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Denver, Colorado, Jan.22, 1903

F.J.Skiff,
Director, Field Columbian Museum,
Chicago, Ill.

My dear Sir:-

Your letter relating to the carbonized corn and enquiring as to what evidence I have that it was calcined by lava heat, is at hand.  I might write a length in support of such, but will confine myself to a brief statement.

Near La Boca station, where the D.&R.G. road crosses Pine river 30 miles East of Durango, may be found some small ruins where in making my excavations I first passed through a deposit of glacial deposit, then through a stratum of lava, then through one of clay-reef material which was once clay mortar, but now converted by the heat of the covering lava to the color and density of hard burned brick, having on its under side the impressions of small logs, poles, canes and tropical ferns.  Beneath this I found implements of stone, (Neolithic), fragments of pottery and carbonized corn. Still lover I found skeletons, which crumbled to dust as soon as exposed to the atmosphere, and decorated pottery which have the same painted designs that are found in pottery taken from the Cliff-houses.  The glacial deposit consists of silt, pebbles and boulders of conglomerate; is some 100 feet in elevation above the bed of the river, and was brought by ice from the head of that stream, some 60 miles toward the north-east, in the Silverton range, where a large mass of that rock is