The walls of ancient caves today are pocked with nail holes. Sheepherders might have camped for a while and left initials and dates picked in the soft stone. Cow bones strewn at the base of the cliff, now dry and white and brittle with age, are the only sad memorials of what went on. And many are the hidden legends. Every little canyon in the locality has a name. Something happened to give them their names. One, Water Canyon, was formerly known as “Diesmo” or “Ten-Percent Canyon,” because a priest collected ten percent of the lambs from sheep owners as a tithe for the church and herded his flocks in this valley. Everything has a meaning in this colorful land. There still exists today a circular platform of blocks of tuff on the floor of Frijoles Canyon. Local farmers claim that it belonged to them and their fathers before them. It was used as a threshing floor. I have heard that it was a dance pavilion or platform and was advised that if I brought over some of the Indian women from San Ildefonso and asked them to do what they were supposed to do, they would begin dancing the ring dance. The stories are many but will the truth ever be known? Time is slipping by. Within quite recent years the Navaho has used the old trails, just passing through, going to some pueblo to trade perhaps. Even Zuñi Indians have passed through the Valley of the Tyuonyi—resting a few minutes and drinking of the waters of El Rito de Los Frijoles as they might have done in years past when they were supposed to have visited the Stone Lions to the south. And Indians from Cochiti have returned to their Tyuonyi during summer months to raise a little corn. These people religiously return to the homes of their ancestors. Even today, certain of the old Tewa men from northern pueblos trudge south into timbered mountainous country and erect shrines near their ancestral homes. They carve miniature pueblos three and four stories high out of volcanic boulders of soft ash. They build altars and burn ceremonial fires. They dig holes in the soft ground, line them with little rocks and cover the holes with green branches from the juniper tree. Many times I have seen evidences of these ceremonies along dry arroyo banks on the Pajarito Plateau. CHAPTER VIII Present Times In 1880, Adolph F. Bandelier, famous Swiss ethnologist, archivist and historian, entered the Valley of the Frijoles.