They were also builders of very comfortable houses, as I can testify from personal experience.

Thus they assumed a prominence, amidst the desolation of the early centuries, of which the railway in the nineteenth speedily robbed them.
* Font says of Garces: "He seems just like an Indian himself...
and though the food of the Indians is as nasty and disgusting as their dirty selves the padre eats it with great gusto." Dr.Coues had planned to publish a translation of Font's important diary.

See Garces, by Elliot Coues, p.

172, Font meant his remark as praise.
Garces, like most of his kind, was an enthusiast on the subject of saving the souls of the natives.

"It made him sick at heart," says Coues, "to see so many of them going to hell for lack of the three drops of water he would sprinkle over them if only they would let him do it." With this idea ever in mind he toiled up and down the lower Colorado, and received assistance from a Yuma chief called Captain Palma.