Sometimes, as at Taos, the separate dwellings or cells of the building are so crowded together as to resemble, in the words of Bandelier, "an extraordinarily large honey-comb." The same

is the case with that of Zuñi, both these pueblos being now inhabited, and the latter, which is the larger, giving shelter to fifteen hundred Indians. Others again, like that of Acoma, are so protected by their situation that this close aggregation of cells is not necessary; and the little tenements are simply placed side by side like houses in a block, the whole being perched on a cliff three hundred and fifty feet high, accessible only by a single row of steps cut in the rock. Sometimes the whole structure is in a cleft of a rock, yet even there it is essentially a pueblo, with the same terraces and the same ladders, so far as there is room. Sometimes we find the main pueblo, ruined or inhabited, beneath the cliff, and the citadel of refuge in a position almost inaccessible among the rocks above. Many of these masses of building are now occupied, more are in ruins. Each shelters, or may have sheltered, hundreds of inhabitants, and

the existing Village Indians probably represent for us not merely the race, but the mode of living of those who built every one of these great structures. If we wish to know what was the America which Cortez invaded, we must look for it in the light of these recent investigations.

No trace now remains of the so-called city of Mexico, as Cortez saw it; but we know, in a vague way, how it compared with the pueblos that still exist. The clew to a comparison is as follows: There prevailed in the sixteenth century a legend that seven bishops had once sailed west from Portugal, and founded seven cities in America. Cabeza de Vaca, after his wanderings in the interior of America in 1536, brought back an account of large and semi-civilized communities dwelling in palaces; and it was thought that these might be identified with the cities founded by the bishops. They were seen again by Fray Marco de Niza in 1539, and by Coronado in 1540, and were by them mentioned as "the seven cities of Cibola." Coronado fully describes the "great houses of stone," "with ladders instead of stairs," thus identifying them unmistakably with the still existing pueblos. Whether they were the seven pueblos of the Zuñis, or those of the Moquis in Arizona, is as yet unsettled; but it is pretty certain that they were identical with the one or the other; and as Fray Marco declared them to be in his day "more considerable than Mexico," we have something like a standard of comparison. Such great communal houses, which could shelter a whole Spanish army within their walls, could seem nothing else than palaces to those wholly unused to the social organization which they represented. The explorers reasoned, just as students reasoned for three centuries longer, that structures so vast could only have been erected by despotism. They saw an empire where there was no empire; they supposed themselves in presence of a feudalism like their own; all their descriptions were cast in the mould of this feudalism, and the mould remained unbroken until the civilized world, within thirty years, rediscovered the pueblos.

Again, so long as the Pueblo Indians were unknown to us, there appeared an impassable gap between the roving Indians. of the North and the more advanced race that Cortez con

quered. Yet writers had long since pointed out the seeming extravagance of the Spanish descriptions, the exaggeration of their statistics. In the celebrated Spanish narrative of Montezuma's banquet, Bernal Diaz, writing thirty years after the event, describes four women as bringing water to their chiefan occurrence not at all improbable. In the account by Herrera, written still later, the four have increased to twenty. According to Diaz, Montezuma had 200 of his nobility on guard in the palace; Cortez expands them to 600, and Herrera to 3000. Zuazo, describing the pueblo or town of Mexico in 1521, attributed to it 60,000 inhabitants, and the anonymous conqueror" who was with Cortez wrote the same. This estimate Morgan believes to have been twice too large; but Gomara and Peter Martyr transformed the inhabitants into housesthe estimate which Prescott follows-while Torquemada, cited by Clavigero, goes still further, and writes 120,000 houses. Supposing that, as seems probable, the Mexican houses were of the communal type, holding fifty or a hundred persons each, we have an original population of perhaps 30,000 swollen to 6,000,000. These facts illustrate the extravagances of statement to which the study of the New Mexican pueblos has put an end. This study has led us to abate much of the exaggeration with which the ancient Mexican society has been treated, and on the other hand to do justice to the more advanced among the tribes of Northern Indians. The consequence is that the two types appear less unlike each other than was formerly supposed.

Let us compare the habits of the Pueblo Indians with those of more northern tribes. Lewis and Clark thus describe a village of the Chopunish, or Nez Percés, on the Columbia River:

"The village of Tunnachemootoolt is in fact only a single house 150 feet long, built after the Chopunish fashion with sticks, straw, and dried grass. It contains twenty-four fires,

about double that number of families, and might perhaps muster one hundred fighting men."

The

This represents a communal household of nearly five hundred people, and another great house of the same race (Nechecolees) was still larger, being 226 feet in length. houses of the Iroquois were 100 feet long. The Creeks, the Mandans, the Sacs, the Mohaves, and other tribes lived in a similar communal way, several related families in each house, living and eating in common. All these built their houses of perishable materials; some arranged

them for defence, others did not, but all the structures bear a certain analogy to each other, and even, when carefully considered, to the pueblos of New Mexico.

Compare, for instance, a ground-plan of one of the Chopunish houses among the Nechecolees with that of an Iroquois house and with a New Mexican pueblo, and one is struck with the resemblance. All these houses seem obviously adapted a communal life, and

to

traces of this practice, varying in different places, come constantly before us. The Pueblo Indians hold their lands in common. The traveller Stephens saw near the ruins of Uxmal the food of a hundred laboring - men prepared at one hut, and

96 Ft.

PLAN OF IROQUOIS HOUSE.

226 Ft.

PLAN OF NECHECOLEE HOUSE.

each family sending for its own portion -"a procession of