Here I may be permitted to refer to the older cartography of New Mexico in general. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century these maps are very defective and incomplete. It is almost as if the Ptolemy of 1548 had served as a basis for them. Even the large and beautiful globe constructed at St. Gall in Switzerland in 1595, and now in the Swiss National Museum at Zürich, places Tiguex near the Pacific coast. It is through the work of Benavides that more correct ideas of New Mexican geography were gained and a somewhat more accurate and detailed nomenclature was introduced, since the Geografie Blaviane of 1667 by the Dutch cartographer Jean Blaeuw contains a map of the region far superior to any hitherto published. The number of early maps of New Mexico is larger than is generally supposed, and there are to-day unpublished maps (for instance in the National Archives of Mexico for the eighteenth century) that indicate, as existing, Indian pueblos and missions that were abandoned nearly a century before the maps were made.
I must state that in this Introduction I have abbreviated as much as practicable the titles of books and manuscripts. These are often very long, and it is unnecessary to burden the present text with them, as I shall have to give the full titles in the notes to the Documentary History proper.
It may not be out of place to add to the above a brief review of the distribution and location of the various Pueblo groups at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but strictly according to documentary information alone. The location of different villages must be reserved for later treatment, hence as the ranges of the various linguistic groups had no definite boundaries, only the relative position and approximate extent can be given here.
Following the course of the Rio Grande to the north from northern Chihuahua, the Mansos were first met, in the vicinity of the present Juarez, Mexico. This was in 1598. Nearly one hundred and forty years later Brigadier Don Pedro de Rivera met them[p. 27] farther north, not far from Las Cruces and Doña Ana, New Mexico. To-day they are again at El Paso del Norte. About San Marcial on the Rio Grande began the villages of the Piros, at present reduced to one small village on the right bank of the Rio Grande below El Paso. The Piros extended in the sixteenth century as far north in the Rio Grande valley as Alamillo at least, and a branch of them had established themselves on the borders of the great eastern plains of New Mexico, southeast of the Manzano. That branch, which has left well-known ruins at Abó, Gran Quivira (Tabirá), and other sites in the vicinity, abandoned its home in the seventeenth century, forming the Piro settlement below El Paso, already mentioned. North of the Piros, between a line drawn south of Isleta and the Mesa del Canjelon, the Tiguas occupied a number of villages, mostly on the western bank of the river, and a few Tigua settlements existed also on the margin of the eastern plains beyond the Sierra del Manzano. These outlying Tigua settlements also were abandoned in the seventeenth century, their inhabitants fleeing from the Apaches and retiring to form the Pueblo of Isleta del Sur on the left bank of the Rio Grande in Texas.
North of the Tiguas the Queres had their homes on both sides of the river as far as the great cañon south of San Ildefonso, and an outlying pueblo of the Queres, isolated and quite remote to the west, was Acoma. The most northerly villages on the Rio Grande were those of the Tehuas. Still beyond, but some distance east of the Rio Grande, lay the Pueblos of Taos and Picuris, the inhabitants of which spoke a dialectic variation of the Tigua language of the south. The Tehuas also approached the Rio Grande quite near, at what is called La Bajada; and in about the same latitude, including the former village at Santa Fé, began that branch of the Tehuas known as Tanos, whose settlements ranged from north of Santa Fé as far as the eastern plains and southward to Tajique, where their territory bordered that of the eastern Tiguas.
The Rio Grande Queres extended also as far west as the Jemez river; and north of them, on the same stream, another linguistic group, the Jemez, had established themselves and built several villages of considerable size. East of the Rio Grande and southwest-ward from Santa Fé another branch of the Jemez occupied the northern valley of the Rio Pecos.[p. 28]
The main interest in this distribution of the Rio Grande Pueblos lies in the fact that it establishes a disruption and division of some of these groups prior to the sixteenth century, but of the cause and the manner thereof there is as yet no documentary information. Thus the Tigua Indians of Taos and Picuris are separated from their southern relatives on the Rio Grande by two distinct linguistic groups, the Tehuas and the Queres; the Jemez and the Pecos were divided from each other by the Queres and the Tanos. That the Piros and the Tiguas should have separated from the main stock might be accounted for by the attraction of the great salt deposits about the Manzano and greater accessibility to the buffalo plains, but that in the Rio Grande valley itself foreign linguistic groups should have interposed themselves between the northern and southern Tiguas and the Jemez and Pecos constitutes a problem which only diligent research in traditions, legends, and the native languages may satisfactorily solve.
New York City,
March, 1910.
Transcriber's Note.
Several words purposely occur in accented and non-accented forms. The differing occurrences are retained.
Page 20: Misspelling of Sante Fé corrected to Santa Fé.
Page 23: The title "Coleccion de Documentos" modified to "Colección de Documentos".