VII Mesa Verde National Park
Weirdness, romance, and mystery dominate the Mesa Verde National Park. Towering high and dry above the surrounding country, carrying in places squatty, scattered growths of piñon pines and cedars, it stands silently up in the sunlight. Combined with these things, the deserted prehistoric cliff dwellings give to the Mesa a strangeness and peculiar appeal. These monuments of a departed race tell but little of the story of their builders. They are the ruins of an ancient civilization that stood its day and vanished; that—
“Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face,
Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.”
Who were the cliff dwellers? It is probable that they were Indians. No one knows where they came from, how long they remained on the Mesa, nor why they left; how long since they went away, where they went to, nor what has become of them. Several hundred ruins of the structures they reared still remain. These are mysterious and thought-compelling, but they tell little more than is told by the Sphinx.
The Mesa Verde National Park covers seventy-seven square miles in southwest Colorado, near the corners of four States. It is in the “Land of Little Rain.” The table-like summit of this steep-walled Mesa is eight thousand feet above the sea, and nearly two thousand feet above the surrounding country. Looking from the summit, one sees strange “Ship Rock” far away in New Mexico. This appears to be an enormous ship in full sail upon the sea. It adds to the unreal and mysterious air of the region.
Numerous cañons are countersunk deeply into this sunny sky plain. Many of the cañons are corniced with a heavy overhanging stratum of rock. Beneath this, in cavelike hollows in the cañon walls, the cliff houses are found. Here ages ago the cliff dwellers lived in large communities and probably under organized government—the oldest and most fully realized civic-center scheme in America. Long before their mesa country was invaded by the men of recorded history, these people of the Southwest vanished, leaving buildings, tools, clothing, and pottery to tell of their odd and interesting Indian civilization.
When the name Indian is mentioned, the average individual usually thinks of a savage. But at the time Columbus discovered America, there were millions of civilized Indians in the Western world, living under organized government. It is true that their civilization was different from ours of to-day, and happily different from the European civilization of that time.
These early civilized Indians lived chiefly in well-built houses. Many of them traveled good roads. They possessed a keen sense of right and wrong, and in ethics they may have averaged higher than the European. Among the tribes that were civilized were the Mayas, the Aztecs, and the Incas.
The cliff dwellers were an agricultural people, and they cultivated corn, beans, cotton, and squash. They appear to have grown crops by means of irrigation. They wove cloth of cotton and of the century-plant fibers. Probably they domesticated the turkey.
The finger-prints in their adobe mortar indicate that women built the stone walls. Among the Indian tribes of the Southwest, it was common for the men to quarry, dress, and carry the stones, while the women built them into walls. Women, too, appear to have made the pottery. The men probably were the weavers. The women ground the corn and most likely carried the water in jars from the springs. Were there more springs in the days of these people than now? Perhaps. Apparently they had numerous reservoirs.
These people did not possess a written language, and their ways of recording their thoughts or preserving their experiences were poor. They made pictographs on stone walls and placed symbols on their pottery and in their weaving. Much of their pottery is attractive in form and of ornamental pattern. There are food-bowls, water-jars, cooking-utensils, and numerous jugs and mugs.
They appreciated the beautiful. Their art, though mostly primitive, was art. It was generally symbolical. Although many of their pottery decorations were of geometric design, others represented objects of beauty in which flowing lines were required. Their basketry showed good taste. Their architecture was good. Although their buildings followed varied types, a number of them displayed lines of beauty and constructive skill.
Well-preserved mural paintings on many of the walls of their structures indicate that they had a good knowledge of dye-stuffs as well as a primitive skill in picturing. Remains of figures of men, animals, cacti, and rain-clouds form a kind of frieze visible on three sides of the so-called painted room in one of these houses. These paintings are believed to indicate that this room was used for a ceremony akin to the New Fire ceremony of the Hopi.
Although nearly everything which they fashioned showed many elements of skill and beauty, they did not have many tools. Stone axes and hammers, scrapers, knives, and awls of bone were the common implements of use.
It may be that at one time the Mesa had a population of many thousands. It is possible that the Sun Temple was built jointly by the inhabitants of the Spruce Tree House, the Cliff Palace, and other houses of the region.
But few things which they left enable one to judge of their characteristics. They appear to have had the typical qualities of human beings. They had their superstitions, their weaknesses, and their strong points. But they are gone.
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”
It is true that we know but little of the people who formerly inhabited these buildings. Surely we can learn more through study. Thus far there has been almost no systematic study, and but little careful excavation or attempt to preserve the various objects found in the ruins. A school of archæology might well be established in this Park for the purpose of securing information about the cliff dwellers and giving it to the world.
In his report on his recent excavation and repair of the Sun Temple, Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes, of the Smithsonian Institution, says:—
The Mesa Verde is unique in its educational importance. It is destined ultimately to be a Mecca for all students of the prehistoric of the Southwest and an object lesson to all visitors who wish to see the best preserved buildings of pre-Columbian times in our country. It is self-evident that the excavation and repair of all the ruins in this park cannot be accomplished in a few years, even were it desirable to attempt it; the work means many years of arduous devotion, intelligently directed, and a large sum of money. It is desirable to open up these precious remains of antiquity carefully, following a definite plan, availing ourselves of methods acquired by experience. The work should be done with care, and it will be an additional attraction if visitors can see how the work is done. Work on the group will reveal important architectural features, and add much to our scientific information.
Prehistoric ruins abound throughout the Southwest. Many show considerable skill in construction and also suggest that the buildings were the work of a people who had organized government.
Mrs. Gilbert McClurg, who visited the Mesa Verde ruins years ago, appears to have been the first to conceive the idea of saving these prehistoric places for the public—of preserving them in a National Park. After a campaign of a few years, led chiefly by Mrs. McClurg, supplemented by the work of organizations and individuals, the Park was established in 1906.
In what is now this Park, a Spanish exploring party discovered cliff houses in 1541. At that time the buildings had been abandoned for generations. No one knows how many centuries or millenniums had then elapsed since the Mesa was deserted. The age of these cliff houses has been estimated from five hundred to five thousand years. Modern discovery of the region appears to have been made by a government geological party in 1874.
A few years later Baron Nordenskjöld, a Swedish explorer, spent many weeks with these ruins, and later wrote a volume concerning them. He carried away from them several carloads of pottery and other products.
The first white discoverers were either religious fanatics or people of the pot-hunter type who were looking for plunder. They were not interested in the preservation of any of the ruins discovered, nor of any of the equipment that had no commercial value. For years some of the early settlers and adventurers made it a business to search for prehistoric buildings in order to obtain the pottery and other treasures which they sometimes contained. Often these pot-hunting treasure-seekers utterly wrecked the buildings which they found. In all probability many objects of interest or information concerning the Mesa Verde cliff dwellers have been lost.
In the autumn of 1904 I visited the ruins for the purpose of taking photographs and found a party of three pottery-hunters camped near the Balcony House. A part of their firewood that evening consisted of precious beams from this ancient house.
For many years the visitors to the Mesa Verde noticed a huge tree-grown mound on the rim of the cañon-wall, directly opposite the Cliff Palace. A few dressed stones, apparently the corner of a wall, thrust above the surface of this mound. Probably there was a building beneath it. Behind and enveloping it lay a forest of low-growing and limby piñon pines and cedars. Over all was the ever-present and brooding mystery of the deserted Mesa Verde.
In July, 1915, Dr. Fewkes put a crew of men to work excavating the mound. As a result of their labors, a prehistoric stone building now stands in the sunshine. It is the shape of the capital letter D. Its straight front, which faces southward, measures one hundred and thirty-two feet; its semicircular back, two hundred and forty-five feet.
Plainly, it was built to a preconceived plan. There was no patchwork, no inharmonious combination. Precisely midway in the south wall was a recess. In another recess near the southwest corner was a fossil palm leaf. This strikingly resembles the rays of the sun, and together with a figure of the sun in the floor, suggests that the building was a Sun Temple. There is nothing to indicate that it was used or intended to be used as a dwelling-place.
The masonry is the best thus far found on the Mesa. It was laid with mortar of tough, enduring clay. The stones of the walls and partitions were small and were cut, many polished, and a few decorated. The figures on a number of these decorated stones consist of triangles, and one is the outline of a typical cliff-house doorway. The outer walls are double. None have outside openings. Perhaps the entrances to the building were either through the roof or by means of subterranean passageways from the face of the cliff just in front and beneath.
In the mound upon the ruins of this building was found a living tree that was more than three hundred and sixty years old. A long period, perhaps several hundred years, must have been required for the earthen mound to accumulate upon the ruins, and then three hundred and sixty years for the tree to grow. Apparently the Sun Temple must have been abandoned several hundred years ago, perhaps about the year 1300. It appears never to have been occupied, and probably was in process of being completed when it was abandoned.
The so-called Cliff Palace in Cliff Cañon is centrally located in the Mesa Verde National Park. This was a stone structure more than three hundred feet long and with more than two hundred rooms. It appears to have been built in sections or installments, not to any consecutive plan. As a result, in this one building there are a number of types of architecture. In one section there is a huge square tower four stories high; in an adjoining section, a large well-built round tower. This building probably was a home for scores of people. There were mill rooms in which corn was ground, storerooms, ceremonial rooms, probably rooms used in religious worship, and other rooms called “kivas,” which appear to have been used much of the time by the men as lounging-places. Fireplaces were scattered throughout the building. Many of the walls were of cut stone, and some were plastered and adorned with paintings. Paint still shows on a number of walls.
This park contains other large stone structures and hundreds of smaller cliff ruins. Among the buildings, besides the Cliff Palace, are the Spruce Tree House, the Balcony House, the Tunnel House, and numerous buildings upon the surface. Near Mummy Lake are a number of large, tree-grown mounds, similar to the recently excavated one that covered the Sun Temple. Beneath each of these is a buried stone structure. Here, apparently, is a buried city.