Kiva, Cross, and Crown
June 23, 2022 8:38 AM   Subscribe

Kiva, Cross, and Crown was commissioned from Dr John L. Kessell by the United States National Park Service and published in 1978 with the goal of documenting the dramatic history of the Pecos, or Cicuye, Pueblo. It’s one of those rare histories which is both rigorously researched and a page turner, and it’s available in refreshingly simple HTML.

From the preface:
Here then is a beginning, an historical documentary of the eastern fortress-pueblo from earliest Spanish contact in 1540, to abandonment three hundred years later. It is largely narrative, written in the active rather than the passive, largely biographical, concerned more with people than with inert phenomena. I have tried throughout to let the juices flow, the stuff of life that wells up in the documents, convinced that we historians too often squeeze them out in the interest of neat and dry, methodical monographs.

I have made every effort to get to the documents. In no case have I cited in the notes an archival source without having seen the Spanish myself, whether the original, a photographic copy, or a transcript.



I have seasoned the text with quotations, with the words of eyewitnesses and participants, of protagonists and antagonists, recognizing at the same time that the Pecos Indians themselves, when they are allowed to speak at all, do so only in a foreign tongue. In that sense, the story is one-sided. Forewarned by anthropologists that the Pecos of 1540 or 1740 were likely very different from their linguistic cousins, or even their own descendants who live at Jémez pueblo today, I have attempted no reconstruction of Pecos social organization. For those who would do so, blending the data of artifacts and the written record, full citation of sources will be found in the notes.

There are scenes that would delight a script writer: the entrance of Alvarado in 1540, bold but wary, as two thousand Pecos watch from the rooftops; Gov. Diego de Peñalosa's vain bullying of the Franciscan superior he had come to arrest in the mission cloister one dark night in 1663; the devil-may-care, three-day burlesque of a bishop's visitation by a Pecos carpenter in 1760; and the solemn harangues of Comanche warriors gathered at the Pecos peace conference of 1786 to embrace Juan Bautista de Anza, to smoke, and to barter.
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