THE BANDELIER NATIONAL FOREST 



571 



deaths from natural causes, yet but comparatively few 

 bodies have been discovered in the neighborhood of the 

 largest ruins. Some of the bodies found have been rudely 

 embalmed or at least an attempt seems to have been 

 made to preserve them from decay, and burial within 

 the rooms seems to have been practiced to a limited 

 extent. As for cremation, there is little or no evidence 



BEAUTIFUL, BUT HORRIBLE TO BEHOLD 



A piece of cord caught the noisy gentleman, but not until he had given 

 the feminine members of our party a good scare. 



that this was practiced. That they were the prey of other 

 and more warlike tribes is quite certain, but there seems 

 to be no positive proof that they migrated to any dis- 

 tance. The most satisfactory theory on this subject is 

 that these ruins were not all occupied at one time but 

 were built and used for a period of years, then deserted 

 for some peculiar reason, either by whole villages or 

 separate families who moved out from the old homes 

 and built others {>erhaps immediately adjoining them or 

 at some distance. This is more or less substantiated by 

 the actions of the pueblos of today for at Hopi, Zuni, 

 Taos and other inhabited villages one can see similar 

 changes and moves taking place each year. 



Near the Hopi villages in northern Arizona Doctor 

 Fewkes, of the National Museum, unearthed from a huge 

 mountain of drifting sand a complete village, obtaining 

 the hint as to its presence from the old men at Walpi, 

 one of the Hopi towns, who told him their legends 

 mentioned the covered city as having been occupied at 

 the time the Spanish visited the region between 1542 

 ^nd 1543. They even had a name for this lost city al- 

 though it must have been completely buried for at least 

 two centuries. This is true also of hundreds of other 



buried towns all over the region, the legends of the 

 pueblos furnishing names for almost all of them. 



Thus it comes that while the numbers of persons living 

 in some of these towns must have been large, it does 

 not follow that all the rooms in each ruin were occupied 

 at the same time or that the total population can be esti- 

 mated on the basis of the number of rooms or dwellings. 

 Following this theory to its logical conclusion we may 

 believe that after a certain group of buildings had been 

 used for many years, the inhabitants for some unknown 

 reason migrated to another site and there started a new 

 city which eventually went through the same process of 

 building and ultimate abandonment. Perhaps some 

 scourge carried off numbers of the people and they 



THE STEEP ASCENT TO THE PAINTED CAVE 



One had almost to be a lizard to negotiate the steep face of the rough, 

 rocky cliff and reach the cave. 



vacated the town just as the Navajos who have always 

 divided this country with the Pueblos, do at the present 

 time, for they at once desert the family "Hogan" no 

 matter how well built and comfortable, when any member 

 of the family dies in it, and, moving off to some distance, 

 erect a new one. Let lightning strike a tree under which 

 a Navajo hogan stands and it is at once vacated and 



