The town-builders gradually pushed their way northward to Pueblo Creek, the Aztec Mountains, and the San Francisco Peaks; but on trying to penetrate further their progress was suddenly arrested by an impassable barrier -- the canons of the Colorado and Flax (Chiquito) rivers, which, united, form a gulf 300 miles at least in length, directly across their course.
Stopped more effectually by nature than by any barrier man could devise, they naturally rejected the worthless regions lying to the westward., and turned their course towards the east, occupying the fine valleys of the Colorado Chiquito above its canon, and following its branches to their source. Having established the kingdom of Cevola, of which Zuiii was the capital, and several other clusters of towns on the neighbouring streams, they commenced to push still further up into the Navajo country, and tried to protect themselves wherever they went against that tribe by building fortified towns.
Thus the seven Moqui villages were built; and still further to the north another cluster of ruins bear record of yet another colony. To the north-eastward they passed from the heads of the Flax River to the southern branches of the San Juan, where they built many populous towns, as the ruins in the Canon de Chaco and the Valle de Chelly bear witness, until at last, by following up the headwaters of the Rio de San Juan into the mountains of Colorado, they entered the commencement of the Rio Grande valley, and thus discovered a new and still finer region to colonize and to subdue.
Gradually they worked down the valley from the north, as their traditions assert, and very naturally built a large stronghold at Toas, to protect that magnificent valley against the attacks of Utes from the mountains, to which it was exposed. In time the entire valley was peopled and studded with groups of towns from latitude 37° to 32°, a distance of over 400 miles. So numerous did the Pueblo Indians become in the main valley that they found it unnecessary to live in fortified towns there; but the settlements on the outskirts, such as Pecos, Quarra, or Gran Quivera, where raids from the Buffalo Indians (Arapahoes and Comanches) were to be feared, or Laguna and Acoma, unpleasantly near the homes of the Navajos, were constructed on the same plan as those in the Colorado basin, and were quite as strongly fortified.
Lastly, it is so short and easy a route from the Rio Grande valley about El Paso (which district, according to early Spanish authorities, contained many towns and a great number of people) to the beautiful and fertile valley of the Rio Corralitos and its lake the Laguna de Guzman, that I feel convinced the Casas Grandes on this stream were built by a colony thence, and that the people now occupying it were quite right when they told Mr. Bartlett that the big houses were built by Montezuma's people, who came there from the north.
Next article Next article
Back to main page
adapted from A. W. Bell
"On the Native Races of New Mexico"
1869 (Journal of the Ethnological Society of London)
