today, that defined ‘world’ is bounded by the far mountains and includes the hills, valleys, lakes, and springs.” That suggests that places like Chaco, and Ridges Basin, became communities or political centers not only due to tangible factors, but also because of where they fit into the symbolic world. Perhaps the “roads” and other AWUF were bridges of sorts, linking the built architecture with the symbolic world, a sort of architectural map of the Pueblo cosmos.
The Great North Road, for instance, points toward 14,252-foot Mt. Wilson, the highest peak in this part of the San Juan Mountains. If one were to follow the road’s trajectory—or what archaeologist Stephen Lekson calls the Chaco Meridian—toward Mt. Wilson, she would first pass through the Aztec Great House on the banks of the Animas River and then, right where the meridian transects the Hogback Monocline, Ridges Basin.9 The monocline is not only dramatic looking, but its coal outcrop has been known to ooze methane, spontaneously combust, and even “erupt,” particularly where waterways slice through the monocline. Surely the ancients witnessed these phenomena. We can only guess as to whether it influenced their decision to settle nearby, or the tragedy that followed.
ON A LATE SUMMER’S DAY IN 800 AD, the Ridges Basin community probably would have looked something like this: The monsoon and its late afternoon downpours have greened up the grass, punctuating it with chaotic wild sunflowers. People mill about their hamlets tending to penned-up turkeys, grinding corn, making pottery. On the outer edges of the community, emerald shocks of corn sway with the breeze alongside beans and squash, planted in alluvial fans.
There is a small stream but there are no dams, no diversion structures, no irrigation ditches leading to the fields. These were dryland farmers. Across the ancient Pueblo world, with the possible exception of the Tewa Basin along the Rio Grande, acres and acres of corn and beans and squash grew without any liquid nourishment aside from rainfall; the same is true at Hopi today.10
This practice can befuddle the modern Westerner. Euro-American settlers in the West are defined by the propensity to move water from stream to field. It wasn’t that the Pueblos lacked the technological know-how to divert streams onto their fields; they did capture, store, and divert rainwater and arroyos, after all. They appear to have chosen to put themselves at the mercy of the rains rather than try to wrest control over temperamental waters that rushed down from the mountains. They were attuned to the seasons and the vagaries of the weather. They prayed for winter snow and summer rain; they danced to summon the sun and to beckon the land to bloom and bear fruit. When that failed, they adapted accordingly, sometimes even moving, giving the land a chance to rest. The place shapes them, not the other way around. “We’re a corn culture,” Kuwanwisiwma told me. “The environment can force you to be humble.”
It’s especially ironic, then, that the remains of those same corn fields at Ridges Basin are now inundated by a reservoir, Lake Nighthorse, the end product of an anything-but-humble, decades-old dream to plumb the watershed, to lift up a portion of the Animas River and send it over the ridge to the La Plata River, where arable land is plentiful but water scarce. The plan for the Animas-La Plata Project, which initially included several reservoirs, a coal power plant on the Southern Ute reservation, and hundreds of miles of canals, pipes, and tunnels, was diminished over the years, finally ending up being no more than one pumping plant lifting Animas River water hundreds of feet uphill into Ridges Basin, where it currently sits, stagnant, in order to fulfill Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute water rights. Someday the water will be piped to distant fields, or to another power plant, or even to a golf course in the desert.
In advance of the reservoir’s creation, archaeologists were sent in to catalog what forever would be entombed by Lake Nighthorse. The most intriguing, and disturbing, finds were made at a village the archaeologists called Sacred Ridge. Atop this knoll sat a little hamlet made up of several structures. Another dozen pit structures, with associated surface dwellings, were situated on the knoll’s slopes, oriented toward the top of the knoll like people sitting around a fire. The pit structures tended to be larger than those found elsewhere in the region during this time, and some were surrounded by “stockades” or fences of a sort—possibly an early form of AWUF. The entire knoll-top hamlet was similarly fenced in, and its pit structures seem to have been used not just for living in, but also for community ceremonies. Perhaps most notable was the tower, made of wood and adobe in the jacal style, on top of the knoll. Though masonry towers would become commonplace at pueblos hundreds of years later, this appears to be the only one from this particular time period.11 Its function is also unknown.
Archaeologists who excavated the sites in Ridges Basin theorize that the architecture and prominent location suggest that Sacred Ridge was home to the upper class, the community’s elite.
In the early 800s the clouds were offering less rain than they had a few decades earlier, and the dense population was beginning to put pressure on local resources. It was nowhere near a crisis, yet something must have gone awry. The community, the landscape, or both were somehow out of balance.
And over a short period of time, maybe even in just one day, someone came in and overpowered nearly three dozen of Sacred Ridge’s residents—men, women, children, even domestic dogs. Some of the captives were hobbled, their feet, ankles, or toes broken to keep them from running and to scare others from doing the same. Then the perpetrators tortured, scalped, and finally killed the victims, butchered the corpses, tossed the thousands of pieces into the Sacred Ridge pit structures, and then lit the structures on fire.
The dehumanizing stereotype of the Pueblo people as “peaceful farmers” was long ago debunked. Archaeological evidence and oral history reveal that violence, whether it was one-on-one murders, mass killings, or warfare between different tribes or groups, was not unheard of in prehistoric or historic times. Like every other society throughout history, these ones had their moments of darkness. Yet evidence suggests Sacred Ridge was among the most brutal, particularly for that time period. Archaeologists have a handful of hypotheses. It appears as if neighbors massacred neighbors. Maybe it was ethnic cleansing, a populist revolt, or a reaction to suspected witchcraft.
Soon thereafter, everyone in the Durango area up and left. By 820, the place was devoid of humanity. “What is intriguing about the abandonment of the Durango area is the suddenness and totality of the exodus,” writes archaeologist James M. Potter. “Even with a climatic downturn and depleted local environment, the Durango area could have continued to support a smaller population.”12
Over the following centuries, the Chaco region bloomed and the population ballooned. When that society waned, new ones grew up along the Animas River near present-day Aztec, New Mexico, in the Mesa Verde region, and in southeastern Utah. Yet no Pueblo people ever came back to the Durango area to live, despite the reliable water sources, fertile soils, and abundance of low, farmable mesas. The trauma from the Sacred Ridge massacre not only must have rippled throughout the Animas River valley, but also reached down through the generations, leaving a dark pall over this place, its spot on the symbolic map forever tainted.
THE PUEBLO PEOPLE TENDED TO GENTLY PULL UP THE ROOTS AND MOVE in response to broad climatic shifts. The Utes, who probably arrived in the Four Corners country from the West at the tail-end of the Puebloan era, moved with the seasons. They were nimble, light on the land, mindful of subtle shifts in flora and fauna. If the Pueblo people’s calendar was marked by a shaft of sunlight touching the center of a spiral carved in stone, the Utes’ was imprinted by the first bear emerging from hibernation or bucks shedding their antlers or the skunk cabbage’s hue transforming from green to rust.
After the Animas River swelled up with snowmelt, the Weenuchiu band followed well-worn trails up the river and into the high country, following the deer, collecting osha, feasting on tart wild raspberries and tiny, sweet alpine strawberries. When the aspen leaves turned yellow and they’d awake to lace-like frost clinging to the grass, they’d pack up and head back down to the lowlands, gather into larger groups, and stay in one place for the winter. They
