In this land of weather-worn porphyry and inter-stratified sandstone, natural caves are met with everywhere, in which the people find a convenient and safe shelter.  Although it may be said that houses are their main habitations, still the Tarahumares live in caves to such an extent that they may be fitly called the American cave-dwellers of the present age.

Caves were man’s first abode, and they are found in certain geological formations in all parts of the globe.  Human imagination always peopled the deep, dark caverns with terrible monsters guarding treasures, and legends and fairy tales still cling about many of them.  Shallow caves, however, have from the earliest time attracted man to seek shelter in them, just as the animals took refuge in them against the inclemency of the weather.  Prehistoric man in Europe was a cave-dweller, and modern investigations have given us a clear and vivid picture of the life of the ancient race, who existed in France while the mammoth and the reindeer were roaming over the plains of western Europe.

As civilisation advanced, under changing climatic conditions, and as man began to improve his tools and implements, he deserted the caves and preferred to live in houses of his own building.  But a long time after the caves had been abandoned as abodes of the living, they were still used for interring the dead.  Do we not remember the story told in Genesis, how Abraham bought for 400 shekels a cave from Ephron that he might bury Sarah there and have a family tomb?

The cave-dwellers of France vanished many thousand years ago; but there are yet in several parts of the globe, for instance, in Tunis and in Central Africa, races who still adhere to the custom of living in caves, although their condition of life is different from that of the antediluvian cave-dwellers.

In Mexico the cave-dwellers are in a transitory state, most of them having adopted houses and sheds; but many of them are still unable to perceive why they should give up their safe and comfortable natural shelters for rickety abodes of their own making.  Padre Juan Fonte, the pioneer missionary to the Tarahumares, who penetrated into their country eighteen leagues from San Pablo, toward Guachochic, speaks of the numerous caves in that country and relates that many of them were divided into small houses.  Other records, too, allude to the existence of cave-dwellers in that part of the Sierra Madre.  Still, the fact of there being cave-dwellers to-day in Mexico was until recently known only to the Mexicans living in their neighbourhood, who regard this condition of things as a matter of course.