From the time the sacred tree was set up until the dance was over, the young men taking part fasted and took no drink. While they suffered, and as they gazed at the sun or lifted up their hands toward it, they continually prayed, saying, “Please pity me; bring to pass the things I desire.” When all was over, the young men were taken home, and each was given four sips of water and a bit of food. A little later they might eat all they liked. Then they went into the sweat lodge. They were now through, and ever after might boast of having danced to Wakantanka.
J. Owen Dorsey.—Missionary, ethnologist. Was connected with the Bureau of Ethnology. Wrote many papers, one of which is Siouan Cults.
XXIV. The Pueblos.
The most interesting Indians of the Southwest are the Pueblos, so called from their habit of living in towns. The word Pueblo is Spanish, and means a village or town. More than three hundred years ago the Spaniards, exploring northward from Mexico, found these clusters of industrious Indians living in their quaint towns. They conquered them and brought them missionaries. They taught them their beautiful language, and even to-day Spanish is spoken in all the pueblos in addition to the native Indian tongue. When the Spaniards entered New Mexico there were more than one hundred pueblos; to-day there are about twenty. Most of these are in New Mexico, but seven, the Moki towns, are in Arizona.
The home of the Pueblos is a wonderful land. It is a country of desert, of flat-topped mesas, of sharp-pinnacled crests, of broad valleys, and deep and narrow cañons. It is a land where the sky is almost always blue, and where the air is clear. There are but few streams, and every spring is precious. The people always built near water, and selected some spot in a valley where there was room for the corn-fields.
The largest of the present pueblos is Zuñi, in New Mexico. Some years ago a white man, [pg 162] Frank Cushing, went to Zuñi and lived for a long time there to learn about the life and customs of the Pueblo Indians. They were kind to him, at first taking him into their own houses, and later allowing him a little house by himself. Since Mr. Cushing went to live at Zuñi, a number of other persons have lived at other pueblos, so that we know a good deal about them now.
View of Pueblo: Taos, N. M. (From Photograph.)
In former times a pueblo consisted of one great house, or, at most, of a few great houses, each the home of a large number of people. Taos, in northern New Mexico, is, perhaps, as old-fashioned as any of the pueblos now occupied. Even to-day it consists almost entirely of two large houses, one on each side of the little Taos River. The houses are so built that the flat roofs [pg 163] of the different stories form a set of steps as one looks at them from in front. In a three-story building the lower floor would have three sets of rooms, one in front of another. The roof of the front line of rooms would form a flat platform in front of the front rooms of the second story, which consisted only of two lines of rooms. The roof of the front line of these, in turn, was a platform in front of the single line of third-story rooms. Formerly there were no doors in the lower rooms, but ladders were placed against the wall, and persons climbed up on the roof; then through a hole in the roof, by means of another ladder they climbed down into the room. By ladders from the roof of the first floor they climbed to the top of the second story; there were doors in the rooms of the second and third stories. Nowadays there are usually doors into the lower rooms, but they still use ladders for getting into the upper stories.