Mesa Verde National Park

MESA VERDE National Pa^rR C O L O IV A. I> O UNITED STATES RAILROAD ADMINISTRATION N AT IONAL PARK. SERIES NORTHERN PORTION OF SPRUCE TREE HOUSE Second in size of the numerous ruins in the Park. It is 216 feet long and contained 114 rooms, including 8 kivas, or circular, underground, ceremonial chambers. An Appreciation of Mesa Verde National Park By DR. J. WALTER FEWKES, Chief, Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution Written Especially for the United States Railroad Administration OME with me to the Mesa Verde, and with me lift the veil that conceals the past and reveals the culture of an unlettered people whose history has been forgotten. What fascination to wander through the streets of a ruined city, to enter the long deserted sanctuaries, examine the paintings and figures on the walls, and live in imagination the life of an ancient people! Time was when American travelers sought distant lands to commune in this way with the past, but now we can turn to our own country. Our great rail roads will carry the tourist near the towns once populous but now deserted and in ruins. The Mesa Verde National Park, containing many of these ancient monuments, has been protected by our Government for this special purpose. It invites all with little discomfort to withdraw from the world of the present with its bustle and noise to live mentally for a time in the past of our own country. Every one who has accepted an invitation to visit this Park has declared his intention to return. Why this lure of the Mesa Verde? Why does mention of its forgotten people cause the weary face of the careworn to relax and his eye to brighten with the light of joy? Because the mystery kindles the imagination and revivifies their life and struggles. Who were these ancient people? When did they live and what became of them? These questions are perennial in their interest. The Mesa Verde beckons the visitor to its canyons, where once lived the dusky maid who ground the corn in a primitive mill as she sang her song in unison with her mates; here one can see the crude fire places where the food was cooked, and the rooms where the priest worshipped his gods; and you can wander through the streets now deserted but once filled with the busy life of the little brown people. There can be seen also the foot-holes cut in the rock where the women climbed from the spring to their eerie dwellings carrying their jars of water. No book can take the place of experience or impress the mind in the same way. One must see for himself these homes in their proper settings in the canyon walls, with the hazy mountains on the distant horizon; the lofty rocky pinnacle that like a phantom ship sails the valley on the south; the Sleeping Ute, far behind which was the house of the cliff dwellers' sun god; and Lookout Mountain, like a sentinel guarding the approaches. Let us then turn our steps from the rush of the modern commercial world to the silence of the Mesa Verde, where the high mesa, cedar clad, and furrowed by deep canyons, refreshes the spirit of man, and where imagination— parent of poetry—speaks to us of a people unlike ourselves that once flourished and disappeared. Page three To the American People: Uncle Sam asks you to be his guest. He has prepared for you the choice places of this continent—places of grandeur, beauty and of wonder. He has built roads through the deep-cut canyons and beside happy streams, which will carry you into these places in comfort, and has provided lodgings and food in the most distant and inaccessible places that you might enjoy yourself and realize as little as possible the rigors of the pioneer traveler's life. These are for you. They are the playgrounds of the people. To see them is to make more hearty your affection and admiration for America. Secretary of the Interior Mesa Verde National Park HERE is always a fascination of the Mancos River. These side canyons about the unexplainable — are usually devoid of streams, but in ages and the attraction becomes past erosion worked enormous cavities in greater if we are enabled to their sides toward the top, and it was in come in contact with the these places, under the overhanging mysterious object and endeavor to con cliffs, which offered such promise of pro jure up an explanation. In Mesa Verde tection from the elements and from their National Park opportunities for such enemies, that the prehistoric pioneers speculation are offered lavishly. built their homes. And one cannot fail The southwestern portion of the United to admire the ability displayed in their States contains many ruins of dwellings choice. From the Cliff Dwellers' stand and other structures left by prehistoric point the sites selected were ideal. peoples who had reached a high degree Most of us are not ethnologists, but it of civilization long before the discovery is our privilege to make conjectures in of America. These people are supposed our own humble way. While eminent to have been the ancestors of the Pueblo archaeologists have solved many of the Indians, although differing from them in leading mysteries in connection with many particulars, one of the more obvious these long-vanished people, the ordinary being the fact that most of the modern visitor may still wander among the ruins Pueblos build their houses of sun-baked of their remarkable habitations and bricks (adobe), whereas the ancients reach his own conclusions in regard to used cut stone. the many interesting problems that are Of all the groups of these ruins, those always presenting themselves. on the Mesa Verde, in Montezuma There are so many ruins in the Park, County, southwestern Colorado, are con and reached with the minimum of time ceded to be the largest, best preserved and exertion, that the contemplative man and most picturesquely situated, and it can be much by himself and, unhampered was for these reasons that Congress in by the presence of other visitors, can 1906 set aside 48,966 acres of this section find an absorbing occupation in seeking and designated it Mesa Verde National to discover the motives that governed Park. the selection of certain building sites Probably the most striking feature of or the adoption of certain features in this mesa (or tableland) is the succession construction—the placing of a door at of great gashes in its contour, leading this point, the use of a peculiar window southward and entering the larger canyon there, the insertion of a port-hole in a P a f\e four A TYPICAL LANDSCAPE IN MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK wall with an angle quite oblique to the so many are found, the children playing latter, or the strange and most interesting around their homes and upon the adjacent arrangement of the kivas, which a face cliffs—in fact, one can almost hear their tious visitor has termed "prehistoric club- childish cries and laughter. And some rooms." where about the homes we can imagine In the less carefully finished portions of the weavers at work making the cotton the walls the imaginative man will cloth and the feather cloth, specimens doubtless place his fingers on the mortar of which are still found in the ruins. At in the marks left by prehistoric hands— another place the women are grinding and ponder. While these primitive corn with stones. Out in the open, a man artisans were humbly and laboriously is sharpening tools and weapons on a fashioning the abodes in which this great rock, which is still in place. Some civilization was being developed inde of the inhabitants are at work in the fields, pendent of Europe, what was happening probably on the mesa above the dwelling, on that continent? Were the Crusaders cultivating the corn, pumpkins and then faring forth to the Holy Land? squashes, the evidences of which are so Or did the Cliff Dwellers ante-date that plentiful in the debris. At another place time? Had Pompeii been destroyed? the potters are carefully fashioning the Had Caesar landed in Britain? Various vessels which they made in such per have been the conjectures as to the period fection, and not far away are the dec of occupancy of these dwellings, and one orators, painstakingly mixing colors and may make guesses ad libitum. placing designs upon the ware. There There is an especial fascination in the was surely the hum of busy life on the ancient trails, where these primitive Mesa Verde in the old days! For the Cliff people's sandaled feet wore smooth the Dwellers were an industrious people. steps which they had laboriously cut in If nothing else, the construction of their the solid rock. And it is not at all houses bears conclusive evidence of this; difficult to imagine the use of these steps and their environment, tending to a in that far-off time—the huntsmen setting vigorous life, was not calculated to pro forth in the early morning with their well duce an anaemic race. In the primitive made bows and flint-pointed arrows, arts they had made remarkable advances, the girls and women proceeding with their and it is to be regretted that they had not household duties, gracefully carrying on evolved some system of writing more their heads the large water jars, of which elaborate than the simple signs which P\a g e five Page six are occasionally found on their walls.

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