In truth, no one had liked Santa Fe very much. The soldiers filled their diaries with disparaging descriptions of the place. It was a greasy, smelly, drunken, superstitious little town, they thought, loud with the fulminations of fat friars who scratched their itches and wore the same robe every evening. Santa Fe was a place of goats and chickens, of twisted offshoots of Catholic doctrine, of spiritual and medical guesswork.
