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Updated: May 17, 2025
Draw a line from the Manzano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and Laguna and Acoma and Zuñi and the three mesas of Arizona to Oraibi and Hotoville for 400 miles to the far west, and along that line you will find ruins of churches, temples, council halls, call them what you will, which antedate the coming of the Spaniards by so many centuries that not even a tradition of their object remained when the conquerors came.
One of the greatest craters of the world holds within itself great parts of wooded Palma. On dead volcanoes are the petty batteries of Spain over against Las Palmas. There is something strange and almost pathetic in the thought of guns raised where Nature once thundered dreadfully in the barren sunlit Isleta.
When he first visited me, in Isleta, he knew just three words of Tigua. In ten days he could make himself understood by the hour with the Principales in their own unwritten tongue. Of course, this was one secret of his extraordinary success in learning the inner heart of the Indians. I saw it proved again in our contact with the Quíchua and Aymará and other tribes of Peru and Bolivia.
There is no more disillusioning place in the world to land in by daytime. The port is under the shelter of the Isleta, a barren cindery satellite of Grand Canary joined to the main island by an isthmus of yellow sand-dunes.
Every Mexican believes that the holy padre buried in a log hollowed out for coffin beneath the chapel rises every ten years and walks through the streets of Isleta to see how his people are doing. Once every ten years or so, the Rio Grande floods badly; and the year of the flood, the ghost of the friar rises to warn his people.
And not only does it owe its one great beauty to the sand, it owes its prosperity to it as well. Yet folks curse its great folded dunes, which by blocking the channel between the main island and the Isleta have created the sheltered Puerto de la Luz, where all its shipping lies in security from the great seas breaking in Confital Bay.
These outlying Tigua settlements also were abandoned in the seventeenth century, their inhabitants fleeing from the Apaches and retiring to form the Pueblo of Isleta del Sur on the left bank of the Rio Grande in Texas.
The wise men or governors of the pueblos are always old men elected out of respect for their superior wisdom, men used to having their slightest word implicitly obeyed. Whipped, shamed, disgraced, they dispersed from the Palace, down the Rio Grande to Isleta, west to the city on the impregnable rocks of Acoma, north to that whole group of pueblo cities from Jemez to Santa Fe and Pecos and Taos.
All these investigations pointed to one great fact, and that was that the cliff and cave dwellers of the Grand Canyon region and all the contiguous country were none other than the ancestors of the present pueblo people, those who live in the Hopi villages, the Zuni villages, Acoma, Laguna, Santo Domingo, Isleta, Teseque, Jemez, Taos, San Ildefonso, Zia and the rest.
Some minutes afterwards a high, dark object like a mountain-top, loomed in the haze. "Grand Canary!" Learmont remarked. "The range behind Las Palmas town. I expect the smudge ahead is the Isleta hill." "We've made it!" Lister said hoarsely, and braced himself. Now the strain was gone, he felt very slack.
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