A Chainsaw, a Printing Press, and Santa Fe - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Chainsaw, a Printing Press, and Santa Fe

Now that I am gainlessly unemployed my fences are cleaner, the views are clearer, and there is an abundance of firewood stacked neatly in anticipation of winter.

A professional woodman would / wood (like that storied woodchuck) / would sneer at my little battery-powered chainsaw but, although I expected only to get a summer or two of work from it before it went off and joined the Marines or found a good job at the refinery, it is still doing well after ten years.

The original battery packed it in only a few years ago, and the several replacements have in their turns faded. The new pair of batteries I ordered on Monday arrived today.

Two days is something less than two years.

Information posted with a museum display in the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe says that when this part of the world was New Spain an order for anything – books, harness, iron for the forge, seeds, tableware – took from two to three years to be fulfilled.

In Spanish East Texas a purchase, with payments and details, would be worked out with a merchant in Nacogdoches or San Agustin (now San Augustine). Then it would be made part of a mail run taking some weeks through the woods to the coast, perhaps at Anahuac, to be filed away there in anticipation of a ship, which might not arrive that year.

After unloading and maintenance, the ship would sail for Spain, a voyage of some months which might be terminated early by English, French, or Spanish pirates. In Spain the order, among many others, would be processed by manufacturers, wholesalers, shippers, and retailers, then to be warehoused again while waiting for a ship back to the colonies.

The prices would have been very expensive, including insurance against loss, and the buyer would have no idea when his goods might arrive, if at all.

The downside of slow communication and isolation is obvious, but there was a benefit, too: the Spanish brought their technology and their problem-solving abilities with them. When the harness needed mending there was a smith (probably not named Smith) to mend it with locally sourced leather and recycled iron. Farmers learned what seeds, including those from native plants, worked in a given environment, and from each crop store seed for the next season. Artisans fired local earths for all sorts of purposes, taking their culture and indigenous cultures and making useful and artistic wares in new ways and new styles.

As for the books, the first printing press in the New World was set up in Mexico City in 1539
(https://web.archive.org/web/20090209001307/http://reservas.net/alojamiento_hoteles/mexicocity_monedastreet.htm). Mexico City is a long way from both Santa Fe and East Texas, but it’s a lot closer than Spain.

Still, while one admires creativity, problem-solving, and hard work, there is much to be said for the good young man delivering books and made-in-China batteries in a big brown truck.

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