Dodge City times. [volume] (Dodge City, Kan.) 1876-1892, 1880-04-17
On the Plaza, Santa Fe.

THREE times a week the military band
plays in the plaza at sunset, and ac-
cept the invitation of General Edward
Hatch, that bravest of cavalry-men and
most genial of gentlemen, to join him
in a cigar at headquarters, and listen to
the music. The benches on the plaza
soon fill up, and the lDortdles that form
a complete colonnade over the sidewalks
around the whole square became pOpu-
lous with pleasure-hunters. 1t is tri-
weekly acquaintance day for the whole
town. A noisy train of long-horned,
thin-bodied oxen, dragging trailed wag-
ons piled high with freight from the
railway terminus, comes round the cor
ner, and stops to listen before unyokiny
for the night, the whacker's long whip
cracking like pistol-shots as he lashes
his unwieldly beast into position. Half
a dozen donkeys, loaded with immense
burdens of fagots cut in the foothills,
are allowed to stop their peregrinations
in search of customer, and make
squealing remarks to the rival burros of
the grass merchant, whose boy is
kept busy with his clnb in protecting
aged parchment-cased Mexican whose
skin is much the color of his shoes, and
begs US to buy his musk-melons, or his
peppers, or at least, senores, the wild
plums that lie in red and saccharine
masses under the lid of his homemade
basket. Then an Indian, tall, straight,
grinning from under hair changed"
like Saratoga bellies, saunter's up,
and thrusts from under his striped
blanket bony hand and arm, with a
"How?" that seems to come from the
heels of his beaded moccasins. He
tears from his bundle a fragment of
coarse wrapping paper, sprinkles upon
it some tobacco, and calmly begs a light
from the Generals cigar. 1t is given
dignity amounts to nothing with an
Indian in such matters), and the
aborigine moves on to range him.
self with half dozen other shapeless
figures in stripes and checkers and zig
zags of Navajo blanket, who lean upon
the fence, and keep time to the quick
step with their active toes.
Every where are troops of women;
and just before us one of the acknowl-
edged demi-monde sits chatting with a
young mother, nodding to acquaint-
ances, and amusing the little laughing
nut-brown babe, without any one lifting
an eyebrow. A woman must be very
far gone indeed before Mexican society
(barring a select few will ostracize her.
This girl is dressed in an attempt at
American style, and loses by it. Her hat
explains what becomes of tine remnants
of superanuated and culled-out stock
which must be left over from each sea-
son. The shops of Santa Fe are a
museum of ancient styles in bonnets and
hats-relics of fashions which expired
before the war, and evidences of an in
genuity in bad taste that could never be |
equaled by design to produce horri
bic effects. 1t is the country people |
who buy them. What do they know of |
fashion ut Santo Domingo or Abiquiu?
l am inclined to believe that the re-
ported grace of motion traditional in
speaking of the Spanish has not been
wholly lost in their American descend
ants. In their gait, in their attitudes
(when not sitting on their heels), in the
use of the ever-present fan, and the mo-
ton of the slender hand, thers is
natural and familiar grace not charac-
teristic of American ladies, and utterly
lacking in the peasantry of the Teutonic
and other Northern races. What has
often been remarked of the senoritas of
old CASTLE is still true of the young
women of Santa Fe.-Ernest LngersoU,
IN Harper's Magazine.