RUINS IN TUSAYAN
General Features
No region of our Southwest presents more instructive antiquities than the ancient province of Tusayan, more widely known as the Moki reservation. In the more limited use of the term, Tusayan is applied to the immediate surroundings of the Hopi pueblos, to which "province" it was given in the middle of the sixteenth century. In a broader sense the name would include an as yet unbounded country claimed by the component clans of this people as the homes of their ancestors.
The general character and distribution of Tusayan ruins (plate xvi) has been ably presented by Mr Victor Mindeleff in a previous report.[31] While this memoir is not regarded as exhaustive, it considers most of the large ruins in immediate proximity to the three mesas on which the pueblos inhabited by the Hopi are situated. It is not my purpose here to consider all Tusayan ruins, even if I were able to do so, but to supplement with additional data the observations already published on two of the most noteworthy pueblo settlements. Broadly speaking, I have attempted archeological excavations in order to obtain more light on the nature of prehistoric life in Tusayan. It may be advantageous, however, to refer briefly to some of the ruins thus far discovered in the Tusayan region as preliminary to more systematic descriptions of the two which I have chosen for special description.
The legends of the surviving Hopi contain constant references to former habitations of different clans in the country round about their present villages. These clans, which by consolidation make up the present population of the Hopi pueblos, are said to have originally entered Tusayan from regions as far eastward as the Rio Grande, and from the southern country included within the drainage of the Gila, the Salt, and their affluents. Other increments are reputed to have come from the northward and the westward, so that the people we now find in Tusayan are descendants from an aggregation of stocks from several directions, some of them having migrated from considerable distances. Natives of other regions have settled among the ancient Hopi, built pueblos, and later returned to their former homes; and the Hopi in turn have sent colonists into the eastern pueblo country.
These legends of former movements of the tribal clans of Tusayan are supplemented and supported by historical documents, and we know from this evidence that there has been a continual interchange between the people of Tusayan and almost every large pueblo of New Mexico and Arizona. Some of the ruins of this region were abandoned in historic times; others are prehistoric; many were simply temporary halting places in Hopi migrations, and were abandoned as the clans drifted together in friendship or destroyed as a result of internecine conflicts.
There is documentary evidence that in the years following the great rebellion of the Pueblo tribes in 1680, which were characterized by catastrophes of all kinds among the Rio Grande villagers, many Tanoan people fled to Tusayan to escape from their troubles. According to Niel, 4,000 Tanoan refugees, under Frasquillo, loaded with booty which they had looted from the churches, went to Oraibi by way of Zuñi, and there established a "kingdom," with their chief as ruler. How much reliance may be placed on this account is not clear to me, but there is no doubt that many Tanoan people joined the Hopi about this time, and among them were the Asa people, the ancestors of the present inhabitants of Hano pueblo, and probably the accolents of Payüpki. The ease with which two Franciscan fathers, in 1742, persuaded 441 of these to return to the Rio Grande, implies that they were not very hostile to Christianity, and it is possible that one reason they sought Tusayan in the years after the Spaniards were expelled may have been their friendship for the church party.
With the exception of Oraibi, not one of the present inhabited pueblos of Tusayan occupies the site on which it stood in the sixteenth century, and the majority of them do not antedate the beginning of the eighteenth century. The villages have shifted their positions but retained their names.
At the time of the advent of Tobar, in 1540, there was but one of the present three villages of East Mesa. This was Walpi, and at the period referred to it was situated on the terrace below the site of the present town, near the northwestern base of the mesa proper. Two well-defined ruins, called Kisakobi and Küchaptüvela, are now pointed out as the sites of Old Walpi. Of these Küchaptüvela is regarded as the older.
Judging by their ruins these towns were of considerable size. From their exposed situation they were open to the inroads of predatory tribes, and from these hostile raids their abandonment became necessary. From Küchaptüvela the ancient Walpians moved to a point higher on the mesa, nearer its western limit, and built Kisakobi, where the pueblo stood in the seventeenth century. There is evidence that a Spanish mission was erected at this point, and the place is sometimes called Nüshaki, a corruption of "Missa-ki," Mass-house. From this place the original nucleus of Walpians moved to the present site about the close of the seventeenth century. Later the original population was joined by other phratries, some of which, as the Asa, had lived in the cliff-houses of Tségi, or Canyon de Chelly, as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century. This, however, is not the place to trace the composition of the different modern villages.