Here the labors of Mr. Jackson’s party ended for the year 1874, but the work was again resumed in July of the following year with even richer results. Two parties were put in the field by the Government Surveying Corps, one headed by Mr. Jackson and the other by Mr. W. H. Holmes, geologists of the San Juan division of the survey for 1875. I am indebted to Prof. Hayden, United States geologist-in-charge, for the memoirs prepared by these gentlemen, with the accompanying illustrations.[478] The reader has already become acquainted with the general character of the remains of the cliff-dwellers, and it will not be necessary to repeat the descriptions of buildings or ruins similar to those already described in these pages. We shall therefore cite only the more remarkable ruins discovered by the above-named explorers. Mr. Jackson was accompanied on his second tour, by Mr. E. A. Barber, naturalist and correspondent of the _New York Herald_, with Harry Lee as guide and interpreter. The party resumed their labors in the arid, waterless region around the Hovenweep, and in fact the same barren characteristics are peculiar to the whole basin of the San Juan. The whole region is rapidly drying up and fast becoming a desert. Down the cañon from the pueblo of the Hovenweep, broken towers and rock shelters were passed in rapid succession. Seven miles distant from their starting-point, they found on the western side of the valley three elevated benches ranging one above another in the face of a jutting promontory, each of which contained houses (see illustration, page 307). The first bench was reached by climbing over a sloping mass of débris to a height of one hundred feet from the base of the cliff, while the upper benches were only accessible by means of a niche stairway similar to the one shown in the figure. [Illustration: Cliff-House of the Hovenweep.] Ruins and masses of charcoal were found at the base of the rock. Numerous adobe foundations, probably of wooden buildings, always circular in form and ranging from fifteen to twenty-five feet in diameter, were met with a short distance down the cañon. Near the junction of the Hovenweep and McElmo cañons an inscription covers sixty feet of the face of a large rock. The figures are those of men, goats, lizards, and hieroglyphic signs. As the party proceeded in the cañon they met rock shelters and enclosures, the latter on the top of the mesa in which slabs of stone three by five feet in size were set on end. Mr. Jackson reports that a party connected with the survey corps discovered near the head of the Hovenweep, on a ledge three hundred feet long by fifty feet wide, one-third of the distance from the top of the cañon, some forty houses crowded along the shelf all in a row. On the San Juan west of the mouth of the Montezuma Cañon, upon a bench fifty feet high, Mr. Jackson found a quadrangular structure of peculiar design, as shown in the cut on page 308.