Canyon de Chelly: The Story of Its Ruins and People

The Story of its Ruins and People
by Zorro A. Bradley
Office of Publications National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, D.C., 1973
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-600078
Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone asleep. It was as still as sculpture—and something like that. It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower....
In sunlight it was the colour of winter oak leaves. A fringe of cedars grew along the edge of the cavern, like a garden. They were the only living things. Such silence and stillness and repose—immortal repose. That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity.... I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert.
— Willa Cather
Quotation from The Professor’s House , 1925, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
The righthand section of Mummy Cave Ruin as it was photographed by Ben Wittick in 1882 during the James Stevenson Survey for the Smithsonian Institution.
Canyon de Chelly National Monument is located in the red rock country of northeastern Arizona’s high plateau, near the center of the Navajo Indian Reservation. Included in its 131 square miles are three spectacular canyons—Canyon de Chelly, Canyon del Muerto, and Monument Canyon—and many ruins of long-deserted villages. Perched in alcoves and on high ledges along the sheer-walled canyons, these villages are evidence of man’s ability to adjust to a difficult environment, using bare hands, simple stone age tools, and his own ingenuity. They stand as enduring monuments to the culture of the ancestors of the present-day Pueblo Indians of the southwestern United States.