The Indians of the terraced houses / by Charles Francis Saunders ; with numerous illustrations from photographs mainly by C.F. and E.H. Saunders.

  • Charles Francis Saunders
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Indians of the terraced houses / by Charles Francis Saunders ; with numerous illustrations from photographs mainly by C.F. and E.H. Saunders. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    VI] directing more general attention to what our country possesses in that remarkable aboriginal remnant—the Indians of the Terraced Houses, as an old Spanish chronicler called them—that this book has been written. With the hope goes the earnest prayer that something will be sympathetically done by the people of our great Republic to arrest the dis- integration and sure extinction of these little Pueblo republics—an extinction towards which the present well-intended but misdirected govern- mental interference is inevitably tending. What John Fiske, in his preface to The Discovery of America, states of one section of the Pueblos— the Hopis—is true of them all: Some extremely ancient types of society [says this American historian], still preserved on this continent in something like purity, are among the most instruc- tive monuments of the past that can now be found in the world. Such a type is that of the Moquis of north-eastern Arizona. I have heard a rumour . . . that there are persons who wish the United States Government to interfere with this peaceful and self- respecting people, break up their pueblo life, scatter them in farmsteads, and otherwise compel them, against their own wishes, to change their habits and