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NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
INCIDENTS AND ANECDOTES. 
BeeResume of the People and Events Which Struck Our Fancy 
in the Southwest. 
(By M. J. Brown, Eprror Lirriy Variey, N. Y., Hus.) 
This letter will close the southwest 
series, and it is made up of odds and 
ends from a note book, little stories 
of human interest and the unusual 
incidents noted on the trip. 
Taking a long walk down the 
banks of the Rio Grande one after- 
noon, by the side of the railroad ! 
found an Indian boy playing alone 
with the stones, building little cattle 
pens. I stopped and watched the 
boy. He was perhaps six years old, 
and a type of the full blood Pueblo. 
I noticed one of his hands was badly 
swollen and inflamed. I sat down 
_ by his side in the gravel and finally 
induced him to let me see his hand. 
It had been badly eut across the 
palm and without any care it had 
become a dangerous wound, swollen 
and cracked open. 
I tried the sign language and fi- 
nally the little fellow understood 
What I wanted. He placed that hot, 
throbbing little brown hand in mine 
and we went back to town and to the 
drug store, where a doctor carefully 
dressed and poulticed it. Then I 
led him back down the track and 
bade him goodbye. 
He was an Indian. He couldn’t 
express himself as we gushing white 
men do. He just looked at me when 
1 left, but I know that should I ever 
meet this little brown man again, I 
have a friend who will come 
through. 
Along the Rio Grande, any where 
where trees grow, you may see the 
beavers’ work, and it is certainly 
wonderful what work these little fur 
animals can do. You have read of 
the beavers’ dams, how these little 
fellows will fell hundreds of trees, 
dam a river and make for themselves 
But it seems to me that tree 
cutting is an instinct or habit with 
these animals and they just bite 
them down to be doing something. 
All along the river the trees are 
felled, and the sharp teeth of these 
water animals have bitten them off 
as smooth as an axe could have cut 
them. 
About as tough a sight as I ever 
saw was a little girl and a drunken 
father, just outside of the little 
mountain town of Espanola. The 
father had fallen from his horse and 
laid in a drunken stupor in the trail. 
_and I shared with him my bed. 
The girl was vainly trying to revive 
him. She would soak her handker- 
chief in the stream, carry it over and 
sprinkle it in the face of the drunken 
father. I told her to go back to the 
town and get help, but she said they 
would put him in jail as they did 
before ‘‘and mamma is. sick at 
home.”’ 
The man had a sack of potatoes 
and a few groceries tied to his sad- 
dle. He had fallen from his horse, 
dead drunk. If left there he would 
freeze before morning. I went back 
to the town, reported the matter to 
the marshal and as I rode into Santa 
Fe that night, many times I won- 
dered if the brute was arrested and 
how the little woman and the sick 
mother came out. 
I saw a traveling salesman and a 
gambler play the limit in a mountain 
saloon one night. Afterward I 
shared my bed with the victim and 
listened to his remorse. He was a 
traveling freight agent. He had sold 
his home in Denver and with the 
money was to have made payment on 
a neat little dobie in Albuquerque, 
and wife and little boy would soon 
be down. He got crazy drunk and 
the soldier of fortune saw him first 
and claimed him. He had several 
New York drafts. Crazy with small 
loses, he endorsed the papers and 
turned them over to the saloon keep- 
er as trustee, while the winnings and 
losings were recorded by pencil. 
The game was dice, one throw. It 
started with a dollar and went to 
one hundred dollars as a stake at 
one throw. As fast as the railroad 
man’s losings totaled the amounts of 
the drafts they were handed over to 
the winner. He told me he lost 
$1200 that night. The place was full 
So- 
bering up in the night, and realizing 
what he had done, he begged to die, 
and if ever I felt like providing a 
man with the means for a quick trip 
to the hereafter it was then. But I 
didn’t have a gun and he was asleep 
when I crawled out the next morn- 
ing. 
While the Mexicans are looked 
upon with much contempt by Amer- 
icans, yet they are feared to a con- 
siderable extent, and if a man has 
anything to say about a Greaser he 
looks around first, and tells it to you 
39 
low. They are revengeful and never 
forget. If they hate a white man 
they will stick a match under his 
store or barn. 
In northern New Mexico the most 
of the Mexicans are Penetenties— 
they belong to the Penitent Brothers, 
the self-scourgers, and a word 
against their religion makes you 
their deadly enemy. The most of 
them are deplorably ignorant. They 
are fanatics, and think the white 
race is against their religion, and 
a man who would pry into their 
strange Flaggellent rites takes a 
long chance, for they will kill him if 
the surroundings are favorable. 
Many of the Mexican girls are 
handsome, some of them strikingly 
beautiful, the red under the olive 
making an unusual combination. 
The men are dark, almost black, 
while the women are nearly all light, 
with just enough of the olive to 
brand them. They love ‘dress and 
display.- 
One of the curiosities made in this 
remarkable country is the Navajo 
blanket. There is no other blanket 
like it. It is remarkable that half 
naked savages in a remote wilder- 
ness which is almost a desert, un- 
washed nomads who never live in a 
house, weave a handsomer, more 
durable, and more valuable blanket 
than is turned out by the costly and 
intricate looms of Europe and Amer- 
ica, but it is true. 
The covers which shelter us at 
night are very poor affairs, artistic- 
ally and commercially, compared to 
those superb fabrics woven by Nay- 
ajo women in the rudest carica- 
ture of a loom. 
Blanket weaving is the one do- 
mestic industry of this great tribe 
of twenty thousand souls, whose 
temporary brush shelters, dot the 
northwestern mountains of New 
Mexico, and the eastern ranges of 
Arizona, but they do it well. The 
work of the men is_ stock-raising, 
they have a million and a half of 
sheep, a hundred thousand cattle and 
several hundred thousand beautiful 
ponies, and they also plant a little 
corn. The women have no _ house- 
work to do, because they have no 
houses—a very different social con- 
dition from that of their neighbors, 
the cleanly, industrious, farm-tend- 
ing home-loving Pueblos. They 
make hardly any pottery, buying 
what they need from the expert 
Pueblos, in exchange for their own 
matchless blankets, which the Pueb- 
los no longer weave. 
