For more than a mile the white 
cliff homes of our first Americans 
rise up from ike level to a height of 
from 200 to 600 feet, and so close 
together are they but a thin space 
of the soft rock separates them. 
‘It is a strange sight for we for- 
eigners—we Columbus Americans— 
who don’t know our country. 
Hundreds of years ago, no doubt 
thousands of years ago, these cliffs 
stood prependicular, but time and 
erosian of wind and rain have crum- 
bled and broken down the rocks, 
and where four and five stories of 
human homes were once chiseled, 
now in many places but two and 
three stories stand the crumbling 
rock and the wash of accumulations 
from above having buried the low- 
er or ground floor rooms. 
When these cliff homes were dug 
there was no iron in New Mexico. 
They were scooped out by hand by 
these pre-historic people, carved out 
by pieces of volcanic glass that they 
traveled many miles to the Jemez 
(pronounce it Tlamez) mountains to 
find. 
From the wash at the foot of the 
cliffs I picked up several fine speci- 
’ mens of these glass tools, thick and 
as hard as a beer bottle, and as sure- 
ly glass as if blown in Pittsburg. 
With these fragments that the 
mountains vomited up, these little 
 eliff men burrowed out their homes. 
f The formation of the rock is soft 
- —-well, simply ashes— and I took a 
knife blade and soon made an ex- 
 eavation that would hold my fist. 
But these men did not have knives 
or any metallic substances, and | do 
not wonder their homes were not 
made larger when they had only 
these fragments of glass to dig them 
with. 
I commenced on the ground level 
(what is now the ground) and went 
down the line, crawling into almost 
every home, and I will never forget 
the impressions of awe and mystery 
they gave me. 
- he first room, the living room, of 
almost every cliff home is the same, 
and inside they vary only in number 
of additions carved out, and I sup- 
: pose these were regulated by the 
size of the family and the amount 
’ 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
‘The Musty and Distant Past. 
zzies of Mystery and Ruins Left for the White 
Man to Solve in the Puye Canyon. | 
(By M. J. Brown, Eprror Lirrin VauiEy, N _Y., Hus) 
of glass on hand. Almost every 
room has one excavation lead- 
ing from it, but very few of them 
are high enough for one to stand 
erect or long enough to lie down. 
The Indian farmer, who has custo- 
dy over the Puye cliffs, said that this 
one common side room seems to have 
been a grave and that when a mem- 
ber of the family died he was put 
in this little round room, in a sit- 
ting position and then the room 
walled up and plastered over. He 
said that excavations in many of 
the rooms had proved this and many 
skeletons had been found, not mum- 
mies, either in a sitting position on 
the floor, with back to the rock, or 
in marry eases, forward on the floor 
of the cave, faces down. 
So I take’ it that these second 
rooms chiseled out, plastered and 
left open, were graves waiting for 
A. Jj ORR 
some one to die, and when they died, 
the corpse was walled in, and an- 
other grave dug—to: be in ‘readiness, 
that the funeral cerémonies might 
not hitch. And yet as I will tell you 
later, there is a great burial ground 
on the messa where hundreds of 
skeletons lie. . . 
Every home is plastered, covered 
with cement, and some have many 
coatings. That is they are plastered 
about half way up the walls, and 
you can plainly see where the plast- 
er ends, and where the smoke com- 
mences. You can hardly stand erect 
in the highest part of the oval 
rooms, so it seems that the walls 
were plastered only so high up as 
would dirty a shirt waist when Mrs. 
Cliff Dweller was sitting on the 
floor with her back to the wall. 
In one room I took my knife and 
cut through seven layers of plaster, 
one laid over the other, each strata 
clearly distinguishable. Whether 
these layers were put on once a year 
or once in a hindred years I ean 
only guess. 
Qn every side of these oval rooms 
are various sizes of nitches, eut in- 
to the walls and plastered. Some 
are high up some on the floor level 
PAINTING AND 
PAPER-HANGING 
Dealer in PAINTS, OILS, GLASS, PUTTY, ETC. 
A full line of PATTON’S SUNPROOF PAINT and Specialties. 
Bennett Street 
= ElephonG. was 
Opposite High School 
Manchester, Mass. 
| NAUMKEAG 
CAPITAL and 
E, J. Fabens, President 
N. A. Very, Treasurer 
TRUST -CO. 
SURPLUS $500,000 
William O. Chapman, Sec. 
DIRECTORS 
Gordon Abbott 
George H. Allen 
Roland M. Baker 
Henry P. Benson 
Stedman Buttrick 
Arthur F. Estabrook 
Jeremiah T 
Eugene J. Fabens 
Francis R. Hart 
. Mahoney 
Robert Osgood 
Francis Peabody, Jr. 
George Lee Peabody 
David Pingree 
Frederic G. Pousland 
Charles S. Rea 
Charles W. Richardson 
Nathaniel G. Simonds 
This company solicits your account whether it is large or small. 
Interest paid on deposits subject to 
check. 
