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Show BY PATH AND TEA1L. 191 vaes ' unfortunate expedition which went to pieces at the mouth of the Suwanee river, one hundred years before De Soto crossed the Mississippi. After them came the fearless and saintly missionary, Padre Eusebio Kino, so highly praised by Venaga, the early historian of Cali fornia. Of the time when the Casa Grande was left deso late before the coming of the Spaniards as early as 1539, or when the ground was broken for the foundations of the town, whose walls even then were an indistinguish able heap of ruins, the neighboring tribes had no tradi tion. It is really wonderful how these structures of sun-dried brick have resisted the ravages of decay and the elements for 500 years of known time. These mysterious people carried from the Grila Elver an irrigation canal three miles long, 27 feet wide and 10 feet deep, and converted the barren sands around them into fertile gardens. The word " pueblo " in Span ish means simply a village, but in American ethnography it has obtained a special significance from the peculiar style of the structures or groups of buildings scattered along the Gila and Salt Eiver valleys, whose architecture was unlike that of any buildings found outside the north ern frontiers of Mexico, Arizona and New Mexico. The most fertile valleys of these regions were occupied by a semi- civilized and agricultural race. The face of these lands was dotted with buildings five and six stories high, held in common by many families, and in many instances the houses and villages were superior to those of the new existing pueblo towns. They were built for defense, the walls of great thickness and the approaches in many cases difficult. At least a century, perhaps many centu ries, before the coming of the Spaniards, the decline be gan and continued with the certainty of a decree of fate, |