The golden legend was watered down somewhat by the time it reached New Mexico. Men still believed in it, and pursued it with determination, and felt that beyond the rim of the next mesa they would see something that would make Montezuma’s fabled city in the lake look small and weak; but the substance of the dream was evasive, out in the great empty stretches of New Mexico, and they found before long that they had invaded a harsh and difficult land that offered little more than hard work, a bleak subsistence, and room for limitless visions. Tenochtitlan was real and the Seven Cities of Cibola were not, but the dawnlight still lay upon the land, and the Spaniard pushed on up to found cities like Santa Fe and Albuquerque, thereby—as is the way of pioneers—accomplishing much that he had not thought about when he made his start.

The talented writer Paul Horgan muses about this in his newest book, The Centuries of Santa Fe , and in it we see the materialistic yearnings of the conquistador giving way to the spiritual longings of the saint. Mexico had been won by men who believed that with their swords they could carve out an empire of wealth and material power; New Mexico, finally, was won by men who believed that with their spirits they could create a different sort of empire, concerned less with power in this world than with blessedness in the next. Like the men-at-arms who followed Cortes, they had their triumphs and their defeats, and the dream which they finally realized was not quite the dream they had begun with; no matter, they wrote their own epic, and what they achieved has helped to color a part of American life ever since.

The Centuries of Santa Fe , by Paul Horgan. E. P. Button and Co. 363 pp. $5.

Mr. Horgan tells the story of New Mexico in a series of loosely connected, partly fictionalized essays, and succeeds uncommonly well in giving a picture of the bitter, frequently abortive struggle to bring the southwestern plains and mountains under civilization.

New Mexico was a queer offshoot from New Spain. Like most of mankind’s ventures, its settlement had a double motivation: the hardhanded desire for easy wealth, and the noble belief that values beyond life could be attained by men who were willing to endure hardship and forget about self-interest. It found precious little in the way of transportable riches. The Indians of this area were dimly like the Indians of the Aztec Empire, but they were also dismayingly different. If they lacked temples where the unspeakable rites of human sacrifice were celebrated, they also lacked gold and precious stones, and their wealth was likely to consist of a bin of corn, a shelf of clay pots, and a bewildering ritual designed to placate the unseen gods of wind and rain