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They had struck straight through the hills for the Rio Grande, where they joined the main body, the same which had attacked us the day after our arrival in the valleys, and which had recently made several successful raids on the flocks and herds near Peña Blanca and Galisteo.
Having wiped out the settlements, the pueblos and their allies swooped down on Santa Fe, led by Juan of Galisteo riding with a convent flag round his waist as sash. To parley with an enemy is folly. Otermin sent for Juan to come to the Palace; and in the audience chamber upbraided him. Juan, one may well believe, laughed. He produced two crosses a red one and a white one.
Of the Galisteo Basin a Spanish report from the sixteenth century says: "There they have no stream; neither are there any running brooks nor any springs which the people could use." The mountain clusters of the Real de Dolores and Sierra de San Francisco, and beyond these the high Sandia chain, divide the Galisteo country from the valley of the Rio Grande in the west.
In Spanish this ridge and another similar one which traverses the plain several miles north of it, running parallel to the former, is called very appropriately El Creston, for if seen from a distance and edgewise it strikingly resembles the crest of an antique helmet. The plain of Galisteo expands between crestones, and on the edges of it stand several villages of the Tanos.
About thirty miles south of Santa Fé, the southern rim of the so-called Basin of Galisteo is bounded by a low and shaggy ridge running from east to west, whose crest is formed of trap-dyke sharply though irregularly dentated.
Five miles out from their encampment Major Chivington, in command of a detachment composed of Companies A, B, H, and E of the First Colorado, and Captain Ford's Company unattached, with Captain Lewis' Company of the Fifth Regular Infantry, was ordered to take the Galisteo road, and by a detour through the mountains to gain the enemy's rear, if possible, at the west end of Apache Canyon, while Slough advanced slowly with the main body to gain his front about the same time; thus devising an attack in front and rear.
The women and children were carried off to captivity from which they never returned. At Galisteo, the men were slain, the women carried off. Rosaries were burned in bonfires. Churches were plundered and profaned. At Santo Domingo, the bodies of the three priests were piled in a heap in front of the church, as an insult to the white man faith that would have destroyed the Indian estufas.
A haze seems to cover the tall and long terraced buildings quite distinct from the vertical columns of sand-whirls that drift over the plain of Galisteo, in calm weather rising above the horizon like thin films of smoke. It is a great day at Hishi. A dance is performed, songs are sung, and prayers and sacrifices are offered that shall be powerful with Those Above.
On the southwestern corner of the Galisteo Basin a broad channel discharges its waters into it, passing between the San Francisco range and the mountains of Dolores. The channel is arid. Mountain torrents rush through it only in the season of thunderstorms, and they have burrowed and ploughed through its surface, scarring it with deep furrows and shifting waterfalls.
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