Dona Ameliana Delcasar, a sister of Don Solomon, was responsible for another alien infusion which ultimately percolated all through the family, and has been thought by some to be responsible for the unusual mental ability of certain Delcasars. Dona Ameliana, a beautiful but somewhat unruly girl, went into a convent in Durango, Mexico, at the age of fifteen. At the age of eighteen she eloped with a French priest named Raubien, who was a man of unusual intellect and a poet. The errant couple came to New Mexico and took up lands. They were excommunicated, of course, and both of them were buried in unconsecrated ground; but despite their spiritual handicaps they raised a family of eleven comely daughters, all of whom married well, several of them into the Delcasar family. Thus some of the Delcasars who boasted of their pure Castilian blood were really of a mongrel breed, comprising along with the many strains that have mingled in Spain, those of Navajo and French. Don Solomon Delcasar played a brilliant part in the military activities which marked the winning of Mexican Independence from Spain in the eighteen-twenties, and also in the incessant Indian wars. He was a fighter by necessity, but also by choice. They shed blood with grace and nonchalance in those days, and the Delcasars were always known as dangerous men. The most curious thing about this r�gime of the old-time Dons was the way in which it persisted. It received its first serious blow in 1845 when the military forces of the United States took possession of New Mexico. Don Jesus Christo Delcasar, who was then the richest and most powerful of the family, was suspected of being a party to the conspiracy which brought about the Taos massacre—the last organized resistance made to the gringo domination. At this time some of the Delcasars went to Old Mexico to live, as did a good many others among the Dons, feeling that the old ways of life in New Mexico were sure to change, and having the Spanish aversion to any departure from tradition. But their fears were not realized, and life went on as before. In 1865 the _peones_ and Indian slaves were formally set free, but all of them immediately went deeply in debt to their former masters and thus retained in effect the same status as before. So it happened that in the seventies, when New York was growing into a metropolis, and the factory system was fastening itself upon New England, and the middle west was getting fat and populous and tame, life in the Southwest remained much as it had been a century before.