| OCR Text |
Show 41 miles a cave- shelter appeared, and then as the valley widened it was dotted in many places with mounds thickly strewn over with the ever-accompanying ceramic handiwork of the ancient people in whose footsteps we are following, and occurring so frequently and of such extent as to excite astonishment at the numbers this narrow valley supported. The line is so sharply drawn that in an hour's ride all traces of any ruins are lost; and there is not so much as a piece of pottery to show that these people had ever extended their residence beyond the limits of their canon. Soou other cave- dwellings appear, most of them little walled- up cir-caiar orifices in the rock, generally inaccessible, but many were approached by steps, or rather small holes cut in in such a manner as to enable the climber to ascend the rock as by a ladder. Examples of these kinds of ruins are shown in Figs. 1 aud 4 of Plate 17, each about 40 feet above the valley, the first perfectly inaccessible and without the least sign of the original method of reaching it; in the other one the walls once closing it have been pushed down so that only traces of them remain; the steps leading up, however, show it to have been considerably used ; they are now so worn down by the disintegrating influences of time as to no longer answer their purpose. Throughout this caiion we find frequent examples of the footsteps cut in the rock, in the generality of cases being simply a way of scaling the smooth, nearly perpendicular wall of sandstone, which hems in the canon on both sides for twelve or fifteen miles; probably a ready mode of escape up the bluff should enemies appear. The cliff and cave dwellings, very small habitations, seldom larger than the one in Fig. 2, Plate 15, appear to occur in groups, not always in connection with the old valley ruins, but rather to alternate in succession as we progress down the caiion. In one of the cave- dwellings, Fig. 3, Plate 17, perfectly black with long-continued smokes inside, and bearing other marks of long use, we found the complete skeleton of a human being; the remains, as afterward determined, of a young man somewhat under a medium size. The excrement of small animals, dust, and other rubbish filled the floor of the little house a foot deep, nearly burying the scattered bones; with them are the shreds of a woolen blanket, woven in long stripes of black and white, just such as the Navajos and Moqnis make at the present time. It is likely that the remains are those of a Navajo, a people who occupied all this country up to within a short time, withiu the remembrance of the older persons, and who were driven beyond the San Juan by the onslaughts of the aggressive Utes. After traveling about 20 miles from our starting- poiut at the foot of the mountains, half of the way in the caiion, we camped at the intersection of a large canon coming in from the west, traversed by a large, well traveled Indian trail, that continued on down, probably the same one we had crossed earlier in the day. At this point the bottoms widened out to 200 to 300 yards in width, and are literally covered with ruins, evidently those of an extensive settlement or community, although at the present time water was so scarce- not beiug. able to find a drop within a radius of six miles- that we were compelled to make a dry camp. The ruins consist entirely of great solid mounds of rocky debris, piled up in rectangular masses, covered with earth and a Wash- growth, bearing every indication of extreme age; just how old i* about as impossible to tell as to say how old the rocks of this caiion * re. This group is a mile in length, in the middle of the valley- space, ftd upon both sides of the wash. Each separate building would cover |
