the village of Zuñi lay. At last the moon came out, and the stars shone in the zenith. A procession of clouds was floating in front of me, over the top of a dark, low hill. That hill was Zuñi, where I afterward spent weeks of instructive research in the house and the company of Mr. Cushing.
The name of Zuñi does not belong to the language of the tribe that bears it, but to the Queres idiom of the valley of the Rio Grande. The pueblo is named "Halona," and the Zuni Indians call themselves "A-shiui."[1] They call the land they occupy "Shmano," a name the analogy of which with Cibola should not be overlooked.[2] It is therefore not strange that the general direction in which Esteévanico went, and in which the monk followed at a regular distance behind him, was north. Unfortunately
- ↑ The application by the whites of foreign names to Indian tribes is very frequent in America.
- ↑ We may remark further that interchanges of b and v were common with the early Spanish writers, and that Fray Marcos de Nizza was a Piedmontese, who, writing in the Italian style, wrote Ci for the English Chi; thus the similarity between Shiuano and Chivola becomes greater, and the difference limits itself to such a confusion of sounds and such exchanges of letters arising from it as are often and strikingly exemplified in the Indian names of places in New Mexico; for example, in the Tehua language, Ta-ui into Taos; in the Queres, Pa-go or Pa-yo-qo-na into Pecos, Hamish into Jemez, Qo-tyi-ti into Cochiti; the Tigua word Tutli-la-nay into Tuta-Itaco, Saray into Xalay, Na-si-ap into Napeya; the Zuñi names Mu-gua into Moqui, Hacuqua into Acuco. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the name Cibola, as the Italian monk heard and pronounced it, was strikingly similar to the word in the Zuñi language that denotes the Zuñi country; therefore this first linguistic clue suggests that the "seven cities of Cibola" may be sought in the region of Zuñi.
