Mr. Gilbert also obtained sketches of etchings in November, 1878, on Partridge creek, northern Arizona, at the point where the Beale wagon road comes to it from the east. He says: “The rock is cross-laminated Aubrey sandstone and the surfaces used are faces of the laminæ. All the work is done by blows with a sharp point. (Obsidian is abundant in the vicinity.) Some inscriptions are so fresh as to indicate that the locality is still resorted to. No Indians live in the immediate vicinity, but the region is a hunting ground of the Wallapais and Avasupais (Cosninos).”
Notwithstanding the occasional visits of the above named tribes, the characters submitted more nearly resemble those of other localities known to have been made by the Moki Pueblos.
Rock drawings are of frequent occurrence along the entire extent of the valley of the Rio Verde, from a short distance below Camp Verde to the Gila river.
Mr. Thomas V. Keam reports drawings on the rocks in Canyon Segy, and in Keam’s canyon, northeastern Arizona. Some forms occurring at the latter locality are found also upon Moki pottery.
Petroglyphs are reported by Lieut. Theodore Mosher, Twenty-second Infantry, U. S. Army, to have been discovered by Lieut. Casey’s party in December, 1887, on the Chiulee (or Chilalí) creek, 30 or 40 miles from its confluence with San Juan river, Arizona. A photograph made by the officer in charge of the party shows the characters to have been outlined by pecking, the designs resembling the Shoshonean type of pictographs, and those in Owens valley, California, a description of which is given below.
A figure, consisting of two concentric circles with a straight line running out from the larger circle, occurs, among other carvings, on one of the many sculptured bowlders seen by Mr. J. R. Bartlett (_a_) in the valley of the Gila river in Arizona. His representation of this bowlder is here copied as Fig. 8. His language is as follows:
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--Petroglyph in Arizona.]
I found hundreds of these bowlders covered with rude figures of men, animals, and other objects of grotesque forms, all pecked in with a sharp instrument. Many of them, however, were so much defaced by long exposure to the weather and by subsequent markings, that it was impossible to make them out. Among these rocks I found several which contained sculptures on the lower side, in such a position that it would be impossible to cut them where they then lay. Some weighed many tons each and would have required immense labor to place them there, and that, too, without an apparent object. The natural inference was that they had fallen down from the summit of the mountain after the sculptures were made on them. A few only seemed recent; the others bore the marks of great antiquity.