Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/552

542[May 8, 1869] formed of alternate layers of small and large stones, held together with mortar.

Another pueblo, Chetho Kette, measures thirteen hundred feet in circumference, and was originally four stories high. It has the remains of a hundred and twenty-four rooms on the first story.

The most perfect of the ten ruined pueblos discovered by Lieut. Simpson, in the Cañon de Chaco, is that of Hungo Pavie (or the Crooked Nose). Its circumference, including the enclosed court, is eight hundred and seventy-two feet; it faces, as usual, the cardinal points, and contains one estufa, placed in the northern wing of the building.

One or more estufas have been discovered in each pueblo. Some are rectangular; others circular. There are similar ruins in the Valle de Chelly. The Navajo Indians, in whose country these pueblos are situated, say that they were built by Montezuma and his people, at the time of their emigration from north to south, and shortly before their dispersion on the banks of the Rio Grande, and over other parts of Mexico.

The country occupying the fork between the Great Colorado and the Colorado Chiquito forms a part of that vast table-land, the Colorado plateau, through which both these streams pass in deep cañons.

The land is cut up into lofty mesas of variable size, and is very arid and worthless. The seven Moqui villages crest the edges of some of the mesas which form the south-eastern encampment of the Colorado plateau. Further to the north-west, and nearer the Colorado, there is another group of pueblos in ruins, larger than those of the Moqui Indians, but situated, like them, on the flat summits of mesas, containing estufas, reservoirs, terraces, aqueducts, and walls of at least four stories high. No trace has as yet been found of their former inhabitants.

Next we come to the ruins on the Colorado Chiquito and its southern tributaries. There are ruins upon El Moro, ruins north of Zuñi, old Zuñi, and others along the Zuñi river; ruins also on the Rio Puerco of the west, amongst which our parties found abundance of pottery; and there are most extensive ruins in the main valley, both above the falls and between the falls, and the entrance of the cañon of the Chiquito, scattered along a fertile basin of at least a hundred miles in length. At Pueblo Creek, the remains of several fortified pueblos were found, crowning the heights which command Aztec Pass; but west of this point (longitude one hundred and thirteen degrees west), no other ruins have as yet been discovered.

Leaving the basin of the Colorado Chiquito, we pass southward to that of the Rio Gila, where the most extensive ruins of all are to be found. Some fine streams enter this river on the north, draining a country very little known, but of great interest, and containing many fertile valleys. The chief of these tributaries are the Rios Preito, Bonito, San Carlos, Salinas, and Rio Verde, which latter two unite before joining the Gila, twelve miles from the Pima villages, and lastly, the Agua Fia. The great New Mexican guide Lerou, started northward from the Pima villages in May, 1854, crossed over to the junction of the Salinas with the Rio Verde (also called Rio de San Francisco), ascended the latter stream, and crossed from it to the thirty-fifth parallel route along the Colorado Chiquito. He represents the Rio Verde as a fine large stream; in some cases rapid and deep, in others, spreading out into wide lagoons.

The ascent was by gradual steppes, stretching out on either side into plains which abounded in timber—pine, oak, ash, walnut, sycamore, and cotton-wood. The river banks were covered with ruins of stone houses and regular fortifications. They were built on the most fertile tracts of the valley, where were signs of acequias and of cultivation. The walls were of solid masonry, of rectangular form, some twenty or thirty paces in length, and from ten to fifteen feet in height. They were usually of two stories, with small apertures or loop-holes for defence when besieged, and reminded him strongly of the Moqui pueblos. At one place he encountered a well-built fortified town, ten miles distant from the nearest water.

Other travellers report many ruined pueblos along the Salinas, others on the San Carlos, and several very extensive ones in the fertile Tonto basin, which is drained by a tributary of the Salinas. Of many of the ruins on the Gila itself, and in the valleys of its southern tributaries, I can speak from personal knowledge. A little west of the northern extremity of the Burro mountains, the Rio Gila leaves the Santa Rita, and other ranges, and meanders for a distance of from seventy to a hundred miles through an open valley of considerable width. This long strip of fertile land is studded throughout with deserted pueblos, which at the present time belong almost entirely to the third class—viz., those of which the foundations