OCR Text |
Show TOLTECCAN. 239 desire it for several hundred generations, and it will spontaneously develop. Beautiful theory ! From Dead Man's Cafion we rise gradually for twelve miles, trav-erse a wide pass walled in by mountains red with iron- stain, and de-scend again to a vast baked plain of barren clay, hard as the sun's rays can cook it. On its western border appears a green oasis, bounded by yellow hills scantily clad with timber and bunch- grass; and on the baked plain beside the oasis stands the hamlet of El Rito (" The Little River"). We had made our drive of twenty- six miles by noon. The " Little River" is little indeed; at its best one can jump across it; now it is all used for irrigation. The country is full of dry channels, many of which are located as rivers on the map; but in three- fourths of them one finds only piles of gravel and shifting sands. El Rito is a strange, old, isolated Mexican town, away out on the edge of the desert, twenty- five miles from the nearest neighbor; and yet it is a century old, and has doubtless contained the same fami-lies perhaps forty in all during all that time. No church, no school, no papers, no books, or very few, to introduce a new idea; but family concerns, town concerns, the winter's rain and the spring rise ; the rare passage of a government train, and the rarer visit of the itinerating padre to baptize the children and confess and absolve the elders, make up their little world of incidents. The oasis is plowed with a sharpened log, well seasoned and hewn into the shape of an Irish spade, and the crops tended with hoe and rake ; while the goats, sheep and asses are pastured in the mountain hollows, and the hens live upon crickets and earth- worms. If the family burro does not die, if the goats do well, if the water is sufficient for enough of mais and chile Colorado, and the hens lay eggs enough to send off by the weekly peddler, and procure a little tobacco and flowered calico, then Quien quiere por mas? ( Who cares for more?) In this little community of degenerate Spaniards A's children have married B's children, and vice versa, and in the next generation double- cousins married double- cousins, for a hundred years, till the wine of life has run down to the very lees, and flows dull in sluggish veins for want of a vitalizing current of alien blood. Every person in the settlement is akin to most of the others. The same practice has had much to do with the degeneracy of the Pueblos, isolated as each of their settlements is. While Hamilton attended to his team, I walked about the town. The men and larger boys were at work in the public field, or tend- |