San Juan Hill

“ As we approach the harbour, and at the entrance dodge into a channel between yellow reefs plainly visible through the clear water, it is no small thing to see our dear Stars and Stripes peacefully waving over that relic of mediæval Spain, the venerable Morro of San Juan on the bold headlands to our left; its wide-spreading fortifications, gray with centuries and fast going to decay, running in walls and terraces far above the sea. We throw our whole soul into the soft folds of that flag with a deep sense of joy. ”

“ The past—the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember. ”

“ Stopping for the passage of an army freight wagon, it seemed very comical to me to hear those Puerto Rican lads “gee-hawing” to the sleek American mules.
If the politics of our American cities could be as well administered as those of San Juan appear to be from the cleanliness and order of her streets we would indeed have cause to rejoice. The streets of San Juan were so clean that even the trailer of skirts might for once be forgiven her lack of common decency. ”

“ Take a bicycle and ride from Ponce around the island or straight across to San Juan. You will find the roads, when there are roads, superlatively excellent—particularly, if you do not mind an occasional hill or sharp and sudden shower of rain. The larger cities all have comfortable hotels; and, if you can afford to stay a month in Ponce, Mayaguez, and San Juan, you will bring back fragrant memories that will last you many years, or else you will send for your household gods and not come back at all. ”

“ During this week of waiting, the chief excitement was to walk out a mile and a half beyond the outposts to the hill of El Poso, and look across the basin that lay in the great valley which leads to Santiago. The left of the valley was the hills which hide the sea. The right of the valley was the hills in which nestle the village of El Caney. Below El Poso, in the basin, the dense green forest stretched a mile and a half to the hills of San Juan. ”

“ As we ascended the San Juan hills, we paused at a turn in the road and got a view of the beautiful valley in which Hollister lies. No more peaceful landscape ever greeted mortal eye. Every acre as far as one could see, not devoted to pasturage, was cultivated. There were grain and hay fields, orchards by the mile, and the seed farms in full bloom, while cattle and horses grazed peacefully in many pastures. ”

“ San Juan, where we passed a miserable week, is, even after seeing San Carlos, one of the most uninteresting places that can be imagined. The land is even flatter than the sea. It is a low sandy plain, just rising above the water, agreeably diversified with stagnant marshes, and hemmed in by unwholesome-looking forests. A few mushroom houses seem to have sprung up out of the sand, and among them three or four hotels, of the same board and shingle pattern that is so odious even in its native New England. ”

“ The street runs due north and south, pointing like a compass to the flat gray desert in the one direction, and in the other to the broken hills swept up into the San Juan mountains. At the northern end, that is toward the more inviting mountains, is the old Mission. To right and left of the whitewashed corridors in a straggling garden of pear-trees and olives and yellow roses are two rude arches made of seasoned cedar. From the top cross-beam of each hang three bells. ”

“ At San Juan, as in all other pueblos, the old adobe church, with its absurdly barbaric furniture and uncouth appearance, is a center of interest. Climbing the rickety ladder to its little gallery, and thence ascending to the roof, one gets the best idea of how valuable a garden spot this district is. As far as the eye can reach, up and down the river, stretch farms and orchards and plazitas. ”

“ About 1 1/8 miles northeast of the town are the Quintana thermal baths, in a building surrounded by pretty gardens. They are visited by sufferers from rheumatism and various other diseases.
San Juan is a perfect specimen of a walled town, with portcullis, moat, gates, and battlements. The wall surrounding this town is defended by several batteries. Facing the harbor are those of San Fernando, Santa Catalina, and Santa Toribio. Looking toward the land side is Fort Abanico, and toward the ocean the batteries of San Antonio, San Jose, and Santa Teresa, and Fort Princesa. ”

“ As we emerge from the tunnel, and creep around the perpendicular side of the mountain on a roadway barely wide enough to accommodate a single train of cars, a bewilderingly magnificent panorama opens to us. Away towards the southwest, one hundred and fifty miles, we observe the lofty and regular heads of the San Juan range, while a little further west we are able to distinguish Uncompaghre Peak, that looks down with benignant aspect upon the town of Ouray. ”

“ The San Juan district is remarkably situated in its geographical relations. This river, rising in the crests of the high mountains forming the water-shed or divide between the Atlantic and Pacific, flows southward until it enters the table-land formation, through which it flows in a southwesterly and then northwesterly direction, making a long, sweeping curve in New Mexico and Arizona, after which it runs westerly to its confluence with the Colorado. ”

“ The San Juan grows constantly wider. Its banks are dotted with the conical huts of Indians; the floors are always raised on poles, high above the ground, to escape the floods and insects.
As we sped down the river many of the naked, painted savages rushed out in their canoes, paddling and yelling like demons in attempts to overtake the launch. ”

“ Following the river, the valley narrows into a ravine, and some interesting masses of broken volcanic rocks, injected edgewise into the general sandstone strata, attract the eye.
It is the far-away landscape, nevertheless, that holds attention as we look backward. Rising above the level of the plain upon which the city is built, you can span with your vision hills and mesas southward, and behold “striking up the azure” a vast length of the ever-magnificent San Juan mountains,—the same glorious pinnacles that towered about us, near at hand, in Baker’s park. ”

“ When a baby is born in San Juan, a rarer occurrence than a strong man's death, the littlest of the bells upon the western arch laughs while it calls to all to hearken; when a man is killed, the angry-toned bell pendant from the eastern arch shouts out the word to go billowing across the stretches of sage and greasewood and gama-grass; if one of the later-day frame buildings bursts into flame, Ignacio Chavez warns the town with a strident clamor, tugging frantically; be it wedding or discovery of gold or returns from the county elections, the bell-ringer cunningly makes the bells talk. ”

“ Here we found that the river forks,--the principal branch, however, which retains the name of Goascoran, still preserving its general course north and south. The smaller branch, called Rio de San Juan, descends from high mountains to the westward, having its rise, we were told, near the secluded Indian pueblos of Similaton and Opotoro. We found the elevation of San Juan to be nine hundred feet above the sea,--an altitude sufficiently great, combined with the proximity of the Cordilleras, to give it a generally cool and delightful climate. ”

“ A sunset in San Juan is truly worth crossing either a continent or an ocean to witness, when the ranges toward La Paz are purple where the sage-brush is, and rose-color where the rains have washed the steep places to the clay, and over all of mesa and mountain the soft glory of golden haze. ”

“ Virginia Page found time passing swiftly in San Juan. Within two weeks she came almost to forget how she had heard a rattle of pistol-shots, how the slow sobbing of a bell in the Mission garden had bemoaned a life gone and a fresh crime upon a man's soul; at the end of a month it seemed to her that she had dreamed that ride through the night with Roderick Norton, climbing the cliffs, ministering to a stricken man in the forsaken abode of ancient cliff-dwellers. ”

“ The first eighty miles of the journey crosses about as pleasant a country as can be found anywhere, passing through the cities of Bella Vista, La Madrid, and San Pedro. At the latter place, the first town in the Province of Catamarca, desolation begins and continues until daylight the next morning when the traveler awakes at the large town of Dean Funes, the junction for San Juan, capital of the province of the same name. Low rocky [132] hills now rise in every direction; the soil, dry, parched, and somewhat stony is overrun with pampa grass. It is cool and a wind is invariably blowing. ”

“ The guides huddled around the dying embers, vainly endeavoring to warm their benumbed limbs; around us the hills seemed to be shaken by the heavy thunders that reverberated along the mountain tops.
Fearing that my horse would give out, as he had lived mostly upon bushes and coarse herbage since leaving San Juan, I arose early, and, guided by the bright starlight, caught my animal, and led him up the valley. A spur of the sierra blocked up the valley, and this steep ascent had to be climbed by the poor animal, he halting every few steps to draw breath. ”

“ The robbers are of their complexion, but not of their nature. These are getting less and less. They were created by poverty and politics, and with the cessation of pronunciamentos and the coming in of railroads they will die. The Valley of San Juan is one of the loveliest I have ever seen. Irrigated by the rivers that come from the hills in the edge of Tierras Calientes, it glows in green as perfect as Cortez's emeralds. For more than twenty miles its enchantments lie under the eye. ”

“ In proof of the tireless industry of the priests and Indians of their charge, there are to be found at San Juan many ruins of the aqueducts, or flumes, some of brick, others of wood, supported across ravines, which conveyed the water needed to irrigate the eighty acres of orchard, vineyard, and garden that used to be surrounded by an adobe wall. ”

“ There is a peculiar fascination about Spanish and Oriental cities, a barbaric splendor that attracts the eye, even while our common sense tells us of its tawdry nature.
Many have described the San Juan of the past, and as a picture that has been turned to the wall, let us for the last time see the Porto Rican capital through the glasses of a [180] clever newspaperman, whose pen paints its colors just as might the faithful camera. This was as Roderic saw it the day after his safe entry into the town:
San Juan wakes early. ”

“ The city of San Juan is Colonial in almost all its aspects, and its public and private gardens, filled with mingled tropical and temperate zone trees, shrubs and flowers, exhale the lazy atmosphere of days the memory of which is so constantly recurrent in all distant Argentine towns. Sleepy hollow; maybe, but its charm! A charm which will not nor can ever be “reconstructed,” try all those of us who are afflicted with unhappy artistic temperaments, never so hard. But that charm is still in San Juan, in Misiones (the one-time “Jesuit Empire”) , Salta and Jujuy ”

“ Nice cool nights for sound slumber? Right here in San Juan, amigo mío. A desert across which the eye may run without stopping until it be tired, a wonderful desert whereon at dawn and dusk God weaves all of the alluring soft mists of mystery? ”

“ The voyage seems only too short to Manuel and Dolores. When they arrive at San Juan there are so many new things to see that the days pass only too quickly. They have never been in the city before.
A STREET IN SAN JUAN
The narrow streets, with the still narrower [101] sidewalks, seem odd indeed to these children used to plantation life. Sometimes they cannot even walk side by side without one being pushed into the street. ”

“ It is the day of San Juan. A broad grassy plain lies just outside the town of San Ildefonso, and upon this the citizens are assembled. It is the scene of the festival, and the sports will soon begin. Before they do, let us stroll through the crowd, and note its component parts. All classes of the community—in fact, all the community—appear to be present. There go the two stout padrés of the mission, bustling about in their long gowns of coarse serge, with bead-string and crucifix dangling to their knees, and scalp-lock close shaven. ”

“ In the evening is when the inhabitants of San Juan really live. These are the pleasant hours of the day. From the sea comes a breeze, cool and fresh, to whisper to the few shade trees in the plazas and revive enervated humanity. Twice a week one of the military bands plays in [181] the principal plaza. ”

“ Wherever I wander, my spirit still dwells,
In the silvery San Juan [E] with its streamlet and dells;
Whose mountainous summits, so rugged and high,
With their pinnacles pierce the ethereal sky;
Where the daisy, the rose, and the sweet columbine
Blend their colors with those of the sober hued pine;
Where the ceaseless erosions of measureless time,
Have chiseled the grotto and canon sublime;
Have sculptured the cliff, and the stern mountain wall;
Have formed the bold turret, impressive and tall;
Have cut the deep gorge with its wonderful caves,
Sepulchral and gloomy ”

“ The balconies—every house has a balcony—are filled with gaily dressed women and officers, and through open windows glimpses of richly furnished interiors can be obtained. On the street level, the Grand [182] Central and other cafés, the Spanish Club and a dozen brilliantly lighted drug stores and shops help flood the plaza with light and lend life and gayety to the scene.
The throng is characteristic of San Juan of to-day—of the San Juan which will soon cease to exist. There are Spanish officers, hundreds of them, clad in an immense variety of uniform—to use a perfectly truthful paradox. ”