 | The material culture of Pueblo Bonito |  |
DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION
Simpson was first to publish a personal impression of the principal
Chaco ruins; Jackson was first to give detailed descriptions. Simpson
names six of the eight ruins he and his nine companions visited between
sunrise and sunset on August 28, 1849. Accompanied by old
Hosta, ex-governor of Jemez pueblo and one of Simpson's guides,
Hosta's grandson, and an interpreter, Jackson, in May 1877, spent
"four or five days" in the canyon during which he examined and
plotted 11 ruins and reported upon other features. I find no fact to
support statements that Ainza in 1735, Gregg in 1840 or thereabout,
and Domenech a decade later were ever in Chaco Canyon. And I
see absolutely nothing on the oft-cited 1776 map of Don Bernardo
Miera y Pacheco (Library of Congress, Lowery 593) to indicate
that he had ever been there either. Traders, colonial agents, and
militiamen unquestionably penetrated this "Provincia de Nabajoo"
repeatedly prior to 1840, and the tales they carried to the market
place in Santa Fe probably supplied the generalized information that
led Gregg (1845, p. 285) and Loew (1875, p. 176) to describe Pueblo
Pintado as Pueblo Bonito. Brand (1937) has best summarized the
known history of the Chaco country, although he errs in some
particulars.
Morgan (1881) quotes directly from Simpson and Jackson and
reproduces the latter's map and ground plans. Mindeleff (1891)
photographed the central Chaco ruins but had surprisingly little to
say of them in connection with his study of Pueblo architecture. After
Mindeleff came a succession of writers, vacationists, and others drawn
dead towns.
The Hyde Expeditions.—In 1896 Richard Wetherill, a leader in
the discovery and exploitation of cliff dwellings and earlier remains,
transferred his field of operations from Colorado and Utah to Chaco
Canyon and began digging in Pueblo Bonito. His initial success, plus
the remarkable condition of the ruin, prompted the idea of a more
formal program. He communicated his thoughts to B. Talbot B.
Hyde and Frederick E. Hyde, Jr., of New York, to whom he had
previously sold a Utah collection. Having donated this latter to the
American Museum of Natural History, the Hyde brothers quite
understandably went to the Museum seeking advice on Wetherill's
proposal. Prof. F. W. Putnam, then curator of the department of
anthropology, not only approved the plan but undertook to guide its
scientific phase from New York while his newly appointed assistant,
George H. Pepper, directed field operations. The Hyde brothers
took over Wetherill's 1896 finds and financed the program during
the four following years, 1897 through 1900. Field work was not
resumed in 1901 "by reason of Government interference" (Holsinger,
Ms., p. 73).
With "about 100 Navajos" employed, provision for their subsistence
had to be made. This necessity suggested a trading post at
Pueblo Bonito, for there was none within 30 miles at the time. Accordingly,
in 1898 a company was formed, under the name of the Hyde
Exploring (or Exploration) Expedition, with Richard Wetherill field
manager and Frederick E. Hyde, Jr., general supervisor. Company
headquarters were established at Pueblo Bonito; in 1901 a local post
office was authorized under the name "Putnam."
A residence for Wetherill was built a few feet from the southwest
corner of Bonito, paralleling its west wall. Rooms 122-124 were
cleared and revamped for occupancy. The store, a large room, adjoined
the residence on the west. Back of the store, extending toward
the cliff, was a long, narrow building, the stable. At the northeast
corner of Pueblo del Arroyo a bunkhouse was built for employees;
at the southeast corner, a boardinghouse with a few rooms for
transients later became known as "the hotel." There were lesser
structures here and there and a horse pasture south of the arroyo,
at the foot of The Gap. All these improvements had been made on
the unappropriated public domain.
On May 14, 1900, Wetherill filed a homestead entry upon the NW
¼ sec. 30, T. 21 N., R. 11 W., an area that included Kinklizhin ruin
and the adjacent prehistoric farmlands. Six months later, alleging
south quarter of section 12, embracing not only the buildings he had
erected but also the ruins of del Arroyo, Bonito, and Chettro Kettle.
To inquire into this request and at the same time to investigate alleged
acts of trespass, Special Agent S. J. Holsinger of the General Land
Office was directed to visit Chaco Canyon. His report to the Commissioner,
under date of December 5, 1901, contains much information
and much misinformation. Wetherill and Frederick E. Hyde, Jr.,
gave their testimony under oath, but it is obvious that they indulged
freely, at other times, in that favorite western sport, spoofing the
stranger. Like those before him, Holsinger was swayed to superlatives
by the size and condition of Pueblo Bonito. He accepted
enthusiastically Wetherill's idea of preserving the Chaco ruins in the
public interest, and it was his argument, in large part, that brought
about creation of Chaco Canyon National Monument in 1907.
Following Holsinger's investigation, but before his report was submitted,
the Hyde Exploring Expedition transferred its headquarters
from Pueblo Bonito to Thoreau, on the Santa Fe Railroad, and its
archeological collections were presented to the American Museum of
Natural History, in New York. A handsome gift half a century ago,
those collections remain today not only convincing proof of the
generosity of the Hyde brothers but also of the cultural heights
attained by the builders of Pueblo Bonito.
Some of his more spectacular finds were described in four short
papers by Mr. Pepper (1899, 1905b, 1906, 1909). The final report
he had hoped to prepare was never written, but in its stead publication
of his rough field notes was authorized in the autumn of 1920. These
notes, of but limited usefulness to one not intimately acquainted with
Pueblo Bonito, are often confused and incomplete, as are my own.
Pepper and I were close friends for 10 years prior to his death in
1924, and Pueblo Bonito was a frequent subject of conversation.
Since we both earned our daily living in museums, no one knows
better than I his disappointment when museum chores year after
year delayed the volume that should have been an appropriate end to
the principal undertaking of his scientific career.
The National Geographic Society Expeditions.—In beginning researches
at Pueblo Bonito 20 years after the Hyde Expeditions, the
National Geographic Society had but a single purpose: to contribute,
if possible, additional information regarding Pueblo civilization at its
height. This cultural apex, many agreed, was best exemplified by
the major Chaco Canyon ruins, and of these Pueblo Bonito had been
recognized by our 1920 reconnaissance as the one site at which all
Pueblo del Arroyo was added because its proximity permitted examination
coincident with the Pueblo Bonito investigation and because
masonry walls exposed by the arroyo on the west side of the ruin
were thought to underlie the latter.
The Society's program of investigation, as approved by its Committee
on Research, included everything identifiable with the life of
these two prehistoric communities. Their domestic water supply,
their sources of food and fuel, their entire subsistence problem—all
lay within the scope of our inquiry.
In the early summer of 1921 we set up our tents directly south of
Pueblo Bonito, on the edge of a long, cellarlike excavation that had
been the Hyde Expedition's storeroom for wool and Navaho blankets.
Where we dug our well, on a sand bar at one side of the main watercourse
and a couple of feet higher, the arroyo measured 32 feet deep
and 180 feet wide. Elsewhere, depth and width were greater. Water
for camp purposes was pumped into a tank elevated above the tents;
gravity carried it down into the kitchen, at the east end of the old
cellar, and to a mud box near the ruin. (A crew of three, sometimes
two crews, made wall repairs as our excavations progressed.)
It is generally recognized throughout the Southwest that drinkable
water is to be had only by digging in, or adjacent to, the actual stream
course of an arroyo. The Hyde Expedition was an early experimenter
in Chaco Canyon. "A six-inch well, 350 feet deep, was drilled
near the south-west corner of Bonito ruins with the hope of securing
artesian water. No flow, however . . . and only brackish water,
unfit for use, encountered." (Holsinger, Ms., p. 10.)
In April 1901, at the time of Holsinger's visit, the well supplying
Hyde Expedition personnel and livestock was situated "just south
and almost under the walls of Pueblo Arroyo" and was 20 feet deep.
It was short-lived, however, presumably ruined at the same time
floodwaters destroyed the wagon road across the arroyo at that point,
since a new well had been dug and a new crossing prepared a hundred
yards upstream prior to Wetherill's death in 1910. During the following
decade floods continued their annual channeling, for when I first
crossed here, in June 1920, the well platform stood 4 feet above the
bottom of the arroyo and a crumpled steel windmill tower lay half
buried in the sand. A year later both wreckage and well disappeared.
| The material culture of Pueblo Bonito | |