[1] “Mesas appear to furnish the most direct and convincing testimony we have of the tremendous power of the wind in effecting general erosion under conditions of aridity. That water could not possibly produce such effects is shown in a number of ways. On the continental divide the streams are smallest. Drainage features are necessarily insignificant. Rainfall is the scantiest. These summit plains of the continent are a region of continual high wind and constant sand-storm. By wind action alone there appears to be incontestable testimony that from the entire area of the vast arid region there has been lifted and exported in very recent geologic times a prodigious layer of rock not less than 5000 feet in thickness. Thus it is that arid regions have introduced us to an erosive agent more potent than stream-corrosion, more constant than the washing of rains, more extensive and persistent than the encroachments of the sea.”—Charles R. Keyes, Wind-Graved Mesas and their Message.
[2] Coronado did not pass Inscription Rock on his way from Zuñi to Ácoma, but went a little south of it. The earliest inscription on El Morro with a date is that of Oñate, 1606, but we found an undated autograph of Luxan, a member of Espéjo’s force. It was easily identified by comparing it with his characteristic signature in an as yet unpublished manuscript. E. H. Vogt, describing some recently explored ice-caves near Ramah, N. M., mentions “two old Indian trails six or eight miles south of the road. One of these enters the lava bed and crosses it in line with El Morro and Ácoma. This was perhaps the way Coronado travelled with his Zuñi guides in 1540.”—El Palacio, February 1, 1924.
[3] Bandelier maintains that no tribe so influenced the fate of the Southwest as did the Apache. Twitchell affirms that “the word ‘Indian’ in all the laws whether Spanish or Mexican, and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, was not intended to cover, nor to refer to any ‘Indians’ other than those living in villages ... who are invariably referred to and described as naturales and pueblos and as indios de pueblos. For the other Indians, such as the Apaches, Comanches, Utes or Navajos, the term savages—Salvajes or Indios barbaros—was always the descriptive and differentiating form of expression.”—R. E. Twitchell, Leading Facts in New Mexican History.
[4] Espéjo called those Indians Navajos who haunted the mountains near Ácoma. Castañeda describes the “Querechas and Teyas” (of the eastern plains) “as being better warriors, having better figures and are more feared. They travel like the Arabs with their tents and troops of dogs loaded with poles and having Moorish pack-saddles with girths.”
[5] “They” (the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico) “live some of them in the identical houses their forefathers occupied at the time of Coronado’s expedition (1541-2) as at Ácoma, Jémez and Taos, and although their plan and mode of life have changed in some respects in the interval, it is not unlikely that they remain to this day a fair example of the life of the Village Indians from Zuñi to Cuzco as it existed in the 16th century.”—Lewis H. Morgan, Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines, in Vol. IV, U. S. Geological Survey, Contributions to American Ethnology.
See Appendix I.
[6] An estado is 5 feet, 7 inches—about the height of an average man.
[7] W. W. H. Davis, in his history of New Mexico, says ten acres in area—which must be either a slip or a misprint.
[8] George Wharton James, Land of the Delight Makers.
[9] Descriptions of Ácoma are in Bancroft, Native Races, Vol. IV, pp. 365, 366; Lummis, The California Magazine, January, 1892. Other references may be found in the bibliography, under Engelhardt, Hodge, Lummis, James, and Prince.
[10] For Ácoma,—George Wharton James, The Land of the Delight Makers.
[11] Called piki in Hopi, and hewe in Zuñi.
[12] According to Lummis, another reservoir on the southern mesa is reached by a toilful path up and down the craggy slope. We did not see this.
[13] Mt. Taylor, 11,389 feet high. At Ácoma it is called Spi-nat.
[14] Or else from twenty miles to the west from “the great frowning pine-fringed Mesa Prieta at whose feet lies the beautiful Vale of Cebollita.”—Hodge, Land of Sunshine, November, 1897.
[15] Land of Sunshine, Vol. 15, 1901, p. 320. The article is supplied with illustrations.
[16] Shelley, Daemon of the World.
[17] Hodge, Handbook of American Indians; also, Notes to Benavides Memorial. Lummis, Poco Tiempo; Spanish Pioneers.
[18] Goddard says Coronado’s Ácoma was partly burned in 1599 but that the village was not destroyed in the revolt of 1680, and therefore the walls now in use may be the same as those seen in 1540, partly rebuilt and repaired from time to time. Handbook—Indians of the Southwest, p. 73.
A writer in El Palacio for August, 1918, mentions a tradition that Ácoma has the only church that survived the rebellion of 1680, but says that authorities do not agree upon this and that Hodge declares no trace of the old edifice remains except the carved beams found in one of the houses of Middle Row. It would seem as if the letter of the commanding Spanish officer should clear away all confusion about this building.
[19] A fuller account may be read in El Palacio for January 1, 1925.
[20] An interesting article, Painting the Town Red, by Professor C. F. Crane, showing the relation of the color scarlet or some shade of red to burial wrappings and ceremonials, may be found in the Scientific Monthly for June, 1924. On pp. 612, 613, the author cites instances among the Sioux tribes in the eighteenth century.
[22] The Cheani are the medicine men or curative shamans, who are officers also of weather control.
[23] The Indian word is ha-chamoni, meaning “they take the breath.” It is invariably a notched stick with plumes attached, and is illustrated in Eleventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 78. See Appendix II.
[24] The Warrior Dance.
[25] Kasik is given as the Keres form of cacique.
[26] This is the same as the asa at Hopi or the ise at Laguna.
[27] To avoid confusion, it is wise to reserve the word kiva for the ceremonial chamber of the Indian pueblo, and estufa for the sweat-houses.
[28] Final Report, Pt. I, p. 268.
[29] Cosmos Mindeleff, Introduction to Eighth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. xxxi.
[30] Relación de Father Fray Francisco de Escobar, October, 1605. Also in Bandelier, Final Report, Pt. I, pp. 143-145.
[31] Description by Leslie Spier, Havasupai Days, in American Indian Life, edited by Elsie Clews Parsons.
[32] In certain tribes women have rites to perform that necessitate kivas for their special use.
[33] Lummis, The Land of Poco Tiempo.
[34] Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), The Soul of an Indian. An Interpretation.
[35] Translated by Alice Fletcher, in the Path on the Rainbow, edited by George Cronyn.
[36] The Coronado Expedition by Castañeda, Fourteenth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, translated by G. P. Winship; The Journey of Coronado, Trail Makers’ Series, 1904, translated by Winship; The Narrative of the Expedition of Coronado by Pedro de Castañeda, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, edited by F. W. Hodge.
[37] Doc. Inéd. de Indios, Vol. III, Relación du Voyage de Cíbola, translated by Ternaux Compans; abstract in English by Fewkes in Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology, Vol. III, 1892.
[38] Very exhaustive studies and excavations were made of Háwikuh by Frank Hamilton Cushing, between 1879 and 1888. His reports can be consulted in the Thirteenth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, and in separate monographs. There are later studies by Fewkes and Stevenson.
[39] Hodge affirms that Jaramillo and Zárate-Salmerón say it was Háwikuh. American Anthropologist, April, 1895.
[40] There are many spellings of this name. According to Hodge, “Ako” is the Indian form. See Appendix I.
[41] Winship, Coronado Expeditions, Chapter XII, p. 490. “They described some cows, which from a picture that one of them had painted on his skin seemed to be cows, although from the hides this seemed not to be possible, because the hair was woolly and snarled, so that we could not tell what sort of skins they had.”
Best brief account in Bolton, Spanish Borderlands.
[42] Castañeda.
[43] Translated by Winship, and included in each of his works on the expedition; also American History Leaflets, No. 13.
[44] Winship, The Coronado Expedition, pp. 491, 560, 569, 575.
[45] Between June 7 and July 10, 1540.
[46] Three reliable records exist of this entrada. The translations of Pedro de Bustamente, and another by Barrado and Escalante, may be read in Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest. A third by Gallegos, “The Scrivener,” is translated by Mecham: MS. thesis in the Bolton Collection.
[47] Two manuscripts recently discovered prove beyond question that the Father had been put to death by the Indians of the Sierra Morena or Sandía mountains before the soldiers returned to Mexico. The viceroy, we now know, had incorporated this information in his report to the Spanish King. Bolton was the first person to make use of this material. It was further elaborated by J. Lloyd Mecham in a thesis for the Master’s degree at the University of California. See also the article by Mecham on the “Death of Fray Santa María” in Catholic Historical Review, October, 1920.
[48] Querecho was a pueblo name for the buffalo-hunting Apache Indians east of New Mexico (Hodge, Handbook, II, 338).
[49] The snake dance is now characteristically a Hopi ceremony, where it is primarily a prayer for rain. It was formerly widespread among the pueblo tribes and traces of it are still found at Ácoma and other places.—Walter Hough, in Hodge, Handbook, II, 605, 606.
[50] Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 182, 183.
[51] Bureau of American Ethnology, Thirteenth Annual Report, 327.
[52] Historia de la Nuevo Mejico del Capitán Gaspar de Villagrá, Año 1610, Con privilegio. En Alcala por Luys Martínez Grande. Translated in part in Bancroft and in Read.
[53] Bancroft, Arizona and New Mexico.
[54] Historical Documents relating to New Mexico (edited by Charles Wilson Hackett, Ph.D., Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C.), pp. 264 et seq.
[55] Translated in Bancroft, Arizona and New Mexico.
[56] A religious inspector.
[57] The Crossing. Here the trail crossed the river and threaded the pass through the mountains. It was a crossing in a double sense.
[58] Canto XVI, translated in Read, History of New Mexico, p. 213.
[59] It may not be entirely beside the point to note here that this same Bernabé de las Casas, a few years after this event, projected an expedition across the country from the Rio Grande to drive the English out of Jamestown.
[60] Ytinerario de las Minas del Caxco. Translated by Bolton, in Spanish Exploration in the Southwest.
[61] Read, History of New Mexico, pp. 226, 227.
[62] Villagrá, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, Canto XXV. Translated in Read, pp. 229-231.
[63] From Villagrá, Folio 222. Translated by Mrs. N. V. Sanchez.
[64] Villagrá, Canto XXX.
[65] Engelhardt, Franciscan Herald, February, 1920.
[66] Villagrá, Historia, Canto XVIII, gives the weapons used by the Ácomas as shields of buckskin, bows and flint-tipped arrows, war-clubs, and a helmet of buffalo hide.
[67] Read, History of New Mexico, p. 229.
[68] No satisfactory translation of Villagrá’s narrative has yet appeared, and the writer is indebted for the material used in this paraphrase to Lummis, The Spanish Pioneers.
[69] This is, so far as known, the only mention of subterranean passages cut in the Rock. Do they still exist and are they used?
[70] American Historical Review, October, 1917.
[71] A translation of this remarkable account may be found in the article by Bourke, American Anthropologist, Vol. VIII, April, 1894.
[72] Perea served as custodian until 1633 or 1636, and during that period founded the church and monastery at Sandía, where he was buried.
[73] A graphic description of the discomforts of the “Jornado del Muerto” in 1888 may be read in The Land of the Pueblos, by Mrs. Lew Wallace.
[74] The name Robledo is still on the map, sixty miles above El Paso.
[75] The text gives the celebration as the “Pascua del Espiritú Santo.” Hodge and Lummis translate this as Easter, which would make the march from Robledo to Santa Fé, including the delay of four days, only a week in passing. In the Roman church the Feast of the Holy Spirit is Pentecost, the celebration of the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples of Christ, and comes fifty days after Easter. We need not infer that the party did not reach Santa Fé somewhat earlier than Pentecost, but only that it was this Holy Day they celebrated there.
[76] The Encyclopaedia Britannica gives no such places as Abasia or Mount Amar. It does speak of Amasia with an acropolis on a lofty cliff overhanging the town. This is a town in Anatolia (Turkey), splendidly situated in a narrow gorge on both sides of a river and eighty miles from its mouth. It contains remarkable antiquities such as the tombs of the kings of Pontus, described by Strabo. (Illustrated in the National Geographic Magazine, July, 1918, in article “Under the Heel of the Turk.”)
[77] Translated by Mrs. E. E. Ayer in Land of Sunshine, Vol. XIII.
[78] Vetancur, Menológio Seráfico, IV, pp. 246-248.
[79] C. W. Hackett, Revolt of the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico in 1680; (The Quarterly of Texas State Historical Association, October, 1911). Prince, A Concise History of New Mexico; Read, History of New Mexico; W. H. H. Davis, The Spanish Conquest of New Mexico.
[80] Apach-u, a Piman word meaning “man.”
[81] This method of reckoning time has been observed in many countries and in all ages. Herodotus describes it as a device of Darius for the Ionian chiefs: Boturini found it among the relics of ancient Mexico, and in the Polynesian islands it has not yet altogether disappeared. According to Fiske, the Spaniards were “astonished at seeing how many things the Peruvians could record with their quipus (knotted cords).” Discovery of America, Vol. II, pp. 298-300.
[82] The Navajo, Havasupai and Walapai use knotted cords to-day in just this way to keep account of time, but not for other purposes.
[83] La Toma is within the present limits of Texas near the monastery of Guadalupe.
[84] Hackett, p. 155.
[85] Hackett, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
[86] Vetancur gives a list of all the missions as they existed just before the Revolt with valuable details about some of them. Of Ácoma he says it was dedicated to S. Estévan on a peñol east of Sía. It was one league in circumference and had fifteen hundred inhabitants who had been converted by Fray Juan Ramírez. “In 1680 they put to death their padre, Fray Lucas Maldonado, native of Tribujona of the same province.” Vetancur, Crónica, III.
[87] Escalante, Carta, 122, 123, translated in Bancroft, Arizona and New Mexico, Vol. XVII, footnote to p. 185.
[88] Between 1680-1692 we have the record of Don Carlos de Siguënza y Góngora, Mercurio Volante, Mexico, 1693. In this the number of soldiers is given as nine. Translated by Read, History of New Mexico, p. 288.
[89] From the Journals of De Vargas printed in translation in Ola Santa Fé, January, 1914, and October, 1916; Bandelier, Final Report, Part II, pp. 215, 216, also gives some details. Also in Twitchell, Some Leading Facts in New Mexico History.
[90] The same L’Archeveque who, when a younger man, traitorously helped to assassinate his leader La Salle in 1687. Now in middle age, he was serving Spain, and in the Franco-Hispanic War of 1720 he was sent on an errand to the junction of the North and South Platte rivers, where he met his death in a surprise attack on the Pawnee Indians just as he was breaking camp to return to Santa Fé.
[91] Bancroft, Arizona and New Mexico, p. 226.
[92] A letter to the Procurador-General, Fray José Miguel de los Ríos, from Father Trigo, July 23, 1754, concerning the Christian and political government of the mission of San Pedro and San Pablo in New Mexico.
[93] A fanega equals two and one-half bushels.
[94] An almud equals one-fifth of a bushel.
[95] For this and the preceding items the writer is indebted to Miss E. M. Healey (MS. thesis), University of California, Department of History.
[96] Good accounts are in James, Land of Delight Makers, and Prince, Spanish Mission Churches of New Mexico. It is this building upon which were based the designs for the exhibition house of New Mexico at the San Diego exposition in 1915-16, as well as part of the new art museum in Santa Fé.
[97] Elliott Coues, On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer.
[98] Lummis, Some Strange Corners of our Country, Chapter XXII, and Mesa, Cañon and Pueblo, Chapter XXIX; Twitchell, Spanish Archives of New Mexico, pp. 458-462.
[99] The Judge was Hon. Kirby Benedict, in early manhood a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, who was in 1858 appointed Chief Justice of New Mexico. A second judgment of his given in favor of Ácoma was a case of some celebrity. Several citizens of New Mexico sought to recover a sum of money on account of there having been delivered to the pueblo one hundred and sixty-six years previously the title deeds to its lands in New Mexico, for which these New Mexicans claimed the Indians of Ácoma had agreed to pay. The verdict of the Justice is a delicious piece of irony and satire, qualities for which he was renowned. Old Santa Fé, July, 1913, pp. 75-81.
[100] MS. as yet unpublished in English, in the Bolton Collection.
[101] In The Indian’s Book, recorded and edited by Natalie Curtis Burlin.
[102] W. H. Ketcham, 1919, Indian agent for the Rio Grande Pueblos.
[103] Op. cit.
[104] Report, Department of the Interior, September 30, 1905.
[105] Senate Bill 3855—commonly known as the Bursum Indian Land Bill.
[106] It is but the obverse of the shield of 1680, when “Otermín called a council of war at which it was decided that it would be better to die fighting than of starvation and hunger.”—Hackett.
[107] Fynn, The American Indian as a Product of Environment, p. 62.
[108] F. J. Turner, The Frontier in American History. Elsie Clews Parsons, Laguna Genealogies. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. VIII, 1923. See Appendix III.
[109] Cushing, Thirteenth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, pp. 352-358. A “parallel example of the influence of salt sources on the movements of primitive peoples may be found in that all the great historic trade routes across Asia were first established along salt trails of prehistoric times.”
[110] Fewkes, Twenty-eighth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 160.
[111] The Spanish word “pueblo,” meaning village, was given by the early explorers to any group of habitations, but it has to-day a derived and technical significance, restricted to a communal village, with separated but adjacent apartments in house-blocks, which, while providing privacy, are more easily defended than are isolated houses.
[112] Fewkes, Twenty-eighth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, pp. 158, 159.
[113] Fewkes, Prehistoric Ruins in Gila Valley. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collection, Vol. LII.
[114] Leslie Spier, Anthropological Papers of The American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XVIII.
[115] Fewkes, Preliminary Report on Navajo National Monument, Arizona, 1911.
[116] Edgar L. Hewett, Communautés Anciennes dans le Désert Americain. See Appendix IV.
[117] Cosmos Mindeleff, Localization of Tusayán Clans. Nineteenth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, Pt. II.
[118] Stevenson, The Sía. Eleventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology.
[119] Bolton, De Mézières, Vol. II, pp. 279, 280, contains a vivid description of the use of the buffalo. A valuable sketch of migrations appears in Kroeber, Introduction to American Indian Life, edited by Elsie Clews Parsons.
[120] Fewkes, Twenty-second Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 194.
[121] Winship, Fourteenth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology.
[122] The other pueblos of the Keresan nation are San Felipe, Santo Domingo, Santa Ana, Cochití, Sía, and to the west, near Ácoma, is Laguna, her daughter colony. “The Keresans are referred to in the creation legend of Zuñi, as ‘The Drinkers of the Dew,’ because their houses were scattered abroad on hills remote from water” “Cushing.”
[123] According to Hopi legend, clans called the Tcá-ma-hia left Snake clans at Wukoki, a ruin on the Little Colorado, still visible fifty miles west of the East mesa of Hopi. From here they made their way east to Ácoma, where they met other clans from the east, which were in all probability also Keresan. See Appendix V.
[124] Nineteenth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, Pt. II.
[125] Investigations Among American Indians, Pt. I, p. 34. But in Pt. II, p. 31, he refers to Taos, apparently a contradiction to the foregoing statement: “Taos, built on both sides of the swift and cool Rio de Taos, is the only village in New Mexico, ancient or modern, the situation of which corresponds with Castañeda’s description and location.”
[126] Mrs. Matilda Cox Stevenson, Eleventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology.
[127] Cebollita, a large stone pueblo surrounded by a noble stone wall already deserted and forgotten in Coronado’s days. The Keres Pueblos still tell the legend of their “Año de la Lumbre,” the year of fire, when their forbears were driven out of this valley by the river of lava that flowed over the region (Lummis).
[128] Bandelier, Final Report, II, 324.
[129] From the Relación of Fray Marcos, Bandelier quotes, after describing Marata and Totonteac: “There is also another very large province and kingdom, named Acus. There is also Ahacus, and that word, with aspiration, is one of the Seven Cities, the largest of them all; and Acus, without aspiration, is a province by itself.”
[130] The Indians conceal information of all sorts about the various ruins, near and far, for knowledge of these ruins is often sacred and the prerogative of special branches of their ritual organization. Moreover, enquiring students are sometimes further baffled by the faking of ceremonial celebrations at unusual seasons for their special benefit.
[131] Fewkes, American Journal of Art and Archaeology, Vol. IV. See Appendix VI.
[132] Mrs. Stevenson also says that Sía has an Oraibí legend of a time when its tribe did not live as now upon the third mesa of Hopi.
[133] American Anthropologist, April, 1895, Vol. VIII.
[134] Journal of American Ethnology and Art, Vol. IV. More briefly given in Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, Vol. XIX, Pt. II.
[135] A great variety of models of Hopi sand pictures may be seen at the Field Museum in Chicago.
[136] After leaving Si-pa-pu, the mythical place of origin in the north, the Ácomas traditionally occupied: 1. Kashkachuti; 2. Washpashuka; 3. Kuchtya; 4. Tsiama; 5. Tapitsíama; 6. Katzímo (the Enchanted Mesa) three miles northward from the Crag of Ácoma.
According to certain legends collected by Dr. E. L. Hewett from San Juan, the Keresans did not originate, as most of the others did, at Si-pa-pu, but at Cueva (the hole or cave) in Taos country. Dr. Parsons was once told at Ácoma that Si-pa-pu was “north of Taos” and at another time that it was at “Los Vegas.” Dr. Hewett also visited a brackish lake in the sand dunes north of Alamosa, Colorado, which the greater mass of legend identifies with Si-pa-pu. The road was treacherous from quicksands, and so fast did the dunes shift that they were hardly recognizable from week to week. Though this is not a volcanic region, the small lake of very black, forbidding-looking water was much like crater lakes. It measured about 300 feet across and emitted an offensive odor. There was a continuous line of dead cattle on its shores and no settlements within many miles. See Haeberlein for Si-pa-pu, in Memoirs of the Anthropological Association, Vol. III, 1916.
[137] Lummis puts this into a charming form in his collection of stories, A New Mexico David.
[138] Idem, Land of Poco Tiempo.
[139] Agnes C. Laut, Through our Unknown Southwest.
[140] “The Disenchanted Mesa,” Harper’s Weekly, August 28, 1897. Also in The Princeton Press, August 21, 1897. See Appendix VII.
[141] Hodge, Land of Sunshine, November, 1897; also Century Magazine, Vol. LVI, 1898.
[142] Kroeber, Introduction to American Indian Life, edited by Elsie Clews Parsons.
[143] Kroeber, Zuñi Kin and Clan.
[144] Elsie Clews Parsons, Laguna Genealogies, American Museum Anthropological Papers, Vol. XIX, Pt. V, 1923. Kroeber, Zuñi Kin and Clan, American Museum Anthropological Papers, Vol. XVIII, Pt. II.
[145] Mrs. M. C. Stevenson, The Zuñi Indian (Bureau of American Ethnology, Twenty-third Annual Report). See also Bureau of American Ethnology, Ninth Annual Report, p. 116. Kroeber, Zuñi Kin and Clan.
[146] Kroeber, op. cit.
[147] Part of the feeling about the ettowe-iyatik type of fetish is the extreme reluctance to disturb it, or to remove it; so that as long as there is a woman who can be trusted to safeguard the fetish properly in its house, i.e., to feed it, and to preclude intrusion, the fetish will be left in the house it is associated with. On the other hand, it is the men who are supposed to know the songs and prayers associated with the fetish. Elsie Clews Parsons, Laguna Genealogies, American Museum Anthropological Papers, Vol. VIII, 1923. See Appendix VIII.
[148] A. L. Kroeber, “Thoughts on Zuñi Religion,” Holmes Memorial Volume.
[149] Full discussions of his functions in Bandelier, Final Report, Pt. I, 278 et seq.
[150] There is a good account of this ceremony and duty in a story called The Flute of the Gods, by Marah Ellis Ryan, which gives a vivid impression of what is probably true of many of the tribes.
[151] A word meaning “person in authority.” One informant told the writer that any officer may be called hócheni.
[152] Because of the scarcity of game all through the pueblo region, save only in the mountains behind Taos, the rabbit hunt is now the only one pursued.
[153] A very holy shrine of the war captains of Laguna is southeast of Ácoma, an entirely detached mound, and Dr. Parsons was told by the sister of the Osach cheani (Sun medicine man) that it would be visited by men of Ácoma, Zuñi, and other towns. This is described in figures in American Anthropologist, Vol. XX, No. 4, p. 382. There are also beautiful illustrations of war feather-sticks.
[154] American Anthropologist, Vol. XX.
[155] Final Report, Pt. I, p. 285.
[156] “Antelope Clan in Keresan Customs and Myths,” Man, December, 1917.
[157] Notes on Ácoma and Laguna, American Anthropologist, Vol. XX.
[158] This sketch outlines only the barest essentials of the winter festival. Anyone interested in more detail should read the careful description by Dr. Parsons.
[159] George Gwyther, M.D., in the Overland Monthly, March, 1871, p. 265.
[160] Natalie Curtis Burlin, The Indians’ Book.
[161] T. T. Waterman, The Explanatory Element in the Folk-Tales of the North American Indians, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XVII. Folk-tales are the art of fiction, in its varied “forms of satire and humor, romance, adventure” (Alexander).
[162] A. M. Espinosa. Collected by Miss Matilda Allen, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXVII, 1914.
[163] Cushing, Zuñi Folk-Tales.
[164] A ruin at the foot of the mesa on which Ácoma is built. It lies on the eastern side. It is where their ancestors lived, the people say, before they built on the mesa.—E. C. Parsons, in Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXXI, No. 120, April-June, 1918.
[165] “Pueblo-Indian Folk-Tales, Probably of Spanish Provenience,” by Elsie Clews Parsons. No. 7, “Forgetting the Song; Inside the Lizard” (Ácoma). The Journal of American Folk-Lore, April-June, 1918 (Vol. XXXI, No. 120), pp. 225, 226.
[166] Elsie Clews Parsons, op. cit., pp. 219, 220.
[167] Collected by Miss Matilda Allen for Professor Espinosa.
[168] Presumably because Pascual did all the work.
[169] Because he had been told to do everything that others did.
[170] “No señor, no se dan, se venden.”
[171] “No señor, no cresen, las gaïnas los ponen.”
[172] El Palacio (Paul A. F. Walter, Editor), Vol. XI, No. 11 (December 1, 1921), pp. 141, 142.
[173] Fynn, The American Indian as a Product of Environment.
[174] J. W. Powell, Introduction to F. W. Cushing, Zuñi Folk-Tales.
[175] Franz Boas, Mythology and Folk-Tales of North American Indians, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXVII (1914).
[176] John R. Swanton, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXIII, 1910.
[177] Matilda Coxe Stevenson, “The Sía,” Eleventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology.
[178] Alexander suggests that the uncannily large earth-nesting spiders which abound in this region may have caused the spider to be called the Earth Goddess wherever it is considered a female.
[179] There is a charming folk-tale of the sun myth in Katharine B. Judson, Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest.
[180] Here is no doubt the origin of an Indian custom in many tribes. When old men part, you see each take the other’s hand to his mouth and breathe upon it; and when they smoke they blow the first six puffs to the six different directions of the universe. See Appendix IX.
[181] Eleventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology.
[182] Death meant the end of life on this earth and of certain kinds of intercourse between the dead and living individuals, “but not by any means a cessation of all kinds of intercourse” (Boas, Mythology and Folk-Tales of the North American Indians).
[183] J. D. C. Pellow, Parentalia.
[184] John T. Short, North Americans of Antiquity, pp. 333, et seq. See also Sir J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, Chapter II of the abridged edition, 1922.
[185] The best-known of all such tales is that of “Quetzlcoatl” of the Mexicans, familiarized by Lew Wallace under the title, The Fair God. An interesting theory of the origin of this culture-hero is by Dominick Daly, in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XXXIX, 1891.
[186] Readers are very naturally bewildered by the name, which is the same as that of the monarch whom Cortés overcame and destroyed. The two were not the same, since, according to the Pueblos, their god Montezuma was among them before ever they had known of Mexico, but, after the Roman Church crushed the native religions of Peru and Mexico, Montezuma the king and Montezuma the mythical high priest became somewhat confused in their legendary history.
[187] Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnaissance of New Mexico, 1846-47, p. 64.
[188] Morgan, Contributions to North American Ethnology, Vol. IV, pp. 151-153. Good account of “Montezuma of the Pueblos” in Bancroft Native Races, Vol. III, p. 171, et seq.
“All [the Pueblos] held Montezuma to be their perpetual Sovereign.”—Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 1831-39.
[189] Bandelier, Final Report, Pt. I, p. 262, and “The Montezuma of the Pueblo Indians,” American Anthropologist, October, 1892, where the matter of the Mexican servants is treated.
[190] Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 190.
[191] See Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXIII; also Bandelier, Final Report, Pt. I, p. 306.
[192] Bourke says that in November, 1881, when he was at Zuñi, an old chief who talked Spanish told him that “in the day of long ago all the Pueblos, Moqui, Zuñi, Ácoma, Laguna, Jémez and others had the religion of human sacrifice, at the time of the Feast of Fire when the days were shortest. The victim had his throat cut and blood was allowed to flow freely but he generally recovered. Although the Mexicans undertook to prevent this ceremony, a modified form persisted for a long time thereafter.” Snake Dance of the Moquis, p. 164. Hodge, on the contrary, rejects emphatically the idea that human sacrifice ever existed among the Pueblos. He says, “It is just the kind of thing the Indian loves to pour into the eager ears of too gullible whites when they had the effrontery to pry too familiarly into their beliefs; but what fun they had the next moment among themselves. Give a Pueblo Indian a hint of the kind of answer you are seeking and he will accommodate you to the fullest extent.”
[193] Elsie Clews Parsons, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXXI, pp. 260, 261; “Mothers and Children at Laguna,” Man, March, 1919; Full description of maternity myths in American Anthropologist, Vol. XX; “Mother and Children at Zuñi,” Man, November, 1919; “Zuñi Conception and Pregnancy Beliefs” (19th International Cong. Americanists, 1915).
[194] Undoubtedly corrupted Spanish for Santo (Saint).
[195] Cushing gives a long list of these charming names never used by white visitors.
[196] A wild, ugly-looking man, or animal, that frightens bad boys; hence any terrible-looking person who frightens others is “el coco.” It is in general use in Spanish literature, “meterle el coco a una persona” (Espinosa, in Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vols. XXIII and XXIX).
[197] In Zuñi an exactly similar character is A’Doshle, though Harrington refers to him as Tsabije or t’ete (grandfather) (Elsie Clews Parsons, Zuñi A’Doshle and Suüke, in American Anthropologist, Vol. XVIII, 1916).
[198] In Holland on St. Nicholas Day, December 5, there is a tradition and a ceremony performed very similar to the Agüelo. In Brittany also there is the same curious custom.
[199] Paul Radin, Religion of North American Indians, Anthropology in North America.
[200] Clark Wissler, The American Indian.
[201] Charles Alexander Eastman, The Soul of an Indian, An Interpretation.
[202] H. B. Alexander, Introduction to North American, in Mythology of all Races, Vol. I, p. xvi.
[203] One of the most careful and interesting accounts of the dual worship of the sun and of the Christian God is in U. S. Geological Survey, Contributions to Ethnology, Vol. IV, pp. 151, 152, by Lewis H. Morgan, who had all his information from native men.
[204] “The conception of deities is quite clearly due to shamanistic systematization.... It is very rare to find any belief in a single supreme deity; when it does occur it is a thoroughly shamanistic construction out of some popular belief.”—Franz Boas, Mythology and Folk-Lore of North American Indians, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XVII, 1914. See Appendix X.
[205] Second Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 11.
[206] “The most highly developed priesthood north of Mexico is among the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona where it controls the civil and military branches of the tribe, transforming it into a theocratic oligarchy.”—Swanton, Handbook of American Indians, Pt. II, p. 523.
[207] Frazer, The Golden Bough (abridged edition, 1922), pp. 61-80.
[208] Kroeber, Anthropology, p. 368.
[209] The placing of “symbolic objects so that they convey the wishes of the worshipper to the Powers,” is found only among the Pueblos (Franz Boas, Mythology and Folk-Tales, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XVII).
[210] See Appendix XI.
[211] Cushing, Fewkes, et al., Second Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology. See Appendix XII.
[212] One of the finest petroglyphs as yet found is at Tscherige, on the north side of the Pajarito Plateau. It is the plumed serpent, seven feet long, etched on the rock by a stone tool.
[213] Brinton has an interesting passage on this subject in his Myths of the New World.
[214] H. K. Haeberlein, The Idea of Fertilization in Pueblos, Memoirs of the Anthropological Association.
[215] Pliny E. Goddard, The Masked Dancers of the Apache.
[216] Brinton, Myths of the New World, Chapter V; Fynn, The American Indian as a Product of Environment, pp. 186-188.
[217] Mrs. Zelia Nuttall, Old and New World Civilizations. See Appendix XIII.
[218] The Shiwanna are masked dancers representing cloud spirits or rain-makers. The oldest of all esoteric fraternities.
[219] Father Noël Dumarest, Notes on Cochití, translated and edited by Elsie Clews Parsons in Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, Vol. VI, 1920.
[220] Dumarest, pp. 164, 165.
[221] A. M. Espinosa, articles on Witchcraft in New Mexican Spanish Folk-Lore, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXIII, 1910, and Vol. XXIX, 1916.
[222] Eleventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 73.
[223] In North America the shamanistic theory is purely animistic; whether or not anthropomorphic seems to be relatively of small consequence (Franz Boas, Mythology and Folk-Tales, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. VII).
[224] Paul Radin, The Religion of the North American Indian, Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXVII, 1914.
[225] Bancroft, History of the United States, Vol. II, p. 423.
[226] In southeastern Europe ceremonies are observed to-day for the purpose of making rain (Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged edition, p. 69).
[227] Mrs. Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Monograph on the Religious Life of the Zuñi Child, Fifth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology.
[228] H. B. Alexander, Introduction to North American, in Mythology of all Races, Vol. I, p. xvi.
[229] See Cushing, Creation of Corn, Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, Vol. XIII, pp. 376, 377.
[230] Journal of Ethnology and Archaeology, Vol. II, p. 5.
[231] Introduction, The Path on the Rainbow, edited by G. W. Cronyn.
[232] Fasting is par excellence the characteristic method of superinducing religious feeling in order to bring about a state of mind in which the world of sense-impressions was shut out and in which auto-suggestion or hallucinations were predominant (Boas).
For one ceremony at Taos eighteen months of self-isolation is exacted of the priests, when no message from family or home is permitted, whatever the emergency.
[233] “Whenever anyone is being named anew, or assuming a new personality or office he is invariably sprinkled or washed that he be cleanly revealed and the better recommended in his new guise and character to the gods and spirits invoked for the occasion.”—Cushing, Thirteenth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 335.
Hair-washing is an indispensable preliminary of almost all Pueblo ceremonials. Hair-clipping of boys has been almost unknown. When, for any reason it was done, the cuttings were burned; if thrown out, it was thought that health and fortune had been scattered to the four winds. But now that the Indian children are sent to American schools in distant cities, one sees many boys and young men with the familiar “military cut.”
[234] Elsie Clews Parsons, Anthropological Papers, American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XIX, Pt. 4, 1920.
[235] American Anthropologist, Elsie Clews Parsons, Vols. XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX; Man, December, 1917, March, November, 1919; Anthropological Papers, American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XIX, Pt. V; Memoirs of American Anthropological Association, Vol. VI, No. 3, 1920; Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXXI.
[236] American Anthropologist, Vol. XVI, 1914.
[237] Eleventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology.
[238] Fewkes says that, while it is as yet impossible to determine the priority of Tusayán or Keresan snake dances, he is positive that the songs and incantations are more ancient than other elements of that ceremonial. “Legends say that the Snake dance is the Cult of the oldest people of Tusayán”; which means, among other things, “that the original Tusayán Cult has kinship with that of the Keresan, the oldest of the linguistic stocks of the pueblos.”—Comparison of Sía and Tusayán Ceremonials, American Anthropologist, Vol. VIII, April, 1892, p. 132.
[239] Best description in G. W. James, New Mexico, Land of Delight Makers.
[240] The officiating priest lives at Laguna, and goes to Ácoma only for the Feast of St. Stephen and on All Souls’ Day; but he is at the farm-colony of Acomita twice every month.
[241] Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXXI. Apparently a somewhat movable fiesta, always announced four days in advance by the Saint’s Crier. He also calls out that now it is time to bring in the wood. A portion of whatever is cooked that day is thrown on the house fire for ahappa awan tewa (“the dead their day”). These words, by the way, are Zuñi in origin.
[242] Ibid., Vol. XXII.
[243] Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXXI.
[244] This dance and ceremony are fully described by Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, in American Anthropologist, Vol. XX, N.S., 1918.
[245] American Anthropologist, Vol. XX, N. S., 1918.
[246] Stevenson, Eleventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, pp. 14, 67.
[247] Stewart Culin in Twenty-fourth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902-03.
[248] Culin, pp. 119-124.
[249] Hodge, American Anthropologist, Vol. III, 1890. Owens, Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XXXIX, 1891. Stevenson, American Anthropologist, n.s., Vol. V, 1903.
[250] The Gallo Race, in Lummis, A New Mexican David.
[251] John G. Owens writes that on the banks of the Zuñi River “you will behold a sight which for genuine mirth and romp will surpass any Eastern park for children. The stream less than ten feet wide winds through a sandy river-bed, which is the chief playground of the Zuñi child.” This spirit of play stays with the boys in later life but the girls age very rapidly—“the transition is from joyous frolicsome girlhood to sedate sober womanhood” after they are 13 to 14 years old. (Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XXXIX, 1891.)
[252] American Anthropologist, Vol. V, n.s., 1903.
[253] Culin, Twenty-fourth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology.
[254] Bandelier, Final Report, Pt. I, p. 295.
[255] Clark Wissler, The American Indian, p. 68.
[256] W. H. Holmes, Fourth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1882-83.
[257] H. W. Henshaw, Second Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 124.
[258] Boas thinks representative decorative art, and geometric decoration are indications of two different sources of artistic activity which tend to merge into a development of graphic and plastic arts.
[259] Fourth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 445.
[260] Fourth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 510 (section on Decorative Symbolism).
[261] Ibid.
[262] Fewkes, Twenty-second Annual Report, and Thirty-third Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology.
[263] Second Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1880-81.
[264] See Hodge, Handbook of American Indians, 1902.
[265] See Wissler, The American Indian, pp. 239-241.
[266] President’s address, 1911, New York Academy of Sciences.