If It Is Not Done To Her Liking, She Allows The
Process To Continue; Otherwise The Banked Up Earth Is Removed, And The
Contents Of The Pit Withdrawn And Placed Upon Adjacent Rocks To Dry.
It now
looks like large cakes of brownish fibres, thoroughly saturated in
molasses.
In taste it is sweet and fairly palatable, though the fibres
render it a food that requires a large amount of mastication. It has great
staying qualities, contains much nutrition, and will keep for months, even
years. I have eaten pieces of it that were sweet and good over three years
after it was made.
Unlimited Fragments of Pottery. In my own wanderings of nearly twenty years
in the Grand and Havasu Canyons and their smaller tributary gorges, I have
discovered scores of these cliff-dwellings. Ruins uncounted are to be found
scattered along the rim, within five to ten miles of the Canyon, and
thousands of pieces of pottery of old design have been picked up by the
visitors of the past fifteen years.
On the Shinumo, opposite the Bass Trail, are several cliff-dwellings, and
as late as the summer of 1908 a young couple camped there for a month on
their wedding trip, excavated and discovered a fine stone axe, numbers of
pieces of pottery of three different kinds, several pieces with holes bored
with the primitive drill of flint or obsidian, a fine spearhead of flint,
and a number of arrow points.
Similarity of Cliff Ruins. The whole region of Arizona, New Mexico,
Southern Utah, and Southern Colorado abounds in these cliff ruins. The
likeness of their appearance, and the fact that everything excavated is of
a similar kind, seems to indicate a relationship, both in time of
occupancy and in the peoples who built and tenanted them.
The questions now naturally arise: Who were these people? What was their
life? Whence did they come? Whither have they gone?
The Race of the Cliff Dwellers. In the earlier days of America's serious
researches into her own archaeology, those who led our thought on the
subject, though personally they had not seen the cliff-dwellings, declared
them to be the homes of the Aztecs, one of the Mexican races found by
Cortes below the City of Mexico. Hence today we find people talking about
the Aztecs and their ruined homes in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and
Utah. We used to read of the wonder of the discoverers of these dwellings,
at finding them so small. The doorways were small, the rooms themselves
less than six feet in width and length, and the ceilings so low that a
five-foot man could not stand upright in them. It was reasonable therefore
to infer, said these discoverers, that the builders and inhabitants of the
cliff-dwellings were an exceedingly small people, dwarfs, as in no other
way could the rooms be occupied. And thousands of people who have read
about these ruins still hold to the idea that they were inhabited by
dwarfs. But who the dwarfs were, or where they have gone to, no one seems
to have the remotest idea. But by and by, such men as Bandelier, the
Mendeleffs, Stevenson, Cushing, Fewkes, Hough, Hodge and Hewett, began to
investigate. They took the field, and carefully explored hundreds of ruins.
Then, some of them with a profound knowledge of the Spanish tongue, went
through all the records and diaries of the old conquistadores and the
padres who accompanied them. They found out all that the early Spaniards
had discovered and conjectured. In the meantime, they began to study the
languages of the Indians of the regions nearest to the ruins, and question
them as to their myths, legends, and traditions bearing upon the ruins, and
their researches speedily bore fruit.
Storage Houses. First of all they classified their discoveries. Though
scores of skeletons were found, there was not a single dwarf specimen among
them. This seemed to be a death blow to the dwarf theory. Stone slabs were
used as doors. Necessarily these were comparatively small, since even
though large slabs might have been found, they could not have been moved by
the cliff-dwellers, on account of their weight. This, in itself, accounted
for the size of the doorways. It had long been noticed that these small
dwellings were scattered profusely where there were larger dwellings, and
finally it became known that the small dwellings were not used for
habitations at all. They were merely storage houses for corn and other
edibles, farmed by the inhabitants of the larger dwellings. On one
occasion, some years ago, I was exploring one of the side gorges of the
Havasu. We had seen scores of the cliff dwellings, perched high in the
walls of the canyons, until at length one particularly well-built, though
exceedingly small structure attracted my attention. My guide was the most
intelligent and communicative of the Havasupai Indians, and he immediately
responded to my query by crying out: "Meala-hawa! Meala-hawa!" (Corn
house). Further inquiry revealed the fact that all the small dwellings were
but storage houses for corn and other foods.
Textiles. Excavation brought forth delicate textiles in cotton and yucca
fibre, well-woven, and in a remarkable state of preservation - silent
testimony to the dry climate, and the fact that the dwellings were so
constructed that rain and snow were practically excluded. Basketry and
pottery in large quantities were found, all showing ability in
manufacture, also artistic skill, anti-aesthetic conception in the form of
the articles and the designs portrayed upon them.
Excavated Relics. Stone hammers and axes, obsidian, flint and other
arrow-heads, spear-heads, and knives, mortars and pestles, metates or meal
grinders, obsidian and flint drills for making holes through stone or
shell, bows and arrows, - the bows of tough wood often brought from afar,
and the arrows pointed with chipped flint or obsidian, deftly and securely
tied to the shaft with tough and durable strings of sinews; shell beads,
pipes, bone awls, punches, needles, etc.; stone fetiches in semblance of
animals, the like of which were never seen on land or sea; ornaments of
shell, turquoise and onyx, and even a kind of jade; sandals and mats of
yucca fibre, and exquisitely delicate feather robes, - these are some of the
things that the excavators have found.
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