is impossible, and water power there is none.
Saltillo is famed for one thing above all others, and that is the beauty of its zerapes. A zerape is a cross between a cloak, a blanket, a shawl and a mat, because it is used for all these. It is the one garment a Mexican prizes next to his hat, the sine qua non of his attire. The zerape is a hand-woven blanket, with figures and colors that would make Pharaoh’s adopted son turn green with envy. They are woven and worn all over Mexico, but those made in Saltillo are a thing of beauty and a joy forever, to the happy possessor. When the Mexican starts out in the morning, his zerape is folded across his shoulder with the fringed ends nearly touching the ground. If he is hunting work, or going to work, or walking for pleasure, or holding up the sunny side of a street corner to keep it from falling down, the zerape is always there. If he sits down, he either sits upon that zerape or fondly folds it across his lap. When night comes, if he has a home, he spreads that zerape on the dirt floor for his bed. If he has no home, a nice soft corner of the stone pavement is carpeted with his zerape. When morning comes, he goes through the same programme. Many slit a hole through the center and stick their heads through. Those who cannot buy, take an old salt sack and rip it up, and presto! a zerape. In the Torrid Zone on the coast, when the hot sun melts the asphalt pavements, an Indian may be seen comfortably smoking his cigarette, his head covered with a woolen sombrero weighted down with silver ornaments, and several yards of woolen zerape covering his reeking body.
Ephraim is wedded to his idols. If the men are wedded to the zerape, the women are equally inseparable from the rebosa. The rebosa is a shawl, nothing more—that is from appearance, but with the Mexican women and girls, it is second self. The common gray, cotton article is called a rebosa, the finer black article is a tapalo, while the lace fabrication is a mantilla, but it is of the rebosa that we now speak. Hats nor bonnets are ever worn by the women at any time or place, the rebosa is used instead. It is drawn across the brow until the ends hang down below the waist, then one end is thrown across the opposite shoulder, protecting the neck and making a drapery both picturesque and pleasing. Sometimes she wears it around her shoulders as a shawl. If she has a baby, she lets the slack out in the back, loops the youngster in it and takes a half hitch with the ends in front. It is an every day sight to see caravans of women come to town with large baskets of fruit on their heads, and the black-eyed youngsters tied in the rebosa and peeping over the mother’s shoulder. When the mothers sit by the roadside to rest the “Kids” are not unwrapped, but they usually keep the peace until released.
The rebosa is the first garment a girl learns to wear, and I might add, until she is quite large it is often the only one. The most remarkable thing about it is, they never cease wearing them. Peep into these hovels, and every woman and girl child will be sitting listlessly on the stone floor, or busily at work with head and ears tightly wrapped up, their sparkling eyes and pleasant faces alone showing. But draw a camera on them, presto! every face is instantly covered. In walking, one or both hands is always engaged in holding the folds under the chin, as no shawl pins are used. The girl of fashion is a combination of painted face, India inked eyebrows and bella-donna eyes, but the ordinary middle class girls have rare beauty sometimes, and a series of faces would make “mighty interesting reading,” but no camera that I have seen can get their faces, unless covered with a rebosa.
The prevailing color of rebosas is as much a distinctive emblem of caste, as any rule in the social decalogue. No high caste woman would dare be seen with a gray rebosa, and though a low caste might be able to buy one of the more costly black ones, I have never seen one do so, and the observance of these social adjuncts is as unchanging as the laws of the Medes and Persians.
Saltillo as seen from the rear is disappointing. Most towns are painted white, but here the dull, wearied-looking sun-baked adobe houses are not pleasing. We visit a high school for young ladies and wonder that all this youthful beauty can bide this dull town, and that reminds me that there is not a mixed school in all Mexico, even the kindergartens being separate. You do not need to visit the primary schools, as you can hear all you wish a block away. The noise that first greets you will remind you of the last inning at the base-ball park when everybody is asking who killed the umpire. There may be three hundred children and each one is studying at the top of his voice, if voices ever have top and bottom, and the priests are stalking among them. The catechism is the first book placed in the hands of the child, and his duty to the church, the priest and the pope, are the first lines he ever learns. This statement will help make plain some other things I shall say later about the religious status of the country.
In the early gray of the July morning, with the chilling fog settling all around us, we draw our heavy wraps about us and leave with no regrets Saltillo, “The Stepping Stone.” We have indeed stepped upon the plateau, and for a hundred and fifty miles the track is as straight as a carpenter’s rule. What a monotony! Desert, yucca palms, cactus, dust. Not a living thing but cactus. No birds, no insects, no rabbits, no snakes—nothing that breathes claims this for a home. The railroad authorities did not plan this road for the beauty of its landscape, but for the economy of building. Ten thousand feet above sea-level lies the back-bone of the Cordilleras, and the plain is as level as a floor.
For twelve hundred miles a carriage can travel here without making a road, so while the journey is disappointing to the tourist, the railroad company pats itself on the back for long-headedness.
Away in the distance we see a tiny curl of white dust no larger than a man’s hand, and reaching to heaven. That is the sign of the burro pack-team bearing their bundles of fagots for the hungry maw of the locomotive. Poor little donkeys, not weighing more than three hundred pounds, without bridle or saddle or harness or halter, and without food except as they can argue with the thorns and thistles by the wayside, follow, follow forever the narrow trail to the wood-pile by the railroad track, drop their burden and return.
Surely the earth is round to the donkey. When he was no larger than a kid, he followed his mother along the same trail until he got large enough to carry a pack-saddle himself. That wearied, discouraged look he has always had, even to the twentieth generation. It is a part of his inheritance. He never had any frisky colt days in a pasture, nor did he have to “be broke” to harness when he reached the state of Coahuila and donkeyhood. In fact he was never born, but like Topsy “just growed up,” a burden-bearing burro. From the Rio Grande to Yucatan, he has gridironed the country and impressed it with his stamp. He and his companions have trailed, Indian file, loaded to the guards with silver ore, until his sharp little feet cut the trail so deep that his burden was raked off by the banks. He then started a new trail by the side of that until his little legs are out of sight in the trails cut by his feet in the solid rock; and then repeats, until you may count twenty or more little parallel gridiron paths for hundreds of miles. He has worn through solid rock in a dozen parallel paths, and only the final recorder in the burro paradise can tell how many weary journeys he had to make to write his name so well.
Neither the trolley car nor the bicycle will ever make his shadow grow less; he is a part of the country, as indispensable as water itself. While the Indians load the tender with wood, I follow the fireman and brakeman into the chaparral. They have a pail of water, a wicker basket, and a long stick with a string lasso on the end, and are hunting tarantulas. Being something of a naturalist myself, I was well acquainted with tarantulas, and I promptly told them I had not lost any tarantulas, and if they had nothing better to lose than tarantulas, they needed guardians. To those who have not a speaking acquaintance with his vitriolic majesty, I will say it is a huge hairy spider that will cover the bottom of a tea-cup, and when placed in a saucer is able to grasp the edge all round, so great is the spread of its claws. It is very vindictive and can leap up to a man’s face when making close acquaintance. In Texas I have known its bite to kill a person in twelve hours. I saw one catch a chicken under the wing, and the chicken fell within one minute.
However, I joined the hunters. We first looked for a hole in the ground, and as the hole denotes the size of the tarantula, only the larger ones were sought. When a hole about the circumference of a half dollar was found, one man guarded that with the stick and basket, while the other sought the outlet, for they always have two entrances to their homes. When it was found, the water was poured in, and out he came into the lasso placed over the other hole—and is caught dangling at the end of the stick. What is he good for? To sell. The Mexican is the greatest gambler this side of Monte Carlo. Tomorrow is the fiesta of his patron saint, and he will celebrate. As every one chooses a saint to his liking, and churches and towns do likewise—there is scarcely a day in the calendar that is not somebody’s saint day. Tomorrow he will “knock off” from work, go to the bull-ring and bet his money on the bull or the man, and whichever one gets killed, he is so much loser or winner. He goes to the cock-pit and stakes again, and a bird soon spears another through with his gaff; but a tarantula fight! Bravo! that is a sport royal. In the bull-ring, the bull sometimes gets wounded and bellows to be allowed to go home to his mother. In the cock-pit, a bird gets a gaff pinned through his upper works and decides to settle the fight by arbitration; but a tarantula, Caramba! they simply eat each other up. The only way you can lose money is that the other fellow’s cannibal will eat yours first.
The engineer blows his whistle and calls us in, and we trail again through the white dust to Catorce, a hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies, only no crow ever flies over this Sodom and Gomorrah. Catorce means fourteen, as the mines were discovered by a band of brigands numbering fourteen. You get off at the station and see nothing but a station and three or four pack trains of burros that have just brought in a load of silver. Follow their gridiron trail, and eight miles further you come to Catorce, a city of from ten to twenty thousand people, according to the output of silver, and these people have never heard the rumble of wheels. Ore was first found here in 1790, and for thirty years the silver output was over three million dollars yearly.
There are hundreds of these mines here, and the drainage tunnel of the San Augustin mine runs into the mountain more than a mile and a half and cost a million and a half dollars. Up, up you climb the rocky sides of the mountain, but there is no other way to reach Catorce, and when there, you are in one of the richest spots on earth, where the ore often assays $15,000 to the ton. The streets run forty-five degrees one way, and I suppose they ought to run the same coming back, but if you let go your hold on the street corners, you would fall out of town so fast you could not measure the angle. The only level place in town of course has a plaza and a very fine cathedral. I have made a similar statement several times, which needs no repetition. Whenever you enter a Mexican town you will always find “A very fine plaza and a very fine cathedral.” That copyright phrase will fit anywhere, with sometimes a modification of very and a change of church for cathedral.
Catorce is the last town in the temperate zone. A few miles beyond, standing solitary upon the desert like Lot’s wife in the geography, is a pyramid erected by the railroad company. It marks the exact line of the Tropic of Cancer. On the north the legend reads:—
TROPICO DE CANCER.
ZONA TEMPLADA.
on the south,
TROPICO DE CANCER.
ZONA TORRIDA.
Out of respect to your early teaching in geography you ought to perspire and be exceeding warm in the Torrid Zone, and see all kinds of gay-plumaged birds and jungles of flowers, but the hammer of the iconoclast has shattered one of your long cherished dreams.
The sun was shining upon a landscape over which clouds never hover. You pull your overcoat around you on this cold July day, and look through your closed windows for the other canard—the landscape. The landscape is all there according to the book, and for that you are thankful, but how changed! As far as the eye can reach and ten times farther are beautiful rock-colored rocks, and dust-colored dust and thorny thorns and dust-hidden sky. Where are the flowers? Never were any. And the birds? Never will be any. Not a blade of grass nor a chirp of insect. For forty miles around, or as far as the eye can reach is the dry, parched dust, and the chaparral, sere and yellow.
After a hundred and fifty miles of desert, how welcome is the oasis! Bocas is its name, and the last stopping-place before we reach the great city of San Luis Potosi.
Las Bocas is a fine hacienda and recalls old feudal times along the Rhine. Here is a fine old castle with its walled enclosure, its beautiful arched bridge and its herds and flocks and gardens and retinue. By the railroad track is a distillery for making liquid lava from the aloe or maguey plant, which is sold under the name of mescal for the purpose of making men drunk. Those who know say it will eat the lining out of a lead-pipe stomach. I saw a case of delirium tremens which it is guaranteed to give, and I can only liken it to a caged hyena after Lent.
Away in the distance is the snow-white trail of a stone wall, which winds its tortuous path many leagues away to encircle the hacienda de Las Bocas, while within its bounds and feeding upon the rocks and thorns are the thousands of cattle that maintain its opulence. How that kind of food can work such wonders is beyond my ken. When I was in school I learned that cattle have four stomachs. I think one would be quite sufficient for all the food a cow can get from a cactus bush, and a couple of millstones might be helpful in digesting the rocks. No one told me that the rocks were positively a part of the bill of fare, but I pointed to ten miles of rocks enclosed by a wall and asked a man why they fenced in the rocks, and he said it was a pasture, and he ought to know, as he is a native and to the manner born.
Four hundred and seventy-five miles from the Rio Grande, and the only trees seen were upon the little oases watered by tiny streams. We leave the plateau and climb the mountain into the city of San Luis de Potosi.