by Craig Childs
Higher in the canyon I settled in a copse of half-lit junipers, took off my pack, and pulled out a down sleeping bag designed for twenty below zero. It would be barely warm enough tonight. As darkness came on, I stripped my clothes, my skin quickly cold in the brittle air before I constructed my night’s layers: long johns, undershirts, a down vest, a wool serape, a coat on top of that. When I was done, only my eyes, my mouth, and the crest of my nose were left exposed. Stars coalesced overhead. Rigel and Procyon shone so cleanly they looked as if they might crack from their settings and fall to earth.
The assembly line of my camp kept emerging from my pack: a pot, a stove, sacks of food, crushed and dried pinto beans. With no moon tonight, I used my headlamp as I went around camp collecting juniper twigs. For later, for this sinking cold of stars, I would have the company of a campfire.
I started a pot of water to boil on a small stove. A cup of tea would be a good beginning to a long night, thirteen hours until daylight and everything frozen solid, even the mountain lion motionless somewhere, half-awake and dreaming of dawn.
Late that night I built a fire no larger than my open hand. I leaned my body over it through shackles of cold, still air. Dry twigs of piñon pine and juniper gave off no smoke at all.
I had finished dinner long before. A disk of ice lay in the bottom of my metal teacup. As I hunched over my fire, it struck me that winter nights would have been exactly the same at the end of the thirteenth century—a vast loneliness, scads of hard, wind-driven snow left here and there. The bold frame of Orion would have wheeled through the sky in the same way, slowly circling the North Star. For whoever was left, getting water from a spring as I had today would have been a triumph. The Great Drought hit this region in about A.D. 1276, and after that only the deeper springs kept flowing. Driven by necessity, or greed, or fear, the last Anasazi who had not migrated closed in around these terminal water sites, where they were trapped.
As I snapped another twig in my gloves and slid it into the fire, I thought of what Eric Hansen, a contract archaeologist working in this region, had told me. He had taken an interest in what kind of firewood people had used, trying to determine what plants had been most abundant and thus how much groundwater had been available long ago. Rather than looking at indoor kitchen hearths, Hansen had focused on outdoor fire pits, figuring that people outside would have been burning whatever was closest at hand. In the early years the ash and charcoal he found indicated the use of long-burning piñon and juniper. After a few centuries these two species were replaced by cottonwood, which burns quickly. Then, finally, came sage, a plant that burns like straw. He believed that he was seeing the steady deforestation of southwest Colorado.
Then Hansen noticed something he had not expected. At twelfth- and thirteenth-century sites people began burning cottonwood again, as well as greasewood, two plants that require high water tables. He had anticipated just the opposite, that while drought was setting in and populations were increasing, water would be disappearing. Hansen pieced his conclusion together: early deforestation must have allowed grasslands to prosper, and in turn the grass kept rain and snowmelt in the soil rather than letting it drain away. With the existence of a healthy water table during increasingly dry times, this part of Colorado would have been especially attractive to farmers. Perhaps this was why so many people ended up moving here.
The phenomenon that may have saved these people also was their downfall. Too many people had come to live and farm in this area, and when the rains ultimately ceased late in the thirteenth century, the whole cultural system of the Four Corners gave way. Some people ceremoniously departed from older pueblos atop the Great Sage Plain, while others had no such freedom and perished in warfare along the flanks of Sleeping Ute Mountain and elsewhere. In whichever manner they left, this is the period widely believed to have been the end, the fall of Anasazi civilization.
By the beginning of the fourteenth century, virtually no one remained in the Four Corners, at least not enough people to have left a record of themselves. I imagine some leftover families of hunter-gatherers, maybe a few ragtag households of short-lived farmers, but mostly solitary travelers tending their small fires back among empty canyons.
My fire burned down. I blew on the last coals, warming my face, and finally there was only the icy light of the moon.
In the morning I walked across drums of hard snow in a scrubby woodland. Yuccas stuck up from breathing holes in the snow. Piñon trees stood dead all around me, victims of bark beetles and a lack of rainfall over the past few years, their ruddy brown needles liberally sprinkled on the white ground. I had been seeing dead piñons all across the Colorado Plateau: in the Grand Canyon, along the Dolores River, on Cedar Mesa. A similarly widespread piñon die-off has been documented in the thirteenth century. Although it has often been blamed on Anasazi industry, it more likely resulted from a lack of precipitation and a subsequent invasion of beetles. Such cycles are common in this land.
When I came out of the bony trees at the rimrock edge of a canyon, I spied seven masonry towers across the way. They looked like melted candlesticks, some with only their right or left halves still standing.
These seven towers, fifteen or twenty feet tall, were the final, tattered banners of the Anasazi. I was startled by their dazzle, their brave stonework. I had not previously known of this site, although I knew I would be seeing towers as I approached Hovenweep, a region of round and square Anasazi pillars on the Colorado-Utah line.
Towers were the last form of architecture erected in the Four Corners, most of them situated to look over the best farming areas. They were not necessarily signal stations, like those of earlier times, but were defensive watchtowers built to protect the fields and the farmers who were still here in the late thirteenth century. Looking across at the daring way these towers broke the skyline, I was riveted by the message they delivered, hardly diminished in all these years: We have spring water under this caprock, and farming fields all within view, and we will defend this place with fierceness and vigor to the very end.
Anasazi towers frequently show signs of extensive burning, and not necessarily the kind seen in ceremonial departures. One excavated tower revealed the remains of more than thirty infants and children, who appear to have been burned alive. The positions of the skeletons suggested they had been taken to the tower’s roof, where they had no escape, and then the tower was set ablaze. This event cuts deeply into my imagination. I see smoke roiling intensely, black with grease, a sickening fist of flame crashing in as the roof collapsed, sparks bursting from splintered beams, the whole flaming turmoil plunging into the kiva below.
Three-story tower built on a boulder in the thirteenth century near the Colorado-Utah border. CRAIG CHILDS
This would have been a fire signal meant to be seen from all around, an act of warfare shining across the land. It appears to me that it was a surgical strike intended to bring down an entire settlement at once, killing its children, what was most precious to thepeople, so that any survivors would flee, dispirited. The killers would have returned home, proud perhaps, and reeking with horror; brothers, fathers, anduncles turned to heroes, to monsters.
In a burned tower just inside Colorado, within a day’s walk of these seven towers, the remains of eight men, three women, and three infants were found in the rubble. The excavator of that site reported finding the skeletons lying in confusion one upon the other. Beneath a T-shaped doorway in the wall of this tower, he uncovered a pair of infant skulls, the rest of their skeletons missing. “One skull,” he wrote, “to our great surprise, was covered with hair, which to all appearances, was thickly matted with blood.”
When these towers were no longer able to defend the land, they became torches marking the fall of one settlement after another, as if sending a message ahead: Your neighbor’s children have been burned alive, and yours are next.
I pulled out my binoculars to study the seven stonework minarets, thinking this place must have felt very isolated in the
last decades of the thirteenth century. Built in a time when most of the Anasazi had already fled, the tower complexes around Hovenweep were the last cultural strongholds. They would have been surrounded by the sounds of sharpening knives, hunter-gatherers constantly ready to lay siege, disenfranchised villagers and crop workers turned into scavengers and murderers in the country beyond. Everyone else had migrated out of here.
I pocketed the binoculars and started down into the canyon. As I reached the other side, coming through bunches of sage, architecture began peeking up around me—leftover walls, throngs of rooms, the ground cratered with kivas. Building stones were everywhere, thousands upon thousands of them. As I passed through these fallen structures, I pieced together in my head how these people might have gotten out of here. Perhaps the residents slipped out the back door, leaving their long-defended home to the vulturous tribes in the area, their departing caravan flanked by warriors as they headed toward rumors of a better place. Or they might have been surrounded and slaughtered before they got that far. However it happened, people finally left these towers empty.
I walked up to the nearest tower. It was big enough to have been a grain silo, its fat stone blocks neatly cut so that the remaining wall had a clean curve all the way around. Exterior faces on these stones were uniformly pecked in pointillist style, a decoration lending the tower a whitish appearance on the outside. The builders had certainly meant for these towers to be seen, giving them an ivory sheen in the sun.
Grass was growing inside the tower, the first green grassanywhere, spring coming soon. As I swept my hand around the outer stones, walking the full perimeter of piles of rubble, I thought about the people who had stayed here. Perhaps they were thinking, We should have left ten years ago. They had watched others depart before them, villages left vacant, and for whatever reason they decided to stay. Maybe they had young children, and the thought of months or years of walking, crossing the southern deserts to reach a foreign land, was simply too much for them. There was no guarantee that they would have found anything better than this. Maybe they thought they could weather the drought and fight off the marauders threatening them. After all, they had these glistening towers to protect them. But at some point they must have realized their error.
The question of why the Anasazi left has been debated since it was first discovered that they were gone. Drought has been the most popular theory. Wood specimens stored at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Tucson, Arizona, have revealed irrefutable evidence of the Great Drought. The land dried up, dendrochronology researchers surmise, and as it did, either people left or they stayed and perished.
But a closer examination of this drought has revealed that it may not be the smoking gun it was thought to be. Carla Van West, an archaeologist looking into the effects of drought, used the same tree-ring data to calculate the amount of soil moisture that existed in a 700-square-mile area of southwest Colorado during those dry years. Even in the depth of the drought, she discovered, there would have been enough water to have allowed at least a portion of the original Anasazi population to remain.
Drought played a role, according to Van West, but in the end it was not the most crucial role. People left, she believes, because of overriding social forces. These forces would have been powerful enough to uproot hundreds of settlements and send people away quickly. What exactly were they? The answer is not merely in the tree rings.
“The reality is that we can gather as much empirical evidence as possible,” Van West once told me, “but we are missing the ideological and cosmological components of who they were and why they left.”
Van West surmises that in the face of social turmoil and environmental strain, the Anasazi did what they had done for countless generations before: they picked up their entire culture and carried it off.
“We have to realize that people simply cannot live without each other,” Van West told me. “We need other people in order to live meaningful lives, in fact just to function.”
She went on. “It must have been getting very lonely for some people. If you weren’t migrating out, you were left behind. There weren’t enough people for mates anymore, not enough people to marry. If you want to maintain your culture, you need to go wherever your people have gone.”
Van West offered herself as an example. She is Jewish but estranged from the Jewish culture. When her father died, she found herself trying to arrange various ceremonies and burial procedures without having the necessary contacts or personal knowledge. In her confusion she began to understand what it means to live far from your own people.
“For the proper religious ceremonies, you are required to have at least ten men in the congregation to recite the prayers,” Van West said. “If you aren’t near a Jewish community, you can’t have a Jewish burial with the necessary rituals. They bathe the dead body in such a way and dress it in certain fine linens before laying it in the ground. You would have to find a rabbi to consult, one of your own persuasion. It seems like it might have been very much like this for people living in the Four Corners. Pretty soon there aren’t enough of your own people nearby to keep the true heart of your culture alive. And then why would you stay?”
As communities began moving out during dry years, they took with them masons and farmers; fortune-tellers, priests, and healers; midwives, clan leaders, astronomers, and record keepers. Even if people could still grow corn and subsist off the last flowing springs, their elaborate cultural alliances had departed. It was only a matter of time before the final settlements caved in, detached and alone.
Van West said, “I think the whole spiritual, social business is very important for a cultural landscape. The environment certainly puts constraints on the physical facts of being alive, but people don’t live simply as economic creatures. There are much farther, deeperrelationships.”
All that remained of these relationships in the Four Corners were garrisons of towers, the ultimate pennants defiantly erected over the Anasazis’ last fields and springs. I walked through these standing hulks, wondering whether these people had felt abandoned, left to defend a homeland no one was coming back to. Grinding stones used for meal stabbed out of the ground around me. Snow huddled in the northern shadows of ruined towers. I walked through with a measured, pensive gait, as if passing through a cemetery.
At dusk I sat on a piece of capstone. I had walked into Utah now, or at least close to it, and from this isolated point of rock I could see clearly in all directions. Gloved hands stuffed deep in my coat pockets, shoulders drawn, I readied myself for the next round of stars. This quiet country and its empty houses seemed forlorn to me tonight, and I thought that the last people living here must have felt something like this, final hunters looking across these lands, feeling the press of emptiness, the tower complexes having finally fallen.
I looked south along the darkening aisles of the Carrizo Mountains, the Lukachukais, the Chuskas. This is where the land divides. Go to the left of these mountains, and you end up settling along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. Go to the right, and you enter a landscape of red sandstone towers and green mesas broken up with canyons, the country of Kayenta in Arizona.
The logic is simple. If the Anasazi left, they had to go somewhere. Their civilization did not end here, as is so often believed. Gone from the Four Corners by the end of the thirteenth century, they took many paths away from this place. A diaspora spread into the rest of the Southwest along ancient migratory routes and lanes of trade. The Anasazi moved on like a spectacular road show, carrying with them the foundations of their culture: signature T shapes, dazzling pottery, lofty architecture, and a penchant for corn. They did not disappear. In fact, a larger future lay before them, and they left a trail to follow to get there.
As I sat on this high dome of the Colorado Plateau, distant provinces of the Southwest visible on all sides, I imagined the question that must have been asked by many people eight hundred years ago: where do we go from here? Every village and pueblo, every family, had to make a
decision. I watched as each horizon diminished into the indigo skyline, the white-crowned San Juan Mountains the first to recede. Next went the thorn of Shiprock, south near Chaco, and then Mesa Verde. Like lights going off in a house, room by room the Four Corners went dark as even the high peak of Sleeping Ute and its lesser attendant summits turned into yet another shade of night. The last to go were the Abajo Mountains in the west, a black nick against the stars.
PART FOUR
SOUTHEAST UTAH
ESCAPE TERRAIN
CANYONLANDS
This catwalk ledge runs midway along a cliff face. Following it an hour before sunrise, I pressed the weight of my body against the wall, the most stable posture I could manage. Glancing toward my feet, I noticed several beads of bighorn droppings. Very slowly I came to one knee, shoulder against the rock face, and reached two fingers down to touch the droppings. They were old, dry as wood, dropped maybe five years before. A bighorn had been out here, a stocky, agile animal that would not have come to this ledge if it was not a way to somewhere. I rose just as slowly and continued on, convinced I was not pinching myself out on this cliff.
There are few places to walk in this land of canyons in southeast Utah. You can follow the canyon floors, but they frequently end in impassable pour-offs, or you can stay on the rims until they whittle down to nothing, leaving you stranded on a distant point. Most of the time you end up here, not at the top and not at the bottom, picking along scaffolding cliffs and ledges. This ledge was not clean like a sidewalk, but was instead cluttered with broken rocks that were loose under my boots. An alarming sense of depth sailed below me into the canyon, dust raining down with every step.