he one in which I now write. Boxed up by the snow-covered
Jemez (Hamez) Mountains at one end, with a black basalt gash in the rock
at the other end through which roars a mountain torrent and waterfalls
too narrow for two men to walk abreast, with vertical walls of yellow
pumice straight up and down as if leveled by a giant trowel, in this
valley of the Frijoles waters once dwelt a nation, dead and gone before
the Spaniards came to America, vanished leaving not the shadow of a
record behind long before William the Conqueror crossed to England,
contemporaneous, perhaps--for all science knows to the contrary--with
that 20,000 B.C. Egyptian desert runner lying in the British Museum.

Lying in my tent camp last night listening to coyote and fox barking and
to owls hooting from the dead silent city of the yellow cliff wall, I
fell to wondering on this puzzle of archaeologist and historian--what
desolated these bygone nations? The theory of desiccation, or drought,
so plausible elsewhere, doesn't hold for one minute when you are here on
the spot; for there is the mountain brook brawling through the Valley
not five minutes' scramble from any one of these caves; and there on the
far western sky-line are the snows of the Jemez Mountains, which must
have fed this brook since this part of the earth began. Was it war, or
pestilence, or captivity, that made of the populous city a den of
wolves, a resort for hoot owl and bittern and fox? If pestilence, then
why are the skeletons not found in the great ossuaries and masses that
mark the pestilential destruction of other Indian races? There remain
only the alternatives of war, or captivity; and of either, not the
vestige of a shadow of a tradition remains. One man's guess is as good
as another's; and the scientist's guesses vary all the way from 8,000 B.
C. to 400 A. D. So there you are! You have as good a right to a guess
as the highest scientist of them all; and while I refrain from
speculation, I want to put on record the definite, provable fact that
these people of the Stone Age were not the gibbering, monkey-tailed
maniacs of claw finger nails and simian jaw which the half-baked
pseudo-evolutionist loves to picture of Stone Age denizens. As Jack
Donovan, a character working at Judge Abbott's in the Valley
said--"Sure, monkey men wud a' had a haard time scratchin' thro' thim
cliffs and makin' thim holes in the rocks." Remnants of shard and
pottery, structure of houses, decorations an