Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/246

232 and gradually united them into a single large village. This village, abandoned in 1680, is now merged in the pueblo of Jemez, which contains in all about four hundred souls.

Returning from Jemez to the Rio Grande, Barrionuevo seems to have followed the right (or western) shore of the river exclusively, for he mentions the pueblo of "Yuque Yunque," "the inhabitants of which, as well as those of another village situated on the river, fled to the mountains," where they had four other fortified villages. The place was inaccessible to horses. "Yuque Yunque" is the present deserted "Yuge-uinge" (village of the ravine), called briefly "Yunque." The town of Chamita on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad stands on its ruins, and near by was built, in 1598, the first Spanish settlement in New Mexico, San Gabriel. On the east bank is the pueblo of San Juan, in a charming situation, and the valley, which borders the course of the Rio Grande, although hardly twelve miles long, is the most fruitful and the loveliest in New Mexico, that of Taos, perhaps, excepted. The massive chain of the Sierra Madre overlooks it in the east, with peaks that rise to a height of 13,000 feet; in the west a gloomy front of volcanic mesas, intersected by awful clefts, projects close upon the riverbank; and behind them the mountains of Abiquin and the Sierra del Valle crown the landscape. This beautiful region was, and still is, occupied by the Tehuas Indians. There yet stand two other of their pueblos, San Ildefonso ("Poo-joge") and Santa Clara ("Ka-Poo"), on the bank, which have existed since