Chapter XV: The Antiquities of the Rio San Juan

Dismantled towers and turrets broken,
Like grim and war-worn braves who keep
A silent guard, with grief unspoken,
Watch o'er the graves by the Hoven weep,
The nameless graves of a race forgotten;
Whose deeds, whose words, whose fate are one,
With the mist, long ages past begotten
Of the sun.
--STANLEY WOOD.

Time forbade a side excursion from Durango to the Mancos Cañon, though we were extremely anxious to make it,--_I_ because I had been there before, and the rest because they were eager to see what I had told them of.

The Rio Mancos is the next tributary of the Rio San Juan west of the Rio de la Plata. When, in 1874, I was a member of the photographic division of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, one of the main objects of our trip was the exploration of this remote corner of the State, where we had vaguely heard of marvelous relics of a bygone civilization unequaled by anything short of the splendid ruins of Central America and the land of the Incas. After traversing the frightfully rugged trails of the San Juan and La Plata mountains, therefore, a portion of our party came out on the southern margin of the mountains, and, despite the smoldering hostility of the Indians, with which the region was filled, headed southward into the long deserted cañons. There were five of us, altogether,--Mr. W. H. Jackson (from whose skillful camera came many of the illustrations that grace my present text), the famous Captain John Moss, who went with us as "guide, philosopher and friend," myself and two mule packers.

The trail led from Parrott City, then a nameless prospect camp, washing gold without a thought of the silver ledges to be developed later there, over to Merritt's pleasant ranch on the upper Rio Mancos, then across rolling grass land and through groves of magnificent lumber pines, a distance of about fifteen miles. Spending one night at the ranch, sunrise the next morning found us eager to enter the portals of the cañon and the precincts of the area within which glorious discoveries in anthropology allured our imagination and made light the toil and privation of the undertaking.

Not five hundred yards below the ranch we came upon our first find,--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. Later the perpendicular, buttress-like walls that hemmed in the valley began to contract, and that night we camped under some forlorn cedars, just beneath a bluff a thousand feet or so in height, which, for its upper half, was absolutely vertical. This was the edge of the green table-land, or _mésa verde_, which stretches over hundreds of square miles, and is cleft by these cracks or cañons, through which the drainage of the northern uplands finds its way into the Rio San Juan.

In wandering about after supper, something like a house was discerned away up on the face of this bluff, and two of us clambered over the talus of loose débris, across a great stratum of pure coal, and, by dint of much pushing and pulling, up to the ledge upon which it stood. We came down satisfied, and next morning Mr. Jackson carried up our photographic kit and got some superb negatives. There, seven hundred 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 a wooden 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 front room 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 brick red 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 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 caches; and behind it a semi-circular wall inclosing the angle of the house and cliff formed a water reservoir holding two and a half hogsheads. The water was taken out of this from a window of the upper room. In front of the house, which was the left side to one facing the bluff, an esplanade had 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 smooth, steeply-inclined face of rock; yet so consummate was their skill in masonry that these abutments still stand, although it would seem that a pound's weight might slide them off.

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. Many edifices in the cliffs escaped our notice. The glare over everything, and the fact that the buildings, being formed of the rock on which they rested, were identical in color with it, increasing the difficulty made sufficiently great by their altitude.

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. The best example of this 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. At that time we concluded this double-walled tower (later triple-walled structures of the same sort were met with) must have had a religious use; but since then I have wondered whether all of these round buildings above ground (save some which manifestly were watch towers) were not used as store-houses for snow. It was a country of long droughts and hot summers. The double or triple walls, with spaces of dead air between would make excellent refrigerators.

These groups of destroyed edifices, occupying the bottom-land, were met with all day; but no other perfect cliff-houses were found 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 off 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. Yet, despite our watchfulness, Mr. Holmes' party, which went next year to study the details of the broad prehistoric picture our rapid trip sketched out, brought to light several fine buildings, high above the valley, in some of which valuable implements and utensils were discovered. None of them were so high, though, or in better condition than one of our prizes this second day.

Keeping close under the mesa, on the western side (you never find houses on the eastern cliff of a cañon, where the morning sun could not strike them full with its first beams) one 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 one side of which it seemed we could climb to the top of the mesa above the house, whence it might be possible to crawl down to it. Fired with the hope of getting some valuable relics of household furniture in such a place, one of the gentlemen volunteered to make the attempt, and succeeded. He found it well preserved, almost semi-circular in shape, of the finest workmanship yet seen, all the stones being cut true, a foot wide, sixteen inches long and three inches thick, ground perfectly smooth on the inside so as to require no plastering. It was about six by twenty feet in interior dimensions 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, and in such a place that you might drop a pebble out of the window 500 feet plumb.

Photographs and sketches completed, we pushed on, rode twenty miles or more, and camped two miles beyond Unagua springs. There were about these springs, which are at the base of the Ute mountain, the tallest summit of the Sierra ù Late, formerly many large buildings, the relics of which are very impressive. One of them is two hundred feet square, with a wall twenty feet thick, and inclosed in the center a circular building one hundred feet in circumference. Another, near by, was one hundred 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 in mortar, filled in with firmly packed fragments of stone. Some portions of the wall 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. About these large edifices were traces of smaller ones, covering half a square mile, and out in 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. Evidently these thick walls were the foundations of old terraced pueblos, an unusually large community having grown up about these plentiful springs, just as at Taos, San Juan, Zuñi, and the present Moqui villages in Arizona.

Our next day's march was westerly, leaving the mesa bluffs on our right and 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 occupied the whole apex of a great conical bowlder, 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 whole valley. This was a watch-tower, and we learned afterward 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 we should, no doubt, have found a whole town. But this was only a reconnoissance, and we could not now stop to follow out all indications.

Not far away the odd appearance of a cliff attracted my attention, and leaving the party I rode over the bare, white, rocky floors which capped all the low, broad ridges, to find a long series of shallow grottos in the escarpment filled with houses, some of which were roofed over, but most consisting simply of walls carried to the ceiling of the light, dry cavern in the sandstone, often only one or two houses occupying each of the small caves, whose openings were in the same water-worn stratum, and only a few feet or yards apart. Still more curious examples of these cave-dwellings have been seen since in the same neighborhood, and lower down. For example, on the San Juan, in 1875, Holmes and Jackson discovered, half way between top and bottom of a bluff where a stratum of shaly sandstone had been weathered and dug out to a depth of six feet, leaving a firm floor and a projecting ledge overhead, a continuous row of buildings, though none have their front walls now remaining. Doorways through each of the dividing walls afforded access along the whole line. A few rods up stream a little, niched cave-house, 14×5×6, divided into two equal compartments; a small, square window, just large enough for one to crawl through, was placed midway in the wall of each half. "We well might ask whether these little 'cubby-holes' had ever been used as residences, or, whether, as seems at first most likely, they might not have been 'caches,' or merely temporary places of refuge. While, no doubt, many of them were such, yet in the majority the evidences of use and the presence of long-continued fires, indicated by their smoke-blackened interiors, prove them to have been quite constantly occupied. Among all dwellers in mud-plastered houses, it is the practice to freshen up their habitations by repeated applications of clay, moistened to the proper consistency, and spread with the hands, the thickness of the coating depending upon its consistency. Every such application makes a building perfectly new, and many of the best sheltered cave-houses have just this appearance, as though they were but just vacated."

The grandest of all these cave shelters, perhaps, was that in the Montezuma cañon, the main building of which was forty-eight feet long, and built of well smoothed stones. "In the rubbish of the large house," says the report, "some small stone implements, rough, indented pottery in fragments, and a few arrow-points were found.... The whole appearance of the place and its surroundings indicates that the family or the little community who inhabited it were in good circumstances and the lords of the surrounding country. Looking out from one of their houses, with a great dome of solid rock overhead, that echoed and re-echoed every word uttered with marvelous distinctness, and below them a steep descent of one hundred feet, to the broad, fertile valley of the Rio San Juan, covered with waving fields of maize and scattered groves of majestic cottonwoods, these old people, whom even the imagination can hardly clothe with reality, must have felt a sense of security that even the incursions of their barbarous foes could hardly have disturbed."

But I cannot linger over these extremely interesting and instructive ruins, nor stop to tell of the variety and skill shown in their architecture, in their storage of water and food, in their means of defense, in their manufacture of utensils, and the art with which their life was adorned. Out of the hundreds of leveled pueblos, cave-houses, towers, water-reservoirs and wasted fields which once bore bountiful harvests, I have only culled one here and there. I may say that not only every cañon which cuts down through the mesa to the Rio San Juan and into all of its lower tributary valleys, but many of the plateaus between, are occupied by the ruins which show an Indian occupation previous to the present savages, and of a different rank, if not of another race.

Particularly accessible to the ordinary tourist are the ruins to be seen in the Animas valley, about twenty-five miles south of Durango. These are said to consist of a pueblo three hundred and sixteen feet long by nearly one hundred wide, which evidently rose to the height of many stories. Some of the lower rooms in this great house are still standing, and skeletons and relics of great interest have been taken from them. In the center of the ruins is a subterranean, cistern-like chamber, described as about sixty feet in diameter, and plastered everywhere within with hard cement. This, probably, was the main _estufa_ of the village. Other lesser ruins and remains of farming operations are scattered about the vicinity, and are well worthy of exploration.

Just who and what were these aborigines (if so they were, which is very doubtful), opinions differ; but that in the Village Indians of New Mexico and Arizona we see to-day their lineal descendants, seems indisputable.

Traditions are few, that have any value, but the partial and imperfect researches which have already been made in the southwest enable us to make out dimly some strangely tragical scheme of history for this race of men whose sun set so long ago.

It is evident, for example, that the most ancient of these prehistoric ruins are those found along the immediate banks of the water-courses in the valleys. There the forerunners of the troublous times to come dwelt in peace and prosperity among their fields, which seem to have stretched over many times the area of land now possible to be cultivated. There is no question, indeed, that in those days rains were more frequent and the climate far more favorable to agriculture than at present. But how many generations--how many centuries--ago was this? And how did the change of climate, which turned the fertility of the land into desolation, come about--by slow degrees, through sudden cataclysm, or with comparatively rapid advance? Probably gradually.

But it does not seem to have been as the result of meteorological disfavor that they abandoned their populous pueblos in the pleasant valleys and began to build refuge homes in the niches of the cañon's wall, or on the crest of inaccessible mesas. From the mountainous north came enemies they were unable to resist, and which devastated their fields and laid waste their towns, as we have seen at Ojo Caliente, and as is written in the ruins of a hundred spring-side pueblos throughout the San Juan valley. No doubt they still cultivated their fields as well as they could between the times of attack, building temporary summer-houses and spending the idle winter in their rocky fastnesses, or retreating to them when warned of an attack. Their watch-towers on every exposed point, tell how sharp and incessant was the lookout they kept against the well-mounted and savage nomadic tribes, the prehistoric Utes and Apaches and Navajos, who were to them as the Scythians and the Vandals and Goths to the weakened empire of effeminate Rome.

But after a time a breathing space seems to have come to the harassed people, and they felt themselves safe to return to their ancient valleys and reinhabit and recultivate them. Certain houses, built upon the substratum of older fallen structures, seem to show this new era of reoccupation, which in some places lasted only a short time before enemies and drought together compelled complete abandonment, while in other more southern strongholds were founded the pueblos that still exist, at Taos, Acoma, Zuñi, and on the Moqui mesas.

When, some day, you can ride down the Mancos in a railway car and get flying glimpses of the ruined houses--if your eyes are sharp to see and your mind quick to apprehend,--do not forget how populous was this dry and garish valley during those bygone days, when the Crusaders were waking up Europe, and all that was known of America was that the Basque fishermen went to the fog-banks of an icy western coast to catch codfish. I am more sure of your interest here, though, than in many other far-paraded precincts of this marvelous realm, I am taking you so swiftly through in my pilgrimage on wheels. And I cannot enforce my point better,--leave an impression more lasting and graceful on your minds of those gentle shepherds and husbandmen (but no less brave warriors), who were here so long before us, than by giving you the poem my clever-brained and genial friend has written in Swinburnian measure about them:

"In the sad South-west, in the mystical Sunland,
Far from the toil, and the turmoil of gain;
Hid in the heart of the only--the one land
Beloved of the Sun, and bereft of the rain;
The one weird land where the wild winds blowing,
Sweep with a wail o'er the plains of the dead,
A ruin, ancient beyond all knowing,
Rears its head

"On the cañon's side, in the ample hollow,
That the keen winds carved in ages past,
The Castle walls, like the nest of a swallow
Have clung and have crumbled to this at last.
The ages since man's foot has rested
Within these walls, no man may know;
For here the fierce grey eagle nested
Long ago.

"Above those walls the crags lean over,
Below, they dip to the river's bed;
Between, fierce wingéd creatures hover,
Beyond, the plain's wild waste is spread.
No foot has climbed the pathway dizzy,
That crawls away from the blasted heath,
Since last it felt the ever busy
Foot of Death.

"In that haunted Castle--it must be haunted,
For men have lived here, and men have died,
And maidens loved, and lovers daunted,
Have hoped and feared, have laughed and sighed--
In that haunted Castle the dust has drifted,
But the eagles only may hope to see
What shattered Shrines and what Altars rifted,
There may be.

"The white, bright rays of the sunbeam sought it,
The cold, clear light of the moon fell here,
The west wind sighed, and the south wind brought it,
Songs of Summer year after year.
Runes of Summer, but mute and runeless,
The Castle stood; no voice was heard,
Save the harsh, discordant, wild and tuneless
Cry of bird.

"The spring rains poured, and the torrent rifted
A deeper way;--the foam-flakes fell,
Held for a moment poised and lifted,
Down to a fiercer whirlpool's hell.
On the Castle tower no guard, in wonder,
Paused in his marching to and fro,
For on the turret the mighty thunder
Found no foe.

"No voice of Spring,--no Summer glories
May wake the warders from their sleep,
Their graves are made by the sad Dolores,
And the barren headlands of Hoven-weep.
Their graves are nameless--Their race forgotten,
Their deeds, their words, their fate, are one
With the mist, long ages past begotten,
Of the Sun.

"Those castled cliffs they made their dwelling,
They lived and loved, they fought and fell,
No faint, far voice comes to us telling
More than those crumbling walls can tell.
They lived their life, their fate fulfilling,
Then drew their last faint, faltering breath,
Their hearts, congealed, clutched by the chilling
Hand of Death.

"Dismantled towers, and turrets broken,
Like grim and war-worn braves who keep
A silent guard, with grief unspoken,
Watch o'er the graves by the Hoven-weep.
The nameless graves of a race forgotten;
Whose deeds, whose words, whose fate are one
With the mist, long ages past begotten,
Of the Sun."