THE CITY OF THE DEAD IN FRIJOLES CANYON

I am sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction but fact. I am not speculating as to how those folk of neolithic times lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses where they lived, sitting on the floor with my feet resting on the steps of an entrance stone stairway worn hip-deep through the volcanic rock by the moccasined tread of aeons of ages. Through the cave door, looking for all the world from the outside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor of the valley a community house of hundreds of rooms, and a sacred kiva or ceremonial chamber where gods of fire and water were invoked, and a circular stone floor where men and women danced the May-pole before Julius Cæsar was born, before-if Egyptian archaeologists be correct-the dynasties of the Nile erected Pyramid and Sphinx to commemorate their own oblivion. To my right and left for miles-for twelve miles, to be correct-are thousands of such cave houses against the face of the cliff, as the one in which I now write. Boxed up by the snow-covered Jemez (Hamez) Mountains at one end, with a black basalt gash in the rock at the other end through which roars a mountain torrent and waterfalls too narrow for two men to walk abreast, with vertical walls of yellow pumice straight up and down as if leveled by a giant trowel, in this valley of the Frijoles waters once dwelt a nation, dead and gone before the Spaniards came to America, vanished leaving not the shadow of a record behind long before William the Conqueror crossed to England, contemporaneous, perhaps-for all science knows to the contrary-with that 20,000 B.C. Egyptian desert runner lying in the British Museum.

Lying in my tent camp last night listening to coyote and fox barking and to owls hooting from the dead silent city of the yellow cliff wall, I fell to wondering on this puzzle of archaeologist and historian-what desolated these bygone nations? The theory of desiccation, or drought, so plausible elsewhere, doesn’t hold for one minute when you are here on the spot; for there is the mountain brook brawling through the Valley not five minutes’ scramble from any one of these caves; and there on the far western sky-line are the snows of the Jemez Mountains, which must have fed this brook since this part of the earth began. Was it war, or pestilence, or captivity, that made of the populous city a den of wolves, a resort for hoot owl and bittern and fox? If pestilence, then why are the skeletons not found in the great ossuaries and masses that mark the pestilential destruction of other Indian races? There remain only the alternatives of war, or captivity; and of either, not the vestige of a shadow of a tradition remains. One man’s guess is as good as another’s; and the scientist’s guesses vary all the way from 8,000 B. C. to 400 A. D. So there you are! You have as good a right to a guess as the highest scientist of them all; and while I refrain from speculation, I want to put on record the definite, provable fact that these people of the Stone Age were not the gibbering, monkey-tailed maniacs of claw finger nails and simian jaw which the half-baked pseudo-evolutionist loves to picture of Stone Age denizens. As Jack Donovan, a character working at Judge Abbott’s in the Valley said-“Sure, monkey men wud a’ had a haard time scratchin’ thro’ thim cliffs and makin’ thim holes in the rocks.” Remnants of shard and pottery, structure of houses, decorations and woven cloths and skins found wrapped as cerements round the dead all prove that these men were a sedentary and for that age civilized people. When our Celt and Saxon ancestors were still chasing wild boars through the forests, these people were cultivating corn on the Upper and Lower Mesas. When Imperial Rome’s common populace boasted few garments but the ones in which they had been born, these people were wearing a cloth woven of fiber and rushes. When European courts trod the stately over floors of filthy rushes, these cliff dwellers had flooring of plaster and cement, and rugs of beaver and wolf and bear. All this you can see with your own eyes by examining the caves and skeletons of the Jemez Forests; and the fine glaze of the beautiful pottery work is as lost an art as the pigments of old Italy.

As you go into the Pecos Forests to play, so you go into the Jemez to dream. You go to Pecos to hunt and fish. So you do to the Jemez; but it is historic fact you are hunting and a reconstruction of the record of man you are fishing for. As the Pecos Forests appeal to the strenuous holiday hunter-the man who considers he has not had his fun till he has broken a leg killing a bear, or stood mid-waist in snow-water stringing fish on a line like beads on a string-so the Jemez appeals to the dreamer, the scholar, the scientist, the artist; and I can imagine no more ideal (nor cheaper) holiday than to join the American School of Archaeology, about which I have already spoken, that comes in here with scientists from every quarter of the world every midsummer to camp, and dig, and delve, and revel in the past of moonlight nights round campfires before retiring to sleeping quarters in the caves along the face of the cliff. The School has been a going concern for only a few years. Yet last year over 150 scientists came in from every quarter of the globe.

Spite of warnings to the contrary given to me both East and West, the trip to the Jemez is one of the easiest and cheapest you can make in America. You strike in from Santa Fe; and right here, let me set down as emphatically as possible, two or three things pleasant and unpleasant about Santa Fe.

First, it is the most picturesque and antique spot in America, not excepting Quebec. Color, age, leisure; a medley of races; sand-hills engirt by snow sky-line for eighty miles; the honking of a motor blending with the braying of a Mexican burro trotting to market loaded out of sight under a wood pile; Old Spain and New America; streets with less system and order about them than an ant hill, with a modern Woman’s Board of Trade that will make you mind your P’s and Q’s and toe the sanitary scratch if you are apt to be slack; the chimes, and chimes and chimes yet again of old Catholic churches right across from a Wild West Show where a throaty band is screeching Yankee-Doodle; little adobe houses where I never quite know whether I am entering by the front door or the back; the Palace where Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur, and eighty governors of three different nationalities preceded him, and where the Archaeological Society has its rooms with Lotave’s beautiful mural paintings of the Cliff Dwellers, and where the Historical Society has neither room nor money enough to do what it ought in a region that is such a mine of history. Such is Santa Fe; the only bit of Europe set down in America; I venture to say the only picturesque spot in America, yet undiscovered by the jaded globe-trotter.

Second, I want to put on record that Santa Fe should be black ashamed of itself for hiding its light under a bushel. Ask a Santa Fe man why in the world, with all its attraction of the picturesque, the antique, the snowy mountains, and the weak-lunged one’s ideal climate, it has so few tourists; and he answers you with a depreciatory shrug that “it’s off the main line.” “Off the main line?” So is Quebec off the main line; yet 200,000 Americans a year see it. So is Yosemite off the main line; and 10,000 people go out to it every year. I have never heard that the Nile and the Pyramids and the Sphinx were on the main line; yet foreigners yearly reap a fortune catering to visiting Americans. Personally, it is a delight to me to visit a place untrodden by the jaded globe-trotter, for I am one myself; but whether it is laziness that prevents Santa Fe blowing its own horn, or the old exclusive air bequeathed to it by the grand dons of Spain that is averse to sounding the brass band, I love the appealing, picturesque, inert laziness of it all; but I love better to ask: “Why go to Egypt, when you have the wonders of an Egypt unexplored in your own land? Why scour the crowded Alps when the snowy domes of the Santa Fe and Jemez and Sangre de Christo lie unexplored only an easy motor ride from your hotel?” If Santa Fe, as it is, were known to the big general public, 200,000 tourists a year would find delight within its purlieus; and while I like the places untrodden by travelers, still-being an outsider, myself,-I should like the outsiders to know the same delight Santa Fe has given me.

To finish with the things of the mundane, you strike in to Santa Fe from a desolate little junction called Lamy, where the railroad has built a picturesque little doll’s house of a hotel after the fashion of an old Spanish mansion. To reach the Jemez Forests where the ruins of the Cave Dwellers exist, you can drive or motor (to certain sections only) or ride. As the distance is forty miles plus, you will find it safer and more comfortable to drive. If you take a driver and a team, and keep both over two days, it will cost you from $10 to $14 for the round trip. If you go in on a burro, you can buy the burro outright for $5 or $10. (Don’t mind if your feet do drag on the ground. It will save being pitched.) If you go out with the American School of Archaeology (Address Santa Fe for particulars) your transportation will cost you still less, perhaps not $2. Once out, in the canyons of the Cave Dwellers, you can either camp out with your own tenting and food; or put up at Judge Abbott’s hospitable ranch house; or quarter yourself free of charge in one of the thousands of cliff caves and cook your own food; or sleep in the caves and pay for your meals at the ranch. At most, your living expenses will not exceed $2 a day. If you do your own cooking, they need not be $1 a day.

One of the stock excuses for Americans not seeing their own country is that the cost is so extortionate. Does this sound extortionate?

I drove out by livery because I was not sure how else to find the way. We left Santa Fe at six A. M., the clouds still tingeing the sand-hills. I have heard Eastern art critics say that artists of the Southwest laid on their colors too strongly contrasted, too glaring, too much brick red and yellow ocher and purple. I wish such critics had driven out with me that morning from Santa Fe. Gregoire Pedilla, the Mexican driver, grew quite concerned at my silence and ran off a string of good-natured nonsense to entertain me; and all the while, I wanted nothing but quiet to revel in the intoxication of shifting color. Twenty miles more or less, we rattled over the sand-hills before we began to climb in earnest; and in that time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande and left the railroad behind and passed a deserted lumber camp and met only two Mexican teams on the way.

From below, the trail up looks appalling. It seems to be an ash shelf in pumice-stone doubling back and back on itself, up and up, till it drops over the top of the sky-line; but the seeming riskiness is entirely deceptive. Travel wears the soft volcanic tufa hub deep in ash dust, so that the wheels could not slide off if they tried; and once you are really on the climb, the ascent is much more gradual than it looks. In fact, our horses took it at a trot without urging. A certain Scriptural dame came to permanent grief from a habit of looking back; but you will miss half the joy of going up to the Pajarito Plateau if you do not look back towards Santa Fe. The town is hidden in the sand-hills. The wreaths have gone off the mountain, and the great white domes stand out from the sky for a distance of eighty miles plain as if at your feet, with the gashes of purple and lilac where the passes cut into the range. Then your horses take their last turn and you are on top of a foothill mesa and see quite plainly why you have to drive 40 miles in order to go 20. Here, White Rock Canyon lines both sides of the Rio Grande-precipices steep and sheer as walls, cut sharp off at the top as a huge square block; and coming into this canyon at right angles are the canyons where lived the ancient Cliff Dwellers-some of them hundreds of feet above the Rio Grande, with opening barely wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible canyons, you must drive up over the mesa, though the driver takes you from eight to ten thousand feet up and down again over cliffs like a stair.

We lunched in a little water canyon, which gashed the mesa side where a mountain stream came down. Such a camping place in a dry land is not to be passed within two hours of lunching time, for in some parts of the Southwest many of the streams are alkali; and a stream from the snows is better than wine. Beyond our lunching place came the real reason for this particular canyon being inaccessible to motors-a climb steep as a stair over a road of rough bowlders with sharp climbing turns, which only a Western horse can take. Then, we emerged on the high upper mesa-acres and acres of it, thousands of acres of it, open like a park but shaded by the stately yellow pine, and all of it above ordinary cloud-line, still girt by that snowy range of opal peaks beyond. We followed the trail at a rattling pace-the Archaeological School had placed signs on the trees to Frijoles Canyon-and presently, by great mounds of building stone covered feet deep by the dust and debris of ages, became aware that we were on historic ground. Nor can the theory of drought explain the abandonment of this mesa. While it rains heavily only two months in the year-July and August-the mesa is so high that it is subject to sprinkling rains all months of the year; to be sure not enough for springs, but ample to provide forage and grow corn; and for water, these sky-top dwellers had access to the water canyons both before and behind. What hunting ground it must have been in those old days! Even yet you are likely to meet a flock of wild turkey face to face; or see a mountain lion slink away, or hear the bark of coyote and fox.

“Is this it, Gregoire?” I asked. The mound seemed irregularly to cover several acres-pretty extensive remains, I thought.

“Ah, no-no Senorita-wait,” warned Gregoire expectantly.

I had not to wait long. The wagon road suddenly broke off short and plumb as if you tossed a biscuit over the edge of the Flatiron roof. I got out and looked down and then-went dumb! Afterwards, Mrs. Judge Abbott told me they thought I was afraid to come down. It wasn’t that! The thing so far surpassed anything I had ever dreamed or seen; and the color-well-those artists accused of over-coloration could not have over-colored if they had tried. Pigments have not been invented that could do it!

Picture to yourself two precipices three times the height of Niagara, three times the height of the Metropolitan Tower, sheer as a wall of blocked yellow and red masonry, no wider apart than you can shout across, ending in the snows of the Jemez to the right, shut in black basalt walls to the left, forested with the heavy pines to the very edge and down the blocky tiers of rocks and escarpments running into blind angles where rain and sun have dyed the terra cotta pumice blood-red. And picture the face of the cliff under your feet, the sides of the massive rocks eroded to the shapes of tents and tepees and beehives, pigeon-holed by literally thousands of windows and doors and arched caves and winding recess and portholes-a city of the dead, silent as the dead, old almost as time!

The wind came soughing up the canyon with the sound of the sea. The note of a lonely song sparrow broke the silence in a stab. Somewhere, down among the tender green, lining the canyon stream, a mourning dove uttered her sad threnody-then, silence and the soughing wind; then, more silence; then, if I had done what I wanted to, I would have sat down on the edge of the canyon wall and let the palpable past come touching me out of the silence.

A community house of some hundreds of rooms lay directly under me in the floor of the valley. This was once a populous city twelve miles long, a city of one long street, with the houses tier on tier above each other, reached by ladders, and steps worn hip-deep in the stone. Where had the people gone; and why? What swept their civilization away? When did the age-old silence fall? Seven thousand people do not leave the city of their building and choice, of their loves and their hates, and their wooing and their weddings, of their birth and their deaths-do not leave without good reason. What was the reason? What gave this place of beauty and security and thrift over to the habitation of bat and wolf? Why did the dead race go? Did they flee panic-stricken, pursued like deer by the Apache and the Ute and the Navajo? Or were they marched out captives, weeping? Or did they fall by the pestilence? Answer who can! Your guess is as good as mine! But there is the sacred ceremonial underground chamber where they worshiped the sacred fire and the plumed serpent, guardian of the springs; where the young boys were taken at time of manhood and instructed in virtue and courage and endurance and cleanliness and reticence. “If thou art stricken, die like the deer with a silent throat,” says the adage of the modern Pueblo Indian. “When the foolish speak, keep thou silent.” “When thou goest on the trail, carry only a light blanket.” Good talk, all of it, for young boys coming to realize themselves and life! And there farther down the valley is the stone circle or dancing floor where the people came down from their cliff to make merry and express in rhythm the emotions which other nations express in poetry and music. The whole city must have been the grandstand when the dancing took place down there.

It was Gregoire who called me to myself.

“We cannot take the wagon down there,” he said. “No wagon has ever gone down here. You walk down slow and I come with the horses, one by one.”

It sounded a good deal easier than it looked. I haven’t seen a steeper stair; and if you imagine five ladders trucked up zigzag against the Flatiron Building and the Flatiron Building three times higher than it is, you’ll have an idea of the appearance of the situation; but it looked a great deal harder than it really was, and the trail has since been improved. The little steps cut in the volcanic tufa or white pumice are soft and offer a grip to foothold. They grit to your footstep and do not slide like granite and basalt, though if New Mexico wants to make this wonderful Frijoles Canyon accessible to the public, or if the Archaeological School can raise the means and cooperate with the Forestry Service trail makers, a broad graded wagon road should be cut down the face of this canyon, graded gradually enough for a motor. The day that is done, visitors will number not 150 a year but 150,000; for nothing more exquisitely beautiful and wonderful exists in America.

It seems almost incredible that Judge and Mrs. Abbott have brought down this narrow, steep tier of 600 steps all the building material, all the furniture, and all the farm implements for their charming ranch place; but there the materials are and there is no other trail in but one still less accessible.

That afternoon, Mrs. Abbott and I wandered up the valley two or three miles and visited the high arched ceremonial cave hundreds of feet up the face of the precipice. The cave was first discovered by Judge and Mrs. Abbott on one of their Sunday afternoon walks. The Archaeological School under Dr. Hewitt cleared out the debris and accumulated erosion of centuries and put the ceremonial chamber in its original condition. “Restoring the ruins” does not mean “manufacturing ruins.” It means digging out the erosion that has washed and washed for thousands of years down the hillsides during the annual rains. All the caves have been originally plastered in a sort of terra cotta or ocher stucco. When that is reached and the charred wooden beams of the smoked, arched ceilings, restoration stops. The aim is to put the caves as they were when the people abandoned them. On the floors is a sort of rock bottom of plaster or rude cement. When this is reached, digging stops. It is in the process of digging down to these floors that the beautiful specimens of prehistoric pottery have been rescued. Some of these specimens may be seen in Harvard and Yale and the Smithsonian and the Natural History Museum in New York, and in the Santa Fe Palace, and the Field Museum of Chicago. Sometimes as many as four feet of erosion have overlaid the original flooring. When digging down to the flooring of the ceremonial cave, an estufa or sacred secret underground council chamber was found; and this, too, was restored. The pueblo of roofless chambers seen from the hilltop on the floor of the valley was dug from a mound of debris. In fact, too great praise cannot be given Dr. Hewitt and his co-workers for their labors of restoration; and the fact that Dr. Hewitt was a local man has added to the effectiveness of the work, for he has been in a position to learn from New Mexican Indians of any discoveries and rumors of discoveries in any of the numerous caves up the Rio Grande. For instance, when about halfway down the trail that first day, at the Frijoles Canyon or Rito de los Frijoles, as it is called, I met on an abrupt bend in the trail a Pueblo Indian from Santa Clara-blue jean suit, red handkerchief around neck, felt hat, huge silver earrings and teeth white as pearls-Juan Gonzales, one of the workers in the canyon, who knows every foot of the Rio Grande. Standing against the white pumice background, it was for an instant as if one of the cave people had stepped from the past. Well, it was Wan, as we outsiders call him, who one day brought word to the Archaeological workers that he had found in the pumice dust in one of the caves the body of a woman. The cave was cleaned out or restored, and proved to be a back apartment or burial chamber behind other chambers, which had been worn away by the centuries’ wash. The cerements of the body proved to be a woven cloth like burlap, and beaver skin. There you may see the body lying to-day, proving that these people understood the art of weaving long before the Flemings had learned the craft from Oriental trade.

You could stay in the Rito Canyon for a year and find a cave of fresh interest each day. For instance, there is the one where the form of a huge plumed serpent has been etched like a molding round under the arched roof. The serpent, it was, that guarded the pools and the springs; and when one considers where snakes are oftenest found, it is not surprising that the serpent should have been taken as a totem emblem. Many of the chambers show six or seven holes in the floor-places to connect with the Great Earth Magician below. Little alcoves were carved in the arched walls for the urns of meal and water; and a sacred fireplace was regarded with somewhat the same veneration as ancient Orientals preserved their altar fires. In one cave, some old Spanish padre has come and carved a huge cross, in rebuke to pagan symbols. Other large arched caves have housed the wandering flocks of goats and sheep in the days of the Spanish regime; and there are other caves where horse thieves and outlaws, who infested the West after the Civil War, hid secure from detection. In fact, if these caves could speak they “would a tale unfold.”

The aim of the Archaeological Society is year by year to restore portions till the whole Rito is restored; but at the present rate of financial aid, complete restoration can hardly take place inside a century. When you consider that the Rito is only one of many prehistoric areas of New Mexico, of Utah, of Colorado, awaiting restoration, you are constrained to wish that some philanthropist would place a million or two at the disposal of the Archaeological Society. If this were done, no place on earth could rival the Rito; for the funds would make possible not only the restoration of the thousands of mounds buried under tons of debris, but it would make the Canyon accessible to the general public by easier, nearer roads. The inaccessibility of the Rito may be in harmony with its ancient character; but that same inaccessibility drives thousands of tourists to Egypt instead of the Jemez Forests.

There are other things to do in the Canyon besides explore the City of the Dead. Wander down the bed of the stream. You are passing through parks of stately yellow pine, and flowers which no botanist has yet classified. There is the globe cactus high up on the black basalt rocks, blood-red and fiery as if dyed in the very essence of the sun. There is the mountain pink, compared to which our garden and greenhouse beauties are pale as white woman compared to a Hopi. There is the short-stemmed English field daisy, white above, rosy red below, of which Tennyson sings in “Maud.” Presently, you notice the stream banks crushing together, the waters tumbling, the pumice changing to granite and basalt; and you are looking over a fall sheer as a plummet, fine as mist.

Follow farther down! The canyon is no longer a valley. It is a corridor between rocks so close they show only a slit of sky overhead; and to follow the stream bed, you must wade. Beware how you do that on a warm day when a thaw of snow on the peaks might cause a sudden freshet; for if the waters rose here, there would be no escape! The day we went down a thaw was not the danger. It was cold; the clouds were looming rain, and there was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and darker grew the passageway. The wind came funneling up with a mist of spray from below; and the mossed rocks on which we waded were slippery as only wet moss can be. We looked over! Down-down-down-tumbled the waters of the Rito, to one black basin in a waterfall, then over a ledge to another in spray, then down-down-down to the Rio Grande, many feet below. You come back from the brink with a little shiver, but it was a shiver of sheer delight. No wonder dear old Bandelier, the first of the great archaeologists to study this region, opens his quaint myth with the simple words-“The Rito is a beautiful place.”