The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona: Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1894-95, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1897, pages 73-198Mindeleff, Cosmos
History
The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona: Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1894-95, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1897, pages 73-198
Mindeleff, Cosmos
Arizona -- Antiquities; Chelly, Canyon de (Ariz.); Cliff-dwellings -- Arizona; Pueblo Indians -- Antiquities
Simpson's description, although very brief, formed the basis of all the
succeeding accounts for the next thirty years. The Pacific railroad
surveys, which added so much to our knowledge of the Southwest, did not
touch this field. In 1860 the Abbe Domenech published his "Deserts of
North America," which contains a reference to Casa Blanca ruin, but his
knowledge was apparently derived wholly from Simpson. None of the
assistants of the Hayden Survey actually penetrated the canyon, but one
of them, W. H. Jackson, examined and described some ruins on the Rio de
Chelly, in the lower Chin Lee valley. But in an article in Scribner's
Magazine for December, 1878, Emma C. Hardacre published a number of
descriptions and illustrations derived from the Hayden corps, among
others figures one entitled "Ruins in Canon de Chelly," from a drawing
by Thomas Moran. The ruin can not be identified from the drawing.
This article is worth more than a passing notice, as it not only
illustrates the extent of knowledge of the ruins at that time (1878),
but probably had much to do with disseminating and making current
erroneous inferences which survive to this day. In an introductory
paragraph the author says:
Of late, blown over the plains, come stories of strange newly
discovered cities of the far south-west; picturesque piles of
masonry, of an age unknown to tradition. These ruins mark an era
among antiquarians. 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.
Of the Chaco ruins it is said:
In size and grandeur of conception, they equal any of the present
buildings of the United States, if we except the Capitol at
Washington, and may without discredit be compared to the Pantheon
and the Colosseum of the Old World.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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