MORGAN] JARAMILLO’S RELATION. 169 
pueblo on the Chaco in apt language, but there are no other pueblos in 
New Mexico, exclusively of stone, of which we have knowledge, except 
those of the Mokis, in the Canon de Chelly, on the Animas River, and 
elsewhere in Southwestern Colorado. There is an apparent difficulty in 
the narrative, in the reference made to the number of houses; but it is 
evident, I think, that Coronado meant apartments or sections, treating each 
great house as a block of houses, and expressing a doubt of their “judg- 
ment and wit to build these houses in such sort as they are.” If any doubt 
remained, it is entirely removed by the fact that all the pueblo houses in New 
Mexico, whether occupied or in ruins, are great edifices constructed like 
these on the communal principle, and that two hundred such houses 
grouped in one town were an utter impossibility. 
Jaramillo, who wrote his Relation some time after the return of the 
expedition, remarks, “that all the water-courses that we fell in with, whether 
brook or river, as far as that of Cibola, and I believe for one or two days’ 
journey beyond, flow in the direction of the South Sea [the Pacific]; 
farther on they take the direction of the North Sea [the Atlantic].”! This 
tends to show that Cibola was situated on a tributary of the Colorado, 
which gathers all the waters of New Mexico west of the Rio Grande and 
north of the Gila, and also that it was situated quite near the dividing ridge. 
It is but ten miles from the Canon de Torrejon, on the Puerco, a tributary 
of the Rio Grande, to the commencement of the Rio de Chaco, an affluent 
of the San Juan, and but twenty-three miles to the Pueblo Pintado. In 
this respect the sites of the ruins on the Chaco are in close agreement with 
the description of the situations of the towns of Cibola. Castateda, after 
speaking of the seven villages, and the character of the houses, remarks 
that ‘the valley is very narrow, between precipitous mountains” [‘‘C’est 
une vallée trés-ctroite entre des montagues escarpées”],” which, in the light 
of Coronado’s declaration, that ‘‘the country is all plain, and on no side 
mountains,” may perhaps have reference to the encompassing walls of the 
canon. This language, literally interpreted, does not describe this canon, 
neither is there any valley in New Mexico, occupied by pueblos, which 
answers this description. 
1Coll. H. Ternaux-Compans, vol. ix, p. 370. 2 Castaneda Relation, Ternaux-Compans, ix, p. 164. 
