20 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



with the sun, and descend by the column of smoke which rose from the sacred 

 fire. As of old the Israelitish watcher upon Mt. Seir replied to the inquiry, 

 'What of the night?' 'The morning cometh,' so the Pueblo sentinel mounts 

 the house-top at Pecos, and gazes wistfully into the east for the golden ap- 

 pearance — for the rapturous vision of his redeemer, for Montezuma's return 

 — and though no ray of light meets his watching eye, his never-failing faith, 

 with cruel deception, replies, 'The morning cometh.' " 



In about 1540, Coronado, the Spanish Governor of New Spain, lured by 

 the resistless rumor of boundless wealth of gold and silver, which no Spaniard 

 could withstand, led an expedition to this very village, then called Cicuye. 

 The Pecos rivtr must have been a far larger stream than at present, as Coro- 

 nado found it frozen over with ice strong enough to bear up his horses. He 

 found the settlement of Cicuye extending along the river for six miles, and 

 the soil extensively cultivated by the Indians. It was from that time that 

 the decline of the tribe commenced. The date of the building of the church 

 is not exactly known,* but it was probably very soon after the invasion by 

 Coronado, for zeal in religious matters was next to lust for gold in the heart 

 of the Castilian, in all of his conquests. 



We may imagine that the gentle and tractable Pueblos were speedily in- 

 duced by their enthusiastic conquerors to embrace Christianity, and that the 

 building of this church was a work of fear of temporal power, rather than of 

 faith in and love of the deity represented by the Spaniards. It was con- 

 structed of adobes, which are about sixteen inches long, twelve inches wide, 

 and three inches thick. Its shape is that of the Latin cross, its walls six feet 

 thick, and its dimensions one hundred and forty feet long by forty feet wide, 

 the transverse portion being fifty-seven by thirty-five feet, and its original 

 height about thirty feet. There were several smaller rooms attached on each 

 side, and possibly a building of considerable dimensions on the west side, as 

 there are traces of adobe walls which indicate either a building or an inclos- 

 ure divided into smaller rooms or lots. I have in my possession a book pub- 

 lished in 1854, containing an engraving which represents the church as having 

 a building on the west side. I could find nothing in the appearance of the 

 ground to indicate anything of the kind, either in the way of rubbish or 

 otherwise, and it seems to me, if the church itself could so well withstand the 

 ravages of time, any adjoining building would have endured as well. The 

 roof of the church has been nearly gone for many years, and the side-walls 

 of the front end are also crumbled away nearly to the ground. The rear 

 portion is nearly at its original height, and some of the cross-beams, with 

 their rude carvings, remain in situ. The others have been cut away by curi- 

 osity-hunters. 



The adobes of which the building is constructed are made of a reddish clay, 

 containing small pieces of pottery of a ruder and coarser order than that 



*Mr. A. Goselachowski informs me that it was probably erected just about 250 years ago, by the 

 Spanish Jesuits, and that the town and church were destroyed by the Comanche Indians in the latter 

 part of the eighteenth century. 



