94 
The Colorado River 
and wide about a stone’s throw.” That this was an accurate 
statement the view on page 95 amply proves. Indeed, the 
accuracy of most of these early Spaniards, as to topography, 
direction, etc., is extraordinary. As a rule where they are ap¬ 
parently wrong it is ourselves who are mistaken, and if we fully 
understand their meaning we find them to be correct. Garces 
found his way down to the Little Colorado by means of a side 
canyon and got out again on the other side in the same way. 
Finally, on July 2nd, he arrived at the pueblo of Oraibi, 
his objective point, and when he and his tired mule had 
climbed up on the mesa which bears the town, the women 
and children lined the housetops to get a glimpse of the 
singular stranger. 
Spaniards were something of a novelty, though by no 
means unheard of, just as even I was something of a novelty 
when I visited Oraibi one hundred years after the Padre 
Garces, because the Oraibis never encouraged white visitors.* 
The first missions were established among the Moki in 1629, 
when Benavides was custodian of the Rio Grande district, and 
included Zuni and Moki in his field. Three padres were then 
installed at Awatuwi, one of the towns, on the mesa east of 
what is now called the “East” Mesa. Four were at work 
amongst the various towns at the time of the Pueblo uprising 
in 1680, and as one began his labours at Oraibi as early as 1650, 
a priest was not an unknown object to the older people. All 
the missionaries having been killed in 1680, and Awatuwi, 
where a fresh installation was made, having been annihilated in 
1700 by the Moki, for three-quarters of a century they had seen 
few if any Spaniards. Therefore the women and children were 
full of curiosity. Padre Escalante had been here from Zuni 
the year before, looking over the situation with a view to bring¬ 
ing all the Moki once more within the fold. At that time 
o 
Escalante also tried to go on to what he called the Rio de los 
’ A year or two after my visit, James Stevenson, of the Bureau of Ethnology, 
was driven away from Oraibi. Thomas Keam and he then went there with a 
force of Navajos and compelled the surrender of the chiefs who had been most 
obnoxious. They took them to Keam’s Canyon and confined them on bread and 
water till they apologised. 
