The trader may have brought stone tools to offer, or a few pots to exchange for the kind made by the women here in the town.
And beyond all that, there was much to tell about and to hear.
The walking trader might come alone, but often he had company. Even so, in such a wilderness, reaching so far and open without forest and with little water, it took an intermittent multitude toiling on foot in tiny, scattered bands across rocky space immeasurable time to make their mark. But they made it. Trails were established, first in relayed knowledge of landmarks, and then in barely worn but visible pathways that were like the first tributaries of communication struggling to feed a stream of knowledge.
The incoming traders looked for things to take back with them when they left. News of what was to be had always took people to country strange to them. In the river towns, traders saw the accumulated produce of the pueblo farms. There was corn meal to be had, either coarse, or ground fine in pinole. Dried pumpkin seeds, squash were bartered. Irrigation ditches ran to cotton fields, and picked cotton was made into cloth, and cloth could be carried away in bulk, or in the form of shirts, kilts, sashes, or shawls. Mineral and vegetable dyes were used to decorate such garments. The traders might trade for the knowledge of how to use such colors.
There was one color and substance they wanted most, for the river pueblos had much of it, and prized it dearly. It was turquoise, and the people knew of a place, the only place in the river world, where it could be found in the earth. South of the site of Santa Fe, they mined turquoise for centuries in undisputed ownership. They made necklaces and ear pendants of the rich green-blue stone, usually carving little discs which they pierced and strung on yucca fibre. It was their principal jewel, and as such it was given to the gods in costumes, vessels, masks, fetishes with sacred meaning—and sometimes with magnificence: in one ancient town there was a superb basket, made in the shape of a cylinder, paved with 1,214 turquoises. If the people had treasure to bury, it was turquoise, and bits of red coral, which they put into large jars and hid in the earth.
Not only trade from far away made trails. The river people themselves went travelling to fulfill their needs, one of which was salt. They knew where to find it, in great deposits across the mountains to the east of the Rio Grande, and about in a line with the southernmost of the river pueblos. There, across that mountain range from the river valley, lived other town people who spoke a different language. They occupied ten or more communities, and their life faced out across the great plains to the east. Mountains behind them divided them from the river world. Precariously they survived the wandering fighters of the plains who came periodically to make war. Their bleak riches were the salt deposits which lay in a series of shallow, white lakes surrounded by low curving hills whose skyline seemed like the idling path of a circling and banking vulture. In some years the lakes were dry and the salt glistened dry at the sun. In others, a milky water filmed over the beds and rippled like cotton cloth when the wind came. Little vegetation grew about the lakes. They were like part of the underworld exposed. Nobody stayed by the brackish water for very long, but gathered up salt, and made whatever trade was necessary, and returned on the trail through the mountains to the river.
They saw much along the way. There were long-abandoned towns here and there, and from the ruins the travellers could learn something about the vanished inhabitants. Wanderers sometimes came to the pueblo world from down south on the river where, they said, there once flourished life in river caves that was long since gone. The river went more or less straight south, as you left the pueblo cities, and for the most part, the best—though not very good—trails were along the west side, for on the east, mountains came very close to the river and made travel difficult if not impossible. But finally after its usual succession of canyons and flat, fertile valleys, and after finding a pass between the ends of two mountain ranges, the river turned southeastward across a hard desert. Travellers had little reason to go there. They said that as far away as many days of walking, the river entered mountains which no man could enter, and disappeared between high rock walls into deep shadow. There were few people there.
But news of the other people who had once lived in river caves far away drifted with the wanderers. (These were the caves of the Big Bend and below.) The Pueblo dwellers listened, though the facts were scattered and few. Still, they could recognize by their own ways what other people must have been like.
The caves were in a great rocky wall of a river far to the southeast. (Was it the same river? It might be. And yet it was very far away. Rivers came from many places. Who could be sure?) The rocks were marked with lines like the flow of water. Water once made the caves and filled them and then left them as the river floor fell. People came to live in them for part of the year, passing the rest of the seasons on the flat plain above the river cliffs. On the cave walls and on near-by rocks they made pictures by scratching with hard stone. They drew animals and the four directions and made marks to show time passing, and more often than anything else they drew hands in outline on the rock. There: hand, meaning a person was here; the thumb spread, the fingers straight. On a wall, hand. On a flat stone up on the plain, hand. I, long ago, hand now, and forever, said the rocks, without saying who, exactly.
From the river they took smooth large pebbles the size of the palm of your hand and painted upon them various yellow, blue and gray lines and made certain spaces which sometimes looked like a man, sometimes like nothing to see but like something to think. They carried these, or made offerings of them in ceremonies, or buried them. They took their colors from rock and berry. With a hollowed bone from a deer’s leg filled with color that could ooze from a little hole in the end, they drew their shapes and spaces.
They had no corn, but near their places up on the plain above the cliff they gathered berries and yucca and ate of them. In time bushes and stalks grew nearer to the cave entrances, as seeds were dropped near the shelter. Paths and toe holds—the only way to the caves—led from the plain above. The men fished in the river where they could get to it. They used hooks made from bent thorns of devil’s-head cactus, and yucca fibre nets weighted with round stones, and stone fish-knives. With a throwing stick from which they discharged spear and arrow they hunted running animals. With bone daggers they struck a wounded animal to death.
There were not many caves—less than a dozen, and only one family lived in each, at a time. They built fires under the overhang of rock, using long slender wooden drills which they palmed to spinning against a wooden hearth to make smoke, spark and flame. From the dry hard brush of the plain they gathered little bundles of kindling.
Like many people they wore few clothes in warm seasons, when the men went bare, and the women wore skirts made of yucca fibre that was corded and woven into matting. In cold times, they all wore blankets of lechuguilla fibre twisted with strips of rabbit fur. Traders rarely came their way, and so they had no turquoise, no red coral for necklaces. Instead, they strung together something that made beads, that was fairly hard to get, even dangerous, and was therefore valuable and not entirely commonplace. It was the vertebrae of the rattlesnake.
What they used more than anything else were baskets and other articles woven from fibre or straw or tender twigs. They made no pottery. But baskets served to cook in and eat from. The children had toy baskets to play with. Even bracelets were made of basketwork. They came to know, as anyone might, how to make baskets from watching birds. The parent birds brought little twigs and bits of grass to make a nest, twining them in and out until a little cup-shaped wall was made. There the nestlings were safe as they grew. A woman of the river caves in time would have her nestling and must carry him with her and keep him. If she wove a nest for him out of fibres, she might make other things in the same way.
As children grew within each family, they met new times of life during ceremonies which told them fearful things and made them able. The gods lived in the sun, in fire and in the snakes of the canyon and the plain. People of the river, and those far away to the south beyond the river in Mexico, prayed to the same powers. Shaped stones and modelled clay represented other powers to help men make and keep life through the day’s hard work of providing shelter and food—coyotes, bears, lions, frogs, wolves.
All