When the Spaniard came into Arizona and New Mexico three hundred and fifty years ago, he found the art of weaving in a well-advanced stage among the domestic and sedentary Pueblo Indians, and the wild and nomad Navahoes. The cotton of these blankets was grown by these Arizona Indians from time immemorial, and they also used the tough fibres of the yucca, and agave leaves, and the hairs of various wild animals, either separately or with cotton. Their processes of weaving were exactly the same then as they are to-day, there being but slight differences between the methods followed before the advent of the whites and after. Hence, in a study of Indian blanketry, as it is made even to-day, we are approximating nearly to the pure aboriginal methods of pre-Columbian times. [5] This chapter is composed mainly from an article of mine entitled "Indian Blanketry," which appeared in _Outing_ of March, 1902. Archæologists and ethnologists generally presume that the art of weaving on the loom was learned by the Navahoes from their Pueblo neighbors. All the facts in the case seem to bear out this supposition. Yet, as is well known, the Navahoes are a part of the great Athabascan family, which has scattered, by separate migrations, from Alaska into California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Many of the Alaskans are good weavers, and according to Navaho traditions, their ancestors, when they came into the country, wore blankets that were made of cedar bark and of yucca fibre. Even in the Alaska (Thlinket) blankets, made to-day of the wool of the white mountain-goat, cedar bark is twisted in with the wool of the warp. Why, then, should not the Navaho woman have brought the art of weaving, possibly in a very primitive condition, from her original Alaskan home? That her art, however, has been improved by contact with the pueblo Hopi, and other Indians, there can be no question, and, if she had a crude loom, it was speedily replaced by the one so long used by the Pueblo. Where the Pueblo weaver gained her loom we do not know, whether from the tribes of the South, or by her own invention. But in all practical ways the primitive loom was as complete and perfect at the Spanish conquest as it is to-day. Any loom, to be complete, must possess certain qualifications. As Professor Mason has well said: "In any style of mechanical weaving, however simple or complex, even in darning, the following operations are performed: First, raising and lowering alternately different sets of warp filaments to form the 'sheds'; second, throwing the shuttle, or performing some operation that amounts to the same thing; third, after inserting the weft thread, driving it home, and adjusting it by means of the batten,--be it the needle, the finger, the shuttle, or a separate device."