354 ZUNI CKEATIOX MYTHS. [kth. ann. U 



selves aud by usages surviving amoug tlie present Zufiis, tliat iu course 

 of time au extensive trade in salt of tbi« particular variety grew up 

 between tlie clitf dwellers aud more northern and western tribes. 

 When found by the Spaniards the Zuui-Cibolans were still carrying on 

 an extensive trade in this salt, which for practical as well as assumed 

 mythic reasons they permitted no others to gather, and which they 

 guarded so jealously that their wars with the Keresan and other 

 tribes to the south-southeastward of their country were caused — as 

 many of their later wars with the Navajo have been caused — by slight 

 eucroachments on the exclusive right to the products of the lake to 

 which the Zuiiis laid claim. 



The salt of this lake is superior to any other found in the southwest, 

 not excepting that of the Mauzano Salinas, east of the Eio Grande, 

 which nevertheless was as strenuously fought for and guarded by the 

 Tanoan tribes settled around these Salinas, and had in like manner, 

 indeed, drawn their ancestry down from earlier cavate homes iu the 

 northern mountains. Hence it was preferred (as it still is by both 

 Indian and white population of New Mexico and Arizona) to all other 

 kinds, and commanded such price that in the earlier cliflf-packs I have 

 found it adulterated with other kinds from the nearer salt marshes 

 •which occur in southern Utah and southwestern Colorado. That the 

 adulteration of tlie lake salt with the slightly alkaline and bitter salt 

 of the neighboring marshes was thus practiced with a view to eking 

 out the trade supply is conclusively sliown, I think, by the presence in 

 the same cliff' homes from which the adulterated specimens were 

 obtained, of abundant specimens of the unadulterated salt, aud this as 

 conclusively shows not only that the cliff' dwellers traded in this salt, 

 as do their modern Zuni representatives, but also that it was then, as 

 now, more highly valued than other kinds of salt iu the southwest. 



The influence on the movements of whole tribes of people which it 

 is here assumed such a source of favorite salt supply as this exerted 

 over the early cliff dwellers, does not stand alone iu the history of 

 American tribes. It already has been intimated that tlie Tanoans so far 

 prized their comparatively inferior source of salt supply in the salinas 

 of the Mauzano as to have been induced to settle there aud surround 

 them with a veritable cordon of their pueblos. 



Another and far more significant instance, that of the Cerro de Sal 

 iu Peru may be mentioned, for in that country not only was salt of 

 various kinds to be found in many valleys and throughout nearly all 

 the deserts of the Medano region extending from northern Ecuador to 

 southern Chili, but the sea also lay near at hand along the entire 

 western border of this vast stretch of country; yet from remote parts 

 of South America trails lead, some from the Amazon and from Argentina, 

 more than a thousand miles away, some from nearer jioints and from 

 all local directions to this I'amous "Cerro de Sal." The salt from this 

 locality was, like that of the Lake of Salt, so highly prized that it 



