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Aunt Maria, Clara, Thurstane, and Phineas Glover entered the residence of the chief, and found themselves in a room six or seven feet high, fifteen feet in length and ten in breadth. The floor was solid, polished clay; the walls were built of the large, sunbaked bricks called adobes; the ceilings were of beams, covered by short sticks, with adobes over all.
The town-house is a long building, occupying the whole upper end of the large rectangular plaza; at the lower end is the fine church and curato. Along the sides were tiendas, school, etc., well built adobes and plastered over with tinted plaster. Behind the church beyond the river rises a handsome background of mountains.
With their undoubted advancement beyond the Iroquois and Minnitarees, the Mound-Builders may have constructed better houses upon these platform elevations than the plans indicate. No remains of adobes have been found in connection with these embankments, and nothing to indicate that walls of such brick had ever been raised upon them.
At a place west of Zuni ancient relics were found, indicating that an extensive Pueblo town had formerly stood there, but “the structures were probably of adobes,” as there was no débris of stone walls, and only very faint traces of foundations.
An hour's ride over stretches of bare, brown plain, and through cornfields and orange groves, brought me to the handsome, conceited little town of Los Angeles, where one finds Spanish adobes and Yankee shingles meeting and overlapping in very curious antagonism.
Having safely landed our horses and mules, we picked up and rode to San Rafael Mission, stopping with Don Timoteo Murphy. The next day's journey took us to Bodega, where lived a man named Stephen Smith, who had the only steam saw-mill in California. He had a Peruvian wife, and employed a number of absolutely naked Indians in making adobes.
Santa Fé is located on a plateau of ground which is about seven thousand feet above the level of the sea. The town itself contains about five or six thousand inhabitants which includes all races. It is built of adobes, or sun-burnt brick, and occupies both sides of a small stream which is called the Rio Chicito and which flows into the Rio Grande nearly twenty miles from the town.
The great house of the Iturbi y Moncadas, erected in the first years of the century, was built about three sides of a court, measuring one hundred feet each way. Like most of the adobes of its time, it had but one story. A wide pillared corridor, protected by a sloping roof, faced the court, which was as bare and hard as the floor of a ball-room.
The trail wound diagonally across the mesa from the south and lost itself in snake-like twistings among hills to the north. Guided to the right into this trail, Pat found himself, a little before noon, in a tiny Mexican settlement. It was a squat hamlet, nestling comfortably among the hills, made up of a few adobes, a lone well, and a general store.
First of all a word about my house and home. Particular attention was paid to the roof, which was first boarded over, then on the boards three inches of mud, and over that sheets of corrugated iron. The whole idea of the adobes and the mud being to secure a cool temperature in summer and warmth in winter. No other materials are so effective.
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