I myself began life handicapped with serious ill health, and for twenty-two years was seldom free from pain. Nervous irritability required constant battling. But when I began to realize the benefit of life spent in God’s great out-of-doors, and devoted much of my time to climbing up and down steep canyon walls, riding over the plains and mountains of Nevada and California, wandering through the aseptic wastes of the deserts of the Southwest, rowing and swimming in the waters of the great Colorado River, sleeping nightly in the open air, and in addition, coming in intimate contact with many tribes of Indians, and learning from them how to live a simple, natural, and therefore healthy life,--these things not only gave to me almost perfect health, but have suggested the material of which this book is made. CHAPTER III THE INDIAN AND NASAL AND DEEP BREATHING The Indian believes absolutely in nasal breathing. Again and again I have seen the Indian mother, as soon as her child was born, watch it to see if it breathed properly. If not, she would at once pinch the child’s lips together and keep them pinched until the breath was taken in and exhaled easily and naturally through the nostrils. If this did not answer, I have watched her as she took a strip of buckskin and tied it as a bandage below the chin and over the crown of the head, forcing the jaws together, and then with another bandage of buckskin she covered the lips of the little one. Thus the habit of nasal breathing was formed immediately the child saw the light, and it knew no other method.