In 1617--three years before Plymouth Rock--there were already _eleven_ churches in use in New Mexico. Santa Fe was the only Spanish town; but there were also churches at the dangerous Indian pueblos of Galisteo and Pecos, two at Jemez (nearly one hundred miles west of Santa Fe, and in an appalling wilderness), Taos (as far north), San Yldefonso, Santa Clara, Sandia, San Felipe, and Santo Domingo. It was a wonderful achievement for each lonely missionary--for they had neither civil nor military assistance in their parishes--so soon to have induced his barbarous flock to build a big stone church, and worship there the new white God. The churches in the two Jemez pueblos had to be abandoned about 1622 on account of incessant harassment by the Navajos, who from time immemorial had ravaged that section, but were occupied again in 1626. The Spaniards were confined by the necessities of the desert, so far as home-making went, to the valley of the Rio Grande, which runs about north and south through the middle of New Mexico. But their missionaries were under no such limitation. Where the colonists could not exist, _they_ could pray and teach; and very soon they began to penetrate the deserts which stretch far on either side from that narrow ribbon of colonizable land. At Zuni, far west of the river and three hundred miles from Santa Fe, the missionaries had established themselves as early as 1629. Soon they had six churches in six of the "Seven Cities of Cibola" (the Zuni towns), of which the one at Chyanahue is still beautifully preserved; and in the same period they had taken foothold two hundred miles deeper yet in the desert, and built three churches among the wondrous cliff-towns of Moqui.