Turbulent Taos - #18 Series of Western Americana

Santa Fe, New Mexico: The Press of the Territorian, 1970. First Edition Stated . Trade Paperback. Very Good. 6" x 9. Gregg, Andy - Drawings. 48 Pages Stapled Format. First Edition October 1970 Limited to 1500 copies. Illustrated with 12 drawings and photographs. Three words underlined on page 6 and two lines are underlined on page 9. No other marks or stamps. Taos sits in an embayment of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Its cluster of earth-colored adobes look like a helter-skelter grouping of brown boulders that have rolled off the mountain slopes. To its front, the broad, rolling, gray-green plain stretches as far as the Jemez Mountains, essentially unbroken except for the desert hills. The Rio Grande runs through a deep vertical-sided canyon. The town is old. A sign in the plaza gives a date of 1615. That's old enough for the place to have established some traditions and legends and Taos has plenty of traditions and legends. And enough history to fill several books, yet several books could never tell the complete story. as much or as little as we know of Taos, no historian has positively determined the origin of its name. We know that the village was early designated as Don Fernado de Taos, after a Captain Don Fernando de Chavez, but the Taos portion remains an enigma. Some contend the name stems from a Chinese word, Tao-the way-and not just a few Indians have suggested that Taos means the place of the sacred mountain. Its name has been spelled and misspelled dozens of ways. Early documents called it Braba and Valladolid. Roving Zebulon Pike mentioned the town variously as Tons, Tous, and Toas, these variations sometimes blamed on a tongue-in-cheek editor, while the engraver for his map labelled it Yaos. George C. Sibley stayed in Taos during his expedition of 1825-1826, and his diary mentioned San Fernando, San Fernandez, Tous, and Taos. Joseph C. Brown, surveyor for the expedition, mentioned Taos Valley and San Fernando, the principal village in Taos. No matter! Whatever its origin, Taos has been popular as a local place name: a county, the three towns, a mountain range (The Taos Range forms part of the Sangre de Cristo), a mountain, a stream, a canyon, and a valley. One thing for sure, its present pronunciation Ta-ous, like house undoubtedly originated with the colorful mountain men. Taos! The name has an intriguing sound. And, after all, why not? Taos is a vastly different sort of place.