Trading in Santa Fe Plaza - Day 2

The second day of trading in Santa Fe's town square finds the cigar-smoking wagon owner has beaten everyone through customs and is trading his wares ahead of the others, getting the best bargains.  After he hired a translator to figure out local taxes and how to fill out forms, the locals look over his axes and rifles, and a mule driver displays one of his specialties - a blanket from Saltillo.  Other crates hold windowpanes, glass bottles, and mirrors.  The townspeople want the glass to decorate the home with colorful shards.  Some barrels contain tacks, brass nails, butcher and hunting knives, and hoes and rakes.  When the boxes are emptied of their cotton and silk thread, hooks and eyes, needles and pins, spoons and scissors, the boxes will be sold to be made into chandeliers and mirror frames. 

The trader will sell his wagon for as much as it cost and get a $10 a yoke for his oxen.  Operating as a entrepreneur - there are no big companies in this trade - he will bring back blankets, jewelry, mules, (soon the famed Mexican mules), gold dust, coins, and silver bullion to sell profitably in Missouri.

The plaza isn't all business though...under the cottonwoods, boys play "pitarrilla", a type of checkers.  Nearby and laid out on a "jergus" (course wool carpets or blankets), is a display of round loaves of bread, sacks of cornmeal and apples, corn, apricots, melons, grapes, peaches, tomatoes and chiles.  A butcher sells mutton hung from the tree limbs.  The locals know that the small sheep that graze the Santa Fe plateau is nutritious and quite tasty. 

In the shade of the "portales" (arcades that rim the plaza and protect from sun and rain) Pueblo Indians sell cooking and storage pots.  A burro goes by dragging two planks, costly timber that is cut from up in the mountains. 

Overlooking all this activity a soldier stands guard and Albino Perez, governor of New Mexico, watches.  His palace is plain but contains offices, a guard room, living quarters, a prison, a dirt floor ballroom with buffalo hide doors and a rare luxury - glass windowpanes.  In front of the flagpole runs the "accquia", a open ditch that brings water for drinking and washing from a nearby swamp area since the town lacks a sewer system. 

Our trip to Santa Fe is through - time to ride back to Missouri with our profits!

Next time - Moving into Texas
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On this Day in Pioneer History: On August 8, 1839, Nelson Miles, one of the most successful but controversial officers in the Plains Indian Wars, is born on a farm in Massachusetts.