"In manufacturing cotton they display much skill, although their looms are of the simplest kind. 'A woman was seated on the ground under one of the cotton sheds. Her left leg was turned under, and the sole of her foot upwards. Between her large toe and the next was a spindle, about eighteen inches long, with a single fly of four or six inches. Ever and anon, she gave it a twist in a dexterous manner, and at its end was drawn a coarse cotton thread. This was their spinning machine. Led on by this primitive display, I asked for their loom, pointing first to the thread, and then to the blanket girded about the woman's loins. A fellow stretched in the dust, sunning himself, rose up leisurely, and untied a bundle which I had supposed to be a bow and arrows. This little package, with four stakes in the ground, was the loom. He stretched his cloth and commenced the process of weaving. "They had salt among them, which they obtained from the plains. Wherever there are 'bottoms' which have no drainage, the salt effloresces, and is skimmed from the surface of the earth. It was brought to us both in the crystallized form, and in the form when first collected, mixed with earth. "The plain upon which the Pimos village stands, extends fifteen or twenty miles in every direction, and is very rich and fertile. The bed of the Gila, opposite the village, is said to be dry, the whole water being drawn off by the _zequias_ of the Pimos for irrigating their lands; but their ditches are larger than necessary for the purpose, and the water which is not used returns to the river, with little apparent diminution in its volume. "It is scarcely to be doubted, that the Pimos are the Indians described by Father Garcias and Pedro Font, as living on the south bank of the Gila, in the vicinity of the Casas Grandes. They lived in two villages, called Utuicut and Sutaquisau, and are described by these explorers to have been peaceable and industrious cultivators of the soil. When Father Font tried to persuade them of the advantages which would result from the establishment of Christian missions, where an Indian alcalde would govern with strict justice, a chief answered that this was not necessary for them. 'For,' said he, 'we do not steal, we rarely quarrel; why should we want an alcalde?'"[149] This is enough for a characteristic; to which it should be added that the area of the Casas Grandes, and that of the agricultural (or semi-agricultural) industry of the Pimos and other tribes coincide. So little, however, are these parts known, that our evidence comes almost exclusively from two quarters--the early Spanish explorers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the very recent American surveyors, the circumnavigators (to use an expression of Gallatin's) of the Californian Desert of the last decennium.