MORGAN.) ORGANIZATION OF TAOS INDIANS. 147 
the rooms below answering that purpose. Thus it is that no entire circuit 
can be made around any one of these stories, the only thing that can be 
called a terrace being the narrow space left in front of some of the rooms 
from the roofs of the lower rooms.” 
Mr. Ward seems to object to the word “terrace” in defining the plat- 
form left in front of each story as a means of access to its apartments and 
to the successive stories. It was used by the early Spanish writers to 
explain the same peculiarity found in many of the great houses in the 
pueblo of Mexico and elsewhere over Mexico, the roofs being flat and the 
stories receding from each other. While this platform is not in strictness a 
terrace, the term expresses this architectural feature with sufficient clear- 
ness. The two structures at Taos are large enough to accommodate five 
hundred persons in each, the inmates living in the Indian fashion. They 
were occupied in 1864 by three hundred and sixty-one Taos Indians. 
‘Hach terrace is reached,” remarks Mr. Miller before mentioned, speak- 
ing of the pueblos in general, “by a wooden ladder, first from the ground 
and afterward from the one below; and ingress and egress to and from the 
rooms below is on the inside in the room above through trap-doors and 
upon ladders. It is wonderful to see with what agility the Indian children 
and the dogs run up and down these ladders. Nowhere is there any side 
communication between the rooms in the great building, and but one family 
occupy each series of rooms situated one above the other.” This last state- 
ment.is too broadly made, as we have seen that Mr. Ward has given the 
measurements of doors through partition walls. Such doors will also be 
shown in a subsequent engraving. But there is no doubt of the fact that 
the number of lateral rooms communicating with each other was small, and 
that the families or groups, if such existed, united in a communal house- 
hold, were separated from each other by solid partition walls, a fact which 
will reappear in the house-architecture of Yucatan. 
In 1877, David J. Miller, esq., of Santa Fé, visited the Taos Pueblo 
at my request, to make some further investigations. He reports to me the 
following facts: The government is composed of the following persons, all 
of whom, except the first, are elected annually: 1. A cacique or principal 
sachem. 2. A governor or alcalde. 3. A lieutenant-governor. 4, A war 
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