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Updated: July 2, 2025
Continuing through great parks and plains he finally descends to the well-wooded valley of Oak creek, an affluent of Rio Verde. Here he finds evidences of aboriginal occupancy on all sides ruins of buildings, fortified hilltops, pictographs, and irrigating ditches testifying that there was at one time a considerable population in this valley.
The trail by which I first entered Havasu Canyon is the one to the left, looking into the Canyon. Topocobya Spring. Arrived at the spring, the stock can be watered, packs removed, beds unrolled, and camp made for the night. The water, however, is not of the best for drinking purposes, though the Indians habitually use it. Pictographs.
There is always some evidence of human occupancy, often many pictographs on the back wall, as in an example in the lower part of the canyon shown in plate LV. This occurs at point 2 on the map, in a cove perhaps 100 feet across, with caves on the northern and southern sides.
They are about four inches in diameter. Their object is not apparent. In one of the basement rooms of the second building are a series of pictographs upon a plastered wall. Our limited time would not permit a sketch. It was built of cobblestone and adobe mortar. Pit-holes indicate the form and plan of the inclosing rooms, but the ruin is too indistinct to form a clear idea of its structure.
There are no pictographs near this ruin, and no signs of former visits by white men. Midway between Honanki and the second Palatki ruin a small ancient house of the same character as the latter was discovered. This ruin is very much exposed, and therefore the walls are considerably worn, but six well-marked inclosures, indicative of former rooms, were readily made out.
On the surface of the sloping rock, at this point nearly flat, there are traces of a circular kiva 18 or 20 feet in diameter. These traces occur at a point about midway between the southern and northern ends of the lower ledge and some 30 feet below it. The cliff walls, both of the lower and upper ledges, are covered with pictographs in white, red, and yellow.
This style of hair dressing was mentioned by the early Spanish explorers, and is represented in pictographs of ancient date; but if all these evidences of its antiquity are insufficient the testimony afforded by the pictures on certain food-basins from Sikyatki leaves no doubt on this point.
One of the most interesting of the pictographs pecked in the rock is a figure which, variously modified, is a common decoration on cliff-dweller pottery from the Verde valley region to the ruins of the San Juan and its tributaries. This figure has the form of two concentric spirals, the ends of which do not join.
"But these traces, and such hieroglyphics, or, to be more exact pictographs, as I have been able to decipher from the old documents, tell of one country, or perhaps it was only a city, over which this great golden idol of Quitzel presided. "There is in some of these papers a description of the idol, which is not exactly a beauty, judged from modern standards.
There are no fragments of pottery about it, and small objects indicating former habitation are also wanting. A cedar had taken root where the floor once was, and its present great size shows considerable age. If any pictographs formerly existed in the adjacent cliff they have disappeared.
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