Pueblo Fete Day [pp. 337-344]

H
OVERLAND MONTHLY.
TO
THE DEVELOPHEArT OF THE COUATTRY.
VOL. III (SECOND SERIEs.)-APRIL, 1884.-NO. 4.
A PUEBLO FETE DAY.
SCATTERED about among the valleys of dress very much alike, cook in the same
New Mexico and Arizona there are some manner, and eat the same kind of food.
twenty-three villages peopled by a race The language of the two, however, is differknown as the Pueblo Indians. Once a ent; but this is not strange, for it is a curimighty nation and an ancient one, the tribes ous fact that among the twenty~three Pueblo
to-day do not number more than 10,000 tribes, hardly any two have the same tongue.
persons, and disease still continues its dec- It is said that when the small-pox had ~enimating work. ~Vho the Pueblo Indians dered one of the New Mexico pueblos no
really are is hard to tell. They were found longer habitable, the remaining members of
living where they do to-day by the Sp~niards the tribe left their homes, and had to travel
as far back as 1540; and to all appearances many miles and visit many different villages
they had occupied their mud-built houses before they found a people who could unmany centunes~betore Cortez landed on the derstand their language. I once heard of a
shores of Mexico, and before Coronado had man who said that a medium or spiritualist
marched to the northern counties beyond. had told him that centi~ries ago a party of
Mr. Frank Cushing, living among the Zuni, Egyptians crossed over at the far north from
is striving to learn what the mythological Europe to America, and settled in what is
history of that tribe is; and i?, as many be- now the arctic region. At that early period,
lieve, the Zuni and the so-called Pueblo however, the country there was possessed of
tribes come from the same race, and were a mild climate; but when it began to grow
originally of the same nation, then Cushing's cold, the Egyptians began to move south,
knowledge of one people's history may en- and continued their migrations until they
able him to unravel the mythological haze reached the shores of the Gulf of Mexico,
surrounding the others. It is possible that and as they moved toward warmer latitudes,
the Pueblo Indians are related to the Aztecs they left behind them, at irregular intervals,
of old Mexico. They certainly have many different bodies of men and their women, who
customs similar to those of the Aztecs, and afterwards fbrmed first the Esquimaux, then
in personal appearance the likeness is re- the Indians of central North America, then
markable. Both live in adobe houses, the Pueblo Indians, and later the Aztecs.
VOL. III.-22.