the cover

HOW WE FOUND THE LOST FORTS OF CHEVELON CANYON

Photographer Nick Berezenko and I were intrigued by the secret in the book I'd found. It told of two fortified pueblos on Chevelon Creek in northern Arizona dating from 800 years ago. But the archaeologists who published the book were careful to conceal the whereabouts of their strange and controversial discovery.

"I've read everything over carefully," I assured Berezenko. "They've omitted map coordinates, but look at these photos."

The arcane mid-70s' report described one fort of 21 rooms and another of eight rooms, and poor photos showed them perched on narrow outcroppings from the main canyon wall. When we asked around, no one knew anything about them.

We were camped in the canyon 150 miles northeast of Phoenix, where we had come to fish and photograph nature. The area is renowned for its rugged beauty, rich wildlife, and good angling. But the ruins had become an obsession, and we decided to find them.

"I've had some archaeological training," Berezenko said, reaching for the book. "I'd like to study it."

That night, in a cramped nest in the back of his old pickup camper, Berezenko read with a battery lamp, while I fell asleep with my doubts in a tent some distance upwind from his unfiltered cigarettes.

"I think I know where they are," he announced in the morning. "All the information you need is there, if you know what to look for." And then he showed me on the map.

Chevelon Canyon looks from the air like a brutal tear through the north slope of the Mogollon Rim, the massive uplift that nearly divides Arizona in half. Chevelon Creek, a busy ditchdigger, begins as a spring at 7,500 feet in an alpine forest. The creek, as well as its tributaries, flows south through three trout-fishing impoundments Woods Canyon Lake, Willow Springs Lake, and Chevelon Lake then appears and disappears at intervals in the gorge until it merges meekly with the Little Colorado River near Winslow. During its 75-mile course, the creek descends nearly 3,000 feet, and in some years high water can be awesome.

The headwaters, above the reservoirs, are popular for recreation. Hiking along the creek, we saw where elk and deer had watered. A hunting bald eagle soared overhead. Wild turkeys (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 14 AND 15) Chevelon Canyon begins at the confluence of Woods Canyon and Willow Springs Canyon drainages, treed areas pockmarked by limestone outcroppings.

(LEFT) At Chevelon Crossing, just a mile south of this idyllic scene on Chevelon Creek, lies one of the two roadways that traverse the streambed.

CHEVELON CANYON

and bears prowl the forest where pre-historic peoples must certainly have hunted.

Below the reservoirs, the creek begins excavating in earnest. Soon the canyon becomes a hard place afoot or on horseback, even a dangerous place when the rattlesnakes are out, and a bad place anytime in a big rainstorm where stretches of unscalable 200-foot cliffs offer few places for escape. Once the canyon leaves the pines, the land descends quickly into a sagebrush desert that is bone-dry in summer.

Despite these discouraging elements, people have fought over the area apparently since Paleolithic times, judging from the Indian forts we were searching for. Mormon farmers were the first American settlers, but drought drove them out.

Later came the gunslingers and the Pleasant Valley War over sheepgrazing, and cowboys and dry-land spreads that included the famous Hashknife Outfit. The upper Chevelon is now part of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, while the lower Chevelon is fractured into a checkerboard of public and private lands.

After Berezenko deciphered the secret of the book, we detoured to Winslow and the sites of two large mound pueblos at the end of a pre-historic Indian trade route known as Palatkwapi Trail, which for a way parallels State Route 87, crossing a broad prairie and open range with nothing higher than a fence post. We hoped to learn more about those long-ago Indians.

CHEVELON CANYON

Karen Berggren, manager of Homolovi Ruins State Park, a 1,000room mound pueblo three miles east of Winslow, had never heard of the Chevelon forts, although she is continually in touch with archaeologists. But she invited us to join a routine patrol of Chevelon Ruins, a 400-room mound pueblo on the creek about 10 miles southeast of Winslow, which flourished about the same time as the forts.

"It's hard to get to," she said. And she prepared us for damage caused by looters. "It did get hit hard by pothunters." She sighed. "We came close to catching them a couple of times."

Our guide was park ranger Kenn Evans. As regional coordinator for the Arizona Site Steward Program to preserve ruins, he is attuned to the amateur archaeological network. "After A.D. 1300," he explained, "occupation was confined to the single site at Chevelon Ruins. Then around 1425, judging from pottery styles, Chevelon also was abandoned."

Chevelon Ruins has crumbled into stony rubble atop a mound that overlooks the creek's delta, an area protected by mosquitoes, gnats, and the state since 1961, as the Chevelon Creek Wildlife Area. Looters have left it pocked in their search for antiquities, even resorting to a bulldozer to disinter some of the estimated 600 Indian grave sites nearby - an unspeakable offense to the Hopis who still consider as sacred places the Chevelon Ruins, in their language Cakwabaiyaki, or "blue running water pueblo," and Homolovi, the "place of the little hills."

Evans took us next to a place popular with Winslow swimmers, where unmolested petroglyphs of clan and fertility symbols, animals and caricatures of spirits, including Kokopelli, the Hopi flute player, are chiseled into Coconino sandstone. This part of the canyon is known as the "Little Chevelon," downstream from where the canyon chokes down into "The Narrows," a twisting slot of pools and flotsam tangles.

Now we were ready for our own search. We had learned scientists are at odds about Indian forts. Some archaeologists contend pueblo Indians were peaceful farmers who did not engage in warfare until the arrival of northern Athapascans, whose family tree includes the Navajos and Apaches.

The three University of California archaeologists who surveyed the forts and published their discovery tried to avoid academic criticism: "No attempt will be made . . . to answer the topological and widely debated question of 'what is a defensive site?' " Yet they went right ahead and speculated anyway.

On a bright December morning, we were able to decide for ourselves. Berezenko, combining map work with hunches, located the ruins quickly.

A TWO-FOOT-HIGH PARAPET COMMANDED A STEEP SLOPE ON THE RIGHT FLANK WHERE AN ENEMY COULD HAVE BEEN REPULSED WITH STONE-ROLLING, ARCHERY, AND ROCK-THROWING SLINGS.

One is located within Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest; the other on private rangeland. Both were cleverly concealed, even after eight centuries. Looking through binoculars from the opposite side of the canyon, I could see nothing of the bulwarks. A cow trail snaked down into the canyon to the foot of the cliff that guards the largest fort, and we followed. Scrambling up a steep incline, we reached the main approach across a narrow bottleneck guarded by a series of parapets of piled limestone boulders. Behind them archers would have dominated a killing field

CHEVELON CANYON

50 yards in radius. An attack there would have been suicidal. A 150-foot cliff protected the rear flank, and on the left flank a 12-foot wall of rock could easily have been defended. A two-foot-high parapet commanded a steep slope on the right flank where an enemy could have been repulsed with stone-rolling, archery, and rock-throwing slings. “Whoever chose this site was a good general,” I suggested. “Whoever built this was really paranoid,” said Dan Gosnell of Phoenix, a friend who, with his wife, Noel, had tagged along.

There were signs of looting. A quarter-mile away at the abandoned site, Berezenko found pottery shards with designs similar to those on shards we saw in the fort. There is no doubt for me now how modern looters find some of these ancient places. Berezenko found the forts easily enough with what he'd learned from a college archaeology course. He had simply followed the clues scientists share with one another when they publish. A Forest Service investigator told me looters often are clever amateur archaeologists who, as we had, followed a paper trail to ruins. Piled rocks defined the rectangles of room foundations. We chose the largest one that archaeologists had excavated to discover, over lunch, our theories about the ancient ruin. I couldn't help but wonder at the battles that might have been fought there. The California archaeologists thought the forts were built to defend food supplies during a time when overpopulation outstripped available resources. They also fed scientific controversy by advancing a theory that intertribal warfare had broken out over food sources; and that it was even possible, they said, the forts were built as protection against predatory Indians, despite a lack of archaeological evidence. “Maybe they were bandits,” raiding from the forts, taking what they wanted from the largely unprotected mound pueblos, suggested Marie Fritz of Payson, a friend of Berezenko's. Tony Biggs of Scottsdale, another of Berezenko's friends, disagreed. An ex-British Army commando, he judged the forts with a military eye. They were designed to be defensive, he said, and both would be difficult to attack successfully. “You would have to defend only one side, the side with the fortifications,” Biggs explained in his Cockney accent. “You'd have to attack in numbers to get up that hill.” The

As Chevelon Creek runs out of The Narrows and heads for its confluence with the Little Colorado River, tamarisk trees grow like weeds along the streambed.

probable losses would discourage that strategy.

"We wondered if it was an outpost," Biggs continued. "We decided it was a place where all the local people, if there was an attack, would run to and fortify themselves until the invaders went away.

"I think they were protecting themselves from other tribes or parts of the tribe. Their numbers were small. We think of Indian wars like you see them in movies with John Wayne. To be realistic," Biggs said, "there probably were only a handful of people fighting each other."

The smaller fort farther upstream had an almost identical defensive layout. The only easy way up led through a notch in a rock guarded by a parapet fitted with weapons ports from which defenders could repel attackers.

Across the canyon, Biggs noticed a small cave. Inside were a stone metate for grinding corn, old husks, and what could have been a human femur.

Our fishing and photography trip had turned into a successful detective story. And our fascination continued even after we found the forts.

The Chevelon is country Berezenko knows well. He has found his way to the 16-Mile Camp of the Hashknife Outfit, the name given to the pioneer Aztec Land and Cattle Co. He has explored the ranch house ruins of Will C. Barnes, a 19th-century cattleman and historian who chronicled many of Arizona's early place-names. For the hardy, Chevelon Canyon is worth exploring.

Tread carefully when you go. The Chevelon is a trove of ancient and modern archaeology. It's also a place of restful grandeur. Phoenix restaurateur Tom Hamilton considers the canyon "one of my favorite places on the planet."

He has visited the upper Chevelon four or five times a year for more than 15 years, mostly as a catch-andrelease fisherman.

"We've caught some 24-inch trout out of Chevelon Lake," he said. "But that's not the main reason for going up there. It's the nicest country I know. But remember: The ancients were there before you. They lived, loved, and fought over the land - the forts prove that and there's no place you can go in the Chevelon where you won't encounter their traces."