It requires a clear head and
steady nerves to perform the daring feat in safety - to the truth
of which statement modern explorers can testify who have made the
attempt in recent years at the peril of life and limb while
engaged in searching for archaeological treasures.
Judged by the everyday life that is familiar to us it seems
incredible that houses should ever have been built or homes
established in such hazardous places, or that any people should
have ever lived there. But that they did is an established fact
as there stand the houses which were built and occupied by human
beings in the midst of surroundings that might appall the
stoutest heart. Children played and men and women wrought on the
brink of frightful precipices in a space so limited and dangerous
that a single misstep made it fatal.
It is almost impossible to conceive of any condition in life, or
combination of circumstances in the affairs of men, that should
drive any people to the rash act of living in the houses of the
cliff dwellers. Men will sometimes do from choice what they
cannot be made to do by compulsion. It is easier to believe that
the cliff dwellers, being free people, chose of their own accord
the site of their habitation rather than that from any cause they
were compelled to make the choice. Their preference was to live
upon the cliffs, as they were fitted by nature for such an
environment.
For no other reason, apparently, do the Moquis live upon their
rocky and barren mesas away from everything which the civilized
white man deems desirable, yet, in seeming contentment. The
Supais, likewise, choose to live alone at the bottom of Cataract
Canon where they are completely shut in by high cliffs. Their
only road out is by a narrow and dangerous trail up the side of
the canon, which is little traveled as they seldom leave home and
are rarely visited.
To affirm that the cliff dwellers were driven from their
strongholds and dispersed by force is pure fiction, nor is there
any evidence to support such a theory. That they had enemies no
one doubts, but, being in possession of an impregnable position
where one man could successfully withstand a thousand, to
surrender would have been base cowardice, and weakness was not a
characteristic of the cliff dwellers.
The question of their subsistence is likewise a puzzle. They
evidently cultivated the soil where it was practicable to do so
as fragments of farm products have been found in their dwellings,
but in the vicinity of some of the houses there is no tillable
land and the inhabitants must have depended upon other means for
support.
