OUB NATIONAL PAEKS. 11 



the Rocky Mountain national parks. The whole country has been 

 fantastically cut and carved by gigantic glaciers of the prehistoric 

 past. Their ancient beds, now grown with forests, their huge 

 moraines, their cirques, or starting places, are, next to the vast 

 mountains themselves, the most prominent features of the region. 



In fact these records of the period when this continent was planed 

 and carved by the ice are so clearly, so simply, written in the rocks 

 of this region that the whole story lies plain to the most casual eye. 



III. 

 THE MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK 



Special Characteristic: Prehistoric Cliff Dwellings 



WHERE did the Indians come from ? That is one of the innumer- 

 able questions which anthropologists have not yet solved. 

 Some suggest that they came from Asia by way of Alaska because 

 the Eskimo seem to somewhat resemble Mongolians. Others think 

 they came from Europe by way of Greenland; others that they came 

 from the South Sea islands by way of South America. 



Perhaps all these theorists are right. In one thing only do they 

 agree and that is that, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, no matter 

 what their tribal or other differences due to varying conditions of 

 climate and surroundings, all American Indians are of one physical 

 type with similar mental characteristics and cultural tendencies. 



Their highest civilization undoubtedly developed in Peru, Central 

 America, and southern Mexico, where architectural ruins of quite 

 astonishing beauty are to-day crumbling under the jungle. This 

 civilization was ruthlessly destroyed by the Spanish conquest follow- 

 ing the discovery of America. 



The next highest prehistoric civilization was in our own southwest, 

 and the remains of its highest special development are the cliff 

 dwellings of the Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, to preserve 

 which Congress has set apart the Mesa Verde National Park. 



When one speaks of the Pueblo Indians he does not mean an Indian 

 stock or tribe, but merely Indians, possibly of various stocks and 

 many tribes, who used to live, and a few of whose modern descendants 

 still live, in pueblos or community houses of many rooms holding 

 entire tribes or villages under one roof. The builders of Mesa Verde's 

 prehistoric dwellings were of the Pueblo type. 



BURROWING INTO THE MESAS 



Those who have traveled through our southwestern states have seen 

 from the car window innumerable mesas or small isolated plateaus 

 rising abruptly, for hundreds of feet, from the bare and often arid 



