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Temples, palaces, and magnificent monuments tell of the wealth which gold gives, a wealth, alas, which also enervated the vital forces, so that the Spanish and Portuguese met with but little serious resistance in their rapid conquests. Cliff-house on the Rio Mancos. House in a rock of the Montezuma Canon. Such are the facts with which we have to deal.
The size varies from a simple globular vessel not larger than a walnut to a jar of considerable size. Many show marks of previous use; others are as fresh as if made but yesterday. This form, although rare at Sikyatki, is represented by several specimens, and in mode of decoration is very similar to the cliff-house pottery.
So close is its likeness in form and texture to cliff-house pottery that the two may be regarded as identical. Moreover, it is not impossible that the object may have been brought to Tusayan from Tségi canyon, in the cliff-houses of which Hopi clans lived while Awatobi was in its prime, and, indeed, possibly after the tragedy of 1700.
Them was the days, I'm telling you you couldn't walk the street for miners out spending their money and a cliff-house like this with a good, tight roof, would bring in a hundred dollars a night, any time that it happened to rain.
The pictographs which are pecked in the cliff are, as a rule, older than those which are drawn or scratched, and resemble more closely those widely spread in the Pueblo area, for if the cliff-house people ever made painted pictographs, as there is every reason to believe they did, time has long ago obliterated them.
Grandpa Saylor stopped off at Pineville and spent a day or two on the head of Straight Creek with his former neighbors. The old home place was occupied by Jim Helton, who, when he sold his land to the coal company, moved into the Saylor house. He spent a day with the Heltons; he even visited the old cliff-house still and at twilight started down the creek for Pineville.
Of all patterns on ancient Tusayan ware, that of the terrace figures most closely resemble the geometrical ornamentation of cliff-house pottery, and there seems every reason to suppose that this form of design admits of a like interpretation. The evolution of this pattern from plaited basketry has been ably discussed by Holmes and Nordenskiöld, whose works have already been quoted in this memoir.
It is therefore the most complicated of all the exterior decorations which have thus far been considered. There is no symmetry in the arrangement of figures about a central axis, but rather a repetition of similar designs. The use of crosshatching is very common on the most ancient Pueblo ware, and is very common in designs on cliff-house pottery.
This custom of decorating the walls of a building with triangles placed at intervals on the upper edge of a dado is a feature of cliff-house kivas, as shown in Nordenskiöld's beautiful memoir on the cliff villages of Mesa Verde.
By intermarriage with nomadic races and from other causes the character of Pueblo consanguinity is no doubt somewhat different from that of their ancient kin, but the character of the culture, as shown by a comparison of cliff-house and modern objects, has not greatly changed.
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