Pueblo people

“ The Pueblo tribes of New Mexico and the Moquis of Arizona are a wonderful people when we consider the wall of savagism which envelopes them; their towns of many-storied structures are better foundations than usually exist for travelers' tales of magnificent cities; ruins are abundant, showing that the pueblo nations were 617 in the past more numerous, powerful, and cultured, than Europeans have found them; rich mines are now worked, and yet richer ones are awaiting development ”

“ The people living here offered but little resistance and were consequently humanely treated. They were found to be a peace-loving and agricultural race, living in great houses of adobe, hundreds of families in a single residence. Their descendants occupy the same dwellings to-day and retain the names given them at that time by the Spaniards. They were called Pueblos—from the Spanish pueblo, or village—and the Pueblos to-day constitute the most civilized and intelligent of our Indians. ”

“ It is interesting to note that if we now proceed to the southwest of the United States and study the Pueblo people, we seem to find not only more distinctly marked affinities between their customs, etc., and those of the Mexicans, but also traces of similarity with certain Maya symbols. ”

“ There are many centres of social life; and if Pueblo people have any other conceivable occupation than to give dinner parties at night and go motoring in the morning, with endless receptions of the Daughters of the Revolution and other clubs, organizations, or purely private card receptions invading the afternoons, the visitor hardly realizes it. ”

“ We saw the beginning of Pueblo development over a thousand years earlier when the first grain of corn was planted somewhere in the Mesa Verde region. From that simple beginning we have seen the culture develop steadily without a backward step. Now it has reached its peak and for two centuries we shall see the people enjoy the results of their long struggle for improvement. It is true that adverse influences will affect the people and will cause a radical change in their way of life. ”

“ It is a significant fact that these people do not all belong to the same stock. On the contrary, the “Pueblo Indians” are members of a number of wholly disconnected stems. This proves that the Pueblo civilization is not due to any one unusually gifted lineage, but was a local product, developed in independent tribes by the natural facilities offered by the locality. It is a spontaneous production of the soil, climate, and conditions, which were unusually favorable to agricultural and sedentary occupations, and prompted various tribes to adopt them. ”

“ Admittedly, the latter part of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century was a period of great instability, migrations occurred, and centers of population shifted. Once the shift had been made, however, important new communities developed in the drainages of the Little Colorado and the Rio Grande, and a renaissance began. It seems entirely possible that the Pueblo people might have achieved another remarkably high cultural stage had it not been for the arrival of the Spaniards in 1540. ”

“ If the growth of the large pueblos has followed the lines above indicated, and if each unit type indicates a social unit as well, we necessarily have in this growth of the community house the story of the social evolution of the Pueblo people. ”

“ The noteworthy point is that from this simple beginning developed the amazing Pueblo culture which reached its peak in the thirteenth century. Since the people were industrious and intelligent they progressed steadily, following the same trail which all people have taken in their climb toward civilization. ”

“ The Pueblos are a peaceful people. They have had time to invent things that astonish the white men who have seen only the Indians of the wandering tribes.
The pueblo of Zuñi is in New Mexico, about two hundred miles southeast of Santa Fé. This Indian town was sought for by Coronado and his Spanish soldiers. They had heard marvelous stories of the silver, gold, and jewels owned by the red people living north of Mexico; but the Pueblos were brave as well as wise, and the history of that Spanish expedition is sad reading. ”

“ A STUDY OF PUEBLO POTTERY AS ILLUSTRATIVE OF ZUÑI CULTURE-GROWTH. BY FRANK H. CUSHING. HABITATIONS AFFECTED BY ENVIRONMENT.
It is conceded that the peculiarities of a culture-status are due chiefly to the necessities encountered during its development. In this sense the Pueblo phase of life was, like the Egyptian, the product of a desert environment. Given that a tribe or stock of people is weak, they will be encroached upon by neighboring stronger tribes, and driven to new surroundings if not subdued. ”

“ Houses on Rocks and Sand Hills--How Many Families Dwelt Together in Unity--Peculiarities of Costumes--Pueblo Architecture and Folk Lore--A Historic Struggle and How it Ended--Legends Concerning Montezuma--Curious Religious Ceremonies.
Perhaps the most peculiar people to be found in our native land are the Pueblos, who live in New Mexico between the Grande and Colorado Rivers. When Coronado, the great explorer, marched through the territory 450 years ago, he found these people in a condition of at least comparative civilization. ”

“ There are no instances on record of disputes such as are met with in boarding-houses patronized by white people, and in this one respect, at any rate, quite a lesson is taught us by the Pueblo tribes. The people are quiet and peaceable in disposition, and one secret of their peaceful dwelling together is found in the absence of jealousy, a characteristic or vice which does not seem to have penetrated into the houses on the cliffs, or to have sullied the dispositions of these people with such a remarkable and creditable history. ”

“ They did not look to them for leadership for certainly there was no union among the people. Probably there were never more than a few thousand Pueblo Indians in the Mesa Verde at any one time. They lived in hundreds of more or less independent villages. While some of these villages seem large and impressive today, they may have had little real importance in ancient times for only a small percentage of the people lived in them. The bulk of the population was in the hundreds of small towns each of which was an independent community that contained no more than a few dozen people. ”

“ These may possibly be idols, but are not always, for both old and young sometimes play with them as toys. They are a religious people. They believe in a Great Spirit and in a future life. Their forms of worship are very strange and sometimes cruel.
The tribes called Pueblos of New Mexico are not included with those which continue to live in the twenty-seven Pueblo towns, for whatever may have been their customs in past centuries, they are now very different from the Village Indians, who still live and worship after the manner of their ancestors. ”

“ After the Spanish reconquered New Mexico in 1692, many Pueblo families from the Rio Grande sought sanctuary with the Navajos. Some of these refugees were absorbed into the tribe, and they brought with them not only weaving, but sheep raising, pottery and basketry techniques, architectural and agricultural ideas, the clan system, and much religious lore. ”

“ Among the many traditions implicitly believed in by the people, and which tend to obstruct the advancement of knowledge, there is one equally as amusing and extravagant as the foregoing, which has been gravely recounted by the present Vicar of New Mexico and ex-delegate to Congress. During the memorable insurrection of 1680, the Pueblo of San Felipe was about the only one that {253} remained faithful to the Spaniards in all the North. ”

“ We purchase corn of some of the people, and after feeding our animals they are intrusted to two Indian boys, who, under the direction of the cacique, take them to a distant mesa to herd. This is my first view of an inhabited pueblo, though I have seen many ruins from time to time. At first I am a little disappointed in the people. They seem scarcely superior to the Shoshones and Utes, tribes with whom I am so well acquainted. Their dress is less picturesque, and the men have an ugly fashion of banging their hair in front so that it comes down to their eyes and conceals their foreheads. ”

“ That the people were vigorous and ambitious is indicated by the progress which they made. Now we see them nearing their cultural peak and it is time for us to leave the Developmental Pueblo period and move into the golden age of the Pueblos. ”

“ All the Pueblo peoples are more advanced than the greater number of the neighbouring tribes; their matrimonial customs are more refined, their domestic life much happier, and they have an appreciation of love, a rare thing in primitive peoples. ”

“ They are by no means to be compared to the nomadic tribes of red-skins, everywhere infesting the prairie, plain, and mountain of the far West, for murder and plunder. Like other Pueblo tribes, these people show marked and distinctive peculiarities, not that they differ essentially in type from the other branches of the great aboriginal families, but as regards their originality in costume, and their strong conservatism. ”

“ Corn, beans and squash are being carried down from the mesa-top fields and spread on roofs to dry. Women are grinding corn, cooking, carrying water and caring for the babies. Some of the men are building a kiva roof and a new house is also being built. In the center of the village, old men sit in the sun and talk about bygone days when things were better.
The Great Pueblo Period of 1100 to 1300 A. D. was the climax of Pueblo development in the Mesa Verde. From 1100 to about 1200, the people lived on the mesa tops in well-built masonry pueblos. ”

“ By intermarriage with nomadic races and from other causes the character of Pueblo consanguinity is no doubt somewhat different from that of their ancient kin, but the character of the culture, as shown by a comparison of cliff-house and modern objects, has not greatly changed. ”

“ Although a large number are engaged in the sale of blankets and Indian goods in the southwestern part of the Union, in the gold diggings of California, in Mormon settlements, in the small railroad stations of Arizona, the average Pueblo Indian prefers a settled life. He is domestic in his habits, and loves his family, his cattle, his farm and his neighbors as dearly as does his pale-faced brothers. ”

“ Near the center of the area, in northern New Mexico and Arizona, live four groups of Pueblo or town building Indians—the Hopi, Zuñi, Keres, and Tewa or Tano—who represent a sort of élite of the native culture. They farm, make pottery, accumulate wealth in turquoise, are governed by priests, worship under a remarkably complex set of rituals, which involve altars, masks, symbols of all sorts, and a rude sort of philosophy. ”

“ As for our own upstart civilization, in this clime of ancient Pueblo refinements one must own that it takes on the color of an impertinence, and as incongruously exhibits itself as a brand-new patch on a long-worn garment. ”

“ The facts conform still more closely to the step pyramid arrangement when consideration is given not to pottery alone but to the whole culture—agriculture, other arts, social forms, ritual, religious organization, and the like. In that case Pueblo culture is seen to comprise easily the greatest number of traits or component parts, and these to grow fewer and fewer towards the edges of the Southwest. ”

“ The Tañoan pueblos have been pretty fully noted in the foregoing itinerary, but the Tusayan and Keresan have not been sufficiently treated. We must first come to an understanding of the term "Pueblo Indians." This is simply a convenient phrase, or façon de parler, to designate various tribes which, in New and Old Mexico, and Arizona, settled in permanent habitations, became attached to the soil, practiced agriculture, kept flocks, and built the kind of towns called "pueblos." They are thus collectively distinguished from all roving and more or less warring tribes; they are settlers, not nomads ”

“ The Pueblo, no less than the Aztec, is the most religious of human beings. His ceremonial, like that of the age of Montezuma, is wonderfully and minutely elaborated; and though originating in a civilization less splendid and refined, it is really less barbarous, since its rites have never, like those of the Aztec, included the horrors of human sacrifice and cannibalism. ”

“ The exactions of the commanders, the outrages of the soldiers, and the interference of the missionaries with the old-time pleasures and ceremonies of the Indians, bred discontent, and in 1680, under the leadership of Popé, a medicine man of the Tewa, there was a simultaneous rising of the Pueblos from the Pecos to the Hopi villages so sudden and complete in its surprise that priests, soldiers, and civilians were everywhere butchered, and the survivors after holding out for a time under Governor Otermin at Santa Fé fled to El Paso, leaving not a single Spaniard in New Mexico. ”

“ If we must feel that the Southwest learned from Mexico “how to grow and weave cotton, to irrigate, [177] to build in stone, to obey priests,” we are at the same time impressed by an intrinsic difference in its development and practice from that of Mexico, as we see it in the Pueblo civilization.
THE ILLIMITABLE DESERT
Bolton
Each pueblo is a tribal unit formed of few or many clans, as the case may be, always matrilinear in descent. ”