Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 November 1893 — A Glimpse of the Orient. [ARTICLE]

A Glimpse of the Orient.

New York Sun “Traveling up the Rio Grande valley last month,” said a tourist just returned from New Mexico, “some of the scenes that I saw seemed to be rather of Syria than of a Western territory of the United States. The little patches of wheat and barley about the Indian and Mexican villages had been reaped,and the natives were threshing grain by the primi tive means used in scriptural times. In the open fields was the threshing floor of clay, leveled and beaten hard. Upon this the grain in the straw was stacked, and around the edge of the heap sheep or goats were driven in a circle at top speed. As they ran the grain continually worked down from the center under their feet, which quickly threshed it from the straw. The hurrying animals; the darkskinned, picturesquely clad Mexicans and Indians, shouting, gesticulating and cracking whips to urge them on: the brown, bare-armed women winnowing grain by tossing it high in blankets, made a picture full of color and motion. In its setting of arid landscape, bounded by distant mountains, with a foreground diversified by a few flat-roofed mud houses, standing amid tiny vineyards, cornfields and orchards, and a few towering cottonwoods marking the course of the Rio Grande, the spectacle seemed an antique passage from the Orient.”