ART IN THE ROUGH

WITHIN recent months the eyes of art-conscious America have been turned toward Andrew Mellon and his nineteen-million dollar purchase of famed old masterpieces to be housed in a great picture gallery in Washington. His agents, armed with unlimited money, have secured pictures hundreds of years old. Nothing, it seems, that he covets for his collection has not been purchased. And yet within the little government reservation in Arizona, known as the Petrified Forest National Monument, are thousands of older pictures than have been brought from Europe, and not all of the millions commanded by Mellon, Morgan or Huntington can purchase even the smallest of them!

They are very simple, even childish things, these priceless pictures. Just art in the rough. But the miles of sandstone ledges stretching across the desolate bad-lands and the brilliant Painted Desert carry the saga of a vanished race, a people that has disappeared into the past, leaving only their tumbled houses of stone, and these indecipherable symbols over which we puzzle our archaeological brains. Are they a tribal saga? Or were many of them made aimlessly just as we moderns make pictures on a scratch pad while we wait for our numheart? Was some watcher for the enemy passing tedious hours carving sun symbols, distant mountains, thunderbirds and coiled serpents while he scanned the landscape for marauders? We do not know. Only those footprints on the sands of time are left to us. Winter snows, summer rains, year around winds have scattered the dust of the dead engravers, but scientists have dated these pictures back so many centuries that the hands which made them were crumbling dust long before Columbus wrangled Isabel's crown jewels away from her for the purchase of exploring ships.

Many learned volumes have been published about the meaning of these mystie symbols, and wonderful and fearful interpretations have been expounded. From the sublime to the ridiculous runs the tale. The matter of fact mind finds that coiled serpents and spirals indicate a nearby waterhole; clouds tell that a flood came and wiped away the bean patch; sun symbols mean it was a long dry summer and drought burned up the corn fields. Human figures are either traders or a war party. It goes on indefinitely. But there is a great modern Church which takes these symbols much more seriously. They hold that our present day Indians are remnants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and that the inscriptions are the record of their wanderings.

Julian H. Steward in his book, “Petroglyphs of California and Adjoining States,” merely remarks that “any attempt to draw inferences as to meaning, age and relationship of petrographic inscriptions is fraught with methodological difficulties.” And so after all these rock writings may be just thousand or two year old symbols found in sheltered coves near ruined prehistoric homes.

Our artistic forefathers left us two kinds of these art galleries; pictographs, which are crudely painted pictures found in caves and sheltered spots, and petroglyphs which were pecked so deeply into rocks that erosion and time have failed to eliminate them. In the Petrified Forest area only these pecked petroglyphs are found. At many places we still find the rude tools employed by the primitive workman. Rounded chunks of petrified wood, two million years old served as pounding stones, and sharp slivers of this same flint-like wood made excellent chisels. This petrified wood compares with the diamond in hardness and the miles and miles of soft sandstone, smoothed and darkened by the elements, provided a perfect out-door studio. Over head the bluest sky for a roof, a hundred miles west the snow-capped San Francisco peaks melting into the background, Painted Desert and great gaunt skeleton logs turned into rainbow colored stone surrounding the artist. Why wouldn't one sing songs, write poetry or draw pictures!

On the top of a crumbling mesa lies the foundation of a big dwelling which could easily have sheltered a thousand Indians. The ruin extends over an acre of ground and forms a patio with three rows of stone houses walling it in. Here in this sunny inclosure the Indian women, more than a thousand years ago, ground the native clay and shaped the pottery cooking vessels, the water jars and bowls, fragments of which we find today. The arrowmaker plied his trade within the patio, bringing big pieces of the agate

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

wood to this place of safety and there shaping it into arrows and spearheads for the use of his own people and to trade for sea shells and turquoise brought by wandering traders.

At the foot of this mesa lies a vast rock showing more than a thousand distinct symbols. Perhaps here was kept the tally sheets of slaves captured in battle; records of the hunt, and memos of bargains struck with the warriors from the northwest who brought obsidian from the black glass mountain in Yellowstone; of turquoise secured from the mines of Mexico and the sea shells brought from the Pacific Coast. Corn and beans, ollas, woven sandals, arrowheads and axes shaped from the rock wood, all passed from dusky hand to dusky hand in this meeting place of the tribes.

On this same rock are many pictures of the Indian "Chindee," the evil spirit that always hovered over their lives. Gaunt grasping creatures were these devils, with claws on hands and feet, terrifying enough just as we see them today. What impressions they must have made on the unfortunate artists of that day, whether they were real or only phantoms of some potent prehistoric hooch. Around these weird devils are varied symbols, perhaps incantations meant to ward off the threatened disaster.

APRIL, 1937

animals or just peacefully tracking their way. Sometimes they seem to be following the mountain sheep of the region. Whether with evolution the mountain sheep of today has lost his tail a la Darwin, or whether the prehistoric artist believed a tail would improve the general contour of his picture is a matter of conjecture, but most of the hundreds of sheep pictured on the rocks have well developed tails.

Just a stone's throw from the largest ruin we find the original stork. True, certain literal-minded scientists coldly state that the bird is a blue crane and that it grasps a frog in its bill, still to the half million visitors who have viewed the bird it remains a stork!

The masterpiece of prehistoric art which confronts every visitor registering at the Monument headquarters is known far and wide as "Nice Pussy." Far in the depths of the somber Blue Forest this ferocious animal glared at nothing in particular, until last year a wandering ranger met him face to face. With the aid of his colleagues this art loving ranger brought him back into the limelight. There is no doubt as to what he represents. A cougar! Some embryo Bonheur The bear, hated today by Navajo and Apache Indians, must have been either a valued ally or a menacing object to those long ago dwellers. His tracks appear wherever there are pictures. Near ruined houses we find them, in sequestered coves, on cliffs near water courses, on kiva walls either in pursuit of other doubtless encountered this hungry feline under duress. The mescal liquor of that period is reputed to have been right effective, so there's the possibility that intoxication added to the impression made by the big cat. His wide and hungry maw; the itching claws and general belligerent attitude are none too reassuring even in the light of the present day.

Among our Indian forefathers were (Continued on Page 23)