use in New Mexico. Santa Fe was the only Spanish town; but
there were also churches at the dangerous Indian pueblos of Galisteo and
Pecos, two at Jemez (nearly one hundred miles west of Santa Fe, and in
an appalling wilderness), Taos (as far north), San Yldefonso, Santa
Clara, Sandia, San Felipe, and Santo Domingo. It was a wonderful
achievement for each lonely missionary--for they had neither civil nor
military assistance in their parishes--so soon to have induced his
barbarous flock to build a big stone church, and worship there the new
white God. The churches in the two Jemez pueblos had to be abandoned
about 1622 on account of incessant harassment by the Navajos, who from
time immemorial had ravaged that section, but were occupied again in
1626. The Spaniards were confined by the necessities of the desert, so
far as home-making went, to the valley of the Rio Grande, which runs
about north and south through the middle of New Mexico. But their
missionaries were under no such limitation. Where the colonists could
not exist, _they_ could pray and teach; and very soon they began to
penetrate the deserts which stretch far on either side from that narrow
ribbon of colonizable land. At Zuni, far west of the river and three
hundred miles from Santa Fe, the missionaries had established themselves
as early as 1629. Soon they had six churches in six of the "Seven Cities
of Cibola" (the Zuni towns), of which the one at Chyanahue is still
beautifully preserved; and in the same period they had taken foothold
two hundred miles deeper yet in the desert, and built three churches
among the wondrous cliff-towns of Moqui.

Down the Rio Grande there was similar activity. At the ancient pueblo of
San Antonio de Senecu, now nearly obliterated, a church was founded in
1629 by Fray Antonio de Arteaga; and the same brave man, in the same
year, founded another at the pueblo of Nuestra Senora del Socorro,--now
the American town of Socorro. The church in the pueblo of Picuries, far
in the northern mountains, was built before 1632, for in that year Fray
Ascencion de Zarate was buried in it. The church at Isleta, about in the
centre of New Mexico, was built before 1635. A few miles above Glorieta,
one can see from the windows of a train on the Santa Fe route a large
and impressive adobe ruin, whose fine walls dream away in that enchanted
sunshine. It is the old church of the pueblo of Pecos; and those walls
were reared two hundred and seventy-five