Zuñi Mythology. Frank Hamilton Cushing

and fur or fiber, and down or cotton breech clouts, while in the silver rings and bracelets of today, not only the shapes but even the half-natural markings of the original shell rings and bracelets survive, and the silver buttons and bosses but perpetuate and multiply those once made of copper as well as of shell and white bone.

      Thus, only one absolutely new practical element and activity was introduced by the Spaniards—beasts of burden and beast transportation and labor. But until the present century cattle were not used natively for drawing loads or plows, the latter of which, until recently being made of a convenient fork, are only enlarged harrowing-sticks pointed with a leaf of iron in place of the blade of flint; nor were carts employed. Burdens were transported in panniers adapted to the backs of burros instead of to the shoulders of men.

      The Zuñi is a splendid rider, but even now his longest journeys are made on foot in the old way. He has for centuries lived a settled life, traveling but little, and the horse has therefore not played a very conspicuous part in his later life as in the lives of less sedentary peoples, and is consequently unheard of, as are all new things—including the greatest of all, the white man himself—in his tribal lore, or the folk tales, myths, and rituals of his sacred cult-societies. All this strengthens materially the claim heretofore made, that in mind, and especially in religious culture, the Zuñi is almost as strictly archaic as in the days ere his land was discovered.