CLIFF-DWELLERS. This term, although of broader application, means in America that prehistoric race that built the houses and vil lages whose ruins are found in the southwest ern part of the United States, and especially in the valley of the Rio San Juan and its tribu taries. This river rises in the extreme south western corner of Colorado, and flows west ward along the borders of adjoining States to a junction with the Rio Colorado. Its course lies mostly in a series of deeply depressed val leys, bounded on each side by tablelands (mesas) with abrupt and lofty faces, which in its lower course confine it in deep and nar row canyons. Its tributaries have cut their way from their mountain-sources down through the soft sandstones of these mesas to the river, forming thus side-canyons, some of which have broad °bottoms° on both sides of the now shrunken streams, always hemmed in by steep walls that have weathered into ledges and re cesses varying in depth with the varying hard ness of their strata. The principal tributaries from the north are the Animas, the Mancos, the Hovenweep and the McElmo, in Colorado, whose canyons are cut through the Mesa Verde; and the Montezuma in Utah; and from the south the Chaco, in New Mexico, and the De Chelly and Navajo creek.s in Arizona. The walls of all these streams, and of lesser tribu taries, abound in the cliff-dwellings and other remains of prehistoric inhabitants.
Rumors of such ruins led to an effort by the United States Geological Survey in 1874 to find and investigate them, and a party led by W. H. Jackson and Ernest Ingersoll crossed the mountains in the summer of that year and made a hasty survey of the Mesa Verde region. This party discovered the since famous ruins of the Mancos Canyon and many others west ward; and Mi. Ingersoll's letters to the New York Tribune in 1874 contained the first intelli gent account of them; while Jackson's report, in the Annual Report of the Survey for that year, gave extended details, illustrated from photographs taken in the field of these novel and.interesting remains. Since that time ex
tensive explorations of this region by the Bureau of Ethnology and by pnvate persons have brought to light vast additions to this in formation; and the government has made national reservations of certain districts, in order that these ruins may be preserved and easily visited.
The area in which the cliff-dwellings occur is practically coextensive with that in which are now found traces of town-building and relics attributable to the Pueblo tribes. The general likeness throughout this region (and locally elsewhere in Arizona and northern Mexico) in architecture, implements, style of decoration, etc., shown by the ruins, establishes their close relationship, historically, with the existing vil lage-Indians of the region (see Punan), and shows that in early periods, as now, numerous tribal groups were represented in the region, and that 'then, as now, °there was a general community of culture if not of kinship in bloodr° This similarity, and the evidence of records and tradition, make it certain that the builders of these abandoned houses and towns were men of the same sort as, if not directly ancestral to, the modern Pueblo Indians.
The valleys occupied are characterized, as has been said, by cliff-like walls of sandstone enclosing large spaces of flat bottom-lands, in which the soil is fertile when supplied with water. It will produce good crops under irri gation—an art well understood by both ancient and modem inhabitants of that arid region. The annual rainfall even now is considerable, and there is evidence that anciently it was much rnore copious.
As to the origin of these vanished °cliff dwellers° nothing is lcnown; but it is evident that centuries ago these valleys were occupied by a considerable, sedentary population, who had fixed homes and cultivated fields for crops of corn (maize), beans, gourds and probably other things, by means of extensive systems of irrigation. They made pottery, cloth, baskets, etc.? and stone implements, but nothing me tallic.