And this it would seem points as unmistakably to such use of forked and notched step logs or crotch-logs as I have attributed to the rancheria builders, as does the "rope-and-slat" ladder-name to the use of the very different climbing device I have attributed to the cliff dwellers. It is probable that when the round-town builders had peopled the trail of salt as far from the northward as to the region of Zuñi and beyond, the absence of very deep canyons, containing rock-sheltered nooks sufficiently large and numerous to enable them to find adequate accommodation for cliff villages, gradually led them to abandon all resort to the cliffs for protection--made them at last no longer cliff dwellers, even temporarily, but true Pueblos, or town dwellers of the valleys and plains. But other influences than those of merely natural or physical environment were required to change their mode of building, and correspondingly, to some extent, their institutions and modes of life from those of round-town builders to those of square-town builders, such as in greater part they were at the time of the Spanish discoveries. In the myths themselves may be found a clew as to what these influences were in that which is told of the coming together of the "People of the Midmost" and these "Dwellers-in-the-towns-builded-round." For there is evidence in abundance also of other kind, and not a little of it of striking force and interest, that this coming together was itself the chief cause of the changes referred to. It has been seen that the western branch of the Zuñi ancestry (who were these "People of the Midmost") were almost from the beginning dwellers in square structures; that their village clusters, even when several of their dwelling places happened to be built together, were, as shown by their remains wherever found, built precisely on the plans of single-house structures--that is, they were simple extensions, mostly rectilinear, of these single houses themselves.