MESA VERDE Rules and Regulations 1920

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK.

GENERAL DESCRIPTION.

OF ALL the many ruins of prehistoric cliff dwellings in the southwestern United States those in the side canyons of the Mancos in the Mesa Verde in Montezuma County, Colo., are for many reasons the most remarkable. This is why Congress has set aside 48,966 acres of southwestern Colorado and called it the Mesa Verde National Park.

It appears strange that the greatest of American prehistoric ruins should have escaped discovery until 1888. Years before that innumerable ancient ruins left in several other States by the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians had been described and pictured. They had been the subjects of popular lectures; they had been treated in books of science and books of travel; they had become a familiar spectacle.

Even the ruins in the Mancos Canyon in Colorado had been explored as early as 1874. Mr. W. H. Jackson, who led the Government party, found there many small dwellings broken down by the weather. The next year he was followed by Prof. W. H. Holmes, later Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, who drew attention to the remarkable stone towers so characteristic of the region. But these discoveries attracted little attention because of their inferiority to the better-known ruins of Arizona and New Mexico. Had either of the explorers followed up the side canyon of the Mancos they would have then discovered ruins which are, in the words of Baron Gustav Nordenskiöld, the talented Swedish explorer, "so magnificent that they surpass anything of the kind known in the United States."

This explains why delvers in libraries find so little about the Mesa Verde. Most books and magazine articles were written when cliff dwellings were a novelty and before the Mesa Verde was known.

OUR PREHISTORIC PEOPLES.

The Mesa Verde National Park is one of the few large tracts of land in the United States which has been taken from the public domain to preserve the antiquities it contains. It is the most extensive reservation for this special purpose. It is educational in character; its ruins are object lessons for the student of the prehistory of our country. No other national park or monument contains more extensive or more mysterious remains of prehistoric people. In no other is the architecture of that vanished race so well preserved.

This park was set aside by the United States Government in 1906 (act of June 29, 1906, 34 Stat., 616), and appropriations have been made yearly since 1907 by Congress for development of roads to it and care of its ruins. Formerly inaccessible save on horseback, it may now be visited with automobile from the station at Mancos, Colo. on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. One can be comfortably entertained at the public camp at Spruce Tree House and inspect the antiquities of the park in a few days.

We are accustomed to regard the Indians of the United States as a race of wanderers, living in temporary habitations made of skin or bark. The Indians are supposed to live by hunting or fishing and to eke out their food by the cultivation of maize or Indian corn, beans, and a few vegetables. While this is true of some Indians, it does not hold for all, for there were many different kinds of Indians living in what is now the United States when Columbus landed at San Salvador. There were highly civilized members of this race in Central America and Mexico—the Mayas and Aztecs. The lofty Cordilleras of South America were the homes of other civilized peoples, as the Incas. The culture of these Indians was characteristic, its origin autochthonous. The American Continent is supposed to have been originally peopled from the Old World.

In the southwestern part of the United States there are Indians who live in houses made of stone or sun-dried bricks. The antiquity of this mode of life in that region can not be questioned; it dates back to pre-Columbian times. These houses are not isolated from each other, but crowded together so that their walls adjoin and are often several stories high, the approach to the several stories being by ladders.

Such a community house is called a pueblo, and the Indians that dwell in these habitations are called Pueblo Indians, the name being derived from the Spanish term, meaning village. Many of these pueblos still survive in the States of New Mexico and Arizona, the least modified of which are the seven villages of the Hopi, not far from the Grand Canyon National Park.

From the car windows of the Santa Fe Railroad the traveler can see at least two of these pueblos, one of which is called Laguna and the other Isleta. As pueblo houses are made of stone or sun-dried bricks, their walls are durable, not easily destroyed; ruins of them remain for a long time, and one who journeys along the river valley away from the railroad may see throughout the southwestern part of the United States numbers of deserted pueblos in ruins, some of which are simply piles of stone; others have well-made walls projecting above the ground.

Ruins of similar villages made of stone also occur in caves, some of which are of great size, the roof of the cave serving as a covering to protect the whole village from the elements.

THE MESAS.

Stone ruins of pueblos are also found on the top of isolated plateaus called in the Southwest from their Spanish name mesas or tables. The depressions between these mesas have been worn down by the rains of centuries which have eroded deep gorges called canyons, often extending for many miles, showing on their sides alternating layers of rock of different colors and degrees of hardness. When softer layers of rock occur below the harder in the sides of these mesas, there are worn caverns often 50 feet high and several hundred feet long. A good example of these mesas in New Mexico is called the Enchanted Mesa, which, projecting high above the plain, is visible for many miles. Its name, Enchanted Mesa, has been applied to it because it is said to be regarded by the Pueblo Indians living in the neighborhood as enchanted or sacred.

The Mesa Verde or Green Mesa is so called from the cedar and pinyon trees which, growing upon it, impart to it a green color. This mesa is large, 15 miles long by 8 miles wide. Rising abruptly from the valley on the north side, its top slopes gradually southward to the high cliff bordering the valley of the Mancos on the south. Into this valley open a number of small high-walled canyons through which occasionally, in times of heavy rain, raging torrents of water flow into the Mancos. In the shelter of the sides of these small canyons occur some of the best-preserved cliff dwellings in America.

THE CLIFF DWELLERS.

In prehistoric times a large human population lived in these cliff dwellings, seeking a home there for protection. They obtained their livelihood by agriculture on the forbidding tops of the mesa, cultivating scanty farms, which yielded them a small crop of corn.

Life must have been hard in this dry country when the Mesa Verde communities flourished in the sides of these sandstone cliffs. Game was scarce and hunting arduous. The Mancos yielded a few fishes. The earth contributed berries and nuts. At that time as at present water was rare and found only in sequestered places near the heads of canyons, but notwithstanding these difficulties the inhabitants cultivated their farms and raised their corn, which they ground on flat stones called metates and baked their bread on a flat stone griddle. They boiled their meat in well-made vessels, some of which were artistically decorated. Their life was hard, but so confidently did they believe that they were dependent upon the gods to make the rain fall and the corn grow that they were a religious people who worshipped the sun as the father of all and the earth as the mother who brought them all their material blessings.

They possessed no written language and could only record their thoughts by a few symbols which they painted on their earthenware jars or scratched on the sides of the cliffs adjoining their habitations.

As their sense of beauty was keen, their art though primitive, was true; rarely realistic, generally symbolic. Their decoration of cotton fabrics and ceramic work might be called beautiful, even when judged by the highly developed taste of to-day. They fashioned axes, spear points, and rude tools of stone; they wove sandals and made attractive basketry.

They were not content with rude buildings, and had long outgrown caves or earth homes that satisfied less civilized Indians farther north and south of them. They shaped stones into regular forms, ornamented them with designs, and laid them one on another. Their masonry resisted the destructive forces of centuries of rain and snow beating upon them.

Details of construction in Cliff Palace.

When the ancestors of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellers first sought natural caves in these precipitous cliffs for their shelter, they were not in as high a sociological condition as when they left them. They sought these places not only for shelter from the winter storms and the burning sun, but also from wild animals and hostile human enemies. Sallying forth from them, they made warfare upon all their enemies. In order to render their aerie homes accessible, they cut foot and hand holes in the cliffs and constructed trails along the top of the débris at the foot of the mesas. They evidently entered some of their rooms by means of notched sticks or ladders. Hand in hand with a growth in their architectural skill they developed other crafts and arts.

GROWTH OF ARCHITECTURE.

The population of the cliff dwellings, due to increase in numbers, led to their covering the cave floor with rooms, after which they emerged from their caves and built their homes in the open on top of the mesas in the form of pueblos or community houses. These latter fell into disuse and for years were indicated by mounds of stone and earth.

One of these mounds, situated on the point of a mesa opposite Cliff Palace, was opened in the summer of 1915 and found to be a massive walled structure. It is significant that this building is, architecturally speaking, one of the most ambitious of all. It was not intended for utilitarian needs, nor was it wholly a fortress for defense, nor a granary for storage. It was identified as a temple for sun worship. This building and older remains of a past, almost-forgotten culture may be examined and studied by anyone who wishes to visit the Mesa Verde National Park. The trip to this and other ruins is full of interest, for every canyon, of which there are many, has numerous known ruins and others which as yet have not been explored. On top of the mesa there are many mounds, not unlike that which formerly covered the Sun Temple.

The scenic features of the park are equally attractive. The cliff ruins are easily entered, and standing within their rooms one may get, from an examination of the remains and articles they contain, a good idea of the manners and customs of the vanished people who inhabited them.

The largest ruin, known as Cliff Palace, was discovered by Richard and Alfred Wetherill while hunting lost cattle one December day in 1888. Coming to the edge of a small canyon, they first caught sight of a village under the overhanging cliff on the opposite side, placed like a picture in its rocky frame. In their enthusiasm they thought it was a city. With the same enthusiasm the expectant visitors of to-day involuntarily express their pleasure and surprise as the spectacle breaks on their astonished vision.

Later these two men explored this ruin and gave it the name Cliff Palace, an unfortunate designation, for it is in no respect a palace, but a community house, containing over 200 dwelling rooms, former abodes of families, and 22 sacred rooms or kivas. They also discovered other community dwellings, one of which was called Spruce Tree House, from a large spruce tree, since cut down, growing in front of it. This had 8 sacred rooms and probably housed 300 inhabitants.

The finding of these two ruins did not complete the discoveries of ancient buildings in the Mesa Verde; many other ruins were found by them and others which can not now be described. They mark the oldest and most congested region of the park, but the whole number of ancient habitations reaches into the hundreds.

Antiquities are not the only attractions in the Mesa Verde National Park. Its natural beauties should not be overlooked. In winter it is wholly inaccessible on account of the deep snows; in some months it is dry and parched, but in June and July, when rains come, vegetation is in full bloom, the plants flower, and the grass grows high in the glades; the trees put forth their new green leaves. The Mesa Verde is attractive in all seasons of the year and full of interest for those who love the grandeur and picturesqueness of mountain scenery.

DETAILS OF COMMUNITY LIFE.

The arrangement of houses in a cliff dwelling of the size of Cliff Palace is characteristic and intimately associated with the distribution of the social divisions of the inhabitants.

The population was composed of a number of units, possibly clans, each of which had its own social organization more or less distinct from others, a condition that appears in the arrangement of rooms. The rooms occupied by a clan were not necessarily connected, although generally neighboring rooms were distinguished from one another by their uses.

Thus, each clan had its men's rooms, which were ceremonially called the "kiva." Here the men of the clan practically lived, engaged in their occupations. Each clan had also one or more rooms, which may be styled the living rooms, and other inclosures for granaries or storage of corn. The corn was ground into meal in another room containing the metate set in a bin or stone box, and in some instances in fireplaces, although these were generally placed in the plazas or on the housetops. All these different rooms, taken together, constitute the houses that belonged to one clan.

The conviction that each kiva denotes a distinct social unit, as a clan or a family, is supported by a general similarity in the masonry of the kiva walls and that of adjacent houses ascribed to the same clan. From the number of these rooms it would appear that there were at least 23 social units or clans in Cliff Palace. The kivas were the rooms where the men spent most of the time devoted to ceremonies, councils, and other gatherings. In the social conditions prevalent at Cliff Palace the religious fraternity was limited to the men of the clan.

Apparently there is no uniformity in the distribution of the kivas. As it was prescribed that these rooms should be subterranean, the greatest number were placed in front of the rectangular buildings, where it was easiest to excavate them. But when necessary these structures were built far back in the cave and inclosed by a double wall, the intervals between whose sections were filled with earth or rubble to raise it to the level of the kiva roof. In that way they were artificially made subterranean, as the ritual required.

DISCOVERY OF SUN TEMPLE.

The Department of the Interior undertook explorations in the Mesa Verde in the summer of 1915, securing the services of Dr. J. Walter Fewkes, of the Smithsonian Institution, for the purpose. The result was the discovery of Sun Temple.

"There was brought to light," reported Dr. Fewkes, "a type of ruin hitherto unknown in the park, and, as was well expressed by a visitor, the building excavated shows the best masonry and is the most mysterious ruin yet discovered in a region rich in so many prehistoric remains. Although at first there was some doubt as to the use of this building, it was early recognized that it was not constructed for habitation, and it is now believed that it was intended for the performance of rites and ceremonies; the first of its type devoted to religious purposes yet recognized in the Southwest.

"The ruin was purposely constructed in a commanding situation in the neighborhood of large inhabited cliff houses. It sets somewhat back from the edge of the canyon, but near enough to present a marked object from all sides especially the neighboring mesas. It must have presented an imposing appearance rising on top of a point high above inaccessible, perpendicular cliffs. No better place could have been chosen for a religions building in which the inhabitants of many cliff dwellings could gather and together perform their great ceremonial dramas."

The ruin has the form of the letter D. The building is in two sections, the larger of which, taken separately, is also D-shaped. This is considered the original building. The addition enlarging it is regarded as an annex. The south wall, which is straight and includes both the original building and the annex, is 121.7 feet long. The ruin is 64 feet wide.

There are about 1,000 feet of walls in the whole building. These walls average 4 feet in thickness, and are double, inclosing a central core of rubble and adobe. They are uniformly well made.

The fine masonry, the decorated stones that occur in it, and the unity of plan stamp Sun Temple as the highest example of Mesa Verde architecture.

The walls were constructed of the sandstone of the neighborhood. Many stone hammers and pecking stones were found in the neighborhood.

THE FOSSIL PALM LEAF.

One of the most remarkable features of the structure is a stone fossil set in the outer wall near the southwest corner. Mr. F. H. Knowlton, of the United States National Museum, has identified this as the fossil leaf of a palm tree of the Cretaceous epoch. The point is that the rayed leaf resembled the sun, and the ancient races were sun worshippers. A natural object resembling the sun would powerfully affect a primitive mind.

"At all events," says Dr. Fewkes, "they have partially inclosed this emblem with walls in such a way as to inclose the figure on three sides, leaving the inclosure open on the fourth or west side. There can be no doubt that the walled inclosure was a shrine, and the figure in it may be a key to the purpose of the building. The shape of the figure on the rock suggests a symbol of the sun, and if this suggestion be correct, there can hardly be a doubt that solar rites were performed about it."

POT HUNTING AMONG AMERICAN RUINS.

In this connection Dr. Fewkes makes this significant statement: "Too strong language can not be used in deprecation of the butchering of architectual features of our Southwestern ruins by pot hunters, either private individuals for gain or representatives of institutions under the name of scientific research."

DISCOVERY OF FAR VIEW HOUSE.

Continuing his explorations, Dr. Fewkes began in the summer of 1916, the excavation of the mounds which lay in what is known as the Mummy Lake region. These mounds, together with that under which Sun Temple was found in 1916, had been observed years before and were the cause of much speculation. When Sun Temple was disclosed with its suggestions of surprising developments in later history of this strange people, desire increased to know what lay under other top-of-the-mesa mounds.

The entire summer of 1916 was devoted to the excavation of one large mound which resulted in restoring to the light of day a mesa pueblo of enormous size. This prehistoric structure is called Far View House because of its commanding position on one of the historic points of the mesa.

In another part of this pamphlet the characteristic features of this great ruin are described in considerable detail.¹

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¹See pp. 44 to 48.

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A LAND OF BEAUTY AND MYSTERY.

"The Mesa Verde region," writes Arthur Chapman, "has many attractions besides its ruins. It is a land of weird beauty. The canyons which seam the mesa, and all of which lead toward the distant Mancos River, are, in many cases, replicas of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. While the summer days are warm, the nights are cool, and the visitor should bring plenty of wraps besides the clothing and shoes necessary for the work of climbing around among the trails. Little horseback riding can be done.

"It is a country for active foot work, just as it was in the days of the cliff dwellers themselves. But when one has spent a few days among the cedars and jack pines of the Mesa Verde, well named 'Green Table' by the Spaniards of early days, he becomes an enthusiast and will be found among those who return again and again to this most unique of national parks to study its mysteries and its beauties from all angles."

ALTITUDE AND SURROUNDINGS.

The highest part of the Mesa Verde National Park is Park Point, 8,575 feet above sea level, while Point Lookout, the most prominent point on the Mesa Verde, has an elevation of 8,428 feet above sea level. The northern edge of the mesa terminates in a precipitous bluff, averaging 2,000 feet above the floor of the Montezuma Valley. The general slope of the mesa is to the south, so that a person on the northern rim has a view in all directions. Looking north can be seen the Rico Mountains, with the Montezuma Valley lying just below the observer, dotted with artificial lakes and fertile fields. To the west are the La Salle and Blue Mountains in Utah, with Ute Mountain in the immediate foreground. To the south can be seen the Tunitcha Mountains in Arizona and Ship Rock in New Mexico, while immediately in front of the observer are the various canyons cutting through the mesa in which the most important of the cliff dwellings are found. To the east can be seen the canyon of the Mancos River and the mesas lying to the east of it.

The approach road, which is open to automobiles, ascends the mesa south and east of Point Lookout, and after a detour of some miles, to avoid a very narrow portion of an old road, comes back to the edge of the mesa; and all visitors to the park will be afforded this wonderful view many times, as the road, in heading many canyons, often returns to this vantage point.

The Mesa Verde is cut by numerous deep canyons, in which are found the cliff dwellings, the principal canyons being Rock, Long, Wickiup, Navajo, Spruce, Soda, and Moccasin.