Documentary History of the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico; I. Bibliographic Introduction | Page 2

imperfect
interpretation of an original text. There are of course instances when
the original has disappeared and translations alone are available. Such
is the case, for instance, with the Life of Columbus, written by his son
Fernando and published in Italian in 1571; and the highly important
report on the voyage of Cabral to Brazil in 1500, written by his pilot
Vas da Cominho and others. These are known only through
translations.
Words from Indian languages are subject to very faulty rendering in the
older documents. In the first place, sound alone guided the writers, and
Indian pronunciation is frequently indistinct in the vowels and variable
according to the individual--hence the frequent interchange in the
Spanish sources of a and o, ó and u, e and i. For many sounds even the
alphabets of civilized speech have not adequate phonetic signs. I may
refer, as an example, to the Indian name in the Tigua language for the
pueblo of Sandia. The Spanish attempt to render it by the word
"Napeya" is utterly inadequate, and even by means of the complicated
alphabets for writing Indian tongues I would not attempt to record the

native term. In endeavoring to identify localities from names given to
them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by European authors,
this difficulty should always be taken into account. No blame can be
attached to the writers for such defects; it should always be
remembered that they did not know, still less understand, the idioms
they heard. Still less should we be surprised if the same site is
sometimes mentioned under various names. Every Pueblo language has
its own geographical vocabulary, and when, as sometimes happened,
several tribes met in council with the whites, the latter heard and
unwittingly recorded several names for one and the same locality, thus
apparently increasing the number of villages. Moreover, interpreters
were not always at hand, and when they could be had both their
competency and their sincerity were open to question.
It is not unusual to read in modern works that such and such a source is
the reliable one par excellence, and the principal basis upon which to
establish conclusions. No source, however seemingly insignificant,
should be neglected. A brief mention is sometimes very important, as it
may be a clue to new data, or may confirm or refute accepted
information and thus lead to further investigation. Some documents, of
course, are much more explicit than others, but this is no reason why
the latter should be neglected. The value of a source may be subject to
investigation from a number of points of view, but it is not always
possible to obtain the requisite information. Thus the biographies of
authors are an important requisite, but how seldom are they obtainable
with the necessary detail!
The sources of the history of the Rio Grande Pueblos, both printed and
in manuscript, are numerous. The manuscript documents are as yet but
imperfectly known. Only that which remained at Santa Fé after the first
period of Anglo-American occupancy--a number of church books and
documents formerly scattered through the parishes of New Mexico, and
a very few documents held in private hands--have been accessible
within the United States. In Mexico the parish and other official
documents at El Paso del Norte (Juarez) up to the beginning of the
eighteenth century have been examined by me to a certain extent, and
at the City of Mexico the Archivo Nacional has yielded a number of

important papers, though the research has been far from exhaustive,
owing to the lack of time and support. Hence much still remains to be
done in that field. Some destruction of papers of an official character
appears to have taken place at Mexico also, yet with the present
condition of the archives there is hope that much that appears to be lost
will eventually be brought to light; in any event we still have recourse
to the Spanish archives, principally at Sevilla. It was the rule during
Spanish colonial domination to have every document of any
importance executed in triplicate, one copy to remain at the seat of
local government, another to be sent to the viceregal archives, and the
third to the mother country. Hence there is always a hope that, if the
first two were destroyed, the third might be preserved. So, for instance,
the collection of royal decrees (cedulas) is imperfect at the City of
Mexico. There are lacunæ of several decades, and it is perhaps
significant that the same gaps are repeated in the publication of the
"Cedulas" by Aguiar and Montemayor. In regard to ecclesiastical
documents the difficulty is greater still. The archives of the Franciscan
Order, to which the missions on the Rio Grande were assigned almost
until the middle of the nineteenth century, have become scattered;