America.

The dwellers in the Mesa Verde were more fortunate even than their
fellow pueblo dwellers. The forested mesas, so different from the arid
cliffs farther south and west, possessed constant moisture and fertile
soil. The grasses lured the deer within capture. The Mancos River
provided fish. Above all, the remoteness of these fastness canyons from
the trails of raiders and traders and their ease of defense made for
long generations of peace. The enterprise innate in the spirit of man
did the rest.

II

The history of the Mesa Verde National Park began with the making of
America. All who have travelled in the southwest have seen mesas from
the car-window. New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Utah, the
region of the pueblos, constitute an elevated plateau largely arid. Many
millions of years ago all was submerged in the intercontinental sea; in
fact the region was sea many times, for it rose and fell alternately,
accumulating thousands of feet of sands and gravels much of which
hardened into stone after the slow great uplifting which made it the
lofty plateau of to-day. Erosion did its work. For a million years or
more the floods of spring have washed down the sands and gravels, and
the rivers have carried them into the sea. Thousands of vertical feet
have disappeared in this way from the potential altitude of the region.
The spring floods are still washing down the sands and gravels, and the
canyons, cliffs, and mesas of the desert are disclosed to-day as stages
in the eternal levelling.

Thus were created the canyons and mesas of the Mesa Verde. Mesa, by the
way, is Spanish for table, and verde for green. These, then, are the
green tablelands, forest-covered and during the summer grown scantily
with grass and richly with flowers.

The Mesa Verde National Park was created by act of Congress in June,
1906, and enlarged seven years later. The Mancos River, on its way to
the San Juan and thence to the Colorado and the passage of the Grand
Canyon, forms its southern boundary. Scores of canyons, large and small,
nearly all dry except at the spring floods, are tributary. All of these
trend south; in a general way they are parallel. Each of the greater
stems has its lesser tributaries and each of these its lesser forks.
Between the canyons lie the mesas. Their tops, if continued without
break, would form a more or less level surface; that is, all had been a
plain before floods cut the separating canyon