But Taos traditions date back farther than the coming of the white man. Christians have their Christ, northern Indians their Hiawatha, and the pueblo people their Bah-tah-ko, or grand cacique, who led their people from the ravages of Apache and Navajo in the far West to the Promised Land of verdant plains and watered valleys below the mighty mountains of Taos. Montezuma was to the Southwest, not the Christ, but the Adam, the Moses, the Joseph. Casa Grande in southern Arizona was the Garden of Eden, "the place of the Morning Glow;" but when war and pestilence and ravaging foe and drouth drove the pueblos from their Garden of Eden, the Bah-tah-ko was the Moses to lead them to the Promised Land at Taos. When did he live? The oldest man does not know. The pueblos had been at Taos thousands of years, when the Spanish came in 1540; and, it may be added, they live very much the same to-day at Taos as they did when the white man first came. The men wear store trousers instead of woven linen ones; some wear hats instead of a red head band; and there are wagons instead of drags attached to a dog in shafts. But apart from these innovations, there is little difference at Taos between 1912 and 1540. The whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the pueblo; but the old _estufas_, or _kivas_, are still used for religious ceremony, and election of rulers, and maintenance of Indian law. You can still see the Indians threshing their grain by the trampling of goats on a threshing floor, or the run of burros round and round a kraal chased by a boy, while a man scrapes away the grain and forks aside the chaff. There are white man's courts and white man's laws, down at the white man's town of Taos; but the Indian has little faith in, and less respect for, these white man courts and laws, and out at Taos has his own court, his own laws, his own absolute and undisputed governor, his own police, his own prison and his own penalties. The wealth of Midas would not tempt a Taos Indian to exchange his life in the tiered adobe villages for all that civilization could offer him. Occasionally a Colonel Cody, or Showman Jones, lures him off for a year or two to the great cities of the East; but the call of the wilds lures him back to his own beehive houses. He has plenty to eat and plenty to wear, the love of his family, the open fields and the friendship of his gods--what more can life offer?