Note I'-3 — Chapter I · ITINERARY: THROUGH NEW MEXICO ON THE RIO GRANDE TO EL PASO, FEB. 27TH-MAR. 21ST, 1807.

Or Rio Caliente, as the name of the stream is now usually rendered. This is formed by various tributaries from the N. and N. W. (Rita Servilleta, Vallecita, etc.), and joins the Rio Chama from the W., about 5 m. above their common entrance into the Rio Grande opp. San Juan. There are various other hot or warm springs than the one at which Pike stopped, and this one is 10 m. or so W. of the railroad station called Ojo Caliente. At various points near the Rio Grande, at a considerable distance to Pike's left, are numerous isolated elevations, some of which are Cerros Olla, Chifle, Montoso, Cristobal, Taoses, and Orejas. Since Pike entered New Mexico, on crossing lat. 37° on the 28th, his route has been practically along the W. border of Taos Co., so named from the well-known Tañoan pueblo or town of Taos, frequently mentioned by him as Tons, Tous, Toas, etc., as his printer happened to fancy, while his engraver made it "Yaos" on the map of New Spain. This is on a branch of Taos cr.; when Pike passes its latitude to-day, he is about 20 m. W. of it. Some places passed along Caliente cr., to his right, are Petaca, Servilleta, and Cueva Springs. The name Taos has several different implications: for a river, Rio de Taos; for the country through which this river flows; for a town at the junction of its principal forks, otherwise San Fernandez; for a place 3 m. S. E. of this, Rancho de Taos; and for another place about the same distance N. E., Pueblo de Taos. San Fernandez de Taos was a Mexican adobe town, which had some 600-800 pop. in 1846, and was the capital of the Department of Taos. The old Indian pueblo of Taos, to which the insurgents had retreated Jan. 7th, 1847, after the skirmishes of Cañada and Embuda, became noted during the war as the scene of a bloody siege and capture: see Ex. Doc. No. 41, 30th Cong., 1st Sess., pub. 1848, p. 457.

In approaching the subject of the New Mexican Pueblo Indians it is necessary at the outset to free the mind from the traditional error that because these live in towns known as "pueblos," therefore they are one kind of Indians. I shall recur to the subject in a later connection. Here I wish to cite an early instance of the recognition of an all-important ethnological fact on the part of Lieutenant James H. Simpson, U. S. T. E., whose interesting Journal of a Military Reconnaissance from Santa Fé, New Mexico, to the Navajo country, etc., in 1849, was published in 1850 as one of the collection of papers forming Ex. Doc. No. 64, 31st Congr., 1st Sess., 8vo, Washington, pp. 56-168, many pll. and maps. He speaks on p. 57 of "the singular and, as I believe, the hitherto unknown fact ... that among the 10,000 (estimated) Pueblo Indians who inhabit New Mexico, as many as six distinct dialects obtain, no one showing anything more than the faintest, if any, indications of a cognate origin with the other." He sharply but justly brings to book the English author Ruxton, for the grossly erroneous statement (Mex. and the R. Mts., p. 194) that "the Indians of northern Mexico, including the Pueblos, belong to the same family—the Apache.... All these speak dialects of the same language, more or less approximating to the Apache, and of all of which the idiomatic structure is the the same." A statement more at variance from the facts in the case could hardly be penned. Those Pueblo Indians whom Pike now or presently meets represent two distinct linguistic families, the Keresan and the Tañoan; and we shall have several others to note in due course. The influence of the church upon the pueblo system has of course not escaped well-informed ethnographers, but I suspect they have not always given it full credit for the hand it had in first founding, then maintaining in misery, and finally fetching to grief, some of these sorry settlements of inoffensive Indians, who had escaped the Apaches on one side and the Navajos on the other, to be herded about some mud joss-house and fleeced as fast as they acquired any substance worth stealing. The business began early, and the way of it is something of a historical curiosity. A man named Alessandro Farnese—the one who was pope 1534-49, and who undertook to regulate the morals of various persons, besides Henry VIII., with indifferent success—once made a discovery so astonishing that he must have been inspired. Papa Paulo III. promptly published his find in a bull which was only saved from being Irish by the fact that it was Latin: for this ethnological pronunciamento a todos los fieles cristianos, que las presentes letras vieren declared in due and solemn form que los indios son hombres y capaces de sacramentos—i. e., told all the faithful to whom this exquisite tomfoolery came that Indians were human and could be humbugged. That was June 9th, 1537, and that settled it—the hint was enough to set upon the savages the horde of corrupt, profligate, and extortionate ecclesiastics who have cursed the country from that day to this. The first business of these people was always to build a church in which to brandish the crucifix at those who had escaped the tomahawk, and pray for the souls of those whose superstitions were thus played upon while their property was preyed upon—for churches cannot be built and priests supported unless somebody sweats for it. I hardly think that Indians thus huddled around a church, in abject terror alike of their natural and their supernatural enemies, outside and inside the pueblo, were any better off for self-defense than they would have been had they been left to their natural resources—though many have so fancied; for the numerical strength of such an aggregation would have been just as effective without that edifice, and tame Indians are no match for wild ones. The process of converting an Indian to Christianity simply mixes his metaphors and muddles his mind, by substituting for the superstitions he thinks he understands other mysteries which the priests themselves declare to be incomprehensible. The advantage of this to the Indian is not easily discerned, and some of its disadvantages are obvious. For example, the priests are responsible for a considerable amount of fornication and fœticide—I do not mean so much by their personal habits as by their keeping so many of their parishioners too poor to pay for marriages and baptisms. By the year 1680, the papal plan and the church method had worked so well that the converted Indians undertook to prove themselves men, capable of the very real sacrament of manhood; for they revolted against the intolerable yoke, killed a great many of their oppressors, and drove these ill-omened birds of prey from their repast for a while.