It cannot fail, however, to excite the wonder of the reader to learn that Major Powell found ruined pueblos hundreds of miles farther up that dismal, almost subterranean river. Not far below the foot of the Cataract Cañon, and a considerable distance above Escalante River, in Southern Utah, the explorers discovered on a wall two hundred feet above the river, but removed from the water by a narrow plain, an old stone house of good masonry. The stones were laid in mortar with much regularity. It had been a three-story building, the first of which still remained in good condition, the second being much broken, and but little being left of the third. Flint chips, beautiful arrow-heads and broken pottery abounded in the vicinity. The faces of the cliffs were also covered with etchings. Fifteen miles farther down the river another group was discovered, the principal building of which was in the shape of an L, with five rooms on the ground floor; one in the angle and two in each wing. In the centre of the angle there was a deep excavation, doubtless an underground chamber for religious services, known as an Estufa. Major Powell considers these remains the work of a branch of the people now occupying the province of Tusayan in northern Arizona. These Moqui peoples will be noticed farther on. In the neighborhood of the last-named ruin, the Major found a tall, pyramidal work of nature, formed by smooth rock-mounds, rising one above another. On climbing this he observed that this natural eminence had been used as an outlook by the people of the Pueblo. A stairway cut in the rock by human hands and an old ladder resting against a perpendicular rock were discovered.[464]
The Colorado Chiquito and its tributaries flows through the very heart of the Pueblo country. One hundred miles above its junction with the Rio Colorado, Whipple, Sitgreaves and others, found numerous ruins, crowning nearly every prominent point in the valley. The pottery of the region is unlike that usually met with, in that it is ornamented with impressions and raised work, instead of being painted.[465] Forty miles farther up the river colossal ruins were discovered standing on the summit of a sandstone bluff. The walls, such as remained standing, were ten feet thick, while the building measured 360 feet in length by 120 in width.[466] With the exception of the remains of stone-houses, at the junction of the Rio Puerco with the Colorado Chiquito, the only aboriginal remains reported are pottery, scattered arrow-heads and numerous rock inscriptions. The next tributary of the Colorado Chiquito—the Zuñi River—is celebrated because of its ancient and modern Pueblo structures. For fifty miles from the mouth of the Zuñi, the antiquarian who could, might read the history of this ancient people, spread out upon the imperishable cliffs—the parchment of Nature’s children. Within eight miles of the inhabited Pueblo towns, numerous ruins are encountered.[467] Here, within a few miles, the almost mythical “seven cities of Cibola,” described by Coronado in 1540, and by Marco de Niça the year previous, are demonstrated to have been situated.[468] Zuñi itself is the Granada of the devoted and romantic conquerors. In the centre of a plain upon a commanding eminence, stands the inhabited Pueblo of Zuñi. Its frontage is upon the river of the same name, while but a short distance in the background, the mesa terminates in tall cliffs of metamorphic rock several hundred feet high. The town is built in blocks, with terrace-shaped houses, usually three stories high, in which the lower stories do service as the platform for those immediately following them. Access is obtained by means of ladders reaching to the roof or terrace, formed upon the first story of each of the houses. The town is very compactly built, many of the streets passing under the upper stories of houses. The whole is divided into four squares, and the houses in each are continuously joined together. The building material employed is stone, plastered with mud.[469] A little more than two miles south-east of Zuñi, the ancient ruined Pueblo of the same name is situated on an elevated mesa of a mile in width, the precipitous descent from which, upon all sides, measures a thousand feet. The ruins of old Zuñi are surrounded with a growth of cedars, and cover several acres of ground. The walls, constructed of small sandstone blocks laid in mud-mortar, are only eighteen inches thick and are sadly dilapidated from age, only twelve feet marking their highest point of present elevation. Still, there is a deeper mystery about this antiquated ruin, for beneath the walls now standing, others are found of a more ancient city, whose walls were six feet thick, which perished either of age or by the hand of the destroyer, before the present was begun. The ascent to the ruin is a winding and difficult path, guarded with stone battlements at different points. At a sacred spring near Zuñi, Whipple found vases standing inverted upon an adobe wall. “Many of these were white, well-proportioned, and of elegant forms. Upon their inner and outward surfaces they were curiously painted to represent frogs, tadpoles, tortoises, butterflies, and rattlesnakes.” The tufted snakes on one of the vases are pronounced almost unique in America.[470] Twelve miles above Zuñi, at Ojo del Pescado, four or five ruined towns are found, but so badly decayed as to furnish little clue to their plan. Two of them, however, are constructed elliptically around a spring, and present a circumference of about 800 to 1000 feet. Two-thirds of a mile down the river, ruined pueblos in a fair state of preservation, with two stories standing, are described as covering an area of 150 by 200 yards. At the time of Möllhausen’s visit, the roofs and fire-places were in quite good condition.[471] A square estufa, still under roof, and numerous rock inscriptions, were observed. In this instance we are furnished with abundant evidence that the destruction of this people never was a wholesale one, but that gradually they are succumbing to their unpropitious surroundings—a land which is fast becoming a howling wilderness, with its scourging sands and roaming savage Bedouin—the Apaches. One more locality in this region merits attention. Eighteen miles south-east of the sources of the Zuñi River, stands a sandstone rock three hundred feet high, which at a distance resembles a Moorish fortress. The Spaniards named it El Moro. It is also known as “Inscription Rock,” because of the Spanish and Indian inscriptions which cover its smooth face. Simpson has copied some of them, which is quite fortunate, since later explorers have found many of them almost effaced. The ruins of two buildings are found on the summit, which is reached by a difficult path. The large group is in the form of a rectangle, measuring 307 by 206 feet. The walls, faced with sandstone blocks, remain standing to the height of six and eight feet. The other group is separated from the first by a deep ravine, and is found upon the very brink of the outer precipice. A circular estufa thirty-one feet in diameter was also noticed. Cedar timbers were found in the walls, and broken pottery in abundance.[472] About one hundred miles in a north north-easterly direction from Zuñi, in longitude 108° and latitude 36°, the most remarkable of the pueblo ruins are situated. These are on the north bank of the Chaco River, a tributary of the Rio San Juan, a stream the affluents of which are noted for a greater number of pueblo and cliff-dwellers’ ruins than are found elsewhere. Lieutenant Simpson has described the ruins of the Chaco, eleven in number, occurring within a distance of twenty-five miles. The first of these met with in coming from the south is called at present (we presume in the absence of the knowledge of the true name) the Pueblo Pintado. The most remarkable feature of this great structure is the beauty and precision of the masonry. The fine, hard gray sandstone blocks are quite uniformly three inches in thickness and are laid without mortar, always breaking joints. The crevices between the ends of the blocks are filled with very thin pieces of stone, not over a quarter of an inch thick. The walls of the pueblo now standing, are at their greatest height, thirty feet, and furnish evidence from the marks of the floor-timbers that the building was three stories. The walls are between two and three feet thick at the base, though this is diminished with each succeeding story by a jog of a few inches, upon which the flooring timbers rest. These are from six to eleven inches in diameter, always of uniform size in the same room. On these beams small round sticks are laid transversely, and these in turn covered with thin cedar strips, lying transversely of the round sticks. In some rooms the chinks in the floor were filled with small stones and the whole covered with a layer of mortar. One room, however, had a floor of smooth cedar boards, seven inches wide and three-quarters of an inch thick. The edges and ends were squarely cut, and their smooth surfaces indicate that they were polished by being rubbed with flat stones. The size of these ruins may be better understood when we state that five buildings measured in circumference respectively 872, 700, 1700, 1300 and 1300 feet; while the number of rooms, still well-defined on the ground floor of each, is 72, 99, 112, 124 and 139. Some of these buildings undoubtedly had as high as a thousand rooms, while the smallest of them probably contained half that number. The smallest apartments are five feet square, while the largest are eight by fourteen feet. The ground plan of the buildings of this valley have three tiers of rooms, while one building, the Pueblo Bonito, has four tiers of apartments. The usual form of the buildings corresponds to three sides of a rectangle, with the fourth (one of the long sides of the figure) left unbuilt (except that in some cases it was inclosed by a semicircular stone wall), thus affording a partially enclosed court of large dimensions. The exterior walls are in all cases perpendicular, thus differing from the pueblos farther south. The terracing in the Chaco structures is upon the inside (court side) of the buildings.
In some of the buildings, however, the angles of the quadrangle are rounded, and in one instance—that of the Peñasca Blanco—the structure is elliptical. From the nature of the plan of any of these buildings it is evident that many of the apartments on the ground floor were dark, and were probably used for granaries and store-rooms. There are no doors whatever in the outer walls, and no windows except in the upper stories. Windows and doors opening into the courts are, on the contrary, numerous in all the stories but the first. The doors are quite small, in many cases not exceeding two and a half feet square. The lintels of the doors and windows are in most cases stone slabs, but in some instances are small round timbers tied together with withes. A remarkable feature of the construction is the presence of the Yucatan arch formed of overlapping stones, illustrations of which may be seen in our next chapter. Dr. Hammond, a companion of Lieutenant Simpson, has minutely described a room of very perfect finish.[473] Each edifice was provided with the sacred estufa, and some of the houses had as many as seven, circular in form, excavated several feet deep in the earth and enclosed with circular walls. One in the Pueblo Bonito was of remarkable size, having been sixty feet in diameter, extending twelve feet below the surface and rising two or three stories high. Lieutenant Simpson found in close proximity to one of the ruins an excavation in the cliff which had been enclosed with a front wall of well-laid stone and mortar, thus associating one of the simplest of the cave-dwellings to which we shall refer presently, with one of the most extensive and perfect of the Pueblo buildings; a fact of no little value in identifying the architects of both as one and the same.[474] This introduces us to another class of ruins, which, with a couple of exceptions, were not discovered prior to the summer of 1874. We refer to the cliff-dwellings, the most remarkable habitations ever occupied by man. The descriptions of them seem more suitable to form parts of the most romantic works of fiction than of sober and scientific memoirs from the pens of government explorers. One hundred miles westward from the ruins of the Chaco lies the Chelly Valley or Cañon. The Chelly is one of the tributaries of the Rio San Juan from the south, having its source in the Navajo country. The Chelly Cañon is described as from one hundred and fifty to nine hundred feet wide, with perpendicular sides between three hundred and five hundred feet high. Simpson in 1849 found several caves built up in front with stone and mortar in a side cañon. About four miles from its foot or mouth he observed on a shelf fifty feet high, accessible only by ladders, a stone ruin, the plan of which resembles that of the Chaco Valley pueblos, except that it was constructed on a considerably smaller scale. Three miles further up the cañon a double ruin of an extraordinary nature was discovered. At the base of the cañon stood an ancient pueblo in ruins, but with parts of the first and second stories still erect. Fifty feet in a perpendicular line, above and immediately back of the first edifice, in a shelf, or in the mouth of a cavern in the cañon’s walls, stood another building constructed of sandstone and mortar, and measuring one hundred and forty-five by forty-five feet, with walls eighteen feet high still standing. Broken pottery was plentiful, as around all the ruins we have described. The building was lighted by square windows and provided with a circular estufa.[475]
The most surprising results in all the history of archæological exploration in this country were obtained in September, 1874, by a party connected with the United States Geological and Geographical Survey Corps. This party was composed of only three persons, Mr. W. H. Jackson and Mr. Ingersoll with their guide, Captain John Moss, a resident of La Plata, who possessed both a knowledge of the country and an acquaintance with the language of the Indians. In the south-western corner of Colorado, the cañons of two of the tributaries of the San Juan were examined, namely, the valleys of the Rivers Mancos and McElmo.[476] The former stream rises among the western foothills of the Sierra La Plata, and flows south-westerly through fertile valleys to a great table-land known as the “Mesa Verde,” thence to the San Juan near the crossing of the boundary lines of the four territories. In the upper valley of the Mancos, between the mountains and the mesa, groups of undistinguishable ruins were discovered in great numbers. An examination of the shapeless heaps revealed foundations composed of great square blocks of adobe. The great multitude of these heaps of masonry overgrown with pines indicates a general and unsparing destruction of the houses of the people who once inhabited the valley, at the hands of their enemies. The cañon through the Mesa Verde is quite uniformly two hundred yards wide, with perpendicular walls of grayish cretaceous sandstone ranging from six hundred to one thousand feet in height. Numbers of the mounds of ruined adobe were met with at each advance into the cañon, and upon promontories jutting out towards the stream, remains of stone walls were seen as high as fifty feet from the river’s bed. Every step revealed great quantities of broken pottery, and with this statement we will let the subject of these fragmentary relics of the by-gone civilization rest for the present.
One of the first cliff houses discovered by the explorers is a most interesting structure, the position of which, over six hundred feet from the bottom of the cañon in a niche of the wall, furnishes a significant commentary on the straits to which this sorely-pressed people were driven by their enemies. Five hundred feet of the ascent to this aërial dwelling was comparatively easy, but a hundred feet of almost perpendicular wall confronted the party, up which they could never have climbed but for the fact that they found a series of steps cut in the face of the rock leading up to the ledge upon which the house was built.
Cliff-House in the Cañon of the Mancos.
This ledge was ten feet wide by twenty feet in length, with a a vertical space between it and the overhanging rock of fifteen feet. The house occupied only half this space, the remainder having been used as an esplanade, and once was inclosed by a balustrade resting on abutments, built partly upon the sloping face of the precipice below. The house was but twelve feet high and two-storied. Though the walls did not reach up to the rock above, it is uncertain whether it ever had any other roof. The ground plan showed a front room of six by nine feet in dimensions, in the rear of which were two smaller rooms, each measuring five by seven feet. The left-hand room projected along the cliff, beyond the front room, in the form of an L. The rock of the cliff served as the rear wall of the house. The cedar beams upon which the upper floor had rested had nearly all disappeared. The door opening on the esplanade was but twenty by thirty inches in size, while a window in the same story was but twelve inches square. A window in the upper story, which commands an extended view down the cañon, corresponded in dimensions and position with the door below. The lintels of the window were small straight cedar sticks laid close together, upon which the stones rested. Opposite this window was another and smaller one, opening into a semicircular cistern, formed by a wall inclosing the angle formed by the side wall of the house against the rock, and holding about two and a half hogsheads. The bottom of the reservoir was reached by descending on a series of cedar pegs about one foot apart, and leading downward from the window. The workmanship of the structure was of a superior order; the perpendiculars were true ones and the angles carefully squared. The mortar used was of a grayish white color, very compact and adhesive. Some little taste was evinced by the occupants of this human swallow’s nest. The front rooms were plastered smoothly with a thin layer of firm adobe cement, colored a deep maroon, while a white band, eight inches wide, had been painted around the room at both floor and ceiling. An examination of the immediate vicinity revealed the ruins of half a dozen similar dwellings in the ledges of the cliffs, some of them occupying positions the inaccessibility of which must ever be a wonder, when considered as places of residence for human beings. Half-way down the cañon, one of Mr. Jackson’s party discovered a rather remarkable watch-tower, which, because of the accumulations of débris, he was not able to accurately measure, though approximate figures were given. Since his visit, the tower has been thoroughly examined by Mr. W. H. Holmes, to whose work in this field we will refer on a future page. Mr. Holmes’ measurements and ground-plan are, therefore, substituted for those of Mr. Jackson.
The diameter of the outer wall is forty-three feet, that of the inner, twenty-five feet. The outer wall is still standing to the height of twelve feet at one point, and is in a fair state of preservation, with a thickness of twenty-one inches, and has the stones dressed to the curve. The ring-shaped space between the inner and outer wall is estimated to have contained ten compartments, two of which at present have complete walls. No door or window was observed in the outer wall, and it is supposed that access was obtained by means of a ladder. Two nearly rectangular openings were found connecting the outer apartments with the central part of the tower, which no doubt was used as an estufa.[477] Mr. Jackson, after leaving the tower which Mr. Holmes has so fully described (of which the above is but a condensed account), saw similar towers on a somewhat smaller scale. His next discovery in the face of the vertical rock, which here ran up from the bottom of the cañon and at a height of from fifty to one hundred feet, were a number of nest-like habitations, one of which is figured in the cut.
