eak, Glacier National Park, 5,000 feet above the lake spreads
glaciers out either way like wings]

[Illustration: _From a photograph by M.R. Campbell_

BEAUTIFUL BOWMAN LAKE, GLACIER NATIONAL PARK

It heads close up under the Continental Divide, where is found some of
the most striking scenery of America]

Here again we repeat, for the hundredth or more time in our leisurely
survey of the park, what the Englishman said of the spectacle of St.
Mary: "There is nothing like it in the world."

XIV

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK, SOUTHWESTERN COLORADO. AREA, 77 SQUARE MILES

I

Many years, possibly centuries, before Columbus discovered America, a
community of cliff-dwellers inhabiting a group of canyons in what is now
southwestern Colorado entirely disappeared.

Many generations before that, again possibly centuries, the founders of
this community, abandoning the primitive pueblos of their people
elsewhere, had sought new homes in the valleys tributary to the Mancos
River. Perhaps they were enterprising young men and women dissatisfied
with the poor and unprogressive life at home. Perhaps they were
dissenters from ancient religious forms, outcasts and pilgrims, for
there is abundant evidence that the prehistoric sun-worshippers of our
southwest were deeply religious, and human nature is the same under
skins of all colors in every land and age. More likely they were merely
thrifty pioneers attracted to the green cedar-grown mesas by the hope of
better conditions.

Whatever the reason for their pilgrimage, it is a fair inference that,
like our own Pilgrim Fathers, they were sturdy of body and progressive
of spirit, for they had a culture which their descendants carried
beyond that of other tribes and communities of prehistoric people in
America north of the land of the Aztecs.

Beginning with modest stone structures of the usual cliff-dwellers' type
built in deep clefts in the mesa's perpendicular cliff, safe from
enemies above and below, these enterprising people developed in time a
complicated architecture of a high order; they advanced the arts beyond
the practice of their forefathers and their neighbors; they herded
cattle upon the mesas; they raised corn and melons in clearings in the
forests, and watered their crops in the dry seasons by means of simple
irrigation systems as soundly scientific, so far as they went, as those
of to-day; outgrowing their cliff homes, they i