Arizona republican., 1920-09-02
An American City Before Christ

easy matter. No doubt the rooms in the cliff walls were made first with rude stone picks. The doors were made small so that a single round boulder would close one against marauder. Windows and chimney holes were dug, and shelves and cubbies for the storing of provisions. Then, as the tribe grew strong and numerous they made rafter holes in the cliffs and built two and three story stone houses out in front munal house on the floor of the can yon. All of it's walls may still be traced, and some of them are yet sev- era1 feet high. And finally the sham ans of the tribe climbed to a great cave 1 in the cliff nearly 200 feet above the stream and there they built one of l their circular places of worship, called a kiva, half way between the silver water and the blue sky that looked over the rimrock. Never was a pagan 1 temple more fitly set.
 The Country Unchanged
 ! It is the beauty of this place that the country is just as it has always been, and that so much of the ancfent city remains. You have only to see it's walls standing again, to populate it with brown men and women, like the l Pueblos of today, save that they were probably more nearly naked: to hear the thunder of the drum from the cere- ] men as they come home from the ! fields the voices of laughing women I trudging in long lines from the stream with tinajas full of water on their heads, and you have a picture of the city that was.
 It was a civilization in the making These people were. potters of grea1 ability, making a glazed pottery, oi which you may find abundant bits and which the modern Indians cannot equal: they wore mantles of cotton l probably gotten in trade; they drew pictures on the rocks and painted them | on the roofs of caves; they had ar organized government and a religion with permanent temples. Who car doubt that they would have evolved . | true civilization had not an older and and stronger one come along and kicked their pretty plaything all tc pieces?
 The clfff dwellings are populous again these summer days with the | many tourists who come from Santa E'e 10 see them, and with archaeolo- gists, who explore and expound ane even insist on rebuilding some of the fallen walls to show how they used tC be. One cannot help feeling this in vasion as something of a desecretation A strangely incongruous creature her, is the eternal wandering woung woman who snaps her futile little camera a everything. and who finds antiquity like everything else perfectly lovely Irritating too. is the strayed stocI broker who climbs perspiring to tn, ceremonial cave and filings to tn, echoing walls his oft-repeated chal- lenge: Say, ain't this grand!"
 The cliff dwellings are a nationa monument and 1t is supposed to b, against the law to carry anythinl away, but all of the visitors carry a! much as they can in the way of broker pottery and clipped obsidian.
 One Indian Left
 John Boyd, the proprietor of Fl Ritt T ranch. and the host of all who com, here. is doing hls best to preserve tn, typical appearance of the place All O his buildings, which he rs rapidly ex tending to meet the growing invasion or tourists, are careful limitations 0 the Pueblo architecture. built of tn same rock that the cliff dwellers used and in the same style.
 There was only one Indian on tn Rito at the time of our visit. She wa a full -blooded Pueblo squaw in tn employ of MT. Boyd. She answers t. the un-Indian name of Lena, and re gards life on the whole as a joke Sh displays no interest in the dwellings o her ancient forbears, and indeed sh takes no pride in her Indian blood a such, but aims to be simply a goo, American. Her faVorite diversions ar playing the photograph and looking a the pictures in the Saturday Evenfn. Post. On one occasion some tourist suggested that she take off her shoe and stockings and dance a war danc so that they could take her picture but Lena declined, pleasantly, on tn ground that the sand was too hot
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