MINDELEFF. ] TRADITIONS—THE WATER PEOPLE. ao 
Bear man who said that our thunder frightened the women and we must not go near 
the village. Then the kwakwanti said, ‘‘ Let us leave these people and seek a land 
somewhere else,” but our women said they were tired of travel and insisted upon 
ourremaining. Then “ Fire-picker” came down from the village and told us to come 
up there and stay, but after we had got into the village the Walpi women screamed 
out against us—they feared our thunder—and so the Walpi turned us away. Then 
our people, except those who went to the Second Mesa, traveled to the northeast as 
far as the Tsegi (Canyon de Chelly), but I can not tell whether our people built the 
houses there. Then they came back to this region again and built houses and had 
much trouble with the Walpi, but we have lived here ever since. 
Groups of the Water people, as already stated, were distributed 
among all the villages, although the bulk of them remained at the Mid- 
dle Mesa; but it seems that most of the remaining groups subsequently 
chose to build their permanent houses at Oraibi. Thereis no special tra- 
dition of this movement; it is only indicated by this circumstance, that 
in addition to the Water families common to every village, there are 
still in Oraibi several families of that people which have no representa- 
tives in any of the other villages. At a quite early day Oraibi became 
a place of importance, and they tell of being sufficiently populous to 
establish many outlying settlements. They still identify these with 
ruins on the detached mesas in the valley to the south and along the 
Moen-kopi (‘place of flowing water”) and other intermittent streams in 
the west. These sites were occupied for the purpose of utilizing culti- 
vable tracts of land in their vicinity, and the remotest settlement, about 
45 miles west, was especially devoted to the cultivation of cotton, the 
place being still called by the Navajo and other neighboring tribes, the 
“cotton planting ground.” It is also said that several of the larger 
ruins along the course of the Moen-kopi were occupied by groups of the 
Snake, the Coyote, and the Eagle who dwelt in that region for a long 
period before they joimed the people in Tusayan. The incursions of 
foreign bands from the north may have hastened that movement, and 
the Oraibi say they were compelled to withdraw all their outlying col- 
onies. An episode is related of an attack upon the main village when 
a number of young girls were carried off, and 2 or 3 years afterward 
the same marauders returned and treated with the Oraibi, who paid a 
ransom in corn and received all their girls back again. After a quiet 
interval the pillaging bands renewed their attacks and the settlements 
on the Moen-kopi were vacated. They were again occupied after an- 
other peace was established, and this condition of alternate occupancy 
and abandonment seems to have existed until within quite recent time. 
While the Asa were still sojourning in Canyon de Chelly, and before 
the arrival of the Hano, another bloody scene had been enacted in 
Tusayan. Since the time of the Antelope Canyon feuds there had been 
enmity between Awatubi and some of the other villages, especially 
Walpi, and some of the Sikyatki refugees had transmitted their feudal 
wrongs to their descendants who dwelt in Awatubi. They had long 
been perpetrating all manner of offenses; they had intercepted hunting 
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