Coast to Coast (14 page)

She was perfectly right. Those beloved old adventurers lived in the recent past, and the rumbustious tradition of the American frontier was established in our grandfathers’ time (Englishmen, of all classes, played a colourful part in the formation of the West: Deadwood Dick himself, who died in 1930, was born in England). I made a pilgrimage to Wild Bill Hickock’s grave, on the side of a hill outside Deadwood, and found it respectable and well-cared for. Hickock, who was Marshal of the town, was murdered in a Deadwood tavern with a revolver shot in the back. This is his second burial place. I forget where he was first laid, but in Deadwood I came across the memoirs of one of the undertaker’s men who had helped move the body to the cemetery on the hill. He first gave some agreeably horrific glimpses of life for an undertaker in the great days of Deadwood, when bodies were lying about all over the place, in smoky taverns or in lonely thickets, and then he described the reburial of Wild Bill. “When we dug up Wild Bill,” he recorded laboriously, “he still looked natural as life. Only his hair and whiskers had grown. But the air done something to the corpse. The air made Bill
sink
in
,
crumble
,
or
something.
We buried him up on the mountain.”

They were men of infinite, if scoundrelly, resource and courage, the western pioneers. In the early days of the Black Hills gold rush, which brought the first prospectors to Deadwood Gulch, they were opposed
not only by wild Indians, unknown territory and a ferocious climate, but also by the United States Army, which was ordered to prevent the entry of white people into those Indian territories. The most moving monument to the frontiersmen is the Thoen stone, preserved at Deadwood. It was found in the Black Hills in 1887, and commemorates the enterprise and fate of a group of prospectors who defied the Army, found some gold, but were annihilated by Indians. Only the stone remains of them, with this message scratched in ungainly letters on it: “Came to the hills in 1833. Seven of us, Del Lacompt, Ezra Kind, G. W. Wood, T. Brown, R. Kent, Wm. King. Indian Crow all ded but me. Ezra Kind killed by Indians beyond the high hills. Got our gold June 1834. Our ponies al got by the Indians. I have lost my gun, and nothing to eat & Indians hunting me.”

Few such individuals prospect for gold nowadays, for it is too expensive to extract it in any quantity; but the greatest gold mine on the American continent, the Homestake, is still active in the Black Hills, in territory haunted by the shade of many a shaggy fortune-hunter. Homestake is a vast concern, dominating the town of Lead, its huge shaft-heads high above the town, its welfare club bright in the main street, its employment office smart and busy. Of all the big gold-mining companies, through which so many famous fortunes were made, only Homestake is still producing. I was taken down the mine by a knowledgeable engineer who had spent the greater part of his life with Home-stake, and who now descended its shafts every day, to wander through its dark lonely corridors and visit the different crannies, tucked away in the labyrinth, where work was in progress. We went down to the 4,000-feet level in a steel cage, dripping with water to prevent the overheating of its wooden supports, and found ourselves in a dank and silent gallery. There was an uncanny stillness about it. Now and again a solitary miner, in steel helmet and rimless protective spectacles,would walk to the lift swinging his electric light and ring the summoning bell; and then the lift would come clanging down, and there would be a brief exchange of words, and the clatter of its steel gate. Generally there was not a sound, and our own voices reverberated creepily down the corridors. We walked a mile or more. Sometimes the galleries were lit with electric light, sometimes they were dark, and we relied on our safety lamps. As we walked, the engineer explained some of the techniques of mining in the Black Hills. The rock we were beneath was some of the oldest in the world, and into this antique substance the Homestake miners had already driven shafts to a depth of 5,000 feet. Now they were exploring deeper still. Mining was in progress on twenty-seven different
levels inside the hills above Lead. Usually the veins of ore were attacked from beneath, and the miners worked upwards, creating a great chamber in the rock. To begin with, the masses of ore drilled off its walls were left where they fell, and the miners climbed ever higher on top of them; eventually, when the “stope” was exhausted, the whole lot was extracted and sent up above by elevator shafts. A ton of gold ore, thus laboriously extracted, yielded 4 oz. of pure gold, and this only after immensely complicated treatments (though this stingy yield does not prevent Homestake from making a steady annual profit of something over 4 m. dollars).

We talked long and leisurely as we walked through the mine, but still there was no sign or sound of activity. “It’s a lonely place,” said I. “Who would have expected a gold mine to be so empty?” “This is normal enough,” the engineer replied. “Don’t you worry, there are plenty of people down here with us. During the war, now, that was different. The Government banned gold-mining then, so that miners could go and do war work, and the old mine really
was
empty. There was lots of equipment about, but all standing idle in the dark. We had a few watchmen working here, they used to roam about sometimes to see how things were, but most of the time it was all empty, all 5,000 feet of it, all twenty-seven levels.”

At last we heard far in the distance a rumble of machines, and presently we saw lights. My guide suddenly left the corridor and swung himself up a ladder, through a narrow crevice in the ceiling. I followed. The surrounding mud was thick and slippery, and at the top of the first ladder we twisted around on a small ledge of wet rock, and began climbing another. Finally, squeezing through a little chimney, we emerged in a huge, low, cavernous, dusty, bright-lit chamber. There was a terrible din. At one end of the place groups of men, their faces black with dust, were drilling with large and shuddering electric drills. Sweat ran heavily down their faces, and when they stopped to adjust the machines they wiped their foreheads with their sleeves. The rock was falling off in great flakes. Sometimes a man paused from his drilling and prised a mass out of the rock wall with a steel instrument; it made a horrible tearing noise, like a tooth coming out. The ore was dark and unattractive. “Where’s the gold?” I asked. The engineer smiled kindly. “You can work down here for five years,” he said, “and never see a streak of the stuff.”

Nevertheless, the gold is there, and it was from this scrubby mountain that the Hearst family extracted its wealth. Up the shafts goes the nasty dirty ore, to be crunched in giant crushers, ground between steel
balls, whirled around in circular vats, and pushed over vibrating screens. Finally the gold is taken to be refined in an unpretentious brick building guarded by armed company policemen; and there a handful of workers, through the months, accepts and handles unexcitedly a constant flow of unimaginable wealth. “What happens to the gold when it’s ready?” I asked, with a vision of creaking harnesses and rocketing stage coaches. My informant looked a little cagey. “It all goes to Denver, to the Mint. All gold has to be sold to the Government, at a fixed price.” “Yes,” I said, “but how does it get there?” “Oh, by train, you know.” “Where from? There isn’t a station here, is there?” He looked at once determined and apologetic. “No, but it goes somewhere else first, by lorry.” “How do you mean, somewhere else?” “Well, it goes to a station somewhere else. In Wyoming.” He was a friendly and helpful man, but I had the impression that on this point he did not want to be pressed; so, changing the subject swiftly, I asked him if there were many Plymouth Brethren in Lead, and he answered with a fluency that seemed to betray relief. I may have imagined all this; but it seems only natural that this great gold mine, one of the biggest half-dozen in the world, should not be anxious to advertise the route by which its hardwon treasure leaves the mountains for the Mint.

Villains as well as heroes were produced by the adventure of the West; little villains, like those unscrupulous prospectors who would push a rival unhesitatingly down any convenient mineshaft, big villains like the great combines which thrust their way to pre-eminence, through the competitive turmoil of the times, to dominate the economy and society of their regions. One of the great popular villains of this kind is the Anaconda Mining Company, a fabulous octopus of a firm which has its headquarters at Butte, Montana, on top of a hill made of copper. Until recently, at least, this mammoth company (with subsidiaries all over the United States, and in South America) was regarded by many Americans as a symbol of all that was ruthless, thoughtless and unkindly in big business. Trade unionists loathed it; liberal journalists vilified it; the unfortunates who worked in its ill-ventilated copper mines, and lived in its unkempt and filthy streets, cursed it without inhibitions. It has been much improved by these persistent criticisms and now provides its workers with some excellent welfare facilities; but it is still no Fairy Godmother, all the same, and still dominates Butte with almost feudal absolutism. On “the richest hill on earth” the company’s tentacles are impossible to evade. Anaconda even owns its own newspapers, with the consequent deadening effect on public discussion, and I remember as symbolic of its manners a gigantic chimney, the largest
in the world, which it has erected in a Napoleonic position not far away, and which its publicists never stop boasting about.

Butte, a dismal town, was once the roughest and brightest of the western mining camps. Until a few years ago gambling was legal there, and there was a famous “prostitutes’ line” (“Just over there,” an Anaconda official remarked to me nostalgically, “you could almost see it from my window”). Now all is drab and dingy, and the few night clubs, ablaze with tawdry light, are outside the town in a dreary little hamlet among the hills. You can still hear many different languages in the bars of Butte, and on the town boundary there is an official sign which says of the place: “She was a bold, unashamed, rootin’, tootin’, hell-roarin’ camp in days gone by and still drinks her liquor straight.” But there is an endless dull slovenliness about the town that is greatly depressing, and frequently you can see cracks in the streets, and green grass growing, and the signs of movement and stress that show a mine-shaft is beneath. Anaconda arranged that the town boundary should avoid many of its pit-heads, to preclude certain taxations; but underground there are no such distinctions, and the whole of Butte’s hill is warrened and honeycombed with copper mines.

Butte stands in open country, on the edge of the hills, like a scab on a fair skin, coarsened by the worst excrescences of the profit motive. But even in this gruesome place the spirit of the West is apparent. The miners are a friendly, salty, brave, uninhibited people, rough enough in the streets on paydays, leathery of cheek and brusque of tongue, but infused with a frontier liberty; and it is queer and interesting to see how closely the miner is bound to his calling, though he is no longer hoping for bonanzas, but simply working for a wage. It will be a long time before the values of commercial Americanism totally swamp the West. Though the towns are spreading, and the old individualisms are mellowing, and you need a licence to shoot the elk; it is still the great trains, and the uranium seekers in their battered jeeps, and the mines, and antelopes in the prairies, and such high-vaulted, tempestuous tokens that I remember most precisely from those regions.

B
right, cheerful colour, too, is a characteristic of the West, especially in those parts where the Spanish Empire once held sway; no imperialism was ever more gorgeous, or more dazzling in its glare and glitter. Driving through New Mexico one day I came across a rock, at a place
called El Morro, on which many generations of travellers have carved their names. First the aboriginal Indians cut crude pictographs, of stilted human figures, bison, and the imprints of hands. More recently American emigrants, moving west, stopped at El Morro for water and scratched their names—stout Anglo-Saxon names, conjuring up scenes of wagon-trains, corn-cob pipes and grace before dinner (though one Anglo-Saxon, Lieutenant E. F. Beale, was on his way to Arizona for experiments with Arabian camels). Some of these signatures are carefully cut, some roughly; some with the decision of education, some childishly. But all are outshone by a magnificent inscription that stands in a place of honour on the rock, with flowery embellishments and exquisite lettering, the very essence of cultivation and aristocracy; this was placed on the rock in 1605 by Don Juan de Oñate, leader of the first Spaniards to colonize the wild Indian country of the south-west, and it stands as a symbol of that brilliant Spanish spirit, born of bigotry and savage cruelty, which still brightens the whole southern frontier of the United States. In Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, the three southern-western States, Spanish ways still prevail, though harried everywhere by the advancing American civilization from across the mountains.

The most complete and delightful Spanish enclave of all is to be found in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, above Santa Fé. They are some of the most beautiful of the American mountains, an outcrop of the Rockies jutting out across the desert. From far away, to the traveller approaching through that arid wilderness, they seem a promise of mystery and lush enchantment. The desert around the Rio Grande (here no more than a clear stream) is rolling and disjointed, and intersected by deep ravines, so that you bob along the tracks, now on the crest of a desert ridge, now deep in a shrubby gorge; but always ahead of you are the mountains, blue and beckoning, a frame of dark clouds around them and a few streaks of snow on their crests.

Clustered on the slopes of these mountains are a number of Spanish villages, where old customs are still alive and where Spanish is still generally spoken. There are roads leading to these villages now—tarmac roads to the bigger ones, dusty tracks to the smaller and remoter places—but they are still insulated by thought and tradition from the encroaching Americanism, and have a charming air of tranquil satisfaction. I remember in particular the village of Cordova, which is tucked away off the highway at a height of about 8,000 feet. The track which approaches it begins respectably enough, but soon lapses into ruts and rocky ledges, and becomes disagreeably steep; until it eventually leads
you, with much roaring of engines and changing of gears, between narrow walls into the village. Cordova is built on a bluff. Below there is a little gulley, with a stream running through it, covered in lush crops—wheat and chili, and orchards of apples and pears. The village is full of growing things, too. The houses are shuttered and cool, with verandas and small courtyards, and when we were there they were ablaze with hollyhocks. Innumerable children, with attendant puppies, hang about its alleys jabbering in Spanish, or sit dangling their bare feet from the top of its stone walls. Sometimes in the evening a couple of tough shepherd boys will drive their sheep through the little square, brandishing sticks, with a clatter of hoofs and a few high-pitched and ineffectual commands. Old men with battered hats saunter by on donkeys on their way to the tavern. Hens clutter up backyards, and careful housewives brush their porches or shake carpets out of their windows.

When we first skidded and roared our way into Cordova, we found ourselves (like every visitor) quickly surrounded by a heterogeneous crowd of children, idlers, and passing farmers, and from it there emerged a tall, shy man, with a dome-shaped head and an agreeable smile. He introduced himself as George Lopez, and asked us if we would care to see his wood-carvings, rather as the roue of tradition hawks his etchings. We went inside his house, by way of a spotless little hall (his wife pausing occasionally, as we went, to flick some dust from the polished wooden floor) and found ourselves in a small, low-ceilinged room, smelling of wood, which was cluttered up with wooden figures. Their spirit had come direct from Spain—Cordova is one of several villages where there still live heirs to the original land grants of the Spanish crown. Many of them were of religious subjects: oddly formalized saints, in bright colours, and Virgins of an appealing angular simplicity. Others were of country subjects—animals and trees and flowers—and some of these seemed to show traces of Indian influences. We bought a small object described as a Christmas tree; from its straight trunk there jutted large flat leaves, and on each leaf there sat a little mountain creature—a squirrel, a hare, and a chipmunk, and a bird or two. Lopez said he had thought of this design himself, and his wife beamed with a most infectious pride.

In these anachronistic villages, where such handicrafts still flourish despite the chain stores in the valley below, there lingers a misty, medieval intensity of religion. At Chimayo, in the foothills of the mountains, there is a small wood and adobe church which is a hallowed place of pilgrimage. It is entered through a rickety wooden gate, between two gnarled cottonwood trees and past the serried tombs of the family that
built it. In an unpaved room at the back of the church there is a hole in the sand, which allegedly cannot be filled or emptied however hard sand is shovelled into it or taken out. This sand is supposed to have miraculous powers, and those who will apply it to their crippled legs or withered arms will find them cured. The walls of the church are crowded with discarded crutches, with fervent letters of gratitude in Spanish or limping English, with paper flowers and postcards of the Virgin. (Among the first American troops to fight in the Pacific war were many New Mexicans, and at the end of the war hundreds of them joined in a pilgrimage of thanks to Chimayo.)

Often, on little hillocks in this country, you will find small chapels, approached by winding, precipitous paths, like some Buddhist
chorten
in the Himalaya; and on the outskirts of many villages there are solitary crosses, facing (it seems) the cardinal points of the compass. I asked several times what these signs meant, and was told that they formed part of the mystery of the Penitentes. This lay religious order, of peculiar characteristics, came to New Mexico with the Franciscan friars from Spain, in the sixteenth century (having earlier crossed the Pyrenees from France). I had heard strange rumours about its rites, and inquired in Santa Fé about them. I was told to go to Truchas, on a commanding spur on the western slopes of the mountain, and to ask its inhabitants; for it was a centre of Penitentes activity.

The village was all but deserted when I reached it. There had been a
fiesta
the day before, and almost the only people in sight were a few obese Spaniards, propped up in the sunshine against a wall, with bloodshot eyes and pale cheeks, their hats pushed to the backs of their heads, breathing heavily and looking distinctly uninformative. There was a man sitting on a torpid donkey, and from time to time, raising himself momentarily from his slumped position over the animal’s neck, he would shout something blurred and incoherent in the direction of a small tavern; from where would come a muffled reply, at once testy and lethargic, as if the innkeeper was lying in bed with his boots on‚ and had to remove the blanket from over his head before he could answer.

However, there was a trim house not far away, with a veranda looking away over the desert below. (In the distance I could see the suspicion of smoke from Los Alamos, the laboratory-town where the first atom bomb was designed.) Its owner was friendly and articulate. He had been a well-known Truchas character for many years, had represented the district in the New Mexico Congress at Santa Fé, and was an elder of the Order of Penitentes. He pointed out to me a low adobe building,
surmounted by a cross, on the edge of the village. This was the
morada‚
or lodge, of the Penitentes, where they held their ceremonies. I asked him what was unusual about their orders of service. Was it true, as I had heard in Santa Fé, that some of their rituals were cruel and bloody, and that the Passion was celebrated by the crucifixion of one of the members, high in the mountains? On these subjects, he replied, he was forbidden to speak, for the Penitentes were a secret fraternity; and he then shook hands, warmly enough, and returned to his house.

I went to the other end of the village and called at a small school maintained by the Presbyterian Church. The headmistress, partly inspired, perhaps, by some slight antagonism towards the Catholic Church, and partly by the fascination of the subject, was very willing to talk about the Penitentes. Certainly the rumours were true. She was not sure about the crucifixions, which had led in the past to the deaths of several members of the Order, but she knew a good deal about some other esoteric customs, and they were certainly still maintained. The high moment of the Penitentes’ year is their commemoration of the moment when the veil of the Temple was split. Then in the Catholic church of Truchas the lights are doused, and in the pitch darkness strange rites are performed. Great stones are rolled about the floor of the church, and there is a clashing of chains, and all over the village the noise can be heard. After the service harsh penances are performed by chosen members of the sect (they consider it an honour to be selected). Outside the
morada
on the night of Good Friday, my informant had seen a man circling a cross on his knees, bearing on his back a huge tree-trunk, the weight of which nearly floored him. In other years processions have been seen coming down from the mountains that included bare-backed men whipping themselves as they walked; their instruments of flagellation were branches of a cactus called the yucca tree, and their backs bled profusely; so did their bare feet as they stumbled over the rocky paths. Always in these processions one man represented Christ, carrying a heavy wooden cross on his bare back, and wearing a crown of thorns.

I asked the Presbyterian lady if the Catholic Church had anything to do with these ceremonies. “Of course they do‚” she said briskly. “It all goes on in the Catholic Church, doesn’t it? Catholic priests take part in it sometimes.” When I returned to Santa Fé I called at the office of the Archbishop (in a fine old Spanish house) and talked to one of his chaplains. Yes, he said, the Archbishop had extended recognition to the Penitentes, but in return for their abandoning their superstitious ways. If such things still went on in the mountains, they were performed by dissident groups of the Order: and indeed, if I liked, I could call on the
head of the fraternity and see for myself his devotion to the Church.

I had some trouble finding this elder’s house. He lived in a poorish outskirt of the town, and I groped my way, in the dusk, through a number of dusty streets with washing flapping in the gardens and many radios blaring. When I did find it, I was kindly received. The elder was a tall and handsome old Spaniard who was treated with some deference by the other unidentified men and women thronging his parlour. On the walls were many signed portraits of eminent Catholic clerics, in their vestments, and there was a framed declaration to the effect that the Order of Penitentes had been given the blessing of the Archbishopric. The elder assured me that all was now harmony between the Order and the Church. There were no more crucifixions in the mountains; but (said the elder warily) it was not beyond the realms of possibility that a few odd practices were still performed in distant corners of the Sangre de Cristos, by refractory members of the fraternity.

He himself had taken part in many such esoteric rites, in the old days, but had conscientiously abandoned them as the Church demanded. Nevertheless, I could not help feeling, as we talked under the saintly gaze of the prelates, that part of his heart, at least, was still with the midnight processions. Nor could I ever see the mountains again, as I crossed the stony desert, without imagining the poor man with the tree on his back, crawling around the cross, or hearing the ghastly clatter of the stones and the chains from the church on Good Friday.