The little community that built their houses here seem to have practised all the industries of a savage life. In one place there was evidence that on that spot had been carried on the manufacture of stone implements. At another place holes had been drilled, as if for a loom. In the main building there were fourteen rooms or apartments, ranging from sixteen to nine feet in width. “In the central room of the main building we found a circular, basin-like depression, that had served as a fireplace, being still filled with the ashes and cinders of aboriginal fires, the surrounding walls being blackened with smoke and soot. This room was undoubtedly the kitchen of the house. Some of the smaller rooms appear to have been used for the same purpose, the fires having been made in the corner against the back wall, the smoke escaping overhead. The masonry displayed in the construction of the walls is very creditable. A symmetrical curve is preserved throughout the whole line, and every portion perfectly plumb. The subdivisions are at right angles to the front. The whole appearance of the place and its surroundings indicate that the family or little community who inhabited it were in good circumstances, and the lords of the surrounding country. Looking out from one of their houses, with a great dome of solid rock overhead that echoed and re-echoed every word uttered with marvelous distinctness, and below them a steep descent of one hundred feet to the broad, fertile valley of the Rio San Juan, covered with waving fields of maize and scattered groves of majestic cotton-woods, these old people, whom even the imagination can hardly clothe with reality, must have felt a sense of security that even the incursions of their barbarian foes could hardly have disturbed.”21 To describe the defensive ruins on Epsom Creek, Montezuma Creek, and the McElmo is simply to repeat descriptions already given. We meet with cave-houses, cliff-houses, and sentinel-towers in abundance. The whole section appears to have been thickly settled. Further explorations will doubtless make known many more ruins, but probably nothing differing in kind from what is already known. We think the defensive ruins belong to a later period of their existence than do the old and time-worn structures we have hitherto described along the river valleys and open plains, as at Aztec Springs. These structures plainly show that at the time they were built the people were subject to an invasion from a stronger foe, one before whose approach they had to fly for protection to the almost inaccessible cliffs.