XXVI. Cliff Dwellings And Ruins Of The Southwest.
Through a large area in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, also in parts of northern Mexico, there are found several kinds of ancient ruins. At some places they are pretty well preserved, and walls still stand to a considerable height. At others they are mere heaps of stone blocks or crumbling adobe bricks. The three best defined [pg 176] types of buildings found in these ruins are old pueblos, cliff ruins, and cave houses.
Zuñi is the largest inhabited pueblo. Not far from it lies Old Zuñi; and under the ruins of Old Zuñi lie the ruins of a yet older pueblo. Such ruins of old pueblos number hundreds in the Southwest. Sometimes the old walls were built of stone, carefully laid, and with the cracks neatly chinked with splinters of stone; sometimes the stones of the walls were laid in adobe cement; sometimes the walls were constructed of great adobe bricks. These old pueblos were in style and character like those now inhabited. They were often three or four stories high and terraced from in front back. Sometimes they were elliptical or rounded in general form, but more commonly they were built around the three sides of a central court, upon which the buildings faced. Some of these old pueblos were larger than any now occupied, and many of them were better built.
The cliff dwellings were built on ledges of rock along the sides of cliffs. Many of the streams of the Southwest flow through deep and narrow gorges cut in the solid rock. Such gorges are there called cañons. Among the famous cliff-dwellings are those in the cañon of the Chelley River, and those in Mancos Cañon. Here are houses perched up on ledges or stowed away in natural caverns. Some of them are hundreds of feet above the stream, and have a perpendicular rock wall for one hundred feet below them. These [pg 177] houses are carefully built with stone laid in cement. Besides houses of many rooms, and of two or more stories, there are circular towers. Plainly, the people who built these houses did it to secure themselves from attack. Their gardens and fields must have been far below in the valley.
Cliff Ruins at Mancos Canyon. (After Photograph.)
The cave houses were usually dug out in the rocks by human beings. They were cut in the soft rock with picks or axes of stone. Some of these dwellings were cut out as simple open caves. In such, there were walls erected at the front. The cave might be so cut that the rock face remained for the front wall of the house; a hole was first cut for a doorway, and then the room or rooms would be dug out from it behind the cliff wall.
Some persons believe these three kinds of [pg 178] houses were built by three distinct peoples or tribes. This is not likely, for sometimes two or all three kinds are found together, so related as to show that all were occupied at one time by the people of one village.
About twenty or twenty-five miles up the Rio Grande from the pueblo of Cochiti, New Mexico, is a brook called El Rito de los Frijoles, which means “the brook of the beans.” It runs in a fine gorge with rock banks; large pine trees grow in the valley and cap the summits of the chasm. In one of the side cliffs are hundreds of holes, the remains of old dug cave rooms and houses. In most of them the rock cliff face itself forms the front wall of the house. We entered one single-roomed house that looked almost as if it had been used yesterday.
We crept in through a little doorway about a dozen feet up in the cliff and found ourselves in a small room about fifteen feet square. We could see the marks on the roof and the upper part of the walls, where stone picks had been used in cutting out the house. The floor was neatly smoothed, and covered with hard clay. The lower part of the wall was finished smooth with clay, washed over with a thin coat of fine cream-colored clay. The roof was black with the smoke of ancient fires; a little smoke-hole pierced the forward wall, near and above, but at one side of, the door. There were niches cut out in the wall, where little treasures used to [pg 179] be kept. Ends of poles set in the rock seemed to be pegs upon which objects were hung; their unevenly cut ends showed the marks of stone axes. In the floor we found a line of loops to which the bottom pole of the old blanket-weaving loom must have been fastened.