A fragment of folklore, which is widely distributed among both the aboriginal peoples of Gila valley and the modern Tusayan Indians, recounts how the latter were at one time in communication with the people of the south, and traditions of both distinctly connect the sedentary people of Tusayan with those who formerly inhabited the great pueblos, now in ruins, dotting the plain in the delta between Gila and Salt rivers. That archeology might give valuable information on this question had long been my conviction, and was the main influence which led me to the studies recorded in the following pages. An examination of a map of Arizona will show that one of the pathways or feasible routes of travel possible to have been used in any connection between the pueblos of the Gila and those of northern Arizona would naturally be along Rio Verde valley. Its tributaries rise at the foot of San Francisco mountains, and the main river empties into the Salt, traversing from north to south a comparatively fertile valley, in the main advantageous for the subsistence of semisedentary bands in their migrations. Here was a natural highway leading from the Gila pueblos, now in ruins, to the former villages in the north. The study of the archeology of Verde valley had gone far enough to show that the banks of the river were formerly the sites of many and populous pueblos, while the neighboring mesas from one end to another are riddled with cavate dwellings or crowned with stone buildings. Northward from that famous crater-like depression in the Verde region, the so-called Montezuma Well on Beaver creek, one of the affluents of the Rio Verde, little archeological exploration had been attempted. There was, in other words, a break in the almost continuous series of ruins from Tusayan as far south as the Gila. Ruined towns had been reported as existing not far southward from San Francisco mountains,[5] and from there by easy stages the abodes of a former race had been detected at intervals all the way to the Tusayan pueblos. At either end the chain of ruins between the Tusayan towns and the Gila ruins was unbroken, but middle links were wanting. All conditions imply former habitations in this untrodden hiatus, the region between the Verde and the Tusayan series, ending near the present town of Flagstaff, Arizona; but southward from that town the country was broken and impassable, a land where the foot of the archeologist had not trodden. Remains of human habitations had, however, been reported by ranchmen, but these reports were vague and unsatisfactory. So far as they went they confirmed my suspicions, and there were other significant facts looking the same way. The color of the red cliffs fulfilled the Tusayan tradition of Palatkwabi, or their former home in the far south. Led by all these considerations, before I took to the field I had long been convinced that this must have been one of the homes of certain Hopi clans, and when the occasion