Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/219

Rh the "Mesa del Cangelon" in the north and "Los Corrales" in the south, and of which the present pueblo of Sandía is the only one left; and a southern branch now concentrated at the large village of Isleta, but which was still, about 1630, scattered in several small places. I have no doubt that the Tiguex of Coronado denotes the northern group of the Tiguas, for it lay north of Acoma and on a large river. This river east of Zuñi could only have been the Rio Grande del Norte, for the Puerco is in that latitude in parts of its course filled Tip with sand, and in other parts reduced to an insignificant, muddy rill. An expression of Casteñeda's, like-wise applying to Cicuyé-Pecos, is decisive on this point. "Tiguex," he says, "is the middle point," and "from Cibola to Cicuyé, which is the last village, we count seventy leagues." The villages of Tiguex were not, like Zuñi and Acoma, built of stone and mortar but of adobe; and that is also the structure of the pueblos the ruins of which I have examined around Bernalillo. I mention still another piece of documentary evidence, although it is derived from an account written at a later period. At Tiguex Coronado stormed and destroyed a pueblo the only case of the destruction of a village in New Mexico during his campaign. In the year 1583 the "Tiguas" told Antonio de Espejo, on his arrival among them, that his countrymen on their first coming had burnt one of their towns in the vicinity of the present Bernalillo. This fixes the locality of Tiguex, as I have attempted to show in an earlier publication, beyond all doubt.

Five days' journey brought Alvarado from the Rio Grande to Cicuyé, where a friendly reception was