AND VISIT TO CASAS GRANDES. 345 
The Apaches, I was informed, had been very bold 
here of late. Three weeks before our arrival a band 
of twenty-six had ventured within two miles of the 
town, where they surprised a party herding mules and 
cattle. They killed three men, and drove the animals 
off. These Indians had also, within the same period, 
run off a large portion of the stock of Mr. Flotte, an 
American living at Barranca Colorada four miles distant. 
No attempt at pursuit and recapture had been made. 
At 11 o’clock the beeves had not come in, nor the 
promised vegetables; and as it would require an hour 
or two after the cattle arrived to kill one and distribute 
the meat, making it too late to leave to-day, I directed 
the mules, which were already hitched up and ready 
to move, to be unharnessed and turned out to feed. 
To make the most of my time, I determined to visit 
Casas Grandes, a town twenty miles to the south of 
us, where there were said to be extensive ruins of an 
aboriginal race. Hastily putting our blankets, fire- 
arms, and some provisions into my wagon, Dr. Webb 
and myself, accompanied by a Mexican servant, set out 
on our excursion. 
I had long known of the existence of these ruins, 
which are spoken of by various writers on Mexico, and 
had made frequent inquiries about them, during the 
winter I spent in El Paso, of old residents there and 
of persons from the city of Chihuahua, without getting 
any satisfactory account of them. All said there were 
some old adobe buildings there in ruins; but whether 
they belonged to the present or to an earlier race of 
Indians, they knew not. At any rate, all agreed that 
they were not worth visiting. 
