Ácoma, the Sky City

PREFACE

The attempt is here made to bring together, and put into a form for the general reader, the story of that pueblo of the Keres people known as Ácoma, so far as yet discovered in the records of Spanish diarists and in those of more recent historical writers. It was one of the places visited by the first white explorers of the region we know to-day as New Mexico. From the very outset Ácoma excited the curiosity and even the fear of the pioneers because of the strangeness of its position and the reputation of its inhabitants for ferocity.

The early Spaniards made no prolonged stay there, but to “the marvellous Crag” there are constant brief allusions from the time of Coronado’s chronicler in 1540 onward to that of its conversion to Christianity after 1629.

Nor are there more vivid and thrilling tales told of any Southwestern pueblo people than can be veraciously set forth of Ácoma, the City in the Sky, built more than 6500 feet above sea-level.

The student of aboriginal legends and customs, after reading the many monographs that have been printed about other Pueblo Indians, notably the Hopi and Zuñi, is inclined at first to think himself fortunate to find a field so little worked as Ácoma. Even Cochití and Laguna have opened windows of understanding to the white investigator. One soon finds that Ácoma has not been neglected, but that every one attempting to go beyond the most superficial glance arrives at a wall as blank of entrance as the ancient lower story of its own fortress dwellings. The ladders of admission to its hatchways hardly give the stranger more than uncertain glimpses here and there within the obscure interior, and these are so fragmentary and elusive, often contradictory, that he can affirm little about their ritual life—which is the core of tribal existence. Of all Indians the Ácomas seem most resentful of intrusive questioning and most unwilling to impart, even for purposes of record, any real knowledge of themselves. Certain clans and rituals are already extinct. It has, however, seemed worth while, before the old life has become something less than a memory, overspun by all the vagueness of tradition, to bring together into one small volume the substance of everything already written about Ácoma. Such historical data as have come to light are followed by a few legends and folk-tales—fairy tales perchance some of them are—and then by the researches of scholars like Bandelier, Fewkes, Parsons and Hodge.

It may be thought that the legitimate bounds of the subject as given in the title have been too far exceeded. In explanation it is but fair to state that since Ácoma is still well-nigh impenetrable to any foreigner, the only way to apprehend its mental and spiritual development is to use inferentially whatever seems permissible from related tribes. In justification of this method I am happily supported by no less an authority than the distinguished anthropologist, Dr. Kroeber, who writes: “That the pueblo civilization was substantially the same in every town has always been assumed; it begins to be evident that a great part of it has been borrowed back and forth in the most outright and traceable manner. The history of the cults and institutions of any one of these people simply cannot be understood without a knowledge of the others. The problem in its very nature is a comparative one, and until the pueblo languages are more thoroughly understood there is no solution.”

Ácoma belongs to the most numerous of the six linguistic groups of the Pueblo Indians, called the Keresan (Queresan), and shares with Laguna a dialect differing somewhat from the rest of that “Nation.” Standing aloof as these two do from the other Keresan villages, they nevertheless own kinship with Sía, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, and Cochití, who all claim the famous Rito de los Frijoles for their ancestral home. The researches of the best scholars find in the Ácoma ritual considerable affiliation with the Zuñi, and rather less with that of the Tusayán tribes of Arizona.

The writer makes no claim to be more than a compiler, but she has endeavored not to include in the following pages the customs and beliefs of any group of Indians which the scholars have not shown to be more or less interwoven with those of Ácoma. In assembling these fugitive accounts of the Sky City from diaries and archaeological notes, as well as from appreciations of sympathetic visitors, she has hoped to lay a foundation for some scholar of the future to build upon. The writer has followed in the footsteps of genuine research, and she desires to offer these pages to be used, like the toe and finger holes of the mesa, chiefly as a guide to others to go further and to do the real work that must be done soon if it is not to be forever lost.

The opportunity to collect and study these materials in the Bancroft Research Library at Berkeley has been most cordially given to the writer by Professor Herbert E. Bolton of the University of California. My thanks are due also to Dr. Leslie Spier for much helpful suggestion and criticism on the chapters dealing with the anthropology and native customs of the Southwest. To Professor Bolton, the master-mind, whose scholarship and insight are joined to a rare power of kindling in others something of his own enthusiasm for historical research, and of setting before them ideals of work which have broadened and deepened the world’s knowledge of early American history, I wish to express my deep gratitude for his never-failing encouragement and guidance.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

All the illustrations but two are from photographs not hitherto published. For the frontispiece, I am indebted to the well-known photographer of Indian life, Mr. Edward S. Curtis. For the difficult trail up Katzímo, to the courtesy of the Century Company of New York.

All the others were taken for this book by Professor Herbert E. Bolton of the University of California, or were given him for my use by the Reverend St. John O’Sullivan of San Juan Capistrano, California. To these gentlemen the author extends her thanks for making the text more vivid. The cover design is from a water-color done by Mr. Kenneth M. Chapman of the Art Museum of Santa Fé, from an ancient jar of Ácoma potters, for which the writer feels especial gratitude.

ÁCOMA, THE SKY CITY — Chapter I MESA LAND

The first effect of the desert upon any human being must be one of surprise—surprise at the contrast between the preconceived idea which the word suggests and its variety of beauty—a beauty which becomes for many an irresistible fascination, a magnet that allures and brings its lovers back again and again.

The simplicity of great spaces and great masses is one of the supreme influences of life. Together with limitless vistas of possibility, there is in them a serenity that brings calm and meditative repose.

However far the eye is carried in the desert of the Southwest, one is never wearied by monotony. Everywhere the undulating sands, hardly held in place by scanty vegetation when the winds blow their wildest, are driven into long rippling waves, or into hillocks, by the Spaniards called lomas. Even while you watch, this shifting, drifting sand takes on many hues. Sometimes it is grey, or pale buff, or almost white, more rarely golden. Out of it grows, here and there, the pungent greasewood, the stunted cedar and the thorny, freakish cacti unfurling gay flags of color to catch the wandering bee.

Cutting the horizon, barrier mountain ranges appear, whose long, restful lines lend a new note of titanic power to the harmony; and every now and again, rock-islands, solitary, abrupt, imposing, tell of other forces silently working through untold ages and leaving behind forms beautiful or merely fantastic. Of all the magnetic elements of the landscape these are the most manifest. But the supreme thing, the over-powering glory, is the majesty of light and the splendor of color that is so all-pervading, all-enfolding in the desert that, before we are aware of it, we become sympathetic with the belief of the indigenous race in sorcery.

In some far foretime the whole of this vast area was an inland sea. Sand and wind in the long interval since the waters receded have done their part in the task of erosion as effectually as do ocean waves beating upon coast-wise cliffs.[1] The work of these elemental forces is uneven. The softer rock has given way. That which is harder is left sculptured into forms that everywhere invite the imagination. To many of them descriptive names have become permanently attached. Such is Locomotive Rock, lifted high above the road between Casa Blanca and Ácoma in astonishing realism. Most extraordinary is the line of heads and trunks of eleven colossal elephants that may be seen two miles away from Ácoma toward its farm-lands. By wind and sand-blast they have been eroded from the oyster-grey stone to such lifelikeness that fancy grows almost into conviction that here we have the work of forgotten sculptors such as once were bred in Egypt or Chaldæa. Forms like these, in solitudes like these, lead to quick recognition of the source of anthropomorphic worship by the sensitively alert mind of primeval man. Such a portentous figure as that called the Kit Carson monument near Fort Defiance arrests the gaze, bizarre and unlovely though it is. Carved by no human hands, it must have seemed to untutored minds a thing supernatural.

In these high altitudes the clear, thin air brings exhilaration of spirit and an unwonted sense of physical well-being that “scorns laborious days” and banishes fatigue. True, at times one may be almost blinded by the shimmering brilliance of “the colored air.” But because the vast stretch of almost treeless earth acts everywhere as a reflector, it is indirect radiation and the lack of shade, rather than direct heat, from which one occasionally needs to seek shelter.

With night there comes an indescribably awesome silence—an isolation, an infinity of separation from all one has ever known; but soon the eyes, uplifted to “the floor of heaven thick inlaid with patines of bright gold,” are soothed and quieted out of all alarm, and blessed sleep brings unconsciousness to human spirits which may not too long hold converse with divinity.

Three of us had spent days of incomparable interest and pleasure visiting the chief monuments of Mesa Land, Zuñi and Tusayán; Inscription Rock[2] with its autograph record of heroic adventurers; the Cañon de Chelly and the Cañon del Muerto, where prehistoric pueblos are built, on rocky shelves or in natural caves, so high above the wet floor of the river that they look like toy villages. From the limitless champaign we had seen solitary mesas lifted up like no other mountain architecture on earth. They varied in size from little islands to great table lands ten miles long and more. To the traveller’s surprise some of these “islands” prove to be peninsulas. This was the case at Hopi. A raised topographic map disclosed the fact that the three mesas (table lands) whereon were built the Seven Cities of Tusayán (Hopi) in the dateless centuries before the coming of Columbus, are really long, irregular fingers pushing out from a single enormous plateau. They are separated from one another by miles of sage-grown plain through which run deep washes, torn by violent streams in periodic seasons of storm, but now as dry and empty of life as extinct craters. The highest point, from which these fabled cities rise in picturesque dignity, is only seven or eight hundred feet above the plain; but we are told that on its farthest rim to the north, this plateau drops a sheer three thousand feet. Long rocky tongues such as these, high and rugged, difficult of access and therefore easily defended, and, moreover, commanding far views of the deep, wide valleys stretching between the highlands, offered to the agricultural Indian a natural fortress of defense from his hereditary foe, who roamed the plains whithersoever the hunting of the buffalo willed that he should go.

Like all the semi-desert country, the valley land seems level until you begin to traverse it. Then the roughness and the strange uplifts and hollows suggest a world still in the making, an emergence from chaos, left but never conquered. But not all is desert. Much beautiful wooded country lies scattered through the Navajo reservation on the way to Hopi Land. On the high plateaus, tall pines and cedars, interspersed with a lower growth of oaks, give the nomad Navajo ample room for his wandering flocks and a hidden shelter for his solitary hogan (hut) whether it be of adobe or of brushwood. No undergrowth obscures the long vistas through the forest, but a carpet of luxuriant grass dotted with brilliant flowers gives pasturage for the woolly flock that provides both clothing and food for the Navajo. One of our keenest memories will always be of the deliciously aromatic scent of cedar burning in these hogans. Rising like incense through the limpid air, it suggested ancient smokes from primeval altars, kindled by the torch snatched from the Fire-God by Coyote.

More pervading and far more magical than the spicy odor of the cedars, was our consciousness of color throughout the land. Color, translucent, evanescent, mysteriously light-irradiated color, everywhere! From the high vault of heaven it came flooding down over the soft greys and buffs of the sandstone mesas, broken by every tone of red, beautiful and varied, running the whole gamut of salmon-pink, rust-red, and vermilion to deep mahogany and royal porphyry. The tones blend, contrast, or are thrown into sharp relief, against backgrounds of dark fir, or foregrounds of that elusive silver of the sage, which is neither grey nor green. Such tapestry of silver-green, covering as it does long rolling valleys and low foothills of the plains, makes a restful foil to the more brilliant and more solemn elements of the earth-picture.

The supreme effect upon the eye of such a palette is dependent, after all, upon the crystalline quality of the light and the ever-changeful and mysterious movement of cloud-shadows. Here one rediscovers for himself the truth the artists taught us long ago, that purple is the complement of yellow. The gold and buff of the soil and the ranges are suffused by the lavenders, violets and deep purples in every shaded cavern, through the wizardry of the over-arching heavens.

Thinking backward through the historic years, it is no surprise to find how unlike each other are the types of Indians in this country. Those tribes who, since an immemorial age, have roved and fought and won their way through alertness of eye and limb, must have acquired physical and mental variations, even if once they were evolved from the same stock as the Indian of fixed dwellings and sedentary habits.[3]

To us the Navajo embodied our preconceived idea of the Indian. He is tall, powerfully built, often handsome, with high cheek bones and an impassive face—mask-like in its haughty, sometimes brutal, stillness. Even in a dance that we watched, nothing stirred his expression. The Navajo is to-day, just as in the elder time, a roamer, pre-eminently the herdsman, so that it is rare to find even as many as two or three of his hogans clustered near a watering place.[4]

The dweller in the pueblos seems almost like a being of a different race from the man of the plains. Shorter of stature, he is more delicate of frame. His hands and feet are noticeably small, as if adapted to the prehensile method of scaling his precipitous cliffs by toe and finger holes. Likewise he is gentler mannered, and his dignified reception of the stranger suggests a hospitable response that at first raises hopes of some genuine mutual confidence. But alas for hopes like these! All too soon one realizes that he will impart no slightest inkling of the meaning to him of his inherited tradition, his religious beliefs or his present-day customs. One wonders whether, even if one could speak his language, there would be any great gain, for the Indian is past-master in adroit and civil dissembling, in the use of words and gestures that beguile, but do not reveal the inner workings of his mind. Under “the bitter lessons of contact with exploiting white” civilization, he has become more secretive, so that his legends, his traditional ritual, and his ancestral customs are fast disappearing. Swift must be the salvage if all is not to be forever lost.

An impressive example of such inevitable change may be seen at Walpi, where there is in process of construction in the valley a new system of irrigation and water supply which will abolish the painfully toilsome task of carrying water from the foot of the mesa to the dwellings on its summit. Inevitably the younger generation will abandon the no longer needed rock of safety for a comfortable and easy existence in the valley near their crops and herds.

Walpi must become a National Monument under federal protection. It is unique. In situation it reminds the traveller of Castrogiovanni above the Vale of Enna in Sicily or of Segovia in Spain, and it is no less worthy of admiration.

Such is the strong and abiding contrast between the Indian of fixed settlements, and the wanderer of the plains who at any day and hour may strike his tent and silently take his way far afield leading his flocks to greener pastures. A homeless gipsying life? Yet he sets up as easily as if it were for always his little forge on which he beats out the silver bracelets he knows the white man covets, or his loom whereon he weaves the blankets that often bring large sums.

One thing the two types of Indian have in common. It is their belief that after all these generations the white man has never proved that he has a remedy for the ills of life half so good as that which their forbears practised and have handed on for use to-day. They are unconvinced that a rule of conduct more honest or more wise has been shown them even by the religious teachers of the ruling people. Whether in medicine or in morals, their ancients still are their guides and resolutely do they keep inviolate the old prescription.

Sometimes our way crossed or followed ancient trails marked out by the invading Spanish pioneers, who must have been amazed at the similarity of this country to their mother land of Spain, and more particularly of Aragón. Between Zuñi and Ácoma we were actually on the first path ever trodden by the feet of white men in this Southwestern country. Then were brought forth from the master’s brief-case precious, and as yet unpublished, translations of old diaries.

Great was our excitement to learn that on these trails may still be found the water holes so accurately described three centuries ago for the guidance of those who should come after. Distances were so carefully measured and noted that to-day they are affirmed to be correct by men living in the region. Experiences such as these kept us all in an enchanted atmosphere. We seemed like actors in an ancient story of exploration rather than people surrounded by present-day events. As we read these diaries upon the very route they detail, there seemed to pass before our eyes in its integrity that strange company of soldiers and priests, well armed and well mounted, followed by the crowd of half-hypnotized, half-terrified natives. Little the Spaniards recked of the hardships of the way; what they saw was Opportunity, Fortune, denied them in the old world they had left. We felt again how, in the virginal wilderness, lured forward by a vision of that “Beyond” where lay a treasure of unstinted gold—gold of the field, gold of the unplumbed rock, gold of souls saved from everlasting death—each man had been led by his individual imagination and by the great general Hope, on and on, undaunted, “to seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield.” Caught by the glamour of the buoyant air, we, far-away inheritors of those “dreamers, dreaming greatly,” realized how much our country owes to them, men of an alien race and breed, in that along with their pursuit of material gain, great ideals were held aloft. Lines of Kipling’s verse were borne hauntingly on the breeze: “came the whisper, came the vision, came the Power with the Need”.... “It’s God’s present to our nation. Anybody might have found it, but His whisper came to”—Spain.

Chapter II THE CITADEL OF ÁCOMA

The citadel rock of Ácoma has always been one of the most conspicuous points in New Mexico. For this reason it was mentioned with particular definiteness by every one of the early Spanish chroniclers—Castañeda, Espéjo, Oñate, Vetancur. Always aloof geographically and spiritually from other pueblos, even its own “nation,” and likewise apart to-day from the usual routes of travel, Ácoma lends a piquant interest to the visitor. One wishes to know how much more of ancient tradition and usage have been perpetuated here than in other settlements more accessible and in which scholars have made extensive studies of native customs.[5]

The approach to Ácoma is quite unlike that toward either Zuñi or Hopi. The Peñol, as the great rock is often designated, is situated about sixty miles west of the Rio Grande and fifty miles almost directly east of Zuñi. Laguna, nineteen miles to the northeast, is to-day the nearest station on the railroad. From Laguna there is a choice of roads. One of them passes through Casa Blanca, a farming village, by a winding and well travelled way from which one sees the tufa rock eroded in many wildly grotesque forms that invite the imagination. By another, hardly more than a cart track, one goes across bare, rough country and drifting sands, above which formidable mountain walls lift a barrier against the sky of intense ultramarine blue. Here, where rabbit brush is more abundant than anything else, is scant pasturage for the sheep and cattle that look up wistfully at the traveller. A turn of this road brings rather suddenly into view the mighty circular butte of Katzímo, popularly called the Enchanted Mesa, rising out of the sunburned waste.

Under a late afternoon sun its precipitous walls and its sharply turreted pinnacles stand forth in vivid tones of yellow and rose. It looks quite inaccessible, in spite of great heaps of talus at its base. These do, in fact, lend little aid toward any ascent, and no kindly zig-zag “toe-and-finger trail” exists. On the southwest may be seen a cleft, as vertical and glassy as the rest. Yet up this apparently unassailable wall occasional ascents have been made by means of ropes—one, within a few weeks of our visit, by two women and two men. Of the latter, one was an Indian who declared to me that nothing would tempt him to venture again, though it is much more likely that his reason was connected with the sacredness of the place rather than with the difficulties of ascent.

From near this point we had our first sight of Ácoma. The rock island rises from the austere plain almost as isolated to-day in all essentials as when Alvarado first saw it in 1540 and regretted the effort it cost his men to ascend the cliff—“well fortified, the best there is in Christendom.”

Halfway between Katzímo and Ácoma one June afternoon we came upon a picturesque group of Indians from Ácoma, both men and women, with many horses and burros. It was a lucky circumstance for us that a watering tank was in process of construction near the pueblo, since otherwise almost all the populace would have been at the summer villages a dozen miles away. The women, who had cooked the food for the men at noon, were sitting about upon hillocks of fresh earth, adding color to the landscape with their gay shawls. Our Laguna chauffeur was known to them and spoke their language (Keresan). He vouched for our friendly interest, and brought to us the governor, who spoke a little English, and the war captain (hócheni), who spoke none. The latter was an older man, not in working clothes, but wearing more ornamental paraphernalia. Friendly enough they all seemed, and after payment of a fee for entrance to the pueblo and for the privilege of taking photographs (according to a printed formula that was shown us) we went on, confident that we should get what we had come for. A gift of candy and “smokes” had brought smiles to all their faces, and we parted hoping for further conversation in the evening, when the workers returned to the pueblo.

The nearer we drew to the great Crag, the more extraordinary was the impression it made—a marvelous agglomeration of abrupt escarpments, mighty pillars, and rugged cavernous clefts. You enter as it were upon the precincts of an astonishing stronghold through a half-ruined gateway of outstanding columns, broken by erosion but magnificent still in their strength and dignity. Looking up, you are aware that the grey sandstone walls above are not merely perpendicular but actually overhanging, and are gashed and splintered into scores of crags of an indescribable grandeur. Absorbed in the general picture, you think little at first of the long, even line on the summit. It does of course indicate the blocks of houses, which are so intimately a part of the cliff itself that an approaching enemy must often have been deceived. Nursing the illusion that this strangely carven rock is in truth some battlemented stronghold of mediaeval time, we made our ascent over a long stretch of sand, and then up the ancient “toe-and-finger-hole” trail in the rocks. At the top we were met by women gracefully balancing on their heads trays of fragile pottery. Quickly finding the one whom we sought, we asked if she would be able to keep us over a night. With a grave inclination of her head, but no word, she turned, and we followed till she paused before ascending by a ladder to the third storey of the terraced house where she lived. Leaving our small impedimenta for her to dispose of, we made our first circuit of the pueblo. The quiet dignity and grave courtesy of our hostess never forsook her, but they did not chill us; and while we were with her we felt welcome to make ourselves as comfortable as we could.

Vetancur, the seventeenth-century chronicler, describes the mesa as “a league in circuit and thirty estados in height.”[6] Modern writers estimate its height at 357 feet, and its irregular but practically level top as seventy acres in extent.[7] The great rock is almost cut in two by a savage cleft “like a pair of eye-glasses, a small saddle representing the bridge.”[8] Sand in the course of time has drifted over this dangerous bridge, and with disintegrated stone fallen in from either side, there has been formed a narrow but treacherous passage, which we were told the boys dare one another to cross, but where no man will risk his neck. It will be convenient therefore to designate the two parts hereafter by the terms “north” and “south” mesa. Although there are no signs of human dwellings on the south mesa and no known tradition that it was ever inhabited, Lummis writes of “a perfect cliff-house” perched there on a dizzy eyrie.

When seen from below, the outer walls of the dwellings seem to be part of the mesa itself, merely hewn from the solid rock. Closely approached, they are found to be as much fortress as house. Three parallel lines of stone and adobe, a thousand feet long and forty feet high, running east and west, are separated from one another by calles or streets of moderate width—the calle between the middle row and the south row being left wider than the others, to provide a plaza for open-air ceremonials.

Each of these structures consists of three storeys built in terraces, after a fashion common enough in the pueblo country. The lowest storey is between twelve and fifteen feet high, and had originally no openings save trap doors on its top. It was used exclusively for the storage of supplies, enough of which could be kept there to withstand a long siege. The Ácomas therefore enter their houses by ladders from the ground to the second storey, but the third storey and the roofs are reached by steep and narrow steps on the division walls.[9] In all terraced pueblos, economy of construction was one feature of this type of house. A far more important consideration was necessity for mutual defense, felt by every small community exposed to raids. No one could foresee when would appear a roving band of hostile Navajos, Apaches or Comanches, but their forced tribute upon the crops at some time was as certain as the dawning of the day.

Though in appearance these long blocks of apartments are community houses, they are in no sense communal if that term be used to define a socialistic form of life. Each family or clan is a unit completely separated from every other by very solid division walls. Independence of all but the immediate family or clan can hardly be carried to a greater extreme than with the Indian. Injury or insult, even if sometimes imaginary, may provoke tragic results. Silent and wary by nature, and made suspicious by experience, the Indian is indifferent to the well-being of his neighbor across streets as narrow as those that separate the house-blocks of Ácoma, and he asks an equal privacy for himself.

May this not explain, at least in part, certain contradictory information gathered from different sources in the same pueblo, of which all investigators complain?

The old town shows signs of decay. The western end of Middle Row is now broken down, displaying the construction of the three storeys and the method by which wooden vigas (beams) are mortised into the adobe walls. One of the vigas was quite beautifully carved with the same design we afterwards saw in another house, where it was partly hidden by white-wash. We were told that these two decorated beams were taken from the first church when it was destroyed, and that in earlier days the half-ruined house had been the residence of the priest. Since at present a priest comes from Laguna but twice in a year, it is evident that he needs no permanent abode. Apartment-like as they look from without, they are never connected inside. Within the houses you will find an open hearth for warmth and cooking. In most houses there will be at one end three corn-grinding troughs (metates) sloping like a washboard in a tub. Kneeling behind them, a woman will use a small bevelled slab of stone or lava, of the same material as the trough, with which she crushes the grain, which then falls over the edge between the slabs, each trough making the meal finer than the one before. It has been noted ever since Castañeda’s day, that, if not observed by strangers, the women always sing at their grinding. For several tribes the music for the Corn-Grinding Songs has been written down.[10]

Outside the house, at fairly frequent intervals, are beehive-shaped ovens where all the baking is done, except that of the “paper bread” (guayave)[11] made from blue corn, which must be baked on very highly polished flat stones. These stones, which receive an extraordinary degree of care from the women, are placed upon a projecting part of the fireplace directly over the blaze. The guayave we saw was about the color and texture of a hornet’s nest and tasted rather like popped corn.

It used to be true, in almost all the tribes, that men did all the weaving and women made the baskets and the pottery, but to-day one hears of women working at the loom. Though the men do all the heavy part of house construction, including the carpentering, it is the women who build the adobe walls, and do all the plaster work. The women make a game of it, apparently, and show more gayety than at almost any other time, whereas if a man were to be seen helping them in the very least, he would be such a butt of ridicule to all his comrades chat it would amount to a disgrace.

Once a year before the great festival, on September second, the inside walls of the houses are freshly whitewashed. Against them are hung buckskins and other garments, as well as guns, trinkets and the silver necklaces made by their own artisans. Here, too, adding high color to the motley array, are the dried fruits, the chilis, and jerked meats, all hung from the beams, as a food supply for winter. At night wool mattresses (colchones) are spread on the floors. By day they make comfortable seats against the walls and are covered with gay blankets.

Few are the industries practised to-day by the Ácomas. Apparently they get all cotton and wool material for their garments by barter. A system of exchange has been reduced to specialization among many tribes, so that, if the Navajos now make most of the blankets and silver trinkets, this is no proof that other tribes are ignorant of these arts.

As a rule the Pueblo Indians can lay small claim to physical beauty, though many photographs and modelled heads bear witness to the austere and finely chiselled comeliness of individuals. The Indian of the pueblo, though strongly built, is apt to be smaller in frame and shorter than his kinsfolk of the nomad race. The coarse black hair is either worn loose by the men, or is plaited in one or two queues and fastened with bright-colored stuff of some kind. Those locks which fall over the forehead are cut in a fringe even with the line of the eyes, and a red banda is worn fillet-wise, leaving the crown of the head uncovered.

The men as well as the women are extravagantly fond of ornament, bedecking themselves with strings of wampum or of bright glass beads. We found no surer way to gain their friendliness than to give them strings of small shells, or the more prized abalones that were not too large to be worn on the breast in time of festival. While the women also wear bead chains, they are especially proud of their heavy silver necklaces ornamented with pendants of the squash blossom (emblem of fruitfulness) which are universally and significantly a part of the costume for feast-days. One is reminded of a similar custom in Greece, where the girls wear their dowry in embroidery, and necklaces made of gold chains, at the Easter dances, often described as the “marriage market.”

The fiesta dress of Ácoma has been so often described that it need not be repeated here. We are told that from the eagle feathers on their hair to the rabbit-fur anklets, and turtle-shell rattles below the knee, all is still as it used to be. These picturesque costumes, costly and elaborate, are hoarded and handed down for generations. After one has witnessed a Corn Dance in an open plaza, one cannot restrain a sigh of regret that so much of color and of harmony with the environing scene has been lost to the daily life of a world grown drab and over-conventionalized.

In the matter of dress the Indian is going through a transition period. His native costume is fast disappearing, since the children, after being put into American schools and given dreary American clothing, are apt to feel conspicuous and uncomfortable if they return to the dress of the pueblo. No one who has seen the blue and white checked uniform of a reservation school can but regret this change. On ordinary days there is little of the ancient dress to be seen at Ácoma. The women all wear on the head a shawl or kerchief that falls in soft flowing lines to the shoulder. From the shoulders hangs down the back a gay-colored square of silk (called utinat) generally made still more lively by a contrasting border. The dress may be of wool or of cotton in one piece worn over a blouse with rather full sleeves. A belt embroidered in red and white completes the costume. The older women wear the footless stocking or the heavy white legging, tucked into buckskin moccasins. The half-grown girls usually prefer American shoes and stockings and cotton gowns of the simplest lines. The little children go barefoot, and are lightly clad in one garment. Generally speaking, the men wear a nondescript medley of blue overalls and a loose shirt open at the throat, supplemented by a gay neckerchief. When to this is added some jewelled ornament like a precious shell amulet, or the insignia of office, an embroidered belt, and a red banda filleted about the head, there is still something delightfully quaint and picturesque about their appearance, though so much has vanished.

The first necessity of life to the Pueblos, after security from their enemies was assured, was a sufficient water supply. No modern ideas of sanitation have penetrated this community, and only the wonderful quality of the air, so high and powerful in desiccation, can account for their escape from epidemic disease. After the dwellings, the most striking objects here are moderate-sized tanks placed at intervals along the streets, filled with water for household use. On asking the source of the water upon this arid and wind-beaten rock, one is told of two great natural reservoirs[12] on the northern side of the mesa from which the women bring upon their heads, in three-to five-gallon tinajas, all the water needed for every purpose. Toward the close of day a beautiful picture is made by women bearing aloft with perfect poise these great ollas, or water jars. The reservoirs are large, and so dry is the air at this great height that the water is always cool. I have been told of the children skating on them in March. The larger of the two on the northern side of the precipice we found emptied and scrubbed out, waiting for the longed-for rains to fill it afresh. To our surprise we found the grey rock was ruddy-hearted. The basin-floor was of a warm tone patterned by nature like a mosaic, with a design oddly suggestive of a colossal frog pinned out under a microscope.

Lieutenant Simpson, in his famous report of 1850, scouts the idea that these reservoirs were sufficient for village use and quotes Lieutenant Abert, who three years earlier wrote of water holes near which his men encamped. “Between our camp and the city [Ácoma] there was some water that ran along the bed of the stream for a few yards when it disappeared beneath the sand. This furnished the inhabitants with drinking water.” It is true that, the night we spent at the foot of the Crag, we were supplied with water brought by our chauffeur and an Indian from a spring a mile or more distant.

Not far below and a little east of the emptied reservoir was a pathetic attempt at a garden on a fairly level shelf of the rock, to which some soil had been brought from the far-down valley. Here were one good-sized peach tree and two tiny ones guarded by an ungainly scarecrow. Of any other green or growing thing there was no trace anywhere upon the northern mesa.

A vast plain surrounds Ácoma, and the far horizon to the south is ringed with barrier walls of forbidding strength. Natural fortresses they are, with weird castellated bastions and watch towers. Toward the north, rises the gracious blue Sierra de San Mateo,[13] an extinct volcano regarded with deep reverence by all these native people. Thence came their timber vigas or whatever other wood might be needed by the pueblo, all to be brought by human labor across thirty miles of desert.[14] On the slopes of San Mateo, we are told, are the most holy and hidden places of prayer and ritual, which the uninitiated may never find or penetrate. Well-worn trails run from Laguna and Zuñi as well as from Ácoma to the summit, and I have been told by a resident of Albuquerque of an altar and prayer sticks found there in recent days.

Leading from the top of the Crag to the plain below there are, according to Lummis,[15] seven trails. Of that number we identified six. We found one on the north, one on the northeast, one on the southwest, and three on the west. The seventh, which Lummis calls the “Split Trail,” we did not see. We more than suspect that there are, besides, trails to the south mesa.

Although Hodge thinks there were always several trails, all difficult and more or less dangerous, the only one ordinarily accepted as existing before 1629 was that on the northwest side, called the “Ladder Trail.” It was formed by toe and finger holes cut in the solid rock and worn deeper by the moccasined feet of the dwellers on the summit. This is the trail that came to be known as the “Camino del Padre,” after Fray Juan Ramírez made his famous ascent to the rock in that year. Up such a staircase as this in the early days every ounce of adobe for their houses, and the wooden beams for their buildings, had to be brought on their backs by the patient dwellers seeking safety from the hostile roving tribes.

Not far to the east of the Camino del Padre, the most often used of all the seven, is the dangerous and now abandoned north trail, where Zaldívar made his feint in the most audacious storming known to military history. The Indians call it either the “Runner’s Trail” or “Deadman’s Trail,” but they say it has not been in use for many years. It seems as if the trail described by the earliest explorers must be that at the northeast end of the pueblo, for the much-used toe-and-finger trail is neither long enough nor hazardous enough to correspond to their descriptions. One day when we were standing above the northeast trail, an Indian with a sense of humor called to us, when halfway up, asking for a rope to be let down, and declaring for quite a while that he could never arrive unassisted. Our host said, quite frankly, that he often went down that way, but never came up by it, because “It’s too hard work.”

No trails over the sheer precipices to the east are mentioned by any writer, and none on the south except the one far round toward the southwest, sometimes called the “Staircase Trail.” Over the upper part of this trail are carefully built well-cut steps of wood and stone, but the lower part is chiefly of the toe-and-finger type. Near the top, in a small natural cavern, we found little bundles of twigs and remnants of feathers carefully hidden away, no doubt a shrine of prayer.

Then there is the “Burro Trail,” which we concluded is the one built under the inspiration of Father Ramírez, so that a more comfortable pathway from the plain might be possible for man and beast. At its head is a good-sized wooden cross which still on Cross Day, in May, is decorated with flowers and before which the people used to kneel to receive a blessing from the bishop during his annual visit. Here daily come and go the burros upon their arduous toil below. This trail debouches not far from the wide sand ramp, which we heard called the “New Trail,” a sort of dyke, formed in part by the wind in recent years, and now the easiest footpath up the Crag. The “Split Trail,” which we did not see, lies on the west, between the Staircase and the Burro Trail. It has three forks below, and its main stem, above, is described as a very stiff scramble. I had hoped to see the lower end of every one of these trails, but we were told it was impossible to follow with the car around the base of the rock, on account of the sand, and though I was promised an escort on foot, the man refused to go, when the time came, saying he couldn’t understand why I wished to see where the trails came out upon the plain. Did it seem to him an idle fancy, or was he a little suspicious that we were spying upon the pueblo for some mysterious reason, which he resented?

Near the southern rim of the plateau, quite isolated from the house-blocks, is the great church, still in good repair. Later on during that first afternoon we sat facing the western sky beyond its precincts, and within sight, as we believed, of the famous cleft over which Villagrá made his epoch-making leap in the fight of 1598. Directly in front of us rose two colossal pillars of eroded rock forming a portal through which our eyes were led across the plain to where, over the riven mountain walls, sunlight and an indescribable depth of purple shadow were blending into amethystine haze as the Sun God sank to his rest, just as one has seen it over a boundless ocean. Who can do less at such a moment than join in reverent worship of the Sun? Soon came the men, one by one, from their toil up the steep finger-and-toe trail to home and supper, followed upon the Burro Trail by a great company of those patient little beasts driven by boys into a corral directly behind the church. All was deserted, peaceful, so we also strolled toward our house of friendly hospitality, climbing by its ladder over the first storey and then by shallow steps in the adobe to the next terrace. There our hostess met us in the open door and signified that all our belongings were to the left, beyond a low parapet, on the terrace of a friend, now absent, and therefore available for our use.

To our dismay our host and our Laguna guide were just leaving “for a meeting of great importance,” and with them all our cherished hopes of evening talk and tales of the long ago (hamaha) and the far away. Rather apologetically a man was pointed out to us, sitting by the door, “Mr. Miller, who will talk with you.” I found him to be one who had known several students of Zuñi folk-lore, and who confirmed various things about which we asked, but we learned nothing new. Our disappointment was the old experience. The self-respect of the Indians admits no curious inquiry into their private life, and why should it? How can they discriminate between the truly interested and friendly student of their poetry, and the selfish and unscrupulous exploiter of their sacred inheritance? They have so long been made the target of the unsympathetic white man who treats them as fair game, that they have every justification for suspicion. Trying as it was to us, who merely longed to preserve and record their swiftly vanishing traditions, we could not find it in our hearts to murmur. How many of us would disclose to a casual stranger to whom we had generously accorded a night’s hospitality, the treasures of our ancestral heritage?

When we had spoken our good-nights, the mystery of everything about us grew more profound, enfolding all the world in the eloquent silences of moonlit heaven above and dim floating space below. In such a scene, as we lay upon an adobe terrace, which was of course the roof of a house below, sleep seemed not worth the courting. That may be had in the boisterous town. This was for once only.

At midnight, at three in the morning, and again at six, the Kahera or town-crier—an annually elected official—went the rounds of all the streets, clad in a scarlet blanket and jingling bells like those on the sleigh-reins of children, chanting the while a monotonous invocation. It proved to us the truth of an observation that contrary to the usual pueblo custom of a town-crier shouting out his news from the highest roof-top, Ácoma has always pursued a fashion of her own, sending the man through street after street just as we heard him. When asked in the morning the meaning thereof, our host said it was the announcement of important work at the watering place and a warning to all to bestir themselves. That might be reasonable for the six-o’clock round, but it hardly seemed so for the others in dead of night. We wondered if perhaps it had aught to do with the invasion of the Crag by three Americans.

Almost all visitors speak of the Ácomas as unusually cleanly, and certainly our experience bears this out. But since they lie down at night in their clothes on their fur rugs or thin colchones, one wonders when they get the refreshment of baths or of changed attire. Morning toilets are consequently brief, and we, like our Indian friends, were early astir. Except where the household has adopted American ways, meals are served on the floor in the ancient fashion. There the family will seat itself in a circle around the bowls of chili and coffee and bread. We were therefore interested to observe that this household had assembled about an ordinary rectangular deal table. Here also had come for his breakfast the governor of the pueblo, because he belonged, like our hostess, to the Eagle Clan and had the right to be considered temporarily a member of her family. His own people were already gone to the farm-lands at Acomita and we were told that many others would join the colony there upon the arrival of the children next day from the schools at Albuquerque or Santa Fé.

The whole policy of the community is rapidly changing, for instead of the age-long custom of the men going to Acomita only for the seasons of planting and of harvest, more and more the bulk of the people live there the year round. Why, say the younger generation, should we climb those weary heights when there are no Apaches to fear? Hence many of them return to the pueblo on the Crag only for ceremonies at stated intervals. This makes the atmosphere more sacrosanct than ever, and consequently more difficult for white students to study and record the life story of the Peñol. Although James, rightly enough, calls the people who now live in the lofty eyrie “pleasant faced, soft voiced, gentle and hospitable,” the visitor is never likely to be unaware of an impenetrable aloofness of mind and manner, which holds him far from intimacy. Our hostess soon made evident that she was eager for us to leave early and she more than sped the parting guest, with inviolable dignity but also with very evident relief.

We had, however, an appointment to keep with the governor, who had himself agreed to show us the interior of the great church which brave Fray Juan Ramírez had toiled to create in the early seventeenth century. Surely there are few memorials of the Spanish epoch in the Southwest that present such a picture of dauntless faith in spiritual ideals as does this fortress church silhouetted high against the sky above the bleak mesa.

An impression prevails that the present edifice is not in any part the original one of Ramírez, but one built after the reconquest in 1699 or 1700.[17] In the letters of Vargas he tells of paying a visit to the church of St. Stephen in 1693, after he had received the submission of its inhabitants. In his own words, “the walls are a yard and a half thick and able to withstand the heavy rains that break windows and skylights.”

The interval of six years between this letter and the date (1699) usually given as that of the present church was so patently only the final struggle of the spent force of enmity that it hardly seems probable the Ácomas would take the trouble to demolish their neglected church, especially to the extent of changing its site “a few feet to the south.”[18] We may, therefore, assume that by 1699 the shrine needed extensive repairs, but that in substance we can visit to-day the basilica of Ramírez. It measures 150 feet in length and has walls that are 60 feet high and 10 feet thick. Timbers 40 feet long and 14 inches through support the roof and make a handsome ceiling, for between them, laid in herringbone design, are the stalks of the yucca, colored blue, yellow or red, making a close rush mat visible between the beams. The entrance is by a wooden door at the east, and a gallery just inside is reached by a plain flight of steps close to the north wall. There are of course no seats, and the only decoration of the nave is a crude red dado of paint reaching perhaps three feet from the floor. This and the bare white wall above are freshly done each year before the great fiesta of St. Stephen on September second. At the western end the chancel is raised by three shallow steps. Behind the altar is a gaudily painted Mexican screen done in 1802. To the left hangs the miracle-working painting of San José sent to the Mission by Charles II of Spain, it is said. On the opposite wall is another holy picture painted on buffalo hide by some Mexican craftsmen. The San José painting was for years a serious cause of dissension and almost of war between Ácoma and Laguna, so that it was amusing to have my host pull me by the sleeve and say, sotto voce, pointing to our chauffeur, “Don’t speak of it, he’s Laguna.” To one who has seen the very beautiful decoration of walls and chancel in the Laguna church, it seems unlikely that any envy of Ácoma now exists in that village.

In the autumn of 1924, the Committee for the Reconstruction and Preservation of New Mexico Mission Churches received a gift from a generous citizen of Denver, Colorado, that enabled them to repair the roof of Ácoma church. Their report repeats graphically the ancient story of the toilful work involved. Once again might be seen the laboring procession of heavy-laden Indians and patient burros carrying all the material needed up the steep trail three hundred and fifty-seven feet to the top of the mesa. Once there, it must yet be hoisted sixty feet higher to the roof of the shrine itself. So low was the water in the reservoirs that that also had to be brought from springs in the plain below. The statistics are: 50,000 pounds of water, 24,000 pounds of cement, 72,000 pounds of sand, 5,000 pounds of felt-roofing, 5,000 pounds of asphalt, and 35,000 feet of boards for scaffolding.[19]

Perhaps no other modern task in the pueblo country has so impressed upon the minds of present-day workers the enormous labor or the devotion to a humanistic ideal such as Fray Juan Ramírez inaugurated at Ácoma more than three hundred years ago.

There were cloisters and conventual rooms adjacent to this church which tell of its having been the centre of religious work, and altogether it is one of the most remarkable of the ancient missions; but of it we have few genuine records. That, at one time, the patron saint was changed to San Pedro, the bell in the northeast tower bears witness by its inscription, “San Pedro, 1710.” Subsequently St. Stephen resumed his sway.

To-day the cloister is only a bare promenade of three sides enclosed by walls on the ground level into which a few unglazed windows admit scant light. Upon the dirt floor more or less littered with outcast odds and ends you are shown the hugest of beams, lying prone, which it is claimed came from the early church, and the marvel is how anything so gigantic and unwieldy was ever got up the steep crag, even after it had been brought across the desert from San Mateo. Someone tried to tell us that the Indians waited till rains had filled the arroyos of the mountain slopes so that these heavy timbers could be floated at least part way down the long journey; but my Albuquerque informant, who owns great cattle ranches in the vicinity of San Mateo, assured me that this was impossible, since there are never streams sufficient for any such purpose. He felt sure of the veracity of the Indians, who say that after a viga for a church has been cut and smoothed, it would be sacrilege to let it touch the ground; it must somehow be carried all the way by men. He knew that the vigas for the houses were borne upon the shoulders of men. A pleasanter walk than that within the cloister may be taken upon its flat and unsheltered roof. From there one looks down into the tiny and now very pathetic garden patio in which one moribund peach tree alone stands upright. From there too, he may lift his eyes in rapt admiration to the splendid panorama of the great plain and the encircling mountains.

Above the cloister and built upon its corner, there is a charming loggia with a hand-carved wooden railing of simple but attractive design. Here again the view is inspiring, and one likes to fancy those self-sacrificing priests refreshing themselves at the quiet end of day by resting there and taking into their wearied spirits the peace of so healing an aspect of nature.

It remains to speak of the great graveyard directly in front of the church, “where the dead of centuries sleep unmindful.” It is an enclosure nearly two hundred feet square, surrounded by a stone wall, plastered with adobe. This has been recently disfigured by ill-moulded knob-like heads perhaps a foot high, that stand at regular intervals on its top. We were told they were done during the Great War, and are called the “soldier guard.” Burial must take place within twenty-four hours after death and there is at Ácoma no separation of the sexes in that resting place under the protection of the church. Either the father’s clan or the mother’s clan takes part in the ceremony and the company is made up entirely of men, save that the water jar, which is to be broken over the grave, may be borne by a woman. When the dead body has been tenderly wrapped in its handsomest blanket, it is lowered with the head toward the east, and above the covering earth is broken the symbolic jar of water.

Early one afternoon, we saw a sad little procession coming up the long sand ramp bringing the body of a woman of the pueblo wrapped in a glorious scarlet blanket[20] for burial. The six bearers were carefully dressed; two followed with bulky burdens on their shoulders and one more behind had pick and spade. As they slowly went through the widest street on the summit, a bitter keening was taken up by all the women, house after house, but all from within doors. This lasted until the funeral group were within their own shelter, when the women we were with returned to their work without any evidence of emotion. Naturally we could not intrude upon the burial itself, of which, later in the afternoon, a dull and distant drumming, followed by three or four strokes of the church bell, gave warning. From a distance we saw the censer swung while the earth was being removed, and that only the nine men took part in the last ceremony. Lummis tells us that during the actual interment, the shamans in the desolated house are “blinding the eyes of the ghosts that they may not find the trail of the vanished soul on its journey to Si-pa-pu.” The spirit of the deceased is believed to hover about his earthly home for four days,[21] when a Cheani[22] brings in the feather prayer-sticks,[23] which he has made at home, and puts them where the deceased has lain. Then he offers a prayer and bids him “begone.” After this the Cheani carry these same feather sticks to the gate of Si-pa-pu, a place a mile west of the town where the rocky conformation opens to the north. Meanwhile the household drinks a cedar brew, and vomits. This is an essential part of all purification rituals by which within and without the entire body is made clean. There follows a general head-washing of the kindred, or, as some have said, of all the clans-people. Re-marriage may not occur till the end of a full twelvemonth, and meantime the children have been cared for by the kinsfolk of their mother, with whom the father may also remain, if he is the one left; or he may live with his own people.

An unmarried girl who had died in childbirth on the day of the arrival of Dr. Parsons (from whose monograph this account is taken) was buried without the usual water jar of oblation and hence no broken potsherds were left upon the mound. A feast, however, was prepared, for which a sheep was killed and its pelt offered for sale by her mother. Wafer bread was baked, and a brew of cedar twigs was made on the stove, of which the mother must have partaken, for she was seen going through the usual after-vomiting. It happened to be the first day of the hoinawe[24] dance, but none of this household went out to watch it. During the day the girl’s father had brought in a load of wood, and in the evening he took supper with the American guest and invited her to go with him to see the cacique;[25] that being over, she was taken by the father of the dead girl into two houses to see other dances, an evident proof that the period of mourning was at an end. The next day, being the fifth after the death, all the household had their hair washed and they now watched the dances. One of the women who watched had earlier thrown bread to the dancers. A decoction of the tansy-mustard[26] is drunk “to make them forget the dead,” although it was once described to Dr. Parsons at Ácoma as poisonous.

A second visit to Ácoma brought some new impressions and confirmed or corrected others. To be where the sun is the only time-piece by day and the Dipper by night, and where no form of trade is nearer than nineteen miles, unless one undertakes to transport the delicate pottery of the women, is certainly a unique experience. Through the day we watched at intervals the marvelously deft and steady fingers of our hostess as she outlined elaborate designs upon some large jars, no two being the same, never hesitating for an instant whether it were the hair-line in parallels on the lip, or the curve of a bird’s wing on the rounded surface, of the jar. A younger woman with her yucca-fibre brush filled in the solid spaces, such, for example, as a lozenge or the wing of a bird, all the colors being previously ground and prepared in shallow dishes from minerals collected by the women themselves. During the day ten such jars were decorated.

That night we made our beds on the ground at the foot of the Crag under “crumbling columns grand against the moon” with such protection as we could find from the sand flying before a high wind that blew continuously even after there was no longer any threatening of rain. Dark and heavy clouds threw dramatic shadows on the outstanding towers that rose all about us, taking on grotesque totemic forms, rugged, massive, sculpturesque. If by day the houses seem part of the Crag, by night the entire Peñol takes on even more the aspect of a fortress with outstanding escarpments.

When at last all grew clear, I sat through the hours of darkness under a vast and vaulted sky in a silence so enfolding that it was awesome. Only once the whinny of a horse from a not distant corral broke the stillness; only once some four-footed creature trotted across the middle distance, stopped to watch me curiously, but, because I was motionless, went on its way, thinking, perhaps, I too was no more than an outcropping figure of those walls and bastions that seemed veritably the temple precincts of a more heroic age and race than ours.

Then came the dawn, grey and pearly. As it warmed to rose, we bestirred ourselves, sobered by the solemnity of surroundings and of effects that baffle words—scarcely even to be named beauty because of overtones of a strange and wondrous majesty.

Before saying a final farewell to the Sky City, we followed a road for nearly two miles, a little west of north, out to a point from which may be had the finest of all the general views of the Crag, with its many vertical pinnacles and shadowy coves. From there the length of the mesa-top is better comprehended, as well as the perfect adaptation of the long, low lines of the houses to the natural situation, while the great church with its two very solid towers is silhouetted against the sky as a separate and individual element of the composition. Nowhere can be better understood the keynote of pueblo culture, which is the astonishing harmony attained by the Indians with all the elemental forces surrounding him, especially evidenced in the building of his houses as a part of the natural setting. Five centuries ago the Spaniard found the Indian and his dwelling probably as they had been, it may well be, for thousands of years. To-day, of all existing pueblos, Ácoma has surrendered itself least to the changes which the invader endeavored to introduce and called “improvement.”

The age-long mistrust of the white men at Ácoma had apparently reached a critical moment at the time of our second visit. The hócheni (war captain) was in full authority and the kindly host of our first visit was helpless to make our stay rewardful. Apparently they were the only men still on the Crag and they were not in agreement about the reception to be given visitors. Consequently we could see nothing new, and I was even warned not to make notes within sight of the hócheni. The number and position of the kivas (ceremonial chambers)[27] were details about which we were especially keen to learn, but, alas, we were entirely baffled. I must therefore resort to a statement of Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons that at Ácoma there are two estufas (Spanish for stoves), which she calls, “A, east end, north side of Middle Row, and B, west end of North Row.” It is altogether probable that Ácoma does not greatly differ from other pueblos, either in its arrangement or its use of ceremonial chambers. Hence I venture to describe them as given elsewhere, and apply this knowledge inferentially to Ácoma.

The number of kivas in the pueblos is very variable, and because at Ácoma they are almost necessarily embodied in the community house-block, instead of being isolated structures as is true of most villages, we have no visible token of their positions. Bandelier says[28] that in his time there were six at Ácoma, but Dr. Parsons found no one willing to tell her either the names or number of them in her visits there in 1917 and 1918.

Though we never discovered the Ácoma kivas, at Walpi, where no ceremonial was in progress, we were allowed freely to enter those of the Antelope and of the Snake Clan. The sacred chamber was in each case a simple, unadorned room, with a bare hearth, its entrance ladder resting on a low platform. There were niches in the walls for ceremonial objects, and hanging from nails or poles were some undistinguishable small ornaments and a few masks.

A stringent requirement of the kiva form is that it should be at least partly subterranean, so it is of necessity entered only by a ladder thrust down from the top through a hatchway. The more primitive form of the kiva is circular, but at Ácoma it is described as rectangular, because, owing to the conditions enforced by a rocky table land, the kiva here became a part of the lowest storey of the house-block, hollowed somewhat deeper into the rock to meet the religious requirement. The curious orifice in the kiva, called Si-pa-pu, represents the place from which human beings originally emerged, and the peculiar arrangement of the floor within the kiva suggested to Mr. Mindeleff that it perhaps typified the four worlds of the genesis-myth, and the “four houses” of the creation myths. The Si-pa-pu with its cavity beneath the floor indicates the lowest house under the earth—the abode of the Creator, Myuinga. The main or lower floor represents the second stage where Light came; the elevated section of the floor, the third stage where animals were created. Upon this platform animal-fetiches are set in groups at New Year festivals. It is also to be noted that the ladder to the surface is always of pine and always rests on the platform, never on the lower floor. In their traditional genesis, the people climbed from the third house by means of a tree or a ladder of pine through such an opening as the kiva hatchway to the outer air, or the fourth world.[29]

The kiva has also been called the nearest approach that the Indian had to a school-house for the boys of the tribe. There, during the long winter evenings, the old men—tellers of tales—would sit wrapped in their many-colored blankets and recite their legends; it might be the story of their origin and their wanderings, or the blood-curdling relation of how their peaceful life was broken in upon by the dreaded Comanches or the Navajos; and then, again, by the invading white men, who came on strange four-footed beasts, filling the souls of the Ancients with terror and awe. Out of such long-spun tales, from the poetry of nature to the massacre of their “nations,” the wondering boys would gradually learn the tribal lore of their people and the mystery of their religious traditions, which could be transmitted only word by word from the elders to the growing generation. Morgan tells us that, at Taos, the special duty of this all-important instruction was given to three old men. Regarding Ácoma, we have no definite information.

At Isleta, in conversation with an educated and very reliable Indian, now federal judge of the pueblo, I was told it is still a regular thing through the winter evenings to assemble the boys, to whom the older men “tell the stories of our origin and our beliefs. We begin about nine o’clock every night and talk till three in the morning, and it takes two weeks of such talks to complete the story.” This suggests that in Isleta, at any rate, there still exists the ancient custom of the boys sleeping in the estufa, going home only for their meals, just as Spartan boys were taken from the homes of their parents to receive the arduous Spartan training.

Not only were the estufas or kivas used for clan and pueblo councils and for the education of the boys, but nearly all the early Spanish chroniclers write as if the men used them also as a sort of club-house where they could keep warm on cold winter days. Coronado speaks of “very good rooms underground and paved at Granada (or Háwikuh) which are made for winter and are something like hot baths,” and again “places where the men gather for consultation. The young men live in the estufas, which are underground, square or round.” Father Escobar writes, “There are many good estufas in each pueblo, which, with little fire, are very warm and wherein they pass the snow and cold of winter.”[30] In some tribes there was certainly a discrimination made between kivas, or purely ceremonial chambers, and estufas for more commonplace purposes, where even the sweat baths[31] were sometimes given. It is said that Keresan tribes always have two kivas. We have no reason to think that more than a single form existed at Ácoma.

The kiva was reserved for the business of the clan, which included the training for the rituals, to be announced to the pueblo in due season by the town crier. Here also are celebrated the secret rites of the fraternities and priesthoods, in many of which there are grades of promotion through which only may an individual slowly attain the goal of his ambition and become a power in his tribe.

In times of council meeting, not even the Indian women may approach the kivas save to place food within reach of the entrance.[32] If need arises to summon forth a member, prearranged signals are used. The fire on the hearth may sometimes point out the position of a hidden kiva to a wise-eyed stranger, such as the one who wrote that at Ácoma “far into the night the watcher is aware of a spiral of smoke curling above the dark hatchway from the sacred fire that never dies nor ever shall.”[33] It is desirable to correct a popular misconception that the kiva was ever in any sense a temple. The only temple the Indian knew, or would think worthy, was the great outdoors. Forest aisles or mountain shrines alone served for the place of communion with Divinity.[34]

For appointed ceremonials small conical structures called kisi are built in the open plaza for the necessary offices of the ritual. These are made of cotton-wood boughs covered with leaves and supported by poles, each about fifteen feet long, driven into the ground and strapped together at the apex. The orifice for the Si-pa-pu is on the ground in front of an opening facing the south.

Since prayer-smoke is the most nearly universal symbol of the Indian’s yearning toward the Unseen, I venture to quote here a song used in the ceremony of the Hako, by a tribe so remote from Ácoma as the Pawnee:[35]

Such are the most striking features of an Indian pueblo. At Ácoma certainly they have been but little altered since the sixteenth century. The political organization of the pueblos seems to have changed more, for, in respect to nomenclature, at any rate, it is an interesting mixture of Indian and Spanish.

Chapter III FIRST EXPEDITIONS FROM NEW SPAIN

The tradition is no longer credited that Cabeza de Vaca in his marvellous journey of eight years from the Florida coast across perilous lands to New Spain actually saw any part of what is now New Mexico. Nevertheless, it was the tales he had gathered on the way, of the Northern Mystery and the Seven Cities, that eventually brought both these localities into history. Vaca reached Culiacán (Mexico) in the late spring of 1536. Men stared to hear of Narváez’ ill-fated attempt to “explore, conquer and colonize the country between Florida and the Rio Grande.” They were staggered at the story of all that had befallen in the intervening years, by way of hardship, imprisonment, and slavery, the four survivors of the gallant three hundred who had entered the continent eight years earlier. When Vaca arrived in the capital he related his story to the viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza. Here was great news for the silk-stockinged official. Eager to gain for himself and his king the glory of new discoveries of territory and of unlimited riches that were said to be buried in the northern regions, he made immediate preparations for exploration.[36]

First a preliminary reconnaissance was undertaken. To lead it the viceroy chose Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan friar, who had served a difficult apprenticeship in Peru under Pizarro. Mendoza directed him to go north with one lay-brother, Onorato, and a small number of Indians. Coronado, Governor of New Galicia, accompanied them as far as Culiacán. The instructions with which Mendoza outfitted them were “a model of careful and explicit directions.” Estévan, a negro servant who had come with Vaca, was interpreter, and varying bodies of native Indians made up the party. They left Culiacán on March 7, 1539. At Petatlán, Fray Onorato became ill and was left behind, after which Fray Marcos was the only white man in the expedition. In the Sonora valley they halted while Estévan was sent ahead to reconnoiter.

Estévan was to send back Indian messengers with crosses, whose size would indicate the value of the country found. After four days, a runner appeared bearing “a cross as tall as a man.” This assured Fray Marcos that Estévan had news of cities equal to those from which they had started in New Spain. The runner confirmed the impression by telling of a province ahead with large cities built up with houses of stone and lime, and all under one lord.

Eager now, Fray Marcos started ahead. Soon he met with Indians wearing fine turquoises in their ears and noses, or on their waist belts. These folk, eager to see the strangers pass on, told of houses farther north that had their doorways studded with gold and turquoises. To the infinite embarrassment of the friar, gifts of this stone and of skins, such as served the natives for raiment, were pressed upon him. Other Indians that were met wandering inland from the seacoast, talked of pearls that could be gathered in quantity.

Estévan had been told to wait for Fray Marcos. Instead he pressed on down the San Pedro valley. In Cíbola he excited the anger of the native population, probably by posing as a great medicine man and using, very likely, the gourds or rattles of a hostile tribe. According to the Zuñi legend, he was taken beyond the pueblo precincts and there given “a powerful kick which sped him through the air back to the south whence he came.”[37]

When the friar arrived late in May (1539) within sight of the first of the Seven Cities of Cíbola he found the inhabitants in no mood to receive another alien visitor, and, like Moses, forbidden to enter the promised land, he could but look into it from a near-by eminence on the south. Alone, and unarmed, he had no other choice than to turn back, thankful, no doubt, to escape from death himself, since he was known to be the responsible chief of Estévan. By hasty marches, “with far more fright than food,” the friar reached New Spain once more. There he reported to the viceroy all that he had seen. What is more valuable, he scrupulously differentiated between this and what he had been told of treasures in the region beyond.

The Zuñis still talk of the “Black Mexican” and point out K’iakima, a ruin on a bluff at the southwest angle of To-yo-ál-a-na (Thunder Mountain) as the place of his murder. Hodge, who has followed Cushing[38] in very careful and important work at Zuñi, is satisfied that Háwikuh was the village first seen by Estévan and that there he met his death; also that it “was the city of Cíbola rising from the plains which Niza and his Piman guides viewed from the southern heights in 1539; moreover that it was the pueblo which Coronado stormed in the summer of the following year, seems indisputable.”[39]

Háwikuh, to-day a ruin of great interest, lies fifteen miles southwest of modern Zuñi. On our way thither we overtook and passed an Indian pointed out as the prize man in the foot-race that is of special ritual significance to this tribe. A hardy, compact figure, he was no longer young, but never failed to do his daily stint of dog-trot practice which would keep him in condition for the annual competition. Háwikuh was built on the slopes of a round and not very elevated hill. The most noticeable of the many excavations are those of the kiva and mission church, not far separated from each other, thus perfectly exemplifying the dual religious allegiance that has prevailed from the first baptism of an Indian by Spanish padres until the present day. A great plain stretches out on every side, sparsely dotted with the familiar stunted herbage of the desert. Standing on the summit of the mound, the middle distance is broken toward the south by a range of moderate height and steepness. On some one of its projecting cliffs the friar might well have stood to look upon the coveted goal to which he might not win. Vast horizons encompass the plain and far off the twin peaks of the Zuñi buttes pierce the sky. It is a lonely scene but the more easy for that reason to re-people with the figures of a vanished past.

Fray Marcos not only saw Háwikuh, but he also heard of Ácoma. The Indian with whom Estévan had talked told the friar that, besides these Seven Cities, there were other territories which they called Marata, Acus, and Totonteac. Acus was described as an independent kingdom and province. Its people went encaconados: that is, with turquoises hanging from their noses and ears. The turquoise they called “Cacona.” The village called “Ácuco” or “Tutahaco” lay between Cíbola and the streams running to the southwest, entering the “Sea of the North.” Ácuco was Ácoma,[40] which therefore came into history only twenty years after Cortés entered the City of Mexico.

When Fray Marcos returned to Culiacán in the late summer of 1539, his accounts of what he had seen, and what he had heard, were sufficient to inflame the imagination of the Spaniards there, who were longing for conquest, for wealth, and for fame. It did not take long to raise a volunteer army, nor to excite the viceroy to do all in his power to further an expedition that might be expected to bring much renown to himself, to the King of Spain, and to Holy Church. For it is never to be forgotten that the soldier armies of Spain were always supplemented by smaller armies of priests.

The Royal Council of the Indies decreed that a new attempt to explore the north should be made both by sea and by land (1540). Hernando de Alarcón was given command of two vessels, and he was ordered to keep near the coast so as to be able easily to coöperate with the land force. As a matter of fact the two divisions never did meet or communicate.

Don Francisco Vásquez Coronado was chosen captain-general of the overland expedition to the north. He was accompanied by a gallant troop of four hundred Spaniards and eight hundred Indians. It must have been a brilliant spectacle when this cavalcade, with its gaily caparisoned horses, its mule train, and its herds of cattle and sheep for food supply, finally set forth from Compostela on Shrove Tuesday, February 23, 1540. The chief of the religious was Fray Juan de Padilla, once a soldier but now a Franciscan, destined to become the proto-martyr of the North. Among others who bore distinguished names three are of especial interest to us, since they have left tangible evidence of their exploits. The standard-bearer of the army, Don Pedro de Tobar, discovered the Tusayán settlements (Hopi) and heard “of a giant People and a mighty river.” Don García López de Cárdenas first saw the great gorge known to-day as the “Grand Cañon” of the Colorado. Hernando de Alvarado, first of white men, saw Ácoma and talked with its inhabitants.

While encamped at Zuñi the white strangers were naturally objects of the utmost curiosity to the native peoples. Among others who came to observe them were some from Cicuyé (Pecos) seventy leagues eastward. They were led by their cacique. He was handsome and well formed, and because of his great mustaches the Spaniards called him “Bigotes.” On the body of one of his Indians was painted a picture of a humpbacked cow (the buffalo).[41] Coronado was told that great herds of these animals roamed the plains. To test the story Coronado sent Alvarado and twenty other Spaniards with the Indians charged to report again at Zuñi in eighty days. For five days they marched eastward. They then “arrived at a town called Ácuco, a very strange place built upon a solid rock, the inhabitants of which were great brigands and much dreaded by all the province.”

It was Ácoma, now first seen by white men. The Crag was described as very high, and on three sides the ascent was perpendicular. The only way to reach the top was by a trail cut in the solid rock. The first flight was of two hundred steps, “which could be ascended without much difficulty, when a second flight of one hundred more commenced. These steps were narrower and more difficult than the first, and when surmounted, there remained twelve feet to the top which could only be ascended by putting hands and feet in the holes cut in the rocks.” It was evidently the difficult trail near the eastern limit of the village. On the top great piles of stones were kept, to hurl upon an approaching enemy. No better proof is needed of the importance to the sedentary Indians of self-defense against the roving tribes than such a fortress pueblo, difficult to reach and easily defended.

In warlike mood the Indians came down to the plain to meet the Spaniards. Drawing a line in the sand, just as those at Tusayán had done, they forbade the strangers to cross it. Persuasion was first tried. This failing, Alvarado decided to attack. Seeing such preparations, the Indians showed willingness to make peace by “approaching the horses to take their perspiration and rub the whole body with it, and then to make a cross with the fingers.”[42] They also crossed their hands, an act considered inviolable. Castañeda mentions a cross at Ácuco, “near a fountain, two palms high and a finger in thickness. The wood was squared and around it were dried flowers, and little staves ornamented with feathers.” Alvarado reported to Coronado that, on his way eastward to the villages of Tiguex, he passed Ácuco. “It is one of the strongest places we have seen, because the city is on a very high rock with a rough ascent, so that we repented having gone up the place.”

There is a curious conflict between the description by Castañeda of this first encounter with the Ácomas and that of another contemporary writer who apparently formed a different impression of the dwellers on the Peñol. In the anonymous “Relación del Suceso”[43] we read, that Alvarado “found a rock with a village on top, the strongest position that ever was seen in the world, which was called Ácuco in their language. They came out to meet us peacefully though it would have been easy to decline to do this and to have stayed on their rock, where we would not have been able to trouble them. They gave us cloaks of cotton, skins of deer and of cows, and turquoises, and fowls and other food which is the same as in Cíbola.”

Such is the story of the first sight by Europeans of the Sky City of the desert. In December, when the ground was covered with three feet of snow, Coronado’s main army marched from Cíbola to Tiguex, and so passed Ácuco, as Alvarado had done. The inhabitants furnished them with provisions in friendly fashion. The Spaniards gazed at the settlement on its summit with much interest, but could not ascend (or they said they could not—it is not stated that they tried) without helping one another, while the Indians went up and down easily, and even their women would do so carrying heavy burdens. From this we infer that the Spaniards ascended the Peñol, for after describing as before the “toe-and-finger trail,” the chronicler continues, “there was a wall of large and small stones at the top, which they could roll down without showing themselves, so that no army could possibly be strong enough to capture the village. On the top they had room to sow and store a large amount of corn and cisterns to collect snow and water. They made a present of a large number of (turkey) cocks with very big wattles, much bread, tanned deerskins, piñon nuts, flour and corn.”[44] There was undoubtedly room enough to “store” provisions, but then as now there was never a particle of garden soil in which to “sow” even a little corn unless carried from the valley.

Epoch-making were the results that came from the Coronado expedition, in the discovery of Cíbola,[45] of the Grand Cañon, and of the buffalo on the Plains. The discovery of the Colorado River was recognized as of the first importance. This is shown by a map made by one of Alarcón’s pilots, for the Ulpius globe of 1542 and the map of Sebastian Cabot of 1544 were changed by reason of this discovery. Yet Coronado took back to Spain no material wealth, and no promise of any except such as might be gained from the cultivation of a good soil by permanent settlers, and by some means, at that time undiscoverable, of transportation for its products. Hence Coronado was regarded not only as an unsuccessful explorer, but almost as a disgraced man, who had wasted the wealth of the realm.

So great was the disappointment over this result and so absorbed were the men of New Spain by the new mineral discoveries in Nueva Vizcaya, as well as by the confusion produced by the Mixton War, that forty years passed before there was another successful attempt to penetrate the northern country. Such sporadic raids as took place in this interval were either personal adventures of individual Spaniards or slave-hunting forays to fill the shortage of laborers at the mines. These adventurers had little interest in true exploration of the country they crossed while the slave-catching aroused fear in the native mind and made further entradas more difficult. A new generation of Spanish explorers and settlers had arisen, to whom Cíbola and Ácuco and Quivira were practically myths, before any fresh interest was aroused to explore the wilderness beyond.

Four decades after Coronado’s exploration, a party of adventurous spirits made a fresh attempt to penetrate the northern wilderness. They were only twenty-eight in number, counting soldiers, three friars and Indian servants. They were organized by a lay brother of St. Francis, Fray Augustin Rodríguez. Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado commanded the soldiers. On the whole, they met little opposition from the native peoples and on their side appear also to have dealt considerately with them.

Curiosity concerning these strange white invaders was mingled with fear born of the earlier forays made to capture slaves who were taken back to the mines. So soon as Fray Rodríguez made evident that he asked no more than fish and maize in exchange for such merchandise as had been brought along for this purpose, the people showed a child-like interest and pointed out the way to the north. In the Tigua country, more hostility was encountered. One of the priests, Fray Santa María, determined, against the protests of soldiers and padres, to return to beg additional help from the viceroy. “Children of the Sun,” the Spaniards had called themselves to these worshippers of the great Sun-Deity, and Santa María seems to have relied on the belief they had engendered hitherto in their invulnerability to attack. His departure excited the suspicion of the natives and, as he was entirely alone, he was easily killed within two days “while sleeping, by having a large stone placed upon him and left to die of suffocation.” Thus did the savages learn that Spaniards could be put to death like other men, and this knowledge proved a serious obstacle to the future progress of the invaders.

Constantly forced after this to be on their guard against plots and ambush, the explorers settled themselves for a time at Puaray (a little above the present city of Albuquerque), from which place excursions were made in various directions. On one of these, going westward, hoping to find Zuñi, they reached “a well-fortified pueblo named Ácoma, the best there is in Christendom.” It is described by their diarist as having five hundred houses of three and four storeys. This, then, is the next definite mention of the Peñol. Here they were told that with two days’ further march inland they would reach many pueblos and mines; consequently they did not linger at Ácoma or make any close examination of its people or their civilization.

With the remainder of this expedition[46] we have no further connection beyond the fact that, when they had returned to San Bartolomé and reported that they had reluctantly left behind their two friars, the order of St. Francis at once bestirred itself to attempt their rescue. On the tenth of December, 1582, the endeavor was inaugurated under the leadership of Antonio de Espéjo, who offered to finance the whole undertaking. One of the soldiers in Espéjo’s company, Miguel Sanchez Valenciano, took with him his wife, Doña Casilda de Amaya, and their two young children, an astonishing example of courage on her part. She was in consequence the first white woman to enter New Mexico, the heart of the continent, a third of a century before the Puritans brought their families to Massachusetts.

Espéjo knew full well about the death of Fray Santa María, for Bustamente and Gallegos, the two chroniclers, had already gone to Mexico City to report the whole story of their experiences.[47] There were rumors, too, that the other friars had been massacred since the soldiers left. But the uncertainty must be removed. It was, however, a full year later that Espéjo confirmed the truth of the massacres, when he reached Puaray. The avowed purpose of the entrada was now accomplished. Espéjo, however, was not without other ambitions, and finding that his religious adviser, Padre Beltrán, was in sympathy with him, he decided to make further advances into adjacent lands. One of the routes took them as far as Jémez and thence to Ácoma.

Espéjo’s narrative describes the fortress of Ácoma as follows:

Four days’ march from Ácoma to the westward brought the party as far as Cíbola (Zuñi), where they halted at the village of Hálona, the present pueblo of the tribe.[51]

The great achievement by Espéjo was the new approach, making the third pathway from Mexico to the north, and to this re-discovered province which he called Nueva Andalucía. Soon afterward it was permanently christened Nuevo Mexico.

The golden dream of the earlier explorers had been of a land bursting with riches and glorious in opportunities for lasting renown, in short, another “Peru” or another “Mexico.” Assuredly it had led them through dangers and hardships which to modern ears sound as much like fairy tales as the treasures these gallant men hoped to secure. If the reality was far from the dream, it was, nevertheless, a land of promise. There continued also a belief in the Strait of Anian, the long-hoped-for northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and some of the claimants for the right to govern the northern territory, while speaking scornfully to the viceroy of the sterile deserts of Cíbola and Quivira, affirmed that the true wealth was beyond, and that by reaching that “beyond” there would also be discovered the shorter route between the two great seas.

Enough had been discovered by Espéjo and his men to stir the imagination and the cupidity of all New Spain. Quite naturally Espéjo felt himself entitled to the first chance. But there were many other aspirants, and Espéjo’s recommendation that the new province should be subject directly to the King of Spain and not to the viceroy of New Spain, was probably no help to the fulfillment of his ambition. In 1595 it was decided to make a fresh attempt to conquer and colonize on a much more complex and thoroughgoing scale than any of the others, and, beyond New Mexico, to reach the much-talked-of Quivira. The command was entrusted to the greatest of all those who went into the north, Juan de Oñate, who became the true founder of New Mexico. Bolton in commenting upon it says, “This was then the great epoch-making step toward both the Strait of Anian and the Sea; no less than the pushing forward of a frontier whose interstices it would take a hundred years to fill, even with military outposts.”

Chapter IV THE BATTLE IN THE SKY CITY — As told by an Eye Witness

There are few figures in the early history of this country so gallant or so picturesque as that of Juan de Oñate, son of Cristóbal Oñate, the man who discovered the rich mines of Nueva Galicia, thereby laying the foundation of one of the first fortunes of North America. The son, Juan, added lustre to the name by his marriage with the houses both of Montezuma and of Cortés, so it is scarcely to be wondered at that the viceroy Velasco chose him from the crowd of hungry applicants to be the leader of a fresh expedition to the new province.

Oñate was accompanied by three others whose names and fortunes are fitted to thrill those to whom the real human hero is a figure more full of true romance than the characters of fiction. These were the two nephews of Oñate, Juan de Zaldívar, maestro de Campo; Vicente Zaldívar, sarjento-mayor; and Captain Gaspar de Villagrá, procurador-general.

Villagrá proved himself not only valiant in arms but a poet of no mean rank. Eleven years after the event, Villagrá published in Seville a rhymed account of the whole of the first Oñate expedition. When Bancroft consulted it in 1877, as a mere literary curiosity, he found instead “A complete narrative of remarkable historic accuracy ...” and he adds, “Of all the territories of America, New Mexico alone may point to a poem as the original authority for its early annals.”

Don Gaspar begins his epic in true Virgilian manner:

Bancroft regrets that the petition and contract granted to Oñate by the viceroy Velasco were unattainable.[53] Since his writing they have been discovered.[54] His contract to colonize New Mexico was made in 1595. Oñate agreed to supply at his own cost not only two hundred men, but all their equipment, and the live-stock, merchandise, and provisions for the support of the colony for a year. They started forth with eighty-three wagons, seven thousand head of stock, and one hundred and thirty persons. In return for this, besides emoluments of land and titles, free from crown taxation, Oñate was to be governor, adelantado, and captain-general of the province. He asked the government also for the support of six friars with proper church furnishings, and likewise full instructions concerning the conversion of the Indians, and the tributes he had the right to exact from them.

A change of viceroys brought about most annoying delays—even a leisurely investigation into Oñate’s fitness for the task. There seem to have been no limits to the official obstacles put in his path, including false calumnies whose refutation was not easily established. But, according to Villagrá,[55] the general never for one moment dreamed of relinquishing his enterprise.

Finally, on January 26, 1598, nearly three years after the first award of the contract, Oñate actually started north from Santa Barbara. In four days he reached the Conchos River. Here the unwelcome visitador[56] was finally got rid of, and Fray Alonso Martínez with ten Franciscans was assigned as the religious aid of the pioneers. Oñate’s own equipment almost staggers the imagination in its elaborate and complete detail.

“The lucky-starred Vicente” Zaldívar opened up a new and shorter highway from Mexico to the Rio Grande, straight to “El Paso,”[57] and here on the last day of April, 1598, Oñate took formal possession of New Mexico and “all the adjoining provinces” for God, the King of Spain, and himself, with even more than the usual grandiloquent ceremonial deemed essential for such an event. In addition to the customary religious service, a comic drama written by Captain Farfán was enacted. The theme chosen depicted a conflict between Christians and Moors, in which, through the aid of Santiago, the Christians were victorious. El Paso is therefore the original home of European drama in the Southwest.

One of the duties given Oñate was to capture any wanderers he might find of the unauthorized exploring ventures that had left New Spain during the preceding years, and by good fortune he did secure two men, left by Castaño, who understood three languages—Aztec, Spanish, and one of the New Mexican tongues. Later, a more valuable aid was the Indian Jusephe, who had been with Humaña and whom Oñate found with the Picuris tribe. With these men as interpreters he could proceed more successfully. The next thing was to force the submission and obedience of the natives.

Beyond El Paso short excursions were made, to explore or to secure maize for food. Crossing the river, Oñate went ahead of the lumbering caravan to “pacify the land”—taking sixty of his men with him. By the twenty-fifth of June the company reached Puaray, where the friars were given lodgings in a newly painted room. Imagine their astonishment next morning when they faced upon the walls sketches which fresh paint had failed to obliterate and which they recognized as portraits of Friars López and Rodríguez, martyred seventeen years before.

In a kiva ceremony at Santo Domingo, the chiefs of thirty-five tribes knelt to kiss the hands of Oñate and of Padre Martínez. Thus an “erstwhile free and sovereign people” became subjects of Philip III of Spain and converts to Holy Roman Church.

They reached the pueblo of Caypa on July 11th, and here Oñate made his headquarters until the spring of 1599, but changed the name to San Juan de los Caballeros, to celebrate the knightly company who had successfully achieved their task. In the words of Villagrá,

At San Juan, in the province of New Mexico, there was founded therefore the second permanent colony in what is now the United States, nine years before Jamestown and more than twenty years before Plymouth.

Not all was made serene and easy for the conquerors, and because the ground was not paved with silver, many of the frontiersmen became turbulent; others deserted, making their escape on stolen horses. To capture such, Captain Marquéz and Villagrá were sent in hot pursuit. While they were absent, Oñate, accompanied by Father Martínez and a suitable escort, went forth to visit the more western pueblos in order to receive their formal submission. As his representative at San Juan, Don Juan Zaldívar was appointed commandant of the troops and governor of the colony, but with orders to hand over this control to his brother Vicente so soon as the latter should return from the buffalo plains.

Meanwhile Oñate himself visited, among other places, the Peñol of Ácoma, where he was received with much apparent cordiality, and was given “maize, water and turkeys.” According to the usual custom, surrender and fealty to the rule of the lieutenants of the Spanish monarch was demanded of the natives. Although up to this time few hints are given of any hostility from the Indians, Oñate was far too wary to risk surprise, and forbade his men to separate from each other while on the mesa. The cacique, Zutucapán, whom we may picture to ourselves a man of intelligence, crafty enough to mask his intent behind keen, penetrating eyes, came forward to offer the white lord the supreme honor within his gift: Would the señor descend to their holy of holies, the subterranean Kiva in the rock? There he would receive signal proofs of the desire of the Ácomas to become worthy subjects of this all-great sovereign. Oñate, closely surrounded by his men, very probably looked down the hatchway from which tall, mast-like poles of the entrance ladder protruded. Was it the silent darkness of the great hole, or did some prophetic warning of danger hold him back? At all events, with courteous disclaimers he refused the honor and went his way, all unaware, it would appear, how narrowly he had escaped death from savages waiting at the ladder’s foot to give him short shrift.

Villagrá, upon reaching San Juan, found Oñate gone to Zuñi, there to await Zaldívar and the thirty soldiers with whom he hoped to realize his dream of reaching the western sea. Consequently he hastened on unattended to report to the general his success in bringing back the deserters from the army. Like his chief, Villagrá was met at Ácoma with friendly entreaty by Zutucapán, who, however, was something too persistent in his questioning, so that the Spanish captain took alarm and apparently did not leave his mount. Assuring the cacique that he was merely the avant-courier of a very large Spanish force hastening to join the general, he managed, though pursued, to escape.

Toward nightfall, man and beast faltered with exhaustion. Throwing himself on the bare ground, Villagrá slept, but awakened while it still was dark to find himself covered by a blanket of snow. The day must not betray him. Mounting his tired horse, he started forward. Only a short distance farther on both fell into a deep pit prepared by the Ácomas for unwary strangers, well screened by brush and now also hidden by the falling snow. Half stunned, Villagrá crawled out, but his horse was dead. For four days thereafter Villagrá tells us he staggered on, with a favorite dog for sole companion, foodless and waterless, since the snow had ceased and only the arid earth was visible. At length he laid himself down to die, when by rare good fortune he was discovered by some of Oñate’s men searching for lost horses. Carried to camp, and nursed to health again, he played his heroic part only a little later in the assault and capture of the great Sky City. By so narrow a margin has posterity inherited his priceless history of the great adventure.

Don Vicente de Zaldívar, having arrived at San Juan, took over the command of the colony as ordered. On the 18th of November, his brother Don Juan started for his western journey, with thirty soldiers, to join Oñate at Zuñi. Meanwhile the bitter disappointment of Zutucapán, foiled by Oñate and again by Villagrá, had had time to ferment into more diabolical designs against the next coming of white usurpers of the land. As Zaldívar approached Ácoma, he was met by the cacique and his confederates in friendliest guise. They seem not only to have urged the Spaniards to visit their sky city but to have promised ample provisions for the further journey. Quite unsuspicious of the evil in their hearts, Don Juan with sixteen companions went up the steep footway in the rocks. The others remained below with the horses. Still off-guard, Don Juan allowed his men to separate on the mesa-top, beguiled by plausible invitations to one or another point of interest.

And now we see the stage set for the tragic sequel. Bare rocky floor. Grim eyeless blocks of building. An illimitable sky, grey and pitiless. On one side a horde of fierce barbarians consumed by primeval passion to resist the entry of an alien force. On the other, a handful of white soldiers, who though armed can make no concerted defence because they have foolishly drawn apart from one another. There is no path of escape, no possible signal for help to those below. Suddenly a hideous war-cry rends the air, and every Spaniard is assailed by mad savages with war-clubs or is pierced with arrows. From house-tops huge stones are hurled. Brave and alert, the Spaniards sell their lives dearly in a terrible hand-to-hand struggle. Don Juan and Zutucapán meet in mortal combat and the valiant officer falls beneath the blow of a massive war-club. Swift and short we may believe the onset, till, breathless, the few Spaniards still alive succeed in getting together. Wounded, but not beyond effort, Captain Tobar and four of the soldiers, pushing and being pushed, finally reach the edge of the abrupt cliffs at the same moment. With a last desperate effort, and we may think by common though unspoken consent, they determine to die by throwing themselves over the precipice, since to die seems all that is left them. By what even then was deemed a miracle, only one of the five was killed in that fearful jump of one hundred and fifty feet. It is supposed that they must have landed on the sand that is heaped at certain places against the base of the cliffs. At all events, the other four were rescued by their companions below, and, probably because of the fear still felt by the Indians for horses, the camp was left unmolested by the victorious savages long enough for the Spaniards to regain some strength; being under the overhanging rocks they were safe from missiles thrown from above.

But fear lest this treachery of the Ácomas was only the prelude to a general uprising of all the pueblos made the Spaniards decide to break camp at once. Separating into small bands of three or four men, they went by different routes, some to warn Oñate of his peril, and others over the arid miles to San Juan, to provide such defence as was possible there for the women and children.

The scheme succeeded, and by the end of the year 1598 all the Spaniards in New Mexico were assembled at San Juan. Oñate, waiting at Zuñi for Zaldívar, had become anxious, and had retraced his path so far as a camp called El Agua de la Peña. There he was met by Bernabé de las Casas,[59] “who with six companions had come with the sad news of the occurrence at Ácoma, and of the death of Don Juan de Zaldívar with other captains and soldiers.”[60]

A serious problem now faced Oñate. The Indians could not go unpunished, nor must the plan of punishment fail—for should it do so, New Mexico would have to be abandoned. Other pueblos, watching to see the result of the revolt of what was considered by them an impregnable fortress of their race, would certainly rise in unison, and there would result a war, possibly one of extermination. There were available but two hundred white men—whereas in Ácoma there were not less than three hundred warriors, and some additional Navajos. Moreover, Oñate could use only a fraction of his own force, because the other pueblos would assuredly rise if the settlements of Spaniards should be left unprotected.

But war was inevitable, and Oñate showed shrewdness in first getting opinions from the padres as to what constitutes a justifiable war, so that he would be supported against all censure of viceroy and monarch should his desperate case prove also a ruined one.

The reply of the comisario and other priests is set forth in long detail and is of eminent worth.[61] It seemed but just and fair that the brother of the slain Zaldívar should lead the avengers of the massacre—and to Vicente de Zaldívar therefore was given the command. With him was Farfán, and another was the soldier-poet Villagrá, whose rhymed history of the siege and capture of the redoubtable rock is the basis of our information.[62] Oñate made the men a moving address of farewell, cautioning them against an over-zealous spirit of revenge, and recommending that they should all be confessed and receive the Communion before they started on their perilous task. Only one man, not named, refused, and so did not go.

Vicente and the dauntless comisario, Father Alonso Martínez, with a band of seven captains and seventy soldiers, left San Juan January 12, 1599, and on the twenty-first arrived at Ácoma. They were greeted from afar by the exultant savages, dancing stark naked on their cliff, while their medicine men, hideously painted, beat the drums and hurled curses and incantations upon the besiegers, and all the inhabitants joined in shrieking insults.

Zaldívar came as near as he dared, and the notary through an interpreter named Tomás, according to a prescribed and usual formula, thrice summoned the Ácomas to surrender. Instead of meek obedience came a shower of stones and arrows. The savages, certain of their own security, had even rejected the counsel of some of their own men to remove the women and children, and now howled defiance at the Spaniards.

While the hideous din of a war dance filled the night with sound, the little band of courageous men encamped below the mesa and planned their coming fight for supremacy.

Next morning, January 22, 1599, just two months after the massacre, with their war-cry of “Santiago! Santiago!” the small force of only sixty soldiers began the assault upon the fortress. They were met from above by a rain of arrows and stones that did their deadly work. But this was only a feint on the part of the Spaniards. During the previous night, under protection of the darkness and the clamor of the war dance on the mesa, the Spaniards had sent twelve men, chosen for their skill, with the one and only cannon in their possession, to make their way up the southern mesa. These men had crept stealthily around under the precipices and, though hampered by heavy armor, had successfully reached a great outlying ledge of rock on the uninhabited cliff of Ácoma, from which the other was separated by a narrow but fearful chasm. This they determined to bridge, and it took heroic effort.

Small pines which grew above the great precipices on the south had been cut. With superhuman effort they were dragged down, and across a troughlike valley, and then again up the perpendicular ledges to where the twelve men were perched with their cannon. All this was done in the night of the twenty-second. When the grey dawn came over the silent landscape on the twenty-third, all but a dozen, left to guard the horses, had joined their comrades, who were screened by pinnacles of rock from the sight of the Indians. Here, according to Villagrá,[64] Father Martínez offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Engelhardt[65] adds, “It was the first time that the holy Mysteries were celebrated on the lofty peñol of Ácoma. During this Holy Mass, all the Spaniards received Holy Communion: doubtless many supposed it was their Viaticum.” Then the comisario addressed the little band, adjuring them, while defending Church and King, to be chary of wantonness in killing.

At a given moment the Spaniards chosen for casting a log to bridge the chasm rushed forth, and luckily for them lodged its further end beyond the gulf. To keep a footing on that crazy log in the face of stones and arrows was no ordinary test of poise and daring. Unhappily, one man caught the rope and pulled the log after him. With yells of triumph the Indians fell upon the forlornly stranded group, when instantly an officer (who was Villagrá himself) flew out from the crowd of his fellows on the other side of the abyss and from its edge sprang into the air, clearing the space, and landing, seized the log and thrust it back, so that it was securely caught. Over it came pouring the Spanish soldiers.

Now the mesa top was again the scene of awful struggle and carnage—a hand-to-hand, merciless fight with knives and clubs and arrows of the savages, against the sword blades and gunstocks of the trained Spaniards.[66] Neither side gave way though bleeding and trampled and stunned, they fell to rise, or fell to die. But after a time the Indians seem to have thought these were perhaps no mortal foes, and they retreated into their fortress-like houses.

Having caught their breath, the besiegers at once began a fresh attack, house by house. Into the narrow calles they dragged the cannon, and the adobe walls crumbled as the stone balls fell upon them. Soon fire ran from house to house and the pueblo was doomed. But not until noontime of January 24 did the Indians yield. Then their old men sued for mercy, and Zaldívar at once ordered his men to cease. In fact, the Indians were persuaded they had been defeated by supernatural power, and after the surrender “they inquired for that valiant rider with the grey beard who on a brisk white steed and accompanied by a handsome queen was helping the Spaniards.”[67] The Spaniards, themselves hardly less given to superstition, now believed that their patron, Santiago, assisted by the Virgin, must have hovered, unseen, above them and brought them victory.

Thus ended the breathless, savage fight of a brave race for home and children, a fight accompanied by a heroism and a disregard of personal danger and injury such as few men have ever shown. Five hundred Indians lay dead, and not a living Spaniard but carried his scars of that fateful time to his death. According to Villagrá, the aged chieftain, Chumpo, who had counselled before the battle that the women and children should be removed from the Crag, was permitted to descend and settle in the plain.

The pity of it! Treachery had met its master, but we can hardly wonder that bitter hatred was engendered between the races, for in addition to death and fire and desolation, Zaldívar carried away eight of the Ácoma girls to be educated by the nuns in Mexico. Was his idea that of hostages to peace, or did he delude himself with the plea of Christian “civilization”?[68]

Dr. Bolton has generously given permission to include here his own translation, as yet unpublished, taken from the “Itinerary from the Mines of Caxco,” by an anonymous diarist of the Oñate expedition to New Mexico, 1596 to 1598. This diary wonderfully confirms the accuracy of Villagrá’s rhymed history, and supplements it in various details, the most valuable of which is the list, not given elsewhere, of names of those men killed or wounded in the affray. The diarist’s account is as follows:

Chapter V ÁCOMA REBUILT

Ácoma, ruined and desolated, had now to be toilfully and painfully rebuilt. It was indeed a desperate spectacle of crumbled rock, and adobe—all that was left of what had been for untold years the habitation and fortress of this Keres tribe. But the homing instinct of every created being forbade its people to dream of anything else than a reincarnation of what was to them their only refuge and dwelling place. Saddened that their castle-crag was no longer so safe from violation as they had always believed, these men and women took up their weary task of reclamation. They were, indeed, all too familiar with the devastation by Apaches of many a pueblo. These new foes were only men of another color, centaur-like and made more invincible, it is true, by horrible fire-breathing sticks that dealt deadly stings. But this was Fate.

Once again we may watch in fancy the long procession of patient men and women bringing on their backs adobes from the plain below, and timber from far-distant San Mateo. Each heavy burden must be carried up the steep, crooked trail. Yet by slow degrees the long adobe blocks of houses did become habitable again, and life resumed its ancient sway. Little wonder that for long thereafter the Ácomas felt deadly enmity for the Spaniards.

In reconstructing a new life upon the ruins of the old one, we have to take into account a new element—one so alien to all the Ácomas had hitherto known that we shall do well to pause for some understanding of the régime under which Spain adapted these primitive people to civilization. High officials were aware that no soldier guard would suffice. Here and now, as everywhere in the years to come, it was the tireless persistence of fighting and teaching Franciscan friars that proved the most successful means of keeping relations friendly with the Indians.

The lesson taught the Indians at Ácoma was so thorough that the Spanish rule was accepted by the other pueblos without further resistance. From San Juan, Oñate moved his headquarters to San Gabriel in 1601. Some eight years later Santa Fé was founded and made the permanent capital. Colonists and friars now settled into a contented routine. Before Oñate went off east in search of Quivira, he and the Father Commissary distributed the friars among the pueblos in seven districts. In the pueblos churches were built, monasteries founded, and schools established. In temporal affairs the natives were put under a hybrid system, part Indian, part Spanish.

The more one reads of Spain’s efforts in establishing her rule over a new continent, the more impressed one must be by the use made of the mission as a frontier agency. No one else has treated this subject with such illumination as Bolton, to whose vivid essay I wish to acknowledge my debt.[70]

Spain not only aimed at dominion, but conceived as well a broadly humane policy toward the Indian. It was in Spanish America chiefly that the Indians were preserved. Elsewhere they have mostly disappeared. Spain aimed to convert, protect, civilize, and exploit the natives. In the early days of the conquest their welfare was entrusted largely to encomenderos (trustees), who were charged with the care and exploitation of the natives within large areas. The grants were called encomiendas. But Mexico was a long distance from Spain. The encomenderos, beyond the reach of the royal arm, fixed their attention too much on profit and too little on their obligations to convert, protect, and civilize the natives. Having abused their power, they became discredited. As the frontier advanced to distant outposts, more and more the encomendero was supplanted by the missionary. By this means more emphasis was placed on conversion and civilization, and less on exploitation. The missions therefore became agencies of both State and Church. Since they served the State, they received State support. Each mission became not only a church and monastery, but a school of discipline in which the rudiments of European civilization were taught.

The missions were usually provided with great enclosures, well defended by high walls against forays of hostile Indians, and the discipline therein enforced was an essential element in the Spanish policy. Even on a barren mesa-top like Ácoma there is evidence of a monastic settlement of considerable extent connected with the church, where the inhabitants of that pueblo received daily instruction of some kind from the padres.

Not merely as teachers and preachers were the missionaries useful. They served also as diplomats to win the Indians to Spain, as explorers to spy out the land, and as reporters to make known the needs of the frontiers.

There are no more heroic annals in the world than those which tell of the experience many brave and ardent priests underwent. The Conquistadores were brilliant soldiers, but their story would be incomplete if beside them had not walked these brown-habited Franciscans, who burned with zeal to save the souls of the invaded country, and stayed on after the soldiers had departed, to pursue their selfless task, coveting martyrdom as their only personal reward.

A widespread impression exists that the Spanish conquerors were brutal, and Spain’s further rule of this continent needlessly oppressive. What are the facts? With any gift of imagination we have only to picture to ourselves the problem confronting the Spaniards, in order to recognize the enormous difficulties which practically offered but two alternatives: either complete annihilation of the aboriginal race, or its gradual training and absorption into a more coherent and civilized nation. “The Spaniard, to his lasting honor, accepted the alternative of assimilation, and although he sometimes faltered in his high purpose and was often guilty of cruelty, oppression and the rankest injustice,” yet we have the keynote of the Spanish system in the last will of Queen Isabella, signed by her the day before her death, in 1504.[71] This will was quoted by Charles V when he founded schools for the instruction of the natives as early as 1550.

To close and summarize this sketch of the early Spanish régime, I quote from Bolton:

In spite of the general unity of the aims of Church and State, the friars and secular officials did not always agree. Royal agents on the frontier were not altogether perfect. There were conflicts of jurisdiction and many manifestations of the ordinary weaknesses of human nature. Such differences arose in New Mexico at the very outset, between Oñate and the missionaries. They marred harmony and impeded progress toward desirable ends. But quarrels assume an exaggerated proportion in the early annals, because they produced and left behind more voluminous documentary evidence than times of peace.

So to the conquered pueblos Oñate and the Commissioners sent the missionaries. Fray Andres Corchado was assigned to Ácoma, together with Sía, Zuñi, Moqui and other towns. It was an enormous district for one man to cover. Very little is known of Fray Corchado’s work in Ácoma. Hodge concludes that no mission churches were built at this time. If that be true, it is probable that no more than a temporary adobe was dedicated to Fray Corchado’s use for lodgings and for church services in the Sky City.

For a time Ácoma was associated with no less a figure than the celebrated Father Zárate Salmerón, historian of his own epoch in New Mexico. For eight years Zárate writes that he “sacrificed himself to the pagans” (1618-1626). Others call him “a great orator and an indefatigable worker, who instilled fresh energy into his mission work.” Jémez was his principal scene of labor; but he also served the Keres. Once at least he visited Ácoma during a period of great hostility and it is recorded that he succeeded in pacifying them for a season.

One of the interesting items in Father Zárate’s “Relación” is his attempt to verify the current belief that there were Indians in New Mexico who talked in the Nahautl language—that is, the language of the Aztecs. He had been told, he said, by Captain Gerónimo Marquéz long before,

and thence to Jémez and so back to their own land. This must have occurred in the time of Oñate, whom Marquéz accompanied. No modern writer has ever mentioned even a tradition of such a decoration of the estufa. Did it perish in the time of the great fight? Who can say? So far as written, no white man has ever penetrated the interior of an Ácoma kiva.

The New Mexico missions now flourished. On Father Zárate’s recommendation, in 1621 the province was made a custodio and named San Pablo. Father Benavides, an even more illustrious historian than Zárate, was San Pablo’s first superior. At the end of five years he reported sixteen friars in New Mexico and the astonishing number of 34,000 Indians baptized. This would be an average of a thousand each for thirty-four towns.

Benavides, when he returned to Spain, wrote his precious “Memorial” on the affairs of New Mexico. Like his predecessors and successors, he notes the aloofness of Ácoma from the rest of the Keres, their kinsmen. He writes that the Keres neophytes “are dextrous in reading, writing, and playing on all instruments, and craftsmen in all the crafts, thanks to the great industry of the Religious who converted them.” He does not mention Ácoma by name in this connection. But if what he says applied to them, we must assume that one or more padres had spent many a month of patient labor on the top of the great rock.

Benavides was succeeded by Father Estévan Perea.[72] With twelve soldiers and twenty-nine priests, in September, 1628, the new custodian sallied forth from Mexico City for his charge. At San Bartolomé, Perea writes, fifteen of their mules fled to join the wild herd; and were not recaptured. But four extra carts were added here to the thirty-two with which they had started.

On Palm Saturday, April 7, 1629, they reached the Rio del Norte, where they gratefully lingered, since for three days they had suffered from lack of water. The natives were friendly, bartering fish in exchange for meat and maize. The party probably crossed the Rio Grande near the present El Paso, and entered on the famous and much dreaded Jornado del Muerto,[73] described as “the terror of all travellers; many a life has gone out in an effort to cross the inhospitable stretch of eighty miles.” According to Vetancur, the whole journey was made almost entirely on foot. On their way up the Rio Grande one of the brethren died and was buried at Robledo.[74] Further delay was inevitable to give the Father suitable burial.

By Pentecost[75] (Whitsunday) the rest of the weary travellers had reached Santa Fé. The friars celebrated their safe arrival by holding a Chapter or business council. No doubt many important things were done in that meeting. But one transaction, which alone would make the gathering immortal, was the selection of the man who was destined to become the Apostle of Ácoma—Fray Juan Ramírez.

Chapter VI FATHER RAMÍREZ AT ÁCOMA

Having first escorted Father Romero and Muñoz to the “bellicose and warlike Apaches” to the east, Governor Silva prepared to conduct the friars assigned to Ácoma, Zuñi, and Moqui. This, too, was enemy country, and soldiers were taken along. Governor Silva was evidently proud of his part in the re-establishment of the faith in the west, for on his way both to and from Zuñi, he carved his name on Inscription Rock (July 29 and August 9, 1629), where it is still plainly to be seen. Silva’s zeal for the faith is shown likewise by his deeds in Zuñi. There he issued an edict that no soldier should enter any house of the pueblo, nor transgress by ill-using the Indians, under forfeit of his life. “Moreover, to make these people understand the veneration due to the priests, wherever they met with Indians, the governor and soldiers knelt to kiss the feet of the fathers, admonishing them to do likewise, which the Indians did; so much as this the example of a Superior can achieve.”

From Santa Fé a cavalcade of thirty soldiers filled with a spirit of high adventure, fully armed, and mounted on good horses gay with the trappings of that period, set forth on June the twenty-third, 1629. Perea writes that the soldiers were well armed in body, but the eight friars were “much better armed in spirit.” Four hundred extra cavalry horses followed close. Behind came ten wagons on which were loaded all the essentials of food, munitions, and church equipment for such a journey. They took the desert trail, marked out through the ages by the unshod feet of the Indian himself—a trail we of to-day must likewise follow almost as blindly since everywhere its course is blurred by drifting sand. Watchful and wary of ambush, but stirring up great clouds of dust, the cavalcade crossed the Rio Grande, and continued its way southwest. In due time the weary hundred miles or more were covered, and the Peñol was reached.

To their relief the Spaniards were given a friendly welcome. Probably the spectacle of such a force, and a still potent memory of the tragedy of the Crag in Oñate’s time caused the Ácomas to reflect, and to conclude that, for the moment at least, discretion was the better part of valor. The friendly reception was gratifying, for as Perea wrote, “by force or by siege it would appear to be impossible to enter the place because of its impregnable site. It is a cliff as high as Mt. Amar in Abasia or the insuperable steep which Alexander won from the Scythians.”[76]

Governor Silva and his party continued west. At the Crag Father Ramírez “remained at the avowed peril of his life—though this had been already surrendered in sacrifice unto God—among these so-valiant Barbarians who had on other occasions fought so well that the Spaniards knew to their sorrow the courage and skill of their opponents.”

Born at Oaxaca, in the valley of Antequera, Juan Ramírez had taken holy orders in the famous convent of Mexico. There his zeal in religious teaching had brought him distinction, so “that he shed lustre upon the Province” and was chosen to go with others of his Order to New Mexico in 1628. Vetancur expressly says that the march was made on foot over the greater part of the six hundred leagues of the wild country, and that because the supplies for their maintenance, furnished by the Crown, were insufficient, “he and the other Religious lived upon what was given them in charity along the way.”

When Father Ramírez heard that the fiercest and most rebellious of all the tribes were those upon the Peñol at Ácoma, he besought the custodian to be sent thither. This intrepid priest believed himself so endowed with grace of heaven that he could succeed where during forty years Spanish arms had failed. The legend is that he ascended the cliff, though with great difficulty, having no other defence than his breviary and his cross, and that so soon as he was seen by the savages, they pelted him with enough arrows to destroy a dozen men, but not one even pierced his habit—a thing so strange that even his would-be murderers thought it a miracle and were sore afraid. Moreover, it happened that a little girl of eight years was accidentally pushed over the brink in the tumult of the riotous savages on the summit, and fell among the cruel rocks sixty feet below. Ramírez went to her, knelt beside her, and prayed over her, and soon led her quite unharmed up to her amazed kinsfolk, who received her with fond caresses. Now they looked upon the Father as one more than human and soon became his disciples. History does not always sustain the poetic overlay of fact, for in this case the records say positively that Ramírez was escorted to the Peñol by Governor Silva.

A second quaint story of a “Religious” who can be no other than Ramírez is told by Benavides. The Father, after recounting his own success among the Indians of Taos, writes as follows of the Crag of Ácoma, at that time apparently hostile to the invading Spaniards:

Some may discredit the two miracles of the children as treasured by the Church; but others feel it to be equally miraculous that the personality and ingenuity of one solitary human being could disarm the ferocity and suspicion of barbarians such as these, win their confidence, make them obedient to his teachings and induce them to adopt a better mode of life. For in these things we have every reason to believe he succeeded so long as he lived among them.

One wishes there were some vivid personal picture of this courageous priest. The quaint phrase of the old chroniclers is too apt to convey an idea of an elderly, grave, and wholly pious padre. But I suspect that any man daring enough to undertake and carry through so hazardous an adventure as this of Fray Juan was certainly in the prime of life. I see him a lithe, muscular, forceful figure, resourceful in emergencies and always fearless. We need not question nor minimize his zeal to save souls if we also believe him gifted with a large share of practical common sense, alertness to seize upon and adapt unusual incidents as they offered, and a firm will that would impress and even awe the Indians. A man in such circumstances must know a great deal besides the liturgy and the confessional. Most of the Spanish priests were men of affairs in one sense or another. They knew how to wield tools and guns as well as the censer and the bell. They were adepts in a score of ingenious useful ways of making life tolerable in the wilderness. How else could they have endured the life there or taught their neophytes new methods of carrying on improved horticulture, church building, and the like? Father Ramírez, like other missionaries in this wild land, thought no danger too great, no labor too mean or too arduous, no sacrifice too momentous, if only the high purpose of civilizing and converting those entrusted to his charge was achieved. All of them understood well that the first step toward winning the confidence of these children of the forest and the desert was to provide for their bodily welfare; and we may take for granted that Father Ramírez was solicitous to give them more food and to teach them how to use their natural resources to better advantage, even while he was learning their language. Then would they in gratitude repay him by repeating the prayers taught them and allow themselves to be “catechized and baptized” as the chronicler tells us was the case. After a time, he went down from the Crag, attended by his flock, apparently to visit some of the other fathers at their posts. They, thinking he must long since have met his death, were amazed to see these ferocious Ácomas changed from “lions to meek sheep.”

We are next told that Father Ramírez built a great church on the top of the mesa and enriched it with many decorations. Can we not visualize the slow and laboring procession of moccasined men and boys coming painfully up those difficult paths with loads of heavy adobe, and with huge timbers from San Mateo Mountain to build their wonderful church? Fortunately the Spanish padres allowed these new-found neophytes to combine in the mission churches their own form of house-building with motifs brought from Spain. Consequently we find complete harmony in the simple lines of the massive structures with their natural environment.

Dedicated as was the shrine on this bleak rock-island to St. Stephen, we should like to think it had been consecrated in memory of the early martyr whose stoning is described in the sixth and seventh chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. Surely it would have been a fitting memorial; but it is definitely stated that the patron saint of Ácoma was that King of Hungary named for Stephen the Martyr, and canonized by Benedict the Ninth because he had converted the Magyars from paganism to Christianity.

A monument which bears Ramírez’s name to-day is the roadway that he caused to be constructed for easier access to the plain below. Down the “Camino del padre” the visitor to-day may watch the burros go every morning, to return at nightfall after a long day’s patient labor.

So the years wore on, twenty or more, years which we may picture among the Ácomas as perhaps the most peaceful in their whole history since the Discovery. Then, because of enfeebled age, the wise and good father was carried back to Old Mexico and put into an infirmary to end his days, as it was thought, in ease. But the old man yearned after his children and could not be comforted. “Rivulets of tears coursed over his cheeks” as he thought on the days of his active service among them. With prayer and the Mass he filled his time as best he could, until, “full of years and virtues he died in the year 1664 on the 24th of July, and was buried in the Convent of Mexico.”[78]

In so many of the lonely places of service given by men like Fray Juan a daily record was kept of what went on about them and of their own progress with the Indians in their charge. None such has ever come to light written of Ácoma. Is it possible that Fray Juan did not beguile his infrequent leisure with any such jotting down of events? Will not some one in some fortunate future day make the longed-for discovery of the record of Ramírez’s life upon the Crag of Ácoma?

Chapter VII ÁCOMA IN THE PUEBLO REVOLT

Between Fray Juan’s departure for New Spain and the great Pueblo Revolt of 1680, we have such unsatisfying scraps of information about Ácoma that the hope is ever present of making some discovery of additional manuscripts in the archives.

The same scarcity of detail applies as well to the whole Province of New Mexico for the period between 1598 and 1680. Everywhere in this part of New Spain the work of a whole century was blotted out by the uprising of the latter year. All records in local archives, civil or religious, were publicly burned and every symbol of the Christian Faith obliterated. The visible token of this was exemplified by the cleansing in the Santa Fé River of all Indians in the vicinity ever baptized by Christian padres.

The story of the Revolt, one of the most bloody and thoroughgoing this country has ever seen, had important consequences not only upon the Indians, but also upon the expansion of European civilization in this country. The researches of Hackett have changed in some details the accepted essentials of the uprising and therefore I have followed his narrative. The reader is referred as well to the more easily attainable books.[79]

The Spaniards had attempted to suppress not only the religious beliefs and practices of the Indians, but also their ancient customs of daily life so as to make something like Europeans out of these aborigines, a custom we have heard not a little about in recent years among other conquering nations. This resulted in New Mexico, as might have been expected, in a steadily cumulative discontent which broke out in rebellion several times between 1645 and 1675. All these abortive attempts were quickly, and harshly, overcome. No punishment, however, availed to make the Indians amenable to rule, and in 1675 Governor Treviño determined to stamp out their evil practices for all time. Taking prisoner forty-seven medicine men alleged to be guilty of sorcery, three were hanged as an example to the rest, and the remainder were imprisoned. After a time these latter were released. Among them was one from San Juan, Popé by name. Embittered still further by what he considered persecution in his own pueblo, he betook himself to Taos, northernmost of all the villages on the Rio Grande.

According to Bandelier the rebellion was more easily incited because of the disappointment the Indians felt in the failure of the new magic, Christianity, to do better for them than their old creed had wrought. No greater protection from their enemies, no more rain for their crops, no less wind and blight for their fruits had resulted from the new religion. Consequently Popé found it no difficult matter to make the men of Taos believe him one given supernatural knowledge by three infernal spirits in one of their kivas. In the kiva Popé plotted the wholesale destruction of every Spaniard in New Mexico, and afterward of every symbol of their rule, so that the Indians might return to their own methods of life and rituals of religion.

Popé was no ordinary Indian malcontent. He must have been a character of unusual force, with keen understanding of his fellows, and with a real gift for leadership. Let us even admit in him a sincere patriotism for his ancestral heritage. Thus he imposed his supernatural claims no less easily than his practical plans for the elimination of the conquering people. At the time of the outbreak the Christianized Indians were estimated at about sixteen thousand. To these Popé proposed to add a large number of tribes occupying districts lying more than a hundred leagues to the westward. This would include Zuñi and Hopi. By means of secret council meetings Popé stirred up a general sentiment of revolt over this great area and even succeeded in winning to his support the Apaches,[80] up to now age-long enemies of all pueblos. The Indians had learned through experience the necessity and the strength of unity, through which, indeed, their success was accomplished. Only the chosen leaders were allowed to know any details of the carefully systematized plot until all was ripe for its operation. Popé’s chief assistants were Jaca of Taos, Catití of Santa Domingo and Don Luís Tupatú of the Picuris tribe, men speaking the same language and wholly in each other’s confidence. Popé took such precautions not to be betrayed that when he suspected his son-in-law, the Governor of the pueblo of San Juan, of friendliness to the Spaniards, he killed him there in his own house.

At last all seemed to be ready. The Piros nation, being the only one that refused to join the movement, was left in ignorance of its arrangements. All the other tribes were informed of the day for the uprising by the clever device of knotted cords carried from pueblo to pueblo by relays of the swiftest runners. There has been some confusion about the full significance of these knots but Hackett is convinced that each knot merely signified a day. At each pueblo one knot would be untied[81] and the number of intervening days indicated by those still in place.[82] When the last knot should be straightened out, the Indians, wherever situated, were to rise as one man, and descend upon their unsuspecting prey, with the absolute order that no one—woman or child, priest or soldier—should be spared. All the pueblos were to be surrounded by their warriors, the mountain paths guarded and defended by Apaches, and if a few Spaniards should escape, the Mansos, living near El Paso, were to finish the slaughter as the Spaniards fled toward Mexico.

The moment chosen was particularly auspicious because the greater part of the Spanish soldiery had been sent to El Paso to meet there the supply train coming from Mexico under the leadership of Father Ayeta, with the result that the colony was comparatively undefended.

The Spanish population was distributed in two districts—Rio Arriba and Rio Abajo. The governor of the whole province, Don Antonio de Otermín, lived at Santa Fé, the capital, situated in Rio Arriba, but the larger number of the colonists were living at this period in the southern district where the second in command, Alonso García, served as lieutenant-governor.

Popé’s runners had met with a refusal, though the penalty was death, from certain chiefs of San Marcos, La Ciéñaga and Tanos, three towns a little south of Santa Fé. Two messengers, Catua and Omtua, were arrested and brought to the governor. They confessed the fact of the general uprising, but said they knew nothing of its causes, having taken no part in the councils of the leaders of the northern pueblos.

Enraged by this treachery, the news of which spread like wildfire, the Indian leaders were nothing daunted, and showed astonishing resourcefulness in bringing about the attack prematurely. Those who travel to-day over this wide, rough land by modern conveyance can hardly credit the truth that the scattered pueblos were so quickly informed of the nearly defeated conspiracy that they were able to rise almost simultaneously by daybreak on August 9, two days earlier than was planned.

Those colonists living near the Taos and Picuris settlements were the first victims; only two escaped and they eventually fought their way to where García’s band of refugees were halted below Isleta. From tribe to tribe, from settlement to settlement, the hideous slaughter was carried forward according to program.

The very day of the outbreak General Otermín heard from three different sources that a revolt of the tribes was under way, but he did not try until the twelfth to “roll back the tide of rebellion,” being up to that time unaware of the magnitude of the plot. By the thirteenth he and his comrades realized how critical was their situation. Many of the Indians were equipped with the guns of Spaniards whom they had already slain. Completely cut off from the outside world, a fight was inevitable. The Indians had successfully divided the Spaniards of Rio Arriba and Rio Abajo and each of these divisions had been assured that their friends were already dead.

All the Spaniards within the environs of Santa Fé, numbering about one thousand persons, were collected within the precincts of the Palacio Real. Otermín now told the religious adviser Father Gómez, to “consummate the Holy Sacrament,” and bring to the governor’s house all church vessels and adornments. For five days, between the fifteenth and the twentieth, the Spanish colony was besieged within the royal precincts. There were only about a hundred men capable of bearing arms, whereas the warriors amounted to at least two thousand. At daybreak on August 20, the small Spanish force rushed out from the Palacio Real, taking the Indians by surprise. A few hours’ struggle accomplished their conquest. Three hundred were killed, forty-seven captured, and the rest escaped by flight.

García, unable to reach his chief, rescued a large number of colonists in Rio Abajo, very few of whom, however, were able to bear arms. Just as Otermín was assured that none of those in the other division had survived, so was García deceived about the true fate of his friends, and after consultation with his subordinate officers he had decided that a retreat to Mexico was the wisest course. His colony of refugees started in that direction on August 14. By the twentieth he learned that he had been duped concerning the fate of Otermín’s contingent, and called a halt.

Meanwhile, by August 21st Otermín learned from captured Indians, not only that the whole region from Taos to Isleta, fifty-one leagues, was devastated, but what was more cheerful, that García’s colony had not been sacrificed.

By this time Otermín also realized that the condition of his survivors was hardly less critical than when they were besieged, and gave the order to march toward Isleta, where he hoped to find García, who, as we know, had already moved on. It was not until September 13 that they joined forces at Fray Cristóbal, and after some further marching and conferring a place called La Toma del Rio del Norte[83] was agreed upon for a temporary settlement from which tidings of their terrible reverses might be sent to the viceroy in New Spain.

Father Ayeta, custodian and procurador-general, was one of the great figures of the place and period. For a long time priest at the famous church in Cholula, he had been transferred to the New Mexican diocese. At this time he had been absent from the missionary field for nearly two years, having gone back to get help for the priests in the province. They were in sore need of men and horses, food and ammunition, to defend themselves against constant raids by the Apaches. Father Ayeta left Mexico City, September 20, 1679, with twenty-eight wagon loads of supplies and a goodly contingent of men and horses. Almost exactly eleven months later he arrived at El Paso (August 25, 1680), to be met by the disastrous tidings of the revolt and of the supposed fate of all the Spanish colonists.

Otermín had sent, some weeks earlier, a troop of thirty men under Pedro de Leiva to meet Ayeta at El Paso and give him necessary convoy for his supply train up river. Under the changed condition of affairs Ayeta hurried Leiva off with a part of the train to succor such fugitives as might be yet alive. Also an Indian runner was sent ahead with a letter to García informing him of the coming of the relief train. García was found at Fray Cristóbal on September 4, and sent the runners back the same day with messages for Father Ayeta. While these men were resting on a mountain off the main road they espied Leiva coming up the river. After signalling to him that the lower camp was but nine leagues farther on, the messengers went on their way and carried to Ayeta his first news that not all the settlers in the north were dead. Ayeta was the real savior of the refugee colonists. As soon as he had despatched the messengers to Otermín, he busied himself “at El Paso in making meal, hardtack, cocinas and bullets.”[84] In response to further requests from Otermín he, a little later, attempted to go to El Paso. The river was in flood and to cross it at “the ford” was impossible. The slow progress of the mule wagons on the west shore of the river was a discouragement, and on the morning of September 18, Ayeta determined to risk the supplies by fording the swollen tide. But the water was deeper and more dangerous than was foreseen and in mid-stream the wagon stuck fast. Ayeta, whose very life was in danger, cut loose the mules, and they gained the shore. Otermín’s men, by now arrived upon the east bank, saw the desperate plight of the heroic Father, swam out to the wagon and bore him on their shoulders to safety. This was at a halting-place named La Salineta.

Hackett says Ácoma at this period was the largest of all the Keresan pueblos, having a population of about fifteen hundred Indians, but “too far removed from the sphere of activity of the valley pueblos to exert much, if any, influence upon them,” and, according to the Spanish documents of 1680, it was also too far to coöperate successfully in the revolt. However, “Otermín learned from the Indian besiegers of Santa Fé that all the Spaniards there were dead.”[85]

We may be sure that although the Ácomas, because of their remoteness from the centre of the great revolt, played no very conspicuous part in it, they were in full sympathy with the movement, for we are told that they burned all the emblems of Christianity, putting to death in some nameless fashion, their priest, a Franciscan padre, Lucas Maldonado.[86]

During one of Otermín’s unsuccessful attempts to win back the territory of Spain he was told that Ácoma and Jémez were in arms and organizing an attack upon the granaries of Isleta, with the further purpose of killing the Indians there because they were friendly to the white men. Mendoza, maestro de Campo, had arrested Catití, one of Popé’s associates, and endeavored in public assembly to win his surrender to the pacific terms offered by the governor. But the listening throng of Indians, in which every tribe but Moqui was represented, made such warlike protest that it was futile. A few days later, however, pacts of peace were formulated and messengers were sent to Ácoma with this news.

Many of the Rio Grande pueblos were utterly destroyed while others were weakened beyond any recovery of their early strength. Bandelier says that of the forty pueblos in the eastern part of the Rio Grande valley, the only ruins that can be identified are Ako, Galisteo and Gran Quivira; and of sixty pueblos of the southern section, not one is in existence, though there are a few of later date. Because of his failure to reorganize the province Otermín lost his post as governor. Others who followed him had no better fortune, or did not attempt the task, with the result that the ancient pueblo rule held its supremacy for the following twelve years. No doubt the Indians believed themselves forever freed from foreign domination, but they did not long keep peace with each other, and inter-tribal wars broke out almost immediately. After the débâcle, Popé assumed powers and demanded honors almost identical with those the Spanish governor had employed, with the inevitable result that his rule became in its turn oppressive and was resented by his whilom followers.[87] Deposed, then re-elected, Popé soon died.

From all these occurrences we may be sure that the firm intention of at some time permanently conquering and ruling New Mexico was never abandoned. At length there arose the man ambitious, capable, dauntless and resourceful, a soldier and a leader of men, Diego de Vargas, who carried to victory the thorny task of establishing the over-lordship of Spain in the disrupted province. It was in 1692 that Vargas, with a small force of eighty-nine men, entered the country. If he met on the whole no very serious resistance from the pueblos, to whom the result of their great struggle for independence had been well-nigh as disastrous as to the invader, he likewise found it no pastime, for it was not until late in 1696 that Vargas could really say he had attained his goal. Hence we see that the Pueblo Revolt was actually a matter not of one year, 1680, but of continuous hostility and struggle for sixteen years.

As the general approached Santa Fé it was Tupatú, the third firebrand of 1680, who, dressed in Spanish clothes, rode to meet Vargas upon a Spanish horse. The chieftain brought promise of submission from his own tribe, the Tewas, but warned the General that the Keres, Pecos, Jémez and Taos people were rebellious and prepared to resist. From Santa Fé, Vargas proceeded westward to Isleta. On the third of November, 1692, he and his little army marched along a “bad bit of road” from a watering place called El Pozo (The Well) where they had camped, to a spot from which the hill of Ácoma was pointed out to him. Shortly afterward he writes, “We descried the smoke made by those traitors, enemies, treacherous rebels and apostates of the Queres tribe.” These epithets suggest that Ácoma had given evidence once more of peculiarly recalcitrant behavior. From this time on the Peñol appears to be the hotbed of sedition until its complete subjugation was achieved.

Five squadrons of soldiers were called up while Vargas halted “in view of the other great Rock, on the right side of the road and slope which appears to be higher.” Could this be Katzímo? Arrived within musket-shot of the Crag, the cry of “Hail” was exchanged between the Spaniards and the Indians on the mesa. Through an interpreter Vargas endeavored to persuade the Ácomas that he had come for no other purpose than to pardon them for past offences. But they were unconvinced, though friendly Indians were sent to tell the Keres how genuinely their forgiveness had already been granted to other pueblos. At length the Spaniards were permitted to mount the sandy slope, only to find at the top that the entrance to the village was barricaded and made impassable.

After long delay the messengers of peace returned to the point where the Spaniards were impatiently awaiting news. One of them, a Zuñi, named Ventura, and called “the Wolf,” brought as gifts watermelon, cooked pumpkin and cakes, but also the unwelcome message that the Ácomas would hold council that night and send their answer next morning. In vain Vargas used arguments to hasten affairs. The Ácomas warned him that the Apaches were lying in wait to kill him and all his force. There was nothing for it but to camp that night at the watering place, a league distant.

Next morning, the 4th, the Wolf was despatched with fresh offers of peace and the Holy Cross, only to return about ten o’clock with the verbal reply that the Ácomas would talk with the general on his way back from Zuñi! Exasperated by this subterfuge, Vargas reconnoitred to see whether there was enough available water near by “to subdue the enemy on said Great Rock, the strength of which is unassailable.” Finding no water, Vargas made the ascent of the sand-ramp a second time, only to find the face and trenches of the mesa crowded by a multitude of its inhabitants. Again the Ácomas were assured of the peaceful intent of the visitors. Their chief, Matthew, an educated Indian, made answer that his people had been warned of quite different designs. Vargas now dismounted, followed by his secretary and the military chiefs. They seated themselves upon flat stones near the fortified entrance. Rising to his full height he proposed that Matthew should swing himself down over the barricade, while Vargas and his few attendants would go on foot up the “impossible part of the approach.” The Indians seem to have agreed to this and there was general embracing when the two companies came together. Vargas then describes the flat top of Ácoma as divided into three sections, and along “the side of the Square a large race-track.”

Here was enacted one more of those picturesque ceremonies that we should like to visualize. Vargas stood upon the arena of that sanguinary struggle for possession of the Rock in Oñate’s time, almost a hundred years before, the memory of which we may be sure had been transmitted in fadeless colors through the generations. Only half convinced as yet that more disaster was not in store for them, tremulous and all unknowing what such forced submission might entail, the dusky throng of primitive folk knelt before the royal standard of Spain and watched the captain of the post of El Paso as he planted the Christian Cross in their midst.

Chief Matthew, acting as interpreter for these invading strangers, told them, as he was bidden, of the great sovereign so far away that they would never see him, yet so all-powerful that he claimed their land, their allegiance, their very lives for his own, while at the same time professing to advance their own best welfare.

Bewildered, supine before their leader, they made no protest when Matthew raised aloft the standard and pledged their fealty to this unknown Spanish king. Here, too, where only twelve years before the last Franciscan father had met his martyrdom in some unconfessed horror of revengeful hate, these native people, some of whom were doubtless participants in that crime, saw two other padres, garbed even as the one they had foully done to death, bidding them repent and promising them absolution of all their misdeeds. By a rite they understood somewhat better, the little children were next given baptism. No doubt the general in his handsome accoutrements was an awesome figure as he stood godfather to Matthew’s child and later to various other infants. Strange and moving scene, fraught with pregnant possibilities!

This business finished, De Vargas once again became the practical director, and in haste to make up for the delay these suspicious people had occasioned him, he wheeled about with a brief command that crosses should be erected at the pass and that prayers be said by the people before the cross now in the square, each day at sunrise and at sunset. Before he might descend to the plain a visit must be paid to the church and the titular saint of the pueblo. Vargas describes St. Stephen’s shrine as of great extent with walls “almost a yard and a half in thickness which stand firm in spite of the heavy rains that break the windows and skylights.” This controverts the ordinary statement that the church had been entirely destroyed in the Revolt of 1680, and makes it probable that in 1699 the ancient edifice was only restored and did not have to be entirely built anew.

De Vargas gives hearty thanks to God that he with “barely fifteen men,”[88] including his secretary and officers, had succeeded in the conquest of this most difficult of all pueblos. He mentions the cisterns on the summit, from which Ácoma is supplied with water. He was evidently impressed by the contrast of their abundance with the plight of his own force, for he says that as he made his way back to camp he felt no little anxiety as to how he should find them. When he arrived he found that his men during his absence had cleared out a nearly dry spring sufficiently to give their animals some water. Next day Vargas went on towards Zuñi. All through 1693, though some Keres villages aided Vargas, Ácoma was insubordinate, and early in 1694 made an alliance with Moqui, Zuñi, and certain Apaches.

By the end of 1694 New Mexico was believed to be once more pacified. The Franciscans busied themselves with the erection of new churches and other needful buildings. The Indians, however, continued restless and mutinous—a condition according to the padres due to Vargas, who had created hostility by appropriating for the use of the Spaniards fertile lands belonging to the natives.

At the beginning of 1696 the missionaries were once more appointed to their several charges, but in a rather long list the name of Ácoma does not appear. Everywhere in the region the Indians were growing sullen and hostile because of a famine that was decimating their population. As early as March the priests became aware of serious danger, through outrages perpetrated in the churches. Though appealed to for help Vargas would do no more than grant them permission to go to Santa Fé, if afraid to stay at their posts. Some went, but more of the missionaries, resenting the thinly veiled implication of cowardice in the curt refusal, stayed where they were and paid the price with their lives. On June 4, came the crisis. Five pueblos of the Rio Grande rose, killed the padres in residence and twenty-one other Spaniards. Abandoning their homes the Indians fled to the mountains. Ácoma was deeply implicated. Neither baptism nor kneeling at the cross morning and night had much availed to change the nature of this wily and treacherous tribe. Four days later the general received a letter from the senior captain of the Keres, governor of the village of Santa Ana, in which he described a meeting held at Ácoma where the warriors were waiting reinforcements from Moqui, Zuñi and the Utes. A little later Fernando de Chaves, senior judge of Bernalillo, sends the confirmatory intelligence that “a multitude of people and the trail of women are seen going toward Ácoma, wherefore we are taking every precaution.” Rebel smokes were watched by the Spaniards to see from what points the attack would come. On the twelfth Vargas heard from Don Felipe, governor of the Pecos, and certain friendly Indians, that throughout all the previous winter emissaries had gone from village to village, “not omitting the remote friendliness of Ácoma, the provinces of Zuñi and Moqui, to instigate a general revolt.” Two informants, men taken at Pecos, though one was from Nambé, were made prisoners and put through a grilling examination. In course of their confession it developed that “the Zuñis, Moquis and Ácomas were expected in their village of the Pecos to join the others and march upon Santa Fé. Furthermore, these three backed by the Apaches had advised the killing of all grown Spaniards, sparing only little children.” The priest of Jémez, Fray Francisco de Jesús, some Spaniards at San Juan and Nambé and certain friendly Indians, had already been massacred. The Indians from Ácoma and other villages had now fortified themselves at Chimayo, where a steep mountain ridge made approach on horseback impossible. As soon as the fields should be sowed all the nations were to unite, led by the Apaches, whose first task was to get possession of all the Spanish horses. Hunger had driven the Indians from San Cristóbal (one of the villages taken by Vargas from the natives) and they had sought refuge at Ácoma and at Zuñi.

On June 13 the second Indian prisoner, in course of a searching examination, confessed that the Keres of all the villages, and Ácoma, were already joined on the ridge of Sandía to attack the Spaniards who lived at Bernalillo, and from there were to go to Los Cerrillos. “They said to the young bucks, this day is already dawned and all must fight like men.” When asked how often he had been to Ácoma, the prisoner denied ever being there more than once, and then not for the purpose of any discussion.

Apparently the attack upon Santa Fé was halted by the rise of the river; but the General had further information that although “the Moquiños, Zuñians and Ácomas had now returned to their pueblos, in one hundred days they would come back,” when all the nations would unite in the uprising. A few days later Vargas learned from a woman of the Keres village of Sía that the Indians were trembling with fear because of the discovery of their plots. Consequently no renewal of this concerted action seems to have been undertaken. A fierce fight partly in San Diego Cañon and partly near San Juan, in which eight Ácoma warriors were killed, no doubt daunted their confidence in their own immunity, for the alliance between Ácoma, Jémez, and Zuñi was soon after dissolved. Ácoma still unsubdued, Vargas marched once more against the fortress city, but being unable to storm it, retreated, after taking prisoner five warriors, and destroying the crops.[89] Just as happened after the great revolt of 1680, the Ácomas, because of their remoteness and inaccessibility, were treated with less severity than was the case with most tribes, so again no further punishment appears to have been meted out to the Peñol.

Throughout the year there was need of constant watchfulness and active defence by the Spaniards, but this revolt of the summer of 1696 was the last serious one that occurred. Henceforth the more peaceful occupations of colonization were resumed with but little interference. The mutinous Keres of the Sky City, seeing all the other pueblos submitting to white rule, could do no otherwise, and on July 6, 1699, they yielded to General Cubero. Thereafter peace reigned in Ácoma, although in 1702 Captain Juan de Uríbarri and L’Archeveque[90] were sent there to investigate a rumored conspiracy.

Chapter VIII THE WONDER-WORKING SAN JOSÉ

Eighteenth-century items about the mission of Ácoma so far available are brief and laconic. In 1703, General Cubero was having a difficult experience with the Moquis, who were trying to incite the Zuñis to revolt, with the result that both pueblos were eventually abandoned to the aborigines. Padre Miranda wrote from Ácoma that the Indians of that pueblo and of Sía wished to go to the rescue of the priest, but that he would not allow it, fearing immediate death for the padre if the Zuñis heard of an approaching force.[91]

In 1713 both Ácoma and Laguna threatened their resident priest with death because of his interference with their native rituals. In a report made by Father Menchero in 1744 we are told that

Ten years later, from a letter by Father Trigo,[92] we glean a few more scraps of information.

The church was more or less neglected through the years, but in 1710 it was restored and the mission was again opened, with the patron saint changed from San Estévan to San Pedro.[96] In 1776 Father Garces, on his journey from Mojave to Moqui wrote from Oraibí that there was “a padre at Ácoma and one at Laguna.”[97]

Ácoma mission had a daughter. And, as sometimes happens, mother and daughter did not always agree. This daughter was Laguna. The pueblo of Laguna did not exist in Oñate’s time, nor for nearly a century thereafter. It was founded in 1699 near a lagoon which has since dried up; hence its name. Unlike almost every other pueblo settlement, it was not a homogeneous colony, but was compounded of people from Ácoma and Sía, who were Keres, others from Zuñi, and still others from pueblos of different languages. It became, nevertheless, a daughter mission or visita of Ácoma. The boundaries of the two pueblos were defined after a fierce battle at Sía between the Indians and the Spaniards in 1699 in which the Keres were conspicuous. After the smallpox epidemic of 1780-81, the headship of the mission was transferred to Laguna, since which date Ácoma has been the visita or branch.

The battered and almost indiscernible painting of San José that now hangs near the high altar of the Ácoma church became a bone of discord between these neighbor towns.[98] The picture is said to have been presented to the Ácomas by Charles II of Spain. It gradually acquired a supernatural fame, and came to be a talisman against misfortune of every kind. With it Ácoma prospered. The people of Laguna, who had thrived by no means so well, grew envious, and believed their poor crops and their childless women would be bettered if they also had a miraculous painting.

A solemn meeting of the head men (principales) of Laguna was held. It was decided that they should ask the older colony for a loan of the miracle-working San José. The Ácoma principales held an equally solemn council. They at last agreed to loan the precious canvas for one month, but were explicit about its return at that time. With much rejoicing and the utmost care, the holy “foster-father of Jesus” was carried over the long, rough trail. As Laguna came in sight, out trooped the whole population with hope and reverence, to meet the saint. Duly installed in the Laguna church, day after day, the picture received the humble devotion of the people. When Holy Week came it was carried in procession throughout the pueblo, followed by the devout inhabitants.

As the story goes, from this moment the fortunes of Laguna changed. The sick became well, the crops were good, and a wholly different atmosphere prevailed. But now no one was willing to part with the blessed talisman. The Ácomas, weary of waiting for the return of the picture, sent messengers to ask the reason for the delay. They got no satisfaction. Angered by such bad faith, there was talk of an immediate raid upon Laguna. The parish priest, Fray Mariano de Jesús López, the last Franciscan ever to be in charge of the Ácoma mission, averted war. He counselled that a conclave be held of the principales of both pueblos and the cause of the trouble discussed. The conference met. After a solemn mass it was agreed that they should draw lots for the picture. No one suggested that St. Joseph might not approve of gambling. Twelve ballots were prepared, eleven of which were blank, and on the twelfth was a rude sketch of San José. All twelve were shaken up in a jar, and one little girl from each of the two pueblos was chosen to do the drawing. On the fifth drawing the Ácoma maiden drew the saint. “So,” said the Father, “God has decided in favor of Ácoma.”

Ácoma was happy, but Laguna was not, and one morning when the people went to pray before their saint in the great Ácoma church, lo! he was not there. Terror, dismay, and wrathful vengeance filled the hearts of all Ácoma. By some ruse Laguna had stolen the patron saint. War assuredly would have resulted had not Fray Mariano once more found a way out. Ácoma ere this had passed from Spain to Mexico and from Mexico to Uncle Sam. Father López counselled that the whole matter should be taken to the United States court at Santa Fé. His advice was followed. The first decision was made in favor of Ácoma. Laguna appealed the case to the Supreme Court. In 1857 Judge Benedict affirmed the original decision in the following words:

Rejoiced at this victory, the men of Ácoma started for Laguna to recover their picture. Even to-day, says James, when they can be induced to tell the tale, they affirm that halfway “they met San José with his face turned homeward.” He had already heard of the decision and started alone, but being weary he had stopped beneath a tree to rest, and there was met “by his happy people going to fetch him home.”

Although the Indians have voluntarily accepted much of the Christian practice of religion, their ancient paganism has never been uprooted. A concrete illustration of their reluctance to accept the faith of their conquerors is found in an Entrada of Moqui by Mariano Rodríguez de la Torre, 1755, entitled:

Chapter IX ÁCOMA AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

In 1863 seven of the pueblo governors went to Washington to see the Great Father and to settle with him the question as to the boundaries of their land grants, and very probably other Indian problems. After their conference, Lincoln presented each governor with a silver-headed cane, upon which was engraved as below, varying only as to the name of the pueblo:

A. Lincoln
Prst. U.S.A.
Ácoma
1863.

The cane is passed to each succeeding governor upon his election in January, and constitutes his badge of office. When he is absent it is given to the man who represents him. On our second visit to Ácoma in 1922 we saw it hanging on the wall of our host’s living-room, since the governor was temporarily away from the pueblo. In a sense, therefore, the government of the United States is represented in the election ceremony each year at seven of the New Mexico pueblos, of which I have learned the names of only four, besides Ácoma—Isleta, Tesuque, Taos, and Zuñi.

In an attempt to learn wherein the laws and courts of the United States government coincide or conflict with such a local pueblo organization as has been outlined in Chapter XI, I have read the annual reports of the Commissioner for Indian affairs from 1854 to 1920, but with no very satisfactory result. Up to 1875, apparently, the only resource the Indian agents had, when crimes and disorders occurred, was military force. In 1915, murder, assault with intention to kill, arson, and burglary were under the jurisdiction of American courts, but the commissioner stated that our citizens were not thus safeguarded against many other misdemeanors, some of a serious nature. This dual control results in a divided allegiance in government as in religion among the pueblo peoples and must induce infinite difficulties on the one hand and deceptions that are truly deplorable on the other. Throughout these Reports, however, it is interesting and gratifying to find that praise of the Pueblo Indians is almost universal. They are described by commissioner after commissioner as being as “different from the Indians of the Plains as light from darkness,” or “as men of a wholly different race.” The adjectives “loyal,” “generous,” “honest,” “industrious,” “amiable,” “eminently self-supporting,” are constantly used to describe the village peoples.

In 1867 the commissioner regrets that since the “marauding Indians” have to be placated so often, “these very friendly and deserving people” have become “ill at ease” and distrustful of our government agents because our promises to them are not kept. In 1874, the commissioner protests that the failure to produce order among the Indians is “largely attributable to the fundamental failure to treat the Indian as a man capable of civilization and therefore a proper subject of the Government and amenable to its laws. At the same time tribal government has virtually broken down by contact with the United States” and he specifically recommends “qualified citizenship.” In 1915 Cato Sells, the commissioner, writes: “The Indian has demonstrated his capacity for intellectual and moral progress amid conditions not always propitious,” and in 1917 he declares that the time has come “for discontinuing guardianship of all competent Indians and giving closer attention to the incompetent so as to fit them to transact their own affairs and control their property.” Such a procedure would leave the Indian assured of full personal rights, quite free to work out his own destiny, while relieving the government of a large number of wards and placing at the same time, before those Indians left under guardianship, an incentive for progress and true ideals of citizenship.

The World War did much toward impressing the Indian with the truth that his welfare can only be advanced through opportunity to share the benefits accruing to our free and self-governing nation. “The Indians signally honored themselves” by the part they took in war activities, but the commissioner dissented from the proposition to make of them separate units in the army. “I want the Indian to go into this conflict as the equal and comrade of every man who assails autocracy and ancient might, and to come home with a new light in his face and a clean conception of the democracy in which he may prosper and participate.” In 1920 he adds that the recent attitude of our government has been “sympathetic, humane and definitely practical,” and recognizes the Indian as “the first and hyphenless American, with quick intellect, glowing spirituality, ardent love for his children, and faithful to his promises”—until betrayed. In his tribal state, all his training was individualistic; the good of the whole was not definitely sought for. “In our policy of absorbing the Indian into the body politic,” we must educate him to care for the welfare of society, but we “must take into account his peculiar endowment which is his social heritage,—religion, art, deftness of hand and sensitive esthetic temperament.” A most interesting piece of information in the Report is that “Indian soldiers and sailors honorably discharged from service in the World War may be granted citizenship by Federal courts without affecting their individual or tribal property rights.”

But, immediately the question arises, have the educational privileges offered the Indians since the United States took them over as its wards been such as would fit them for citizenship? Everyone knows that under Spanish rule the mission schools directed by the padres did excellent civilizing work and that under Mexican independence these schools were less well supported. The United States assumed control in 1846, twenty-two years later. In 1868 the commissioner reports that “there is not a single school nor mechanical shop” in existence, that parish priests who formerly resided in the pueblos have “long since given up any such ideas,” and that there are no government farmers: in short, that the Indians “have been steadily retrograding” since they became the wards of the United States—a melancholy statement indeed! In 1872 the report states that the Indians have been granted 439,664 acres of land, and that there are five schools conducted to teach the children the English language. In 1920, three fourths of all Indian children are said to be in school where their studies are “pre-vocational and vocational with an elimination of needless studies.” “The increased attendance of Indian children in state and in public schools will eventually take them out of Government Indian day and boarding schools.”

In following up this matter more specifically as pertaining to Ácoma, we find the Indian agent reporting in 1897 that there were fifty-five children on the mesa, but no school. The building formerly used by Catholic missionaries for a school-house was used by the United States in some other way. In 1917 the agent again reports “no school at Ácoma but one at Acomita. If the mesa is still to be inhabited” he recommends that a school should be installed there, but admits that “because the people are most unprogressive, the situation demands the utmost tact and ability.” In 1919, the agent says that “of 150 children of school age but 19 were in attendance at Acomita and that the Ácoma people are very backward, almost resentful of anything being done to assist them. So long as there is opportunity for them to remain in isolation at the peñol of Ácoma, where almost anyone can be safely hidden in the cliffs and escape from the influence of law and authority, there is an opportunity for them to evade their duties and responsibilities. Much as Ácoma appeals to me, as it must to anyone having the least regard for history and sentiment, I believe that to minimize its importance is an important step in the progress of these people.” This agent’s remedy would be to increase permanent school facilities at Acomita and exert “proper pressure” to make the children attend.[102]

I was told in 1922 that all children not at Acomita are sent to Albuquerque or Santa Fé, but it was fairly obvious that a good many of the younger ones can get no regular teaching whatever, since their parents migrate too frequently between the mesa and the farm villages.

The long procession of the years has produced but little material change in Ácoma. Very few references to this pueblo occur in government reports and such alteration as one notes is in the increased hostility of the mental attitude of its people toward the white man. Its geographic isolation from other pueblos is matched by its aloofness in every other respect. No matter at what point of mental or spiritual contact we attempt some rapprochement, we are now met by closed doors and our knocking gains no entrance. Yet it was not always so at Ácoma.

Lieutenant Abert, who was, in 1847, a member of the Advanced Guard of the Army of the West, says, in his “Examination of New Mexico,” that when he had gone to Ácoma from Laguna,

On their way to the rock his party overtook or passed many Indians going thither with burros heavy-laden with peaches, and on the summit the men urged the Americans to eat all they wished of this delicious fruit. It was carried to their azoteas, or roofs, where, cut in halves, it was spread to be dried in the sun. Compare such cordial friendliness and the spirit shown in the Indian agent’s report in 1919, and ask yourself, why this change?

How ardently one wishes the Ácomas might believe in our sincere sympathy and would respond as the Zuñis and Hopis have done, who say they wish us to know about their beliefs and their rich legacy of tribal lore, if only we will record it “straight and true”; or, as the High Chief among the Cheyennes and the Dakotas is quoted in that delightful book by Natalie Curtis Burlin:[103]

Or, as Short Bull, a Dakota medicine man, phrased it (when the Federal government forbade the Ghost Dance movement and, in order to enforce this mandate, massacred three hundred men and women of that tribe),

I should like to incorporate here entire the splendid appeal of Commissioner Francis E. Leupp, for the development of the Indian along the lines of his own genius. His protest against the idea of the white philanthropist, that the Navajos should be supplied with power-looms to advance their particular industry of blanket-weaving, contains more irony than is often found in official reports. Mr. Leupp sums up the situation in the following words:

After one has learned from very varied sources how tragic is the gulf of misunderstanding that has yawned between the races, one asks perforce, was it necessary, and if not, why did it happen? Even in the days of their early and difficult adjustment to the new rulers who came and took their lands, their corn, their freedom, there was much of kindliness and receptivity among the Pueblo Indians which the centuries of white over-lordship has turned to bitterness and hostility. One cause of their distrust has been, besides our bad faith in smaller matters, the encroachment of our race upon the lands assured them by the Spaniards, grants long ago confirmed by the United States. But the more vital hurt has come from the total misapprehension by white men of the significance of their “dances” and their withdrawals to the wilderness for fasting and prayer. The contempt shown for their rich heritage of poetic ceremony has wounded the Indian in his deepest and holiest susceptibilities, especially when this criticism is accompanied by a Federal ban upon their periodic festivals, upon their native costume, and limitations upon their freedom in pursuing their crafts and their whole manner of life. One is forced to conclude that we have not yet, as the governing race, really understood the task or the responsibility that we assumed in taking over as wards human beings with an individuality highly sensitive and highly developed. If the two paths so long travelled at cross purposes by the two races shall ever converge and become but one, we may be sure the gain will not all be to the Indian. His poetry, his art, his music, his religion, are all fraught with infinite suggestions from which the white man may well learn to his profit.

Yet in spite of so much expert testimony through the years, the United States Senate in the autumn of 1922 passed a bill that is the most injurious to the Indian of all that the Federal government has ever been besought to make the law of the land. Unless there can be substituted for the Bursum Bill[105] something permanently protecting and effective, it would be more humane to make brief work of the complete annihilation of the Indian race by standing up the tribes, one after another, to face a firing squad of the army.

The writer has been told by well-informed men in the East that, unless some thorough and honest remedy for the present situation is carried out, an explosion is bound to come. That the Indians themselves will choose to die fighting, after the tradition of their race, rather than by slow starvation, is hardly to be wondered at or condemned.[106] The Paiute uprising in 1923 is only the first torch of what we may expect to hear of here, there, anywhere, like the signal fires of the ancients, till all the Indian country is aflame.

And when the beacons are all put out, and there remain only silence and ashes, we, the ruling race, proud of our superior intelligence, will have deliberately and completely killed the only original contribution by America to the art of the world.

This chapter may be fitly closed with

Chapter X ORIGINS AND MIGRATIONS

From primeval times there were in the Southwest four geographic regions to which the aborigines naturally gravitated, because of their favorable river systems. These were the basins of the Rio Grande, the San Juan, the Little Colorado, and the Gila. “Here the ancient ruins are most numerous, and life seems to have been more active and intense than elsewhere.”[107] The ancient pueblo region extends from Great Salt Lake southward into Mexico, and from the Grand Canyon eastward to the Pecos River. This region comprises 150,000 square miles. In certain portions of it ruins are to be found by the thousands. Usually they are clustered together in villages, but there are, besides, scattered ruins that probably indicate outlying settlements on the farm lands of the community.

Prehistoric migrations were due to various causes. Preëminent among them was the search for water, that primal necessity of existence. The need of salt for men and animals was another factor in the choice of settlement of aborigines as well as of the later frontiersmen.[108] New Mexico, Arizona, and the Great Basin are peculiarly rich in saline deposits, which no doubt had their part in attracting population.[109] Salt might also be a cause of emigration. Fewkes shows that land long irrigated may become so saline as to be useless for agriculture, and he says, “This cause was perhaps more effectual than human enemies or increased aridity in breaking up the prehistoric culture.”[110] The hostility of neighbor clans or neighbor tribes often drove tribes to positions that could be more easily defended.

The routes of migration can be traced by the ruins of the more or less temporary settlements which were constructed on the way. These ruins, too, give us a clue to origins. They are of two types, compounds and pueblos. “Compounds are clusters of houses (or their ruins) each arranged on a platform bounded by a surrounding wall ... while compact blocks or rooms, each without a surrounding wall, are clan houses,” or pueblos.[111] From the differences in architecture of these two forms of habitations, and still more from the differences in pottery in the village mounds, Fewkes deduces two sources of aboriginal immigration into the valley of the Little Colorado, with a resulting mixed culture. One stream of these home-seekers went westward down the San Juan; the other moved northward up the Salt.[112] The southern culture came later than that from the east, but was effectual over a wide area. Its northern boundary is near Hopi. Eastward it extended to Ácoma, which, says Fewkes, is “regarded as the Eastern limit of southern Gila influence, and marks one point on a line of demarcation of the dual influence which merged at Hopi and Zuñi.”[113]

The careful research of one of the latest students of pueblo pottery, Dr. Leslie Spier, brings out the fact that

To illustrate, Spier found, in the ruins of the vicinity of modern Zuñi, two general types of pottery. Since the sherds of any particular ruin belonged to only one class he was able to establish the historical fact that the Hálona of Coronado was the present Zuñi, and that the settlement across the river, where are now the trading stores, had been abandoned long before that period.[114]

The sequence of the many ruins near Zuñi bears the same relation to that pueblo that those of the Galisteo Basin do to Ácoma. There is, in fact, a Zuñi tradition that, shortly before Fray Marcos discovered Cíbola, its people had conquered some small Keres villages toward the south and southeast, had adopted some of the survivors and incorporated some of their ritual dances with its own, which are still performed. Was it from these that Zuñi sent colonists in 1699 to found—with other tribes—the new pueblo of Laguna?

Wherever they have studied early civilizations, scholars have been wont to consider that the nature of the country finally settled upon had no inconsiderable influence upon the forms of buildings there erected. Fewkes believes that “the cliffs in which are the ruins of the Navajo Monument favored the construction of cliff dwellings rather than of open pueblos.”[115] Caverns large and small, trees for beams and rafters, in short, all the conditions for cliff communities are there. It is incredible that the same conditions would not have had an effect as well upon the arts and crafts. The fantastic shapes into which the summits are eroded, and the great columnar forms of awesome size, cannot have failed to impress the primitive mind, developing conceptions of supernatural forms and agencies.

Priority of origin between cliff dwellings and those on the level soil is an interesting question. The earliest villages were probably in river valleys or near small streams at the foothills of the many mesas. Later the Pueblo Indians removed to the more inaccessible sites on the summits of the mesas for protection from the nomad tribes who constantly harassed them by predatory raids upon their flocks and crops. The aboriginal Indians probably lived in detached houses, grouped more or less according to clans, or to the neighborhood of their planting fields. Gradually a more compact village or pueblo existence was found essential to protect the agricultural Indians from the nomad tribes. There are writers who believe, in accordance with the fond tradition of the native peoples, that the oldest villages on low ground were evolved from cave and cliff dwellings. Santa Clara, for example, in a flat region close to the Rio Grande, claims the cliffs of Puyé for its ancestral home as well as its temporary refuge in times of danger in later eras. On the other hand, Dr. Hewett[116] writes that he has indubitable proof that this claim is only one of many ruses employed by the Indians to secure their hold upon increased territory. No doubt in times of emergency Puyé was used by Santa Clara, but the “nation” never originated in these lofty cliff dwellings. In the case of Walpi the removal from the lower levels to the mesa top occurred within the historic period; Ácoma, we know, had been on its cliff summit long before the first white man saw it, nor has any record yet been found that does not connect it with the top of the great crag. At whatever period this change occurred from life on the arable ground-level to these easily defended cliffs, there must have resulted a fundamental change in the organization of existence. Permanent houses would be built only on the high stone table-lands, while the farms would be supplied with merely temporary dwellings. In some cases these farms would be actually overlooked, as at Walpi, by the mesa pueblo, or, as at Acomita, be a dozen miles distant from Ácoma.

Since most Pueblo Indian ceremonial exists to implore help for the increase of the fertility of all created things, including the increase of human beings, all important rites and dances take place either before the time of planting or after the harvest is gathered; consequently the summer settlements rarely, perhaps never, had kivas or ceremonial chambers; this fact is an aid in determining the temporary or permanent character of the ruins scattered over the plains.[117]

Various were the causes for the abandonment of these prehistoric dwellings. Some of the houses found were evidently of only temporary usefulness—way-stations in a pathless wilderness. Some settlements perhaps were near water sources long since overwhelmed by drifting sand. Prolonged drought often was the primary reason for moving. The hostilities of other tribes would drive a people from a location not easily defended. The failure of grain crops or of other nutritive or medicinal plants would generally be considered a sign from the gods that the place was accursed. Any prolonged disaster, whether it were drought, or flood or disease, was usually attributed by the Pueblos to witchcraft. Many secret crimes committed in retaliation have contributed slowly but surely to the depopulation of whole villages. The pueblo of Sía is said to owe its decline in comparatively recent time to constant “inter-killing going on for supposed evil practices of witchcraft.”[118] Originally, it is believed by some writers, the two divisions of the race known as those of the Plains and those of the Pueblos were one and the same, the Pueblo Indians being merely “fragments” of wandering tribes left behind on both banks of the rivers that coursed through the plains. Differing environments effected great contrasts in the lives of the two peoples. The hunting of the buffalo largely determined the habits of the Plains Indians. That animal furnished a steady supply of meat in contrast with what could be got by the Pueblos from the occasional hunt of small game; his skin dried in the sun made an excellent tent, in place of the brush or adobe shelter; his fur made warm and durable clothing, whereas the Pueblos had to depend upon wool and cotton garments. From the horns drinking-cups were fashioned.[119]

Since moving on from point to point in early times was so much the habit of all Indians, the marvel is that these migrating bands stopped in a region so unpromising and infertile as the Great Basin, where the human struggle for existence is of such incalculable proportion that the imagination grows weary; but stop they did, as innumerable pueblo ruins bear tangible witness. By its very aridity the sedentary Indians were assured of a certain protection from their enemies, who would not be so much attracted to the desert as to more luxuriant regions.[120] True, this land of sage and sand, of greasewood and the burning sun, can be made to flower like a garden, with sufficient water, but the infinite labor required daunts the mind.

Since the outcome of migration is more or less permanent settlement, some allusion to the adaptation of the Indian to the natural environment in which he elected to remain is pertinent here. If upon the flat plain, his adobe of pinkish yellow or brown sinks into the sandy background and seems a mere outcropping of the rounded hills close by; if upon the mesa-top, the houses look as if carved from the cliff itself and defy all approach. The lack of all domestic animals among the Pueblos, a notable fact, was of course a very serious handicap to them. Until the Spaniards brought the horse and the sheep into the country in the sixteenth century, the infrequent dog left behind by the nomad tribes and used by the Pueblos as an accompaniment of the chase was their only four-footed domestic animal. Castañeda notes as an uncommon sight the wolfish dog which the Plains Indians harnessed to carry heavy burdens of transport.[121] He also wrote that the pueblo people assured him they kept the turkey only for its eggs and its feathers, but he could not believe it, since the Spaniards found that bird such good eating.

Other points of contrast between the sedentary and nomad Indians are full of interesting suggestion. But we can here indicate only in a superficial way the most patent of them all. The Pueblo Indians, having established themselves in a latitude and at an altitude highly favorable to civilization, made more rapid progress in agriculture and the arts than their kindred “nations” farther north. But on the other hand, wandering over great distances trained the nomad Indian to much greater quickness of eye and other sense perceptions, and also developed a more sinewy and alert body. Change of scene increased his knowledge of other parts of the continent and taught him how to cope with innumerable difficulties on the way, of which the Pueblo Indian knew nothing.

The Spaniards coming north from Mexico found the Pueblos a backward people relatively to the Nahuas and the Mayas, but leading a peaceful, agricultural existence just as they had done for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, and having developed at the same time a culture of many sorts that suited their needs and satisfied their hearts. This culture included an architecture ranking high among “Pueblo Arts” and characteristic of the mesa country which produced it, where building-material was to be had for the taking.

One form of expression of their art is found in the pictographs on the cliffs and kiva walls intended to communicate a kinship of ideas between tribes who could not understand each other’s speech. It is not believed that these pictographs were at all like the ideographs of the Central American peoples. They generally delineate natural objects, most often animals, and while they may sometimes record events, like a victory in war, or indicate the special shrine of the antelope or the serpent, they are for the most part thought to be merely the beginnings of pictorial art characteristic of all children and of races in their childhood. The archaeologists and ethnologists have thus far gathered so few positive data about the Ácomas that their racial origin is still wrapped in mysterious and romantic legend. But so much as this is agreed upon: the Ácomas are a people of one race, the Keresan,[122] composed of many clans, some of them related to those who settled in the Tusayán region.[123] They entered this great valley from the Gila, and form the most eastern group of its influence and seem from the very first to have been in continual conflict with other peoples. They were apparently at once attacked and forced to defend themselves, and forthwith chose the most inaccessible rock they could find, whereon to build an impregnable fortress-city from which other tribes could not dislodge them.

Cosmos Mindeleff considers Ácoma’s position on a mesa summit unusual, and thinks it due to the fact that, “like the wilder tribes, its people were predatory upon their neighbors.”[124] The actual date when the Pueblo of Ácoma began its life upon its fortress-rock we shall probably never know, but all are agreed that it was very ancient in Coronado’s time (1540).

Lummis asserts that Isleta and Ácoma are the only pueblos on sites occupied in Coronado’s time; but in another place he says that he was told by the Ácomas that “a generation ago” drought forced their inhabitants to form a colony at Isleta. Bandelier says: “With the exception of Ácoma there is not a single pueblo standing where it was at the time of Coronado, or even sixty years later, when Juan de Oñate accomplished the peaceable reduction of the New Mexican village Indians.”[125] Again he writes that such fragments of Ácoma tradition as could be gathered pointed “to the north as the direction whence that branch of the Queres originally came, and of the Pueblo of Sía on the Jémez River as the place where they separated from the other Queres.” Since it is true that much Ácoma tradition assigns their origin to a separation from the main Keres nation at Sía, it is rather curious that Mrs. Stevenson[126] makes not the slightest allusion, in her exhaustive memoir, to Ácoma or to any tribal connection between Sía and Ácoma. After this separation they drifted “to the Southwest across the bleak valley of the Rio Puerco, and dividing into two bands, established themselves in small pueblos to the right and left of Cañada de la Cruz and on the mesa above Acomita, twelve miles north of their present village.”

On both sides of the Cañada de la Cruz toward Laguna there are mesas with ruins which Ácoma claims for its ancestors. This supports their tradition of having drifted hither in several small bands, which settled separately and then consolidated—on Katzímo, or on Ácoma. This would be the place and time for their use of the Mesa Encantada.

Acomita is still part of the cultivated land belonging to the Ácomas. Thither nearly the whole population has migrated every summer for generations, and some of them now live there the year round. It is twelve miles in a straight line north of the peñol and occupies fertile bottomlands of Blue Water Creek. Pueblito and McCarty’s are other stretches of adjacent farming country occupied in the same way by the Ácomas. Here they raise enough wheat, corn, chili, beans, peaches, and melons for their use, and have some to barter for other necessities. Bandelier considers it uncertain whether these fields were cultivated when Espéjo came there in 1583, because the distance of “two leagues” that Espéjo gives does not agree with the present position. May it not rather be an incorrect measurement?

Other associations of the Ácoma tribe with the surrounding countryside are more definite. At Cebollita[127] the ruins are believed to be Spanish, but with an Indian origin. They belong to a series of ruins scattered at irregular intervals along an ancient trail of seventy miles leading from Ácoma to Zuñi in regular use in the seventeenth century. There are indications that it began to be used after Ácoma had been founded, or at least after the Ácoma tribe established itself in the vicinity,[128] a proof that there was regular communication between the pueblos to the far west and those more centrally located. This is the trail described by Hernando de Alvarado and Fray Juan de Padilla. As Castañeda does not mention that these men suffered from any lack of water, it seems certain that they passed no inhabited villages, but only a desert waste which the nomad raided at pleasure. From Ácoma onward, pueblos were seen at short distances from one another, thus requiring of the traveler more caution and a slower progress.

The Ácomas call Cebollita, Ka-uni-a, but strenuously deny all knowledge of its builders. This trail after passing Cebollita passes another “rancho,” Cebolla, and thence to the south of El Morro (Inscription Rock), and the headwaters of Zuñi River in an almost straight line to Zuñi hot springs, where is Ahacus or Háwikuh, which by some early students of the tradition was confused with one of the many ways of spelling the aboriginal name of Ácoma.[129]

Bandelier examined an isolated cliff-house two miles due south of Ácoma, with walls of yellow clay in perfect condition. The rocks showed caves and partition walls, and there were rock-paintings and rude carvings on large detached blocks not far from the ruins. The Indians denied all knowledge of them save that they were older than their ancestors, but a boy guide told Bandelier that the painting was the work of the Koshare (delight-makers) of Ácoma. Here they also found plume-sticks, which showed it to be a sacrificial place in actual use.[130]

Fewkes[131] believes that in the early migrations there was some close relation between the ancestors of the tribes now at Hopi, who are Shoshonean, and those at Ácoma, who are Keresan, and who do not to-day acknowledge such a connection, since they speak two different languages.

The Antelope Chief at Walpi is the authority from whom Fewkes learned that in the Hopi Snake legends the Tcá-ma-hia[132] (a Keresan term), or ancestral hero of the Puma or Snake clan, left the Snake people at Wukoki on the Little Colorado, to seek other clans emerging from the underworld. He was told by a war god at So-tcap-tu-twi to go westward. He did so and met those clans at Ácoma, where he joined them and where their descendants live. The relations between Tcá-ma-hia at Ácoma and the Snake clan at Walpi seem never to have been broken.[133] At the biennial dance there are placed around the border of the sand mosaic of the Antelope altar eighteen smooth, light-brown stones called Tcá-ma-hia, which are looked upon as ancient weapons representing the warriors of the Puma clan of the Snake phratry. During the altar-songs one of the priests of the Sand clan, who are said to have lived at Wukoki with the Snake clan, beats on the floor with one of these stones, keeping rhythm with the song and the rattles. It is a telegram to Ácoma for the Tcá-ma-hia to join them in the Snake ceremony. He arrives on the evening of the eighth day at the subterranean Moñ-Kiva. Tcá-ma-hia is then present at Walpi next day to act as Asperger (Nahiapüma) at the kisi (brush shelter). While throwing out the charm liquid to the six cardinal points, he calls out the Keres invocation to warrior gods: Awahia, Tcá-ma-hia, yomaihiye, teimahaiye. His dress and speech are not Hopi but of an older stock, and the whole impersonation undoubtedly is meant to recall the ancestral wanderer of Keresan blood who left the Snake people to be joined at Ácoma by other clans.

There is said to be a ruin on the now uninhabited mesa of Awátobi called A-Ko-Kai-Obi (place of the ladle) which is also the Hopi name for Ácoma. At all events, there is every indication of former association of the Puma and the Snake clans of Hopi and Ácoma.

There is so much that seems to connect Hopi (Tusayán) and Ácoma (Keresan) in prehistoric times that it is difficult to resist the temptation to quote the whole creation story as told to Fewkes at Walpi, because of its innate poetry; but so varying are the details in the several Tusayán pueblos that we dare not assume the identity of any one of them with a place as far away as Ácoma. We must be content with referring the reader to the legend as related by Fewkes, quoting here from it only the Ácoma detail.[134]

Sand mosaics, or “dry-paintings,” made with elaborate care by skilled artists of the tribe with sands of many colors, are so usual a part of the ritual celebrations of Indian people that it has been no little surprise and perplexity to find not a single allusion to such altar-pictures at Ácoma. It is true that they are always within a kiva, and since we have no description of any kiva interior at Ácoma, the conclusion can be only that sand mosaics are regarded as too sacred for alien eyes to behold.[135]

To-day there is a colony of about five hundred Indians resident upon the lofty peñol. The rich heritage of migration tradition, of folk-lore concerning the adventures of their prehistoric ancestors, no less than the more tangible evidence of a hardy and adventurous tribe within the period of historic record, furnishes plenty of material for the interested student. From the shadowy north by way of legendary halting-places to Wukoki on the Little Colorado and so to the very solid, glowing mass of Katzímo and on to Ácoma itself we have followed their pilgrimage. Long labor would be sweet if only some one might gain the coöperation of their own wise men to put within our grasp this history of a vanishing culture.

Chapter XI THE TRADITION OF KATZÍMO AND ÁCOMA

Of all the features of the great lonely stretches of country that one passes under the burning sky of the Southwest, most characteristic are the mesas, those level-topped tables that rise abruptly from the sandy plains, many-colored, and of irregular outline, catching the late afternoon sunlight in such fashion as to bring into view mysterious caverns that often were the early homes of cliff-dwellers. None, of all the mesas, is more striking than Katzímo, rising isolated and abrupt four hundred and thirty feet from a waste of sand. Here, says the long-revered tradition of the Ácomas, their ancestors dwelt after their slow progress from the north[136] until driven forth by disaster, whence comes the appellation of the “Enchanted” Mesa, to build a final home upon the great white rock where we find them to-day.

The first impression of Katzímo as one approaches it by the sandy road is of its extraordinary beauty of color. Buff blended with rose is delicately veiled by the haze which almost everywhere softens severe outlines in the desert, so that the gazer from afar finds one more reason for its baptism of the Enchanted. Nearly circular in form, Katzímo seems to be composed of sheer perpendicular walls fantastically pinnacled and turreted, but on nearer scrutiny a sort of amphitheatre or cave hollowed out by long erosion is found both on the northern and on the western sides; yet so glassy are the walls that there is little encouragement to attempt their conquest.

The legend of Katzímo relates that then as now the inhabitants were an agricultural people, cultivating their crops in the plain below. Once, in the timeless yesterday of their race when the season of planting had arrived, the Sun Priest issued a proclamation that all the people must descend the mesa to their fields.[137] There were left on the top only three women, too ill for the work, and one boy to care for them. At night he was directed to stand watch, lest the dreaded Apaches might raid the pueblo in the absence of its warriors. A fearful storm of rain and thunder such as had never been known made his task dangerous the second night, but he stayed at his post till called by his mother, upon whom a portion of her house had fallen. She told him to go down and bring back some of the men to help.... The boy with infinite peril reached the plain and started for the fields.

Thus are we led to think that some portentous convulsion of nature had toppled off the pueblo, destroyed the ladder trail, and left the colony homeless. No effort is recorded of any attempt to save the hapless women, and the chapter is abruptly closed. It was apparently after this terrible disaster that the mesa was called Katzímo, the “accursed” or “enchanted,” and many is the spot that has earned such title for less cause. How the mesa top looked before it was accursed we can never know, but a few piñons and cedars on its top suggest the probability of its having been sparsely wooded. This is a land of tempestuous thunder-storms and heavy rains, when the water falls in cataracts over the mesa summit, carrying fresh detritus to the heaps of talus below. Since this has been going on for centuries, it is of course almost hopeless to find much genuine record on the cliff itself of the origin and development of its people. Nevertheless a few faint traces do exist, and because the legends and the folk-lore of Katzímo and of Ácoma are so closely intertwined, we cannot envisage the story of Ácoma without including Katzímo, however slight the hope of disentangling solid fact from poetic legend.

We have good reason to believe that there are still shrines in the recesses of Katzímo, and that in all probability there takes place either in these clefts or on the summit periodic performance of rituals by the Ácoma people. One clue to such use of the mesa is given by Miss McLain of the Indian Service. She reported that an Indian family told her that, when an Ácoma youth is being instructed in the kiva into the mysteries of the faith, the last step in his initiatory discipline before giving him full freedom as a man, is to blindfold him and send him to the top of the Mesa Encantada for a night’s lonely vigil, bearing a jar of water as oblation to the spirits. It was explained to her that a boy could climb blindfolded where he could not go open-eyed, “a fact all mountain engineers will substantiate.”[139] There is also reason to think that these novices as well as the worshippers at other ceremonies on Katzímo have their own undivulged means of reaching the summit.

The desire to solve the mystery of Katzímo has impelled several students of ethnology to scale its fearful cliffs and to gather whatever fragmentary tales the Indians of the tribe can be induced to impart. Here it may be well to note certain things that it is necessary to have in mind when questioning an Indian. He is more likely to tell you the facts or the legends of some other tribe than of his own, and even when he does not exactly prevaricate, he is willing to embroider upon the truth in the hope that he may mislead the foreign visitor, whose questions seem to him an unwarranted intrusion upon his own particular preserves. Very little from any source is to be learned of Katzímo. Bandelier, the distinguished student of the history of the Southwest, has only this to say:

The men who have written the most about Ácoma and Katzímo are Bandelier, Lummis, Hodge, and James. They all lived for considerable periods among the Indians of this region, winning their friendship and confidence, so that if any Indian traditions are trustworthy it would seem that this must be so. But the fact is that the Ácomas are more secretive to-day, probably, than any other Indian tribe.

Although the mesa is called inaccessible, Lummis made its ascent in 1883, the earliest by a white man in our time. He published his account in 1885. A decade later (1895) Hodge, then of the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, attempted the ascent but was stopped sixty feet below the actual top by a sheer wall of rock. He did, however, examine the talus, piled high at the southwestern corner, and found many fragments of very ancient pottery, which it is easy to distinguish from the modern ware because decorated with a vitreous glaze, an art no longer practised by the pueblo potters. Hodge also found unmistakable toe and finger holes in the walls of the cliffs by which he climbed, which apparently justified the tradition that it was up this part of the mesa that the ancient trail had gone. A verbal account of the tradition was given Hodge at this time by Tsiki, a chief and famous medicine man, of Ácoma.

In July, 1897, Professor William Libbey, of Princeton University, made the ascent of the mesa with what he describes as almost superhuman effort. He remained for two hours on the summit and was of the opinion that there was “not the slightest indication that the top of the Mesa had ever been the prehistoric home of the Ácomas or had ever been inhabited at all,” since no bits of pottery or traces of construction of any sort were visible. Consequently he named it “The Disenchanted Mesa.”[140] Libbey admitted, however, that he made no exploration of the southwest cove up which the ancient trail was reputed to have passed, nor of the talus at its foot. As soon as Libbey published his account a new interest was aroused in its history, and the Bureau of Ethnology requested Hodge, who was at work in Arizona, to go to Katzímo and see what he could find. Accordingly, in September of that year Hodge made his second ascent, and since then George Wharton James has made further explorations. Setting aside, then, the slight allusions of Bandelier and Libbey, let us look at the experiences of the other three, who, on the whole, agree in their deductions, though with some inevitable minor variations of detail.

James says very reasonably that, if the whole Katzímo tradition is discredited, all Indian tradition is discredited and more obstacles added to the unravelling of the obscurities of prehistoric Indian life. But he also makes the good point that evidences of human presence and of human occupation of any place are quite separate and diverse things.

Hodge’s first experience had taught him that light extension ladders and some half-inch rope would suffice to enable him to scale the sixty feet of cliff which unaided he had been obliged to forego in 1895. Accordingly, when he reached Laguna, he secured as companions a United States surveyor of long residence in the region, Major G. H. Pradt, A. C. Vroman, a well-known photographer of Pasadena, Mr. H. C. Hayt of Chicago, and two Laguna Indian boys. They made their camp in some cedars at the base of the cleft on the southwest, and while the ladder and other equipment were got into position for the climb, Major Pradt determined “that the elevation of the foot of the talus is 33 feet above the plain; the apex of the talus 224 feet, and the top of the highest pinnacle on the summit of the mesa overlooking the great cleft is 431 feet above the same level.” [141]

Their climb, achieved with heroic effort and some danger, convinced them that the toe and finger holes, without question originally chipped out by human hands, had lost their first form by reason of the erosion during the long lapse of years. Near the place where Hodge had been stopped two years before was a great boulder in the corner of a terrace, to which their ropes were now secured. Just below it ran a long crack through the thirty-foot wall, and while resting on the boulder Hodge suddenly saw four oak sticks about two and a half feet long and one inch thick, pointed at both ends by some sharp tool. Soon afterward a potsherd of modern make and an unfeathered prayer-stick were discovered, and by digging in the sand the rest of the broken jar was found—evident proof of some recent sacrificial offering. A few moments’ search on the summit revealed a potsherd of very ancient type. A rude stone “monument” was examined which Libbey had dismissed as being a natural phenomenon, but which Hodge regards as indubitably a work of man. A slab thirty inches long of vertical stratification is held erect by smaller slabs or boulders of horizontal stratification—a variation that could hardly be fantastic erosion.

Next morning the party was surprised by the appearance of three Ácoma Indians, who had seen the fire built by the explorers for warmth on the summit, and who were at first in no friendly mood. These men were two principales and a medicine man of their tribe. They had threatened the Laguna Indians left in the camp below with cutting the ladder-rope and compelling the descent of the invading white man. They were soon pacified when told the visitors were only searching for curios and not prospecting for territory. Luciano, the lieutenant-governor, said their “Ancients” had once occupied the mesa, but that the destructive storms, to which the region is subject, would prevent any relics of their time ever being found. Then the ancient potsherd was produced and the Indians showed excitement about it, as well as great “surprise” at the cairn, which they did not explain. Whether or not their attitude might have come from a desire to conceal their sacred treasures, Hodge does not intimate. At all events, they helped in the search for more potsherds, and a number were found in the scattered débris, as well as portions of a shell bracelet and a blade-end of a white stone axe. This seemed important, as the upper side was bleached by exposure, while the lower was soiled and damp.

After they had all descended the mesa, one of these Indians showed Hodge another axe-blade notched similarly to the one they had found on top, and admitted it had come from the ledge just below the summit and that he was keeping it for ceremonial purposes. Thus the proofs of human occupation of Katzímo seem well established, but whether permanent or only periodic may perhaps never be known. In a personal letter to the writer in February, 1922, Dr. J. W. Fewkes says:

Chapter XII SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

By reason of their geographic position, the pueblos were the natural channel through which passed the culture from the south to more northern areas. This culture, of whatever sort, they transmuted by their own endowment into something distinctive and characteristic of themselves. Kroeber puts it happily:

If we must feel that the Southwest learned from Mexico “how to grow and weave cotton, to irrigate, to build in stone, to obey priests,” we are at the same time impressed by an intrinsic difference in its development and practice from that of Mexico, as we see it in the Pueblo civilization.

Each pueblo is a tribal unit formed of few or many clans, as the case may be, always matrilinear in descent. Each is wholly independent of every other and all have had a republican form of government from the earliest times. Under very great stress of emergency, tribes have been known to combine for a brief period, but ordinarily they crossed one another’s path in peaceful times only for purposes of trade, or as Bandelier puts it, “It may be said that no two tribes were ever so hostile as never to trade, or so intimate as never to fight each other.” The designation of titles and of official duties in these self-governing villages varies more or less from tribe to tribe, but in essentials the recent investigations of scholars incline them to believe in a fundamental similarity.

There has been much discussion as to the priority of clan or of kinship in the up-building of the economic fabric of pueblo society. The position of Kroeber seems the most simple and natural. He contends that clan functions are too vague and remote to allow them precedence over the normal and inherent relations of every created being. Quoting him: “To blood ties they are blindly loyal and instinctively affectionate. Outside all are but associates.” If further intercourse cements esteem, any one, of whatever race, “even a Navajo,” may be held more dear and less hostile than one of their own tribe. Again Kroeber says,

One remarkable and characteristic feature that prevails in the clan system is the grouping of clans in pairs. It is very prominent in Hopi, and though not directly established for Keresan Pueblos, it appears probable because the same pairs frequently occur in that nation.

Kroeber differentiates the family and clan as follows. The clan is a ceremonial institution, whereas the family is the foundation of society and is centred in the house as a basic concept. The house belongs to the women of the family, not merely as they are living to-day, but from the long past in successive generations. “There they have come into the world, pass their lives, and within its walls they die.” True, the clan is maternal and totemically named, and also the same terms of relationship are applied to its members as to those of blood kindred. While this is an undoubted source of confusion to strangers and to the student of its culture, there never is the slightest ambiguity in the native mind between the two.

from which he concludes that European contact had no important influence upon Zuñi kinship, or, by inference, upon any other Pueblo community.

The children belong to the mother’s clan, and marriage within that clan is forbidden. Though permitted within the clan of the father, it is disapproved. A reason for this as given to Dr. Parsons was that the children born of such union are never as strong as when diverse clans are mingled. The family organization among all Pueblos tends toward a compound type, consisting of as many as three generations. The young children are much in the care of the old people, especially of grandparents, by which division of labor the parents are released for their active toil in the fields or at their crafts. One sees in such a village as Ácoma quite little girls carrying far too heavy babies in a blanket on their backs, but one is told that there the men frequently carry the little children, which is not a usual pueblo custom.

There are no terms in Keresan for son or daughter, the words child, boy, girl, being used instead. Ácoma distinguishes according to sex but not according to age in expressing relationships between brother and sister. There is no specific terminology for relatives by marriage, but such exists for “cross-cousins,” that is, the children of a blood brother and sister. Dr. Parsons says that “Ácoma kinship terms correspond closely to Laguna,” but that brother-and-sister terms are applied in Ácoma to all cousins, which is not the common usage, though it is done at Zuñi. She has compiled elaborate tables for kin- and clanship at Laguna, in which Ácoma is frequently alluded to, and has included one long table of Ácoma terms.[144] Kroeber likewise gives a table of Ácoma-Laguna kinship-terms, compiled by himself, some of which he considers “not only not European, but far more extreme than Zuñi,” although the “generic resemblance of Keres to Hano and Zuñi is preserved.”

The next important question is the relation of the clan to the fraternities. Kroeber says that the one is social, and the other religious. Certain fraternities are widely distributed, and he has established for Zuñi, as Mrs. Stevenson did for Sía, that membership is voluntary, not clan-controlled, but follows blood or marriage connection. It is apparently true that in “certain cases succession to office in fraternities does depend on clanship.”[145] This is rather different from the situation in the Hopi pueblos, where the fraternities are at least definitely associated in the native mind with the clans of the same name. The function of the fraternities consists mainly in medicine-giving and in jugglery; though they take part in some of the communal ceremonies, they have no masked representations of deities, nor do they exercise their powers primarily for the bringing of rain. They have no right to the kivas, their meeting-place being in the front rooms of houses; they have official heads, but no priests.

At Sía and presumably at Ácoma, the Koshare and the Cuiranná form one fraternity whose duty it is to guide and attend the K’at’sina in their masked dances. At Zuñi the clan is then a body of

Certain other complexities of strain have arisen through the coming in to the pueblo of women from other nations. One Zuñi governor married a woman from the Cherokee Wolf clan, and as a matter of course she was received into their Coyote clan. In two or three generations it will be forgotten that her descendants were ever anything but Zuñi. Our author admits that the social fabric of Zuñi may be more closely knit than some others, but is of the opinion that all Southwestern tribes are so intimate that what is true of one may be predicated of the rest.

At bottom, all Pueblo government is theocratic. Civil officers are chosen and may be deposed by certain priesthoods which are clan-associated. However great the divergence of opinion during the choice of candidates, no decision may be announced until a complete unanimity is agreed upon. The civil government is chiefly concerned with property, and equities in material things, individual or communal. The governor and lieutenant-governor must be of different clans, and, theoretically at any rate, so also are their aids. Certain officials serve only one year at a time, and as there is a general disposition to give equal representation in public affairs to each clan, such diffusion of power tends toward a community thoroughly welded together.

According to Kroeber,

The fetishes are preserved in certain houses and are normally kept in jars of special design, fed at appointed times, but handled and exposed only on occasions of extreme ritualistic importance. The true understanding of Zuñi life other than its purely practical operations can be had only as we centre it about the ettowe.

When a family abandons a house, the room where the ettowe usually lies is kept in repair, and its priests continue to go in watto (to pray) there.[147] Each clan possesses its ettowe, and probably each set of priests is more or less clan-associated.

The visitor to any particular pueblo, if forearmed with some such general ideas of its policy, will assuredly gain a little better understanding of even the superficial occupations that he may chance to observe. We were consequently keen to learn how many of the old customs survive in this conservative community of Ácoma. It was not difficult to realize the deeply intimate family relationship of three generations of women of the Eagle clan with whom we associated. We also visited a more modern house of the Sun clan and we got some confirmatory impressions of many of the civil functions of its male population. In Ácoma, then, as in most Pueblo settlements, the family life is a mutually supporting partnership. Everything within the house belongs to the woman, even if brought there by her husband. Although the man goes forth to the hunt, once he has laid within the threshold a rabbit or a deer, he may not thereafter touch it if his wife objects, and all domestic animals, like sheep and chickens, belong to her and may not be sold without her permission. However, the man has his own prerogatives. To the man belong his blankets and his weapons, his horses and burros, his farm implements and all other tools. The right to hold office in the pueblo, to attain to priesthood in the fraternities, and to frequent the kivas (ceremonial chambers) are alone open to the men. From this fact it is evident that in spite of this semblance of a matriarchate the women have no voice in government. Further, it is true that so long as a man is a legitimate member of a household he is ruler of its affairs. The curious anomaly is seen (at Zuñi) in the contrasting fact that if a man divorces his wife even for the most flagrant immorality, it is he who leaves the house to her use, though, as sometimes happens, he has rebuilt it, and he does this without the faintest feeling of any injustice done to himself.

The Ácomas use the Catholic form of sponsorship at marriage, and no divorce is permitted. The parents of either one of the bridal pair choose a man and his wife to be the “best man” and “best woman,” and these two take the couple directly home from the ceremony to their house, wash their heads, and give them advice. The man speaks first and gives a present to the groom; then his wife does likewise with the bride. The bridegroom also gives his bride a present, perhaps a dress.

Although at Ácoma divorce is said to be unknown, it is very likely that here, as in most pueblos, the simple device of putting beyond the doorway all the man’s personal belongings is all the information he needs that his wife no longer wishes him to live with her. Similarly, if a man throws his blanket over his shoulder in a certain way and departs, his wife is notified of his intention to separate from her.

A definite idea was certainly given us at Ácoma in 1922 that the government there is fundamentally theocratic. I am, however, indebted to Dr. Parsons for the details of its organization as she understood it in 1918.

The officials of Ácoma are a cacique (ti-á-moni, arch-ruler), a governor with purely administrative functions, two lieutenant-governors (tenientes), three war chiefs (tsatichucha), and their two cooks (cocineros). There are besides, ten principales, who, like the cacique, are chosen for life, whereas all other officials serve but one year at a time.

A chief duty of the cacique[149] is to act as penitent for the sins of his tribe; and when he goes out into the wilderness by untrodden paths to fast for an uncertain length of days, the whole pueblo is in solemn mood, and the chance visitor is not made welcome.[150] Contrary to the custom in most pueblos, at Ácoma the cacique has no subordinates; neither does he have to be a cheani (medicine man) himself, although he is always appointed by the cheani. The true character of the cacique’s position has never been clearly defined for us, since he will not reveal the secrets of his office to anyone, unless to the man he looks upon as his successor. Although his title is that of “Arch-ruler,” he is evidently not all-powerful, for the war captain (hócheni)[151] is his warden, with power to punish him if he becomes arrogant or remiss in his duties.

Upon every important occasion the cacique must fast, either having only one meagre meal in a day, or sometimes none for four days; consequently the office is not a very popular honor. It demands a long, severe tutelage in physical endurance as well as in the deeper mysteries of the esoteric orders. During all fasts and ceremonies, unbroken continence is exacted, for the cacique is Watcher of the Sun. Moreover, he has to help the war captains to look after the Katsina, or masked impersonators of the gods which “function for rain, crops, animals, and the sick.” In times of war he is both surgeon and nurse for the wounded. Nevertheless the cacique has certain perquisites; for, although the people do not plant for him they do bring in to him his harvests. Also, each year they hold four rabbit hunts for him, one in each of the cardinal directions. This hunt comes “after the war chiefs say they have been fasting for four days and it is time to have a hunt.” A little later comes a general hunt in which women may join.[152]

The ten principales, who are always of the Antelope clan, and who enjoy a life tenure, seem to act as a higher court. They may be quite young, and they instruct the cacique if he is old, as to what is going on, and what he must do. The principales control the land distributions, agricultural land being allotted to individuals and grazing fields being held in common.

“The war chiefs[153] have undoubtedly sacerdotal as well as military functions. They are said to pray morning and night and at ceremonials for the people, for their animals, for crops and for rain.” But of these rites Dr. Parsons[154] learned nothing definite. The present writer saw three of the war chiefs going forth about six in the morning, gorgeously blanketed and bedecked with many and various pendant ornaments, but too far away to be distinguished.

Bandelier[155] says that the war captain occupies among the Keres a position of peculiar distinction. He is the military leader and sheriff. His supremacy over both governor and cacique arises from an old belief that he is representative of Ma-se-ua, one of the two sons of the Sun Father and Moon Mother. The other son, Oyo-ya-ya, is represented by the war captain’s lieutenant, who bears his name.

These two brothers, equivalent no doubt to the Twins in Zuñi myths, are held in almost greater reverence than the sun and moon, and one of the chief public dances of the Keres is given in their honor, whereas formerly it was addressed to the sun.

Although different informants gave Dr. Parsons no clear statement as to whether or not there is definite ranking of the clans, she concluded that it is the Antelope clan (Kuüts Hanoch) that governs, and that it has undoubtedly ceremonial prerogatives.[156] Its members choose the Kasik, who is the spiritual, and nominally the temporal, head of the pueblo, and is almost invariably a man distinguished for uprightness and wisdom.

On the first of the two brief visits made to Ácoma in the summer of 1922, I was told by a man who spoke English readily that the cacique is “always Antelope,” and that, though his duties are chiefly sacerdotal, it is he who names the officers for the ensuing year at the election in December. On the second visit the same informant referred for the first time to the cacique as his “uncle,” adding, “He is very old and nearly blind.” There was no question that the man with most authority in 1922 was the hócheni or war captain, a situation due very possibly to the physical disability of the cacique.

The annual election of officers forms an important part of the winter solstice ceremonies. After a week of commingled pagan and Christian festivities, the installation takes place either on December 30 or January 1, which is known as “King Day.” To inform the pueblo when and where this function will take place, the town crier (kahera) makes the circuit of the several roadways (as is the custom at Ácoma) calling out his instructions. When the men have assembled in the long-house (Komanira) near the church, the nominations made by the cacique are announced by the outgoing war chiefs; after this a general vote is taken, though a pure formality, for even if a nominee demurs he cannot help himself. We are told of cases when men ran away to avoid office, but were forced to return and serve as chosen. In installing officers, says Dr. Parsons, those going out “kneel on both knees, make the sign of the Cross, say the prayer beginning, ‘Padre santo-spirito. Amen,’ and pass the cane of office to their successors. All present kneel, of course removing their hats. Bandas are not removed.”[157] The election festivities continue through January 10, dances being performed in different houses in honor of the newly elected officers. The governor told Dr. Parsons that the people would stay on for ten days or so: “They have to, we have not given them the rules yet,” he said.[158]

One writer[159] describes a ceremony at Ácoma that I have found mentioned nowhere else. He witnessed it on a spring morning in 1864. He describes the “single steep, narrow, winding path” from the plain to the top of the mesa, which “near the top narrows and is flanked on each side by a tall much-worn pillar of the sandstone-rock formation of the mesa, requiring no very vivid imagination to portray them as sentinels keeping watch over the approaches to this citadel.” A dance of purification for a recent victory over the Navajos was to be celebrated that day. The visitors noticed that one of these two stone pillars “appeared to be an object of especial regard; ribbons were hung on it; heads of corn and pieces of cake were flung up with an effort to lodge them on its flattened or concave summit.” The Alcalde of the pueblo joined the Americans and told the story of the pillar, in substance as follows:

Many long years ago the peace of the Indian country was threatened by a great force of Spaniards coming from Mexico. Warning was given by runners from pueblo to pueblo in order that a concerted resistance might be made to stop the “ruin and desolation that marked the Spaniard’s path in this cruel warfare. Soon these warnings ceased.” But because there was plenty of evidence that the invaders were still despoiling the land, the young men of Ácoma agreed among themselves to keep a vigilant watch from the summits of one of these stone pillars. Many days passed and all was quiet. The pillar top was well stocked with provisions for the watcher. And then one night, after rain and wind had made the darkness unwontedly thick, he was startled as the dawn came, to see the Spaniards actually scaling the steep. They were, in fact, so close that he could not leave his post to give the alarm. All he could do was to blow his “loud-sounding horn-note of imminent danger to his friends” and try as best he could to keep the enemy at bay for the few precious moments before help could reach him. He was well equipped “with bow and arrows, shield and spear. Without descending from his post, the narrow path, whose width only admitted of one person passing at a time, was soon blocked with the disabled foe.” Wounded, the sentinel hero fell back on his lofty perch, but not till the village men had hurried to his aid, and these, fresh and strong, were more than a match for those Spaniards who gained the top of the cliff. A short, impetuous fight brought victory to the Ácomas, and the long dread was vanquished, but the hero of the pillar was dead at his post. “And for this,” said the Alcalde, “we every year have our rejoicings near the foot of the pillar and by our joy and praises thank the spirit of the hero who so bravely sacrificed himself to save his people.”

This story was confirmed during my second visit to the mesa. Although we saw no such weather-worn pillars on the summit of Ácoma, I hazard the guess that they may have stood at the top of the so-called “Runners,” or “Deadman’s trail,” which our informant told me had been out of use for many years but which once had served to preserve the pueblo from the Spaniards. At that time I thought he was trying to persuade me that the Ácomas won the famous fight of Zaldívar, but he probably knew the tradition of this other invasion by the Spaniards, for he was very positive in his statement that the white men were all killed or driven off in a fierce encounter at that point, and that the second name was given to that particular trail because of this event.

Another noteworthy remark of Gwyther’s is that the Ácomas were somewhat surly until they found that the visitors were all Americans; it was only toward Mexicans that they cherished any ill-will, and thereafter the visitors were treated with entire cordiality.

Who will go to Ácoma and become by slow degrees a familiar and trusted dweller among the people, even as Cushing did at Zuñi? That person alone, I am convinced, talking their language, eating their food, observing quietly their customs, will avail to penetrate the heart of the Ácoma secret.

Chapter XIII FOLK-TALES OF ÁCOMA — Borrowed Feathers: Don’t Look Up: Back to Life — Forgetting the Song: Inside the Lizard — Borrowed Feathers — The Serpent, the Man, the Ox, the Horse, and the Coyote (From Acomita) [167] — San Pascual — Short Folk-Tales and Anecdotes — A Story of Long Time Ago at Ácoma [172] or, The Melons of Discord

Three types of the survivals of inherited traditions regarding the supernatural, and its relation to human beings, are the religious beliefs, the great myths, and the folk-tales, which may be regarded as myths in their infancy. Folk-tales are the happenings of more recent times than those that are concerned with the origin of the race and the heroic demi-gods.

Story-telling by the old men of any semi-civilized society is the pastime of their leisure hours, and is all the literature of the tribe. With the American Indian there were songs and tales for every adventure in their tribal history. Imagination is so vital an element of all that the Indian believes, entering into all he says and does in daily life, that it must never be out of mind in any study of his culture.

All unexplained phenomena belong to the world of necromancy, and every Indian language has its own name for this magic power residing in such phenomena. Throughout the Indian world the song of birds is deemed a magic spell. When, therefore, human beings sing, they too are weaving magic, over the grinding, over the planting, over the painting of jars, to bring the favor of those above upon that especial occupation. Hence, singing is a universal accompaniment of Indian life and Indian worship.

In the book of Indian music by Natalie Curtis Burlin[160] there are three songs given from Ácoma, belonging to the Corn-people, Gátsina (K’at’sina), those mythological beings impersonated by masked dancers in the ceremonials. Only two words appear in these songs, shiwanna, meaning cloud, and hawilana, meaning growing corn. For the remainder, vocables only are used. It is further stated that these songs are sung in other villages, such as Laguna and Zuñi, and therefore they may not be distinctively native to Ácoma. In folk-tales, just as in the myths, we are warned against too much reliance upon explanatory significances. A single tale may involve ten or a dozen interpretations. Waterman points out that a most interesting fact in American folk-lore is the enormous distance, sometimes thousands of miles, to which a tale can travel from what it is fair to consider as its original home. Naturally the explanation will vary with local conditions, for primitive man is even more interested in and occupied by his immediate environment than are we of a later age, and we are by no means emancipated from that limited outlook upon the world about us.

Waterman says very happily that

Ácoma on its craggy height, haughtily indifferent or inimical to its neighbors, has imparted little of itself to outsiders even in the way of folk-lore or of music. Espinosa considers that the “Pueblo Indians have given very little to the great traditional treasure of Spanish folk-lore of New Mexico.... But some of them have absorbed a considerable amount of Spanish folk-lore material.” He contributes two tales and about fifty short anecdotes or fables, collected at the farm colony of Acomita by one of his students, all of which show European ancestry.

I wish here to express my thanks to Mrs. N. V. Sanchez for her translation of the following selection from this group of tales. That called “San Pascual” is apparently a satire upon the Christian ritual. To the ignorant lad the figure of the Lord on the cross means only that he must be a criminal; when later He creates a feast from nothing tangible it could only be through sorcery. The Indian everywhere attributed diseases that followed the coming of the Spaniards to their sprinkling of the neophytes with holy water. Only with these three things in mind does the story of San Pascual become intelligible.

The same student collected fifty fables, from which I have chosen four, one of which bears a certain likeness to that of Æsop called “The Fox and the Crow.”[162]

Two stories given below were told to Dr. Parsons by the cacique of Ácoma and written down by her in English. In one of these, for the first time we gain faint hints of a tradition of an earlier settlement at the foot of the rock which, if confirmed, would seem to ally the movements of this Keresan tribe more closely to those of other mesa pueblos than has heretofore been evident.

The brief form of “Borrowed Feathers” is added because of its allusion to Katzímo, and also because there is little question that in it we have a tale of purely Indian origin.

One significant allusion to Ácoma may be read in a volume of tales collected by Cushing at Zuñi.[163] In the one called “The Maiden and the Sun,” an Ácoma spectator takes part at a Zuñi festival, and runs away with the body of the maiden’s mother. Later the scene moves to Ácoma itself in an attempt to get from the dance-priestess there the magic-working bones of the deceased woman. Here we have a striking proof of certain inter-relationships of tradition and of custom between Ácoma and Zuñi, about which ordinarily we hear emphatic denial rather than confirmation.

Informant, cacique (hócheni) of Ácoma, about 75 years of age

Long ago at Hanishoku[164] the pigeons (houk) were flying about. They gave Coyote some of their feathers to fly with. Coyote (chuski) was heavy and lagged behind. The pigeons said, “Let us fly up to the water-hole on top of the mesa! Let us fly on ahead of Coyote. He has a dirty mouth.” They flew on to the water-hole, Coyote after them. When they had finished drinking, they took their feathers away from Coyote and left him there crying. As he was crying, the spider below heard him. Spider said, “Somebody is crying.” Spider went up, and saw that it was Coyote. Coyote said, “Will you take me down?” Spider said, “Yes. Wait here until I get my basket. I will lower you down in it.” Spider went down and got his basket. He said to Coyote, “Get in, but as you descend do not look up. If you look up, I shall drop you.” When the basket was half way down Coyote began to say to himself, “I wonder why Spider does not want me to look up!” Then he looked up. Spider let go of the basket, and Coyote dashed down into pieces.

Another coyote passed by, and saw the pieces. “I wonder who died here!” said he. “I had better see.” He gathered together the bones, and covered them over with a cloth. On the north side he began to sing,

On the west side he sang,

On the south side he sang,

On the east side he sang,

The coyote said, “I wish to see who is underneath. Arise!” Out came Coyote. “Is it you?” “Yes.” “Who killed you?” “I was on top of the mesa, and Spider threw me down.” “Where do you live?” “I live far over on the south side.” “Well, go home.” That is all (tomesau).—Pp. 220, 221.

Informant, cacique of Ácoma

A long time ago (tsikinomaha) at Kaiaushitsa there was a lizard (?) (tapinosk) singing. He sang,

There came up a coyote (chuski) and listened. Lizard sang again,

Coyote said, “I think it was over there to the west.” He came closer. He said, “Friend (saukin), are you here?” Lizard said, “Yes.” Coyote said, “You have fine sound. I want you to sing for me. I want to learn it.” Lizard said, “Very well.” He sang,

“Did you learn it, my sound?” asked Lizard. “Yes.” “Sing it.” Coyote sang (in a lower key and ponderously),

“I see you have learned my sound,” said Lizard. Coyote said, “I am going.” He went to the east. As he approached a cedar tree, singing his song, a rabbit sitting under the tree heard him. The rabbit jumped up and ran into a prairie-dog hole. Coyote ran after the rabbit, and began to dig in the hole. He dug, dug, dug, until his nails were worn off. Then he tried to sing his song, and could only say, “Mati, mati.” The rest he had forgotten. He said, “I had better go back and ask my friend.” He went back to Lizard, and said, “Friend, sing for me.” Lizard only looked at him, saying nothing. “Friend, sing your song for me. I am going to ask you four times. Then, if you don’t sing, I shall swallow you down. Now, sing for me.” Lizard said nothing. “Sing for me.” Lizard said nothing. “Sing for me.” Lizard said nothing. Then he swallowed him down. Inside of Coyote, Lizard sang,

Coyote said, “Where are you?” “I am inside.” “Very well, friend; but don’t cut my throat or my stomach. Just sing.” But Lizard did cut his throat and his stomach, and Coyote fell down dead.[165]

Informant, Getsitsa of Laguna, about 60 years of age

Long ago (hamaha), the bluebirds (?) (kaihadanish) were grinding. Coyote (chuski) began to grind too. The bluebirds said, “Let us all go get a drink on top of Katzímo! But what shall we do with our friend (saukin) here? He has no feathers. We must give him some of our feathers.” So they gave him of their feathers. They flew to the top of the mesa. They drank. Then they said, “Let us take back our feathers! Let us leave Coyote here!” They took all their feathers away from him. He roamed about looking for a way down. He began to jump. It was steep. He fell and killed himself. The bluebirds wondered what had become of him.[166]

Once a man, while going through a meadow, found a serpent trapped under a stone. The man had compassion for it and took away the stone.

At that time the animals spoke the same as we, and the serpent said to the man: “Now I am going to eat you: I am very hungry.” “Why do you wish to eat me after I did you such a great benefit?” But the serpent insisted on eating him and at last the man said to him: “Wait a little while. Wait until that ox gets here and then you may eat me.” “Good,” the serpent replied.

And as soon as the ox arrived the man said to him: “Where has it been seen that a good deed is repaid with evil?” “In me,” replied the ox. “After I served my master for many years he unkindly turned me out here to get fat so that he can kill me.” And then the serpent said to the man: “So you see it is right that I should eat you.”

“Wait a little until that old horse comes, and then you may eat me,” the man said to him. Good; so they waited, and as soon as he came the man said to him, “Where has it been seen that a good deed is repaid with an evil one?” “In me,” said the horse, “for after serving my master for many years they left me here for the wild beasts to eat me.” “Now you see how right it is that I should eat you,” the serpent said to the man. “Wait a bit until that coyote comes and then you may eat me.”

Good; so the coyote came and the man said to him: “Where has it been seen that good is repaid by evil? This serpent was trapped under a stone, and because I did him the benefit of taking away the stone he now wishes to eat me.” “It is quite right that he should eat you,” said the coyote, “but first I wish to see how the serpent was trapped.”

The serpent then consented that they should roll back the stone so that they might see how he was trapped. And as soon as he was well trapped, the coyote said: “Was it like this that he was trapped?” “Yes, it was like this,” they all replied. “Good,” the coyote said to them, “if that is the way it was, let him remain so, so that the devil may not cause him to eat me also.”

A poor man who lived in a city had no family but his disconsolate wife.

In the course of time they had a little child. And as they were so poor there was no one they could ask to be godfathers. Near the city lived a rich man who had many sheep, and they determined to ask this rich man to be the godfather.

The rich man consented with much pleasure, and they took the child to the chapel of the same city and baptized him. They named him “Pascual the destitute.”

Not long afterwards, in three months, death came and carried away the mother of the child, and the father then decided to go and deliver the orphan to the godfather. And as at the same time the farm foreman arrived with his party, the godfather gave the child to him and said: “See here, man, take this child with you, so that you may rear him with a goat, in order that he may be of some service to you when he is a man.”

Good; so they took him to the steward and told him what his name was and that the patron had said that they were to rear him. And then they took him.

The steward was a very religious man and whenever he could he went to divine services, but he never took the child.

When Pascual was ten years old and was now very useful, the steward ordered the farm foreman to go to the house of the patron, for he did not need him any longer.[168]

One day the steward went to mass, and left Pascual alone taking care of the cattle. Pascual began to think, and said to himself: “But what can mass be?” Finally he decided that if he left him alone again he would follow him to find out what mass was.

He did so. The steward went away and Pascual followed him. When he lacked only a mile to arrive in the city he saw a man coming in a cart for wood. As the poor little fellow had never seen carts, he said, “Now I know what mass is. This is it.”

As soon as the woodman came up he said to him, “May God give you good days, kind sir.” “Good days to you, good boy.” Then Pascual asked him: “Where is mass?” Said the woodman, “Go straight along this road until you come to the plaza, there where it is seen to coloriar, and the great house which is in the little square in the middle is the church, and inside of it they say mass.”

“And what does one do in mass?” asked Pascual. “Everything that you see done, you do,” the woodman told him.

Good; he then went straight to the plaza and soon found the chapel. Outside was an old woman, and he took her shawl from her and covered himself. And he took off his breeches and covered them up. Then he entered the church. And when they all prostrated themselves they saw him without breeches, and some of the mischievous ones pricked him behind. And then Pascual pricked the old woman, who was in front of him, saying: “Prick, prick, for they are pricking behind.”[169]

When everybody went out he remained alone, much frightened, and when he saw the Lord nailed on a timber he said, “This poor man killed or robbed.” The sacristan did not see him and locked all the doors, leaving him shut in.

Then Pascual went to where the Lord was and said to him: “Friend, do not be sad. I am going to work and I will bring you food to fatten you. Where can I find work?” “Look,” said the Lord, “go along the main street until you find a great house. Ask for work there.”

The door opened and Pascual went out and came to the great house, which was where the curate lived, and the sacristan came out and asked him what he wanted. “I am looking for work.” The curate then came out and said to him: “What kind of work do you want?” “I do not know how to do anything but take care of sheep,” replied Pascual. “Then come here. How much pay do you want?” “Nothing but food for myself and a friend of mine.” “Good, then take this hoe and weed the garden.” “How weed?” “Level it all,” said the curate.

And Pascual weeded the garden, leveling it all, chili, onions, and everything, he cut down level. The sacristan saw the destruction and went to tell the curate. But when the curate came he saw that all the pulled-up plants were flowering and giving fruit. And the curate said to him: “Surely this is a servant of God, who comes to test my gratitude.”

And he called Pascual to come and eat with him. “No, I only want food for myself and for my friend.” They gave it to him and he went away. When he returned the curate said to him: “To-morrow I am going to make a great feast, and I wish you and your friend to come and eat at my table.” They went, and the curate made a very great feast.

And the Lord said to Pascual: “Tell the father to invite to-morrow all the people to a feast except your godfather, because he was ungrateful.”

The next day the gentleman made the feast, and when the people were coming Pascual was much ashamed because he saw that nothing was ready, and he said to the Lord: “But, men, nothing is ready. That is why they have you a prisoner, because you are a deceiver.” “Go bring a barrel of water,” the Lord said to him. “And where shall I go to bring water?” “Go, Pascual, on one side of the street and you will find it.” And Pascual went out and returned with a barrel of water.

When he returned there was a large table well set out and full of all kinds of viands. And Pascual said to the Lord: “With reason they regard you as a witch.” “Be silent, Pascual; take this barrel and follow me.” And Pascual followed him, and when he turned around he saw dead persons lying on all sides, and he said to the Lord: “With reason they held you prisoner, for you are a regular murderer.” “Be silent, Pascual; follow me.” And they went on, scattering water on all sides until everybody was dead.

And when Pascual died he was raised to the celestial mansions. And his godfather went to the eternal abyss for his ingratitude.

(From Acomita)

22. A man who was very poor and had a very large family was once talking with his children, and he said to them: “When I have money I am going to build a house with balustrades.” One of his sons came to him and said: “I am going to climb on the balustrade.” Another said: “And I also.” And still another said: “And I am going to sit on the balustrade.” The man became angry and told them: “This disorderly family will wear out the balustrade.” And he gave them all a good beating.

27. A man was riding horseback one day. It was raining, and he wished to smoke his pipe. He had no matches, so he waited till there was a lightning flash, when he put spurs to his horse and went to light his pipe by the light of the flash.

29. A little coyote was going along with a chicken in his mouth, and on the way the chicken said to him: “Why don’t you say ‘cheese’?” And the coyote said ‘cheese’ and away goes the chicken to the top of a tree. “Come down,” said the coyote to her. “A command has come for all the animals to assemble.” “Good,” said the chicken. “There are some hounds coming now.” “That is not in the command,” said the coyote, and ran off.

36. They say that a Mexican of Alameda went to Albuquerque to sell eggs. The American of the store said to him: “Sit down.” “No sir, they are not to be given away (no se dan), they are for sale,”[170] he said to this. Then the American, who did not understand him, said: “Are you crazy?” And he replied: “No sir, they do not grow, the hens lay them.”[171]

30. Un pastor le diju al cura que quería pagar por una misa tutanada con alaridos (cantada) en el palo gueco (pulpito), con regaños en el tapanco (sermon) y con jumaderas en l’oyit’ el cuajo (incensario).

A shepherd told the curate that he wished to pay for a mass (tutanada) with shouts (sung) in the hollow stick (pulpit) with scoldings in the stall (sermon) and with smokes in the little hole of the bladder (censer).

42. A woman had a neighbor who everybody said was a witch. One night when she went to sleep with her she could not sleep because she was so frightened.

About midnight the witch got up, took out her eyes and put them on a plate, took off her arms and legs and hung them up carefully, and then herself turned into a wolf and went out by the chimney.

(In another version the woman goes away, unchanged, riding on a broomstick. Collected by Miss Matilda Allen.)

(Ácoma Pueblo)

A long time ago, the people of Ácoma used to live on the mesa below the present village. One day during that time the governor announced to his people that there would be a rabbit hunt on the following day and advised them to get their shoes, clubs, bows, and arrows ready. So early the next morning the whole village, except the governor’s daughter, whom he commanded to stay at home, set out for the hunt.

But the daughter did not like to remain behind alone, so shortly after the others had gone, and contrary to her father’s wishes, she followed the party. That afternoon as the villagers were cleaning rabbits for their evening meal, she overtook them and hid behind a rock. A young man coming in late to join the others passed near by and startled her so that she made a movement that betrayed her.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I am trying to get a rabbit out from under this rock,” she answered.

Then the young man, who had many rabbits strung around his belt, gave a number of them to the girl and they went together to join the rest of the party. The people were surprised to see that the girl had killed so many rabbits; but her father, the governor, was angry.

The hunt lasted four days. After they returned the governor, together with all of the villagers, scolded the daughter for her disobedience and ostracized her.

On the following day when everyone was busy preparing to dance a kachina dance in celebration of the success of the hunt, the governor’s daughter ran over to the Zuñi village, four miles to the west of Ácoma, and told the Zuñis that her people were having a dance. She invited them to come and dance too.

The Zuñis accepted the invitation and went to Ácoma loaded with melons, colored corn, and some of all of the fruits of their harvest. The Ácomas did not have any real melons. They danced with the melons made of dyed buckskin; and so when the first relay of their dance was over and the Zuñis danced in with their melons, the Ácomas were jealous. They demanded to know why the Zuñis were intruding themselves into their fiesta. Angry words followed and the Zuñis returned home enraged.

Then the Ácomas urged their governor to prepare for war, but he refused to do so; and the villagers, remembering the spirit in which the Zuñi Indians had left them, hastily removed their possessions to the top of the high mesa, and built the present village of Ácoma, leaving the governor alone on the mesa below.

Shortly thereafter the Zuñis came in their war paint and, finding only the governor in a deserted village, they slew him and returned home again.

Six days later the governor’s daughter went back to Ácoma and perhaps lived happily ever after. Because a governor mistreated his daughter and she avenged herself is the reason that Ácoma occupies its present inaccessible position.

Chapter XIV KERESAN MYTHS

Although it is possible to regard the current beliefs of the Indian concerning his origin, his migrations, and his religion, as largely mythical, all such events are of a grandiose and serious character. Besides these major beliefs, there exists a vast number of lesser myths and superstitions, as well as familiar folk-tales, which are not to be overlooked, since they have almost as much power over the primitive mind as the more essential matters in his history and his faith. Careful inquiry has proved that a myth is rarely or never confined to a single tribe, and that certain myths can be traced from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is common knowledge also that as a myth travels its poetic factor tends to predominate. We should expect to find, as we do, that myth forms are most nearly alike in contiguous tribes, and most unlike in those separated by great distances. Hence the myths of Ácoma are part of the general lore of the Southwest. One group of scholars considers that myths should be restricted to such tales as have an explanatory tendency (which is easily overestimated), and would differentiate between mythical tales on the one hand, and mythical ideas or concepts on the other, for they say we can gain much information about the first of these but very little about the second. Of “explanatory myths,” moreover, there are two forms,—inclusive and particularistic. The first is well exemplified by a culture-hero who “taught the people all the arts,” and the second by a culture-hero who taught the people merely one art, hitherto unknown, such as basket making. Another illustration is the myth of the Thunder Bird, so widely believed in that it is used by some authorities as a typical mythical concept. The conventionalized figure is found in many silver ornaments, upon the pottery, and upon scores of baskets. At Ácoma the best of her potters make a fine design of it upon plaques and vessels of various sorts. Apparently the underlying idea of this myth is of a bird flying through the heavens, so huge that he darkens the skies. The flapping of his wings is the thunder, the winking of his eyes causes the lightning, and so forth.

If, then, the “tawny patch on the shoulder of a rabbit,” the antlers of a deer, the crest of a bird, are full of meaning to the Indian mind, we can understand that there must be an inexhaustible store of tales, varying from tribe to tribe with the living creatures and the local conditions that obtain in each. Though we to-day after the long sophistication of the years may regard this phase as childish, ignorant, and superstitious, and resent its tyrannous fettering of the human mind, we must remember that it was the only view of life possible at the period of its sway—a life of Nature, speaking with many voices, sensitive to every changing facet of the created world—and that from such rude beginnings all primitive religion and poetry have arisen. We cannot afford to ignore or lose the only contribution thereto made on the western continent.

Myths represent incidents long past and not to be repeated, those which occurred in the morning of the world when man had few or none of his present customs and arts. Folk-tales, on the other hand, are busied with more recent events and may even be woven about present-day occurrences. The myth therefore appeals especially to the imagination and the emotions, and to that deep-seated belief of the Indian that the world of sense and the world of spirit are so intimately linked that the former is ruled in minutest detail by the latter.[175]

The “ritualization of myths”[176] takes place when an attempt is made to weave together these far-away happenings into a consistent tribal, clan, or fraternity story, the telling of which is frequently accompanied by ceremonies. Since there is usually a desire shown to arrange these chronologically, they may become an historical record of the tribe’s beginnings. At the same time, it must never be forgotten that these myths are handed down verbally by the older men of the tribe through successive generations, and must suffer certain alterations and embellishments as time passes.

Strong resemblances exist between the origin-legends of all the different Pueblo tribes, though each has its own variants. There is almost total absence of intimate studies of the Ácoma tradition, such as have been made with elaborate care and detail for both the Hopi and the Zuñi. It is not possible to set forth any origin or religious myths as positively or exclusively those of the Ácomas, yet since they, like the people of Sía, only seventy miles away, both belong to the Keresan nation, we feel something like assurance in assuming that the Ácoma legends must be closely similar[177] to those described in the distinguished researches of Sía.

To all Pueblo Indians the world was flat and round, like a great disk. Before there was any life, the All-Father existed alone in the Somewhere, and immemorial darkness covered all space. This primal All-Father “thought outward into space” until mists finally penetrated the thick and universal blackness, and the Middle Place appeared, guarded by Six Warriors. In some legends, a god named Po-shai-an-ki-a is identical with the All-Father, whereas in others he is only an early culture hero, giver of domestic animals and of wealth. In the larger number of legends the Spider—Sussistinnaka[178]—is the All-Father, sometimes spoken of as a male, and in other tribes as a female, deity. In Sía myths, however, the spider is the first living creature of the underworld, dominating the actions of all other beings.

The creation of light follows that of the Middle Place, and the sun becomes not only an emanation from the All-Father, but the Supreme Being himself,[179] and Mother Earth is his complement. The Pueblo world is divided into six regions, each having its centre in a spring somewhere in the heart of a great mountain, on whose summit is a gigantic tree. I combine the phrasing of the myths of two Keresan pueblos to make more clear these six “points of the compass,” as we call them.[180] Each of them has its especial color-symbol, which, however, is not uniformly assigned by all tribes.

In Sía legends, those presumably most closely akin to Ácoma, the creation was performed by the Spider, who drew two lines of meal upon the lighted ground, which, by crossing each other, made four equal squares. He then seated himself close to two parcels placed in the two upper spaces, and chanted a low, sweet song, to which the parcels “rattled” an accompaniment, and presently out of each walked a woman. One, named Utset, was the mother of all Indians; the other, Nowutset, the progenitress of all other people upon earth. Two male heroes called The Twins, with names varying in different tribes, are universally described as Dark and Light, having been born of a mother sometimes called The Dawn, who died in giving them birth. These mythical heroes live in the east, and the Twin called Light is always white—the “fixed emblem of peace, friendship, happiness, propriety, purity, and holiness.”[181] Light and Life, Darkness and Death, have been synonymous in all systems of religion.

At first the earth was very hot, so that it melted, but later the people lacked fire. In all the tribes we find a universal folk-tale of the Theft of Fire, and generally it is Coyote who is commissioned to bring it from beyond the Kingdom of Sussistinnako—a difficult and delicate task, for there were three doors to pass, guarded first by the Snake, then by the Cougar, and lastly by the Bear. When, finally, human beings began to people the earth and had to disperse, their place of egress from the underworld, in which all men and animals were born, was Si-pa-pu, and it is to Si-pa-pu again that the spirits of those who die must return. The road to and from Si-pa-pu is always spoken of as crowded by the two lines of spirits passing each other, the ghostly forms of the dead crossing those who are yet to be born into life.[182]

We find also the idea of death in life associated with the dying day, and perhaps this is the origin of the expression of the soldier lads in the World War who spoke of their comrades as “going west.” Rest from labor with the setting sun led naturally to the search for some place of repose for the weary soul in that region where the sun had sunk from sight of mortal eyes.

One myth that Pueblo Indians possess in common with each other and with almost all primitive peoples is that of a culture-hero, regarded as the ancestor of a tribe, sometimes even as the creator of the universe.[184] This half-divine being appeared on earth while all was still chaos, taught the people their arts, and, having established their social and religious order, vanished, not by death but in some mysterious manner, promising to return to earth when the appointed time should arrive.[185]

Among the Pueblos, this many-sided culture-hero is known as Montezuma,[186] and “is the centre of some of the most poetic myths found in ancient American mythology.” Many places in New Mexico claim to be his birthplace, and the variety of aspects under which Montezuma is presented is due to the fact that each tribe jealously guards its individual legends concerning his achievements. Emory wrote in 1847:

An old tradition given as common to all Pueblo Indians is to the effect that they had no kinship with nomad tribes but were “a people seated on the soil,” and that they were “Children of Montezuma;[188] when he and his subjects were hard pressed by the Spaniards, they were summoned south to help in the succor of the City of Mexico, from whence none of them ever returned.” There is no foundation in fact for this legend, but a reasonable explanation for the picturesque tale is given by Bandelier, who says: “The Mexican Nahautl language has left positive traces, through the Indians from Central Mexico and the Spaniards themselves, who brought them to New Mexico as their servants.”[189]

One is surprised and impressed by so often coming across analogies, in the tales of these so-called barbarians, with those which have all the charm and authority of classic antiquity. For example, there are everywhere among the Indians legends of a great flood and of mountains of refuge which correspond to Ararat, though the actual locality varies with the different tribes, just as is true of Si-pa-pu, their place of emergence from the underworld. This was in truth so continuously heard by the Spanish padres when first they came upon North American soil that they were wont to affirm the Indian religion to be a pervert from their own sacred theology.

In some of the tribes we find the belief that when the waters covered the earth, all living things perished save Montezuma and his friend Coyote. They had built a boat and moored it high on the summit of Santa Rosa (their Ararat) in case of need. Montezuma in some of the tales thus became the founder of the Indian pueblos, of which Ácoma was the first and Pecos the second.

A variation of the deluge myth was told me at Isleta. The people there believe that this continent was never overtaken by the great flood, and that consequently the American Indian is in descent from the oldest race that has had a continuous existence upon earth. In the summer of 1922 some fragments of this myth were told me by my host at the Rito de los Frijoles, who had been shown “a very ancient manuscript by an aged Indian, who had spent two days” in relating to him the Montezuma legend, which the Indian affirmed had no connection with the Aztec king of the same name.

We also meet among these American aborigines a world-wide myth which is probably most familiar in the Minotaur, or in the legend of St. George, who rescued the Libyan princess when she was chosen by lot to feed the terrible dragon outside her father’s city, and who remained to convert that heathen people to Christianity.

Professor Espinosa[191] found among the Pueblos a myth of the Monster Viper which he is inclined to believe is purely Indian in origin—probably derived from the Aztec. He says that the Indians were very vague about it, or wished to deny it; but the legend is that in each pueblo is hidden a monster viper to which several children are fed every year.

In New Mexico the belief is said to be widespread that the gradual extinction of the Pueblo tribes there is due to the fact that child-sacrifice no longer exists. Professor Espinosa has reason to believe that it was at some time a common practice.[192] Mrs. Stevenson no later than 1886 believed that she discovered that in at least two Tewa pueblos the rattlesnake was propitiated by human sacrifice, either of the youngest female, or failing this, of an adult woman who had neither husband nor children—if such could be found.

We have very little to contribute about myths peculiar to Ácoma, but Dr. Parsons[193] has discovered much concerning those that relate to maternity-beliefs and practices there and at Laguna, and to her articles the interested reader is referred. It must suffice here to mention only a bare outline of the birth myth about which undoubtedly clusters, as is true at Sía, much that is especially sacred and secret. All Ácoma clans are maternal and exogamous, and many are the “beliefs of sympathetic magic in connection with conception, pregnancy, and growth.” At Ácoma the ritual for the increase of children is especially associated with the Santu cult,[194] which, contrary to the case in most tribes, is both at Ácoma and Laguna a male deity. “The Santu is regarded as a source of light, in the same sense of life, and also a specific for rain,” and therefore a power directly able to further fertility, whether in plants or in animals. As such his favor is besought at the winter solstice ceremonial by particular offerings at his altar. To it women desiring children bring clay figures of a baby (wiha), and other prenatal practices are arranged. The Santu then is supposed to lie in for four days after the winter solstice, and all about him are placed images of domestic animals, rings, bracelets, and so forth. When the birth is close at hand, the human mother is carefully watched by her grandmother, and for four days after the child has come into the world she also lies in, with an ear of corn close beside her baby. “On the fourth morning the ‘Medicine Man’ and his wife arrive sometime before dawn. He prays and sings four or five songs, after which he takes the child out to the east side of the mesa to show it at sunrise to the Sun God. The child’s mother goes along, and during the ceremonial sprinkles sacred meal.” The child’s forehead, body, and legs are anointed with ashes in the form of a cross, “because witches do not like ashes.”

The christening does not take place for seven or eight months because, if the baby does not live, it is better not to have to remember it with a name. When the time for this ceremony is decided upon, it is held in the church, in the presence of its godparents, who make the child a gift and then carry it to their own house, where its head is washed, “an interesting instance of the way the Catholic rite may be combined with native practice.” Presents must be exchanged between godparents and the child on every following Christmas. What Indian name is given we may never know; for more common is the nickname, given later to describe some characteristic trait, or act, when a child’s personality becomes apparent. A happy little girl may be called “Laughs in the Morning,” or a fleet-footed boy who has shot his coyote will thereafter be known as “Flying Wolf.”[195] Then, usually, the Roman priest administers Christian baptism and bestows a Spanish name. If the child goes to an American school, he or she is sure to receive an American name, and by the last, to us as visitors from the outside, is most likely to be introduced. Thus we have another complex to add to all the others, none of which appears to confuse or disturb the serenity of the Indian.

Many writers about Indian life in the pueblos emphasize the obedience of the children and speak of punishment by parents as being so little merited that it is an almost unheard-of event. The fact appears to be that parents terrify their children at a very early age with tales of supernatural beings and their evil powers, so that to utter a single talismanic word, like el coco, or d’agüelo, suffices to subdue the naughtiest infant. They obey from fear, not of their parents, but of the unseen powers. The Agüelo (Spanish abuelo, for grandfather)[196] is a very old man who goes about the pueblos during Christmas week to see if all the children have learned their prayers properly. He is feared more than anything else, and the children always give him sweets and cakes to put in the bag he carries, but it is quite large enough to hold naughty children also. At each home he makes himself known by a loud knock on the door, and by the cry, El Agüelo, El Agüelo! Aquí viene el Agüelo![197] The children must at once appear and recite their prayers, after which he forms a circle with them and they dance from right to left, and then from left to right, singing at the same time some verses. Children who are frightened into good behavior all the year through by a mythical bugaboo cannot be expected to differentiate him from the one they actually see and propitiate at Christmas time.[198]

The deeper our study of Indian inheritances, the stronger grows the conviction that, while the white conqueror has imposed upon the race the outward observance of conventions in daily conduct, in morals and religion, the mental attitude toward most of these things has not changed in the slightest degree.

The conclusion of the whole matter is therefore that all Indians divide the phenomena of nature, including man, into human and superhuman, and to him almost every natural phenomenon is a mystery. As the Reverend J. Owen Dorsey, a first authority on the subject, puts it: “Even man himself may become mysterious by fasting, prayer, and vision,” and this was indeed the chief function of the cacique, who by acts such as these expiated vicariously the sins of his clan.

If the dictum of a wise man be justified, that “every man is to a greater or less extent a dual personality,” the American Indian should rank as the most evenly developed of all human creatures, since duality is the essence of his being.

Chapter XV RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

If we are to attempt to understand the Pueblo Indian it becomes necessary to preface our inquiry by a brief outline, however superficial, of those general aspects of his religious belief and practice which scholars have agreed to consider as part of the common heritage of the race. In this Ácoma must inevitably share.

There is no manifestation of the Indian character more extraordinary than his elaborate religious and ritual organization. Fundamental to any real interpretation of Indian life, it is so bewilderingly intricate and so elusive that we can here touch upon only a few of the more definite aspects. No one not a master of this subject can treat it briefly without doing it a certain violence. It is impossible to say that the Indian in general believes this or that, for while there are a few essential deities in his hierarchy that are almost universally accepted, though varying somewhat in nomenclature through the tribes, the differences are legion.[199] Each nation presents its own galaxy of gods who must be separately described to give a just impression of the whole. Wissler says there is “nothing like the supreme over-ruling and personal being” such as we name God, but that the Indian “seems rather to have formed complex and abstract notions of a controlling power or series of powers pervading the universe.”[200] Thrust into life, man finds himself surrounded by potencies wholly beyond his control. These powers, supernal or infernal, must therefore be propitiated, and if man in his ignorance has offended, expiation must be offered and endured. The commonest form of address used in prayers and sacrifices is to “Those Above.” On the authority of a full-blooded Dakota Indian (Ohiyesa),[201] well known by his American name of Charles Alexander Eastman, we are told that the religion of his race is the last thing a white man can hope to understand, for it is something no Indian, still firm in his own faith, will ever talk about, since he is convinced that neither it nor the ceremonies of its celebration will be rightly interpreted.

Where all is so vague as to escape true analysis, the question arises, why separate myth and religion? Are they not practically one and inclusive? Alexander discusses this briefly and ably, and concludes that with the Indian, as with all other peoples, it is impossible to

The race as a whole has been classed among the “sun worshippers”[203] from their conviction that the sun is the highest manifestation of nature, without which no living thing can thrive. As their forefathers faced in silent adoration the golden globe coming out of the nebulous dawn, or, from that high-placed kiva in the cliffs of the Rito de los Frijoles, stood mute and motionless till it sank from sight beyond the farthest reach of the eye, it was the omnipresent spirit within the sun, but never the orb itself, to which they paid reverence. Such a contemplative worship, with its touch of orientalism, permits us to accept the appellation of “The Great Mystery” as their idea of deity. In most tribes the spirits of the earth, the sky, and water are nearly or quite equal to the sun. Below these, whom we may call the Great Gods, who cannot descend to earth in visible form, there is an infinite number of lesser deities—the half-gods, and still further to complicate such a system every deity possesses many attributes, and may at any time manifest himself under any one of a great variety of forms. Among the lesser gods are the thunder and lightning, the serpent, and the bird. Each of these has his especial power and his appointed mission to perform. He must therefore be individually appealed to in prayer, propitiated by offerings at secret shrines of earth, or thanked at appropriate seasons for benefits conferred upon weak humans, watchers of “this ominous and treacherous world.”[204]

From such a composite hierarchy it is apparent that the popular idea of “one Great Spirit” worshipped by the Indian race is a romantic fancy, unless by it is meant Nature—Nature in all of her manifestations of plants and animals, and rocks, and heavenly bodies. The Indian belief, in fact, belongs to the system called hecastotheism, the opposite extreme from monotheism, in which, to quote Cushing,

It is the eternal contest between the material and the spiritual that was to the Indian an omnipresent prepossession. Through the powerful theocratic organization of the community in its social as well as in its hieratic aspects, and by the songs and prayers of a hoary antiquity, the whole year is a complex of ceremonies. This is more especially the case in the maize-growing countries. From birth to death the Indians were aware of mysterious environing forces, some beautiful and fortune-bringing, others inimical and disastrous. To the end that life should be made endurable, a large number of esoteric organizations was everywhere established, each of which employed a special ritual at an appointed time. Among the Keres, there were originally four such priesthoods,[206] but the march of modern ideas has gradually eliminated some of these in certain of the villages. Highest of these groups were the Ya-Ya (mothers) to which the caciques belonged; then came the medicine men, the warriors, and the hunters.

Frazer points out that in the most primitive societies the practice of magic was for individual gain, but that, as community life evolved, it was employed for the benefit of the tribe. Sacrifice and prayer were the means by which the gods, the personal agents of elemental forces, were induced to bestow favors upon the whole people. Consequently it signified a great advance in social progress when a class of magic-practising men was set apart to bring prosperity to their tribe, whether this was for the control of the weather, and so indirectly for the increase of foods, or for the healing of diseases.

Although everywhere these priests were given terrible power, often ruthlessly exercised, they were,

The entire highly complicated program as practised by the Pueblo Indian may be summed up as a system of religious ideas which have as their objective counterparts bundles of fetishes, which help to serve the good of the clan, or fraternity, or community at large. According to Kroeber, “Among the Pueblos each priest is the curator of a sacred object or fetish, carefully bundled and preserved.” The mere display of these objects upon an altar made of meal or sand is a prayer to “those above.” The fetishes may not themselves be thought of as divine, but they do represent something of the same concept as does the crucifix above the High Altar of the Roman church. And they have the direct quality, as medicine-objects, of bringing succor to those in distress. To quote Kroeber once more:

There is scarcely any limit to the fetishes that exist, for they are mediators between men and the deified animal or object which each particular fetish represents, and they are therefore an essential accompaniment of all dances, or other rites, also of all the supreme events of life, such as birth, adolescence, and death. In the most unlikely clefts of the mountain or in hidden spots of earth curious little bundles are found that betoken the shrine of some fetish.[209]

Probably the oldest of all religious cults is the worship of the serpent, so often curiously mingled with that of the sun, as, for instance, in the pantheon of the Aztecs. In his “Origin of Civilization,” Sir John Lubbock says that, “as an object of worship the serpent is preëminent among ancients.”[210] Do we not also know that in that period which the historian Gibbon calls the happiest and most prosperous of the human race—the era of Marcus Aurelius—the Romans sent every year a troop of young girls to feed a great serpent asleep within a sacred cave, and that if any of the maidens were impure the serpent did not eat and the harvest of that year was a failure? How many visitors to the pueblos of the American Indian comprehend the profound reason for the awe that underlies the worship there of what is to the average white man an object of repulsion if not of fear—the rattlesnake? Yet it is easy to understand when explained. It has long been observed that the mysterious force by which all things move, whether on earth, in the sky, or under the sea, is regarded by the savage as so inexplicable that he believes it to be controlled by unseen beings of superhuman power. Consequently, the continuous movement of a serpent, whether slow or swift, without any visible aid to locomotion, would strike the primitive man as especially mysterious; add to this its power of hypnosis, its immortality achieved through the annual shedding of its skin, and lastly, a death-dealing sting, and we see reason enough why savages should regard a creature, thus endowed with gifts he has not, with such awe and fear as would lead to an intense desire to propitiate the occult power. Given desire of sufficient intensity, it may in itself become worship.

Various scholars have pointed out that not only is the zig-zag form of lightning the natural sky symbol of the serpent, but that since both may kill instantaneously when they strike, there is another logical association of ideas between them.[211] The plumed serpent,[212] Awanyu, was guardian of the waters, and had for his sky emblem the rippling course of the Milky Way. Although the snake ceremonial is thought of as chiefly a prayer for rain, it had an equally intimate connection with the bestowal of health, reminding us of the classic myth in which the symbol of Esculapius was a serpent.

If white visitors to the communal dances of any of the tribes, but let us say particularly to the snake dances of Hopi-land, would only recognize that this whole performance is an incantation or invocation to the gods, giving thanks for the harvests of the year, and would refrain from laughter and other unseemly expressions that are sacrilege to the Indian, they would greatly help toward the mutual good-will and understanding of the two races.

From the plumed serpent to the adoration of the bird is an easy transition for the Indian mind. Do we not read in the wisdom of Solomon: “There be three things which are too wonderful for me; and the chief of these were the way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent on a rock”? And in truth what is more enviable than a bird, that, spurning the earth, may overtop the clouds, pouring out his melody as he soars; or, like the eagle, proud, swift, and sudden, may swoop to clutch his prey and be aloft again in the flash of a moment.[213]

The Keres to which the Ácomas belong regard Sky Father—synonymous with Sun Father—and Earth Mother as the great deities. Haeberlein tells us the common Southwest concept is that the Earth Mother while lying down is impregnated either by a sunbeam or a drop of water. In either case rain must effect the union and the fertilization. He calls the specific psychologic characteristic of Pueblo culture the “idea of fertilization,” because all their ceremonies are focused upon the production of fertility for the fields. He further maintains that this psychologic aspect cannot be disposed of as an independent element, nor as a mere accessory, but that “it is at every point in time, and space, inherently associated with the historical side”;[214] that is, it has entered materially into every new idea or form of worship that developed in their midst.

Lakes and springs are more or less consciously identified by the Keres with Si-pa-pu, the place of exit from the underworld, where the Earth Goddess gave birth to the clans of men. Hence such water is the most direct path of communication with the gods of fertilization, of which a water monster is the symbol. The Keres believe that the Twin war gods received from the Sun Father bows, arrows, and lightning-bolts as weapons; in the ceremony the lightning is not a death-dealing weapon of war, but only a bringer of rain. Here we have a concrete illustration of that duality which is so characteristic of the Indian and often so puzzling to the white observer. Kroeber considers it in part, at any rate, a deliberate repetition connected with a tendency toward exacting elaboration of ceremonial. The idea here is that when the Twins meet, the clouds cause rain to fall. Hence the war captain and his lieutenant always impersonate the Twins. There are significant secondary psychologic associations illustrated by these dual concepts, for these gods are at the same time deities of war and of fertilization. In one game we find netted wheels to symbolize the war shields of the Twins, which were spun from clouds. The Hopi women, on the other hand, play the Dart and Wheel game as the magic of fertilization. Here is another illustration of the universal belief in magic power, which human activity of the right sort may influence in order that the life of man may be safeguarded and led forward to a desired goal.

The K’at’sina, who impersonate the gods in the masked dances, were, according to Keres ideas, created in the underworld by Utset, an earth goddess. She sent them to live in the west, which is therefore their traditional home. They are variously described as rain-makers, as deified spirits of ancestors, or, as one writer calls them, as “a heterogeneous crowd.”

Goddard says of the K’at’sina that in them we have one of the most outstanding features of the ceremonial and religious life of the Southwest:

Enough has been said to show that symbolism plays a large rôle in Indian beliefs and in daily life.

Among the most sacred symbols of the Indians was the number four, undoubtedly derived from the four cardinal points, which, like most of the primitives, the aborigine in his wanderings identified with the daily journey of the heavenly bodies; and with the winds, which were the spirits of the cardinal points that brought about changes of weather and of seasons. The amazing extent of the application of this sacred four is beyond the scope of this work, but a few examples will illustrate the astonishing variety of its use:

All the first missionaries who came out to New Mexico with the Conquistadores were of the Franciscan order. Very keen were these ardent apostles to watch the native mind, and to make use of every point of approach or community of idea that would help the savage to grasp the new religion they offered him. One of the first aids undoubtedly toward this end was their recognition of certain emblems or totems that they found in Indian villages, which bore some resemblance to Christian symbols. In this they were but following the example set them by the earliest of their faith, who took over as far as possible pagan characters, such as we may see in the Roman catacombs. May we not believe that, as they found among the barbarians symbols such as the cross, or a ritual of sprinkling and of head-washing somewhat akin to Christian baptism, through which initial links of understanding could be established between them and the Indians, so they must soon have perceived that in the Canticle of the Sun, given them by their founder, Saint Francis, there was another possibility of mental approach, deeper and more embracing than any other? The Canticle does not indeed proclaim the “worship of all creatures,” but its communion with all elemental life surely forged a bond between them and the aborigine, which made the Indian more willing to listen to this new religion, and which aided the priests in forcing upon them its acceptance:

Mrs. Nuttall, after long years of study, concludes that the constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor were a guiding principle of the Aztec calendar and furnished the archetype of the varied forms of the swastika and of the cross symbol.[217] She gives 4000 B.C. as an approximate date for the first use of this symbol. Certainly the swastika forms a favorite design for amulets, and for the decoration of baskets and pottery, among the Pueblo artists, and since it is agreed that nearly every ornament has its symbolic purpose, have we not here perhaps one more point of contact? At all events, the cross unquestionably existed in America for a very long time before the coming of the “men with faces white like snow who came in wooden houses with wings.” Did not Castañeda write, upon finding some cross-shaped prayer-sticks, “in some way the Indians must have received light from our Redeemer Christ”? In fact the padres found the cross below our Rock of Ácoma as well as elsewhere, and questioned whether it could be due to “the pious labors of St. Thomas or to the sacrilegious subtlety of Satan.” However they settled so obscure a problem, the Indian familiarity with the cross symbol—something both races held in reverence—undoubtedly helped the Franciscans to spread their gospel of the cross of Christ.

It is interesting to recall that the rosary and the double cross date in the Indian country from Espéjo’s time (1582) when he forced the natives to wear it as a token of allegiance to Spain and to the Roman church.

John G. Bourke says in 1884 that at Santo Domingo

Another example of such “application” is the rule that everyone must be signed with a cross of ashes on Ash Wednesday, according to the practice of the Roman church.

So interwoven with real religion are fear and superstition in the mind of aboriginal man that we find everywhere in primitive society a belief in witchcraft. It is then a safe clue toward an understanding of many unusual things which the observant visitor sees in New Mexico.

Witches are mischievous beings, doing ill to their neighbors in pure wantonness of mood, for little or no reason. Since this is so, there is no outward characteristic that distinguishes a witch, and we are told that part of the aloofness and also of the courtesy shown strangers is because anyone may prove capable of doing the household an injury. Father Dumarest writes:

The most frequent metamorphoses of human beings into animals for the purpose of practising witchcraft are into the owl (tecolete) or the fox. The hoot of the owl is therefore a portent of evil, and brings a shudder to every Indian. In New Mexico one of many ways of discovering a witch is to plant a broom at the door surmounted by a small cross made from straws of the same broom; or the broom may be put behind a door with a cross formed of two needles. “If a woman is a witch she will not leave the house till broom and cross are removed.”[221] Witches are the cause of all illness. For instance, all skin diseases are attributed to the “angry ants,” and toothache is especially dreaded as a sign of the displeasure of the gods. To counteract these malevolent powers, the Shamans or medicine men are sought in times of distress because they are the workers in “good magic,” and hence are healers. Consequently the materia medica of the Indian is fetishistic, and even when ‘real medicine’ is taken by a sick person, magic and fetish medicine are invariably added. Mrs. Stevenson[222] says that

While animism, in the broadest sense of that term, was universal in the beliefs of the New World, and to this day the greater part of their religious culture bequeathed to them from dim prehistoric time is preserved and accepted as the rule of daily life, there is nevertheless something so abstract, so lofty and poetic in the Indian absorption in pure spirit that his religion becomes elusive and must be sympathetically felt by us rather than arbitrarily expressed.

Religion has never been separated in primitive civilizations from the

A deeply ingrained tenderness for children, the poetry of a race sensitive to all natural phenomena, the awe born of a consciousness of the mystery and the sorrows of every human life, and the need of something not ourselves, something higher and more helpful than anything earth can give, is the essence of Indian religion, as it is of all our humanity. The Indian worship of spirit is silent and solitary, in temples not made with hands, where all-embracing Nature herself dwells in forest silences, or on heights where sun and wind alone abide. How mistaken and purblind was the assumption of the European that, because these primitive people had not his particular belief, the religion that served them as its substitute was worse than none at all, whereas actually there was within it the elements of the most developed faith—that awe of which Henry Dwight Sedgwick in his “Life of Marcus Aurelius” writes: “Among the qualities that go to make up character a sensitiveness to the feeling of awe is the surest sign of the higher life. It lies deeper than other susceptibilities, sensuous or spiritual.”

While allowing that the Indian always was and is to-day a pagan, and that his worship of the countless manifestations of nature must be called superstition, let us admit that this worship is, nevertheless, the honest faith of men who “look not beyond the evidence of the senses,” of which its unquenched and never-to-be quenched altar fire is the eternal symbol, to many a serious student a holier thing than priest-made creeds.

Chapter XVI CEREMONIALS AND RITUALS

The three motives which lie at the bottom of Pueblo Indian ceremonies (quite wrongly miscalled dances by American onlookers) are: the desire for rain, which brings fertility and hence abundant crops; for the cure of illnesses, more often in case of epidemic disease; for success in war. How natural are these desires may be judged from the first of them, by anyone who has travelled even a little in Arizona or New Mexico, and who will certainly reëcho in his own heart the prayer for rain. To drive along a shadeless road and notice on the one side green stretches of corn or of alfalfa, while on the other are nothing but desert wastes in which cactus and sage alone can live, is the most graphic object lesson of what a moderate supply of water achieves. I recall a region near Bernalillo (the Tiguex of Coronado) where a pitiful bunch of cattle was staggering over a great area, on which not even a blade of parched grass could be seen, while a dry arroyo tantalized them with a suggestion of where water ought to be. On the other side of that sterile ditch were other cattle and horses, plump and glossy, wading deep in luscious herbage. Such an experience gives one sympathy for a people who recognize in water the nourisher of all life, and who adore the spirits that live in fountains, lakes, and rivers. But much sympathy will hardly help us to interpret the ordered form of any ceremonial we may be allowed to watch. If it is borne in mind, however, that every Pueblo ritual, however named, is fundamentally a prayer for rain, since without water there can be no increase of life, all observation and study will be simplified.

The staple food of the Indians, in this infertile land, is maize, which, because it was so preëminently their staff of life, is universally known as “Indian corn.” It does not suffer from the long, dry summers, and requires almost no care. Bancroft writes of it:

No wonder, then, that corn dances figured equally with the snake dances as prayers for rain, throughout the Indian country.[226] This cult was further developed by a selection of colors to harmonize with the six regions of the world. Since the colors for direction as given by Mrs. Stevenson for Zuñi agree with the names of the original Corn clans of Ácoma, I venture to use her designation:

The visitor will see in every home neat piles of the corn in all these colors.

All authorities are agreed that North American ceremonialism reached its apogee in the southwestern Indian, and that the hopelessness of getting any one of them to unravel for the American its inner significance is profound. Yet the rites, far more than traditions or myths, will, if ever fathomed, probably be found to hold the key to their beliefs and to the secret of their daily life.

Alexander classifies the rites as follows:

1. The smoke offering, constituting a kind of ritualistic definition of the Indian’s cosmos.

2. The sweat-bath or purification, which is likewise the spiritual aspect of a healing rite.

3. Fasts and vigils for inducing visions.

4. Shamanistic rites that may inspire and possess the human agent of divinity.

5. Communal ceremonies or “dances,” of which the white visitor never sees the sacred and probably most significant part, but only their dramatic expression. For example: eight days of most secret and exhausting ceremony precede the snake dance, which the white man may witness as a spectacle, just as in a theatre, on the ninth day.

6. The ceremonial rites in honor of the ancestral dead, or of those more recently departed whose good-will and active help are desired.[228]

This custom suggests to the student of comparative rituals the Parentalia of the Roman religion, not of course a conscious correlation, but the common instinct of very unlike races to honor or appease their forefathers. It may add interest to state also Kroeber’s conviction that the so-called ancestor worship among the Pueblos bears not the slightest relation to that of the eastern Asiatic belief. If we translate the K’at’sina cult as of the “ancients,” we must understand by that word the dead of all time, including those of last year.

He who can sympathetically understand the import of an Indian ceremonial will alone solve the mystery of what has been bequeathed by immemorial ancestors and of what reigns supreme to-day. To guard their ritual is the jealous care of the older generation. Not only is secrecy imposed by the ruler of their fraternities, but it is in fact their last weapon, whether of defence or of revenge, against the unwarrantable abuse of power and privilege which white over-lordship has wielded over its so-called “wards.” It is as if the Indian said:

One who has lived long among them told the writer that he had learned most from watching and listening to some old men who had come to look at a symbolic design made by a young Indian artist. For a while there was silence; then one man began to point out certain things, then another and another spoke, adding details, forgetful of their white friend silent in the background, till a long and complex tale had been quite unconsciously revealed to the listener. A familiarity born of years of sympathetic study of their traditions and folk-lore must be acquired before anyone can dare say he sees the deeper significance of their ceremonials. Like the dances of all primitive races, those of the Pueblos are essentially religio-sociologic in character, and present very subtle intricacies. Nothing “happens.” Everything is started by some personal agency, and everything has sex, and all is dramaturgic.[229] Dr. Fewkes is unquestionably right in saying that “the explanation of these observances, while the most fascinating and most valuable study, is most liable to error.”[230] “Back of every Indian ceremony is a story, and for every possible adventure of tribal life” there are tales and songs which are a part of daily existence, but which are especially celebrated by the festal “dances.” It follows that the Indian religion is a dramatic one, full of action and color that express to the lay mind hidden truths, just as in early Christian days the painted story on church walls was a picture Bible for those who could not read.

Mary Austin says that most songs are for “occasions,” and that so blended are movement, melody, and the muffled beat of the tombé that “the Indian will say indifferently, ‘I cannot sing that dance,’ or ‘I cannot dance that song.’ They are as much mingled as the water of a river with its own ripples and its rate of flowing.”[231]

There are various aids to all ceremonies, such as the sprinkling of the sacred meal, and the use of pollen in prescribed ways. The ceremonial pollen is gathered from hundreds of plants according to very rigid rules. But the chief method of bringing man into harmonious relations with “those above” is through fasting,[232] self-castigation, and prayer, a discipline followed by bodily purification. The well-being of man is so dependent upon water that its use, both actual and emblematic, was apparently made in very early days an established part of all religious ceremonies. Perhaps nothing more amazed the Christian missionaries than to find the Indian, in order to free himself from sin and make himself fit to appeal to his gods, using the rite of sprinkling the face and head with medicine water, very closely akin to “holy baptism.” The weekly sweat-bath, the frequent head-washing with soapsuds made from yucca roots, and the purging induced by emetics are strictly enforced before or after almost every ritual, and have probably been a prime source of physical healthfulness in the pueblos.[233]

It follows that the lustration of snakes at Hopi before the snake dance is a logical part of that ceremony, for the snakes are the “elder brothers” of their clan, and since they are brought in from the field, covered with dust, their cleansing is an essential preliminary to their totemistic share in the dance. After taking the snakes back to the fields, the men on their return to the pueblo go through the vomiting, or inward purification, before sharing the feast that ends the ceremony of several days.

There are ceremonial hunts, as well as those for the gaining of essential food, and the races at their fiestas were not merely an expression of athletic prowess or primarily a struggle for individual supremacy. Indeed, the adult Indian seems to do nothing purely for fun.

Since Ácoma has succeeded better than most of the pueblos in preserving her ancient way of life, it is far more difficult to penetrate her ritual than that of any other. We are told by Lummis of the impression, at the time of the great festival, of a mystery in the surrounding air—of an alert anticipation or watchfulness for magic, good or evil—and how in hidden crannies of her most inaccessible cliff one may find plume sticks, because “the feathers of the eagle’s breast symbolize to the natives that, as the eagle soars by means of these feathers into the very eye of the sun, so may their prayers ascend to the sacred precincts of ‘Those Above.’”

We know of three important ritual celebrations at Ácoma: namely, the Fiesta of San Estévan, patron saint of the mission and now of the pueblo, on September 2; that of All Souls’ Day; and the winter solstice rites, commingled with Christmas. A fourth that occurs at the time of the summer solstice, on San Juan’s Day, June 24, is in most pueblos an occasion of serious and elaborate ritual, but at Ácoma it is so much more like a madcap race and game that it is described in the chapter on games. All festivities are announced by the town crier some days in advance. It is worth noting that, though the days for both of the solstice ceremonials are appointed by the head cheani, called together by the war captains, it is evident that they are determined by the observation of the sun’s “turning back” in June, from which moment six moons are counted. In fact, the only reckoning of time is by the moons from solstice to solstice. In some tribes each month has its poetic name, derived from the appearance of the moon.

Of all investigators, the one who has best succeeded in giving us some hints about their present ritual customs and beliefs is Dr. Parsons.[234] All who are interested in making more than the most superficial acquaintance with Ácoma rituals should consult her printed articles.[235] Professor Espinosa has also collected a valuable number of folk-tales and anthropological data. To these two sources the writer acknowledges her great indebtedness for the facts given in this section of the study. Dr. Parsons went to Ácoma in January, 1917, accompanied by a native Zuñi who knew her well and who had relatives at Ácoma. Even with such an introduction, and though she was hospitably entertained by an Ácoma household, she had “to contend against extreme distrust of the whites,” and with much difficulty finally differentiated herself from “the ordinary picture-taking tourist.” But their special aversion was to any representative of the national government “from whom every ceremonial or detail of life is to be hidden.” So that even after they had begun to trust Dr. Parsons, the story-teller of the moment would break off suddenly at a critical point to be reassured that none of what he had said would be forwarded to Washington. Of a second visit in 1918, Dr. Parsons says, by way of preface, that “information is so difficult to get that, fragmentary as it is, it should be presented,” both for its own value and because the only way to learn something from the Pueblo Indian is to know something beforehand.

Before mentioning the public ceremonials, it is well to note in passing certain individual rites, classed as “crisis ceremonialism,”[236] by which is understood the transition from one stage of life to another. Birth, adolescence, the initiation into fraternities, marriage, funeral and mourning, each has its ordered recognition by definite rituals. One not shared by white people, called “ceremonial friendship,” is a beautiful relation between two persons who have become fast friends but have no kinship of blood. Always a voluntary choice, it may begin in very early childhood, or at any later period; it is most frequently seen between two men, much more rarely between two women, and not seldom between a man and a woman. In the last case, it constitutes a relation of brother and sister with no possibility of marriage, nor would either dream of marrying into the clan of the other. Saukin is the Ácoma word for friend. In Zuñi these friends are called kihe, and there is a solemn ceremony performed to consummate it. Dr. Parsons could not be sure of the same custom at Ácoma, but she saw a woman make a present of a bowl to a Zuñi visitor to whom she had previously given a meal. “We are now friends,” said the Ácoma woman—although Zuñi claims never to make kihe with other pueblos.

Espéjo in 1580 mentioned the snake dance at Ácoma, but did not say anything about the snakes being carried in the mouth as at Walpi, which is so extraordinary a sight that he could hardly have overlooked it; and Mrs. M. C. Stevenson[237] in her vivid and important account of the snake ceremony of the Queres pueblo at Sía, expressly says that the Sía priests held the snakes in their hands. The Hopi, in fact, assert that the Queres never have put the serpents in their mouths, as they themselves do. In 1895 several Snake and Antelope priests at Hopi told Fewkes that portions of the snake ceremonial still survived at Ácoma, but he could not confirm this from anyone acquainted with Ácoma rituals.[238] In 1918, according to Dr. Parsons, there was but one Snake clansman left at Ácoma, and I was told in 1922 that he had since died. On September 2, the feast day of the patron saint of Ácoma, a dramatic representation is given of the coming of St. Stephen to New Mexico.[239] Visitors are apparently made more welcome at this time than at any other during the year. The church is wide open for prayers in early morning, and then there follows a religious service. After this comes the drama, and then a long programme of dances, foot races, and other games.[240] The ceremony is chiefly pagan but here, as everywhere in the Indian country, the name of the saint is given whose day coincides in the Christian calendar with that of the ancient fiesta—another adroit adaptation of the early padres.

The celebration of All Souls’ Day at Ácoma and Laguna is unquestionably an inheritance of early Catholic training, albeit at Zuñi Dr. Parsons was told that it was a ritual of their own race, and not one engrafted from any other. At nightfall in Ácoma on November 1 or 2[241] the informant of Dr. Parsons “guessed” that parties of possibly as many as ten boys go about the streets calling out “Tsalemo, Salemo,” at the same time ringing a bell. This custom, according to Professor Espinosa, is a purely Spanish one, and the words used as they beg for food are an Indian corruption of the first words of an “invocation undoubtedly taught their ancestors by Spanish padres: ‘Tsalemo, Saremo, Oremo, Soremo.’”[242] The boys are given food, and other food is taken to the cemetery and placed at the foot of the wooden cross standing there, near which the war chiefs are on guard. By next morning all the food has disappeared. Dr. Parsons[243] speaks of the “Mexican prayer: Padre Spirito Santo, Amen” as part of the celebration, but, according to Professor Espinosa, “these Indian vocables are regular phonetic developments of the first three words of the Catholic ceremony: por la señal.” The current familiar pronunciation is pol la seña. Professor Espinosa gives the whole prayer as the Indian mumbles it, with the Spanish words below, as follows:

The celebration in December is longer, and in certain respects more elaborate, than either of the others, though it is less like a pageant than the fiesta of St. Stephen, and, as has been said elsewhere, it is a curious complex of pagan and Christian customs. The whole celebration is known in Mexican as fiesta del Re, but in Keresan it is Koachansiwatsask. It is preceded by the warrior dance called hoinawe. Dr. Parsons was not allowed to witness the preparation of the songs composed for the occasion, which took place in the estufas. The men were summoned to the dance by officers, who walked through the three avenues, crying out their summons.

Beginning on December 16, the church bell is rung every morning at nine o’clock, and mass is said by the sextana. Everyone counts the days until the 22nd when there is a grand rehearsal of the dances at night in the clan house of the Sun. From then until the 30th there are continual dances and exchanges of gifts. On Christmas day the so-called “Comanche dance,” in which costumes like those of that once-dreaded enemy are worn, takes place in the church at the foot of the altar. This dance must be of Spanish origin, for a similar ceremony takes place in Seville cathedral before the altar on December 8 for the celebration of the Immaculate Conception, and again at the Feast of Corpus Christi. The open plaza called Kakati, where a cross-street runs from North Row to Middle Row, supplies the stage for all outdoor dances. No whites are allowed to see the masked dances at Ácoma or Laguna, although these take place in the open plaza. The dance Dr. Parsons did see was maskless, to celebrate the installation of officers, and was called “unfinished.”[244]

From the 26th to the 29th, Comanche dances in which children may take part are frequent in the plaza. The Kachale come out, and there is the pasku, or butterfly dance. Meanwhile, the Kasik and his “brothers” and “uncles,” that is, the younger and older members of the Antelope clan, meet in their house a group of ten, probably the principales. (This house was back of the estufas, and Dr. Parsons did not ascertain whether it was the clan house or a ceremonial house.) Here was held the discussion about the men eligible for election on the following day, when all the men meet in the Komanina (a long house near the church, where the officers hold court).[245] So anxious was Dr. Parsons’s host to have her leave town at a certain time, before the dances were finished, that she felt sure there was some ritual too sacred for her profane eyes.

This merely suggestive sketch of the ceremonials which are to the Indian the most intimately important occupation of his life may be closed with a summary by Mrs. Stevenson, who says:

When, therefore, the Christian missionaries made the astounding and appalling announcement to the native dwellers that they were under the awful doom of eternal punishment, they aroused, by adding a supernatural terror, a superhuman determination in the breast of the Indian to rid his land forever of the blasphemous invaders. When this proved impossible to effect by force of arms, they apparently yielded to “conversion,” but only to cherish the more sacredly their old rites and beliefs, so that, gradually fusing the two more or less, they have to-day an inextricable complex of ritual.

What does the American government think it is likely to gain by a suppression of these moral and social laws, with their ancestry of centuries?

Chapter XVII INDIAN GAMES

The subject of games will be treated here only as one aspect of the sociologic interpretation of Indian life. Not to mention games would be to ignore an important element of youthful training and of adult life in every pueblo. Yet the subject is difficult to make vivid, unless one has watched the special sport described. Mr. Stewart Culin, to whom we owe most of our knowledge of Indian games, and to whose work I wish here to acknowledge great indebtedness, has given us a monograph profusely illustrated. To it,[247] and to the many museum collections of the implements employed in Indian sports, the especially interested reader must go for more than a superficial acquaintance with them.

All Indians are so devoted to games and gaming that the familiar sobriquet of “inveterate gambler” is well deserved. But the sport to which they are most addicted is not, as is popularly supposed, the playing of cards. That is a vice which the Indian has learned from his white conquerors and which has proved so baneful that it is now forbidden under rather heavy penalties by the agents on all the reservations. It so happens that cards and “nine-men’s morris” are two of the very few games the Indian ever borrowed from the white man. These are well balanced by lacrosse and racket, which are the gifts of the Indian to the white man. Games of all kinds, often quite trivial in appearance, are played persistently by both men and women, apparently as a mere pastime, regardless of the wager involved; but one can be pretty certain that there is hardly any daily pursuit whose enjoyment for the Indian is not enhanced by some stake. Also it is not to be forgotten that to every individual of the race, the underlying religious significance of almost all the games he plays constitutes an important factor in his development, and practically all of them, when carefully studied, are found to be so intimately interwoven with religious beliefs and practices that Indian games may be said generally to possess a devotional significance. It is probable that some of the games have a divinatory meaning. Consequently, though betting is the commonest detail of every day, the Indian’s real absorption is usually in the game itself rather than in the stake involved.

Since, in general, the great games are played ceremonially to secure fertility, to give life and prolong it, to expel demons, or to cure sickness, these are all sure to come at the seasonal periods of planting and of harvest, or in especial times of disaster to individuals or communities.

Such races as those still run at Ácoma and at Zuñi are visible proof that the physical vigor characteristic of the Pueblo tribes in days of old has not vanished. The invading Spaniards were not seldom amazed by the indomitable courage of the Indians in facing hardships and their endurance of cruel suffering without blenching. The stoicism with which they bear wounds with no outcry is not achieved without much discipline, and the Indian from his childhood is no stranger to pain. The early morning programme of an Indian of one of the northern tribes may be taken as typical of all:

Games to develop the muscles, to strengthen the whole frame, and inure it to arrow wounds are the constant occupation of the growing lad, and when he kills his first rabbit or catches a woodpecker with his hands, his father will proudly celebrate the event by a “smoke” or a feast. Until a boy is admitted to the hunt, and later to the rank of warrior, there is no cessation to the disciplinary training, even though much of it is given under the guise of play.

The normal routine of a youth, in the process of hardening himself to become even as skilful and as strong as the average of his companions, seems to us an extraordinary procedure. Withdrawal to the silences of the woods or the cliffs for a more or less variable length of time was, and still may be, exacted at the age of puberty, with fasting and continence also rigidly enjoined. Fasting, learned by degrees, makes the long fasts required later for ritual purposes more easy, and it has developed the capacity of the desert tribes to live for long periods upon an incredibly meagre diet in seasons of drought and the failure of crops. Young men who seek to gain power and to win the highest reward within the gift of their tribe, office in the esoteric priesthoods, add to the ordinary discipline rigors of which we can have little comprehension. They whip themselves into states of ecstasy, seeing visions in consequence, and receiving aid from supernatural powers to counteract the mischief-working beings who live, as they believe, in plants or beasts, or even in certain men and women. Then they return to the pueblo with the far-away gaze in their eyes of those who see not as other men see, and it is understood by all that they have been favored of the gods and are “not as other men are.”

Culin divides all Indian games, including racing, into the two classes of games of chance and games of dexterity. Games requiring the kind of intellectual calculation and skill that chess demands seem never to occur. The aboriginal legend tells us that Iyatiko, the Mother, invented all games, and that many of them, such as the one called “chuck-away-grains,” were brought from Si-pa-pu, in the first migration. Culin also believes that all Indian games are native to these people and contain no modifications due to white influence other than the common degeneration which characterizes all Indian institutions tainted from the same source. Again, he emphasizes

Culin says that the implements used in games are almost universally derived from the symbolic weapons of the mythic Twins: for example, the various sticks used in stick games are either miniature bows, or arrows, and the painted tubes used in guessing games are arrow shafts. Racket may be referred to the netted shield of the war gods, and is played only by men.

The games of chance are of two sorts: those in which the implements are either something in the nature of disks thrown at random to determine a number or numbers, with the count kept either by pebbles, or by sticks, or upon a counting board, the gain or loss depending upon the priority in which the players arrived at a definite goal; and those where the players guess in which of two or more places a particularly marked lot is concealed, success or failure resulting in the loss or gain of counters.

Games of dexterity include many modifications of archery, sliding javelins or darts upon the hard ground or ice, shooting at a moving target formed of a netted wheel or ring; ball, in several highly complicated forms, and racing games more or less related to and complicated with ball games.

A game known as the ball race appears only among the Indians of the Southwest, including Mexico and California, and is in season only from March until May, as an appeal for rain. In this sport the ball may be of stone or of wood. At Ácoma it is a game between the war captains, and, as among other Keres tribes, it is not played with balls but with two billets of wood.[248] The winning stick is buried in a cornfield. At Zuñi[249] the ball race is the great tribal game, which, since it comes when the men have finished the planting, has also the ceremonial character of a prayer for rain to fertilize the freshly sown fields. There is no more exciting event in the whole year at Zuñi. Starting upon the pueblo, the men race across to To-a-ya-lana (Thunder Mountain), their holiest shrine, then for two miles or more along its base and back to the pueblo. Often the racers are followed by as many as two or three hundred persons on horseback closely watching to see whether they are losing or gaining the stakes they have ventured. These wagers have been known to include all the possessions of a man, even his wife; for that matter, the women become as excited as the men and their betting is quite as heavy. Shinny, which may be played only in the autumn, is commonly played by women only, and this is also true of double-ball. The writer saw the girls of Taos playing at this latter game most gracefully and tirelessly upon the upper terraces of the north pueblo. Every writer speaks of the Indian as the most graceful loser in the world, so he at once enlists our sympathetic attention. Ácoma’s great spectacular game is the Gallo Race on San Juan’s Day, June 24. Some form of this game is found everywhere in New Mexico, among the people of Spanish descent, as well as among the Indians, but the two races play it with a difference.

Lummis,[250] who makes a picturesque story of it as seen at Ácoma, says that he has

At Ácoma, the starting-point is at the foot of the great mesa. Two old men go out to a level spot at the foot of one of the buttes and plant a cock in the sand so that only his head and perhaps two inches of neck can be seen. In 1922, I was told that an unusual number of entries were made, and that men started on the top of the Rock in a foot-race and mounted the horses at the bottom, while running full speed, to catch the fowl and carry it off—“a great race,” said my Indian informant, laughing immoderately at the recollection. The victor is pursued by all the others, who tear off bits of feathers and claws or whatever they can secure. The struggle often lasts as much as four hours, the tireless horses and riders, of surpassing agility and endurance, tearing over “the broad plain, hither and yon through rock-walled passes, up and over steep ridges of knee-deep sand, rider and horse alike unrecognizable for foam and dust in their wild career.”

Among the games of dexterity played at Ácoma, Culin mentions the shooting of arrows at bundles of tied-up grass as the only variety of archery pursued.

A specialty of the Ácomas which they regard as their original possession, though it is also played at Zuñi, is a game called bish-i. The tradition is that the greatest of all legendary gamblers, Gau-pot, played this game against the sun, was defeated, and became blind. The implements are four pieces of hollow cane split longitudinally, each five or six inches long. Before the canes are thrown, the players breathe upon them, and so great is the sacredness of the game that no women may ever touch the canes. The playing of this game is confined to the winter season in the kivas, where a society called Bish-i is devoted to its cult.

As has been said in another connection, the adult Indian appears seldom to do anything purely for fun. Almost the only games indulged in for mere amusement, as we play them, are the simple ones of the children, who, like children everywhere, play at the occupations of their elders. Imitative warfare, however, is not confined to these men of smaller growth, with their bows and arrows.[251] Cat’s cradle, which we think of as a childish amusement but which is played by adults the world around, is regarded by most authorities as being without religious significance. But, as Culin says,[252] it is known by “every tribe of whom direct enquiry was made,” and the Zuñis believe that this string-game was taught by the Spider Woman to the war gods for their netted shields. The distinguished English anthropologist, Dr. Alfred Haddon, and his daughter collected several hundred forms of cat’s cradle among the South Sea Islanders, and on their way back to England lingered in Arizona, where, with Dr. Alfred Tozzer’s help, they identified more than a dozen varieties of the game among the Navajos, some of which appeared to have a ritualistic significance. Mr. Culin was told by Dr. Bernard Haile of St. Michael, Arizona, that the Navajos have a legend to the effect that the holy spiders taught them how to make the numerous figures of stars, bears, coyotes, snakes, and so forth, on the solemn condition that the game should be played in winter only, because then snakes and spiders are asleep and cannot see them. Certain death was sure to overtake anyone playing at any other season. But Dr. Haile could not discover any deeper religious use or meaning.

To conclude: games, like every other aspect and detail of the Indian community, are socio-religious in essence, and hark back in many tribes to their origin myths. Here we find the description of a

Chapter XVIII POTTERY

Since the Ácoma potters are justly famous, a brief discussion of the ceramic art as practised by the Pueblo peoples is here introduced. In the determination of areas of material culture on the western continent, the cultivation of maize is particularly significant and widespread. Coextensive with maize growing is found some form of pottery. Since botanical evidence makes certain that the art of maize cultivation arose south of the Rio Grande,[255] we are safe in assuming that the art of pottery also originated beyond that region.

No account of Indian civilization can be attempted without some mention, however brief, of an art through which much of the development and kinship of the tribes may be traced. The sketch which I shall attempt to make here is largely based on the laborious and distinguished researches of Mr. F. H. Cushing and Dr. W. H. Holmes, which are to be found for the most part in the “Annual Reports” of the Bureau of Ethnology. It is regrettable that such valuable aids to study are not accessible in other form. The study of the pottery of the prehistoric pueblos, as I have said, furnishes one of the best clues to their inter-relationships, and the first idea of students was that it must also throw much light upon their racial origins. Further investigation, however, taught that

At the period of their discovery by Spain the Village Indians were living in the stone age, and they used, for the most part, stone tools; their religious symbols are therefore found on axes and knives as well as on pottery, or interwoven in baskets and blankets.

There are three groups of pottery accepted as existing in North America in the pre-Columbian era. These are the crude stone implements of the nomadic tribes of the Atlantic coast, the earthenware vessels found in the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, and the advanced ceramics of the Pueblo peoples in the Southwest. Though we cannot here discuss the first two varieties, it is worth while, in passing, to note that the Mound Builders left behind them a vast number of pipes for smoking. These were made from a single piece of the hardest procurable stone carved to represent certain birds and animals. Moreover, their pipe sculpture betrays an art so superior to all else that they did that it makes evident how great an importance was probably attached to these pipes.

Smoking is an essential preliminary to, and element of, every ritual. Hence it follows, naturally enough, that

In the arid regions of the Southwest, water was so precious a commodity that the Pueblo peoples very early acquired skill in making receptacles for its transport and conservation and became, as Powell says, “the potters par excellence of aboriginal America.” Just as the first incentive toward the art of pottery grew out of the need of utensils for the preparation of foods, so to-day it is the most general and important motive for its creation. Profoundly influenced by the earlier art of basketry, pottery is always found in close relationship with its sister art wherever the two industries occur together. The nomad tribes would naturally prefer the basket because so much more easily transported from place to place, and they showed extraordinary skill in making cooking vessels of wicker that are not only water-tight but are of such beauty that they are to-day accounted almost priceless by collectors.

Of the more advanced pottery, Dr. Boas says, that of the Rio Grande pueblos was “a good deal behind the Peruvians artistically but second to none mechanically.” The Pueblo people have always dwelt in a land of cañons and high plateaus, rising from great stretches of sand that touch at last the far blue horizon. Here they were provided by nature with an inexhaustible supply of material suitable for pottery. Clay of a consistency perfectly adapted for this purpose is left by the sudden storms that wash through the deep arroyos and deposit therein a valuable sediment. The self-taught potters were not long in learning through experience just what admixture of sand would make this clay malleable and more durable. The colors of the stratified sandstone and clay taught them harmony as well as contrast, and the ochres and other mineral deposits provided them with the pigments they desired for the varied decoration of their jars. Thus was built up an art and a culture which deserves our admiration and should forever set at rest the careless assumption that the original Americans were a savage people at the time of the white invasion.

Gradually certain vessels came to be set aside for purposes of religious or Shamanistic ceremonials. Mortuary jars for a long time were apparently no other than those used by the departed one in life, but eventually, like those dedicated to other ritualistic necessities, funeral and grave jars were differentiated and set aside as something to be especially reverenced and never otherwise employed. Imperfect tinajas, or the still larger jars intended for storage, are much used for the chimneys of pueblo houses, being built up one upon another till the requisite height is attained, when a coating of adobe-mortar fills in all chinks and makes a smooth outer surface; but it is believed that this occurred only after Spanish influence was introduced. Before this innovation the smoke escaped through the hatchway. At first, all vessels were probably moulded by the fingers of the potter from a lump of material; then, copying the wicker coils of the basket-maker, the potter rolled in the hands long ropes of clay, mobile and easy to build up spirally into any desired form. Nothing resembling a potter’s wheel has ever been employed in the pueblos, but a shallow foot of wicker, or a piece of a gourd often serves as a temporary support in order that the jar may be revolved by a touch of the artist’s fingers, without injury to the clay coil. We find, of course, that most enviable characteristic of all hand-work—the slight variations in modelling and in decoration that are lost when more mechanical processes are employed. The quality of the material varied somewhat according to the use to be made of the jars. Those for storage, either of grain or of water, or those for dyeing wool where weaving is a local industry, are of coarse clay and are plainer and heavier than the small receptacles made for daily use. After the modelling would come the question whether the irregularities of surface were to be left ribbed or made smooth by scraping with the sharp edge of a bit of gourd, or of a broken shard, or fragment of obsidian. Jars are found with the roughnesses of the coils inside, and the outer surface carefully smoothed, but the commoner practice was the reverse of this, and indeed the Pueblo people showed at a very early stage their love of ornament by using a great variety of devices in the spiral coils. Thumb-nail indentations in regular patterns probably made one of the first of such decorative adjuncts. Sometimes the coil is crimped throughout the whole surface, and again the body of the vessel will be smoothed and the coils left only upon the shoulder and collar. More and more elaborate patterns, wave-like or of incised lines, or overlapping in scale design, were invented and varied in a multitude of ways. The next innovation was modelling in relief, and this was soon followed by painting. Black appears to have been the first pigment discovered, and the black-and-white pottery is considered the oldest; but it could not be long before an artist living in a land of color would wish to use color on the light surface of jars, and would begin to reproduce designs familiar in natural objects. Such ornament followed closely in the footsteps of basketry and textiles. Meander patterns and geometric adaptations of rectilinear outlines were employed in both arts in an infinite variety of designs.[258] Dr. Holmes thinks that very little decoration was invented outright and that, like the forms of pottery, it originated in copying natural objects such as the exquisite shells, whose surfaces are “embellished with ribs, spines, nodes and colors.” “Clay,” he says, “is so mobile it can be made to record or echo a vast deal of nature and of co-existent art.”[259] The conch-shell may have suggested, to the imaginative mind of the native artist, spiral forms of vessels, as well as the convenient addition of handles, and also must have helped the painter to adapt rectilinear lines to the curved surfaces of the jars.

Colors were always used symbolically as well as decoratively on every kind of vessel, whatever its material. While watching a potter at Ácoma I was interested to notice that the first delicate hair-lines around the lip of a jar were never quite closed together. The space left was so tiny it would not be noticed as an imperfection, and it was most illuminating afterward to read that Cushing was told by a Zuñi woman that this little unfilled space was “the exit trail of life and being.” Cushing goes on to say that when at length a pot is dried, polished, and decorated,

This vague feeling that any and all jars have some sort of personality is further illustrated by the belief that the noise made when a pot is struck is the voice of the spirit within, and the louder note of a pot when broken is similarly the cry of the spirit escaping from the imprisoning clay.

The superstition that to close completely an ornament is unlucky must be as widely diffused as any primitive belief, for it is a well-known fact that, among the weavers and embroiderers and painters of Greece and the Balkans, no design is ever quite joined. A tiny bit that does not mar the effect is always left unfinished.

The extent and variety of ways in which the Indian depicts his idea of the source or breath of life is vividly illustrated by Cushing in his “Decorative Symbolism.”[261] For example, clouds or many another “phenomenon of nature held sacred and mysterious” by the Indian are conventionalized by the potter for decorative purposes. Thus the terraced or stepped rim of a round bowl is the symbol of the horizon whence rise the clouds. The painted decoration on jars conveys the same idea, and the pendant drops from many an ornament represent the falling rain. The art of ornament is everywhere a conservative one and depends greatly upon the general development of culture in the nation practising it; or, as Dr. Holmes puts it: “The character of ornamentation does not depend so much upon the age of the art, as upon the acquirements of the potter and his people in other arts.”

Though the work of all pueblo potters is free-hand, it is never haphazard. The Indian friend whom we watched through a long day of work at Ácoma had no pattern, no visible rule, nor did she measure out any spaces for her most elaborate designs. Though she did not tell us how many more she knew than the ten designs we saw, she did say that she knew exactly from the starting of each what the whole would become. The brush used is very limber, being made from two or three strands of yucca fibre about three inches in length. With this flexible tool she adapted her pattern to the curved surfaces, without embarrassment or erasures, and with as little difficulty as one might have in tracing a flat drawing in a book. It is no doubt a convenience to restrict the preparation of colors for any one particular time, and on that day she used only black, yellow, and brown colors.

After the decoration is completed there is the process of firing. The chalk-white clay acquires a mellow tint, varied according to the fuel used. Age, and especially daily use over the fire, deepen and beautify this surface tone so that the older a jar, the more delightful is it to possess. In the museum at Santa Fé a large case of jars, all marked as coming from Ácoma, shows that the modern potters are using old designs, often mingled with those believed to have originated at Sía. In earlier days many kinds of fuel were used for the firing process, such as very dry greasewood, sagebrush, or piñon, though wherever cannel coal was found it was given preference. The worst method ever employed was burying the green pot under hot ashes and encircling it with a blazing fire. The better and more usual practice is to dig a little kiln in the ground, or, as is perforce the only way at Ácoma, to hollow out a space in the rock. This is lined with dried cakes of sheep dung—now the universal and almost exclusive fuel in all pueblos. The jars are fitted into this shallow kiln and a dome-like structure of dung is built above, after which the whole is slowly fired. The dung is thought by the Indians to bake the ware more evenly than the resinous woods, but Cushing thinks this fuel so inferior that to its use in great measure can be attributed the deterioration of modern ceramics in the pueblos. Resinous woods cannot be used where the color is the important thing, but the

No principle of true glaze is now known to the pueblo potters, but in early days a genuine glaze was used purely for decoration. Being spread over only a part of the surface, it added nothing toward making a jar water-tight.

I have found no indication that the Ácomas ever followed any other art than that of pottery, but it is quite possible this may be only their share of the partitioning of the industries agreed upon by the pueblos in comparatively recent time. However, since to-day the sole artistic occupation of the Ácomas appears to be in ceramics, I have omitted, in the consideration of Pueblo arts, both textiles and basketry. With regard to the pottery, Dr. Fewkes says that, in the absence of more definite insight,

Though the pottery of the Ácomas is less durable than that of the Zuñis, its designs have much more variety—trees and leaves, birds and flowers, being introduced along with geometrical patterns. There are specific reds and grays used in the Ácoma and Zuñi pottery; and a bright green pigment applied in circular blotches before firing, that gives something approaching a glaze afterwards, is found at both Ácoma and Laguna.

Among those pueblos where pottery and earthenware utensils form a conspicuous feature of their civilization, Mr. James Stevenson[263] mentions Ácoma and the great similarity of its pottery to that of Laguna, though the Laguna potters use more colors. He calls some of the designs at Ácoma “very spirited.” Many of the jars in the Santa Fé museum have combinations of Ácoma and Sía designs—the bird of each pueblo being quite distinct.

We may briefly summarize here the value of our knowledge concerning ceramics to the other forms of cultural development of any people and find it applicable to the inter-relationships of those American Indians who practised the art. Since it can never be known when the modelling of clay was first practised, there is fascination in the suggestion that it came in some long-past day when a man walking on clay softened by rain noticed his own footprints. The rudest savage may well have discovered with what ease he could fashion a crude but useful vessel from moist earth, but the first baking of such a utensil probably occurred through some happy accident. We know that sun-dried bricks were used in early building, but no clay cups thus treated would have served to hold liquids.

The student searching for some standard by which to measure the creative attainment of a semi-civilized race has chosen as most universal the work of the early potters, and the interesting fact is disclosed that the first attempts in ceramics of all peoples are curiously alike in processes, in modes of decoration, and in adaptation to practical needs. There is in the decorative addition of painting to pottery something much more valuable than mere ornament, namely, a conventionalized representation, graphically expressed, of the mythology and the social habits of a race, so that even without written records it becomes possible for us to form a fairly clear idea of its cultural development. In short, the study of pottery has disclosed so much of race origins that it is now regarded as essential to an understanding of the history and mythology, and, in many countries, of the industries no less than of the arts, of ancient peoples.

The student of American ceramics accepts the theory prevailing to-day to the effect that the aborigines of this continent came from Asia, not all at once but in successive migrations, bringing with them customs and arts from many different sources at many different times; and our hope to-day is that the modifications brought about by the meeting and mingling of these various migratory streams will be finally made clear through the patient work of the experts as new ceramic “finds” are unearthed throughout the continent.

L’ENVOI

In taking our leave of the Republic of Ácoma, seated haughtily aloof upon her stony citadel, certain reflections grow imperious. Emerging from the shadows of legendary origins to the historic past, already a dim and distant background, we may please our fancy with poetic and picturesque, or heroic episodes, while recognizing that the flowing tide of civilization has inevitably swept away some that was admirable, along with more that was brutal and savagely impossible to retain.

The sources of Ácoma’s life story, as of other Indian communities, are three. First, we have all that has been carefully garnered and interpreted for us by the anthropologists. This is chiefly concerned with pre-Columbian or pre-Spanish days. Since the American domination, government officials and visitors to all the pueblos have added much of value and interest. There remains an almost untouched treasure in the vast number of records kept through nearly three centuries by Spanish priests and chroniclers. The padres in particular saw the Indian as he is in his daily occupations, in his mind, in his traditional worship, as well as in his warrior adventuring. When these shall have received due recognition from students of the Southwest, we may begin to hope that we shall understand the First Americans.

Looking at Ácoma as symbolic of all Indian “city-states,” are we not forced to admit that the white invader has pretty completely blotted out one type of the human family? So altered are the fragmentary remains of its religious and its social organization that they appear to be hardly more significant to the white onlooker than is any picturesque pageant; while to the Indian himself they must be rather a poor imitation of his traditional ceremonial.

It is too late to ask whether or not white conquest could have been less cruel, but surely our reconstruction might have been less ruthless.

It is asserted by those who know that “nearly a thousand languages have given way before the Anglo-Saxon speech.” When the American succeeded to the Spanish over-lordship of the aborigine, why did he not heed the example of his English forbears in their rule of subject races? Tolerant of all that was most sacred and inherent to the conquered, recent English colonial policy has had for a fundamental principle the fostering of native genius, and a respect for the faith and ritual, essential to those brought under subjection.

This served as well the useful end of making conquest less offensive and obedience more willing. It makes one envious of what Sir Valentine Chirol writes of his rulers when they mastered India. “They respected the customs of the people, tried to understand their needs, and gave the humblest folk a new sense of security from arbitrary oppression, and a new conception of justice as a boon that was neither to be bought nor sold.”

The Spaniard was the pioneer invader and conqueror. The American should have grasped his opportunity as trustee of a rich and original element in the land. Trustees accept a duty and responsibility along with new power, the success or failure of which lies within their own hands. But the white man began by imposing upon the Indian a religion so unlike his own that it soon became a weapon of deceit, and a dangerous impediment to their mutual understanding.

The system under which these wards of the nation are ruled to-day would doubtless protest against the old phrase that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” but in practice it does not materially improve on that unhappy formula.

In justice to a great inheritance of art and of primitive literature (for the chant and the folk-lore are the germ of written tales), can we not now arouse a public pride for the appreciation of this legacy, which constitutes, as has been said earlier in these pages, the only original contribution of the western world to either form of creative genius.

The healthy association of the races should promote an education that pays heed to the needs and mentality of the Indian, fostering his deft fingers in his native crafts instead of teaching him that machine-made and artificially dyed rugs are superior; that would help him to develop his innate agricultural talent by better implements and a more generous use of soils and of irrigation. At least let him be protected from political exploitation and even from the selfishness of too ardent exploring students.

It does not fall within this writer’s province to suggest solutions for one of the most urgent and complex of national problems. She only desires to bring before the bar of public opinion the tangle of difficulties largely created by an indifference to Indian philosophy and sensitiveness and to a misuse of power which has bred a deep sense of racial injustice.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX — I. The Name Ácoma — Population — II. Ha-Chamoni — III. Salt — IV. Towers and Great Houses — V. Keres (Queres) — VI. Language — VII. Katzímo, A Disenchanted Mesa — VIII. Medicine — IX. Smoke — X. Shaman — XI. Serpent — XII. Lightning — XIII. The Swastika and Primitive Cross-Symbols — XIV. Religious Import of the Dance

Ako (of obscure ethnology). They call their own people Ákomi (mi = people). It is translated as People of the White Rock.

Hacus of Fray Marcos of Niza.

Ácuco of Coronado.

Hakukue in Zuñi language, meaning “drinkers of the dew.”

A-ko-kai-obi in Hopi language, meaning “the place of the ladle,” and referring to the two great natural reservoirs upon the summit.

Ácoma Clans extinct:

Clans still existent:[264]

Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, in 1918, adds to the clans: Chaparral, Cock, Tansy-Mustard, and Lizard (this last may be identical with Rattlesnake). She omits Road-runner and Ant. In 1922 we were told that the Snake was extinct.

Other pueblos occupied by Ácoma clans at various early periods were Heash-Koa, two miles southwest, by the Red-corn clan; and Kowina, fifteen miles west, by the Calabash clan. This was a mesa at the head of the Cebollita Valley.

Castañeda (1541) wrote that “Ácoma could place on foot about 200 warriors and that there was not room on the Rock for much more than 1000 people.”

Espéjo (1581) speaks of more than 6000; Oñate (1595) estimated them at 3000; Villagrá says that there were 6000 at the time of the siege.

In 1680 Ácoma was credited with 1500 inhabitants.

In 1760 there were said to be 1052 inhabitants.

In 1780-81 a smallpox epidemic prevailed, so that ten years later there were but 820 persons.

In 1910 there were but 691 inhabitants; while Laguna had, in 1910, as many as 1441.

Ha-chamoni (prayer-sticks) are deposited by the oracle of the cult of the hunt to convey the messages of the people. The hunt may or may not take place directly after these offerings, its time being at the pleasure of the Ho-aanite (theurgist or oracle), who does not himself inform the pueblo but communicates with the war chief.—Mrs. M. C. Stevenson (of Sía Pueblo).

Early chroniclers mention the “salt-kernels” of the Cíbolans, and Cushing found “a trail brokenly traceable for hundreds of miles from the cliff-town to the inexhaustible Lake of Salt in central New Mexico.” This salt is superior to any other found in the Southwest and commanded such a price that Cushing found it often adulterated with other varieties. He goes on to say that the influence of such a salt supply upon the movements of large tribes is not confined to those of America, for “all the great historic trade-routes across Asia were first established along salt trails.”—Thirteenth Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology and Anthropology, pp. 352-355.

Shrine of Salt Woman. Near, or in, the Grand Cañon, Cárdenas in 1540 used the same trail which the Hopi use to-day when they visit the Havasupai in Cataract Cañon, or part of the old route of the Hopi to get salt. The trail apparently crosses the Little Colorado not far from Moenkopi trail at Tanner Crossing, a few miles below Black Falls. Before gathering the salt, which hung from the cliffs in “icicles,” the Hopi laid one prayer-stick before the image of the salt goddess and the other before the god of war. The gatherer must be suspended over the edge of the cliff by ropes to reach the icicles.—Cushing, Bureau of Ethnology and Anthropology, Vol. VIII, pp. 352-358.

Salt Place (Zuñi Salt Lake) belongs to the Parrot clan. The substance of a folk-tale collected by Dr. Boas explaining how this happened is given in “Laguna Genealogies.” When Salt Woman and the Twin War Gods were on their wanderings they were hospitably entertained by the Parrot people, when everyone else had refused them admittance. Going farther southward, Salt Woman met Zuñi Parrot people, to whom she gave her house; but Laguna informants assert that until her people showed them how, neither Hopi nor Zuñi folk were able to get the salt out of the Place. The journey to Salt Place is made in September, and in company with collectors from Ácoma, a rare case of inter-pueblo coöperation. Parrot men lead the expedition, while those of the clan who remain at home are praying in their house. The salt-collector desires to get omens at the Place; hence he must offer prayer-sticks and then pray. Before putting the sticks and cigarettes and shell-meal into the water, he must rub himself with salt. Having taken off his clothes, and standing in the water, he feels for the salt with his feet and treads it out; then gathers it with his hands, using neither pick nor shovel. If you are to have good harvests of wheat or watermelon, or if you are going to kill a deer, you will see in the water the wheat or watermelon or deer. If you are going to die you will see yourself lying dead there. Besides the salt, medicine-water is brought back from Salt Place. On the return journey, the accompanying war captain sends forward one day before arrival a messenger to procure two donkeys from the Parrot people. As the expedition approaches, all the clans-women with the kurena-cheani come out to meet it, and they all sing together for the Salt Woman. Later these same women distribute the salt. “If an individual wants to go salt-collecting on his own account he will go to the Parrot clansman to ask him to make prayer-sticks. If your salt gives out you may ask the Parrot clan-mother to give you some.”—Elsie Clews Parsons, Laguna Genealogies.

Were they observation points or granaries or ceremonial places? Or, did they combine all these with defence? No satisfactory answer yet found, nor the epoch in which they were constructed. Some have great trees growing in them, but none has a roof; their walls are so good that they do not suggest very great age; yet the builders of cliff-dwellings, and by inference their kindred, the Tower Builders, were far superior in their art to modern pueblos.

Concerning the origin of the word Keres (Castañeda’s Quirix) nothing can be learned from any of these people, who pronounce it in every conceivable way. But they all agree that “they have no ethnic name in Keresan language which sounds anything like it.” We have, therefore, a confusion of designations for Ácoma.

Sía (Tsía) is linguistically a part of the western branch of the Keres nation. According to fragments of Keres tradition this is the place on the Jémez River where the Ácomas separated from the other Keres.

The name Temá is applied to the Cochití and to all who talk like them. Among these are Sía, Ácoma, and Laguna. The two latter are so isolated from the rest of the Keres nation that frequently they are not listed with the other pueblos of their stock; when they are, they invariably are made a separate group by themselves.

The culture of the Keresan tribes is fundamentally similar to that of the others in the Southwestern area; namely, a dependence upon maize and other cultivated foods; the use of the metate instead of a mortar for grinding the maize; terraced houses of stone and adobe; tailored textile clothing, which involves cultivation of cotton and weaving on a loom; a pottery decorated in color; much less use of basketry than in non-Pueblo tribes; the domestication of the turkey; matrilinear descent; a mythology characterized by migration traditions; each pueblo a “republic” with governor and war chief elected annually, but the religious head, cacique, must give his sanction; very complex ritualism; numerous shrines before which sacred meal and pollen are constantly offered; purification rites by emetics and head washing; Kachina, or K’at’sina, ceremonies by masked impersonators; different priests for summer and for winter.

In most pueblos there are made extensive sand paintings for religious festivals. No writer mentions them at Ácoma. Is this because no strangers have seen their most sacred celebrations?[265]

The Queres Indians, to which nation Ácoma belongs, have always claimed the range of the Tanos Mountains and the valleys of the upper Rio Grande and the Jémez Rivers as their ancestral heritage. The prehistoric remains in the romantic gorge of the Rito de los Frijoles are said by the Queres to belong to their people and especially to those who later settled permanently at Cochití. The medicine men of Cochití paid frequent visits to holy shrines there as recently as 1890.

The ethnologists agree that there is no reason to suppose that only one language existed among the earliest dwellers in America. Certainly the Spaniards found the different languages, or dialects, a great source of confusion in their early expeditions from Mexico into the North. To know one well was no password to the next or to those beyond.

Dr. Franz Boas says that “at any rate when man began to increase, the number of languages was legion though sprung from the same root.” As some tribes grew more powerful and as inter-tribal wars did their fatal work, “many older stocks were eliminated, to be replaced by the dialects of a few groups.”[266]

The four pueblo linguistic stocks distinguishable to-day are:

(1) Shoshonean, to which belong all Hopi pueblos, except Hano; (2) Zuñian; (3) Tanoan; (4) Keresan or Queresan.

Professor Libbey, of Princeton University, describes in Harper’s Weekly, August 28, 1897, the way in which he went, with two assistants and two heavily laden wagons which contained “among other things a small cannon, and miles and miles of rope.” After the cannon had been charged, a large shot was fired to which had been attached a projecting shaft and ring in the gun. By throwing the shot to the far side of the mesa, it was possible to construct a kind of bo’sun’s chair which, with pulleys, lifted Libbey to a point on the smaller end of the rock. A ladder was now sent up to him, on which the explorer climbed down the face of the cliff to a point from which he could jump across to the other side of the chasm. “A few grasses and plants common on the plains below, and these with one grey rat and some lizards were all the evidences of life to be seen.”

Libbey admits that “a small cairn-like structure of stones” might have been the work of human hands; but he was convinced not only that the mesa had never been a human habitation, but that no fragment of pottery or of implements of any sort could be found.

According to Alexander, medicine has come to be applied to objects and practices controlling the animistic powers of Nature as the Indian conceives them. Medicine is, therefore, private magic and may “exist in the form of a song or spell known to the owner,” in some symbol upon his body or in some object that he carries in his “medicine bag.” It may appear in a ceremony or in a system of rites and practices known to the “medicine lodge.” “The essential idea varies from fetichism to symbolism.” When fetichistic, the objects are regarded as talismans. Disease comes from occult powers of wizards or from the anger of certain animals. Death is the result of necromancy practised by bad men or angry gods. Medicine ceremonials are quite unlike rain ceremonials.—H. B. Alexander, North American Mythology, p. 269.

Cigars and cigarettes are used by Navajo and Pueblo peoples even for ritualistic purposes. Smoke is an invocation to “those above” and, being always a preliminary to councils, came to be known to the white man as the Pipe of Peace. All Southwestern and California tribes used the straight tubular pipe of clay or stone. Elaborate pipes are found in prehistoric mounds, most often among the more northern tribes. However, in 1922 Dr. J. Walter Fewkes and his corps of archaeological assistants found on the Mesa Verde National Park a central Kiva unique there so far as we yet know. Among the objects found in it “were a full dozen decorated tobacco pipes made of clay, some blackened by use, others showing no signs that they had ever been smoked.... For many years it had been suspected that the ancient inhabitants of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings were smokers, but these pipes are the first objective evidence to prove it, and the fact that these objects were found in the shrine of a sacred room would indicate that they were smoked ceremonially, as is customary in modern pueblo rites.” The Kiva is known as Pipe Shrine House.

A word corrupted from the Sanskrit, meaning “ascetic.” A term more or less interchangeable with “medicine man,” “doctor,” or even “priest.” Many tribes give Shaman and priest not merely distinct, but antagonistic functions. The priest is keeper and demonstrator of rituals. The Shaman mystifies by jugglery, pretends to foretell events and control them by incantations, and by fetish-practice prevents the evil spirits to whom all mishaps are attributed from working harm. Since disease is mischief done by evil spirits, Shamans treat the sick. They are the workers of “good magic,” and preside over ceremonies peculiar to their healing powers. When they fail they become wizards and practisers of “bad magic,” and are feared and if possible are put out of the way.

The great mythic serpent is as much a sky-being as one of earth. The lightning and the Milky Way are his sky attributes. He is the emblem of healing and of fertility in our Southwest.

The writer is indebted to a California friend for the following examples of hypnosis by rattlesnakes.

“When I was a young girl visiting on a ranch in Napa County, California, I had the following interesting experience, which was unusual, in fact, unique. Napa County is infested with rattlesnakes; subconsciously we were never unaware of the danger and, as children, killed many of them. The country was a particularly well-favored spot for the raising of turkeys and as we often drove them into the stubble fields where the grasshoppers were to be found we became accustomed to the ways of these very sensitive domesticated birds. Their usual mournful whine would give way to an alert cry if a hawk or buzzard began to circle over us in the sky and we also noticed a very peculiar and distinct cry when a rattlesnake was seen by them: Brrrup, Brrrup, in a very high piercing key.

“One day we were in the house when we heard this peculiar snake cry from the throats of about one hundred young birds. They were only about four weeks old and were in a small, well-protected snake-proof enclosure. Two of us ran out to see what could have happened, and this is what we saw—a rattlesnake the size of a lead pencil coiled in one corner and surrounding him all the turkeys in a semi-circle with heads stretched to the fullest, slowly but surely hypnotized and moving towards the swaying head of the snake. So absorbed were they that neither the snake nor the turkeys heard us. We watched the performance long enough to be sure of what was happening and then, with the never forgotten stick, killed the snake. The little turkeys, released from the spell, shook themselves, blinked, yawned and stood around confused until their little brains registered safety.

“I was talking with a friend of mine about Lower California one day and he was telling me of the fascinating beauty of it. ‘However,’ he said, ‘it has one great drawback and that is the size and number of the rattlesnakes.’ He said that it was not at all unusual to see them five feet long with bodies the size of a quart bottle and heads that would cover the palm of his hand.

“One day while hunting he saw a thrush behaving in a most peculiar manner under a bush. It was jumping up and down in one spot, feathers ruffled and fairly crying in a terrified manner. He crawled under the bush and there he saw one of these huge rattlers hypnotizing the bird. As soon as the snake saw him and turned his head towards him the bird flew away unharmed. He had his gun and shot from the hip, killing the snake.

“Another experience he had that was interesting. A boy jumped down on to a ledge and failed to see a huge snake almost red in color that was coiled on rocks of the same color. A companion, afraid that he might hurt the boy, shot the snake near the tail. The snake writhed for some time and then, apparently realizing it could not move, turned and stung itself, dying within a few minutes.”

Mrs. Stevenson records of the Queres people that the “lightning-people shoot their arrows to make it rain harder, the smaller flashes coming from the bows of the children. Thunder-people by making a great noise frighten the lightning and cloud-peoples to work harder.” The rainbow people were created to make the sky more beautiful for the earth people.

The swastika, a symbol in the form of a Greek Cross with the end of the arms bent at right angles all in the same direction, and each prolonged to the height of the parallel arm of the cross. Full discussion of the swastika is found in Mrs. Zelia Nuttall’s “Old and New World Civilizations.” She finds these symbols universally accompanied by vestiges of a certain set of cosmical concepts and a scheme of organization which can be traced back to an original pole-star worship. The calendar swastika or cross of ancient Mexico gives absolute proof of native association with ideas of rotary motion and progress of time, and furnishes an indication that it may have been used by primitive races as a sign for a year or a cycle. Cushing found almost precisely the same thing among the Zuñi priesthood.

“Not the epic song, but the dance, accompanied by a monotonous and often meaningless song constitutes everywhere the most primitive, and in spite of that primitiveness, the most highly developed art. Whether as a ritual dance, or as a purely emotional expression of the joy in rhythmic bodily movement, it rules the life of primitive man to such a degree that all other forms of art are subordinate to it.”—Wundt, Völker Psychologie, 3rd ed. Bd. 1 Teil 1, p. 277.

FOOTNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

INDEX

• Abert, Lieutenant, cited on friendly attitude of Ácomas, 140.
• Ácoma (Peñol), 14-19, 218;
• dwellings on, 19-21;
• industries, 21-22, 159;
• cisterns on, 25-26, 122;
• trails, 27-29;
• church, 34-39, 128;
• historical evidences of, 56, 58, 60-61, 63;
• Espéjo’s description of, 65;
• Oñate’s visit, 74;
• taken by the Spaniards, 80-85;
• rebuilding of, 88-89;
• Spanish administration of, 93, 97;
• aloofness and isolation, 95, 140;
• patron saint of, 104;
• size of, in 1680, 115;
• not active in revolt of that year, 115;
• the coming of Vargas (1692), 118-122;
• uprising and defeat (1696), 123-126;
• hostility to the mission, etc., 127-128;
• dispute with Laguna over painting of San José, 128-132;
• education in, under the Federal government, 139-140;
• the Bursum Bill, 143,
• and the appeal of the Ácomas, 144-146;
• racial origin relationships, 157, 162-164, 197;
• origin of pueblo, 157-159;
• rock-paintings and carvings at, 161;
• details concerning, in creation story, 164;
• present population, 164;
• folk-tales from, 198-208;
• corn clans of, 247;
• ritual celebrations at, 253-260.
• See also St. Stephen, Trails.
• Ácoma Indians. See Pueblo Indians.
• Acomita, farm-lands at, 33;
• summer migration to, of Ácoma (Pueblo) Indians, 159.
• Agüelo (grandfather), 223.
• A-Ko-Kai-Obi, Hopi name for Ácoma, 163.
• All Souls’ Day, 257.
• Alvarado, first white man to see Ácoma, 16, 57-60.
• Amaya, Doña Casilda de, first white woman to enter New Mexico, 64.
• Animism, 242.
• Apache Indian, influence of, in the Southwest, 9 n.
• Architecture, among the “Pueblo Arts,” 156.
• Art, Pueblo, 156, 161;
• sand (dry) painting, 163.
• See also Architecture, Pottery.
• Awanyu, plumed serpent, 233.
• Ayeta, Father, 113;
• part played by, in Pueblo Revolt of 1680, 114-115.
• Bibliography, 299.
• Bird cult, 233-234.
• Bolton, Dr. H. E., acknowledgment to, viii;
• first use of Espéjo’s narrative, 65;
• unpublished translation of an anonymous diarist, 85-87;
• missions as agents of the State, 88, 92.
• Buffalo, “humpbacked cow,” discovery of, 58, 61.
• Burial, among the Pueblo Indians, 39 and n., 40-42.
• Bursum Bill, 143-144.
• Cacique (Kasik), tenure of office, 186;
• duties, 186-187, 224;
• chosen by, and from Antelope Clan, 188, 189.
• Caypa (San Juan de los Caballeros), 73.
• Cedar Brew, in purification ritual, 41.
• Ceremonies (Ceremonials) among the Pueblo Indians, color scarlet in relation to, 39 n.;
• election, United States represented in, 135,
• description of, 189-190;
• effect of white man’s contempt for, 143;
• purpose, 152, 247-250;
• Snake, 163, 233, 246, 255;
• sacerdotal functions of war chiefs, 187;
• prerogatives of Antelope Clan, 188;
• purification (1864), 190,
• story of, 191-192;
• Santu, 221-222;
• christening, 222;
• priesthoods, 229,
• origin, 231;
• Painted Altar, 231;
• fertilization, psychological characteristic of, 234-235, 263;
• underlying motives, 245-246;
• classification of, 247-248;
• hunts, 252;
• friendship, 255;
• All Souls’ Day, 257;
• Christmas, 258;
• uses of pottery in, 276.
• Chamuscado, Francisco Sanchez, with Rodríguez’ expedition, 62.
• Cheani, 40, 40 n. 2.
• Child-sacrifice, 220.
• Children in the Pueblos, christening of, 222-223;
• obedience of, 223;
• participation in dance, 260.
• Christianity, Indians’ attitude toward, 132.
• Cíbola, discovery of, 61.
• Clan, or Kinship, priority of, in pueblo social organization, 177, 180;
• clans grouped in pairs, 178;
• Kroeber’s differentiation of family and clan, 178;
• relation of clan to fraternity, 180-182.
• Clans, ranking of, 188;
• maternal, and exogamous among Ácomas, 221.
• Cliff dwellings, vs. those on level soil, priority of, 151.
• Colchones, 22.
• Color, scarlet, relation to burial wrappings and ceremonials, 39 n. 1.
• Color-symbols, of respective six “points of the compass,” 214, 247.
• Colorado River, discovery of, 61.
• Corchado, Fray Andres, missionary to Ácoma, 93.
• Corn (maize), ceremonial motive, 246.
• Corn Clans of Ácoma, 247.
• Coronado, expedition of, 57-61.
• Creation story, 212-216;
• Ácoma detail in, 164.
• Cross, symbol, 237-239;
• below the Rock of Ácoma, 239.
• Culture-hero myth, 216.
• December ceremonial at Ácoma, a complex of Christian and pagan customs, 258-260.
• Diary, account of Oñate’s expedition, 85-86.
• Duality of the American Indian, 224, 235.
• Early Chroniclers, 14.
• Education of the Pueblo Indian:
• under the padres, 138;
• under Mexico, 138;
• under United States government, 139-140.
• El Paso, the Crossing, first home of European drama in the Southwest, 72.
• Encomenderos, and encomienda system, 90.
• Espéjo, Antonio de, expeditions of, 64-67;
• opened third pathway to New Mexico, 66.
• Estévan, negro (“Black Mexican”), 52-53;
• death of, 54.
• Estufas, 45;
• educational and council uses of, 48;
• distinction between, and Kiva, 48-49.
• Family, differentiated from clan, 178-179;
• the family a partnership, 184;
• marriage and divorce, 184-185.
• Fasts, 248.
• Federal government. See United States.
• Fetishes, strong influence of, in Pueblo Indian organization, 182-183, 230-234.
• Folk-tales defined, 194;
• scanty contribution of Pueblo Indians, 196;
• of Ácoma, 198-208.
• See also Myths.
• Four, the number a sacred symbol, 236-237.
• Fraternity (phratry), relation of, to clan, 180-182;
• function of, 181.
• Gallo Race, 268-269.
• Games, Indians’ devotion to, 262-263;
• underlying socio-religious significance, 263-264, 271;
• purpose and periods of, 263-264;
• disciplinary training of, 264-265;
• two kinds of—chance and dexterity, 265-267, 269;
• of native origin, 266;
• implements used in, and derivation of, 266;
• ball-race, 267;
• shinny (by women only), 268;
• Gallo race, 268;
• cat’s cradle, 270.
• Gaming, Indians’ passion for, 262-263.
• Gave, 21.
• Grand Cañon, discovery of, 61.
• Ha-chamoni, 40 n. 3.
• Hamaha, 31.
• Háwikuh, 55-56.
• Hewe, 21 n. 2.
• Hoinawe, 41.
• Hopi Indians, racial relationships, 161-164.
• Inscription Rock, 6.
• Gonad del Muerto, 96.
• Kahera, 32.
• Kasik, Keres form of Cacique, 42 n. 1.
• See also Cacique.
• K’at’sina or Katsina, or Cachina, 186, 235.
• Katzímo (Enchanted mesa or Mesa Encantada), the “accursed,” 15, 118, 159, 166;
• legend of, 167-168;
• ritual performances at, 169-170;
• present-day knowledge of, 170-175;
• ascents of, by Hodge and by Libbey, 171-174;
• elevation of, 173;
• proofs of human occupation of, 175.
• Keres (Queres), kindred nations, 157, n. 1;
• priesthoods of, 229.
• Keresans, racial origin, 157, 161-164.
• Kinship, place of, in pueblo social organization, 177-180.
• Kisi, description of, 49.
• Kivas, 45-49;
• number, 45;
• forms, 46;
• signification of, 46;
• educational uses, 47-48;
• distinction between, and estufas, 48;
• not temples, 49.
• Komanina (long house), 260.
• Laguna, 15,
• founded, 129;
• church, decoration of, 36;
• hostility to missionary, 127;
• rivalry with Ácoma over painting of San José, 128-132;
• Santu a male deity in her cult, 221.
• Lightning, symbol of serpent, 232.
• Lincoln, President, presentation of official cane to Indian Pueblo governors, 134-135.
• Maize. See Corn.
• Mendoza, Antonio de, Viceroy, 52.
• Mesa Prieta, 27 n. 2.
• Mesas, 4 n.
• Metates, corn-grinding trough, 21.
• Monster Viper, Myth, 219.
• Montezuma, god of the Pueblos, 216 n. 3, 218.
• Myths, 209-220;
• universality of a myth, 209;
• explanatory: (1) inclusive, (2) particularistic, 210-211;
• ritualization of, 212-215;
• culture-hero, 216;
• in connection with children, 221-224.
• Navajo Indian, the, 9;
• Commissioner Leupp’s comment on white man’s attitude toward, 142.
• Navajo Reservation, 7.
• New Mexico, formal Spanish possession of, 72;
• missions and missionaries in, 94-96, 102;
• made a custodio and named for San Pablo, 94;
• pueblos of, 135.
• See also Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Sedentary Indians, United States.
• Niza, Marcos de, 52, 54, 56.
• Oñate, 6 n.;
• founder of New Mexico, 67;
• expedition of, 69-85;
• diary, 85, 86;
• his marriage connections, 69;
• official titles, 71;
• revenge taken on Ácomas, 79-85.
• Padilla, Fray Juan de, proto-martyr of the north, 57.
• Painted altar, ceremonial trait, 231.
• Parentalia, 248.
• Pecos (Cicuyé), 57, 218.
• Peñol, “the Crag.” See Ácoma.
• Pictographs, expression of Pueblo art, 156.
• Piki, 21 n. 2.
• Plains Indians, contrasted with Sedentary Indians, 155, 156.
• Popé, Indian instigator of Pueblo Revolt of 1680, 107-110;
• his chief assistants, 109;
• brief victory, 116;
• death, 117.
• Pottery, art of, a determinator of time relations, 150;
• evidences of, at Katzímo, 171, 174;
• Thunder Bird motif in, 210;
• historical sketch of, in the Southwest, 272;
• the three pre-Columbian groups, 273-274;
• first incentive toward, 274;
• development of, 275, 278;
• use of color, 277-278;
• vessels set aside for ceremonial uses, 276;
• personality ascribed to, 279;
• decoration of, free-hand, but not haphazard, 280;
• fuel for firing, 281;
• importance of, in search for race origins, 284.
• Pueblo, significance of word, 149 n. 1;
• Terraced, 19.
• Pueblo (Ácoma) Indians, compared with Plains Indians, 10, 12, 217;
• dwellings of, 19-20;
• separateness of, family or clan, 20;
• industries, 21-22, 282;
• dress, 23-25;
• self-respect, 31;
• cleanliness, 33;
• evidences of American influence, 33;
• lack of domestic animals, 155;
• annual summer migration to Acomita, 159;
• clans, maternal and exogamous, 221;
• children, birth, christening, 221-223.
• Political and civil organization, 50;
• relation to Federal government, 135;
• republican in form, 177;
• theocratic, 182, 185;
• property relations, 182;
• based on fetishism, 182-183;
• officials and their duties, 185-189;
• election of officers, and their installation, 189-190.
• See also Ceremonies, Education, Lincoln, United States, World War.
• Pueblo Indians, Social organization, in Stone Age, at time of Spanish Conquest, 277.
• See also Ácoma, Burial, Ceremonies, Education, Myths, etc.
• Pueblo region, extent of, 148.
• Pueblo Revolt of 1680, 106-117;
• in 1696, 123-126.
• See also Ayeta.
• Ramírez, Fray Juan, 28;
• the church he built, 34-39, 103;
• Apostle of Ácoma, 96;
• brief sketch of, 99-102;
• death and burial, 104.
• Rituals (religious beliefs), purification, 41, 247;
• foot-race, 55;
• sand mosaics, 163;
• myths ritualized, 212-215, 221-224;
• increase of children, 221;
• elaborate organization of, 225;
• myth and religion, 226-227;
• sun-worship, 227;
• contemplative quality of, 227;
• Nature, the Great Spirit, 228;
• priesthoods, 229;
• classification of, 247-248;
• at Ácoma, 252-253, 255;
• Smoking an essential element, 50, 274.
• See also Bird, Ceremonies, Estufa, Fetish, Katzímo, Kisi, Kiva, Serpent, etc.
• Rodríguez, Fray Agustin, expedition of, 62-64.
• St. Stephen (San Estévan), church of, 34, 103, 104, 121;
• feast-day of, 256.
• See also Ramírez, Vargas.
• Salt, need of, a motive for migration, 148.
• San Gabriel, headquarters of Oñate, 89.
• San José, miracle-working painting of, 36, 130;
• rivalry for, between Ácoma and Laguna, 128, 132.
• San Juan de los Caballeros (Caypa), second permanent colony in the United States, 73.
• Sierra de San Mateo, mountain sacred to Keres people, 27.
• San Pablo (New Mexico), 94.
• San Pedro, patron saint of Ácoma church for short time, 37, 128.
• Sanchez, Mrs. N. V., acknowledgment to, 196.
• Sand painting (dry mosaics), 164.
• Santa Fé, founded, 89.
• Santa María, fate of, 63.
• Santu Cult, male deity, 221.
• Saukin, Ácoma word for friend, 255.
• Sedentary Indians of New Mexico, 14 n.;
• contrast between and the nomad or Plains Indians, 155-156.
• Serpent cult, 231-233.
• Shamans (Shamanism), 241-242, 248.
• Shoshonean, racial relationships, 161.
• Sía (Zía, Tsía), nearest of kin to Ácoma as tribe, 157, 158.
• Si-pa-pu, place of emergence for all created beings, 40, 41, 46, 215;
• “north of Taos,” 167 n., 234;
• the path to heaven, 215.
• Six “points of the compass,” 213-214;
• separate color-symbols of, 214.
• Smoking and ceremonials, 57, 274.
• Songs, universal in Indian life and worship, 195, 250;
• corn-grinding, 21;
• of the corn-people, 195.
• Spanish administration of the New World, 90-93.
• Spier, Dr. Leslie, acknowledgment to, viii.
• Swastika, 238.
• Sweat-bath, 248.
• Mt. Taylor (Spi-nat), 27 n. 1.
• Thunder-Bird, myth of, 210.
• Time, the reckoning of, 253.
• To-ya-la-na, Thunder Mountain, shrine of the Zuñi, 261.
• Trails from the mesa of Ácoma, 27-29;
• Burro, 29;
• Camino del Padre, constructed by Ramírez, 104;
• Deadman’s, 28, 192;
• Ladder, 23;
• New, 29;
• Runner’s, 28, 192;
• Split, 27, 29;
• Staircase, 29.
• Treviño, Spanish governor of New Mexico, 107.
• Tupatú, Popé’s assistant in 1680, 109, 117.
• United States, the second permanent settlement in, 73;
• relations with Pueblo government represented in election ceremony, 134, 135;
• Reports of Indian Commissioners quoted, 136-139, 142;
• educational statistics, 139-140;
• increasing hostility and misunderstanding between the two, 140-144, 254;
• danger and tragedy in the Bursum Bill, 143-144;
• “Appeal of the Ácomas,” 144-146.
• Utinat, 24.
• Vaca, Cabeza de, 51.
• Vargas, General Diego de, reconquest of New Mexico, 117-126;
• submission of Ácoma to, 118-122;
• his description of the shrine of St. Stephen, 121;
• final conquest of, 125-126.
• Vigas, 20, 27, 38.
• Villagrá, Gaspar de, soldier and poet, 69-70;
• adventure at Ácoma, 75-76, 82, 84;
• his famous leap, 30.
• Walpi, 11, 255;
• the tie between, and Ácoma, 162.
• Witchcraft, 153.
• Witches, 239.
• World-War, and the Pueblo Indians, 137-138, 215.
• Zaldívar, Vicente de, leader of attack on Ácoma, 80-85.
• Zárate Salmerón, Father, missionary and historian, 93-94;
• visits Ácoma, 93.
• Zuñi (and Ácoma), 198;
• Zuñi name for Keres, means “Drinkers of the Dew,” 157.
• Zutucapán, cacique of Ácoma, 75-76;
• plans foiled to murder Oñate, 76;
• attack on Spaniards with Zaldívar, 77-78.