ARIZONA INDIANS

Bridges from the Beginning

EVERY river, every chasm, challenges the determination and ingenuity of mankind with its mute declaration “Thou shalt not pass.” From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, man has accepted this challenge and overcome, one by one, the barriers Nature has placed in his path.

As far back as we can see along the toilsome path over which humanity has come, mankind has built bridges. But, after all, we cannot look very far. Behind Assyria, Egypt, and Babylon there hangs a baffling curtain of darkness and mystery that even the keen eye of science has not yet been able to pierce. What The engineering achievements are hidden by that curtain no man may say. We may speculate and theorize, but we cannot know. Behind that veil are the begin nings of bridge construction, co-existent, probably, with the beginnings of humanity.

The oldest bridges of which any remains still exist show a high technical skill and constructive ability, that must necessarily have been the fruit of thousands of years of experiments, failures, and successes.

Such a structure is the Caravan Bridge, over the River Meles, in Smyrna. Archaeologists believe this to be the most ancient bridge on earth, though they throw up their hands in despair at assigning to it any definite date. In spite of its age it is in constant use today. The River Meles is forty feet wide at this point, and the bridge crosses it with a single span not the work of ignorant, untutored builders one must admit. Close by this bridge Homer played as a boy, twenty-nine hundred years ago. St. Paul passed over it on his journey to Smyrna. What a pageant of peoples and centuries it has seen! The parapets and pavement were renewed about two hundred years ago, but the remainder of the bridge is as the unknown engineer built it so long ago.

One fourth of the Indian Reservation area of the United States, and one-fourth of all the "Full Blood" Indians of the United States are in Arizona. Socially and economically, Indians are of importance to Arizona. Eleven thousand of the 43,726 Indians of Arizona over ten years of age, were gainfully employed in 1930, when the last census was taken. More than 8,600 were engaged in agriculture. Manufacturing enterprises engaged the attention of over 1,000. About 400 were classed as laborers other than agriculture. Indians too, find employment in miscellaneous classes of wide variation, as for instance, 25 are clerks, 80 are engaged in personal service, as servants; nine are listed as clergymen; 21 are janitors; one is a technical engineer; one a stenographer; four are musicians; 13 are teachers, and so on through employment. This does not attempt to enumerate the large number of Indians of many tribes that are producing blankets, baskets, jewelry and many other articles that are in demand and which serve to make thousands self supporting.

When the census was taken in 1930, there were in the United States, 322,297 Indians, full blood, mixed tribal blood, or mixed, white, negro or other races. Of the total, the 43,726 in Arizona represented a little over 13 per cent, but as only 46 per cent of the Indians of the United States are full blood, and as 86 per cent or more of those in Arizona are of pure tribal blood, the percentage of full blood Arizona Indians to the full bloods of all tribes in the United States is 25 per cent. Oklahoma has more Indians than any other state, but only 26,057 that are full blood, while Arizona has 27,800 that are identified as being of unmixed tribal blood. To the ethnologist and the anthropologist, the Indians of Arizona offer a better opportunity for study, therefore, than the Indians of any other state. To the tourist also, the Indians of Arizona are of extraordinary interest. A considerable number of Indians live on the same land occupied by their ancestors for many centuries, and some are living under primitive conditions not materially different from those of their ancestors of four centuries ago, when the first white man came. Since Arizona enjoys this unique position among the States, and since, too