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This work, while embodying chiefly a narrative most valuable to the ethnography of western Arizona and eastern California, of the journey of Oñate to the Colorado river of the West, followed by an extended report on De Soto's expedition to the Mississippi river, contains data on the Rio Grande Pueblos and on those of Jemez that are of permanent value.
Picture to yourself two precipices three times the height of Niagara, three times the height of the Metropolitan Tower, sheer as a wall of blocked yellow and red masonry, no wider apart than you can shout across, ending in the snows of the Jemez to the right, shut in black basalt walls to the left, forested with the heavy pines to the very edge and down the blocky tiers of rocks and escarpments running into blind angles where rain and sun have dyed the terra cotta pumice blood-red.
It stated that the bearer was on his way to the Indian pueblo of Jemez, to prevent the massacre of a number of Navajo women, children, and old men who had sought asylum there, and authorized me to furnish him with all the aid in my power.
Having thus whetted their appetite for cruelty and vengeance, the Indians started to carry the news of their independence to Moqui, and signalized their arrival by the barbarous murder of the two missionaries who were living there. Their bodies were left unburied, as a prey for the wild beasts. At Jemez they indulged in every refinement of cruelty.
After dismounting and entering my quarters, the agent stated that, the Navajo country being over-run by national troops, many of the principal men had sent their wives and children, with a few old men, to Jemez for safety; that the party of Dominicans which had been recently captured by us, being bitterly disappointed at their lack of success in retaking their missing cattle, had determined to go to Jemez and wreak vengeance upon the enemy.
Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the cañon in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez Mountains; and one night from my camp in this cañon, I heard the coyotes howling from the empty caves.
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.
In no other portion of our planet is nature so unnatural, so fanciful and extravagant, and seemingly the production of caprice, as on the great central plateau of North America. They had left far behind the fertile valley of the Rio Grande, and had placed between it and them the barren, sullen piles of the Jemez mountains.
The bluest skies of a blue-sky land curved in fathomless majesty over the yellow valley of the Santa Fé. Against its borders loomed the silent mountain ranges purple-shaddowed, silver-topped Ortiz and Jemez, Sandia and Sangre-de-Christo. Dusty and deserted lay the trail, save that here and there a group of dark-faced carriers of firewood prodded on their fagot-laden burros toward the distant town.
The Rio Grande Queres extended also as far west as the Jemez river; and north of them, on the same stream, another linguistic group, the Jemez, had established themselves and built several villages of considerable size. East of the Rio Grande and southwest-ward from Santa Fé another branch of the Jemez occupied the northern valley of the Rio Pecos.
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