Books: Borderland

RIO GRANDE — Harvey Fergusson — Knopf ($3). Time moves fast in the U. S., but in the Southwest it goes slower than elsewhere. Of Spanish feudalism only a “wistful remnant” is left; of the two-gun bad men only legends remain. But both the land and its natives, says Native Son Harvey Fergusson, are much the same as they were 300 years ago. There are still 9,000 Pueblo Indians, out of an estimated 25,000 when the Spaniards came. Author Fergusson says the Navajos are the only aboriginal people in the U. S. that have increased, have multiplied five-fold in the last 70 years, now number 30,000. Rio Grande, neither a guidebook nor a history, is something of both, covers in simple anecdotal style a big country, a spacious time. The easy-rambling narrative overtakes and passes historical figure after figure, never stays long with any: Indian Pope, the King Philip of the Southwest; Uncle Dick Wootton, who traveled 5,000 miles in unmapped, hostile country; James Ohio Pattie, who preferred adventurous hardships to riches and domestic bliss; Armijo, sheep-thief who became the absolute dictator of New Mexico; indefatigable Bishop Lamy, hero of Willa Gather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop; Billy the Kid, who “briefly ruled a region as large as France because he was faster on the draw than any other man in it”; Elfego Baca, Mexican bravo who got a sheriff’s job by standing off a posse of Texan sharpshooters for 36 hours; many another border saint & sinner, hero & villain. Of the Penitentes, pseudo-Christian sect of flagellants, Fergusson tells bloody tales, bloodier rumors. The sect still flourishes (TIME, April 17). Its headquarters are in Mora and most of its membership within New Mexico. In almost every Mexican village, says Fergusson. there is an apparently deserted building, the Morada, headquarters of the Penitentes. “Nowadays one may see only the whipping of bare and lacerated backs and the crucifixion of an image but what goes on in the night and in the secret chamber of the Morada none but the Penitent Brothers know.” A Mexican told Fergusson that the Penitentes number 35.000. Pioneer days in the Southwest are over, but the border still remains. The only pioneers now are the Mexican immigrants, “humble track-workers and fruit-pickers.” Sadly, somewhat senatorially Author Fergusson concludes: “Taos and Santa Fe now are art colonies. . . . Santa Fe now has much in common with Greenwich Village, Carmel, Provincetown and all those other foci of cultural infection which pimple the fair face of our land.” The Author had a gun of his own at 9, at 11 began shooting deer, riding range with the cattlemen round his native Albuquerque, N. Mex. After a restless course at two universities he passed his forest ranger’s examination, was waiting for an appointment when his father. New Mexico’s only Representative, offered him a government job in Washington. After three weeks he quit the service to try newspaper work, in Washington. Savannah, Richmond. Back in Washington again as correspondent of the Chicago Record-Herald, his job was “to keep in touch with all the members of one state delegation in Congress, and I achieved an intimate and disillusioning knowledge of these gentlemen and their affairs.” After eight years as editor of the F. J. Haskin newspaper syndicate, Fergusson began to pine for