Volume 4 — CHAPTER XI. ANTIQUITIES OF ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO. (continued 2)

THE ANCIENT PUEBLO TOWNS.

4. It follows that New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Chihuahua were once inhabited by agricultural semi-civilized tribes, not differing more among themselves than do the Pueblo tribes of the present time; the most fertile valleys of the region were cultivated by them, and were dotted by fine town-dwellings of stone and adobe, occupied in common by many families, similar but superior to the present Pueblo towns. At least a century, probably much longer, before the Spaniards made their appearance, the decline of this numerous and powerful people began, and it has continued uninterruptedly down to the present time, until only a mere remnant in the Rio Grande and Moqui towns is left. Before the Spaniards came all the southern towns, on the Gila and its tributaries, had been abandoned; since that time the decline of the northern nations, which the Spaniards found in a tolerably flourishing condition, is a matter of history. The reason of the decline this is hardly the place to consider, but it is doubtless to the inroads of outside warlike and predatory tribes like the Apaches that we must look for the chief cause. It is not impossible that natural changes in the surface of the region, such as the drying-up of springs, streams, or lakes, may have also contributed to the same effect. These changes, however, if such took place, were probably gradual in their operation; for the location of the ruins in what are still in most cases among the most fertile valleys, either in the vicinity of water, or at least of a dried-up stream, and their absence in every instance in the absolutely desert tracts, show pretty conclusively that the towns were not destroyed suddenly by any natural convulsion which radically changed the face of the country. It is not difficult to imagine how the agricultural Pueblo communities, weakened perhaps at first by some international strife which forced them to neglect the tillage of their land, and hard pressed by more than usually persistent inroads from bands of Apaches who plundered their crops and destroyed their irrigation-works, visited perchance by pestilence, or by earthquakes sent by some irate deity to dry up their springs, were forced year by year to yield their fair fields to the drifting sands, to abandon their southern homes and unite their forces with kindred northern tribes; till at last came the crowning blow of a foreign invasion, which has well nigh extinguished an aboriginal culture more interesting and admirable, if not in all respects more advanced, than any other in North America.