EXCURSION TO THE BIRTH-PLACE OF MONTEZUMA. 425 
the night ?” ‘‘The morning cometh,” so the Pueblo sentinel mounts the house- 
top at Pecos, and gazes wistfully into the East, for the golden appearance, for 
the rapturous vision of his redeemer, for Montezuma’s return, and though no ray 
of light meets his watching eye, his never failing faith, with cruel deception, replies 
‘¢The morning cometh.’’ ” 
In about 1540 Coronado, the Spanish governor of New Spain, lured by the 
resistless rumor of boundless wealth of gold and silver, which no Spaniard could 
withstand, led an expedition to this very village, then called Cicuyé. The Pecos 
river must have been a far larger stream than at present, as Coronado found it 
frozen over with ice strong enough to bear up his horses. He found the settle- 
ment of Cicuyé extending along the river for six miles, and the soil extensively 
cultivated by the Indians. It was from that time that the decline of the tribe 
commenced. The date of the building of the church is not_exactly known, but it 
was probably very soon after the invasion by Coronado, for zeal in religious mat- 
ters was next to lust of gold in the heart of the Castilian in all of his conquests. 
We may imagine that the gentle and tractable Pueblos were speedily induced 
by their enthusiastic conquerors, to embrace Christianity, and that the building of 
this church was a work of fear of temporal power, rather than of faith in and 
love of the deity represented by the Spaniards. It was constructed of adobes, 
which are about sixteen inches long, twelve inches wide and three inches thick, 
Its shape is that of the Latin cross, its walls six feet thick and its dimensions one 
hundred and forty feet long by forty feet wide; the transverse portion being fifty- 
seven by thirty-five feet, and its original height about thirty feet. There were 
several smaller rooms attached on each side, and possibly a building of consider- 
able dimensions on the west side, as there are traces of adobe walls which indi- 
cate either a building or an inclosure divided into several smaller rooms or lots. 
I have in my possession a book published in 1854, containing an engraving which 
represents the church as having a building on the west side. I could find noth- 
ing in the appearance of the ground to indicate anything of the kind, either in 
the way of rubbish or otherwise, and it seems to me, if the church itself could so 
well withstand the ravages of time, any adjoining buildings would have endured as 
well. The roof of the church has been nearly gone for many years, and the side- 
walls of the front end are also crumbled away nearly to the ground. The rear 
portion is nearly at its original height, and some of the cross-beams with their 
rude carvings, remain 27 szfu. The others have been cut away by curiosity hunters 
The adobes of which the building is constructed, are made of a reddish clay 
containing small pieces of pottery of a ruder and coarser order than that found 
about the Pueblo villages. In one of these inclosures just west of the church is 
a small excavation about twelve feet in diameter, evidently the remains of a wa- 
ter-reservoir. Immediately in front of the entrance and about forty feet from it, 
is what seems to be an old well, which had been walled up with stone and has 
been more recently filled up with earth. 
About seventy-five feet still further on, we come to the traces of an old wall term_ 
