Fremont style rock art figure, mckee springs, utah

Native American Sacred Places: Past, Present, and Imperiled

Enigmatic is this figure pecked a thousand years ago onto a sandstone cliff face at McKee Springs Wash. Its trapezoidal body is adorned with ear spools and breast plate.

The figure flashes a sun spiral shield and, in one hand, a symbolic trophy head. Keeping company with other anthropomorphic rock art in this history-rich area straddling Colorado and Utah are mazes, meanders, bighorn sheep, supernatural beings lavishly bedecked with elaborate jewelry, lizards, bison, staffs, and what the imagination wants to identify as spiral galaxies and super novae.

Humans have left their footprints on the dusty earth here for more than ten thousand years, starting with Paleo-Indians. Some have come and gone with hardly a visible trace. Others have left mark that bewilder us. Fast-forward about six hundred years before the arrival of the Spaniards to a people whose calling cards are uniquely their own.

For early peoples, the desert was a blank slate—its exposed sandstone cliff faces darkened from red to black with the

patina of desert varnish, the chemical result of iron and manganese oxides interacting with bacteria in the rock, water, and sun. Much Fremont culture engraved and painted prehistoric rock art executed here in the highly schematic “Classic Vernal Style” depicts shamanic—magic and/or religious—magic and/or religious—themes whose meanings and interpretations will forever remain a mystery. However, a recurring motif throughout much of Utah is the purse-like “bag” suspended from the outstretched arms of anthropomorphs.

Ethnographic research suggests that these “bags” represent the skinned heads of an enemy taken as a trophy. The trapezoidal figures represented in rock art were also created in three-dimensional form as clay figurines that bore the same hair “bobs” and necklaces.

The prehistoric societies now called Fremont emerged from the hunter-gatherers of the Colorado Plateau and in the eastern Great Basin. Gradually, between about 2,500 to 1,500 years ago, these distinct groups adopted many of the characteristics of farming societies that had settled in the Southwest. The new agrarians grew beans, squash, and corn on small streamside plots along the foothills of mountain ranges.

Radiocarbon dating on corn from a Fremont permanent site establishes its harvest period at 2,340 to l,940 years ago. The shift to a horticultural lifestyle called for a correlative shift in shelters. Some time between 1,750 and 1,250 years ago, the Fremont’s economic, thin-walled habitations and small subterranean storage pits must have seemed inadequate. Construction began of larger, sturdier, semi-subterranean timber and mud houses with adjoining above-ground granaries of mud or rock.

But the sedentary life was not for everyone. Pottery discovered in caves and rock shelters occupied by the Fremont hunter-gatherers still dates to about 1,500 years ago, even as pottery is a difficult possession for nomadic peoples to safely transport.

At the peak of the culture’s classic period, Fremont villages delicately laced, not blanketed, the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin territory—from as far east as Grand Junction, Colorado, west to Ely, Nevada, north to Pocatello, Idaho, and south to Cedar City, Utah.

The agrarian lifestyle could be supported only by adequate rainfall. When it failed for prolonged periods, the Fremont, like farming peoples worldwide, gradually returned to hunting and gathering. By about 1250 AD, the Fremont phenomenon began to unravel.

Hunter-gatherer ancestors of the Ute, Paiute, and Shoshoni peoples encountered the Fremont peoples, who would have been competitors for food resources. Research may determine which occurred as a result: displacement or integration of the various cultures. The sudden replacement of classic Fremont material culture, which made this group distinctly identifiable, such as basketry, pottery, moccasins, and rock art, suggests that the Fremont were swiftly edged out of territory that had fed them, clothed them, and provided for their needs.

Four-hundred-thirty-four light years from earth, Polaris isn’t the brightest star on the cosmic block, but its value to civilizations past was magnified because Earth’s axis is pointed almost directly at it. Polaris virtually stays put, making it more accurate than a compass. It neither rises nor sets. No matter the hour, year-round, this pulsing star appears unchanged above the northern horizon, even as other stars circumscribe it.

Ptolemy observed it, but shining not nearly as brightly as today. It was even noted in the Assyrian tablets. Polaris has been close to the actual position of the North Pole for more than one thousand years, long enough for these Classic Period Puebloans of the Galisteo Basin to have observed it, much as we do today, and certainly for the maker of this rock art Avanyu to have signified its importance, too.

Nearby, a massive bear petroglyph dominates another sandstone panel. Interestingly, Polaris is the brightest star of the Ursa Minor constellation and forms the tip of the “Little Bear’s” tail. Is the bear panel a literal representation of the fierce predator that still roams off the mountains and into the valley in search of food and water, or does it depict a shaman from a medicine society? Does the big bear panel relate in some yet-unknown way to the flowing form of Avanyu not far away? Hopi stories say that it was the Bear Clan that was the first to finish the four purification migrations—linked with the constellations and guided by the stars—divine instruction given to them by Massau’u, the ancient caretaker of Hopiland.

Snake iconography has appeared throughout human history. Quetzalcoatl (ket-tsul'kwot-ul) the great snake with the plume of feathers adorning its regal head, gave to the Aztec of ancient southern Mexico the gifts of fire, sacred corn, how to irrigate their fields, and animal domestication. Such a powerful deity as Quetzalcoatl (quetzal, a beautifully plumed green bird of Central America, and coatl, serpent; in Mayan, atl means water) could not long be kept secret, and his influence was born on the summer winds and trade routes, northward from Mesoamerica to the peoples who occupied the vast arid and semi-arid lands of the Southwest.

With the spread of mythologies is the influence of creation myths. In Mesoamerica the Quetzalcoatl—the illuminator of mankind—is the son of the star god with close ties to the sky went into the underworld and created mankind to fill the empty Fifth World that the gods had created. Grieving his dead wife, Quetzalcoatl was tricked into drunkenness and forbidden sex with his sister. So ashamed and remorseful was he that he built a great fire and threw himself into it. His ritual sacrifice created the Morning Star.

For early inhabitants of the Southwest, the gigantic serpent inside the earth could be called upon to bless both fields and wombs, making them fertile. Avanyu nourished and replenished the land as the sap of plants and the lifeblood of animals.

The ancient Anasazi—now referred to as Ancestral Pueblo—and Mogollon paid homage to the Horned Water Serpent god-beast by anchoring his image to rock where springs rose from the ground or streams ran through washes during monsoonal rains and flash floods. Worldwide, cultures celebrate the phallic nature of snakes, as Southwest rock art representations of fertility attest. Avanyu’s potency was well known to the people of the Basin: he could impregnate their women while they bathed and his life force could add years to the lives of their elders.

For as many as sixteen thousand years, hunter-gatherers with diverse traditions and beliefs have wandered into and out of the Galisteo Basin, beginning with Clovis and Folsom. How many left behind petroglyphs will remain unknowable. Representations of rock art dating to between 5000 and 3000 BC are not only extremely rare, but also difficult to detect, as these peckings have long repatinated—like invisible ink, sun, rain, and minerals have restored the dark desert varnish to the Southwest’s rock surfaces.

Over time, as the Pueblo peoples scattered their agricultural units, tethering communities to long stretches of the Río Grande, nearly two-dozen subgroups emerged. Oral traditions and myths of the Galisteo Basin Ancestral Puebloans, known as the Southern Tewa, reinforce and largely preserve the Classic Period iconography of the Upper Río Grande Valley. To the east, however, that thread of tradition and oral history associated with the stories told by the rocks was stretched thin, even broken by centuries of Spanish mission work that successfully stamped the Pueblo psyche with the new brand, Christianity.

To another group, Avanyu is Balolokong, “The Great Sky Serpent,” which is synonymous with a cluster of stars that snaked across the northern skies. Horned, like the great snakes of the deserts around the world, or feathered and plumed, the iconography spread. Some archaeologists suggest that his progression throughout the Southwest may have been hastened by the predisposition of earlier hunting cultures to incorporate animal horn symbols across their rock art, where it is seen on quadrupeds and anthropomorphic figures, as well as on masks. The plume variously manifested as a forward-pointing horn and even as a backward-pointing horn.

The shaman artist of this 700-year-old Avanyu pointed the horn forward, in the most-frequently seen position. That serpent horns and plumes are found facing in opposite directions hints that shamans recognized and manipulated the dual forces of Nature that symbiotically keep the cosmos in motion. If community life was out of balance, Avanyu’s wrath could spawn earthquakes and floods. “That which is below is like that which is above.” (from The Green Tablet)

While the function of each rock-art occurrence is site-specific, symbolically and ritually the desired outcome is manipulation of the supernatural realm and the beings that inhabit it. In the sacred landscape of the Great Basin, hunters evoke magic and engage a deity to make their arrow swift, their spear thrust true.

A “magical place bristling with protective powers,” as New Mexico archaeologist Polly Schaafsma describes Comanche Gap’s serpentine volcanic dike—a Sistine Chapel of resplendent images. Liberally strewn over this vertical basalt canvas that transects an enormous, private, land-grant ranch are imprints of hands, feet, concentric circles, deer, bighorn sheep, copulation, birds, fish, lightning, textile and pottery designs, plant forms, dots zig-zags, and dancing humped-back, phallic flute players.

This extraordinary example of human creativity at Comanche Gap and the area known as San Cristóbal were whisked from future public access from 1598 until 1821, when Spain and, later, Mexico, encouraged settlement of the Territorio de Nuevo Mexico by granting vast parcels of land to individuals and groups. Among the Southwest’s preeminent archaeological treasures, what is now Singleton Ranch, comprises more than volcanic dykes. Its expansive open grasslands are sprinkled with Ancestral Puebloan villages, some containing more than a thousand rooms.

Clearly, the manifestations of daily life, religion, cosmology, denotation of shrines and boundary demarcation, and clan symbols weren’t the only concerns on the minds of Galisteo Basin rock-art makers. War symbolism is a sharp interlude to ethereal motifs. Pervasive throughout the Basin are detailed, haunting images of elaborate warrior shields. They cannot keep a secret either: all was not harmonious and tranquil in Ancestral Puebloan life.

Expectedly, rock art created by the Southern Tewa group of the Galisteo Basin of the Upper Río Grande after 1100 AD proved “stylistically consistent” with rock art of the Anasazi world. Ideas percolated to the Tewa from neighbors to the north and east, often with little modification. Once the Anasazi abandoned their communities for the tributary drainages of the Río Grande, the population redistribution shifted the locus of the Pueblo world to the Río Grande Valley. Such human aggregation and coalescence elicited a major ideological shift and concurrent artistic florescence characterized by a new ideographic context in the rock art. Large village formation birthed social and religious sodalities, evinced by the thriving kachina cult.

Though progression of the sun-plumed serpent duality cult can be traced from Mexico northward along the Río Grande, its ideological and iconographic appearance in the Four Corners regions by the mid-thirteenth Century suggests that knowledge of Quetzalcoatl wended northwestward years before religious currents channeled the deity along the Río Grande.

Water and sun—inseparable strands weaving the circle of life. Yet, at winter solstice, when the sun was most vulnerable, it had much to fear from the plumed serpent. Puebloan sky-watchers followed the path of the sun. They had calculated the advent of its lowest point above the horizon. Carefully choreographed ritual intervention, sun ceremonies assured the deity’s return from its long winter sleep to bless the people, the land and their crops. The triumph of the sun over the plumed serpent was a time for purification and rebirth.

The cosmos and the earth moved in unison, a precarious balance kept in check by the shamans. And the Galisteo Basin, like the cosmos, was a-glitter with stars—four-pointed beings, often with faces and legs, that frequented the rock art, associating with the plumed serpent. The body of the great bear petroglyph is adorned with stars.

History has seemed to prove true the adage that all good things must come to an end. At the least, history repeats itself. Throughout the Southwest, the faucet of predictable monsoons and winter precipitation shut off. Ironically, as peoples of the Four Corners were coping with the drought, Galisteo Basin prehistoric farmers were being blessed with the start of a wetter cycle. Although archaeologists had theorized a correlation between the resulting abandonments in the Four Corners’ area with the population boom in the Galisteo Basin, research refutes this supposition, as colonization of the Basin occurred well before the devastating climate charges that drove peoples out of their massive villages to the north.

By the 1130s, Southwest prehistoric peoples struggled to overcome the effects of a deep, hard drought, gradually, painfully worsened by generations of cold the likes of which the grandmothers had never known. The bitter winters that began around 1180 AD remained tortuous until the mid-thirteenth century. The tapestry of the region was being rewoven.

Around 1400 AD the Galisteo Basin’s social dawn rose as a short-lived era that some archaeologists refer to as the “super-pueblo phenomenon.” But in the mid-day heat, farmers’ efforts to fructify their increasingly desiccated lands became an exercise in futility. Is it this crisis in Nature, this failure of a social structure to meet the needs of its community that’s reflected in the warrior symbols and shields in the rock art? Around 1500 AD, what was the tipping point that lead builders, farmers, families, star-gazers, and shamans to leave behind the efforts that defined this phenomenon?

But Nature operates independently of the desires of mankind. A reversal of fortune meant monsoonal rains once again drenched the Four Corners, and the many seasons of plenty in the Galisteo Basin came to an end.

In 1540 AD, searching for the wealth of Quivira, thirty-year-old Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, his men and enslaved natives strode across this region, but found not riches, but struggling pueblos. The seven Golden Cities of Cibola eluding him, he pressed onward to Kansas, to return once again, only to leave behind the mark of the cross. And, so, the Southwest was not to be spared surmounting of Puebloan culture by monks, priests and governing servants of the Spanish monarchy. On August 10, one hundred and forty years after Coronado’s first appearance, the decimated Christianized Puebloans could take no more. In a stupendously coordinated coup d'état that still stirs native hearts, the cataclysmic Pueblo Revolt ripped to shreds the thick cloak of Spanish dominion in New Mexico. But only for a time.

The twenty thousand or so petroglyphs here chronicle a breath-taking swath of Southwest history—from ancient Archaic hunter-gatherers, Plains Indians, Athabaskans, to post-contact peoples, such as Hispanics, Apache, and Anglos—an epic, yet-not-fully-decoded saga of grace, suffering, abundance, lack, spiritual peaks and religious lows, successes and failures, all lessons of time.

That fleeting florescence of art and architecture associated with the Galisteo Basin was unmatched before or since. Yet no museum can showcase it. No national park shelters its historical value. Gratefully, in 2004 President George W. Bush signed into law and Congress passed The Galisteo Basin Archaeological Sites Protection Act for “the preservation, protection, and interpretation of the nationally significant archaeological resources in the Galisteo Basin” of New Mexico. Including sites such as San Cristóbal and Pueblo Galisteo, the act protects “some of the largest and most storied Ancestral Pueblo settlements in North America.”

As Avanyu is guardian over streams, pools and subterranean waters, the Bureau of Land Management is charged with omniscient guardianship of the Galisteo Basin.

Like a temporal stream undulating through the desert before disappearing into the ground, the plumed serpent deity Avanyu guards life-giving water from the sandstone rock on which it was carved. Avanyu’s zig-zags snake through the thirsty earth. It is the lightning high above the canyon rivers in New Mexico and Arizona that flashes through the blackest clouds pregnant with rain. His lightning-fast, fecund strike represents the annual promise of abundance in a land of scarcity.

Avanu, Plumed Serpent Petroglyph, Galisteo Basin, New Mexico

On this outcropping panel, protruding from a massive volcanic dyke overlooking the Galisteo Basin in central New Mexico, Avanyu’s characteristic horn leads our attention to the “North Star,” Polaris, the celestial polar star and the home of demanding gods. Because of its astronomical value, Polaris has been regarded by many cultures, including ancient Native Americans, as the most important star in the heavens.

big skylight cave, el malpais national monument, new mexico

Tortured, twisted, the black crust of El Malpais collapses here and there under the burden of time, revealing in the labyrinth of lava tubes the dried blood of the giant Ye’iitsoh. To the Zuni and Acoma, it is the congealed blood of an angry kachina.

“The badlands” in Spanish, El Malpais (pronounced Mal-[rhymes with wall]-pie-ees), is part of the second largest volcanic field in the Basin and Range Province on the southeast margin of the Colorado Plateau.

In the 1940s, scientists working with the Manhattan Project designated this lava field as a candidate site for detonation of the first atomic bomb.

Nature’s power has shaped and reshaped El Malpais. Over the last three million years—only a brief geological moment—and as recently as seven hundred years, some thirty volcanoes and many times more vents and spatter cones spewed molten rock and ash over a landscape half the size of Rhode Island. Oozing out across the land, the flows sometimes puddled into smooth ripples and gentle waves. Elsewhere, great crusty swells abruptly walled off sections of previously unscathed terrain. Their rapidly cooling surfaces buckled against intense internal heat and pressure, only to be chiseled by eons of wind and rain.

The large roof collapse that gives Big Skylight Cave its name opens the six-hundred-foot-long lava tube to sufficient sunlight to nurture a bed of green moss below. Molten lava flowing through the tube long-ago tattooed striations along its walls.

For more than ten thousand years, Indigenous people have interacted with the lava flows, cinder cones, pressure ridges, and complex lava tube systems of “the badlands.” This land still harbors ancient secrets. And in secret places, twenty-first-century Ramah Navajo, Zuni, and Acoma peoples still conduct ceremonies not intended for the eyes of non-Indians.twisted

candelaria Ice cave, el malpais national monument, new mexico

The conditions that originally created the formation of ice in caves thousands of years ago are still speculation. But what preserves the Winter Lake in this well-insulated, natural icebox is the settling of frigid air that becomes trapped below the surface of the earth, which is maintained at a constant 31 degrees Fahrenheit. As long ago, today rainwater and snow melt still seep into the cave and freeze into another layer on the thickening floor. The rate of ice accumulation depends on annual precipitation.

Radiocarbon 14C dating from CO2, an insect, twig, and a feather indicate that the bottom of the ice cliff may be 1,800 to 3,000 years old.

The exposed and layered back wall of ice was formed over time as ancient Indians mined the sacred winter water to mix with pigments used in ceremonials. Saloon owners once carved blocks to frost their beers, and settlers found the ice instrumental in slowing food spoilage. By the time that ice removal was stopped in 1946, the ice wall at the back of the cave was nearly twelve feet high. Sunlight reaches the base of Candelaria’s rear wall for only a few minutes approximately five days before and after winter solstice.

chief seattle's grave, snoqualmish, washington

of Indians Affairs at the National Archives have yet to vouch that these prophetic words emanated from the mouth of Seattle. Were they the compilations of Indian sympathizers, or the irrefutable words of a Red Man with great insight and profound sadness?

Si'ahl died on June 7, 1866. From his gravesite in this peaceful Suquamish tribal cemetery, next to a small Catholic church on the Kitsap Peninsula in Suquamish, Washington, the modern city of Seattle is visible across Puget Sound.

To the Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, water is that life-giving, intimate connection with the Creator, and the carved Suquamish canoes over his gravestone symbolize safe passage over peaceful waters to the next world.

Every August, during the tribal ceremonial honoring Chief Seattle, Indigenous peoples from all over the West Coast, dressed in their finest regalia, join the Suquamish tribe for a gravesite ceremony.

On June 5, 2011, The Seattle Times published an article titled, “Renovated grave site of Chief Seattle dedicated,” dateline: Suquamish. Now gone are the beloved raised canoes. The renovation, costing in excess of $200,000, created a major change in site’s appearance.

The story poles, in black and rust paint and natural cedar, show the 600-foot-long Old Man House built by Chief Seattle’s father in the mid-1770s. Above that is Chief Seattle as a boy, standing in front of sails. It depicts his sighting in 1792, at about the age of 6, of Capt. George Vancouver’s ships that were exploring Puget Sound.

Yonder sky that has wept tears of compassion upon our people for centuries untold, and which appears changeless and eternal, may change. Whatever Seattle says, the great chief in Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons. The white chief says that Big Chief at Washington sends us greetings of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him for we know he has little need of our friendship in return. His people are many. They are like the grass that covers vast prairies. My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain. The great, and I presume good,

White Chief sends us word that he wishes to buy our land but is willing to allow us enough to live comfortably. This indeed appears just, even generous for the Red Man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, as we are no longer in need of an extensive country. There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.

I will not dwell on, nor mourn over, our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it, as we, too, may have been somewhat to blame. …Then in reality, he will be our father and we his children. But can that ever be? Your God is not our God. Your God loves your people and hates mine! …Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man’s God cannot love our people or He would protect them. How then can we be brothers? No, we are two distinct races with separate origins and separate destinies.

To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred, and their resting place hallowed ground. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors—the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit and the visions of our sachems, and it is written in the hearts of our people. …Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living….

Day and night cannot dwell together. However, your proposition seems fair, and I think that my people will accept it and will retire to the reservation you offer them. Then we will dwell apart in peace…. It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. The Indian’s night promises to be dark. Not a single star of hope hovers above his horizon. Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance. A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this borrowed land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit, will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours.

But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nations, like waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.

The White Man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.

fern cave, lava beds national monument, CAlifornia

permit the formation of lava tubes. Like underground soda-straws, the three hundred twenty or so lava tube caves in the monument are geologically similar. Only one—Fern Cave—is biologically and historically unique.About the time of Christ, a band of people, or an individual from the prehistoric Modoc people walking through this high, semi-arid desert, perhaps en route to water, must have been startled to stumble upon this gaping maw in the parched crust.

Someone cautiously crouched at the edge of the crumbling basalt and peered into the eight-foot by ten-foot collapse of the lava tube’s roof. Had the time of day been different, they might have missed the inconspicuous gap and its burst of sparkling emerald green ferns at the bottom, a lavish oasis in a tight, coned circle rising as if to beckon them to enter. The nearest similar ferns are found among the coastal California redwoods, more than one hundred miles away.

But in the cool, constant 53 degree Fahrenheit cave, precious moisture from an aquifer just fifty feet below condenses on the ceiling, then drizzles to the floor, simulating an annual rainfall of one hundred inches, when the land above thirsts with only fifteen.

The concentrated energy and supernatural power of Fern Cave must have been palpable to the first human to experience this subterranean Eden. Over time, Modoc shamans and specially privileged few entered the space, filling a far wall with pictographs, their black and white pigments mixed with deer grease and saliva.

The sacred lava tubes were not for habitation. The discovery in 1999 and 2003 of prehistoric human remains and a funerary object in Fern Cave, as well as its delicate ecosystem, now require it receives special protection, and public access is restricted. Contemporary descendants of the Modoc are members of both the multi-cultural Klamath Tribes of Chiloquin, Oregon, and the Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma, likely to have shared group identity and are culturally affiliated with an earlier group who occupied the area of Lava Beds.

Shamanism, the basis of much Native American spirituality, was a way to communicate with spirits, to gain power from an inanimate object, or to cure sickness. Natural cracks in the stone were incorporated into the rock writings and represented passageways to the spirit world. For hundreds of years, Fern Cave secreted the objects of Modoc myth and ritual. That is, before early souvenir hunters carried many of them off. In the late 1930s, the cave opening was gated to preserve the largest panel of pictographs in the monument.

Copyright © 1998 Charlotte Meares

The Land of Eternal Winter Water, or, as the Pueblo Indians call it, the Winter Lake, is a subterranean sacred place and a source of mystery. The beautiful frozen underworld that is Candelaria Ice Cave, draped by the black remnants of fiery volcanoes, began to form around 3,400 years ago—the age of the deepest ice—and is now about twenty feet thick. Over the last half century, the floor of the ice cave has risen, and less of the back wall is exposed. Arctic algae cause the green tint, and algae on the ceiling adds a hint of red.

Candelaria Ice Cave at Bandera Crater formed in a collapsed lava tube in the Bandera Volcanic Field. Lava tubes are similar to a soda straw. They form when a lava flow cools much more rapidly on the surface than its still molten core, which continues to push past solidifying exteriors, leaving a hollow center.

Si'ahl, Anglicized “Seattle,” was born around 1780 and baptized into Catholicism around 1848 under the baptismal name, Noah. A noted orator in his mother’s native Duwamish language and the Suquamish of his father’s birth, the nearly six-foot-tall warrior inherited the title of chief from his maternal uncle.

For more than a century, debate has raged questioning the authenticity of the magnificent and memorable speech attributed to Seattle at the presentation outlining the treaty proposals of 1854.

Several versions have been published, and the following excerpts—complete with “Victorian rhetorical flourishes”—appeared in the Seattle Sunday Star, October 29, 1887, in a column by Dr. Henry A. Smith. Smith, a poet, “good writer,” and a scholar from Ohio, was fluent in Duwamish. Research conducted by many scholars and records of the Bureau

A tumultuous geology and history roiled over the high-desert landscape of northeastern California. Where the land is perforated with caves, scarred with battlefields, adorned with rock art, peopled with the descendants of those first Paleolithic settlers who, for millennia took refuge in its natural shelters, there is a secret place where reason defies reality.

This is Fern Cave, the center of the Modoc Indian world. For half a million years, Medicine Lake shield volcano spewed and spit molten contents of the earth out onto the Cascade Range—until about nine hundred years ago. Thirty thousand and forty thousand years ago, the conditions during an eruption at Modoc Crater in the southern part of what is today Lava Beds National Monument were exactly right to