Geology is the showy star of the Colorado Plateau, the huge geographic province that straddles the states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. Within its 240,000 square miles lie ancient volcanoes, a profusion of buttes and mesas, forested mountain ranges, and countless canyons cutting deep into a layer-cake of stone that records nearly 2 billion years of North American history.
The most famous example of this is, of course, the Grand Canyon, that mile-deep gash exposing stair-stepping layers of stone as colorful as their names — the Kaibab formation, Coconino sandstone, the Moenkopi formation. But there are, by my formal count, a zillion other canyons of greater or lesser size and complexity. The Southwest is a particularly rewarding environment for geology nerds like me, because the arid climate means the bones of the Earth tend to be exposed in ways they are not in wetter regions where forests and other vegetation cloak it. The ancient story is relatively easy to read.
On our recent trip across this region, however, it was a different set of layers that drew much of our attention. If the Colorado Plateau presents an obvious assemblage of lithic evidence testifying to the geologic processes that shaped it, it also presents subtler evidence of the cultural layer-cake that lies draped across the landscape. It is not always as visible as great stacks of stone, but it is every bit as complex.
An unusual partnership
There are 30 units of the National Park system on the Colorado Plateau — national parks, national monuments, national historic sites, national recreation areas. Traveling in Next Chapter, our camper van, Leslie and I visited about a half dozen of them on our late spring road trip across the region, including Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico; Petrified Forest National Park and Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site in Arizona; and the Vermillion Cliffs and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, which straddle Utah and Arizona.
But two places we visited stood out for the way they illuminate the complex and often fraught cultural history of the region: Canyon De Chelly National Monument, and Pipe Spring National Monument, both in Arizona. (I’ll save the story told at Pipe Spring for another day.)
Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “deh-SHAY” and probably a Spanish mangling of the Navajo name for the canyon complex, Tseyi’) has been inhabited for more than 4,000 years. It is a singular oddity among the units overseen by the National Park Service. Although NPS administers the monument and its infrastructure, the land is owned by the Navajo Nation — at 17.5 million acres, the largest tribal reservation in the U.S. — and about 40 Navajo families continue to live seasonally and farm within the monument boundaries.
White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly.
The Navajo Nation co-manages the monument with the U.S. government, and the Navajo perspective is well represented in its interpretive materials. This is in striking contrast to many other NPS units. Although things are slowly changing, most visitors to these treasured elements of our national heritage have only occasionally been made aware that before they were parks and monuments, they were the homes of indigenous peoples. In many cases, they were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands for the convenience of white settlers and, later, tourists.
Priorities are different at Canyon de Chelly. Outsiders may visit most of the monument only when accompanied by a Navajo guide or a park ranger. This means visitors often encounter the landscape with the help of someone with a deep and personal connection to it.
The Navajo, however, are only the most recent people to occupy the canyon complex, and their story is but one chapter in the book written by hundreds of generations of men and women who have called the area home. The full human history of Canyon de Chelly — like that of so much of the American West — is a complicated one, layer upon layer of comings and goings, settlement and dispossession, alliance and conflict, abundance and scarcity.
Cultural change across centuries
Just as geologists have an agreed-upon nomenclature and classification system for the layers of rock that form the Colorado Plateau, archaeologists, historians and anthropologists have a generally agreed-upon system and timeline for classifying the various cultural traditions that have arisen in the Four Corners region over the past 10,000 years. That system mostly focuses on the most recent 2,300 years, the period for which there’s a relatively robust archaeological record.
There are six broad divisions, generally based on subsistence patterns, dwelling types, pottery styles, and size and complexity of communities. The timeline tracks the transition from a mobile hunting and gathering lifestyle to one that eventually included intensive agriculture, participation in a transcontinental trading network, and construction of the vast stone cities to be found in places such as Chaco and Mesa Verde National Park. Collectively, the people responsible for these cultural complexes are referred to now as the Ancestral Pueblo.
That wasn’t the case back in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was studying archaeology and anthropology in college. The people of the Four Corners region, who abandoned their longtime settlements nearly a thousand years ago, were collectively referred to as the Anasazi, and the profession seemed to have been mystified by their apparent disappearance.
The professional consensus now is that “Anasazi” — a Navajo word generally translated as “Ancient Enemies” — was not appropriate and that the people did not “disappear.” They migrated — driven perhaps by severe drought, dwindling natural resources, conflict among communities — and settled in areas now occupied by their descendants: the pueblo peoples of today, such as the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, Laguna and others.
In Canyon de Chelly, a big chunk of that history is on full display. So is a lot of simply spectacular country.
A complicated story
The first time I visited the interior of Canyon de Chelly, about 15 years ago, I reached it on horseback from a ranch on the canyon rim, and the journey involved an unnerving descent on a narrow and exposed trail that switchbacked down the steep, 600-foot canyon wall.
This time, however, we met our Navajo guide, Fernando, at the Thunderbird Lodge in Chinle, Ariz., and our transport was a six-wheel-drive, Austrian-built Pinzgauer troop carrier, converted into an open-air tour bus. Fernando simply drove into the canyon at its lower end following the course of a small stream. It was not as historically evocative as a horseback visit, but it was considerably more comfortable.
The canyon walls rise as you head upstream. “Chinle” means “canyon mouth” in Navajo, and it’s the point where the sandstone formation into which the canyon complex is eroded plunges out of sight below the surface of the sandy wash. The farther you proceed upstream, the deeper the canyon grows, its depth eventually reaching more than 800 feet. It’s a beautiful landscape, the bottom lined by cottonwoods, the walls eroded into fantastic shapes, the ruddy de Chelly sandstone so luminous it seems lit from within.
Cottonwoods and Pinzgauer.
The main attractions, however, are the evidence of ancient habitation, including rock art and the remains of sophisticated multi-story buildings made of stone, wood and clay. Fernando drove us to several of these sites during our tour, including the spectacular White House Ruin, perched in a large alcove in the cliff, which represents a relatively late phase in the human occupation of the region.
Although it was used during the preceding 2,700 years by people hunting and migrating through the canyons, the earliest evidence of settlement in Canyon De Chelly dates to about 200 BC. The first evidence of Ancestral Pueblo culture, characterized by relatively large settled villages and pottery, shows up around 700 AD.
The White House site was occupied from around 1060 to 1275, shortly before Ancestral Pueblo populations throughout the region abandoned their settlements and migrated toward other parts of the Southwest, including the more fertile Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico and the Little Colorado River Basin in Arizona. That great transition occurred in stages, and at slightly different times in different areas, and was mostly complete by 1300.
There is evidence that the Hopi, descendants of the Ancestral Pueblo people, returned to Canyon de Chelly to visit and conduct rituals from about 1300 to 1700. At one stop on our tour, Fernando — who grew up in the canyon, raised by his grandmother on one of its small family homesteads — pointed out rock art images on the cliff face that he identified as Hopi clan symbols.
The Navajo arrived in the late 17th century, linguistic and genetic analysis indicating that at least some of their ancestors had recently migrated to the Southwest from northern Canada or Alaska.
They remain in the canyon still, despite a massacre at the hands of the Spanish in 1805 and forced removal by the U.S. military in 1863. The latter was the culmination of a campaign of terror led by Col. Kit Carson, whose troops captured or killed many of those living in the canyons, burned their crops and homes, and slaughtered their livestock. Carson’s depredations were one episode in a horrific multi-year campaign by the American government to round up the Navajo, evict them from their homeland, and force them to journey on foot to what was in effect an internment camp in New Mexico. They would not be allowed to return until 1868.
That deadly ordeal, known to the Navajo as The Long Walk, echoes in the canyon today, a painful chapter in the complicated story of a hauntingly lovely landscape. That the Navajo and the U.S. government now partner in the management of this place — and collaborate to tell its stories — is a reminder that history need not determine destiny. That’s a useful lesson for all of us who live in the West.
Hi John,
Thank you for sharing your adventures and deep knowledge of the Four Corners area.
When Anita and I lived in Santa Fe for 10 years, we spent a lot of time in Navajo Nation, exploring many of the 'layers' that you mentioned. It's a place that everyone should try to experience!!!!
We likewise will look forward to your next installment, and please give Leslie a BIG hug from us.
Cheers,
Doug and Anita
Looking forward to your Pipe Springs experience. My family still ranches along that border, the “Arizona Strip”. When working cattle we would always stop by Pipe Springs…there used to be a small place that made great fry bread.