ALBUQUERQUE. 5 
th blue blouse and paper cap—knife in hand, performing 
onders in dissection upon his slaughtered sheep. Two 
gurs later, on our return to the hotel, we stopped at the 
flice of the Albuquerque Chronicle. At the door we met the 
itor and proprietor, who, to our great amusement, was no 
ther than our facetious host ‘of the night before, the butcher 
yf Albuquerque, and now, bereft of blouse, the energetic 
sditor of the daily paper. 
Is not a lesson to be learned from this little sketch of 
Western life? I would at least respectfully recommend it to 
the consideration of our would-be emigrants. 
From Albuquerque we travelled in the valley of the Rio 
Grande, 115 miles, to Fort Craig. For the whole of this 
distance the valley was studded on both sides with numerous 
villages, some belonging to Pueblo Indians, the greater 
number to Mexicans. The largest of the former was Isleta, 
where Colton and myself rested an hour or two at mid-day, 
after leaving Albuquerque, and enjoyed the produce of a 
very fine vineyard, cultivated, of course, by the Indians. The 
houses were built, like those of the Mexicans, of adobe, but 
were much larger; many were of two stories; all seemed to 
contain more than one family, and were not entered from the 
yutside or from the roof, as it is common in some pueblos, but 
generally from an inner court. The irrigating ditches were well 
built and cared for, and the whole place had a more well-to-do 
look about it than the Mexican villages generally exhibit. 
The crops were also finer. Some of the Indians, clothed in 
buckskin and in fur, lay basking in the sun, and took little or 
no notice of us as we passed. 
The greater part of the valley is here almost entirely 
destitute of trees. This may be partly accounted for by the 
fact that the banks of the river are of a sandy, friable nature, 
q 
