Antiquities of the Mesa Verde National Park

by Jesse Walter Fewkes

SITE OF THE RUIN

Spruce-tree House (pls. 1, 2)[1] is situated in the eastern side of Spruce-tree canyon, a spur of Navaho canyon, which at the site of the ruin is about 150 feet deep, with precipitous walls. The canyon ends blindly at the northern extremity, where there is a spring of good water; it is wooded with tall piñons, cedars, and stately spruces, the tops of which in some cases reach from its bed to its rim. The trees predominating on the rim of the canyon are cedars and pines.

The rock out of which the canyon is eroded is sandstone of varying degrees of hardness alternating with layers of coal and shale. The water percolating through this sandstone, on meeting the harder shale, seeps out of the cliffs to the surface. As the water permeates the rock it gradually undermines the harder layers of sandstone, which fall in great blocks, often leaving arches of rock above deep caves. One of these caves is situated at the end of the canyon where the rim rock overhangs the spring, which is filled by water seeping down from above the shale. Another of these caves is that in which Spruce-tree House is situated. Several smaller caves, and ledges of rock harder than that immediately above, serve as sites for small buildings.

The wearing away of the fallen fragments of the cliffs is much hastened by the waterfalls which in time of heavy rains fall over the rim rock, their force being greatly augmented by the height from which the water is precipitated. The fragments continually falling from the roofs of the caves form a talus that extends from the floors of the caves down the side of the cliff. The cliff-dwellings are erected on the top of this talus.

RECENT HISTORY

Although there was once an old Spanish trail winding over the mountains by way of Mancos and Dolores from what is now New Mexico to Utah, the early visitors to this part of Colorado seem not to have been impressed with the prehistoric cliff-houses in the Montezuma valley and on the Mesa Verde; at least they left no accounts of them in their writings. It appears that these early Spanish travelers encountered the Ute, possibly the Navaho Indians, along this trail, but the more peaceable people who built and occupied the villages now ruins in the neighborhood of Mancos and Cortez had apparently disappeared even at that early date. Indian legends regarding the inhabitants of the cliff-dwellings of the Mesa Verde are very limited and indistinct. The Ute designate them as the houses of the dead, or moki, the name commonly applied to the Hopi of Arizona. One of the Ute legends mentions the last battle between the ancient house-builders of Montezuma valley and their ancestors, near Battle Rock, in which it is said that the former were defeated and turned into fishes.

The ruins in Mancos canyon were discovered and first explored in 1874 by a Government party under Mr. W. H. Jackson.[2] The walls of ruins situated in the valley have been so long exposed to the weather that they are very much broken down, being practically nothing more than mounds. The few cliff-dwellings in Mancos canyon which were examined by Jackson are for the most part small; these are found on the west side. One of the largest is now known as Jackson ruin.

In the year 1875 Prof. W. H. Holmes, now Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, made a trip through Mancos canyon and examined several ruins. He described and figured several cliff-houses overlooked by Jackson and drew attention to the remarkable stone towers which are so characteristic of this region.[3] Professor Holmes secured a small collection of earthenware vessels, generally fragmentary, and also a few objects of shells, bone, and wood, figures and descriptions of which accompany his report. Neither Jackson nor Holmes, however, saw the most magnificent ruins of the Mesa Verde. Had they followed up the side canyon of the Mancos they would have discovered, as stated by Nordenskiöld, “ruins so magnificent that they surpass anything of the kind known in the United States.”

The following story of the discovery of the largest two of these ruins, one of which is the subject of this article, is quoted from Nordenskiöld:[4]