We spent altogether about six weeks in Cave Valley, and the weather, as far as our experience went, was pleasant enough, although in February, for several days, a strong, cold wind was blowing, so as to interfere with our work in the mounds at daytime and with our sleep at night.  In addition to the discomforting feeling that at any moment my tent might be blown down, I was worried by the possibility of its falling on the results of our excavations, the pottery and skeletons, which, for safety’s sake, I kept in my tent.  The situation was not improved by some indiscreet burro (donkey), who would stray into the camp and get himself entangled in the tent ropes.

On January 30th nearly seven inches of snow fell.  One day a flock of twenty-five turkeys was observed near our camp; but our efforts to get within shooting distance proved futile, as these cunning birds, who apparently move about so unconcernedly, always disappeared as if they had vanished into the ground, whenever one of us, no matter how cautiously, tried to approach them.

News of Apaches was again afloat, and one day a Mexican officer called at the camp obviously in pursuit of Apaches from whom he had recently taken twelve horses:  but unfortunately the men had escaped.  The presidente of Casas Grandes had been advised of the killing of two Americans near San Bernardino by some Apaches, and had also ordered some men to look for the miscreants in the sierra.

Having thoroughly investigated the caves, we turned our attention to the mounds, which are very numerous in this part of the country.  They are always covered with grass, and sometimes even trees grow on them.  When excavated they disclosed the remains of houses of a type similar to that of the cave-dwellings.  Some of the mounds were high enough to justify the supposition that the houses had two stories, each six or seven feet high, and containing a number of rooms.  From the locality in which the mounds were found it becomes at once evident that the houses which once stood there were not destroyed by inundations and covered by diluvial deposits.  The mounds are composed of gravelly cement and fine debris of house walls, and the rooms left are completely filled with this material.  It is easy to imagine how the mounds were formed by the gradual demolition of the ceilings, plastering, and roofs, forming a heap which to-day appears as shapely as if it had been made by man for some definite purpose.

The houses were communal dwellings, each consisting of one room, which generally was not quite ten feet square.  The walls, eight to nine inches thick, built of a mixture of clay and earth, were fairly well preserved in places.  In one house, which had unusually solid compartments, the walls were twenty, and in some places even thirty-three, inches thick.  Here nothing could be found, either in the rooms or by excavating below the floor.  The same conventional doorways were met with in all the mound houses, but there was hardly any trace Of woodwork.