THE SOUTHERN DENES. 41

previous residence or passage of tribes now established considerably to the
south thereof. But of this more shall be said when we come to the question
of the nation’s origin.

Any intelligent observer who studies the sketch map annexed to this
chapter, especially if aware of the Special caracteristic, boldness, of the most
southern tribes in the two main groups of the entire race, will, it seems to
me, readily enough concur in the following surmise.

In times past, for reasons that shall probably never be ascertained, an
important part of the nation, led by the restless and aggressive Apaches
acting as scouts or vanguard to the bulk of the moving army now called
Navahoes, fought its way to the banks of the San Juan River! and ultimately
of the Rio Grande, from Utah to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, some of
the former tribe even crossing into old Mexico. “United we stand” seems to
have been the motto of.the moving mass of humanity, and they did stand
against many odds, finally securing a strong hold on the country south of
the San Juan mountains. Their Progress was only arrested by encountering
the sedentary Pueblos? and the superior Sonoran tribes, some of which, as
the Tepehuanas of northern Mexico, are said by the old chroniclers to have
been the most valiant of all the aborigines of New Spain, though laborious
and devoted to their fields3,

But insignificant bands of stragglers, who, either allured by the natural
advantages of the spots in which the Inigrating body may have temporarily
Stayed in its march southward, unwilling or unable to go further, were even-
tually hemmed in by hostile tribes and gradually driven to the sea coast,
where they had to remain in a more or less subordinate condition, in the
limited areas where the whites found them in the course of the last century.

Considering the direction of the Japanese sea current, which sweeps all
along the Pacific coast, and the many well authenticated cases of junks hailing
from remote Asia which, at comparatively recent dates, were stranded on the
shores of the Pacific States, the hypothesis of a general emigration by water
is also admissible. In that case, the Déné tribes found along that coast would
simply be the descendants of parties who chose to stay where they had
temporarily landed. But when we bear in mind that the Dénés are eminently
a race of hunters and nomads, and that there is no reason for supposing
that they ever permanently occupied the shores of the northern Pacific, which,
on the contrary, seems to have been from time immemorial in the possession
of powerful allophylian peoples, this last supposition will not appear very
probable.

‘ An affluent of the Colorado River.

* Who, however, could not always hold their own against the fury of the invaders, since,
according to Capt. J. G. Bourke in the “Journal of American Folklore” (1890, p. 114), the
Apaches still remember driving from their homes the cliff-dwellers established west of Santa Fe.

* Cf. “The American Race”, by D. G. Brinton, p. 126.