ps
centuries before the coming of the Spaniards. The gorge is known as the
Rito de la Frijoles, which is the Spanish name of the clear
mountain-stream which flows through it. Since 1916 it has been known as
the Bandelier National Monument, after the late Adolf Francis Bandelier,
the distinguished archaeologist of the southwest.

The valley is a place of beauty. It is six miles long and nowhere
broader than half a mile; its entrance scarcely admits two persons
abreast. Its southern wall is the slope of a tumbled mesa, its northern
wall the vertical cliff of white and yellowish pumice in which the caves
were dug. The walls rise in crags and pinnacles many hundreds of feet.
Willows, cottonwoods, cherries, and elders grow in thickets along the
stream-side, and cactus decorates the wastes. It is reached by
automobile from Santa Fe.

This national monument lies within a large irregular area which has been
suggested for a national park because of the many interesting remains
which it encloses. The Cliff Cities National Park, when it finally comes
into existence, will include among its exhibits a considerable group of
prehistoric shrines of great value and unusual popular interest.

"The Indians of to-day," writes William Boone Douglass, "guard with
great tenacity the secrets of their shrines. Even when the locations
have been found they will deny their existence, plead ignorance of their
meaning, or refuse to discuss the subject in any form." Nevertheless,
they claim direct descent from the prehistoric shrine-builders, many of
whose shrines are here found among others of later origin.

CHACO CANYON NATIONAL MONUMENT

For fourteen miles, both sides of a New Mexican canyon sixty-five miles
equidistant from Farmington and Gallup are lined with the ruins of very
large and prosperous colonies of prehistoric people. Most of the
buildings were pueblos, many of them containing between fifty and a
hundred rooms; one, known to-day as Pueblo Bonito, must have contained
twelve hundred rooms.

These ruins lie in their original desolation; little excavation, and no
restoration has yet been done. Chaco Canyon must have been the centre of
a very large population. For miles in all directions, particularly
westward, pueblos are grouped as suburbs group near cities of to-day.

It is not surprising that so populous a desert neighborhood required
extensive systems of irrigation. One of these is so well preserved that
little more than the