For a time Ácoma was associated with no less a figure than the celebrated Father Zárate Salmerón, historian of his own epoch in New Mexico. For eight years Zárate writes that he “sacrificed himself to the pagans” (1618-1626). Others call him “a great orator and an indefatigable worker, who instilled fresh energy into his mission work.” Jémez was his principal scene of labor; but he also served the Keres. Once at least he visited Ácoma during a period of great hostility and it is recorded that he succeeded in pacifying them for a season. One of the interesting items in Father Zárate’s “Relación” is his attempt to verify the current belief that there were Indians in New Mexico who talked in the Nahautl language—that is, the language of the Aztecs. He had been told, he said, by Captain Gerónimo Marquéz long before, how the first time he was on the great cliff of Ácoma he entered an _estufa_ and saw in it some Indians painted on the wall. As he recognized them for Mexicans (Aztecs) by their dress, he asked the Ácoma Indians who these might be that were thus portrayed. They replied that a few years earlier some Indians dressed in this fashion came there from the direction of the sea coast (the Pacific); and because such a thing had not hitherto been seen among them, they had painted them; also that from there the strangers had gone toward the pueblo of Sía of the Queres nation, and thence to Jémez and so back to their own land. This must have occurred in the time of Oñate, whom Marquéz accompanied. No modern writer has ever mentioned even a tradition of such a decoration of the _estufa_. Did it perish in the time of the great fight? Who can say? So far as written, no white man has ever penetrated the interior of an Ácoma _kiva_. The New Mexico missions now flourished. On Father Zárate’s recommendation, in 1621 the province was made a _custodio_ and named San Pablo. Father Benavides, an even more illustrious historian than Zárate, was San Pablo’s first superior. At the end of five years he reported sixteen friars in New Mexico and the astonishing number of 34,000 Indians baptized. This would be an average of a thousand each for thirty-four towns. Benavides, when he returned to Spain, wrote his precious “Memorial” on the affairs of New Mexico. Like his predecessors and successors, he notes the aloofness of Ácoma from the rest of the Keres, their kinsmen. He writes that the Keres neophytes “are dextrous in reading, writing, and playing on all instruments, and craftsmen in all the crafts, thanks to the great industry of the Religious who converted them.” He does not mention Ácoma by name in this connection. But if what he says applied to them, we must assume that one or more padres had spent many a month of patient labor on the top of the great rock.