and inhabited some of the pueblo structures now in ruins in other parts of the same area. All the early accounts concur in representing the Aztecs or Mexicans, when they first arrived in Mexico, as subsisting by the cultivation of maize and plants, as constructing houses of stone, and with a religious system which recognized personal gods. These statements are probably true. They had attained to the status of Village Indians. This again renders New Mexico their probable original home as the only area in the north where ruins of structures of tribes so far advanced have been found.
The San Juan district is remarkably situated in its geographical relations. This river, rising in the crests of the high mountains forming the water-shed or divide between the Atlantic and Pacific, flows southward until it enters the table-land formation, through which it flows in a southwesterly and then northwesterly direction, making a long, sweeping curve in New Mexico and Arizona, after which it runs westerly to its confluence with the Colorado. It receives from the north the following tributaries, rising like itself in the high mountains, the Piedra, Pine River (Los Pinos), the Animas, the La Plata, the Mancos, the McElmo, now dry, and the Hovenweep and Montezuma creeks, now nearly dry. Its southern tributaries are the Navajo, Chaco, and De Chelly.
With such evidences of ancient occupation, here and elsewhere in the San Juan country, we are led to the conclusion that the Village Indians increased and multiplied in this area, and that at some early period there was here a remarkable display of this form of Indian life, and of house architecture in the nature of fortresses, which must have made itself felt in distant parts of the continent. On the hypothesis that the valley of the Columbia was the seed-land of the Ganowanian family, where they depended chiefly upon a fish subsistence, we have in the San Juan country a second center and initial point of migrations founded upon farinaceous subsistence. That the struggle of the Village Indians to resist the ever continuous streams of migration flowing southward along the mountain chains has been a hard one through many centuries of time, is proved by the many ruins of abandoned or conquered pueblos which still mark their settlements in so many places. At the present moment there is not a Village Indian in the San Juan district. It is entirely deserted of this class of inhabitants.
