The Yucatan and Central American Indians were, in their architecture, in advance of the remaining aborigines of North America. Next to them, probably, were the Aztecs, and some few tribes southward. Holding the third position, though not far behind, were the Village Indians of New Mexico. All alike they depended upon horticulture for subsistence, and cultivated by irrigation; cotton being superadded to the maize, beans, squashes, and tobacco, cultivated by the northern tribes. Their houses, with those previously described, represent together an original indigenous architecture, which, with its diversities, sprang out of their necessities. Its fundamental communal type, I repeat, is found not less clearly in the houses about to be described, and in the so-called palace at Palenque, than in the long-house of the Iroquois. An examination of the plan of the structures in Mexico, New Mexico, and Central America will tend to establish the truth of this proposition.
New Mexico is a poor country for civilized man, but quite well adapted to Sedentary Indians, who cultivate about one acre out of every hundred thousand. This region, and the San Juan, immediately north of it, possessed a number of narrow fertile valleys, containing together, possibly, 50,000 inhabitants, and it is occupied now by their descendants (excepting the San Juan) in manner and form as it was then. Each pueblo consisted either of a single great house, or of three or four such houses grouped together; and what is more significant, the New Mexican pueblo is a fair type of those now found in ruins in Yucatan, Chiapas, Guatemala, and Honduras, in general plan and in situation. All the people lived together in these great houses on terms of equality, for their institutions were essentially democratical. Common tenements for common Indians around these structures were not found there by Coronado in 1541, neither have any been found there since. There is not the slightest ground for supposing that any such tenements ever existed around those in Yucatan and Central America. Every structure was in the nature of a fortress, showing the insecurity in which they lived.
Since the year 1846, the date of the conquest of New Mexico, a number of military reconnaissances, under the direction of the War Department, have been made in various parts of the Territory. The army officers in change devoted their chief attention to the physical geography and resources of the regions traversed; but, incidentally, they investigated the pueblos in ruins, and the present condition of the Pueblo Indians. The admirable manner in which they have executed the work is shown by the series of reports issued from time to time by the government. More recently, the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, under Prof. F. V. Hayden, geologist in charge, and also the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, Maj. J. W. Powell, geologist in charge, have furnished a large amount of additional information concerning the ruins on the San Juan and its tributaries, the Cliff Houses on the Mancos River and elsewhere, and the Moki Pueblos. Valuable as this information is to us, it falls short of a full exposition of these several subjects.
At the time of Coronado's expedition to capture the Seven Cities of Cibola, so called in the relations of the period, the aborigines of New Mexico manufactured earthen vessels of large size and excellent workmanship, wove cotton fabrics with spun thread, cultivated irrigated gardens, were armed with the bow, arrow, and shield, wore deer-skins and buffalo robes and also cotton mantles as external garments, and had domesticated the wild turkey.
[Footnote: "We found here Guinea cocks [turkeys], but few. The Indians tell me in all these seven cities that they eat them not, but that they keep them only for their feathers. I believe them not, for they are excellent good, and greater than those of Mexico."— Coronado Rel., Hakluyt, iii, 377.]
"They had hardly provisions enough for themselves," remarks
Jaramillo of the Cibolans, "and what they had consisted of maize,
beans, and squashes." [Footnote: Relation of Capt. Juan Jaramillo,
Coll. Terneaux-Compans, ix, 369.]
"What was true of the Cibolans in this respect was doubtless true of the Sedentary Indians in general. Each pueblo was an independent organization under a council of chiefs, except as several contiguous pueblos, speaking dialects of the same language, were confederated for mutual protection, of which the seven Cibolan pueblos, situated probably in the valley of the Rio Chaco, within an extent of twelve miles, afford a fair example." The degree of their advancement is more conspicuously shown in their house architecture.
The present Village Indians of New Mexico, or at least some of them, still manufacture earthen vessels, and spin and weave cotton fabrics in the aboriginal manner, and live in houses of the ancient model. Some of them, as the Mokis and Lagunas, are organized in gentes, and governed by a council of chiefs, each village being independent and self-governing. They observe the same law of hospitality universally practiced by the Northern Indians. Upon this subject, Mr. David J. Miller, of Santa Fe, writes as follows to the author: "A visitor to one of their houses is invariably tendered its hospitality in the form of food placed before him. A failure to tender it is deemed a grave breach of hospitality and an insult; and a declension to partake of it would be regarded as a breach of etiquette. As among us, they have their rich and their poor, and the former give to the latter cheerfully and in due plenty." Here we find a nearly exact repetition of the Iroquois and Mandan rules of hospitality before given. Whether or not they formerly practiced communism in household groups, I am not informed. Their houses are adapted to this mode of life, as will presently be shown; and upon that fact and their stage of social advancement, the deduction of the practice must for the present rest.
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