luable information
on this question had long been my conviction, and was the main
influence which led me to the studies recorded in the following pages.

An examination of a map of Arizona will show that one of the pathways
or feasible routes of travel possible to have been used in any
connection between the pueblos of the Gila and those of northern
Arizona would naturally be along Rio Verde valley. Its tributaries
rise at the foot of San Francisco mountains, and the main river
empties into the Salt, traversing from north to south a comparatively
fertile valley, in the main advantageous for the subsistence of
semisedentary bands in their migrations. Here was a natural highway
leading from the Gila pueblos, now in ruins, to the former villages in
the north.

The study of the archeology of Verde valley had gone far enough to
show that the banks of the river were formerly the sites of many and
populous pueblos, while the neighboring mesas from one end to another
are riddled with cavate dwellings or crowned with stone buildings.
Northward from that famous crater-like depression in the Verde region,
the so-called Montezuma Well on Beaver creek, one of the affluents of
the Rio Verde, little archeological exploration had been attempted.
There was, in other words, a break in the almost continuous series of
ruins from Tusayan as far south as the Gila. Ruined towns had been
reported as existing not far southward from San Francisco
mountains,[5] and from there by easy stages the abodes of a former
race had been detected at intervals all the way to the Tusayan
pueblos. At either end the chain of ruins between the Tusayan towns
and the Gila ruins was unbroken, but middle links were wanting. All
conditions imply former habitations in this untrodden hiatus, the
region between the Verde and the Tusayan series, ending near the
present town of Flagstaff, Arizona; but southward from that town the
country was broken and impassable, a land where the foot of the
archeologist had not trodden. Remains of human habitations had,
however, been reported by ranchmen, but these reports were vague and
unsatisfactory. So far as they went they confirmed my suspicions, and
there were other significant facts looking the same way. The color of
the red cliffs fulfilled the Tusayan tradition of Palatkwabi, or their
former home in the far south. Led by all these considerations, before
I took to the field I had long been convinced that this must have been