ful site at the foot of the Zuñi 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 Zuñí 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 Zuñi River, sometimes in canyons cut in black lava. Zuñí 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
ROUND TOWER ON A ROCK.
CANYONS OF THE COLORADO.
these people, though Zuñi 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 Nuñez Caveza de Vaca was the first white man to see Zuñi, 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 City of Mexico. He had with him a Barbary negro, who was killed by the Zuñi, and his burial place is still pointed out.