right angles but in circles, from a center outward. First they plastered the walls of the caves with a composition of black lava and in a later age with white cement with which they also covered the floors. Under those floors some day the chief antiquarian treasures may be found. Later still, they divided some of the caves into rooms by partitions and built outbuildings or additions upon ledges outside of the caves. After that they built houses of stone on the cliffs, first, only of 1 to 5 rooms, then, as if on a sudden inspiration, houses of 100 to 150 rooms, and at last by another bound palaces of 1,500 to 5,000 rooms, marking a transition from a people living in isolated caves to a nation having large cities and practicing all the arts of an advanced civilization. It is in those days, probably, when the rainfall became less and the rivers were drying up, that immense systems of irrigation were built, only a few traces of which remain to-day. They built roadways which are worn deep into the stone, a sign that they were traveled by thousands of people for thousands of years. They began to erect burial mounds which to-day are veritable treasure houses of antiquities. They began to carve pictographs on the cliffs. They domesticated animals and tilled the fields, planting them with corn, as charred ears of corn are found with their other remains. Skeletons found in the burial mounds indicate that they were a people of gigantic stature, 6 to 8 feet high, although some writers maintain that they were a small people; that they had large heads and intellectual brows, but that they differed in features from any race that exists to-day. Sunstones that reflected the sun on their hearths seem to show that they were sun worshipers, and they probably knew something of astronomy. The absence of any idols thus far in the ruins seems to prove that they were not idolators.

There is one striking feature of the cliff dwellers' period which must always be kept in mind. Its climate differed materially from that of to-day. The ravines and canyons were sparkling rivers. The top of the cliffs and the mesas beyond were cultivated. There exist traces of reservoirs and irrigation canals which would be of no earthly use to-day, for water has to be carried 35 miles and there are no natural reservoir sites near by at a greater elevation than the cliffs. This change of climate since the days of the cliff dwellers gives some clue to the age at which they were most numerous. Great as this age is, it is modern compared with the age of their predecessors, the cave makers.

One day, perhaps within historic times, there came a catastrophe. Whether it was a seismic disturbance such as at that time or later crumbled and tore asunder the walls of the communal buildings; whether it was a great flood like the deluge; whether it was an eruption of barbarians from the north who came across the Behring Strait, may never be known; but it seems certain that some of the cliff dwellers escaped, or else that the catastrophe was preceded by a gradual drying up of the rivers and the gradual decline in the amount of rainfall, which drove some of the cliff dwellers to the south, where the route they took is indicated by the cliff dwellings and communal buildings along the Gila and by the caves inhabited to the present day in Mexico. They may have founded the Montezuma dynasty, or even made their way through Central America to the table-lands of Peru and Bolivia, where, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, they founded a civilization far more advanced and splendid than that along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. Another migration went west. In the vicinity of the modern Gallup it reared communal buildings of stone without cement, seven stories high and 50 feet in diameter. None of the stones in any of the communal buildings, however, are larger than a man of ordinary strength could conveniently handle. They may have founded the seven cities, the legend of which enticed Fray Marcos, three hundred and fifty years ago, to the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. To-day all trace of these people has been lost in that section except the buildings they reared, the relics they contain, and the civilization which they may have taught the Moquis and the Zuñis.

Another party of the cliff dwellers went to the north, where, in Chaco Cañon, in San Juan County, and in the Mancos Cañon and on the Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, they reared the communal buildings, which, to the present day, are the admiration of the tourist, but which are now being destroyed and looted for alleged scientific, but principally for commercial, purposes. A fourth expedition of cliff dwellers may have gone southeast, and if recent discoveries made in western Texas are correctly reported they dwelt in that part of the country for a while. But the cradle of all those people stood along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. The cliff and cave dwellings and the communal buildings around Espanola and west of Santa Fe are by far the oldest, and from there radiated the people that at a later time built the communal buildings in other parts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. At least such is the trend of the discoveries thus far made. The cliff dwellers deserted their original homes suddenly. No remains indicate that they were

slaughtered or died suddenly in great numbers. They left while they were preparing their evening meal, and if the cause of their sudden departure can ever be learned it will be a story of the greatest tragedy, outside of the Deluge, of which the world has any record.

Then came the Pueblo Indians. They imitated some of the arts of the cliff dwellers. They fled to the caves and inhabited them whenever danger threatened them. They were adobe, not stone, builders. They plastered the smoke-covered walls of the cave dwellings with adobe mud. They fashioned their pottery after that which they found around the hearthstones of the cliff dwellers. They built communal buildings and corrals of adobe. They made stone idols, which the Spanish conquerors destroyed by thousands. They could not occupy the caves, cliffs, and communal buildings left by the cliff dwellers permanently, for the land round about had become parched, the cliffs had been rent asunder, and the paths between the cliffs and communal buildings, which had been worn by thousands of bare feet in the course of thousands of years, became impassable on account of clefts in the rocks. The Pueblos were dwellers along river banks, where they applied in a primitive way the methods of irrigation they had seen high on the barren mesas and cliffs. They built cities like the Gran Quivira, with its fabled treasures; the pueblos of Acoma, Zuni, Taos, and others more or less old.

Then came the nomad Indian tribes, the Apaches, the Comanches, the Navajoes. Battles were fought, pueblos destroyed, and an incessant warfare was waged.

Soon thereafter the Spanish conquistadores appeared. They reared buildings like the old palace at Santa Fe, which now are historic, too, and worthy of preservation. What fitter place could be found for a museum of New Mexico antiquities, an adjunct to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, than the historic palace at Santa Fe?

What a tremendous lapse of time between the cave makers and the present rulers of this country! What an immense vista of history that was enacted along the Rio Grande from the time its waters were imprisoned as a lake above the cañons and cliffs west of Santa Fe until to-day, when its channel has cut deep through the tufa, the lava, and the Tertiary rock, and now bids fair to be lost in the sand it carried down from the mountains in the north! Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome, and even the most distant days of China, seem but yesterday against the time when the cave makers made their first caves along the Rio Grande. It was in the days of the mastodon, the plesiosaurus, the ichthyosaurus, whose bones are so frequently unearthed in the country of the cliff dwellers; when the palm cast its shadows over purling streams, and the gigantic ferns nodded in quiet pools of water; when the desolate cañons and the dry ravines of to-day were living rivers, and when the fire had not yet died out of the chain of volcanoes of the Great Divide. A land of mystery indeed; a strange land, a weird land; a land that must ever attract the tourist, the scientist, the story-teller, the poet, the philosopher, the seeker after truth!

Should the man with a small soul and a smaller intellect be allowed to destroy those ruins? Should he be permitted profanely to rob the grave of a bygone civilization? Should he unhindered erase altogether the scant records that bygone races have left? In the Rio Grande Valley may be found burial mounds where vandals have with heavy pick and sharp shovel destroyed a dozen ancient pieces of pottery, several skeletons, and other precious remains to get out two pieces of pottery that, on account of their modern glitter, aroused their cupidity. In Chaco Cañon, in San Juan County, for many years already excavations have been going on systematically, brutally, on a large scale, ostensibly for museums widely scattered, but, what is worse, also for commercial purposes. Every day pot hunters go out to bring home relics by the cartload and to scatter them to the winds. Men who have dabbled a little in antiquities bring to their homes treasures to adorn their parlors, but which are lost forever to science. Indians, with no idea of scientific values, are hired to dig out pieces of pottery that from the antiquarian standpoint are of small value compared with those which are destroyed in the search. A halt must be called at once! The nation must be aroused! The Government must realize that what the Pyramids are to Egypt, the Parthenon to Greece, the Coliseum and Pompeii to Italy, that and more are the cliff dwellings and the communal buildings to the United States. Every foot of ground of that sacred region should be carefully scrutinized by the scientist; every shovelful of earth should be minutely sifted by the antiquarian. All excavations should be carried on under the supervision of the Government, and as carefully as the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum have of late years been uncovered. It is not necessary for the preservation of the cliff dwellings and the other prehistoric remains grouped around them to withdraw large areas of public land from settlement or to prohibit grazing upon them. The purpose can be accomplished by

the appointment of a custodian with a force of keepers or patrolmen, who will protect the ruins from vandals, will render all assistance possible to those who desire to visit the cliff dwellings or to study them, and to take part in making accurate maps and to help in any excavations that may be carried on under Government control. The following description of the cliff dwellings in the Pu Ye cliff appeared in The Land of Sunshine in June, 1900, and is both graphic and accurate:

"The lower portion of the cliff is covered by a talus more than 100 feet in height, above which is a perpendicular face 60 to 70 feet high, at the top of which is a bench from a foot to 20 feet wide, and back of that from 10 to 30 feet more of cliff. This upper portion is very much harder in texture, and seamed and creviced, as the lower portion is not. There are stairways or steps cut in the rock, by which the bench and the top were to be reached. In the face of this cliff are more than 800 caves, in places arranged one above another, 4 in the lower face and 3 in the upper. Many of the bottom tier of caves have had the talus leveled off and a stone pavement 4 to 5 feet wide laid before the entrance.

"Over such caves were rows of round holes cut into the wall, evidently used to support the logs of an outer room, whose roof made an approach to the second tier of caves. This was repeated, so in its time the town must have been of several stories, terraced, and with caves in the rear.

"The doorways and entrances were often small and usually low, compelling all to stoop and sometimes creep-to enter. The caves were excavated from a foot to 4 feet from the outside, oval in shape, and generally measuring about 5 feet in width and height, with small niches in the walls, used probably for storage. Over the door a hole was cut to the outside, which admitted light and afforded an exit for smoke, and beneath this, on one side of the door, the fire was built. The ceilings, though blackened by smoke, show the chipped appearance produced by the rough tools of the cave makers, but the bottoms of the walls in some have been plastered. Chipping a piece from the plaster, we find it is simply a thin coat of adobe clay, such as is used by the Pueblo Indians in the valleys to-day. Beneath this is another coat of plaster, harder than the first, containing sand and looking like cement, and behind this are the grimed and rough walls of the cave.

"Upon the summit of the cliff we stop amazed as we look upon the ruins of a 'cut' stone building which covered 50,000 square feet. It was nearly 300 by 200 feet in size, and, if but one story in height, once contained 1,200 rooms; but in reality it was at least three stories high. The rooms are clearly outlined by the walls still standing from 3 to 5 feet high, though buried in the accumulated débris of centuries. Clearing several, we found them 5 by 12 feet in size, arranged in series or suites of nine rooms each, opening to the center, or placita, of the main building; so that you pass through eight rooms to reach the last or outer one. The walls and floor were plastered with a hard, gritty cement, and charred pieces of logs indicated it was destroyed by fire. The average size of the caves and of those rooms, with their low, narrow entrances, indicate the cave makers and the cliff dwellers were smallish people. Nor is there in all of their stonework a block of stone too large for a 14-year-old boy to handle.

"All about this building are scattered pieces of obsidian, agate, and pottery, while near by among the cedar bushes may be found corrals covering several acres, showing these people kept turkeys and other domestic animals.

Standing upon the ruins of 'Casa Grande,' what a magnificent view is spread out before us of valley and mountain, hill and canyon, mesa and precipice! Below us are the dark-green tops of the pines under which the camp is pitched, and beyond the red-brown heads of the grama grass covered the mesa over which we had driven. Three thousand feet below us in the valley the isolated butte of Flat Top looked like a punctuation mark on the long line of the Rio Grande, visible from the Chama to the White Rock Canyon. The fields, green with corn or alfalfa or yellow with oat stubble, made a striking and beautiful contrast with the somber green of the pine forests beyond. Over these and above the timber line, from 11,000 to 13,000 feet high, towered 'the Truchas,' the 'Lake Peaks,' and round-topped Old Baldy,' brown and gray in their nakedness. In the north were outlined the Spanish Peaks of Colorado-a dark blue against the turquoise of the summer sky; in the south the Ortiz Mountain, and in the west the serrated tops of the Santa Claras-frame and picture which Nature alone could make; and her lavish hand has laid on the colors blue and gray, yellow and red, orange and green, in all shades, contrasted and harmonious. And as we look the cave people of the past are for the moment forgotten, and we stand silent in this magnificent and beautiful presence."