But to the cliff dwellers and their first descendants of the farther north this period "after the planting" was the only available one of the year; for the journey along their trail of salt must have consumed many days, and been so fraught with danger as to have drawn away a goodly portion of the warrior population who could ill be spared at a later time in the season when the ripening and garnering of the harvest drew back upon the cliff-towns people the bands of predatory savages who annually pillaged their outlying fields, and in terror of whom they for so long a time clung to their refuge in the cliffs. Additional considerations lead further to the inference not only that the Zuñis inherit their pilgrimages for the salt and the commemorative and other ceremonials which have developed around them directly from the cliff-dweller branch of their ancestry, but also that these latter were led down from the cliffs to build and dwell in their round towns along the trail of salt chiefly, if not wholly, by the desire to at once shorten and render less dangerous their communal expeditions to the Lake of Salt and to secure more exclusive possession thereof. These two objects were rendered equally and the more desirable by the circumstance, strongly indicated by both the salt remains themselves and by usages surviving among the present Zuñis, that in course of time an extensive trade in salt of this particular variety grew up between the cliff dwellers and more northern and western tribes. When found by the Spaniards the Zuñi-Cibolans were still carrying on an extensive trade in this salt, which for practical as well as assumed mythic reasons they permitted no others to gather, and which they guarded so jealously that their wars with the Keresan and other tribes to the south-southeastward of their country were caused--as many of their later wars with the Navajo have been caused--by slight encroachments on the exclusive right to the products of the lake to which the Zuñis laid claim.