From a photograph, copyright igo6, by E. S. Curtis. 
The mealing trough—Hopi. 
form of government that the remnants of 
it, though shadowed by three centuries of 
white men’s greed and politics, remain 
praiseworthy to the present day. To quote 
Lummis, in “Poco Tiempo,” '‘ There were 
many American Republics before the sail¬ 
ing of Columbus.” 
The booty-loving Spaniards, who first 
found this land, were in search of the seven 
cities of Cibola, with their fabled hoards of 
gold and portals of turquoise, the cities of 
the many-times-told and exaggerated tales 
of the Negro Estevan and the Friar Mar¬ 
cos. Rather than the expected riches, equal¬ 
ling those of the Incas in the Perus, they 
found no gold and little turquoise, only 
simple Indians without riches, but with a 
life far advanced from that of the nomadic 
tribes, possessed of many arts and crafts. 
They were tilling fields of corn and beans, 
and from wild cotton wove cloth which 
would do credit to any art-loom of to-day, 
and fashioning from clay utensils of superb 
workmanship, decorated with highly con- 
162 
ventionalized designs; they were tanners, 
dyers and workers in gems, and beyond all 
the arts of their domestic life was the ritual 
of their ancient pagan one, a life exceed¬ 
ingly rich in religious ceremony; while their 
astronomical and astrological lore is even 
to-day a thing of wonder to the student. 
The women held legally a higher place 
in the domestic scheme of life at the coming 
of the white man, three centuries ago, than 
is granted by the laws of many states to the 
white mother and wife to-day. The Pueblo 
wife was the owner of the home and the 
children. Descent was traced through her 
clan, not that of the father. In case of a 
defection of a husband, the wife could 
divorce him; if he returned to the home to 
find his personal belongings placed outside 
the door, it meant that her decree of divorce 
was sealed; in which case, if he saw fit to 
apply to the council in hopes of a reversal 
of judgment, he might secure sympathy 
and even assistance from her clan, but not 
from his own. 
