The Queres Indians, to which nation Ácoma belongs, have always claimed
the range of the Tanos Mountains and the valleys of the upper Rio Grande
and the Jémez Rivers as their ancestral heritage. The prehistoric
remains in the romantic gorge of the Rito de los Frijoles are said by
the Queres to belong to their people and especially to those who later
settled permanently at Cochití. The medicine men of Cochití paid frequent
visits to holy shrines there as recently as 1890.
VI. LANGUAGE
The ethnologists agree that there is no reason to suppose that only one
language existed among the earliest dwellers in America. Certainly the
Spaniards found the different languages, or dialects, a great source of
confusion in their early expeditions from Mexico into the North. To know
one well was no password to the next or to those beyond.
Dr. Franz Boas says that “at any rate when man began to increase, the
number of languages was legion though sprung from the same root.” As some
tribes grew more powerful and as inter-tribal wars did their fatal work,
“many older stocks were eliminated, to be replaced by the dialects of a
few groups.”[266]
The four pueblo linguistic stocks distinguishable to-day are:
(1) Shoshonean, to which belong all Hopi pueblos, except Hano; (2)
Zuñian; (3) Tanoan; (4) Keresan or Queresan.
VII. KATZÍMO, A DISENCHANTED MESA
Professor Libbey, of Princeton University, describes in _Harper’s
Weekly_, August 28, 1897, the way in which he went, with two assistants
and two heavily laden wagons which contained “among other things a small
cannon, and miles and miles of rope.” After the cannon had been charged,
a large shot was fired to which had been attached a projecting shaft and
ring in the gun. By throwing the shot to the far side of the mesa, it
was possible to construct a kind of bo’sun’s chair which, with pulleys,
lifted Libbey to a point on the smaller end of the rock. A ladder was
now sent up to him, on which the explorer climbed down the face of the
cliff to a point from which he could jump across to the other side of the
chasm. “A few grasses and plants common on the plains below, and these
with one grey rat and some lizards were all the evidences of life to be
seen.”
Libbey admits that “a small cairn-like structure of stones” _might_ have
been the work of human hands; but he was convinced not only that the mesa
had never been a human habitation, but that no fragment of pottery or of
implements of any sort could be found.
VIII. MEDICINE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account