Perrysburg journal. (Perrysburg, Wood Co., O. [Ohio]) 186?-1965, 1878-11-29
The Western Oliff-Dwellers.

Of late, blown over the plains, come
stories of strange newly-discovered
cities of the far southwest; picturesque
piles of masonry, of an age unknown
to tradition. These ruins mark an era
among antiquarians. The mysterious
mound-builders fade into comparative
insignifcance before the grander and
more ancient cliff-dwellers, whose cas-
ties lift their towers amid the sands of
Arizona and crown the terraced slopes
of the Rio Mancos and the Hovenweep
pronounced Hov-en-weep.1
A ruin, accidentally discovered by A.
ID. Wilson, of the Hayden Survey, sew
eral years ago, while he was pursuing
his labors as chief of the Typographical
corps in Southern Colorado, is described
to me by Mr.. Wilson as a stone build
ing, about the size of the Patent-O Office.
1t stood upon the bank of the Animas,
in the San Juan country, and contained
perhaps five hundred rooms. The roof
and portions of the walls had fallen,
but the part standing indicated height
of four stories. A number of the rooms
were fairly preserved, had small loop
hole windows, but no outer doors. The
building had doubtless been entered
originally by means of ladders resting
on inches, and drawn in after the occu-
pants. The floors were of cedar, each
log as large around as mans head,
the spaces filled neatly by smaller poles
and twigs, covered by a carpet of cedar
bark. The ends of the timber were
bruised and frayed, as if severed by a
dull instrument; in the vicinity were
stone hatchets, and saws made of sand
stone slivers about two feet long, worn
to a smooth edge. A few hundred
yards from the mammoth building was
a second large house in ruins, and be-
tween the two strongholds rows of
small dwellings, built of cobble-stones
laid in adobe, and arranged along
streets, after the style of the village
of to-day. The smaller houses were
in more advanced state of ruin, on
account of the round stones being more
readily disintegrated by the elements
than the heavy masonry. The streets
and houses of this deserted town are
overgrown by juniper and pinon-the
latter dwarf wide-spreading pine
which bears beneath the scales of it's
cones delicious and nutritious nuts.
From the size of the dead, as well as
the living, trees, and from their posi-
ton on the heaps of crumbling stone,
Mr.. Wilson concludes that great
period of time has elapsed since the
buildings fell. How many hundred
years they stood after desertion before
yielding to the inroads of time cannot
be certainly known.
The presence of sound wood in the
houses does not set aside their antiuui-
ty. In the dry, pure air of Southern
Colorado, wood fairly protected will
last for centuries. In Asia cedar-wood
has been kept thousand years, and in
Egypt cedar is known to have been in
perfect preservation 1000 years after it
left the forest. The cedars throughout
the territories of the southwest do not
rot, even in the groves. They die, and
stand erect, solid and sapless. The
winds and whirling sands carve the
dead trees into forms of fantastic
beauty, drill holes through the trunks,
and play at hide-and- -gO-seek in the per-
forated limbs until, after ages of resist
ance, they literally blow away in atoms
of fine, clean dust.
On the Rio San Juan, about twenty
five miles distant from the city of Ami
mas, Mr.. Wilson discovered the follow
ing evening similar pile, looming SOL
emnly in the twilight near their camp
ing-place. The scene as described was
weird in the extreme. AS the moon
arose, the shadows of the phantom
buildings were thrown darkly across
the silvery plain. The blaze of camp
fires, the tiny tents, the negro cook, the
men in buckskin hunting garb, and the
picketed mules, made strange picture
of the summers night, with back ground
of moonlit desert and crumbling ruins,
on whose ramparts lowered dead,
gaunt cedars, lifting their bleached
skeletons like sheeted ghosts within the
silent watch-towers of the murky past.
From aD illustrated article in Serb
rler for December.