164 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 184 
early trader among the Hopi, in Chamber’s Journal of 1883. ‘The 
Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona,” by John G. Bourke (1884), 
was published in the following year. We do not know when it was 
that James and Matilda Stevenson learned of the Snake ceremony at 
Sia, but it was probably during the fall of 1887, when they spent 
considerable time there. We first learn of their discovery in Major 
Powell’s Annual Report of the Director of the Bureau of [American] 
Ethnology for 1887-88 (1892, pp. xxvili-xxix). The Stevensons did 
not witness the ceremony itself, although they examined the little 
adobe house where it is held and saw the niche where the ceremonial 
bowls were stored. Mrs. Stevenson did, however, obtain a rather 
detailed account of the ceremony from the vicar of the Snake society. 
We know of no non-Indian who has ever seen the Sia snake ceremony, 
and no eye-witness account of it has ever been published. 
There are indications that ceremonies with live snakes were once 
rather widespread among the pueblos of the Southwest. In 1581-82, 
the party of Father Rodriguez and Captain Chamuscado witnessed 
a ceremony at a pueblo located near the Galisteo ruins of today in 
which two live rattlesnakes were carried about: ‘“They coil around 
the neck and creep all over the body’ (Hammond and Rey, 1927, 
p. 347). Antonio de Espejo saw a ceremony at Acoma in 1583 in 
which live snakes (‘‘vivoras vivas’’) were carried (Bandelier, 1890, 
p. 149). Live snakes have been kept in some pueblos, according to 
reports, for ceremonial purposes. Bandelier (ibid., pp. 306-307) 
believed that the reports he had of live snakes being kept in the Tewa 
pueblos where they were treated, ‘if not with veneration, at least 
with particular care,” were “not unfounded.” Matilda Stevenson 
(1914), too, has some allusions to snake ceremonies among the Tewa. 
Hodge (1896, p. 133) was told at Laguna that, prior to 1876, the 
Indians of one of the Laguna summer colonies ‘‘kept a large rattle- 
snake which they brought out in certain ceremonials.”’ Fray Estevan 
de Perea’s party saw a number of live rattlesnakes in an enclosure 
at Zufii early in the 17th century, but they were told by the Indians 
that they were kept to provide them with poison for their arrow 
points (Bloom, 1933, p. 228). Hodge (1896, p. 134) was told by the 
Cochiti Indians that they had had a snake ceremony about 1865 or 
earlier. As early as 1910 Walter Hough (1910, p. 605) had come to 
the conclusion that ‘‘the Snake dance formerly must have been 
widely distributed among the Pueblo tribes.”” And we have a little 
more evidence now than he had then. 
The only reason for believing that Cochiti once had a snake cere- 
mony is that ‘‘an unusually intelligent Indian” told Hodge that they 
once had the ceremony and that they had introduced it into Sia, 
which had not had it previously. This evidence is virtually worth- 
