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At its eastern entrance is a large residence, known as Pigeon's Ranch, from which the battle to be described derives its name, though, as stated, it is also known as that of Apache Canyon, and La Glorieta, the latter, perhaps, the most classical, from the range of mountains enclosing the rent in the mighty hills.
Thirteen years ago I revisited the once well-known Kosloskie's Ranch, a picturesque cabin at the foot of the Glorieta Mountains, about half a mile from the ruins on the Rio Pecos.
Weeds and sunflowers mark the once broad trail to the quaint Aztec city, and silence reigns in the beautiful valley, save when broken by the passage of "The Flyer" of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway, as it struggles up the heavy grade of the Glorieta Mountains a mile or more distant. Besides the driver, there was another employee the conductor or messenger, as he was called.
Pascualo was on his way home from an afternoon in Valencia; but on reaching the Glorieta, he stopped in front of the Old Customs House. It was six o'clock. The sun was tinting the enormous front of the building an orange gold, softening the colors of the greenish black smudge that the rain had left on the mansard windows.
A little below that island, in a spot where there are a great number of orange-trees now growing wild, the traveller is shown a small rock, two hundred feet high, with a cavern called by the missionaries the Glorieta de Cocuy. It was here that Cocuy, the chief of the Manitivitanos,* had his harem of women, and where he devoured the finest and fattest.
The train dumps you off at Glorieta, a little adobe Mexican town hedged in by the arid foothills, with ten-acre farm patches along the valley stream, of wonderfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a homemade system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish first came in the fifteen hundreds and found the same little checkerboard farm patches under the same primitive ditch system.
The automobile is there now in large numbers, in place of the old volante, and there are asphalted streets in place of cobble-stones. The band plays in the evening in the Parque Central or at the Glorieta, instead of in the Plaza de Armas, but the band plays. The restaurants are still a prominent feature in Havana life, as they were then.
Having reached Glorieta, you have decided which of the many ranch houses in the Pecos Forest you will stay at; or if you have not decided, a few words of inquiry with the station agent or a Forest Service man will put you wise; and you telephone in for rig or motor to come out for you.
My father had received an appointment to the Geographic and Political Institute. We lived on the Calle Real, just beyond the Glorieta de Bilbao, in a street which is now a prolongation of the Calle de Fuencarral. Opposite our house, there was a piece of high ground, which has not yet been removed, which went by the name of "La Era del Mico," or "The Monkey Field."
Near Glorieta, you can meet a rancher who last year earned $3,000 of hunting bounty scrip, if he could have got it cashed. In the White Mountains last year, two of the largest bucks ever known in the Rockies were trailed by every hunter of note and trailed in vain. Later, one was shot out of season by stalking behind a burro; but the other still haunts the cañons defiant of repeater.
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