The Last of the Plainsmen 



question if Snake Gulch ever before had such a raking 

 over. Despite its name, however, we discovered no 

 snakes. 



From the sandy niche of a cliff where we lunched 

 Wallace espied a tomb, and heralded his discovery 

 with a victorious whoop. Digging in old ruins 

 roused in him much the same spirit that digging in 

 old books roused in me. Before we reached him, he 

 had a big bowie-knife buried deep in the red, sandy 

 floor of the tomb. 



This one-time sealed house of the dead had been 

 constructed of small stones, held together by a 

 cement, the nature of which, Wallace explained, had 

 never become clear to civilization. It was red in 

 color and hard as flint, harder than the rocks it 

 glued together. The tomb was half-round in shape, 

 and its floor was a projecting shelf of cliff rock. 

 Wallace unearthed bits of pottery, bone and finely 

 braided rope, all of which, to our great disappoint 

 ment, crumbled to dust in our fingers. In the case 

 of the rope, Wallace assured us, this was a sign of 

 remarkable antiquity. 



In the next mile we traversed, we found dozens of 

 these old cells, all demolished except a few feet of the 

 walls, all despoiled of their one-time possessions. 

 Wallace thought these depredations were due to 

 Indians of our own time. Suddenly we came upon 



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