seemed to
have legendary knowledge of a place somewhat like it where they said
the Great Plumed Snake had one of his numerous houses. They reminded
me of a legend they had formerly related to me of how the Snake arose
from a great cavity or depression in the ground, and how, they had
heard, water boiled out of that hole into a neighboring river. The
Hopi have personal knowledge of Montezuma Well, for many of their
number have visited Verde valley, and they claim the ruins there as
the homes of their ancestors. It would not be strange, therefore, if
this marvelous crater was regarded by them as a house of Palueluekon,
their mythic Plumed Serpent.

Practically little is known of the pictography of this part of the
Verde valley people, although it has an important bearing on the
distribution of the cliff dwellers of the Southwest. There is evidence
of at least two kinds of petroglyphs, indicative of two distinct
peoples. One of these was of the Apache Mohave; the other, the
agriculturists who built the cliff homes and villages of the plain.
Those of the latter are almost identical with the work of the Pueblo
peoples in the cliff dweller stage, from southern Utah and Colorado to
the Mexican boundary. It is not a difficult task to distinguish the
pictography of these two peoples, wherever found. The pictographs of
the latter are generally pecked into the rock with a sharpened
implement, probably of stone, while those of the former are usually
scratched or painted on the surface of the rocks. Their main
differences, however, are found in the character of the designs and
the objects represented. This difference can be described only by
considering individual rock drawings, but the practiced eye may
readily distinguish the two kinds at a glance. The pictographs which
are pecked in the cliff are, as a rule, older than those which are
drawn or scratched, and resemble more closely those widely spread in
the Pueblo area, for if the cliff-house people ever made painted
pictographs, as there is every reason to believe they did, time has
long ago obliterated them.

The pictured rocks (plate XCVII) near Cliff's ranch, on Beaver creek,
four miles from Montezuma Well, have a great variety of objects
depicted upon them. These rocks, which rise from the left bank of the
creek opposite Cliff's ranch, bear over a hundred different rock
pictures, figures of which are seen in the accompanying illustration.
The rock surface is a layer of bl