[426] Prairie-dogs.
[427] This would make the point at which the army reached Pecos River about eighty miles below Puerto de Luna, or not far from the present town of Roswell.
[428] Castañeda is writing about twenty years later. De Soto's army was exploring the eastern country as Coronado was traversing the buffalo plains. The Espiritu Santo is the Mississippi.
[429] See the Gentleman of Elvas in the second part of the present volume.
[430] As usual Castañeda gives a date a year later than the actual one.
[431] The pueblos occupied by the Jemez people. Only one of these now exists; this is on the Rio Jemez, a western tributary of the Rio Grande, which enters the latter stream above Bernalillo, New Mexico. See p. 359, note 2.
[432] This was Yukiwingge, on the site of the present small village of Chamita, at the mouth of the Rio Chama, opposite San Juan pueblo. The other one of the two villages was doubtless San Juan. Both of these were occupied by Tewa Indians. At Yukiwingge was established, in 1598, by Juan de Oñate, the colonizer of New Mexico, the settlement of San Gabriel de los Españoles, which was occupied until the spring of 1605, when the seat of the provincial government was moved to Santa Fé, founded for the purpose in that year. See p. 359, note 4.
[433] These may have been the pueblos, now in ruins, in and north of the Pajarito Park, one of which, called Puye, gives evidence of occupancy in post-Spanish times.
[434] It is not known definitely whether actually glazed pottery or merely the black, highly polished earthenware characteristic of the Tewa Indians of the neighborhood is here meant. The ancient Pueblos manufactured a ware with decoration in what appears to be a salt glaze. Specimens of this have been gathered in the Pajarito Park, at Zuñi, among the Hopi of Arizona, and from ancient ruins around Acoma, but the art seems to have been lost. There is abundant evidence that this form of decoration was prehistoric. The finding of the "shining metal" (called antimony in Pt. 2, chap. 4) would seem to indicate that the polished rather than the glazed ware was here meant.
[435] This was the pueblo of Taos, which stood near the site of the present village of the same name, on both sides of the little stream (Taos River). The present Taos has 425 inhabitants. The swift and deep river without the ford, here referred to, must have been the Rio Grande in the neighborhood of Taos, rather than the Rio de Taos, which is insignificant except in seasons of freshet. Castañeda was evidently not one of Barrionuevo's party.