With respect to Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, these pueblos, when built, were evidently liable to the incursions of the Apaches; otherwise they would not have been constructed as fortified towns. But rich mines were early discovered in the mountains hard by, and extensively worked by the Spaniards ; so that it is impossible to say whether slavery or the Apaches, or both, caused the destruction of the entire population.

It only remains, in concluding this account of the Pueblo Indians and their history, to say a few words on a subject usually brought forward as chief amongst the causes which have led to the extinction of that race.

I have heard it affirmed on all sides that the country has become depopulated because it is no longer capable of sustaining its former inhabitants, and that as the face of nature changed, so did those dependent upon nature diminish. The country has changed for the worse. A few centuries ago the rainfall was greater, forests were more abundant, spots were productive which now are barren, and springs gushed from the ground which now are dry. But at this period, also, a much larger area of land was probably under cultivation (both with and without irrigation) than to-day; and I think it far more likely that the decrease in the amount of land cultivated tended to produce aridity than that the change of climate made the country uninhabitable. The Spaniards probably did great mischief by stripping the hills of timber for mining-purposes, and thus drying up springs, the waters of which were"so needed in the valleys. The greater part of the Rio Grande was swept of its timber, and is very different now from what it was when Antonio de Espejo visited it in 1582. The Apaches also have a very destructive habit, amongst their long catalogue of vices, of firing the forests of their enemies. Although these facts may account for the gradual drying up of the country, they will not explain how it happens that the fertile bottom-lands along the Rio Verde (a country, according to Lereux, "well timbered, and containing many lagoons") are now uninhabited, while the people of Moqui, who live almost in a desert, have managed to fight out the battle of existence down to the present day.

Colonel Greenwood, who had charge of one of our engineering parties, discovered two very remarkable objects near the San Francisco Mountains. One was a broken jar, into the hollow of which lava had flowed; the other was the skeleton of a man, encased in the same material. If the colonel was not deceived, it is certain that some of the lava which now covers large tracts of country in many parts of New Mexico, and especially Arizona, and still looks bright and fresh, was poured over the surface within the present epoch; but it cannot prove that either the convulsions of the earth or climatic changes produced by them so altered the condition of the land that it starved out its inhabitants. The natural workings of cause and effect are, I think, sufficient to account for the present desolation of these regions, without calling to our aid either meteorology or geology.

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adapted from A. W. Bell
"On the Native Races of New Mexico"
1869 (Journal of the Ethnological Society of London)