The region of the high plateaus of the southwestern United States presents many strange and interesting aspects. Equipped with pack animals for the trails, and conducted by a guide who knows the position of the springs, one might wander for months over this rugged and semi-arid region without becoming weary of the wonderful sights which Nature has prepared. In travelling over the plateau one has to consider that often for long distances the precipitous walls of the canons cannot be scaled, and that the springs are few and inaccessible. To one not acquainted with the plateau it appears incapable of supporting human life. There is little wild game and scarcely any water to irrigate the dry soil. However, if the country is examined closely, the discovery will be made that it was once inhabited, though by a people very different from the savage Indians who wandered over it when the white men first came. These early people had permanent homes and were much more civilized than the Indians. They lived chiefly by agriculture, cultivating little patches of land wherever water could be obtained. Go in whatever way you will from the meeting point of the four states and territories, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, and you will find the ruins of houses and forts. Upon the tops of precipitous cliffs, in the caves with which the canon walls abound, by the streams and springs, there are crumbling stone buildings, many of them of great extent, and once capable of sheltering hundreds of people. Scattered over the surface of the ground and buried in the soil about the ruins are fragments of pottery, stone implements, corn-cobs, and in protected spots the remains of corn and squash stems. The people who once inhabited these ruins have been called Cliff Dwellers, because their homes are so frequently found clinging to the cliffs, like the nests of birds, in the caverns and recesses of the precipitous canon walls. The Cliff Dwellers have left no written records, but from a study of their buildings and of the materials found in them, and from the traces of irrigating ditches, we are sure that they were a peaceful, agricultural people. The oldest ruins are probably those in the open and less protected valleys. It is evident that after these dwellings had been occupied for an indefinite time the more fierce and warlike Indians began to overrun the plateau region and make attacks upon the primitive inhabitants. These people, peacefully inclined and probably not strong in numbers, could find no protection in the valleys where they irrigated little patches of land and raised corn and squashes; so, retreating to the more inaccessible canons, they became cliff dwellers. Seeking out the caverns so abundant in these canons, they went to work with tireless energy to build for themselves impregnable homes and fortresses to which they could retreat when the savage Indians appeared.