Williston graphic. (Williston, Williams County, N.D.) 1895-1919, 1913-08-07
THE sNCIENT Y
CLIFF JEWELLERS
SECOND ARTICLE OF SOUTH
WEST SERIES - ANCIENT
HOMES OF SMALL PEOPLE

than mile the white cliff homes Of
our first Americans rise up from .
level to height of from 200 to 600
feet,and so close together are they
built that only thin space of the
soft rock separates them. It is
-starange sight for we foreigners
we Columbus Americans-who don't
know our country.
Hundreds Of years ago, no doubt
thousands of years ago, these cliffs
stood perpendicular, but time and
erosion of wind and rain have crum-
bled and broken down the rocks, and
where four or five stories or human
rhomes were once chisled, now in
many places but two and three stories
stand, the crumbling rock and the
wash of accumulations from above
having buried the lower or ground
floor of the rooms.
When the cliff homes were dug there
was no iron in New Mexico. They
were scooped out by hand by these
prehistoric people, carved out with
pieces of volcanic glass that they
travelled many miles to the Jemez
mountains to find
From the wash at the foot of the
cliffs l picked up several fine speci-
mems of these glass tools, thick and
as hard as beer bottle, and as sure
ly glass as if blown in Pittsburgh.
With these frgament that the noun
tains vomited up, these little cliff
men burrowed out their homes. The
formation of the rock is soft-well,
simply ashes-and l took knife
blade and soon made an excavation
that would hold my fist. But these
men did not have knives, or any me-
talic substances, and l do not wonder
| that their homes were not made
larger when they had only these
fragments of glass to dig them with.
I commenced on the ground level
(what is now the ground leveD and
went down the line, crawling into al
most every home, and / will never
forget the impression Of awe and
mystery they gave me.
almost every cliff home is the same,
and inside they vary only in the num-
ber of additions carved out, and
suppose these were regulatd by the
size Of the family, and the amount
of glass on hand. Almost every
room has an excavation leading from
it, but very few of them are high
enough for one to stand erect or long
enough to lie down. The Indian far
mer, who had custody over the Puye
cliffs, said that this one common side
room seemed to have been grave,
and that when member of the fami-
ly died he was put in the littl( round
room, in a sitting position, and then
the room was walled up and plaster
ed over. He said that the excava-
ton in many of the rooms had proved
this and many skeletons had peen
found, not mummies, either in a
sitting position on the floor with
back to the rock, or in many cases,
forward on the floor in the cave, faces
down.
So | think that these second rooms
chiseled out, plastered and left open,
were graves waiting for someone to
die, and when they died, the corpse
was walled in, and another grave
sdug-to be in readiness, that the fu-
neral services might not hitch. And
yet, as l will tell you later, there is
great burial ground on the mesa,
where hundreds of skeletons lie.
Every home is plastered, covered
with cement, and some have many
coatings. That is they are plast-
and you can plainly see where the
plaster ends, and where the smoke
commences. You can hardly stand
erect in the highest part of the oval
rooms, so it seems that the walls
were plastered only SO high up as
would dirty shirt waist when Mrs.
Cliff Dweller was sitting on the floor
with her back to the wall. In one
room l took my knife and cut through
seven layers of plaster, one layed
over the other, and each strata clear
ly distinguishable. Whether these
layers were put on once year or
once in hundred years we can only
guess. On every side of these
oval rooms are various sizes of inches,
cut into the walls and plastered. Some
are high up, some on the floor level
all shapes and sizes. We can only
wonder at their uses, but no doubt
they were their sideboards of those
days, and receptacles for the family
necessities. One in particular was
just the size of baby's bed, and
perhaps it was.
In one room, plainly discernable,
was what was once the opening to
one of the larger rooms, mentioned
above, and an oval seam on the plast-
er showed the opening had been clos
ed long after the rest of the room
and the custodian said that no
doubt a skeleton was sitting just
the other side of the wall. on,
for pick and thirty minutes, when
the guard was not there! l would
have dug out this fellow, ratified his
bones and asked him what it was all
about. One house, just about the
middle of the cliff, and where stone
stairway ascends to the mesa, was
different from all the rest. It was
double dome, or rather where home
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