The head gear, if any be worn, as is often the case, is simply a large colored handkerchief.  Girls are usually dressed like the daughters of Southern farmers, but they refuse to discard the bloomers, over which the petticoats are worn a little below the knees.  These leather pantalettes are a necessity in a country where poisonous snakes and insects abound in gardens and fields.  To see a Pueblo girl at her best, she must be surprised in animated gossip in a bevy of girl friends, or when engaged in mirthful laughter while at work.  Then the expressive, deep black eyes sparkle and the white teeth offer a glittering contrast to her fine black tresses, eyes and eyebrows.  The Pueblo Indians are to be congratulated on one fact especially, that they permitted their moral improvement through the agency of the black-frocked missionaries and school teachers who came from the East, but also that they are one of the few tribes who resisted the conscienceless rascals who would wreck their homes through “fire water” and gambling devices.

A large number of ancient many-storied, many chambered communal houses are scattered over New Mexico, three of the most important of which are Isletta, Laguna and Acoma.  Isletta and Laguna are within a stone’s throw of the railroad, ten miles and sixty-six miles, respectively, beyond Albuquerque, and Acoma is reached from either Laguna or Bubero by a drive of a dozen miles.  The aboriginal inhabitants of the pueblos, an intelligent, complex, industrious and independent race, are anomalous among North American natives.  They are housed to-day in the self-same structures in which their forefathers were discovered, and in three and a half centuries of contact with Europeans their manner of life has not materially changed.

The Indian tribes that roamed over mountain and plain have become wards of the Government, debased and denuded of whatever dignity they once possessed, ascribe what cause you will for their present condition.  But the Pueblo Indian has absolutely maintained the integrity of his individuality, and is self-respecting and self-sufficient.  He accepted the form of religion professed by his Spanish conquerors, but without abandoning his own, and that is practically the only concession his persistent conservatism has ever made to external influence.

Laborious efforts have been made to penetrate the reserve with which the involved inner life of this strange child of the desert is guarded, but it lies like a dark, vast continent behind a dimly visible shore, and he dwells within the shadowy rim of a night that yields no ray to tell of his origin.  He is a true pagan, swathed in seemingly dense clouds of superstition, rich in fanciful legend, and profoundly ceremonious in religion.  His gods are innumerable.  Not even the ancient Greeks possessed a more populous Olympus.  On that austere yet familiar height, gods of peace and of war, of the chase, of bountiful harvest and of famine, of sun and rain and snow, elbow a thousand others for standing room.  The trail of the serpent has crossed his history, too, and he frets his pottery with an imitation of its scales, and gives the rattlesnake a prominent place among his deities.  Unmistakably a pagan, yet the purity and well being of his communities will bear favorable comparison with those of the enlightened world.