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Show BY PATH AND TRAIL. 157 rite of the " Feast of the Snake/ 7 when the tribal medi cine men, or shamans, holding in their mouths and fond ling venomous rattlesnakes, dance around and through the sacred fire, and rushing wildly through the assembled crowd of women and children, disappear behind the estu-fas and liberate the reptiles. These Moqui dwellings and the Zuni pueblos of New Mexico are the oldest continu ously inhabited structures in America and probably re main more nearly in their original state than those of any other aboriginal people in North or South America. For ethnological study it is hardly possible to overes timate the value of these strange people the Moquis and the Zunis. In the accounts of their early explora tions the Spanish missionary fathers found from eighty to a hundred cells of these pueblo and cliff dwellers in habited in Sonora, Chihuahua and Arizona. Clearly the whole of New Mexico, Arizona and northern Mexico was occupied by these semi- civilized people, who lived in caves, stone and adobe houses, cultivated the land with stone hoes, and irrigated it with water brought in chan nels from the nearest river. Centuries before the advent of the Spaniards, the decline of the race began, and event ually would have ended in total savagery if the European had not entered upon the scene. Internecine wars, drought, pestilence, and, above all, the coming into the land of the fierce Apaches, or Dinnes, and their many predatory and annihilating raids, wore down the ancient race and threatened their extinction. All the adobe and stone ruins, all the remains of ditches and canals from all over the river lands of New Mexico and Arizona, are the relics of these strange people. This is not the place to enter into a disquisition on the origin or migration of the race. I may, however, |