In former times a pueblo consisted of one great house, or, at most, of a
few great houses, each the home of a large number of people. Taos, in
northern New Mexico, is, perhaps, as old-fashioned as any of the pueblos
now occupied. Even to-day it consists almost entirely of two large houses,
one on each side of the little Taos River. The houses are so built that
the flat roofs of the different stories form a set of steps as one looks
at them from in front. In a three-story building the lower floor would
have three sets of rooms, one in front of another. The roof of the front
line of rooms would form a flat platform in front of the front rooms of
the second story, which consisted only of two lines of rooms. The roof of
the front line of these, in turn, was a platform in front of the single
line of third-story rooms. Formerly there were no doors in the lower
rooms, but ladders were placed against the wall, and persons climbed up on
the roof; then through a hole in the roof, by means of another ladder they
climbed down into the room. By ladders from the roof of the first floor
they climbed to the top of the second story; there were doors in the rooms
of the second and third stories. Nowadays there are usually doors into the
lower rooms, but they still use ladders for getting into the upper
stories.
The people are fond of sitting on the house-tops as they work. There they
spin, shell corn, cut and dry squashes, shape pottery vessels, etc. There
they gather in crowds when there are dances in the pueblo, and when there
are foot races or pony races.
The walls of these houses are built of stone covered over with adobe mud,
or of sun-dried adobe bricks. They did not formerly have what we would
call windows, but there were small openings in the walls for air, or for
peepholes. In the pueblos of to-day we find true sashes with glass in a
few of the houses. There are also some rather old rooms that have windows
made of “isinglass” or gypsum, a mineral found in the mountains, which can
be split into thin sheets, which are transparent. The chimneys in these
houses are made of broken water-jars laid up, one on another, and the
joints plastered with mud.
[Illustration.]