Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Lincoln Canes Connect Taos and Washington, D.C.

By Carol Mell, 7-16-08

	Lincoln's hands rest on a bundle of canes, symbol of authority that dates back to the Roman Empire.

Taos sometimes seems to have amazing connections with almost everywhere else. I was thinking about this as I toured the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., two weeks ago. I’ve been studying Taos history for my new job, giving history tours to tourists, so that could be the reason I couldn’t stop seeing the East through a Western lens.

My minister husband and I had been called out of our ordinary lives to dwell for a few days on the Virginia side of the Potomac River at the Virginia Theological Seminary, where the grass is very green, the trees oh so leafy, and water flows through sprinklers rather than an acequia, Arabic for ditch.

One afternoon we rode a commuter train past Taos resident Donald Rumsfeld’s old hangout, the building shaped like a pentagon, and arrived in our nation’s capitol, or Monumentville, and stepped out into the heat waves, wavy as old window glass. The many grey and white pillars, that always remind me of elephant legs, made the street seem heavy. The air was soppy and suffocating, but we pressed on past the very White House, threading through the summer-colored crowd to find Lincoln’s memorial and mounted the long slope of steps to where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous dream speech as he looked out beyond the reflecting pond toward the great white phallus meant to remind us of George Washington.

Inside, we found honest Abe seated in what I’d always thought was a throne. He and his throne are big, massive really.

My husband, a historian before he was a minister, pointed out that Abe’s hands rested on a bundle of sticks, bound together with bands.

“Those are the Roman canes,” he said, “called fascio, I think. They were the symbol of ancient Rome. Italians who wanted to restore the Roman Empire called themselves fascists, but you better look that up.” So I did. The bundle of rods, in Latin called fasces and in Italian fascio, symbolized strength through unity; each rod being fragile but becoming strong when bundled together.

A few days later, giving a tour on my way to Taos Pueblo, I told again how each year the new pueblo governor receives the Lincoln cane, among others, as a symbol of the right of the people to govern themselves.

I decided to research the canes, too, and discovered that, in 1858, the U.S. recognized the rights to the land granted to the pueblos by the Spanish land grant of 1659. Indians from several pueblos went to Washington, D.C., to meet with Lincoln. He gave each tribe a silver-headed cane engraved with his name and the year, 1863.

According to the book, “The Taos Indians and the Battle for Blue Lake” by R.C. Gordon-McCutchan, that land Lincoln recognized, including the sacred Blue Lake, was taken away again in 1906 by Teddy Roosevelt and turned over to the U.S. Forest Service.

Refusing money and asking only for the return of their sacred lake, the tribe gave up its right to the town of Taos but the Forest Service persisted in cutting roads into the area and allowed fishing, camping, grazing, logging and even threatened to open mining.

“To the Indians, this was comparable to developers taking over the Washington Cathedral and turning it into a strip mall,” wrote Gordon-McCutchan.

The story of how the land and the lake were finally returned took a book to tell but after battling for years, members of the tribe “flew on an airplane for the first time in their lives to Washington to attend hearings before the Senate subcommittee,” Gordon-McCutchan wrote. “But the culmination of the hearings happened when the venerated 93-year-old Cacique, the spiritual leader of Taos Pueblo, Juan de Jesus Romero, spoke to Congress so movingly and with such spiritual presence (bringing his three canes of office from the King of Spain, President Abraham Lincoln and President Nixon with him) that Washington was stunned, and on Dec. 15, 1970, Bill HR 471 was signed by Nixon into law and Taos Pueblo got back 48,000 acres of their sacred space including their beloved Blue Lake.”

Seeing Lincoln’s canes in Washington made me think of all the connections in life, the connections we suddenly discover, like invisible threads that strap and bundle the separate strands of our lives together through time and culture.

You’re danged if you do and danged if you don’t so you might just as well.

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