aves, and deerskin. They went from one part of the
country to another according to the food supply. In prickly pear time
they went into the cactus region to gather the fruit, on which they
mainly lived during the season. When pinon nuts were ripe they went into
the mountains and gathered these, threshing them out of the cones to be
eaten fresh, roasted, or ground into flour for cakes baked on flat
stones. They had no dishes except baskets and gourd-rinds, and their
houses were tent-poles covered with hides. When a squaw wished to roast
a piece of meat she thrust a sharp stick through it. When she wished to
boil it she filled a large calabash-rind with water, put in it the
materials of her stew, and threw stones into the fire to heat. When very
hot these stones were raked out with a loop of twisted green reed or
willow-shoots and put into the water. When enough had been put in to
make the water boil, it was kept boiling by changing the cooled stones
for hotter ones until the meat was cooked.

Many of the baskets made by the squaws were curiously decorated, and
made of fine reed or fiber sewed in coils with very fine grass-thread,
so that they were both light and strong. There were cone-shaped
carrying-baskets borne on the back with a loop passed around the
forehead; in these the squaws carried grain, fruit, nuts or occasionally
babies. There were baskets for sifting grain and meal, and a sort of
flask that would hold water. The materials were gathered from mountains,
valleys and plains over a range of hundreds of miles--grasses here, bark
fiber there, dyes in another place, maguey leaves in another, and for
black figures in decoration the seed-pods called "cat's claws" or the
stems of maiden-hair fern. A design was not copied exactly, but each
worker made the pattern in the same general form and sometimes improved
on it. There was a banded pattern in a diamond-shaped criss-cross almost
exactly like the shaded markings on a rattlesnake-skin. The Indians
believed in a goddess or Snake-Mother, who lived underground and knew
about springs; and as water was the most important thing in that land of
deserts, they showed respect to the Snake-Mother by baskets decorated in
her honor. Another design showed a round center with four zigzag lines
running to the border. This was intended for a lake with four streams
flowing out of it, widening as they flowed; but it looked rather like a
cross or a swastika. There was a design in zigzag