The Mexican War and American occupancy followed closely on these exciting episodes. Save during the brief periods of the arrival and departure of the caravans at Santa Fé, with the resultant hubbub and flow of gold, the capital was more dead than alive. The people, for the greater part, were densely ignorant; in 1832 there were only half a dozen schools in the whole territory, and although the salaries of the Santa Fé teachers aggregated only $500 in that year, even this sum, from lack of funds, was unavailable in 1834 and the schools were closed. By 1844 the only schools were "of the lowest primary class," and a keen observer asserted that three fourths of the people were illiterates. Santa Fé was without a newspaper, although a sheet called _El Crepúsculo_ ("The Dawn") was printed at Taos for four weeks in 1835 on the only press then in the territory of seventy thousand inhabitants. Possibly the press later found its way to Santa Fé to become the principal part of the equipment of a "government printing office" which existed in one end of the Palace in 1846, and from which Kearny published his "Code," the first Spanish-English production of the territory. In its appearance Santa Fé had changed but little since 1807, when Pike described its aggregation of low adobe houses as resembling from a distance a fleet of flat-bottomed Ohio river-boats. The Palace occupied then, as it did early in the seventeenth century and does to-day, the northern side of the plaza. Besides being the only building in New Mexico that could boast the luxury of glass windows, it contained the governmental offices as of yore, as well as quarters for the guard and the government printing office. In Pike's time the opposite side of the plaza was occupied by the houses of the clergy and the public officers, in addition to the military chapel, but with the advent of trade these gave way, before 1846, to the shops of merchants and traders. [Illustration THE OLD PALACE AT SANTA FÉ.]