Before the landslide it was an open shelter cavern, 15 feet wide at the opening and 7 feet at the back end; greatest width, 16 feet; average, 13; length, 30 feet; height, 13 feet, and depth of excavation after clearing out the sand of the landslide, 5 feet. The pictures are mostly of the rudest kind, but differing in degree of skill. Except several bisons, a lynx, rabbit, otter, badger, elk, and heron, it is perhaps impossible to determine with certainty what were intended or whether they represented large or small animals, no regard being had to their relative sizes.
[Examples of the figures are here presented as Fig. 91.]
Perhaps a indicates a bison or buffalo, and is the best executed picture of the collection. Its size is 19 inches long by 15½ inches from tip of the horns to the feet.
b represents a hunter, with a boy behind him, in the act of shooting an animal with his bow and arrow weapon. The whole representation is 25 inches long; the animal from tip of tail to end of horn or proboscis 12 inches, and from top of head to feet 7 inches; the hunter 11 inches high, the boy 4½.
c represents a wounded animal, with the arrow or weapon near the wound. This figure is 21¾ inches from the lower extremity of the nose to the tip of the tail, 8¾ inches from fore shoulders to front feet, and 8 inches from the rump to the hind feet. The weapon is 4½ inches long by 5 inches broad from the tip of one prong or barb to that of the other.
d represents a chief with eight plumes and a war club, 11 inches from top of head to the lower extremity, and 6¾ inches from the tip of the upper finger to the end of the opposite arm; the war club 6½ inches long.
Dr. Hoffman made a visit to this cave in August, 1888, to compare the pictographic characters with others of apparently similar outline and of known signification. He found but a limited number of the figures distinct, and these only in part, owing to the rapid disintegration of the sandstone upon which they were drawn. Many names and inscriptions had been incised in the soft surface by visitors, who also, by means of the smoke of candles, added grotesque and meaningless figures over and between the original paintings, so as to seriously injure the latter.
Mr. T. H. Lewis (d) describes the petroglyphs, a part of which is reproduced in Fig. 92, as follows:
