Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/297

Rh four sites of remains of Indian dwelling-places or pueblos. Five miles south are two, one smaller and one larger, on the banks of the usually dry "Arroyo Hondo." The small village contained not quite two hundred, the larger one—which is called "Cua-Kaa" by the Tanos, to whom it belongs—less than eight hundred souls. Both were deserted before the middle of the sixteenth century. Twelve miles southwest lie the ruins of "Tzigu-ma," near the place called "Ciénega." This village also, which was abandoned after 1680, never numbered one thousand inhabitants. Lastly, there is San Marcos, or "Yaa-tze," eighteen miles south-southwest of Santa Fe, near the so-called "Cerrillos." In the year 1680 it contained six hundred Indians, and the extent of the ruins leads me to the conclusion that this number was not at any time doubled. The plain of Santa Fé, which includes an area of hardly one hundred square miles, thus never held more than three thousand settled inhabitants before the advent of the Spaniards, and these were distributed among not more than four villages inhabited at one time. None of these villages could compare in population with Pecos, Hauicu, Pilabó (or Socorro), Teypaná (or Quivira), etc., or with the Zuñi of to-day.

Those villages were inhabited in the sixteenth century and from a long time before by the Indians called "Tanos." The Tanos were Tehuas; they constituted the southern half of that great linguistic stock; and their territory extended from Pojuaque ("P'ho-zuang-ge"), seventeen miles north of Santa Fe, to San Pedro ("Cua-Kaa"), forty miles southwest. Their traditions are fully confirmed by the