l8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I47 



represented had grown at no great distance ; had been felled and peeled 

 while green, and carried by manpower to the building site. But the 

 forests from which they came are no longer in existence. A dozen 

 pines, living and dead, stood at the head of Chaco Canyon at the time 

 of the Society's 1920 reconnaissance ; four others, all dead and three 

 of them fallen, were later seen in Wirito's Rincon, about 2 miles 

 southeast of Pueblo Bonito (Douglass, 1935, p. 46). 



Elderly Navaho told us of pine trees and stumps formerly present 

 in Mockingbird Canyon and elsewhere. Unknown persons, according 

 to one informant, had cut the pines on neighboring mesas and their 

 stumps had been used for fuel by Mexican sheepherders. Always the 

 sheepherders were to blame! Old Wello, with a steel ax issued at 

 Fort Defiance before the turn of the century, felled two small pines 

 on the rimrock at the head of Wirito's Rincon. He wanted them for 

 repairs to his cabin, built by cattlemen at the north end of Peiiasco 

 Blanco mesa about 1880 and abandoned shortly thereafter. And, 

 knowing I was from Washington, the old man took particular pains 

 to assure me he had cut only two of the three pines then standing. A 

 lone survivor, 5 or 6 inches in diameter, had won anchorage in shallow 

 soil upon the south cliff overlooking our camp and stood there defiantly 

 until some needy individual cut it for firewood during the winter of 

 1926-27 (Douglass, 1935, p. 40). 



These scattered remnants, the dead logs in Wirito's rincon, the 

 stumps in Mockingbird canyon and beyond, the decayed trunk from 

 the West Court at Pueblo Bonito, the lone survivor on the south cliff, 

 and the cluster of pines 15 miles to the east are all that remained in 

 1924 of forests which once crowned the mesas overlooking Chaco 

 Canyon and extended down through the rincons and out upon the 

 valley floor. 



Whatever their extent or limitations, those ancient forests had 

 produced thousands of choice timbers, large and small, for Pueblo 

 Bonito and its neighbors. These timbers grew under diverse condi- 

 tions as may be seen from the 97 specimens we recovered. In some 

 of these, annual growth rings are so uniform as to indicate a nearly 

 constant water supply year after year ; in others, rings are thin, 

 starved, and stunted. These differences could reflect either a variable 

 climate or merely unlike growing conditions. 



That rainfall was once more plentiful in Chaco Canyon is suggested 

 not only by growth rings in trees but also by the quantities of reeds 

 and willows utilized in construction of Pueblo Bonito. Willows and 

 reeds require moisture, and geologists tell us that ponds or swampy 



