420 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
rounded by mountains; those on the west being grand in their outline and crown- 
ed by a bald peak, which appeared exactly adapted for a watch-tower for the peo- 
ple of the city on the plateau, and perhaps for an outlook for the priests of the 
sun, who from its lofty summit, could catch his earliest rays long before they 
would be visible to the people below. ‘The whole valley, from mountain range to 
mountain range, is about five or six miles, while it seems to be inclosed at both 
ends by purple ranges, about ten miles apart, with an occasional snow-capped peak. 
Thus apparently hemmed in on all sides, and in the midst of what was probably 
in the day of their prosperity a luxuriant and fertile plain, these ancient people 
built their singular houses and lived peaceful and quiet lives. The evidences of 
their civilization are found in abundance, in implements for grinding corn, pottery 
evincing various degrees of ski!l, and in some places in pictured rocks and decora- 
ted caves. 
These houses are very much alike in all the villages that are known, being 
built against. the sides of bluffs or rocky acclivities, one story above another to 
the height sometimes of five to six or seven stories. The material used is stone, 
cemented together and sometimes coated or plastered on the outside, with mud. 
The first story has no opening except at the top, which is reached with a ladder, 
while the other stories have doors opening from the roofs of those below. Within, 
or at least in the lower or basement stories, there are connecting openings from 
one to another, The stories are separated by floors of timbers laid together and 
sometimes bound together with withes. Remains of corner-posts made of pine 
and cedar poles are found abundantly in their proper position. 
The system of walls and outworks is very extensive, but whether it is all of the 
same age as the village, is more than I was able to determine. Commencing at 
the western end of the plateau, the first evidence of the hand of man that I dis: 
covered, wasa circular stone wall inciosing aspace thirty feet indiameter. (z in 
plate.) This is located upon a rocky point some fifty feet above the adjacent ground, 
and commands a view of the valleys on both sides, as well as of the plateau be- 
yond, upon which the village is built. From all indications this was a fort or lookout 
tower. (W. H. Holmes in Bulletin No. 1 of the United States Geological and 
Geographical Survey of the Territories, vol. II, 1876, describes the ruins of a 
tower found in the Mancos cafion in Colorado, probably similar to this, whose 
outer dimensions were forty-five feet in diameter and twelve feet in height at the 
highest point of the wall yet standing, which is twenty one inches in thick- 
ness. It was doubled walled, with apartments between the outer and inner walls. 
On the mesa above the bed of the River McElmo, a square shaped tower 
was discovered standing in on the summit of a great block of sandstone, forty 
feet high and detatched from the bluff back of it. 
At another place on the McElmo, the ruins of a triple-walled tower were 
found, with sectional apartments between the outer and second walls, and such 
towers abound on prominent points all along the Gila, Chaco, Rio Grande and 
other rivers of Colorado and New Mexico.) Proceeding eastwardly, we descend 
from this point some twenty feet or more to a long and narrow passage of bare rock, 
