During the earlier years of my life with the Zuñi Indians of western-central New Mexico, from the autumn of 1879 to the winter of 1881—before access to their country had been rendered easy by the completion of the Atlantic and Pacific railroad,—they remained, as regards their social and religious institutions and customs and their modes of thought, if not of daily life, the most archaic of the Pueblo or Aridian peoples. They still continue to be, as they have for centuries been, the most highly developed, yet characteristic and representative of all these people.
In fact, it is principally due to this higher development by the Zuñi, than by any of the other Pueblos, of the mytho-sociologic system distinctive in some measure of them all at the time of the Spanish conquest of the southwest, that they have maintained so long and so much more completely than any of the others the primitive characteristics of the Aridian phase of culture; this despite the fact that, being the descendants of the original dwellers in the famous "Seven Cities of Cibola," they were the earliest known of all the tribes within the territory of the United States. Like the other Pueblos, the Zuñians, when discovered, were found living in segregated towns; but unlike the other groups (each separate community of any one of which was autonomous except on rare occasions) they were permanently and closely confederated in both a political and hierarchical sense. In other words, all their subtribes and lesser towns were distinctively related to and ruled from a central tribe and town through priest-chiefs, representative of each of them, sitting under the supreme council or septuarchy of the "master priests of the house" in the central town itself, much as were the divisions and cities of the great Inca dominion in South America represented at and ruled from Cuzco, the central city and province of them all.
It thus happened that, although one or another of the Zuñi subtribes was at different times partially and temporarily conquered by the Spaniards, they were never as a whole people subdued; and, although missions and chapels were ultimately established at one and another of their towns by the Franciscan friars, they were never all of them immediately under mission influence and surveillance at any one time until a comparatively recent date. The evidences and tragic consequences of this may be traced throughout the history of Spanish intercourse, and as the measure of its effect in minimizing the influence of Spanish thought and example on Zuñi culture and habits is of great importance in determining to what extent the following sacred myths may be regarded as purely aboriginal, a brief outline of this history is regarded as desirable.
The first discovered of the Seven Cities of Cibola or Zuñiland, called by the Zuñis themselves Shíwona, was by native account the most easterly of their towns, the K‘yä´kime of tradition and the Caquima of later Spanish record. According also to native tradition it was entered by Estevanico, the negro spy of Fray Marcos de Niza, and the Black Mexican of Zuñi story, in the spring of 1539. The negro was forthwith killed by the inhabitants; but the friar, following him shortly after, saw from the mesa heights to the southward one of the seven villages, and, making good his escape, reported his discovery to the viceroy of Mexico, Don Antonio de Mendoza.
Only a year later the largest of the westerly towns, Háwik’uh (Aquico) was stormed and its inhabitants partly subdued, partly driven away to the great tribal stronghold, Thunder mountain, by that valiant knight, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, and his vanguard of hardy mail-clad soldiers. The little army occupied as headquarters, for several months, the town they had captured, and later the more numerous rear of the army were quartered at the more central and eastern town of Mátsaki (Muzaque). During this time Coronado and his comrades in arms were able to reassure and pacify the natives, insomuch that when, two years afterward, they were returning through Zuñiland en route to Mexico from the conquests of the farther Pueblos and their vain search for the golden province of Quivira, they were entreated to remain and join the tribes. But Fray Juan de Padilla, the heroic priest of the expedition, had found more fertile fields to the eastward, and only three or four Mexican Indian allies of the Spaniards were fain to stay.
When, in 1581-'82, Francisco Chamuscado and his 9 soldiers recklessly penetrated those vast and lonely wilds of the southwest (in 1888 I sketched his graven signature and those of many of his successors on El Moro, or the Rock Mesa of Inscriptions, 35 miles east of Zuñi) and passed through the country of Cibola, he was not hindered by its people. And when Antonio de Espejo, in 1582, with scarcely more of a company, was on his way toward Tusayan or the Hopi country, in the northwest, he stopped at the central town of Alona (Hálona) and was well received. To this day the marks, said by the Zuñis to have been made by the "iron bonnets of his tall warriors," are shown on the rafters of one of the low, still used prehistoric rooms facing the great northern court (once the central and main one) of Zuñi, and attest to the hospitality so long ago accorded them there.
Again, in the autumn of 1598, Juan de Oñate and his more considerable force of soldiers and priests, after their general tour of formal conquest in the other Pueblo provinces, were met as they approached the Zuñi towns by delegations of singing priests and warriors, and were received with such showers of white prayer-meal on entering that they had to protect themselves from these offerings, as they supposed, of peace. This incident, and that of the ceremonial hunt and feast given them afterward, signifies conclusively the estimation in which, up to that time, the Spaniards had been held by the priestly elders of Zuñiland. Precisely as the returning Kâ´kâkwe, or mythic-dance dramatists, personating gods and heroes of the olden time are received twice yearly (before and after the harvest growth and time), so were these soldiers and friars received, not as enemies nor as aliens, but as veritable gods or god-men, coming forth at the close of autumn from out the land of day, whence come the ripening breaths of the Frost gods!
As yet, the Franciscan friars, although sometimes baptizing scores of the Zuñi—much to their gratification, doubtless, as quite appropriate behavior on the part of such beings when friendly,—had not antagonized their ancient observances or beliefs; and the warriors who accompanied them had never, since the first of them had come, and after fighting had laid down their dreadful arms and made peace and left hostages, albeit mortals like themselves, with their forefathers—had never again raised their fearful batons of thunder and fire or their long blades of blue metal like lightning.
But all this was soon to change. When, nearly a quarter of a century later still, Fray Alonzo de Benavides became father-custodian of New Mexico, he undertook to establish missions throughout the country. More than twenty missionaries were introduced into the Pueblo provinces by him, and soon afterward Esteban de Perea brought thirty more from Spain and old Mexico. Among the latter were Fray Martin de Arvide and Fray Francisco de Letrado. Fray Letrado was assigned to Zuñi some time after 1628. By the end of the following year the Indians had built for him at Hálona the little Church of the Purification or of the Immaculate Virgin, and at Háwik’uh the church and conventual residence of the Immaculate Conception.
Fray Francisco was an old man and very zealous. Unquestionably, he antagonized the native priests. It is as certain that, at first welcoming him, they gradually came to look upon his religion as no less that of mortal men than their own, and to regard its magic and power of appeal to the gods as of small account in the making of rain or the quelling of war and sorcery. Wherefore, although baptized by dozens as they had been, they brooked but ill the compulsory attendance at mass and other observances and the constant interferences of the father and his soldiers (for a small escort, unluckily, accompanied him) with their own acts of worship. When in the winter of 1630 Fray Martin de Arvide joined Fray Letrado at Háwik’uh, on the way to establish missions among the Zipias, a pueblo people said by the Zuñis to have lived considerably to the southwestward of them at that time, and called by them Tsípiakwe ("People-of-the-coarse-hanging-hair"), he foresaw for his brother and himself speedy martyrdom. He had but fairly departed when, on the Sunday following, the people delayed attending mass, and Fray Francisco, going forth to remonstrate with them, met a party of the native religionists armed with bows and arrows and in mood so menacing that in expectancy of death he knelt where he had stood, clinging to his crucifix, and, continuing to entreat them, was transfixed by many arrows.
Thus speedily was slain the first resident priest of Zuñi; thus were the Zuñis themselves disillusionized of their belief in the more than mortal power of the Spaniard and the deific character of his religion; for they broke up the ornaments of the altar, burned the church, and then sallied forth to follow Fray Martin. They overtook him at night five days later, attacked his party while in camp, overawed and killed outright his two soldiers, and, joined by his traitorous "Christian Indians," one of whom, a half-blood, cut off his hand and scalped him, they killed also this venerable friar and hastened back to their town. There the ceremonial of the scalp dances of initiation were performed over the scalps of the two friars, an observance designed both as a commemoration of victory and to lay the ghosts of the slain by completing the count of their unfinished days and making them members by adoption of the ghostly tribe of Zuñi. The scalp-dance is also supposed to proclaim in song, unto the gods and men, that thenceforward their people are of the enemy, and unto the gods of the enemy that the gods of Zuñi are victors over them, whereof and wherefore it will be well for them to beware. Thus the estimation in which the Spaniard, and especially his religious representatives, were ever afterward to be held was fixed on those fatal days at the close of February, 1630.
Now again, after this demonstration, the Zuñis, as in the days of the great flood, when men had disobeyed the gods, as when Coronado advanced on Háwik’uh, so soon as they had completed the rites of purifying and baptizing the scalps, betook themselves to Thunder mountain and thereon intrenched themselves.
It was not until after two years had passed that they were attacked there, but not overcome, by Tomas de Albizu and his soldiery and induced by the priests who accompanied him, and whom the Indians, knowing them to be unarmed, allowed to approach, to hold parley. It is probable that Don Tomas, finding it impossible to storm their rock successfully, promised that if they would yield the wretched mestizo who had cut off the hand and torn away the scalp of Fray Martin, he and his people would leave them in peace. At any rate, the mutilator of the friar was yielded, and in due course was hanged by the Spanish authorities.
Then gradually the Zuñis descended from their stronghold and a few years later were peacefully reoccupying the largest four of their towns. More than thirty years elapsed before the missions of the Purification at Hálona and the Immaculate Conception at Háwik’uh were reestablished. In 1670 Fray Juan Galdo was the resident priest at the one, and at the other Fray Pedro de Avila y Ayala. But in the autumn of the year named a numerous band of Apache-Navajo attacked the town of Háwik’uh, and, making for the lower courts where stood the church and convent, they dragged Fray Avila from the altar, at which he had sought refuge, clinging to the cross and an image of the Virgin, and, stripping him, beat him to death with one of the church bells at the foot of the cross in the courtyard hard by. They then plundered and burned the church, threw the image of the Virgin into the flames, and, transfixing the body of the priest with more than 200 arrows, cast upon it stones and the carcasses of three dead lambs. The mutilated corpse was thus found the following day by Fray Galdo and carried to Hálona for sepulture in the Church of the Purification there.
After this tragic occurrence the pueblo of Háwik’uh was abandoned by the missionaries and for a short time at least by its native inhabitants as well. Nevertheless, it seems highly probable that other Zuñis, if not indeed some of the townspeople themselves, had to do with the tragic affair just related, for there is no evidence that, although the people of Háwik’uh were numerous, any of them came to the rescue of the father, or that their town was sacked, whereas the church was plundered and burned.
They do not seem, however, to have done injury to the priest of Hálona, for just previously to the summer of 1680 when they, in common with all the other Pueblo Indians, joined in the revolt against Spanish rule and religion, they were tolerating the presence of Fray Juan de Bal at this town and of another priest, it seems, at Háwik’uh.
When the message strands of that great war magician, Popé of Taos, who had planned the rebellion and sent forth the knotted strings of invitation and warning, were received by the Zuñis, their leaders of one accord consented to join the movement and sped the war strands farther on to the Tusayan country, there insisting with the less courageous Hopi that they join also, and ultimately gaining their at first divided consent.
When all the knots had been numbered and untied, then, to a man, the Zuñis arose to slay Spaniards wheresoever they might encounter them. They forthwith killed Fray Juan de Bal, the priest of Hálona, burning his church and destroying the chapels in the lesser towns round about. Not content with this, they dispatched warriors to the Tusayan country to see to it that the Hopi remain faithful to their promise and vigorously to abet them in its fulfilment.
It fared far otherwise with the priest of Háwik’uh. Although his name is unknown, and although it has been doubted that any other missionary than Fray Juan of Hálona was with the Zuñis at the time, or that the mission of Háwik’uh was ever occupied after the death of Fray Pedro de Avila, yet Vetancurt's chronicles are explicit in stating the contrary, and that, although the Church of the Conception was again burned, the priest escaped. This latter statement is substantially true if we may trust Zuñi tradition, which is very detailed on this point, and which is trustworthy on many another and better recorded point of even remoter date.
The elder Priests of the Bow—three of whom were battle-scarred warriors of nearly a hundred winters at the time of my initiation into their order—told me that one of their gray-robed tútatsikwe ("fathers of drink," so named because they used cup-like vessels of water in baptizing), whom their ancients had with them at Háwik’uh in the time of the great evil, was much loved by them; "for, like ourselves," they affirmed, "he had a Zuñi heart and cared for the sick and women and children, nor contended with the fathers of the people; therefore, in that time of evil they spared him on condition "—precisely the rather sweeping condition these same veterans had in 1880 imposed on me ere they would permit of my adoption into one of their clans—"that he eschew the vestment and usages of his people and kind, and in everything, costume and ways of life alike, become a Zuñi; for as such only could they spare him and nurture him." Not so much, I imagine, from fear of death—for the dauntless Franciscan friars of those days feared only God and the devil and met martyrdom as bridegrooms of the Virgin herself—as from love of the Zuñis, if one may judge by the regard they even still have for his memory, and a hope that, living, he might perchance restrain them, alike to the good of their people and his own people, the father gave way to their wishes; or he may have been forced to accede to them by one of those compulsory adoptions of the enemy not uncommonly practiced by the Indians in times of hostility. Be this as it may, the Zuñis abandoned all their towns in the valley, and taking the good priest with them, fled yet again to the top of their high Mountain of Thunder. Around an ample amphitheater near its southern rim, they rebuilt six or seven great clusters of stone houses and renewed in the miniature vales of the mesa summit the reservoirs for rain and snow, and on the crests above the trickling spring under their towns, and along the upper reaches of the giddy trail by which the heights were scaled they reared archers' booths and heaps of slingstones and munitions of heavy rocks.
There, continually providing for the conflict which they knew would sooner or later reach even their remote fastnesses (as speedily it began to reach the Rio Grande country), they abode securely for more than ten years, living strictly according to the ways of their forefathers, worshiping only the beloved of war and the wind and rain, nor paying aught of attention to the jealous gods of the Spaniard.
Then at last Diego de Vargas, the reconquistador of New Mexico, approached Zuñiland with his force of foot soldiers and horsemen. The Zuñis, learning this, poisoned the waters of their springs at Pescado and near the entrance to the valley with yucca juice and cactus spines, and, they say, "with the death-magic of corpse shells; so that the horses and men, drinking there, were undone or died of bloating and bowel sickness." In this latter statement the historians of Vargas and the Zuñi traditions agree. But the captain-general could not have stormed the Rock of Cibola. With the weakened force remaining at his command his efforts were doubly futile. Therefore, where now the new peach orchards of the Zuñis grow on the sunlit sand slopes, 800 feet below the northern crest of the mesa their fathers so well defended in those days, Vargas camped his army, with intent to besiege the heathen renegades, and to harass and pick off such stragglers as came within the range of his arquebuses.
Now, however, the good friar whom the Indians called Kwan Tátchui Lók‘yana ("Juan Gray-robed-father-of-us"), was called to council by the elders, and given a well-scraped piece of deerskin, whitened with prayer meal, and some bits of cinder, wherewith to make markings of meaning to his countrymen. And he was bidden to mark thereon that the Zuñis were good to those who, like him, were good to them and meddled not; nor would they harm any who did not harm their women and children and their elders. And that if such these captains and their warriors would but choose and promise to be, they would descend from their mountain, nor stretch their bowstrings more. But when they told their gray father that he could now join his people if that by so doing he might stay their anger, and told him so to mark it, the priest, so the legend runs, "dissembled and did not tell that he was there, only that the fathers of the Áshiwi were good now;" for he willed, it would seem, to abide with them all the rest of his days, which, alas, were but few. Then the hide was tied to a slingstone and taken to the edge of the mesa, and cast down into the midst of the watchful enemy by the arm of a strong warrior. And when the bearded foemen below saw it fall, they took it up and curiously questioned it with their eyes, and finding its answers perfect and its import good, they instant bore it to their war captain, and in token of his consent, they waved it aloft. So was speech held and peace forthwith established between them.
That without casualty to the Zuñis an understanding was in some way soon reached between them and Vargas, the chroniclers of the expedition agree with this Zuñi legend; and before the end of the century the Indians had all descended to the plain again and were gathered, except in seasons of planting and harvest, chiefly at three of their easternmost towns, and the central one of Hálona Ítiwana, the Zuñi of today. After the reconquest at least some of the missions were rehabilitated, and missionaries dwelt with the Zuñis now and again. But other chiefs than those chosen by the priestly elders of the people were thenceforward chosen by the Spaniards to watch the people—gobernador, alcalde, and tenientes,—and these in turn were watched by Spanish soldiers whose conduct favored little the fostering of good will and happy relations; for in 1703, goaded to desperation by the excesses of these resident police, the Zuñis drove at least three of them into the church and there massacred them. Then, according to their wont, they fled, for the last time, to the top of Thunder mountain.
When they finally descended they planted numerous peach orchards among the cliffs and terraces of Grand mountain and Twin mountains to the northward of Zuñi, and there also laid out great gardens and many little cornfields. And with the pretext of wishing to be near their crops there, they built the seven Sónoli ‘Hlúëlawe (the "Towns of Sonora"), so named because the peach stones they had planted there had been brought from Sonora, Mexico. But their real object was to escape from the irksome and oft-repeated spyings upon and interdictions of their sacred observances and mythic drama-dances, which, as time went on, the Spanish frailes, supported by the increasing power of the authorities at Santa Fé in the first half of the eighteenth century, were wont to make. So, in hidden and lone nooks on the mountains, where their fine foundations may be seen even now, the Indian priests had massive kivas built, and there from year to year they conducted in secret the rites which but for this had never been preserved so perfectly for telling, albeit only in outline, in the following pages. But even thus far from the mission and its warders the plume-wands of worship, which in earlier times had been made long (each one according to its kind as long as from the elbow to the tip of one finger or another of him who made and sacrificed it), now had to be cut short and made only as long as the hands and the various fingers of those who made them; for the large plumed messages to the winds and spaces often betrayed the people, and they must now needs be made of size convenient for burial or hiding away in crannies or under bushes as near as might be to the shrines of the sacred precincts where once the fathers had worshiped so freely.
Toward the end of the century, between 1775 and 1780, the old Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which now harbors only burros and shivering dogs of cold winter nights and is toppling to ruin in the middle of the grand plaza of Zuñi, was built and beautifully decorated with carved altar pieces and paintings, gifts from the King of Spain to the Indies and work of resident monks as well. Its walls were painted—as the more recent plasterings scaling off here and there reveal—by Zuñi artists, who scrupled not to mingle many a pagan symbol of the gods of wind, rain, and lightning, sunlight, storm-dark and tempest, war-bale and magic, and, more than all, emblems of their beloved goddess-virgins of corn-growing with the bright-colored Christian decorations. And doubtless their sedulous teachers or masters, as the case may have been, understanding little, if aught, of the meanings of these things, were well pleased that these reluctant proselytes should manifest so much of zeal and bestow such loving care on this temple of the holy and only true faith.
In a measure the padres were right. The Indians thenceforward did manifest not only more care for the mission, but more readiness to attend mass and observe the various holy days of the church. To be baptized and receive baptismal names they had ever been willing, nay, eager, for they were permitted, if only as a means of identification, to retain their own tik‘ya shíiwe ("names totemic of the sacred assemblies"), which names the priests of the mission innocently adopted for them as surnames and scrupulously recorded in the quaint old leather-covered folios of their mission and church. Thus it chances that in these faded but beautifully and piously indicted pages of a century ago I find names so familiar, so like those I heard given only a few years since to aged Zuñi friends now passed away, that, standing out clearly from the midst of the formal Spanish phrases of these old-time books, they seem like the voices of the dead of other generations, and they tell even more clearly than such voices could tell of the causes which worked to render the Zuñis of those times apparently so reconciled to Spanish teaching and domination.
For it is manifest that when, as the meaning of his name informs us, the chief priest of the Kâ´kâkwe, or mythic drama-dancers of a hundred years ago, entered the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe and was registered as "Feliciano Pautiatzanilunquia" (Páutia Tsani Lúnk’ya), or "Felix Of-the-sacred-dancers-glorious-sun-god-youth," neither he nor any of his attendant clan relatives, whose names are also recorded, thought of renouncing their allegiance to the gods of Zuñi or the ever sacred Kâ´kâ; but that they thought only of gaining the magic of purification and the name-potency of the gods of another people, as well as of securing the sanctification if not recognition of their own gods and priests by these other gods and priests.
That this was so is shown also by the sacred character almost invariably of even the less exalted tribal names they gave. Thus, those belonging not to the priesthood, yet to the "midmost" or septuarchial clans, as "Francisco Kautzitihua" (Káutsitiwa), or "Francis Giver of-the-midmost-dance," and "Angela Kahuitietza" (Káwiti Etsa), or "Angelina Of-the-midmost-dance Little maiden;" and those belonging to yet other clan divisions and the Kâ´kâ, like "Manuel Layatzilunquia" (Laíyatsi Lúnk‘ya), or "Emanuel Of-the-flowing plume Glorious-tall-bearer," and "María Laytzitilutza" (Laítsitilutsa), or "Mary Of-the-soft-flowing-plume Little-bearer;" and, finally, even the least sacred but mythically alegoric clan names, such as "Manuel Layujtigua" (Lá-yúhtiwa) or "Emanuel Plume-of-lightness," a name of the Eagle clan and upper division of the tribe; and "Lucia Jayatzemietza" (Haíya Tsemi Étsa), or "Lucy Of-green-growing-things-ever-thinking Little-maiden," which, alluding to the leaves of growing corn and vines when watched by the young unmarried girls, is one of the Corn or Seed clan names belonging to the southern division. Only very rarely were the colloquial names one hears most often in Zuñi (the sacred and totemic names are considered too precious for common use) given for baptismal registration. I have found but two or three. One of these is written "Estévan Nato Jasti" (Náto Hastiŋ) or "Stephen Old-tobacco," a Navajo sobriquet which, in common with the few others like it, was undoubtedly offered reluctantly in place of the "true and sacred name," because some relative who had recently borne it was dead and therefore his name could not be pronounced aloud lest his spirit and the hearts of those who mourned him be disturbed.
But the presence of these ordinary names evidences no less than that of the more "idolatrous" ones, the uncompromisingly paganistic spirit of these supposedly converted Indians, and the unmodified fashion of their thoughts at the period of their truest apparent allegiance, or at least submission, to the church. Hence I have not hesitated to pause somewhat in the course of this introductory sketch to give these examples in detail, particularly as they evidence not merely the exceeding vitality of the native Zuñi cult, but at the same time present an explanation of the strange spectacle of earnest propagandists everywhere vigilantly seeking out and ruthlessly repressing the native priesthood and their dances and other ceremonials, yet, unconsciously to themselves, solemnizing these very things by their rites of baptism, officially recognizing, in the eyes of the Indians, the very names and titles of the officiators and offices they otherwise persecuted and denounced. It was quite of a piece with all this that during the acts of worship performed in the old church at that time by the Zuñis, whilst they knelt at mass or responded as taught to the mysterious and to them magic, but otherwise meaningless, credo, they scattered in secret their sacred white prayer-meal, and invoked not only the souls of their dead priests—who as caciques or rulers of the pueblo were accorded the distinction of burial in the church, under their very feet—but also, the tribal medicine-plumes and fetiches hidden away under the very altar where stood the archenemy of their religion!
So, in following farther the Spanish history of Zuñi, we need not be surprised that all went well for a while after the completion of the church, and that more than twenty priests were at one time and another resident missionaries of Zuñi. Nor, on the other hand, need we be surprised that when in the early part of the present century these missionaries began to leave the pagan surnames out of their registers giving Spanish names instead—began to suspect, perhaps, the nature of the wall paintings, or for some other reason had them whitewashed away—and sought more assiduously than ever, in the deepest hiding places of the many-storied pueblo, to surprise the native priests at their unholy pagan practices, that the records of baptisms in the old books grew fewer and fewer, and that as the secular power withdrew more and more its support of the clergy, the latter could no longer control their disaffected flock, and that finally the old mission had to be abandoned, never again to be reoccupied save on occasions of the parochial visits of priests resident in far-away Mexican towns or in other Indian pueblos.
Nevertheless, although the old church was thus abandoned and is now utterly neglected, there lingers still with the Indians a singular sentiment for it, and this has been supposed to indicate that they retain some conscious remnant of the faith and teachings for which it once stood.
It is true that the Zuñis of today are as eager as were their forefathers for baptism and for baptismal names additional to their own. But it must be remembered that baptism—the purification of the head by sprinkling or of the face by washing with medicine-water, was a very old institution with this people even before the Spaniards found them. With them anyone being named anew or assuming a new personality or office is invariably sprinkled or washed "that he be the more cleanly revealed and the better recommended in his new guise and character to the gods and spirits" invoked for the occasion, "and thus be constantly recognized by them as their child, named of themselves, and so be made a special recipient of their favor." This custom is observed, indeed, on many occasions, as on reaching puberty or before any great change in life, or before initiation into the sacred societies, as well as both before and after war, and especially before and after performance in the sacred dances. The head and face of every participant in these mythic dramas is washed or sprinkled when he is being painted and masked to represent or to assume the presence and personality of the god for whom he is to act or by whom he is to be possessed.
Thus it may be seen that this custom probably had its rise in the simple and necessary act of washing the face for painting before the performance of any ceremony calling for the assumption of a new rôle, and in the washing away of the paint, when the ordinary condition of life was to be resumed after such performance. Thus, too, it may be seen that baptism as practiced by the early Franciscan missionaries must have seemed not only familiar to the Zuñis, but also eminently proper and desirable on occasion of their accepting the benefits of initiation into what they supposed was the Kâ´kâ, or one of the general sacred societies of these other people. No wonder, then, that when about to be baptized they insisted on giving their own sacred names of the Kâ´kâ, if only as a surety of their full recognition under them in this new Kâ´kâ, no less than under the new names they were about to receive.
It is also true that the Zuñis do not again burn the dead and cast their ashes into the river, nor bury the bodies of the clan elders, or the priests of the tribal septuarchy, in their own houses, as they did ere the time of Coronado, or "under the ladders," as their funereal rituals continue nevertheless to say they do. They bury all, now, in the little strip of consecrated ground out in front of the church; ground already so overfilled with the bones of past generations that never a new grave is made that does not encroach on other graves. Bones lie scattered all about there, rubbish accumulates, the wooden cross in the center of the place is frequently broken, and the mud walls inclosing it are sometimes allowed to fall to the ground. Yet in vain I urged them if only for sanitary reasons to abandon burying their dead there, and inter them in the sand hills to the south of the pueblo. "Alas! we could not," they said. "This was the ground of the church which was the house of our fathers wherein they were buried, they and their children, 'under the descending ladders.' How, if we bury our dead in lone places, may they be numbered with our 'fathers and children of the descending ladders?'"
But far from indicating any lingering desire for "Christian burial," this is a striking example of the real, though not apparent, persistence of their original mortuary customs. For they still ceremonially and ritualistically "burn" their ordinary dead, as did their forefathers when first compelled to bury in the churchyard, by burning some of their hair and personal effects with the customary clan offerings of food and property, and casting the ashes of all into the river; and it matters not where these, who virtually exist no more, but are, in their eyes, consumed and given to the waters, are buried, save that they be placed with the priestly dead of today, as the "children" or ordinary dead were placed with the priestly dead in the days of the "Mísa k‘yakwe" or "Mission-house people." So, too, the priests of today, or the tribal fathers, are still painted with the black of silence over their mouths and the yellow and green of light and life over their eyes and nostrils, as are the gods, and are ritualistically buried "under the ladders," that is, in their own houses, when actually buried in the churchyard. Thus, when the gods are invoked, these, as being demigods, still priests of the beloved, are also invoked, first, as "Fathers and children of the descending ladder," then as souls in the clouds and winds and waters, "Makers of the ways of life." So the whole burial ground of the church is, in the estimation of the Zuñi, a fetich whereby to invoke the souls of the ancestors, the potency of which would be destroyed if disturbed; hence the place is neither cared for nor abandoned, though recognized even by themselves as a "direful place in daylight."
It is much the same with the old church. A few years since a party of Americans who accompanied me to Zuñi desecrated the beautiful antique shrine of the church, carrying away "Our Lady of Guadalupe of the Sacred Heart," the guardian angels, and some of the painted bas-reliefs attached to the frame of the altar. When this was discovered by the Indians, consternation seized the whole tribe; council after council was held, at which I was alternately berated (because people who had come there with me had thus "plundered their fathers' house"), and entreated to plead with "Wasintona" to have these "precious saints and sacred masks of their fathers" returned to them.
Believing at the time that the Indians really reverenced these things as Christian emblems, and myself reverencing sincerely the memory of the noble missionaries who had braved death and labored so many years in the cause of their faith and for the good of these Indians, I promised either to have the original relics returned or to bring them new saints; and I also urged them to join me in cleaning out the old church, repairing the rents in its walls and roof, and plastering once more its rain-streaked interior. But at this point their mood seemed to change. The chiefs and old men puffed their cigarettes, unmoved by the most eloquent appeals I could make, save to say, quite irrelevantly, that I "talked well," and that all my thoughts were good, very good, but they could not heed them.
I asked them if they did not care for their míssa k‘yakwi or mission-house. "Yea, verily," they replied, with fervor. "It was the sacred place of our fathers, even more sacred than were the things taken away therefrom."
I asked if they would not, then, in memory of those fathers, restore its beauty.
"Nay," they replied, "we could not, alas! for it was the míssa-house of our fathers who are dead, and dead is the míssa-house! May the fathers be made to live again by the adding of meat to their bones? How, then, may the míssa-house be made alive again by the adding of mud to its walls?"
Not long afterward there was a furious night storm of wind and rain. On the following morning, great seams appeared in the northern walls of the old building. I called a council of the Indians and urged that since they would not repair the míssa-house, it be torn down; for it might fall over some day and kill the women and children as they passed through the narrow alley it overshadowed, on their way to and from the spring. Again I was told that my words were good, but alas! they could not heed them; that it was the míssa-house of their fathers! How, if they took it away, would the fathers know their own? It was well that the wind and rain wore it away, as time wasted away their fathers' bones. That mattered not, for it was the work of the beloved, whereof they, the fathers, were aware, but for themselves to move it suddenly away, that were worse than the despoiling of the shrine; for it was the house of the fathers, the shrine only a thing thereof, not a thing of the fathers as verily as was the house itself.
From their point of view this reasoning of the Indians was perfectly consistent, based as it was on their belief that the souls of their ancestors were mediators and that their mortal remains and the places and things thereof were means of invoking them, quite as sacrifices are supposed to be, for the time being, the mortal and mediate parts of the gods and spirits to which they have been offered, hence a potent means of invoking them. This is shown much more clearly in the only other instance of seeming reverence for the church that I can pause to give.
The Zuñis are careful to remove all traces of Catholicism, or rather all symbols of the Mexican religion, from their persons or vicinity during the performance of their sacred dances or rites, seeing to it that no Mexican word, even, is ever spoken in the presence of the Kâ´kâ. If a Mexican or anyone suspected of being a Mexican happens to approach their town during a ceremonial, he is met by watchful sentinels and led, no matter what his rank, condition, or haste, to some sequestered room, where, although courteously treated and hospitably entertained without charge, he is securely locked up and rigorously guarded until after the dance or other observance is over. "The fathers of these Mexicans did violence to our fathers," say the Indians in explanation, "when that our fathers of old called the sacred Kâ´kâ. Therefore, in those days our fathers sought to hide the dancers from their eyes. Our fathers come nigh in breath, when now we call the Kâ´kâ, and they aid our songs and prayers to the beloved Gods of Rain and Wind. How, if they see we have departed from their customs, and reveal these things? Then will they be sad at our forgetfulness of their ways, and filled with fear lest these evil people, beholding, do sacrilege to their precious Kâ´kâ, and will flee away, nor aid our songs and prayers for rain, nor our calls for their beloved presence!"
Nevertheless, in autumn, when the harvest is over, one may see the dilapidated little figure of Saint Francis borne about the pueblo on the eve of the "Feast of the Dead;" and one may see here and there candles burning, or such poor substitutes for them as the Indians can get; and here and there also old rosaries and a few brass crucifixes revealed. Before they fell, one heard, as the night wore on, the ancient church bells hammered; and half forgotten, wholly unintelligible phrases of church Latin chanted. But all this is not in memory of a "saint's day," as would seem, or as one would be told were he injudiciously to inquire. It is the feast and drama of the beloved dead of all days past. And whilst the dead of long, very long ago, must first be summoned by means of their ancient relics which best they knew—the tribal medicines and fetiches, and the songs to them belonging—yet the "old ones of the míssa times knew also these things of the míssa; and so, that they be lured near and come not as strangers, but find means of recognition and movement (manifestation) to us, and happily receive our offerings of food to the fire, they must (in place of the summoning songs and drums and rattles) hear the church bells and chants of the Spaniards and see the things which they, perforce, held to most familiarly and with least fear and secrecy in times of festival while yet they lived in daylight."
I need not add that this fully accounts for the contradictory behavior of the Indians in reference to the old church, the burial ground, and other things pertaining to it. The church could not be rebuilt. It had been dead so long that, rehabilitated, it would be no longer familiar to the "fathers" who in spirit had witnessed its decay. Nor could it be taken suddenly away. It had stood so long that, missing it, they would be sad, or might perhaps even abandon it.
The Zuñi faith, as revealed in this sketch of more than three hundred and fifty years of Spanish intercourse, is as a drop of oil in water, surrounded and touched at every point, yet in no place penetrated or changed inwardly by the flood of alien belief that descended upon it. Herein is exemplified anew the tendency of primitive-minded man to interpret unfamiliar things more directly than simply, according to their appearances merely, not by analysis in our sense of the term; and to make his interpretations, no less than as we ourselves do, always in the light of what he already familiarly believes or habitually thinks he knows. Hence, of necessity he adjusts other beliefs and opinions to his own, but never his own beliefs and opinions to others; and even his usages are almost never changed in spirit, however much so in externals, until all else in his life is changed. Thus, he is slow to adopt from alien peoples any but material suggestions, these even, strictly according as they suit his ways of life; and whatever he does adopt, or rather absorb and assimilate, from the culture and lore of another people, neither distorts nor obscures his native culture, neither discolors nor displaces his original lore.
All of the foregoing suggests what might be more fully shown by further examples, the aboriginal and uncontaminated character—so far as a modern like myself can represent it—of the myths delineated in the following series of outlines. Yet a casual visitor to Zuñi, seeing but unable to analyze the signs above noted, would be led to infer quite the contrary by other and more patent signs. He would see horses, cattle and donkeys, sheep and goats, to say nothing of swine and a few scrawny chickens. He would see peach orchards and wheat fields, carts (and wagons now), and tools of metal; would find, too, in queer out-of-the-way little rooms native silversmiths plying their primitive bellows and deftly using a few crude tools of iron and stone to turn their scant silver coins into bright buttons, bosses, beads, and bracelets, which every well-conditioned Zuñi wears; and he would see worn also, especially by the men, clothing of gaudy calico and other thin products of the looms of civilization. Indeed, if one did not see these things and rate them as at first the gifts to this people of those noble old Franciscan friars and their harder-handed less noble Spanish companions, infinitely more pathetic than it is would be the history of the otherwise vain effort I have above outlined; for it is not to be forgotten that the principal of these gifts have been of incalculable value to the Zuñi. They have helped to preserve him, through an era of new external conditions, from the fate that met more than thirty other and less favored Pueblo tribes—annihilation by the better-armed, ceaselessly prowling Navajo and Apache. And for this alone, their almost sole accomplishment of lasting good to the Zuñi, not in vain were spent and given the lives of the early mission fathers.
It is intimated that aside from adding such resources to the tribe as enabled it to survive a time of fearful stress and danger, even the introduction of Spanish plants, animals, and products did not greatly change the Zuñis. This is truer than would at first seem possible. The Zuñi was already a tiller of the soil when wheat and peaches were given him. To this day he plants and irrigates his peach trees and wheat crops much as he anciently planted and watered his corn—in hills, hoeing all with equal assiduity; and he does not reap his wheat, but gathers it as he gathers his corn in the ear. Thus, only the kind of grain is new. The art of rearing it and ways of husbanding and using it remain unchanged. The Zuñi was already a herder when sheep and goats were given him. He had not only extensive preserves of rabbits and deer, but also herds—rather than flocks—of turkeys, which by day were driven out over the plains and mesas for feeding, and at night housed near the towns or in distant shelters and corrals. It is probable that his ancestry had even other domesticated animals. And he used the flesh of these animals as food, their feathers and fur as the materials for his wonderfully knitted, woven, and twilled garments and robes, as he now uses the mutton and goat meat for food, and the wool of the sheep for his equally well-knitted, woven, and twilled, though less beautiful, garments and robes. Thus, only the kinds (and degree of productivity) of the animals are new, the arts of caring for them and modes of using their products, are unchanged. This is true even in detail. When I first went to live with the Zuñis their sheep were plucked, not sheared, with flat strips of band iron in place of the bone spatulæ originally used in plucking the turkeys; and the herders always scrupulously picked up stray flecks of wool—calling it "down," not hair, nor fur—and spinning it, knitting, too, at their long woolen leggings as they followed their sheep, all as their forefathers used ever to pick up and twirl the stray feathers and knit at their down kilts and tunics as they followed and herded their turkeys. Even the silversmiths of Zuñi today work coins over as their ancestors of the stone-using age worked up bits of copper, not only using tools of stone and bone for the purpose but using even the iron tools of the Spaniard mostly in stone-age fashion.[1]
This applies equally to their handling of the hoes, hatchets, and knives of civilized man. They use their hoes—the heaviest they can get—as if weighted, like the wooden and bone hoes of antiquity, vertically, not horizontally. They use their hatchets or axes and knives more for hacking and scraping and chipping than for chopping, hewing, and whittling, and in such operations they prefer working toward themselves to working from themselves, as we work. Finally, their garments of calico and muslin are new only in material. They are cut after the old fashion of the ancestral buckskin breeches and shirts, poncho coats of feathers and fur or fiber, and down or cotton breech clouts, while in the silver rings and bracelets of today, not only the shapes but even the half-natural markings of the original shell rings and bracelets survive, and the silver buttons and bosses but perpetuate and multiply those once made of copper as well as of shell and white bone.
Thus, only one absolutely new practical element and activity was introduced by the Spaniards—beasts of burden and beast transportation and labor. But until the present century cattle were not used natively for drawing loads or plows, the latter of which, until recently being made of a convenient fork, are only enlarged harrowing-sticks pointed with a leaf of iron in place of the blade of flint; nor were carts employed. Burdens were transported in panniers adapted to the backs of burros instead of to the shoulders of men.
The Zuñi is a splendid rider, but even now his longest journeys are made on foot in the old way. He has for centuries lived a settled life, traveling but little, and the horse has therefore not played a very conspicuous part in his later life as in the lives of less sedentary peoples, and is consequently unheard of, as are all new things—including the greatest of all, the white man himself—in his tribal lore, or the folk tales, myths, and rituals of his sacred cult-societies. All this strengthens materially the claim heretofore made, that in mind, and especially in religious culture, the Zuñi is almost as strictly archaic as in the days ere his land was discovered.
If a historic sketch of Spanish intercourse with the Zuñi people indicates that little change was wrought on their native mood by so many years of alien contact, an outline of their pristine history, or a sketch of their growth and formation as a people, will serve yet further to show not only how, but also why, this was so, as well as to explain much in the following outlines of their myths of creation and migration, the meaning of which would otherwise remain obscure.
Linguistically the Zuñi Indians of today stand alone, unrelated, so far as has heretofore been determined, to any other Indians either sedentary, like themselves, or unsettled, like the less advanced peoples of the plains. Nevertheless, although they as yet thus constitute a single linguistic stock, there are present and persistent among them two distinct types of physique and numerous survivals—inherited, not borrowed—of the arts, customs, myths, and institutions of at least two peoples, unrelated at first, or else separate and very diversely conditioned for so long a period of their preunited history that their development had progressed unequally and along quite different lines, at the time of their final coalition. That thus the Zuñis are actually descendants of two or more peoples, and the heirs of two cultures at least, is well shown in their legends of ruins and olden times, and especially in these myths of creation and migration as interpreted by archeologic and ethnographic research.
According to all these tokens and evidences, one branch of their ancestral people was, as compared with the other, aboriginal in the region comprising the present Zuñi country and extending far toward the north, whence at some remoter time they had descended. The other branch was intrusive, from the west or southwest, the country of the lower Rio Colorado, their earliest habitat not so clearly defined and their remoter derivation enigmatical, for they were much more given to wandering, less advanced in the peaceful arts, and their earliest ruins are those of comparatively rude and simple structures, hence scant and difficult to trace, at least beyond the western borders of Arizona. Considering both of these primary or parental stocks of the Zuñi as having been thus so widely asunder at first, the ancestral relations of the aboriginal or northern branch probably ranged the plains north of the arid mountain region of Utah and Colorado ere they sought refuge in the desert and canyons of these territories. Yet others of their descendants, if still surviving, may not unlikely be traced among not only other Pueblos, but also and more distinctly among wilder and remoter branches, probably of the Shoshonean stock. The ancestral relations of the intrusive or western branch, however, were a people resembling the semisettled Yumans and Pimans in mode of life, their ruins combining types of structure characteristic of both these stocks; and if their descendants, other than Zuñis themselves, be yet identified among Yuman tribes, or some like people of the lower Colorado region, they will be found (such of them as survive) not greatly changed, probably, from the condition they were all in when, at a very distant time, their eastward faring kinsfolk, who ultimately became Zuñis, left them there.
It is quite certain that relatives, in a way—not ancestral—of the Zuñis still exist. Not many years before Fray Marcos de Niza discovered Cibola, the Zuñians conquered some small towns of the Keres to the south-southeastward of the Zuñi-Cibola country, and adopted some of the survivors and also some of their ritual-dramas—still performed, and distinctively Keresan in kind—into their own tribe. Previously to that—previously, indeed, to their last and greatest union with the settled people mentioned as the aboriginal Zuñi—a large body of the western branch and their earlier fellows (called in the myths of creation "Our lost others") separated from them in the country south and west of the Rio Puerco and the Colorado Chiquito, and went, not wholly as related in the myths, yet quite, undoubtedly, far away to the southward. I have identified and traced their remains in Arizona toward and into Mexico as far as the coast, and if, as the Zuñis still believe, any of them survive to this day, they are to be looked for lower down in Mexico or in the still farther south, whither, it is said, they disappeared so long ago. But, as before intimated, these relatives (by adoption in the one case, by derivation in the other) were not, strictly speaking, ancestral, and thus are barely alluded to in the myths, and therefore concern us less than do the two main or parental branches.
Of these, the one which contributed more largely in numbers, certain culture characteristics, and the more peaceful arts of life to make the Zuñis what they were at the time of the Spanish conquest, was the aboriginal branch. The intrusive or western branch is, strange to say, although least numerous, the one most told of in the myths, the one which speaks throughout them in the first person; that is, which claims to be the original Shíwi or Zuñi. Of this branch it is unnecessary to say much more here than the myths themselves declare, save to add that it was, if not the conquering, at least, and for a long time, the dominant one; that to it the Zuñis owe their vigor and many, if not most, of their distinguishing traits; and that, coming as they did from the west, they located there, and not in the north, as did all these other Pueblo Indians (including even those whom they found and prevailed over, or were joined by, in the present land of Zuñi), the place where the human family originated, where the ancestral gods chiefly dwell, and whither after death souls of men are supposed to return anon.
According to their own showing in the myths they were, while a masterful people, neither so numerous at the time of their coming, nor so advanced, nor so settled, as were the peoples whom they "overtook" from time to time as they neared the land of Zuñi or the "Middle of the world." They did not cultivate the soil, or, at least, apparently did not cultivate corn to any considerable extent before they met the first of these peoples, for, to use their own words, they were "ever seeking seeds of the grasses like birds on the mesas."
There is abundant reason for supposing that the "elder nations"—these peoples whom they "overtook," the "People of the Dew," the "Black people," and the "Corn people" of the "towns builded round"—were direct and comparatively unchanged descendants of the famous cliff dwellers of the Mancos, San Juan, and other canyons of Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico. The evidences of this are numerous and detailed, but only the principal of them need here be examined.
The ruins of these rounded towns of the Corn tribes which Hernando de Alvarado and Fray Juan de Padilla saw in 1540 while going southeastward from Zuñi, are especially characteristic of the Zuñi region, and extend quite generally both southward toward the Rito Quemado and the Salinas in western central New Mexico, and, by way of the Chaco, northward nearly to the Colorado boundary. They are as often half round as they are wholly oblong or circular, and even when completely rounded or oval in outline are usually divided into two semicircular parts by an irregular court or series of courts extending lengthwise through the middle, and thus making them really double villages of the half-round type.
A comparison of the ground plans of these round or semicircular ruins with those of the typical cliff ruins reveals the fact that they were simply cliff towns transferred, as it were, to the level of the open plains or mesa tops. Their outer or encircling walls were, save at the extremities of the courts, generally unbroken and perpendicular, as uninterrupted and sheer, almost, as were the natural canyon walls surrounding to the rearward the older cliff towns to which they thus corresponded and which they apparently were built to replace; and the houses descended like steps from these outer walls in terraced stories, facing, like the seats of an amphitheater, the open courts, precisely as descended the terraced stories of the cliff dwellings from the encircling rock walls of the sheltered ledges or shelves on which they were reared, necessarily facing in the same manner the open canyons below. Thus the courts may be supposed to have replaced the canyons, as the outer walls replaced the cliffs or the back walls built nearest them in the rear of at least the deeper village caves or shelters.
Other structural and kindred features of the cliff towns are found to be equally characteristic of the round ruins, features which, originating in the conditions of building and dwelling in the cliffs, came to be perpetuated in the round towns afterward built on the plains.
So limited was the foothold afforded by the scant ledges or in the sheltered but shallow hollows of the cliffs where the ancient cliff dwellers were at first forced as a measure of safety to take refuge and finally to build, that they had to economize space to the utmost. Hence in part only the women and children, being smaller and more in need of protection than the men, were accommodated with dwelling places as such, the rooms of which were so diminutive that, to account for them, theories of the dwarfish size of the cliff dwellers as a race have been common. As a further measure of economy these rooms were built atop of one another, sometimes to the height of several stories—up, in fact, to the very roof at the rear of the cavern in most cases—and thence they were terraced toward the front in order that light and air might be admitted as directly as possible to each story.
For the double purpose of accommodating the men and of serving as assembly rooms for councils and ceremonial functions, large circular chambers were constructed almost always out in front of the terraced dwelling cells of the women and children, and thus in the more exposed mouths of the caverns or shelters the villages nestled in. These round assembly rooms or kivas were often, indeed, built up from sloping portions of the sheer outer edge of the village cave shelf, in order to be as much as possible on a level with or even below the limited ground space between them and the houses farther back, so that the front along the lower and outermost row of these house cells might remain open and unobstructed to passage.
The dwelling rooms or house cells themselves were made as nearly rectangular as was practicable, for only partitions divided them; but of necessity such as were placed far back toward or against the encircling and naturally curved rock walls, or the rear masonry walls, built in conformity to their curvature in all the deeper caves, had small triangular or keystone-shape spaces between their partitions. These, being too small for occupancy even by children, were used as storerooms for grain and other household supplies. When the cave in which a village was built happened to be very deep, the living rooms could not be carried too far back, as neither light nor sufficient air could reach them there; hence here, chiefly against the rear wall or the cave back itself, were built other storerooms more or less trapezoidal in shape, according to the degree of curvature in the rock face against which they were built, or, as said before, of the rear wall itself, which in the deeper caves often reached from floor to roof and ran parallel to the natural semicircular back of the cavern.
Against the rearward face of such back walls when present (that is, between them and the rear of the cave itself), behind the village proper, if space further permitted, small rooms, ordinarily of one story, or pens, sometimes roofless, were built for the housing of the flocks of turkeys which the cliff dwellers kept. Beyond these poultry houses was still kept, in the deeper village caves, a space, dark and filled with loose soil and rubbish, in which certain of the dead, mostly men, were buried; while other dead were interred beneath the floors of the lowermost rooms, when the soil or sand filled in to level up the sloping rock bottom of the shelter was sufficiently deep to receive them.
A noteworthy peculiarity of the doorways in the upper stories leading toward the rearward storerooms already described was that they were often made T-shape; that is, very narrow at the bottom and abruptly widened at the top. This was done in order to avoid the necessity of making these openings for entrance and egress too large proportionally to the small size of the rooms. Thus, neither were the walls weakened nor were the inmates needlessly exposed to cold; for fuel, even of the lightest kind, was gathered with risk and transported thither with great difficulty, and the use of it was therefore limited to cookery, and yet a person bearing a back load of corn, or other provender might, by stepping first one foot, then the other, through the narrow lower portion of such a doorway, then stooping with his blanket or basket load, pass through without inconvenience or the necessity of unloading.
Nearly all of these features—so suited to, and some of them evidently so unavoidable with, a people building eyrie-like abodes high up on limited sloping ledges in pockets of the cliffs—were, although they were totally unnecessary to the dwellers in the half-round or double half-round towns of the plains, where space was practically unlimited and topographic and other conditions wholly different, nevertheless characteristic of these also.
Not only were the external walls of these old villages of the plains semicircular, as though built in conformity with the curved rock walls of the hollows in the cliffs, but they were continuous. That is, in all the rounded town ruins, except those which seem to have been reconstructed in more recent times, the outer walls were built first as great semicircular inclosures, hollow artificial cliffs, so to say, and afterward the house walls were built up against them inside, not into them, as they would have been had these outer and the inner walls been built up together. Moreover, not only were the ground plans of these towns of the plains semicircular, as though built in conformity with the curved rock walls of hollows in the cliffs in ancestral fashion, but the storerooms were also still tucked away in the little flaring spaces next to these now outer and surrounding walls, instead of being placed near the more convenient entrances fronting the courts. The huts or sheds for the turkeys, too, were placed not in the inclosures of the courts, but against and outside of these external walls of the villages; and while many of the dead were buried, as in the cliff houses, under the floors of the lowermost rooms, others of them, almost always men, and notably victims of war or accident, were still buried out beyond even the turkey huts. So both the turkey huts and some of the graves of these round villages retained the same positions relative to one another and to the "rearward" of the dwellings that had very naturally been given them in the cliff villages; for in these, being behind the houses and in the rear of the caves, they occupied the most protected areas; while in the round villages, being behind the houses, they were thrown quite outside of the villages, hence occupied the most exposed positions, which latter fact would appear inexplicable save by considering it as a survival of cliff-town usage.
The kivas, or assembly rooms of the round villages, were placed generally in front of the houses facing the courts, as of old they had been built in the mouths of the caverns, also in front of the houses facing the canyons. Moreover, they were, although no longer in the way, wholly or in part subterranean, that is, sunk to the level of the court or plaza, as in the cliff towns they had been built (except where crowding rendered it necessary to make them two-storied, as in some cases) up the front slopes only to the height of the general cave floor or of the lowermost house foundations.
Finally, there were no doorways in the lower stories of the rounded villages, the roofs of which were reached by ladders; but in the upper stories there were passages, some of which, although here no longer so needfully small, were still economically fashioned as of old—wide at the top, narrow at the base, like the T-shape granary avenues of the cliff ruins.
The closeness of correspondence of all these features in the round ruins to those in the cliff ruins (features which in the round ruins appear less in place than in at least the older cliff ruins) would seem to justify my conclusion, earlier stated, that the round towns were simply outgrowths of the cliff villages, transplanted, as it were, into the plains; for all of these features, as they occur in the old cliff ruins, can, with but a single exception (that of the circular form of the kivas or assembly chambers, which, as will presently be shown, were survivals of a yet older phase of building), be accounted for as having originated from necessity, whereas in the round ruins they could not have originated even as possible expedients, since they were unsuitable save by having become customary through long usage.
I have reasserted this fact because the theory that all cliff dwellings were but outlying places of refuge or the hunting and farming stations of larger pueblos in their neighborhood, strongly fortified by position in order that the small parties occupying them now and then for longer or shorter seasons might find safe retreat in them, has been advanced quite successfully. As this theory is not unlikely to gain a considerable hearing, it is necessary to demonstrate even more fully the fact that at least the round towns did not give their structural characteristics to such of the northern cliff ruins as resembled them in plan, and that therefore the latter are to be regarded as actual cliff-dweller remains. In the southern portions of New Mexico and Arizona, as on the upper Salado and in canyons of the Sierra Madre, still farther south, all the cliff dwellings and villages were built without reference to the curved forms of the caverns in which they occurred.[2] That is, they rigidly retained the rectangular pueblo form of arrangement characteristic of the larger ruins in the valleys and plains around them. Hence for this and for other reasons they may be regarded as pueblos transferred to the cliffs, such outposts of the larger pueblos of the plains as it is claimed all cliff dwellings were. So, also, as hitherto intimated, many of the later cliff dwellings, even of the north, have rectangular pueblo additions below them in the canyons or above them on the mesas, and some of the village ruins in the cave shelters themselves are almost faithful miniature reproductions in general plan of the large pueblos of the plains near at hand; but in the one case the pueblo additions above and below were comparatively modern, and indicate either that the cliff dwellings they are adjacent to continued to be occupied down to the time of later true pueblo building, or that they were reoccupied from comparatively modern pueblos and that all additions made were constructed according to customary later forms of building. In the other case, that of the rectangular structures in semicircular cave shelters, either a return to cliff dwelling from pueblo dwelling is indicated, or, as with the southern cliff villages, these also were outposts of comparatively modern kinds of pueblos occurring in the neighborhood. Such, for example, was the case with many of the cliff dwellings of the Tsegi or Canyon de Chelly, some of which continued to be occupied long after the more easterly towns of the San Juan were abandoned, and others of which were reoccupied, probably by Tusayan Indians, in comparatively recent time.
The occurrence of sepulchers in or near almost all the San Juan cliff ruins would alone indicate that they were central and permanent homes of the people who built and occupied them. The surviving Pueblo Indians, so far as I am aware, never bury in or near their outlying towns. Invariably the dead are taken to the central pueblo home of the tribe for sepulture, as there only may they become tribal fetiches in the manner I have heretofore indicated, and be properly renounced by the clans of kin at their place of birth and rearing. If, then, all the cliff towns were merely outlying strongholds, no interments of the original inhabitants would be found in them save those of children perchance born and reared in them. In fact, this is precisely the case with some of the towns in question, those above described as manifestly settlements from later true pueblos.
Another feature of the older cliff dwellings is still more significant in this connection—the presence of the kiva; for the kiva or sacred assembly room was never, for mythic and sociologic reasons, built in temporary or outlying settlements. The mere council chamber was sometimes present in these, but the true kiva never, so long as they remained resorts of more central pueblo towns, for each kiva of such a town located a division of the tribe as pertaining to one or another of the quarters or mythic divisions. Hence, as might be expected, in the more southerly cliff dwellings belonging to more recent pueblos no kiva is ever found.
The evidence furnished by the kivas is significant in other ways, for in connection with the above theory the claim has also been advanced that the cliff villages were occupied for only brief periods at best; that they do not, as assumed by me, represent a phase—so much as an incident—in the development of a people. Aside from the linguistic, sociologic, and other evidence I have to offer later on that of not only these kivas, but also of certain other features of the ruins themselves, is decidedly indicative of both long and continuous occupancy; and an examination of this evidence helps to an understanding of the culture growth of the early cliff dwellers as being not that of Pueblos at first, but that of Pueblo ancestry, Pueblos developing.
Occurring in the midst of the greater groups of northern cliff dwellings, no less than somewhat more scatteringly and widely distributed to at least as far south as the middle of Arizona, are remains of cave dwellings of an older type. They are usually lower down in the cliffs, although they once occurred also in the larger and more accessible of the caverns now occupied by later cliff-house remains, underneath or amid which remains they may still in places be traced. These rude and very ancient cave dwellings mark the beginnings of the cliff occupancy. In all essentials they correspond to the modern cave dwellings of the Sierra Madre in Sonora, Mexico, so admirably described by my friend, Dr. Carl Lumholtz, as built and still lived in by the Tarahumári and Tepehuani Indians, who survive either in the state of these first cliff dwellers of the north, or, as is more probable, have naturally and independently resorted to a similar mode of life through stress of similar circumstances.
Like the Tarahumári, these ancient people of the north at first resorted to the caves during only portions of the year—during the inclement season after each harvest, as well as in times of great danger. At other times, and during the hunting, planting, and seed-gathering seasons particularly, they dwelt, as do the Tarahumári, in rancherias, the distinctive remains of which lie scattered near and far on the plateaus and plains or in the wide valleys. But the caves were their central abodes, and the rancherias, frequently shifted, were simply outlying stations such as are the farming hamlets of the modern pueblos.
The earliest of these dwellings in the caves were at first simple huts disposed separately along the rear walls of these recesses in the cliffs. They usually had foundation walls, approximately circular in plan, of dry-laid stones, upon which rested upper converging courses of cross-laid logs and sticks, hexagonal and pen-like covers surmounted, as were the rancherias of the open plains, by more or less high-pitched roofs of thatch—here in the shelters added rather for protection from cold than from storms of rain and snow.
But in course of time, as the people dwelling, when needful, in these secure retreats increased in numbers, and available caves became filled, the huts, especially in the more suitable shelters, were crowded together in each, until no longer built separately, but in irregularly continuous rows or groups at the rear, each divided from others by simple, generally straight, partitions, as are the dwelling divisions of the Tarahumári today. But unlike the latter, these hut-like rooms of the northern cave-dwellers were still rounded outwardly, that is, each hut (where not contiguous to or set in the midst of others, as was the case with those along the front), retained its circular form. The partitions and foundation walls were still built low, and still surmounted by converging cross-laid upper courses of logs or saplings and roofs of thatch. As with the Tarahumári, so with these earliest cliff dwellers of the north; their granaries were far more perfectly constructed than their own abiding places. To adequately protect their store or provision from seed-devouring animals, no less than from the elements, it became necessary to place it in dry crannies or pockets of the cliffs near at hand, preferably in recesses as far back in their caves as possible, and also to seal it up in these natural receptacles. At first (as may be seen in connection with the caves of Las Tusas, Arizona, containing some of the oldest and rudest separate hut remains I have yet examined) the mouths of these receptacles were walled up with dry-laid stones, carefully chinked, and plastered inside with mud, precisely as were the granary pockets of the Havasupai Indians seen by me in 1881. Later, while still the houses continued to be mere low-walled and partitioned sheds or huts of dry masonry, these granaries came to be quite well constructed, of mud-laid walls, and were enlarged, as stores increased with increase of settlement and tillage, until they had to be built outward from the niches like good sized, slightly tapering bins, protruding somewhat from the cave walls, and finally forming, as do the granaries of the Tarahumári today, miniature prototypes of the perfected single cliff house of a far later day.