“The principle and most accessible ruins are the Spruce Tree House, Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Tunnel House. Spruce Tree House is located in the head of Spruce Tree Canyon, a branch of Navajo Canyon. It originally contained about 130 rooms, built of dressed stone laid in adobe mortar, with the outside tiers chinked with chips of rocks and broken pottery.
“Cliff Palace is located about two miles east of Spruce Tree House, in a left branch of Cliff Canyon, and consists of a group of houses with ruins of 164 rooms, including 20 round kivas, or ceremonial rooms, and a tapering, loopholed tower forming a crescent of about 100 yards from horn to horn, which is reputed to be one of the most famous works of prehistoric man in existence.
“Balcony House, a mile east of Cliff Palace, in Ruin Canyon, contains about 25 rooms, some of which are in almost perfect condition.
“Tunnel House, about two miles south of Spruce Tree House, contains about 20 rooms and two kivas connected by an elaborate system of underground passages, and a burial ground of 5,000 square feet. In each of these villages is an elaborate system of fortification, with, in some cases, walls two to three feet thick and 20 feet high, watchtowers 30 feet high, and blockhouses pierced with small loopholes for arrows....”
I should advise any traveller planning to visit any of the Southwest Indian Reservations to go well armed with literature. The U. S. Government circulars, from which the above is quoted, may be had from the Department of the Interior, and the Santa Fé Railroad provides excellent literature.
“With the creation of the Zion National Park in 1919 there entered into our National Park system a reservation as remarkable, as brilliantly beautiful, and as highly differentiated from all others as any of the distinguished group. It contains a hundred and twenty square miles of painted terrace country of southern Utah, surrounding from its source a shallow river whose carved and fretted and monumented canyon lies between sandstone walls which rise two thousand feet in gorgeous mottled reds, surmounted by a thousand feet in marble-white.
“This Park makes two principal appeals, that to the universal delight in extraordinary beauty of colour and form, and that to the intelligence of the student of earth’s history.... To the best of my knowledge, there is no place in the world where one may see so easily so much of the record of the earth’s history.