A Volunteer with Pike by Robert Ames Bennet

During the journey to Santa Fe, while stopping over at the town of San Juan, where I was treated with the utmost warmth of hospitality, I was able to inform myself as to the prosperous condition of the trader Le Lande, who had married and settled in the vicinity. But my apprehensions as to my reception by the Governor of this remote province prevented me from taking as deep an interest either in that rascal or in the strange customs and appearance of these Mexican people as I should have felt in easier circumstances.

Unlike Agua Caliente and some of the other small settlements we had passed, I found Santa Fe a town widely scattered in the outskirts. Many of the low adobe buildings which made up the bulk of the place stood each in its tiny patch of field, which, early as was the season, the people were beginning to cultivate with their rude ploughs and mattocks. Within these suburbs, however, the houses crowded closer and closer together, until they were for the most part separated only by streets that were no less narrow and crooked than dirty. A more striking difference between this two-century-old settlement and the ones up-country was the presence of the two huge adobe churches which towered among the hovels, all the more imposing for the contrast. Their windows, like those of the better houses, were glazed with sheets of thin, transparent talc.