MINDELEFF. | TRADITIONS CONCERNING THE SPANIARDS. 21 
ki, the yellow-house, from the color of the sandstone of which the houses 
were built. These and other fragmentary bits have walls not oyer a 
foot thick, built of small stones dressed by rubbing, and all laid in mud; 
the inside of the walls also show a smooth coating of mud plaster. The 
dimensions of the rooms are very small, the largest measuring 94 feet, 
long, by 44 feet wide. It is improbable that any of these structures were 
over two stories high, and many of them were built in excavated places 
around the rocky summits of the knolls. In these instances no rear wall 
was built; the partition walls, radiating at irregular angles, abut against 
the rock itself. Still, the great numbers of these houses, small as they 
were, must have been far more than the Fire-people could have required, 
for the oval house which they abandoned measures not more than a 
hundred feet by fifty. Probably other incoming gentes, of whom no 
story has been preserved, had also the ill fate to build there, for the 
Walpi people afterward slew all its inhabitants. 
There is little or no detail in the legends of the Bear people as to their 
life in Antelope Canyon; they can now distinguish only one ruin with 
certainty as having been occupied by their ancestors, while to all the 
other ruins fanciful names have been applied. Nor is there any special 
sause mentioned for abandoning their dwellings there; probably, how- 
ever, a sufficient reason was the cessation of springs in their vicinity. 
Traces of former large springs are seen at all of them, but no water flows 
from them at the present time. Whatever their motive, the Bears left 
Antelope Canyon, and moved over to the village of Walpi, on the terrace 
below the point of the mesa. They were received kindly there, and were 
apparently placed on an equal footing with the Walpi, for it seems the 
Snake, Horn, and Bear have always been on terms of friendship. They 
built houses at that village, and lived there for some considerable time; 
then they moved a short distance and built again almost on the very 
point of the mesa. This change was not caused by any disagreement 
with their neighbors; they simply chose that point as a suitable place 
on which to build all their houses together. The site of this Bear house 
is called Kisakobi, the obliterated house, and the name is very appropri- 
ate, as there is merely the faintest trace here and there to show where 
a building stood, the stones having been used in the construction of the 
modern Walpi. These two villages were quite close together, and the 
subsequent construction of a few additional groups of rooms almost con- 
nected them, so that they were always considered and spoken of as one. 
It was at this period, while Walpi was still on this lower site, that the 
Spaniards came into the country. They met with little or no opposition, 
and their entrance was marked by no great disturbances. No special 
tradition preserves any of the circumstances of this event; these first 
coming Spaniards being only spoken of as the “ Kast/ilumuh who wore 
iron garinents, and came from the south,” and this brief mention may 
be accounted for by the fleeting nature of these early visits. 
The zeal of the Spanish priests carried them everywhere throughout 
