Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, October 1899: Vol. LV, May to October, 1899Various
Philosophy
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, October 1899: Vol. LV, May to October, 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
As one approaches the center of Arizona, along the line of the Santa
Fé Railroad, whether he come from the east or from the west, his
attention is sure to be arrested by several tall, spire-like hills
which are silhouetted against the sky to the far north. These peaks
are the Moki Buttes, and to the north of them lies the province of
Tusayan, the land of the Mokis, or the Hopis, as they prefer to be
called. That country to-day contains more of interest to the student
of the history of mankind than any other similar-sized area on the
American continent. But very few of the great throng that roll by on
the Santa Fé trains every year in quest of pleasure, of recreation, of
new scenes and strange, stop off at Holbrook or Winslow to take the
journey to the Hopis, and very few even know of the existence of these
curiously quaint pueblos of this community, which to-day lives pretty
much as it did before Columbus set out on his long voyage to the
unknown West.
The term _pueblo_, a Spanish word meaning town, is by long and
continued use now almost confined to the clusters of stone and adobe
houses which to-day shelter the sedentary Indians of New Mexico and
Arizona. Not only are these Indian towns called "pueblos," but we
speak of the Indians themselves as the Pueblo Indians, and of the
culture of the people--for they all have much in common--as the pueblo
culture. This similarity of culture is not due to unity of race or
of language, but is the resultant of a peculiar environment. In recent
times, the limits of the pueblo-culture area have contracted to meet
the demands of the white man; we know also that before the advent of
the Spaniard many once populous districts had been abandoned, and as a
result there came to be fewer but larger villages. We know also, both
from tradition and from archæological evidence, that in former days
the pueblo people inhabited many of the villages of southern Colorado
and Utah, and that the Hopis and their kin were numerous in many parts
of Arizona. The silent houses of the cliffs, the ruins of central
Arizona, and the great crumbling masses of adobe of the Salt and Gila
River valleys and in northern Chihuahua are all former habitations of
the Pueblo Indian. To-day there are no representatives of these people
in Utah or Colorado, while the seven Hopi towns of Tusayan alone
remain in Arizona. But there are still many pueblos scattered along
the Rio Grande, Jemez, and San Juan Rivers in New Mexico. Alike in
culture, we may divide the existing pueblos into four linguistic
groups--namely, the Hopis of Arizona, the Zuñis of New Mexico, the
Tehuas east of the Rio Grande, and the Queres to the west of the Rio
Grande. Of the earlier home of the last three stocks we know but
little. The ancestors of the Hopis we know came from different
directions--some from the cliff dwellings of the north, others from
central Arizona. To-day, however, they form a congeries of clans
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