In the Moqui Country [pp. 243-256]

In the _Ioqui Coun try.
possibly be given a more certain sign of
his unworthiness?
Not all of the men of the tribe can
participate in the snake dance. Those
who do are members of a society in
which there is something like Freema sonry. They have many secrets, and
the true meaning of the dance is one of
them.
How long have the Moquis been
where we now find them? From whence
came they? Who are they?
The history of the tribe, though al most entirely an oral one, seems fairly
accurate, and upon some points the nar rators all agree. They all know of the
visit of Coronado. He and his party
were the first white men they had seen;
at that time they first sawv horses, and
many other things made it a great event
in Moqui history. They tell us that
they had been living in the villages they
now occupy a time about twice as great
before his visit as has elapsed since.
Coronado saw them in I 540,- about 350
years ago,- so that Tewa, Citcumave,
and Walpi, from the summit of the great
cliff, have looked down upon the plain
far more than ten centuries. And may
not the deep trail worn by their bare
feet in the rock, the enormous amount
of broken pottery mingling in the soil
of the plain all around the mesa, the
many tombs, and the old, old look of
the place be taken as corroborating testimony?
But through all that time, bringing so
many changes to the people of other
lands, the dwellers in the Moqui villages
have remained much the same. Some
battles have they fought, but they have
not marched with mind. They build no
better than they built ten centuries ago.
They cherish every superstition that
they cherished then.
The Moqui traditions tell us that before their people built upon the cliffs the
seven villages they now occupy, they
lived in cities upon the plain, some to the
northward, on the streams flowing to the
San Juan, and others south of the Little
Colorado, particularly near Silver Creek,
which they call the "blue river."
In confirmation of this, in many places
in the country lying between the streams
mentioned are the ruins of almost count less buildings, that as nearly as one can
judge from the small part of the mason ry that remains in the low foundation
walls and the mounds of debris, were
similar to the houses now built by the
tribe. About fifteen miles north of Te wa and the other towns, are the most
extensive ruins on the plains of northern
Arizona. They can be traced for miles,
and from them some of the finest speci mens of the ancient pottery have been
collected.
About six miles south of the Little
Colorado and four miles east of Chero lon Cafion, upon a very high part of the
plain three or four miles from any living
water in the present day, I found the
foundation walls of quite a large group
of buildings. The ground plan shows
them to have been very like the houses
now occupied by the Moquis. Most of
the rooms were small and square, or
nearly so, - about ten by twelve, or
twelve by fourteen feet,- and in at least
one instance a second wall surrounds at
a distance of about ten feet an inner one,
as though the outer wall enclosed the
one-story part of the house, and the inner wall the two-story part, the second
floor to be reached by a ladder over the
roof of the ground rooms, the same as in
the houses on the mesa.
About these ruins, as about all the
others in that region, are innumerable
fragments of a pottery so like, in style
and decoration, the pottery now made
by the Moquis, that it seems good evidence that the ancestors of Cimo's people once had their homes within those
ruined walls.
Before they lived in the cities on the
plain the Moquis, according to their
story, were the cliff dwellers of Canion
de Chelly, the canion near Flagstaff, and
25 4'
[Sept.