Note 617 — Chapter X · —Man's Relation To The Water

The primitive American civilization that arose among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, the only strictly sedentary tribes relying exclusively on agriculture north of the Mexican plateau, was primarily a result of the pressure put upon these people by a restricted water supply.617 Though chiefly offshoots of the wild Indians of the northern plains, they have been markedly differentiated from their wandering Shoshone and Kiowa kindred by local environment.618 Scarcity of water in those arid highlands and paucity of arable land forced them to a carefully organized community life, made them invest their labor in irrigation ditches, terraced gardens and walled orchards, whereby they were as firmly rooted in their scant but fertile fields as were their cotton plants and melon vines;619 while the towering mesas protected their homes against marauding Ute, Navajo and Apache.620 This thread of a deep underlying connection between civilization and the control of water can be traced through all prehistoric America, as well as through the earliest cultural achievements in North Africa and Asia.