as "Navajo Church." Early in the afternoon we are at Fort
Wingate and in civilization once more. The fort is on a beautiful site
at the foot of the Zuni Plateau. And now our journey with the pack train
is ended, and I bid good-by to my Indian friends. My own pack train is
to go back to Utah, while from Fort Wingate I expect to go to Santa Fe
in an ambulance. But the region about is of interest for its wonderful
geologic structure and for the many ruins of ancient pueblos found in
the neighborhood. On the 2d of November Captain Johnson, an artillery
officer, takes me for a ride among the ruins. Many of these ancient
structures are found, but those which are of the most interest are the
round towers. Nothing remains of these but the bare walls. They average
from 18 to 20 feet in diameter, and are usually two or three stories
high. Probably they were built as places of worship.

Above Fort Wingate there is a great plateau; below, there stretches a
vast desert plain with mesas and buttes. The ruins are at the foot of
the plateau where the streams come down from the pine-clad heights.

On the 3d of November with a party of officers I visit Zuni in an
ambulance. The journey is 40 miles, along the foot of the plateau half
the way, and then we turn into the desert valley, in the midst of which
runs the Zuni River, sometimes in canyons cut in black lava. Zuni is a
town much like those already visited, except that it is a little larger.
Nothing can be more repulsive than the appearance of the streets;
irregular, crowded, and filthy, in which dogs, asses, and Indians are
mingled in confusion. In the distance Toyalone is seen, a great butte on
which an extensive ruin is found, the more ancient home of these people,
though Zuni itself appears to be hundreds of years old. The people
speak a language radically different from that of Tusayan, and no other
tribe in the United States has a tongue related to it.

In the midst of the town there is an old Spanish church, partly in
ruins, but it is still graced with the wooden image of a saint, gayly
colored; and the old tongueless bell remains, for it was sounded with a
stone hammer held in the hand of the bellman; the marks of his blows are
deeply indented in the metal. Alvar Nunez Caveza de Vaca was the first
white man to see Zuni, when he wandered in that long journey from
Florida around by the headwaters of the Arkansas, through what is now
New Mexico and Arizona, southward to the Ci