Finding the Worth While in the Southwest

by Charles Francis Saunders

A SUNNY WALL IN ZUÑI

The men of Zuñi are famous knitters. This one is making his wife a pair of leggings.

A short walk from the pueblo brings you to Hepatina (hay´-pa-tee-na) a stone shrine erected on the plain, which in the Zuñi conception, marks the center of the earth; for the unreconstructed Zuñi believes naturally enough, just as your and my ancestors did a few centuries ago, that the earth is flat. Hither in the days of long ago, a guardian divinity of the Zuñis brought them as to the safest place in the world—the farthest from the edge—preceding them in the form of a water strider. The double-barred cross, which you will see sometimes on Zuñi pottery, or fashioned in silver, is the symbol of that divine guide. There has been, by the way, some good pottery made at Zuñi, and the visitor interested in that art may still enjoy the adventure of a house-to-house ceramic hunt with chances of a pleasurable outcome.

The accommodations for visitors in the pueblo are very limited. Perhaps one of the couple of white resident traders or the school teacher may be complaisant enough to take you in; and there are certain Indian houses where lodging can surely be had. If you are not of a meticulous sort, I would recommend a stop-over long enough at least to visit the mesa Towa-yálleni, which Cushing has put into literature as Thunder Mountain. It looks near the pueblo, but is really 4 miles distant. On its summit centuries ago there was a pueblo of the Zuñis, the broken down walls of which, overrun with cactus and brush, are still quite evident. Curious pictographs of the ancients may be traced on many a rock; and if one knows where to look, there are pagan shrines where prayer plumes are yet offered to the Divine Ones. Among such are those of the Twin War Gods, whose home is believed to have been on Towa-yálleni—“little fellows that never give up.” I was once informed by a Zuñi, “gone away now may be gone up, may be gone down; quien sabe?”[41] It was on this mountain the Zuñis found a refuge after their losing fight with Coronado in 1540; and again in 1632 they retreated hither after killing their missionary, Padre Letrado, of whom we shall hear again at Inscription Rock in the next chapter. And here they were in 1692 when De Vargas forced their surrender in the re-conquest. Tradition has it, too, that here long, long ago, the people fled for safety when an offended deity flooded them out of their villages in the plain; and the water still rising, a desperate sacrifice was called for. A boy and a girl were tossed from the summit into the angry flood. In a twinkling, the children were transformed into pinnacles of rock and the waters sank appeased. You can see these spires of stone today from Zuñi, and old people will tell you that the one with a double point is the boy. A peculiar virtue resides in that petrified humanity it seems. If a childless couple resort to the base of the pinnacles and there plant prayer plumes, there will be granted to them the children of their desire.

There are trails, steep and rough, up Towa-yálleni’s sides, and if you can make the trip with an intelligent and communicative old Zuñi (most of the young ones seem to know or care little about the ancient things), you will have a remarkable outing. An hour or two spent on that lonely breeze-swept, sun-kissed mesa-top, with the ruined town, its broken shrines, its historic and legendary memories, will induct you, as no amount of reading will, into the atmosphere of the Southwest’s romantic past. There used to be—and for all I know still is—a trail that a rider on horseback can follow, at the northeastern side of the mesa. The ancient peach orchard through which it wound owes its existence to seed brought to Zuñi by the Spaniards.

NOTE: Five miles northeast of Zuñi, is Black Rock, where travelers with an interest in Government education of the Indians may see a Reservation School in operation. Within a radius of 15 or 20 miles of the main pueblo are 3 farming villages occupied in summer by Zuñis to be near certain tracts of tillable land. One of these, Ojo Caliente, 15 miles southwest of Zuñi, is close to the site of ancient Háwikuh—the first Pueblo town seen by white men. Upon it in 1539, intrepid Fray Marcos de Niza looked down from a nearby height, and then, warned by the murder of his avant-courier, the negro Estévanico, beat a prudent retreat to Mexico. Coronado captured the place in the following year, and thence made his first report of the famous 7 cities to the viceroy in Mexico. It is the scene of one of the most charming of Cushing’s Zuñi folk tales, “The Foster Child of the Deer.” Extensive excavations have recently been made there by Government ethnologists.

CHAPTER VII
EL MORRO, THE AUTOGRAPH ROCK OF THE CONQUISTADORES

Thirty-five miles eastward from Zuñi (2 hours by automobile, if the roads are dry) is a huge rock mass of pale pink sandstone whose sides rise sheer a couple of hundred feet against a turquoise sky. It stands in the midst of a lonely plain whose wild grasses are nibbled by the passing flocks of wandering Navajos, and so far as I know, there is no nearer human habitation than the little Mormon settlement of Ramah, through which you pass to reach the rock. This cliff has a story to tell of such unique interest that the United States Government has acquired the mesa of which it is a spur for a National Monument. It is known as Inscription Rock, or El Morro (the latter a not uncommon Spanish-American designation for a bold promontory), and was a landmark as early as the sixteenth century for the Spanish expeditions bound between Santa Fe, Acoma and Zuñi. Water, feed, and wood were here available, as they are today, making the foot of the high cliff a good camping place, and here as a matter of fact during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, many a Spanish military party did camp, and having rested themselves and their cattle, went on refreshed to do the errands of their King and Church.

And hither one day in 1849, just after New Mexico had become part of the United States, came Lieut. J. H. Simpson, U. S. A., with some troopers on a military reconnaissance, and discovered that the base of the cliff was a veritable album of those old Conquistadores; bearing not only the names of the Spanish explorers but frequently an accompaniment of date and comment that form important contributory evidence touching the early history of the Southwest. Simpson made copies of a number of the inscriptions, and these were published with translations (not always accurate) in his report to the Secretary of War.[42] Most of those recordings carved in the soft rock with sword or dagger point are still fresh and legible, so little have centuries of dry New Mexico weather worn the clear-cut lettering. If you go to see them, you will be a dry-as-dust indeed if you do not feel an odd sort of thrill as you put your finger tips upon the chiseled autographs of the men who won for Spain an empire and held it dauntlessly. For most of these records are not idle scribblings of the witless, but careful work by people with a purpose, whose names are mentioned in the documents of the time. Here are the names, for instance, of Oñate, the conqueror, and of De Vargas, the re-conqueror, the very flower of the warrior brotherhood. The Rock is a monument such as has no duplicate in the country; and some day when our historians have got the Southwest in proper perspective, and waked up to a realization of the heroism and romance that went into the making of it, El Morro will perhaps be really protected (if its priceless inscriptions survive so long) and not left as it is now to vandal tourists to hack and carve their silly names upon.

It takes knowledge of old Spanish abbreviations to get at the sense of many of the records, but even the casual visitor cannot but be struck by the artistry that characterizes many of the petrographs. One who has Spanish enough to give zest to the quest could easily spend a couple of days, camped at this fascinating spot, spelling out the quaint old notations, peopling again in fancy this ancient camp-ground with the warriors of long ago in helmet and cuirass, their horses housed in leather; and ever with them the Franciscan soldiers of the Cross in gray gown and cord with dangling crucifix. Then there is the enjoyment of the place itself—the sunny solitude, and the glorious, extended views, the long blue line of the Zuñi Mountains, the pale spires of La Puerta de los Gigantes (the Giants’ Gate). Then, if you like, is the climb to the mesa’s summit for yet wider views, and a sight of the ruined old pueblo there, whereof history has naught to tell—only tradition, which says that it was once a Zuñian town.