Particularly accessible to the ordinary tourist are the ruins to be seen in the Animas valley, about twenty-five miles south of Durango. These are said to consist of a pueblo three hundred and sixteen feet long by nearly one hundred wide, which evidently rose to the height of many stories. Some of the lower rooms in this great house are still standing, and skeletons and relics of great interest have been taken from them. In the center of the ruins is a subterranean, cistern-like chamber, described as about sixty feet in diameter, and plastered everywhere within with hard cement. This, probably, was the main estufa of the village. Other lesser ruins and remains of farming operations are scattered about the vicinity, and are well worthy of exploration.
Just who and what were these aborigines (if so they were, which is very doubtful), opinions differ; but that in the Village Indians of New Mexico and Arizona we see to-day their lineal descendants, seems indisputable.
Traditions are few, that have any value, but the partial and imperfect researches which have already been made in the southwest enable us to make out dimly some strangely tragical scheme of history for this race of men whose sun set so long ago.
It is evident, for example, that the most ancient of these prehistoric ruins are those found along the immediate banks of the water-courses in the valleys. There the forerunners of the troublous times to come dwelt in peace and prosperity among their fields, which seem to have stretched over many times the area of land now possible to be cultivated. There is no question, indeed, that in those days rains were more frequent and the climate far more favorable to agriculture than at present. But how many generations—how many centuries—ago was this? And how did the change of climate, which turned the fertility of the land into desolation, come about—by slow degrees, through sudden cataclysm, or with comparatively rapid advance? Probably gradually.
But it does not seem to have been as the result of meteorological disfavor that they abandoned their populous pueblos in the pleasant valleys and began to build refuge homes in the niches of the cañon’s wall, or on the crest of inaccessible mesas. From the mountainous north came enemies they were unable to resist, and which devastated their fields and laid waste their towns, as we have seen at Ojo Caliente, and as is written in the ruins of a hundred spring-side pueblos throughout the San Juan valley. No doubt they still cultivated their fields as well as they could between the times of attack, building temporary summer-houses and spending the idle winter in their rocky fastnesses, or retreating to them when warned of an attack. Their watch-towers on every exposed point, tell how sharp and incessant was the lookout they kept against the well-mounted and savage nomadic tribes, the prehistoric Utes and Apaches and Navajos, who were to them as the Scythians and the Vandals and Goths to the weakened empire of effeminate Rome.
But after a time a breathing space seems to have come to the harassed people, and they felt themselves safe to return to their ancient valleys and reinhabit and recultivate them. Certain houses, built upon the substratum of older fallen structures, seem to show this new era of reoccupation, which in some places lasted only a short time before enemies and drought together compelled complete abandonment, while in other more southern strongholds were founded the pueblos that still exist, at Taos, Acoma, Zuñi, and on the Moqui mesas.
When, some day, you can ride down the Mancos in a railway car and get flying glimpses of the ruined houses—if your eyes are sharp to see and your mind quick to apprehend,—do not forget how populous was this dry and garish valley during those bygone days, when the Crusaders were waking up Europe, and all that was known of America was that the Basque fishermen went to the fog-banks of an icy western coast to catch codfish. I am more sure of your interest here, though, than in many other far-paraded precincts of this marvelous realm, I am taking you so swiftly through in my pilgrimage on wheels. And I cannot enforce my point better,—leave an impression more lasting and graceful on your minds of those gentle shepherds and husbandmen (but no less brave warriors), who were here so long before us, than by giving you the poem my clever-brained and genial friend has written in Swinburnian measure about them:
“In the sad South-west, in the mystical Sunland,
Far from the toil, and the turmoil of gain;
Hid in the heart of the only—the one land