can do it for themselves; but the right of property is in the children. When a piece of land is sold it is done in the presence of witnesses, if it is so desired. Oftener the sale and transfer are made by and between the parties themselves No documents are used. This is so in all the pueblos. The rules and customs in the sale and delivery of rooms in a house and of personal property, such as animals, are the same. There is no preference, as to males or females, in the descent of property rights and titles There is a corn-field at each pueblo, cultivated by all in common, and when grain is scarce the poor take from this store after it is housed. It is in the charge of, and at the disposal of, the cacique (called the governor). Land cannot be sold to an alien; but an Indian coming from another pueblo to live at this may acquire land to subsist upon, though such immigration is rare. It is not allowed at any of the pueblos that a white person acquire property therein. An Indian woman is not allowed to marry a Mexican and live at the pueblo. A piece of land held and recognized as belonging to a person is his property, whether he utilizes it or not, and he may sell or donate it absolutely at his will to persons within the community.
"At Jemes and Zia (other pueblos in New Mexico), when a woman dies her property goes into the control of her husband; if a widow, it descends to her children; if she has no children, it goes to her brothers and sisters equally; and if none survive her, then to her nearest relatives; if she has no relatives, then to such friends as attend her in her last illness. It never reverts to the pueblo, which as a corporate community owns no land."
What Mr. Miller refers to as property rights and titles, and ownership in fee of land, is sufficiently explained by the possessory right found among the Northern tribes. The limitations upon its alienation to an Indian from another pueblo or to a white man, not to lay any stress upon the absence of written conveyances of titles made possible by Spanish and American intercourse, show quite plainly that their ideas respecting the ownership of the ultimate title to land, with power to alienate in fee, were entirely below this conception of property in land. The more important ends of individual ownership were obtained through the possessory right, while the ultimate title remained in the tribe for the protection of all. That the pueblo now owns no land, as Mr. Miller states, must be under-
