With This Luminous Fact Before Them, A Greater Study Began Of These Pueblo
People, And It Was Then Found That,
To this day, they use the same
utensils, make the same implements, wear the same ornaments, follow the
same burial
Customs, and generally live the same life that these ancient
cliff-dwellers did. The conclusions, therefore, are obvious and inevitable.
The cliff-dwellers were none other than the ancestors of the pueblo people,
a little less advanced, doubtless, in the march of civilization, yet
already far progressed from the rude civilization of the nomad. They were
driven to occupy the inaccessible cliffs by the constant attacks of the
warlike nomads.
Sedentary and Home-loving Indians. Thus the cliff dwellings become
interesting memorials of the great fight for existence, where one race has
striven to the very death with other races, and the weaker have either
given way or been swept out of existence. The picture is easy to draw. The
country was peopled with these sedentary and home-loving Indians. They had
come largely from the south, had settled down, had built their humble
villages, tilled their fields and cultivated their crops. The women made
baskets and pottery, and the men hunted game, while the women prepared it
for food, and gathered seeds, nuts and roots to eke out their not
overextensive dietary. Young men and women grew up, felt the dawnings of
love and the final awakenings of the great passion, and then married,
settled down in a house the community helped them to build, and began to
work a piece of land selected for them, or at least approved, by the town
council. For, even in those early days, there is every evidence that these
people had a definite and distinct form of democratic government, to the
elected officials of which they yielded an almost perfect reverence and
obedience. In due time, happy and healthy children were born to them.
Peaceful and Religious. They were a religious people, were these early
dwellers in the land. They built kivas and estufas, - under and above ground
ceremonial chambers, - where they regularly and decorously met to worship by
dance, recitation of ancient songs, telling of divine leadings and
interpositions on their behalf, smoking, singing, prayer, and the
observance of other ritual. Thus happy, contented and basking in the favor
of Those Above, they dwelt, until suddenly a new and unfavorable element
was injected into their hitherto peaceful life. The buffetings of nature
they had become accustomed to, and they had kept their bodies healthy so as
to resist these assaults, but now human storms were about to burst upon
them. Apaches in the south, Comanches and Navahos in the east, Utes and
Navahos in the north, Mohaves and Yumas in the west began to encroach upon
them. Envious eyes gazed upon their houses and the goods that industry and
skill had gathered within. Those who had no food stored when famine swooped
upon them, came and begged from those who had.
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