A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola: Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1886-1887, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891, pages 3-228 — John Shaqi
A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola: Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1886-1887, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891, pages 3-228Mindeleff, Cosmos
History
A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola: Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1886-1887, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891, pages 3-228
Mindeleff, Cosmos
Pueblo Indians -- Antiquities; Pueblo architecture
Some of the incidents as well as the disastrous termination of this feud
are still narrated. A party of the Sikyátki went prowling through Walpi
one day while the men were afield, and among other outrages, one of them
shot an arrow through a window and killed a chief’s daughter while she
was grinding corn. The chief’s son resolved to avenge the death of his
sister, and some time after this went to Sikyátki, professedly to take
part in a religious dance, in which he joined until just before the
close of the ceremony. Having previously observed where the handsomest
girl was seated among the spectators on the house terraces, he ran up
the ladder as if to offer her a prayer emblem, but instead he drew out a
sharp flint knife from his girdle and cut her throat. He threw the body
down where all could see it, and ran along the adjoining terraces till
he cleared the village. A little way up the mesa was a large flat rock,
upon which he sprang and took off his dancer’s mask so that all might
recognize him; then turning again to the mesa he sped swiftly up the
trail and escaped.
And so foray and slaughter continued to alternate between them until the
planting season of some indefinite year came around. All the Sikyátki
men were to begin the season by planting the fields of their chief on a
certain day, which was announced from the housetop by the Second Chief
as he made his customary evening proclamations, and the Walpi, becoming
aware of this, planned a fatal onslaught. Every man and woman able to
draw a bow or wield a weapon were got in readiness and at night they
crossed the mesa and concealed themselves along its edge, overlooking
the doomed village. When the day came they waited until the men had gone
to the field and then rushed down upon the houses. The chief, who was
too old to go afield, was the first one killed, and then followed the
indiscriminate slaughter of women and children, and the destruction of
the houses. The wild tumult in the village alarmed the Sikyátki and they
came rushing back, but too late to defend their homes. Their struggles
were hopeless, for they had only their planting sticks to use as
weapons, which availed but little against the Walpi with their bows and
arrows, spears, slings, and war clubs. Nearly all of the Sikyátki men
were killed, but some of them escaped to Oraibi and some to Awatubi. A
number of the girls and younger women were spared, and distributed among
the different villages, where they became wives of their despoilers.
It is said to have been shortly after the destruction of Sikyátki that
the first serious inroad of a hostile tribe occurred within this region,
and all the stories aver that these early hostiles were from the north,
the Ute being the first who are mentioned, and after them the Apache,
who made an occasional foray.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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