When we had finished this work, the stuff was taken out and carried off by different members of the party, but where is it now? Nobody knows. Like most of the material from the smaller pueblos around the larger buildings, it is gone. I, being only a small kid, did not get my choice of artifacts, I had to take what was left, which made a nice little collection, at that. But it, too, is about all gone.
We went on with our work, opening all of the rooms that visitors now pass through with the guides, but we found nothing more. The holes that we made through the walls have been converted into doorways through which all visitors now pass from room to room.
For a number of years, rather indiscriminate looting by pothunters and others interested in these antiquities continued sporadically. Luckily, the pothunters did not get into the rooms which seemed to require a lot of hard work and digging, but merely broke into those rooms which were still more or less intact and in which readily accessible material was lying around on the floor or scattered through the debris.
In 1889, a patent covering the site of the Aztec ruins was issued to John R. Kuntz and continued in his possession until 1907, when it was transferred to H. D. Abrams. Due largely to the efforts of these gentlemen, the ruins were relatively protected against vandalism until it could be scientifically investigated by Morris in 1916.
The name of Earl H. Morris is well known in Southwestern archeology. Although he also did considerable archeological work in Central America, particularly at the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza in Yucatan, trying to unravel the story of the prehistoric inhabitants of the American Southwest was always his first love. Morris was born on October 24, 1889, in Chama, N. Mex. His family had originally come west from the Pennsylvania oil fields in the mid-1870's, and his father engaged in construction work such as building railway grades and roads, digging canals, and hauling freight. In 1891, the elder Morris moved his family to Farmington, N. Mex. There, he was able to rent out his teams on a canal construction project. This left him free to pursue his hobby--digging for Indian antiquities--the love of which he was able to impart to his son Earl.