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Naturally no one will climb into the garret who has the means of securing more convenient apartments, under the huge system of 'French flats', which is the way of living in Zunyi. Still there is little or no social distinction in the rude civilization, the whole population of the town living almost as one family.
A glove of undressed goat-skin is worn, the hand being dipped in the hot liquid and then passed repeatedly over the wall. "In Zunyi, as elsewhere, riches and official position confer importance upon their possessors. The wealthy class live in the lower houses, those of moderate means next above, while the poorer families have to be content with the uppermost stories.
Zunyi, the only known place, showing a probability that it was one of the seven towns, is too far distant from the buffalo ranges to answer to this portion of the narrative. Lastly, the evidence, collectively, favors a far northern as well as far eastern position for Cibola. The people of Cibola knew nothing of either ocean.
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.
Castanyada, who accompanied the expedition of Coronado to New Mexico in 1540-1542, estimated the population of the seventy villages visited by detachments and situated between the Colorado River Zunyi and the Arkansas at twenty thousand men which would give a total population in this wide area of a hundred thousand Indians.
His wife accompanied him, and she has furnished us the following description of that pueblo: "Zunyi is situated in Western New Mexico, being built upon a knoll covering about fifteen acres, and some forty feet above the right bank of the river of the same name. "Their extreme exclusiveness has preserved to the Zunyians their strong individuality, and kept their language pure.
These structures are of stone and 'adobe'. They are clustered around two plazas, or open squares, with several streets and three covered ways through the town. "The upper houses of Zunyi are reached by ladders from the outside. The lower tiers have doors on the ground plan, while the entrances to the others are from the terraces.
At the present time, in the valley of the Rio Grande, a single pueblo house, accommodating five hundred persons makes an Indian village. Two or three such houses as at Taos and Santo Domingo form a large pueblo and a group of several such houses as at Zunyi a pueblo of the largest size which once contained perhaps five thousand persons, now reduced to fifteen hundred.
This could hardly have been true of the people of Zunyi with respect to the Pacific, or at least the Gulf of California. Coronado himself was in doubt as to which sea was nearest, and seems to have been conscious of the widening of the continent upon both sides of him. Assuming that the pueblos on the Chaco were inhabited in 1540, they were the finest structures then in New Mexico.
James Stevenson, in charge of the field parties under Major Powell, made an extended visit to Zunyi and the neighboring pueblos, for the purpose of making collections of their implements, utensils, etc., during which time the photographs from which the accompanying illustrations of the pueblos were made.
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