When the message strands of that great war magician, Popé of Taos, who had planned the rebellion and sent forth the knotted strings of invitation and warning, were received by the Zuñis, their leaders of one accord consented to join the movement and sped the war strands farther on to the Tusayan country, there insisting with the less courageous Hopi that they join also, and ultimately gaining their at first divided consent.
When all the knots had been numbered and untied, then, to a man, the Zuñis arose to slay Spaniards wheresoever they might encounter them. They forthwith killed Fray Juan de Bal, the priest of Hálona, burning his church and destroying the chapels in the lesser towns round about. Not content with this, they dispatched warriors to the Tusayan country to see to it that the Hopi remain faithful to their promise and vigorously to abet them in its fulfilment.
It fared far otherwise with the priest of Háwik’uh. Although his name is unknown, and although it has been doubted that any other missionary than Fray Juan of Hálona was with the Zuñis at the time, or that the mission of Háwik’uh was ever occupied after the death of Fray Pedro de Avila, yet Vetancurt's chronicles are explicit in stating the contrary, and that, although the Church of the Conception was again burned, the priest escaped. This latter statement is substantially true if we may trust Zuñi tradition, which is very detailed on this point, and which is trustworthy on many another and better recorded point of even remoter date.
The elder Priests of the Bow—three of whom were battle-scarred warriors of nearly a hundred winters at the time of my initiation into their order—told me that one of their gray-robed tútatsikwe ("fathers of drink," so named because they used cup-like vessels of water in baptizing), whom their ancients had with them at Háwik’uh in the time of the great evil, was much loved by them; "for, like ourselves," they affirmed, "he had a Zuñi heart and cared for the sick and women and children, nor contended with the fathers of the people; therefore, in that time of evil they spared him on condition "—precisely the rather sweeping condition these same veterans had in 1880 imposed on me ere they would permit of my adoption into one of their clans—"that he eschew the vestment and usages of his people and kind, and in everything, costume and ways of life alike, become a Zuñi; for as such only could they spare him and nurture him." Not so much, I imagine, from fear of death—for the dauntless Franciscan friars of those days feared only God and the devil and met martyrdom as bridegrooms of the Virgin herself—as from love of the Zuñis, if one may judge by the regard they even still have for his memory, and a hope that, living, he might perchance restrain them, alike to the good of their people and his own people, the father gave way to their wishes; or he may have been forced to accede to them by one of those compulsory adoptions of the enemy not uncommonly practiced by the Indians in times of hostility. Be this as it may, the Zuñis abandoned all their towns in the valley, and taking the good priest with them, fled yet again to the top of their high Mountain of Thunder. Around an ample amphitheater near its southern rim, they rebuilt six or seven great clusters of stone houses and renewed in the miniature vales of the mesa summit the reservoirs for rain and snow, and on the crests above the trickling spring under their towns, and along the upper reaches of the giddy trail by which the heights were scaled they reared archers' booths and heaps of slingstones and munitions of heavy rocks.
There, continually providing for the conflict which they knew would sooner or later reach even their remote fastnesses (as speedily it began to reach the Rio Grande country), they abode securely for more than ten years, living strictly according to the ways of their forefathers, worshiping only the beloved of war and the wind and rain, nor paying aught of attention to the jealous gods of the Spaniard.
Then at last Diego de Vargas, the reconquistador of New Mexico, approached Zuñiland with his force of foot soldiers and horsemen. The Zuñis, learning this, poisoned the waters of their springs at Pescado and near the entrance to the valley with yucca juice and cactus spines, and, they say, "with the death-magic of corpse shells; so that the horses and men, drinking there, were undone or died of bloating and bowel sickness." In this latter statement the historians of Vargas and the Zuñi traditions agree. But the captain-general could not have stormed the Rock of Cibola. With the weakened force remaining at his command his efforts were doubly futile. Therefore, where now the new peach orchards of the Zuñis grow on the sunlit sand slopes, 800 feet below the northern crest of the mesa their fathers so well defended in those days, Vargas camped his army, with intent to besiege the heathen renegades, and to harass and pick off such stragglers as came within the range of his arquebuses.
Now, however, the good friar whom the Indians called Kwan Tátchui Lók‘yana ("Juan Gray-robed-father-of-us"), was called to council by the elders, and given a well-scraped piece of deerskin, whitened with prayer meal, and some bits of cinder, wherewith to make markings of meaning to his countrymen. And he was bidden to mark thereon that the Zuñis were good to those who, like him, were good to them and meddled not; nor would they harm any who did not harm their women and children and their elders. And that if such these captains and their warriors would but choose and promise to be, they would descend from their mountain, nor stretch their bowstrings more. But when they told their gray father that he could now join his people if that by so doing he might stay their anger, and told him so to mark it, the priest, so the legend runs, "dissembled and did not tell that he was there, only that the fathers of the Áshiwi were good now;" for he willed, it would seem, to abide with them all the rest of his days, which, alas, were but few. Then the hide was tied to a slingstone and taken to the edge of the mesa, and cast down into the midst of the watchful enemy by the arm of a strong warrior. And when the bearded foemen below saw it fall, they took it up and curiously questioned it with their eyes, and finding its answers perfect and its import good, they instant bore it to their war captain, and in token of his consent, they waved it aloft. So was speech held and peace forthwith established between them.
That without casualty to the Zuñis an understanding was in some way soon reached between them and Vargas, the chroniclers of the expedition agree with this Zuñi legend; and before the end of the century the Indians had all descended to the plain again and were gathered, except in seasons of planting and harvest, chiefly at three of their easternmost towns, and the central one of Hálona Ítiwana, the Zuñi of today. After the reconquest at least some of the missions were rehabilitated, and missionaries dwelt with the Zuñis now and again. But other chiefs than those chosen by the priestly elders of the people were thenceforward chosen by the Spaniards to watch the people—gobernador, alcalde, and tenientes,—and these in turn were watched by Spanish soldiers whose conduct favored little the fostering of good will and happy relations; for in 1703, goaded to desperation by the excesses of these resident police, the Zuñis drove at least three of them into the church and there massacred them. Then, according to their wont, they fled, for the last time, to the top of Thunder mountain.
When they finally descended they planted numerous peach orchards among the cliffs and terraces of Grand mountain and Twin mountains to the northward of Zuñi, and there also laid out great gardens and many little cornfields. And with the pretext of wishing to be near their crops there, they built the seven Sónoli ‘Hlúëlawe (the "Towns of Sonora"), so named because the peach stones they had planted there had been brought from Sonora, Mexico. But their real object was to escape from the irksome and oft-repeated spyings upon and interdictions of their sacred observances and mythic drama-dances, which, as time went on, the Spanish frailes, supported by the increasing power of the authorities at Santa Fé in the first half of the eighteenth century, were wont to make. So, in hidden and lone nooks on the mountains, where their fine foundations may be seen even now, the Indian priests had massive kivas built, and there from year to year they conducted in secret the rites which but for this had never been preserved so perfectly for telling, albeit only in outline, in the following pages. But even thus far from the mission and its warders the plume-wands of worship, which in earlier times had been made long (each one according to its kind as long as from the elbow to the tip of one finger or another of him who made and sacrificed it), now had to be cut short and made only as long as the hands and the various fingers of those who made them; for the large plumed messages to the winds and spaces often betrayed the people, and they must now needs be made of size convenient for burial or hiding away in crannies or under bushes as near as might be to the shrines of the sacred precincts where once the fathers had worshiped so freely.
Toward the end of the century, between 1775 and 1780, the old Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which now harbors only burros and shivering dogs of cold winter nights and is toppling to ruin in the middle of the grand plaza of Zuñi, was built and beautifully decorated with carved altar pieces and paintings, gifts from the King of Spain to the Indies and work of resident monks as well. Its walls were painted—as the more recent plasterings scaling off here and there reveal—by Zuñi artists, who scrupled not to mingle many a pagan symbol of the gods of wind, rain, and lightning, sunlight, storm-dark and tempest, war-bale and magic, and, more than all, emblems of their beloved goddess-virgins of corn-growing with the bright-colored Christian decorations. And doubtless their sedulous teachers or masters, as the case may have been, understanding little, if aught, of the meanings of these things, were well pleased that these reluctant proselytes should manifest so much of zeal and bestow such loving care on this temple of the holy and only true faith.