CHAPTER VI

Cliff Dwellers Again

By the close of the sixteenth century, it seems, all of the great towns—the terraced community apartment houses on the Pajarito—had been abandoned. Life in the hills and mountains had grown unbearable because of a shortage of water. These people, I have no doubt, disliked leaving their mountain homes. The mountains were more conducive to successful living than the hot sandy banks of the Rio Grande. But this made no difference now—moving was a necessity. Groups pushed off the mesa tops and down the canyons into the Valley of the Rio Grande. Soon little settlements sprang up. This move certainly must have been a step down for the cliff and pueblo dwellers. They had lived for centuries on the wooded mesa tops near high mountains and had drunk spring water. Now they had only the muddy waters of the Rio Grande. They established the village of Perage on the west bank of the river about a mile west of their present pueblo of Powhoge or San Ildefonso. Other groups could have gone to other Tewa-speaking villages. Just when the pueblo of San Ildefonso was established is not certain but it was long, long ago.

Tewas could live in peace now and raise corn, beans, squash and pumpkins, for here the muddy waters of the Rio Grande were ever flowing. But it was not for the Tewas to say, or think, that they could live in peace. The next Spanish expedition taught them this. The expedition headed by Don Juan de Oñate was the colonizing expedition into New Mexico. In 1598, soldiers, colonists, carts and baggage streamed up the Valley of the Rio Grande and took possession of New Mexico in the name of His Majesty, the King of Spain. This time the occupation was in earnest. Four hundred or more settlers and soldiers marched up the valley, the settlers with everything they possessed in the way of tools and personal effects. Thousands of domestic animals were brought in. The Spanish meant to stay this time.

In the north Tewa country, beyond San Ildefonso, was the Province of Yunqueyunque which is thought to have been located near the present San Juan Pueblo. It was here that the first capital city of New Mexico was established by the Spanish on July 11, 1598. It was called San Gabriel.

It was about this time that the Tewa-speaking people on the Pajarito Plateau were abandoning their homes in canyons and on mesa tops and moving to the banks of the Rio Grande where they built the pueblo of San Ildefonso. These Indians built the pueblo with rows of houses two and three stories high and built their kivas on top of the ground instead of below the ground as they had done in their former homes.

After Oñate had been removed from office as Governor of New Mexico, the Viceroy appointed Don Pedro de Peralta and the capital was moved from San Gabriel to Santa Fe in 1610. Governors changed. Each made new laws. Indians were used as slaves. They produced goods for the Spanish. Children went to school and all went to church. They took on Christianity—yes, but they retained their old beliefs and old forms of worship. Roman Catholic Missionaries built churches in many of the Rio Grande pueblos which the Indians paid for. Some were flogged for not wanting to go to church, but this new form of religion was forced upon them. Hours were long and hard and taxes imposed by the Spanish were exorbitant. This kept up for seven decades.

Rebellion was on the way. Acoma, the Sky City, was the first village to rebel. This was quelled. Then the Jemez, then the pueblos of San Felipe and Cochiti, our Keres-speaking friends, rebelled. Alameda and Isleta were next. But these uprisings were not put down. It all ended up in the bloody and terrible Pueblo Rebellion of 1680. Spaniards were murdered right and left all over New Mexico. The Tewas of San Ildefonso were in sympathy with the Rebellion. They had suffered too, and so they marched with their allies regardless of creed, clan or language spoken, to Santa Fe, the capital city. The remaining little handful of Spanish refugees had gathered in the Palace of the Governors as a last resort. One white cross and one red cross were sent to the Spanish Governor Otermin by the Indians. White meant peace. Red meant war. The Governor chose war. But the cause was hopeless now. The Spanish were outnumbered and their food and water supply had been cut off. Surrender was the only alternative, so, on August 21, the Spanish left the Palace and back-tracked down the Valley of the Rio Grande. The Indian now had his land back. He could live in peace along the banks of the river and raise his crops, so he thought. No more toil and no more taxes. But this Utopia was not to be realized.

Even though the Navaho had taken an active part in the uprisings, he began to cause trouble as soon as the Spanish were out of New Mexico. The Pueblo people had not counted on this. The Navaho had taken everything from the Spaniard that he could use against him, including the horse. As soon as the weakened Pueblo people thought they had rid themselves of trouble and war and killing, the wild Navaho took advantage of the situation. Terror reigned for a decade or more. The Navaho swooped down upon the pueblos at night, plundering and killing. Putting up with the Spanish might have been easier to take than this. But all was to change again. Don Diego de Vargas marched up the Rio Grande with another colonizing expedition, soldiers and missionaries. Pueblo after pueblo was reconquered and Santa Fe was re-entered in 1693. The Pueblo people were not too hard to bring to submission this time. The Spanish would help their warriors to drive off their enemies. The pueblos had had about all they could take from the Navaho.

Then there were the Tewa villages to be dealt with up the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and the pueblo of San Juan. The San Ildefonso Tewa fled to a high black rock known as “Black Mesa.” It had been used by them for years as a place of defense. From its top the country can be seen for miles around. It was here that they held out against the Spanish soldiers from January until September of 1694. They finally surrendered after several unsuccessful assaults at their rock and a siege which lasted for five days. Black Mesa figures considerably in the mythology of the Tewas. They say that during this seven-months period while their people were besieged on the high mesa top, brave men descended through the precipitous gap during the night to the Rio Grande below to get water for their marooned people. Black Mesa is sometimes known as “Mesita Huerfano” or “Orphan Mesa.” It is said that a giant lived here at one time and caught children from the pueblo which he and his wife and daughter ate. He was at last killed by the Tewa War Gods. Legend has it that the giant’s heart is still on the mesa top in the form of a white rock.

We have almost forgotten the Keres-speaking people to the south who were also having trouble. During the Rebellion, the Cochitenos abandoned their pueblo and moved back up the Cañada de Cochiti to Kotyiti. This was, according to their legends, the last site they occupied after being driven from the Tyuonyi and before establishing the present Cochiti on the banks of the Rio Grande. Kotyiti was built on top of a high mesa known to the Spanish as “Potrero Viejo.” It is a mesa about two miles long and several hundred feet high. It was a natural fortress for the Indians, and it was to this fortress that the Keres moved back and built their homes shortly after the beginning of the Rebellion. This fortress was known as “Hanat Cochiti” or “Cochiti Above.” With the coming of Diego de Vargas in 1693, the Indians fled from the pueblo on the river to their mesa and put up a stiff battle, but in vain. After their reconquest, broken and tired of trouble, they moved back to Cochiti in 1694 where they have been ever since.

But what trouble the Tewas of San Ildefonso did have! There suddenly came another outburst of pueblo rebellion in June of 1696 and the people of San Ildefonso burned their beautiful church which had been built for them by the Spanish with Indian labor, sweat, blood and taxes. Two priests were caught in the burning building as well as several other Spaniards. There they all perished. The San Ildefonso Tewa have a legend and a belief that they should always move to the south and never to the north. But someone wanted the pueblo moved to the north. And so there was a contest between good people and sorcerers, and the sorcerers won by witchcraft. The pueblo was moved to the north. The San Ildefonso people believe that this is the reason why they had pestilence and famines, and why their people decreased in numbers. Such trouble they had!

Could it be that during these trying and troublesome years at the close of the seventeenth century, some of these heart-sick and war-weary Indians decided that life back on the high forested mesa tops or in deep canyons to the south where their ancestors had lived, just a century before, would be better than this? Could they tear themselves away from their brethren at night and sneak south, back into the hills and down into deep canyons protected by high vertical cliffs, even into Hidden Valley? Spanish soldiers on horseback could not find them here. They could not follow the old Indian trails. Perhaps those known as the “good people” of San Ildefonso were so opposed to moving their pueblo a little to the north that they refused to have any part in this plan and preferred moving far to the south.

To assume that such a move took place would not be folly even if we had no supporting evidence. Families could have removed themselves to the hills of the Pajarito. Here Hidden Valley offered them protection. It was deep in the south country and water had returned to the creek. The drought period was over and there would be water from the heavens again. The old abandoned dwellings in Frijoles Canyon were in ruins. Roof timbers had rotted and walls had fallen. These were the homes of their ancestors. But with very little work these homes could be made livable again. And so, in a remote section in the lower end of Frijoles, the Indians again went to work in a group of rooms high above the floor of the Canyon. They were a quarter-mile from the ruins of the Long House and Puwige which were in open sight.

Like true cliff dwellers in prehistoric times they rebuilt old homes into new ones. Rooms were cleaned out. The old roof structures were removed from the inside. Loose building stones were removed from the broken-down walls. And the cave rooms above were also cleaned out. Indian men again cut pine timbers for roof poles with crude stone axes. They rebuilt walls and laid the poles over the tops. Indian women mixed mud—good hard Tewa mud. They brought in clay from nearby arroyos or from the Rio Grande and raised their talus houses two stories high. Some of the caves, after a hundred years, had eroded beyond use. Doorways and fronts had fallen. Indians gathered fallen building blocks strewn along the base of the cliff which had been fashioned by their ancestors. They built artificial fronts to the caves and plastered them over with mud. Fine clay mortar was smeared over the floor and rough surfaced walls. Doorways were built in the front walls of houses. Ladders were built. A corn patch was planted. Game likely was plentiful now. Black volcanic glass was chipped into sharp arrow points. A deer or two were brought in triumphantly from a hunt. And they created new homes for themselves and brought life back to Hidden Valley while their kin and kind struggled on and on with Spaniard and Navaho.

Safe at last, they lived again. Corn was harvested in the fall of the year and shucked and stored. Indian women ground corn on old worn metates left there a century before and the men again chanted away in time with the beat of a drum which echoed between steep canyon walls. Baskets were made of juniper and yucca. Blankets of fur and feathers were sewn together. Stout cord was twisted from the fibers of yucca. Indian women made brooms of grass tied with corn husks and yucca fiber to sweep their sooty rooms, while brown-skinned babies rolled in the dust. Gourds were scraped and made into utility vessels and Indian women again carried water in urns on the tops of their heads from the little creek far below.

It undoubtedly took some readjustment to live in the cliffs again after a century of acculturational contact with the Spanish. Just how many Indians or how large a group returned to the Canyon homes is not known. But by this time we see that the Indian had acquired a few things from the Spanish either by trade or thievery. This little group brought with them pieces of metal and wooden objects of possible foreign origin, objects brought in by the Spanish to the Rio Grande. One such object, which we found, was a two-pronged pick of viburnum, elaborately carved on top with a sharp steel blade. It was not much longer than a hair-pin and reminded one of such. Its use is still puzzling. And the Indians brought woolen cloth which was definitely post-Spanish. The Spaniards had brought the sheep to New Mexico. The weave of the cloth was such that it could not be mistaken. Could it have been from a Spanish garment or was it Indian-made? It is even possible that these people were wearing woven garments of wool when they reoccupied the Frijoles.

The little community was a poor one. There is no doubt about it. The Indian made fire in the same old way with fire drills. A blunt round piece of wood was turned so fast in the groove of a flat piece of wood that fire was produced. These people used cultivated tobacco at this time—a variety never before discovered in the Southwest of this early age. During a moment of temptation, the writer rolled a cigarette from part of this Indian mix which he found buried in a small red bowl. He smoked it without any ill effects. It looked like tobacco, smelled like tobacco and tasted like tobacco. Discarded fragments of pipes were found which had bowls of hard wood burned through. Moccasins of deer skin sewn together with sinew were found. Could they have been made in Frijoles Canyon or were they brought into the valley by these Indians? Whichever was the case, they were worn out. One pair was half-soled—not like our half-soles today, but on the inside. A new piece of buckskin had been cut and fitted and sewn to the inside of one of the worn-out moccasins which had been discarded.

The chirp of a turkey hen or the gobble of a gobbler created a dead silence in any primitive household. The calls echoed and could be heard for a half-mile. Even today, we stop and listen and follow the call just for a glimpse of the wild turkey. It is exciting. A tenseness of nerve and muscle envelops a person. An Indian father crept noiselessly down the steep slope to the valley far below—stopped, listened—not a sound but the whining of the wind through the high tops of pines or the caw of a raven flying high above, or the rolling waters of the little river. Following again and picking each step, bow and arrow in hand, ready to draw, he stopped. The turkeys were coming closer and behind a rock he hid or laid close to the little river out of sight. They were almost upon him, feeding peacefully on grasshoppers and bugs. A well directed arrow would mean meat for the whole family. That the Indian used only the feathers of the turkey is an idea of the past. The broken food bones are found in the ruins of ancient homes. Besides using the meat of the turkey for food, the Indian used the feathers for ceremonial purposes and strips of turkey feather spines made excellent wrappings for making arrow guides.

Such was life in Hidden Valley after the conquest of New Mexico by the Spanish. Living in the Tyuonyi at this time was apparently a necessity. It could again have been our Tewa-speaking friends who raised corn, beans, squash and pumpkins in the beautiful and colorful Valley of the Frijoles and who watched the sun, day after day, pass down behind the cliff to the land of Sipapu. But time again had a way of making things right, though not just as the Indian desired it. After the close of the seventeenth century, it seems, Frijoles was abandoned again. The Indians left their cliff homes and moved back to the Valley of the Rio Grande. There was little trouble with the Spanish from then on and the Indian wars were over and all were subdued and the ancient homes in Frijoles continued to crumble and walls continued to fall. A little time was all that was necessary to completely cover the abandoned dwellings. Howling winds beat sharp particles of dirt against crumbling walls and eventually filled them in and covered them. Deep kivas were no more. Small stones, boulders and dust fell from the cliffs covering up talus houses. Huge slides covered many homes and the wind and rain beat against the vulnerable cliff walls and eroded many of the caves almost beyond identification. Indian occupation was ended now but Hidden Valley still remained. The Rito de Los Frijoles continued to cut its course deeper and deeper through the soft volcanic ash as it had done through six hundred years of Indian living. Struggle had ended over the Tyuonyi. It was deserted to the ravages of time. To the south the Keres were settled now, and to the north the Tewas. They were content; and Hidden Valley was left alone.