Certainly the most striking fact in the history of this Park is the rapidity with which it has been developed and opened to travelers. L. W. Hill has given this region a large share of his time, and in it has spent enormous sums of money. There is more than commercialism behind his work. It has been done with happy hands. He has made this a part of his life-work. He has endeavored to create on artistic lines. What he has done for this Park has stimulated interest in the other Parks and will greatly help to bring about their development.
VII
MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK
Weirdness, romance, and mystery dominate the Mesa Verde National Park. Towering high and dry above the surrounding country, carrying in places squatty, scattered growths of piñon pines and cedars, it stands silently up in the sunlight. Combined with these things, the deserted prehistoric cliff dwellings give to the Mesa a strangeness and peculiar appeal. These monuments of a departed race tell but little of the story of their builders. They are the ruins of an ancient civilization that stood its day and vanished; that—
"Like snow upon the desert's dusty face,
Lighting a little hour or two—is gone."
Who were the cliff dwellers? It is probable that they were Indians. No one knows where they came from, how long they remained on the Mesa, nor why they left; how long since they went away, where they went to, nor what has become of them. Several hundred ruins of the structures they reared still remain. These are mysterious and thought-compelling, but they tell little more than is told by the Sphinx.
The Mesa Verde National Park covers seventy-seven square miles in southwest Colorado, near the corners of four States. It is in the "Land of Little Rain." The table-like summit of this steep-walled Mesa is eight thousand feet above the sea, and nearly two thousand feet above the surrounding country. Looking from the summit, one sees strange "Ship Rock" far away in New Mexico. This appears to be an enormous ship in full sail upon the sea. It adds to the unreal and mysterious air of the region.
Numerous cañons are countersunk deeply into this sunny sky plain. Many of the cañons are corniced with a heavy overhanging stratum of rock. Beneath this, in cavelike hollows in the cañon walls, the cliff houses are found. Here ages ago the cliff dwellers lived in large communities and probably under organized government—the oldest and most fully realized civic-center scheme in America. Long before their mesa country was invaded by the men of recorded history, these people of the Southwest vanished, leaving buildings, tools, clothing, and pottery to tell of their odd and interesting Indian civilization.
When the name Indian is mentioned, the average individual usually thinks of a savage. But at the time Columbus discovered America, there were millions of civilized Indians in the Western world, living under organized government. It is true that their civilization was different from ours of to-day, and happily different from the European civilization of that time.