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.a 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.

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aAncient Ruins in Southwestern Colorado, in Rep. U. S. Geol. and Geogr. Survey of the Ter., 1874, p. 369.

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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.b 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."

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bReport on the Ancient Ruins of Southwestern Colorado, examined during the summers of 1875 and 1878, ibid, 1876, p. 383

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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:c

The honour of the discovery of these remarkable ruins belongs to Richard and Alfred Wetherill of Mancos. The family own large herds of cattle, which wander about on the Mesa Verde. The care of these herds often calls for long rides on the mesa and in its labyrinth of canons. During these long excursions ruins, the one more magnificent than the other, have been discovered. The two largest were found by Richard Wetherill and Charley Mason one December day in 1888, as they were riding together through the piñon wood on the mesa, in search of a stray herd. They had penetrated through the dense scrub to the edge of a deep canon. In the opposite cliff, sheltered by a huge, massive vault of rock, there lay before their astonished eyes a whole town with towers and walls, rising out of a heap of ruins. This grand monument of bygone ages seemed to them well deserving of the name of the Cliff Palace. Not far from this place, but in a different canon, they discovered on the same day another very large cliff-dwelling; to this they gave the name of Sprucetree House, from a great spruce that jutted forth from the ruins. During the course of years Richard and Alfred Wetherill have explored the mesa and its canons in all directions; they have thus gained a more thorough knowledge of its ruins than anyone. Together with their brothers John, Clayton, and Wynn, they have also carried out excavations, during which a number of extremely interesting finds have been made. A considerable collection of these objects, comprising skulls, pottery, implements of stone, bone, and wood, etc., has been sold to "The Historical Society of Colorado." A still larger collection is in the possession of the Wetherill family. A brief catalogue of this collection forms the first printed notice of the remarkable finds made during the excavations.

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cThe Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, pp. 12, 13, Stockholm, 1893.

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Mr. F. H. Chapin visited the Mesa Verde ruins in 1889 and published illustrated accountsa of his visit containing much information largely derived from the Wetherills and others. Dr. W. R. Birdsall also published an account of these ruins,b illustrated by several figures. Neither Chapin nor Birdsall gives special attention to the ruin now called Spruce-tree House, and while their writings are interesting and valuable in the general history of the archeology of the Mesa Verde, they are of little aid in our studies of this particular ruin. The same may be said of the short and incomplete notices of the Mesa Verde ruins which have appeared in several newspapers. The scientific descriptions of Spruce-tree House as well as of other Mesa Verde ruins begin with the memoir of the talented Swede, Baron Gustav Nordenskiöld, who, in his work, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, gives the first comprehensive account of the ruins of this mesa. It is not too much to say that he has rendered to American archeology in this work a service which will be more and more appreciated in the future development of that science. In order to make more comprehensive the present author's report on Spruce-tree House, the following description of this ruin is quoted from Nordenskiöld's memoir (pp. 50-56):

A few hundred paces to the north along the cliff lead to a large cave, in the shadow of which lie the ruins of a whole village, Sprucetree House. This cave is 70 m. broad and 28 m. in depth. The height is small in comparison with the depth, the interior of the cave thus being rather dark. The ground is fairly even and lies almost on a level, which has considerably facilitated the building operations. A plan of the ruins is given in Pl. IX. A great part of the house, or rather village, is in an excellent state of preservation, both the walls, which at some places are several stories high and rise to the roof of rock, and the floors between the different stories still remaining. The architecture is the same as that described in the ruins on Wetherill's Mesa. In some parts more care is perhaps displayed in the shape of the blocks and in the joints between them. The walls, here as in other cliff-dwellings, are about 0.3 m. thick, seldom more. A point which immediately strikes the eye in Pl. IX, is that no premeditated design has been followed in the erection of the buildings. It seems as if only a few rooms had first been built, additions having subsequently been made to meet the requirements of the increasing population. This circumstance, which I have already touched upon when describing other ruins, may be observed in most of the cliff-dwellings. There is further evidence to show that the whole village was not erected at the same time. At several places it may be seen that new walls have been added to the old, though the stones of both walls do not fit into each other, as is the case when two adjacent walls have been constructed simultaneously. The arrangement of the rooms has been determined by the surrounding cliff, the walls being generally built either at right angles or parallel to it. At some places the walls of several adjoining apartments of about equal size have been consistently erected in the same direction, some blocks of rooms thus possessing a regularity which is wanting in the cliff-village as a whole. This is perhaps the first stage in the development of the cliff-dwellings to the villages whose ruins are common in the valleys and on the mesa, and which are constructed according to a fixed design.

In the plan (Pl. IX) it may be seen that the cave contains two distinct groups of rooms. At about the middle of the cliff-village a kind of passage (23), uninterrupted by any wall, runs through the whole ruin. We found the remains, however, of a cross wall projecting from an elliptical room (14 in the plan) in the south part of the village. Each of these two divisions of the ruin contains an open space (16 and 28) at the back of the cave, the ground in both these places being covered with bird droppings. It is probable that this was the place where tame turkeys were kept, though it can not have been a very pleasant abode for them, for at least in the north of the ruin this part of the cave is almost pitch dark, the walls of the inner court (28), rising up to the roof of rock. In each of the two divisions of the cliff-village a number of estufas were built, in the north at least five, in the south at least two; while several more are, no doubt, buried in the heaps of ruins. These estufas preserve to the least detail the ordinary type (diam. 4-5 metres) fully described above. They are generally situated in front of the other rooms, with their foundations sunk deeper in the ground, and have never had an upper story. Even their site suggests that they were used for some special purpose, probably as assembly-rooms at religious festivities held by those members of the tribe who lived in the adjacent rooms. In all the estufas without exception the roof has fallen in. It is probable, as I have mentioned before, that the entrance of these rooms, as is still the case among the Pueblo Indians, was constructed in the roof. The other rooms were entered by narrow doorways (breadth 40-55 cm., height 65-80 cm.). These doorways are generally rectangular, often somewhat narrower at the top; the sill consists, as already described, of a long stone slab, the lintel of a few sticks a couple of centimetres in thickness, laid across the opening to support the wall above them. The arch was unknown to the builders of these villages, even in the form common among the ruins of Central America, and constructed by carrying the walls on both sides of the doorway nearer to each other as each course of stones was laid, until they could be joined by a stone slab placed across them. Along both sides of the doorway and under the lintel a narrow frame of thin sticks covered with plaster was built (see fig. 28 to the left). This frame, which leant inwards, served to support the door, a thin, flat, rectangular stone slab of suitable size. Through two loops on the outside of the wall, made of osiers inserted in the chinks between the stones, and placed one on each side of the doorway, a thin stick was passed, thus forming a kind of bolt. Besides this type of door most cliff-villages contain examples of another. Some doorways present the appearance shown in fig. 28 to the right (height 90 cm., breadth at the top, 45 cm., at the bottom 30 cm.) They were not closed with a stone slab. They probably belonged to the rooms most frequented in daily life, and were therefore fashioned so as to admit of more convenient ingress and egress. The other doorways, through which it is by no means easy to enter, probably belonged in general to storerooms or other chambers not so often visited and requiring for some reason or other a door to close them. It should be mentioned that the large, T-shaped doors described above are rare in the ruins on Wetherill's Mesa which both in architecture and in other respects bear traces of less care and skill on the part of the builders, and are also in a more advanced stage of decay, thus giving the impression of greater age than the ruins treated of in the present chapter, though without showing any essential differences.

The rooms, with the exception of the estufas, are nearly always-rectangular, the sides measuring seldom more than two or three metres. North of the passage (23) which divides the ruin into two parts, a whole series of rooms (26, 29-33) still extends outwards from the back of the cave, their walls reaching up to the roof of rock, and the floors between the upper and lower stories being in a perfect state of preservation. The lower rooms are generally entered by small doors opening directly on the "street." In the interior the darkness is almost complete, especially in room 34, which has no direct communication with the passage. It must be approached either through 35, which is a narrow room with the short side towards the "street" entirely open, or through 33. We used 34 as a dark room for photographic purposes.

The walls and roof of some rooms are thick with soot. The inhabitants must have had no great pretensions as regards light and air. The doorways served also as windows, though at one or two places small, quadrangular loop-holes have been constructed in the walls for the passage of light. Entrance to the upper story is generally gained by a small quadrangular hole in the roof at a corner of the lower room, a foothold being afforded merely by some stones projecting from the walls. This hole was probably covered with a stone slab like the doors. Thick beams of cedar or piñon and across them thin poles, laid close together, form the floors between the stories. In some cases long sticks were laid in pairs across the cedar beams at a distance of some decimeters between the pairs, a layer of twigs and cedar bast was placed over the sticks, and the whole was covered with clay, which was smoothed and dried.

In several other parts of the ruin besides this the walls still reach the roof of the cave. These walls are marked in the plan. In all the estufas and in some of the other rooms, perhaps the apartments of chiefs or families of rank, the walls are covered with a thin coat of yellow plaster. In one instance they are even decorated with a painting, representing two birds, which is reproduced in one of the following chapters. Pl. X:2 shows a part of the ruin, situated in the north of the cave. The spot from which the photograph was taken, as well as the approximate angle of view, is marked in the plan. The left half of the photograph is occupied by a wail with doorways, rising to a height of three stories and up to the roof of the cave; within the wall lies a series of five rooms on the ground floor; behind these rooms the large open space mentioned above (28) occupies the depths of the cavern. Here the beams are all that remains of the floors of the upper stories, their ends projecting a foot or two beyond the wall between the second and third stories, where support was probably afforded in this manner to a balcony, as an easier means of communication between the rooms of the upper stories. In front of this part of the building, but not visible in the photograph, lie two estufas and outside the latter is a long wall. To judge by the ruins, the roofs of these estufas once lay on a level with the floors of the adjoining rooms, so that over the estufas, which were sunk in the ground, only the roofs being left visible, the inhabitants had an open space, bounded on the outside by the said long wall, which formed a rampart at the edge of the talus. The same method of construction is employed by the Moki Indians in their estufas; but these rooms are rectangular in form.—Farther north lies another estufa. Its site, nearest to the cliff wall, would seem to indicate that it is the oldest. The walls in the north of the ruin still rise to a height of 6 metres.

The south part of the ruin is similar in all respects to the north. Its only singularity is a room of elliptical shape (axes 3.6 and 2.9 in.); from this room a wall runs south, enclosing a small open space (16) where, as at the corresponding place in the north of the ruin, the ground is covered with bird droppings mixed with dust and refuse. At one end there are two semicircular enclosures (17, 18) of loose stones forming low walls. In a pentagonal room (8) south of this open space one corner contains a kind of closet (height 1.2 in., length and breadth 0.9 in.) composed of two large upright slabs of stone, with a third slab laid across them in a sloping position and cemented fast (see fig. 29). Of the use to which this "closet" was put, I am ignorant. Farther south some of the rooms are situated on a narrow ledge, along which a wall has been erected, probably for purposes of defense.

Plate x:1 is a photograph of Sprucetree House from the opposite side of the canon. The illustrations give a better idea of the ruin's appearance than any description could do.

Our excavations in Sprucetree House lasted only a few days. This ruin will certainly prove a rich field for future researches.c Some handsome baskets and pieces of pottery were the best finds made during the short period of our excavations. In a room (69) belonging to the north part of the ruin we found the skeletons of three children who had been buried there.

A circumstance which deserves mention, and which was undoubtedly of great importance to the inhabitants of Sprucetree House, is the presence at the bottom of the canon, a few hundred paces from the ruin, of a fairly good spring.

Near Sprucetree House there are a number of very small, isolated rooms, situated on ledges most difficult of access. One of these tiny cliff-dwellings may be seen to the left in fig. 27. It is improbable that these cells, which are sometimes so small that one can hardly turn in them, were really dwelling places; their object is unknown to me, unless it was one of defense, archers being posted there when danger threatened, so that the enemy might have to face a volley of arrows from several points at once. In such a position a few men could defend themselves, even against an enemy of superior force, for an assailant could reach the ledge only by climbing with hands and feet. Another explanation, perhaps better, was suggested to me by Mr. Fewkes. He thinks that these small rooms were shrines where offerings to the gods were deposited. No object has, however, been found to confirm this suggestion.

To the right of fig. 27 a huge spruce may be seen. Its roots lie within the ruins of Sprucetree House, the trunk projecting from the wall of an estufa. In Pl. X:1 the tree is wanting. I had it cut down in order to ascertain its age. We counted the rings, which were very distinct, twice over, the results being respectively 167 and 169. I had supposed from the thickness of the tree that the number of the rings was much greater.

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aCliff-dwellings of the Mancos Canons, in Appalachia, VI, no. 1, Boston, May, 1890; The American Antiquarian, XII, 193, 1890; The Land of the Cliff Dwellers, 1892.

bThe Cliff-dwellings of the canons of the Mesa Verde. in Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, XXIII, no. 4, 584, 1891.

cSince this was written, a well-preserved mummy has been found by Wetherill in the open space (28) at the very back of the cave. This is a further example of the burial of the dead in the open space between the village and the cliff wall behind it (see p. 47).—[Nordenskiöld.]

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