Antonio de Espejo
In February 1583, Espejo arrived at the territory of the Piros, the most southerly of the Pueblo villagers. From there the Spanish continued up the Rio Grande. Espejo described the Pueblo villages as "clean and tidy". The houses were multi-storied and made of adode bricks. "They make very fine tortillas," Espejo commented, and the Pueblos also served the Spanish turkeys, beans, corns, and pumpkins. The people "did not seem to be bellicose". The southernmost Pueblos had only clubs for weapons plus a few "poor Turkish bows and poorer arrows". Further north, the Indians were better armed and more aggressive. Some of the Pueblo towns were large, Espejo described Zia as having 1,000 houses and 4,000 men and boys. In their farming, the Pueblos used irrigation "with canals and dams, built as if by Spaniards". The only Spanish influence that Espejo noted among the Pueblos was their desire for iron. They would steal any iron article they could find.
Havasupai
Prior to modern times agriculture was the essential means of progress and survival for the Havasupai. While in the winter the tribe members stationed themselves on the plateau of the canyon, in the summer irrigation gardening of the crop fields brought the members back inside the canyon walls. As vast and uneven as the Grand Canyon is, it is somewhat of an anomaly that the Havasupai were able to agriculturally sustain and thrive in such a voluminous landscape. Because of a lack of available soil rich in nutrients, it has been suggested that the tribe cultivated only of land on the canyon floor. Although lacking space, the tribe's irrigation technology was far more advanced than others in the Southwest which allowed them to be agriculturally intensive. However, being located at the bottom of a canyon left the fields vulnerable to flooding as a result of rain and the overflowing of Cataract Creek, as was the case in 1911 when almost an entire crop field was destroyed. In 1920 to combat the issue the federal government assisted the tribe in constructing a new irrigation system which was generally effective in ceasing soil erosion from water overflows.