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Updated: June 19, 2025
The low one-story adobes, fronted by broad, arched portals, that then lined the west side of El Paso Street for several blocks, was a long solid row of variety theatres, dance halls, saloons, and gambling-houses, never closed by day or by night. They were packed with a roistering mob that drifted from one joint to another, dancing, gambling, carousing, fighting.
Within a week they had explored the valley and its cañons, made a road to the timber eight miles away, built a saw-pit, sawed lumber for a skiff, ploughed, planted, and irrigated half a hundred acres of the parched soil, and begun the erection of many dwellings, some of logs, some of adobes.
The sky was cloudless and the distant range of low mountains stood out sharp and clear against the sky. As Kid Wolf rode into the town, a hard wind was blowing across the sands and it was high noon. San Felipe's single street presented an interesting appearance. Most of the long, flat adobes were saloons The Kid did not need to read the signs above them to see that.
In 1803 a chapel was built at a ranchería called by the Indians Mescaltitlan, and the Spaniards San Miguel, six miles from Santa Barbara. It was of adobes, twenty-seven by sixty-six feet. In 1807 eighteen adobe dwellings were erected at the same place.
Incredible as the thing seemed, so incredible that they had not at first believed their eyes, they were at the base of the walls of a fortress. A confused, general murmur broke forth of "Ruins! Pueblos! Casas Grandes! Casas de Montezuma!" The architecture, unlike that of Tegua, but similar to that of the ruins of the Gila, was of adobes.
We encounter the same brown adobes everywhere; the same villainous-looking leperos lounging at the corners; the same bare-legged, slippered wenches; the same strings of belaboured donkeys; the same shrill and detestable cries. We pass by a ruinous-looking house in a remote quarter. Our ears are saluted by voices from within. We hear shouts of "Mueran los Yankies! Abajo los Americanos!"
All these buildings, with the exception of the ruined convent, which was of stone, were built of adobes, or large sun-dried blocks of mud; and their walls, doors, and staring red roofs were everywhere bruised or perforated with shot.
Then the war.... The withdrawal of the army, the invasion of Sibley’s Confederate forces which had reached this far in the persons of Howard’s Arizona Rangers—and most of all the raiding, vicious, deadly, and continual, by Apaches and outlaws—had blasted Tubacca. Now, in the fall of 1866, it was a third of what it had been, with a ragged fringe of dilapidated adobes crumbling back into the soil.
The original structure was built in the usual style of all Indian trading-stations of that day, of adobes, or sun-dried bricks. It was enclosed by walls twenty feet high and four feet thick, encompassing an area two hundred and fifty feet long by two hundred wide. At the diagonal northwest and southwest corners, adobe bastions were erected, commanding every approach to the place.
In the hot lands of the coast, and some low valleys in the interior, the rancho is a frail structure of cane and poles with a thatch of palm-leaves. On the elevated "valles," or table-plains and here, be it observed, dwell most of the population it is built of "adobes," and this rule is universal.
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