ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT XXI 



is carried on horseback to Yuma and 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 con- 

 sumed, the families prepare for the annual migration to 

 the higher lands, where they await the rise and subsi- 

 dence of the vernal 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 freshet or the 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 concen- 

 trated population, so that its tendency combines with 

 that of annual migrations to stifle the home sense and to 

 scatter the members of consanguineal groups, and thus 

 to affect the social organization. The recurrent floods also 

 affect the ceremonies and attendant faiths of the tribes- 

 men in various ways; for example, they control mortuary 

 observances and have undoubtedly led indirectly to the 

 custom of burning the bodies of decedents in and with 

 their houses, distributing their property to nonrelatives, 

 and incidentally destroying adjacent houses and other 

 property. This . dispersive social factor combines with 

 that growing directly out of the agricultural 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 cori;espondent of the Bureau) revised his memoir 

 on "The Wild Rice Gatherers of the Upper Lakes" (pub- 

 lished as part of the Nineteenth Annual Report), incor- 

 porating some of the results of recent researches. On 



