[366] Vacapan was apparently an Opata pueblo, or rather two pueblos, on a branch of the Rio Yaqui, which the Spaniards passed through shortly before reaching Corazones (Ures) on the Rio Sonora. The preserved cactus fruit is regarded highly by all the Indians of the general region even to-day, and in season they subsist largely upon it. The saguara (Cereus giganteus), or great columnar cactus, furnishes the chief supply.
[367] The well-known Rocky Mountain sheep. As late as twenty years ago some of the mountain ranges of southeastern Arizona, especially the Catalina Mountains, were noted for this animal.
[368] Compare Chapter 13. These two groups of pueblos were not the same.
[369] Castañeda speaks as a member of the "army," not of the advance guard. See the preceding chapter.
[370] These lines were drawn in corn meal and must not be crossed. To this day similar lines of meal are made across a trail when certain ceremonies are being performed. The Spaniards were now at the pueblo of Awatobi, the first village of the Hopi (Moqui) people of Tusayan, in northeastern Arizona, reached in coming from the southward. It was destroyed by the other Hopi villagers in 1700, because the Awatobi people favored the re-establishment of the Spanish mission that had been destroyed in the great Pueblo revolt of 1680.
[371] Castañeda, speaking from hearsay with respect to the Tovar expedition, errs in this statement, as the Hopi were the principal cotton growers and weavers of all the Pueblos. Later Spanish accounts all agree on this point. Indeed, even now the Hopi cotton kilts, sashes, and ceremonial robes are bartered throughout the Pueblo region.
[372] Piñon nuts.
[373] Obtained by trade with the Rio Grande Pueblos, who mined them in the Cerillos, southeast of Santa Fé, New Mexico. It is from the same deposits that much of the "matrix turquoise" of our present-day commerce is derived.
[374] See the reference to the Cocopa Indians met by Melchior Diaz, in Chapter 10.
[375] The Grand Cañon of the Colorado, now visited and described by white men for the first time.