Page:The Coronado expedition, 1540-1542.djvu/401

. The houses are of earth, two stories high; the people have a good appearance, more like laborers than a warlike race; they have a large food supply of corn, beans, melons, and fowl in great plenty; they clothe themselves with cotton and the skins of cows and dresses of the feathers of the fowls; they wear their hair short. Those who have the most authority among them are the old men; we regarded them as witches, because they say that they go up into the sky and other things of the same sort. In this province there are seven other villages, depopulated and destroyed by those Indians who paint their eyes, of whom the guides will tell Your Grace; they say that these live in the same region as the cows, and that they have corn and houses of straw.

Here the people from the outlying provinces came to make peace with me, and as Your Grace may see in this memorandum, there are 80 villages there of the same sort as I have described, and among them one which is located on some streams; it is divided into twenty divisions, which is something remarkable; the houses have three stories of mud walls and three others made of small wooden boards, and on the outside of the three stories with the mud wall they have three balconies; it seemed to us that there were nearly 15,000 persons in this village. The country is very cold; they do not raise fowls nor cotton; they worship the sun.and water. We found mounds of dirt outside of the place, where they are buried.

In the places where crosses were raised, we saw them worship these. They made offerings to these of their powder and feathers, and some left the blankets they had on. They showed so much zeal that some climbed up on the others to grasp the arms of the cross, to place feathers and flowers there; and others bringing ladders, while some held them, went up to tie strings, so as to fasten the flowers and the feathers.