forty years at least, this "Red house" has been repeatedly identified with the so-called "Casas Grandes," lying to the south of the Rio Gila in Arizona.[31] It should not be forgotten that from the upper course of the Rio Sonora two groups of Indian pueblos in ruins were within reach of the Spaniards. One of these were the ruins on the Gila, the other lay to the right, across the Sierra Madre, in the presp. 11ent district of Bravos, State of Chihuahua, Mexico. Jaramillo states that Coronado crossed the mountains to the right.[32] Now, whether the "Nexpa," whose stream the expedition descended for two days, is the Rio Santa Cruz or the Rio San Pedro, their course after they once crossed the Sierra could certainly not have led them to the "great houses" on the Rio Gila, but much farther east. The query is therefore permitted, whether Coronado did not perhaps descend into Chihuahua, and thence move up due north into South-western New Mexico. In any case,—whether he crossed the Gila and then turned north-eastward, as Jaramillo intimates,[33] or whether he perhaps struck the small "Rio de las Casas Grandes" in Chihuahua, and then travelled due north to Cibola, according to Pedro dep. 12 Castañeda,[34]—the lines of march necessarily met the first sedentary Indians living in houses of stone or adobe about the region in which the pueblo of Zuñi exists. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if all the writers on New Mexico, from Antonio de Espejo (1584) down to General J. H. Simpson (1871), with very few exceptions, have identified Zuñi with Cibola.

There are numerous other indications in favor of this assumption.

1. Thus Castañeda says: "Twenty leagues to the north-west, there is another province which contains seven villages. The inhabitants have the same costumes, the same customs, and the same religion as those of Cibola."[35] This district is the one called "Tusayan" by the same author, who places it atp. 13 twenty-five leagues also; and "Tucayan" by Jaramillo, "to the left of Cibola, distant about five days' march."[36] These seven villages of "Tusayan" were visited by Pedro de Tobar. West of them is a broad river, which the Spaniards called "Rio del Tizon."[37]

2. Five days' journey from Cibola to the east, says Castañeda, there was a village called "Acuco," erected on a rock. "This village is very strong, because there was but one path leading to it. It rose upon a precipitous rock on all sides, etc."[38] Jaramillo mentions, at one or two days' march from Cibola to the east, "a village in a very strong situation on a precipitous rock; it is called Tutahaco."[39]

3. According to Jaramillo: "All the water-courses which we met, whether they were streams or rivers, until that of Cibola, and I even believe one or two journeyings beyond, flow in the direction of the South Sea; further on they take the direction of the Sea of the North."[40]

4. The village called "Acuco," or "Tutahaco," lay between Cibola and the streams running to the south-east, "entering the Sea of the North."[41]

It results from points 3 and 4, that the region of Cibola lay at all events west of the present grants to the pueblo of Acoma. There are watercourses in their north-western corner, and through the western half thereof, which become tributaries to the Rio Grande del Norte. The only settled region, or rather the region containing the remains of large settlements, lying west of the water-shed between the Colorado of the West and the Rio Grande, is much farther north.p. 14 It is the so-called San Juan district, where extensive ruins are still found, for the description of which we are indebted to General Simpson, to Messrs. Jackson and Holmes, and to Mr. Lewis H. Morgan. To reach this region, Coronado had to pass either between Acoma and Zuñi, or between the Zuñi and the Moqui towns. In either case he could not have failed to notice one or the other of these pueblos; whereas Nizza, as well as the reports of Coronado's march, particularly insist upon the fact that Cibola lay on the borders of a great uninhabited waste.

Our choice is therefore limited between Zuñi and the Moqui towns themselves; for there can be no doubt as to the identity of the rock of Acuco or Tutahaco, east of Cibola, with the pueblo of Acoma, whose remarkable situation, on the top of a high, isolated rock, has made it the most conspicuous object in New Mexico for nearly three centuries.[42] p. 15

But there can be as little doubt, also, in regard to the identity of the Moqui district with the "Tusayan" of Castañeda and of Jaramillo. When the Moqui region first was made known under that name ("Mohoce," "Mohace") in 1583, by Antonio de Espejo, it lay westward from Cibola "four journeys of seven leagues each." One of its pueblos was called "Aguato" ("Aguatobi").[43] Fifteen years later (1598), Juan de Oñate found the first pueblo of "Mohóce," twenty leagues of the first one of "Juñi" ("Zuñi") to the westward.[44] Besides, the "Rio del Tizon" was, at an early day, distinctly identified with the Colorado River of the West.