ÁCOMA, THE SKY CITY

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

ÁCOMA MAIDENS AT THE SPRING

Copyright by E. S. Curtis

ÁCOMA, THE SKY CITY

A STUDY IN PUEBLO-INDIAN HISTORY
AND CIVILIZATION

BY
Mrs. WILLIAM T. SEDGWICK

CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1927

COPYRIGHT, 1926
BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Second Impression

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

IN GRATEFUL AND LOVING MEMORY OF
Mrs. CHARLES ELIOT GUILD
AND
ELEANOR GUILD

But yet I treasure in my memory

Your gift of charity, your mellow ease,

And the dear honour of your amity,

For these once mine, my life is rich with these.

Because of your strong faith I kept the track

Whose sharp-set stones my strength had well-nigh spent.

I could not meet your eyes if I turned back,

So on I went.

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 vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended

And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

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.

MESA-LAND

Bolton

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.

THE CARSON MONUMENT

Near Fort Defiance

Bolton

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.

WALPI IS UNIQUE. IT MUST BE PRESERVED

Bolton

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

Ácoma is in point of site not only the most remarkable but the most ancient of New Mexico pueblos to-day ... a formidable cliff in an exceptional situation, a site isolated and impregnable to Indian warfare.—Bandelier.

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.

KATZÍMO, OR THE ENCHANTED MESA

Bolton

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.

THE SAND-RAMP, OR “NEW TRAIL”

Bolton

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?

ÁCOMA NORTH ROW

Bolton

ÁCOMA MIDDLE ROW

Bolton

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.

ÁCOMA MAN IN EVERYDAY DRESS

Fr. O’Sullivan

ÁCOMA WOMAN ON HER HOUSE TERRACE

Fr. O’Sullivan

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.”

THE LADDER TRAIL

Bolton

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.

ÁCOMA “DOORWAYS”

Entrance from the Ground

Bolton

THE TWO UPPER STOREYS, ÁCOMA

Bolton

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.

Below lay stretched the boundless universe,

There far as the remotest line

That limits swift imagination’s flight,

Unending orbs mingled in mazy motion

Immutably fulfilling

Eternal Nature’s law.[16]

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.”

GENERAL VIEW OF ÁCOMA PUEBLO

Cloister in Foreground

Bolton

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.

THE CHURCH, ÁCOMA

Bolton

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.

A KISI IN A RIO GRANDE PUEBLO

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 LONG LINE OF ÁCOMA

Two Miles Away

Bolton

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]

See the smoke ascend!

Now the odor mounts, follows where his voice

Sped, intent to reach

Where the gods abide. There the odor pleads,

Pleads to gain us help.

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

In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Spain occupied perhaps the most prominent position on the theatre of Europe.... The Spaniard came over to the New World in the true spirit of a knight errant, courting adventure however perilous, wooing danger, as it would seem, for its own sake. With sword and lance, he was ever ready to do battle for the Faith, and as he raised his old war-cry of “Santiago,” he fancied himself fighting under the banner of the military apostle. It was the expiring age of chivalry and Spain, romantic Spain, was the land where its light lingered longest above the horizon. Arms ... was the only career which the high-mettled cavalier could tread with honor. The New World, with its strange and mysterious perils, afforded a noble theatre for the exercise of his calling, and the Spaniard entered on it with all the enthusiasm of a paladin.—W. H. Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico.

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.

New Mexico in the Seventeenth Century.

FROM BANCROFT. ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO

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.

HÁWIKUH TO-DAY

First of the Seven Cities of Cíbola

Bolton

THE RUINED CHURCH OF HÁWIKUH

Bolton

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.”

THE STAIRCASE TRAIL AND THE CHURCH

Bolton

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:

We set out from this province, Emexes [now known as Jémez], toward the west, and after going three days, or about fifteen leagues, we found a pueblo called Ácoma, which it appeared to us must be more than fifty estados in height. In the very rock, stairs are built by which they ascend and descend from the town, which is very strong. They have cisterns of water at the top and many provisions stored within the pueblo. Here they gave us many mantas, deerskins and strips of buffalo-hide, tanned as they tan them in Flanders, and many provisions, consisting of maize and turkeys. These people have their fields two leagues from the pueblo on a river of medium size whose waters they intercept for irrigating purposes, as they water their fields with many partitions of the water near this river, in a marsh. Near the fields we found many bushes of Castilian roses. We also found Castilian onions, which grow in this country by themselves, without planting or cultivation. The mountains thereabouts apparently give promise of mines and other riches, but we did not go to see them as the people from there were many and warlike. The mountain people come to aid those of the settlements, who call the mountain people Querechos.[48] They carry on trade with those of the settlements, taking to them salt, game, such as deer, rabbits, and hares, tanned deerskins, and other things with which the government pays them.

In other respects they are like those of the other provinces. In our honor they performed a very ceremonious mitote and dance, the people coming out in fine array. They performed many juggling feats, some of them very clever with live snakes.[49] Both of these things were well worth seeing. They gave us liberally of food and of all else of which they had. And thus, after three days, we left this province.[50]

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.

TO-YA-LA-NE

From Modern Zuñi

Bolton

MODERN ZUÑI, ON SITE OF ANCIENT HÁLONA

River in Foreground

Bolton

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

Hand to hand and foot to foot

Nothing there save death, was mute.

Strike, and thrust, and flash, and cry

For quarter or for victory

Mingle there with the volleying thunder.

—Byron, Siege of Corinth.

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.”

FACSIMILE OF TITLE-PAGE OF VILLAGRÁ’S RHYMED HISTORY OF NEW MEXICO

Don Gaspar begins his epic in true Virgilian manner:

Of arms I sing and of the man heroic:

The being, valor, prudence, and high effort

Of him whose endless, never-tiring patience

Over an ocean of annoyance stretching

Despite the fangs of foul, envenomed envy

Brave deeds of prowess ever is achieving:

Of those brave men of Spain, conquistadores

Who, in the Western India nobly striving

And searching out all of the world yet hidden

Still onward press their glorious achievements

By their strong arms and deeds of daring valor

In strife of arms and hardships as enduring

As, with rude pen, worthy of being honored.[52]

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.