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

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, �� 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 F�� 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 lacun? 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; the destruction of the archives at the great Franciscan convent in the City of Mexico in 1857, though not complete, resulted in the dispersion of those which were not burned or