NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
35 
—of which we know 
The Pueblos of Acomo and Laguna. 
Indian Villages of New Mexico that Date Back Before the Conquest, 
Our First Americans in their First Homes. 
“he (By M. J. Brown, Eprror Lirrte Vauuey, N. Y., Hus) 
- Before closing this series of letters 
' want to tell you a little of two 
cient inhabited pueblos that | 
ave only mentioned in former let- 
ters, Acomo and Laguina, but which 
‘are no less wonderful and strange 
than Taos or Zuni, and are typical 
of Indian life back in the days be- 
fore white men came to America. 
We live in an age of automobiles, 
bird men, wireless talk, and trust 
e goods, and there is nothing 
new under the sun. 
But right here in our own country 
so pitifully 
little—there are some old things, 
conditions and people that date 
back before history and _ tradition. 
And when a 1911 American drops 
down into these 1540 Indian towns 
and tries to tell what he sees and 
what he feels—well, he simply can’t 
make the assignment good. 
The Santa Fe spoiled Laguna. 
’ “When that railroad blasted its lines 
het aol 
eh a Py Wye Cage Ly Mtns othe Tedd, 
ol Ate ed 
iVMAGCH YS os aes ~ 
“ 
through the solid rock at the foot of 
this Indian village it made a museum 
of Laguna and took away the old 
smell. Today the Indian mama has 
to watch out for the 10.45 and see 
that her young Indians are off the 
track. 
I passed a few hours in Laguna 
ea a wait between trains. It isa 
eliff-built village, »ot as old as many 
Bot the other comunity houses of 
the southwest, but old enough to be 
on the map. It was founded in 1699 
and has been doing business since 
—an offspring from Acomo. 
Like the most of the Pueblo vil- 
lages, Laguna is really one great 
house —a village where the houses 
join, a bee hive. The houses are of 
stone and are built up the side of a 
solid rock cliff. What the object 
of building on this barren cliff was, 
only the contractors of the old days 
knew, and they are past the telling. 
A half mile out on the prairie is a 
splendid village site, but the Indians 
chose this rocky hill, The generally 
accepted reason is that this village 
was built for protection—as a fort. 
I got off at Laguna. 
fore a lumber train had gone over 
the bank and piled up a modern 
wreck. The great engine of 1911 
lay there on its side, while the In- 
dian boys of over two centuries ago 
climbed over its mass of broken steel 
and rubbed their hands over the pol- 
ished sides of a steel horse made by 
The day be-. 
the Brooks Locomotive Works in 
Dunkirk, N.Y. It made me think 
of that celebrated painting, where 
the Indians, had massacred a pack 
train, and found an illustrated paper 
which they had gathered around. It 
made me think. of Salem and then 
Broadway. 
Laguna is built on an island of 
rock, and its walls rise high above 
the surrounding plain, built of 
stone, terraced one above the other. 
For hundreds of years the Pueblo 
Indians have lived here and they 
live today just as they have always 
lived. They retain their habits and 
customs of the time before the con- 
quest and do not conform to the 
white man’s ways. Many years ago 
the Santa Fe railroad almost cut the 
village in two, but the Indians never 
by any sign or change noted its 
coming. They live just as they have 
always lived and just as they al- 
ways will live. Civilization and de- 
velopment can have no part in their 
lives. They are of the old days. 
Just before the sun set behind the 
desert plain, I sat on a rock at the 
foot of this village and watched twi- 
light activity in this old town. From 
almost every direction the Indians 
Were coming in, singly and in 
eroups, some with sacks of grain, 
some with wood, some on foot, others 
on ponies—all coming home for the 
night. And by my _ observation 
place came an old man, an Indian 
long past the century mark, they 
told me, a man dim of sight and fee- 
ble of foot. This old fellow had 
been sitting on a rock for hours, 
watching the white man’s trains go 
by, and no doubt thinking back to 
the time when the red men domin- 
ated the southwest. The old man 
turned his dim eyes to me, stopped, 
made a sign with his arm and then 
erawled up the cliff to his coop. 
And I thought what wonderful 
stories this old man could tell me— 
if he only could. 
It is only when the through trains 
stop at Laguna that you see the In- 
dians as they are not, see them at a 
vocation utterly foreign to their na- 
tures. And then it is only the 
squaws and the children who ply the 
trade—selling pottery and_ bead- 
work. They block around the ob- 
servation car, showing their wares, 
looking at you from those old In- 
dian eyes, wishing you to buy, but 
never asking. They are not ped- 
dlers; they can’t ‘‘trade.’’ <A Little 
decorated dish is fifteen cents, but 
you ean’t buy two for a quarter— 
they can’t understand that. If you 
offered to buy all they had if they 
would give you a nickle off, they 
would simply shake their heads. 
They have a fixed price and that 
price goes or it doesn’t go. There is 
no Yankee streak in these Indians. 
They hate to sell you anything, but 
they know smoking tobacco comes 
easy this way. 
You can’t mix it with these vil- 
lage Indians, you simply can’t get 
chummy. You can prowl through 
their village and offer them every in- 
ducement to be neighborly, but they 
act as if they don’t see you. They 
have a crust thicker than Huclid 
Avenue. They will look over you, 
beyond you, but not at you, and as 
plain as actions can say it they will 
tell you to get out. 
Twenty miles southwest from La- 
guna is Acomo—the most wonderful 
of the many pueblos of New Mexico. 
Like Zuni it is far back from the 
railroads—one of the remote pueb- 
los that we Americans know little 
or nothing of. When the Spanish 
explored this region, three hundred 
and thirty years ago, the Acomos 
were living there—and they live to- 
day just as they lived then, and 
nothing but the white man’s law of 
survival, and that law literally en- 
forced will ever change their present 
life. 
The driver told me, and tradition 
told him, that many hundreds of 
years ago Acomo was a village on 
top of an island messa, where the 
Indians fled for self protection. A 
great rock, with a stairway, afforded 
them a Gibralter defense against 
any of the wandering tribes who 
thought war was easier and cheaper 
than agriculture. But one day a ecy- 
clone swept away the stairway and 
Acomo had to lay out a new village. 
Nobody knows how old Acmo was 
when the first white man found it. 
Coronado could find no tradition or 
anything that started at the begin- 
ning. It was so old that its history 
was forgotten when the first Euro- 
peans came up in 1540. It is the 
most picturesque and most natural 
of the many communial dwellings of 
the unknown southwest, and an 
American can hardly believe that he 
is yet in our own boasted eiviliza- 
tion, our own progressive America, 
when he looks up at this strange 
village builded by our first Ameri- 
cans—founded while yet the people 
of the old world scoffed at Colum- 
bus and his world-round theories. 
