Judged by the everyday life that is familiar to us it seems incredible that houses should ever have been built or homes established in such hazardous places, or that any people should have ever lived there. But that they did is an established fact as there stand the houses which were built and occupied by human beings in the midst of surroundings that might appall the stoutest heart. Children played and men and women wrought on the brink of frightful precipices in a space so limited and dangerous that a single misstep made it fatal. It is almost impossible to conceive of any condition in life, or combination of circumstances in the affairs of men, that should drive any people to the rash act of living in the houses of the cliff dwellers. Men will sometimes do from choice what they cannot be made to do by compulsion. It is easier to believe that the cliff dwellers, being free people, chose of their own accord the site of their habitation rather than that from any cause they were compelled to make the choice. Their preference was to live upon the cliffs, as they were fitted by nature for such an environment. For no other reason, apparently, do the Moquis live upon their rocky and barren mesas away from everything which the civilized white man deems desirable, yet, in seeming contentment. The Supais, likewise, choose to live alone at the bottom of Cataract Canon where they are completely shut in by high cliffs. Their only road out is by a narrow and dangerous trail up the side of the canon, which is little traveled as they seldom leave home and are rarely visited. To affirm that the cliff dwellers were driven from their strongholds and dispersed by force is pure fiction, nor is there any evidence to support such a theory. That they had enemies no one doubts, but, being in possession of an impregnable position where one man could successfully withstand a thousand, to surrender would have been base cowardice, and weakness was not a characteristic of the cliff dwellers. The question of their subsistence is likewise a puzzle. They evidently cultivated the soil where it was practicable to do so as fragments of farm products have been found in their dwellings, but in the vicinity of some of the houses there is no tillable land and the inhabitants must have depended upon other means for support. The wild game which was, doubtless, abundant furnished them with meat and edible seeds, fruits and roots from native plants like the pinon pine and mesquite which together with the saguaro and mescal, supplied them with a variety of food sufficient for their subsistence as they do, in a measure, the wild Indian tribes of that region at the present day. [1] The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, by F. Nordenskiold, Stockholm. 1893. [2] An Elder Brother of the Cliff Dwellers, by T. M. Prudden, M.D. Harper's Magazine, June, 1897. [3] Pueblo and Cliff Dwellers of the Southwest. Records of the Past, December, 1902. CHAPTER XIII