cut out blocks of the tufa and with them built pueblos two or three
stories high. The blocks are usually about twenty inches in length,
eight inches in width, and six inches in thickness, though they vary
somewhat in size. On the volcanic cones which dominate the country these
people built shrines and worshiped their gods with offerings of meal and
water and with prayer symbols made of the plumage of the birds of the
air. When the Navajo invasion came, by which kindred tribes were
displaced from the district farther west, these Tewan Indians left their
pueblos on the plateau and their dwellings by the rivers below in the
depths of the canyon and constructed cavate homes for themselves; that
is, they excavated chambers in the cliffs where these cliffs were
composed of soft, friable tufa. On the face of the cliff, hundreds of
feet high and thousands of feet or even miles in length, they dug out
chambers with stone tools, these chambers being little rooms eight or
ten feet in diameter. Sometimes two or more such chambers connected.
Then they constructed stairways in the soft rock, by which their cavate
houses were reached; and in these rock shelters they lived during times
of war. When the Navajo invasion was long past, civilized men as Spanish
adventurers entered this country from Mexico, and again the Tewan
peoples left their homes on the mesas and by the canyons to find safety
in the cavate dwellings of the cliffs; and now the archaeologist in the
study of this country discovers these two periods of construction and
occupation of the cavate dwellings of the Tewan Indians.

North of the Rio San Juan another vast plateau region is found,
stretching to the Grand River. The mountains of this region are the La
Plata Mountains, Bear River Mountains, and San Miguel Mountains on the
east, and the Sierra El Late, the Sierra Abajo, and the Sierra La Sal on
the west, the latter standing near the brink of Cataract Canyon, through
which the Colorado flows immediately below the junction of the Grand and