Trail dust: Readers reflect on parade of the past

It has long been a custom of mine to review comments submitted by readers of my weekly history column and do a final roundup piece at year's end on some of the more interesting items sent. In one column, I had described how Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, many of them from New Mexico, became national heroes during the brief Spanish American War. T.R.'s success led him initially to the governorship of New York, then to the U.S. presidency. Our territorial governor, Miguel A. Otero, I noted, acquired an unfavorable opinion of Roosevelt, who attended the first Rough Riders' Reunion held in Las Vegas, N.M., in 1899. While in town, the future president swaggered, boasted and mugged for the cameramen. Based on Otero's observations, I remarked that Roosevelt's vanity did not prevent him from ascending to the office of president. For that, a reader chided me, saying: "Although vanity may be a sin, I'll take Roosevelt's minor weakness over our crop of courage-less leaders. He was fearless and wouldn't have hidden from his constituents."...From Albuquerque, Jill Ritz wrote concerning my column on los inocentes (the innocent ones). That is the polite Spanish term used for the mentally handicapped. "I especially liked that column," she said. "I love the gentle spirited way that the inocentes are treated in the stories you mentioned. It is such a contrast to how handicapped people are treated in the big cities of the modern world." One of the inocentes I told about was a familiar figure in Santa Fe during the 1930s and 1940s. He would go out in the street downtown to direct traffic and would attend all funerals to partake of the meals served afterward. I had never been able to pin down the name of this individual, but a reader, Ascensión G. Griego, supplied it for me. It was Alejandro Sánchez, known to all as "Alejandrito."...more