332 ZUNI CREATION MYTHS. [eth.ann.13 



That without casualty to the Zuuis au uuderstauding was in some 

 way soou reached between them and Vargas, the chroniclers of the 

 expedition agree with this Zuiii legend; and before the end of the 

 century the Indians had all descended to the plain again and were 

 gathei^ed, excei^t in seasons of planting and harvest, chiefly at three 

 of their easternmost towns, and the central one of HAlona Itiwana, 

 the Zuiii of today. After the recon(iuest at least some of the missions 

 were rehabilitated, and missionaries dwelt with the Zuiiis now and 

 again. But other chiefs than those chosen by the priestly elders of 

 the people were thenceforward chosen by the Spaniards to watch the 

 people — gobernador, alcalde, and tenientes, — and these in turn were 

 watched by Spanish soldiers whose conduct favored little the foster- 

 ing of good will and happy relations; for in 1703, goaded to despera- 

 tion by the excesses of these resident police, tlie Zufiis drove at least 

 three of them into the church and there massacred them. Then, 

 according to their wont, they fled, for the last time, to the top of Thun- 

 der mountain. 



When they finally descended they planted numerous peach orchards 

 among the cliffs and terraces of Grand mountain and Twin mountains 

 to the northward of Zuui, and' there also laid out great gardens and 

 many little cornfields. And with the pretext of wishing to be near 

 their crops there, they built the seven Sonoli 'Hlvielawe (the "Towns 

 of Sonora"), so named because the peach stones they had planted 

 there had been brought from Sonora, Mexico. But their real object 

 was to escape from the irksome and oft-repeated spyings upon and 

 interdictions of their sacred observances and mythic drama-dances, 

 which, as time went on, the Spanish frailes, supported by the increasing 

 power of the authorities at Santa Fe in the first half of the eighteenth 

 century, were wont to make. So, in hidden and lone nooks on the 

 mountains, where their fine foundations may be seen even now, the 

 Indian priests- had massive kivas built, and there from year to year 

 they conducted in secret the rites which but for this had never been 

 preserved so perfectly for telling, albeit only in outline, in the following 

 pages. But even thus far from the mission and its warders the plume- 

 wands of worship, which in earlier times had been made long (each one 

 according to its kind as long as from the elbow to the tip of one finger 

 or another of him who made and sacrificed it), now had to be cut short 

 and made only as long as the hands and the various fingers of those 

 who made them; for the large plumed messages to the winds and 

 spaces often betrayed the people, and they must now needs be made of 

 size convenient for burial or hiding away in crannies or under bushes 

 as near as might be to the shrines of the sacred .precincts where once 

 the fathers had worshiped so freely. 



Toward the end of the century, between 1775 and 1780, the old 

 Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which now harbors only birrros 

 and shivering dogs of cold winter nights and is toppling to ruin in 



