In Honor of Tough Workers
Often seen as lowly, this hybrid horse has a real history in New Mexico
Pity the poor burro. Small, hardworking, overlooked. The Rodney Dangerfield of domestic animals. One of his names has become a scornful synonym for a stupid, laughable person, even though some biblical translations tell us that Jesus himself rode into Jerusalem on an ass.
The burro and his hybrid cousin, the mule, did all the hard work in settling New Mexico, but who gets all the glory? The horse.
El Rancho de las Golondrinas, the living history museum southwest of Santa Fe, tried to settle the score a little this past weekend with a celebration in the beasts’ honor — “Burros y Mulas: Trailing with Longears.” Burros decked out in colorful ribbons gave children rides and pulled them in carts, while storytellers wove yarns and animal-handlers demonstrated how to pack loads on the beasts of burden.
Some of the best stories were tucked away, though, in the indoor exhibit and the memory of its creator, Louann Jordan. It’s her last exhibit; she’s retiring today, said Jordan, who estimates that she has put together more than 20 exhibits for the museum in 35 years of working there.
The funny thing is, Jordan said, that she always hated history in school. Her main work has been in advertising. But listen to some of the nuggets she has unearthed about burros and mules.
Wild little helpers
A statue at Burro Alley in Santa Fe recognizes the creatures’ contributions, but life wasn’t so easy for them when they put in their labor, Jordan said. Men would take the burros up into the mountains, load them with firewood, bring them back into town to sell the wood — and then turn them loose. No warm stall to go home to, no sweet bed of hay or trough of oats and grasses to reward them for their work. Nope, they were just set loose to find some sustenance on their own.
Too often, that sustenance turned out to be flowers planted by homeowners to spruce up their property. Prodded by their indignant complaints, the city fathers would round up the beasts, Jordan said, pointing to a photo of the burros biding their time in the courtyard of the Palace of the Governors.
“Every week, they’d have an auction,” she said. “They’d sell for about 25 cents apiece, and the guys who had done the firewood would buy them, take them up (to the mountains) and do the firewood again.” It was cheaper to keep buying them than to provide care for the animals, she said.
Burros also carried salt from salt lakes near Estancia. It was loaded on wagons, probably drawn by mules, for the long trip down to Chihuahua, where it was used for processing ore from gold and silver mines. “Salt was one of New Mexico’s big exports in the early days,” Jordan said.
She pointed to another photo, which showed a 20-mule team harnessed to a grader, working on building the original Taos Highway from Santa Fe. Yet another picture shows men from Chupadero with their burros loaded down with goods to sell at the Native Market in Santa Fe in the 1930s. That year-round retail outlet sold locally made goods when tourists came through on the railroads and stayed at the Harvey Hotels, Jordan said.
From the Spanish
You hear all the time about the Spanish settlers bringing horses to the New World, but they brought the mules and burros, too, she said. “The only domestic animals before the Spanish were turkeys and dogs,” she said. Juan de Oñate and his settlers brought them along to this region in 1598, she said. The mules, which pulled the wagons, could pull up to 400 pounds and travel 12 to 15 miles a day.
Some of those creatures turned into food for travelers, too. Tales of the Monterrey to San Diego trail in 1769 told that the weakest pack mule was killed and eaten each day, Jordan said. “They had killed 12 by the time they reached San Diego,” she added.
A mule is the product of a male donkey and a female horse. It’s sterile, unable to reproduce because it has an odd number of chromosomes, Jordan said. You need an even number to have offspring. The product of a female donkey and male horse is called a molly, but you don’t see them too often, because they’re smaller and not as easy to work with as a mule, she said.
Maybe the Greeks have the answer for why mules and donkeys don’t often get the credit they deserve. On the island of Santorini, where donkeys haul tourists the thousands of steps up the steep cliffs, the Greeks say that the donkeys contain the souls of the dead, who are laboring in purgatory for their sins in the world.
