About 900 years ago the New York of America was about mid-
way between Thoreau and Bloomfield, N. M. There were more
permanent residents on one 3-acre spot, with a higher degree of
culture, than anywhere else north of central Mexico.
We know little about these people except by study of what they
left in this great Indian ghost town. Pottery. Beads. Baskets.
Stone and bone implements. Skeletons and fragments of
clothing. And, above all, the great house in which they lived. It
stands there today, this awesome Pueblo Bonito, in some places
four and five stories high, its 800 rooms as empty as any ghost
might wish.
It is strange how that great apartment house endured from its
abandonment around 1200 A. D. until white men found it about a
century ago. Two factors helped preserve it: mild dry climate and
the superstitious dread in which the Navajo Indians held it.
Pueblo Bonito still remains a ghost town, except for the U. S.
Park Service employees and the thousands of visitors who
stream in and out of here. Archaeologists have uncovered
hundreds of the rooms. In some the vigas or roof beams are still
sound, en- abling archaeologists to date these rooms accurately
by the tree- ring method.
A Park Service ranger will tell you that 32 kivas or ceremonial
rooms have been excavated here. He will point out where a great
stone slabin 1941 came crashing from the cliff against which the
ruin nestles, and crushed in many rooms--thus fulfilling a Navajo
superstition that when the slab fell the world would meet with a
great calamity. For us Worid War II began soon after the shaft fell.
The ranger will point out adjacent ruins, some hundreds of
years older than Pueblo Bonito. Very near is Chetro Ketl, an-
other five story apartment house. In all these ruins the buff-
colored walls have good masonry.
Why did the Pueblo Bonito people leave such a home? Pest-
ilence? Drought? Savage invaders? Where did they go? We
have no positive answers--yet.
To reach Pueblo Bonito leave Highway 66 at Thoreau, and
drive 64 miles via Crownpoint. Or, coming from the north, turn off
Highway 44 onto Highway 56 about 28 miles from Bloomfield.
There are no accommodations at Pueblo Bonito except water-shy
campgrounds.