Our American Wonderlands

find not one, but a score of places, as absolutely desert and out of civilization as Burnaby found on his A Ride to Khiva, or Sven Hedin on his Asiatic journeys. Two of the most vivid and truthful articles that have recently appeared in American magazine literature containxthe account of a trip through desert Arizona to one of the marvelous Cliff-Cities named in the heading of this chapter. Both of these ruins had recently been discovered, Kitsiel, by Richard Wetherill in 1894, and Betatakin, by Professor Byron Cummings, of the University of Utah, in 1909. These had been shown to Mr. W. B. Douglass, Especial Examiner and Surveyor of the Interior Department, and by him reported to his superiors, and they were thereupon deemed so important that they were created into the Navaho National Monument and Dr. Fewkes detailed to examine and report upon them. This report was published as Bulletin 50 of the Bureau of Ethnology, and from it Mr. J. W. Oskison gained his information and inspiration to visit the ruins. His two articles appeared in recent numbers of The Outing Magazine. The pictures he draws of the land and its aboriginal inhabitants, and also of the white man's general ignorance of these remote corners, are not more graphic than they are reliable, and it is to illustrate the influence this part of the Arizona country has on the minds of a blase newspaper man that the following quotations are made. Following Dr. Fewkes's somewhat vague directions of his own journe... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.