When Mabel Dodge moved to Taos in 1917, she had already left behind two successful salons in Florence and Greenwich Village. But in Taos she discovered a place where she could finally settle and grow roots, even if the urge to travel never left her.

Soon after her arrival, she divorced her husband, Maurice Stern, married a Taos Indian named Antonio Luhan, and purchased twelve acres of prime land adjacent to Taos Pueblo. Tony Luhan then transformed the land's three room adobe house into a grand house - a sprawling triumph of Pueblo revival architecture.

Eighteen years later, this house, which Mabel named Los Gallos, became the setting for Luhan's non-fiction classic, Winter in Taos, now available for the first time in decades through Sunstone Press's Southwest Heritage Series.

Winter in Taos takes place over the course of one winter's day. Soon after Mabel awakens, her husband announces he is going over to Arroyo Seco, a nearby mountain village, to do some trading with his successful oat crop. Meanwhile, Mabel goes about her tasks, directing the upkeep of Los Gallos, while imagining Tony's journey across the New Mexico landscape. Throughout the book, events at Los Gallos and the stages of her husband's voyage stir reflections in Mabel and a series of vivid scenes and memories emerge.

The result is a wonderful and rare portrait of Taos in the 1930s, filled with powerful landscapes and eccentric characters, some of them famous. There are Una Jeffers, Robinson Jeffers' wife, chasing after a rogue pig with a shotgun; or Dorothy Brett, the deaf artist, furiously blowing a police whistle to express her dismay at riding horseback on a sheer trail 11,000 feet up Pueblo Mountain. One of Taos's most eccentric denizens, magazine publisher "Spud" Johnson, provides a subject that allows Luhan to show off her painterly sense of detail: "The ?back room' in Spud's house is Rembrandtesque: all brown and black and white, from the hand press and the trays of type, the stove, the benches, the loom, . . . the dim old ceiling made of ancient cedar strips laid on beams, which comes weightily close to one's head, and the dirt floor, which provides a constant veil of fine dust that softens every outline and subdues every surface. A few numbers of past Laughing Horses that were born in this room rest on shelves in their assorted colors."

Then there are the Taos natives - the Indians climbing the festival pole of San Gerónimo, the Hispanic farmers clearing the acequia madre as they ready the fields for spring planting, the Anglo shop owners gathering at friends' houses to play cards and drink "the best coffee in the world" late into the night, and all of them meeting at the post office to escape winter's darkness and exchange gossip.

Of course, Los Gallos itself provides Luhan with plenty of great descriptive passages, with its cottonwoods, olive trees, horses, pigeons, leaky plumbing, smoky chimneys, and the detritus of continents - everything from Czechoslovakian embroideries left by John Reed to the ceramic chickens that gave the house its name.

But most wondrous is Luhan's romance of the land as revealed in her depiction of Tony's trek to Arroyo Seco. As he crosses through remote valleys, snow covered fields, and tiny villages of centuries old adobe homes, Mabel deftly describes them, as well as nearby sacred places - the darkly mysterious cave which inspired "The Woman Who Rode Away," D.H. Lawrence's tale of human sacrifice, or the long climb to Blue Lake, a holy place for the Taos Indians which they call Star Water.

While Mabel Dodge certainly throws some clinkers in, like her personification of a robin and more information about her pets than necessary, Winter in Taos brims with prose gems. According to Lois Rudnick, Luhan's biographer, when the book appeared in 1936, heavyweights like Thornton Wilder and Willa Cather called it "delightful." Thanks to Sunstone Press, today's readers get to experience that delight.
       
John Nizalowski is the author of Hooking the Sun (Farolito Press). He currently teaches creative writing at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colo., and is working on a biography of Frank Waters.