to have ceased among them, and the use of machine-made beads to have become universal. The wampum belts continued for a century longer to be made from these beads by the Indian women, but the difference between the belts of the two periods is apparent at a glance. The hand-made beads in the earlier belts are of various sizes, some being twice as large as others, while the machine-made beads, of which the more recent belts are composed, are all of uniform size. Such belts can still be procured from the civilized and mostly half-breed Iroquois of the province of Quebec, with any devices that may be desired. They differ from the genuine Indian belts precisely as a counterfeit denarius differs from a genuine Roman coin.
| SOME PRIMITIVE CALIFORNIANS. |
By MARY SHELDON BARNES.
IN the Santa Clara Valley, near the southern end of San Francisco Bay, some five miles south of Stanford University, there stands a fine old deserted abode, formerly a well-known station on the road from the Santa Clara Mission to San Francisco. Its owner, Don Secundini Robles, was of the pure old Castilian stock, and he and his wife. Donna Maria, were lord and lady for all the region round, and their house the center for all the gay rodeos and fandangos of the valley. Now the house is a ruin, Don Secundini dead, and Donna Maria, in poverty and alone, lives in the village of Mountain View. But their name passes on to fame among the Stanford students in connection with the Robles Rancheria, a large, low-lying mound of earth some quarter of a mile away from the old house, with that mysterious reputation attaching to it that always hovers around an Indian mound. It has indeed an artificial look, rising in the midst of the otherwise level valley; and the boys of the vicinity assured us that there were plenty of skeletons in it. The man who owned it said that when he first began to plow in that field he turned up human bones, and added, "You may guess I was scared." Indian mortars and pestles from this same heap were found in the possession of various neighbors, and the site altogether seemed promising for exploration. So, with the permission of the owner, and with such direction as could be given by a historian with an amateur interest in archæology, some Stanford students began to explore the site.
The survey of one of our civil engineers gave us the plot of the mound shown in Fig. 1: a length of four hundred and seventy feet, a width of three hundred and twenty feet, an area of some two acres, and a height of about ten feet in the highest parts. Its
