PREFACE

This story is the result of eight years spent in ethnological and
archæological study among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. The first
chapters were written more than six years ago at the Pueblo of Cochiti.
The greater part was composed in 1885, at Santa Fé, after I had bestowed
upon the Tehuas the same interest and attention I had previously paid to
their neighbours the Queres. I was prompted to perform the work by a
conviction that however scientific works may tell the truth about the
Indian, they exercise always a limited influence upon the general
public; and to that public, in our country as well as abroad, the Indian
has remained as good as unknown. By clothing sober facts in the garb of
romance I have hoped to make the "Truth about the Pueblo Indians" more
accessible and perhaps more acceptable to the public in general.

The sober facts which I desire to convey may be divided into three
classes,--geographical, ethnological, and archæological. The
descriptions of the country and of its nature are real. The descriptions
of manners and customs, of creed and rites, are from actual observations
by myself and other ethnologists, from the statements of trustworthy
Indians, and from a great number of Spanish sources of old date, in
which the Pueblo Indian is represented as he lived when still unchanged
by contact with European civilization.

The descriptions of architecture are based upon investigations of ruins