Another pueblo, Chetho Kette, measures 1300 feet in circumference, and was originally four stories high. It has the remains of one hundred and twenty-four rooms on the first story. The most perfect of the ten ruined pueblos discovered by Lieutenant Simpson in the Canon de Chaco is that of Hungo Pavie (or the Crooked Nose). Its circumference, including the enclosed court, is 872 feet. It faces, as usual, the cardinal points, and contains one estufa, placed in the centre of the northern wing of the building.
The accompanying engravings are taken from Simpson's "Navajo Expedition" and show at a glance the form of these structures. The terraces of Hungo Pavie are here represented as facing the central court. This may have been the plan adapted in many pueblos, but not in all. At Zuni, for instance, the terraces face outwards and rise in steps towards the centre; and while the ruins in the Canon de Chaco seem to show that there the outermost wall was the highest, many ruins elsewhere prove that the opposite was often the case. Thus two forms were probably in use : the one rose from without in steps towards the centre of the building; the other faced the courtyard, and was encircled by its highest wall.
One or more estufas have been discovered in each pueblo. Some are rectangular, others circular. There are similar ruins in the Valle de Chelly. The Navajo Indians, in whose country these pueblos are situated, say, I am told, that they were built by Montezuma and his people at the time of their emigration from north to south, and shortly before their dispersion on the banks of the Rio Grande and over other parts of Mexico.
The country occupying the fork between the Great Colorado and the Colorado Chiquito forms a part of that vast tableland the Colorado plateau, through which both these streams pass in deep canons.
The land is deeply eroded, being cut up into lofty mesas of variable size, and is very arid and worthless. The seven Moqui villages crest the edges of some of the mesas which form the south-eastern escarpment of the Colorado plateau. Further to the north-west, and nearer the Colorado, there is another group of pueblos in ruins, larger than those of the Moqui Indians, but situated, like them, on the flat summits of mesas, containing estufas, reservoirs, terraces, aqueducts, and walls at least four stories high. No trace has as yet been found of their former inhabitants.
Next we come to the ruins on the Colorado Chiquito and its southern tributaries. There are ruins upon El Moro, ruins north of Zuni, Old Zuni, and others along the Zuni River; ruins, also, on the Rio Puerco of the west, amongst which our parties found abundance of pottery; and there are most extensive ruins in the main valley, both above the falls and between the falls and the entrance of the canon of the Chiquito, scattered along a fertile basin at least a hundred miles in length. At Pueblo Creek the remains of several fortified pueblos were found crowning the heights which command Aztec Pass; but west of this point (longitude 113° west) no other ruins have as yet been discovered.
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adapted from A. W. Bell
"On the Native Races of New Mexico"
1869 (Journal of the Ethnological Society of London)
