Great River. Paul Horgan

council, these leaders fasted. They did penance the better to make wise decisions. Their fasting was known about. At home they abstained. In the kiva they abstained. They spoke to no one of what lay heavily upon their thoughts, but their concern was plain to all. Soon there was wonder, and gossip, worry; something was brewing; what would it be; was there anywhere to turn but once again to blind Nature?

      But at last the council would speak to them. At evening, the town crier went to his rooftop. Perhaps the sky was yellow behind him and the house fires sent their smokes upward in unwavering lines of pale blue above the earth’s band of twilight. The murmur of talk was like the sound of the river beyond its groves. Facing four ways in succession, the crier told four times what the council had decided and what it wanted of the people. On their roofs, or by their walls, or in their fields, the people heard him, and gave no kind of response; but they all heard and in proper order and time did what was asked of them.

iv. dwelling

      When the Pueblo builders came to the river they found dwellers in little shelters built of upright poles stuck in the ground with brush woven among them and covered with dried mud. The walls of the cliff cities which had been left behind were of chipped flat stone anchored with earth. Now by the river there was no stone to be had, and the outlines, the terraces, the pyramids of the cliff towns were reproduced in the river material—clay, adobe, mixed with brush or straw from dried grasses native to the valley. At first even the upright poles of the scattered jacales along the river were used, in modified design. The poles were set close together in double rows. Between the rows wet earth was poured. The faces of the walls, outdoors and in, were built up with adobe scooped together a handful at a time and patted, puddled, into place. Layers were allowed to dry, and new layers for strength and thickness were added. When a wall was thick enough it could support beams; cross branches could be laid on the beams and plastered over, to make a ceiling, and a roof. Once a smooth level was managed on the roof, it could serve as a floor for a second storey, which in turn could support a third, and a fourth, until the great hive with all its cells had a porous strength shared by all its supporting uprights and laterals. There was no entrance at ground level. Ladders took the dweller from ground to all levels above.

      The cities were much alike in form, varying most in color. The Rio Grande long ago cut down through different layers of buried color, revealing each at widely separated places along its course. The local soil made the walls, and gave them their color. The prevailing hue was pale, the Indian tan of dried river mud, wherever the pueblos sat on or near the river course in its most pastoral character. Where lava still showed in the soil in spite of centuries of weathering after forgotten upheavals, the earth, and the town, had a gray look, as at San Ildefonso. Up the Chama river, the ancient pueblo of Abiquiu had a dusty vermilion adobe, taken from the red hills and cliffs. A faint pink clay went into the pueblos of the Piros farther down the Rio Grande near Socorro.

      The form of the pueblos was found not only on the Rio Grande. Those cities, and the typical life they showed, were common to great areas, over long gaps of time. Just as certain tribes of Pueblo Indians came to the river to resettle, so others went westward and grew their cities in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona. Even deep in Mexico, and long before them in time, the Rio Grande Pueblos had their counterparts among the Aztecs, whose houses, temples, rituals and organization suggested theirs. Much came northward with the seed of corn and of ways to cultivate, invoke and protect it.

      In the community house each family had a room. It was private, for its only entrance was through a hatch in the roof, entered by a long ladder. It was small—about twelve by fourteen by seven or eight feet. The walls were painted with gypsum and water whitewash. Much gypsum was available in the river country. The beams overhead were brought from forests far away. The length of the timbers determined the size of the room. Smoke from fires built on the floor went up through the hatch in the ceiling. Little openings in the walls let a draft in and gave a view outward, and in times of trouble served as a hole through which to fly arrows. Blankets of cotton and yucca fibre mats made beds and places to sit upon. There were also drum-shaped stools carved out of cottonwood trunks, and hollowed out on top.

      If the family grew, a room next door was built, connected by a low opening to the first room. Each family prepared its own food. Food and water were kept in pottery vessels, and cooked in them. Pottery bowls were used to eat from. The pots were more than just receptacles. They were works of art, and more, they were made as acts of devotion, just as the poetry and song and drama and design of the dances were. All imaginative creation and skilled craftsmanship went to fulfill a direct purpose which was partly religious, partly esthetic and always utilitarian. A pot was made in a certain size and shape for a certain purpose; beyond that it was decorated with designs which spoke of the potter’s desire for blessings from the natural world and its gods. By representing the forms of life associated with fertility, rain and growth, the Indian painter called them into being on his own behalf. Handling pots decorated with such symbols, the family had daily communion with the powers. The designs were without meaning for their own sake. Their value was not inherent in their lines, masses and colors, but dwelt in their spiritual message. They were outpourings of wish, not of artistic pleasure. As all forms of art and craft went to express the unanimous belief and observance of the people, so every person was in some degree an artist or a craftsman. The arts like all other phases of Pueblo life were communal in their purpose and realization.

      The people of the Rio Grande had no metal crafts. Their products were all made with stone or bone tools, and with fingers. Raw material and finished object remained close to each other. What was inherent in the one determined the form of the other.

      Pueblo symbols for bird, or cloud, lightning or rain, animal, or man, or mountain, were used by all makers. There was a common graphic language in each tribe. Its designs were not meant to be realistic, nor were they purposely grotesque. They were stylized images hallowed by long usage and accepted as descriptive. The typical Pueblo pot carried bands of design around its circumference combining specific symbols with abstract lines and spaces. Even these last had a suggestive power. Though they represented nothing, they seemed to recreate the spaces and the angles, the sweep and line of the Southwest, the shafting of light in the sky, the bold mesa, the parallels of rain and the dark spots of juniper on hills otherwise bare. There was a genius common to all Indian artisans—a tepee recalled a pine tree, a pueblo was a mesa, a clay cist was a seed pod. Whatever its conscious motive, however symbolic its style, the impulse to record life was an ancient one; and in any degree of its fulfillment always respectable as art.

      The needs of daily use called forth in the Rio Grande town Indians a profuse and vigorous creation of pottery. They took the same material of which they made their houses and with it made their vessels, and somewhat by the same method, building up surfaces of moist earth, letting them dry, adding more, and exposing the final form, in the one case, to the baking sun, and in the other, to the fire of the kiln. The decorations of the pottery were rich, often using two or three colors, some of which had a glazed finish. Black, white, red and natural clay color were the most common. A syrup of the yucca fruit was used with paint and water. The designs were painted with a brush made of yucca leaves. The line was flowed firmly, the sense of balance and proportion was exquisite, and the use of color was both strong and delicate. In such artistry there seemed to be an impersonal obedience to laws of harmony and grace which dwelled deep in the common spirit of the people. They said that life existed in everything; and that when they made a pot, they gave personal life to it, just as all creatures, places and things had personal life. Believing so, they knew a responsibility not to art and its abstract aims, but to life and its hope of perfection. They dared not make even a pot with less than their utmost skill if it was to live a good life. Allowance was invariably made for its spirit to breathe and come and go in the painted design on its surface. Somewhere in the decoration there was always left an opening in the design, a gap, a space not closed, so that life might enter there or flow from it. Wherever decorative design appeared—on textiles, walls, or on the half-sections of gourds fashioned into ladles—the ceremonial gap was represented.

v. garments

      The pueblo people wove cloth and wore it hundreds of years before they came to the river. They made thread from the native cotton, and used a true loom, and whether they invented