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ANTIQUITIES OF THE MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK
SPRUCE-TREE HOUSE
By JESSE WALTER FEWKES
RECENT HISTORY
Although there was once an old Spanish trail winding
over the mountains by way of Mancos and Dolores from what is now New
Mexico to Utah, the early visitors to this part of Colorado seem not to
have been impressed with the prehistoric cliff-houses in the Montezuma
valley and on the Mesa Verde; at least they left no accounts of them in
their writings. It appears that these early Spanish travelers
encountered the Ute, possibly the Navaho Indians, along this trail; but
the more peaceable people who built and occupied the villages now ruins
in the neighborhood of Mancos and Cortez had apparently disappeared
even at that early date. Indian legends regarding the inhabitants of
the cliff-dwellings of the Mesa Verde are very limited and indistinct.
The Ute designate them as the houses of the dead, or moki, the
name commonly applied to the Hopi of Arizona. One of the Ute legends
mentions the last battle between the ancient house-builders of Montezuma
valley and their ancestors, near Battle Rock, in which it is said that
the former were defeated and turned into fishes.
The ruins in Mancos canyon were discovered and first
explored in 1874 by a Government party under Mr. W. H. Jackson.a The
walls of ruins situated in the valley have been so long exposed to the
weather that they are very much broken down, being practically nothing
more than mounds. The few cliff-dwellings in Mancos canyon which were
examined by Jackson are for the most part small; these are found on the
west side. One of the largest is now known as Jackson ruin.
aAncient Ruins in Southwestern Colorado,
in Rep. U. S. Geol. and Geogr. Survey of the Ter., 1874, p.
369.
In the year 1875 Prof. W. H. Holmes, now Chief of the
Bureau of American Ethnology, made a trip through Mancos canyon and
examined several ruins. He described and figured several cliff-houses
overlooked by Jackson and drew attention to the remarkable stone towers
which are so characteristic of this region.b Professor Holmes secured a
small collection of earthenware vessels, generally fragmentary, and also
a few objects of shells, bone, and wood, figures and descriptions of
which accompany his report. Neither Jackson nor Holmes, however, saw
the most magnificent ruins of the Mesa Verde. Had they followed up the
side canyon of the Mancos they would have discovered, as stated by
Nordenskiöld, "ruins so magnificent that they surpass anything of the
kind known in the United States."
bReport on the Ancient Ruins of Southwestern
Colorado, examined during the summers of 1875 and 1878, ibid, 1876, p.
383
The following story of the discovery of the largest
two of these ruins, one of which is the subject of this article, is
quoted from Nordenskiöld:c
The honour of the discovery of these remarkable ruins
belongs to Richard and Alfred Wetherill of Mancos. The family own
large herds of cattle, which wander about on the Mesa Verde. The care of these
herds often calls for long rides on the mesa and in its labyrinth of
canons. During these long excursions ruins, the one more magnificent
than the other, have been discovered. The two largest were found by
Richard Wetherill and Charley Mason one December day in 1888, as they
were riding together through the piñon wood on the mesa, in search of a
stray herd. They had penetrated through the dense scrub to the edge of a
deep canon. In the opposite cliff, sheltered by a huge, massive vault of
rock, there lay before their astonished eyes a whole town with towers
and walls, rising out of a heap of ruins. This grand monument of bygone
ages seemed to them well deserving of the name of the Cliff Palace. Not
far from this place, but in a different canon, they discovered on the
same day another very large cliff-dwelling; to this they gave the name
of Sprucetree House, from a great spruce that jutted forth from the
ruins. During the course of years Richard and Alfred Wetherill have
explored the mesa and its canons in all directions; they have thus
gained a more thorough knowledge of its ruins than anyone. Together with
their brothers John, Clayton, and Wynn, they have also carried out
excavations, during which a number of extremely interesting finds have
been made. A considerable collection of these objects, comprising
skulls, pottery, implements of stone, bone, and wood, etc., has been
sold to "The Historical Society of Colorado." A still larger collection
is in the possession of the Wetherill family. A brief catalogue of this
collection forms the first printed notice of the remarkable finds made
during the excavations.
cThe Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, pp. 12,
13, Stockholm, 1893.
Mr. F. H. Chapin visited the Mesa Verde ruins in 1889
and published illustrated accountsa of his visit containing much
information largely derived from the Wetherills and others. Dr. W. R.
Birdsall also published an account of these ruins,b illustrated by
several figures. Neither Chapin nor Birdsall gives special attention to
the ruin now called Spruce-tree House, and while their writings are
interesting and valuable in the general history of the archeology of
the Mesa Verde, they are of little aid in our studies of this particular
ruin. The same may be said of the short and incomplete notices
of the Mesa Verde ruins which have appeared in several newspapers. The
scientific descriptions of Spruce-tree House as well as of other Mesa
Verde ruins begin with the memoir of the talented Swede, Baron Gustav
Nordenskiöld, who, in his work, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde,
gives the first comprehensive account of the ruins of this mesa. It is
not too much to say that he has rendered to American archeology in this
work a service which will be more and more appreciated in the future
development of that science. In order to make more comprehensive the
present author's report on Spruce-tree House, the following description
of this ruin is quoted from Nordenskiöld's memoir (pp. 50-56):
A few hundred paces to the north along the cliff lead
to a large cave, in the shadow of which lie the ruins of a whole
village, Sprucetree House. This cave is 70 m. broad and 28 m. in
depth. The height is small in comparison
with the depth, the interior of the cave thus being
rather dark. The ground is fairly even and lies almost on a level, which
has considerably facilitated the building operations. A plan of the
ruins is given in Pl. IX. A great part of the house, or rather village,
is in an excellent state of preservation, both the walls, which at some
places are several stories high and rise to the roof of rock, and the
floors between the different stories still remaining. The architecture
is the same as that described in the ruins on Wetherill's Mesa. In some
parts more care is perhaps displayed in the shape of the blocks and in
the joints between them. The walls, here as in other cliff-dwellings,
are about 0.3 m. thick, seldom more. A point which immediately strikes
the eye in Pl. IX, is that no premeditated design has been followed in
the erection of the buildings. It seems as if only a few rooms had first
been built, additions having subsequently been made to meet the
requirements of the increasing population. This circumstance, which I
have already touched upon when describing other ruins, may be observed
in most of the cliff-dwellings. There is further evidence to show that
the whole village was not erected at the same time. At several places it
may be seen that new walls have been added to the old, though the stones
of both walls do not fit into each other, as is the case when two
adjacent walls have been constructed simultaneously. The arrangement of
the rooms has been determined by the surrounding cliff, the walls being
generally built either at right angles or parallel to it. At some places
the walls of several adjoining apartments of about equal size have been
consistently erected in the same direction, some blocks of rooms thus
possessing a regularity which is wanting in the cliff-village as a
whole. This is perhaps the first stage in the development of the
cliff-dwellings to the villages whose ruins are common in the valleys
and on the mesa, and which are constructed according to a fixed
design.
In the plan (Pl. IX) it may be seen that the cave
contains two distinct groups of rooms. At about the middle of the
cliff-village a kind of passage (23), uninterrupted by any wall, runs
through the whole ruin. We found the remains, however, of a cross wall
projecting from an elliptical room (14 in the plan) in the south part of
the village. Each of these two divisions of the ruin contains an open
space (16 and 28) at the back of the cave, the ground in both these
places being covered with bird droppings. It is probable that this was
the place where tame turkeys were kept, though it can not have been a
very pleasant abode for them, for at least in the north of the ruin this
part of the cave is almost pitch dark, the walls of the inner court
(28), rising up to the roof of rock. In each of the two divisions of the
cliff-village a number of estufas were built, in the north at least
five, in the south at least two; while several more are, no doubt,
buried in the heaps of ruins. These estufas preserve to the least detail
the ordinary type (diam. 4-5 metres) fully described above. They
are generally situated in front of the other rooms, with their
foundations sunk deeper in the ground, and have never had an upper
story. Even their site suggests that they were used for some special
purpose, probably as assembly-rooms at religious festivities held by
those members of the tribe who lived in the adjacent rooms. In all the
estufas without exception the roof has fallen
in. It is probable, as I have mentioned before, that
the entrance of these rooms, as is still the case among the Pueblo
Indians, was constructed in the roof. The other rooms were entered by
narrow doorways (breadth 40-55 cm., height 65-80 cm.). These
doorways are generally rectangular, often somewhat narrower at the top;
the sill consists, as already described, of a long stone slab, the
lintel of a few sticks a couple of centimetres in thickness, laid
across the opening to support the wall above them. The arch was unknown
to the builders of these villages, even in the form common among the
ruins of Central America, and constructed by carrying the walls on both sides
of the doorway nearer to each other as each course of stones was laid,
until they could be joined by a stone slab placed across them. Along
both sides of the doorway and under the lintel a narrow frame of thin
sticks covered with plaster was built (see fig. 28 to the left). This
frame, which leant inwards, served to support the door, a thin, flat,
rectangular stone slab of suitable size. Through two loops on the
outside of the wall, made of osiers inserted in the chinks between the
stones, and placed one on each side of the doorway, a thin stick was
passed, thus forming a kind of bolt. Besides this type of door most
cliff-villages contain examples of another. Some doorways present the
appearance shown in fig. 28 to the right (height 90 cm., breadth at the
top, 45 cm., at the bottom 30 cm.) They were not closed with a stone
slab. They probably belonged to the rooms most frequented in daily life,
and were therefore fashioned so as to admit of more convenient ingress
and egress. The other doorways, through which it is by no means easy to
enter, probably belonged in general to storerooms or other chambers not
so often visited and requiring for some reason or other a door to close
them. It should be mentioned that the large, T-shaped doors described
above are rare in the ruins on Wetherill's Mesa which both in
architecture and in other respects bear traces of less care and skill on
the part of the builders, and are also in a more advanced stage of
decay, thus giving the impression of greater age than the ruins treated
of in the present chapter, though without showing any essential
differences.
The rooms, with the exception of the estufas, are
nearly always-rectangular, the sides measuring seldom more than two or
three metres. North of the passage (23) which divides the ruin into two
parts, a whole series of rooms (26, 29-33) still extends outwards
from the back of the cave, their walls reaching up to the roof of
rock, and the floors between the upper and lower stories being in a
perfect state of preservation. The lower rooms are generally entered by
small doors opening directly on the "street." In the interior the
darkness is almost complete, especially in room 34, which has no direct
communication with the passage. It must be approached either through
35, which is a narrow room with the short side towards the "street"
entirely open, or through 33. We used 34 as a dark room for photographic
purposes.
The walls and roof of some rooms are thick with soot.
The inhabitants must have had no great pretensions as regards light and
air. The doorways served also as windows, though at one or two places
small, quadrangular loop-holes have been constructed in the walls for
the passage of light. Entrance to the upper story is generally gained by
a small quadrangular hole in the roof at a corner of the lower room, a
foothold being afforded merely by some stones projecting from the walls.
This hole was probably covered with a stone slab like the doors. Thick
beams of cedar or piñon and across them thin poles, laid close together,
form the floors between the stories. In some cases long sticks were laid
in pairs across the cedar beams at a distance of some decimeters
between the pairs, a layer of twigs and cedar bast was placed over the
sticks, and the whole was covered with clay, which was smoothed and
dried.
In several other parts of the ruin besides this the
walls still reach the roof of the cave. These walls are marked in the
plan. In all the estufas and in some of the other rooms, perhaps the
apartments of chiefs or families of rank, the walls are covered with a
thin coat of yellow plaster. In one instance they are even decorated
with a painting, representing two birds, which is reproduced in one of
the following chapters. Pl. X:2 shows a part of the ruin, situated in
the north of the cave. The spot from which the photograph was taken, as
well as the approximate angle of view, is marked in the plan. The left
half of the photograph is occupied by a wail with doorways, rising to a
height of three stories and up to the roof of the cave; within
the wall lies a series of five rooms on the ground floor; behind these
rooms the large open space mentioned above (28) occupies the depths of
the cavern. Here the beams are all that remains of the floors of the
upper stories, their ends projecting a foot or two beyond the wall
between the second and third stories, where support was probably
afforded in this manner to a balcony, as an easier means of communication
between the rooms of the upper stories. In front of this part
of the building, but not visible in the photograph, lie two estufas and
outside the latter is a long wall. To judge by the ruins, the roofs of
these estufas once lay on a level with the floors of the adjoining
rooms, so that over the estufas, which were sunk in the ground, only the
roofs being left visible, the inhabitants had an open space, bounded on
the outside by the said long wall, which formed a rampart at the edge of
the talus. The same method of construction is employed by the Moki
Indians in their estufas; but these rooms are rectangular in
form.—Farther north lies another estufa. Its site, nearest to the
cliff wall, would seem to indicate that it is the oldest. The walls in
the north of the ruin still rise to a height of 6 metres.
The south part of the ruin is similar in all respects
to the north. Its only singularity is a room of elliptical shape (axes
3.6 and 2.9 in.); from this room a wall runs south, enclosing a small
open space (16) where, as at the corresponding place in the north of
the ruin, the ground is covered with bird droppings mixed with dust and
refuse. At one end there are two semicircular enclosures (17, 18) of
loose stones forming low walls. In a pentagonal room (8) south of this
open space one corner contains a kind of closet (height 1.2 in., length
and breadth 0.9 in.) composed of two large upright slabs of stone, with
a third slab laid across them in a sloping position and cemented fast
(see fig. 29). Of the use to which this "closet" was put, I am ignorant.
Farther south some of the rooms are situated on a narrow ledge, along
which a wall has been erected, probably for purposes of defense.
Plate x:1 is a photograph of Sprucetree House from
the opposite side of the canon. The illustrations give a better idea of
the ruin's appearance than any description could do.
Our excavations in Sprucetree House lasted only a few
days. This ruin will certainly prove a rich field for future
researches.c Some handsome baskets and pieces of pottery were the best
finds made during the short period of our excavations. In a room (69)
belonging to the north part of the ruin we found the skeletons of three
children who had been buried there.
A circumstance which deserves mention, and which was
undoubtedly of great importance to the inhabitants of Sprucetree House,
is the presence at the bottom of the canon, a few hundred paces from the
ruin, of a fairly good spring.
Near Sprucetree House there are a number of very
small, isolated rooms, situated on ledges most difficult of access. One
of these tiny cliff-dwellings may be seen to the left in fig. 27. It is
improbable that these cells, which are sometimes so small that one can
hardly turn in them, were really dwelling
places; their object is unknown to me, unless it was
one of defense, archers being posted there when danger threatened, so
that the enemy might have to face a volley of arrows from several points
at once. In such a position a few men could defend themselves, even
against an enemy of superior force, for an assailant could reach the
ledge only by climbing with hands and feet. Another explanation, perhaps
better, was suggested to me by Mr. Fewkes. He thinks
that these small rooms were shrines where offerings
to the gods were deposited. No object has, however, been found to
confirm this suggestion.
To the right of fig. 27 a huge spruce may be seen.
Its roots lie within the ruins of Sprucetree House, the trunk projecting
from the wall of an estufa. In Pl. X:1 the tree is wanting. I had it
cut down in order to ascertain its age. We counted the rings, which were
very distinct, twice over, the results being respectively 167 and 169. I
had supposed from the thickness of the tree that the number of the rings
was much greater.
aCliff-dwellings of the Mancos Canons, in
Appalachia, VI, no. 1, Boston, May, 1890; The American
Antiquarian, XII, 193, 1890; The Land of the Cliff Dwellers,
1892.
bThe Cliff-dwellings of the canons of the Mesa
Verde. in Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, XXIII,
no. 4, 584, 1891.
cSince this was written, a well-preserved mummy
has been found by Wetherill in the open space (28) at the very back of
the cave. This is a further example of the burial of the dead in the
open space between the village and the cliff wall behind it (see p.
47).—[Nordenskiöld.]
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