It occupied 4 years to cross the disrupted country. The kwakwanti (a warrior order) went ahead of the people and carried seed of corn, beans, melons, squashes, and cotton. They would plant corn in the mud at early morning and by noon it was ripe and thus the people were fed. When they reached solid ground they rested, and then they built houses. The kwakwanti were always out exploring—sometimes they were gone as long as four years. Again we would follow them on long journeys, and halt and build houses and plant. While we were traveling if a woman became heavy with child we would build her a house and put plenty of food in it and leave her there, and from these women sprang the Pima, Maricopa, and other Indians in the South.
Away in the South, before we crossed the mountains (south of the Apache country) we built large houses and lived there a long while. Near these houses is a large rock on which was painted the rain-clouds of the Water phratry, also a man carrying corn in his arms; and the other phratries also painted the Lizard and the Rabbit upon it. While they were living there the kwakwanti made an expedition far to the north and came in conflict with a hostile people. They fought day after day, for days and days—they fought by day only and when night came they separated, each party retiring to its own ground to rest. One night the cranes came and each crane took a kwakwanti on his back and brought them back to their people in the South.
Again all the people traveled north until they came to the Little Colorado, near San Francisco Mountains, and there they built houses up and down the river. They also made long ditches to carry the water from the river to their gardens. After living there a long while they began to be plagued with swarms of a kind of gnat called the sand-fly, which bit the children, causing them to swell up and die. The place becoming unendurable, they were forced again to resume their travels. Before starting, one of the Rain-women, who was big with child, was made comfortable in one of the houses on the mountain. She told her people to leave her, because she knew this was the place where she was to remain forever. She also told them, that hereafter whenever they should return to the mountain to hunt she would provide them with plenty of game. Under her house is a spring and any sterile woman who drinks of its water will bear children. The people then began a long journey to reach the summit of the table land on the north. They camped for rest on one of the terraces, where there was no water, and they were very tired and thirsty. Here the women celebrated the rain-feast—they danced for three days, and on the fourth day the clouds brought heavy rain and refreshed the people. This event is still commemorated by a circle of stones at that place. They reached a spring southeast from Káibitho (Kumás Spring) and there they built a house and lived for some time. Our people had plenty of rain and cultivated much corn and some of the Walpi people came to visit us. They told ns that their rain only came here and there in fine misty sprays, and a basketful of corn was regarded as a large crop. So they asked us to come to their land and live with them and finally we consented. When we got there we found some Eagle people living near the Second Mesa; our people divided, and part went with the Eagle and have ever since remained there; but we camped near the First Mesa. It was planting time and the Walpi celebrated their rain-feast but they brought only a mere misty drizzle. Then we celebrated our rain-feast and planted. Great rains and thunder and lightning immediately followed and on the first day after planting our corn was half an arm’s length high; on the fourth day it was its full height, and in one moon it was ripe. When we were going up to the village (Walpi was then north of the gap, probably), we were met by a Bear man who said that our thunder frightened the women and we must not go near the village. Then the kwakwanti said, “Let us leave these people and seek a land somewhere else,” but our women said they were tired of travel and insisted upon our remaining. Then “Fire-picker” came down from the village and told us to come up there and stay, but after we had got into the village the Walpi women screamed out against us—they feared our thunder—and so the Walpi turned us away. Then our people, except those who went to the Second Mesa, traveled to the northeast as far as the Tsegi (Canyon de Chelly), but I can not tell whether our people built the louses there. Then they came hack to this region again and built houses and had much trouble with the Walpi, but we have lived here ever since.
Groups of the Water people, as already stated, were distributed among all the villages, although the bulk of them remained at the Middle Mesa; but it seems that most of the remaining groups subsequently chose to build their permanent houses at Oraibi. There is no special tradition of this movement; it is only indicated by this circumstance, that in addition to the Water families common to every village, there are still in Oraibi several families of that people which have no representatives in any of the other villages. At a quite early day Oraibi became a place of importance, and they tell of being sufficiently populous to establish many outlying settlements. They still identify these with ruins on the detached mesas in the valley to the south and along the Moen-kopi (“place of flowing water”) and other intermittent streams in the west. These sites were occupied for the purpose of utilizing cultivable tracts of land in their vicinity, and the remotest settlement, about 45 miles west, was especially devoted to the cultivation of cotton, the place being still called by the Navajo and other neighboring tribes, the “cotton planting ground.” It is also said that several of the larger ruins along the course of the Moen-kopi were occupied by groups of the Snake, the Coyote, and the Eagle who dwelt in that region for a long period before they joined the people in Tusayan. The incursions of foreign bands from the north may have hastened that movement, and the Oraibi say they were compelled to withdraw all their outlying colonies. An episode is related of an attack upon the main village when a number of young girls were carried off, and 2 or 3 years afterward the same marauders returned and treated with the Oraibi, who paid a ransom in corn and received all their girls back again. After a quiet interval the pillaging bands renewed their attacks and the settlements on the Moen-kopi were vacated. They were again occupied after another peace was established, and this condition of alternate occupancy and abandonment seems to have existed until within quite recent time.
While the Asa were still sojourning in Canyon de Chelly, and before the arrival of the Hano, another bloody scene had been enacted in Tusayan. Since the time of the Antelope Canyon feuds there had been enmity between Awatubi and some of the other villages, especially Walpi, and some of the Sikyatki refugees had transmitted their feudal wrongs to their descendants who dwelt in Awatubi. They had long been perpetrating all manner of offenses; they had intercepted hunting
parties from the other villages, seized their game, and sometimes killed the hunters; they had fallen upon men in outlying corn fields, maltreating and sometimes slaying them, and threatened still more serious outrage. Awatubi was too strong for Walpi to attack single-handed, so the assistance of the other villages was sought, and it was determined to destroy Awatubi at the close of a feast soon to occur. This was the annual “feast of the kwakwanti,” which is still maintained and is held during the month of November by each village, when the youths who have been qualified by certain ordeals are admitted to the councils. The ceremonies last several days, and on the concluding night special rites are held in the kivas. At these ceremonies every man must be in the kiva to which he belongs, and after the close of the rites they all sleep there, no one being permitted to leave the kiva until after sunrise on the following day.
There was still some little intercourse between Awatubi and Walpi, and it was easily ascertained when this feast was to be held. On the day of its close, the Walpi sent word to their allies “to prepare the war arrow and come,” and in the evening the fighting bands from the other villages assembled at Walpi, as the foray was to be led by the chief of that village. By the time night had fallen something like 150 marauders had met, all armed, of course; and of still more ominous import than their weapons were the firebrands they carried—shredded cedar bark loosely bound in rolls, resinous splinters of piñon, dry greasewood (a furze very easily ignited), and pouches full of pulverized red peppers.
Secure in the darkness from observation, the bands followed the Walpi chief across the valley, every man with his weapons in hand and a bundle of inflammables on his back. Beaching the Awatubi mesa they cautiously crept up the steep, winding trail to the summit, and then stole round the village to the passages leading to the different courts holding the kivas, near which they hid themselves. They waited till just before the gray daylight came, then the Walpi chief shouted his war cry and the yelling bands rushed to the kivas. Selecting their positions, they were at them in a moment, and quickly snatching up the ladders through the hatchways, the only means of exit, the doomed occupants were left as helpless as rats in a trap. Fire was at hand in the numerous little cooking pits, containing the jars of food prepared for the celebrants, the inflammable bundles were lit and tossed into the kivas, and the piles of firewood on the terraced roofs were thrown down upon the blaze, and soon each kiva became a furnace. The red pepper was then cast upon the fire to add its choking tortures, while round the hatchways the assailants stood showering their arrows into the mass of struggling wretches. The fires were maintained until the roofs fell in and buried and charred the bones of the victims. It is said that every male of Awatubi who had passed infancy perished in the slaughter, not one escaping. Such of the women and children as were spared were taken out, and all the houses were destroyed, after which the captives were divided among the different villages.
The date of this last feudal atrocity can be made out with some degree of exactness, because in 1692, Don Diego Vargas with a military force visited Tusayan and mentions Awatubi as a populous village at which he made some halt. The Hano (Tewa) claim that they have lived in Tusayan for five or six generations, and that when they arrived there was no Awatubi in existence; hence it must have been destroyed not long after the close of the seventeenth century.