548 THE COKONADO EXPEDITION, 1540-1542 Ieth.axn. h 



March I received a letter from him, which he sent me by Juan de Zal- 

 dyvar and three other horsemen. In this he says that after he left 

 Culuacan and crossed the river of Petatlan he was everywhere very 

 well received by the Indians. The way he did was to send a cross to 

 the place where he was going to stop, because this was a sign which the 

 Indians received with deep veneration, making a house out of mats in 

 which to place it, and somewhat away from this they made a lodging 

 for the Spaniards, and drove stakes where they could tie the horses, 

 and supplied fodder for them, and abundance of corn wherever they had 

 it. They say that they suffered from hunger in many places, because 

 it had been a bad year. After going 100 leagues from Culuacan, he 

 began to find the country cold, with severe frosts, and the farther he 

 went on the colder it became, until he reached a point where some 

 Indians whom he had with him were frozen, and two Spaniards were in 

 great danger. Seeing this, he decided not to go any farther until the 

 winter was over, and to send back, by those whom I mentioned, an 

 account of what he had learned concerning Cibola and the country 

 beyond, which is as follows, taken literally from his letter: 



"I have given Your Lordship an account of what happened to me 

 along the way; and seeing that it is impossible to cross the uninhabited 

 region which stretches from here to Cibola, on account of the heavy 

 snows and the cold, I will give Your Lordship an account of what I have 

 learned about Cibola, which I have ascertained by asking many persons 

 who have been there fifteen and twenty years; and I have secured this 

 in many different ways, taking some Indians together and others sep- 

 arately, and on comparison they all seem to agree in what they say. 

 After crossing this large wilderness, there are seven places, being a 

 short day's march from one to another, all of which are together called 

 Cibola. The houses are of stone and mud, coarsely worked. They are 

 made in this way: One large wall, and at each end of this wall some 

 rooms are built, partitioned off 20 feet square, according to the descrip- 

 tion they give, which are planked with square beams. Most of the 

 houses are reached from the flat roofs, using their ladders to go to the 

 streets. The houses have three and four stories. They declare that 

 there are few having two stories. The stories are mostly half as high 

 again as a man, except the first one, which is low, and only a little 

 more than a man's height. One ladder is used to communicate with 

 ten or twelve houses together. They make use of the low ones and 

 live in the highest ones. In the lowest ones of all they have some 

 loopholes made sideways, as in the fortresses of Spain. The Indians 

 say that when these people are attacked, they station themselves in 

 their houses and fight from there; and that when they go to make 

 war, they carry shields and wear leather jackets, which are made of 

 cows' hide, colored, and that they fight with arrows and with a sort of 

 stone maul and with some other weapons made of sticks, which I have 

 not been able to make out. They eat human flesh, and they keep those 

 whom they capture in war as slaves. There are many fowls in the 



