Throughout Arizona can be found traces of a vanished people. In and
around the Petrified Forest, prehistoric dwellings and “picture
writings” are plentiful, and of great antiquity and high development.
Probably nowhere have such pictographs been so well preserved. The soft
smooth sandstone was an ideal surface for the artist to work upon, and
nowhere in the world, in that age, could such suitable tools be found to
work with. Here at hand were sharp pointed chisels already prepared by
the fracturing of wood. These chisels were hard enough to cut glass.
Rounded pieces of the same material made excellent mallets. Hundreds of
these have been found in the Reservation. With these rude instruments,
this unknown people left for us a record of their existence graven deep
in the sandstone in sheltered places. These pictures today are a lasting
monument to the race that roamed this region in the gone-by centuries.
These sketches depict different kinds of animals, such as antelope and
mountain sheep, snakes and turtles. They are grotesque and out of
proportion, but doubtless they represent, for the most part, animals
that formerly roamed the western plains. Some pictures, however,
represent animals that could never have been seen on land and sea, and
existed only in the fevered imagination of the artist. Perhaps there
were futurist artists even among those primitive men.
In one scene a herd of deer cross a plain. Near that a stork stands on
attenuated legs and dangles what appears to be a baby in its bill. This
is doubtless the earliest picturization of a stork’s visit. In another
place a long line of human figures clasp their hands and drag one
another up a steep incline. In the heart of the Reservation lies a mesa
almost entirely surrounded by a steep cliff that has broken and fallen
in ruins. On the huge boulders that have rolled to the desert below,
there are pages and pages of history could one but read what is so
plainly written. One figure stands alone disconsolately weeping. Quite
monstrous tears are falling from his eyes, and just beneath his weeping
figure a six inch bowl was found. Although broken in half by the passage
of time with its destructive elements the piece of pottery, at least two
thousand years old, was carefully restored and has an honored place in
the Government Museum.
[Illustration: Courtesy C. J. Smith
Graven deep into the stone in sheltered places thousands of years ago,
these pictures are a lasting monument to the people who roamed this
region in the gone-by centuries.]
On almost every mesa are the remains of ancient dwellings. There are
arrowmaker’s chips and fragments of pottery, and crude colored beads
that may have delighted some wee maiden with their brilliance. The
pottery shows two distinct varieties, the finger-nail decorations
covering the blackened bowls which seem to have served as cooking
utensils, and the finer pottery, on which the black and white tracings
are as startlingly vivid today, as they were so many, many centuries ago
when they were drawn by the day-dreaming housewife as she sat in the sun
and painted the fanciful designs.