Ácoma, the sky city E-Book

Mary Katrine Rice Sedgwick

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The first effect of the desert upon any human being must be one of surprise—surprise at the contrast between the preconceived idea which the word suggests and its variety of beauty—a beauty which becomes for many an irresistible fascination, a magnet that allures and brings its lovers back again and again.
The simplicity of great spaces and great masses is one of the supreme influences of life. Together with limitless vistas of possibility, there is in them a serenity that brings calm and meditative repose.
However far the eye is carried in the desert of the Southwest, one is never wearied by monotony. Everywhere the undulating sands, hardly held in place by scanty vegetation when the winds blow their wildest, are driven into long rippling waves, or into hillocks, by the Spaniards called lomas. Even while you watch, this shifting, drifting sand takes on many hues. Sometimes it is grey, or pale buff, or almost white, more rarely golden. Out of it grows, here and there, the pungent greasewood, the stunted cedar and the thorny, freakish cacti unfurling gay flags of color to catch the wandering bee.

Leseprobe

ÁCOMA, THE SKY CITY

ÁCOMA MAIDENS AT THE SPRING

ÁCOMA, THE SKY CITY

A STUDY IN PUEBLO-INDIAN HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION

BYMrs. WILLIAM T. SEDGWICK

© 2024 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385747091

ÁCOMA, THE SKY CITY

ÁCOMA, THE SKY CITY

Chapter II THE CITADEL OF ÁCOMA

Chapter III FIRST EXPEDITIONS FROM NEW SPAIN

Chapter IV THE BATTLE IN THE SKY CITY

As told by an Eye Witness

Chapter V ÁCOMA REBUILT

Chapter VI FATHER RAMÍREZ AT ÁCOMA

Chapter VII ÁCOMA IN THE PUEBLO REVOLT

Chapter VIII THE WONDER-WORKING SAN JOSÉ

Chapter IX ÁCOMA AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Chapter X ORIGINS AND MIGRATIONS

Chapter XI THE TRADITION OF KATZÍMO AND ÁCOMA

Chapter XII SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Chapter XIII FOLK-TALES OF ÁCOMA

Borrowed Feathers: Don’t Look Up: Back to Life

Forgetting the Song: Inside the Lizard

Borrowed Feathers

The Serpent, the Man, the Ox, the Horse, and the Coyote (From Acomita)[167]

San Pascual

Short Folk-Tales and Anecdotes

A Story of Long Time Ago at Ácoma[172] or, The Melons of Discord

Chapter XIV KERESAN MYTHS

Chapter XV RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

Chapter XVI CEREMONIALS AND RITUALS

I. The Name Ácoma

II. Ha-Chamoni

IV. Towers and Great Houses

V. Keres (Queres)

VI. Language

VII. Katzímo, A Disenchanted Mesa

VIII. Medicine

IX. Smoke

X. Shaman

XI. Serpent

XII. Lightning

XIII. The Swastika and Primitive Cross-Symbols

XIV. Religious Import of the Dance

PREFACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ÁCOMA, THE SKY CITY

Chapter IMESA LAND

The vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended

And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

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

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

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

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

MESA-LAND

Bolton

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

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

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

THE CARSON MONUMENT

Near Fort Defiance

Bolton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WALPI IS UNIQUE. IT MUST BE PRESERVED

Bolton

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter IITHE CITADEL OF ÁCOMA

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

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

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

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

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

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

KATZÍMO, OR THE ENCHANTED MESA

Bolton

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

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

THE SAND-RAMP, OR “NEW TRAIL”

Bolton

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

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

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

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

ÁCOMA NORTH ROW

Bolton

ÁCOMA MIDDLE ROW

Bolton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ÁCOMA MAN IN EVERYDAY DRESS

Fr. O’Sullivan

ÁCOMA WOMAN ON HER HOUSE TERRACE

Fr. O’Sullivan

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

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

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