200 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



found in the valley of the Las Animas, in Southwestern Colorado. 

 He speaks of a valley fifteen miles long and seven miles wide, on 

 the Animas River, and says this valley was covered with dwellings 

 built of stone, but he gives particular attention to a row of build- 

 ings built of sandstone laid in adobe mud. These buildings are 

 about three hundred feet long and three hundred feet apart, as 

 I understand the writer, and extend a distance of six thousand 

 feet. The outside walls are four feet thick and the inside ones 

 from one and a half to three feet thick; there are rooms still left 

 and walls remaining that indicate a building four stories high. 

 In some of the rooms there are writings that never have been 

 deciphered, and iu one of them there are drawings of tarantulas, 

 centipedes, horses and men. The word "horses" riveted my at- 

 tention, and connected with it there were several things to be 

 considered. First, were the drawings really intended to represent 

 horses? Second, if so might they not have been placed there long 

 after the builders had disappeared and in recent years? Third, if 

 placed there by the builders, what was their date, and were they 

 before or after the introduction of the horse into Mexico by the 

 Spaniards? The possibility of ever obtaining any satisfactory 

 information about these drawings and their date seemed very 

 remote, but after watching and waiting for about eighteen years, 

 I have recently received two letters that settle the whole matter 

 so far as these particular ruins are concerned. 



Mr. Charles McLoyd, a very intelligent gentleman of Durango, 

 Colorado, who has made a special study of the Cliff Dwellers and 

 kindred subjects, in that part of the world, writing under date 

 of January 10, 1895, says: 



" I am unable to inform you in regard to the pictures on those particular 

 ruins, but can say that in no other locality have 1 found pictures of horses or 

 anything to indicate that these prehistoric races had any knowledge of the 

 animal. If such pictures existed we would be unable to determine anything 

 definite from them; or in other words, it would not show that the horse was 

 on this continent before the Spaniards brought him, but rather that the people 

 who constructed the buildings lived here after the Spaniards came. I have 

 often seen pictures of horses on the walls of canons, but there is no question 

 but they were the work of the present Indians. We often find associated with 

 them pictures of railroad trains, etc., that indicate that some of them are of 

 very recent date. To sum the matter up, would say that, so far, there is no 

 evidence that these races had any knowledge of the horse, or had ever seen 

 the Spaniards." 



Mr. John A. Koontz, of Aztec, New Mexico, writes under 



