Page:The Coronado expedition, 1540-1542.djvu/326

 March I received a letter from him, which he sent me by Juan de Zaldyvar and three other horsemen. In this he says that after he left Culuacan and crossed the river of Petatlan he was everywhere very well received by the Indians. The way he did was to send a cross to the place where he was going to stop, because this was a sign which the Indians received with deep veneration, making a house out of mats in which to place it, and somewhat away from this they made a lodging for the Spaniards, and drove stakes where they could tie the horses, and supplied fodder for them, and abundance of corn wherever they had it. They say that they suffered from hunger in many places, because it had been a bad year. After going 100 leagues from Cnluacan, he began to find the country cold, with severe frosts, and the farther he went on the colder it became, until he reached a point where some Indians whom he had with him were frozen, and two Spaniards were in great danger. Seeing this, he decided not to go any farther until the winter was over, and to send back, by those whom I mentioned, an account of what he had learned concerning Cibola and the country beyond, which is as follows, taken literally from his letter:

"I have given Your Lordship an account of what happened to me along the way; and seeing that it is impossible to cross the uninhabited region which stretches from here to Cibola, on account of the heavy snows and the cold, I will give Your Lordship an account of what I have learned about Cibola, which I have ascertained by asking many persons who have been there fifteen and twenty years; and I have secured this in many different ways, taking some Indians together and others separately, and on comparison they all seem to agree in what they say. After crossing this large wilderness, there are seven places, being a short day's march from one to another, all of which are together called Cibola. The houses are of stone and mud, coarsely worked. They are made in this way: One large wall, and at each end of this wall some rooms are built, partitioned off 20 feet square, according to the description they give, which are planked with square beams. Most of the houses are reached from the flat roofs, using their ladders to go to the streets. The houses have three and fonr stories. They declare that there are few having two stories. The stories are mostly half as high again as a man, except the first one, which is low, and only a little more than a man's height. One ladder is used to communicate with ten or twelve houses together. They make use of the low ones and live in the highest ones. In the lowest ones of all they have some loopholes made sideways, as in the fortresses of Spain. The Indians say that when these people are attacked, they station themselves in their houses and fight from there; and that when they go to make war, they carry shields and wear leather jackets, which are made of cows' hide, colored, and that they fight with arrows and with a sort of stone maul and with some other weapons made of sticks, which I have not been able to make out. They eat human flesh, and they keep those whom they capture in war as slaves. There are many fowls in the