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Updated: April 30, 2025
To-day, there is a government school here, and the two pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are among the cleanest and most advanced of the Southwest. Fifteen hundred souls there are, living in the hillside tiered-town, where you may see the transition from Indian to white in the substitution of downstairs doors for the ladders that formerly led to entrance through the roof.
Miss McLain, who was in the Indian Service at Laguna, reports that once an Indian family told her of this Acoma ceremony.
It is not certainly known, but it is vaguely supposed they were Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the Narvaez expedition, who wandered westward across the continent from Taos to Laguna and Acoma. As the legend runs, they were made slaves by the Indians and traded from tribe to tribe from 1528 to 1536, when they reached Old Mexico.
If you ask how it is that the pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are so superior to all other Hopi communities of the Southwest, the answer invariably is "the influence of the two Marmons and Pratt." Coming West as surveyors in the early seventies the two Marmons and Pratt opened a trading store, married Indian women and set themselves to civilize the whole pueblo.
Hill Ki grins as he unhitches his horses, and answers: "You understan' when you go up an' see!" But he does not offer to escort me up. As I am looking round for the beginning of a visible trail up, a little Hopi girl comes out from the sheep kraal at the foot of the Acoma Mesa.
There is the Enchanted Mesa, with its sister mesa of Acoma islands of rock, sheer precipice of yellow tufa for hundreds of feet amid the Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds exaggerated in huge, grotesque mirage against the lavender light, and Indian riders, brightly clad and picturesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad.
And if you take to studying native Indian life, at Laguna, at Acoma, at Taos, you will find yourself in such a maze of the picturesque and the legendary as you cannot find anywhere else in the wide world but America. This is a story by itself a beautiful one, also in spots a funny one.
They live, some of them, in the same identical houses their forefathers occupied at the time of Coronado's expedition to New Mexico in 1541-1542, as at Acoma, Jemez, and Taos, and although their plan and mode of life have changed in some respects in the interval, it is not unlikely that they remain to this day a fair sample of the life of the Village Indians from Zunyi to Cuzco as it existed in the sixteenth century.
The same is true of the reports of Fray Marcos de Nizza and Melchor Diaz, which clearly apply to the Zuñi Pueblos, the most easterly settlement of sedentary Indians alluded to being the Queres pueblo of Acoma. It is to the chroniclers of the expedition of Coronado, therefore, that we must look for the earliest definite information concerning the Rio Grande valley and its inhabitants.
The only other notable structure in Ácoma is the Roman Catholic church, the walls of which are sixty feet in height and ten feet thick.
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