Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona

CANYON DE CHELLY NATIONAL MONUMENT... ARIZONA PHOTOGRAPHS by ANSEL ADAMS TEXT by NANCY NEWHALL

THE PLACE: From the rim of the Canyon de Chelly, you look down three levels and two thousand years, into the past of man. You stand in high country dotted with piñon pines; in front of you, red, ochre and violet, the canyon opens rounding, hollowing down to where the Rio de Chelly in the rainy season flashes many-channelled and dangerous with quicksands. In the dry season, trails thread its sandy bottom, dipping down the steep banks left by floods, rising to disappear under cottonwoods and willows. Huge monoliths, jutting eight hundred feet above the valley floor, stand forth from the canyon walls like statues of primeval gods.

The first level lies at crystalline depth below you; it is alive. In a moving dust cloud a flock of sheep bleats and scrambles around the stately figures of Navajo shepherds. Sun glints on silver and flames on color as women and children chase a goat, or go to gather beans or squashes, or sit before their hogans husking corn. A woman comes forth from a hogan, carrying her baby swaddled to a frame. This is the immemorial life of nomad herders and farmers, still bound to the cycle of earth and sun. We look down into it and deep into our own past. It has flowed here in this valley some two hundred years; it flows in Caucasian memory back thousands of years, back beyond all but the seed of myths, to the ancient trek with flocks from unremembered Asia. Here, to us on the rim, it appears still pure, sunk between canyon walls that rise from shadow to glow in sunrise and sunset, still guarded during the rains by quicksands. Today and its civilizations seem passing unheeded overhead; yesterday the Spanish came and vanished, the Americans came and remained, both bringing war, greed, retaliation, strange priests and strange ideals, both leaving gifts a horse, a velvet jacket, a bright skirt, the shape of a silver crescent to hang on a necklace, a rifle, and the light of peach trees blooming in the spring.

High in a canyon forking into this, there is a cave the Navajos do not willingly enter. To them, the dead, even their own dead, become evil and envious ghosts. In the winter of 1804, their warriors, going on a raid, hid the women, children and old people in this cave for safety. Seeing the Spanish come riding up the empty valley, searching for Navajos to punish for past raids, an old woman who had been captured and sold to the Conquerors in her youth could not resist yelling insults at them. The infuriated Spanish, tracing her cries, discovered the secret cave and shot into it as into a trap. They left not one survivor. The cave is known as Massacre Cave; the Canyon is named for death: Canyon del Muerto.

The Americans also suffered from raids on towns and ranches; during the Civil War, Kit Carson came here with cavalry, rounded up all Navajos and tried to transplant them to the Pecos River. The experiment failed; the Navajos have flowed back to the ancient and magical canyon. Within the vast and arid reservation allotted to them, it is now preserved by the Americans as a National Monument.

The second level is more remote in time and closer to us in thought. In the great cliffs the river hollowed caves, then wore a deeper channel. In these caves, scattered through the canyons, but chiefly in the Canyon del Muerto, abandoned shells of masonry stand like teeth in an open mouth. Square houses, some of them multiple-roomed, rise two or three stories under the arching rock. The builders, by our standards, were little men and women. They quarried stone, dressed it, carried it perhaps on their backs up from toehold to toehold in the rock, and laid it in courses. Coronado's men, clambering in helmet and breastplate up such toeholds to later pueblos, were amazed to see the native women passing them swiftly, though laden with firewood, jars of water, baskets of corn. The fingerprints of women are still visible in the mortar of these cave pueblos. The inhabitants farmed the fertile patches in the valley below, stored their grain in pockets in the cliffs, hunted deer and antelope with bow and arrow, wove cloth, shaped pots and jars from clay, flattened their babies' heads against cradleboards, prayed in their kivas, painted antelopes still bright on the living rock. Because they chose sites so inaccessible, they have been dismissed as weak. Yet the lords and priests of medieval Europe and Asia, who set walled towns along mountain slopes and crowned the crags with castles, are not considered weak. In this remote canyon, in a continent then known to Europe and Asia only through seafaring victims of storm and current, there glimmers faint and crude but unmistakable, a reflection of the medieval mind. Perhaps the medieval was a stage inevitable in the long evolution of man; perhaps between men in a certain period of development there is mysterious communion, as between cells in the same body, causing them, no matter how scattered or unknown to each other, to think and build in similar ways.

The ruins of Europe and Asia are known both to legend and history; no written or spoken record lingers about these. We have given them their names: Antelope House from paintings, Standing Cow from a Navajo pictograph, White House from a coat of plaster still unweathered on the inner houses. Tree rings tell us these people began their houses about 900 A.D. and lived in them until about 1300 A.D. A severe drought came and lasted year after implacable year. Finally, defeated only by the earth, the cavedwellers left their pueblos, their parched farms in the cracked and skeletal river bottom, and vanished, perhaps to build new pueblos, perhaps to mingle with other peoples.

The third level comes dimly through the retreating centuries. Tree rings again tell us that the Basketmakersas though some future race should call us the Railroadbuilders-came here around the time of Christ. They were the first men to live in this valley; we know their earliest life only by finding in their rubbish heaps the throwing sticks with which they hunted and fragments of their fine baskets and woven sandals. Later they took clay and made pottery; then they began building circular houses sunk a foot or more into the earth at the base of the cliffs. Then they climbed the cliffs and set their pithouses into the lips of the caves. Suddenly, around 700 A.D., in one of those periods of rapid growth peculiar to man, they became in a century or two the pueblo people, and in such places as Mummy Cave, as the excavations show us, began building a new civilization on the abandoned ruins of the old.

The past becomes more and more transparent to its watchers. Behind the first faint traces of man in this valley, the past looks deep almost beyond imagination. The ancient river that with the wind and rain has been for millions of years sculpturing these canyons, islands and monoliths, suddenly seems new. The rock, solidifying long ages before the river was born, was once sand dunes. Eroding in undulations, fracturing along sinuous curves, it testifies to a still more remote perspective: aeons of wind and lapping water on vanished inland seas once rippling where we stand.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS:

In 1873, Lt. George Wheeler of the U. S. Corps of Engineers led his party surveying and exploring Territories West of the 100th Meridian into the Canyon then called de Chelle. Tents were pitched in the valley near the Navajos' earth huts; botanists, geologists, meteorologists scattered to their jobs. The survey's photographer, Timothy O'Sullivan, loaded his mules with cameras, darktent, bottles of collodion, silver nitrate and hypo, and set forth to make what are doubtless the first photographs of the Canyon and some of the finest photographs of his life. He was a long, lean, intrepid young man; at nineteen, as one of Brady's cameramen in the Civil War, he coolly continued to photograph through a bombardment that twice knocked his camera over and drove veterans to shelter. As photographer for Clarence King's survey along the 40th Parallel, he saved his party from shipwreck in the Truckee Rapids by boldly plunging in and carrying a rope to shore. He photographed in the jungles of Darien for Commander Selfridge's survey for what is now the Panama Canal; on Wheeler's 1871 expedition up the Colorado River, he commanded the boat laden with his equipment and appropriately christened The Picture on solitary and not unperilous voyages. Generally he photographed as handsomely as possible the rock formations, trees, and people that excited his colleagues, always with a Congress to convince and a people avid to see in the back of his mind. Now and then, to judge by the results, he found a theme close to his own heart and talent. In the Canyon de Chelly, among the hollowing cliffs, the towering monoliths, the light, the space, and the strange ruins whose origin was not even known to the Navajos, Timothy O'Sullivan, recorder and explorer, could be-and was a poet. (See article by Beaumont Newhall, "Early Western Photographers," Arizona Highways, May, 1946).

Nearly seventy years later, Ansel Adams, another photographer on service to the Government, came to the Canyon de Chelly. The public, the medium and the man were different. The public had moved into the vast wild land O'Sullivan photographed, often to gut it and move on; the problem now-in less than seventy years!was to help them understand and love the land, to reclaim what had been ruined, and to preserve for themselves forever the magic and beautiful places that had been saved intact. The medium was no longer merely the faithful witness, the handmaiden to the arts; it was now the main visual communication of the world, and an art in its own right. The man had been lover, explorer, and photographer of the wilderness since he was fourteen; during his education as a musician, he kept returning to the mountains, photographing for various trips and expeditions. Finally, at twenty-eight, in 1930, he gave up music as a profession, devoted himself to photography, and in two or three years stood internationally acclaimed as one of the masters and great visual poets of the medium.

In 1941, as photo-muralist to the Department of the Interior, he was searching for places whose images, planned as murals for the Interior Building in Washington, should speak most eloquently of the vast areas under administration. Instead of O'Sullivan's mules, tents, and campfire, he came with a station wagon, sleeping bags and gasoline stoves; he slept at night on the canyon rim, and by day, lacking the mules, packed his smaller cameras-the 5 x 7 and the miniature on his own back and went down over the trails, or, taking his 8 x 10, explored up the canyons with Cozy McSparron, trader for the region and owner of the Thunderbird Ranch, who drives a car with special tires for sand.

Suddenly, on that first trip, packing down from the rim, he saw White House in the same light from the same spot as O'Sullivan's great photograph. In homage and admiration, Adams set up his camera and photographed it again. Seventy years had produced only two changes. One was natural: the ruins at the base of the cliff were now almost hidden by willows and cottonwoods. The other was in the photographic medium: O'Sullivan, flowing his glass plate with collodion and sensitizing it with silver nitrate, had an emulsion blind to red and so could record the striations made by rainwater that radiate up the cliff like the pinions of a huge wing. Adams had an emulsion so sensitive to red that only through a green filter could he deepen the reddish tone and make the striations more vibrant on modern panchromatic film.

In 1947, Adams came again, this time on a Guggenheim Fellowship to interpret for Americans the magnificence and beauty they inherit in the National Parks and Monuments. The mural project had been killed by World War II, before any murals were installed, but the purpose behind it is one to which Adams has always dedicated a major part of his life and work. What he saw was no longer O'Sullivan's epic of bright space. He saw the Canyon with a deeper poignancy: White House set small and glimmering in its shadowy cliff above the living brilliance of the trees; Antelope House ghostly under its precipice and fallen rock; the Navajo woman and her swaddled child; cactus surmounted by the pristine flowers of a delicate vine. He saw the waters and the ribbed and shining sand, the undulations and ancient wind patterns in the stone, the strange polygonal symmetry of the giant Monument. Rocks, to O'Sullivan, were routine; to Adams, they are articulate, elemental. Man appeared little and profoundly moving among the huge forces and rhythms of the earth.

In the fall of 1951, Adams came again to the Canyon. The drought for several years had been severe. Dust was deep underfoot, no thunderstorms darkened the dry washes; there were no clouds in the hard sky. Deliberately Adams avoided its brazen glare. From the rim, at evening, he photographed down at Spider Rock rising still bright against the dim space of Monument Canyon. At noon, on the canyon floor, using a new small reflex with interchangeable lenses, he photographed up through the ruins at White House to the pictograph gleaming in the same merciless sunlight that seven centuries ago drove the cavedwellers, thirsty and starving, away from the Canyon forever.