502 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
biya han’? @hi (Franciscan Fathers, 1912, vol. 1, p. 228), “the cliff 
braced up from beneath” (translation by Mrs. John Wetherill). 
The cliff-braced-up-from-beneath has been variously designated. 
Holsinger (MS., p. 14) says it was locally known as “the Elephant” in 
the days of the Hyde Exploring Expedition, 1896-1900. Nelson (zn 
Pepper, 1920, p. 889) described it as “the shored-up Cliff Block.” To 
Hewett it was “the balanced rock” in 1921; “the leaning cliff” a year 
later (Hewett, 1921, p. 18; 1922, p. 116). It has been “Threatening 
Rock” to personnel of the National Park Service and others since 1934. 
This latter name was entirely appropriate as long as the threat 
remained but one that will endure forever is the Navaho tsé’ biya hanv’ 
Whi. It isan individualistic, descriptive appellation that immediately 
and positively identifies Pueblo Bonito. There is no other place in 
all the Southwest to which this name applies. 
Throughout the length and breadth of the Navaho Reservation in 
Arizona and New Mexico every Navaho child knows of tsé’ beya han?’ 
@ht. Itis the kernel of many wintertime tales. In 1908 and 1909, on 
the edge of Monument Valley, Utah, long before Chaco Canyon had 
special significance for me, I heard of Pueblo Bonito as “the place 
where the cliff is braced up from beneath.” Later I heard the name 
from Hopi who spoke Navaho and from the Apache. No other pre- 
historic ruin can boast an equally distinctive feature. 
The now-fallen mass rose 100 feet above its terrace platform. Its 
west end, on a magnetic-north line, stood 117 feet from the outer north- 
west corner of Room 189, and its east end, half again as far from the 
nearest point on the southward-curving exterior of the pueblo. Wind 
and storm in pre-Bonito times had undercut the softer stratum of the 
great cliff as much as 15 feet in places. It could topple forward upon 
the terraced village at any time and without warning. Hence the very 
understandable and continuing concern of the Bonitians. They fore- 
saw and undoubtedly delayed a major rockfall that finally took place 
years after they had abandoned the pueblo. It is possible, but quite 
unlikely, that they knew of a still earlier fall and one of even greater 
magnitude that happened long before they came to Chaco Canyon. 
The original settlers of Pueblo Bonito, the “Old Bonitians,” had 
built some of their dwellings between and upon jagged masses of rock 
cast from the canyon wall long previously, but we may only guess as 
to the time when the later immigrants, the “Late Bonitians,” first 
recognized the Braced-up Cliff as a constant danger. So, too, we may 
only guess the order of the several projects by which they sought to 
control the threat—constructional projects of such magnitude that 
any one of them might have defeated a less determined people. These 
later immigrants propped the undercut cliff with pine posts and bedded 
those posts in rubble; they weatherproofed the rubble with a facing of 
