Part 1 (1/2)

Through Our Unknown Southwest.

by Agnes C. Laut.

INTRODUCTION

I am sitting in the doorway of a house of the Stone Age--neolithic, paleolithic, troglodytic man--with a roofless city of the dead lying in the valley below and the eagles circling with lonely cries along the yawning caverns of the cliff face above.

My feet rest on the topmost step of a stone stairway worn hip-deep in the rocks of eternity by the moccasined tread of foot-prints that run back, not to A. D. or B. C., but to those post-glacial aeons when the advances and recessions of an ice invasion from the Poles left seas where now are deserts; when giant sequoia forests were swept under the sands by the flood waters, and the mammoth and the dinosaur and the brontosaur wallowed where now nestle farm hamlets.

Such a tiny doorway it is that Stone Man must have been obliged to welcome a friend by hauling him shoulders foremost through the entrance, or able to speed the parting foe down the steep stairway with a rock on his head. Inside, behind me, is a little dome-roofed room, with calcimined walls, and squared stone meal bins, and a little, high fireplace, and stone pillows, and a homemade flour mill in the form of a flat _metate_ stone with a round grinding stone on top. From the shape and from the remnants of pottery shards lying about, I suspect one of these hewn alcoves in the inner wall was the place for the family water jar.

On each side the room are tiny doorways leading by stone steps to apartments below and to rooms above; so that you may begin with a valley floor room which you enter by ladder and go halfway to the top of a 500-foot cliff by a series of interior ladders and stone stairs. Flush with the floor at the sides of these doors are the most curious little round ”cat holes” through the walls--”cat holes” for a people who are not supposed to have had any cats; yet the little round holes run from room to room through all the walls.

On some of the house fronts are painted emblems of the sun. Inside, round the wall of the other houses, runs a drawing of the plumed serpent--”Awanya,” guardian of the waters--whose presence always presaged good cheer of water in a desert land growing drier and drier as the Glacial Age receded, and whose serpent emblem in the sky you could see across the heavens of a starry night in the Milky Way. Lying about in other cave houses are stone ”bells” to call to meals or prayers, and cobs of corn, and prayer plumes--owl or turkey feathers. Don't smile and be superior! It isn't a hundred years ago since the common Christian idea of angels was feathers and wings; and these Stone People lived--well, when _did_ they live? Not later than 400 A. D., for that was when the period of desiccation, or drought from the recession of the glacial waters, began.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ruins of South House, one of the great communal dwellings of Frijoles Canon, after excavation]

”The existence of man in the Glacial Period is established,” says Winch.e.l.l, the great western geologist, ”that implies man during the period when flourished the large mammals now extinct. In short, there is as much evidence pointing to America as to Asia as the primal birthplace of man.” Now the ice invasion began hundreds of thousands of years ago; and the last great recession is set at about 10,000 years; and the implements of Stone Age man are found contemporaneous with the glacial silt.

There is not another section in the whole world where you can wander for days amid the houses and dead cities of the Stone Age; _where you can literally shake hands with the Stone Age_.

Shake hands? Isn't that putting it a little strong? It doesn't sound like the dry-as-dust dead collections of museums. It may be putting it strong; but it is also meticulously and simply--true. A few doors away from the cave-house where I sit, lies a little body--no, not a mummy! We are not in Egypt. We are in America; but we often have to go to Egypt to find out the wonders of America. Lies a little body, that of a girl of about eighteen or twenty, swathed in otter and beaver skins with leg bindings of woven yucca fiber something like modern burlap. Woven cloth from 20,000 to 10,000 B. C.? Yes! That is pretty strong, isn't it? 'Tis when you come to consider it; our European ancestors at that date were skipping through Hyrcanian Forests clothed mostly in the costume Nature gave them; Herbert Spencer would have you believe, skipping round with simian gibbering monkey jaws and claws, clothed mostly in apes' hair.

Yet there lies the little lady in the cave to my left, the long black hair s.h.i.+ny and l.u.s.trous yet, the skin dry as parchment still holding the finger bones together, head and face that of a human, not an ape, all well preserved owing to the gypsum dust and the high, dry climate in which the corpse has lain.

In my collection, I have bits of cloth taken from a body which archaeologists date not later than 400 A. D. nor earlier than 8,000 B.

C., and bits of corn and pottery from water jars, placed with the dead to sustain them on the long journey to the Other World. For the last year, I have worn a pin of obsidian which you would swear was an Egyptian scarab if I had not myself obtained it from the ossuaries of the Cave Dwellers in the American Southwest.

Come out now to the cave door and look up and down the canon again! To right and to left for a height of 500 feet the face of the yellow _tufa_ precipice is literally pitted with the windows and doors of the Stone Age City. In the bottom of the valley is a roofless dwelling of hundreds of rooms--”the cormorant and the bittern possess it; the owl also and the raven dwell in it; stones of emptiness; thorns in the palaces; nettles and brambles in the fortresses; and the screech owl shall rest there.”

Listen! You can almost hear it--the fulfillment of Isaiah's old prophecy--the lonely ”hoo-hoo-hoo” of the turtle dove; and the lonelier cry of the eagle circling, circling round the empty doors of the upper cliffs! Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the canon in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez Mountains; and one night from my camp in this canon, I heard the coyotes howling from the empty caves.

Below are the roofless cities of the dead Stone Age, and the dancing floors, and the irrigation ca.n.a.ls used to this day, and the stream leaping down from the Jemez snows, which must once have been a rus.h.i.+ng torrent where wallowed such monsters as are known to-day only in modern men's dreams.

Far off to the right, where the wors.h.i.+pers must always have been in sight of the snowy mountains and have risen to the rising of the desert sun over cliffs of ocher and sands of orange and a sky of turquoise blue, you can see the great Kiva or Ceremonial Temple of the Stone Age people who dwelt in this canon. It is a great concave hollowed out of the white pumice rock almost at the cliff top above the tops of the highest yellow pines. A darksome, cavernous thing it looks from this distance, but a wonderful mid-air temple for wors.h.i.+pers when you climb the four or five hundred ladder steps that lead to it up the face of a white precipice sheer as a wall. What sights the priests must have witnessed! I can understand their wors.h.i.+ping the rising sun as the first rays came over the canon walls in a s.h.i.+eld of fire. Alcoves for meal, for incense, for water urns, mark the inner walls of this chamber, too.

Where the ladder projects up through the floor, you can descend to the hollowed underground chamber where the priests and the council met; a darksome, eerie place with _sipapu_--the holes in the floor--for the mystic Earth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his people. Don't smile at that idea of an Earth Spirit! What do we tell a man, who has driven his nerves too hard in town?--To go back to the Soil and let Dame Nature pour her invigorating energies into him! That's what the Earth Spirit, the Great Earth Magician, signified to these people.

Curious how geology and archaeology agree on the rise and evanishment of these people. Geology says that as the ice invasion advanced, the northern races were forced south and south till the Stone Age folk living in the roofless City of the Dead on the floor of the valley were forced to take refuge from them in the caves hollowed out of the cliff.

That was any time between 20,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. Archaeology says as the Utes and the Navajo and the Apache--Asthapascan stock--came ramping from the North, the Stone Men were driven from the valleys to the inaccessible cliffs and mesa table lands. ”It was not until the nomadic robbers forced the pueblos that the Southwestern people adopted the crowded form of existence,” says Archaeology. Sounds like an explanation of our modern skysc.r.a.pers and the real estate robbers of modern life, doesn't it?

Then, as the Glacial Age had receded and drought began, the cave men were forced to come down from their cliff dwellings and to disperse.

Here, too, is another story. There may have been a great cataclysm; for thousands of tons of rock have fallen from the face of the canon, and the rooms remaining are plainly only back rooms. The Hopi and Moki and Zuni have traditions of the ”Heavens raining fire;” and good cobs of corn have been found embedded in what may be solid lava, or fused adobe.

Pajarito Plateau, the Spanish called this region--”place of the bird people,” who lived in the cliffs like swallows; but thousands of years before the Spanish came, the Stone Age had pa.s.sed and the cliff people dispersed.

What in the world am I talking about, and where? That's the curious part of it. If it were in Egypt, or Petrae, or amid the sand-covered columns of Phrygia, every tourist company in the world would be arranging excursions to it; and there would be special chapters devoted to it in the supplementary readers of the schools; and you wouldn't be--well, just _au fait_, if you didn't know; but do you know this wonder-world is in America, your own land? It is less than forty miles from the regular line of continental travel; $6 a single rig out, $14 a double; $1 to $2 a day at the ranch house where you can board as you explore the amazing ancient civilization of our own American Southwest. This particular ruin is in the Frijoles Canon; but there are hundreds, thousands, of such ruins all through the Southwest in Colorado and Utah and Arizona and New Mexico. By joining the Archaeological Society of Santa Fe, you can go out to these ruins even more inexpensively than I have indicated.