About three months before my first expedition into Mexico, I saw a notice going the rounds of the press that living cliff dwellers had been seen in the San Mateo Mountains of New Mexico, and that as soon as the snow melted a mounted party would be organized to pursue and capture them; but I have heard nothing from it, beyond the little stir created at the time, and which the finding of any living cliff dwellers anywhere would be likely to create. Yet here are people of that description, of whom the world seems to have heard nothing. How many there are of them, as I have already said, it seems hard to tell. We saw at least five to six hundred scattered around in the fastnesses of this grand old mountain chain, and could probably have trebled this if we had been looking for cave and cliff dwellers alone along and off our line of travel. Let us place them at only three thousand in strength, and we would have enough to write a huge book upon, giving as startling developments as one could probably make from the interior of some wholly unknown continent--in fact more curious; for the public is somewhat prepared for such a story by the large number of old deserted cliff dwellings found in Arizona and New Mexico, which have often been assigned to a people older than the ruins of the Toltec or Aztec races. That there is some relation between these old cliff dwellers and the new ones I think more than likely; and I believe that most writers who have seen both, or rather the ruins of the former and much of the life of the latter, as I have, would agree with me in this view. It is pretty clearly settled that the Apaches are Athabascans, and came from the far north; and it seems not unlikely that they drove southward or exterminated the northern cliff dwellers, leaving only these here as representatives, although numerous beyond belief, of a most curious race generally supposed to be extinct. The Pueblo Indians, of the same locality, by living in larger communities and stronger abodes were better able to resist these Indian Northmen, and consequently some of their towns still exist; but the old cliff dwellers, like the new ones, could in many cases be cut off from water by a persistent and aggressive enemy, such as the Apaches must have been then, when just fresh from their northern excursion. It is still more probable, however, that they drove them southward until the retreating cliff dwellers became so powerful by being massed upon their southern brothers that they could resist further aggression, and therefore give successful battle to their old foe, as we know they have been able to do recently when the Apaches were performing such destructive work in this part of the country.