176 



the crossing, the stationing of the garrison, the death of officers of 

 rank, etc. They were interesting — fascinating. The whole locality 

 was full of myster}", and it was with the greatest reluctance that 

 we took our departure. 



Not only at jioints where the canons can be crossed, however, 

 do ruins exist. In the Grand Canon, in nooks that ai")pear inacces- 

 sible from the country more than six thousand feet above, 

 fallen walls can be found, overgrown by huge cacti and thorny 

 mesquite. Every patch of alluvium seems to have been taken 

 advantage of by this doomed people. Their store-caves may be 

 discovered along the cliffs, or in the solitude of the lateral canons. 



Of course the ruins north of the Colorado are much more disin- 

 tegrated than those just described, on account of their greater age. 

 I have walked over many that could scarcely be distinguished with- 

 out digging. Oftentimes the ground where a village once stood 

 will be thickly covered with the old building stones, sand, broken 

 pottery and fragments of grinders — a confused mass extremely 

 puzzling to the inexperienced. But upon digging below the debris 

 the walls are often found to be well preserved, even to the clay 

 mortar, and the topography of the village can be accurately ob- 

 tained. Among adobe ruins it is different ; for clay is not lasting 

 like stone. Yet I have seen modern adobe houses, in that region, 

 from which the roofs had been stripped when they were abandoned, 

 eight or ten years before, and it was astonishing to note what a 

 slight effect those eight or ten years of exposure had produced on 

 the bare walls. It was my impression that they might stand a 

 hundred years without losing their outline. And if that were true 

 of unbaked clay, how many centuries it would require for weather- 

 ing alone to raze buildings of stone ; and then, how many centuries 

 they would lie in their half-ruined state before it would be difficult 

 to distinguish their former dimensions ! 



Where the Shinumos used adobe as a building material, the 

 reason was not that they did not understand working in stone, but 

 that adobe required less labor and skill in its manipulation, and 

 because, in certain localities, only metamorphic and igneous rocks 

 w^ere to be found, and they possessed no tools with which they 

 could readily dress these, as they could the slabs from sedimentary 



