Niche Stairway of Chelly Cañon
Here the labors of Mr. Jackson’s party ended for the year 1874, but the work was again resumed in July of the following year with even richer results. Two parties were put in the field by the Government Surveying Corps, one headed by Mr. Jackson and the other by Mr. W. H. Holmes, geologists of the San Juan division of the survey for 1875. I am indebted to Prof. Hayden, United States geologist-in-charge, for the memoirs prepared by these gentlemen, with the accompanying illustrations.[478] The reader has already become acquainted with the general character of the remains of the cliff-dwellers, and it will not be necessary to repeat the descriptions of buildings or ruins similar to those already described in these pages. We shall therefore cite only the more remarkable ruins discovered by the above-named explorers. Mr. Jackson was accompanied on his second tour, by Mr. E. A. Barber, naturalist and correspondent of the New York Herald, with Harry Lee as guide and interpreter. The party resumed their labors in the arid, waterless region around the Hovenweep, and in fact the same barren characteristics are peculiar to the whole basin of the San Juan. The whole region is rapidly drying up and fast becoming a desert. Down the cañon from the pueblo of the Hovenweep, broken towers and rock shelters were passed in rapid succession. Seven miles distant from their starting-point, they found on the western side of the valley three elevated benches ranging one above another in the face of a jutting promontory, each of which contained houses (see illustration, [page 307]). The first bench was reached by climbing over a sloping mass of débris to a height of one hundred feet from the base of the cliff, while the upper benches were only accessible by means of a niche stairway similar to the one shown in the figure.
Cliff-House of the Hovenweep.
Ruins and masses of charcoal were found at the base of the rock. Numerous adobe foundations, probably of wooden buildings, always circular in form and ranging from fifteen to twenty-five feet in diameter, were met with a short distance down the cañon. Near the junction of the Hovenweep and McElmo cañons an inscription covers sixty feet of the face of a large rock. The figures are those of men, goats, lizards, and hieroglyphic signs. As the party proceeded in the cañon they met rock shelters and enclosures, the latter on the top of the mesa in which slabs of stone three by five feet in size were set on end. Mr. Jackson reports that a party connected with the survey corps discovered near the head of the Hovenweep, on a ledge three hundred feet long by fifty feet wide, one-third of the distance from the top of the cañon, some forty houses crowded along the shelf all in a row. On the San Juan west of the mouth of the Montezuma Cañon, upon a bench fifty feet high, Mr. Jackson found a quadrangular structure of peculiar design, as shown in the cut on [page 308].
“We see that it is arranged very nearly at right angles to the river, its greatest depth on the left, where it runs back one hundred and twenty feet; the front sweeps back in a diagonal line, so that the right-hand side is only thirty-two feet in depth. The back wall is one hundred and fifty-eight feet long, and at right angles to the two sides. In the centre of the building, looking out upon the river, is an open space seventy-five feet wide, and averaging forty feet in depth, its depressed centre divided nearly equally by a ridge running through it at right angles to the river. We judged it to have been an open court, because there was not the least vestige of a wall in front, or on the ridge through the centre, while upon the other three sides they were perfectly distinct; although it is difficult to explain why it should have been hollowed out in the manner shown in the plan. Back of this court is a series of seven apartments of equal size, springing in a perfect arch from the heavy wall facing the court, leaving a semicircular space in the centre, forty-five feet across its greatest diameter. Each one is fifteen feet in length, and the same in width across its centre, the walls somewhat irregular in thickness, but averaging twenty inches, compact, and well laid. On the left are three rooms extending across the whole width of the building, each averaging forty-five by forty feet square; on the right only one was discernible. Back of the circle, our impression was that the walls diverged in the manner shown in the plan, although there is so much confusion resulting from the heaping up of the débris that much must be left to conjecture. There is also a slight shadow of doubt in regard to the wall facing the river on the right; it is barely possible that it extended somewhat farther out, although there is here a steep inclination to the brink of the bluff, and that it has become entirely obliterated by its foundations giving way. The remains of the wall above, however, led us to believe that it had been originally built in the way it is shown in the plan. Extreme massiveness is indicated throughout the whole structure by the amount of débris about the line of the walls, forming long rounded mounds four to five feet high, with the stone-work cropping out, twenty to twenty-four inches in thickness.”
RUINS UPON THE RIO SAN JUAN
Rock-Shelters of the San Juan Cañon.