195109-DesertMagazin.. - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

Wayne and Lucile Hiser on the rim of Kaiparowits—
always with their cameras at hand.
covers much of the top of the plateau,
like temples and fortresses of creamcolored
Wahweep sandstone. Tens of
thousands of years of rain and wind
have scooped out great caverns in the
sidewalls of these buttes—and it was
in these shallow caves, protected by
the overhanging rock above, that the
aborigines built their homes of stone
and mud.
Edson previously had visited some
of the cliff dwellings in this area, and
he knew the best places to look for
them.
The Moquis were thrifty housebuilders.
Their ideal site was beneath
a low-roofed overhang where it was
necessary only to lay up rocks for an
outer wall. The back of the cavern
supplied one wall of the dwelling, and
the ceiling was the roof of the cave.
There were plenty of small stones and
boulders for the masonry, and these
were laid with a mortar of mud. Few
of the dwellings remained intact after
a thousand years of weathering, for in
SEPTEMBER, 1951
most instances the front walls were
exposed to the weather, and mud mortar
with a heavy content of sand does
not long resist rain.
Every cliff dweller had his granary
for the storage of the corn and squash
raised around the springs, and pinyon
nuts and seeds gathered from the landscape.
It was important that these
storage vaults be proof against weather
and rodents, and they were built in
the most sheltered cranny of the cave.
As a consequence we found many
granaries practically intact.
At a few places on the plateau are
the ruins of pueblo structures—a type
of housing adopted by the prehistoric
Indians as they abandoned their cliff
dwellings.
Kaiparowits was given its name by
John Wesley Powell. It is a U:e word
variously translated, but most of the
versions have approximately the meaning,
"Big Mountain's Little Brother."
Moqui merely is a term applied
locally to the prehistoric Indian habi-
Here the party used Moqui finger-holds chiseled in the
rocks a thousand years ago.
tations in this area. To a scientist the
Indians who dwelt on Kaiparowits
were of the Anasazi culture, which
embraced both the early basketmaker
and pueblo periods of Indian occupation
in the general region of the Four
Corners.
Until the 1890s the Hopi Indians
were known as Moquis. The Navajo
Indians called them Mogis, meaning
"monkey," expressive of the contempt
in which the Hopis were held by their
Navajo neighbors. Later the Spaniards
called them Moquis or Mokis. This
term was used until 1895 when the
Smithsonian Institution adopted the
name Hopi, a contraction of Hopitu,
meaning "peaceful people."
The fact that Utah people in this
vicinity refer to the Kaiparowits cliff
dwellings as Moqui houses carries no
proof that the ancestors of the present
Hopi Indians actually resided in these
caverns. No one knows for certain
who they were or where they went
when they abandoned the plateau.