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Updated: May 28, 2025
A legend so hoary, that "the memory of man runneth not to the contrary", had assigned the outlines of this stone cutting to that dim dawn of primeval tribal life, which left its later traces in the Watch Tower of the Mancos, the Casa del Eco, and the "niche stairway of the Hovenweep".
Mr G. Nordenskiöld, who examined a number of cliff and other ruins in the Mancos canyon and the Mesa Verde region, adopts a very simple classification, as follows: I. Ruins in the valleys, on the plains, or on the plateaus.
Examples almost identical with those shown here are abundant in the Mancos ruins. It was probable they are of ceremonial rather than of decorative origin, and in this connection it may be stated that Mr Frank H. Cushing has observed in Zuñi the ceremony of marking the sides of a kiva hatchway with white bars closely resembling those shown in figure 73.
"'Minds me o' goin' to meetin' when I was a six-year-old," mused Mancos Mitch; "when Circuit's pencil got to smokin' over th' paper an' we-uns got so dedburned still, 'peared to me like I was back in th' little ol' meetin'-house in th' mosquito clearin', on th' banks o' th' Lee in ol' Uvalde County.
The mysterious mound-builders fade into comparative insignificance before the grander and more ancient cliff-dwellers, whose castles lift their towers amid the sands of Arizona and crown the terraced slopes of the Rio Mancos and the Hovenweap.
Ruins of clusters of small single houses built of cobble-stone and adobe mortar, and of large pueblos of the same material, are to be seen in the La Plata Valley, and in the Montezuma Valley, west of the Mancos River. On the Mancos River are a large number of cliff houses of stone, and also round towers of stone, of which the uses are not at present known.
No expedients were employed to make access either easier or more difficult, except that here and there series of hand and foot holes have been pecked in the rock. Steps, either constructed of masonry or cut in the rock, such as those found in the Mancos canyon and the Mesa Verde region, are never seen here.
As there is no positive knowledge as to when the cliff dwellers flourished, one man's guess on the subject is as good as another's. An important discovery was recently made near Mancos, Colorado, where a party of explorers found in some old cliff dwellings graves beneath graves that were entirely different from anything yet discovered.
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.
It should be added that in the section which accompanies it the roof of the tunnel appears to be supported by a series of small cross sticks, although no information on this point is afforded by the test. The examples which occur in De Chelly are apparently much ruder and more primitive than those of the Mancos, and only one of them approaches the latter in finish and elaboration.
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