jru
1
t J
l^rudden
On the Great
American Plateau
Wanderings among Canyons and
Buttes, in the Land of the
Cliff-Dweller, and the
Indian of To-day.
By
T. Mitchell Prudden
Illustrated with Photographs, and with Original
Drawings by Edward Learning.
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
Ube Ikntcfcerbocfeer jpress
1907
COPYRIGHT, 1906
BY
T. MITCHELL PRUDDEN
Gbe fmtcfeerbocfcer press, mew HJorfc
PREFACE
THESE glimpses of the rugged South-
west country, with its quaint
aborigines and the ruins of an
elder folk, already in part have been pub-
lished in the magazines. They are here
brought together in the hope that some
other town dweller, after the rush and
turmoil of his winter's work, may be led
to wander away from the beaten tracks
into the serene and inspiring solitudes
of this land of wide horizons.
The writer is indebted to the courtesy
of the Messrs. Harper and Brothers for
permission to publish in this form such
of the material as has appeared in Harper's
Magazine, and to The American Anthro-
pologist for consent to similar use of an
article from its pages.
T. M. P.
NEW YORK, June, 1906.
iii
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGB
I. — A GLIMPSE OF THE GREAT
PLATEAU i
II. — DAYS IN THE SADDLE . . 13
III. — OLD AMERICANS OF THE PLA-
TEAU COUNTRY . . 24
IV. — UNDER THE SPELL OF THE GRAND
CANYON .... 36
V. — A LITTLE STORY OF WORLD-
MAKING .... 72
VI. — A SUMMER AMONG CLIFF
DWELLINGS ... 90
VII. — PRIMITIVE AMERICAN HOUSE-
BUILDERS . . . .137
VIII. — FORGOTTEN PATHWAYS ON THE
GREAT PLATEAU . .176
IX. — ACROSS THE PLATEAU BY RAIL
AND TRAIL . . -197
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
SENTINELS OF THE PLATEAU Frontispiece
A BROWN PAGAN OP THE PLATEAU . 4
HORSES OF ALL DEGREES OF DEPRAVITY 10
THE MULE is READY . . . .14
A TRAIL ALONG A DEEP ARROYO . 18
A WAYSIDE HOME ON THE PLATEAU . 22
A PUEBLO OF THE HOPI ... 26
A NAVAJO HOGAN ... 30
NAVAJO VISITORS IN CAMP . . 34
LOOKING ACROSS THE GRAND CANYON . 38
A LONG HOT DAY .... 44
A WAY BETWEEN LOFTY MESAS . 52
BATTLEMENTS OF THE CANYON'S RIM . 58
UPPER LEDGES OF THE CANYON WALL 64
TEMPLES AND TOWERS WITHIN THE
GRAND CANYON .... 68
THE WILY COYOTE .... 80
MILES OF GORGEOUS PINNACLES AND
BUTTES ..... 86
THE MAKING OF A NAVAJO BLANKET . 96
CLIFF HOUSES IN A CAVE . . . 100
vii
viii flllustratfons
PAGE
SANDALS OF THE CLIFF-DWELLER . 104
SKILFUL PREHISTORIC MASONRY . . 108
ARROW-HEADS, SPEAR-HEADS, ETC., OF
THE CLIFF-FOLK . . . .112
PREHISTORIC PICTOGRAPHS . .116
POTTERY OF THE CLIFF-DWELLER . 120
RELICS OF A PRIMITIVE CULTURE . 128
A PRIMITIVE LODGE ON THE FACE OF A
CLIFF . . . . .140
A PREHISTORIC BURIAL MOUND . .150
A GREAT RUIN AT THE HEAD OF A
GULCH . . . . 156
A CLIFF TOWN IN RUINS . . .160
A Row OF CLIFF-HOUSES ON A LEDGE . 164
A TOWER OF THE CLIFF-DWELLERS . 170
A SMALL CLIFF DWELLING IN A CAVE . 174
A NAVAJO SHEEP HERDER AND His
BURROS ..... 184
A CORNER OF THE ZUNI PUEBLO . 188
HOMES OF THE CAVE-DWELLERS . . 192
DAUGHTERS OF THE DESERT . . 200
AN INSCRIPTION OF A DON ON EL MORRO 216
A BEARER OF WATER AT ZUNI . .222
HOPI FOLKS ..... 230
THE ACCIDENT OF COLOUR AND GARB . 234
Map At End
On the Great American Plateau
On the Great American
Plateau
CHAPTER I
A GLIMPSE OF THE GREAT PLATEAU
THE Great Plateau of the United
States west of the Rocky Moun-
tains reaches far up into Wyoming,
lies upon the borderlands of Utah and
Colorado, and broadens southward over
the upper half of Arizona and the north-
west corner of New Mexico.
Multitudes of desolate valleys and can-
yons have been carved out of this great
highland, thousands of feet deep in places,
by unnumbered ages of erosion. These
i
ZTbe Great plateau
are now almost wholly dry, save when a
cloud-burst or a storm on the far moun-
tains sends a mad torrent roaring down.
The higher regions range from seven to
eleven thousand feet above the sea, vast
rugged platforms bordered by winding
cliffs. Upon some of these, great pine
forests stretch for hundreds of miles
guarding their primeval solitudes.
The tops of many mesas and tablelands
are clad with dense growths of pinon,
juniper, and cedar; while on the lower
levels, uncouth weeds, scattered tufts
of grass, the cactus, the Spanish bayonet,
the sage-brush, and the greasewood make
shift to gather what little moisture they
may need from the deep recesses of the
soil. Along some of the stream beds
great cottonwoods afford a generous shel-
ter from the sun. In open glades and
forests here and there quaint brilliant
flowers in their season smile back a jaunty
Glimpse
defiance to the austere earth. In many of
the broader valleys the sand lies deep or
drifts in blinding clouds upon the air.
This land of mighty wind-swept up-
lands and bewildering gorges, of forest
and desert and plain, lies to-day almost
as the Spaniards found it more than
three hundred years ago. Some favoured
valleys have yielded to the magic
touch of irrigation, and small farming
hamlets nestle beside the waterways.
Along the line of the few railways which
have pushed across the plateau in quest
of the Pacific are widely sundered uncouth,
villages. But get out of sight of the
settlements and out of hearing of the
locomotives, and you are face to face with
the naked earth as the great sculptors,
flood, wind, and sand, have left it.
One might belong to almost any century
since the world was peopled ; and the folks
now and then encountered are more than
ZEbe (Breat plateau
likely to be brown pagans who still people
the earth and air with gods of their own,
live in the thrall of strange superstitions,
and know the day and its happenings as
only the out-of-door folk can. To these
Indians, beasts and plants talk, the wind
whispers, while the sun and the rain
study their welfare or plot their undoing.
The story of this great plateau tells of
ages in which the world was slowly moulded
by fire and flood, and carved by the re-
lentless elements. Dry land was con-
jured from great interior seas and lifted
into vast uplands, then torn and tilted
and gullied as new gigantic rivers sought
new highways to the sea. Life came and
traced its records here and there upon the
pages of the great stone book.
The vast tableland is dumb anent the
coming of man. But we find the ruins of
his abandoned homes all over the southern
segment of the plateau, straggling out upon
oj
bfl
rt
G
^
O
H first Glimpse
its eastern and its western fringes. Cliff-
dwellers and cave-dwellers, dwellers upon
the tops of lofty mesas and in snug valleys
at their feet, all are gone; and their
crumbling homes are desolate.
It was not until the Spaniards came
prying up upon the plateau that the
Pueblo and other Indians whose descend-
ants still wander the old pathways were
dragged, very much against their will,
out of the languid prehistoric silences.
Then came the conquests of the Spaniards,
followed by a quarter of a century of
Mexican rule.
At last the Great Plateau, austere as
ever, is gathered to the fold of the United
States. Its wayside stories, wild, quaint,
pathetic, it tells to the wanderer in tune
with its spirit along its ancient pathways.
It has received the hunter, the trapper,
the explorer, into its capacious bosom —
to return or not as fortune and the Indian
Ube Great plateau
willed. The cowboy has spied out its
fastnesses ; the railway engineer has marked
in toil and hardship the routes along
which in later time the streams of life
and industry and trade surge to and fro.
The surveyor has projected his lines over
its arid one hundred and thirty thousand
square miles. But the Great Plateau
yields very grudgingly to the touch of
civilisation. It opens here and there a
narrow way for the hurrying trains,
closing its great silences behind them as
they vanish, then rolls away their pol-
luting trails of smoke into its vast aerial
spaces, and falls asleep again.
The part of the plateau which on the
whole is most attractive to the seeker of
adventure in this land of wide horizons is
that which lies between the Denver and
Rio Grande Railroad on the north and the
Santa Fe Railway and the country to
which it ministers on the south. The
H fftrst Glimpse
Santa Fe crosses through the heart of the
plateau over a region austere and forbid-
ding enough it is true, from the car window,
for all its miles of gorgeous cliffs and noble
forests. But it is so lavish in stories of
the world's fashioning, so rich in fading
glimpses of strange old barbarians who
are gone, so quaintly peopled with kindly
children of the earth and the sun who bid
one welcome to homes and firesides where
for centuries they have foregathered; a
land withal so alluring for its absolute
freedom from fret and fume, where you
and you alone are owner of the day, that
when once you have broken the link which
bound you to the rails and head off into
the dreamy, shimmering mazes which
lure you on and on, it will be strange indeed
if you do not for some lucid hours care
least of all things whether the fortunes of
the way are ever to lead you back.
Nothing matters much so long as you
ttbe <3reat plateau
can find a little water for yourself and your
faithful beasts, and a few stray sticks
to cook your simple fare. Some line of
curious, brilliant buttes upon the far
horizon, some faint tradition of a crum-
bling ruin over the long divide, some
rumour of an assemblage of the clans in
ceremonial dances which bridge the years
between the age of stone and the age of
steam, or mayhap only the whim to see
where you will get to if you follow the
meagre trail winding up the valley, —
such are the sufficient aims of days and
weeks of wandering on the Great Plateau
when once you have forgotten that the
twentieth century has just begun, and
have drifted back into the simple days
and ways before the Spaniards came.
Remote as are many parts of the Great
Plateau from the usual lines of travel,
the tourist may get close to the archaeo-
logic heart of the land, may see varied
H first (3limpse
phases of native Indian life, and some
of the most beautiful and the grandest of
the canyons, through the ministrations
of established public conveyances and
the occasional use of a ranchman's team.
But for the longer journeys into the
recesses of the plateau, the explorer must
secure hardy ponies or mules, accustomed
to forage for themselves on the scantiest
of herbage, and capable, if need be, of
sustaining life for a day or two on the
willow twigs and rank dried weeds of the
bottoms. The pack is entrusted to mules)
A canvas wagon-sheet and a blanket must
serve in lieu of tent and bed. It is no
hardship, however, in this dry and bracing
air, to sleep on the ground under the stars.
Unless one knows the country well and
is accustomed to the management of
horses and mules of all degrees of de-
pravity, it is hazardous to venture out
upon the plateau and into the Indian
io Ube Great plateau
country unattended. Here is elemental
life, here is genuine freedom; but these
exalted states are not to be won without
strict conformity to the inexorable re-
quirements of the land. Water is often
very scanty, and usually, to the uninitiated,
very hard to find; and the ignorant and
foolhardy can readily die from thirst.
In the high country the great pines
sway and sing in the wind at night and
morning. The pifions and cedars on the
lower levels murmur fitfully to the passing
breeze. Small lizards rustle in the dried
grass as they whisk from your presence.
Prairie dogs here and there chatter at you
as you pass. Now and then in the forest
a mountain lion steals away among the
pines, or a surprised bob-cat dashes off
around the rocks. Deer and antelope still
feed in the remoter uplands. The mount-
ain sheep are gone. Bear are seldom
encountered. As night comes on, the howls
rt
!_,
o,
Q
H ffirst (Bltmpse
and barks of the wily coyotes circling far
about the camp are weird and mournful.
But the great country stretching away for
hundreds of miles has scarce a human
habitation, few wild animals and birds,
and these largely of the still kind.
It is very hot in the daytime, with the
sun glaring straight at one from above
and back at him from the rocks. Perhaps
there is no shade for twenty miles, except
under the mules, — and perhaps the mules
kick. But it is a dry heat which does not
depress and exhaust ; it stimulates while it
scorches.
The nights are always deliciously cool.
Altogether the wanderer who does not
mind the wholesome sunburn upon the
skin, and has a good supply of water, is
as free and comfortable and happy as good
mortals deserve to be. How far away
the great city seems! And for the thou-
sand unnecessary things which we gather
12 TEbe Great plateau
about us in our winter thralldom and dote
upon, how pitiful are they, if we deign
to recall them! This is living. We get
down to sheer manhood, face to face with
the bare, relentless, fascinating old earth.
And ever above is the marvellous sky and
ever a nameless witchery of the air, making
far things strange and beautiful, and more
than all else luring the wanderer back to
these hot wastes year after year.
CHAPTER II
DAYS IN THE SADDLE
ONE day in the saddle in the plateau
country is much like another, save
for the ever-changing scene and
the mild adventures of the way. Before
dawn the Indian is off to track and bring
in the beasts, which have been turned
adrift to forage for themselves through
the night.
Now, one by one, jumbled heaps of
blankets, scattered on the ground, heave
and shift, and at length disclose each a
man, who quickly satisfies the modest
claims of the toilet, and at once gets to
work at the breakfast. A fire is made,
the biscuit are baked in an iron pot set
upon coals with a small fire alight upon
is
14 Ube (Breat plateau
the lid. The ground is seat and table.
There is no dallying with the breakfast.
The mules are packed early, for it gets
hot right away after sunrise.
So the beasts get their last sip of water,
the canteens are filled, and the caravan
moves off in single file. The gait is
usually a jog-trot or a walk. The distance
covered in a day depends upon the situa-
tion of water along the route. The
average is from twenty-five to thirty
miles.
The march in summer is always
strenuous in the South-west, because of
the burning sun. But in the high country
refreshing breezes are almost always astir,
and the vast sweep of the vision, the great
masses of marvellous colour in sand and
cliff and butte, the matchless sky, and
the glorious freedom of the life banish
all thought of hardship, and hide fatigue
in the inspiration of a careless holiday.
Daps fn tbe SafcMe 15
We skirt the bases of gigantic cliffs
which, seen from near and far below, look
like the sides of mountain ranges. We
scramble up through rugged gullies to the
top, and find that they are level plateaus
scantily clad with soil, and broken by
shrub and pinon and cedar. The Spanish
bayonet bristles and great scrawny cac-
tuses stare at us. The eye wanders off
to other uplands scored and furrowed by
gorges of wildest form, and catches still far-
ther away the shadowy uplift of mountain
peaks — the Henrys, the La Sals, the Blues
the Carrisos, San Mateo, the San Francisco
peaks, and the long dome of old Navajo,
faint and tremulous through miles of
shimmering space.
Away off on the San Juan desert or
along the barren reaches of the Colorado
Chiquito, great sand pillars swirl upward
on the wind and sway and crumble and
fade, while the under surfaces of fleecy
16 Ube Great plateau
cloud-banks sailing over their dreadful
wastes are lurid from the hot reflection
of the sand.
We swing across the plateau and slide
or clamber down again. But with the
descent of a few hundred feet we are in
another world. The vision no longer
revels in those upland spaces which raise
the spirit into exultant mastery. It may
be a desperate labyrinth of gorges along
which now we fare, whose grotesque and
threatening walls crowd in upon the way
in stolid, brutal insistence. It may be a
broad valley with dry, level, grassy bottom,
and bordered by miles of majestic cliffs
beset with alcoves here and there, whose
blissful shadows lure one from the way.
Perhaps ahead of us the valley narrows,
the buttressed cliffs forming a gigantic
colonnade down which we ride, while
great rock pillars and colossal obelisks
tower here and there above the walls
Daps In tbe SafcMe 17
gleaming in grey or buff or pink or red
against the rich blue background of the sky.
Or the valley opens out upon a sweep
of sandy plain, its buff and yellow stretches
beset with billowy masses of the sage,
now grey, now lilac- tinted through the
shimmering air, with an elusive purple
among the shadows of its leaves, which,
as one rustles by them, fling a faint aroma
on the air. We look across this tremulous
stretch of lilac and purple and gold, like
a brilliant restless sea struck motionless,
with its waves abreak, to the far horizon
upon which rise miles of gorgeous buttes —
white, yellow, purple, orange, and brown —
all alive with the intense shadows .which
come and go upon their rugged faces.
Sometimes we drop suddenly out of
the shimmering spaces of the plain and
ride for miles along the bottom of huge
arroyos which the floods have washed out
of the deep alluvium.
TTbe Great plateau
Now and then the quivering air plays
strange tricks with the vision as we
straggle across the sandy reaches of the
bottoms. In the mirage the cliffs shoot
up in wavering pinnacles, rock columns
rise and hang in swaying pointed masses
above their real selves, then slowly dwindle
and fade or draw upward and flash out
of sight. A few times I have seen beauti-
ful lakes suddenly appear across the trail,
with foamed-tipped waves breaking in
silence upon green shores, which glided
along the burning sand to vanish in a
breath.
From the high uplands scudding clouds
sometimes shoot down long wavering
shower-slants, which fade at the touch
of the hot, dry air before they reach the
earth. One may see afar, or encounter,
brief veil-like showers, which are con-
jured into being with never a cloud in
all the sky.
in tbe SafcMe 19
Although continuous rainfall is infre-
quent upon the wide expanses of the
plateau in summer, thunder-showers of
terrific violence sometimes sweep across
them. And I know of no more severe test
of serenity of spirit than to face one of
these in its unmitigated violence. If there
were but a rock or tree or bush under
which one could secure at least the moral
support of a shelter, the strain would be
less severe. Still one may summon for-
titude at last to face the rage and fury
of the wind and rain, and even to exult
in the flash and roar and clatter of the
bolts which fall in quick succession all
about one. When the demon of the
storm is once in possession, one loses all
thought of danger, and is fairly regretful
when at last, with a sudden swish, the
last pulse of the downpour sweeps by
and the black chaos goes roaring off.
But when, as not rarely happens in
20 ZEbe Great plateau
these violent showers, out of the seething
alembic hailstones are hurled down upon
one, neither serenity nor bravado is of
much avail. He gets black and blue
welts upon his back and shoulders just
the same, and the horses go wild with
terror and pain of the fiendish bombard-
ment.
Here and there we come upon ruins of
the old cliff-dwellers, plastered on the
faces of the ledges, or atop of dizzy pin-
nacles of rock, or in sags of the hills, where
trickling springs may still be found.
Broken pottery in places litters the ground
about these ruins, and the old burial-
places tell in no doubtful fashion, to him
who knows how to read the story, the age
and populousness of these long-forgotten
homes.
The animals must be well cared for in
the long, arduous jaunts, no matter how
man is neglected. Because, in these dry,
in tbe SafcMe 21
desolate countries, to be left afoot is to
face such hardships as few care to risk.
The horse is fed first, watered first, and
first unburdened for his rest. How he
will fare in the night forage is the last
thing in your consciousness before you
sleep. How he has fared, the first query
of the morning. And all day long he is
your comrade. Sharing thus the varied
fortunes of the way, you fall into terms
of intimacy and often affection.
The animals of the South-west country
are wonted to long journeys and serious
hardship. But that which most relent-
lessly saps the energy and daunts the
spirit is lack of water. A horse or mule
may now and then go on for two hot days
and a night without it; but this may be
his ruin, for he is apt to lose heart and
give up if such demands be frequent.
The men in a small company can carry
water enough for themselves in canteens
22 Ube Great plateau
and a small keg for two dry days. But
dry camps are not cheerful, and one ought
to be mighty certain of water of some sort
before dark on the second night.
Now and then one rides forward for a
chat with a comrade; he may beguile
the way with a song. The Indian strikes
up some weird refrain; then one shrieks
at the pack-mules as they stray. But
the order is mostly single file, and the
trail is mostly silent. It is a dreamy,
vacuous life which one slips away into as
the hot hours pass. He is half conscious
of the splendid sky and the lengthening
shadows on cliff and plain as he jogs on
and on, but the vision of memory is often
more vivid than the impression of the
hour.
So at last we come to the camping-place.
Sometimes this is in the cozy shelter of a
friendly cottonwood, or in the lee of a
gigantic butte towering above the plain ,
Daps in tbe SafcMe 23
or in a shallow cave in the ledges of a
rugged ravine. More often the camp is
out in the open among the sage-brush or
where a trickle or puddle or pool of water
is found. Wherever it may be, there are
no tents to pitch, nothing necessary but
forage for the horses, water, a little wood,
and a few square feet of earth. Drop your
packs and build a fire and you are at home.
The horses are hobbled and turned
adrift, supper is materialised and, if the
night be at hand, hurriedly and sleepily
despatched. Each man pre-empts a little
patch of ground, which he levels off as
best he can. The blankets are spread
early, for the nights are always cool; and
as the stars come out one may see here
and there the gleam of pipes alight, as,
half ensconced in his nest, the smoker
wooes the last and sweetest solace of the
day before he tastes oblivion. Then sun-
rise is at hand again. So the days go.
CHAPTER III
OLD AMERICANS OF THE PLATEAU COUNTRY
PEOPLE rarely consider what an
interesting experiment in the evolu-
tion of man was going on here in
America when Columbus set out on his
crazy adventure across the sea, nor how
abruptly the experiment ended when the
white race and the brown race met. For
most of us the history of America begins
in 1492.
We, of course, all have some notion,
framed partly from fact, largely from
fiction, of the original possessors of our
continent. But, after all, I fancy that
most of us only dimly realise that back of
the wars which made the country free,
back of the struggle with forest and soil
24
Hmertcans 25
and forbidding wastes which made it
rich, back of the bold adventures which
made it known, stretch long ages, in which
masses of dusky people, from one seaboard
to the other, lived out their simple lives
face to face with nature, won their way
slowly through savagery to barbarism, and
even here and there began to press eagerly
through the portals which open toward
civilisation.
Then from countries in which mankind
had started earlier, or had more quickly
scaled the heights of communal life, came
the white man. The native advance was
stayed, and soon the doors were closed
forever upon a genuine American bar-
barism just shaping itself into a crude
civilisation in favoured corners of the
land. The Old World experiment in
man-culture was grafted on the New, or,
more frequently, replaced it altogether.
But here and there in the South-west
26 Ube Great plateau
some small groups of brown men, called
Pueblos or village Indians, the wreckage
of the abortive experiment in primitive
man-culture in America, still survive.
These Indians are mostly in Arizona and
New Mexico, living in quaint stone or
adobe houses in far-away fertile valleys,
jr perched atop of great plateaus. Until
within a decade or two they lived and
thought and worshipped Powers unseen
in just such fashion as they did, and in
the very places where they were, when
the Spaniards found them so long ago.
These Pueblo Indians are not to be
confounded either with the savages upon
the Atlantic seaboard or in the eastern
interior, with whom much of our early
national history is concerned, nor with the
nomadic tribes elsewhere in the land.
Some of them present to-day a significant
transition phase in the advance of a people
from savagery toward civilisation, whose
Hmertcans 27
study is of priceless value in the under-
standing of the science of man.
But each year — nay, each month —
brings new ideas, aims, and needs into the
simplicity of this native life. Old tra-
ditions, old customs, old aspirations, are
fading swiftly and surely in the presence
of the white man. It is humiliating, not
only for an American, but for any educated
human being, to realise that in this great,
rich, powerful United States, boasting
ever of its general enlightenment, there
is neither the intelligent public spirit nor
the sustained private devotion to the
wider aspects of science to secure the
myths and traditions and lore of these
wonderful people before this page now
open upon the Story of Man shall be
closed forever. For nowhere else upon
this planet does this particular illumining
phase of human life exist, nor will it come
again. There are many fields of science
ZTbe Great plateau
in which it does not make very much
difference if the work which is waiting
to be done shall wait a little longer. A
decade more or less is of little importance
in the end. But here delay is fatal.
The school-houses near the Pueblos,
the new requirements in food and dress,
the new conceptions of the world, which
begins for them to reach out beyond the
cliffs upon the far horizon — these all may
be very important to the material welfare
of such waifs from the past, with the new
world crowding in upon them. But it
means the speedy extinction of old cus-
toms, in life and worship and ceremonial,
which still are full of the spirit and practice
of a primitive culture. It means that all
natural things and happenings in their
out-of-door world will soon lose their
spiritual impress, and that the quaint
myths out of forgotten centuries will fade
with the old folks who still may cherish
<S>U> Bmerfcans 29
them. When such people get on cotton
shirts, need coffee and sugar, want rum,
and begin to name their sons after the
Presidents, they will not continue long to
send messages to the gods by rattlesnakes,
nor propitiate the elements by feathers
and songs.
The Bureau of Ethnology in Washington
has done admirable work already. Gushing,
Bandelier, Lummis, Stephen, Matthews,
Fewkes, Mrs. Stevenson, Hodge, Holmes,
Dorsey, and others have rescued much.
But the work should be more extended,
more sustained, more amply supported,
and must withal be quickly under way.
The surviving Pueblo Indians are widely
scattered now. There are several villages
grouped along the valley of the Rio
Grande and its tributaries, which are
readily visited from various Santa F6
railroad towns. The primitive old settle-
ments, Acoma and Zuni, lie but a few
3o Ube Great plateau
miles off to the south of the railroad,
while the Hopi villages, far away to the
north, in the heart of the Great Plateau,
are at the end of a more strenuous journey
across the desert.
The later chapters of this book will
afford some glimpses of these quaint
relics of the early Americans and sug-
gestions of the places from which they
may be most conveniently reached.
The Navajo Indians are in many ways
as interesting as the Pueblos, and are
typical of a quite different phase of abor-
iginal life, and one which was most largely
represented in America at the time of
the discovery.
The Navajo country lies in the northern
belt of Arizona and New Mexico and may
be most easily entered from some of the
Santa Fe railroad towns upon the south
or from the Mancos region in Colorado
on the north.
oS CJ
S'S
£ -2
iz« <
PQ
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Hmertcana 31
The Navajo are pastoral folk, herding
sheep and goats and horses over their
great arid ranges, raising corn and a little
grain in the moister bottom lands, living
in low earth-covered huts, called hogans,
in the winter, while in the summer they
build bough shelters or wickiups near
their fields and stock ranges. They are
notable blanket weavers, self-supporting,
and, while nominally confined to their
great reservation, are scattered out beyond
its borders in all directions. They have
been from the earliest times raiders and
plunderers of the Pueblo and Mexican
settlements, and are still often aggressive
and domineering to their neighbours.
There are rich Navajo and poor ones;
there are dignified, impressive, noble figures
among them. Altogether they are among
the most interesting of the aborigines
who live in the old fashion, hold to the
old deities, and maintain a degree of
32 Ube Great plateau
self-respect and independence in the face
of the blighting influences of civilisation
which is noteworthy and admirable.
While the Navajo are peaceable and in
their fashion hospitable to the wanderer
whose aims and purposes in their land are
comprehensible to them or unsuspicious,
they will, themselves unseen, keep a close
watch upon your movements as you ride
day after day over what seems a tenantless
waste.
Sometimes a few lusty, well-mounted
fellows in gaudy blankets will dash in
upon your camp, whooping and shrieking,
draw up a few feet away and sit gazing
at you, or sternly demand your business.
It is regarded as good form in the best
white circles of the frontier to maintain
for a time under these circumstances an
air of absolute inattention to this demon-
stration. It would be as difficult to in-
dicate the apt moment when you cease
OR> Hmertcans 33
to ignore and become aware of the presence
of visitors, as it would be to write a formula
for the not more imperative social graces
of the town. But if you have not winced
at the startling and uproarious advent of
your guests, and seem to have business
and know how to attend to it, your
visitors will doubtless alight with alacrity
at your invitation, sometimes without,
smoke all the tobacco you will give them,
eat all that is left of your meal no matter
how much or of what kind, smoke some
more, and then silently ride away, or in
hope of a breakfast camp beside you for
the night. Time is not pressing to the
Navajo, and a day with a solid meal and
tobacco in it is to him a day well spent.
The Navajo will not tolerate mineral
prospectors upon his reservation if he can
help it, for he knows as well as we do that
the day on which valuable ore shall be
discovered in his domain is the day which
34 ftbe Great flMateau
sounds his doom. So if you can assure
the Navajo that you are no gold seeker
in his land, and while insisting upon your
right to go wherever you choose, are also
mindful of the rights of the natural lords
of this desolation, you may drink from
his springs and water holes; negotiate
fodder from the meagre patches which he
tills ; buy a sheep from his flock if you are
clever at bargaining; watch the women
weaving blankets in the shadow of a
scrawny tree or under a summer hut of
boughs; and now and again you may
be permitted to stand by at weird dances
or sit the night out at the uncanny cere-
monials of the medicine men.
There are a few Utes still upon their
dwindling reservation in southern Colo-
rado, awaiting extinction at the hands of
a beneficent government. A few Pah
Utes are scattered in southern Utah and
northern Arizona. A small remnant of
Navajo Visitors in Camp.
Bmericans 35
the Havasupai still live upon their farms
at the bottom of one of the smaller chasms
which open upon the deeps of the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado River. On the
western borders of the great highland,
the Wallapai are gathered. In the country
which stretches southward from the pla-
teau and within the borders of New
Mexico, the wreckage of the fierce Apache
is held in qualified durance upon a Gov-
ernment reservation. But it is especially
the Navajo and the Pueblo, lingering types
of the nomadic and the house-building
barbarian, whom the wanderer upon the
Great Plateau most often encounters to-day.
CHAPTER IV
UNDER THE SPELL OF THE GRAND CANYON.
THERE were ten of us when we
started — three white men, one
Navajo, two horses, one pony, one
broncho, and two mules. We had been
busy for several days padding pack-
saddles, mending blankets, cleaning guns,
and laying in our stock of food — flour,
sugar, baking-powder, bacon, rice, oat-
meal, and dried fruit.
" Adios!" "Good luck!" and we turned
our faces westward. It was the Alamo
ranch of the Wetherills at Mancos, in
south-western Colorado, the time July, and
we were off for that glorious plateau
country through which the great Red
River of the West has cut a series of
36
Grant) Cannon 37
profound chasms and desolate valleys,
known to the world as the Canyons of
the Colorado River.
People who saw the Grand Canyon in
the early days left the Santa Fe Railway
at Flagstaff, and after an all-day stage
ride over a shoulder of the San Francisco
Mountain, across a small corner of the
Painted Desert, and through the majestic
pines of the Coconino Forest, alighted,
tired but expectant, in a little camp of
tents close upon the brink of the Canyon.
To-day the tourist is conveyed by a
branch of the Santa Fe Railway from
Williams, Arizona, to a modern, pictur-
esque, and most comfortable hostelry, El
Tovar, at the head of the Bright Angel
trail a few miles below the old camp,
where he commonly lingers for a day or
two and then the busy world reclaims him.
Those who seek the wider outlook upon
the vast amphitheatre at the head of the
38 TTbe Great plateau
Grand Canyon are carried by stage a
dozen miles eastward through the great
pine forest to the quaint and cosy Grand
View Hotel which fosters longer sojourn.
But wherever he may be and which
ever way he came, he who lingers here
in the presence of this stupendous and
alluring episode in world-making, sooner
or later becomes conscious of a haunting
desire to know what sort of land it is of
which he catches fitful glimpses across this
bewildering, palpitating space. No sign
of a human being ever comes across to you,
it is much too far for sound, and you wonder
whether the tiny greenish uplifts upon the
farther brink can be more than saplings.
And where does it come from, that broken
streak of water shimmering between the
cliffs, and now and then roaring up at yoii
on the wind like the great mad river it
really is, a mile beneath? It seems to
come out of a red wall some twenty miles
bX3
Oranfc Cannon 39
to your right. But over that and across
a narrow gleam of desert rises a hazy line
of grey cliffs, with a faint blue mountain
dome beyond, a hundred miles away.
Close under this, they tell you, the great
river is coming down, already buried deep
between gigantic walls. You follow its
course toward the west through a maze
of temples and pinnacles and towers, until
these merge into the illimitable blue of
the sky, or are lost in the fading tints of
sunset.
This, then, is why our faces are set
westward. We want to see where the old
Rio Colorado comes from and where it
goes. We want to pluck out the heart
of its mystery in those hidden hundreds
of miles of awesome gorges. We want
to wander in the country beyond the
river which the pioneers have told about
and where the geologists have conjured
from the rocks such impressive secrets
4o zrbe <3reat plateau
of the world's workshop. And we want
to soak in Arizona sunshine and revel in
Arizona skies, and sleep under the stars,
which are so bright and clear that they
cannot be very far away from Arizona.
The Colorado River is formed by the
junction of the Green and Grand in
south-eastern Utah. Its upper foaming
stretch, running in the Cataract Canyon,
is about fifty miles long, and from thirteen
to twenty-seven hundred feet deep. At
the lower end of this the Fremont River
comes in from the west. When Powell
came down the Colorado in his memorable
exploring expedition, his men were not
pleased with this tributary, and named it
the Dirty Devil, a name which in local
parlance clings to it still. Here the walls
of the canyon break away on either side
giving access to the Dandy Crossing.
Below this the walls close in again to
form the Glen Canyon, one hundred and
TTbe Grant) Cannon 41
fifty miles long, but bordered by lower
and more broken cliffs. Into this segment
of the canyon the San Juan River enters
close at the northern base of Navajo
Mountain. The Colorado can be crossed
at three points along the Glen Canyon —
at Hall's Crossing, near the mouth of the
Escalante, at the Hole-in-the-Rock Cross-
ing, near by, and at the Crossing of the .,
Fathers — below the entrance of the San
Juan. These crossings are now little
used except by miners who pass here to
reach placer beds along the stream.
At its lower end the Glen Canyon pierces
the cliffs, the Colorado receives the Paria
from the west, and runs for a mile or so
sedately in the open. Here is Lee's
Ferry, where a large boat carries across
the few horsemen and teams which come
this way.
But the walls close in again, and for
sixty-five miles the river is closely bor-
42 TTbe Great plateau
dered by cliffs from two to three thousand
feet high. This is the Marble Canyon.
At its foot the Colorado Chiquito — the
Little Colorado — enters from the east.
From this point until it sweeps out upon
the desert, more than two hundred miles
away, the Colorado runs at the bottom of
a great valley from four to twelve miles
across, sunk from three-quarters of a mile
to a mile and a quarter below the surface
of the great plateau, and bordered by an
endless succession of vast rock amphi-
theatres, with gorges and canyons reaching
a short way back from the valley, while
from its depths and along its sides rise
graceful, majestic, tapering buttes in infi-
nite variety.
This rock-walled valley of amphitheatres
and buttes, wonderful in color beyond all
possibility of description is called the
Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.
Here a large tract on both sides of the
Ube <3ranfc Cannon 43
river has been sequestered as a National
Forest Reserve.
We headed across the Great Plateau by
way of Bluff City on the San Juan River
for the Dandy Crossing.
After nine days of steady travel, across
arid mesas, down long and burning valleys,
skirting the brinks of dizzy cliffs, scram-
bling across gorges, and winding in and
out among rocks and buttes and piiions, a
sudden turn of the trail brought us upon
the crest of a low bluff, with the Colorado
River at our feet, sweeping on to the
south. This was the Dandy Crossing,
and the first sign of humanity since we
left Bluff City, seven days before, was a
rough cabin on the far side of the river,
here about one-eighth of a mile across.
We drew up the caravan, fired a shot in
the air and waited.
Presently three black-clad figures issued
from the cabin, filed solemnly around in
Great plateau
front, and squatted in a row upon the
ground. Then we both waited.
The black row brooded motionless.
Presently we caught faintly, "What ye
want?" "We want to get across; send
over the boat. " "They ain't no boat; ye
can't git over. "
This was pleasant. The nearest other
available crossing was ninety miles as
the crow flies, and full thrice as far as mules
must go.
At last we gathered amid the roar,
"They 's a skiff somers upstream, and
mebbe ye kin git 'er. "
So we scrambled for three or four miles
along the shelving rocks at the river's
brink, the cliffs towering a thousand feet
over us, and then stopped, clinging as
best we could to the last shelf upon
a wall which rose sheer from the water.
But we had sighted a hovel on the
other side, and presently hailed with
Q
o
W
be
a
o
TTbe <3ranfc Cannon 45
joy a woman clad largely in a sun-
bonnet.
" They is an old boatyar, " she shouted
"but I ain't strong enough to git 'er
acrost. "
Night was at hand, so we turned back
to a less precipitous place where our stock
could forage, made camp, and sat in
council.
The river is big, it is broad, it is muddy,
it is swift, and even in its quieter places
sullen and forbidding. Great smooth
swirls come and go upon its surface;, it
swishes viciously past the rocks and bushes
on the brink. And it has a bad reputation.
It drowns people and it drowns stock.
It often claimed, but fortunately lost,
tribute from Major Powell's plucky little
company in 1 869 . Nothing short of human
life appeased it when Colonel Stanton and
his men went through the canyons twenty
years later. The folks who know it best,
46 TTbe Great plateau
the cattlemen and the miners, dread and
hate it. "She's a durned, cussed, ugly
devil, and ye 'd best not monkey with 'er, "
said one of our native councillors who
knew.
But we thought that we would make
an attempt anyhow, so one of our number
mounted our veteran horse and plunged
in. There was splashing and turmoil
in the water, horse and man disappeared,
and when, in a few seconds, the rider was
dragged ashore in grieved surprise, and
the horse scrambled up the bank a hundred
yards below, trembling and snorting, we
were ready to concede that the task before
us was not what in the juvenile vocabu-
lary would be called a "cinch." Then
we had supper, and slept upon the situation
—and the rocks.
In the morning, one of us crawled
around the cliff and along the boulders far
up the bank, secured a stranded log, and
Ube Grant) Canpon 47
floating and swimming with the current,
finally reached the other side.
The boat was an old ramshackle, leaky,
flat-bottomed, ten-foot skiff, with patched
and clumsy oars, but in small loads we
got our saddles and packs across, and then,
after a careful reconnoissance of the banks
on both sides for a safe entering-place
and landing, we tackled the stock.
None of our animals had been tried in
deep and rapid streams. Indeed, neither
they nor our Indian, both children of the
desert, had ever before seen so much
water. It was evident from our first
attempt that if we pushed them off into
deep water to take their chances, the
animals would either scramble back again
or drown. The only thing to do was to
tow them over, one by one. This would
have been a more agreeable undertaking
if the oars had been less nondescript in
form and less fragile, if the boat had
48 tTbe 6reat plateau
leaked in fewer places and in less aban-
doned fashion, and if she had n't threat-
ened to fall to pieces every time the
oarsman pulled unequally upon the sides.
It would make a long list if one were to
set down all the surprising things which
a horse or a mule will undertake to do
when, with a rope around his neck, held
in the boat a rod or so off shore, he is
suddenly pushed off a steep bank into deep
water. He tries to go to the bottom first,
but he is too buoyant for success at that ;
then he tries to get back to the bank, but
the rope pulling from the boat and shouting
men ashore brandishing clubs discourage
that. He surges right and left, he snorts,
he splashes, he groans, and when at
length he realises that he can't possibly
get ashore again, he concentrates all his
hitherto diverse purposes into a fixed
intention to get aboard the boat.
He has now been hauled close astern,
<Branfc Cannon 49
and has lost all notion of the shore. The
oarsman meanwhile is pulling madly
toward the other bank, the whole circus
sweeping every second down the stream.
With every lurch upon the rope the joints
in the crazy craft open, and the Colorado
River seems determined to get aboard
along with the horse. Floundering up
and down in the struggle to raise his
fore feet over the stern, his knees thump
against the outside of the boat. He swims
first around one side, then around the
other, as far as the short rope will let him
go. He rolls on his side as a vicious
whirl in the water catches him, and seems
to lose his bearings. His eyes bulge, his
breath grows short, he groans rather than
snorts, and at last, when the man sitting
astern with the rope raises his nose over
the thwart, with a great sigh he gives
up and swims along behind, blowing
and puffing and with strained eyes, but
50 Ube (Brcat plateau
quietly and smoothly. The fight is
over.
In this lull in the panic we secure evi-
dent recognition of words of cheer and
encouragement with which, even in mid-
stream, we strive to re-establish claims
to friendliness and good-will so rudely
strained by the deep damnation of that
pushing off.
Presently the boat begins to slew
around. The oarsman cannot keep her
on the course headed for a rocky point
far down the stream upon which and
nowhere else the landing must be made,
because of quicksand at every other
place. It is evident in an instant that
the beast has caught sight of the far
shore, and regardless of the boat, is head-
ing for it. So the rope is payed out and
let go, and he bears away gallantly for the
point.
It was fortunate that the first horse
ZTbe Oratto Cannon 51
which we piloted thus across let us drag him
nearly all the way, because we secured
for him the proper landing, where he and
the others, as one by one they joined him,
stood as landmarks for those which were
to follow. We had a distinct and varie-
gated campaign with each animal, but the
lines of the story fall much the same in
all. At last we got them safely over,
and gratefully returned in one piece the
gallant craft which saved the day. We
had lost a few illusions about the ease
of primitive travel on the frontier, but
we had gained a distinct preference
for bridges, and we had conquered the
Colorado.
Then we head away westward again up
the nearly dry, rough wash of the Crescent
Creek or Lost Gulch, and are soon out
upon the plateau close to the eastern
slope of the Henry Mountains. We skirt
the northern spurs of the Henrys, entering
52 Ubc Great plateau
the midreaches of the Dirty Devil Valley
among outlying Mormon settlements.
Now, day after day, the way leads west
and south through great gashes in the ledges
of lofty plateaus, past cliff-girt mountain
vales, up the long stretches of the Sevier, a
river whose waters never reach the sea. At
last we climb the height which divides
the waterways leading back to the salt-
lake basins of Utah from the summit
sources of the Kanab and the Virgen,
children of the great Colorado.
As we cross the divide we are between
two great tables which rise a thousand
feet or more above us to the right and
left. These are the Pansagunt and the
Markcigunt plateaus, standing nine and
ten thousand feet above the sea.
The Kanab Creek has cut a rough
winding gorge down through the cliffs and
terraces which mark the descent from
the high plateaus southward to the great
<
(BranD Cannon 53
bench of the Colorado. In this we clamber
down the marvellous series of terraces
sloping upward to their edges, clearing
at a leap ledges which it took a thousand
or perhaps a hundred thousand years to
build, and as many more, mayhap, to
wash away again. How we and our
mules flaunted our heels in the face of
Time that day!
If we were geologists, we should check
the ledges off as we descend — Eocene,
Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and out
upon the Permian. But being just com-
mon folks, they may be for us the Pink
Cliffs, White Cliffs, Vermilion Cliffs, Brown
Cliffs. I will not try to describe their
majesty, nor the weird forms and the
gorgeous colours with which in the lower
series they are glorified. At last we come
down upon the lowest of the terraces, the
Vermilion Cliffs sweeping away right and
left, and into the little hamlet of Kanab,
54 tTbc 6reat plateau
the last Mormon outpost in southern
Utah, close upon the northern line of
Arizona.
The Grand and Marble Canyons cut
the north-western corner of Arizona com-
pletely off from the rest of the Territory.
Except by Lee's Ferry, and the long, hot
road which leads to it, or by a far western
route, this corner is inaccessible from the
south. It looks small enough upon
the map, but it is rather larger than the
State of Connecticut, and save for a few
scattered cattle-shacks, has no human
habitation.
Over the middle and western portions
of this barren northern Colorado bench,
where in five thousand square miles there
may be a dozen springs and fickle water-
pockets, bands of wild horses roam,
defying pursuit, worrying more docile
stock, and eating grass and drinking
water which are none too plenty for
TOe Oranfc Cannon 55
cattle and for better mannered horses. But
a fine show these splendid creatures make
of it when, from ten to fifty in a bunch,
they catch sight of an outfit like ours
and line out for a run.
For the next two weeks we wander over
this stretch of the plateau which lies
along the northern side of the Grand
Canyon, among extinct volcanoes, across
sinister lava flows, and along dry shallow
water courses, which once were tributary
to the Colorado River, while it too was a
broad leisurely stream before the carving
of the great inner gorge.
Lying along the whole eastern side of
this district and forming a large part of
the most imposing segment of the northern
wall of the Grand Canyon and the western
wall of the Marble Canyon esplanade, is
the Kaibab Plateau, or Old Buckskin, as
hereabouts it is familiarly called. It is
the Kaibab which looms up before the
56 Ube Oreat plateau
tourist on the southern side of the Grand
Canyon as he stands upon the brink at
El Tovar or the Grand View Hotel. It is
from seven to nine thousand feet above
sea level, stretches a hundred miles north
and south, and at its widest is somewhat
more than thirty miles across.
We now turn to the great Kaibab.
Everybody had told us that it is a para-
dise up there in the forest, and we found
it true. There one may wander for days
in an open forest of noble pines ; or along
exquisite glades, green-bottomed, where
the quaking aspen cheers the eye, and
edged with the delicate spires of spruce
and fir. Bright flowers bloom in long
forest-sequestered parks. One may even
hear water gurgle here and there among
the rocks, a sound not very common in
Arizona. Deer are plenty and very tame.
We chased them among the trees as one
might runaway cows. But as we were not
<5ranfc Cannon 57
out to kill things we left them mostly to
their own devices.
However pleasant it may be, after the
hot weeks of travel in the open, to loiter
under the pines and among the glades
in the heart of the Kaibab, one cannot
long resist those hazy glimpses caught
here and there between the trees into far
blue depths upon which shadowy outlines
of temples and minarets, and nameless
dreamy masses in soft rich colours, float
and gleam. However deep in the forest
or cosy beside the camp fire at the edge
of one of those matchless glades, the spell
of the great abyss hovers about one and
lures him to its side.
We ride for a day and crawl over upon
a great peninsula of rock — Powell's Plateau,
they name it — which looms above the
heart of this under- world, and revel in
the vision. We ride and camp and ride
again out and out for miles to the last
58 Ube (Breat plateau
rock pillar which stands poised on Point
Sublime, and linger hour after hour in the
thrall of a waking dream.
Then away we go again — for it makes
one restless, this mighty thing of trans-
cendant beauty — and after many miles
reach a towering promontory around
which the river makes a great curve as it
emerges from the Marble Canyon and
sweeps into the vast chambered space
below. This is the vantage-ground, lo-
cally known as Greenland Point, infre-
quently visited by parties of the nearest
Mormon villagers for a view of the Grand
Canyon. Two projecting cliffs upon this
point, known to the geologists as Cape
Royal and Cape Final, loom up across
the Canyon from Grand view.
When Major Powell and his men came
floating down the river they seemed a
little remorseful for the mood in which
the Dirty Devil had been named, and as
Battlements of the Canyon's Rim.
As seen from the Colorado River.
tlbe 6ran& Cannon 59
they reached the mouth of a side canyon
a few miles below our Greenland Point,
whence issues a sparkling brook, they
were inspired to call it the Bright Angel.
The new hotel, El Tovar, at the terminus
of the railroad, looks up this winding
gorge from the southern rim of the Grand
Canyon, a dozen miles away.
It was at a little spring close under
the edge of the summit ledges in which
this happily christened streamlet finds its
source that we lingered longest in camp,
loath to relinguish the shelter of the noble
forest and lose the glimpses of wonderland
down through the corridor of cliffs and
towers which the Bright Angel has fash-
ioned in its mad rush to the bosom of the
Colorado.
But there are hundreds of hot miles
between us and home, and so at last,
after some days of forest wandering,
we turn our faces toward the eastern
60 ZTbe (Breat plateau
fagade of the Kaibab, heading for Lee's
Ferry.
Here we secure a small boat and work
our way toilsomely up into the lower
boxes of the Glen Canyon, trying to
realise as we drift back again, the toils
and dangers and recompenses of those
who have floated through all the long
stretches of the canyons — Powell and
Stanton with their parties, the story of
whose explorations has been told in most
complete and entertaining fashion by
Dellenbaugh, himself one of the bold
adventurers, in his Romance of the Colo-
rado River.
From the ferry crossing one looks down
upon the upper reaches of the Marble
Canyon, its walls steadily rising until they
close in perspective over gloomy depths.
It is a thirsty ride of seventy-five miles
along the Echo Cliffs from Lee's Ferry
to water at the trading-post at Willow
Ube Grant) Cangon 61
Springs, whence the way leads on to the
Mormon city of Tuba, now a Navajo
agency, and to the Pueblo Indian ranches
in the valley of the Moencopie.
I have not woven into my wayside
narrative the human interests passing
in and out through the story of the scarred,
insistent earth which so inevitably domi-
nated our waking hours. But we stopped
beside forlorn hovels, whose Mormon
inmates had memories clear enough of
better times in other lands, and hopes
pathetic and dim of a brighter day for
the Chosen. Cattle-men, weeks from the
sight of other faces, were glad to leave
their lonesome cabins among the pines
and ride for miles beside us to hear our
story and to tell their own. Dusky
forms, mostly of Pah Utes and Navajos,
would dash out upon us or suddenly
materialise at our camp fires in the re-
motest places, and in mutual stares and
62 TEbe Great plateau
smokes and pantomine we always won
our way to good fellowship and confidence.
From Tuba the way is not far to the
eastern fringe of the Coconino Forest,
and across the uplands to the range of the
tourist and the hotels at the Grand
Canyon, whence we were lured at the
beginning of this chapter by glimpses of
the land beyond.
The Cataract, the Glen, and the Marble
Canyons, and that portion of the Grand
Canyon which lies below Powell's Plateau,
are gorges of overpowering grandeur, but
they are perfectly comprehensible. When
one has won his way along and across them,
and now in sun and now in shadow has
studied their sombre walls, he can easily
enough describe them and recall better-
known canyons and gorges which serve
fairly well by comparison to illustrate
their extent and majesty. But face to
face with this other, comparisons are
TTbe Orarto Cannon 63
futile, and figures and estimates seem
impertinent. Each change of season, each
new day, and every passing hour reveals
new elements of grandeur in the cliffs,
fresh phases of transcendent beauty in
their colours.
The great Canyon is shy of the camera,
and the marvellous blue haze, now lumi-
nous, now faint, now shot with purple
as the light falls red upon it at sunset,
is always there holding its reserve in-
violate. Single cliffs and towers of rare
strength and beauty may be secured
upon your films, but the Canyon never.
The first white men to look upon the
Grand Canyon were some old Spaniards,
who went out from the Moqui villages in
1541. A few of them scrambled down
the cliffs a little way and took a world
of satisfaction, when they got back, in
pointing out to their wiser comrades who
had staid above, some pinnacles of rock
64 Ube Great plateau
partway down apparently as large as a
man, but which they triumphantly de-
clared were bigger than the great tower
of Seville.
Major Powell, who knew the Colorado
well, says impressive things, in very
charming fashion, about the Grand Canyon.
But he finds the task perilously exacting,
and at last, yielding to the frenzy of
comparison, plucks up Mount Washington
by the roots to the level of the sea, and
drops it head first into the abyss, calling
you to witness that the waters still flow
between the walls. Anon the Blue Ridge
is plucked up and even hurled into the
canyon; but there is room aplenty still.
Charles Dudley Warner, wearying of
description, stows away the Yosemite in
an inconspicuous side gorge, and defies
you to find it. Then he summons dreams
of the Orient, calls Babylon back across
the years, fixes his eyes upon a far, aerial
Upper Ledges of the Canyon Wall.
On the Grandview Trail.
6ran& Cannon 65
heaven which fades at last into visions
of the New Jerusalem, and so, altogether,
conies off with flying colours from his
skilful, lusty tilt with the impossible.
A wise and sympathetic, as well as
learned description of the Grand Canyon
and its adjacent country is that of Captain
Button, unfortunately buried for most
readers in a bulky report. — Vol. II. — of
the United States Geological Survey.
After all, one may be glad if he can win
the conviction that in a world so strenuous
with obvious duties and conscientious
impulses, no man has got to describe the
Grand Canyon.
But if one would really know it he must
not hasten away. Many interesting jour-
neys along its borders, afoot and ahorse,
are feasable from the hotels, especially
from Grand View. One may ride from
Grand View north-eastward for sixteen
miles among the piiions of the Coconino
5
66 Ube (Brant) Gannon
Basin and peer into the shivery depths
of the narrow gorge through which the
Little Colorado sinks into the arms of
its big brother from the scorching sands
of the Painted Desert.
One may visit little groups of cliff houses
in the gullies which lead from the basin
up into the northern fringes of the forest
or along the summit ledges of the great
valley. One can grope his way into lime-
stone caves far down the cliffs, or may
wander for miles along the brink of the
canyon, winding in and out to head the
vast amphitheatres which face the abyss,
picking up old arrow-heads and frag-
ments of archaic pottery.
A ride of some sixty miles south-westward
will bring one to the bottom of the canyon
of Cataract Creek, where a dwindling
relic of the Havasupai Indians awaits
extinction in poor wickiyups among their
meagre corn-fields and melon-patches.
TTbe <3ranfc Cannon 67
It is not easy, where every outlook is
sublime, to select a single point upon the
canyon's brink of which one can say, this
is, after all, the best.
The outlook from El Tovar or from
the points near by is impressive, almost
overpowering, because one gets here his
first glimpse which is straight down into
the vast abyss.
One of the most comprehensive views
is a long, high spur on the south side,
some miles below the railway terminus
and accessible from Bass's camp. This
looms far out over the deeps between
two mighty gulfs and commands a stretch
of many miles of the Canyon on either
side.
The outlook from Grand View is, how-
ever, in many respects the most alluring
of all since it commands from the highest
point upon the sou them 'rim, not only the
vast amphitheatre at the entrance of
68 Ube Great plateau
the Little Colorado, but glimpses of the
Painted Desert, the Marble Plateau, Echo
Cliffs, and the exquisite dome of Navajo
Mountain, upon the far northern horizon.
Do not go before you have seen the
great valley filled to the brim with seething
billows of cloud, and watched their fading
under the touch of the early sun. You
must see a shower march across the vast
spaces below, leaving trails of heightened
colour upon the streaming faces of the
cliffs. From above you should see the
night close in, and strain the eyes to catch
the outline of familiar forms grown faint
and far and strange. And when the
moonlight falls full into the depths, say
if you can that down there it is still a
part of the earth you know.
You should scramble down the trails
and learn that it is a real river foaming
and tossing over the rocks. But you will
not win your way to the inmost spirit of
Ube (Brand Cannon 69
the place unless you spend a night alone
down in those awesome chambers — as
far out of the world as you can get, it
seems, and still hold the link intact.
The going out of the day from your
seclusion and the splendour of the world's
night far above you, the unearthly sweep
of the moonlight across the faces of the
awful cliffs which hem you in, and the
coming of the morning, ushered in upon
your solitude in mysterious fashion from
some invisible source — these and the mem-
ory of a hundred weird happenings of
the night, which I may not linger to set
down, will seal the enchantment when,
again stretched in the friendly shade of
some gnarled old cedar close upon the
brink, you let the hours slip by in dreamy
visions which each moment weaves afresh
out of the mass and colour of cliff and
pinnacle and gorge and their veil of
ethereal blue.
70 Ube 6reat plateau
So at last we have learned where the
old Colorado comes from, and have seen
it sweeping through dwindling gorges
out to the desert of the far South-west.
The mystery of the country beyond the
river has been merged in pictures of a
summer holiday. We know that those
tiny uplifts over there upon the farther
brink are not the puny twiglets which
they seem, but gigantic pines, through
whose swaying tops the wind moans and
sings. We could even prove, "an we
would, " out of its miles of splendid cliffs,
that the Grand Canyon is, indeed, the
masterpiece of world sculpture. But when
the last is said, the spirit, as at the first,
is swayed most of all by its elusive, un-
earthly beauty. Perhaps Mr. Warner,
after all, was wise to drop halting phrases
and turn to visions of the New Jerusalem.
Our way homeward leads past the
Hopi villages, where we linger through
Ube (Branft Cannon 71
the weird ceremonial of the snake-dance
at Walpi. Thence the hot trails lead us
for eight days over the wide stretches
of the Navajo reservation, around the
western spur of the Carriso Mountains,
across the San Juan River, along the
western front of the Mesa Verde, in whose
recesses the cliff -dwellings are concealed.
!^(
And so we straggle into the ranch.
There still are ten of us, but it is in part
another ten. For of the six sturdy,
willing beasts which started on the way,
only two have weathered the privations
and hardships of the thirteen hundred
toilsome miles which make up the record
of our summer wandering.
The hardships of the way are soon
forgotten, but in the lulls of busy life the
memory is fain to conjure back the spell
of those serene deeps, which woven once,
nor time nor space shall ever break.
CHAPTER V
A LITTLE STORY OF WORLD-MAKING
IF one lingers for a while beside the
stream of tourist travel which surges
in to the Grand Canyon at El Tovar
stares, exclaims, gasps, squeaks, chatters,
even weeps sometimes, and then slips
back whence it came, he will hear first
and last a great deal about how the
Canyon " happened. "
One may read all about it and more
too, in the descriptions of passing news-
paper correspondents diverted for a day
from the main line of the Santa Fe at
Williams. These are, however, not in-
frequently so bathed in an atmosphere of
personal impression and so charged with
more or less lurid comparisons that signi-
72
73
ficant details are lost. Many learned trea-
tises on the geology of the Canyon are
quite accessible. But the temptation is
strong to sum up the opinions of the ex-
perts in simple fashion for the visitor who
seeks the story for itself but likes his
science tempered to the spirit of his
holiday.
If I venture here to tell the story of the
Canyon's making in simple impersonal
fashion I must assume that the reader
has already wandered to and fro at leisure
upon the "rim," that we have made our
way down the colossal terraces by one of
the well made trails, preferably at Grand
View, and have come at last to the camping
place upon a great sand bar beside the
river. We dispose of our frugal meal as
the night creeps in upon the vast abyss
and its chambered recesses. We have
made a fire of river driftwood, and here,
if ever, the grim walls looming far up on
74 tTbe (3teat plateau
either side, a clear-cut strip of starry sky
between, and the swirl and roar of the
river close at hand, is the time and place
for a story.
There are so many kinds of story which
a camp-fire invites that one might hesitate
in choice. But the spirit of the situation
and the hour lead most directly to a
sober tale of world-making which geolo-
gists have read out of the stone story-
book opened wider in this land of the
great plateaus than almost anywhere
else on earth.
I have upon my writing-table, holding
down a pile of unruly papers, the oldest
relic of America which human eyes have
ever rested on. It is a rough fragment
of rock which I broke off from a long,
low granite ridge, a part of which is
now called the Laurentian Hills in
Canada — the first land to emerge from
that universal, shoreless sea which
75
once swept unhindered round the
earth.
After the appearance of my paper-
weight — the avatar of the North American
Continent — some scattering rock islets
and ridges got their heads also into the
sunlight here and there, along the line
of the Appalachian chain, among the tips
of the Rockies, and over the central and
northern regions of the future great
republic.
Then these rock islands, and others
which the throes of the uneasy earth sent
up to join them, and the shallow bottoms
here and there, were pounded through
ages by resistless seas, and powdered and
weathered into boulder, pebble, sand, and
silt. This wreckage filled in the borders
of the land, and slowly built up, layer by
layer, the bottoms of the interinsular
seas. The layered ruin of the earlier earth
was then baked by plutonic fires into new
76 tlbe Great plateau
rock, and again became the sport of the
elements, and took new forms and places
in the earth's foundation.
And so, after never mind how many
millions of years, the continent of North
America grew into some semblance of its
present form. But for a long time the
South Atlantic seaboard was under water ;
Florida was not; and what now we call
the Gulf of Mexico sent a deep bay
up the Mississippi half-way to the Great
Lakes; while a vast inland sea, the Medi-
terranean of early America, stretched
north-westward from the Gulf across the
Rocky Mountain country, over the region
of our great plateau, and far on toward
the Arctic Ocean.
Just here the sequence of events grows
dim as centuries file along. At any rate
the great inland sea was gradually filled
by the wash from its shores and by the
water-borne wreckage of the hills in the
77
back country. Then it lost its connec-
tion with the sea, and became a vast fresh-
water lake, or chain of lakes, with rather
unstable bottoms, which rose and sank
as the earth's crust bent and wrinkled.
The shores and depths of this new lake
were haunted by strange living crea-
tures.
Finally the whole basin got rilled up and
dry, except for the water pouring down
out of the northern hills. Thus a great
new drainage area was formed, which
headed far in the crumpled mountains to
the north, and stretched off south-west-
ward toward a mighty arm of the sea, of
which the Gulf of California is the dwin-
dling relic. This drainage area became
in time the plateau country, and the new
watercourse, the Colorado River, so nois-
ily in evidence beside our camp, forswore
its inherited fealty to the Atlantic, long
maintained through the Gulf of Mexico,
78 Ube Great plateau
and henceforth paid loyal tribute to the
Pacific.
Please remember that I am just telling
the story as I have gleaned it from the
students of the rocks in book and lecture
and in far-off camps among the hills.
So if a million years or so should slip
away unheeded in my tale, or if the
shores of nameless, vanished seas should
in my memory break in wider beach-lines
or a little farther inland than in fact
they did, I claim the license of way-side
narrative.
It is tiresome to try to conceive of the
long reaches of time during which this
great inland sea was filling up, and it is
fortunate that the geologists who deal in
such lordly, lavish fashion with the years,
handling them in parcels of a few millions
or a hundred millions or so, finally lump
them together under ages — Carbonifer-
ous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Creta-
79
ceous, etc., names which are not insist-
ent in the suggestion that they were, after
all, made up of hours and minutes, which
only one by one have slipped away.
But if you go out into the plateau coun-
try five hundred miles from any ocean you
will not doubt this inland sea. For you
may ride for hours along shaly rock escarp-
ments on which the ripples of the ancient
shores are as plain and plenty as ever
you saw them on the Jersey coast. You
can pick up shells too, which at least sug-
gest clams, stone though they be to-day.
In the northern part of the plateau coun-
try, now cut off from the rest by the
Uintah Mountains, the bones of monkeys
and crocodiles, of birds with teeth and
three- toed horses, of sea-serpents — honour
bright, I appeal to Marsh and to Osborn —
and of a motley lot of named and name-
less uncouth, ludicrous beasts, are piled
pell-mell together in the washes, or half
8o Ube Great plateau
buried in banks and cliffs and weathered
buttes which once were the shores and
bottoms of our slowly shoaling inland sea.
It is a pleasant memory which lingers
with the writer, of an undergraduate
summer spent in this region under the
tutelage of Professor Marsh, who was so
wise in the lore of these crumbling hills.
Most vivid of all, perhaps, is the recol-
lection of a long, hot week whose day-
light hours were spent alone astride the
shelving edge of a low weathered butte,
with hammer and stone-chisel, pecking
away the rock around the fossil head
of a preposterous beast, something like
a crocodile, I fancied, which once had
floundered about in that old inland sea.
Every day, as soon as the click of the
chisel began, three huge grey wolves
came peering over the edge of the bluff
a hundred feet or so above me, and
here they stood, alert, but silent, all
The Wily Coyote.
81
through the hot day. A hallo and a
sudden wave of the hand would send
them scampering off, but presently they
were there again, attentive as ever to
the strange thing below. It was a far
cry back from my contemporaries upon
the bluff, who seemed to have very
little business of their own on hand, to
the old inhabitant at my feet ; and though
we had n't much in common, we all
got on very well together, and parted
friends.
But I have lingered behind my story,
for we have seen the old inland sea filled
up, and a new great river, which will
some day be the Colorado, sweeping down
from the northern regions on its way to
the Pacific. This stream bore great floods
of water, and began to gather enormous
quantities of eroded stuff from the lake-
beds over which it passed. So that after
this great basin, covering an area of con-
82 TTbe (Breat plateau
siderably more than a hundred thousand
square miles, had been filled in, layer by
layer, some two or three miles deep, at
such an inordinate cost in mountains and
at such a reckless expenditure of time,
and the stuff had all got nicely packed
and settled into good solid earth crust, the
whole thing began to wash out again, to
make new land somewhere else.
I don't know where it all went to, but in
the later periods, at least, a vast amount
went down the Colorado. But gone much
of it is, especially of the upper strata, as
you might see for yourself if you went
over into southern Utah and northern
Arizona, into the land beyond the Great
Kaibab of which we caught some hasty
glimpses in the last chapter.
You would get up on top of some of
the upper strata of the rock which filled
the inland sea, now forming what are
known as the High Plateaus of Utah,
83
and bear off south toward the river.
You would come off from these between
the Mark£gunt and the Pansagunt, down
a series of gigantic steps hundreds of feet
high, each the edge of one of the old upper
layers, left exposed in miles of gorgeous,
fantastic cliffs by the wear and tear and
wash of the centuries. When you got
down from the remnants of the top
layers you would have descended over
six thousand feet upon the lower level,
whose surface has been exposed in huge
patches over hundreds of square miles
by the erosion of insatiate streams.
Even then you would not have reached
the bottom of the inland sea. For you
would make your way southward for
forty miles across a rough desert country,
on the top of what our learned friends
call the Carboniferous strata, until you
came to the brink of the canyon at its
grandest part and nearly opposite to
84 Ube 6reat plateau
the haunts of the tourists. If then you
should descend the dizzy mile of Car-
boniferous cliffs and terraces to the level
of the river, you would at last have
reached the very bottom of our old inland
sea, and gone a thousand feet into the
rugged granite ledge beneath, which
claims the kinship of age with my paper-
weight from the Laurentian Hills. This
granite ledge which formed the earliest
bottom of the inland sea emerges from
the under world within a few hundred
yards of our camp upon the sand bar,
and it may be seen from many points
near Grand View, sloping up into the
sunlight from beneath some layered rem-
nants of the ancient sediment.
The secret of the great denudation and
of this wonderful achievement of the
Colorado in carving out of rock a series
of canyons about five hundred miles long,
and, in one place at least, more than
85
a mile deep, with a multitude of tribu-
tary chasms and gorges, is very simple
when you know it. The old lake-bed
slowly rose.
At first, the Colorado River and its
tributaries, or some nameless monstrous
ancestor of these, sweeping over the
slowly rising surfaces, planed them down
in most relentless fashion, and then be-
gan wearing out broad shallow stream-
beds. But then the country rose more
rapidly, and the water had to cut deeper
channels in the rocks in order to get
out and away to sea.
Owing in part to the wear of the water
itself, but more to the ceaseless bom-
bardment of the suspended sand which
it bore from the up country, or picked
up as it went along, and to the thump
of pebbles and boulders which it swept
on in flood-time, the river kept cutting
down as the strata rose, until finally,
86 TTbe Great plateau
when what was left of our inland sea-
bottom got thrust up so that, towering
far above its erstwhile rocky shores, it
had to be called a plateau, the Colorado
River and its auxiliaries found them-
selves at the bottom of a series of colossal
canyons and gorges, where they are to-day.
Then, increasing the complexity of
things hereabouts, the strata in the rising
plateau got overstrained, and bent up in
great swells or ridges, forming subsidiary
tables or plateaus of great extent. In
other places the strata broke in cracks, a
hundred miles in length sometimes. Along
these cracks the rock layers on one side
or the other often sank below or were
pushed above the general level, forming
those abrupt cliffs or escarpments which
the wise ones call " faults. "
So, thrust up hundreds of feet, over
great areas, by resistless plutonic forces,
losing large tracts of its upper strata by
o -5
O §
M-, ®
0 A
m J
r^ U
87
earlier floods and streams, gouged out by
the Colorado and its tributaries, still ex-
isting or extinct, and withal crumpled
and cracked and displaced in varied fash-
ion when the earth's crust writhed, the
old inland sea-bottom, now our Great
Plateau, certainly has won through much
tribulation the right to glory in its
stupendous relics.
But, in addition to all the rest, a mul-
titude of volcanoes and lava streams have
at one time or another burst up through
the strata here and there, some of them
not so very long ago, leaving imposing
mountains, building cinder cones, and
deluging the land with molten rock.
That is my story. Its plot in years is
long indeed. It exploits the forces which
build and sculpture worlds. And if it
lack the human touch which lies at the
heart of the best stories, one yet may link
the present to the past if he realise that
88 Ube Great plateau
the swift turbid stream beside our camp
still as sand and silt, is bearing the moun-
tains to the sea; that the click of pebble
against pebble where the water rushes
over shallows, and the beat of rock on
rock along the deeper bottoms, are slowly
wearing stone to sand; that the great
river is cutting its channel deeper and
wider year by year, while the shower
gusts and the frost are yet at work shaping
this wonderland into those forms of grace
and majesty which are the heritage of
millenniums. The great inland sea is
gone, but the ripples are on its beaches
still. The strange beasts have vanished,
but their bones cumber the ground. The
earth's crust has ceased to heave and
crack, but the crumpled broken strata
rise in imposing hills and cliffs. The
volcanoes are cold and silent, but the great
cinder cones and lava beds are still sinister.
When we clamber back up to the sur-
89
face of the earth again in the morning,
passing the rugged millennial marks as
we go, we shall not fail to bear some
uplift of spirit from this little sojourn
with the world's masterpiece.
CHAPTER VI
A SUMMER AMONG CLIFF DWELLINGS
I FANCY that to most people the word
archaeology conveys suggestions
largely of old Greece or Rome or
Egypt, of fluted pillars and damaged
friezes, or of statues whose heads and
legs and arms have mostly gone afield —
of these and sundry things which agents
of societies and colleges dig up with
subscription money, and write books about,
or lecture upon with a lantern in a dark-
ened room. At least if entirely candid,
the writer must confess that this was the
response which his untutored mental ma-
chinery offered to the chance suggestion
of the word.
By this it will be perceived that the
90
Cliff Dwellings 91
writer is, as to archaeology, one sitting
in the outer darkness, and this is what
he wishes to be clearly understood. For
so only would it seem wise to record
in haphazard fashion some phases of a
summer's wandering among ruined and
forgotten homesteads of the great South-
west, and a layman's conception thus
derived of a group of prehistoric Americans
who had finished their strenuous and
narrow lives, and faded into tradition
and myth before the Spaniards, zealous
for God and athirst for gold, had pene-
trated to the heart of our continent,
and even before Columbus had ventured
across the unknown sea.
The "cliff-builders" lived in such queer
places, built so well, and seem to have
vanished so utterly, that by many they
are regarded as the most mysterious of
the American aborigines.
But those who know their World's
92 ZTbe (Brcat plateau
Fairs or who have read the results of
Bandelier's toilsome researches, or who
have turned the pages of the great reports
of the Bureau of Ethnology, are aware
that a good deal is known, after all, about
the haunts and ways of the American ' ' Cliff-
dwellers," and that some shrewd guesses
are current about their story. The heart
of the story seems to be that they were
sedentary Indians allied to the present
Pueblos, some of whom were long ago
driven to places of defence and conceal-
ment under stress of conflict with no-
madic tribes, who built no houses, and
have left no trace in the land across
which they hunted the unhappy refugees.
Let us glance a moment at this land .
I suppose that few know which four of
the commonwealths of the United States
come together at one point in right-
angled corners. The writer cannot truly
say that these possessors of unusual geo-
Cliff Dwellings 93
graphic lore are greatly superior to the
uninformed majority. But, in fact, Colo-
rado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico
do meet at one point, in one of the most
lonesome and forbidding sections of the
Great Plateau. And a few venturesome
persons have travelled a good many hot
miles to tickle their fancies by sprawling
their anatomies into the domain of four
at once of the units of this great republic.
A glance at a map of the United States
shows this unique relationship, and at-
tention is called to it here only because
this easily located point on the map is
near the northern limit of a little-known
and little-traversed district in which relics
of the prehistoric American are accessible,
abundant, and well-preserved.
If one takes a map of the United States
drawn on such a scale that it is about
seven inches from New York to San
Francisco, and puts a silver quarter of
94 ftbe (Sreat plateau
a dollar upon it so that the head of the
alleged bird of freedom, looking toward
the west, lies just over these four corners,
he will have covered a tract considerably
larger than New England, almost as
dry as Sahara, and as rich in the relics
of a vanished race as any classic country
of them all.
The eastern border of the silver "quar-
ter" lies along the slopes of the Great
Continental Divide covering the sources
of the Rio Grande. Its western segment
bridges the awesome depths of the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado, and edges close
upon the foothills of the Wasatch range.
The Santa Fe Railway traverses the lower
third of the tract. Across its upper
portion the San Juan River, muddy and
treacherous, rolls sullenly westward
through hot reaches of desert, and then
rushing along deep gorges, merges at
last into the great Colorado as it sweeps
Cliff Dwellings 95
and roars through its vast self-sculptured
chasm on its way to the Pacific. North-
ward the great hills are piled confusedly
together, guarding their treasure of gold
and silver and jewels and coal. To the
south the land stretches brokenly away
toward Mexico.
All over this great stretch of country,
so hot in its untempered summer sun-
shine that one wishes that he had not come,
so bewitching in its skies and clouds and
atmosphere and hills that not for worlds
would he have staid away, are the ruined
homes of the forgotten people.
One finds them at the doors of Navajo
wickiups deep in the wilderness, where old
women sit weaving blankets in the sun.
One finds them hundreds of miles from
the white man's dwellings or the brown
man's haunts. Sometimes they are on
high plateaus, sometimes in broad valleys,
sometimes hung along the crags of well-
96 Ube Oreat plateau
nigh inaccessible canyons, or perched, it
may be, in dizzy security atop of some
gigantic rock which rises sheer and soli-
tary above the plain, over which it has
kept so long unheeded vigil.
Some of the ruins are only crumbled
piles of stone, half covered with sand or
overgrown with grass and bushes and
trees, which the untutored traveller would
pass unheeding. Some of them have
walls, often several storied, still upright
and firm, or partly fallen in. Some, out
upon the bare plateaus, are to-day im-
posing in their mass, with hundreds of
stone chambers quite intact and accessi-
ble, or filled with the stone and mortar of
other walls fallen upon them from story
after story above.
Some of the forsaken dwellings are
mere caves scooped out at the base of
cliffs. Some are the natural or widened
1 'blow-outs" on volcanic hills. Finally
iwl
<u
H
2>wellin08 97
along the walls of the canyons, some-
times near the bottom, but more often far
up their rugged sides upon shelves or
caverns in the softer rock, one may
see, scarcely visible against the grey bare
surfaces, tiny stone boxes edging sheer
upon the face of the cliff, or a series of
these more conspicuous and strung along
on various levels, with only a bird's or a
squirrel's way in sight to reach them.
All these silent witnesses of folks that
were will not greatly disturb the equa-
nimity of the traveller, who, after he has
learned from disappointing scrambles that
relics are rare on the floors of the aban-
doned rooms, will from the saddle for a
little look and wonder, and then pass on.
But there comes a time to the well ad-
vised and well-conducted wanderer when
everything else on earth for a moment
fades. He has ridden through miles
it may be, of an aggravating jungle of
98 £be $reat plateau
pinon and juniper, and has passed at last
into a wilderness so desperate and so pro-
found that all human habitation seems a
thing of infinite remoteness.
Suddenly the horse stops. The smooth
rock reaches, over which he has been
making his way, have dropped before
him, and he is on the brink of a chasm.
The walls fall sheer at the top some hun-
dreds of feet, then slope, then fall again
to a shrub-clad bottom which stretches
away into blue distance. This at first
is all, and the grandeur of the scene
alone commands attention. But slowly
then out of the grey shadows of the far-
ther side a picture is evolved, so strange,
so confusing, so improbable, that one is
disposed to wonder if the sun has not
played him false, and the thing before
him is not some weird delusion.
It is a great group of ruins perched
midway in the opposite cliff, many sto-
Cliff Bwelltnas 99
Tied, quaintly towered, with doorways
and narrow windows still intact, or stout
walls here and there fallen forward into the
chasm, revealing chamber within cham-
ber, tier upon tier, all silent, motionless,
and utterly uncanny here in the heart of
the wilderness. Here, where none comes
except by chance a roaming Indian, who
hurries in superstitious dread away ; where
naught lives but squirrels, rabbits, vul-
tures, and coyotes, and some still crawling
things, and where for hours no sound falls
upon the hot, slumberous air-
But I have a little outrun my tale.
While the cliff dwellings are scattered
here and there all over the region which
I have bounded in silver, they are for the
most part not large, and as single structures
not very striking. But there is a district
lying close about the meeting-point of
Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico
in which not only the prehistoric ruins
ioo TTbe Great plateau
of the plateaus and the valleys, but
also those built in the dizzy recesses
of the canyon walls, are imposing even to
grandeur.
No part of this once widely inhabited
region is so rich in these great communal
cliff dwellings as a high plateau, thirty
miles long and twelve or fifteen wide,
situated largely in the Ute Indian reser-
vation in south-western Colorado, and
called the Mesa Verde. This great tim-
bered upland, rising in rough, forbidding
cliffs fifteen hundred or two thousand feet
above the surrounding country, slopes
gradually southward toward the San Juan
River in Arizona.
The Mancos River, flowing south-west-
ward to join the San Juan, at some remote
period, has gouged out of the great rock
mesa a series of wild canyons. These are
now mostly dry, and, save by dim, rough
Indian trails, almost impassable.
I
rt
g
s
u
rt
U
Cliff Spellings 101
It is in the walls of these arid canyons so
desperately aloof even yet, that the "Cliff-
men " built some of their most elaborate
and imposing fortress-homes. It was here
in the hollows and on the plateaus above,
that for years which no man to-day may
number, they wrung a meagre subsistence
from the parched soil, fighting meanwhile,
as it would seem, for even this scanty
foothold in the wilderness. And then
they left it all to the squirrels and vultures
and coyotes, to the wandering Ute and
Navajo, to the lizards and the sun.
Nearly all of the cliff dwellings of the
Mesa Verde have been vigorously, though
none of them exhaustively, explored.
The delver among these ruins is early
and continually impressed by the won-
derful preservation of things of the most
delicate texture; things which in most
climates would speedily have rotted and
crumbled, such as fabrics and feathers
102 ZTbe Great plateau
\
and corn-husks and the tassels of the
corn and fragile wood fibres. The cli-
mate of these regions is so very dry, and
the remnants of household articles have
been so absolutely protected from rain
and snow in the deep recesses of the great
caverns in the cliffs where the houses are,
that the usual disintegrating processes
of time have here been held largely in
check.
It would make too long a story were I
to enter upon a description of these great
houses in the cliffs, or recount the vicissi-
tudes of the explorer as he seeks for the
old pathways along the ledges, or scram-
bles up the bare rocks, clinging to shallow
grooves and notches which the old "Cliff-
men " made so long ago, and which the
wear of centuries has not yet effaced
Nor need I emphasise the toilsome nature
of the explorer's task when he enters
upon the search in the choking dust heaps
Cliff Dwellings 103
which the ages have strewn over all the
ruins, and under the piles of fallen masonry,
for the secrets of the burial-places. The
sun is very powerful, the dust is insuffer-
ably annoying, the stones which must be
turned are legion, and what is left of the
early American himself, when you do
get at him, is not a pleasing thing to behold,
and may be hauntingly uncanny.
For any one who chooses now to gather
them, the ancient pottery and other uten-
sils of the "Cliff-" and" Plains-dwellers"
have considerable value for purposes of
sale to tourists and collectors. In some
parts of this region it is the practice of
the settlers, on Sundays or other holidays,
to organise picnics to the ruins. And
the rustic swain is wont to signalise his
regard for his Dulcinea by digging for her
out of the desolate graves what articles
the chances of the hour may bring. She,
cosily seated amid piles of broken pottery,
104 ZTbe Great plateau
darting lizards and dead men's bones,
smiles complacently the while upon the
dusty delver from the chaste recesses
of a sun-umbrella.
If, now, without further parley as to the
details of the ruins and the vicissitudes
of their exploration, we turn to the vari-
ous things which the old " Cliff-dwellers "
have left, many of which one may see for
himself to-day upon the spot, and try to
frame from them a conception of the
masters of these homes, we shall find that a
good deal may be read out of the dark-
ness of forgotten centuries without special
light from the torches of the professional
archaeologists.
He was a dark-skinned fellow, this old
" Cliff-dweller," as his mummified remains
show plainly enough. The hair was usu-
ally black, and moderately coarse and
long. He was of medium stature, and
the back of his skull was flattened by be-
Sandals of the Cliff- Dweller.
Cliff Dwellings 105
ing tied firmly against a board in infancy,
as among some races is the custom still.
He had fair teeth, much worn, as the
years grew upon him, from munching ill-
ground corn.
It would be difficult to say from the
articles thus far discovered just how much
this prehistoric man was devoted to dress,
or rather, to undress. A simple breech-
clout was certainly in vogue, and there
is considerable reason to think that this
was, at times at least, the piece de resist-
ance in his costume. But parts of hide
jackets, fur caps, blankets made of feathers
tied on to a coarse net of cord, are also
in evidence, and mostly preserved among
the furnishings of the dead. A variety
of sandals and other rude foot-gear has
been found, some woven of yucca leaves,
some braided of other vegetable fibres
some rudely constructed from corn-husks.
A certain passion for personal adorn-
106 Ube Great plateau
ment and devotion to superstition is evi-
dent from the rough beads and the strings
of bones and small shells which he wore,
while amulets of turquoise or shell or
broken pottery pierced for suspension
about the neck are not seldom found.
He brushed his hair with tightly tied
bunches of stiff grass, with one end
trimmed square, and his long coarse
black hairs are clinging still to some of
them.
The spirit of the age now prompts us to
ask what did he do for a living, this dark
fellow in scanty attire, with a tinge of
vanity and superstition?
He was, first of all, a farmer. He
raised corn and beans and gourds in the
thin soil, of the mesas, or upon the lesser
slopes, which still show traces of scanty
terraces. Corn is frequently found, some-
times still on the cob, sometimes shelled
off and stowed in jars, while corn-cobs and
Cliff Dwellings 107
corn-husks are scattered everywhere among
the rubbish. The beans and gourds are
less abundant. The gourd seeds were
sometimes carefully stowed away. The
only farming implements which have
been found are, so far as I am aware,
stout sticks pointed or flattened at one
end, quite like the planting-sticks still in
use by primitive agriculturists.
It is evident enough that in his time, as
now, his country was very dry, and water
had to be carefully husbanded. One finds
here and there traces of shallow reservoirs
and what seem to have been irrigating
ditches. Sloping hollows in the rocks
near the houses are not infrequently
dammed across their lower ends, appar-
ently to save the melting snow or the
waste of showers.
The considerable number of large jars
would indicate that water was sometimes
stored also in the houses. The earthen
io8 Ube Great plateau
ladles or dippers not infrequently found
in the ruins or in the graves are often
much worn and bevelled on the edges,
an indication that they were used to ladle
up water from hollows in the rocks, such
as abound on the plateaus above and
about the cliffs. Small springs still exist
near some of the largest cliff-houses.
That the " cliff-man " was skilled in
masonry the well shaped and finished
stones, the trim walls hung upon steep
sloping rock surfaces, sheer at the edges
of cliffs, where they rest to-day firm and
secure, abundantly prove. The mortar
of most of the houses was very cleverly
laid in, and between the tiers pebbles and
small stones were set, giving a pleasing
break to the lines of the masonry.
The rooms of these great dwellings
were apparently not all built at one time,
and in size, shape, and arrangement con-
form to the exigencies of the situation.
Skilful Prehistoric Masonry.
Dwellings 109
Some of them are many feet across, some
so small that one can hardly stand up-
right in them and can reach from side to
side. Some communicate with one an-
other by low openings, through which
one must crawl on hands and knees;
others are entered only through holes in
the ceilings. Some of the rooms are so
small that they could have been used only
for storage.
The great sloping arches of the caverns
in which the larger cliff-houses are bulit
shelter most of them from above. But
when rooms were exposed or were built
one above another, the roofs or floors are
supported by timber girders, whose rough
ends witness to the toilsome processes in-
volved in their shaping with such tools
alone as men of the stone age could
command. Upon the heavier timbers they
laid smaller sticks, tied osiers and cedar
bark to these, and plastered the whole
no Ubc Great plateau
over with thick layers of mud or mortar.
A large part of the timber is well preserved.
Within, the masonry is usually coated
with a thin layer of plaster, and the sweep
of the rough palms of the old artisans is
still plain on many a chamber wall.
They had tiny fire-places in the corners
of some of the little rooms. In others
the fire was in a pit in the floor at the
centre. The smoke from the fires found
its way out as best it could through
holes in the ceilings. So the walls are
often very black, and from some of them
you can rub off the soot upon your hands
to-day. But when the wall got too
sooty a thin fresh layer of plaster was
laid on over it. In some of the larger
rooms one can count sixteen, and perhaps
more, thin layers of fresh plaster, with
the soot in streaks of black between them.
Furniture there is no trace of, unless
one reckon as such a low stone step or
Cliff Dwellings
bench which runs around some of the
larger rooms.
Many of the ruins contain large round
chambers with the narrow stone bench
along the wall, and a pit in the centre
for a fire. They have usually a pyramidal
or dome-like roof of large timbers, whose
ends rest upon stone piers which project
into the rooms. The walls of these rooms,
which seem to have been places of assem-
bly and are called estufas or kivas, are
usually very sooty. In them, too, one
finds such evidence of an intelligent
provision for ventilation as shames some
of our practices to-day. Flues, often of
considerable size, are built into the walls,
leading from the open air down into the
chambers, and opening at the floor-level.
In front of this opening, and between it
and the fire-pit, was usually a stone or
wooden screen.
Little square cubbies were not infre-
H2 Ube <3reat plateau
quently made inside the rooms by leaving
a stone out of the masonry. These are
especially common in the large round
chambers just mentioned, and small uten-
sils and ornaments have been frequently
found stowed away in them. Many of
the rooms have wooden pegs built into
the walls, apparently for hanging things
upon.
The stout timbers which form the floors
of the higher rooms were sometimes left
sticking through the masonry outside the
walls, and small cross-sticks being tied
upon them, they made excellent balconies
—a little dangerous, perhaps, if some
skulking marauder with a bow and arrows
should happen to creep to the nearest
cliff edge above, but airy and with com-
manding outlook.
Fires ticks have been left, with round
charred ends, such as the early folks
the world over were wont to twirl upon
Arrow-Heads, Spear-Heads, etc., of the Cliff-folk.
Cliff Dwellings n3
another stick and so win fire. Little
bunches of cedar-bark strips closely tied
with yucca threads, and burnt at one end
where they have been used as tinder,
are not uncommon "finds" in the rooms
and in the rubbish heaps.
No trace of metal tools or utensils has ^
ever been found in these ruins. The
" Cliff-dweller " was a man of the stone age.
He was no mean artisan, however, as may
be seen by his stone arrow-heads and spear-
heads, by his stone axes and hammers, many
of them, thanks to the dry climate, with
the wooden handle still tied firmly on to
them. He had knives made of chipped
stone tied into the end of a stick, and
often made fast with some sort of pitch.
Sharp, smooth stones, which may have
been used for skinning large game, are
noc rare.
Small stone mortars with spherical or
cylindrical pestles are not uncommon,
H4 tTbe (Breat plateau
and one may safely conjecture that they
were employed to grind the mineral
colours used in the decoration of pottery.
Stone-tipped drills have been found, which
were doubtless used to make holes in their
amulets and beads, and in mending broken
pottery. There are corn-mills — great stone
slabs, a little hollowed, and set aslant
in the floor at one side of some of the
rooms, with a flat narrow slip of stone to
be grasped in the hands in grinding.
Our early American was something
of a hunter, if we may judge from the
deer bones often found. He was a war-
rior, too. Many of his houses are not
only built in inaccessible and well-pro-
tected places, but loop-holes sloping
towards the avenues of approach are
common in the walls, and the doors have
ample provision for closure by tightly
fitting slabs of stone. Bows still loosely
strung with sinew, and stone-tipped arrows
Cliff Dwellings 115
with the shaft intact, have defied time,
too. With these and stone-tipped spears
and stone knives and wooden clubs our
warrior did his hunting and his fighting.
The "cliff -man" had one domestic animal
and, so far as can be made out, only one,
and that was the turkey, or something
very like it. This bird must have been
kept in considerable numbers. Its feathers
are found in abundance, and were used,
as I have said, to make blankets. Bunches
of the quills have been discovered stowed
away in the houses. This domestic pet
has been pictured more often than any
other creature by the man of the cliffs,
and most frequently upon his pottery.
There is no evidence of the use of written
characters by these people, but here and
there simple geometric or irregular figures
are found in dull colour on the plaster
and on the faces of the cliffs. There is
relatively little animal drawing, but
n6 ftbe Great plateau
occasionally crude linear figures of men,
mountain sheep and birds are found.
Similar crude pictographs are occasionally
cut in rough shallow lines in the rocks
near the dwellings. On the whole, such
artistic capacities as this old barbarian
possessed were but scantily exercised
upon his walls.
In his pottery, however, as well as in
animal figures and various other objects
made of shell, jade, onyx, and turquoise
among which are some very handsome
mosaics, we find such expression of the
artistic sense as gives him a very respect-
able standing in the hierarchy of early
American art.
While whole pieces of pottery are
occasionally found in protected places
in the abandoned rooms, and fragments
are scattered in profusion everywhere,
the larger part of the well-preserved
articles of clay has come from the burial
Prehistoric Pictographs.
On the face of the cliffs facing the San Juan River, in Utah.
Cliff Dwellings 117
places. So I must linger a moment to
speak of these.
The rock about the cliff dwellings is
usually so scantily clad with soil that
earth burial was not accomplished without
difficulty. The places outside the dwell-
ings most commonly selected for this
purpose were low shelves in the cliffs,
from which the earth was scooped, and
shallow pits, sometimes stoned at the
sides or lined with clay, were thus fash-
ioned.
But one of the most common burial-
places of the " cliff -man " of the Mesa Verde
was the rubbish heaps which he allowed
to accumulate, often to an enormous
extent, in the low, dark, angular space
at the back of his houses, where the sloping
roof of the caverns in the cliff met the
horizontal shelf on which the houses
stand.
These great rubbish heaps, often several
n8 ZTbe Great plateau
feet deep, are made up of dirt and dust
of unrecognisable origin, of turkey drop-
pings, and of all sorts of waste from the
man and his housekeeping. There are
feathers and corn-husks and corn-cobs,
fragments of bone and wood, rinds and
stems of gourds, scraps of yucca, half-
burned corn-cobs, pieces of charcoal, bits
of worn fabrics, cast-off sandals, and
broken pottery in abundance.
Now and then the delvers in these
back-door rubbish heaps have come upon
whole pieces of pottery or stone imple-
ments and other things which have evi-
dently been hidden there, perhaps in
times of siege. The whole material is
disagreeable on account of the fine choking
dust which rises whenever it is stirred, but
it is not otherwise offensive now.
It was in this dark, protected place, then,
that the cliff-man often buried his dead.
The legs and arms were usually drawn
Gliff Dwelling 119
to the body, which was tied and bound
with yucca leaves, and protected in vari-
ous ways from direct contact with the
earth, sometimes by wooden or osier or
yucca mats, or by feather cloth or bas-
ketry, or slabs of stone. Many of the
skeletons are well preserved, and occa-
sionally the whole body is mummified
and in very perfect state. Some bodies
have been found walled up in the smaller
rooms.
But it is of the pottery that I wish es-
pecially to speak. It is all fashioned by
the hands, for no tidings of the potter's
wheel had ever reached these folks, and
their skill in the management of clay
justly commands admiration. Some of
the great jars holding several gallons are
scarcely one-eighth of an inch thick, are
of excellent shape and symmetry, and,
when struck, ring like a bell. The old
cliff-man — or woman — knew how to mix
120 TTbe Great plateau
pounded stone, or sand, or old pottery
broken into small fragments with his clay
to prevent shrinkage and cracking. He
knew how to bake his finished articles,
and his fancy in shaping and decorating
was of no mean order.
Some of the ware is grey and smooth
and undecorated; some forms show that
it was built up by strips of clay, coil upon
coil. In many pieces regular indentations
made by the finger tips or nail upon the
coils give the general impression of basket-
work. The tiny ridges of the maker's
finger-tips are often marked upon this
indented coilware with a sharpness which
rivals any of the impressions which one
can get to-day on paper, with all the
refinement of Galton's fascinating but
smeary technique. Then there is a third
kind of pottery, in which the article has
received a surface wash of light mineral
colour, upon which are decorations of
US n-
Cliff Dwellings 121
various forms, usually in black, but some-
times in black and red. It is not very
common to find red pottery in the region
about the Mesa Verde, but occasionally
a piece is unearthed.
The forms of pottery are various.
There are bowls of many shapes and
sizes, usually decorated on the inside
only. There are long jars and short jars,
some with wide and some with narrow
mouths. There are vases, pitchers, cups,
ladles, platters, sieves, mugs, and bottles,
and many other queer-shaped things which
it would be difficult to name. The colours
were mineral, and very durable, as is
evident from their excellent preservation
after hundreds of years of burial.
The decoration is frequently almost
concealed, when the articles are exhumed,
by a rough whitish incrustation of lime
which through the years of burial has
gathered on the surfaces. Washing with
122 TTbe Great plateau
dilute acid discloses the pattern under-
neath.
Not infrequently one finds bowls and
jars which have been cracked or broken,
and mended by drilling holes along the
cracks and tying the pieces together with
yucca cords. A great deal of care was
evidently taken in fashioning and deco-
rating some of this pottery, and the
thrifty old " ClifT-dweller " knew very well
that a mended jar was useful to store corn
and flour and such dry things in, even if it
would no longer hold water.
One often finds, inside the pieces of pot-
tery in the graves, fragments of the min-
eral from which the pigment is ground,
and smooth stones with which, apparently,
the surface of the clay articles was
smoothed and polished. Arrow-heads,
bone implements, beads, shells, amulets,
corn, and a variety of their pathetic be-
longings are not infrequently found packed
Cliff Dwellings 123
within the jars and bowls beside the
crumbled bodies.
And the " Cliff-dweller" smoked a pipe!
I feel constrained to leave it to the ar-
chaeologists to decide whether he smoked
for the fun of it, or with devotional or
ceremonial intent, and what he smoked.
But one short-stemmed pipe of clay, dec-
orated in red, and blackened within from
use, and one half shaped in process of
construction, are in my own collection.
It is a dreamy land, this which he lived
in, and I hope that he lay in the shadows
sometimes in the lulls of his strenuous
life, and, with no urgent thought of his
gods or his etiquette, puffed idly and at
ease his little dudheen.
Baskets and mats showing consider-
able variety in the weaving and a
distinct appreciation of ornament witness
to the cliff -man's skill. Coarse grass,
yucca, willow, and split sticks are the
124 TTbe Great plateau
materials which he used for this pur-
pose.
The bottoms of most of the jars and
larger clay vessels are rounded, and, so
far as I have seen, never have the hollow
underneath which in modern Indian pot-
tery facilitates its carrying poised upon
the head. And so plaited rings, which
were doubtless used for steadying the jars
upon the head or on the ground, are, as
might be expected, not uncommon.
But his skill as a weaver was not lim-
ited to basketry, for fabrics of varied
texture and composition are largely in
evidence. The yucca, or Spanish-bayonet,
which grows all over the arid country of
the "Cliff-dweller," was one of the things
which he had to thank his gods for, hour
by hour.
He hung the narrow leaves about his
houses in neatly tied dried bunches, ready
for coarser purposes . He used them in this
Cliff Dwellings 125
form as cords to tie slender sticks in place
upon his ceilings, on which the mud was
plastered ; with them he bound his sandals
to his feet, pieced out bands of cloth which
were too worn or weak to steady burdens
carried on his back; with them he tied
together the sticks which framed the
baby board and bound the dead for burial.
With them he mended broken bowls, and
wove coarse nets around the great water
jars for support or suspension; while,
woven close, they made durable sandal
soles and coarse baskets.
Then he beat out the brittle woody
part of these precious yucca leaves, with
wooden sticks, and out of the fine, tough,
pliable fibrils which were left he twisted
threads and cords, the warp and woof of
his most common woven fabrics. Some
of these fabrics are coarse and rough;
some are smooth and fine. In some of
them the yucca cord forms the warp,
126 TTbe <3reat plateau
while the woof is of cotton, dark and light,
with woven pattern.
Whether he used the narrow strips of
the leaf, or cords or rope twisted of their
fibres, the old cliff fellow knew how to tie
good square knots which have not slipped
a jot for some hundreds of years. I have
sought in vain for "squaw" knots, among
thousands of these bits of handiwork, on
roof and ceiling and mended fabric. And
he who never saw the sea could make a
"ring splice" to shame a sailor.
The feather cloth is, in some re-
spects, one of the most noteworthy of
this old citizen's productions. He hetch-
elled his dry yucca leaves, twisted their
fibrils into coarse cords, tied these to-
gether to form a wide-meshed net, and
then inch by inch he bound them close
with little tufts of fluffy blue-grey feathers,
ravaged, no doubt, largely from his turkey
pets ; or sometimes he twisted the feathers
Cliff Dwellings 127
into the cords as he made them. Some
of the feather blankets so toilsomely con-
structed have been found in excellent
preservation, but in most of them the
feathers are largely frayed away. They
must have been very warm, and were
apparently among the choicest posses-
sions of these thrifty folks. A little fine-
textured cloth all of cotton has been
found.
The utensils of some of his milder in-
dustries the cliff-man largely fashioned
out of bone. He ground broad bevelled
edges on the broken segments of the leg
bones of larger animals, like the deer,
forming crude knives and chisels and
scrapers ; but of smaller bones, and espe-
cially of the long bones of the turkey,
he made awls and punches and needles.
About the surface of the rocks, near the
cliff dwellings, are shallow hollows and
grooves, worn, no doubt, by the old artisan
128 ftbe Great plateau
in shaping and polishing his stone and
bone implements.
I was greatly puzzled, during our delv-
ings among the rubbish heaps behind the
ruins, by numerous small irregular wads
of fine strips of corn-husk or other fibre,
which had been bruised and closely mat-
ted together; and it was not until I had
later become acquainted with the Hopi
Indians, two hundred and fifty miles to
the southward of the Mesa Verde, that
I found a clew. Here I saw them pick
out of a bowl of thick brown stuff, which
they said was sweet, and which cer-
tainly was sticky, similar looking wads
of fibre, and, thrusting them into their
mouths, begin vigorous mastication. Then
I realised that the husk wads of the rubbish
heaps had probably been, while in their
pristine state, the prehistoric avatars of
the chewing-gum.
A dark-skinned, black-haired, scantily
Relics of a Primitive Culture.
At the top are two Hunting Fetishes and a Prayer-stick of the modern
Pueblo Indians. Below are objects from the graves of the Cliff-Dwellers :
Amulets, Pipes, Implements of Bone, and a Stone " Scraper."
Dwellings 129
clad barbarian, then, it seems he was, our
dweller in the cliffs, the real American.
Farmer, mason, potter, weaver, basket-
maker, tailor, jeweller, hunter, priest,
and warrior all in one. Daring and hardy
he was to scale those cliffs, and build upon
their brinks the houses into which he
gathered sustenance wrung from the un-
willing soil. Diligent and thrifty he was
certainly. Skilful, too, as skill goes in
the stage of evolvement up to which he
had slowly won his way. Superstitious,
doubtless, as is ever the case with those
who frame their notions of the world face
to face with the crude forces of nature.
Dreamy, I fancy he must have been, for
he looked abroad through red dawns and
hazy noontides and witching twilights
fading very slowly into night.
And he was — well — he was undoubt-
edly dirty. Life has more urgent uses for
water than bathing in these grim arid
130 TTbe Great plateau
wastes. But nature is a very efficient
sanitarian in dry climates such as his, and
"use can make sweet the peach's shady
side." So let us say no more about it.
It is the business of the archaeologist
to learn and tell you, or to guess and tell
you, when these early Americans lived,
where they came from, and whither they
have gone. A group of skeletons, with
skulls broken as if by blows, which the
early explorers found lying unburied in a
heap upon the floor, would seem to indicate
that in one case at least there was a fierce
dramatic ending to the story. The archaic
character of the pottery and the size of
some trees which have grown upon the
ruined masonry prove that several cen-
turies at least have passed since their
abandoned homes fell into the custody of
the squirrels and the elements. The mod-
ern Indian shuns them, as a rule, as he
does all things which savour of death ; and
Cliff Dwelling
so, until a dozen years or so ago, the silent
dwellings held unchallenged the secrets of
the vanished race.
But if the fortunes of the reader should
lead him, as was the writer's hap, to cross
on Indian trails the dreary plains and
barren ridges which, stretching south-
westward from the Mesa Verde into
Arizona, through the country of the
Navajos, bring one at last to the Hopi
pueblos perched upon towering rock islets
in the desert, where, since the Spaniards
found them more than three centuries
ago, they have lived alone and almost
untouched by the tides of civilisation
which have faltered and stopped a
hundred miles away If he should for
a time dwell there among the simple,
kindly people who will bid him welcome
to their homes, he will come to realise, I
think, that these are at least the Cliff-
dwellers "kind of folks," though some
132 Ube Great plateau
stages beyond them in ways which look
toward civilisation.
These Pueblo Indians have half emerged
from their age of stone more by borrow-
ing than by evolution. They weave crude
fabrics in their homes. They make rude
pottery without a wheel, and with more
colour in its decoration than the cliff-men
knew. They brush their hair with bunches
of stiff fibre, which the cliff folk would
surely claim to be their own. Their corn-
mills and mortars are the same.
In the tiny Hopi houses built of stone
our cliff-man would find his own little
chambers with stone benches, the door in
the ceiling, and plastered still afresh when
soot grows thick upon the walls . He would
find blankets made as he made his, only
instead of feathers, it is fur of rabbits tied
or twisted on to cords. He would see,
could he but wander here, the large as-
sembly chambers, mostly sunken in the
Cliff 2>wellfnas 133
rock, with smoky fire in a pit in the- mid-
dle, and an air-hole in the wall where his
own more purposeful fresh-air flue was
wont to be. Peering into these chambers
he would see the men now making or
mending garments, now gathered in seri-
ous council, now absorbed in weird cere-
monial, or through long hours rehearsing
stories in which the gods walk and talk
in very chummy fashion with their brown
brothers.
He would find the new fellow tilling
just such meagre fields as he did before
his work-days were ended. And if he
missed a certain stuffy snugness and
palpable security which his cliff eyry
lent, he would realise that the Hopi man
has still chosen a brave vantage-ground
atop of his great frowning mesas, which
only gunpowder has made ridiculous as
natural forts.
So we find at last that our wanderings in
134 TCbe Great plateau
the open along paths which lead through
no academic shades, and which are
lighted but faintly by the torches of
science, have landed us safely under the
wings of the modern archaeologists.
And now, if still one linger on among
the Hopi — the "peaceful folks," they
call themselves — and can enter a little
into the spirit of their homely lives, he
will surely realise that while the material
things which the old "Cliff-dweller" left
may furnish clews to some definite con-
ceptions of the outside man, there must
yet have been something spiritually dom-
inant in the silent race to which here
among these simple living folks there is a
key. The visitor will soon learn that into
each act of life, each thought, and all tradi-
tion is woven the sense of intimate rela-
tionship with potent Beings in earth and
sky, who guard and shape the brown
man's destinies.
Cliff H>welltngs 135
So one can be certain that the old
fellows on the cliffs read strange stories
in the lambent stars, heard angry voices
in the thunder, caught whispers on the
breeze, and took all that life brought them
of good or ill as the meed of gods potent,
familiar, and ever close at hand. One
can be certain, too, that when in the old
days the stars peeped into the smoky little
dungeons perched along the cliffs, they
saw intent dusky circles listening hour
after hour to strange stories of the Pre-
sences which rule the world, and to
quaint, endless myths which the old men
passed on, a sacred legacy, age after
age.
And when one turns homeward, un-
willing as a school-boy bidden to his
tasks, his impressions of the cliff-man
and his deserted homes come back to him
linked with such pictures of sky and air and
sculptured hill that they all gather at last
ITbe Great plateau
into a memory so gracious and so in-
spiring as almost to seem woven in the
texture of dreams.
CHAPTER VII
PRIMITIVE AMERICAN HOUSE BUILDERS
WE have seen in the last chapter
that it is possible to construct
out of the relics which have
been preserved in the graves and in the
deep recesses of the great cliff houses, a
fair conception of the cliff-man, his busi-
ness and his arts. It may be interesting
now to look a little more closely and in more
sedate and systematic fashion at the
houses which this dusky savage built,
especially in the open, and to see where
they are in the land of the Great Plateau.
In a survey of the widely scattered ruins
of the south-western United States which
mark a prehistoric occupancy of regions
now arid and mostly deserted, it is both
137
138 tlbe (Breat plateau
convenient and instructive to recognise
large natural districts corresponding to
the great drainage areas. Such dis-
tricts are the watersheds of the Gila
and its tributaries, of the Little Colo-
rado, of the Rio Grande, and of the Rio
San Juan. These are indicated on the
map.
A few ruins are scattered along the
Kanab and the Virgen rivers, which enter
the Colorado from the west, and a few
along the borders of the great Colorado and
its mighty Canyon. Many of the most
primitive and apparently oldest types
of ruins are found in the San Juan water-
shed, especially north of the river in
south-eastern Utah and the adjacent corner
of Colorado. In the Rio Grande groups and
in the valleys of the Little Colorado and the
Gila and their tributaries, the older ruins
are scattered among those of a later
period, some of the latter being prehistoric,
toonse Buffers 139
others historic, with traces of the Spaniards
here and there.
The ruins of the Upper Gila and Salt
River in Arizona have not been carefully
explored, nor have those which dot the
country reaching into Mexico.
The ruins in each of these districts
are marked by peculiarities of construction
and grouping, by apparent differences in
age, and by types of pottery, fabrics, and
utensils, all of which appear to be of con-
siderable significance in the attempt to
characterise these early American Indians
and to trace the lines of their relationship
to one another and to existing tribes.
When each of these districts shall have
been carefully studied and compared
and not until then, will the data be at
hand for wide generalisations regarding
the origin, relationships, and period of
occupancy of these house-building people.
The early explorers of the South-west
Ube Great flMateau
country were much more impressed with
the ruins which they found perched upon
the ledges of the cliffs than with the
stone heaps and fragments of standing
walls in the open country. The cliff
houses appealed then as now more strongly
to the imagination, and as is natural
from their more sheltered position, they
are usually in better preservation. The
early conception of them as defensive
homes and fortresses and as the scenes of
savage warfare, lent also a touch of the
dramatic to the unknown story of these
house-makers.
But after all the open ruins are far
more numerous than are the cliff houses,
not only on the Great Plateau but on its
eastern and western borders and in the
land which stretches away into Mexico.
Open ruins are almost always to be found
at no great distance from the cliff houses
and as the relics from both have been
primitive f>ouse Builfcers 141
gathered for comparative study it has be-
come clear that the " Cliff-dweller " did not
always dwell on the cliffs, that his houses
on the ledges were not usually forts, and
that in many instances at least he built
under the overhanging rocks or in the
depths of the caverns simply because in such
places he found a house half made already.
While, therefore, it is sometimes con-
venient to speak of "valley dwellings,"
"mesa dwellings," "cliff dwellings," and
"cave dwellings," there appears to be no
reason for believing that these distinctions
are of deeper significance than marks of an
adaptation to their environment of a
house-building people lingering in the higher
stages of savagery. Thus the prehistoric
house-building Indian of the south-west
dwelt on the cliff or on the plains as was
most expedient, but we choose to name
him the "Cliff-dweller" after his most
picturesque election.
142 Ubc Great plateau
In the northern part of the great ruin
area the building material was largely
stone, either trimmed stone or boulders,
depending upon the most available source.
These were laid in adobe mortar. In
the southern districts many of the build-
ings were made largely or wholly of
adobe.
There is no reason for believing that
the number of ruins in any district affords
an exact indication of the populousness.
of the region at any one time, because the
present condition of the ruins seems to
point to very great differences in age.
Thus, some of the houses, even though
standing in exposed situations on the
storm-swept summits of the mesas, show
still the weathered roof and floor timbers
either in place or fallen in upon the shat-
tered walls; while, on the other hand,
many of the ruins near by are reduced to
formless heaps, and are covered deep with
primitive "Bouse JSuflfcers 143
the wear and weather of the stones and
by the drift of the sand-laden winds.
Furthermore, excavations which have
been made in several places show that
buildings, themselves of great age, have
been made on the top of still older struc-
tures. Finally, distinctly different struc-
tural types of buildings may be found in
associated groups, which points to a long
or an interrupted occupancy of the site.
The attempt to establish typical archi-
tectural forms in the buildings of these
ancient people is beset with practical
difficulties, owing to the frequent special
adaptation in material and in form to
particular situations as well as to the
skilful incorporation of natural objects,
such as caves, benches, cliffs, and fallen
rocks, into the structure of the buildings.
One may, however, conveniently place
in a class together those ruins which stand
in the open, either in the valley bottoms
144 ZTbe 6reat plateau
or upon the mesas. These open ruins fall
naturally into four groups: First, small
isolated or clustered houses or pueblos,
each conforming to a distinct primitive
type; second, irregular and often rambling
groups or clusters of houses, usually
adapted in form and position to peculiar-
ities of their situation, such as the heads
of gulches, the brinks or slopes of canyons,
the tops of rocks or buttes, etc.; third,
towers and other isolated structures usu-
ally standing alone and frequently com-
manding wide outlooks; fourth, large
communal pueblos forming compact, many
roomed buildings.
On the other hand, it is convenient to
bring together in a second class those
ruins which are more or less protected by
their situation in shallow natural recesses
or caves or upon overhung benches on
the faces of the cliffs. Such ruins may
stand singly or in small clusters or may
primitive l>ouse 3Builber0 145
be massed to form communal dwellings
of considerable size. The houses of this
group are commonly called "cliff dwell-
ings."
The so called "cave dwellings" are
artificial caves dug out of soft rock. The
caves often formed only a part of
the dwelling, being frequently in com-
munication, through narrow doorways,
with stone structures built against the
faces of the soft cliffs in which the caves
were dug.
Let us now look at some of these types
of ruins a little more in detail.
The writer has spent the summers of
several years in wandering with a pack
train over the wide realm of the Great
Plateau and the adjacent regions where
the ruins are most abundant, locating the
various groups which had not been pre-
viously described and comparing the var-
ious types of building and forms of burial.
146 Ube Great plateau
Early in his studies the impression was
gained that the most typical forms of
buildings were to be sought in such situa-
tions as offered no incumbrances and no
adventitious structural adjuncts — such
situations, in short, as are found in the
open level bottoms or on the approx-
imately level mesa tops.
It was found, in fact, that among the
smaller ruins which stand in the open,
either in the valleys or on the mesas,
there is one type which is by far the most
abundant and widely distributed, especi-
ally north of the San Juan River. These
ruins are usually fallen and are often more
or less overgrown with sage-brush or
other low shrubs, so that unless the walls
are partly standing they form irregular
and often inconspicuous stone heaps.
They are, however, almost invariably
composed of three elements — a series of
chambers forming the house, an estufa
primitive f>ouse J5uil&ers 147
or kiva or assembly chamber, and a
burial mound. Such ruins in the San
Juan district constitute at least nine-
tenths of all these smaller isolated struc-
tures.
The house in this type of ruin in its
simplest form consists of a single row of
rooms, each usually five or six feet wide
and from eight to ten feet long, with a
straight wall upon the back, and a short
right-angled wing at each end : the whole
forming approximately one side of a
square. This usually opens southward,
with an estufa occupying the partially
enclosed court. The ground-plan of this
type of ruin is shown in the accompanying
diagrammatic sketch. Houses of this type
may have only three or four rooms along
the back, with single rooms in the wings.
Or there may be eight or ten rooms at the
back with two or three in each wing.
Frequently when there are several rooms
148
<3reat plateau
along the back there are two or more
estufas in the court.
Ground-plan of Primitive House Type.
The house in the most typical of these
ruins is usually carefully constructed.
The outer walls are from ten to fourteen
primitive t>ouse JBuitoers 149
inches thick, often laid up with two rows
of stones dressed on the outer and inner
faces, the space between being filled with
rubble and adobe mortar. The partitions
between the rooms are usually somewhat
thinner than the outer walls and often
consist of a single row of stones. Small
doorways frequently lead from room to
room. I have never seen openings in
the back or sides, nor have I been able
to determine the existence of doorways
opening toward the estufa. The entrance
was doubtless from the roof which was
reached by ladders. The roof timbers,
if such there were, have wholly disappeared
from these typical ruins.
In many cases, though the walls are
largely fallen, the outlines of the buildings
and rooms are readily made out, or are
developed by throwing off a few of the
outer fallen stones. In many instances,
however, drifting sands have largely cov-
150 Ube Great plateau
ered the ruins, or sage-brush and pifions
have grown upon them, so that these and
soil conceal most of the structural outlines.
The estufa is uniformly circular and is
situated within or in front of the court
formed by the wings of the house and
which looks southward. It is usually
sunk below the level of the ground surface
and largely filled with earth and fallen
stones from its walls, which I have never
found rising above the general level when
the ruins are built upon earth. The
estufas are then shallow circular pits,
deepest at the centre, and after rains
may for a time contain water. Thus it
is that they are commonly called reservoirs
by the cattlemen and the Navajo. I
have never excavated one of the estufas,
so that I know nothing about their depth
or internal structure.
The burial mounds which are almost
invariably associated with such ruins
primitive Douse JSuU&ers 151
are, when the surface permits, uniformly
south or southward of the house, sometimes
close by, sometimes a few feet or yards
away. They are sometimes very large,
occupying much more ground space than
the ruin itself. When not washed out
they usually, though not always, rise a
little above the general surface of the
ground, are of irregular shape, and are
more or less abundantly strewn with
fragments of broken pottery. The soil
on and about the burial mounds is com-
monly somewhat darker than the sur-
rounding earth, and briars, sage-brush, and
other shrubs are apt to flourish upon them.
In earlier days the seeker for hidden
treasure or for merchantable relics was
wont to pull down the walls of the ruins
and to delve beneath the rooms. But
since the significance and constancy of
the burial mounds have become generally
known, the fury of the pot-hunter has
152 Ube Great plateau
been largely diverted to them. It is
from these burial mounds of the open
valley and mesa ruins that a large part
of the pottery is derived which is con-
stantly poured into the bric-a-brac and
curio market through ranchmen, traders,
and professional vandals.
These burial mounds were apparently
rubbish heaps, and charcoal, ashes, bits of
bone, etc., reveal their character. The
bodies are buried at various depths, from
a few inches to three or four feet. Some-
times a slab of stone lies over the body,
sometimes not. Usually in these open
burial mounds nothing but the skeleton
or weathered fragments of bone are left,
together with one or sometimes several
pieces of pottery buried with the dead.
Perishable stuff, — grain, meal, fabrics, etc.
— such as is often found intact in the pro-
tected cliff house burials, is rarely recog-
nisable. But household utensils of various
primitive Ifoouse :S5uil&ers 153
kinds are common. The pottery is fre-
quently intact and close to the shoulders
or skull. But it is often broken and not
infrequently has moved in the earth
several feet from the bones, during the
long years of burial, doubtless from the
action of frost.
While ruins of this primitive type are
most abundant in the San Juan watershed,
they are scattered also through the valley
of the Little Colorado and along the
tributaries of the Virgen.
It is interesting to note the frequency
with which in these primitive abodes
each house, be it larger or smaller, has its
separate burial mound. Sometimes there
are scores of houses scattered over an
area of less than a square mile, but unless
these houses are definitely massed to form
a single building, each with few exceptions,
has its own combined rubbish heap and
mausoleum.
i54 TTbe (Sreat plateau
The significance of this convenient
arrangement must be sought in the lore
of the Pueblo Indians of to-day in whom
the ties of family and clan are of great
importance in shaping their performances
and traditions.
I am disposed to attach considerable
significance to this type of small dwelling,
with its uniform association of house,
estufa, and burial mound, as the simplest
expression of an early and primitive
phase of the house-building culture. The
character of these small ruins as types of
residence was overlooked in the earlier
studies in this field, and the significance
of the burial mound was not recognised.
When receiving special mention the latter
was looked upon simply as a rubbish heap,
strewn with broken pottery.
Variants of this type of ruin are common.
Thus, there may be a double row of
rooms at the back with a single or double
primitive Douse IBuilfcers 155
row in the wings. In such double rows
the back row may have two stories. Or,
these structural units with either single or
double rows of rooms may be placed end
to end, thus often forming buildings of
considerable length.
Sometimes the wings are prolonged,
having several rooms enclosing a square
or elongated court which contains the
es tufas. In various ways these structural
units are frequently placed together form-
ing large buildings with irregular passage-
ways here and there between them. In
such cases it is not infrequently evident
from different degrees of preservation and
from differences in the character of the
masonry that the buildings were made at
successive periods.
The next best defined type of ruins of
this class which stand in the open are
those which are built around the heads
of rock gulches or canyons. The shallow
156 Ube Great plateau
water-courses, often inconspicuous upon
the tops of the larger plateaus, are apt to
break suddenly into rocky gulches.
The ruins which are built around the
heads of such gulches are especially nu-
merous in the country north of the San
Juan River. They are always irregular
in form, often composed of a series of
isolated chambers or groups of these
around the brink of the gulch, and not
infrequently extending down the rocky
slopes or ledges toward the bottom. The
direct line of the stream is usually left
clear. Not infrequently a rude stone dam
is still to be seen across the shallow sag in
the rocks above the ruins.
Occasionally there is a shallow cave
beneath an overhanging ledge at the head
of the gulch in which is a spring or a
water-pocket. In several ruins of con-
siderable size built around the cliff edges
at the head of a gulch, a rock wall about
4_, C/}
03 o
primitive fjouse iBuflfcers 157
three or four feet high, often forming a
zigzag, stands a few feet outside the line
of the ruins, partially or completely fenc-
ing them in. This is apparently a defen-
sive structure.
Towers of various shapes and heights
occasionally form a part of composite ruins
of various types. Isolated towers and
small single-room structures, often com-
manding wide outlooks, are occasion-
ally found. Small single buildings; large
and small low-walled stone enclosures;
square or oblong box-like structures from
one to two feet across made of thin stone
slabs, often apparently empty or some-
times containing a little charcoal, are not
uncommon. Here and there are rows
and clusters of thick slabs of stone set
upon end without other apparent associated
structures.
The largest of the open ruins are in the
form of great pueblos or communal dwell-
158 Ube Great plateau
ings formed of a congeries of rooms some-
times several hundred in number, often
several stories high, with either one or
more courts which usually open southward.
These stand in the open, either in the
valleys or on the tops of the mesas, and
resemble in many ways the great inhabited
pueblos like that of Acoma and those of
the Hopi group. Such are the ruins in
the upper Chaco Valley, the great ruin
near the modern village of Aztec in New
Mexico, and the so-called " Aztec Spring
Ruin" at the foot of the Sierra El Late
in Montezuma Valley in south-western
Colorado, and many others in the valley
of the Little Colorado and its tributaries.
Some of the latter are prehistoric, some
historic.
Near some of the large pueblos burial
mounds of considerable size have been
found. In other instances, however, nota-
bly in the Chaco group, the situation of
primitive Ifoouse JBuilfcers 159
the mass of the burials is still unknown.
Let us now turn briefly to the ruins in
protected situations in cliffs and first
to the cliff dwellings. These ruins built
in the shallow recesses weathered out of
the sand rock in the sides of the canyon
walls, as well as those which stand upon
narrow ledges overhung and in part pro-
tected by the cliffs above, vary in form,
size, and material with the differences in
site.
There are countless intermediate forms
between the long, high shelves upon
whose brinks shallow stone cabins stand
alone or in single rows to the shallow
recesses at the level of the valley bottom,
in which time and flood and wind drift
have dealt less kindly with the old habi-
tations than with those upon the higher
levels. There is almost endless varia-
tion from the great caverns of the Mesa
Verde with their large and still imposing
160 ZTfoe Great plateau
buildings or great masses of fallen walls
to the tiny recesses with scarce foothold
for a pair of rooms.
The belief was developed early in the
study of these ruins, and has since been
widely entertained, that the builders of
houses in natural or artificial recesses or
caves in the cliffs represented an earlier
and a different phase of culture from that
which inspired the buildings, large and
small, which stand in the open and which
are necessarily of a somewhat different
structural type. But this notion is not
justified by the accumulating evidence of
the essential identity of the house-builders'
culture, variation in type of structure being
clearly accounted for by differences in
local environment and by such conditions
of change as might readily occur within
a very limited ethnical period.
It was obviously important in the choice
of a building site in a cliff recess that the
u 5
primitive Ibouse JBuilbers 161
slope of the bottom should not be so
great as to render insecure the foun-
dations of the buildings, though in many
instances this difficulty has been most
skilfully overcome. The overhang of the
cliff must be such that the water, running
in torrents as it often does from the bare
rock surfaces above, should fall clear of
the building site. The roof of the recess
must be solid and not, as is often the
case, weathering off in huge blocks or in
shaly flakes.
The accessibility of the site seems not
to have so much concerned the builders,
for though in most instances there are
simple and natural modes of access even
to those cliff ruins which it appears at
first impossible to reach, in the last resort
they frequently pecked into the rock
those foot and hand holes up the steepest
slopes which are still not wholly obliter-
ated and are still useful. Finally, it
162 Ube Great JMateau
appears to have been almost indispensable
that the chosen site should have a south-
ward or at least a sunny exposure.
When all these factors are considered,
I think it is safe to say that it will be
evident to one who travels widely in the
ruin district, searching critically the cliffs
and the walls of the canyons and gorges,
that a large proportion of the natural
recesses which are accessible and are
suitable in depth, in the slope of the bottom
in the character of the overhanging walls,
and in exposure, are now, or give evi-
dence of having been at some time, occu-
pied by buildings. The form, number, and
distribution of the cliff houses, then, in any
region is strictly dependent on its natural
features.
When, therefore, in certain localities
cliff houses preponderate, while in others
ruins of other types prevail, justifiable
inference does not point toward different
primitive Ibouse Builders 163
stages of culture or periods of occupancy
or stress of circumstance. It simply in-
dicates that in one case the weathering
of the cliffs has led to the formation of
recesses adapted for building sites, while
in the others suitable sites have not been
formed — either because the dip of the
strata, the character of the rock, the
nature and rapidity of erosion, etc., have
not favoured the formation of rock shelters
in the cliffs ; or, because no cliffs exist.
These people were first of all farmers,
and while they may have been, and
doubtless were, at times forced to main-
tain defensive homes, they were clever and
sensible folks, who were not averse to a
house half built by erosion in some shel-
tered nook in the canyons. But it was
after all the arable land and the rustic
tradition which largely shaped their cus-
toms and destinies.
The so-called " Cave-dwellers " were the
164 ITbe Great plateau
same folk as those who built upon the
ledges of the cliffs and in the open coun-
try. Only it happens that in a few places
in the land which these house-building
people called their own, there were some
soft ledges near streams and arable valleys
in which it was easy to scoop out a series
of chambers with their utensils of harder
stone. Neither in time nor culture did
the cave-man differ from the cliff-man,
or the valley-man. It was his good for-
tune to be able to make a comfortable
dwelling with a little less skill and toil
than could his brothers whose lot had
fallen on different geological bottoms.
The most typical and noteworthy ex-
amples of cave dwellings or cavate lodges
in the south-western United States are
those in the soft volcanic formation in the
narrow canyons on the eastern slopes of the
Valles of the great Cochiti Plateau in New
Mexico, now within the Pajarito National
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primitive Douse Buil&ers 165
Park, and those in the soft sandstone
ledges along the Rio Verde in Arizona.
The general subject of the water supply
of the early inhabitants of this arid region
may be considered here. It should be
remembered, first, that the personal re-
quirements in this respect of these people,
as of their successors in this desert coun-
try, should not be judged by the standard
which a more advanced culture and a
different climate impose; second, that
few arid regions are actually as devoid
of water as they seem to be, and that a
long and close familiarity with a dry
country often reveals fairly abundant
hidden sources of moderate supply.
It is the failure to take account of these
important considerations which has so
often led to the belief that in the time of
these early residents the climate must
have differed essentially from the present
with a much more abundant rainfall.
166 TTbe Great plateau
But while this is a natural first impression
it is not sustained by a careful and ex-
tended study of the region and the ruins.
If, as has often been the case, one
cherishes the notion that the defensive
motive was dominant in the selection of
sites and in the construction of buildings,
and further, that these dwellings are to
be regarded as largely fortresses which were
in a state of frequent and prolonged be-
leaguerment, the necessity in certain in-
stances of more numerous and more
abundant water sources might be conceded.
But in the majority of instances the
defensive character of the sites and build-
ings does not seem to be at all obvious nor
the evidence of frequent sieges at all clear.
In fact, some of the larger pueblos, as
well as many of the larger valley villages,
are close beside living streams or sandy
stream-beds which bear abundant currents
just beneath the surface. Furthermore,
primitive Douse Builders 167
many of the large recesses in the walls of
canyons and gulches in which the cliff
dwellings are built furnish a constant
trickle of water from the rock strata in
their depths — to whose action, indeed, in
many instances the weathering of the
rocks into cave-like recesses has apparently
been largely due.
It should also be remembered that dry
as many of the great sand bottomed
washes and canyons may appear, there is
along many of them a steady deep flow of
ground water which collects here and
there, where the rock bottom rises, in
great underground pockets beneath the
stream-beds or valley bottoms and comes
out at times upon the surface.
The ancient resident of this district
doubtless knew as well as his successor,
the Navajo, knows, exactly where very
little digging in an apparently absolutely
dry, sandy stream-bed would furnish an
1 68 Ube Great plateau
abundant and unfailing supply of water.
It is illuminating in this connection to
travel with a Navajo Indian over the
desert country and see how often a little
scraping in the dry sand which has blown
across the foot of a rock ledge or has
gathered in a stream-bed along which
you may have been riding for miles,
desperately athirst, will reveal a trickle of
water running away just beneath the
surface. Many of the old springs near the
ruins, which constant use would keep
open, are now no doubt covered with sand
drift.
The more familiar one becomes with
this country the less keen is his surprise
at the occurrence of a little water in what
seem the most unlikely situations. This
is a land of vast erosion, many thousand
feet of sedimentary strata have been
washed away over great areas leaving
the edges of the remaining portions widely
primitive tbouse IBuilfcers 169
exposed, and one is quite as likely to find
a spring far up in the glare on the face
of a great cliff or upon the top of a towering
butte or mesa as upon the lower levels.
Nor need one assume that for an essen-
tially agricultural people, as these old
inhabitants of the ruin district were, a
more abundant water supply than now
exists was necessary. The crops which
the modern Indian secures in some hot,
sun-baked sag in the long slopes which
lead down to the dry stream-beds, and the
fruit trees which flourish upon the glaring
sand-dunes, indicate the presence of mois-
ture in many places not too far beneath
the parched surfaces to be reached by
the rootlets of the meagre crop.
I would not convey the impression that
the ruin region is well watered. One who
journeys here even under the most ex-
perienced guidance has too many memories
of long privation to be easily led into such
170 Ube (Bteat plateau
a belief. But there are, in fact, many
more sources of moderate water supply
in all the regions containing many pre-
historic ruins, than from the general
aspect of the country would seem possible.
On the other hand, that water was not
abundant is evident from the many in-
stances, to be everywhere seen, in which,
by the construction of small reservoirs
and ditches, by the damming of shallow
sags on exposed rock surfaces, by the
utilisation of natural and the construction
of artificial water-pockets, the collection
of rain-water was frequently resorted to.
But after all there are many groups of
dwellings of considerable size and many
more isolated ruins which appear to be
far from any source of water supply, and
here the probability of transportation
and storage in large jars so frequently
found in and about ruins must be admitted.
One of the questions which we are very
primitive Ijottse Builders 1 7 1
apt to ask a professional archaeologist is,
how long ago did these people live here.
And it may not be unjust to say that the
reserve of his answer seems usually to
furnish a fair clue as to his knowledge of
his business.
In fact some of the ruins in the Rio
Grande Valley were occupied long after
the Spaniards came and show distinct
suggestions of their culture. Other build-
ings were in ruins when the Spaniards first
passed them. Back of this the probable
age of the ruins must remain largely
conjectural until a more careful and
systematic study shall have been made of
such marks of this early culture in all
parts of the ruin region as the hands of
the vandals may have spared.
But the well preserved condition of
some of the older types of ruins and the
ceremonial and household utensils which
have been found in them would not pre-
1 7 2 TTbe (Breat plateau
elude the conclusion, should this be
justified on other grounds, that several,
perhaps even many centuries have passed
since this special phase of early culture
gained a foothold in these austere recesses
of America.
Most of the prehistoric ruins of the
south-west are given over to-day to un-
bridled vandalism. A pot or a skull is
worth a few dimes to the trader and a
few dollars to the tourist, and so has been
evolved the holiday and the professional
pot-hunter. Everywhere the ruins are
ravaged. More is destroyed in the search
than is saved. No records are kept. But
worse than this the Indian, in whose
domain are many of the most interesting
ruins, has learned his lesson from the
white brother, and has learned it well.
A few years ago the Indian stood in
superstitious dread of these ruins and of
all that they contained, especially of the
primitive t)ouse 3Builfcer8 173
human bones which were now and then
washed out. So potent was this dread
that in the earlier days in the Indian coun-
try I have left valuable provision and
other tempting booty for days together,
piled up under canvas with the lower jaw
bone of a " ClifT-dweller, " carried along for
this purpose, placed ostentatiously on top
of the heap. The cache was invariably
visited in our absence by our prowling
brown brethren, whose tracks were quite
in evidence close by. But I never lost
an article thus guarded.
Now, however, all is changed. The
Indian, particularly the Navajo, has
learned that no harm seems to come to
the white man from handling these ancient
bones, and carrying off the contents of
the ruins and the graves. They have
been employed by the whites in ex-
cavations. So, at last, they too have
begun to dig and devastate on their own
174 ftbe Great jMateau
account, destroying great amounts of
valuable relics. I have learned of one
instance in which a Navajo has gone at a
great burial mound with plough and
scraper destroying many valuable pieces
of pottery, and securing a few intact,
which were sold to a trader for a trifling
sum.
Steps have already been taken to protect
by national legislation some of the ruins
which lie within the forest and Indian
reserves. But the country is so vast and
lonesome that the policing even of these
regions is very difficult, and more, much
more, must be done, and that speedily, if
we would save our precious heritage.
It is, indeed, but broken glimpses of
the story of the ancient folk which are
gained by gleanings in these ruins which
there is not enough public enlightenment
and interest to save. But when these
mouldering relics are interpreted in the
primitive Douse Buffers 175
light of the lore of the living Pueblo Indian
the story becomes coherent and full of
significance. By and by, when disin-
terested intelligence shall more obviously
leaven our state and national councils,
the story will be plainer and richer in
pictures of early life in America.
CHAPTER VIII
FORGOTTEN PATHWAYS ON THE GREAT
PLATEAU
THERE is no chapter in the story
of early America so rich in adven-
ture, so tinged with heroism, so
quaint with tales of the chase of will-o'-
the-wisps, so full of heartbreaking failures,
as that which may be gleaned out of the
old Spanish records of the early explo-
rations of the plateau country in the
sixteenth century.
One may follow to-day the trails along
which the loyal subjects of Ferdinand and
Isabella plodded in the old days out of
Mexico and back again, drink from the
springs and water holes which tided them
176
fforaotten patbwa^s 177
over the hot weary miles, and still in the
crumbling faces of the cliffs along which
the forgotten pathways ran, he may
decipher the rudely graven names and
the meagre stories cut in the idle hour of a
night or noonday camp, of the soldier,
the priest, the titled officer on the service
of God and their gracious Majesties; to
the end that souls might be saved, new
countries explored, and incidentally that
such gold as the barbarians possessed
might grace new coffers.
Many of the pathways which the old
Spaniards followed over the lower seg-
ment of the plateau were the trails of
the Pueblo Indians, and back of these
were the meagre tracks of older people still,
whose quaint picture writings in shallow
rock-picked lines upon the cliffs stand cheek
by jowl to-day with the inscriptions of
the Dons.
Some of these ancient pathways, worn
178 TTbe Great plateau
first by prehistoric races, followed by
their successors — still barbaric folk — and
here and there broadened by the early
Spanish expeditions, have become modern
highways or waggon roads and even railway
beds. But all over the deeper recesses of
the plateau the ancient trails wind still
along valleys and canyons, and over the
upland summits, turning aside to springs
and water-pockets, now worn deep and
plain in the softer rock, now faint and
grass-grown, or lost here and there in
the sand drift, with no hint in all the
great sweep of the vision of the bustling
creature who has crowded the brown man
into forlorn corners, and only now and
then in an idle hour rides back through
the centuries along the pathways the
old fellows wandered on foot in quaint
procession or alone.
It is an interesting fact that it was the
great arid plains stretching away west-
jforgotten patbwaps 179
ward from the Mississippi and Missouri
rivers up to the eastern foothills of the
Rocky Mountains, rather than the moun-
tains themselves, which barred so long an
exploration of the mysterious country be-
tween the frontier settlements and the
far-off Pacific. It is equally interesting
that these vast plains together with the
mountains, through the long periods in
which fairly distinct ethnic groups of
people were developing, should have held
asunder the two great classes of American
aborigines, known as the "Mound-builders"
east of the mountains, and the "Cave-" and
"Cliff-dwellers" west, upon the plateau.
People wise in such lore say that these
folk, so different in their modes of life
were probably descended from a common
source far to the north, wandering down
on either side of the great plain and moun-
tain barrier, and finally, without ever inter-
mingling, became extinct as barbarian
i8o TTbe (Breat plateau
types before the Spanish expeditions
out of Mexico ushered in the historic
period in mid- America.
At last, however, the zeal for explo-
ration and adventure among the pale-faced
intruders who had won and settled the
east broke across the barriers, and the
tides of trade and emigration swept to
the western ocean in two great divergent
streams. The Great Salt Lake Trail fol-
lowed the Platte River to the north and
west. The Santa Fe Trail bore south-
westward, rounding the southern spurs
of the Rockies into New Mexico, whence
the way led down the Rio Grande over
into the Gila valley and so on to the coast.
Thus a vast, wild region behind the
mountains which makes up the larger
part of the Great Plateau lay long undis-
turbed between the two active routes of
far western travel. Then, and it seems
hardly credible to us to-day that it should
JFovaotten patbwass 181
have been scarcely four decades ago, the
pack train and the prairie schooner, the
pony express and the overland mail, gave
place to the iron highway, and steam
was king along the great transcontinental
routes.
The Union Pacific was first to link the
eastern and the western oceans, and fol-
lowed through long stretches the lines
of the Salt Lake Trail, cutting across the
upper end of the Great Plateau. Later,
the Santa Fe Railway, following the line
of the old trail as far as the City of the
Holy Faith, pushed on across the lower
third of the plateau into southern Cali-
fornia. Other railways now climb the
Rocky Mountains, skirt the northern
fringes of the plateau, and join the Union
Pacific in Utah. The Southern Pacific
bears away south of the plateau along
the watershed of the Gila River.
It is easy to-day, even within the limi-
TTbe Great plateau
tations of a summer jaunt, for one to
gather not a little archaeologic lore at first
hand and revel in some of the natural
grandeurs of the Great Plateau.
It is the purpose of the writer in this
and the next chapter to suggest to the
transcontinental traveller how by not too
strenuous excursions from his route he
may enjoy at least some illuminating
glimpses of the past and the present in
this austere wonderland.
Perhaps the best place accessible by
rail, from which to get a first glimpse of
the plateau country and the " Cliff-dwell-
ers " who once flourished there, is the little
town of Mancos in south-western Colorado.
It lies upon the very border of the Great
Plateau where this rests against the slopes
of the San Juan Mountains, and may be
reached by the narrow-gauge loop of the
Denver and Rio Grande Railway from
Denver or Pueblo.
jforaotten patbwass 183
At Mancos it requires but a few hours
to get an outfit ready for a trip to the
fastnesses of the Mesa Verde, some twenty
miles away, where high in the sides of
the rough canyons are perched those
largest and best preserved ruins of the
" Cliff-dwellers "in the whole country, from
which in an earlier chapter we have formed
a picture of the old builder and his homes.
The trails are steep and rough. One
must sleep for three or four nights under
the stars. But blankets and provisions
for the out-door life go along on pack
animals, and one would be very tender-
footish indeed who, man or woman, could
not under competent guidance make the
journey in safety and without serious
fatigue.
A trip of three or four days from Mancos
will introduce one to the prehistoric
ruins of America in their most impressive
phases, give one a taste of life with a
1 84 TTbe Great plateau
pack-train out in the open, and some
glimpses of the plateau which will, if I
mistake not, be memorable wherever and
however he may have journeyed before.
From Mancos one may ride westward
half a day over into the Montezuma
valley where just at the foot of the Ute
Mountain — Sierra El Late — is the Aztec
Spring ruin, which with its multitude of
rooms, some of them still intact and
unexplored, is an excellent type of the
older communal dwellings joined to form
one vast stone structure.
For those who like to brave the sun,
who do not shun rough fare, are not
fastidious in drinking water, and can ride
day after day over a rough, baked, almost
trackless land, there is a vast region west
and north-west from Mancos, reaching
over to the Colorado River and beyond
which is little visited, full of wild, scarcely
explored canyons with many prehistoric
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forgotten patbwaps 185
ruins not mentioned in the books, quaint
carvings on the cliffs and far outlooks from
volcanic summits and from the rims
of lofty mesas.
One of the most noted of the forgotten
pathways on the Great Plateau drops off
from the eastern hills at Mancos and bears
away northwest across the great sage-
brush upland to the crossing of the Colo-
rado, far above the head of the Grand
Canyon. It started at Santa F6, came
up the Rio Grande and Chama valleys,
then across country to this point. Its line
is indicated on the map.
Over on the plateau, a few miles beyond
Mancos, the old trail passes the Yellow
Jacket Springs around which the " Cliff-
dweller " folk built their houses, and is
to-day just the narrow meandering track
with the same dreary outlook across the
wide reaches of the sage-clad upland
which old Father Escalante blinked at,
i86 Ube Great plateau
as with Brother Dominguez and a little
escort he wandered out from Santa F6 in
1776.
They were following the line of an old
trail to see if they could not find some
new Indians to gather into the fold and
a new way to the missions at Monterey
upon the Pacific. They roamed the coun-
try to the east of the Green River, north
of the later line of the trail, straggled over
into Salt Lake valley, and got down off
from the high plateaus in Utah. Cold
weather came on, and they all got very
hungry and deemed it wise to go back.
But the stupendous Canyon of the Colo-
rado was now between them and home,
and to retrace the long route by which
they had come was impracticable. So
they peered and scrambled about the cliffs
along the gorge, and at last found a crossing
and won their way in a very demoralised
state to the Moqui villages, thence along
ffor^otten patbwa^s 187
an old pathway past Zuni and the famous
Inscription Rock, and so home to Santa Fe".
The crossing of the Colorado which they
found is still called El Vado de los Padres —
The Crossing of the Fathers — and the route
which they followed out of Santa Fe and
across the plateau has long been known
as the old Spanish Trail to California.
It crossed the Green River, worked its
way down through the western reaches
of the plateau and through the narrow
intervales of the Wasatch Mountains,
whence it bore off down the Virgen River
and across the country toward what is
now Los Angeles in the general direction
followed by the new San Pedro, Los An-
geles, and Salt Lake Railroad.
When time or whim, which after all
should have a good-deal to say about a
summer wandering, bid one leave Mancos
for fresh fields, he may be impelled to
go in quest of the Pueblos. For the key
i88 Ube Great plateau
to the mystery of the " Cliff-dwellers" is to
be sought in the Pueblo Indians who live
farther south and east.
If one seek out these descendants of the
cliff folk in the Rio Grande valley above
Santa Fe or at Acoma or Zuni, or better
still, at the Hopi villages in Arizona, he
will be able to create for himself a con-
ception of the old " Cliff-dweller," his ways
and habits, his play and his religion, his
utensils and his homes, which will not
be far from the truth; and one will gain
an impression of barbarian life very much
as the wondering Spaniards saw it three
hundred years and more ago.
If one have a pack outfit and loves to
wander, the most attractive way from
Mancos to reach the Pueblos of the Rio
Grande, which are most accessible of all,
is to follow backward the trail of Father
Escalante, across the foothills of the
great San Juan Mountains, past the
jforgotten patbwaps 189
Pagosa Hot Springs, down the Chama
valley, by quaint Abiquiu to Espanola in
the Rio Grande valley. Here, close to
the Indian villages, accommodation, prim-
itive but sufficient, can be found for
men and beasts.
But the twentieth century offers the
alternative of steam, and one can reach
Espanola in a day by rail or he may come
in a couple of hours by rail from Santa F6.
The Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande
valley hereabouts are simple farmer folk,
clinging tenaciously to their traditional
mode of life in adobe houses crowded
close together, some of which are still
entered from the flat roof by ladders.
On feast and dance days, gaudy, fantastic
dress and weird ceremonial betoken the
lingering strain of barbarism which, though
in sight of the railroad and in close touch
with the white man, links them with the
days before Columbus came and with
190 TTbe Great plateau
the spirit and aspirations of the old
fellows who built the houses in the cliffs.
At Espanola teams can be secured and
competent guidance to the adjacent Indian
villages. A ramble about the pueblos of
San Juan, Santa Clara, and San Ildefonso
affords curious glimpses of a phase of
rude life which is here fast passing away.
The Spanish conquest of the Pueblos
in the Rio Grande valley, as elsewhere,
was only accomplished through the de-
struction of many towns, so that none
of the present pueblos are prehistoric
and none are exactly upon the old sites.
But the ruins of the old towns are accessible
and worth a visit.
As one looks west from Espanola, he
sees close at hand a series of long, tongue-
like mesas ending in the valley and sloping
back to a line of low mountain peaks.
These are the Valles Mountains and
between the mesas at their feet are many
forgotten patbwaps 191
lonesome canyons. In these some low
green trees, a few lofty pines, grass and
cactus, and in the season jaunty flowers
hide somewhat the sandy reaches of the
narrow bottoms and lower the glare of
the bright yellow cliffs which shimmer
and scorch in the sun at midday.
These vivid cliffs are very soft, for they
are mostly formed of pumice stone, the
plaything of some volcanic outburst which
has deluged the land hereabout with
molten lava and reared low mountains
over the site of the broken earth. Often
a little stream gurgles down into the
heads of these canyons to be soon lost in
the sand ; more often in the summer they
are wholly dry.
It is not because they are picturesque
little canyons, broiling hot in the midday
sun and wofully "shy" in water, that I
invite attention to these recesses in the
hills near Espanola. For we are now on
192 Ube Great plateau
the eastern edge of the Great Plateau
over whose whole vast extent are hundreds
of canyons in themselves far more note-
worthy.
But if one climb for a few miles up into
one of these canyons just above Santa
Clara, he will presently stand face to face
with some of the most curious, primitive,
and fascinating deserted homes which are
to be found in all America, the homes of
the "Cave-dwellers."
In the fronts of the winding cliffs,
looking out upon the little valleys at their
feet, are holes of various shapes, big
enough for a man to crowd through by
stooping, which lead into cosy little
chambers within and often into a series
of these clustered around the opening
and all pecked out of the friable rock.
Many of them are smoke-begrimed still,
in some mud plaster is yet clinging to
the walls. Small cubby holes here and
jforaotten patbwapa 193
there at the sides of the rooms made snug
places in which to stow away trinkets,
while fragments of projecting sticks near
the low ceilings show the method of
bestowal of scanty wardrobes. A few
of the dwellings have a small smoke hole
above the entrance, but for the most part
the door is door and window and chimney.
The vivid picture framed by the rude
doorway of these rock chambers as one
looks out from their cool recesses upon the
hot green and yellow reaches of the valley
and the pine-clad slopes beyond is most
attractive, and as he lingers within, loath
again to face the ardent sun, he is ready
to concede that even the rude lot of the
old cave man had its compensations.
In front of many of the caves, piles
of hewn stone and small timber holes in
the cliff show that rude stone buildings
once stood in front covering the doorways
in the rock. Pottery has been found in
13
194 ttbe $reat plateau
the recesses of some of the caves. Stone
axes, arrow-heads and pottery fragments
still are plenty along the foot of the cliffs,
while picture-writing in the faces of the
rocks is plain and frequent.
The swarthy fellows down here in the
valley of the Rio Grande unfold to-day
the tradition that it was their people,
the Cochiti, who long ago in the stress of
conflict with alien tribes were forced again
and again to seek these fastnesses and
make shift to carve a shelter in the cliffs.
The pottery, the utensils, the masonry,
and the pictographs upon the rocks con-
firm the story which science has framed
from the fading memories of the Queres.
In this short and easy excursion from
Espanola to the cave dwellings of the
Puye", now included in a recently se-
questered National Reservation — Pajarito
Park — one gains a vivid conception of
this curious phase of aboriginal life. There
jforaotten patbwaps 195
are larger groups of similar dwellings and
other strange structures in the region
immediately south between the Great
White Rock Canyon of the Rio Grande
and the mountains. But the country
is wild and rough and rarely visited ex-
cept by old Cochiti veterans who now
and then slip away on mysterious errands
to these ancestral haunts.
Should one, however, be tempted to
explore them they are best approached
from Cochiti, whose nearest railway point
is Thornton on the Santa F6 Railway.
With a pack outfit and under the guidance
of one of the old fathers of Cochiti, one
may seek out the Painted Cave, the ruins
of the Tyu-ony6, or the Stone Lions of
Cochiti, and scramble over gigantic ruins on
the mesa tops where the old pathways are
worn deep into the rock as they run from
ruin to ruin, or from the ruins to the water
sources, or to the places of the shrines.
i96
(Sreat plateau
When one gets home again, he will prob-
ably read with zest that curious archaeologic
novel by Bandelier, The Delight Makers,
whose plot is set in the recesses of this
gashed mountain slope and deals with
the loves and lives and customs of the
quaint old people who have gone leaving
their stuffy homes to silence and the sun.
From these upper reaches of the Rio
Grande valley everything gravitates
towards Santa F6 and the quaint old
town with its squat adobe Mexican houses
elbowed into cramped corners by modern
structures, its old church, its museum,
and the least imposing palace I fancy
which the country boasts, may well
detain the tourist for a day.
CHAPTER IX
ACROSS THE PLATEAU BY RAIL AND TRAIL
THE Rio Grande valley lies along the
eastern border of the Great Plateau.
The traveller westward bound
across the continent by the Santa F6
Railway catches his first glimpses of the
Pueblo Indian villages as he swings from
the Gallisteo beyond the last spur of the
Rocky Mountains, into the Rio Grande
valley. Here he passes close to the
quaint villages, San Domingo and San
Felippe.
From Bernalillo a little farther on one
may drive up the Jemez Valley and visit
the pueblos of Santa Ana, Sia, and Jemez
and the interesting old ruins on the hills
about them, the wreckage of Spanish
197
198 Ube (Bteat plateau
conquest in the seventeenth century. But
the train speeds on down the river, the
level edges of the plateau, here lava-
capped, building the western horizon
line. The Sandia Mountains cut short
the vision toward the east.
At Albuquerque, the last town of con-
siderable size this side the Pacific coast,
one might outfit a pack-train — a stout
buck-board would answer — for a journey
of several days up through the valley of
the Rio Puerco of the East into the heart
of the plateau to the Chaco Canyon.
This route leads along old Pueblo and
Navajo roads, past Cabezon, and across
the line of the old transcontinental trail
westward from Santa Fe. It is in part
the route over which Colonel Washington
and Lieutenant Simpson and their military
escort travelled in 1849, to carry an ulti-
matum to the predatory Navajos, dis-
covering the wonderful Chaco ruins and
Bcroas tbe plateau 199
the cliff houses of the Canyon de Chelly
westward.
In the Chaco Canyon and upon the
adjacent hills is a large group of superb
prehistoric ruins of great communal houses
telling of thriving times, of skilful builders,
of excellent farmers, in the old days when
all the folks were brown and the brown
folks owned the earth. One of these
Chaco ruins containing several hundred
rooms has been partially explored by the
Hyde Expedition, whose invaluable col-
lections are deposited in the American
Museum of Natural History in New York.
There is accommodation here to-day at
the trading post of Richard Wetherill,
close beside the famous Pueblo Bonito,
one of the largest of this great ruin
group.
The Chaco Valley may be most easily
reached, however, by team from Chaves
or Thoreau on the Santa Fe Railway
200 Ube (3reat plateau
farther west. In any case it is a long hot
journey over a rough arid country, peopled,
if at all, by Navajos, and should not be
undertaken except under skilful guidance
with a good outfit and an abundance of
provision.
A few miles below Albuquerque the
railroad passes one of the most flourishing
and most modernised of the Pueblo villages,
Isleta, leaves the Rio Grande and enters
the plateau country bearing west. Pres-
ently it crosses the Rio Puerco of the East,
so called to distinguish it from a stream
of the same name over the continental
divide, and winds up a small branch,
the San Jos6.
To the north rises the volcanic crest of
the San Mateo Mountain, renamed Mount
Taylor by Simpson in 1849 in honor of
the President under whose administration
his explorations in the plateau country
were conducted.
across tbe plateau 201
This mountain with its sharp summit
and long rough spurs standing high upon
a great mesa top is an impressive type of
an extinct volcano with hundreds of
subsidiary outbursts gathered at its feet.
It was long ago forced up through the pla-
teau, deluging the land for wide areas with
lava and thus protecting the surfaces at
its base from later erosion. But the floods
and the weather have made away with
vast areas of strata all about the moun-
tain, marking its borders with long valleys
edged with canyons and gorges, and now
the rugged old sentinel stands up aloft
looking out over a wilderness of barren land
The summit is easily accessible in a day
and a half from Pajuate, a small Pueblo
farming village at the eastern base, whence
a good trail leads to the foot of the summit
spur. Then it is a go-as-you-please scram-
ble to the top which rises about eleven
thousand feet above the sea.
202 TTbe Great plateau
Save for the summit of the San Fran-
cisco Mountain in Arizona, I do not know
of any vantage ground from which one
may more happily than here look over
this marvellous land. The vision is in-
spiring, and if one be new to the allure-
ments of far horizons swaying in long
fantastic waves across the hazy reaches
of the hot south-west; if the earth he
knows has not dipped her cliffs in sunset
and set them in lines which beckon on and
on, he will begin to realise from this, as
he might from many another pinnacle
in this lofty wonderland, that in spite of
its austerities, in spite of its vast arid
wastes the Great Plateau weaves a spell
over him who has once shared the spirit
of its solitudes from which he can never
again, nor would he willingly, be free.
San Mateo is one of the sacred moun-
tains of the Navajo and to its summit
they, as well as the Pueblo Indians, resort
Bcross tbe plateau 203
for secret ceremonies and especially to
propitiate and to tell their needs to the
Powers Above which manage rain. I
gather from hints, particularly of the
Navajo, that the night has veiled many
a weird ceremonial on this narrow moun-
tain top which, as they tell me, is none of
the white's man business. In fact, there
is a small cave or pit in the rock on the
very summit of the peak just large enough
for a man to crawl into, with four deep-cut
pathways leading a few feet away from it
toward the world corners. I found stuck
into the rock-debris at the sides of the pit
several old prayer -sticks of Pueblo manu-
facture, with the jagged lightning symbol
cut at one end, the other pointed, the husk
parcel of sacred meal with which they were
once furnished mostly weathered off.
Just at the edge of one of the lava-clad
tongues which the San Mateo Mountain
sends off into the San Jose" Valley, the
204 TTbe Great plateau
railroad cuts through the corner of the
Pueblo village, Laguna. This is an inter-
esting excursion centre where temporary
accommodation and teams may be secured.
The Laguna pueblo is picturesque and
rich in curious phases of the village Indian
life. Here may be seen the making and
decoration of pottery by hand and its
primitive firing in the open air. But
here as elsewhere the elder pottery makers
are fast disappearing, and a rougher, less
artistic, less attractive ware is supplanting
the old. Nevertheless, here and at Acoma
and Zuni, interesting jars and bowls may
now and then be found.
From Laguna one may be taken in a
farm waggon, perhaps by one of the Indians,
to the quaint Mexican towns, Cubero and
Ceboletta, a few miles away. From here
also one may best secure guidance and
conveyance for the trip to the summit of
the San Mateo.
across tbe plateau 205
But the little journey from Laguna
which above all others will be memorable
ends in that fascinating old "City in the
Sky" — Acoma. It is some sixteen miles
from Laguna, the road winding along a
wide, cliff-bordered valley. It is the same
old town, perched upon a great sheer
walled mesa standing high out of the
valley bottom, which the Spaniards found
as they came floundering through the
sand and scrambling over the rocks from
Cibola, eager for gold, in 1540. Except
for the far-away Hopi villages, it is the
most primitive and impressive of the
pueblos.
Acoma has been most vividly described
and its stories and legends rehearsed by
Lummis who knows it and its people well.
And if one has read, as he who travels in
this south-west country should, his Spanish
Pioneers, Strange Corners of our Country,
and the Land of Poco Tiempo, the ride up
206 ZTbe Great plateau
the valley past the Enchanted Mesa, the
unfolding of this wonderful old town, the
glimpses of its quaint folk caught as you
pass round the foot of the mesa, climb
the ancient trail to the summit and wander
among the houses, will frame a memory
which will seem no part of the land and
century you know.
As the necessity for protection has
disappeared, the Acoma people, as is the
case of other Pueblos whose old towns
stand on defensive sites, have gradually
built summer homes nearer their farms,
so that the visitor to Acoma in the hot
season will find many of the houses closed.
But enough of the people are always
there to interest the stranger and, it may
be added, to be interested in him.
If one can so time his journey as to be
at hand when the harvest dance is held
in early September, the people will all be
there and the quaint life, the weird cere-
across tbe plateau 207
monial, and the festive spirit of the hour
will reveal old Acoma at its best.
One can drive to Acoma from Laguna,
wander for two or three hours through
the town, and return the same evening.
But it is better to stay over for a night.
The sunset hour at Acoma with the
exquisite far outlooks upon valley and
mesa and mountain; the processions of
quaintly clad women bringing water in
great handsome jars poised upon their
heads; the musical call of the town crier
as from an housetop he issues some order
of the Governor, some plan for the mor-
row's work, some announcement of cere-
monial to be set afoot; the quaint home
groups which gather on the housetops at
dusk laughing and chatting or calling
from house to house the gossip of the day ;
a dusky mother crooning to her babe;
a weird song caught from group to group
and floating off into the valley ; the glow
208 Ube Great plateau
of the lines of bake-ovens along the streets
as night falls ; the gleaming smoky heaps
in which pottery is slowly firing under the
watchful ministrations of old women gath-
ered close about them; then the great
silences of the night up on this towering
rock close under the stars — these, and the
stir of the new day as the early sun flashes
from cliff to cliff, are all impressions
which one were ill-advised to miss.
Some of the kindly folk can always be
found who will cheerfully sweep a corner
of the living room in their terraced houses
where a blanket may be spread, or point
out, which I always prefer, a cosy corner
on the roof where the night may be passed
in comfort.
If one should chance, as was once the
writer's good fortune, to come over on a
feast day in the autumn with the Padre
and hear the bells in the great church
beside the village peal out a welcome as
Bcross tbc plateau 209
the watchers on the cliff catch sight of
him toiling up the trail, he will not doubt
that the little French missionary and
the Church which he personifies have won
a strong hold upon these simple children
of the south-west, who find no incongruity
in reverence for the Cross and regard for
its ministers, and in a sturdy belief in
their own Powers Above and an attitude
towards nature which we others name
pagan.
The Padre is coming! The Padre is
coming! was the meaning of their jubi-
lant cry as they crowded, big and little,
men and women, to the head of the trail
to meet him. The Padre had the best
room in the village, the whitest bread,
and the thickest, blackest mutton-stew.
When he walked about, a score of shrieking,
giggling brown youngsters, naked or clad
it matters not, pattered at his heels. He
does not allow himself to be disturbed if,
210 Ube Oteat plateau
as he celebrates the Mass in the Church,
some of his restless, inquisitive, blanket-
clad charges roam about the altar and
finger with appreciative mien the splen-
did vestments which his function de-
mands.
When their turn comes after the noon,
and up and down the long streets between
the strangest dwellings in America the
fantastic procession of painted men and
women goes shuffling and singing in the
weird harvest dance which celebrates and
solicits the beneficence and good-will of
powerful Beings in earth and air of whom
our Scriptures fail to tell and for whom
we seek in vain among mythologies,
while the good Padre wanders to and fro
beaming approval, one wonders and ad-
mires. One wonders if these are the
people who used to stone the priests and
throw them off the great cliffs yonder;
he cannot fail to admire the adaptability
Her 055 tbe plateau 211
of the Church even in our day to unusual
and complex phases of belief.
As one leaves Laguna by rail going up
the valley of the San Jose, if he is interested
in the outlook with which plodders of
many sorts and many centuries along the
forgotten pathways have beguiled the
weary miles, let it be in the daytime,
even if one has to take a freight train,
for just here and for a long way up the
valley of the San Jose ran a noteworthy
old highway.
The Pueblo Indians used it in prehistoric
times as did no doubt the earlier dwellers
in the cliffs and caves, if they ventured
so far afield. The Spaniards came this
way again and again in their early ad-
ventures on the plateau. Along here
came Father Escalante floundering wearily
home to Santa Fe. Many a lonesome
little caravan and many a solitary fortune-
seeker, his pack upon his own back, has
2 1 2 ZTbe Great plateau
passed this way on the long journey from
Santa Fe to the Pacific, dodging hostile
Indians, hungry and bedraggled.
Along here came Lieutenant Simpson in
1849, homeward bound, after his long
jaunt into the Navajo country to teach
those braves manners. Captain Sitgreaves
and his party passed here in 1851, by order
of the Senate to find out where the Zuni
River went to. Lieutenant Whipple, in
1854, laid out along the valley the lines
which the railroad was by-and-by to
follow. Tired, worn, and ragged, Lieu-
tenant Ives hurried back down the valley
from the Colorado River in 1858.
How many times the Navajo have
stolen down this way out of their lairs
among the northern hills to plunder the
thrifty Pueblos it would not be easy now
to tell. Then the highway grew wide and
worn, and great waggon trains from Santa
F6 bore around the spur of the San
Hcross tbe plateau 213
Mateo, heading off up the valley. At
last the noisy trains began to waken
strange echoes from the mountain flanks,
usurping the choicer places as the nar-
rowing valley climbed the long slopes of
the Continental Divide, elbowing the old
pathway unceremoniously aside.
As one rolls along up the valley, he will
presently see great jagged black rocks
crowding close to the rails on either side.
These are old lava flows, one from the
plateau of the San Mateo on the right, the
other, the end of a great stone river which
has poured out of the earth some twenty
miles off to the south-west where is a
beautiful cool spring called the Agua Fria.
Down it came, this river of fire, full four
miles wide in many places, sluggish and
glowing, cooling as it ran until just here
where the railroad skirts its gloomy
margins, it grew black and hard and
stopped. But as the molten lava cooled,
Ube (Bteat plateau
its surface was thrown into wild and
forbidding shapes, black and sinister.
It is shunned by man and beast, this
gloomy streak of chaos stretching down
from the Agua Fria. For the hoof of the
beast and the foot-gear of the human
venturing into its recesses are soon cut
and torn by its jagged edges. One old
trail goes across the lava flow, formerly
used by the Zunis and the Acomas when
they traversed the country to visit and to
trade. But it is hard to find to-day and
it is wiser not to try.
Now at the left, the country rises over
the long timber-clad slopes of the Zuni
Mountain which for many miles shuts the
railroad in against the northern mesas.
One of the old trails to Zuni and on to
the Pacific, now a reasonable waggon road,
goes across the mountain ; another rounds
its southern end, passing the Agua Fria;
another leads our way up through Camp-
Hcross tbe plateau 215
bells' Canyon over the Continental Divide.
The two former were much frequented
trails from Coronado's time and before,
down to the day of the railroad.
Straight over the mountain not far from
its farther slope, and some fifty miles
away, is the famous El Morro or In-
scription Rock in whose soft cliffs are
cut strange pictographs of prehistoric
folk and brief record of their passage, in
quaint old Spanish script, of many ex-
peditions out of Mexico in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Nor is the trace
of vandals wanting, who have not spared
to efface some of these priceless records
of real men that the names of miscreants
might win enduring shame.
Noteworthy names are here inscribed;
names with heroic stories clinging to them ;
soldiers of fortune and of the Cross in the
days of our Pilgrim Fathers. For just
three centuries has the graven record
216 Ube Great plateau
which I have selected from my photo-
graphs for reproduction here been exposed
to the sun and the weather. But the
shallow lines cut in the soft rock are still
plain as the picture shows. Founder of
colonies and of the City of the Holy Faith,
governor and explorer, Don Juan Onate
passed this way when our Pacific Ocean
was just becoming known and was called
the South Sea.
El Morro — The Castle, as the Spaniards
named it — is still miles away from any
settlement and save for the few scrawls of
the vandals upon its base there is nothing
upon or about the rock to indicate to the
visitor that times have changed. Some
bedraggled emissary from the Spanish
Court might for aught that we can see
file around the corner of the cliff yonder
in quest of water and camp; still seeking
the fabled cities of Quivira. There is
no historic monument in America more
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Hcross tbe plateau 217
worthy of preservation than this noble
collection of autographs and legends of
the early pioneers.
Some large ruins crown the top of El
Morro, and a small pool of water is often
to be found at its foot. Altogether it
is one of the most picturesque camping-
places upon the old pathways of the
plateau. It may be reached from Zuni
or from Fort Wingate in a day and the
way is not hard to find.
I wandered once across this way from
Zuni with one of the old men of the tribe,
hight Mappa-Nutria. A manly, genial,
white-haired old barbarian he was, who
muttered prayers and sprinkled sacred
meal upon the ruins which we passed,
and, stooping low the while above the
water, with much mumbling offered to
the Spirit of the Agua Fria from his
little treasure bag small pieces of irides-
cent shell and some excellent fragments
218 ITbe (Breat plateau
of turquoise. I was glad to have so
earnest an advocate with the Powers which
kept the beautiful little spring under the
lava bed wholesome and aflow, but the
water had become sacred for the time
and while to drink it was no sin, I
must perforce go one night with unwashed
face and hands, for such use was not, he
said, respectful. I feigned accedence, but
tried at dusk in surreptitious fashion to
rinse my finger tips. Old Mappa found
me out, however, and gave me such a
spirited wigging, half in Zuni, half in
Mexican, and all mingled with vivid
pantomime, for my lack of reverence
and decency towards the Powerful Ones,
that I was actually ashamed. And I
think if I had been possessed of them
I should then and there have cast some
little shells and broken turquoise into the
bubbling water, too, in late extenuation of
my fault. But I came in sight of the rail-
Hcross tbe plateau 219
road the next day, and then if I had made
the offering I should perhaps have been
ashamed again.
Now for many miles the way of the
rails lies north of west along a wide valley,
the Zuni plateau still to the left, and to the
right one of the most superb reaches of
stupendous cliffs which the whole land
affords. Red and grey and brown is
what one calls them if he is pinned down
to words. But if one can pass this noble
palisade at sunset coming east — and it
is worth while to come back this way
for this alone — and if as the low sun
smites them one shall see the majestic,
winding faces of the cliffs rise and glow
with a palpitating splendour almost un-
earthly, he will realise that one more link
has been forged in the chain which hence-
forth shall hold the spirit subject to the
matchless beauty of the Great Plateau.
.The traveller by rail is presently over
220 TTbe (Breat plateau
the divide and going down hill with the
water courses which lead to the Pacific.
The great cliffs at the north dwindle, the
Zuni Mountain falls away, and the train
goes thundering down the valley of the
Rio Puerco of the West.
Before one gets down to Gallup in the
valley of the Puerco, he must make up his
mind whether the time or money or whim
are consenting to a trip to Zuni ; for if it is
yes, Gallup with its livery stable and neces-
sary outfit is the best place to stop.
Zuni lies about forty miles to the south
of Gallup, over a fair waggon road. The
pueblo is in a broad brown valley not so
picturesque as Acoma, like it half deserted
in summer, with a type of face and form,
a style of pottery and architecture, and
hosts of superstitions all its own. A group
of ruins near the modern Zuni is all that is
left of one of the famous seven cities of
Cibola of early Spanish days. But one
Hcross tbe plateau 221
may find the others if he be not afraid
to wander in the sun. The Zunians will
point out a rude pile of stones a few
hundred yards from the village, which
is the centre of the world.
One may climb the rude ladders and
wander on the terraced roofs up to the
fifth story and look across the shimmering
valley to a grand old mesa standing
alone — the Thunder Mountain of their
legends. The visitor will be welcome —
doubly so if he discreetly dispense
some small offerings of sweets and
tobacco — to the snug abodes of the various
clans, and may gain entrance to the
gloomy chambers under ground in which
at times weird ceremonies are conducted.
If one be missionaryly inclined, he will call
upon the ladies at the school and admire
the spirit and beneficence of their work.
One finds here in Mr. D. D. Graham, an
Indian agent whose example of honest,
2 2 2 TTbe Great plateau
vigilant, and sympathetic administration
offers the simple and effective solution
of the Indian problem. For the problem
lies not so much in the Indian as in se-
curing and properly supporting an honest
and capable representative of the Federal
Government, and for lack of this in many in-
stances we have suffered national disgrace.
One may ride in a day from Zuni to In-
scription Rock along the old pathway
which the early Spaniards trod and return
to Gallup, if he will, by the way of Fort
Wingate.
When the wanderer gets back to Gallup
and the railroad, he will doubtless be
weary of the rough roads and the ardent
sun, and impatient for the train which is
to carry him to " somewhere. " But before
he goes he should look across the narrow
valley to the cliffs beyond through which
an old road leads to Fort Defiance in the
Navajo Reservation, a day's journey away.
Hcross tbe plateau 223
The old army post at Fort Defiance is
now abandoned by the soldiers but is an
agency for the Navajo Indians. It is a
typical frontier military post, with the
little houses grouped around a square,
its barracks, its stables, and now the
school. One would not be tempted to
brave the sun for this alone. But a day's
ride beyond the post, along a fascinating
old trail which in its time has seen many
a quaint procession, will bring the rider
to one of the grandest canyons in the
whole plateau, next to the matchless one
which lies upon the flanks of the great
Colorado. It is the Canyon de Chelly, in
whose recesses are hundreds of ruins of
the prehistoric people. A few Navajo
live here during the summer and cultivate
the fertile patches in the bottom which
the old folks owned and tilled in the days
which are forgotten.
The Canyon de Chelly can be approached
224 ^be (Breat plateau
from Santa F6 or from Albuquerque by
way of the Chaco, along the old trails
already mentioned. I have come to it
over the hot miles out of Colorado and
the San Juan Valley. The easiest approach
is from Gallup by way of Fort Defiance;
but if one be in command of a pack outfit
the trip to the Chelly is worth the toil it
costs to reach it, whichever way he comes.
Again aboard, the train speeds down
the Puerco Valley, past Navajo Spring
which has been the scene of many a
rendezvous of Indians and of white men
in the old days. Down here ran the old
trail from Cibola to Tusayan — the land of
the Hopi — along which the eager Spaniards
toiled in the sixteenth century, hoping
that at Tusayan they might find that
golden storehouse of their dreams which
at Cibola had faded into a tangle of mud
houses with vociferous brown folk swarm-
ing over the roofs and heaving rocks down
Heroes tbe plateau 225
upon their heads. But it was not much
better at Tusayan whence some pushed
on west in quest of rumoured giants, but
found only the gigantic chasm of the great
Colorado from which they could not even
slake their thirst, so monstrous were the
precipices at whose feet the river roared
and tossed. Then they all came sadly
back this way to Cibola to wander off
again far eastward in the vain quest of
cities and treasures which were chimeras.
From Adamana in a day one may visit
the Petrified Forest, survey noteworthy
ruins of the elder folk, and see some
excellent ancient pictographs upon the
faces of the ledges.
Presently the valley widens, the country
stretches away grey and hazy on either
hand, and the train is winding along the
Rio Colorado Chiquito— The Little Red
River, or as we now call it, the Little
Colorado. From the vicinity of Winslow
226 Ube Great plateau
one may look down the valley of the Little
Colorado across the forbidding reaches of
the Painted Desert to the brown and red
buttes between which a way leads up to
Tusayan.
The Little Colorado winds in placid
fashion through the sand for a few miles,
then strikes the lava flows from the San
Francisco Mountain, drops into an unas-
suming canyon which gradually deepens
until at last it is a straight walled gorge,
less than a mile wide at its rim and full
three thousand feet in sheer depth. The
adventurer in this country of precipices
and gorges gets wonted to dizzy trails and
shivery depths close at his feet, but he who
without flinching can peer over the edge
of the Little Colorado gorge may be cer-
tain that he has sustained the supreme
test. These lower reaches of the Little
Colorado are most conveniently visited
from the Grand View Hotel at the Grand
across tbe plateau 227
Canyon along an old Moqui trail. Many
ruins of the ancient people lie in the Little
Colorado Valley not far from Winslow
and along the stretches a few miles north
of the railroad.
As one leaves Winslow, looking out of the
car window ahead and to the left, he sees a
break in the lines of the buttes through
which the old Sunset Pass Trail, and later
a mail and waggon road entered the great
Mogollon Forest on the way to the Verde
Valley and the country beyond. This
old highway, like many another which the
railroad has crowded aside, is followed
now and then by the cattlemen driving
in their unruly charges from the forest
ranges. But it is now rough and over-
grown and the great pines are claiming
their own again.
Now the railroad climbs up on to the
mesa out of the valley of the Little Colo-
rado, up into the pine forest, up among
228 Ube Great plateau
a wilderness of cinder cones, to the foot
of the grand old volcano, the beautiful
San Francisco Mountain. Here the homely
little town of Flagstaff, in the name of the
Grand Canyon of the Colorado to which
it was so long the popular gateway; in
the name of the superb view from the
mountain top ; in the name of cliff dwell-
ings and cave dwellings, and many an
alluring forest drive, invites the traveller
to break his journey westward.
From Flagstaff, by waggon or ahorse, one
may cross the great Mogollon Forest
southward into the Verde Valley and the
land of the Apache, visiting Montezuma's
well and castle and the cave dwellings
of the Verde. Thence by the old Govern-
ment road one may cross over the hills to
the Tonto Basin and the curious natural
bridge, and so back again to Flagstaff
another way.
An old waggon road "Beales Waggon
Heroes tbe plateau 229
Road," straggling westward from Santa
F6, around the San Mateo Mountain by
the Agua Fria and Inscription Rock via
Zuni, Navajo Spring, and the valley of the
Little Colorado, comes close to the railroad
just as it turns the spur of the peak to
enter Flagstaff. Farther west it bears off
to the right, skirting the edges of the
Coconino Forest, on the way to the crossing
of the Big Colorado.
Beyond Flagstaff the railroad makes
its devious way westward.
At Williams a branch road leads to the
very rim of the Grand Canyon some
sixty miles across the Coconino plateau,
where are hotels, saddle-horses, guides,
and all necessary as well as many un-
necessary conveniences for excursions
along and into the Canyon. One should
not permit either the world, the flesh, or
any other potency to call him back in less
than a week from this inspiring region.
230 TTbe Great plateau
Now the railroad drops comfortably
down from the plateau, and comes at last
to the crossing of the Colorado River below
the Grand Canyon where the sullen,
muddy water laps ignominious shores with
no suggestion of the glorious chasm which
it has helped to sculpture. Then the
desert, then the Garden of America in
Southern California, then the Pacific.
But the most interesting excursion of
all those which may be made from the
Santa Fe Railway as a base remains to be
described. It is to the far-away Hopi or
Moqui villages, the ancient Tusayan, about
one hundred miles north over a rough arid
upland with few watering places and at
best a hot, hard ride.
Although the Hopi Pueblos were among
the earliest to be seen by the Spaniards and
were quickly brought into nominal sub-
jection, they maintained their isolation
throughout the period of Spanish rule and
Hopi Folks.
The whorls of hair at the side of the head indicate that the wearer
is unmarried.
Bcross tbe plateau 231
it was not until the explorations for the
transcontinental railroad route, midway
in the last century, that their modes of
life and points of view became markedly
modified by intercourse with the whites.
They are still too far from lines of travel
to be visited frequently. The result is
that the Hopi settlements of to-day re-
veal the village Indian in his most prim-
itive aspects with his traditions and myths
and barbaric ceremonials but superficially
modified by ingrafts of the white man's
point of view.
While traces of the Roman Catholic
Church are interwoven in very complex
fashion with the religious conceptions
and even in some degree with the primitive
ceremonials of all the other existing
Pueblo Indians, the Church has from the
first secured but a superficial and fitful
foothold among these people. Within the
past few years, it is true, the establishment
232 TTbe (Breat plateau
of schools and government agencies and
the more frequent visits of the whites have
profoundly modified the dress, the material
aspirations, and the conceptions of the
great world of men beyond the immediate
vision of the Hopi. But here in his snug
houses with their terraced stories, perched
upon great bare mesas is that by which
we may most closely link the present with
the genuine barbarian of a high order who
saw the coming of the white man into his
contented seclusion along the same old
pathways by which the visitor comes
to-day, straggling along under the cliffs,
hot and dusty and athirst.
The Hopi man is a farmer still, but is
beginning to cast aside his primitive uten-
sils for the white man's farming tools.
He is a genial, hospitable pagan, fun-
loving in his way, loyal to his family, and
closely linked in every act and purpose
and aspiration with potent Beings in earth
Bcross tbe plateau 233
and air and sky which he consults, worships,
placates, holding them in close communion
through quaint and weird ceremonials
which age by age have been handed down
at last to him. His women folk are al-
together not uncomely, the youngsters
just gurgling, playing, laughing young-
sters, in aspect much like others who are
white save for the accident of colour and
garb.
While the relatively unalloyed traditions
of the Hopi offer a field for the student of
folk-lore among the Pueblo Indians of
exceptional extent and value, the ordinary
visitor touches but superficially upon the
inner life of the people. He is indeed
constantly impressed with a mysterious
underlying current of life and impulse
which is opened only to such as can win
their confidence, understand their speech,
and are trained to recognise the value and
significance of their lore. But certain of
234 TO>e Great plateau
the Hopi ceremonials, especially the so-
called Snake Dance, which is really an
elaborate prayer for rain, are so weird and
striking that for several years white men
have gathered in considerable numbers
to witness them.
The Snake Dance has been frequently
described. The scene at an absorbing
moment has been caught by Lungren
upon his great, well-known canvas. Photo-
graphs of various phases of the ceremonial
are abundant. To the repeated pains-
taking observations and the learned treat-
ises of Dr. Fewkes we owe the most
comprehensive exposition of the weird
ceremonial and its lore.
I shall not here describe the Snake
Dance nor attempt to indicate the pro-
found impression which this relic of
barbarism makes upon the sympathetic
beholder. To the many, the appearance
and the handling of snakes, both harmless
f-3
!i
-q
• X C
o <u
y 4J
4) ^5
^ -e
—I C
s
o
across tbe plateau 235
and venomous, in the culminating phases
of the intricate and prolonged ceremonial
is the chief and absorbing attraction.
But to him who has come to know the
participants in their daily walks, and
realises that the crude barbaric exhibition
is but the expression handed on through
centuries, of sincerely cherished and pro-
found religious conceptions; to him who
now and again as the strange processions
out of the slumbering centuries unfold
before him at sunset finds the eye
wandering out upon the hazy valleys and
over the quavering uplands under whose
sway the conceptions here dramatised
were evolved or fostered : to him who has
grown even fond of these children of the
sun, for their simplicity, directness,
and familiar intercourse with Beings out
of sight but ever close at hand which rule
the world, — the Snake Dance ceremonial
has a more absorbing and abiding fasci-
236 ttbe Great plateau
nation than its crude dramatic features
can awaken.
There are seven of the Hopi villages, and
at some of these the Snake Dance cere-
monial is held each year between the
middle and the end of August.
For the journey out to Hopi and back
one should take at least a week. It can
be made from Flagstaff or Canyon Diabolo
or Winslow or Holbrook or Gallup, either
on horseback or by waggon, and usually
one or more conveyances go from each of
these places. Almost all of these routes
follow in the main the lines of old Indian
trails and lead by the ancient watering
places which till fifty years or so ago only
the brown man and the Spaniard knew.
Agents of the Santa F£ Railway can give
information regarding routes and have
issued an interesting short description of
the Snake Dance by Hough.
It is disheartening to realise, as the
Hcross tbe plateau 237
thoughtful visitor to the lingering remnants
of a vanishing race in our western country
is forced to do, that priceless treasures of
folk-lore are each year slipping away out
of sight forever as one by one their swarthy
old custodians drop away. It is to be
hoped that general enlightenment among
the people '0f the land may demand, ere
it be too late, such liberal appropriations
for the maintenance of devotees to Ameri-
can Anthropology in these lonesome fields
as shall be more worthy a nation so great
as ours and with aspirations not all for
material conquest, whatever may be the
apparent leaning of the hour.
The writer is certain that he who shall
break his long transcontinental journey
for one or all of the glimpses of life and
nature on the Great Plateau which these
pages have aimed to suggest, will win some
lasting and inspiring memories and a deeper
love of the great land which we inherit.
1***
SKETCH MAP
DRAWN FOR
ON THE GREAT
AMERICAN PLATEAU
INDEX
Acoma, 205
Adamana, 225
Albuquerque, 198
Aqua Fria, 213, 217
Bandelier, 29, 196
Bass's Camp, 67
Beale's Waggon Road, 228
Bluff City, 43
Bright Angel Creek, 59
Cabezon, 198
Canyon, Campbell's, 215; Cataract, 40; Chaco, 198;
de Chelly, 223; Glen, 40; Grand, of the Colorado
River, 42; access to, 37; cliff-houses of, 66; des-
criptions of, 62 ; Forest Reserve of, 43 ; geology
of, 72; hotels at, 37, 67; wanderings about, 65;
Little Colorado, 226; Marble, 42; White Rock of
Rio Grande, 195
Cataract Creek, 66
Cave Dwellings, 145, 163, 192
Cibola, 220, 224
Cliff-Dwellers, baskets of, 123; bone implements of,
127; burials of, 150; cave ruins of, 159; character-
istics of, 104, 129; dress and adornments of, 105;
firesticks of, 112; homes of , 96, 137; land of, 92;
masonry of, 108, 148; open ruins of, 140, 146;
pictographs of, 115; pottery of, 119; sandals of,
239
240 fnfcej
105; stone implements of, 113; towers of, 157;
utensils of, 113 ; water supply of, 165
Cliff Dwellings, 90, 137; classification of , 143; van-
dalism in, 172
Cochiti, 194; stone lions of, 195
Coconino Basin, 66; Forest, 229
Colorado Chiquito, 42, 225
Colorado River, canyons of, 40; crossings of, 41,
43, 187; sources of, 40
Cushing, 29
Dandy Crossing, 40
"Delight Makers," 196
Dellenbaugh, 60
Dirty Devil Creek, 40
Dorsey, 29
Dutton, 65
Echo Cliffs, 60, 68
El Morro, 215
El Tovar Hotel, 37, 59, 67
Escalante, Father, 185
Espanola, 189
Estufa, in, 150
Fewkes, 29, 234
Flagstaff, 228
Ft. Defiance, 222
Ft. Wingate, 217
Gallup, 220
Gila River, ruins on, 138
Graham, 221
Grand View Hotel, 38, 65, 67, 226
241
H
Hodge, 29
Hopi Indians, 132, 230
Hough, 236
Hyde Exploring Expedition, 199
Indians, Apache, 35; Havasupai, 35, 66; Hopi,
132, 231; Navajo, 30; Pah Utes, 34; Pueblo,
26, 131, 132, 189, 231; Ute, 34; Wallapai, 35
Inscription Rock, 215
Isleta, 200
Ives, 212
Kanab, 53
Kiva, see Estufa
L
Laguna, 204
Lava Beds, 213
Lee's Ferry, 41
Little Colorado River, 225
Lummis, 29, 205
M
Mancos, 182
Matthews, 29
Mesa, enchanted, 206
Mesa Verde, 100, 159, 183
Mogollon Forest, 227
Montezuma, castle and well, 228
Monument Valley, 86
Mound-Builders, 179
Mountains, Blue, 15; Carriso, 155 Henry, 51; La
Sal, 15; Navajo, 41, 68; Sandia, 198; San Fran-
cisco, 228; San Juan, 188; San Mateo, 200;
Taylor, 200; Thunder, 221; Ute, 184; Valles, 190;
Zuni, 214
242
N
Navajo Indians, 30; spring, 224
O
Onate, Inscription of, 216
P
Painted Desert, 66, 68, 226
Pajarito Park, 164, 194
Petrified Forest, 225
Pictographs, 115, 225
Plateau, Buckskin, 55; Cochiti, 164; Great American,
access to, 8; across, 197; animals of, 10; camp-
ing on, 22; characters of, i, 14; colours of, 14;
ethnology of, 27; forgotten pathways of, 176;
formation of, 4, 77; fossils of, 79; Indians of, 5,
25 ; mirage of, 18; mountains of, 15 ; railways of,
1 81 ; settlement of, 179; showers of, 19; trails of,
180, 1815,227; travel on, 9, 13; vegetation of, 2;
water of, 10, 21, 165; High, of Utah, 82; Kaibab,
55; Marble, 68; Powell, 57
Points: Final, Greenland, Royal, and Sublime, 58
Powell, 40, 45, 64
Pueblo Bonito, 199
Pueblo villages: Acoma, 205; Cochiti, 195; Hopi,
230; Isleta, 200; Laguna, 204; Moqui, 230; of the
Rio Grande, 190, 197; Zuni, 220
Rio Grande, ruins in valley of, 138
Rio Puerco, 198, 200, 220
River, Colorado, 40; Colorado Chiquito, 225; Dirty
Devil, Fremont, 40; Gila, 139; Green and Grand
40; Kanab, 138; Salt, 139; San Jose", 211; San
Juan, 41, 138; Virgen, 138
Ruins, protection of, 172
243
Santa F£, 196
Simpson, 198, 212
Sit greaves, 212
Snake Dance, 234
Spanish Bayonet, 124
Stanton, 45
Stephen, 29
Stevenson, 29
T
Thornton, N. M., 195
Thoreau, N. M., 200
Tonto Basin, 228
Trail, Great Salt Lake, 180; Old Spanish, 185; San*
ta Fe, 1 80; Sunset Pass, 227
Tuba City, 61
Tusayan, 224
Tyu-aiiye", ruins of 195
Verde valley, 165, 228
W
Warner, 64
Washington, Col., 198
Wetherill, 199
Whip pie, 212
Williams, Ariz., 37, 229
Winslow, Ariz., 225
Yellow Jacket Spring, 185
Yucca, uses of by Cliff-man, 124
Zum, 220
" The best work that has appeared on this sub'
ject for a long time" — Nashville American.
THE
MYSTIC MID=REQION
THE DESERTS OF THE SOUTHWEST
BY
ARTHUR J. BURDICK
Octavo, With 54 full'page illustrations.
Net, $2.25. By mail, $2,40
Mr. Burdick brings to the public both a general know-
ledge of the deserts of the Southwest and a particular
acquaintance by means of pen and camera with many
of the most unique features and interesting localities
in California and adjacent desert regions.
The deserts offer so many obstacles to research that
they are comparatively unknown. He who braves the
perils and endures the hardships finds himself amply
repaid, as they offer one of the most interesting fields
for exploration and nature study. The present volume
is a faithful chronicle of both the deserts' pleasures and
terrors, dangers and delights, mysteries and revelations.
Send tot illustrated descriptive circular
Q. P. PUTNA/TS SONS
YORK LONDON
The Romance of the
Colorado River : : :
A Complete Account of the Discovery and of the
Explorations from 1540 to the Present Time,
with Particular Reference to the two. Voyages of
Powell through the Line of the Great Canyons
By FREDERICK S. DELLENBAUGH
<?°, with 200 Illustrations, net, $3.50. By mail, $3.75
" As graphic and as interesting as a novel. . . . Of especial value
to the average reader is the multiplicity of pictures. They occur on
almost every page, and while the text is always clear, these pictures
give, from a single glance, an idea of the vastness of the canyons and
their remarkable formation, which it would be beyond the power of
pen to describe. And the color reproduction of the water-color draw-
ing that Thomas Moran made of the entrance to Bright Angel Trail
gives some faint idea of the glories of color which have made the
Grand Canyon the wonder and the admiration of the world." — The
Cleveland Leader.
" His scientific training, his long experience in this region, and his
eye for natural scenery enable him to make this account of the Col-
orado River most graphic and interesting. No other book equally
good can be written for many years to come — not until our knowl-
edge of the river is greatly enlarged." — The Boston Herald.
SEND FOR ILLUSTRATED DESCRIPTIVE CIRCULAR
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.P97 On the Great
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