National Monuments # # * # 161 



flood lights are installed in some of the rooms. The cave is twenty-six miles 

 from Carlsbad, New Mexico, on the Ozark Trails and on a branch line of 

 the Santa Fe Railroad. 



CHACO CANYON 



As skilful architects the prehistoric builders who lived in Chaco Canyon, 

 New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Gallup, were without equals in the 

 whole of the United States. No written word is left of these people whose 

 cultural material, recovered from abandoned rooms, reveals greater variety, 

 technique, and beauty of design than that of any other of the ancient peoples 

 of the Southwest. 



Pueblo Bonito, "Beautiful Village," the largest of the ruins, is a great 

 semicircular structure, originally five stories high. It was 667 feet long and 

 315 feet deep, an enormous building, and it has been characterized as the 

 largest apartment house built anywhere in the world prior to 1887, housing 

 1,300 people. This structure is but one of eighteen villages in the Chaco 

 Canyon, several of the others being almost equally remarkable in construc 

 tion, though not as large. Near some of the ruins evidences of ancient 

 irrigation engineering are plainly traceable. 



Chaco Canyon is one of the larger national monuments, comprising 

 20,629 acres. The ruins are most easily reached from Thoreau, on the Santa 

 Fe Railroad, or by motor over the Old Trails Highway from either Albu 

 querque or Gallup, New Mexico. There is a small store at Chaco Canyon 

 and limited accommodations are available. Motorists should be prepared to 

 camp, sites being plentiful. 



EL MORRO 



Ordinarily, carving upon the walls of monuments is an act frowned 

 upon and punished by fine, but in the case of El Morro the carving 

 upon the sandstone wall was the occasion for making a national monument. 

 On the smooth walls of this sandstone cliff, in west central New Mexico, the 

 early Spanish explorers carved records of their exploits and of their expedi 

 tions against the Indians. The earliest of these Spanish records is that of Don 

 Juan de Onate, governor and colonizer of New Mexico, and founder of the 

 city of Santa Fe, the oldest city in the country, who rested by this cliff on 

 his return from a trip to the head of the Gulf of California in 1606, fourteen 

 years before the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth. Don Juan records 

 that the Indians "gave their obedience" and that he granted them favor 

 "with clemency, zeal, and prudence." Other and succeeding Spanish con- 

 quistadores left their records beside those of Don Juan. 



It should be added that the idea of recording exploits upon these rocks 

 was not original with Don Juan. He carved his record over those of pre 

 historic Indians who left their thoughts in pictographs, many of which are 

 not destroyed by the Spanish records. The Indian records may play an 

 important part in piecing together the history of the Southwest Indians. 



