During the wars which for many years marked the intercourse of the Navajos with the whites—both Spaniards and Americans—the Cañon de Chelly was a notable stronghold of the red men. It was here that in 1864 Kit Carson and his troopers at last succeeded in breaking the backbone of the Indian resistance. Today the Navajos are as peaceable as the Pueblos. According to Navajo legends, the boundaries of their land were marked out for them by the gods who brought them up through the great reed from the lower world.[51] These landmarks were in the form of mountains especially created for the purpose of earth brought from the lower world, and were seven in number. Of these the Sacred Mountain of the East is believed to be Pelado Peak, 20 miles northeast of Jemes pueblo and it was made fast to the earth by a bolt of lightning; the Sacred Mountain of the South is known to be Mount San Matéo, 20 miles or so northwest of Laguna pueblo, held in place by a great stone knife thrust through it from summit to base; the Sacred Mountain of the West, is the San Francisco Mountain, 12 miles north of Flagstaff, Arizona, fastened down by a sunbeam; and the Sacred Mountain of the North is some one of the San Juan range, which a rainbow held in place. The other three are peaks of the mid-region, only one of which, Hosta Butte in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, has been identified.[52] Two of these mountains are plainly visible from the Santa Fe Railway trains and by motorists following the National Old Trails transcontinental highway—namely, the San Francisco Mountain (12,611 feet) and Mount San Matéo (11,389 feet). Both are extinct volcanoes. The vicinity of Mount San Matéo (which is also known as Mount Taylor)[53] is the scene of a thrilling tradition. There it was that the Navajo Gods of War (children of the Sun and of the Waterfall), mounted upon a rainbow, met and slew with lightning bolts the boy-eating giant, Ye-itso. The latter was a monster so huge that the spread of his two feet was a day’s journey for a man, his footfalls were as thunder, and when he drank his draught exhausted a lake. His head, cut off by the War-gods and tossed away, was changed into El Cabezon, a truncated cone of a mountain visible 40 miles northeast from San Matéo; and his blood flowing in a deluge to the south and west is what we white folk in our ignorance call a hardened lava-flow, as we watch it from the car window for miles westward from McCarty’s. Look at it again with the eyes of faith, and is not its semblance that of coagulated, blackened blood?