Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 November 1874 — THE ANTIQUITIES OF COLORADO. [ARTICLE]

THE ANTIQUITIES OF COLORADO.

The following interesting account ofc the ancient ruins found in Colorado is taken.from a recent letter from the New York Tribune's correspondent with the Hayden exploring expedition: Just along the southwestern border of Colorado the mountains sink almost abruptly into plains, which stretch away to the Gila and Colorado Rivers. Rising in Northern New Mexico, at the end of the main range of the Rocky Mountains, which here stops short, and flowing south -and west into. Arizona, thence north into Utah twenty-five or thirty miles west of the Colorado line, then fradually westward into the Colorado liver, is the Rio San Juan, the largest river Of this district. It receives but one -tributary of consequence from the south, but from the north many streams draining the southern slopes of the mountains, the principal of which are the Rio Pietra, Ria Las Animas and its branch, the Florida, Rio La Plata, Rio Mancos and Montezuma Creek, naming them from east to west. Leaving the main camp stationed in Baker’s Park, at the head of the Las Animas, Mr. Jackson and myself, with two muleteers, Steve andßob, took the snlalL est possible outfit, except of cartridges, and started for a rapid reconnoissance of the valleys of these rivers, in which we hoped to find what w r e sought. Our first and second days’ marches carried us across high, rugged, volcanic mountains, wild and picturesque and full of grizzlies, and down into Animas Park, which is a succession of grassy valleys diversified by frequent groves, and seemingly always warm and lovely. A few adventurous ranchmen have located here and raise splendid crops. From here across to the La Plata is a day’s pleasant ride. At the La Plata we found a jolly camp of old Californians preparing to work the gold placers. * * * Proceeding west fifteen miles and descending some 2,000 feet we struck the Rio Mancos a few miles down, where we began to come upon mounds of earth which had accumulated over fallen houses, and about which were strewn an abundance of fragments of pottery, variously painted in colors, often glazed within and impressed in various designs Then the perpendicular walls that hemmed in the valley began to contract, and for the next ten miles the trail led over rocks which were anything but easy to traverse. That night we camped under some forlorn cedars, just beneath a bluff a thousand or so feet high, which for the upper half was absolutely vertical. This was the edge of the table-land, or mesa, which stretches over hundreds of square miles hereabouts, and is cleft by these great cracks or canons, through which the drainage of the country finds its way into the great Colorado. In wandering about after supper we thought we saw something like a house away up on the face of this bluff, and two of us, running the risk of being overtaken by darkness, clambered over the talus of loose debris, across a great stratum of pure coal, and, by dint of much pushing and hauling up to the ledge upon which it stood, we came down Satisfied. There, 700 measured feet above the valley, perched on a little ledge only just large enough to hold it, was a two-story house, made of finely-cut sandstone, each block about fourteen by six inches, accurately fitted and set in mortar now harder than the stone itself. The floor was the ledge upon which it rested, and the roof the overhanging rock. There were three rooms upon the ground floor, each one six by nine feet, with partition walls of faced stone. Between the stories was originally & wood floor, traces of which still remained, as did also the cedar sticKs set in the wall over the windows and door; but this was over the frontjToom only, the height of the rocky roof behind not being sufficient to allow an attic there. Each of the stories was six feet in height, and all the rooms, upstairs and down, were nicely plastered and painted what now looks a dull brickred color, with, a white band along the floor like a base-board. There was a low doorway from the ledge into the lower story and another above, showing that the upper chamber was entered from without. The windows were large, square apertures, with no indication of any glazing or shutters. They commanded a view of the Whole valley for many miles. Near the house several convenient little niches in the rock were built into better shape as though they had been used as cupboards or c&ebues';

and behind it a semi-circular wall inclosing the angle of * the house and clifl formed a water resejyoir holding two and a half hogsheads. The water was taken out of this from a window of the upper room, and the outer wall was carried up high so as to protect one so en?;aged from missiles from below. In ront of the house, which was the left side to one facingthe bluff, an esplanade bad been built to widen the narrow ledge and probably furnish a commodious place for a kitchen. The abutments which supported it were founded upon a steeply-inclined smooth face of rock; yet so consummate was their masonry that these abutments still stand, although it would seem that a pound’s weight might slide them oft. Searching further in this vicinity we found remains of many houses on the same ledge, and some perfect ones above it quite inaccessible. The rocks also bore some inscriptions—unintelligible hieroglyphics, for the most part —reminding one' of those given by Lieut. Whipple in the third volume of the Pacific Railroad reports. All these facts were carefully photographed and recorded. Leaving here we soon came upon traces of houses in the bottom of the valley in the greatest profusion, nearly all of which were entirely destroyed, and broken pottery everywhere abounded. The majority of the buildings were square, but many round, and one sort of ruin always showed two square buildings with very deep cellars under them and a round tower between them, seemingly for watch and defense. In several cases a large part of this tower was still standing. These latter ones, judging from the analogy of the underground workshops of the Moquis, were manufactories of utensils and implements. Another isolated ruin that attracted our attention particularly consisted of two perfectly circular walls of cut stone, one within the other. The diameter of the inner circle was twenty-two feet, and of the outer thirty-three feet. The walls were thick and were perforated apparently by three equi-distant doorways. Was this a temple? We continued to meet wiih these groups of destroyed edifices all day, but nothing of especial interest except two or three round towers, and no perfect cliff houses, until next morning, when a little cave high up from the ground was found, which had been utilized as a homestead by being built full of low houses communicating with one another, some of which were intact and had been appropriated by wild animals. About these dwellings were more hieroglyphics scratched on the wall, and plenty of pottery, but no implements. Further on were similar but rather ruder structures, on a rocky bluff, but so strongly -were they put together that the tooth of time had found them hard gnawing; and in one Instance, while that portion of the cliff upon which a certain house rested had cracked oft and fallen away some distance without rolling, the house itself had remained solid and upright. Traces of the trails to many of these dwellings and the steps cut in the rock were still visible, and were useful indications of the proximity of buildings otherwise unnoticed. We were now getting fairly away from the mountains and approaching the great sandy, alkaline pjains of the San Juan River. Our valley of the Mancos was gradually widening, but still on either hand rose the perpendicular sides of the mesa, composed of horizontal strata of red and white sandstone, chiseled by the weather into rugged ledges and prominences, indented by great bays or side canons, and banked up at the foot by taluses of the gray mail which lay beneath it. Imagine East River 1,000 or 1,200 feet deep and drained dry, the piers and slips on both sides made of red sandstone and extending down to that depth, and yourself at the bottom gazing up for human habitations far above you. In such a picture you would have a tolerable idea of this canon of the Rio Mancos. —- Keeping close under the mesa on the western side—you never find houses on the eastern cliff of a canon, where the morning sun, which they adored, could not strike them full with its first beams —qne of us espied what he thought to be a house on the face of a particularly high and smooth portion of the precipice, which there jutted .out into a" promontory, up the sides of which it seemed possible to climb to the top of the mesa above the house, whence it might be possible to crawl down to it. Fired with tjfie hope of finding some valuable relics of household furniture in such a place, the Captain and Bob started for the top, and disappeared behind the rocks while we busied ourselves in getting ready the photographic apparatus. After a while an inarticulate sound floated down to us, and looking up we beheld the Captain, diminished to the size of a cricket, creeping on hands and knees along what seemed to us a perfectly smooth vertical face of rock. He had got where he could not retreat, and it seemed equally impossible to go ahead. There was a moment of suspense; then came a cry that stopped the beating of our hearts as we watched with bated breath a dark object, not larger than a* cricket, whirling, spinning, dropping through the awful space, growing larger as it neared the earth, till it fell with muffled thud on the cruel, sharp rocks below. But ere we could reach it another object seemed to fall backward from the highest point, and reeled down through the flooding sunshine, casting its flying shadow on the brilliant bluft, gathering dreadful momentum with which to dash its poor self dead on the dentless stohes beneath. ■/ The Captain had thrown down his boots. He Was still there, crawling carefully along, clinging to the wall like a lizard, till finally a broader ledge was reached; and having the nerve of an athlete he got safely to the house. He found it perfect, almost semi-circular in shape, of the finest workmanship yet seen, all the stones being cut true, a foot wide, sixteen inches longhand three inches\thick, ground perfectly smooth on the inside so as to require no plastering. It was about twenty by six feet in interior di-

mensions and six feet high. The door and window were bounded by lintels, sills, and caps of single flat stones. Yet all this was done, so far as we can learn, with no other tools than those made of stone; no implements of any kind were, however, found here. Overhanging the house and fully 800 feet from the ground was a thin projecting shelf of rock. Upon this bracket Bob was now to be seen dancing about in a very lively manner, and endeavoring to get below. It would have somewhat damped his ardor if he had known how thin a stratum held him from the voyage the Captain’s boots had taken! At any rate he turned pale when he got down and saw where he had unconsciously been. Photographs and sketches completed, we pushed on, rode twenty miles or more, and camped just over the Utah line, two miles beyond Aztec Springs, which, for the first time in the Captain’s experience, were dry. It was a sore disappointment to us all. There were about these springs, which are at the base of the Ute Mountain, the natural corner post of four Territories, formerly many large buildings, the relics of which are very impressive. One of them is 200 feet square, with a wall twenty feet thick, and inclosed in the center a circular building 100 feet in circumference. Another near by was 100 feet square, with equally thick walls, and was divided north and south by a very heavy partition. This building communicated with the great stone reservoir about the springs. These heavy walls were” constructed of outer strong walls of cut sandstone regularly laid m mortar, filled in with firmly-packed fragments of stone, chiefly a reddish fossiliferous limestone containing a profusion of beautiful fossil shells—especially ammonites and bacculites. Some portions of the walls still stand twenty or thirty feet in height, but, judging from the amount of material thrown down, the .building must originally have been a very lofty one, What puzzled me was to place the entrance, or to satisfy myself that there had been any at all, on the ground floor. About these large edifices were traces of smaller ones covering half a square mile, and out on the plain another small village, indicated by a collection of knolls. Scarcely anything now but white sage grows thereabouts, but there is reason to believe that in those old times it was under careful cultivation. Our next day’s march was westerly, leaving the mesa bluffs on our right gradually behind. The road was an interesting one intellectually, but not at all so physically—dry, hot, dusty, long and wearisome. We passed a number of quite perfect houses, perched high up on rocky bluffs, and many other remains. One, I remember, occupied the whole apex of a great conical bowlder as big as two Dutch barns, that ages ago had become detached from its mother mountain and rolled out into the valley. Another worth mention was a round tower, beautifully laid up, which surmounted an immense bowlder that had somehow rolled to the very verge of a lofty cliff overlooking the valley. This was a watch-tower, and we Were told that almost all the high points were occupied by such sentinel-boxes. From it a deeply-worn, devious trail led up over the edge of the mesa, by following which w#should, no doubt, have found a whole town. But this was only a reconnoissance, and we could not stop to follow out all indications.

Time was short, and we must gallop on to where tradition tells us the last great battle was fought, the last stand made against the invaders, into whose rude grasp they must surrender their homes. Toward night we reached it. The bluffs at our right had sunk into low banka of solid red sandstone, white at the base; on the left frowned tall rock-buttes; and the barren hills sloped away to the south behind them. Ahead the valley closed into a canon, and where we stand and off to the right the .surface is a succession ot low domes of bare sandstone, worn info gullies and chiseled into pot-holes by ancient rivers and modern rains, devoid of soil, supporting only a few stunted cedars rooted in the crannies, bleached and ghastly and garish under the September sun. Brilliant cliffs, wierdly carved by Titans, ranged themselves behind, and right in the fore-ground, thrust up through the very center of one of these sandstone domes, stood a ragged christone —a volcanic dike —thin, shattered and comb-like. It was a scene of despair and desolation, enhanced rather than softened and humanized by the tw r o great stone towers that stood near by and the fragments of heavy walls that once defended every approach to the habitations about the christone. Climbing carefully to the top of the dike, mapping out the plan of the ancient fortifications, listening to the fearful concussion of a stone hurled from the top, feeling how absolutely safe a garrison would be there so long as they could hold out against hunger and thirst, it required but little faitb to believe the tradition of this valley of death, whose broad slopes of while sandstone were once crimsoned and recrimsoned with human blood. Jhe story is this: Formerly the aborigines inhabited all this country we had been over as far west as the head waters of the Ban Juan, as far north as the Rio Dolores, went some distance into Utah, and south and southwest throughout Arizona and on down into Mexico. They had lived there from time immemorial —since the earth was a small island,which augmented as its inhabitants multiplied. They cultivated the valley, fashioned whatever utensils and tools they needed very neatly and handsomely out of clay and wood and stone, not knowing any of the useful metals, built their homes and kept their flocks and herds in tfie fertile river-bottoms, and worshiped the sun. They were an eminently peaceful and prosperous people, living by agriculture rather than by the chase. About a thousand years ago, however, they were visited by savage strangers from the north, whom they treated hospitably. Boon these visits became more frequent and annoying. Then their troublesome neighbors— ancestors of the present Utes—began to forage upon them, and at last to massacre them and devas-

tate their farms; so, to save their lives at least, they built houses high up on the cliffs, where they could store food and hide away until tfie raiders left. But one summer the invaders did not go back to their mountains as the people expected, but brought their families with them and desired to settle down. So, driven from their homes and lands, starving in their little niches on the high cliffs, they could only steal away during the night, and wander across the cheerless uplands. To one who has traveled these steppes such a flight seems terrible, and the mind hesitates to picture the suffering of the sad fugitives. At the christone they halted and probably found friends, for the rocks and the caves are full of the nests of these human wrens and swallows. Here they collected, erected'"stone fortifications and watch-towers, dug reservoirs in the rocks to hold a supply of water, which, in all cases, is precarious in this latitude, and once more stood at bay. Their foes came and for one long month fought and were beaten back, and returned day after day to the attack as merciless and inevitable as the tide. Meanwhile the families of the defenders were evacuating and moving south, and bravely did their protectors shield them till they were all safely a hundred miles away. The besiegers were beaten back and went away. But the narrative tells us that the hollows of the rocks were filled to the brim with the mingled blood of conquerors and -conquered, and red veins of it ran down into the canon. It was such a victory as they could not afford to gain again, and they were glad when the long fight was over to follow their wives and little ones to the south. There in the deserts of Arizona, on well-nigh unapproachable, isolated bluffs, they built new towns, and their few descendants—the Moquis—live in them to this day, preserving more carefully and purely the history and veneration of their forefathers than their skill or wisdom. It was from one of their old men that this traditional sketch was obtained. This is but a picture here and there of one fortnight among these prehistoric ruins. Ten times as much might be said but limits forbid. Suffice it to say that no item will be forgotten or neglected that can throw any light on this intensely interesting phase of the aboriginal history of our country, and no opportunity let slip to elucidate further the origin and character of these antiquities.