These ancient people of the Colorado region, Yuman or other, had, as their remains show (not in their earliest period, nor yet in a later stage of their development, when a diverging branch of them--"Our lost others"[5]--had attained to a high state of culture in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, but at the time of their migration in part Zuñiward), houses of quite a different type from those of the north. They were mainly rancherias, that is, more or less scattered over the mesas and plains. They were but rarely round, commonly parallelogrammic, and either single or connected in straight L-shape or double L-shape rows. The foundations were of rough stones, designed probably to hold more firmly in place the cane-wattled, mud-plastered stockades which formed the sides and ends as well as (in the house rows) the partitions. They owed their rectangular shapes not to crowding, but to development from an original log-built house type--in the open (like the rancheria house type of the Tarahumári), to which may also be traced their generally greater length than width. They were single storied, with rather flat or slightly sloping roofs, although the high pitched roof of thatch was not wholly unknown, for it was still employed on elevated granaries; but sometimes (this was especially the case with single houses) the stockade posts were carried up above this roof on three sides, and overlaid with saplings on which, in turn, a bower of brush or cane or grass was constructed to protect from the sun rather than from rain. Thus a sort of rude and partial second story was formed, which was reached from below by means of a notched step-log made of a forked or branching tree-trunk, the forks being placed against the edge of the roof proper to keep the log (the butt of which rested on the ground) from turning when being ascended.[6] [5] See pages 403, 405-406. [6] See Mindeleff, Architecture of Tusayan and Cibola, Eighth Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethnology, p. 157. Of these single houses the "bowers" described in the following myth of the creation of corn (see page 391), and typically surviving still to a great extent in the cornfield or farm huts of modern Zuñi, may be taken as fair examples; and of the villages or hut-row structures of these ancient plains and valley people, an excellent example may be found in the long-houses of the Mohave and other Yumans of the valley of Colorado river. Both these hut-row houses and the single-room houses were generally surrounded by low walls of loose stone, stone and mud, stockade and mud, or of mud alone; and as often as not one side or the front of a hut within such a wall inclosure was left entirely open.