Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1890 — The Oriental Aspect of New Mexico. [ARTICLE]

The Oriental Aspect of New Mexico.

Harper's Weekly, In many parts of New Mexico the landscape features present an aspect not dissimilar to certain parts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. There is the same clear air, high lights, and wide desert spaces bounded by plateaus and sand hills, and winding through the flat sandy valley, a silver stretch of river, its banks, bordered by occasional trees—ln New Mexico cycamores and cottonwoods —growing singly and in plumps. The low, flat-roofed, thickwalled[houses of sun-baked brick, of tints akin to the soil, add to this impression, and tho Oriental aspect of the country is sustained in many Of the structures, implements, and customs lof its people. In open fields are the i threshing-floors of heated clay,, upon | which sheep, goats or asses trample ! the wheat from the straw, and the, | grain is afterward winnowed by the ; process of tossing it from blankets into ■the nil-; and in RP.cluded- jcaimm.un-ities the Juice yetis troded from the grape in rawhido tubes by the naked feet of men and women, and fermented into I wine in great ollas, or earthern jars as ; large as barrels. In these by-places, ; oxen, as in patriarchal times, draw [SaSSen or one-handled plough or creaking cumbrous wooded cart by ! means of yokes stretched across their horns.