Through some but not all of these gorges run never-failing streams of clear water.  In a few instances the gorge expands and takes the proportions of a narrow vale.  Then the high timber that usually skirts the rivulets shrinks to detached groves, and patches of clear land appear, which, if cultivated, would afford scanty support to one or two modern families.  To the village Indian such tillable spots were of the greatest value.  The deep ravine afforded shelter not only against the climate but against roving enemies, and the land was sufficient for his modest crops; since his wants were limited, and game was abundant.

The material of which the walls of these canons are composed, suggested in times past to the house-building Indian the idea of using them as a home.  The tufa and pumice-stone are so friable that, as we have said, the rock can be dug or burrowed with the most primitive implements.  It was easier, in fact, to excavate dwellings than to pile up walls in the open air.

Therefore the northern sides of these secluded gorges are perforated in many places by openings similar in appearance to pigeon-holes.  These openings are the points of exit and entrance of artificial caves, dug out by sedentary aborigines in times long past.  They are met with in clusters of as many as several hundred; more frequently, however, the groups are small.  Sometimes two or more tiers of caves are superimposed.  From the objects scattered about and in the cells, and from the size and disposition of the latter, it becomes evident that the people who excavated and inhabited them were on the same level of culture as the so-called Pueblo Indians of New Mexico.

It is not surprising, therefore, that some traditions and myths are preserved to-day among the Pueblos concerning these cave-villages.  Thus the Tehua Indians of the pueblo of Santa Clara assert that the artificial grottos of what they call the Puiye and the Shufinne, west of their present abodes, were the homes of their ancestors at one time.  The Queres of Cochiti in turn declare that the tribe to which they belong, occupied, many centuries before the first coming of Europeans to New Mexico, the cluster of cave-dwellings, visible at this day although abandoned and in ruins, in that romantic and picturesquely secluded gorge called in the Queres dialect Tyuonyi, and in Spanish “El Rito de los Frijoles.”

The Rito is a beautiful spot.  Situated in a direct line not over twenty miles west of Santa Fe, it can still be reached only after a long day’s tedious travel.  It is a narrow valley, nowhere broader than half a mile; and from where it begins in the west to where it closes in a dark and gloomy entrance, scarcely wide enough for two men to pass abreast, in the east, its length does not exceed six miles.  Its southern rim is formed by the slope of a timbered mesa, and that slope is partly overgrown by shrubbery.  The northern border constitutes a line of vertical