196 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
and inhabited some of the pueblo structures now in ruins in other parts of 
the same area. All the early accounts concur in representing the Aztecs or 
Mexicans, when they first arrived in Mexico, as subsisting by the cultiva- 
tion of maize and plants, as constructing houses of stone, and with a religious 
system which recognized personal gods. These statements are probably 
true. They had attained to the status of Village Indians. This again ren- 
ders New Mexico their probable original home as the only area in the north 
where ruins of structures of tribes so far advanced have been found. 
The San Juan district is remarkably situated in its geographical rela- 
tions. This river, rising in the crests of the high mountains forming the 
water-shed or divide between the Atlantic and Pacific, flows southward until 
it enters the table-land formation, through which it flows in a southwesterly 
and then northwesterly direction, making a long, sweeping curve in New 
Mexico and Arizona, after which it runs westerly to its confluence with the 
Colorado. It receives from the north the following tributaries, rising like 
itself in the high mountains, the Piedra, Pine River (Los Pinos), the Animas, 
the La Plata, the Mancos, the McElmo, now dry, and the Hovenweep and 
Montezuma creeks, now nearly dry. Its southern tributaries are the Navajo, 
Chaco, and De Chelly. 
With such evidences of ancient occupation, here and elsewhere in the 
San Juan country, we are led to the conclusion that the Village Indians 
increased and multiplied in this area, and that at some early period there 
was here a remarkable display of this form of Indian life, and of house 
architecture in the nature of fortresses, which must have made itself felt in 
distant parts of the continent. On the hypothesis that the valley of the 
Columbia was the seed-land of the Ganowanian ‘amily, where they depended 
chiefly upon a fish subsistence, we have in the San Juan country a second 
center and initial point of migrations founded upon farinaceous subsistence. 
That the struggle of the Village Indians to resist the ever continuous 
streams of migration flowing southward along the mountain chains has been 
a hard one through many centuries of time, is proved by the many ruins of 
abandoned or conquered pueblos which still mark their settlements in so 
many places. At the present moment there is not a Village Indian in the 
San Juan district. It is entirely deserted of this class of inhabitants. 
