72 REPORT OF THE SECRETARY. 



and they regulate the movements, most of the industrial habits, many 

 of the social customs, and much of the mythology of the human popu- 

 lation. During the greater part of the year water is obtainable only 

 from the shrunken river, on whose banks grow most of the seed-bearing 

 and root-yielding plants available as food, so that the people are led to 

 occupy the lower bottom lands. Here the cultivated crop plants are sown 

 in soil soaked by the flood and enriched by its silt deposit, to grow and 

 ripen rapidly under the subtropical sun; here habitations are erected, nat- 

 urally of light and temporary character, and here the small and scattered 

 villages characteristic of the tribe grow up during each late summer and 

 early autumn. The chief crop plants are corn ( maize) , beans, peas, squashes, 

 and melons, and it is noteworthy that most of these represent the aboriginal 

 plant stocks brought under cultivation in pre-Columbian times. Fishing 

 and hunting the abundant waterfowl, as well as other game, contribute 

 to the tribal subsistence, and during recent years part of the corn, beans, 

 and peas is carried on horseback to Yuma, where it is bartered chiefly for 

 appareling. Early winter is the time for ceremony with the attendant 

 feasting, and by early spring when the greater and less portable part of 

 the annual crop is consumed, the families prepare for the annual migration 

 to the higher lands, where they await the rise and subsidence of the ver- 

 nal flood. On its passing they return to the low grounds, to rebuild and 

 plant on the last year's farms or elsewhere according to the changes wrought 

 by the freshetorthe chance of death and mortuary observance. Naturally 

 an agriculture depending so largely on chance conditions is improvident, 

 comparatively unproductive, and incapable of sustaining any considerable 

 or concentrated population, so that its tendency combines with that of 

 annual migrations to stifle the home sense and to scatter the members of 

 c< msanguineal gr< >ups and thus to affect the social organization. The recur- 

 rent floods also affect the ceremonies and attendant faiths of the tribes- 

 men in various ways; e. g., they control mortuary observances and have 

 undoubtedly led indirectly to the custom of burning the bodies of dece- 

 dents in and with their houses, distributing their property to nonrelatives, 

 and incidentally destroying adjacent houses and other property. This dis- 

 persive social factor combines with that growing directly out of the agri- 

 cultural methods, and not only prevents the development of village life 

 with the concomitant institutions, but perpetually impoverishes the tribe. 

 Thus the Cocopa Indians present an industrial paradox, for while they 

 occupy one of the garden spots of the Western Hemisphere, whose natural 

 freshets might be so utilized as to sustain an enormous population, they 

 subordinate themselves to the environmental conditions and remain one 

 of the poorest and most hopeless of the American tribes. 



During the earlier part of the year Dr. Albert E. Jenks (then a correspond- 

 ent of the Bureau) revised his memoir on The Wild Rice Gatherers of the 

 Lake Region (in press as part of the Nineteenth Annual Report, as noted 

 in the last report), incorporating some of the results of recent researches. 

 On June 1 he was appointed to the position of assistant ethnologist in the 

 Bureau, and was assigned to work related to his previous researches. He 

 at once took up the subject of birch bark, with the aboriginal industries 

 depending on this natural commodity of a considerable fraction of the 



