In the middle of the last century a Spanish captain of engineers, Don Bernardo de Mier y Pacheco, went upon a scientific and political mission for the Crown in New Mexico. He explored the ruins of the country, and the numerous pueblos of the Cañon de Chaca (in the present home of the Navajos) excited his interest in the highest degree. When he began to concern himself about the situation of Quivira, it was supposed that he had plans and documentary evidences to assist him in finding the place. The measurements which he made in the ruins of the Chaca convinced the people that Quivira was there, and this conviction grew and spread rapidly. There was living at that time in Socorro on the Rio Grande an old Indian who was called “Tio Juan Largo.” When he heard of the search of the Spanish officer, he protested at once against the idea that Quivira could be found in the northwest, and insisted that the ruins of the former mission of the Jumanos and Quiviras were east of Socorro, on the “Mesa Jumana.” He was a Jumano Indian--perhaps the last who passed for one. Attention was then turned at once to the region east of Socorro. The country beyond the Sierra Oscura, between the Rio Grande and the Pecos, had remained uninhabited after the insurrection of 1680, and the small settlements of Manzano and Abó, in the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake, were not founded till about 1841 and 1869. The Apaches Taraones and the Comanches had, as it were, frightened all life away from the region. Ruins of pueblos and imposing stone churches, burnt out, with their enclosures open to the sky and the clouds, remains of the modest prosperity which the pueblo Indians enjoyed under the guidance of the Franciscan monks, before their unfortunate insurrection, lie scattered on the cliffs. Definite recollections are associated with all these ruins; the descendants of the Indians of Cuaray, Chililé, and Tajique still live at Isleta in Texas, and the posterity of the inhabitants of Abó at Senecú near El Paso del Norte. The existence of these ruins and a dim outline of their history were never absent from the recollections of the Spaniards.
Touching the Valley of Abó on the east and the basin of the Salt Lake on the north, rises a broad mesa, the borders of which are covered only on the north side with thin woods. The surface is inclined toward the south, and is treeless, though covered with good grass, but from the northern edge of the mesa south, southeast, and southwest, there is for from thirty to sixty miles not a drop of standing water. While I was there from the 4th to the 10th of January, 1883, melted snow was my only drink. This uninhabited plateau is the “Mesa de los Jumanos,” and on its southeast side stand the ruins of a pueblo which, according to my measurements, contained about twelve hundred inhabitants, with two stone churches, one of which is thirty-four feet wide and one hundred and thirty-two feet long, and stands almost undamaged, except in the roof. The walls are six feet thick, and a few hewn beams are still left in the interior. Adjoining these ruins are the walls of a considerable presbytery. The other church has been reduced to crumbling walls. No running water is to be found anywhere near, but four large artificial pools afford enough water for drinking purposes. This is the ruin which the old Jumano Indian of Socorro in the last century described as the former mission of Quivira, and which consequently now bears the name of “_la gran Quivira_.”