Arizona weekly journal-miner., 1902-07-23
SCIENTISTS COMING
Arizona Will Shortly Be Visited By a Party of Scientific Men to
 Explore Cave Dwellings.
An Ancient Race of People Who h. habited This Country, of Whom
 Little is Known.

Much interest is being manifested not only in Arizona, but in other sections of the country, in the pro- posed visit to the former homes of the cliff dwellers of this territory by a party of prominent St. Louis scien- lists. The party will start for Ari- zona about the first of August and will spend several months among the ruins in northern Arizona. The most interesting places from a scientific stendpoint are to be found in Yavapai and COnonino counties. There are numerous cliff and cave dwelling homes between Camp Verde and Flagstaff, near the Montezuma we'll.
 Among the party will be Dr. William F. Parks, Y. Mott Porter of St. Louis and Dr..Henry NJ. Baum of Washington, D. c. They propose to dig for specimens to be taken to St. Louis and exhibited during the worlds fair in 1904.
 These ancient American dwelling places cover 100000 square miles. They begin in lower Colorado and extend through New Mexico and Arizona into the state of Chihauhau, in old Mexico.
 Thousands of these ruins have not been explored, because no one with the time or equipment has ever pene- trated into the isolated parts in which they are found. Others have not been entered because they are per ched at such great heights that men have either feared 10 scale the cliffs or have been unable to do so. In the days when the homes were occupied there were stars cut in the sand stone cliffs. but these have in so many places worn smooth with disinte- grafton that no stairway remains to be climbed today. Holmes saw in the Canyon Rio Mancos cliff houses so high above the dry river bed that they could only be made out with a telescope. The cliff presented no possible means of reaching them. Up in the great Colorado canyon. still so little known, Major J. W. Powell of the Smithsonian institution saw cliff dwellings 4,S00 feet up in the cliff, or almost a mile from the canyon bed.
 In the first number of his magazine. Records of the Past. issued in Janu- ary of this year, pr. Baum said:
 "The most perplexing problem con- fronting the historian of the human race is the presence of prehistoric man in the western hemisphere as the builder of great temples, palaces, mounds and pyramids. Did he find his way here over Bering strait or now buried continents in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans?
 Not very many years ago consid- erable portions of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, southern Utah and Nevada were marked in our school geographies as unexplored territory. 1hl5 territory was supposed to be a wilderness inhabited by bears and barbarous Indians. and such was the case. Yet scientific exploration has demonstrated that the land once marked unexplored is rich in the re- mains of forgotten races, and that America rivals in human interest those parts of the old world which are popularly supposed to be hoary with antiquity.
 'BecauseOf historic threads-sacred | and profane-that link Us to the past. | we in America are apt to ignore the archaeological wonders at our own door in contemplation of the ruins of the valley of the Nile and along the 1 Tigris and Euphrates. Although | known of since the days of the Span ish invasion. it is only of late years that the attention of Americans of | average intelligence has been directed | to the mighty chain of ruins that ex- tends from the valley of the Gila, in Arizona, to the Isthmus of Panama f and along the western coast of South | America. We are just awakening to | the fact that America has ruins that rival in interest those of the old | world, with the added mystery that We have no tangible clue to the build CTS of the great mounds in the Mis- sissippi valley, the cliff dwellings and | pueblos of Arizona. Colorado, New | Mexico and other parts of the south west, and can only speculate as to the name and fate of the race or races that built the pyramids, pal aces and temples that excite the won der of the traveller in Mexico and the Central American states and the wan derer along the Cordilleras."