400 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



keep sheep, while the rest of the white men, which means about one 

 for every thousand square miles, are traders who supply the simple 

 wants of the Indians, and incidentally make large profits. Here and 

 there a few acres are cultivated by the Navajos, but not one family 

 in ten possesses any arable land, and even those who have fields by no 

 means get their mam living or even a good share of it from agriculture. 



The most remarkable portion of this region is the Chaco Canyon. 

 In this steep-sided, flat-floored valley there are at the present time 

 two Indians who are reasonably sure of a crop of corn each year. 

 I saw their farms, unbelievably dreary wastes of drifting sand in the 

 bottom of the canyon where two large branches join, and where there 

 is consequently more water than anywhere else for 50 miles. The 

 sand is a necessary adjunct of farmmg, for it is needed to act as a 

 mulch to prevent the evaporation of the precious water. These two 

 men between them have not more than 20 or 30 acres, if as much. 

 Even their crops fail completely sometimes, as in 1903. During the 

 last 16 years, that is, from 1895 to 1911, according to information 

 given me by a trader's wife who has lived there during that time and 

 who moved away because her husband was murdered by the Indians, 

 the crop of all the Indians except the two just mentioned failed 

 absolutely in the years 1902, 1903, and 1904, while good crops were 

 raised in only two years, 1905 and 1908. During the remaining 11 

 years an Indian here and there raised a scanty crop, but none of them 

 could get a living were it not for their cattle and horses. 



The contrast between the past and the present is remarkable. In 

 the Chaco Canyon or on the plateau on cither side of it there are 

 about 20 ruins of considerable size within a distance of 25 miles. 

 Some of these, such as Pueblo Bonita, Chetwelketl, and others, are 

 strongly built, compact structures, wliich must have sheltered hun- 

 dreds of people, and the larger ones probably had one or two thousand 

 denizens. There can scarcely have been less than 5,000 people in the 

 canyon and its vicinity, and perhaps the number was much larger. 

 Whether it be 10,000 or 1,000, however, matters little, for the mam 

 point is that we have here a series of strongly built, fortified villages 

 whose inhabitants evidently cultivated a large amount of land where 

 now no crops can be raised. These people, as appears from their 

 pottery, their skulls, and their methods of arcliitecture, belonged to 

 a civilization different from and earlier than that of the modern 

 Pueblos who inhabited Gran Quivira at the time of the commg of 

 the Spaniards. 



Yet the buildei-s of the high walls which we now see in the Chaco 

 Canyon were not the Original mhabitants of the country. Diggmg 

 down below their ruins one finds traces of an older occupation. 

 Moreover, the largest villages ^^dth houses of several stories, which are 

 now in chief evidence, invariably lie near to main lines of drainage 



