The various objects found in the ruins or on the surface of the ground
as a rule are characteristic of a people in the stone-age culture,
ignorant of metals, and therefore prehistoric, but here and there on
the surface have been picked up iron weapons which belonged to the
historic period. The old “Spanish Trail” mentioned in preceding pages
was the early highway from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the Great Salt
Lake, and followed approximately an old Indian trail that was probably
used by the prehistoric inhabitants or the builders of the towers. Not
far from the head of Yellow Jacket Canyon a ranchman discovered on
his farm a few years ago the blades of two Spanish iron lance heads
or knives, still well preserved, the hilts, however, being destroyed.
These objects, now in Mr. Williamson’s collection at Dolores, may have
belonged to a party of Spanish soldiers who explored this region, but
their form, in addition to the material, is so characteristic that no
one would assign them to aboriginal manufacture. Fragments of a stirrup
of metal, parts of the harness or saddle, also belonging to the Spanish
epoch, have also been found. The indications are that these objects are
historic, but their owners may have been Indians who obtained them from
Europeans. They probably do not antedate the middle of the eighteenth
century, when two Catholic fathers, with an escort of soldiers, made
their trip of discovery from Santa Fe into what is now Utah. They shed
no light on the epoch of the aborigines who constructed the castles and
towers considered in this paper.