A Mexican journey

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

CHAUTAUQUA
HOME READING SERIES

to

of it|e

of tlonmto

A. WEBBER

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

By

E. H. BLICHFELDT

Illustrated

(Eltautamiua

CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK

M C M X I X

The Chautauqua Literary
and Scientific Circle

Home Reading Department of Chautauqua Institution
Founded in 1878

This volume is part of a system of home reading the es-
sential features of which are:

1. A Definite Course covering four years, and including History,

Literature, Art, Travel, Science, etc. (A reader may enroll
for only one year.) No examinations.

2. Specified Volumes approved by the Councillors. Many of the

books are specially prepared for the purpose.

3. Allotment of Time. The reading is apportioned by the week

and month.

4. Current Topics, week by week, in one of the foremost publica-

tions in America, The Independent.

5. A Monthly Bulletin, The Round Table, giving helps and hints

for home study, circle programs, notes from the field,
teaching and illustrative material.

6. A Question Book, serving as the outline of a written report

on each year's reading, should the individual choose to
make such.

7. Individual Readers, no matter how isolated, may have all the

privileges.

8. Local Circles may be formed by three or more members for

mutual aid and encouragement.

9. The Time Required is no more than the average person

wastes in disconnected, desultory reading.

10. Certificates are granted each year and a diploma at the end

of four years to all who complete the course

gst is $6 for books, The Independent, The
and all necessary help:;. 2or full in-

INSTITUTION
AUTAUQUA, N. Y.

905765

PREFACE

MOST of what appears in the following
pages was first written for the Chau-
tauquan magazine, though all has
been carefully revised for its present use. If
the fruits of laborious original research ap-
pear anywhere, it is the research of some one
besides the author. His debt in this way is
informally suggested by the text, except when
it relates to things now become common prop-
erty, and calling for no special acknowledg-
ment. The opinions and sentiments expressed
regarding our Mexican neighbors, on the con-
trary, may be taken as at first hand. Here
also the writer would be presumptuous to set
up any claims as a discoverer or to deny that
he owes much to teachers and prompters.
These opinions and sentiments, however, are
such as without falsity he may call his own,
and grow out of alert, sympathetic contact
and correspondence with Mexicans for several
years. If the reader can be made to adopt

iii

PREFACE

them by the somewhat impressionistic account
here given, the only deliberate purpose of the
book will have been served. For the most
part even this has been quite subordinate to
the impulse that Henry Ward Beecher de-
clared when he said, "There are some things
that cannot be seen satisfactorily with less
than four eyes." The delights of travel in
Mexico are such as one would like to share*

PREFATORY NOTE TO 1919 EDITION:— So far as this book
is a record of easy, somewhat irresponsible travels, it is unchanged
since the first edition. The last tour described was made in 1911,
just when the Madero revolution had got well under way. Since
then, adventurous students, with quite special credentials, have
made their way to capital and rebel camp alike, and representatives
of important foreign interests have held on here and there; but to
the casual visitor, Mexico has been closed.

It matters little, for the aspects of the country dwelt upon are
either unaltered or altered in ways not yet confirmed. That the
sailing route of the Ward Line steamers in 1919 differs from that of
1911, for example, is unimportant for the purpose hi mind.

The historical narrative, on the other hand, has been supple-
mented; and political comment has been adapted to new facts.

CONTENTS

HAPTER PAGE

I. MEXICO 1

II. THE MEXICANS 10

III. GOING 23

IV. HENEQUIN 41

V. VERA CRUZ 57

VI. TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE ... 67

VII. OAXACA 92

VIII. To MITLA AND BACK 100

IX. MEXICO CITY 109

X. SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL . . . .119

XI. THE GOVERNMENT 145

XII. XOCHIMILCO 164

XIII. CUERNAVACA, CUAUTLA, PUEBLA . . . 173

XIV. A TOLTEC PYRAMID 182

XV. HIGHER THAN THE ALPS 190

XVI. TOWNS AND MORE TOWNS . . 202

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

XVII. A RIDE TO REGLA 210

XVIII. THE WEST AND NORTH 220

XIX. TIDES THAT MEET 235

XX. CUSTOMS AND COMPARISONS 248

XXI. LAST WORDS 257

BIBLIOGRAPHY 271

INDEX . . 273

\i

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

COPYRIGHT. 1912,
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY.

Published September, 191t.

A Mexican Journey

MEXICO

IF you will join our company going to
Mexico, I promise to show you things en-
joyable to see — things that have been a
source of unfailing pleasure to me myself.
You will see them as I did on a visit a few
months ago.* Along the way I shall not
wholly refrain from telling you of earlier hap-
penings and experiences that come back to
one on familiar ground after an absence; it
would be hard to exclude these, and I feel
sure of your good-humored consent. Do not
expect learned instruction on any scholarly
subject, though if that is what you want per-
haps I can tell you where to find it. For the
most part I know it will not be desired. Here
and there an intelligent visitor is likely to ask
questions; and at such points, without going
to excess, I will tell you a little of what I

"1911 1

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

understand the scholars and thinkers have con-
cluded. It is not an analysis but a survey
that we shall try to make, however, — not an
investigation but a pleasant, wide-awake jour-
ney together. If in its progress you grow
as fond of Mexico and the Mexicans as I have
long been, you will feel that acquaintance
with them is abundantly worth whatever time
and effort it may have cost.

On any but the idlest excursion every one
is fore-minded to a degree. Let us not ac-
tually set out, therefore, till we have inquired
briefly who the Mexicans are, what their an-
tecedents, environment, and condition, and
what prejudices and ideals we may look for
among them.

Mexico is not so large by half as it was
before the war with the United States, known
in American history as the Mexican War. To
be more exact, we should say before the Texan
War for Independence; but Mexicans think
of Texas as having been wrested from them
by the same strategy which ended in their loss
of that greater neighboring area since carved
up, roughly speaking, into a half-dozen other
states and territories of the American Union.
Till 1835 their domain was nearly equal to

MEXICO

that of the United States, or to the whole
of Europe leaving out Russia and Turkey.
Even now, what remains to them would be
enough to encompass Great Britain, Ireland,
France, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. That its natural resources will sus-
tain such a comparison can here be neither
asserted nor denied, but the scientist and the
explorer go far beyond the mere tourist in
appreciation of its riches. Where the tourist
sees only desert, they see the waving green
and yellow of potential harvests. If they dis-
count at all the reckless enthusiasm of pro-
moters beguiling the American investor, it is
not regarding the latent wealth of the country,
but regarding the ease with which settlers
totally lacking in experience may grow rub-
ber on impossible land bought at random, or
market pineapples irrespective of means for
transportation. There is no doubt that the
country will feed and clothe some added mil-
lions of people, and that it hides mineral
wealth either to supply the necessaries of
still other millions, or to barter for what-
ever may be lacking. Suffice it to say that
in its undeveloped resources we are consider-
ing no insignificant country. Then let us

3

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

pass from things that might or that doubtless
may be to things that have been and are.

The mantle of natural verdure and primi-
tive human graces, of medieval romance sur-
viving in a practical age, of hospitality, of
leisure, and of pride which have been painted
for us by the hands of such writers as Mr.
F. Hopkinson Smith — this mantle is spread
over a rugged and highly substantial frame-
work, concerning which one refers, with an
appropriate feeling of solidity, to Alexander
von Humboldt. The geologic framework will
be suggested to travelers in the United States
by saying that it exhibits yet more strongly
the qualities, as plainly it continues the sys-
tem, not of the Appalachian, but of the west-
ern highlands of the United States. It is
rugged, Titanic, challenging, not rounded and
softened as though it grew ready ages ago to
invite the coming of civilized man. The stu-
dious reader may consult Humboldt and later
supplemental investigations, while others con-
tent themselves for the moment with this
general hint. Not gentle little hills like sheep
in a meadow, but towering and bristling
giants amid shatterings of a world stand in
Mexico for mountain scenery.

4

MEXICO

Even while giving this description I recall
a very different one which may well be quoted
here. Charles Macomb Flandrau, in his highly
suggestive and entertaining, though often
cynical and at times flippantly careless "Viva
Mexico," says:

"The view from the piazza was characteristic of
the mountainous, tropical parts of Mexico, and, like
most of the views there, combined both the grandeur,
the awfulness of space and height — of eternal, un-
trodden snows piercing the thin blue — with the soft
velvet beauty of tropical verdure, the unimaginable
delicacy and variety of color that glows and palpi-
tates in vast areas of tropical foliage seen at different
distances through haze and sunlight. Mountains
usually have an elemental, geologic sex of some sort,
and the sex of slumbering, jungle-covered, tropical
mountains is female. There is a symmetry, a chaste
volcanic elegance about them that renders them the
consorts and daughters of man-mountains like, say,
the Alps, the Rockies, or the mountains of the Cau-
casus."

The description just quoted, however, is
true only of what it represents, and it repre-
sents the mountains with which, doubtless, the
author is most intimately acquainted. The
mountains with which I lived from day to
day in Mexico for three years rise from plains
already too high for tropical or even semi-

5

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

tropical conditions, and hold their peaks from
two to three and one-half miles perpendicu-
larly above sea-level. They are, I believe, of
the sort that one usually means in speaking
of mountainous Mexico. The other picture,
however, will have value to us, not only for
intrinsic beauty, but also as showing how
almost everything Mexican defies simple and
summary treatment. The country is one of
well-nigh unlimited variety, of sharp con-
trasts, and of apparent contradictions. Snow
and burning desert, oak and palm and steam-
ing jungle growth, are all to be found in the
1500 miles between Sonora and Yucatan.
More impressively, indeed, they will all ap-
pear in a cross-section, to be accomplished by
one day's travel. One may drink chocolate
and cinnamon on the warm Gulf shore in the
morning, pass upward through the altitudes
of cocoanut, orange, coffee and banana, sugar
and cotton, during the next two or three
hours, and by eleven o'clock, if a "norther"
happens to be blowing, draw on a heavy coat
for warmth, while looking upward across the
dry table-land to slumbering volcanoes capped
with snows that never melt. Mexico is a land
of contrasts.

6

MEXICO

A notion that the tarry-at-home traveler
must dismiss before he can rightly conceive
of Mexico, is that latitude determines temper-
ature. Latitude is one of a number of con-
ditions that have their influence on climate,
but no one of them can ever be assumed to
determine temperature until the others have
been taken into account. The northern fringe
of New York State along Lake Erie, which
has become famous as a "grape belt," has as
mild a climate as parts of eastern Kentucky,
and there are points on the coast of Alaska
where the winter is less severe than in either
of the localities just compared. Of all the
conditions that go to determine climate, alti-
tude is the one that figures most surprisingly
to the New Englander when Mexico is being
studied. At least one Mexican guide-book
has, and all such guide-books ought to have,
tables of elevation for the important places on
the map. All other elements being normal,
an altitude of less than 3000 feet will give a
hot climate in any part of the republic. An
altitude between 3000 and 7000 feet will give
a temperate climate, and an altitude from
7000 up to 14,000 feet will give a cold climate.
One does not speak at all of climate in the

7

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

snow belt of Mexico, because snow and vegeta-
tion do not alternate there, and life cannot in
any natural way be supported. The snow line
is about 14,000 feet above sea-level. The gen-
eral level in that vast part of Mexico known
as the Plateau has an elevation of 6000 to
8000 feet. Suppose, however, that we mean
by a hot climate an average temperature
throughout the year of about 85 degrees, still
it is true that the greatest extreme of heat
will not exceed that in New York, and the
discomfort caused by it will be less than in
New York. Similarly, if by a cold climate
we mean £ yearly average temperature of 60
degrees, it will be found that the thermometer
rarely goes so low as freezing, even in winter.
A moment's reflection will now make it clear
that variations up or down in a given locality
are much less than they are farther north.
This would be inferred from the latitude, as
seasonal changes are generally less marked
nearer the equator.

If the differences between winter and sum-
mer are less, the differences between night and
day are more, and those between shady and
sunny sides of a street far more, than in New
York or Chicago. Even above 8000 feet the

8

MEXICO

noonday sun is fierce, yet in the shade there
is never a day above that altitude when the
"shirt-waist man" from New York would sit
long without his coat. At a given tempera-
ture he would feel much colder than at home,
probably because evaporation from the skin
is more rapid, as well as because of the rarer
atmosphere and consequent smaller intake of
oxygen. If ordinarily blessed with good cir-
culation, the northerner will be surprised that,
even when the thermometer registers several
degrees above freezing, he needs winter under-
wear and a heavy overcoat. A phenomenon
well known to mountain climbers and physi-
cists, but new to many visitors, is that the de-
creased air pressure allows water to boil at
lower temperature, and an egg or any vege-
table cooked in it must be kept longer over
the fire. The atmospheric pressure at Mexico
City, for example, is fourteen pounds to the
square inch. This is a mere detail ; but it rep-
resents a whole set of conditions for which the
visiting lowlander is never quite prepared,
however much he may have heard and read
about them.

II

THE MEXICANS

SOMEWHAT like the diversity of the
land is the diversity of its people.
Among them are about six millions be-
longing to the native races, over six millions
of mixed blood, and three million whites. If
we could assign to each of these three classes
its relative - place in the social and economic
scale, you would no doubt welcome the con-
venience. This is impossible. There is a so-
cial and economic scale with well-marked
gradations, but in applying its test, race can
hardly be said to figure. It is true that among
those occupying the highest station, pure In-
dians are rare, and that among those occupy-
ing the lowest station, the pure white does not
exist, the occasional American tramp being
outside our discussion. The fact remains,
however, that there is no relation in industry,
profession, business, politics, or formal so-
ciety from which the pure Indian would be

10

THE MEXICANS

debarred, or for aspiring to which he would
not have ample warrant in law, sentiment, and
historic example. Benito Juarez, the greatest
Mexican who has ever lived and the greatest
object of national veneration to-day, was a
full-blooded Indian. Porfirio Diaz was one-
fourth Indian according to his approved biog-
raphers, but intelligent Mexicans generally
believe him to have been three-fourths, and
they do not say this to disparage him. For a
Mexican of European ancestry to disdain a
Mexican of somewhat mixed blood, or for one
of mixed blood to treat a cultured Indian as
inferior, because in him the native blood per-
haps of princes has never been mingled for
better or worse with a foreign strain — either
of these demonstrations of arrogance would, I
suppose, be unique in recent times. There are
families who take a harmless pride in declar-
ing themselves Creoles of pure Spanish ex-
traction. A writer already mentioned, how-
ever, says that most unadulterated Spaniards
in the republic are "either priests or grocers."
Bull-fighters are another contingent. A gov-
ernor of one of the Mexican states once said
to me after speaking of his own lineage:
"Very few of us here, if we are Mexicans of

11

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

more than two or three generations, can tell
what proportion of native Indian blood we
may have." It might have been replied that,
even so, they are not much farther from a
complete racial analysis of themselves than
some of the rest of mankind.

It very soon ceases to be a surprise, then,
to find in the learned professions and in im-
portant positions of various kinds, people of
the original Mexican stock. Perhaps the fact
that all of these are not equally dark, that
some Spaniards are far from light, and that
the natives often have splendid heads and
finely chisekd features has as much to do with
the state of affairs as the undoubted capacity
of many of the Indians.

In the entire absence of a race problem, for
which Mexicans ought to be grateful, eco-
nomic differences are as sharp and distinctions
are as clearly drawn as elsewhere. There is
perhaps no country equally civilized where the
educational, political, and material welfare of
the laboring people has advanced less and
where their condition presents more cruel, and
at the same time more immemorially pictur-
esque phases than in Mexico. The problem of
lifting them to a distinctly higher plane of

THE MEXICANS

life is the immediate and urgent problem of
the nation. It was the justification for the
Madero revolution, whatever may have been
the alleged grievances of other classes. It is
the matter concerning which the Diaz regime
must give its most important final account,
however great the progress made in material
development. We may assume that Presi-
dent Diaz and his friends recognized this; it
was one of their boasts, whether founded on
exact truth and complete knowledge or not,
that in Diaz's native state, Oaxaca, illiteracy
had been reduced from sixty per cent, to eight
per cent. Still, removing illiteracy in its tech-
nical implication by extending the mere ability
to read and write is not a complete cure.
President Madero at once declared his realiza-
tion that something larger and more funda-
mental is demanded and that the problem is
nation-wide. Henceforth, indeed, it cannot
be ignored. But when at length its solution
is reached, we feel that also one of the most
engaging, one of the most beautiful to the
imagination, of all the figures in the pageant
of human life will have passed forever. The
gentle, graceful, submissive, but well-nigh
unconquerable and wholly inscrutable child

13

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

of the ancient Aztecs, Chichimecs, and still
earlier Toltecs, whoever they may have been,
will have given place to some other, and
doubtless a newly composite type.

In writing the history of England, scholars
can give us little more than conjecture until
the advent of the Romans. Our British an-
cestors neglected to make for us any intelli-
gible record before that event. Similarly,
authentic knowledge of Mexico begins but
little previous to the arrival thither of the
gold-hunting, proselyting, and bloodthirsty
Spaniards, who were the first bringers of the
white man's Civilization. Of the records that
existed, very many were ruthlessly destroyed,
and of the rest only a small part have been
deciphered. The advance toward civilization
on this continent, as in Europe, had had its
ebbs and flows, had been broken rather than
continuous. The Mexicans whom Cortez and
his valiant murderers overcame knew little
and said less of their remote predecessors. If
the Spaniards wondered at this they may also
have recalled similar lapses at home, seeing
that for generations the invading Moors, so
lately withdrawn from Spain, had been the
only preservers of classic Greek and Latin

14

THE MEXICANS

learning. The Spaniards, as conquerors of
Mexico, were less kind to futurity; still cer-
tain outlines have been pieced together from
picture writings and from other evidence that
survives.

While there were tribes in various parts of
the land that maintained independence, the
greatness of Mexico as far back as history
can trace it centers in the valley of Mexico
round about the present capital, high on its
table-land, yet encircled by mountains of
much greater height.

When we say this, we are leaving aside, as
we must, the builders of noble and awe-inspir-
ing structures in Yucatan and elsewhere be-
cause they date back farther than any history.
These builders were great in their forgotten
day, but we do not know them and can give
them no place. They may have been contem-
poraries of Solomon or even of the Pharaoh
who oppressed the Israelites in Egypt.

Beginning, then, with what is fairly authen-
tic, the Toltecs had sway in Mexico from
about 650 A.D., four hundred years. They
were the greatest builders of historic or semi-
historic times. The Chichimecs, a ruder peo-
ple, succeeded the Toltecs, not by conquest

15

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

but because the Toltecs had died out. One
legend says that pulque, the intoxicating
drink of the natives to this day, was the cause.
However that may be, the land of the Toltecs
was deserted until the Chichimecs spread over
it about 1175 A.D. The Acolhuas arrived a
few years later, and still a little later came the
Aztecs or Mexicans. No one can fix the exact
dates, but with a few years' interval the three
nations appear to have followed each other
in this order: Chichimecs, Acolhuas, Aztecs.
Although not wholly settled till later, all seem
to have appeared before the year 1200.

If the Chiohimecs were less advanced in
arts than had been the Toltecs, this was not
equally true of the Acolhuas, who may have
been descended from some kindred of the
Toltecs, and with whom the Chichimecs min-
gled and intermarried. So progress was hin-
dered less than might have seemed likely. As
for the Aztecs (or Mexicans) , they were wan-
derers for a long time and held themselves
aloof. They are said to have come from
the Californias. On the way they built the
Casas Grandes, of which notable ruins re-
main. Then after further wandering they
reached the present site of Tula, fifty miles

16

THE MEXICANS

north of Mexico City, where more ruins can
easily be observed. The air is at once clear
and marvelously soft; and as I remember
there are two tireless buzzards wheeling far
above the sunlit crest of the hill. One fancies
that they must have done so always. The
Aztecs remained here nine years. Finally
they came to Chapultepec, "the hill of the
grasshopper," about 1250 A.D. They went
through one period of enslavement but were
set free, so the story goes, because their mas-
ters, a tribe called the Colhuas, were horrified
by their religious sacrifices of human beings
and the atrocious way in which they carried on
war, even when nominally under Colhuan
control.

The Aztecs had never been far distant from
Chapultepec since they first discovered it, and
near it on an island they now settled them-
selves. It was the year 1325. The priests
who advised the tribe said that they saw
there an eagle sitting on a nopal or prickly
pear and strangling a serpent in its talons.
This they declared was a sign in agreement
with prophecy, and the place of their abiding
was so fixed. The Mexican coins of to-day,
as well as the national flag, bear as insignia

17

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

the eagle, the serpent, and the nopal cactus.
Classic stories of the founding of other towns
on sites oracularly pointed out may be inter-
esting— the story of Rome for example. The
Aztecs confirmed their tradition of religious
cruelty by a ceremonial baptism of the new
city in the blood of prisoners. Throughout
their future they continued such evil practices.
They showed, however, a genius for organiza-
tion, for coping with natural difficulties — as
in the construction of floating gardens before
they could possess themselves of enough nat-
ural land — and for diplomacy. By intermar-
riage of their princes with other royal families,
they at last made themselves masters of the
entire region round about.

It was an Aztec dynasty, the dynasty of
the Montezumas, that Cortez found in 1519,
or almost 200 years after the establishment
of their city. That horribly cruel religious
rites and inhuman conduct in war were fa-
miliar among them has been made clear; but
it is also certain that better instincts were
recognized among the people under their rule.
Otherwise, how would the legend have been
preserved that the independent existence of
the Mexican tribe came from a repugnance of

18

THE MEXICANS

their masters to their cruelty in religion and
war? Quetzalcoatl, the gentle god of peace,
was the titular deity of many Aztecs who
were opposed to the sway of the more popular
god of war, Huitzilopochitli. Similarly, it is
clear that the government was aristocratic, but
familiarity with another ideal appears from
the account of how the nobles obtained their
power over the people. In 1425 the king and
his advisers wanted to make war upon some
neighbors, while the common people opposed
it, fearing that the enemy would be too strong.
The curious compact was made that war
should be entered upon with vigor, and that
if it failed the people might exact of the nobles
any forfeit, even their lives. If it succeeded,
contrary to the dismal prophecy of the people,
then they were to become slaves of the nobles.
The war succeeded and the people were held
to their unhappy promise.

The form of government among neighbor-
ing tribes varied. The Tlaxcalans, who aided
Cortez against the Mexicans because of an
old enmity, were democrats, their government
being a sort of republic. The interesting con-
sideration here is as to the state in which mat-
ters were found by the conquerors from over

19

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

the sea. Cruelty in practice by the rulers of
the principal nation, though mercy was recog-
nized as an ideal, and tyranny toward the
poor, though the democratic principle had
long been familiar, tell much of the condition.
The Europeans brought no improvement in
either of these two respects. Another element
worthy of mention was the strong religious
vein, availed of by the craft and power of the
priests, as unscrupulous as were the Roman
clergy a little later. In short, conditions were
present to make easy either the improvement
or the continued exploitation and degradation
of the people.

The Spaniards came. Few chapters in the
story of man surpass the record of daring,
energy, cruelty, greed, perfidy, and religious
hypocrisy on the one hand, and of patriotism,
heroic self-devotion, and unavailing courage
on the other, which marked the conquest. The
Mexicans showed themselves not inferior to
the Spaniards in valor, in strength, in organ-
ization, or even in military strategy; but they
had no horses, knew nothing of gunpowder,
and were otherwise less effectively equipped.
Their chivalry was too high. On one occa-
sion they sent food to the Spaniards because

20

THE MEXICANS

they disdained to fight a starving foe. Their
superstition made them, and particularly
Montezuma himself, very susceptible to the
deceit of the Spaniards. Even with all these
disadvantages, however, it would have re-
quired far greater forces than Cortez led to
overcome them if, instead of having thousands
of native allies, he had found all the tribes
united against him. Like Greece in its fall,
the native people lost their chance of per-
petuity and continued development by not
being able to stand united against the alien
invader. Their downfall can scarcely be told
with more dramatic effect in romances like
Wallace's "The Fair God" than it is in a
supposedly matter-of-fact history like Pres-
cott's "The Conquest of Mexico."

Though it is not strange that Mexicans
even of Spanish blood should celebrate the
independence of their nation, there is some-
thing a little curious in the fact that, review-
ing all this early history, they identify them-
selves throughout in thought and sentiment
with the Indians rather than with the con-
quistadores. The finest statue between the
heart of the capital and the castle of Chapul-
tepec, on one of the finest avenues of the

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

world, is a statue of Cuauhtemoc, the Aztec
prince who refused to tell the Spaniards the
whereabouts of his nation's treasure. A visit
to the Academy of Fine Arts will fill the
stranger with admiration of the same fact.
Sculpture and painting, poetry and the elo-
quence of public speech, have all been devoted
to magnifying the dignity, the generosity, the
courage of the native race. Between the
purest Castilian and the most thoroughly
Indian elements of the people, Mexican pa-
triotism knows no division in this. The con-
quered, not the conquering heroes, are the
heroes and fathers of the nation. The ardent
Mexican of any class resents being taken for
a Spaniard.

Ill

GOING

THERE are now several ways of ap-
proach to Mexico; but the historic way
is by Havana and Vera Cruz. It was
from the governor of Cuba that Cortez re-
ceived his commission to go in quest of gold
and adventure in 1518; and while he was not
the first Spaniard to visit the Mexican coast,
nor Vera Cruz the first place that his vessels
touched, yet the successful invasion of the
country began with his landing there in the
spring of 1519. It would take a long story
to tell of all the invaders and adventurers that
have made Vera Cruz their port since his
time, despite the absence of any protected
harbor. This lack made Cortez destroy his
fleet, and was never remedied till about the
beginning of the twentieth century. As for
railroads, even a generation ago when the
building of one from the United States was
proposed, the rulers of Mexico were accus-
tomed to forbid it, saying, "Between the

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

strong and the weak the desert is a necessity."
It was in 1884 that railroad connection was
first established. The land route, therefore,
is not taken by any one wishing to reconstruct
the past; and even for a present sense of the
individuality of our neighbor nation we should
not choose to step over the imaginary border
line from a town nominally American but
still in a degree Mexican, to a town nominally
Mexican but already a good deal American-
ized. The broad track of the ocean, not the
narrow glistening rail, shall take us to the
land of our pilgrimage.

Leaving New York on a sleety and cruel
Thursday of December or January, we slip
down the East River, remaining on deck,
whatever the cold, and letting the impression
of our own perpendicular metropolis fix itself
as strongly as it will on our departing vision.
So we have said "good-bye" to the exigent
Land of Now and have determined the picture
that will return to us for contrast when we
look on older cities in the "land of manana,"
the land of the long yesterday and the un-
tried to-morrow. If we sight again any shore
of the former country it will be as those who
pass by, and with a feeling of detachment.

24

GOING

We find ourselves aboard a steamer which
one member of the company, much traveled
on trans-Atlantic Largitanias, can scarcely
regard without amusement at its littleness.
There is, however, a well-seasoned old cap-
tain, for this voyage a plain passenger like
the rest of us, who says that our supercilious
friend will change his estimate of the Morro
Castle. The fastest vessel of the Ward Line,
she is admirable also for the steadiness of her
going in all weathers. As for size, not many
years ago there was no craft afloat that could
belittle a ship of 9,500 tons.

This captain, born and grown in Ayr, Scot-
land, and as fond and proud of Bobbie Burns-
as becomes a good Ayrshireman, is just re-
turning from a visit home after several years'
work for "the Pearsons" at Vera Cruz and
elsewhere. If we don't know who the Pear-
sons are, he evidently thinks that we ought to
know; and doubtless we shall learn before we
have finished our tour. On arriving in Vera
Cruz, if we like he will take us aboard one
of their dredging schooners, of which he was
once in command. Now he is to become chief
pilot of the new port of Salina Cruz, over
on the Pacific.

25

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

The Scottish captain is not the only inter-
esting passenger. On a ship bound for Liver-
pool or Hamburg one might find the list
made up of persons like oneself, bent on
merely "doing" the objective country or coun-
tries and then returning with the supposed
gains of the expedition all jumbled or nicely
assorted in their heads. But these people
bound for Mexico are to be charged with no
such levity. They set out with as many
large and grave desires as were ever regis-
tered at Wishing Gate. The young man with
pink cheeks and curly locks has accepted in
high hope of advancement a position as secre-
tary to an American railway official; and his
parents, who think that every Mexican car-
ries two pistols and a wicked heart, bade him
a tremulous farewell at the wharf. The dark,
resolute-looking, "tailor-made" girl is a school
teacher, now to become a missionary, whose
parents, if she has any, probably sent her
from them with Spartan or Puritan fortitude.
That angular countryman of ours with the
long nose is going to bring suit against the
Mexican Federal government for having di-
verted the natural water supply from a
property in which he is interested. He can

26

GOING

discourse to you roundly about the devious-
ness and perversity of the courts down there
and of their servility to the wishes of the
Executive. He, however, will bring pressure
to bear from without, if no satisfaction is
given; and he has an English partner who
will apply for redress also through the British
representative. The very quiet man in the
modest clothes may be a professional gambler,
the engineer of a mine three days' saddle ride
from any railroad, or a United States secret-
service man appointed to find out something
or other at personal risk. There is a former
ship's doctor going to set up practice in a
new "camp," and an old man making, for
him, a really perilous journey to learn the
truth about a mine in which his savings are
invested. The mine has been paying since
the days of Captain Drake, who may have
enjoyed some indirect dividends, but the man-
agement changes from time to time and will
bear investigation. The brown, gesticulating
group that you have noticed, who talk Spanish
too fast to be understood by the Cortina
method, are on their way home to Guatemala.
The small but efficient-looking young Mexi-
can and his quite dazzlingly beautiful bride

27

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

have spent two weeks of their honeymoon in
New York, where the senora, lately senorita,
found her greatest delight in the Hippodrome.
Do not on that account question her culture
or her seriousness. Her playing on the ship's
piano to-night was brilliant. She can discuss
with meaning the literature of either her own
language or ours. She and her husband are
loyal but not implicit Catholics, with advanced
political ideas; and they assured us that while
they did not favor revolution in 1911, never-
theless, President Diaz being safely retired,
they and scores of thousands would resist the
succession of any but a progressive man. She
is interested in social advancement and has
herself been a teacher of the poor on her
father's plantation. In a little aside she de-
clared her conviction that Mexican girls be-
come model wives in their faithfulness and
their devotion to all the interests of their hus-
bands, but generally the Mexican man is not
so good a husband as the American of her
acquaintance. If her own husband were not
an exception, of course, as touching this sub-
ject, she would hold her finger upon her lips
forever.

This business of reviewing our fellow-pas-
28

GOING

sengers, some consultation of Terry's and
Campbell's guide-books, a little study of
Spanish, a good deal of parading the deck,
and hours given to the sights of the sea, will
fill the next week or more. We are due to
arrive at Vera Cruz on Friday, but Captain
Ayrshire says we probably shan't — Sunday
morning is more likely; — and so we may as
well sink into comfortable acquiescence. The
study of Spanish, even, may be dispensed with
altogether, for the ship's stewards are all
Americans or Britons and we are advised one
can make one's way anywhere in Mexico now
by the aid of English alone, so general has its
use become. This is demonstrated by many
tourists every year. Yet by the aid of from
fifty to two hundred Spanish words and a
little knowledge of the grammar, one can
travel with added pleasure and satisfaction.
Often a clerk or waiter who is advertised to
speak English will understand better even the
most limited and halting Spanish. The Mexi-
can people everywhere appreciate any evi-
dence that a stranger has taken pains to learn
a little of their idioma, which is probably of
all languages the easiest, as it is certainly one
of the most rewarding of casual study.

29

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

The first event will be the sight, early Sun-
day morning, of palms above an amber beach
that some one says is Florida. We think we
have heard the name in connection with the
doings of one De Leon. As for our much-
traveled friend, he has heard that there is
wireless connection along the coast and goes
to ask if the Aerogram for the day is issued
yet. He is interested, not in the Fountain of
Youth nor in a mythical El Dorado, but in
the success of the orange crop. All day Sun-
day this low land and the flotilla of keys that
trail away to the southward will be visible, the
canvas of many sailing vessels contrasting
prettily with the green of the islands. When
the sun goes down among them, imagination
may flash forward at once to New Old Spain,
in its larger conception; for on the morrow
we shall find ourselves, not in Mexico to be
sure, but in Cuba.

At daybreak Monday morning on the first
voyage that I took we were called and told
that Morro Castle was in sight. The name
filled us with a not unpleasant excitement
then, for the incidents of the American war
with Spain had not yet passed from tense
actuality into the calm atmosphere of things

30

GOING

historic. We were entering the tragical pres-
ence of the battleship Maine, through a por-
tentous gateway, on our way to a foreign, ro-
mantic, and more or less enchanted city. It
was a great moment. There, sure enough,
was the castle at the left, there were the an-
swering batteries on the other side, and there
were we, breathlessly stealing in between the
two terrors. This feeling gave way almost
instantly to another, an appreciation of
beauty that can no more be described than it
can be forgotten. With its tower lamp held
up like a yellow blossom against the flush of
dawn, the castle, for all its bulk, has no frown-
ing reality. Its lines and those of the ram-
part farther in must have been hard enough
once; but the mellow hue of decay, the half-
concealment of venerable trees, and other
quieting touches have at last subdued it all to
a picture of loveliness. Beyond spreads the
wide harbor, and along it the low-built town
of many colors, all harmonious in the dim
light, its sky line varied by many palm trees
and here and there by church towers that could
not belong in any Anglo-Saxon country.

The flag of the United States was floating
over the castle just then, and our ship cast

31

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

anchor near the wreck of the Maine. I hired
a russet-colored man with a heavy boat and
a tattered red sail, bare feet, and a yellow
cigarette to take me around the wreck. We
went ashore and visited among other things
the old Cathedral, where the sexton assured us
of as much history as he could by declaring
several times with a good deal of emphasis,
"Columbus — ashes! Ashes — Columbus!" We
understood this kind of Spanish very well,
as far as it went, and our guide-books re-
minded us how Columbus was first buried ac-
cording to his own wish on the island of Santo
Domingo; how, later, in 1795, when the
French took the island, certain bones purport-
ing to be his were brought from there to
Havana, and how, in 1898, when in turn Cuba
was lost to the Spaniards, they took the relics
away with them to Seville.

In this city of 400,000 inhabitants we began
to appreciate a few of the facts, to see char-
acteristic pictures, and to feel the proverbial
spell of Latin America. The republics to
southward of us have two of the five largest
cities on the western continent, and may boast
a half dozen cities all larger than Havana,
which, however, surpasses Antwerp, Dublin,

GOING

or Hong Kong. In any of them Anachro-
nism, a figure that walks openly enough in
every modern town, would be as plain to
northern eyes as here, and show as pleasing
guises.

Cuba should have only passing mention on
our way. We were aboard again before sun-
down. The view of Havana from an out-
bound ship at nightfall is most beautiful.
There is no bewilderment of lights as in New
York, but a thin line of sparks like a string
of gems dangles along the shore for miles, a
suffused glow reveals the outlines of things
even more romantically than they appeared in
the morning; and the personality that one
ascribes to every harbor city appears at Ha-
vana to be one of tenderness, as thus seen and
left.

Sea life is more abundant and varied in the
Gulf than in the Atlantic. Flying fishes, like
little creatures of silver, are passed frequently,
and from time to time a school of porpoises,
bent on making their way across the path
of the ship, recall the antics of sheep bolting
through a gateway. There is such a thing as
heavy grace, and the porpoise at play em-
bodies it.

33

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

Three days from our arrival at Havana, or
two days and an added night of actual sailing,
bring us to the west coast of Yucatan. This
time there is no gateway with ancient castles
for newel posts, no enclosed harbor with space
for a thousand ships, no domes and towers to
enhance the sky line, no murmurs of an in-
dolent city's awakening. There is nothing but
the word of the officers to tell you that you
are riding opposite Progreso, the port of
Merida, which is the capital of Yucatan and
has more per capita wealth than any other city
in Mexico. No place could be more devoid
of shelter ; arid while Progreso is an important
discharging point, the estimates of cost for an
artificial harbor have always in the past been
such as to discourage the undertaking. A
plan now under consideration is expected to
cost over twenty millions of dollars. If you
inquire, you will be told that there is no better
place along the whole Yucatan coast. "We
used to stop at Campeche," says the quarter-
master, "and that's over a hundred miles far-
ther south. It looked as bad and was in fact
worse. When off Campeche you saw nothing
but water and sky, with a little rim of sand
between. Yucatan has no harbors."

34

GOING

But we have not begun to make acquaint-
ance with Progreso. The delay must be par-
doned as it is unavoidable.

The authorities forbid the landing of a per-
son or a pound till the medical officer of the
port has honored us with a visit and inspec-
tion. In this they follow the American ex-
ample. The Senor Doctor, however, has too
much dignity, too much appreciation of com-
fort, too much regard for social amenities
among his friends, to follow the abrupt, mat-
ter-of-fact business ways of his American
counterpart. If the breeze is too stiff or if
the clouds seem to threaten, if there is a bull-
fight or a wedding afoot, or if he is engaged
in a friendly game of cards, clearly it would
be inconvenient for him to come out. On one
visit of mine the twelve-hour stop of the
steamer was lengthened to forty-eight, and on
another to sixty-five. We may as well gen-
eralize, therefore, about the configuration
along the peninsula, about the habits of cer-
tain public functionaries, about human prog-
ress toward the millennium or toward the
vanishing point. For it is impossible, even
on ship-board, to talk all the time about one's
meals.

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

When all else fails we can look overboard
at the sharks. This has a fascination, un-
canny enough in daytime, but of multiplied
power and hatefulness at night, for often
there are lamps by which the ghastly and
noiseless forms can be discerned. Yes, they
will come up in plain sight enough, and not
by ones and twos but by the half-dozen. To
be sure, they cannot, however they try, pro-
duce quite the appliqu& effect seen in Wins-
low Homer's painting of the "Gulf Stream."
They must remain suspended in and some-
what identified with the medium that they
infest; and tfiere is a certain unreality about
one of them, however obvious he makes him-
self. Is it not so with all creatures of prey—
the tiger, the owl, or the pirate ship, if you
ever observed any of them in their haunts?
You are not so sure of them as of a cow,
or a lumber barge. Still, the sharks at Pro-
greso will do all that you have any right to
expect in the interest of verification and
definiteness. They are so tame, the officers
of the Ward Line have been quoted as saying,
that they "will eat from a person's hand — or
leg." They will take a hook if you bait it
with a chunk of fish or odorous meat as large

36

GOING

as a ham, and you can try the muscular sense
upon them. When you have brought one up
to the surface, with the help of fellow-pas-
sengers, and have lost your only hook, the
mate will assure you that they are much easier
to "drown" than a bass if you work them
rightly, and that the only way to land one
is with a runnin' bowlin' around his tail.

Nights at Progreso are lonely to a stranger
on deck. Perhaps there is no doctor whose
business it is to come out and examine us. Per-
haps there isn't any town, though there are a
few lights over there to the eastward that look
human and wistful. Everything ashore, for
aught that we can tell, may be as when Fran-
cisco Cordoba skirted this coast in 1517.
Nothing is very certain. One passenger who
had spent two days and nights thus with the
sharks and the gulls, the water and the sky,
the warm, unctuous air, the distant lights, and
the solitude put his mood into rather senti-
mental verse:

What meaning have the terms of space —
What is it to be near, or far?
I have not altered, though apace
Removed, nor felt that your loved face
Would alter, or the inward grace
That makes you what you are.
37

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

. And what reality has time?
Is this not hard to understand —
Half miserable, half sublime, —
That now my thoughts with yours may chime
And still for lagging Fortune's prime
I wait, to grasp your hand?

I do not know, but while to-night,
In low, companionable tone,
The waves console each other — bright
The long familiar stars, and sight
Peers home to every landward light, —
I know I am alone!

At times the port is far from lonesome, and
humor is more natural than melancholy. I
saw a half dozen American and European
vessels there at one time, some having waited
three days already for the perfunctory atten-
tion of the port officers. It is diverting to
imagine the inside appearance of a man's
mind who can thus make large numbers of
persons and great values in property wait for
release upon his petty convenience and then
can show himself complacent and polite as if
nothing incongruous had happened. Cer-
tainly he has not a Yankee sense of the ab-
surd. "And so that is the Mexican way, is
it!" you exclaim. Well, it is a familiar way
among certain grades of officials.

38

GOING

Once the embargo is removed, there will
be doings about the ship almost interesting
enough to make one stay aboard. Cattle will
be lifted either by the horns or in slings out
of the hold and dropped into the "lighters"
that have come alongside. A great many
American cattle of good breeds go to Yuca-
tan, you are told. If you have been studying
Spanish you will enjoy the admonition ffPoco
a poco!" ("Little by little") as pianos are
deposited bottom-side up in another lighter.
You may see currants from Italy, butter from
Denmark, and corn from the United States, if
it so happens. You will learn that Yucatan
imports nearly everything and exports chiefly
one thing, henequin, which is the fiber of a
kind of century plant used to make binding
twine for reapers, coarse inferior rope, and
cheap brushes. You wonder that the rest of
the world can afford to send to Yucatan the
means of subsistence in exchange for such a
commodity; and you are told that in fact a
mere subsistence is a small part of what the
rest of the world has accorded most owners
of henequin plantations. As for the workers
in it, they must be considered separately.

One puzzling thing is the incredible activity
39

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

of the barefoot workers in these native barges.
You are told that they receive, too, an almost
incredible stipend, for Mexico, a dollar and
a half per day. They earn whatever they are
paid. Only monkeys or squirrels are expected
to be so nimble, only horses to be so strenu-
ous and unstinting of energy. They do not
illustrate your general idea of Mexican lassi-
tude. You make note of them, but as yet
they remain unclassified.

40

IV

HENEQUIN

BY the time the ship's tender is ready to
leave, you have decided that after all
you had better go ashore. You have
already seen enough of the "lightering" pro-
cess to give you a notion of the rest.

Progreso, you discover, isn't anything but a
good lighthouse and a port without a harbor,
which stands second to Vera Cruz in the re-
public for quantity of imports received. If
the government builds the proposed jetties,
their necessary length will be four or five
miles. As for the town, it is credited with
5000 inhabitants whose dwellings straggle a
considerable distance along the beach. It has
a park, a church that cost more money to
build than a town of like size would afford at
home, a bull-ring, a market that will offer a
great variety of sensations to eye and ear
without undue offense to the nostrils, and a
railway station by which one may leave for
Merida.

41

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

It is a low, flat country, with little vegeta-
tion except scrub trees and presently the
henequin, which you easily distinguish because
of its arrangement in straight rows. The
plants, if allowed to grow haphazard, would
arouse no suspicion of their being worth any-
thing, gray-green, juiceless-looking, sword-
shaped leaves radiating from a gnarled stalk,
and growing out of a dry, dust-and-ashes-
looking soil, if indeed they do not grow out
of the limestone itself. Standing valiantly in
their rows, however, they command instant
respect, and knowing that they extract an-
nually twenty million dollars' worth of value
(American money) from the unfertile soil of
the peninsula, you can easily view them as
typifying man's subjugation of the world.
The poorer the soil for any other crop, the
more sturdily henequin is said to grow upon
it, and the larger the quantity of growth, the
better also the quality of fiber.

At intervals you will see a little hamlet or
the buildings of a plantation with its wind-
mills. A clump of palms marks the location
of a well. Water of excellent quality is said
to abound in Yucatan, but it is all under-
ground water, which must be drilled for and

42

HENEQUIN

pumped. The soil for gardens and most field
crops has also to be brought artificially, the
rocks being first broken by blasting. So you
no longer wonder at the variety of imports
that you saw coming ashore from your own
and other vessels, though you had supposed
perhaps that corn would come more cheaply
from some parts of Mexico. Surely in parts
of the country, being the staple food of the
poor, it must be cheaper than in Nebraska.
So indeed it is in parts, and at times; but
you are told that crops have been bad for
two or three years and transportation and
other facilities being as they are and the de-
mand in each Mexican state so nearly equal-
ing the production, American corn is to be
had at less cost. This does not wholly dis-
miss the subject from your mind. Butter
from Kansas or from Denmark at a peso a
pound does not stagger you, nor currants at
any price, because, as Mark Twain declared
about principles, one can do without them;
but that the poor, who must have their corn,
should be buying it from the United States
disturbs our feeling that the low compensa-
tion of labor is doubtless adjusted somehow
to low costs in a bountiful land.

43

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

From the car windows you catch glimpses
of the poor natives and reflect that they have
at least one economic advantage, that of need-
ing few clothes. At the same time you will
become aware of a merit in them — such gar-
ments as they wear are astonishingly clean.
This is not a condescending remark that on
the whole, considering poverty and ignorance,
they do very well; it goes farther than that.
For in fact it is hard to conceive how people
can trudge up and down the dusty roads bear-
ing their burdens, in and out through the
dusty fields tat their toil, and keep their white
clothing so spotless as these people do. It
makes one lift up one's head in pride. If the
evolution theory is a correct guess, to be a
human being is after all a great thing and
must signify a long upward process. The
Mayas, who are the native race of Yucatan,
did not learn from the Spaniards to weave
their cloth, nor to cut and drape it in simple
grace, nor to color in native dyes their threads
with which to embroider it. As for keeping it
clean, if you study that habit among them you
will conclude that it also must have been a long
time fixed.

Another comforting observation is that,

HENEQUIN

whatever the wage scale, or the submergence
below any such, whatever the cost of living,
the seeming scantiness of fare, or the rate of
mortality, these are not an emaciated people.
Their well-rounded limbs, flat backs and full
chests, well-poised heads and full contour of
face do not tell of starvation. It must be that
to some conditions for which writers have
pitied them, they are adapted by immemorial
breeding. You will find this same observa-
tion holds in other parts of the republic (we
call it so for convenience) ; and you had bet-
ter draw all proper comfort from it, as some
of the standard tests of well-being will show
badly enough when you come to apply them.

While the train speeds along its level and
easy way, you speculate further about these
golden-bronze men and women with their glis-
tening white garments and their statuesque
figures. Is it not an Oriental fact about them
that they can be well fed upon almost nothing,
and are they not Oriental in the calm continu-
ance of their own ways of dress and their own
style of habitation? For even the wretchedly
poor do give some hints of what architecture
they approve. Here are questions that the
learned have, perhaps, not considered specifi-

45

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

cally, though the larger general one as to
origins has been often before them.

Recurring to cleanliness, you ask whether
all Mexican laborers are like these. Your more
way-wise companion will counsel you not to
press that query but only to mark these that
you have seen in your note-book.

Whoever these people are, you will remem-
ber them with gratitude for having made
spots so vivid in a barren landscape.

We are traveling now under an arrange-
ment with the Yucatan Tours Bureau, so cabs
will await us on our arrival in Merida. It
has a population above 40,000 and the reputa-
tion of being the cleanest city of all Mexico.
Its well-washed asphalt pavements, the order-
liness of the business streets, and the look of
freshness about the buildings in general jus-
tify this title.

You will be sure to notice the beauty of
some of the gardens, and will be told not only
that every tree and shrub had to be planted,
but that the very soil in which they grow had
to be transported and paid for by the cubic
meter. The vegetable gardens of the city are
grown by Chinese, who gather up every scrap
of refuse capable of being used as fertilizer.

46

HENEQUIN

In the way of sights you will be taken to
a half-million-dollar theater, to a cathedral
finished in 1598 at a cost of $150,000,
to the house of Monte jo, built by a Span-
ish worthy of that name in 1549, or only a
little over half a century after the first voy-
age of Columbus. You will be taken also to
the Government Palace and will note that it
is a substantial structure, but will not care for
details. Very soon one learns in Mexico that
the things to see are not "the sights." The
picture of the city in general, with its
many gesticulating windmills, the occasional
glimpses of beautiful courts within the solid
old dwellings, the unexpected presence of a
few houses that would not be amiss in Balti-
more, the panorama of strangely varied life —
this is what feeds the imagination more than
concrete and particular show objects. Cosmo-
politan-looking Mexicans and cosmopolitan-
looking strangers mingle with the most out-
landish-looking foreigners and the most char-
acteristically garbed of Mexicans — the women
with their idealizing mantillas and the men
with their abnormally big sombreros balanced
above abnormally slim legs. Here, too, come
the Mayas in their cotton with colored bor-

47

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

ders, their quiet self-possession, and their Ori-
ental reserve. Mexicans will tell you that
Yucatan is very clannish and express a hope
that this aloofness may be overcome a little by
such compliments as the one paid them by the
election of a Yucatecan, Senor Pino Suarez,
to be Madero's Vice-President. Of course
you politely hope so too, but it does not sur-
prise you to hear that the people here are
peculiar and separate.

If you can you will visit the museum, and
will regret that you have not a day for the
statuary and other Maya cilrios here pre-
served. You will be certain later, however,
to visit the National Museum at the capital,
where a mere tourist can do more in a given
length of time.

If you are to continue with the same ves-
sel, you will see nothing of the world-famous
ruins of Yucatan, those gigantic and ponder-
ous as well as beautiful relics of a people
whose forefathers, as some scholars believe,
may have been the earliest of human kind.
Again, if you must, you will console yourself
in your purpose to see other ruins, not like
these and not so old, it may be, but of such
character and such antiquity as to fill us with

48

HENEQUIN

the same awe of the greatness of the past in
our western hemisphere. If, on the other
hand, you can spare a week till the next
steamer, as I never could, you may
easily spend a day or two on a hene-
quin plantation, and visit the most ac-
cessible Yucatan ruins, those of Uxmal. The
ruins cover square miles of area and consti-
tute only one of many groups in Yucatan.
They do not need to be reconstructed by the
imagination and the patience of the archse-
ologist; they stand clear and real for the eye
and the camera of whoever seeks the?ii out,
not only in the solidity of their age-old walls
but in the loveliness, astonishing variety, and
unexplainable subject-matter of their decora-
tions. Elephants, leopards, and other animals
not associated in our minds with any
American civilization are plainly repre-
sented. How old are they? How old
is Egypt? There are serious and pains-
taking scholars who believe that the wondrous
builders of these colossal and rich palaces,
temples, and tombs were as early in their
progress as the builders and sculptors of the
Nile valley. They are old. But you do not
wish to tarry with one who knows them only

49

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

from having gone over books and printed
views in delight and amazement. John L.
Stephens has written about them, and there
are later supplemental writings.

So it is recent history to recall that Span-
iards caught sight of the peninsula in 1506 or
that they landed upon it in 1518, or that they
made their first settlement in 1528. The voy-
ages of Columbus himself were but a little
while ago. ^

It will not take much travel to suggest, and
any added travel will only confirm the impres-
sion, that Yucatan is somehow related to
Florida, though geologists doubt or deny it.
The train ride from Progreso to Merida across
the low land with its scrubby growth and its
many pools and marshes would have called up
remembrances of certain Florida scenery even
if one had not just sailed along the keys that
are like the dotted line between two heavy
pen strokes. Yucatan is not to be thought of
as coming under our first general description
of Mexico at all, for it compares with the
main land as Florida compares with the Rocky
Mountain country.

There is likely to be less haste in getting
back to the steamer than there was to catch

50

HENEQUIN

the morning train. In Progreso a visit can
be made to one of the great sisal (henequin)
warehouses and time can be taken to notice
the quality and quantity of the material ranged
in great 400-pound bales upon the wharves.
Here, as on the plantations, little mules pro-
pel the flat cars that convey it along narrow-
gauge tramways ; and the bales mass up as do
cotton-bales on the wharves at New Orleans,
by the thousand.

No one who has been reading about Mex-
ico can leave Merida and Progreso without
asking as to the status of the people who do
the work on the plantations. On my last trip
I devoted a large part of my time to just this
inquiry. The revolution was not yet accom-
plished and President Diaz was still in nom-
inal control.

Are Yaquis deported here from far-away
Sonora? Yes, certainly, as a war measure.

Are they ill treated? They are accorded
the same treatment that the native Mayas re-
ceive. There is no occasion to treat them with
special severity since they are as industrious,
peaceable, and dependable as any workers in
the republic. After all, however, they are
somewhat undesirable in one respect, that they

51

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

die very rapidly when brought to this climate
so different from their own.

What is implied by saying that they are
treated like the Maya laborers? Are they
slaves? No one uses the word slave in Mex-
ico. The laws and the Constitution forbid
slavery. The people are held without sanc-
tion of law, but with the connivance of the
government in a feudal bondage to the land.
The owner of the land exercises a power
whose limits are seldom discussed, and the
people look to him for whatever protection,
guidance, and means of subsistence they are
to have.

Can they leave at will? Not if they are in
debt, as is usually the case. A shrewd em-
ployer, even though a kindly one, will usually
find opportunity to bring that about — trans-
portation if they come to him from a distance,
marriage fees, baptism fees, or what not, ren-
der most of them willing borrowers. To Mexi-
cans just a degree more intelligent, of course
debt is a mortal terror.

Can they be transferred at the will of the
owner? He can transfer his debt-claim, yes.
But he seldom wishes to, except when he sells
the land, as labor is scarce.

52

HENEQUIN

Are the slaves — that is the workers — ever
beaten, or otherwise maltreated? Doubtless,
sometimes, but sensational books exaggerate.
A great many owners are kind to their work
people. Some make great personal effort and
sacrifice for their welfare, and feel it a serious
responsibility. Food, housing, personal treat-
ment, and exactions of labor vary, of course,
with different owners.

Still, if there should be here and there a
cruel owner or overseer, the laborers are at
his mercy, are they not? What redress have
they? Well, there are shyster lawyers who
will take the case of such laborers, but often
the workers find the attempt difficult and
dangerous. The fact is the authorities have
favored a pretty tight hold on the only kind
of labor that seems possible here; and that
means a pretty strong exercise of control by
the owners.

If a man owes fifty dollars which I am will-
ing to pay in order to secure his service, can
he go away with me of his own choice? You
would have to get his employer to go before
a judge and sign a release, indicating that all
the man's debt is discharged by your payment
of fifty dollars.

53

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

Then the fact is that by my help the man
may with difficulty free himself, and without
help he would certainly be unable, unless his
employer saw fit to release him? That is one
way of putting it, yes.

And what excuse is there, in a country with
a modern Constitution and with enlightened
laws on its statute books, for maintaining such
a system? The excuse of business necessity.
These people would not do the needed work
on a voluntary basis; and the labor problem
could not be met at all. The system is not de-
fensible by argument, it is not what it ought
to be, but to' change it seems impossible. We
believe these natives are generally and for the
most part better off with some one both to
command them and to provide for them. Left
to themselves they are both improvident and
lazy. Many Mexican laborers cannot be hired
to work voluntarily more than two or three
days a week.

The above, though a composite of several
interviews with men in official authority, in
business relations, or otherwise well qualified
to know, represents the unanimous and, ex-
cept in details, the unvarying replies that
were given me on the points raised. I talked

54,

HENEQUIN

with no one of radical sympathies. It is only
as to frequency or infrequency of gross abuse
that difference of opinion exists. And with-
out having spent a good deal of actual time
among the plantations, one's opinion on this
must be taken either from such testimony as
one can gather, or from settled doctrines as to
the tendency of arbitrary and irresponsible
power and the natural effect on its unwilling
objects.

Every one is doctrinaire enough to infer
something from general principles. Standing
on the wharf ready for departure one looks
at the clean, coarse fiber in its bales, thinks of
its growth under the ardent but not unwhole-
some rays of the sun, and would be willing to
vote that no man should betray another sim-
pler man into debt and servitude in order to
obtain its cultivation. Free labor and a fair
share of its return, together with the strict
punishment of any one who should advance
money on a labor contract, might be hard for
existing enterprise to adjust itself to; but on
broad humanitarian grounds one would be
willing to see it honestly, bravely, and persist-
ently tried. Even should production fall off,
there are worse things conceivable. One goes

55

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

away inclined to give the exploited poor the
benefit of the doubt. "That is," retort the
defenders, "y°u would be willing to try ex-
periments at some one else's expense." There
are indeed many things that one might hesi-
tate to try at one's own expense, yet which
the most rudimentary justice demands. Dis-
interested public opinion is needed to arbi-
trate.

NOTE TO 1919 EDITION:— It is gratifying to know that under
an entirely new regime, with a governor whose political theories are
advanced and even radical, the people of Yucatan have entered a
very different set of conditions. While there are conflicting opinions,
somewhat influenced, no doubt, by the fact that the price of American
binder twine has been forced upward, unquestionably the plantation
laborer has obtained a measure of freedom. This has been brought
about, too, without any intervening period of chaos or general dis-
order, so far as Yucatan is concerned.

56

ABOARD again and ashore again! This
time, after two nights and a day, it is
Vera Cruz. It might have been Tam-
pico, another important and somewhat expen-
sive man-made harbor 250 miles farther north,
if we had cared to change lines at Progreso.
We should have fared worse for the rest of
our sea voyage, however; and unless in the
way of hunting or tarpon fishing should have
had little reward for it. Eight days, less a
few hours, is the time from leaving New York
till you anchor at Vera Cruz, if the port in-
spection at Progreso is made promptly. It is
said that this sometimes happens.

Vera Cruz has a delightful little park with
so many fine trees and shrubs that its conven-
tionality does not appear. It has a good mili-
tary band to play martial and other airs in the
evening, and a hotel of an aspect as old as
Ferdinand and Isabella, from under the por-

57

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

tal of which the band can be heard to advan-
tage. There are two or three hundred girls
who walk round the outer square of the plaza
making themselves part of the little poem to
which the trees and the music also belong. A
visitor who could afford to dash illusions to
the ground would call only a very few of the
girls beautiful; and there are at least two or
three for whom an attempt at modernity has
resulted in the absurd. Most, however, are
picturesque, and have a quaintness that makes
them pleasant to look at in the well-filtered
though abundant light. They come to enjoy
the music and the activity, to distract the
minds of an equal number of less interesting
young men, and, perhaps, to play with some
mild distraction in their own pretty heads.
Some have older women as visible accessories,
for others, mother love is watchful from the
benches among the trees, and for still others,
as Vera Cruz is a coast town and has learned
foreign ways, perhaps no one is vigilant. The
girls revolve like a circlet of paper flowers in
one direction, and the young men in a circle
without take the opposite direction, by which
device mutual admiration may exchange
glances twice on each round. Still a third

58

circle is made up of the lower-class people,
men and women, who also love the music, the
light and flickering shadows, and the barter-
ing of glances — if this were worthy of notice
in their case. For one thing I have watched
them and have not seen it. There is no look
of envy or resentment toward those whom
Fortune has placed nearer the center of the
wheel of happiness. They belong to a docile,
placidly reflective race who take most things
for granted. Of the three revolving rings the
outmost is not the least satisfactory to the im-
agination. As for the young men, they will
show better in daytime, when one does not so
greatly miss the tight-fitting leather or velvet
that they ought to be wearing instead of the
foreign clothes which they have not yet learned
to wear, and when they and we have other
thoughts than now. One smiles at the young
men here in the evening.

There are Americans who eat and drink
too much under the portales. There are money
changers who demand five per cent., to en-
hance the better currency than their own
which you have to offer. There are, to be
sought in due time, great high-posted beds
canopied with mosquito netting, now less

59

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

needed than a few years ago, but still not
amiss as a precaution; the beds are two in
each room, and a room is as large as a town
hall. If you get a front room, which is best,
you will have air to breathe, will see new
charms of the park, but will be kept awake by
street noises, including those of electric cars.
A flat wheel in Vera Cruz sounds very much
as it would in Hoboken. So also does a
phonograph whose voice is changing.

All these things are easily seen and experi-
enced.

You may incline to hurry away because of
the reputation of the port for mosquitoes and
fever. If your fortune is like mine recently,
however, you will see nothing to suggest mos-
quitoes but the netting over the bed. I re-
member when they were in evidence. As for
fever, in the winter months it is very rare, and
no longer prevalent at any season. The few
cases that occur are chiefly among those classes
who cannot or will not meet the requirements
of sanitation. Probably you will not take a
sip of water in the city, except what is bought
in bottles at a sufficient price; and this is well
enough; but still you ought to be told that
the city water obtained from the Jamapa

60

VERA CRUZ

River is passed through great filtration beds
on which a good deal of money has been
spent, that there is a two-million-dollar sew-
age system, and that conditions generally are
much better than they were a decade ago. No
one used to stay in Vera Cruz longer than
necessary, and any foreigner whose work held
him there would have his family no nearer
than Orizaba.

It may happen, if your steamer makes port
in the morning, that you will have an enforced
wait of a day in which to learn some of these
things for yourself. Then, perhaps, you will
make a trip to the old Castle of San Juan de
Ulua. Begun in 1528, built at an inflated
cost of forty million pesos in all, but, like
more recent works at Vera Cruz, done well if
bravely charged for in the bill, beaten upon
by the untempered storms of the open sea,
captured more than once by buccaneers, made
the last stronghold of Spain in the war for
Mexican independence, later occupied, in 1838,
by the French, and again, in 1847, by an Amer-
ican fleet, witness in its dungeons of miseries
untold, and even lately the frowning tomb of
many civil or political offenders in whom hope
was dead, San Juan de Ulua has a more

61

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

varied and awesome history than any other
fortress on the western continent. The Span-
iards are gone forever, and it is known how
they kept prisoners in mere manholes where
the tide would rise to their necks. Other cruel-
ties more revolting are known. The military
rule under which Porfirio Diaz held the coun-
try being so recently at an end, and his suc-
cessor having been less addicted to the press
agent than he, we do not know fully what
uses he made of this most dreaded prison.
The dungeons and the manholes are still there;
but our guide-book, published under official
sanction during his regime, naively says that
the humane government does not use them.
However that may have been, in November,
1911, President Madero ordered that all pris-
oners be removed from the castle to more sani-
tary quarters.

If you go out upon one of the jetties, at the
end you will see boys fishing with long lines,
heavy "sinkers," and large bait for fish dimin-
utive, though of brilliant colors; or they may
be flying kites out here where no trees or wires
obstruct. You should admire the masonry,
and read from your guide-book that harbor
protection at Vera Cruz cost four hundred

62

VERA CRUZ

years and thirty million pesos ($15,000,000).

You will surely walk or ride out from the
main plaza to the Alameda, another more in-
formal park, and so out the Paseo de los
Cocos. The winter temperature is delightful.
From one of the benches on a Sunday or a
holiday you may review a great deal of life.

This Paseo de los Cocos has not one strik-
ing feature, unless the stretch of avenue and
park itself with the rows of graceful trees be
meant. Yet, to the visitor with a leisure hour,
there is something about the street as a whole
that will make itself felt as unique. There are
typical houses of every style that the varied
character of the people would suggest, includ-
ing the American, and of every quality from
that of comparative affluence to that of the
laborer. Whoever has traveled in the South
of the United States and has gone up and
down the streets of a negro quarter in any but
a very large town with his imagination alert
will know what is meant by saying that houses
of the negro-cabin type, though not all occu-
pied by negroes, predominate. The little dwell-
ings are pretty in their way, most of them,
and decently kept. The fine avenues of trees
lends to them a setting that their owners

63

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

could never have procured. The air of the
whole place seems one of greater content-
ment, of more relaxation and ease of life than
that of the usual street in Mexico. The
Mexican poor may suggest patience or abject
submission to a miserable state; but they sel-
dom show the happy abandon of the negro.
As you go along here there is a feeling that
normally the world is kind even to the poor.
Arrived at the end of the avenue you stand
by a statue of liberty whose design you will
soon forget, and your eye sweeps on over a
view of country that will not be so soon for-
gotten. The statue marks for these people
the end of what is accomplished or determi-
nate; but the road goes on, and there are still
palms that wave gracefully, and gentle hills
that rim in the picture, and sky that is deep
with haze — a soft enlargement every way that
if it does not summon them to largeness of
achievement must beguile them into largeness
of comfort. They are not poets or wordy
commentators ; but they do come out here and
look — have we not seen them doing so, quietly,
by families, the white, the black, the yellow,
and the various blends of these? If you walk
back along the Paseo in the gathering twilight

64

VERA CRUZ

you will fancy that the natural scene is re-
flected in all that you pass. It may be only
fancy, but it is likely to remain.

There is an evening train for the highlands,
but if you take it you will miss the evening
view of the city, and, what is worse, will be
able to see little on the way up. So you will
doubtless choose to spend the night at Hotel
Diligencias. From your balcony when you
are awake you will become aware of a rather
fine old church fronting the park, lovely in
color, admirable in lines, and of impressive
solidity. From your vantage point at a dis-
tance you have seen it at its best.

You will betake yourself in the half-light
to the railway station, which is less than half
lighted, and will vaguely hope that you are
enough awake to have found the right way
out of this perilous and purgatorial state to
the paradise of your expectations. You will
have learned that a modern union station, in
keeping with the substantial customs houses,
postoffice, lighthouse, and other public build-
ings, is under construction; but this will not
relieve you of groping through the old one.
Make your way to the ticket window and ask
for a time-table and the agent will tell you

65

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

hay," which is pronounced as if allu-
ding to the darkness, "No eye," and which
means that the thing desired is non-existent.
You will become familiar with it in Mexico
partly because every second-hand American
wag will emphasize its recurrence. As for
time-tables, doubtless the passenger is expect-
ed to carry the Guia Oficial, a monthly rail-
road guide to be had at trifling cost.

There is so much in anticipation that Vera
Cruz may seem only a gateway and you bid
it no lingering farewell. Yet this town, which
was almost a century old when Shakespeare
and Cervantes wrote, has a great deal of his-
tory that may be read before and after the
observations of a day; and even apart from
reading you may find more direct impressions
treasured in mind from your first day in
Mexico than just now you are aware.

66

VI

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

AS yet there can be no just quarrel with
the goings or the tarryings of our
journey, because they have involved
little choice; but henceforth there is all the
latitude that a great country of varying in-
terests affords. The visitor for a few weeks
must choose, then harden himself against all
distracting allurements.

Mexico City is in mind when Vera Cruz is
left, not only because it is now the capital
and metropolis but because in historic times
it has always claimed this distinction and be-
cause the route thither is the most famous in
the republic. Economy of travel, however,
will dictate that some other places be visited
earlier. We turn southward toward the Isth-
mus of Tehuantepec, over the Vera Cruz
al Istmo Railway to a restaurant with an
American manager and Chinese service which
bears the devout Castilian name of Santa

67

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

Lucrecia. There may be a colony of alliga-
tors to swell the importance of the place, for
alligators do abound in parts of the Coatza-
coalcos River; but the freedom with which
native women and children bathe below the
iron bridge would argue that the alligators,
if present, are little regarded. What makes
Santa Lucrecia of any note is that there the
railroad has its junction with the trans-isth-
mian route called the Ferrocarril National de
Tehuantepec. We are on our way to the
Pacific terminus of that line, which has been
in operation since 1907, which is better known
in Europe \han in the United States, and
which it is prophesied will be an enduring
rival of the Panama Canal for all freight
traffic between the two oceans.

The traveler who left Vera Cruz in the
morning reaches Santa Lucrecia about bed-
time. The eating house, as one writer has
nicely phrased it, suggests the old California
mining camps with their "cheap bars and
camp grub." "Here," he declares, "you put
your zinc teaspoon into the sugar-bowl lest
you offend by superior ways; drink without
wincing if any one asks you to, and hold your
tongue." In a literary way I would not criti-

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

else this. . As to its meaning, I have never
tried wincing over a drink, or loosing my
tongue in disparagement of one already
taken; but I refused to drink at Santa Lu-
crecia with no more hesitancy than I would
in Saratoga; and the company, including a
young American engineer, an English plan-
tation manager, the German captain of a
river boat running to Coatzacoalcos, and
some mixed or nondescript personages did
not take affront. We continued talking to-
gether for hours till my train left, they ex-
ercising their liberties and I undisputed in
mine.

The embarrassments and perils to a "total
abstainer" in Mexico, by the way, are often
exaggerated. I have heard Americans coun-
seled to absent themselves from certain social
gatherings on the ground that it would be
a serious breach of amenity to refuse any-
thing offered; but when they disregarded the
advice they found their hosts as open to
polite explanation as Americans would be in
like circumstances. The Governor's family
in the state where I lived gave continued and
unmistakable demonstrations of cordiality to
a visitor who had declined their cognac from

69

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

the gracious hand of the Governor's wife
herself. Why should they not? to be sure.
As for the absence or unfitness of water, in
restaurants mineral spring water is almost
as omnipresent as beer; boiled milk is fur-
nished; and then there are always coffee, tea,
and chocolate, all of which have of course
been boiled. Lime juice is recommended on
good authority as a discourager of germs, so
that a little may wisely be squeezed into water
of which one is not sure. On jaunts, oranges
and other fruits often take the place of drink;
the palatable tuna or prickly pear grows on
some of the* driest deserts. The milk of a
new cocoanut (coco de agua), if obtainable,
will quench thirst for hours. All this is of-
fered not as stimulating but perhaps as serv-
iceable information.

Santa Lucrecia is about midway between
the two oceans, though not at the height of
land, as the Pacific slope is much more abrupt
and the highest point, therefore, about forty
miles west of the middle. By west I mean
toward the Pacific; and that is directly south.
We have been for some little time and are
still in a region of heavy rainfall, and the
country is a typical jungle in consequence;

70

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

but it will end abruptly at the ridge. The
difference between aridity on the Pacific slope
and abundant rain on the Atlantic which is
indicated for South America is almost equally
marked even here where the ridge becomes
low, and is narrowed to 125 miles. The west
side has comparatively little forest, while the
east has the greatest conceivable variety and
luxuriance of growth.

As evening had begun to lower before the
change from semi-desert conditions took place,
it will be impossible just now to get a full
impression of the jungle. That requires
either a long time or the traversing of con-
siderable distance. The traveler is aware at
the first approach of a coolness after the
scorching heat of mid-day on the plains, of
a gradual increase in vegetation until it is
abundant, and of the insect choir, which,
though different voices may enter, seems to
produce at nightfall the same droning effect
wherever and whenever heard. It is a sur-
prise to find that one is to have a comfortable
night, a thick blanket proving not unwel-
come.

Now the train is slipping downward over
the isthmus, the highest point being Chivela,

71

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

at an altitude of 750 feet, and vegetation
begins to grow less. You may be prepared
to view a quite different country from your
car window in the morning.

If you are up betimes you will catch sight
of Tehuantepec, the name of which place is
also the name of the Isthmus, and about
which you can read and hear tales to stir
your blood. The tales belong to the whole
region and some of them more specifically to
other towns like Juchitan, a few miles away;
but Tehuantepec is the name with which they
have become associated. They are stories of
a race prouder, braver, handsomer, and it
may be more intelligent than others round
about, refusing to intermarry with other
tribes and having tastes and standards quite
their own. Men and women were numeri-
cally proportioned to each other somewhat
as elsewhere, no doubt, till the men were
killed off. Then the women, still disdaining
to marry with men of a lower type, assumed
the business and the leadership, and it be-
came a community of women.

A brother of Porfirio Diaz figures in the
history of this change. Being governor of
the state of Oaxaca, which includes the Te-

72

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

huantepec region, he did such wholesale vio-
lence to property rights, to the virtue of
native women, and to life itself, that he
could no longer be tolerated. It is said that
he was in the act of fleeing from the country
when, early in the year 1877, he was cap-
tured by the Indians, tortured as dreadfully
as he had tortured many victims, and then
killed. It is said that vengeance at the behest
of President Diaz on account of this act was
what prompted a massacre of nearly all male
inhabitants of the place long afterward,
though he is credited with having planned
to kill only every tenth male and not all
that the soldiers could reach, as actually
happened. Porfirio Diaz has not been ac-
customed to tell his motives or explain his
actions, but a cold-blooded massacre did oc-
cur, removing a large part of the men who
had not been sacrificed in the long war with
Spain and the later civil wars; and the gen-
eral understanding of its motive is as just
suggested.

Ten years ago people said little about such
matters; but in the spring of 1911, when
they might with reason have been more cau-
tious than ever, I found them eager every-

73

where to say what they knew and believed.
Books and periodicals in the United States,
too, have not hesitated to disclose a great
many things the mere hint of which, in 1910,
would have caused some reviewer in the New
York Post to denounce the authors as guilty
of "ignorant abuse." To say that on the
whole Mexico has been ruled in a way favor-
able or unfavorable to ultimate high destiny
is perhaps not given to fallible critics at this
time. But that the existing rule has often
been accompanied by deliberate, profuse, and
relentless shedding of blood for over thirty
years every one at all familiar with the facts
knows. When drastic measures were taken
against the lawless and violent, they had the
apparent sanction of necessity. A charac-
teristic policy of President Diaz was setting
"a thief to catch a thief" — he mobilized com-
panies of bandits and organized them into
the "Rurales" whose duty it was to hunt
other bandits and render country travel safe.
Such a weapon in the hands of an arbitrary
and irresponsible ruler, however, lent itself
too easily, some have thought, to less justi-
fiable use. That intimidation and repression,
banishment, summary killing of individuals

74

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

guilty of no moral wrong, and now and then
wholesale slaughter were admirably suited to
the needs of the nation may be quite obvious
to a few minds; but to the average intelli-
gence it seems doubtful.

And here is Tehuantepec shifting brightly
across the vision in the morning light. A
few women at the station who might be
Queens of Sheba unless their garb seem too
brilliant, a few who look like the witch of
Endor, some market people carrying their
wares, a highway bridge over the track, a
strange - looking hotel with a high wall, a
sparsely inhabited street, lined with cocoanut
trees on the outskirts of the place, and some
bathers in the Tehuantepec River are all that
you see of this town of 10,000 inhabitants, as
you pass westward.

I spent a night at Tehuantepec on the
way back from Salina Cruz, at a hotel whose
proprietor, in the good English of an intelli-
gent Jamaican negro, declared himself an
"honest thief," and who justified the adjective
in all his dealing with me. I would not ad-
vise, and he would not advise, ladies of fas-
tidious requirements to put up at his house,
nor in his town. Yet if they could ignore

75

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

whatever did not look good to them they
might, I think, not fare badly in any respect.
They should find their rooms only at the hour
of retiring, and plan to leave them without
scrutiny immediately when awakened.

I walked about in the evening and early
morning; talked for hours with an old pros-
pector who has lived among the Indians in
their villages; inquired afterward about the
place and its people of officials, American and
Mexican; read what the books say about it;
and found that although a month would be
needed for even such study as a casual, non-
professional * visitor would be prompted to
undertake, the impressions and ideas that I
was able to gather had the advantage of being
reasonably clear and consistent.

The Tehuanas live very much in their own
way. No intimate, everyday influence came
to bear on their conservatism till the rail-
road was completed in 1907, if even that has
brought any such influence to bear. Of
course I speak of the native Indians, not offi-
cials or other Mexicans from elsewhere, who
are as alien as the American himself. They
are not imitative of foreigners. Their adobe
houses vary in size and costliness, many being

76

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

only of two rooms, some being quite exten-
sive; and the furnishings differ accordingly.
Their dress, even if they have means to buy
costly materials, adheres to their own style,
which is simple in cut but often elaborate in
trimming, vivid in color, harmonious with
their physiognomy and bearing, graceful in
effect, and altogether of an Oriental sug-
gestion. A young woman of such beauty,
symmetry, and carriage that she might pose
for Cleopatra is as little conscious of bare
feet and ankles as though she lived in Cleo-
patra's Egypt. If a triangle of meerschaum-
color shows on either side above the waist-
band of her red skirt, it is a thing of habit and
she thinks nothing of it. Clothing, for the
most part, is to her like the silk scarf that she
carries over one wrist, as inseparable as the
Japanese girl's fan, or like the necklace of
gold coins that she wears — it is for adorn-
ment. Concealment of person is no more
essential to her than to Eve after the first
accession of modesty ; but of the little require-
ment in this respect she is never forgetful.
Her modesty is as real and her sense of
decorum as definite as that of the civilized
and sophisticated American or European.

77

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

Her neatness, cleanliness, and fitness of per-
sonal ornament are such as to give one a
pang when the inevitable result of outside in-
fluence is thought of.

Morality is a thing that strangers may
easily misapprehend. The morals of these
people are somewhat primitive, but not de-
graded, if the two words are in any danger
of being confused. Some will understand if
it be said that there is a good deal of im-
morality but very little downright immorality
— very little wantonness. I have heard coarse
men and men of careless speech declare ad-
miration and respect for the women of Te-
huantepec.

Two Tehuana girls are employed as serv-
ants by a cultured American woman in an-
other town. They are honest, and she trusts
a good deal to them. They are also confid-
ing. They do all the rough, domestic work
of her house. They are as quiet-mannered as
any guest that she entertains. Their scant
garments are as clean as she could wish her
own to be. She says that they not only bathe,
but wash their abundant black hair every day.
They would no more put on shoes than she
would put a ring in her nose; but they have

78

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

pretty sandals to wear when so inclined.
Each wears at her daily work a necklace
worth from a hundred to two hundred dol-
lars and carries the inevitable scarf. Each
has a more costly necklace for festal occa-
sions. Their straight, tapering, and daintily
kept fingers show no signs of toil, their slen-
der wrists are not thickened by the wringing
of clothes; they seem immune to the effects
that we usually think inseparable from labor.
And how long will they keep their youth?
Well, they mature early; but the Tehuana
matron is also a creature of dignity, keeps her
pride, and has a look of character. The aver-
age of good looks in Tehuantepec is doubt-
less greater than anywhere else in Mexico,
and the average in Mexico, to any one of
catholic taste, is distinctly greater than among
the people that most foreign observers left at
home. Colors and contours to delight an
artist are everywhere; though the wretchedly
poor, the aged, the lame, the halt, and the
blind may show as hideous marks of social
injustice here as elsewhere, and there are as
many of them in Mexico as in any fruitful
land under the sun.

Of men who appear to be of the same
79

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

stock as these women of Tehuantepec there
are few enough to confirm the legend as to
how they were decimated. There are few
enough native men of any stock, though the
old haughty exclusiveness is breaking down
of late. Such men as one does see at all
identified with the population are markedly
inferior to the women. So the matriarchate
which has been the rule for a generation will
doubtless prevail for at least one generation
more in this city of women.

Have the men of the mountains, like the
men of the valley settlements hereabouts,
been exterminated? By no means in the same
degree. My prospector friend told me of
places where a camera and tripod, if mis-
taken for a surveyor's instrument, may bring
a fusillade on its luckless possessor, and
where the authority of the central Mexican
government is not recognized, but where the
people are reasonably friendly if they can be
assured as to one's designs. There is tung-
sten in some of the high mountains, a good
deal of coal, and unestimated stores of silver,
iron, and other metals, the opening of which
might have been hastened but for the some-
what deterrent attitude of the mountaineers.

80

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

Yet these people, less known than the Yaquis
of Sonora and regarded as equally warlike,
may prove as little opposed to progress on
equitable terms as many fair writers believe
the Yaquis to have been. They do not trust
the powers that be ; and to obtain and deserve
their confidence would be one of the duties
of a progressive, enlightened government.

The most conscious object of a trip south
from Vera Cruz is usually to inspect the
remarkable railroad and two splendid harbors
which, at a cost of about $65,000,000, have
established a freight route between the Paci-
fic and the Atlantic shorter by four days and
nearer by 1250 miles than that through the
Panama Canal. This is a sufficient object in
itself. But, after all, one ought seldom to
travel with a single purpose. It would be
like throwing away the by-products of the
cotton industry. We are on our way to gaze
at the artificial harbor, the dry dock which is
the largest on the Pacific coast, the modern
electric cranes for handling freight, the cars
of special type for receiving their loads, the
special oil-burning engines, the special swamp
road construction, the devices for spraying
hot chemicals to, kill the almost irrepressible

81

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

vegetation, and the other means, anachronistic
in this land of supposed inaction, through
which the uses of our heralded canal, save the
passing of war vessels, have been anticipated
by a decade. Yet we will not reproach our-
selves for having paused over old, forgotten,
far-off things. The decade or so will pass,
the great canal will be finished, both routes
may find use beyond their capacity and we
shall see engineering feats to transcend them
both; but we shall never, later, be able to
muse a day in the Tehuantepec that now
charms and baffles us. I had the privilege of
visiting one 6f the harbors and rowing about
the jetties in the company of an American
army engineer whose name is familiar to
most readers, and he was as much interested
as professionally he should be. Yet he be-
trayed more interest in a primitive Isthmian
ox-cart than in any appliance that we saw—
a cart entirely innocent of tire, bolt, nail,
buckle, or other scrap of metal; hewn out of
wood by rude implements; fastened together
by wooden pins and by thongs; a perfect, un-
perverted example of its type, within a
stone's throw of so much foreign innovation.
Salina Cruz is not a Mexican town and as
82

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

a town deserves little attention. A courteous
American consul and an admirable hotel con-
ducted by a refined American woman from
Kentucky or Texas or somewhere, figure in
the traveler's note-book as next in importance
to the harbor works. A day is sufficient, and
next morning one starts up the slope again
toward the other terminus of the road. Long
before noon the height of land is reached.
This time the jungle is experienced in day-
light, and over such distance that its char-
acter may be felt. Palm trees, banana plants,
trees that might belong to some species fa-
miliar at home for all that the eye could tell,
undergrowth, tangles of vines, mosses, flags,
and lily pads make altogether a variety and
excess that is inconceivable. Many of the
trees bear flowers of showy hues, many of the
vines that climb up to the highest branches
are masses of red and purple, orchids fasten
themselves upon every crevice, and so the
vividness and variety of color become almost
as great a marvel as the rank prodigality of
growth. If you could penetrate a little into
the forest, it would be still more illuminated
by the brilliancy of birds whose kinds are
listed by hundreds in books. You catch occa-

83

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

sional glimpses of movement; but unless it
be a blackbird you could rarely make out the
cause. It might be a parrot, an oriole, or a
jay, all of which are so numerous that a
census has never been taken, though being a
little less impudent than the blackbirds they
are more difficult to observe. As for the
sounds, they are myriad and unending. In-
sects, frogs, perhaps monkeys, and no doubt
scores of creatures that you never heard be-
fore mingle their cries in a babel that neither
the guide-book nor your well-informed neigh-
bor can help you to analyze.

To calculating discernment all this is a
challenge. Mahogany trees, five or six feet
thick, dye woods and medicinal plants, lus-
cious fruits and excellent oils are here in the
jungle. Here is fertility to yield the food of
millions, here are riches to reward the labor,
the enterprise, and the prophetic vision of
many a bold spirit. The instinctive feeling,
however, is not unmixed with something
like horror. One sees a riot of soft but
malignant forms, of silent but powerful and
malign forces. Our fine ecstasies about virgin
Nature were mostly written in temperate or
semi-arid places where Nature is self-dis-

84

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

ciplined. Here is no exclusive survival of
the fittest but an indiscriminate and revolting
survival of everything that mere fecundity
can engender and fatten. Individuality, char-
acter, symbolism, as we ascribe them to out-
door objects at home, are foreign to this mass
of vegetables. Here are no tongues in trees,
nor books in the running brooks. The axe
and the bush hook one thinks of without dis-
may. It only seems that axe and bush hook
could make little impression. "Railroaders"
take dynamite to any ironwood trees in their
path. A good conservationist at home, I
caught myself drawing an eager breath on
seeing a little forest fire, then settling back
in quick disappointment at the certainty that
the fire could not spread much. Every clear-
ing around a native hut becomes as welcome
as an oasis in a desert, and when you finally
emerge at Juile into broad fields where cattle
graze in numbers, they are as beautiful as
asphodel meadows to a returned traveler
from the Shades.

It will be night again when Coatzacoalcos,
or Puerto Mexico by its new name, is
reached. Another night in another hotel
conducted by an American and owned by

85

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

"the Pearsons," another day in surveying a
harbor and its equipment, less remarkable
here than at Salina Cruz because the mouth
of the Coatzacoalcos River offered some nat-
ural advantage, another impression of a town
that is neither Mexican nor American nor
English nor a composite of its discoverable
elements, and in which women seem to be as
scarce as in Tehuantepec they are super-
numerary, and you have completed your Isth-
mian observation, you think.

One hundred and fifty miles farther down
the Isthmus toward Yucatan and Central
America, at Frontera, still another artificial
harbor is projected, this time by dredging a
canal from the Grijalva River near its mouth
to a quiet bay a mile distant. But we shall
not visit Frontera.

Cortez foresaw that across this narrow sep-
aration between the two oceans, where the
mountain range breaks down low, would pass
a great highway for the world's trade. He
so wrote of it. Humboldt called it "the
bridge of the world's commerce." As early
as 1774 a Spanish engineer declared his be-
lief in the feasibility of the canal idea. About
the middle of the nineteenth century, those

86

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

opportunists, the '49 - ers, on their way to
California gold fields, without waiting for
canal or railroad, went across by scores, the
Spaniards having long before built a coach
road from one ocean to the other. An old
stage driver who took many of the miners
over was still living, I was told, in 1905. The
American gold coins in the necklace of a
Tehuana belle, if they do not date back to
the '50's, may represent a preference that
grew up then. An American engineer named
Eads once had a concession from the Mexi-
can government to construct a "ship rail-
way," whatever that may have meant, but
could not raise capital for it. It was a Brit-
ish firm, S. Pearson and Son, builders of the
harbors at Vera Cruz, Salina Cruz, Coatza-
coalcos, and elsewhere, who finally constructed
the railroad, the government at first paying a
fixed sum for each unit of work but after-
ward entering into a joint partnership with
the Pearsons, which is to hold till 1953. Sir
Weetman Pearson, president of the company,
is now planning to build a railroad from Mex-
ico City to Puebla, reaching snow line on
Popocatepetl at 14,000 feet and with a branch
to the peak about 4000 feet higher. It will

87

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

enable one to go from Mexico City to the
peak of "Popo" in two hours, leaving balmy
air and a temperature generally of 75 to 80
degrees and reaching one often as low as 20
degrees below zero. Americans are not the
only bold projectors. Americans, however,
have not ceased to be prominent in the Te-
huantepec region. There are abandoned plan-
tations and abandoned home sites well dis-
tributed along both the Isthmian railroad
proper and the Vera Cruz al Istmo route,
which represent the utterly foolish investment
of American money, generally brought about
by ignorant dnd unscrupulous American pro-
motion. I could learn, for example, of only
one rubber plantation in which stock has been
offered for sale that has a prospect of even
moderate returns ; and my informants ascribed
this exception more to luck than to com-
petence of the prime movers, who were inex-
perienced. Many plantations and private
"home sites" not yet abandoned ought to be
and will be. Every one at Santa Lucrecia
treated the matter either as a huge joke or as
a great pity. Missionaries in Mexico City
afterward told me of helping families to pay
their way back home, and urged that some

88

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

general warning be given. The objection to
any general warning is that there are possibil-
ities in the region for the right type of settler
acting under the right advice. The American
Consul-General, when appealed to, said in
effect that he had often had these matters
brought to his attention, but any consular
officer is powerless to help, as the State De-
partment does not authorize our representa-
tives to offer opinions regarding particular
business undertakings. From a source of the
highest competence I obtained this advice:
"Refer people through their banks to Dun's
and Bradstreet's, but let them say that they
are interested only incidentally in the financial
rating of the agents or promoters in the
United States. What they need is a thorough
special report on the conditions of the planta-
tion or other enterprise itself." One of the
most absurd things is the way in which inex-
perienced persons make a tour under the con-
duct of some agent, as a party were doing in
our train, and flatter themselves that they
have investigated. They take for rubber
plants a kind of glassy-leaved tree that is as
worthless as mullein stalks. They miscalcu-
late the healthfulness of climate, the number

89

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

of years necessary to raise a crop, the cost
and availability of labor, the time involved in
transporting perishable fruits — any one of a
dozen factors that are vital.

Making any of these blunders, a man is
likely to profit little by the general fact that
Mexico as a whole yields annually two hun-
dred million dollars' worth of farm products
and that scarcely a hundredth part of her
arable land is yet under cultivation. Some
day vast regions in northern Mexico will be
irrigated and reclaimed as California, Colo-
rado, Texas, and Nevada so largely have
been; but during the process many a too in-
cautious person may lose all he has. The
right Americans to invest in Mexican enter-
prises are either those who are prepared for
wild speculative chances or those who know
what they are about.

Your Isthmian impressions are after all
not quite finished, for as you climb the grad-
ual slope in the evening train, lights will glim-
mer with lowly human kindness from behind
screens that in daytime your vision did not
penetrate, and will mean something domestic,
something that is comfortable to think about.
After all, men do live here where only reptiles

90

TEHUANTEPEC AND THE JUNGLE

might be thought to have a place, and some-
how they shape life to its environment. The
environment will yield also to them, and who
knows of what they may be the forerunners?
You can grapple with the thought of the
jungle better now in the soothing dark, and
to-morrow you will not regard it with your
first abhorrence. You will again see it preg-
nant with great values for time to come.

91

VII

OAXACA

STILL back over your course as far as
Santa Lucrecia, then north, that is par-
allel to the coast, which is to say west,
two hundred miles to Cordova, and again you
touch the route that you might have taken at
once from Vera Cruz to Mexico City. But
still you are not ready to follow it. You are
bound for the city of Oaxaca, the capital of
the state in which you have been for several
days, and then to Mitla, the place of ruins.
At one time you were within seventy-five
miles if you could have struck across country ;
but the trail would have led through formid-
able mountains, where the Indians are of un-
certain temper toward strangers, and you
could have saved nothing in time, nor in
money after guide and mules were paid for.
So you make this circuit of more than four
hundred miles over three railroads, through
two states besides the one that you have left
and into which you will return.

92

OAXACA

A night in Tehuacan, whose bottled water
has made you familiar with the name in ad-
vance, will give you a taste of perfect climate
and a view of Mexicans at a health resort.
The hotel has decorations that would cost
more in New York than the whole establish-
ment is worth. You walk out into the coun-
try about sundown and see women washing
clothes but find no evidence that their own, or
they themselves, were ever washed. The swift
streams rush along with water enough to
cleanse a multitude, through the clean, hard
banks that they have lined with their calcium
deposit; but people and houses look as if the
water had brought none of its ministries to
them. Is this merely one of the unaccountable
variations of custom, or partly explained by
the disheartening amount of dust that flies
about, so that cleanness would be but a mo-
mentary state at best? I remember speculat-
ing about this at El Riego, a mile or so out;
I remember as I returned seeing two soldiers,
one reading to the other, under a palmetto
tree; I remember the mountains at sunset;
and I remember the heavy, fragrant white
flower that dropped on the pavement under my
window at night with a sound like that of a

93

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

banana peel. So much I remember of Tehua-
can.

Oaxaca has 40,000 inhabitants, which is to
say that it is as large as the old Massachusetts
town of Salem. It is older by a hundred and
forty years — older than St. Augustine by
more than three-quarters of a century. It
has been the scene of many battles, from when
the Mixtec and Zapotec Indians made stand
after stand against Cortez, the future Mar-
quis of Oaxaca, to the times of Hidalgo,
Juarez, and their successors. Such opposi-
tion did the Spaniards encounter here on their
first visit that* they withdrew till a year later,
in 1522, when Montezuma had fallen and his
capital, Tenochtitlan, was in their hands.
Then they subdued the place by the aid of
great numbers of native allies. The inhab-
itants of the region were largely an agricul-
tural people, though the city itself had grown
important because of the presence of gold in
rich deposits. It was on account of the gold
that Cortez chose this as the seat of his do-
main and had himself created Marquis of
Oaxaca by the Spanish crown. As for the
gold, the conquistador -es were not wholly dis-
appointed, though their dreams were beyond

94

OAXACA

realization. As to the people, while the city
has always remained a stronghold of Roman-
ism and often of political reaction, it has also
been a center of political agitation whenever
any new impulse was astir anywhere in the
country. Even to-day there are Indians com-
ing in to sell their wares at the Oaxaca mar-
ket who have never acknowledged the author-
ity of a foreign ruler.

The cochineal industry originated here and
spread hence to Central America, then to the
Canary Islands and elsewhere. The Indians
of Oaxaca had used the brilliant and perma-
nent scarlet dye to color their sarapes, prob-
ably for centuries, without discovering that
they were indebted to a minute insect which
feeds on certain species of cactus. They
thought that they were baking or boiling a
natural product of the plant itself. How-
ever, they were perfectly familiar with its
virtues, as they were with those of many of
the native dye woods. Here are still to be
bought the best Indian blankets in the repub-
lic, of either wool or cotton, dyed with vege-
table colors, though one needs to guard
against aniline and other delusions. The
Oaxaca market, be it here said, is as charac-

95

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

teristic as any in Mexico; and as becomes the
market in one of the best Roman Catholic
towns of a Spanish country, it is at its live-
liest on Sunday.

Oaxaca nestles, as do many cities of the
Mexican plateau, among mountains that give
a noble frame and background to every pic-
ture. There is no vista without a church
dome; and churches and houses alike have an
appearance not only of age but of permanence
that is satisfying. The houses are all made of
the heaviest construction to survive earth-
quakes. I saw one of adobe that has been
standing since* 1660. Solidity is the keynote,
in aqueducts, houses, churches, everywhere.
The ancient-looking ox carts with their pon-
derous wooden wheels, and the rough cobbled
pavements over which they move so lazily all
express it. The native men and women are
types of it. One has difficulty to conceive that
anything at Oaxaca ever changed. The cli-
mate never does — it is almost perfectly equa-
ble, and thoroughly delightful.

There is an amazingly rich old church,
Santo Domingo, once larger with its acces-
sory buildings than St. Peter's at Rome, where
young Porfirio Diaz dangled down upon a

96

OAXACA

rope to the window of his former teacher's
prison cell — one of many exploits in the career
of this daring and resourceful man. He, like
Juarez, was a native of the city.

As striking as any architectural feature are
the massive and extensive portales, which face
the Zocalo and, with the cathedral, give satis-
fying dignity to it. They harbor, within doors
and without, the busiest mercantile activities
of the city, and make part of a picture which
could not seem much more remote than it does
from any twentieth-century part of the world.
Having left my hat in one of the shops to be
cleaned after a dusty ride, I ventured bare-
headed among the venders, public letter-
writers, idlers, and passers-by, in search of a
boot-black. When I found him, his first im-
pudent, astonishing words were: "Where's
your hat, Mister? You'd better look out or
they'll arrest you and send you into the
army." I told him they'd have to send me
into the American army, and asked where he
had learned my language so well. It de-
veloped that he had beaten his way to New
York a year or two before and had spent sev-
eral months there in the "shine" business. He
was about fifteen years old.

97

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

The cathedral stands where the Zocalo and
the Alameda, both rectangles, touch at a cor-
ner, so that it has beautifully shaded park both
in front and on one side and is itself the cen-
tral figure of the whole scheme. It has at
least one delightful aspect, that of the fa£ade
from the plaza opposite. Particularly in the
evening, this view is one of melting loveliness.
The soft creamy or greenish hues of a native
stone, the somewhat decayed surfaces, the
angles softened by wear, are all more beauti-
ful than they can have been when the builders
left them, though the front must always have
been one of singular beauty. Within are two
or three noted paintings by native artists ; but
often I have not found Mexican churches
favorable places for looking at pictures, and
this cathedral with its warm tones and gentle
outlines is a sweeter picture than any that it
houses.

On one of the high, surrounding hills, what
appear from the hotel windows to be several
natural mounds are in fact part of the ruins
of Monte Alban, to be reached by three hours'
horseback ride and worthy of a visit by any
one of antiquarian interests. They may be
older than the ruins of Yucatan and are cer-

98

OAXACA

tainly much older than those of Mitla, which
nearly every visitor to the region sees. They
are also more accessible.

An excursion that is recommended, though
I never went so far, is one eastward beyond
Mitla to the summit of Zempoaltepec, about
12,000 feet high. The panorama of moun-
tains, forests, tropic lands, and opposite
oceans — the Gulf of Mexico on the east and
the Pacific on the west — is said not to be
equaled from many points in the world.
While lamenting that we cannot go out for
the ascent, we may stretch our thoughts to it
from having been so breathlessly near going.
Another time, perhaps!

99

VIII

TO MITLA AND BACK

MI TLA, about twenty-five miles from
Oaxaca, is the most famous place of
ruins in all Mexico. Soon it will be
reached by railroad; but I am glad that for
me it was still necessary to take a coach.
Three horses were driven abreast and a change
was made at Tlacolula. There I saw the cere-
mony of hand-kissing performed with as much
gravity between friends on the street as
though each withered and ragged crone were
a duchess. It was always the older person
that was thus reverenced by the younger. At
Tlacolula, too, I entered an old church where
the guide-book said nothing was of interest,
and did, it is true, find the interior being done
over in lurid vulgarity and furnished with
images, the hideous crudity of which seems
blasphemous to a heretic eye ; but I found also
some old pictures, the canvas breaking
through but the colors as rich as when the
brush left them, and the whole effulgent still

100

with the light that never was on sea or land.
It is not worth while to ask the name of the
artist, he was a native and a copyist — all art-
ists are copyists — and there have been many
like him in Mexico; but he belonged to the
school of those who mix more than "brains"
with their colors — who mix in tears and
ecstasy, who, seeing the invisible, have the art
to make some hint of it appear.

At another little village, sooner reached
than Tlacolula, in fact, is one of the largest
and oldest trees on earth. A new lettuce is
no fresher than the big cypress tree of Tule,
with its girth of 160 feet, and its height, rela-
tively small, of 160 to 175 feet. Cortez rested
under it and so wondered at its vastness that
he made record of it. Humboldt, as late as
the middle of the nineteenth century, carved a
legend to distinguish it, and it has grown
calmly on till this decoration is nearly em-
bedded. There are other great trees of the
same species near; but none approaches this
in size.

Every lane in Tule is hedged in with the
organ cactus which stands like elongated
prickly cucumbers on end, giving a strange
aspect to the irregular streets. The houses

101

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

are thatched and surrounded by fruit trees
and flowering plants. The inhabitants, long
accustomed to watch the stranger go by, have
never adopted his ways. A woman clothed
only from her waist down disappeared on our
approach, but not in confusion. Children did
not disappear at all, but stood unashamed,
asking for centavos. Men working over their
sandals or their wooden plows hardly lifted a
glance. From within the bamboo huts came
the spatting sound with which Indian wives
have always beaten their corn paste between
their hands into thin cakes for cooking. While
tortillas are how made in the larger towns by
machinery, yet this immemorial patter an-
nounces dinner time to-day in every Mexican
village.

The road from Oaxaca to Mitla is wide
enough for four coaches to drive abreast. It
might remind one of Charles Lamb's remark
about a certain man's taste — so much of it
and all so bad! Along it go in procession the
centuries from Homer's day to that of Sancho
Panza, but never anything of later style, ex-
cept the occasional tourist from foreign lands
who recognizes in himself a thing forced, un-
natural, grotesque. He passes like a comet

102

TO MITLA AND BACK

through serene skies, save that he must pass in
a borrowed vehicle; and serenity will return
when he is gone. The crooked stick that
served for a plow in Egypt and India will
move along in its furrow, the oxen trudging
before it; the carts will creak along the high-
way; the donkeys with skin bottles puffing on
either side will patter on; and the blue sky
will arch over them all, unruffled.

An hacienda with its old house covering an
acre, the walls four feet thick, is the refuge
and headquarters of tired and dusty aliens in
Mitla. The world is all within the court you
enter. Grated windows, doors three inches
through, locks that some blacksmith made in
1690 or thereabouts — everything in the place
has been quieted by the caress of age. But
travel out through the rather squalid village
to the monuments you have come to see, and
again you are reminded that age is relative.
Not so old as Uxmal with its strange animal
figures, not so old as Monte Alban with its
picture writing, capable now of being repaired
for centuries of their original use if any one
knew and cared to perpetuate it, yet old
enough to be stripped of history and free from
ascriptions of origin, these ruins are a contra-

103

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

diction and an astonishment. They are not
moss-grown, for moss does not grow here.
Trees and shrubs have not veiled and claimed
them again to an identity with nature, for
only the cactus is at home on these plains and
slopes. Storm and earthquake have won no
compromise of their erectness and rectilinear
power, for they were built to defy storm and
earthquake. Even the character of their
decoration is such as to set them farthest from
any hint of natural objects — not only is it
geometric as distinguished from the repre-
sentation of plants and animal forms, but its
designs are worked out in straight lines. If
ever architecture spoke, these massive halls
upon the high ground of Mitla speak for
their builders, "Behold we were men, and this
work was our work, not a thing of chance or
growth; and this our work was greatly done,
done after a fashion of our devising, done to
remain." It is estimated that a million tiles,
or more properly flat stones, went into the
walls of Mitla thus far uncovered. They con-
stitute a mosaic that differs from the ordinary
because the stones are set on edge, and by
their inequalities of width, projecting one be-
yond another, form the design in relief. Door-

104

TO MITLA AND BACK

ways are not arched — a curved arch, even if
they knew it, would ill have fitted the style of
these builders; but great stones from fifteen
to eighteen feet long, five feet wide, and four
feet thick were placed as lintels and then the
same deep intricate design was unflinchingly
carved upon them. The walls were so well
laid, for the most part without mortar, that
each stone is perfectly firm in its original
place and only curious examination discovers,
even to-day, where carving leaves off and
mosaic begins.

There are several great halls, one called the
hall of monoliths, where are six columns of
porphyry, fourteen feet high and about seven
in circumference, having neither capital nor
pedestal but tapered and rounded toward the
top in a way that shows artistic thought, and
is as much a departure from straightness as
this peculiar style would warrant.

A little of the colored decoration that re-
mains where pious Roman priests formerly
stabled their horses, shows, strangely enough,
grotesque heads. The heads give to some
the impression of being grotesque not because
of incapacity to make them otherwise but
from conscious design.

105

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

The ruins of Mitla are large enough to be
those of a city, yet are not those of a city.
They may have been related to one as the old
castle to its village, or they may have been
only temples or tombs. Whatever the pur-
pose for which they were built, the men who
built them in their geometric perfection must
have done much else that would be worthy of
attention if known. To have looked at their
handiwork is to have faced the riddle of the
ages.

Leave Mitla, imagine your way retraced to
where you left the axis between Vera Cruz
and Mexico1, and proceed at last toward the
capital. Orizaba is the first considerable
town, girt around with high mountains, well
wooded. A coffee center and the capital of
the cotton-weaving industry in Mexico, it is
best remembered merely as a beautiful hill
town, the first up from Vera Cruz in which
fever is practically unknown, the natural first
station on the journey upward. Here the
European allies in 1862 by consent of Juarez
made their first headquarters.

Up from Orizaba, with its altitude of 4000
feet, round the famous Maltrata curve, still
winding steeply up, never down, at every vil-

106

TO MITLA AND BACK

lage buying fruit and baskets of intoxica-
tingly fragrant gardenias from women and
girls as dark and comely as Ruth or Rebecca,
and at a distance of 173 kilometers (110
miles) from Vera Cruz we shall find ourselves
on the level of the great plateau. As we
turn again and again up the incline, villages
and farms spread like little gardens far below
us ; and all has a look quite different from that
in the jungle, of having been long subdued
to human use. Every path has been beaten
for centuries by the sandaled or naked feet
of men and women not belonging to our race,
but seeming far nearer kin to us now as we
look thus upon their homes and haunts than
we had ever before felt them. We find our-
selves in a critical state of mind, not toward
the primitive life that has been lived here,
but toward our own. It seems a pity that,
while learning a few things of undoubted ad-
vantage, we should have learned so many
tending only to complication and unnatural-
ness.

As the elevation increases and the air grows
colder, the Mexican blanket is more and more
in evidence. The statuesque gives way to the
picturesque, and the beauty and grace of

107

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

nature little trammeled or adorned to the dig-
nity and the humor of umber figures bedecked
in high colors and draped with the pride of
grandees.

On across the plain, all afternoon, passing
the great prehistoric pyramids of the sun and
moon at San Juan Teotihuacan, which I have
seen many a time from car windows, and think
of as old friends though I never stopped to
visit them, and so at evening we shall arrive
at Mexico City, a little giddy from the alti-
tude, it may be, a little bewildered by kalei-
doscopic changes, but with a feeling of enrich-
ment from the experiences of the day.

108

IX

MEXICO CITY

THE mingled sounds of hoofs upon as-
phalt, of street cars, of automobiles de-
manding the right of way, and of many
human feet and voices, the downward swoop
of an elevator, and then the smell of "coffee
and cut roses" triumphing over that of fresh
ink on your newspaper — all these that you
experience at the beginning of your first day
in Mexico City do not give any overwhelming
sense of being swung out into far places or of
being projected backward into the sixteenth
century. This Mexican Herald has tele-
graphic columns as long as those of the
"daily" at home and editorials written in Eng-
lish as familiar.

Though it may have been two or three
weeks since you landed in Vera Cruz, prob-
ably the tall American with the long nose or
some equally remembered fellow-passenger
will be sitting within reach of a nod; and

109

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

there will be also some of last night's "ar-
rivals" who will tell you, if you ask, that they
were just four days coming from Buffalo or
three from St. Louis, with Pullman and din-
ing car service all the way. This is rather start-
ling but is only a prophecy of what will soon
be accomplished as far as Guatemala and be-
yond. Already tolerable trains run from
Gamboa on the Tehuantepec line, southward
to the Guatemalan border. The Pan-Amer-
ican system which was the dream of James G.
Elaine will be in operation, possibly within
fifteen years, from New York to the great
ports of South America.

You are at an American hotel. If you were
a German or a Frenchman you would be at a
German or a French hotel and would find
things as little foreign to you as everything
here seems to American observation. You
would still be reading your newspaper in Eng-
lish, it is likely, but for Germans and French-
men in Mexico English ceases to be a strange
tongue. In short, you are in a cosmopolitan
city. The American population alone is esti-
mated at 7000. Then there are the English
and the English-speaking Germans and
French alluded to just now, and it would be

110

MEXICO CITY

hard to say how many English-speaking
Mexicans. On the principal business streets
and in business hours English is heard more
than Spanish, and more than any other lan-
guage whatsoever, though man spricht
Deutsch and parle Franpais also with such
frequency as to denote that other than Amer-
ican enterprise is at work.

No city is the center of the United States
as Mexico City is that of the Mexican repub-
lic ; it is metropolis, political and financial cap-
ital, chief seat of learning, publishing center,
travel center, and heart of the nation in al-
most every organic way that can be thought
of. Every one who lives or even winters in
the republic comes to "the City" from time
to time. Paradoxically enough, it is one of
the least Mexican of all places in Mexico. It
is no place in which to make any detailed first-
hand study of character and conditions. One
may, however, do much generalizing here, and
profit much by the knowledge and observation
of others.

London and New York, cosmopolitan as
they are, have each their marks of nationality,
so that a traveler awaking in one would hard-
ly fancy himself in the other. There are so

111

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

many Germans, Frenchmen, and Americans
in London, all wearing clothes conformed
to a world pattern, and so many Ger-
mans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen in New
York, all similarly conformed, that an
off-hand analysis of the human stream on
a busy thoroughfare might give no clue; but
there are always signs at hand. The hack-
man in New York is a different figure from
the London "cabby," the policeman on Fifth
Avenue and the "bobby" on Pall Mall do not
look alike, the New York "sky-scraper" may
be suggested by individual buildings elsewhere
but is dominant in the view of no city out-
side of the United States. Similarly, in Mex-
ico City, everything official, or institutional,
or architectural, is Mexican on its face. South
America, Spain, Palestine, would show like-
nesses; but I am indicating that cosmopolitan
appearance and international resemblance dis-
solve under close examination. There are
taxicabs^ but if a taxicab from Mexico City,
driver and all, could pass through New York,
it would be gazed at, even in that blase me-
tropolis, from Battery Park to Harlem. The
street cars are of a familiar enough model,
built in the United States. It is one of the

112

MEXICO CITY

first facts learned that, if not under American
control, they are under English, and so
equally far from promising any Mexican as-
pect. But the motorman and the conductor who
comes to take your seis centavos (three Amer-
ican cents) have quite other than Anglo-
Saxon earmarks. The "running stock" of
the road, for that matter, would reveal some
variations if watched long enough, for ex-
ample— one of the relatively swift things in
Mexico — an electric hearse, that is a flat car,
with a black canopy designed for funeral pur-
poses mounted upon it. Such a car will be
followed by passenger coaches as many as the
size of the funeral requires. But I had in-
tended no description here — only an entry in
our catalogue of things distinctive. Police-
men and letter carriers, and, in spite of their
German uniform, soldiers also, are as Latin-
American as careful selection could have made
them if such had been applied. The Amer-
ican stores as well as the shops with American
clerks, and those with polyglot French and
German managers or clerks, or with "Amer-
ican" speaking Mexican clerks, are non-com-
mittal enough in a casual view of their stock,
barring, of course, souvenir photographs and

113

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

curios ; but look up at almost any of the build-
ings in which they are housed and you will
know that you are not in the neighborhood of
John Wanamaker's or Marshall Field's em-
porium.

Even between the crowds in one national
metropolis and in another the likeness is al-
ways superficial and confined to certain quar-
ters. Intermingled with "citizens of the
world" who almost constitute an international
type of themselves, and with foreign people
of business, there are always the clearly in-
digenous, those who in the nature of things
would not £e where they do not belong. One
knows them instantly to be the rightful in-
habitants; and nowhere are they more
strongly marked than in Mexico, with the
sandals, the cotton suit of two garments for
man or woman, the gaudy blanket, the wide
hat or the rebozo. They appear as free from
self-consciousness and go as calmly about
their affairs in Mexico City as in Tehuacan.
I once saw two imperturbable Aztecs in native
costume drive a flock of a hundred or more
turkeys along San Francisco, the most
bustling street of the capital, using a strip of
cloth on the end of a stick to direct their

114

MEXICO CITY

feathered charges, and apparently unconscious
of the varied world around them. One tur-
key was holding up an injured and bleeding
foot that had been run over by some car or
cart, but otherwise things appeared to be mov-
ing admirably.

Among the well-to-do one can find the
native types by noticing who go in and out at
old houses of settled character, apart from the
business district. A frame building is almost
unknown, by reason of which the fire loss is
practically nothing, though companies of
"pumpers," that is firemen, are prudently
maintained. The prevailing style of house in
Mexico City, as "elsewhere in the republic, is
the hollow square, built of stone or of either
brick or adobe stuccoed over, with a tunnel
through the lower story from the street to the
inner hollow. In other words, it is the Span-
ish plan, Oriental before it was Spanish, of a
flat, tile-roofed house of two or three stories
built around an open court or patio, fronting
directly on the street and with no outside
ornament except the window balconies, the
heavy gratings, and sometimes elaborate carv-
ing or other adornment on the wooden doors.
The outside walls, if stuccoed, may be tinted

115

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

variously ; and if the occupants have bad taste
the effect may be almost as dreadful as they
would achieve upon a clapboard mansion in
Illinois. There is no lawn, either in front,
where space would permit none, or in the
court, which as often as not is paved
throughout. This court, however, is usually
made beautiful by a profusion of plants and
flowers, occasionally by statuary and foun-
tains. There are not only the ponderous
doors at the entrance from the street, but
grilles at the farther end of what for conven-
ience we have called the tunnel; and the
glimpse of the patio that one gets, pleasing as
a rule even without their enchantment, ac-
quires from these iron gratings an added
charm of half concealment such as a lady's
face may borrow from a veil. The entrance is
wide enough to admit a coach and pair, with
purpose, too, for the family coach does actu-
ally enter. The "carriage house," as we
should say, and the stables as well, are com-
monly parts of the house itself. They occupy
a corner of the lower story, toward the back,
the servants' quarters occupying the front
part of this same story. It is true, in a very
large house, stables may be built on a sec-

116

MEXICO CITY

ond court behind that of the house itself,
reached by a second "tunnel" at the back.
The portero, or doorkeeper, is an important
functionary who, with his family, occupies a
room, not necessarily blessed with any furni-
ture, near the door, answers every summons
on the knocker or bell by day, locks the
doors about ten o'clock at night, and ex-
pects a fee if called from his straw mat
after hours to admit any belated resident
or visitor. The family live on the sec-
ond story, where a "corridor" or balcony
runs completely around, reached by a stair-
way from the lower court. Here, again, there
are flowers and foliage plants in pots and
boxes. This upper veranda is a pleasant
place, usually affording a sunny side if one is
chilly or a shady side if the weather seems too
warm.

So much we may learn without intrusion or
undue asking of questions if no introduction
actually admits us to a house. The people
who go in and out of these spacious dwellings,
each of them making as separate an atmos-
phere for itself as a cloistered monastery, are
the leisurely, graceful, and dark-skinned dons
and ladies that we should expect.

117

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

When we left hotels, restaurants, and shops
behind, we left most of our American and
other foreign friends. The foreigners, to be
sure, do not all live in hotels. There is a
highly uninteresting colony where various at-
tempts have been made to transplant Amer-
ican styles of houses or to compromise be-
tween these and the established type. Then
there are hundreds of families that either own
or hire houses of the Mexican plan, or live in
viviendas (apartments) as they find them. If
we stroll by accident into any quarter that has
been thus invaded, however, we shall soon
recognize it", and can betake ourselves else-
where for observation.

118

X

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

FOR much that we desire we may make
the parks our stalking ground. The Zo-
calo, as it is called, is the real center of
Mexico City, so far as grouping of interests
is concerned. One writer has said that in no
American city are the parks used in any such
way as in Mexico. Washington is the near-
est approach to it. A park is a lounging place
for the idle hours, a promenade for the exhibi-
tion hours, and a forum for the most interest-
ing talkative hours of genteel people, to say
nothing of laborers and others with no dignity
to maintain. The Zocalo is all this. Then,
too, around it or within a few minutes' walk
are the Cathedral, the Flower Market, the
National Palace, the City Hall, the Museum,
the National Academy of Arts (San Carlos),
the National Pawn Shop, the Thieves' Mar-
ket, and other objects of admiration or curi-
osity. All these might be seen between sun-

119

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

rise and sunset if there were not a somewhat
troublesome schedule of open and closed days
for some of them; and yet at almost any of
them a week could easily be spent.

Before beginning our career we shall have
learned the whereabouts of the Alameda, a
more fashionable park, beyond which the axis
of interest, so to speak, having run northwest
from the Zocalo, bends to the southwest and
runs on to a third park more famous than
either, two and a half or three miles distant, at
Chapultepec.

Time would fail us to do much more than
check off as "seen and noted" the really in-
teresting institutions already on our list. The
Cathedral is the foremost church edifice in
Mexico, perhaps in North America, cruci-
form in plan, with two towers that are both
beautiful and unique, having domes shaped
like the bells that they support. It occupies
the site of the principal Aztec pyramid of the
city and is built, historians say, on founda-
tions made largely of Aztec carvings, which
have been found and are still found in great
numbers whenever excavations are made in
the vicinity. The Cathedral is a massive
structure of basalt and gray sandstone in the

120

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

Spanish Renaissance style, over 390 feet long
by 180 broad, is known to have cost over two
millions of dollars, and was ninety-four years
in building. The decorations and treasures of
the church, previous to the confiscation by
Juarez's government, were almost fabulous,
and even now it is rich in old wood carvings,
paintings, and other such accessories as could
not readily be converted into public funds.
One painting ijs an undoubted Murillo, two or
three others may be of the same or equally
high origin, and a number by native painters
are good. Mexican onyx in lavish quantities
enriches the interior, but not to excess, for
Mexican onyx is of soft rather than dazzling
beauty, in appearance about equally resem-
bling wax and marble. There are, as always
in these churches, many accessory and tem-
porary things which are gaudy, hideous, and
altogether out of character, but the general
effect is powerful enough to overcome their
presence. Critics who compare it with the
great churches of Europe regard the Cathe-
dral as a beautiful and impressive structure,
characterized on the whole by harmony and
restraint.

The middle-class women and such of the
121

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

wealthy as frequent the place, with their re-
bozos or mantillas and black garments, are in
keeping with the architecture, the aged and
darkened carvings, the pictures, the gigantic
vellum-bound books, the soft light of the
candles, and the murmur of the chants. In-
dians from the rural districts in their bright
native garb come and kneel to kiss in apparent
rapture whatever presents itself as most
sacred. Their understanding of the differ-
ence between the religion of their early ances-
tors and that which they profess is merely
that a more< glorious temple and a superior set
of divinities, more realistically portrayed, have
somehow displaced the old ones. "No mat-
ter," says the broad-minded and indifferent-
minded dispenser of off-hand reflections, "for
a half -hour they have been happy. Idolatry
and superstition appear to be very comfort-
ing, exalting things." Indeed! Opium also
is a comforting and exalting thing, at times
and in certain effects; but to avail oneself
of its nepenthe has not seemed favor-
able to personal progress or to bearing
one's part in the common march forward.
And how can we prove that progress is
desirable? We do not try. Samuel John-

122

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

son was once asked, since the cultivated are
not all happy and the ignorant not all miser-
able, how he would argue that knowledge and
culture are desirable. He answered, in sub-
stance, that there is no person who has them
and could be induced to part with them, and
no person lacking them unless a fool, who fails
to desire them. Progress commends itself
directly to the sincere intelligence, and to any
other it need not ask to be commended. For
the definition and the proof of progress we
have no time here. I have seen such peones
as these emerging from ignorance and super-
stition to a sense of their own misery — not a
very agreeable change, you say — but to a
larger hope for their children, and to a sus-
taining belief in the dignity of their own
souls which would neither unqualifiedly admit
any reprobate or even decent fellow-mortal
as vicar, nor longer think it right for any gov-
ernor to hold them as beasts. I have seen them
exemplify all the simple virtues that smart
writers deny them, work and sacrifice for
their new faith, and approach old age and
death with a less fitful happiness than they
could draw from myths and fables.

I speak not as the highly regenerate, not in
123

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

deference to so-called missionaries who find
easy places in the balmy tropics and draw
more money than they could command at
home, not in apology for missionary secre-
taries who think the indolent, the languid, or
the ill-prepared are fit enough to send out.
But self-sacrificing, high-minded, gifted, and
wise men and women have built their strength
and their virtue into the Protestantism of
Mexico with its hundred thousand adherents,*
and its educated, heroic native pastors living
on $25 to $40 a month; and any intelligent
northern man of the white race who has lived
in Mexico and permits them all to be called to
naught is unfair. I have known Unitarians to
contribute up to the full measure of their abil-
ity to Presbyterian work in Mexico because its
value was manifest without analysis of doc-
trines. I have known American Roman
Catholics to contribute for the work of a
Methodist missionary because he was doing
good. They did not consider that they were
helping to proselyte anybody from Catholi-
cism as they recognize it. Whether they would
have been sanctioned by the Vatican I doubt;
but they made a natural human response to
things as they found them.

124

*Largely scattered during the Revolution.

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

American, English, and French Catholics
visiting the country have repeatedly written
that Mexican faith, so far as the rank and file
of the people are concerned, is a dead faith.
The Aztec religion was highly ceremonial.
"The introduction of the Roman religion had
no other effect," according to Humboldt,
"than to substitute new ceremonies and
symbols for the rites of a sanguinary wor-
ship." Catholicism as exemplified by the
Spaniards was generally at its worst, and a°
propagated among the Indians it was empti-
ness unqualified. It has improved. I heard
a priest, not an American nor a Frenchman
but a young Spaniard from the Philippines,
after sending a sick man away, with his prof-
fered fee, to a physician, ask, "How can you
Protestants consign these poor cattle to either
Heaven or Hell? They have never been
taught anything. Surely they will need some
place of probation." Such honest and rational
treatment as his will help. The Protestant
influence will help; Catholicism has improved
most where Protestantism has been most
active. There are Mexican Catholic clergy-
men who admit this. A sermon or some dis-
course to the people in Spanish is now a very

125

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

common part of the service; formerly it was
unusual. Another consideration is that the
missionaries do not gather adherents solely or
chiefly from attentive members of the Roman
church, but very largely from the neglected
and the unchurched. To suppose that all the
Mexican people are already Christianized ac-
cording to the tenets of Romanism is to make
a blind assumption. Protestant missions are
as legitimate and almost as sorely needed in
Mexico as in India; and they entered only
after urgent entreaty. There is a kind of
reciprocity involved in whatever work may
really overlap that of the Roman church, for
when the establishment in Mexico was the
richest in the world considerable money was
sent to help weak and struggling Catholic
churches in the United States.

So much of reflection, as we visit and leave
the greatest religious edifice in Mexico, a city
of churches in a land of churches. There are
three hundred in the capital alone, some as
beautiful and more aristocratic, though not so
large nor so interesting as the Cathedral. The
most popular one of all is the church on
Guadalupe Hill, not in the city at all, prop-
erly speaking, but a little more than two miles

126

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

out to the northeast, in a line parallel with the
shore of the gradually receding salt Lake
Texcoco. Here, in 1531, when some effective
sign was needed to turn the natives from their
old religion, a miraculous lady appeared to
Juan Diego, a poor villager. She was in fact
the Virgin Mary ; but the identity is not much
emphasized. There are tens of thousands to
whom the Lady of Guadalupe, or simply
"Guadalupe," means more than all the other
sacred beings in their category. Her like-
ness as she appeared in a luminous cloud was
kindly left with Juan along with some magical
roses on his mantle and is as familiar through-
out Mexico as the national coat of arms. Why
not, as she is the acknowledged patron saint?
The chapel which is her shrine cost a million
and a half dollars gold and contains precious
things and sacred relics of great additional val-
ue, including the miraculous picture. This is
the most frequented shrine in North America,
not excepting Ste. Anne de Beaupre near
Quebec. It is the source of marvelous cures
for which the ignorant in thousands, and the
less ignorant in scores, come hundreds of
miles. On December 12th, the special day set
apart in its honor, when the weary and wistful

127

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

devotees throng out by every means of con-
veyance, as well as on foot, different onlookers
may have different feelings but scarcely any
one can view the strange procession unmoved.

Let us return to the vicinity of the Zocalo.
The simple and impressionable Indian was
always a lover of flowers. He brought flowers
as well as vegetables through the canals that
led to this very spot — to the old city of Te-
nochtitlan on the shore of a lake now disap-
peared. He still knows how to tend them and
to mass them in seductive array. The Flower
Market of Mexico City in early morning is a
place to go and see roses, poppies, and other
flowers really abundant for once, and at
prices, despite the tourist "bulling" of the
market, that should make a New York florist
feel highly compassionate, or very much
ashamed. Sweet peas enough to fill a wash-
bowl, spicy and fresh, may be had for a
nickel. Nor do they become contemptible for
their cheapness or their abundance, here in
the hands of these romantic children of the
sun.

The Thieves' Market is another place where
variety is inconceivable, where beauty and
precious values may be present though in am-

128

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

bush, and where romance, albeit of a different
sort, may easily spin its web. Who wore these
jewels before some enterprising thief at much
risk claimed them for display here? Or what
enterprising rogue had them made for the ex-
press purpose of barter with the "Gringo"?
What hands lovingly caressed this old book,
yellowed with years, and what deft fingers em-
broidered this gossamerlike shawl of silk?.
Were yonder little shoes taken ruthlessly from
baby feet or did their owner outgrow them or
perchance move to a country where none are
ever needed? What happy and confident
bride concealed her blushes and eager tears
behind this veil? To what treasuries did this
great hand-made and joyously elaborated key
once give entrance? This little old painting
with its wonderful amber varnish, cracked
but luminous, over the glory of color — who
painted his life into it? A place for fancies
is the Thieves' Market. One of the most
curious things that happens is not rare,
namely, that some one who loses an article of
value goes forthwith to the Mercado del Vo~
lador and makes it his own again for a tithe
of what it first cost him.

The Pawn Shop, or "Mount of Piety," here
129

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

as everywhere under the sun, is a varied mu-
seum illustrating the separableness of im-
provident man from his belongings and those
of his wife and children. But this pawn shop,
at least in intent, is a beneficent institution.
It is not managed in the interest of the pound
of flesh. A rich man, in 1775, seeing how the
common people were robbed by money lend-
ers, gave a fund to endow a concern which
should loan upon a given article something
approaching its value, charge only a fair rate
of interest, and make redemption of it as easy
as possible. The national government recog-
nized what appeared to be the merit of such
a scheme and made an appropriation to ex-
tend it, not only in Mexico City, but else-
where in the larger towns of the Republic.
The "good loan shark," by the way, has just
arrived in the United States, ushered in by
the Russell Sage Foundation, one hundred
and thirty odd years after it came into use in
Mexico.

At the Academy of San Carlos and also at
the National Museum are some of the worst
paintings that can be imagined, and they are
the first that a visitor is likely to see. Flesh
tints, always constituting one of the crucial

130

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

tests in portrait or figure painting, were a new
thing to be reckoned with when the skin of
the Indian and the mixed breed was to be
painted, and some of these dignitaries have
the complexion of an old whetstone or of a
white man who has survived a gunpowder ex-
plosion. When you have seen the best of the
work here, however, you will have seen a tri-
umph that for veracity may rank a little
higher or a little lower than the successful
treatment of the blonde or the near-blonde
that we call brunette, but which for intrinsic
beauty goes beyond comparison. It is not the
color of a chestnut, nor of glowing varnish
upon an old violin, it is not the color of gold
bronze, it has no exact representation in ivory,
nor in ancient vellum ; but if a composite of all
these could be made, one who has no technical
knowledge of color and who avoids consider-
ing too severely may imagine that the result
would be something like this. He knows, if
he has seen Indians of the finer types, that
whatever the ingredients of this color they
have found them. The Mexican artists too
have found them, and have found the counter-
feit of life which makes their pictures speak
and move.

131

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

A great deal of the riches in art that once
abounded in Mexico was destroyed or taken
away during the French usurpation, and some
of it suffered during the civil wars. Yet there
are old masterpieces here to repay the pilgrim-
age of an art lover from New York. Murillo,
Zurbaran, Rubens, Titian, Guido Reni, Juan
de Carreno, are all represented. It is not
such importations, however, but the work of
the early and the modern Mexican schools that
will make the most striking impress on a visi-
tor whose thought is full of Mexico. If any
single picture ought to be specially mentioned
it is perhaps that by Parra of Father Las
Casas, the Pere Marquette of Mexico, pro-
tecting the Indians. It is of heroic size, splen-
didly conceived and feelingly executed, be-
longs to the modern school, and is Mexican in
subject, representing an incident in the con-
quest. As for the best piece, there is no best
one among such a collection. Noble in qual-
ity, both when religious scenes are depicted
and when original and distinctively Mexican
subjects are treated, most impressive in num-
ber and spread of canvas, superbly hung and
lighted, the pictures in the San Carlos gallery
exalt and transport the visitor of average re-

132

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

sponsiveness as few arrays of paintings in the
whole world, probably, will do. It is not the
awe of venerable old pictures but the glory,
the opulence, the vivid palpitating joy, loveli-
ness, grief, courage of life which startles. It
is intimate, though in type or incident we
might describe it as romantic or strange. It
fits into what one has tried to actualize when
going up and down among the Mexicans. It
fuses the ideal, the romantic, with the real of
the sight-seeing of yesterday. Whether one
should desire to see these pictures by Echave,
Cabrera, Iberra, Obregon, Gutierrez, Ortega,
and Felix Parra as early as possible, so as to
carry their vision into one's observation, or
whether it is better to have seen first with
half -illumined eyes and matter-of-fact mind
would be difficult to decide.

The National Museum has its collection of
pictures, numerous and valuable, but of no
such account as those of the National Acad-
emy of San Carlos. It has ethnological and
geological and zoological exhibits: but it is
for the Aztec and other antiquities of prehis-
toric Mexico that the museum will be most
remembered. The archaeological section can
be seen and a very strong impression got of

133

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

it in a half-hour. For it has specimen after
specimen of colossal-sized carving in porphyry
and trachyte rock, the character of which will
make itself felt at a glance. Is this the West-
ern world? Are we sure we are not in a mu-
seum of Bible lands, and of lands that Xeno-
phon and Caesar described? Here are near
cousins, surely, to the gods and demigods,
demons and grotesqueries, of Egypt, India,
Assyria. A wise scholar may tell us that this
great figure of Chac Mol is nothing like a
sphinx, that his head faces wrong, that his
body is not that of a lion but of a man, etc.,
but we have seen a resemblance that will not
be explained away. The professor may tell
us that other figures do not resemble the squat
Buddha. The professor knows too much.
We see the resemblance. The professor has
almost become brother to the monoliths, and
he distinguishes them all according to their
individual marks. It needs some one not of
the family to take in resemblances at a flash.
Such an outsider knows when he sees them,
usually. There are Ethiopian types here, as
unmistakable as a photograph of the stalwarts
who helped Roosevelt weigh his dead lioness in
Africa. There are faces that are Mongolian,

134

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

if we ever saw any such, and others that are
Semitic. We who are not learned are sure as
we stand here that the natives of pre-historic
Mexico had more than one connection with
the civilizations of the ancient East, if in fact
they did not originate them. Asked which of
the various theories as to origin we believe, we
shall probably declare, "All of them." Nor
shall we be without learned support in our
conviction.

A stone calendar weighing twenty-four tons
shows that the Aztec year had eighteen
months of twenty days each, like that of the
Egyptians, with an extra period of five days
to complete the astronomical round, and in its
proper time a leap year. This, and another
huge cylinder believed to have been a sacri-
ficial stone, are both admirably carved and of
very hard material.

The National Palace, in part of which the
Museum is housed, is both old and new, hav-
ing been begun in 1692 and altered from time
to time ever since; and it is a rather imposing
structure.

At the southwest corner of the Zocalo is the
ancient City Hall, "restored" for the Cen-
tennial Fete in September, 1910. Within its

135

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

confines regular meetings of the City Council
have been held for 350 years.

On the site of the present Zocalo or Plaza
Mayor the Aztec priests found the symbolic
eagle on the cactus, and here they made the
center of their town. It was here that Cor-
tez found the chief teocalli, about where the
Cathedral now stands, and here some of the
fiercest fighting was done. This center, the
"Aztec forum," became also the center of
the Spanish town which immediately began to
grow, the waterways about it being filled up
to make streets. Little by little, through the
centuries, the lakes have receded, the canals
have been filled, more or less successful drain-
age has been effected, until it is harder to con-
ceive the ancient city, with waterways regu-
larly intersecting its streets, and beyond, upon
the two "inland seas," one salt, one fresh, the
myriad canoes bringing in their tribute, — this
is even harder than to imagine Ely or some
of the other cathedral towns of England as
formerly upon islands.

The drainage canal which makes the chief
guarantee of security against flood and fever,
was contemplated as early as the fourteenth
century, begun in 1607, abandoned and re-

136

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

begun under different authorities, including
that of Maximilian, and at last finished by
President Diaz, in 1896, at a cost of sixteen
million dollars. It does not prevent the soil
from being marshy, so that cellars are impos-
sible and the death rate, though reduced from
60 per thousand to 18 per thousand, is still
more than it would be if the city were on
higher ground not far away. One may give
only qualified belief to the theory that vagrant
cows trod out the city plan of Boston; but
clearly enough the site of Mexico was deter-
mined when jealous neighbors of the Aztecs
would not let them settle anywhere else. Why
the Spaniards clung to the unwholesome choice
is less clear. One viceroy in the sixteenth
century asked permission of the crown to move
the capital to a better situation where are now
the suburbs of San Angel and Tacubaya; but
by that time, so far had growth proceeded,
the change would have cost $50,000,000 and
it was forbidden by the ungenerous monarch
as impractical.

The Alameda, the other center, is a more
aristocratic park, very beautiful, and associa-
ted in sentiment with Carlota, who did much
to improve it. Just before reaching it, on the

137

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

way from the Zocalo, one sees the only mod-
erately impressive though very costly post
office, too much lightened and weakened in ap-
pearance by broken surfaces and open spaces
near the top, but really one of the best post-
office buildings in the world. The interior
provokes no criticism. Its superb marble,
Italian bronze gratings, and richness of mate-
rial throughout, together with the general
plan, suggest a building for some art purpose
rather than for the business of a government
department ; but it serves no less well for that.
The eight-million-dollar theater at the east
end of the Alameda is a thing to challenge ad-
miration at once. Let us hope no one will
insist on gilding its statuary or otherwise ruin-
ing its delicate beauty. Its curtain, a wonder-
full glass mosaic picture of the mountains
Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, as they loom
before the city, was made by Tiffany in New
York. One cannot help wondering what use
will be made of so fine a theater when it is
finished, seeing that Mexico has no drama
worthy of the name and no native actors
worth mentioning. Suggestion has been made
and I think a semi-official promise been given
that first-class companies from the United

138

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

States will be offered the use of the building
free, except for the cost of lighting. If the
government does this, the educative effect
should be considerable. Good opera, indeed,
especially Italian opera, is already heard and
appreciated — I heard Tetrazzini in Mexico
before she had ever sung in New York. How-
ever, every Latin- American capital must have
its costly national theater, so why cavil as to
what shall be done with it? It is a conven-
tional ornament. To speculate on what could
have been done in the way of model tenements
with the millions spent here is equally idle.
The tenements will come; and the children of
the poor will be taught to live otherwise than
wallowing in filth. For the beautifully clean
asphalt streets of Mexico do run close to only
half-hidden wretchedness with which the worst
negro alley in our own vaunted Washington
is not to be compared. The people are not
descended from the cleanly Mayas, but from
the less scrupulous Aztecs; they have long
been living in conditions alien to them, of
which they are neither the makers nor the mas-
ters and which give little room for dignified
human life. So in looking at them one is
grateful for visions of the people in the mar-

139

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

ket of Tehuantepec, or even, oppressed as
they are, those in the fields of Yucatan.

Let us not be accused of wandering far
from the Alameda, for, as just intimated, we
have turned but a little aside.

I was happy enough to know this lovely
park when one could pass all along it without
being startled, amazed, and shocked by the
colossal statue of Juarez which now fronts
Avenida Juarez at about the middle point of
the southern edge. Colossal as is the statue,
one feels what must be the instant effect when
a great wreath, not of marble but of gold, is
clapped down upon its head by one of the like-
wise colossal angels. There are urns, also of
gold, that claim at least as much attention as
the central figure, and there are two lions be-
ing relentlessly crushed by a weight on the
small of their backs. One fancies that some
enemy of Juarez must have had to do with this
hideous perpetration. If the gold leaf could
be all removed, the total effect would be less
than half as bad.

The Juarez statue is representative of
many things. Mexican aptitude for drawing,
design, pen-work, wood carving, painting and
all allied arts, on the side of mere facility, is

140

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

almost unbelievable to an American. There
is hardly a school where some boy cannot
draw the teacher either in likeness or in carica-
ture as he chooses. There is no church society
or other little local group that cannot have a
memorial or memento nicely engrossed with-
out going outside its own membership. The
love of color and of ornament is everywhere.
So it is with music. Every village has its
brass band. The tattered peons will stand
for hours listening to music that, in the United
States, would be too good to be popular. The
military bands of Mexico play not only with
zest, but with soul, and are acknowledged to
be among the best in the world. To hear the
national anthem played as they often play it
is to hear a thing which will never be for-
gotten. But restraint of taste seems lacking
among rich and poor, ignorant and educated.
Women overdress. Men make display pup-
pets of themselves. Apart from the outside
severity of the conventional dwelling, architec-
ture tends to the ornate, the overglorified.
This is not a universal indictment ; it is a state-
ment of general observation. The emotional
susceptibility, the responsiveness, the manual
dexterity, the mental ingenuity, and the tem-

141

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

peramental patience being undoubtedly pres-
ent, there would seem reason to hope that
increase of general culture, and a fuller
liberation of the spirit of the nation as democ-
racy advances, will bring in larger creative-
ness than we matter-of-fact Americans have
yet attained. The really superb achievements
in painting at times when conditions were at
all favorable, are a promise of this. Sculp-
ture, of course, is a severer test, and architec-
ture the severest of all.

Up and down the Alameda on Sunday
morning walk the "quality" of Mexico City,
listening to the best band in the Republic. On
Sunday afternoon the same people ride be-
hind Kentucky-bred and other thoroughbred
horses, though usually in quaint, comfortable
carriages, out past the Alameda, along the
Paseo de la Reforma, past the great bronze
statue of Charles V of Spain, and that of the
valiant Cuauhtemoc, through splendid avenues
of trees, to Chapultepec. To Chapultepec, in
a hired coach, an inexpensive thing in Mexico
City, let us betake ourselves. There, at sun-
down, leaning over a parapet on one of the
inclined approaches to the castle, aware of its
reminiscent though not dreadful shadow be-

SIGHT-SEEING AT THE CAPITAL

hind us, aware of the sad, sempiternal great
trees below, we will gaze off to the tender
color and stupendous bulk of Popocatepetl
and {iis consort, the White Lady (Ixtacci-
huatl), as they float in the haze and last glow
of evening. Here Montezuma took his ease.
He must have walked often at nightfall under
those same trees, which are a thousand years
old. Here Maximilian and Carlota dreamed
their dreams. Here, it may be, American
soldier boys, in 1847, rested after a not too
glorious fray and forgot to question the
wherefore of present commands in musing
upon "the old woe of the world." Change has
written its record here as surely if not in as
hard characters as on the Palatine or the Ac-
ropolis. Yet the cypress trees live and grow,
with a kind of melancholy vigor which proph-
esies long continuance and succession of their
kind to witness the coming and the passing
of many another generation and perhaps still
changing races of men.

Those who profess to know a gay capital
when they see it declare that Mexico City is
not such. It has its clubs, its cafes, its showy
balls, its handsome women, its glare of lights
at night, its bullfight on Sunday in the

143

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

largest bull ring in the world, and its various
other pleasures and vices. Its people are
vivacious and, in the main, happy even when
a political cloud of dread omen hangs over
them. Hardly any people can be more lavish
in expenditure for play or more extravagantly
overdressed.

That a strain of seriousness, bordering on
melancholy, and quite distinct from the heavy
solemnity ascribed to the English in proverbs,
does seem present even in their enjoyment
cannot be denied. So perhaps Mexico is not
a gay capital. I am sure that neither New
York nor Washington is gay. Perhaps Paris
or Monte Carlo, analytically considered, is
not. Nothing is gay that is not naive, spon'
taneous, youthful; and Mexico has memories
enough to make it old.

144

XI

THE GOVERNMENT

IT has already been said that the national
memory of Mexico before the coming of
Cortez is largely tradition. The country
was under the baneful domination of Spain
from 1521, when the subjugation of the Az-
tecs was completed, to 1821, when Augustin
de Iturbide, sent to suppress a revolution, led
his forces over to the insurgents and became
the first head of independent Mexico. There
had been uprisings before, notably one in
1910, led by Miguel Hidalgo, a priest, whose
statue adorns some public square in almost
every Mexican city; but the movements had
succeeded only in creating and increasing a
desire for independence. There had been at-
tempts, too, on the part of some governors
and viceroys to mitigate the condition of the
people and suppress the worst abuses of the
clergy. On the whole, however, the Spanish
rule in Mexico, as in every other Spanish

145

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

colony, was one of avarice, hardness, religious
bigotry, and coercion. Perhaps the Inquisi-
tion was never practised in more devilish op-
position to the principles it invoked than here.
In no land have the people shown more of the
stuff of which martyrs are made, whether in
the cause of patriotism or in that of true re-
ligion. Initiative, though often strikingly
shown, may at times have been lacking, but
never the resolution to suffer and to persevere.
With the accession of Iturbide, who became
the first Emperor, the Inquisition at least
passed away. Other benefits were slower in
coming.

China and Russia alone were greater in ex-
tent than the empire of which Iturbide found
himself in command. It included Honduras
to the south, and to the northward set up
claims on the western half of the continent
even as far as the present border of Canada.
There were as yet, however, neither settled
principles of control, nor any means of
developing this almost inconceivable realm.
Through massacre and war, the Aztec empire
of thirty million souls had shrunk to a popula-
tion of fifteen millions. Soundness could not
be attained in a moment, even had the new ad-

146

THE GOVERNMENT

ministration been the wisest. Disintegration
began. Scarcely a year passed before Gua-
temala seceded, and already a formidable re-
publican movement had got under way. An-
tonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who had helped
Iturbide to break the Spanish rule, now pro-
claimed the end of Iturbide's own power and
the establishment of a republic. This was at
the end of 1822.

With many ups and downs and much of
intermittent warfare, the Mexican republic
was maintained from 1822 to 1864, when the
French interfered. During this period not
only had Guatemala seceded, but Texas, on
account of impatience among American set-
tlers with the erratic and intolerant ways of
President Santa Anna, and influenced by the
Southern party of the United States, had de-
clared its independence. The war against the
"North Americans" had been fought unsuc-
cessfully, and more than a half million square
miles of territory outside of Texas had been
relinquished as a forfeit of the struggle.
Santa Anna, after a downfall and a return to
power, had sold still another fifty thousand
square miles to the United States. Yet in-
ternally the nation improved; Santa Anna

147

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

had been thrust out at last in 1855 and the
dictatorship — for so it was — gave place to an
actual republic. Benito Juarez, first as Min-
ister of Justice, then as President, formulated
what William H. Seward called the best plan
of government ever devised. True, to make
his admittedly right plans effective involved
a struggle, the end of which was not to be in
his lifetime, nor perhaps in ours. It was part
of a world struggle to establish the right of
all human creatures, not only to political and
religious liberty, but also to some freedom in
the exercise of their own productive powers
and a share in the bounty of nature. The
people, however, made their loyalty to Juarez
unmistakable, and no more hopeful sign could
have developed than the growth of an en-
lightened, consistent public sentiment, A
new Constitution was adopted in 1857. The
jurisdiction of ecclesiastical and military
courts over civil cases was declared at an end,
an evil which Iturbide's constitution had not
even sought to remove. Religious toleration
was guaranteed, the separation of church and
state was declared, the control of the church
over cemeteries was denied, the right of the
church to possess landed property was abol-

148

THE GOVERNMENT

ished, civil marriage was instituted. The ne-
cessity for the two last-named measures may
well be explained at this point. The Roman
Catholic Church in Mexico, while the people
still lived in abject poverty, was the richest
church establishment in the world, owning
then over one-third of the total wealth of the
nation, or about $300,000,000 worth of prop-
erty. Even Roman Catholics, outside the re-
actionary group, admit that such a state of
affairs is not desirable. Madame Calderon
de la Barca, herself a devout Catholic, gave
warning as early as 1841 that if reforms were
not made by the church itself, they would be
forced upon it, and that its cathedrals would
perhaps be turned to "meeting houses" by
Mexico's neighbors from the north. Regard-
ing marriage, it is a curious reflection that this
sacrament, first instituted to meet the needs of
the alienated classes, to whom the old Roman
law denied the right, had in Mexico and other
Spanish countries been made so expensive that
the poor could no longer afford it. Many
thousands of children were illegitimately born
because their parents could not pay the ex-
tortionate fees of the clergy. The institution
of civil marriage did away with this to a great

149

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

extent, and to-day no marriage in Mexico has
legality except the civil marriage. The church,
however, dissuaded or intimidated many from
availing themselves of civil marriage, as in-
deed it does in many cases to-day. Similarly,
the papal authorities threatened excommuni-
cation to all who professed liberal ideas.
Juarez answered by banishing the bishops, the
Papal Nuncio, and the Spanish representa-
tive. Though civil war followed> the pos-
sibility of rallying the friends of liberty by an
appeal to the people and of defying supersti-
tion was proved.

In 1861 Napoleon III, seeing the United
States on the verge of civil war and unable to
enforce the Monroe Doctrine, conceived a
gigantic scheme for the re-establishment of
Latin power in the New World. He would
recognize the Southern Confederacy and
strengthen it by all means in his power. He
even held out to the Southern party the sug-
gestion that if they should set up and make
firm an independent confederacy, a union of
Mexico with it would be favored in Europe.
A considerable party in Mexico desired this
extension of what had already happened to
Texas. Mexican refugees and reactionaries

150

THE GOVERNMENT

in France viewed it with no favor, preferring
a French protectorate; and Napoleon was
treating with them while he falsely professed
to favor the other plan. So the wily Bona-
parte helped to precipitate the American civil
war. To England he represented the desir-
ability of limiting the power of the United
States, but concealed his dream of a Latin
and Roman Catholic empire. To Spain he
revealed this dream of his but professed an in-
tention that he seems never to have enter-
tained— that of placing a Spanish prince on
the throne. To Austria he divulged more fully
the plan afterward attempted — that of com-
pensating Austria for recent injuries which
he had inflicted, by placing a representative of
the Hapsburg line over the new empire; but
even to Austria he did not emphasize his in-
tention that France should control the puppet
thus set up.

The pretext for definite action came when
Juarez, as President of Mexico, announced
that nothing could be paid and that no at-
tempt would be made to pay anything on the
Mexican national debt for two years. This
was not repudiation and financiers have de-
clared it as sound a thing as, in the impover-

151

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

ished condition of the country, he could have
done. Two years of peace would enable him,
he thought, to resume payment. Unfortu-
nately, however, the announcement gave a
pretext for France, Spain, and England, all
creditors, to pounce down upon him. The
United States, also a creditor, refused a tardy
invitation to join them, and announced its
readiness to loan money to Mexico if desired.
A military expedition started in 1861, but
England and Spain almost immediately
learned that they were being duped and with-
drew. Juarez was able to rally a stronger
support and maintain a greater resistance
than had been anticipated. The United
States, which had steadfastly recognized the
little Indian statesman's government and re-
fused to recognize the usurper, astounded all
Europe by the resources put forth in dealing
with the Southern secession. Even the South
itself, incensed at Napoleon's trickery, turned
from him and his schemes. Certain politicians
went so far as to propose that North and
South make a truce till their united armies
could sweep the French invaders into the sea.
It was an exaggeration to declare, as has been
done, that either President Davis or President

152

THE GOVERNMENT

Lincoln favored this. The idea was consider-
ably discussed, however, which fact in itself
shows that unanimity of American feeling re-
garding Mexico had come to be assumed pre-
vious to Lee's surrender. The "Emperor"
Maximilian, for whom, with his beautiful
young wife, Carlota, an appropriation of
about a million dollars a year had been made
from the hypothetical resources of a dis-
tracted, oppressed, and bankrupt nation, had
proved equal only to the ornamental and cere-
monial requirements of his office. So of all
the deceived and disappointed parties to the
whole scheme, barring the unhappy Maxi-
milian and Carlota, no one was more disap-
pointed and humiliated than Napoleon III.
The civil war in the United States being at an
end, and emphatic demands for the evacuation
of Mexico being made by the American Secre-
tary of State, he felt obliged to comply. The
pretty Emperor and Empress refusing to
join in this, he abandoned them. Maximilian
was captured and shot at Queretaro, June 19,
1867, and Carlota, after a vain journey and
appeal to both Napoleon and the Pope, went
mad. The Mexican people have always re-
garded the lily-fair prince and his beautiful

153

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

wife as unfortunate rather than as astute and
sinister figures.

Now comes the most problematic turn in
Mexican history. Juarez returned to the cap-
ital and took up the details of government as
nearly as possible where they had been inter-
rupted five years before. One of his strong-
est military supporters had been General Por-
firio Diaz, whose patron and friend he was
from the time when Diaz, as a boy, entered
the law school at Oaxaca. He had trusted
and befriended Diaz all along, and the
younger man's loyalty up to this time seems
not to be que'stioned. So far as the tangle of
diverging stories and deliberate coloring of
records will permit a foreigner easily to
judge, the military service of the young man
had been of highest value. He had displayed
courage, foresight, astuteness, and almost in-
credible vigor. Up to this time the relations
of the two men were such as coming genera-
tions in Mexico might have looked upon with
pride and gratitude. Juarez, however, was
not only an enemy of church domination and
of foreign domination, he was also an enemy
of military domination. Himself a repre-
sentative in blood, experience, and tradition

154

THE GOVERNMENT

of the class who had, perhaps, sacrificed more
than any other for the maintenance of the
nation, he firmly believed in their capacity, if
they could have wise, patriotic leadership for
a few years, to learn self-government. His
critics regard him as a doctrinaire in this,
and point not only to the untutored condition
of the Indians, but to the fact that the mil-
itary leaders who had helped to sustain the
government must of course be reckoned with.
They were sure, in view of their habits, to de-
mand larger rewards than could accrue under
a democratic government. Such demands they
did in fact promptly make. What more
simple and natural than that the country
should be divided into military departments,
that each general should be given a depart-
ment from which he could farm revenues and
in which he might administer government as
he chose, and that the only return demanded
should be unfailing payment of a quota, un-
failing military support when needed, and un-
failing assent to all the acts of the central
government at all times? The plan of Juarez
was undeniably more complex and far more
difficult, one of the difficulties being that the
generals would declare war on him if he did

155

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

not satisfy them. He chose the harder way.
Diaz refused to follow, artfully declaring that
he could but sympathize with his old com-
panions in arms, as years of service had un-
fitted them for high place in democratic civil
life. He could by no means take the sword
against them, he said, and the nation was not
ready for the higher course.

Assuming that Juarez was right, had he
been heartily supported by Diaz, there is little
doubt that Diaz would in due time have been
chosen president upon the same platform. He
stood second to Juarez in national promi-
nence, and as a military figure had no equal.
Supposing that Juarez was wrong, on the
other hand, it seems strange that Diaz's with-
drawal and later his active opposition in arms
never accomplished the downfall of the little
Indian idealist. Harassed by some whose
support would have comforted and enor-
mously aided him, nevertheless, until he died
suddenly in 1872, five years after the depart-
ure of the French, fifteen years after his first
elevation to the presidency, and seventeen
years after he had announced the Juarez law
concerning courts of justice, Juarez was able
to maintain his government through that pub-

156

THE GOVERNMENT

lie support on which he relied. At Juarez's
death, there was perhaps only one other man
capable of weathering the storms to which
the presidential office was subjected. In
1876, after four troublous years, in which he
himself led part of the disturbances, Porfirio
Diaz became president, and with the nominal
exception of one four-year term, he ruled the
country thenceforth for thirty-five years, till
the spring of 1911. He had come in, how-
ever, upon a different principle from that of
Juarez, and by a different principle he ruled.
The material development, which means also
the exploitation of the national resources by
foreign capital, was phenomenal. The main-
tenance of order in spite of unsuccessful up-
risings of which a censored press told little,
was, on the whole, either commendable or
sinister, according to the point of view, but in
either case was effective. Foreign capital and
foreign settlers were encouraged to partic-
ipate in the wealth of the country. It was
even said that an Englishman, a German, or
an American could enjoy under Diaz more
security in his business enterprise than any
native might feel, and conduct his enterprises
on better terms than any native not belonging

157

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

to the official governmental group. Mean-
while, the friends of the deposed ruler argue
that everything possible has been done to edu-
cate the masses and make them ready for
what Juarez proclaimed fifty years ago — a
democratic government. There is a school in
every municipality of the Republic and
2,000,000 children, they declare, are in the
public schools — by no means an incredible
figure. Assuming that progress is being made,
the foreign observer is inevitably brought to
feel that after thirty-five years of military
despotism, the common people have much left
to desire, and even if inclined to think that
the dream of Juarez was impractical, he will
still wish that it might have come true. As
for the people themselves, in so far as they
rise to the level of intelligent belief, they are
enthusiastic, persistent, and unwavering in
their assertion that, given a leader of the
Juarez school, they could have realized
Juarez's program. Ultimately, of course, a
people will obtain for themselves a govern-
ment approximating what they deserve and
have intelligence to appreciate. The Mexi-
cans have always coveted better than they
have had, and have never admitted that the

158

THE GOVERNMENT

iron hand of irresponsible power was toler-
able. That President Diaz, though strong,
efficient, and it may be patriotic in motives,
was ever in all his "unanimous" elections
really the object of popular choice, has only
the flimsiest appearance of verity. His final
election in 1910 was a caricature. The op-
position forces had been shattered by the ar-
bitrary and forcible breaking up of their meet-
ings, the imprisonment of their leaders, and
the intimidation by soldiers at the polls of
voters with the hardihood to present them-
selves. The defenders of the government
profess that a dignified and peaceful cam-
paign would have been tolerated. Those in-
terested in it, and many foreign witnesses as
well, have declared that the campaign was
notable for self-restraint under trying condi-
tions. However that may be, an actual elec-
tion was not permitted. The president,
through members of his cabinet, had been
warned that if the nation were thwarted then,
revolution would follow. Uprisings did occur
at once following the so-called re-election and
within a few weeks took on serious propor-
tions.

Travel and much inquiry in pacific quarters
159

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

of the country during the struggle warrant
me in the assertion that discontent was almost
universal. Fundamentally its cause was eco-
nomic; unjust division of benefits, preposter-
ously unequal distribution of taxes, and out-
rageous dispossession of small land owners
from their ancestral homes, being averred.
But the immediate demand was for political
reform. The progressive movement harks
back to the little Indian legislator of 1855 as
its prophet.

Up to the present there is only one name in
all their annals, the mention of which will
bring an emotional response of pride and ven-
eration among Mexican citizens from the
northern to the southern end of the country —
one name that they delight to put beside that
of Washington, who might have been a king,
but who would not — and that is the name of
Juarez. So strong has this sentiment been
all along, that the president and every repre-
sentative of the government, ignoring the his-
toric relation of their regime to his, must join
with what heart they could in the annual and
occasional demonstrations of it. If a second
name is put with that of Juarez in any spon-
taneous way, it is that of the patriot priest

160

THE GOVERNMENT

and first great martyr of Mexican liberty,
Hidalgo. The time may come when, for a
widely different service, a more qualified ap-
preciation will be given to Porfirio Diaz with
something like the same general accord; but
the time is not yet. For better or worse he
has had his day and the future will judge
him. The revolution of 1911 was not directed
against an old man whose control could no
longer be more than nominal and whom the
people would have been willing to let die in
peace, it was directed against those who might
pretend to be his logical successors without
having demonstrated the only right that can
ever justify despotism, the right of might.
Such right in his years of early vigor Porfirio
Diaz proved in a remarkable degree. Such
right will have to be shown by his successors
if he is to have any. Otherwise, and probably,
a new order will prevail. That something of
the rigor of the Diaz policy is needed while
outlaws defy the government and terrorize
peaceful farms and villages almost every one
believes. It is one thing to insist on law and
order, however, and quite another thing to in-
sist that all shall favor the existing officers for
continuance in power. This Diaz did. A

161

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

change must come and be made permanent.
That its definite arrival might have been vig-
orously and convincingly asserted at once by
the Madero government, and not have needed
confirmation through the further drenching of
the country in blood, is the wish of every
friend of the Mexican people.

In dismissing this subject a word should be
said about the organic form of the govern-
ment. The Constitution of Juarez has never
been abrogated or greatly altered. It ex-
pounds the nature of the Mexican government
as federal — that is, composed of free and sov-
ereign individual states — as representative,
and as democratic. It distinguishes three co-
ordinate branches of government, adopting
our own fiction that the judicial function is
neither legislative nor executive. The rights
of individuals are guaranteed, in some re-
spects more fully than by our Constitution.
The mechanism with which to carry out this
scheme is provided for and has in fact been
preserved — a President chosen by an electoral
college, a bicameral Congress whose mem-
bers are nominally elected by the people, and
a system of courts like our own. The separate
state legislatures correspond to ours. In

162

THE GOVERNMENT

practical working, since the death of Juarez,
there has been but one department of govern-
ment, that is the executive. Under Diaz the
governor of a state was his representative, the
jefe politico of a district was responsible to
the governor; and the people had nothing to
do with choosing any of them. Still it is
something to have had the right principles
laid down in theory and acknowledged in
form. It makes difficult the opposition of
any argument but force against the institu-
tions of democracy, and gives the progressive
group an immediate basis of procedure.

163

XII

XOCHIMILCO

THE valley of Morelos lies close to the
valley of Mexico, though at a lower
level and with a high wall between. It
is possible, if one has pneumonia and hours
are precious, to take a train in the unhealth-
ful capital at daybreak, arrive in balmy Cuer-
na\aca by noon, and be declared on the way
to recovery next day. Under usual condi-
tions, however, the valley of Mexico is not to
be so eagerly left. While the nights are often
chilly, the climate is otherwise almost irre-
proachable and the natural charms of the val-
ley are worthy of some large-visioned poet of
outdoors. It should not be discredited because
it had one piece of lowland whose open drain-
age the Spaniards could stop and upon which
a somewhat miasmic though beautiful city
could be built. So even if one cannot tarry
for months to etch in the picture of maguey
fields on the drier flat lands, of cypress trees,

164

XOCHIMILCO

of dome-crowned villages, and of encircling
mountains, at least one can pay the respect
of a slow departure. This may be done by
way of the Viga, the one Aztec canal that still
remains in use, leading south toward Cuerna-
vaca as far as Xochimilco.

There are those who will tell you that they
have seen this canal, so extravagantly described
in books, and that it is no more than a slimy
ooze. They have seen the miserable diminu-
endo at the city end that is finally lost in a
sewer ; but they do not know the Viga. What
stream, even the mightiest, without very spe-
cial protection, can make its way through a
city of 450,000 inhabitants and still remain
"undefined for the undefiled"? Even at the
city end of this ancient canal our friends, if
alert, might have seen something to describe
other than the excrements of obscene brew-
eries along the banks, and unlimited oceans of
mud; they might have seen the people, one of
the superlatively clean tribes, thank Heaven!
propelling their dugouts up and down, and in
the dugouts enough vegetables for a thousand
tables, besides flowers in quantities really ex-
citing to think of.

For thirteen miles as one goes out along the
165

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

Viga there are no tributaries. There is only
one channel of nearly uniform width, arched
by quaint bridges and enlivened by an unend-
ing succession of barges going to market with
garden truck, and of little canoes that dart
along upon other errands. Gradually the
water becomes purer till it is void of offense.
Then begins perfect enjoyment. The re-
moter plain may be somewhat brown in the
dry season, varied only by the maguey, cousin
to our old friend the henequin plant, while
near by on either hand are luscious green
fields with cattle wading or grazing at will.
The canoe moves easily, propelled not by oars
or paddles but by a long, light pole thrust to
the bottom. In places this is varied by toss-
ing a rope to one of the boatmen, who leaps
cheerfully ahead with it over his shoulder, now
in water, now upon a tow path, his muscular
though not heavy limbs bare to the thigh.
Boys fish from the banks. New things are
constantly appearing, not to tease the eye and
the mind as on a railway journey, but to be-
guile the imagination. At last, after about
four hours, the canal resolves itself into a
great number of smaller canals which are fed
by springs in themselves worth a visit, and are

166

XOCHIMILCO

conducted in and out among the so-called
"floating gardens" so as to make every gar-
den an island. Within the memory of men
still living much of this area was a lake and
some of the gardens were actually floating;
but now the little oblong patches of soil rest
upon bottom. The willows that grow straight
up like Lombardy poplars were once only
stakes to keep the unique real property from
moving off. Masses of water plants buoyed
up by air chambers on their stalks float upon
what remains of the lake and show how land
began to form. As would be guessed from
such an origin, the gardens have the richest
mold, they never lack water, and the sun
smiles upon them as only a southern sun can.
Each is as large as a good town lot and any
of them if actually afloat would sink from the
weight of vegetables and flowers. The poppy,
the sweet pea, and the bachelor's button are
favorite flowers, though carnations and mar-
guerites also abound and roses are by no
means uncommon. All these and other blos-
soms hang down and are reduplicated in the
water. They scramble over the tops of the
houses. In daylight or in moonlight they
make incomparable pictures at every turn.

167

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

The graceful, brown-armed figures gliding
about in their canoes strike no jarring note.
Nothing annoys. The most appropriate ex-
clamation at the crystal springs of Xochi-
milco is, "I did not believe there was such a
place in the world! "

Barges go down heavy with the current to
Mexico and come back light. Few large
cities have sources of so abundant supply for
vegetables and flowers, with means of trans-
portation so cheap. Xochimilco was a source
of supplies for the Aztec capital in the old
days, and, unless scholars have wrongly trans-
lated, an occasional source of victims for the
Aztec sacrificial stone. Whoever lived here
at any time, if he had marauding neighbors,
must have been an easy prey, for gentleness
and soft confiding in the loveliness of an
idyllic world are as natural here as a square
front to all comers must be in a country of
highland blasts. A friend of mine had a
quarrelsome retainer who chose to follow him
from one locality to another and always man-
aged to involve himself and his master in
trouble. They went to Xochimilco and
Gabriel fought with no one. It seems he
could find no one to fight with.

168

XOCHIMILCO

It cost three Mexican dollars ($1.50) to
bring out seven of us in a large covered canoe,
with enough luggage to burden four or five
carriers in transferring from the canoe to the
house. A canal ran very near the house occu-
pied by our friends, the only foreign family
in the village, by whom we were to be enter-
tained. A canal runs near everybody's door
in Xochimilco; there are a hundred miles of
them at least. Fish abound and come in fine
condition from the cold water. We saw many
goldfish of no diminutive size, and bought for
fifty centavos a wriggling carp that weighed
about six pounds.

This American friend, at whose house we
stopped, an engineer, was in charge of work
installing a new plant to increase the water
supply of Mexico City. He took us along a
small canal until suddenly it widened, deep-
ened, and came to an end. We were floating
upon a basin seventy-five feet in diameter,
twenty-five feet deep, and filled with gushing
pure water. It was one of the marvelous
springs at Xochimilco, flowing about eight
million gallons in twenty-four hours. There
are several others, not so large, but still of
great output and all of the same pure water,

169

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

fed probably by the melting snow and ice of
Popocatepetl.

A feature of every landscape hereabout is
the little church. Above the fringe of green
vegetables or of glorious bloom, over the
thatch of the hut, between the willows, against
the bulk of the mountains, there is certain to
be a church in the view. We must have seen
twenty, all commanding because of the low-
ness of the houses round about, all venerable-
looking and harmonious with the feeling of
the place; never, on any of them, a "steeple."
The spire with its call to upward pursuit of
the unattainable, is no part of Mexican church
architecture. The dome seems to suggest
contemplation and repose. True, the Span-
iards were restless enough, but their restless-
ness was not upon the side that churches
represent. Concerning religion they leaned
back upon authority, and came easily to that
perfectness of satisfaction which must have
expressed itself powerfully at times to any one
who has traveled in Mexico, the land of
domes. There are said to be more of these,
chiefly of the media naranja (half orange)
form, than in any other country in the world.
And if the Anglo-Saxon cannot adopt this

170

form as his emblem, for he is self-conscious,
he can be happy in visiting a land whose tem-
perament it suits.

"Xochimilco," our engineer friend declared,
"is only the beginning of the most beautiful
part of the canal system, for you can travel
a full day beyond. I never did get to the end,
though on a trip some time ago I went
through a string of towns for over thirty
miles. I was fascinated with some of the old
places — splendid they must have been once;
but they had gone down and down as the more
intelligent sons of the families were drawn
off to the cities, till some fine haciendas were
altogether deserted and others occupied only
by peons. It was impossible not to build air
castles when I thought of what a progressive
trained man could do there on some places to
be bought almost for the song that he might
sing. Cattle of the best breeds would thrive
on his wide level fields, vineyards and orchards
would spring up at his touch in this perfect
climate, water power and streams for irriga-
tion would come from the hills to work magic
for him, native labor would offer itself cheaper
than he ought to wish, and paddle wheels on
the canals would carry all his produce to a

171

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

great market. This will come true for some-
body, but for whom? I think it will come
true most largely and remain true the longest
for Americans, Europeans, or intelligent In-
dians, according as one or another of them has
most spiritual depth and force — most desire
to give and to teach among the poor natives
and not merely to exploit them. In the end
I think all Mexico will be the heritage of
those, whoever they are, who come with a will
to help. The other sort of thing goes to seed
and to rot, as it has once done in this valley;
and in the long run social forces among the
common people, the allies of the man who
helps, will destroy the parasite. As neigh-
bors of Mexico we Americans have great pos-
sibilities at our doors; the question is, Are we
big enough?"

My friend the engineer is an idealist, and
grows very enthusiastic at times.

From Xochimilco it is not far to Eslava
where, only a day late because of our little
journey into a primitive world, we can take
the train from Mexico to Cuernavaca. One
gets almost a bird's eye view of the region of
Mexico City from the top of the range at a
height of 10,000 feet.

172

XIII

CUERNAVACA, CUAUTLA, PUEBLA

CUERNAVACA, though not inviting
comparison with the little Indian Ven-
ice, is in its own way the loveliest spot
yet visited. At Xochimilco one rubs one's
eyes and looks again to make sure that the
scene really belongs to the world of wide-
awake. At Cuernavaca one settles forthwith
into a conviction of always having known the
place, and a feeling that everything here is
the normal by which things elsewhere may be
tested. With an altitude of only 4500 feet,
more than two thousand feet lower than the
valley of Mexico, and with a southern ex-
posure among sheltering hills, this other val-
ley has no cold winter, no cold nights and no
hot ones, no droughts, no inconveniences of
climate, hot or cold, wet or dry. The town
of 7000 inhabitants is all clean, orderly,
thrifty, reposeful, and old. The steep and
narrow streets, which often become stairways

173

of rock, the thick walls, the heavy doors, the
elaborate latches and hinges, all bear the testi-
mony of age. It is a place of running water,
and fountains are numerous.

Of course the town has its cathedral, this
one founded in 1529; and of course, being of
sufficient antiquity, it has a palace of Cortez.
We visited his residence in Oaxaca, and an-
other in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City,
this latter being the oldest structure erected
by any white man on American soil. Now we
must by all means pay our respect to the
Cuernavaca palace, the more because it has
been made the state government building and
because it commands from the roof a superb
view of the green valley and the peaceful
mountains. It was begun by Cortez in 1530.

The chief exhibit of Cuernavaca is the
Borda Garden, established about the middle
of the eighteenth century by Joseph le Borde,
a Frenchman who had made enormous for-
tunes in Mexican silver mines. It is said to
have cost a million pesos then, but time has
added much that the owner could not buy,
both in definable beauty and in the pervasive
charm of imaginative suggestion. There are
old walls, built high and solid enough to en-

174

CUERNAVACA, CUAUTLA, PUEBLA

dure; trees grown old but of unfailing vigor;
old Moorish fountains that have become
weathered and flawed but lost nothing of their
airy Saracenic grace; walks that Carlota trod
many a time, when Cuernavaca was the sum-
mer capital, and when old Joseph, their first
owner, had been long sleeping in a poor man's
grave; benches on which she must have sat;
roses and oleanders that she may have tended,
and mangoes whose fruit she may have eaten.
You will think more of Carlota in the garden
than you will of its original owner whose
name it bears; and many other thoughts you
will have which you will never convey unless
to some one at your side under the shade of
the tropical trees with their unfamiliar names
and their delicious fruits.

Cuautla, in climate and general character,
needs no description to one who has visited
Cuernavaca. It is not quite so old, not quite
so large, and not quite so full of romance;
but having famous hot sulphur springs is
rather more haunted by invalids and resters.

Not in the state of Morelos, where we have
been lingering, but in a state whose name it
shares, Puebla has a little more altitude, a
little cooler climate, yet the same quality of

175

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

softness in the air, the same sulphur water
that flows so abundantly in Cuautla, and a
degree of the same popularity with those need-
ing to be cured. Puebla, however, is more of
a city, and can assimilate these latter visitors
as Cuautla cannot. Moreover, Puebla has
some charming suburbs and rest spots to
which, being a city, it dispatches many of the
impotent or the indisposed. With a popula-
tion just under one hundred thousand, it nar-
rowly misses being the second city in size of
the republic ; and if it must yield to Guadala-
jara in this respect, it still claims second place
in the consideration of the visitor. It has the
name of being conservative as to taste and
social customs, anti-foreign, Romanist in re-
ligion, reactionary as to politics. Certainly
it is not progressive in many of the usual im-
plications of the word; but without being so
it would seem to have made progress in what-
ever contributes to its charm. The capital of
the richest state in Mexico, it has a look of
comfort and of competence. In architecture,
in landscape, in the equipages upon its clean
asphalt streets, in the dress of its well-to-do
citizens, one is reminded that essential har-
monies may be preserved in more than one

176

CUERNAVACA, CUAUTLA, PUEBLA

style. Puebla society is accused of being ex-
clusive, and perhaps this is confirmed rather
than otherwise by the eagerness that I ob-
served in the daughter of one of its prominent
families, when visiting in another town, to
make acquaintance with the American and
English colony, including the Protestant
church there. If so, when their opportunity
for reciprocating came the family were gener-
ous beyond expectation in making a little
glimpse of their own life possible^ I was in-
vited to call at the house, which does not hap-
pen to a young man in their own set unless he
is an accepted suitor. They were meeting an
American in his own way. The daughter
whom I knew greeted me first, after the
servant. I was conducted to where the
maternal head of the household and her old-
est daughter sat to receive their callers, and
was introduced. Then for a few moments I
sat in a second parlor with Miss Maria, as I
shall name her — an impossible departure from
their conventional etiquette — till the younger
sisters began to come in one after another,
down to a little toddler of four years. Puzzled
at first by a stranger whose speech was for-
eign, she ended by sitting on my lap. Whether

177

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

the entry of this beautiful troop was also
contrary to established rules I do not know.
Some very wise persons will say that of course
such special favors were tantamount to a
matrimonial acceptance; but they certainly
had not the shadow of such meaning. L, was
not only an American, but I was an American
from another city, in Puebla for no more than
three or four days, and they had decided to
treat me according to American ways of hos-
pitality so far as they knew them. If in any
particular they happened not to know, they
would err on the side of kindness. On a sec-
ond call to take leave, I did not see the chil-
dren till I was going out, but then found
them, all four, in the corridor in a row wait-
ing to bid me good-by. It is years since then
and I have never met one of the family since ;
but this pretty and gracious picture, together
with others that I remember of the luxurious
and beautiful home and perfectly managed
household, is still a source of enjoyment.

Puebla has more Mexican history than any
other city except the capital. Not founded
till 1532, when the Spaniards felt the need of
a city halfway between and more healthfully
located than either Vera Cruz or the Aztec

178

CUERNAVACA, CUAUTLA, PUEBLA

capital on Lake Texcoco, it nevertheless has a
miraculous story of its location, two angels
having pointed out the spot to Fray Julian
Garces. So it was called Puebla de los
Angeles. It soon outgrew the neighboring
Indian town of Cholula as Mexico City did
its ancient neighbor Xochimilco. Leaping
over to modern times, it was captured in 1821
by Iturbide, the first ruler of independent
Mexico, was occupied by the Americans in
1847, and was besieged and taken by the
French in 1862. A little later, May 5, 1862,
its recapture by General Zaragoza was the
most brilliant victory in all the history of
Mexican arms, and May 5 has been as great
a national holiday ever since as the Fourth
of July is with us. The French regained the
town again next year and held it till 1867,
when it was captured by General Porfirio
Diaz, and the French garrison were made
prisoners. Zaragoza's victory in 1862 changed
the name of the town to Puebla de Zaragoza.
No longer a "city of the angels," Puebla is
still a city of churches. Any commanding view
of it will show from fifty to seventy domes,
agreeing in outline with those other domes,
Popocatepetl and Orizaba, on either hand, and

179

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

in color showing all the variety of tiles for
the manufacture of which Puebla is noted.
Popocatepetl is accompanied by his consort
Ixtaccihuatl and also in this case by a strange
figure, that of the pyramid of Cholula, nearer
at hand. To the north is Malintzi, almost as
towering as the other two giants, so that there
is always an enclosing rim to the region, and
everywhere the land has its bounty of grow-
ing crops.

Of all the churches, the cathedral is the
most notable. Not so large as the cathedral
in Mexico City, it is still very large — 323 feet
by 101 feet. If not quite so rich upon the
exterior, it is generally felt to be even more
harmonious; and within it has not only the
same advantage but has also fortunately kept
more of the opulence of decoration and fur-
nishing that history associates with both these
buildings. The interior is even "gorgeous" as
described by one writer. It is not only in
broad general effects that it gives the impres-
sion of richness; whether one examine the
onyx and marble altars, columns, and pave-
ments, or the wondrous old Gobelin tapestries
of extremely pagan subjects given by Charles
V of Spain, or the statuary, or the paintings

180

CUERNAVACA, CUAUTLA, PUEBLA

by European and Mexican masters, or the
wood-carving and inlay work in ivory, the
effect remains throughout of unstinted devo-
tion of rich materials, of labor, of ingenuity,
and of art. Some discriminating critics re-
gard the Puebla cathedral, taking it all to-
gether, as more worthy of study than any
other church in America, not even excepting
that at Mexico. Again, curiously, like the
cathedral at the capital, it is not the fashion-
able church.

181

XIV

A TOLTEC PYRAMID

FROM Puebla it is less than two hours
to Cholula, the town of the pyramid. I
speak of going by tramcar and not by
that contrivance out of due time, the Inter-
oceanic Railway. Not that progress need be
lamented, even by the sentimentalist, for it is
by innovation, so often deplored as an enemy
of romance, .that romance is made perpetual.
Not till a thing has passed out from daily
habit and commonplace utility may fancy be-
set it with a glamor of things past; but the
consecration is one in which epochs are not
finely observed. This quaint and dingy con-
veyance, and the tiny mules in front, now
tugging pitifully over a hard place, now at a
level jog, and again scampering away down
some slope before the pursuing car — these
might have belonged to any age not ours — so
they do not offend.

On either side as we pass, grain fields show
that the earth yields willing increase, and at

182

A TOLTEC PYRAMID

intervals are reapers who thrust in their sickles
and turn with tedious movement to lay the
grain in sheaves, as was the manner of reap-
ing long ago. Such oxen as these that plod
along, with yokes rudely bound upon their
horns, labor steadily forever on imperishable
old Greek bas-reliefs. Somewhat as now we
see them, asses went burdened in the time of
Mary and Joseph. The jars that are borne on
dark and graceful shoulders are of a form
long familiar before Rebekah came out from
Nahor to draw water. As for the women and
girls who are washing at many pools by the
way, they are types from the age when Nau-
sicaa spread her new-whitened garments by
the shore of the sea.

It was in the afternoon that I arrived at
this town so variously celebrated, and found
in it neither a remnant of the great and splen-
did city which the scribes of Cortez lyingly
represented, nor a mere "town of one-story
whitewashed mud huts" which was all one
mole-eyed modern writer could discover. I
found under the dominant shadow of the giant
mound a sleepy and romantic-looking village
in which the signs of former Spanish domi-
nance are plain, in which the hues of venerable

183

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

towers and domes seem dissolving under the
breath of decay to mingle with the softer air,
in which the tones of bells in harmony still call
a simple people to worship at unthrifty hours,
and in which balconies and grated windows
suggest many a fancy of love-making in years
gone by. In short, Cholula is a provincial
Mexican town. There two civilizations met,
the older was nearly obliterated by the other,
and that in turn was left to slacken when the
usurpers who brought it had been driven out.
The impulse of new Mexican life has not been
much felt there, so Cholula dreams on in its
valley.

Within five minutes two ragged boys at-
tached themselves to me for better or for
worse. They first helped me to buy and eat
some bananas and mangoes at the market
place where a canvass of every booth had to
be made before the woman could return
change for my dollar, and then it came all in
centavos. They pointed out an old sacrificial
stone and were able to hint vaguely that it
had a fearful history. In fact, it was doubt-
less wet many a time with human blood. At
each of the churches they informed me as to
how much money I should give the sacristan,

184

A TOLTEC PYRAMID

having a care, I think, lest my stock of cen-
tavos should unduly lessen before they had re-
ceived their part. One advised the use of my
field glass for looking at a picture in the con-
vent; and the other thought me an ill-fur-
nished Americano because I had no camera.
They sold me for ten centavos — so far had we
advanced in friendship — a clay head that is
muy antiguo (very ancient) and for which
they had at first asked a dollar. They even
became confidential regarding their family
affairs. Both father and mother were dead,
and their only dependence was an aunt, who
was at times very abusive. When I remarked
that they did not seem unhappy, both at once,
with the most aggrieved tone possible, ex-
claimed, "Como no, Senor?" ("Pray, why
not?")

Together we sauntered out to the pyramid.
This is larger than any other such — about two
hundred feet high and more than a mile in
circumference. The latter measurement is
greater than that of the largest Egyptian
pyramid, though in height some of the Egyp-
tian structures are greater. It must also be
said that while the Egyptian monuments were
built of natural stone, this thing of little honor,

185

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

as our unpoetic friend would describe it, was
built of mud. That is to say, it was built of
sun-dried bricks, the junctures of which can
still be seen, and was faced with stone and
plaster which have either crumbled away or
been removed. Its form, however, must have
been at one time strikingly like the Egyptian,
though truncated. This teocalli of Cholula
is not the best preserved in Mexico. The
Pyramid of the Moon and the Pyramid of
the Sun, the two principal ones at Teoti-
huacan, noticed on our first journey to the
capital, are niore perfect specimens. But the
one at Cholula is more famous, and the vege-
table growth of a milder climate has made it
more beautiful. Its flat top, about an acre in
extent, and with a stone parapet all around,
is not so empty as theirs, but is surmounted
by a Spanish church which takes the place of
the once splendid temple, and with which
also the hand of time has been at work. Nor
is the spot without an added charm of pathos
to the imagination of most visitors, probably,
because of that valiant resistance and bloody
massacre which have been noted since the con-
quest.

When I asked my guides and instructors
186

A TOLTEC PYRAMID

who built the pyramid, they said, "L,os Az-
tecas" Other authorities have disagreed,
thinking the pyramid older than Aztec occu-
pancy, and ascribing it to that gentler and
more civilized people, the Toltecs. Indeed,
faith in the general accuracy of my informants
was somewhat shaken at this point; for when
I asked who built Popocatepetl, they again
answered, "Los Aztecas." I tried to bring
them to a worthier notion of the old giant
towering in the distance, wrapped about just
then with the whiteness of two distinct cloud-
levels below, and above with his monk's cowl
of eternal whiteness. The attempt may have
been lost. They seemed to take my correc-
tion at once ; but ready agreement is a finished
art with them, and I am not sure of their
thoughts.

On the summit of the mound one commands
a fine view of the country round about for
many miles, broken here and there by a moun-
tain and bounded at last by the crests that
make the limit of the valley. One does not
think it strange that here the ancient god of
agriculture bade his last farewell to Mexico.
Should he ever return — as some natives still
hope with well-nigh Hebrew fondness, seeing

187

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

that the Spaniards by no means brought him
on their arrival — should he ever come again
to this valley of Puebla, he will find that
meanwhile he has not been wholly without
devotees. Rude enough is their devotion; but
Heaven seems to acknowledge it with har-
vests.

Cortez declared that from this eminence he
counted four hundred pagan temples; and it
is of record that as he destroyed them he set
the natives, however unwilling or little able,
to replace each by a building for Catholic
worship. 1^ would seem that in this instance
Cortez may have told the truth, for churches
stand as close everywhere as lighthouses on a
rocky coast. If so many can be seen from one
point anywhere else in the world, it would be
interesting to know where. They lend them-
selves so to beauty in the landscape, and look
such perfect symbols of peace and simple
piety, that one is not willing to regard them
otherwise. One accuses oneself of ungrate-
fulness when the thought occurs that blood
was wrung from an unhappy people in the
demand for tribute to these sacred buildings
— a demand from whose impoverishing effect
they have never recovered.

188

A TOLTEC PYRAMID

Having taken a farewell glance at the
panorama in the slanting light, there was
nothing to do but go my way. A native ran
after me, offering an arrow-head for sale and
declaring with great emphasis that it was
genuine. I assured him of my implicit belief,
and said that I had seen pecks of such curios
found in the Connecticut Valley. He turned
back in no ill humor, apparently less vexed
than amused. At the railway station, for I
confess I left by railway, we three friends
justly divided the now lighter burden of cen-
tavos, ar-d said a cordial good night. I hoped
that for once the dreaded aunt would be rea-
son* bta

189

XV

HIGHER THAN THE ALPS

EITHER Cholula or Amecameca around
to the west will serve as a way station
for one who means to climb Popoca-
tepetl. It happened that I went up on the
west side from Amecameca. This account of
my experience will lack the distinction of a
first ascent. The summit, though two thou-
sand feet higher than the highest Alp, has
been scaled many a time since a companion
of Fernando Cortez braved its then unprece-
dented height. The yawning mouth of the
drowsy volcanic monster, which we entered,
has become a place of industry for human
pygmies like ourselves; the sulphur that it
spits out as venom is an article of commerce;
and stolid Indians, going every day to bring
this down, think the ascent as commonplace
as any other hard day's toil. Yet if you ever
make it you will probably not do so with in-
difference. Eighteen thousand feet above the
sea, ten thousand feet above the surrounding

190

HIGHER THAN THE ALPS

plain, and shaped for all the world like the
crown of a high sombrero, with snow covering
all above the top of the broad band, the
"smoking mountain" will never be lightly ap-
proached by a stranger, it is safe to say, un-
less the threatened railroad is built. Even
if limbs are good, and lungs are sound, and
heart proves equal to the strain, you will find
the task one to be reckoned with.

The first thing is to get on speaking terms
with the giant. "Popocatepetl" it is written,
but that is not enough to know. The natives
call it Popo'ca taypet'tle, and, as has been
hinted, it means "smoking mountain." It be-
longs to the primitive tongue of the Indians
and has no more to do with Spanish, the lan-
guage of Mexico to-day, than old Welsh
names in Wales with the modern language of
Great Britain. If you cannot manage it in
its full bulk and weight, call it "Popo," as
tourists do.

A letter of introduction sent forward to the
ranch some five thousand feet above, brought
the overseer down at a smart jog with pony
and pistols. He found us all eating in a res-
taurant. The moment he appeared and ad-
dressed us in tolerable English, we knew that

191

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

if our troubles did not soon begin it would not
be his fault. Sufficiency was marked all over
him. He helped to find horses and guides,
fix prices, and arrange for supplies. The
typical Mexican ranchman, by the way, is a
gentleman, a born fighter, ambitious, patri-
otic, and resourceful. He will figure largely
as the animating spirit of any change that
may come, either by moral influence or by
force of arms.

Next morning, the women of the party hav-
ing spent the night packed away in a hotel
that was too small for them, and the men hav-
ing slept on flie earth floor of the railway sta-
tion, our young ranchero with his odd cos-
tume, wiry figure, light air, and gay songs led
the way out of town, the guides trotting along
behind and occasionally making short cuts.
We had several hours of travel thus, women
and men alike riding our beasts in the way
that nature intended. About four o'clock we
reached the shanty, whose hospitality we were
glad to find. Senor Perez, for our guide now
became our host, announced that here we were
to lodge. And indeed night already began to
settle upon that side of the mountain. Such
is the angle that the sun seemed scarcely to

192

HIGHER THAN THE ALPS

have entered the western half of the sky be-
fore it hid itself.

We had seen the mountain froir the top of
the old Toltec pyramid of Cholula; we had
seen it through notches among the hills where
only goats and Mexican donkeys could keep
footing upon the trail; we had viewed it in
morning and in evening light from Chapul-
tepec and from the arches of Cuernavaca.
Some of us were to look down upon its great
surface from the rim at the top. But never
did it make the breath stop and the heart
grow sick with a feeling that could not be con-
trolled, as when we looked, straight up it
seemed, at the terrible cold height in the last
glow of that afternoon sun, and knew that
it did not hang over us more nearly than did
the adventure for its conquest on the morrow.

Nineteen of us, and Perez with a partner
and friend, making twenty-one in all, slept as
best we could packed around one small room
with heads toward the many chinks in the wall
and with feet toward the center. The circle
was not complete; for at one corner was a
rough fireplace discharging most of its smoke
into the room. The chinks, though they ad-
mitted enough cutting blades of air, seemed

193

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

not to let much of the smoke escape. We lay
in our clothes, of course, and in whatever
extra blankets we had, for at that height of
13,000 feet the air at night is cruel to one
who has spent months in the mild climate of
the plateau. Our shoes only we removed, as
no one wished to awake with swollen and
aching feet.

At three in the morning we rose, and at
five were started. Should any one be curious
as to how the two hours between had been
spent, some of our party could answer for the
employment of them. In the numbing, blis-
tering, altogether strange cold of that lofty
air, we had spent most of the time helping to
catch a stray horse, identifying horses and
saddles that each person as far as possible
might have his own of the day before, adjust-
ing girths that stiffened fingers refused to
manage, and calling down blessings on the
guides, no one of whom was more useful for
such matters than a sheep. On the whole
perhaps they were worth what they received;
each member of our party was to pay, for
horse and guide during three days, the sum of
eight dollars, Mexican money, or four dollars
in our own.

194

HIGHER THAN THE ALPS

Finally we mounted. Those of us who had
been martyrs for the rest were chattering with
cold. More than half had been sickened by
the smoke or some other cause. No one had
eaten much breakfast, as it is against all ad-
vice. Yet some, of course, were more cheer-
ful than others. Part of these were to be
among the first "quitters."

We rode our horses to the snow line, four-
teen thousand feet high in the month of Janu-
ary, and there left them. Some were almost
exhausted, so that they had been brought
along only by leading and coaxing. All suf-
fered from the cold, as they were accustomed
to the plains below. Persons who knew said
that going much beyond this point would be
fatal to them.

Henceforth it was to be real climbing. The
zigzag path was easy to follow with the eye,
but painfully hard for already lagging feet.
However, we kept along. I myself felt no
other distress than this sensation of labor and
a continued rebellion in my stomach.

After what seemed a very long time of our
starting and halting, the sun came up out of
the low country and showed itself. The angle
from us was as if we viewed a cartwheel from

195

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

a church steeple. Such a phenomenon in itself
would have been curious enough to pay for
some effort. But we were bent upon other
things, those who still held out, so we gave it
very brief attention. Adjusting our colored
glasses, for we had been warned against the
glare of a tropical sun upon the snow, we
thrust our sandals into the path and kept on.

By this time it was pure doggedness with
the best of us, and we had reached an altitude
of some sixteen thousand feet. As the snow
began to melt, the difficulty was increased.
Often our foothold gave way so that the des-
perate climbing of a full long minute was lost
by a single slip. The need of stopping to rest
became more and more frequent. One man,
indeed, a physician, about fifty years old, had
been obliged from the first to lie down every
few feet. Now he was far below most of us
and it seemed useless for him to think even of
reaching where we were. Yet he kept on.

When we were two-thirds of the way up
my nausea, which I had attributed to the
smoke, left me. The chief cause of this feel-
ing is doubtless inequality of pressure upon
the organs, and particularly failure of the
heart to adjust itself to lessened resistance

196

HIGHER THAN THE ALPS

upon the arteries. One authority says that
bubbles form in the blood-vessels. With some
climbers mere weariness probably accounts
for more than they are aware.

Whatever had been the cause of my own
ills, they were all forgotten when the break in
the everlasting curve was actually seen; and
when we had won the battle I felt like a war-
horse. Others apparently were as much
elated, though some postal cards that we
wrote did prove rather shaky.

Most of us carried our own blankets,
barometers, and lunch-boxes all the way.
After mere "Oh's!" and "Ah's!" of general
admiration, we attended first to the lunch-
boxes, and afterward to the barometer and
similar matters.

The crater of Popocatepetl is at the very
middle of the perfect dome. Its rim is un-
broken all around and is of nearly equal
height, though the side at which we looked
over is a little lower than the other. It was
topped then by a smooth abrupt wall of hard
snow about six feet high. From side to side
it is fully six hundred yards — surprisingly
large. It is more than five hundred feet deep
and some two hundred yards wide at the bot-

197

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

torn, where there is a sulphur lake. The color
of this is green — not greenish like sea water,
but green.

At several points in the side of the old
crater are little holes as large as a man's
wrist, from which sulphur smoke issues with
an unpleasant hissing noise. All the sides of
the crater are decidedly warm, though not too
hot to touch. We went down some little dis-
tance. We measured, guessed, commented,
gazed, and wondered.

Then we started toward the world again.
When we were ten minutes downward, which
would mean a good hour's distance in the op-
posite direction, we met Perez with the doctor
and a school teacher in tow. He afterward
succeeded in landing them at the top, though
not within the hour.

Thus far scenic effects have hardly been
mentioned. During the grim effort to get
up we took little notice of them, beyond mar-
veling at the sunrise so far below us. When
at the summit, we could see less than must at
times be possible, for there were cloud masses
lower down. The impression of distance is
not so great as on one New England moun-
tain of local celebrity which rises a thousand

198

HIGHER THAN THE ALPS

feet above its surroundings. From such a
petty height every distance and bulk is appre-
ciated, and level fields seem to be very far be-
low. They are not too far to seem far. But
from old Popo the eye cannot measure by
anything. Everything is gigantic and in
equality of proportion, for the things below
which are not gigantic are lost altogether.
Yet the clouds and the snow, and the colors
upon both, and the shapes of mountains, and
the blue of the upper sky (for there is a
lower sky also, to one who climbs) — all this
gives a feeling not easily to be described nor
soon forgotten. Two other snow-capped
mountains stood in view above the vapors:
Orizaba, a few feet higher than Popo, and
Ixtaccihuatl, not quite so high. The valleys
were so full of dense, perfectly white and
level-lying clouds that it seemed every time
we looked as if we could sit upon a straw mat
and slide down the snow, across the snowy
cloud reaches, and up the other side.

Most of the party did slide down on the
snow crust, but two of us were obliged to
walk for lack of a man with an iron-bound
stick to steer the craft. We walked when we
did not run or sprawl, the guides calling after

199

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

us, "Despacito" ("A teeny bit slow!") at
every jump or slip. Their caution was wise,
no doubt, but we had lost all respect for them.
We brought on ourselves more local soreness
of muscles from this coming down than from
going up; but we enjoyed the descent and ar-
rived at the snow line soon after those who
slid. In another half-hour we were at the
shanty.

The only visible mementos of the ascent
that I took with me were my sandals, which
weeks afterward I threw away in despair for
the bad odor of the native-tanned leather, and
a small piece of sulphur, which I had the
pleasure of giving to Mr. William Jennings
Bryan next day in a railway train. For cir-
cumstantial evidence that our party did make
this journey, therefore, I can now point only
to the mountain itself. Any investigating
person will find that it stands there in actual-
ity, just as I have said.

Our goggles had not prevented some cases
of inflammation from the glare, and sunburn
is a mild word for what we suffered; but on
the whole the hardships and difficulties were
not so great as we had thought possible, for
they were all such that we got over them.

200

HIGHER THAN THE ALPS

Popocatepetl, smooth, even dome that it is, is
doubtless one of the easiest mountains on the
globe upon which to reach so great a height.
There are no glaciers, no treacherous ravines,
none of the special terrors that attend moun-
tain climbing elsewhere. One's trying experi-
ences are likely to arise for the most part
from within. However, he must be a hard-
ened climber indeed to whom the ascent would
appear commonplace.

201

XVI

TOWNS AND MORE TOWNS

IT would be resented by enthusiasts for
each town if I should say that Morelia, to
the northeast of Mexico City, in the state
of Michoacan, and Guadalajara, three times
its size, in the state of Jalisco, look in any
way alike; that there are no differences worth
noting between Guanajuato and Queretaro,
capitals of two neighboring states of the same
names to the north of the Federal District;
or that between Aguas Calientes and San
Luis Potosi, similarly related to two states in
the next tier northward, though still four hun-
dred miles from the border, one might be at a
loss to distinguish. There are differences in
setting, altitude, latitude, mean temperature,
numerical population, and chief industries.
Guadalajara has for sale its famous pottery,
and Aguas Calientes its even better known
Mexican drawn- work on linen. Guanajuato
has its mint and its mines which do add land-

202

TOWNS AND MORE TOWNS

marks to the surrounding hillsides, its really
splendid theater, and its gruesome catacombs.
In Queretaro they will show you a chapel on
the site of Maximilian's execution, and the
church of Santa Rosa which claimed the en-
thusiastic praise of Charles Dudley Warner
for its unsurpassed wood carving, its wealth
of gold leaf decoration, and its beautiful
paintings. There are the features of local
pride and interest; but after all a description
of one town, as seen by a northerner, would
read very much like the description of an-
other. One tires of those worthies, Cortez
and Maximilian, after a time. If, as in the
Queretaro church, one learns that a superb
altar piece was burned, not from public neces-
sity, as Juarez ordered many things de-
stroyed, but by the French in mere greed and
wantonness, one's flagging interest revives.
It is always stimulating to have something
that one can resent.

On the whole, even the tourist is likely to
imbibe something of the quiescent mood of
the country. It is not inherent and peculiar
to Mexicans; the animals have it. Though
very little of a horseman, I have ridden young
stallions in Mexico as unhesitatingly as I

203

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

would ride old Dobbin on the New England
farm, and with as little danger. I have gone
through yards full of mules, and suffered no
harm. They clatter in strings along the high-
ways without a strap except the girth of the
pack saddle, and driven by one small boy for
a dozen or twenty mules. I never saw one
show signs of viciousness. One will kick,
naturally, if he gets his leg over a chain trace.
Bulls are driven along the roads by children;
at different times, on foot or on horseback, I
have passed scores and they always gave me
the road. The explanation I have never
heard. One man says it is in the breeding;
but why should breeding have happened to
affect them all so — horses, mules, cattle? An-
other asserts that it is in the fodder — one feed-
ing a day of barley and barley straw will not
make an animal very spirited, he says. But
on this same fodder the animals show remark-
able strength and endurance and keep in con-
dition if otherwise well treated. Neither do
they show absence of life in its harmless
demonstrations. The peculiarity is not due to
uniformly humane treatment I can vouch, nor
can animals be cowed by any crueler treat-
ment there than some receive in the United

204

TOWNS AND MORE TOWNS

States. Rattlesnakes around Lake Chapala
almost never bite. It must be "the Mexican
habit," which, contrary to the usual idea, is
non-aggressive. The tourist gets it, and be-
comes willing to sit in the central park of any
typical Mexican town — the park is always
there — and let life pass by for his delectation
or enlightenment. This experience is about
the same in any of the places mentioned.

There is a town, Pachuca, that deserves
special description as unique. It has a park,
but it has an almost perpetual cold wind, and
frequent storms that make sitting in the park
an uneasy enjoyment. It is in the bottom of
a cup, with only one low side, toward Mexico
City, from which three railroads come out the
sixty miles and terminate. Down the sides of
this cup, in the rainy season, the water rushes
till the streets, flooded from all sides, become
rivers. Through a little gap in the high wall
the northern winds drive with violence. In
the dry season only a few years ago men killed
each other quarreling over a bucketful of
water. Now the water of a beautiful moun-
tain lake has been piped into town and the
poor who cannot have it in their houses may
draw it from public hydrants, except when

205

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

the Governor has diverted too much to his
private fields and gardens. Still, in the dry
season there is cause enough to look eagerly
for rains. Every wind bears clouds of blind-
ing and pestilential dust, and the whole sur-
rounding of the place is a desert.

In the rainy season, from May to Septem-
ber, visited with the other extreme, people
pray for the freshets to cease. Every morning
is an amethyst above and an emerald under
foot; but every afternoon the clouds blacken
and the floods come. Market women have
been drowned in the streets.

Forty thousand people live here, including
perhaps a hundred Americans and the rem-
nants of a colony of Cornish miners — tin
miners they were in Cornwall — who lived here
for thirty or forty years. One by one the
Cornish families are going back home now to
live henceforth on what Mexico has bestowed.
And what makes the place? Silver. Silver
and pulque. The only crop grown with any
large success in the immediate neighborhood
is the maguey, from which the national intoxi-
cant is made. One English millionaire owes a
large part of his fortune to his activity in
pulque, and there are several members of his

206

TOWNS AND MORE TOWNS

family personally the worse for too much use
of it. Maguey was grown by the Indians be-
fore the Spaniards came, but silver is the
chief local interest. There are about three
hundred mines in the vicinity and some of
them have been worked since early in the six-
teenth century, till the output must be esti-
mated in billions of dollars. The claim marks,
the piles of tepetate (refuse), the yawning
mouths of tunnels, and the curious mine build-
ings lend variety to the precipitous hillsides.
The silver that they yielded, until a few years
ago, went the sixty miles to Mexico by stage
or mule train. As late as 1901 there was no
bank, and paper money was unfamiliar. The
Mexican silver dollar, the peso, then worth
about forty-three cents, was almost the only
familiar unit of value, and a man who had a
month's salary about him, unless poorly paid,
was grievously burdened. It was no uncom-
mon sight to see a servant accompanying
some one on his way to a business appoint-
ment literally staggering under a load of dol-
lars. It is not quite true to say that this dol-
lar was or is the only familiar unit. It is the
official unit, the unit in business. But the
market women cannot reckon in pesos nor in

207

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

centavos. They hold by the old Spanish
scheme of real (shilling), half -real,, and quar-
ter-real, which runs into fractions. This,
however, little irks them, for they sell only a
real's or a cuartillo's worth at a time. If you
want five times the amount, you repeat the
transaction five times. It is forbidden to buy
or sell merchandise by any but the metric
units or to reckon money by other than the
decimal system. A weighing scale cannot be
imported unless with whatever other markings
it may have it bears the metric scheme of
grammes, kilogrammes, etc. In the markets
the law is relaxed, seeing that it is hard for
the common people to change, but in shops it
is usually enforced. An inspector of weights
and measures was in a small drygoods place
when a boy asked for a vara (about a yard)
of cloth. "We sell it by the meter, thirty
centavos/' said the proprietor. "But I don't
know meter/' protested the boy; "how much
would a vara be?" "Well, a vara would be
about twenty-five centavos/' vouchsafed the
man. The boy asked for a vara, paid twenty-
five centavos,, and went out. "You are fined,"
said the inspector, "for selling cloth by the
vara." "How much am I fined?" asked the

208

TOWNS AND MORE TOWNS

shopkeeper. "Twenty reales" pronounced
the inspector, half severely, half indulgently.
"But you have imposed my fine in reales" ex-
claimed the shopkeeper, "and therefore you
also are fined." Both men laughed, neither
fine was paid, and the inspector afterward
told me the story on himself.

209

XVII

A RIDE TO REGLA

AT ten one morning, though six would
have been a better time, we left Pa-
chuca on two hired horses, bound for
Regla. An hour's riding over the famous
road to Real del Monte, along which many a
fabulous fortune of silver has gone by mule-
cart and whose sharp turns have witnessed
many a bold bandit adventure, then a short
canter across a flat, and we came to "the
Real."

A little way back we had seen a man wear-
ing a blanket that we coveted for its rich
colors and its characteristic Mexican design.
Now, as we dismounted, he was coming into
sight, and I went to greet him, with some com-
pliments regarding the blanket. He was
soon prompted to offer it for ten pesos (five
dollars) and to explain how an old woman
among the mountains of Puebla had woven it
for him. For eight pesos, after some argu-

210

A RIDE TO REGLA

ment, the blanket was bought. It was well
bundled and well wrapped, as its condition
required, but we were sure that after thorough
washing it would come out as beautiful as an
Oriental rug, nor were we to be disappointed.
Perhaps we ought to have paid the ten pesos,
but we were not clear about it and there was
no one to arbitrate.

Having greeted the native Protestant pas-
tor and his wife, we went up the street a few
doors to take dinner with "Aunt Mary," a
good soul whose title of affection had become
so familiar among English and American
miners for fifty miles around that she was
scarcely known, even at the post office, by any
other name, and all the shopkeepers had
learned to call her by the Spanish equivalent,
"la tia Maria." More than twenty years she
had remained in this place, ten thousand feet
high, where husband and brothers, miners all,
had lost their lives, and where she was soon
to end her own, though we did not know that
the present meal was the last we should have
with her. So, here and there, no doubt there
are many solitary foreign women who stay to
do good in a land where they have suffered.

The hottest two hours of the day being
211

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

over, we took leave of "Aunt Mary," made
our little contribution toward the charities
that she was dispensing every day from slen-
der means, and joined the friendly minister,
who was going toward Regla as far as Ve-
lasco. Pleasant chatting carried us through
Omitlan to his destination, a little farm vil-
lage among the mountains.

Cornish "pasties," strong tea, and saffron
cake full of plums, all pressed upon us by the
bountiful "tia Maria' at noontime, now in-
clined us more to repose than to exertion.
Rain, also, began to threaten, and we hesi-
tated. Soon, however, we were to leave the
republic, and Regla, so long heard about,
might remain by us forever unvisited. So
we kept on through San Antonio, turning to
the right from that hamlet to an interesting
and beautiful blue lake, the Ojo de Agua.
We retraced to San Antonio and took the op-
posite direction to Regla, arriving there at a
quarter before five o'clock.

When we reached the gate of an old haci-
enda it was with half a feeling of distrust that
we entered, being told that so we could best
see the noted falls. Inside and at the left of
the entrance is a venerable chapel. At the

A RIDE TO REGLA

right of the entrance is an exceedingly quaint
garden with steps leading up to a quainter
balcony, which runs along the side of a great
nondescript building and terminates in some-
thing like a conservatory. Clearly there are
living apartments beyond that, and pleasant
they must be. From the office a courteous
Spanish-looking young man came out, invited
us to dismount, and told us that we could
reach the falls only by walking. He fur-
nished us a guide with keys and we started
along a way which presently became a tunnel,
then an arched and vaulted succession of
underground chambers where smelting ap-
pears to have been done, then, emerging
again after we had despaired of it, opened
into a path along the edge of a ravine. Our
guide told us naively that the subterranean
passage was haunted, but that he himself had
never seen anything ghostly. He assured us,
however, that it is "una cosa muy espantosa"
(a very frightful thing).

Moving along the ravine, we came at last
to a sight of two high natural walls, approach-
ing each other at an angle; and gurgling and
plunging down between them at their point
of greatest nearness, a waterfall. This, though

213

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

not wonderful in size or height, is a joyful
thing to look at, and would in itself have re-
paid us for the journey. What attracted our
attention most was the columns that form
the two rocky converging walls. They are
nearly perfect hexagonal prisms, basaltic in
the popular sense, whether or not in the
mineralogist's definition, and about three and
one-half feet in diameter. Their height was
not easy to determine, but I judged it to be
some hundred and fifty feet. Most remark-
able, I think, is a broken formation by which
at one place not the sides but the smooth ends
of the prisms' are exposed to view, though con-
siderably inclined upward. To the right and
left of these are columns that stand erect, and
above them are short stumps that are also per-
fectly upright.

The hacienda,, church, and connected dwell-
ings were built about a hundred years ago
by the famous Count of Regla, The cost of
construction may have been millions of dol-
lars. Hours would be well spent in exploring
the place, for which we had only minutes. This
Count of Regla was the rich man who en-
dowed the National Pawn Shop of Mexico.
He it was who lent the Spanish crown a mil-

A RIDE TO REGLA

lion pesos and offered if the king would visit
him to pave the coach road with silver for his
coming.

Again on horseback, having given our
thanks to the Spanish-looking young man and
our peseta to the guide, we started homeward.

The country from Regla to Omitlan is as
unlike the barren Pachuca plain and hillsides
as could well be. Cattle are grazing, crops
are growing luxuriantly, the road has a con-
sistency of genuine earth under foot, and there
is green everywhere. The peasants' huts are
cleaner and much more comfortable, the
simple costumes of carriers and donkey driv-
ers give signs of acquaintance with water,
here and there are little shady groves where
rabbits skip; and all is a picture of simple,
rural prosperity. Velasco and Omitlan, but
for the Indian blankets and wide hats and the
low style of buildings, are like contented, hill-
surrounded farm villages at home.

One slope as we came along startled us by
what seemed to be multitudes of glaring
lights. They proved to be the points of a
thousand maguey plants, wet with a little
shower that was all the outcome of earlier
cloudy threatenings, and now all aglow with

215

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

red reflection from the setting sun. I had
seen windows lighted up so, but never any-
thing in nature. The flash of a thousand
polished spears could not have been more
brilliant.

A maguey field has other beautiful phases.
One that I must mention belongs not to the
cultivated field but to the native growth on
many a hillside. It occurs when a sprout
twenty to thirty feet high has shot up from
the heart of each mature plant and burst into
wonderful bloom, when the morning damp is
on them all, and when thousands of humming-
birds of different varieties, like small animate
jewels, dart to and fro among them. The
field that we were now passing was, of course,
not under cultivation for beauty ; and its yield
would be taken before it could ever blossom.

Still later, for night was approaching, we
looked through the notch in the mountains be-
yond which we knew was Real del Monte, and
saw framed between their dark masses that
beautiful constellation, the Southern Cross,
which has an additional charm for the fancy
because from our latitude at home it is never
seen. This cluster of beacons was before us
continually as we galloped along the shadowy

216

A RIDE TO REGLA

roads for an hour, finally slacking rein and
breath within a few moments' ride of "the
Real." On Saturday night there is just
enough chance of slightly unpleasant encoun-
ters to make a spice in the after recollection.
Twenty years ago all this neighborhood was
thoroughly infested by bandits. Babes have
grown to manhood in the villages since then,
however, without knowing any worse fear
than of some drunken miner who might give
trouble. True, this argues that the hand of
Diaz at his prime was steady and strong; but
it argues more than that. It is proof that the
rank and file of Mexican citizens in places
like this desire order and quiet, and given
proper firmness in controlling the few unruly
spirits that always appear in a mining coun-
try, they will live together as peacefully as
good citizens anywhere.

A little before eight o'clock we were again
with our friends in their pretty flower-hidden
parsonage, where we were to spend the night.

An incident of one trip to Real del Monte
has always returned to me with peculiar
pathos. On a high hill overlooking "The
Real," where it can be seen for miles around,
is the cemetery of the English people of Pa-

217

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

chuca and Real del Monte, enclosed by a white
wall. It has been there now for more than a
generation, and there are graves enough to
keep each other company. I happened along
as a child's funeral was approaching and
waited to attend. From the foot of the hill
the coffin is always carried up by two sets of
bearers, alternating as often as they need. No
hired person ever touches a shovel to a grave.
All such labor is performed by friends and
neighbors, which is peculiarly significant in
this country where no white man does manual
work. On this particular occasion all the
children of the colony, between fifty and a
hundred, attended, dressed in black and white
and carrying wreaths. While no lover of
funerals, I have remembered this one as sig-
nifying the group unity of fellow-countrymen
in a strange land. I felt as if something al-
most traitorous were being done when last
spring, ten years later, I found all the pros-
perous families of the colony going home. A
rather melancholy fact for the less prosperous
who remain! They will become identified with
the new American colony that is growing up,
and as a consoling tie some of their former
neighbors will still be represented by sons and

218

A RIDE TO REGLA

daughters to whom England is not home,
and who, though jealously claiming citizen-
ship as Britons, find that they cannot be
happy away from the land of their birth.
Strange ramifications of interest and senti-
ment indeed, come of life in a foreign
country.

219

XVIII

THE WEST AND NORTH

fP^WO young friends of mine who were
going from eastern New York to Mex-
ico thought California so little out of
their way that they would be foolish not to
include it in their journey, which they did.
They got a check cashed in San Francisco and
made a new beginning; a railway ticket to
Mexico City costs more from San Francisco
than from Toronto. To infer that Mexico
has a long coast line on the west will not be
going astray. Those who are fresh from
school geography will disdain the weakness of
mere inference here; and you may feel about
equally superior if you have lately referred
to a map. My friends were describing almost
an equilateral triangle, so that after three
thousand miles of travel they found them-
selves little nearer their destination than
before.

Maps and other sources of indirect knowl-
220

THE WEST AND NORTH

edge are likely to play a larger part in our
acquaintance with the rest of the republic.
Whoever has gone over as much ground as
we have now covered and does not find his
allotted time well toward its end, is no mere
winter tourist. He may be the prospective
author of some first-hand studies among the
aborigines of "Unknown Mexico," or of inves-
tigations concerning the economic and social
conditions which have lately been character-
ized under the strong phrase, "Barbarous
Mexico," or of learned disquisitions on fauna
and flora, on geology, or archaeology, or what
not. He may be an intending settler, a pros-
pector or a dawdler. Whatever he is, he may
be well enough in his way; but to the brisk
and somewhat careless traveler he is of course
no companion.

Toward home then we shall be gradually
making our way, alert for any thought of
somebody else that may help us to generalize,
sympathetic and intelligent now toward many
things that a little while back we dismissed
simply as barbarous, by an insidious process
turned students of prosaic books of reference
during odd hours upon train or in hotel, find-
ing nothing dull which broadens our acquaint-

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

ance with this country of our travel. It has
become the way of the three months' visitor
"to love that well which he must leave ere
long."

Western Mexico has two beautiful lakes
which might have been named along with the
cities of Morelia and Guanajuato some time
ago. One is Patzcuaro, dutifully described
by almost every writer because of the paint-
ing of the Descent from the Cross at Tzin-
tzuntzan attributed to Titian, Cabrera, Ibarra,
and other great or lesser artists. The second
lake, Chapala, is the largest in Mexico and
the most popular for vacations. Both lakes
are full of fish and haunted by game and song
birds. Both are high and have a delightful
climate.

Among the sierras of the west live tribes of
Indians acknowledging no allegiance to the
Mexican government, little touched by any re-
ligion except that of their forefathers, little
altered in customs or life by contact with
white men, and thousands of them unable to
speak Spanish. They differ markedly in type,
one tribe from another, there being one pop-
ularly called Chinos by the Mexicans because
of their Mongolian appearance.

222

THE WEST AND NORTH

The map and the guide-book — for we must
resume our journey — will tell us that even
more than our own country, Mexico has been
slow to develop along its western slope. Aca-
pulco, some three hundred miles north of
Salina Cruz, has a harbor generally conceded
to be the best natural port in America, and
one of the finest in the world, offering without
man's effort advantages for which substitutes
have been so costly at Vera Cruz and Tam-
pico. Acapulco is completely land-locked,
with high protecting hills, and amid charac-
teristic tropical scenery. Some dredging is
needed to make it of use for the largest steam-
ers. Here the galleons of the old Spanish trad-
ers used to put in, and the buccaneers that
pursued them. Fortifications were built in
the seventeenth century, and for more than a
hundred years this was the entry port for all
the traffic of Spain, not only with her Philip-
pine possessions, but also with India. Cargoes
were unloaded, packed across the isthmus
about four hundred miles to Vera Cruz, and
reshipped. But of late a port without a rail-
road could not flourish, so Acapulco has not
greatly prospered. The Cuernavaca division
of the Mexican Railway is being extended,

223

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

and when it reaches the coast Acapulco will
assume importance. Manzanillo, already hav-
ing railway connections over the "Central" by
way of Guadalajara, but lacking complete
harbor protection as yet, is another port des-
tined to grow. San Bias, yet a little to the
north, then Mazatlan, and last, halfway up
the east side of the Gulf of California, Guay-
mas, make a succession of harbors most of
which are too shallow for large vessels, but all
such as can be deepened, all well protected,
or capable of being made so, all extremely
beautiful. Absence of railroad facilities,
which are just now being provided, has left
undisturbed in these towns a great deal that
is quaint, while being on the coast, they have
slowly gathered strange accretions of life
from every quarter of the globe. You may
sit in the plaza and study them. There are
more various breeds of people than in the in-
terior and more variously mixed. Over there
is a Chinaman with the bundle of linen that
seems the attribute of a Chinaman the world
over; and those girls just beyond moving
along with a gait that is half glide and half
waddle might be his daughters. They are
more probably the daughters of some Chinese

THE WEST AND NORTH

shopkeeper who plainly has a Mexican (In-
dian) wife. Of complexion they have rather
more than either of their parents are likely to
have had — a decided pink with a waxy cream
color. You do not know after looking twice
whether to call them pretty or repellent; but
they look clean, healthy, and satisfied with
life.

The negroes that pass now and then do not
differ much in appearance from those to be
seen in the Carolinas, though most of them, if
you listen, are talking Spanish.

This mother with three children is a mon-
grel-looking female — one may say it with
slight shame and not unkindly since no other
phrase describes a jaded creature in whom the
Aztec, the African, and the Iberian are all
mingled, and if not badly mingled have still
not fortified her to make more than sad, per-
severing battle with life and frequent mater-
nity. But do you notice how immaculate are
the starched clothes of the three children and
how almost pathetically clean her own cheap
garments? Have you any notion how much
work is involved to make the integuments of
four as clean as that? Your laundry bills
may at times have given you a hint that did

225

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

not belittle it. And this woman has either
devoted such an amount of work for to-day's
outing or paid some one yet poorer to do it.
Smile if you will as she sends one of her prog-
eny back to the dulce man with a goody that
he has already begun to enjoy, but which she
fears is not wholesome, and the dulce man,
with the universal complacency of the land,
submits to an exchange. So you might smile
if you could witness the housekeeping of this
mother of a family. More scrubbing will be
done in a week than we might think necessary
for a month; but the tolerance of all kinds of
filth within arm's length of the door, unless
some public authority looks after it, is a thing
to admire. She is cleanly, but she does not
know what sanitation means. She has a crav-
ing for beauty, as the personal bedeckments
of the family attest; but she has neither cul-
tured tastes nor the unspoiled instinct for
simplicity of some of her ancestors. She has
a spark of aspiration after various things if
only her aspiration were well directed and she
were not so fragile a piece of yellow clay.

That peon on the other side of the walk is
borracho, which being interpreted means
drunk — very drunk. The well meaning

226

THE WEST AND NORTH

young fellow of his own class who shakes him
and is greeted with a muddled but emphatic
protest, wishes to save him if possible from
being helped away by a policeman. "You
don't want a trip to the Voile National, do
you?" he inquires in answer to the protest;
and the name has a sobering effect. Unless
you have been reading books you will not
know what the Valle Nacional is; but the
borracho has an idea. The name is burned in
on his mind so that even an excess of pulque
or other drink does not wholly obliterate it.
It is the place, so he believes, where a fellow
arrested for being disorderly may find him-
self consigned to help raise some of the best
tobacco in the world, under such climate and
conditions that he will not last for more than
one crop. The poor people have their bug-
aboos, many of which are unsubstantial, and
Valle Nacional is one of them. The army is
another, and the army has shown itself de-
cidedly unsubstantial on occasions. Why not,
if composed of men to whom it was a bug-
aboo until it became an unwelcome reality?

This woman with the powder so thick on her
face and the ludicrous grandee air is the wife
of some small merchant of European or

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

mixed blood, and the young Indian girl, so
much superior to her in physique, in comeli-
ness, and in apparent interest in life, is her
servant.

On paper, that is in books planned so as
not to need revision for two or three years,
railroad connection is complete from Guana-
juato all the way up the coast through the
ports and beyond to Nogales, Arizona. In
fact there are gaps as yet in the southern part.
For the immediate present the tourist will
choose a route farther eastward. There are
three principal routes from the capital to the
United States: one by Zacatecas, Torreon,
and Chihuahua to El Paso, Texas; one turn-
ing a little eastward at Torreon to Eagle
Pass, Texas; and one still farther to the east
by way of Monterey, entering the United
States at Laredo, Texas. Each of the Amer-
ican border cities has its neighboring Mexican
town just over the line: for Nogales, Arizona,
Nogales in Sonora; for El Paso, Texas,
Juarez in Chihuahua; for Eagle Pass, Texas,
Ciudad Porfirio Diaz in Coahuila; for La-
redo, Texas, Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas.

Mention ought to be made of Durango, a
fine city of 40,000 inhabitants, which is

228

THE WEST AND NORTH

reached by a side trip of six to seven hours
southwestward from Torreon, which with an
altitude of six thousand feet has a delightful
climate, and about which is an interesting
region but little developed. The country is
mountainous and full of mineral deposits.
Fish and game abound.

Zacatecas, hidden in a ravine between sil-
ver-bearing mountains, has a population of
thirty-five thousand and is noted for mining,
for churches, and for nearness to some inter-
esting ruins, La Quemada. The climate is not
one of the attractions though the scenery has
a barren beauty. A trip to a mine is some-
times made part of a visit here. My own ac-
quaintance with silver mines happens to have
been made at another famous camp, but essen-
tials would not differ. A tram car drawn by
mules is the most likely conveyance from
town. Stone or plastered and whitewashed
monuments on the hillside indicate the bound-
aries of the "claim." When the actual build-
ings are reached, the departments working
above ground are too numerous to mention —
offices, assaying rooms, sorting, grinding,
washing, packing rooms, blacksmithing and
repair shops, smelters, etc. Many cripples

229

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

of the industry find employment in these su-
perterranean departments. The man who
drives nails in that "skip" is blind of one eye,
the man who turns the wheel over there at the
bellows is totally blind, and yonder you may
notice a poor fellow standing on a wooden
prop which serves as a leg. These are natives.
But here comes a young Englishman from
the chief office who lost his arm only six
months ago through some mishandling or im-
perfection of a machine. You have bespoken
a pleasure about as grim as visiting the forge
of Hephaestus. Along with the blind and the
cripples, you look every moment for dwarfs
and giants. Now enter through the long tun-
nel where you see the little flat cars issuing
drawn by mules, and keep close to your guide.
The walls of the tunnel are part masonry,
part natural rock. When you reach the far
end of this nearly horizontal tunnel, you are
already far under a hill. The elevator or
"cage" will take you up the shaft to the sur-
face, or down to lower and lower levels. No-
tice the great pumping engine lifting thou-
sands of gallons of gray mine water per min-
ute, night and day, and always under careful
watch, to keep the whole enterprise from be-

230

THE WEST AND NORTH

ing submerged. In some places you would
still find only bull hides, roughly sewed and
used as buckets, strings of them being hauled
to the surface; but you are visiting a some-
what modernized establishment. There are
sixteen different levels, one below the other,
to which you may plunge in this cage of yours,
till your technical friend tells you you are
only a petty two or three thousand feet above
sea level and your sensations tell you that
hell cannot be far below. Along every level
run narrow shafts, broadened wherever rich
ore has appeared in quantity. Along every
shaft crouch men and little children, half
naked, under their dripping loads. Over each
group of Indian laborers is a Mexican, an
English, or quite possibly an American boss,
his lamp, a candle, stuck upon his hat with
soft clay. He himself does no work except
in emergency — no white man in Mexico above
or below ground does manual work — but even
so his position does not provoke envy. Heat,
blackness of thick darkness, strange half-
muffled, reverberant sounds, a sense of pres-
sure in the ears and of deadly weight upon the
lungs, a saturating drip, drip at every turn,
and confused glimpses now and then of

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

human figures at toil — this is about all that
the casual visitor to a mine can record. Above
ground again you may watch to see how the
workers emerge and will observe them riding
upon an open "skip" — not a "cage" this time
— some standing upon the low edge and reach-
ing over to cling to the rope by which the car
is hoisted. Deaths, you are told, are only
moderately numerous, the greatest numbers
being on Mondays or following feast days
when pulque has been imbibed. The Mexi-
can laborer is not lazy on a work day, but if
free to do so he will observe all the festivals
and memorials, for he is a creature of custom.
The mules that you see mixing the great torta
(cake) of amalgam out there are not crea-
tures of custom and do not observe holidays
nor die with incontinent suddenness; but they
have shockingly sore legs from the effect of
vitriol in the mixture. They are relieved,
when too much affected, and used by way of
change to turn the great rolling stone that
grinds the ore. You may console yourself
that modern stamp mills are displacing this
invention of 1557 as well as some of the uses
of human labor just shown you. And yet
there are to this day also mines where peons

THE WEST AND NORTH

toil to the surface upon notched tree trunks
for ladders, denied even the perilous aid of
the "skip." By means thus widely varying,
Mexico leads the world as a source of silver,
with forty million dollars' worth annually,
stands well up in the list of gold-producing
countries, with twenty-four million dollars'
worth, is second to the United States in cop-
per production, with an annual yield of thir-
teen million dollars' worth, and is third for
output of lead, though for this the figure
seems small — three and one-half million dol-
lars' worth. Silver, gold, copper, and lead
are very commonly found two or three to-
gether, a mine being operated for the pre-
dominant metal, while assays are made for the
others as by-products. The subject of min-
ing would repay further discussion if we were
either investigators or formal students.

Torreon, with a population of fourteen
thousand, has its chief distinction in being a
railway junction as already indicated. An
accident to our train made me acquainted
with it, and I found it a good deal American-
ized. Chihuahua is even more so, being nearer
the border, and is twice as large. Silver
smelters — for still we are in the region of

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

rich silver mines — iron foundries, and fac-
tories give it a modern air. Hidalgo, the
"Author of Mexican Liberty," was put to
death here in 1811. Though the city of Chi-
huahua is chiefly famous for the raising of a
useless and sickly kind of dog, it is the capital
of a state larger than Ohio and Pennsylvania
combined. This area is sparsely populated by
Tarahumare Indians, the best runners in the
world, and by miners and ranchmen, many of
whom are Americans. It is the old sister
state of Texas, and like it in having vast
regions devoted to cattle raising. Lumber-
ing and silver mining are also among the in-
dustries.

234

XIX

TIDES THAT MEET

A WRITER in a religious weekly not
long ago spoke of the twentieth
century as being on one side of the
Rio Grande, and the sixteenth on the other.
No one would expect this altogether to be
the case, and yet one is constantly surprised
to find how far it is from being so. Monterey
is about as American a city as San Antonio,
and San Antonio lacks little of being as Mex-
ican as Monterey. The baggage man, the
customs agent, and lately, by reason of a de-
cree, the train conductor also are of quite dif-
ferent types on the two sides of the line; and
from these one might easily generalize. But
an article by Charles Moreau Harger in the
Outlook for January 25, 1911, apropos of the
admission to statehood of Arizona and New
Mexico, reveals that on the American side
from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, Cali-
fornia, the "twentieth century" is only

TIDES THAT MEET

blended with the sixteenth. From the Gulf
to the Pacific, the quiet, non-official popula-
tion who have nothing to do with large affairs
but are so important in any prophecy regard-
ing the future character of a region, has a
considerable residue of the Mexican to whom
the whole southwest once belonged. He is
the "native," here as in Mexico itself. Forty-
one per cent, of the population of New Mex-
ico are Spanish American; there are 135,000
of them in this one state. How many more
are of mixed blood would be hard to guess,
but the number is certainly large.

The Mexican, as a rule, is without strong
national or racial antipathies. Says a friend
of mine who has studied the subject for years:
"They are the amalgamators of all races.
Large numbers of the poorer Mexicans are
coming to the United States now and by in-
termarriage will do much to solve the negro
problem and the Indian problem. What the
final race will be I cannot predict, but my ob-
servation makes me think it will be good.
There are at present about as many Mexicans
as there are American negroes in this south-
ern strip; and the amalgamation can be seen
all along the border, especially in San An-

236

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

tonio, Texas. There is a city by itself in San
Antonio where all the breeds may be studied
by any one who will take the trouble." As
well as the poor, some Mexican families of
means and culture have always remained in
the United States since the border was shifted
southward to include them.

On the other hand, the aggressive Amer-
ican is in evidence on the southern as well as
the northern side of the border, occupying
the positions in which initiative and the ability
to manage would naturally place him. Nor is
he the only modifying influence. "From all
these colonies in the United States Mexicans
and mixed bloods who have got a little Amer-
ican education are constantly going back to
Mexico along with the Americans who go
looking for land. The flow southward will
increase now that the free land in the United
States is nearly all taken. The Roosevelt
Dam and other projects, and the statehood of
Arizona and New Mexico, will hasten the
movement. The national line has little effect
to stop it."

In Torreon, you will remember my saying,
I experienced one of the delays that still oc-
cur from time to time on Mexican railroads,

237

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

or on our own, for that matter. I entered a
barber shop and asked to be shaved, putting
the request as well as I could in Spanish.
"Beg pardon, sir! What did you say?" was
the rather sharp response. "Oh, then you
speak English?" said I. "Yes," answered
the man, "and it's lucky, for I don't speak
anything else."

This man was an American, plying his
trade over two hundred miles from our bor-
der, yet without knowledge of any tongue but
our own; and the incident occurred ten years
ago.

There was a young Texan in our party
who was on his way homeward to repair ill
health, and who could not eat buffet rations.
I had tried repeatedly to get him some Amer-
ican crackers or English biscuits — quite sim-
ilar articles under a different name, — but the
Mexican shops that I entered could not
supply either. I asked my barber friend if
he could help me to what was wanted. "There
is an American grocer three or four doors be-
low," he replied. In this grocery, also, Eng-
lish was of course the language of trade,
though Spanish may have been used on occa-
sion. I found that one could do better with

238

TIDES THAT MEET

good English than with lame Castilian in the
town generally.

In the "Pullman," which was to go as far
as Mexico City, the capital and very heart of
the republic, I heard a party of Mexicans try-
ing to make their wants understood. "Oh, I
don't comprende what you quiere! " (don't
know what you want!) was the exclamation
of the negro porter. The number of Amer-
icans traveling by Mexican railroads is pro-
portionately larger than would be supposed,
if third-class passengers be left out of reckon-
ing. Particularly is this true in sleeping-cars.
So our porter had a not unaccountable feel-
ing that English was the language of his
realm, and that aliens ought to learn English
before coming in. The steward in the same
train called upon some passenger to interpret,
when he wished to buy watermelons of a
native.

All Pullman conductors in Mexico, so far
as I have ever observed, speak English. Most
of them are Americans, by birth or adoption.
It is true that they all speak Spanish. There
has lately been made a law that porters also
must know Spanish; but the need of such a
law explains itself. Fancy a law requiring

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

similar officials in the United States to know
English!

It is not surprising that English should
make some way southward over the boundary.
So does Spanish penetrate northward, for the
matter of that. But the exchange is not equal
in amount, as the Mexicans emigrate less and
travel less than we. There are several thou-
sand resident Americans in Mexico City
alone, to say nothing about the multitude of
tourists. If the linguistic movement south-
ward continues to be more than the counter
movement, plainly the line of contact will it-
self gradually be moved. There is hardly a
Mexican urchin selling fruit or papers along
the railroads within fifty miles of the Rio
Grande who does not know at least some
colloquial phrases of English. This becomes
less and less true, indeed, as one progresses
southward. But one is never surprised to be
asked by some russet - faced tatterdemalion,
"You want the paper?" "You want some
fruit?" and — this is a parenthesis — English
reappears more prominently than ever at the
capital. Ask a Mexico City policeman in
very simple English where some important
building is, and quite probably he will tell

240

you. Walk into any large shop and ask for
what you want, and if the clerk does not
understand "United States" he will call some
one who does.

Let me suggest a few reasons for the
spread of English among our neighbors on
the south. The first shall be a negative rea-
son. Hating Spain as they do, and with more
cause, historically speaking, than ever es-
tranged us from our British cousins, Mexi-
cans have no great tenacity for the Spanish
language. I am not wholly accounting for
the fact; but at least it is a fact. Before I
have ended, this will have become more ap-
parent.

A second reason for the tendency men-
tioned is the dearth of modern writing in
Spanish upon scientific and technical subjects.
If a young man expects to go far in the study
of architecture or engineering, he must read
English, because enough books in Spanish
do not exist, original or translated. French
works are all that could be desired for aesthetic
treatment, but not as touching practical ques-
tions of construction. German is learned only
with difficulty, being more purely Teutonic.
If the student turns his attention to medicine,

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

he must do his reading in either French or
English. French has been preferred, but
English is displacing it. The same is true of
any theology save that of the Roman church.
The most important school of Protestant the-
ology in the republic prescribes its reading
courses in English throughout, most of the
teachers being Americans.

The inadequacy of Spanish was smartly
alluded to once by a young Englishman of
my acquaintance. At a dinner party where
no other foreigner was present, he sat next a
young woman who lacked the usual courtesy of
her nation and who was disposed to humiliate
him. Having noticed his difficulty in Span-
ish, she made him confess that he knew but
little French or German. "Then, sir, pray
what do you speak?" asked she. "Senorita,
thanks be to Heaven, I speak English very
well," came the retort. "One who can do
that need not learn all the other languages.
English will take me wherever I wish to go,
and whatever I wish to read I can read in
English." Blunt as was the answer, their
Mexican host applauded it.

The commercial aggressiveness of Amer-
icans and English is recognized as one cause

242

TIDES THAT MEET

of the great strides made by our language the
world over, and not less in Mexico than else-
where. Already English is, more than Span-
ish, the medium of large business transactions
in the capital. This is more easily understood
the more one looks at statistics. According
to estimates something like a billion of Amer-
ican dollars is invested in Mexico.

Our linguistic stupidity and obstinacy may
be regarded as a cause of our linguistic tri-
umphs. In Mexico, Germans are considered
the best foreigners because of their quickness
to acquire both speech and customs, while
English and Americans are universally known
as the worst. Any of us who is even a little
instructed has frequent occasion to blush for
the ignorance and regardlessness of his coun-
trymen. Hence it follows, though the argu-
ment brings us doubtful credit, that those who
will treat with us must learn our ways and our
speech. Most Frenchmen and practically all
Germans in Mexico speak English as well as
Spanish.

Mexicans know the significance of these
facts, and every intelligent Mexican who does
not speak English is anxious to learn. I
knew well a teacher of scores of them, some

243

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

of whom can now use English almost as a
native tongue; and many more would have
become pupils if time could have been given
them. There were two other private teachers
of English in the same town, whose popula-
tion, excluding illiterates, would not be more
than ten thousand; and both teachers were
continually refusing work. Besides this pri-
vate instruction to adults, regular work in
English is required of all children in public
schools. From two to five years of English
is given in all state institutions of higher
grade, and practically the same is true of pri-
vate schools.

On one occasion the American teacher men-
tioned was invited to call upon the principal
of a large school for boys and asked to name
a price for certain hours of English. The
principal made some objection to his charge,
whereupon the Mexican friend who intro-
duced him declared: "The patrons of the
school pay more than that for music, which is
a mere ornamental accomplishment for most
children. By and by, when the Yankees have
finished their pacific conquest of Mexico, we
shall learn which is more necessary, English
or music."

244

TIDES THAT MEET

The pacific conquest is going on, though it
does not look at all toward political union.

To prophesy that in a few generations
English will be the universal language of
Mexico, would be to prophesy overmuch.
Spanish has never become a universal lan-
guage there. Thousands of Indians in the
remote villages still retain the primitive
speech of their ancestors. But in a few gen-
erations, possibly not more than two or three,
English seems destined to become the lan-
guage of Mexican schools and the language
of Mexican society generally. We have' seen
that it has points of superiority as among the
Mexicans themselves. I have hinted at a
more potent reason for such prophecy; multi-
plied and growing interrelations make it in-
creasingly desirable that we and they shall
have a common speech. And when a com-
mon speech is established, it will be no arti-
ficial Esperanto, but a language that shall
naturally have become the medium because
of having proved itself, of the two now used
between us, the more vigorous and practical
for modern needs. Barring a catastrophe,
that language will of course be English. At
present it shows marvelous increase.

245

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

Some who have studied general movements
and tendencies in the western world recog-
nize that more than Mexico and our border
states are concerned in the interplay of which
we are speaking. Without any thought of
political aggression the Latin influence
presses outward from the strong and growing
republics of South America, while the Anglo-
Saxon influence, so called, just as constantly
bears down from the north. Where the two
tides will definitely come to a balance is not
sure — that will depend on the outcome of
many material and moral factors; but the
Anglo- Saxdn dominance appears not likely to
be eliminated north of the Isthmus of Pana-
ma. All of North America will some day,
we are thus constrained to believe, be one in
language and civilization, one in the funda-
mentals that concern society, just as all South
America promises to be one; and just as Can-
ada and the United States are already one,
geographers and politicians alike to the con-
trary. It is not government but the broader
social facts that this implies.

We chose the ocean route southward to
begin with, you will remember, partly be-
cause the Rio Grande looks so much alike on

246

TIDES THAT MEET

its two banks; and we proposed not to be
cheated of contrasting the twentieth century
with the sixteenth. You may have it in mind
also that for five hundred miles the border is
not marked even by this puny stream, which
barring times of freshet may be forded at will.
We are divided only by a line on the map.
Why should we not intermingle and take on
each other's ways more or less, we and our so
near neighbors?

247

XX

THERE is very much, we discover, that
we would like to have got at first hand,
but must now gather in these secondary
ways. Familiarity with the bullfight will not
be one of them, for whoever wants to see a
bullfight has opportunity enough. I myself
am unacquainted from choice. Those to
whom the romantic traditional associations ob-
scure the actualities of the thing and who can
think back to the old tournament jousts
during a performance may enjoy it. Those
who wish to read about it are advised to take
Mr. Arthur M. Huntington's "Notebook in
Northern Spain," Miss Katharine Lee Bates's
"Spanish Highways and Byways," or any
one of a number of books in which it figures,
including the Mexican guide-books. To some
it is only an exhibition of a poor old horse
being impaled or having his entrails gored out
by a tortured animal that would gladly be let

248

CUSTOMS AND COMPARISONS

alone — sickening and revolting. Many Amer-
ican men who carry an air of bravado on their
travels and want to see what is to be seen are
unable to sit through one killing. Mexicans
apologize for the institution even while they
admit they enjoy it, and say that it is sure to
disappear, though its death is slow. The mor-
bid curiosity of foreigners helps to perpetuate
it. I never heard a Mexican silly enough to
argue that it is "less brutalizing than foot-
ball," though some Americans have so argued.
The infliction of bodily injury or pain is no
object in football unless to some player un-
worthy of the game — certainly not to the spec-
tator— while in bullfighting the glee of the
whole matter is the glee of killing. If the
bullfighter himself suffers, the sport is all
the better for that.

Many comparisons of various kinds at first
made to the detriment of Mexico are after-
ward revised. With writers about Mexico
the "palm shack" and the "mud hut" are fav-
orite objects of contempt. The bamboo and
paper house of the Japanese is appreciated,
but the Mexican palm shack, which may be a
cousin to it, is still treated with derision or
disgust. Yet the palm shack has its merits.

£49

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

It affords excellent ventilation where ventila-
tion is desirable; and if it is not always of
marked cleanliness, neither are the places
where men and women starve among us at
home. At its best it may be very inviting.
The "mud hut," that is the adobe house, is
certainly the kind I should build in Mexico
if I could spend only two or three thousand
dollars on a dwelling. It is fire-proof, earth-
quake resisting, warm in winter, cool in sum-
mer, highly durable, and, when plastered,
capable of being colored and recolored to suit
the taste of the occupants, at small expense.
I have mentioned one in Oaxaca that is two
hundred and fifty years old and still good.

Whoever speaks of Mexico as a benighted
country does not refer to the method of light-
ing her towns. A direct change from the
candle lantern to the electric arc took place
there while only the most progressive Amer-
ican towns had as yet adopted electric light-
ing. As Mexico had no natural gas, no known
supply of native coal from which to make gas,
and no oil except what was imported, there was
every stimulus to develop her many slender
but high waterfalls from which abundant elec-
tric current could be generated. Part of the

250

CUSTOMS AND COMPARISONS

lacks named above have since been filled;
though domestic coal is still not abundant, and
so iron, of which there are considerable de-
posits, especially in Durango, is smelted at a
disadvantage and in limited quantities. Mon-
terey has the largest and most modern plant,
where even heavy Bessemer steel rails are
made.

The Mexicans as a people are artistic in
temperament and intellectual when given a
chance. In an imitative way they are clever
at all sorts of handicrafts. They have less
mechanical ability than Americans, less busi-
ness invention or initiative, and less general
practicality. The representative Mexican
physician, I believe, knows as much of the
theory of his profession as the American
physician, and has done more reading aside
from his profession; but for applying his
knowledge to cases commend me to the Amer-
ican. I have known of some unfortunate ex-
periences with Mexican doctors, and particu-
larly surgeons, for whom as men of culture
and of intellect I had great respect. The
same characteristics appear in the trades. A
Mexican carpenter can do nothing for you
which requires ingenuity; but if he makes you

251

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

a plain chest he will insist on making it better
than the American carpenter would think
worth while.

Mexicans on their part are as likely to
think us better than we are as to think us
worse. A native preacher of really admirable
attainments after spending a winter in New
York gave an account of his impressions. It
was extremely interesting but also amusing to
some American hearers because of the way in
which he lauded us for merits that we do not
possess. The extreme courtesy of everybody
in New York was one subject of comment
with him. New York policemen, he observed,
are not armed, except with a stick, and have
no need to be.

That there are some speakers and writers
who regard Americans as mere exploiters of
their country cannot be denied, and while un-
balanced, their view has an element of truth.
Americans own some of the henequin planta-
tions of Yucatan, control mines where labor
is as much oppressed and safety of life as
little regarded as ever under Spanish manage-
ment, and hold large areas of unimproved
land which an iniquitous system long made
exempt from taxation. American policy of

252

CUSTOMS AND COMPARISONS

finance compelled a constant apology or de-
fense of the Diaz administration when it was
indefensible, and so made us enemies of prog-
ress among our southern neighbors. It is de-
clared, let us hope falsely, that the counter-
revolution and attempt to overturn Madero's
progressive government was partly financed
from Wall Street.

There are, of course, no end of customs and
objects in Mexico which do not lend them-
selves to any comparison at all but which one
remembers and would like to describe. One
is the celebration of Christmas. The puestos
or special Christmas markets are interesting,
but I have reference more to the Posada,
which translated means "the inn." A shrine
is set up, and the manger, the divine babe,
Mary, and Joseph are represented as well as
other figures or incidents pertaining to the
life of Christ. Some of the company remain
inside while others forming a procession out-
side sing or chant their supplication for ad-
mittance. This is denied, also in song, nine
times, symbolizing the failure of Mary and
Joseph to find lodging, but on the tenth time
it is granted, after which the remainder of
the solemnity is held before the shrine. A

253

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

less serious part of the ceremony comes with
the giving of gifts, which are likely to be
figures in the forms of dancers, clowns, or
animals, filled with candy or other dainties.
Larger figures of earthenware are hung from
the ceiling, and blindfolded members of the
party hit at them with sticks, the aim being to
make sudden distribution of the contents.

Another curious custom belongs to the
Easter season. " On Saturday of the semana
santa (Easter week), at an appointed hour,
Judas the betrayer is burned with great
demonstration. I saw him suffer, representa-
tively, in front of several pulque shops on the
day which I recall. Announcement before-
hand will have gathered a considerable crowd
at each place. From the roof or upper win-
dow of the shop, a rope is made fast to some
opposite building. In proper time the man
who is to manage the affair shows himself
and slackens the rope so that it is within
reach from the ground. Then Judas is borne
out and greeted by shouts and the waving of
many small paper banners which have been
distributed by some merchant, perhaps the
keeper of the shop, and which bears an ad-
vertisement of his wares.

£54

CUSTOMS AND COMPARISONS

Judas makes plain at once that some humor
is admitted to the occasion. He is sure to
have grotesque features, usually with a large
and well-colored nose, like those of our comic
valentines. Not infrequently he has a high
hat and always a coat that is "to laugh at."
He may have been given an old basket, or a
great empty gourd, or some cast-off garment
to sling across his arm to make him more
ludicrous. If his ordeal is to be before a shoe
shop instead of a "drinkery," then he will
probably have a pair of shoes or a hat which
will be coveted by the people below. So far
as I have observed, Judas always keeps a
cheerful air through the whole ceremony, until
the fatal end, when of course he can no longer
preserve any air at all.

Hurriedly taken to the middle of the street,
the curious figure is hung upon a rope, a fuse
in the region of his coat-tail is lighted, and the
rope drawn tight again. Judas begins to re-
volve merrily, much to the enjoyment of the
crowd. Then some explosive in his inward
parts takes action, and all that is external,
being of paper, is either blown to tatters or
quickly consumed.

Once again the rope is lowered and scores
255

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

of loud-hooting boys charge at the flimsy
skeleton of Judas, which still remains
dangling. Perhaps, for mischief, it is jerked
out of reach again once or twice. But it is
soon caught, and every boy of the howling
company makes wild efforts to get at least
some splinter as a trophy. Doubly trium-
phant is he who clutches the one thing of
value that poor Judas possessed, whether that
may have been shoes, hat, or some other piece
of apparel. In an instant all is over, and the
srowd begins to disperse, every one with a
jatisfied look.

This performance was doubtless attended,
generations ago, with religious fanaticism.
Now there is nothing of the sort, though it is
participated in by only the most ignorant of
the people. There seems to be no more
thought of symbolism than in our eating of
Easter eggs, and no more sentiment than in
nost of our Fourth of July noise. It only
shows that the half-clothed and half-civilized
native peones and their families have as much
barbaric love of demonstration as many of us.
For a stranger, however, it is full of curious
interest and suggestion.

256

XXI

LAST WORDS

NO, it is not true that the Bio Grande
makes a barrier four centuries wide.
We have a quite immediate reason for
being interested in a people who are so des-
tined to affect us and to be affected by us.
They recognize 'the future and are prepar-
ing for it; not only is English taught in all
their schools, as we have seen, but hundreds
of their young people are studying in vari-
ous institutions in 'the United States. It
behooves us to know what kind of people
they are. "They are all gentlemen of the
deadly knife or the too ready pistol," says
one. ' ' The Mexican of position is ' an adroit
and plausible rascal. The poor Mexican is
a petty thief. They are polite, but their
politeness means nothing. A Northerner
can never understand them; and they do not
wish him "to."
Now it is true that the carrying of arms is

257

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

more common in Mexico than among us,
though less common just before the recent
outbreak than a few years earlier. That is
not a race characteristic, but belongs to a
state of society, as it did in the pioneer days
of our own West. I doubt whether we, less
accustomed to have weapons at fingers'
ends, should be more restrained in the use of
them if they became fashionable ornaments
among us.

It is true that not1 all Mexicans of brains
are honest; but when the system under
which business and government have been
done is taken into account, the standards of
honesty that prevail are commendable. It
is 'true that parasites have occupied very
many of the public offices; but Mexico is not
alone in that reproach. A son of a gov-
ernor in one state drew a salary as in-
structor at an institute where he seldom or
never appeared; and meanwhile an under-
ling was paid a miserable pittance to do
the work. Some Americans in the town
characterized this arrangement in a way
tnat doubtless it deserved; but they did not
compare it with our system of appointing
first and second class post-masters to a sin-
ecure and paying an assistant rather meanly
to conduct the office. The governor's son was
only taking 'ad vantage of an analogous cor-

258

LAST WORDS

rupt system against which it is true he
ought to have set himself resolutely as a
good citizen. About the same time, in the
same town, another young Mexican of the
same social set was dissolving a highly
lucrative partnership and going out to make
a place for himself in a new community be-
cause he said he wished to be an honest man.
The ingenious conclusion is that Mexicans
are both honest and dishonest. There are
petty thieves among the poor and the un-
fortunate. As everywhere, their number
depends a good deal on the 'extent and de-
gree of misery that prevails, and on the
measures taken to discourage their activ-
ity. As for 'veracity, it has its different
codes and interpretations. A young man
who was studying English in a private
class said to the teacher: "The hours of my
work have changed so that I can no longer
attend." Two days later he made a spe-
cial errand to say: "I have lied to you. My
friends tell me that you Americans are very
literal, and that with you, if I mean to be
truthful, I must tell the exact 'truth. Now
the fact is that I have lost my employment
and cannot afford to pay for more lessons
at present. I hope to come back within a
few days or weeks." The Mexican is not
literal. But considerable acquaintance with

259

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

him does not make me think him especially
given to deceiving others to their hurt.

That he is polite cannot be denied. If
you meet a stranger or a procession of them
on any highway not a city street, there will
be none so lowly or so haughty that he will
not look to exchange greetings with you. A
baggage man will not bellow "One side!"
but will call instead, "With your permis-
sion, Senor!" If you have business deal-
ings with a Mexican, he may not always
have your interest foremost in his mind;
but to treat you with a manner lacking in
consideration would be to violate his own
breeding. Jhere are a great many humor-
ous and entirely true stories of the courte-
ous airs with which gentlemen of the cross-
roads used to 'divest travelers of their be-
longings. One relates that a bandit asked
an American if he would graciously conde-
scend to favor him with "a light." The
American answered that it would be his
greatest pleasure. Before his faction was
comprehended, he had thrust the cool end
of his cigarette into the barrel of the small
revolver that he was carrying ready in hand,
and thrust the other end 'up to the mouth of
the suppliant Latin. The only part of this
story that is not characteristic is the slow-
ness of the bandit. But if the Mexican is

260

LAST WORDS

polite it ought not 'to be imputed to him for
evil, as he inherited it from both his Span-
ish and his Aztec ancestors, and it works no
inconvenience to any one except in the fact
that politeness is looked for in return. The
American railroad man has largely elimi-
nated himself from the republic not because
he was inefficient but 'because he carried an
air of contempt which, while it did not al-
ways reflect his actual feelings, did always
offend the sensitive native. I have had
grateful evidence that the politeness re-
ferred to is not always hollow. And I re-
call what an elderly Englishman told me of
his experience. He had made a fortune and
had lost it all again. "And who do you sup-
pose came and offered me help to get back
on my feet?" he said. "Not any of the Eng-
lishmen that I had known from boyhood and
some of whom could have done it easily,
but two of the Mexicans whose high com-
pliments I had never thought meant any-
thing more than an extravagant habit. I
tell you, they showed themselves men and
friends, and I have never forgotten it."
The politeness of the poor has at least so
much substance that you will constantly
see them share their scant meals of tortillas
and beans and do other acts of kindness to-
ward the beggars by the roadside. They

261

AS MEXICAN JOURNEY

have no organized charities to take care of
worthy cases and it is to be feared many un-
worthy cases share in the bounty.

The writer in the Outlook mentioned
above quotes the owner of a one-hundred-
thousand-acre ranch in New Mexico as
saying: "I have bought tens of thousands
of sheep from Mexican shepherds with-
out a written contract and never had one
fail to do as he agreed, which is more
than I can say for American stockowners. "
He quotes Judge John R. McFie, Chief Jus-
tice of the Supreme Court of New Mexico,
thus: " No where have I found better jurors
or men with a higher sense of justice than
the Mexicans. I have tried murder cases
where the defendants were Mexicans and
every member of the jury was of that na-
tionality, yet have always found the verdict
fairly given and conviction has followed
regularly if the testimony warranted.
They are good citizens, are fair-minded, and
adhere to the Court's instructions more
closely than any other jurors I have found.
Probably there are more defendants of this
race than of Americans, proportionately to
the population, but their offenses are
mostly of a minor sort."

Remember that this relates chiefly to
poor Mexicans of the laboring class, though

262

LAST WORDS

as once indicated above there are also many
cultured and intelligent Mexicans who have
preferred never to leave the United States.
Is it not gratuitous to assume that such
people in their own country would be in-
capable of democratic self-government, once
given a little practical training and a
chance? Yet this was the assumption of
the American press in general during the
revolution of 1910-11. Not until its close,
indeed, did the American press admit that
any such movement was under way. The
Public, in its issue of June 9, 1911, said: "In
less than a year after all the great news-
papers were assured that there was no revo-
lution in Mexico — assured into silence —
they are obliged to report the complete
overthrow of Diaz by a revolution that was
in full vigor while they ignored it. Was
this poor journalism, or what1?"

The revolution ran its course, constitu-
tional government was set going for the first
time in a generation, and the reactionary
efforts that every one foresaw were soon be-
gun with more than the expected energy
and violence. Since then, no one has felt
altogether sure of the course that affairs
will take. The Mexico that at present ex-
ists, politically, is unfamiliar to me. A few
months before, I had scarcely heard of the

263

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

men who came into prominence with the
Madero movement; it was hard for any
Mexican to be generally heard of who did
not belong to Diaz's group. In March,
1911, when I visited the city of Oaxaca, a
local engineer was in prison for disseminat-
ing treasonable ideas, as the government re-
garded them. His friends told me that he
would doubtless be stood against a wall to
face a firing squad. Three months later I
received word that our engineer was now
jefe politico of a near-by town and that the
district superintendent of the native Meth-
odists was his apoderado (deputy). Only
those someVhat familiar with the opposi-
tion to Protestant work in Oaxaca during
the past can appreciate the latter fact; nor
can those who never chanced to talk with
his anxious friends and relatives find the
ups and downs of the engineer so exciting
as they were to me; yet some notion will be
gathered of how complete an overturning
had taken place in a short time.

During the fall of 1910 Francisco Madero
himself was in prison. On the 7th of June,
1911, he was given such an ovation at the
capital as probably no other Mexican ever
received. And there at the heart of the Re-
public where he was best able to make him-
self understood, the people never ceased to

264

LAST WORDS

believe in him. National agencies for pub-
licity, however, were at no time so highly
developed in Mexico as agencies '' for the
suppression of knowledge long were; and
even if the best means for the purpose had
been ready at hand it is doubtful whether
Madero would have had the art to use them.
It is a great deal to find an advanced idealist
and an administrator united in one man;
and that he should also be both a politician
and a military genius would perhaps be too
much to expect. Madero did not take effec-
ive steps to keep the people informed of
what, the government was doing. So it be-
came possible for those who object to the
imposition of taxes on the great landed es-
tates, those who are hostile to any and all
progressive measures whatsoever, and those
who merely resented being dislodged from
their places under the despotism, to stir up
the ignorant, the disinherited, and the un-
happy against him. The real cause of hat-
red toward him being that he was a
thoroughgoing progressive, they made the
hypocritical complaint that he was doing
nothing for progress or in the interest of the
poor. It is true that those who had unin-
telligently looked for immediate and direct
confiscation of ill-gotten lands were of
course disappointed. They lent themselves

265

A' MEXICAN JOURNEY

to the movement against Madero, ended in
his overthrow and assassination early in
1913, by the reactionary traitor General
Victoriano Huerta, whose infamous govern-
ment the United States refused to recognize
even in the de facto sense. They have con-
tinued to embarass the now existing govern-
ment of President Carranza. Under the
fierce and fanatical though doubtless sincere
leadership of Emiliano Zapata, lately ap-
prehended and killed through the defection
of some of his own men, they have overrun
whole states in the South and even briefly
held possession of the capital. Under the
less worthy, though vigorous and sagacious
leadership of Francisco Villa they have
harassed the North, provoked the United
States beyond endurance by border raids,
and otherwise delayed the return of pros-
perity and peace. To their groups, however
deserving of sympathy the rank and file may
be, all the worst elements of lawlessness and
brutality naturally hang on. They are the
menace of national security in Mexico to-
day; and they are the product of old wrongs.
As for the active military leaders who
personally took the field for the ' counter-
revolution, they should hardly be classed
with any group of interests or prejudices.
Desperados and bold adventurers who will

266

LAST WORDS

fight for hire are no national phenomenon;
and their theory is very simple.

The judgment of Americans as touching
government in Mexico has been too much
affected by the belief that this, that, or the
other element is favorable or unfavorable
to the United States. It may be well to re-
mind ourselves that the legitimate choice of
any leader in Mexico has only secondary
reference to us and that such choice has
reference mostly to the well being of Mex-
ico. A president or governor who ardently
desires to serve the Mexican republic,
whose scheme gives due regard to funda-
mental justice, and who has the force to
carry out his scheme, is a good Mexican
president or governor, whatever he may
think of us, his neighbors on the North.
That Venustiano Carranza, like his former
young leader, Madero, is a man of the most
genuine patriotism and of very high ideals
no discerning and impartial critic can well
doubt. His attitude toward the United
States has been uncertain at times, but
clearly it was dictated at all times by a de-
termination to protect the just rights of his
own people, and he has always declared
himself personally friendly to the legiti-
mate projects of Americans in Mexico.
However that may be, it is by his aims and

267

'A. MEXICAN JOURNEY

competence as a servant of Mexican dem-
ocracy that lie must be judged.

As for Madero, that he was no master
of military strategy his friends and enemies
alike have agreed. He was a civilian in
ideals and in natural temper. His leader-
ship was a moral leadership and signified
national faith in the possibility of a genuine
civil government for the nation. If he
erred it was in trusting overmuch to civil
measures and dallying with men like Zapata
when nobody but himself thought he could
quiet the brigand by anything but the iron
hand. The recompense of armed outlawry
should be swift and terrible ; and to make it
so need involve no suspicion of despotic
purpose. The necessity, if government is
to endure, is almost axiomatic.

Carranza is of Madero 's school of think-
ing, but sterner and less sentimental.

Whether the friends of democratic consti-
tutional government shall remain upper-
most will depend largely on the courage, re-
sourcefulness, and unwavering patriotism
of a few individuals. This is always true
at a crisis; for those who are given the
greatest power to serve have also the power
to betray. Washington and his immediate
lieutenants might have been able to set up
an American tyranny, if they had so willed.

268

LAST WORDS

Fortunately, though soldiers and generals
gallantly participated, Mexico owes its de-
liverance from the old bondage not to any
general mainly, but to a popular uprising
and to Francisco Madero. Bernardo Reyes,
the only general of whom anything was ex-
pected, proved an enemy of the people's
cause. Men like Orozco and Villa have ex-
hibited their character so plainly as almost
to remove the peril that any mere fighter
may be blindly chosen as a popular idol.
They have no appeal to make but a shame-
less appeal to force; and Mexico is genu-
inely tired of that.

That turbulence has arisen as it has
proves little against the Mexican people. A
larger army was required to put down the
"Whiskey Rebellion in the United States
than had been in the field against the Brit-
ish at any time during our war for inde-
pendence; yet the Whisky Rebellion was
put down. We had not only our Arnold
during the Revolution but our Burr after it
was over; yet the Republic survived and the
guardians of order and safety kept their
seats. All sincere and intelligent demo-
crats will hope that Carranza in Mexico
may keep his, till he can vacate it for an
honorable successor elected by the people,
and that so the principles of Juarez may be-
come established.

269

A MEXICAN JOURNEY

If the Republic fails it will be because
some supremely powerful man has risen
and has become a traitor to the people; and
if no such man succeeds in rearing himself
till Carranza's successor is elected, the
cause will be reasonably safe. Whatever
the outcome, be assured that there is a gen-
eral and sincere longing among the people
for the guarantees of liberty, a genuine
respect for law, and a full consciousness of
the necessity for order and individual sub-
mission to the sovereign will. Sometime,
too, if not at present, these things will be
achieved. The Indian patience waits long
but does not forget its object. Perhaps
something of the old high dauntlessness of
the Spaniard ought also to be separately
recognized in the Mexican spirit. Or per-
haps we should recognize in it simply hu-
manity aware of itself. For it Mexican
men by the thousands have willingly
languished in prisons. Mexican women
have offered their bodies as food for starv-
ing soldiers. For over a century it has per-
sisted, often obscured, sometimes betrayed
into error, but never quenched; and in the
end it will not be denied.

270

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bancroft, " The Native Races of the Pacific States ";
"A Popular History of the Mexican People"; "Re-
sources and Development of Mexico"; "History of
the Pacific States." Prescott, " Conquest of Mexico."
Wallace, "The Fair God." Biart (Lucien), "The
Aztecs," translated from the French by J. L. Garner.
Humboldt, "A Political Essay on the Kingdom of
New Spain;" "Geography of the New Continent," 5
vols. Lord Kingsborough, "Antiquities of Mexico,"
9 vols. Brocklehurst, "Mexico To-day." Wright,
"Picturesque Mexico." Tweedie, "Mexico As I Saw
It." Hale (Susan), "History of Mexico." Burke
(N. R.), "Life of Benito Juarez." Stephens, "Inci-
dents of Travel in Yucatan." Lumholtz, " Unknown
Mexico." Creelman, "Master of Mexico." Flandrau,
"Viva Mexico." Smith, "A White Umbrella in Mex-
ico." Kirkham," Mexican Trails." Butler, "Sketches
in Mexico." Barton, "Impressions of Mexico."
Campbell, "Guide to Mexico." Terry, "Guide to
Mexico." Gooch, "Face to Face with the Mexicans."
Lummis, " The Awakening of a Nation." Ober (F. A.),
"Travels in Mexico"; "History of Mexico." Romero
(M.), "Geographical and Statistical Notes on Mex-
ico"; "Mexico and the United States." Calderon de
la Barca (F. I.), "Life in Mexico during a Residence
of Two Years in that Country"; "Mexican Year
Book." Noll (A. H.) & McMahon (A. P.), "Life and
Times of Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo." Turner (J. K),
"Barbarous Mexico." Edwards (W. S.), "On the
Mexican Highlands." Harper (H. H.), "Journey in
Southeastern Mexico." Wallace (D.), "Beyond the
Mexican Sierras"; "Foreign Relations." Douglas
(J.), "United States and Mexico."

271

INDEX

ACAPULCO, 223-224.
Acolhuas, the, 16.
Adobe houses, 249-250.
Agriculture, god of, 187-188.
Agricultural products, amount of,

90.

Aguas Calientes, 202.
Alameda, park in Mexico City,

120, 137-143.
Amecameca, 190.
American capital invested in Mex-
ico, 243.
Americans in Mexico, 237-238,

252-253.

Animals, quiescent spirit of Mex-
ican, 203-205.
Archaeology, Mexican, 133-135.

See Ruins.

Arrow-head souvenirs, 189.
Art-
cathedral, Mexico City, 121.
church of Santa Rosa, Quere-

taro, 203.
"Descent from the Cross" at

Tzintzuntzan, 222.
despoliation of objects of, by

the French, 132, 203.
Juarez statue, Mexico City,

140.
National Academy (San

Carlos), 119, 130-133.

post office, Mexico City, 138.

Puebla cathedral, 180-181.

theater, Mexico City, 138.

Arts, aptitude of Mexicans for all

the, 140-142, 251.
"Aunt Mary, "21 1-212.

Aztec Indians, 16-22.

antiquities, National Museum,

133-135.
calendar of, 135.
choice of site of town by,

136.

conquest of, 145.
"Forum" of, 136.
pyramid, Mexico City, 120.
religion of, 125.

BANDITS, 161, 210, 217, 260-261.
Bates, Katharine Lee, work by,

cited, 248.

Blanket, a Mexican, 210-211.
Borda Garden, Cuernavaca, 174-

175.

Borde, Joseph le, 174, 175.
Bryan, W. J., 200.
Bullfighters, 11.
Bullfights, 143-144, 248-249.

CABRERA, painting attributed to,

222.

Calderon de la Barca, Mme., 149.
Calendar, the Aztec, 135.
Campeche, 34.
Canal, the Viga, 165-169.
Canals, Xochimilco, 169, 171.
Canoe trip, Viga Canal, 164-169.
Carlota, Empress, 137, 143, 153-

154, 175.

Carreno, Juan de, paintings by, 132.
Casas, Bartolome de las, portrait

of, 132.

Casas Grandes, the, 16.
Catacombs, Guanajuato, 203.

273

INDEX

Cathedral—

Cuernavaca, 174.

Mexico City, 120-121, 181.

Puebla, 180-181.
Catholicism in Mexico, 124-126,

149-150.

Cattle raising, Chihuahua, 234.
Cemetery, Real del Monte, 217-

218.

Chapala, Lake, 205, 222.
Chapultepec, 17, 120, 142-143.
Charles V, Emperor, 180.

statue of, 142.
Chichimec Indians, 15-16.
Chihuahua, city of, 228, 233-234.
Chihuahua, state of, 234.
Chinese, 224-225.
Chinos, Indians called, 222.
Chivela, 70-71.
Cholula, 179, 182-189.

Toltec pyramid at, 180, 185-

188.

Christmas customs, 253-254.
Church, on pyramid at Cholula,

186.
Churches —

Cholula, 188.

Mexico City, 126-128.

Puebla, 179-181.

Queretaro, 203.

Xochimilco, 170.
City Hall, Mexico City, 135-136.
Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, 228.
Civil marriages, 149-150.
Coatzacoalcos, 85-86.
Cochineal industry, 95.
Colhuan Indians, 17.
Columbus, remains of, 32.
Constitution of Juarez, 162-163.
Copper, annual production of, 233.
Cornish miners, 206.

Cuauhtemoc, statue of, 22, 142.

Cuautla, 175.

Cuba, 30-33.

Cuernavaca, 164, 172, 173-175.

DIAZ, PORFIRIO, 11, 13, 28, 62, 73.
accession to presidency, 157.
birthplace, Oaxaca, 97.
capture of Puebla, 179.
discontent universal under,

159, 160.
drainage canal completed by,

137.
feeling among people toward,

160-162.
form of Juarez' government

followed by, 163.
Indian blood of, 11.
massacre of men of Tehuan-

tepec by, 73.
overthrow of, 263-266.
principle of government, 157^

159.

proof of strong hand, 217.
relations with Juarez, 154-

157.

repressive measures of, 74-75.
Rurales organized by, 74.
Diego, Juan, 127.
Dollars, Mexican, 207-208.
Domes of churches, 170, 179-180.
Drainage canal, Mexico City, 136-

137, 165.
Drawn-work on_ linen, Aguas

Calientes, 202.
Drinking, question of, 68—70-
Durango, city of, 228-229.
iron deposits at, 251.

EAGLE PASS, Texas, 228.
Easter celebration, 254-256.

Cortez, Fernando, 18, 21, 23, 94, Egypt, correspondences between

101, 136, 145, 174, 183, 188,
190, 203.
palaces of, 174.
Courtesy in Mexico, 260-262.
Coyoacan, 174.

274

Mexico and, 133-134.
Electric lighting systems, 250-251.
El Paso, Texas, 228.
English colony, Real del Monte,

217-219.

INDEX

English language, progress of, in

Mexico, 236-245.
Eslava, 172.

FAMILY LIFE, 115-117, 177-178.
Farm product statistics, 90.
Flandrau, C. M., quoted, 5.
Floating gardens, Xochimilco, 167.
Flower market, Mexico City, 119,

128.
French —

attempt of, to conquer Mex-
ico, 150-153.

defeats and victories, 179.
spoliation of art treasures, 132,

203.

French language, use of, in Mex-
ico, 241, 242.
Frontera, 86.

Funeral, Real del Monte, 218.
Funeral electric cars, Mexico City,
113.

GARCES, FRAY JULIAN, 179.

Germans in Mexico, 243.

Gobelin tapestries, Puebla cathe-
dral, 180.

Gold, annual production of, 233.

Guadalajara, 176, 202.

Guadalupe, chapel of Lady of,
126-128.

Guanajuato, city of, 202, 222.

Guatemala, secession of, 146.

Guaymas, 224.

HARBORS —

Acapulco, 223.

Isthmus of Tehuantepec, 86.

Tehuantepec, 81-82.

western coast, 224.

Yucatan, 34.
Harger, C. M., Outlook article by,

235-236, 262-263.
Havana, 31-33.
Henequin-growing, 39, 42, 51.
Hidalgo, Miguel, 145, 160-161,
234.

Honduras, originally a part of
Mexico, 146.

Huitzilopochitli, god of war, 19.

Humboldt, A. von, cited and
quoted, 4, 86, 101, 125.

Huntington, Arthur M., "Note-
book in Northern Spain" by,
248.

IBARRA, painting attributed to,

222
Indians, 10-11, 14-22.

laborers in mines, 231-232.

of western sierras, 222.

sulphur carriers, Popocate-
petl, 190.

Tarahumare, 234.
Inlay work, Puebla cathedral, 181.
Interoceanic Railway, 182.
Iron deposits, 251.
Iturbide, Augustin de, 145, 146,

147, 148, 179.
IxtaccihuatI, 143, 180, 199.

mosaic picture of, 138.

JALISCO, state of, 202.

Johnson, Samuel, cited, 122-123.

Juarez, Benito, 11, 97, 148, 158.

becomes president, 148.

government of, 154-156.

Madero the representative of
principles of, 268-269.

measures of, concerning re-
ligious toleration, 150.

statue, 140.

veneration for name of, 160.
Juarez, town of, Chihuahua, 228.
Juchitan, 72.

Jungle, Tehuantepec, 70-71, 83-
85.

LABORERS —

in mines, Zacatecas, 231-232.
Yucatan plantations, 44-46,

51-56.

Lady of Guadalupe, chapel of,
126-128.

275

INDEX

La Quemada, 229.

Laredo, Texas, 228.

Lead, annual production of, 233.

Lumbering, Chihuahua, 234.

McFiE, JUDGE JOHN R., quoted,

262-263.

Madero, Francisco, 13, 62, 253.
government established by,

162, 265-270.
Madero revolution, 253, 263-

270.
Maguey fields, 164, 166, 206, 207,

215-216.

Malintzi, Mt., 180.
Maltrata curve, 106.
Manufactures —

at Chihuahua, 234.
of iron and steel, 251.
Manzanillo, 224.
Marriage, civil, 149-150.
Massacre of men of Tehuantepec

by Diaz, 72-73.
Maximilian, Emperbr, 143, 153-

154, 203.
Maya Indians, Yucatan, 44-45,

47-48.

Mazatlan, 224.
Merida, 34, 41, 46.
Metric system, use of, 208.
Mexican Railway, 223-224.
Mexican War, 143, 147.
Mexico —

agriculture, 90.
animals, 203-205.
archaeology, 49, 133-135.
area, 2-3.

art and architecture, 119, 121,

130-133, 140-142, 180-181,

203, 221, 222, 251.

bullfights, 143-144, 248-249.

Catholicism in, 124-126, 149-

150.

climate, 6-9, 164.
coinage, 207-209.
Constitution of Juarez, 162-
163.

Mexico (cont'd)

contrasts and contradictions,

6.

drinking customs, 68-70.
family life, 115-117, 177-178.
French in, 150-153, 179.
government, 145-163, 265-

270.
harbors, 34, 81-82, 86, 223-

224.

history, 145-160.
honesty of people, 262-263.
Indians, 10-11, 14-22, 222,

234.

Inquisition in, 146.
iron deposits, 251.
lakes, 222.

languages in, 236-245.
Madero revolution, 253, 263-

270.

manufactures, 234, 251.
mineral resources, 80, 233,

251.

mineral wealth per year, 233.
missionaries, 124-126.
money, 207-209.
mountains, 4-5, 190-201.
music, 141.

national customs, 248-256.
original extent, 146—147.
people, 10-22, 72-73, 77-81,

121-124, 215, 217, 222, 224-

228, 235-237.
people who will inherit, 171-

172.

politeness in, 260-262.
professions and trades, 251-

252.
progress of English language,

236—245
railroads, 23-24, 81-82, 87-

88, 110, 223, 224, 228, 239.
religions, 124-126, 148-150.
silver mines, 206-207, 229-

233.

the new Republic, 263-270.
towns, 202-209.

276

INDEX

Mexico (cont'd)

vegetation, 83-85.

weights and measures, 207-

209.

western coast line, 220.
women, 72-80, 121-122, 225-

226.

Mexico City, 67, 109-144.
Americans in, 240.
art, 133-135, 138.
atmospheric pressure, 9.
bullfights, 143-144, 248-249.
cathedral, 120-121, 181.
choice of site, 136-137.
churches, 126-128.
City Hall, 135-136.
comparisons with other cap-
ital cities, 111-112, 143-144.
cosmopolitan character, 110-

111.

drainage canal, 136-137.
English language in, 240-241.
Flower market, 119, 128.
gaiety of, considered, 143-

144.

hotels, 110.
houses, 115-117.
National Academy of Arts

(San Carlos), 119, 130-132.
National Museum, 133-135.
National Palace, 119.
National Pawn Shop, 119,

129-130, 214.
newspapers, 109.
opera in, 139.
parks, 119-120, 137-143.
people, 139.
post office, 137-138.
residences, 115-118.
slums, 139.
theater, 138-139.
Thieves' Market, 119, 128-

129.

Michoacan, state of, 202.
Minerals, Tehuantepec, 80.
Mines, Guanajuato, 202.
Mining, 229-233.

Mint, Guanajuato, 202.
Missionaries, 124-126.
Mitla, ruins at, 100, 103-106.
Monte Alban, ruins of, 98-99.
Montejo, house of, Merida, 47.
Monterey, 228, 235.

iron and steel plant at, 251.
Montezuma, 143.
Morelia, 202, 222.
Morelos, valley and state of, 164,

175.

Morro Castle, 30-31.
Murillo, paintings by, 121, 132.
Music, Mexican appreciation of,

141.

NAPOLEON III, schemes of, 150-

153.
National Academy of Arts, 119,

130-132.

National Museum, 133-135.
National Palace, 119.
National Pawn Shop, 119, 129-

130,214.

Negroes, Mexican, 225.
Nogales, Arizona, 228.
Nogales, Sonora, 228.
Nuevo Laredo, 228.

OAXACA, city of, 92, 94-98, 174,

250, 264.

Oaxaca, state of, 13, 92, 264.
Ojo de Agua, lake, 212.
Omitlan, 212, 215.
Onyx, Mexican, 121.
Opera, Mexico City, 139.
Orizaba, city of, 106.
Orizaba, Mt., 179, 199.
Orozco, insurgent leader, 267.
Outlook article, cited and quoted,

235-236, 262-263.
Ox-carts, 82, 96.
Oxen, Cholula road, 183.

PACHUCA, 205-209, 217.
Paintings —

cathedral, Mexico City, 121.

277

INDEX

Paintings (cont'd)

"Descent from the Cross" at
Tzintzuntzan, 222.

National Academy, 132.

Puebla cathedral, 180-181.
Palm shacks, Mexican, 249-250.
Parra, Felix, painting by, 132, 133.
Paseo de los Cocos, Vera Cruz, 63.
Patzcuaro, Lake, 222.
Pearsons, the, 25, 87.
Peons, 122-123, 226-227, 231-232.
Perez, Sefior, 192, 193, 198.
Pesos, Mexican dollars, 207.
Physicians, Mexican, 251.
Politeness, Mexican, 260-262.
Popocatepetl, 143, 179. 180, 187.

altitude, 190.

appearance, 191.

ascent of, 190-201.

comparative ease of ascent,
201.

descent of, 199-200.

description of crater, 197-198.

meaning of name, 191.

mosaic picture of, 138.

pronunciation, 191.

railway to, projected, 88.

view from summit, 198.
Post office, Mexico City, 137-138.
Pottery of Guadalajara, 202.
Prehistoric monuments, Uxmal,

49. See Ruins.
Prescott, W. H., "Conquest of

Mexico" by, 21.
Progreso, 34, 41, 51.
Protestantism in Mexico, 124,

125-126.

Public, the, quoted, 263.
Puebla, city of, 175-181.

cathedral, 180.

churches, 179-181.

history, 178-179.

naming of, 179.

population, 176.

society, 177-178.

suburbs, 176.

tiles made at, 180.

Puebla, state of, 175, 176.
Puerto Mexico, 85-86.
Pulque, 16, 206-207.
Pyramid —

Aztec, Mexico City, 120.

Toltec, Cholula, 180, 185-188.
Pyramids of Sun and Moon, 108,
186.

QUERETARO, 202.

chapel at, 203.

execution of Maximilian at,

153.
Quetzalcoatl, god of peace, 19.

RAILWAYS —

building of first, 24.

connections by, with United
States, 110, 228.

English spoken on, 239.

on west coast, 224.

Tehuantepec line, 81-82, 87-

88.

Ranchmen, characteristics of, 192.
Rattlesnakes, Lake Chapala, 205.
Real, shilling, 208.
Real del Monte, 210, 216, 217, 218.
Regla, 210, 212-215.
Regla, Count of, 214.
Religious toleration, 148-149.
Reni, Guido, paintings by, 132.
Reyes, Bernardo, 267.
Rubber industry, 88-90.
Rubens, paintings by, 132.
Ruins —

La Quemada, 229.

Mitla, 100, 103-106.

Monte Alban, 98-99.

Tula, 16-17.

Uxmal, 49.

Yucatan, 48-50.

Rurales, organization of, by Diaz,
74.

SACRIFICIAL STONES, 135, 168, 184.
Salina Cruz, 82-83, 223.
San Angel, suburb of, 137.

278

INDEX

San Antonio, town of, 212.

San Antonio, Texas, 235.

San Bias, 224.

San Carlos, Academy of, 119, 130-

132.
San Juan de Ulua, Castle of, Vera

Cruz, 61-62.
San Juan Teotihuacan, Pyramids

at, 108.

San Luis Potosi, 202.
Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez de,

147-148.

Santa Lucrecia, 67-70.
Santa Rosa, church of, Queretaro,

203.
Santo Domingo, church of, Oax-

aca, 96.

Seward, William H., cited, 148.
Silver, annual production of, 233.
Silver mining, 206-207.
Slavery question, Yucatan, 51-56.
Slums, Mexico City, 139.
Southern Cross, the, 216.
Spaniards in Mexico, 20-22.
Spanish language, displacement of,

and reasons, 241-242.
Springs —

at Xochimilco, 169.
sulphur, at Cuautla, 175.
Statues —

Mexico City, 140, 142.
of Hidalgo, 145.
Puebla cathedral, 180.
Steel manufacture, Monterey, 251.
Stephens, John L., cited, 50.
Suarez, Pino, 48.
Sulphur from Popocatepetl, 190,

198.
Sulphur springs, Cuautla, 175.

TACUBATA, suburb of Mexico

City, 137.
Tampico, 57.

Tapestries, Puebla cathedral, 180.
Tarahumare Indians, 234.
Taxicabs, Mexico City, 112.
Tehuacan, 93-94.

Tehuan tepee, Isthmus of, 67-91.
Tehuantepec, town of, 72-73,

75-82.

Temples, Cholula, 188.
Teotihuacan, pyramids at, 186.
Tetrazzini, 139.
Texas, cities of, corresponding to

cities across the border, 228.
Texcoco, Lake, 127, 179.
Theaters, 138-139, 203.
Thieves' Market, 119, 128-129.
Tile manufacture, Puebla, 180.
Time-tables, the matter of, 65-66.
Titian, paintings by, 132, 222.
Tlacolula, 100-101.
Tlaxcalan Indians, 19.
Toltec Indians, 15.
Torreon, 228, 229, 233, 237-239
Tree of Tule, 101.
Tula, ruins at, 16-17.
Tule, village of, 101-102.
Tzintzuntzan, painting at, 222.

UNITED STATES —

attitude toward Juarez' gov-
ernment, 150-153.

capital from, invested in
Mexico, 243.

citizens of, in Mexico, 237-
238.

Mexicans in, 236-237.

railway connections between
Mexico and, 228. See also
Railways.
Uxmal, ruins of, Yucatan, 49.

Voile National, 227.
Velasco, 212, 215.
Vera Cruz, 23, 57-66.
Viga Canal, the, 165-169.

WALLACE, LEW, "Fair God" by.

21.

Warner, Charles Dudley, 203.
Washwomen, 183.
Waterfalls, 213-214, 250.
Weights and measures, 207-209.

279

INDEX

White Lady (Ixtaccihuatl), 143.
Women —

community of, Tehuantepec,

72-80.

Mexico City, 121-122.
of west coast towns, 225-

226.
Vera Cruz, 58.

XOCHIMILCO, 164-172.
canals, 166, 169.
churches, 170-171.
floating gardens, 167.
possibilities of, 171-172.
springs, 169.
the Mexican Venice, 173.

YAQUI LABORERS, Yucatan, 44-46,
51-56.

Yucatan —

henequin production, 39, 42,

51.

imports, 39.
laborers, 44-46, 51-56.
people, 44-46.
ruins, 48-50.
seaports, 34.
slavery question, 51-56.
water and soil, 42-43.

ZACATECAS, 228, 229-233.
Zapata, insurgent leader, 267, 268.
Zaragoza, General, 179.
Zempoaltepec, Mt., 99.
Zocalo —

Mexico City, 119.

Oaxaca, 97, 98.
Zurbaran, paintings by, 132.

BENITO JUAREZ.

"THE TORTURE OF CUAUHTEMOC," NATIONAL MUSEUM.

DETAIL FROM CUAUHTEMOC MONUMENT. (SEE FRONTISPIECE.)

TARAHUMARE CARRIERS.

AMATECA GIRL.

A MEXICAN KITCHEN.

D

\

.' •'' \ y\y Zadatei

TEP1CN ">' ,-£GU As

JALISCO SMi

MEXICO-
OUTLINE

• ON THE ROAD TO MITLA.

ZAPOTEC CHILDREN IN RUINS OF MITLA.

HAUL OF MONOLITHIC COLUMNS, MITLA.

RUINS OF MITLA.

TURKEYS GOING TO MARKET.

MARKET, MEXICO CITY.

CAIENDARIO AZTECA 0 PIEDRA DEL SOI

[• [L "is 01 Dicimenr oti »io ot 1710

STONE CALENDAR OF THE AZTECS.

INDIAN WOMEN.

PORFIRIO DIAZ.

CATHEDRAL AT PUEBLA.

PYRAMID AT CHOLULA, WITH CHURCH ON SUMMIT.

PYRAMID AT CHOLULA FROM FARTHER SIDE.

POPOCATEPETL.

IXTACCIHUATL.

POPOCATEPETL — ASCENT.

POPOCATEPETL— DESCENT.

LAKE CHAPALA.

CHIHUAHUA.

rORREON.

MONTEREY.

VENUSTIANO CARRANZA

PHOTOGRAPH BY UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD. NEW YORK

FRANCISCO MADERO.

F Blichfeldt, Emil Harry

1215 A Mexican journey

B7 '
1919

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY