In fact, if you want to find the old True West, you'll find it undiluted
and pristine on the trip to Taos.

CHAPTER XII

TAOS, THE MOST ANCIENT CITY IN AMERICA

Taos, Santa Fe and El Paso--these were to the Southwest what Port Royal,
Quebec and Montreal were to French Canada, or Boston, Salem and
Jamestown to the colonists of the pre-Revolutionary days on the
Atlantic. El Paso was the gateway city from the old Spanish Dominions of
the South. Santa Fe was the central military post, and Taos was the
watch tower on the very outskirts of the back-of-beyond of Spanish
territory in the wilderness land of the New World.

Before Santa Fe became the terminus of the trail for American traders
from Missouri and Kansas, Taos was the terminus of the old fur trader
trail, in the days when Louisiana extended from New Orleans to Oregon.
Here, such famous frontiersmen as Jim Bridgar and Manuel Lisa and
Jedediah Smith and Colonel Ashley and Kit Carson came to barter beads
and calico and tobacco and firewater for hides and fur and native-woven
blankets and turquoise and rude silver ornaments hammered out of Spanish
bullion into necklace and bracelet. What Green's Hole and the Three
Tetons were to the Middle West, Taos was to the Southwest. Mountains
round Taos rise 14,000 feet from sea level. Snow glimmers from the
peaks more than half the year; and mountain torrents water the valley
with a system of irrigation that never fails. Coming out of the
mountains from the north, Taos was the natural halfway house on the
trail south to Old Mexico. Coming out of the Desert from the south, Taos
was the last walled city seen before the plunge into the wilderness of
forests and mountains in the No-Man's-Land of the north. "Walled city,"
you say, "before the coming of white men to the West?" Yes, you can see
those very walls to-day, walls antedating the coming of Coronado in 1540
by hundreds of years.

No motor can climb up and down the steep switchback to the Arroyo Hondo
of the Bridge. Cars taken over that trail must be towed; but from the
Bridge, you can go on to Taos by motor. As you ascend the mesa above the
river bed, you see the mountains ahead rise in black basalt like
castellated walls, with tower and battlement jagged into the very
clouds. Patches of yellow and red splotch the bronzing forests, where
frost has touched the foliage; and you haven't gone very many miles into
the lilac mist of the morning light--shimmering as it al