In approaching the subject of the New Mexican Pueblo Indians it is necessary at the outset to free the mind from the traditional error that because these live in towns known as "pueblos," therefore they are one kind of Indians. I shall recur to the subject in a later connection. Here I wish to cite an early instance of the recognition of an all-important ethnological fact on the part of Lieutenant James H. Simpson, U. S. T. E., whose interesting Journal of a Military Reconnaissance from Santa Fé, New Mexico, to the Navajo country, etc., in 1849, was published in 1850 as one of the collection of papers forming Ex. Doc. No. 64, 31st Congr., 1st Sess., 8vo, Washington, pp. 56-168, many pll. and maps. He speaks on p. 57 of "the singular and, as I believe, the hitherto unknown fact ... that among the 10,000 (estimated) Pueblo Indians who inhabit New Mexico, as many as six distinct dialects obtain, no one showing anything more than the faintest, if any, indications of a cognate origin with the other." He sharply but justly brings to book the English author Ruxton, for the grossly erroneous statement (Mex. and the R. Mts., p. 194) that "the Indians of northern Mexico, including the Pueblos, belong to the same family—the Apache.... All these speak dialects of the same language, more or less approximating to the Apache, and of all of which the idiomatic structure is the the same." A statement more at variance from the facts in the case could hardly be penned. Those Pueblo Indians whom Pike now or presently meets represent two distinct linguistic families, the Keresan and the Tañoan; and we shall have several others to note in due course. The influence of the church upon the pueblo system has of course not escaped well-informed ethnographers, but I suspect they have not always given it full credit for the hand it had in first founding, then maintaining in misery, and finally fetching to grief, some of these sorry settlements of inoffensive Indians, who had escaped the Apaches on one side and the Navajos on the other, to be herded about some mud joss-house and fleeced as fast as they acquired any substance worth stealing. The business began early, and the way of it is something of a historical curiosity. A man named Alessandro Farnese—the one who was pope 1534-49, and who undertook to regulate the morals of various persons, besides Henry VIII., with indifferent success—once made a discovery so astonishing that he must have been inspired. Papa Paulo III. promptly published his find in a bull which was only saved from being Irish by the fact that it was Latin: for this ethnological pronunciamento a todos los fieles cristianos, que las presentes letras vieren declared in due and solemn form que los indios son hombres y capaces de sacramentos—i. e., told all the faithful to whom this exquisite tomfoolery came that Indians were human and could be humbugged. That was June 9th, 1537, and that settled it—the hint was enough to set upon the savages the horde of corrupt, profligate, and extortionate ecclesiastics who have cursed the country from that day to this. The first business of these people was always to build a church in which to brandish the crucifix at those who had escaped the tomahawk, and pray for the souls of those whose superstitions were thus played upon while their property was preyed upon—for churches cannot be built and priests supported unless somebody sweats for it. I hardly think that Indians thus huddled around a church, in abject terror alike of their natural and their supernatural enemies, outside and inside the pueblo, were any better off for self-defense than they would have been had they been left to their natural resources—though many have so fancied; for the numerical strength of such an aggregation would have been just as effective without that edifice, and tame Indians are no match for wild ones. The process of converting an Indian to Christianity simply mixes his metaphors and muddles his mind, by substituting for the superstitions he thinks he understands other mysteries which the priests themselves declare to be incomprehensible. The advantage of this to the Indian is not easily discerned, and some of its disadvantages are obvious. For example, the priests are responsible for a considerable amount of fornication and fœticide—I do not mean so much by their personal habits as by their keeping so many of their parishioners too poor to pay for marriages and baptisms. By the year 1680, the papal plan and the church method had worked so well that the converted Indians undertook to prove themselves men, capable of the very real sacrament of manhood; for they revolted against the intolerable yoke, killed a great many of their oppressors, and drove these ill-omened birds of prey from their repast for a while.
[I'-4] Pike joins Rio Caliente with the Chama (Conejos in the text, by error) too near Ojo Caliente and too far from San Juan, but the sum of his figures is about right. Rio Caliente does not seem to be as well populated now as it was in his day; Los Gallegos is a present place on this stream. The confluence of the two is at the point of a butte, with the Black mesa immediately to the left or E.; some of the present places thence to the Rio Grande are Cuchilla, Chili, and San José, all on the W. side of Rio Chama, off his route, and not noted by him; the site of Chama itself was on the other side, near the mouth. The St. John's of the text, charted "Sn Juan 1000," is the Tañoan pueblo San Juan, pop. now 400. He crosses to this place on the E. side of the Rio Grande, where there was a ford or ferry; the railroad crosses there now, at Española.
[I'-5] I have not succeeded in identifying Baptiste Lalande. One Alexis Lalande (his × mark) appears among signers of a document executed at St. Louis, Oct. 30th, 1819; and on Sept. 16th, 1809, the same was one of a jury that convicted John Long of murdering one George Gordon the previous June 26th; and Alexis subsequently swore he neither spoke nor knew English. The William Morrison of the same paragraph is easily discovered. He was the oldest one of several brothers who came from Doylestown, Bucks Co., Pa.; had been associated with his uncle, Guy Bryan, in business in Philada.; came to Kaskaskia about 1785, and became prominent as a merchant there, in Cahokia, and in St. Louis; married (1) a lady of Illinois; (2) in 1813, a daughter of General Daniel Bissell, U. S. A.; died 1837, at Kaskaskia; was grandfather of Hon. William R. Morrison. (Billon's Annals, 1804-1821, pub. 1888, p. 219.)
[I'-6] In the orig. ed. this paragraph appears as Doc. No. 7, p. 69, of the App. to Pt. 3, to which Pike refers the reader by a footnote. But as it is out of place there, and also so short, I simply run it into the present and proper context.
[I'-7] The defective itinerary of Mar. 3d requires attention. We see that Pike crossed the river to San Juan, whence he goes down the E. side to Santa Fé. But first for the places he marks on the W. side within the distance to Santa Fé, and which are: 1. Abicu, pop. 500; 2. Cia, pop. 450; and 3. Gomez, pop. 500. 1. Abicu is marked as if it stood near the mouth of Rio Chama, in the vicinity of present San Antonio and San José; but its exact location is not difficult to discover. For this is the town now called Abiquiu, 20 m. by the road up the Rio Chama from the Rio Grande, on the S. side of the Chama, at the mouth of Frijoles (Beans) cr. It is on the long and well-known trail which led up the valley of the Chama and so on over the mountains en route to Los Angeles, Cal. 2. Cia or Sia is a Keresan pueblo, with a present pop. of about 100. 3. Gomez is the Tañoan pueblo Jemez, misplaced too near the Rio Grande: see note beyond for this and for Cia. The Jemez trail from San Ildefonso passes the ruins of an old pueblo (called by the Spanish equivalent Pueblo Viejo), on the edge of the mesa, say 1½ m. W. of the Rio Grande and 5 m. S. W. of San Ildefonso. There is also within this distance the Tañoan pueblo of Santa Clara, with a present pop. of over 200, on the W. side of the Rio Grande, a mile below the mouth of Santa Clara cr. From San Juan to Santa Fé there are or were two roads; a lower, which hugs the Rio Grande for some distance before it turns away from the river, and an upper, more direct course, probably that which Pike took. In either case, he crossed the two small streams or arroyos now known as Cañada and Nambe. Along his route he passed three villages, which are marked on the map and mentioned without name in the text. 1. The first of these, Santa Cruz, 5 or 6 m. from San Juan, is marked on the map "Village 1200"; in 1846 it had only 300 or 400. It is situated on the Cañada near its mouth; higher up on the same are the Chimayo settlements and Potrero. 2. The next, 7¼ m. further, mapped as "Village 600," is Pojoaque or Pojuaque, a Tañoan pueblo situated about 6 m. up Nambe cr. At the mouth of this stream stood and stands another Tañoan pueblo, San Ildefonso; while Nambe, yet another village of the same family, was located on the same creek about 3 m. above Pojoaque. These have all declined during the century, the Indian pop. of Pojoaque being lately given as 20, that of San Ildefonso 148, that of Nambe 79. 3. The next village, "17 m." further, marked on the map "Village 600," is Tesuque (Tesugue, Zesuqua, etc.), likewise a Tañoan pueblo, now of less than 100 Indians. There appear to have been two establishments of this name, 3 or 4 m. apart, both on a branch of Nambe cr.; the furthest on, falling in best with Pike's 17 m. from Pojoaque, is only some 6 m. from Santa Fé. Between Pojoaque and Tesuque Pike passed by Cuyamanque or Cuyamunge: and he entered Santa Fé from the N., by the site of old Fort Marcy.
It should be particularly observed in this place that Pike has two maps of this part of the Rio Grande, which are discrepant in several material respects. One is his [Louisiana map], which he runs down to take in the Rio Grande to Santa Fé. On this his trail is dotted as if it were the lower one, hugging the Rio Grande from Santa Cruz past Santa Clara (and Polvaredo) to San Ildefonso, before it turned off to Santa Fé, and with the above three villages all on his left as he passed; the above village of Abicu is lettered Abricu, and a certain village of "Pino" is set at the mouth of Rio Santa Fé. I have here gone by his [New Spain map], which may be presumed to be his best delineation of Rio Grande country, and which certainly fits in best with the text which we here follow.
To finish reckoning the towns Pike maps north of Santa Fé, we must note the following: 1. "Enbudo 500" on both maps. 2. "Tranpa 450" on one map, and "Tramha 450" on the other. 3. "Pecucio 500" on one map, and "Pecucis 500" on the other. These places all lie off to the N. E., in the direction of Taos. 1. Embudo or Embuda is a town on a creek of the same name, which makes into the Rio Grande from the E., about 25 m. by the road from San Juan. The location is a couple of miles above the mouth of the creek, which falls into the Rio Grande at a place called Rinconada on account of its cornered or shut-in site among the surrounding mesas. It is near the scene of an engagement in Jan., 1847, when Captain John H. K. Burgwin of the 1st U. S. Dragoons defeated the insurgents; he died Feb. 7th of wounds received Feb. 4th in the assault on Taos. 2. Trampas is a town on the creek of that name, a main tributary of the Embudo, 8 or 10 m. above the town of Embudo. You pass Trampas about halfway on the main upper road from Santa Fé to Taos, about 7 m. N. of Truchas. 3. Picuris is an old Tañoan pueblo, on another branch of this same Embudo cr., with a present pop. of 100.
All the foregoing places are under the shadow of the lofty mountains to the E., whence the several streams named also make down into the Rio Grande valley. Some of their peaks are: Lake, 12,400 feet; Baldy, 12,600 feet; the Cone, 12,700 feet; Truches, 13,100 feet; and the more isolated "U. S." mountain, 10,700 feet. On the other side of this range are the headwaters of Rio Cañada—that great fork of the Arkansaw better known as the "Canadian" r., without the tilde: see [note17, p. 558].
[I'-8] Santa Fé is not "on the Rio Grande," as often loosely said, but at least 20 m. (direct) E. of that river, and considerably further than this up from the mouth of the small stream on which it is situated, in a rather out-of-the-way place. This creek, Rio de Santa Fé, or Rio Chacito, comes down from the lofty Santa Fé mts. under which the town nestles, and runs with a general S. W. course into the Rio Grande between the town of Peña Blanca and the old pueblo of Cochiti—places 3 m. apart. Cochiti is a Keresan pueblo on the W. bank of the Rio Grande; present pop. perhaps 250. Peña Blanca, often called Piña Blanca, on the E. bank, is a place where the Rio Grande can be forded, to take the old road from Santa Fé to Fort Wingate.
Santa Fé was first entered and occupied by the Army of the West under General Stephen Watts Kearny, Aug. 18th, 1846—his cowardly Excellency Don Manuel Armijo having blustered and promptly evacuated the place on the approach of our forces. The site of Fort Marcy was selected by Lieutenants W. H. Emory and J. F. Gilmer, in a commanding position 600 yards from the plaza of the town, and the work began on the 23d. On Sept. 22d General Kearny issued his manifesto for the government of New Mexico, under the authority of the President of the United States; appointing as governor Charles Bent (soon afterward cruelly massacred at Taos), and as secretary Donaciano Vigil; other territorial officers appointed were Richard Dallum, Francis P. Blair, Charles Blummer, Eugene Lertensdorfer, Joab Houghton, Antonio José Otero, and Carl Bavbien—the last three as judges of the supreme court. A copy of the original document, in Spanish, is given in Lieutenant J. W. Abert's report Ex. Doc. No. 41, 30th Cong., 1st Sess., pub. 1848, p. 453. The population of Santa Fé at that time was somewhere about 3,000; it is now only a little over 6,000. It was probably the site of a pueblo before 1500; but the present town has no authentic history back of 1608, when it was founded by Juan de Oñate as a capital or seat of government. The town may boast an unbroken record as such from that day to this, in spite of changing hands several times.