ule fields and crops and village courtyard.) The voters then
signify their choice by marks on the sand.

Houses are built and occupied communally, and ground is held in common;
but the product of each man's and each woman's labor is his or her own
and not in common--the nearest approach to socialistic life that America
has yet known. The people here speak a language different from the other
pueblos, and this places their origin almost as far back as the origin
of Anglo-Saxon races. Another feature sets pueblo races apart from all
other native races of America. Though these people have been in contact
with whites nearly 400 years, intermarriage with whites is almost
unknown. Purity of blood is almost as sacredly guarded among Pueblos as
among the ancient Jews. The population remains almost stationary; but
the bad admixtures of a mongrel race are unknown.

We call the head man of the pueblo the governor, but the Spanish know
him as a _cacique_. Associated with him are the old men--_mayores_, or
council; and this council of wise old men enters so intimately into the
lives of the people that it advises the young men as to marriage. We
have preachers in our religious ranks. The Pueblos have proclaimers who
harangue from the housetops, or _estufas_. As women stoop over the
_metates_ grinding the meal, men sing good cheer from the door. The
chile, or red pepper, is pulverized between stones the same as the
grain. Though openly Catholic and in attendance on the Mission church,
the pueblo people still practice all the secret rites of Montezuma; and
in all the course of four centuries of contact, white men have never
been able to learn the ceremonies of the _estufas_.

Women never enter the _estufas_.

Who were the first white men to see Taos? It is not certainly known, but
it is vaguely supposed they were Cabeza de Vaca and his three
companions, shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the Narvaez
expedition, who wandered westward across the continent from Taos to
Laguna and Acoma. As the legend runs, they were made slaves by the
Indians and traded from tribe to tribe from 1528 to 1536, when they
reached Old Mexico. Anyway, their report of golden cities and vast,
undiscovered land pricked New Spain into launching Coronado's expedition
of 1540. Preceding the formal military advance of Coronado, the
Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza and two lay brothers guided by Cabeza de
Vaca's negro Estevan, set out with the cross in their hands