The number of cliff rooms in the walls of the well is small and their capacity, if used as dwellings, very limited. There are, however, ruins of pueblos of some size on the edge of the well.
One of the largest of these, shown in the accompanying illustration (plate XCVI), is situated on the neck of land separating the well from the valley of Beaver creek. This pueblo was rectangular in form, of considerable size, built of stones, and although at present almost demolished, shows perfectly the walls of former rooms. Fragments of ancient pottery would seem to indicate that the people who once inhabited this pueblo were in no respect different from other sedentary occupants of Verde valley. From their housetops they had a wide view over the creek on one side and the spring on the other, defending, by the site of their village, the one trail by which descent to the well was possible.
The remarkable geological character of Montezuma Well, and the spring within it, would have profoundly impressed itself on the folklore of any people of agricultural bent who lived in its neighborhood after emigrating to more arid lands. About a month after my visit to this remarkable spring I described the place to some of the old priests at Walpi and showed them sketches of the ruins. These priests seemed to have legendary knowledge of a place somewhat like it where they said the Great Plumed Snake had one of his numerous houses. They reminded me of a legend they had formerly related to me of how the Snake arose from a great cavity or depression in the ground, and how, they had heard, water boiled out of that hole into a neighboring river. The Hopi have personal knowledge of Montezuma Well, for many of their number have visited Verde valley, and they claim the ruins there as the homes of their ancestors. It would not be strange, therefore, if this marvelous crater was regarded by them as a house of Palülükoñ, their mythic Plumed Serpent.
Practically little is known of the pictography of this part of the Verde valley people, although it has an important bearing on the distribution of the cliff dwellers of the Southwest. There is evidence of at least two kinds of petroglyphs, indicative of two distinct peoples. One of these was of the Apache Mohave; the other, the agriculturists who built the cliff homes and villages of the plain. Those of the latter are almost identical with the work of the Pueblo peoples in the cliff dweller stage, from southern Utah and Colorado to the Mexican boundary. It is not a difficult task to distinguish the pictography of these two peoples, wherever found. The pictographs of the latter are generally pecked into the rock with a sharpened implement, probably of stone, while those of the former are usually scratched or painted on the surface of the rocks. Their main differences, however, are found in the character of the designs and the objects represented. This difference can be described only by considering individual rock drawings, but the practiced eye may readily distinguish the two kinds at a glance. The pictographs which are pecked in the cliff are, as a rule, older than those which are drawn or scratched, and resemble more closely those widely spread in the Pueblo area, for if the cliff-house people ever made painted pictographs, as there is every reason to believe they did, time has long ago obliterated them.