Indians of the Mesa Verde

by Don Watson

The members of these various tribes were not all alike. They differed greatly in appearance, in language, in religion and in mode of living. The answer is apparent. The various groups came from different parts of Asia. They came at different times. They settled in different parts of the New World and developed in different ways according to the natural resources in each region. As a result there came into being the many tribes of American Indians which were in America when Columbus came on his journey of rediscovery from the east.

The early part of the story of the Americas is still hazy. In spite of many years of search by dozens of top-flight archeologists there are many unanswered questions. Each year expeditions sift through the dust of the ages on the trail of those early Americans. More often than not the trail leads to a blank wall. The ancient past of the Indian is clouded with uncertainty but the lure of the unknown still beckons to those who are endeavoring to trail him back to his Asiatic birthplace.

The great trouble is that for thousands of years the Indians lived a hunting life. They wandered from day to day, living on the natural foods they found in each day’s journey. There was no permanent home, no settled life. The hunter was ever on the trail of his next meal.

Consider the life of the primitive hunter. Each morning he is awakened by the pangs of hunger in his empty, flapping paunch and he views with dismay his breakfast which is disappearing over the horizon on four strong, swift legs. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes he starts out in pursuit of his breakfast. Failing to catch up with it, he starts after his lunch. If it eludes him, he begins to work on the next meal—and the next and the next. Always he is one jump behind his food supply. When he makes a kill he gorges and smoothes the wrinkles out of his belly. When he fails, he goes hungry.

Being forced to follow the game he is ever on the move. He can have no permanent home, no pottery, nothing that cannot easily be transported on the trail. One night he sleeps under a tree and leaves behind a broken stone knife. The next night he sleeps in a cave ten miles away and discards a worn-out sandal. The third night he builds his campfire beside a lake across the mountain. On and on through the days he moves and finally, when the end comes, the animals of the wild clean and scatter his bones and they return to the dust from whence they came.

The archeologist may find the stone knife and the discarded sandal. He may even find the long-cold ashes of the campfire. But there is nothing to indicate that all three belonged to the same man. There is not a single bit of evidence that ties them together.

Thus it is with the hunter. His trail is cold: the clews are few. He is the will-o-the-wisp of the human race. He has put many gray hairs in the head of the archeologist.

All of the early inhabitants of North and South America lived a wandering, hunting life. For thousands of years they lived on the chance products, animal and plant, that nature offered. They seldom stayed long in one place: they never built a permanent thing. To date the story of the first ten or fifteen thousand years is far from complete. It can be summed up in a few words.

The men themselves have, for the most part, eluded us. The fact that they lived a wandering life and seldom, if ever, buried the dead, has made it difficult to find the bones of the men themselves. However, the tools and weapons made and used by those men have been found in great numbers. And best of all, they have been found in situations which clearly indicate the antiquity of man in America.

A few thousand years ago there were elephants in America. The mammoth was here as well as his terrifying near-relative, the mastodon. There were horses in various parts of the country and a strange, lumbering animal, the ground sloth, was common. Tremendous bison with long sweeping horns wallowed in the bogs and camels roamed the plains.