Throughout Arizona can be found traces of a vanished people. In and around the Petrified Forest, prehistoric dwellings and “picture writings” are plentiful, and of great antiquity and high development. Probably nowhere have such pictographs been so well preserved. The soft smooth sandstone was an ideal surface for the artist to work upon, and nowhere in the world, in that age, could such suitable tools be found to work with. Here at hand were sharp pointed chisels already prepared by the fracturing of wood. These chisels were hard enough to cut glass. Rounded pieces of the same material made excellent mallets. Hundreds of these have been found in the Reservation. With these rude instruments, this unknown people left for us a record of their existence graven deep in the sandstone in sheltered places. These pictures today are a lasting monument to the race that roamed this region in the gone-by centuries.

These sketches depict different kinds of animals, such as antelope and mountain sheep, snakes and turtles. They are grotesque and out of proportion, but doubtless they represent, for the most part, animals that formerly roamed the western plains. Some pictures, however, represent animals that could never have been seen on land and sea, and existed only in the fevered imagination of the artist. Perhaps there were futurist artists even among those primitive men.

In one scene a herd of deer cross a plain. Near that a stork stands on attenuated legs and dangles what appears to be a baby in its bill. This is doubtless the earliest picturization of a stork’s visit. In another place a long line of human figures clasp their hands and drag one another up a steep incline. In the heart of the Reservation lies a mesa almost entirely surrounded by a steep cliff that has broken and fallen in ruins. On the huge boulders that have rolled to the desert below, there are pages and pages of history could one but read what is so plainly written. One figure stands alone disconsolately weeping. Quite monstrous tears are falling from his eyes, and just beneath his weeping figure a six inch bowl was found. Although broken in half by the passage of time with its destructive elements the piece of pottery, at least two thousand years old, was carefully restored and has an honored place in the Government Museum.

On almost every mesa are the remains of ancient dwellings. There are arrowmaker’s chips and fragments of pottery, and crude colored beads that may have delighted some wee maiden with their brilliance. The pottery shows two distinct varieties, the finger-nail decorations covering the blackened bowls which seem to have served as cooking utensils, and the finer pottery, on which the black and white tracings are as startlingly vivid today, as they were so many, many centuries ago when they were drawn by the day-dreaming housewife as she sat in the sun and painted the fanciful designs.