On Monday I moved from Show Low over to the Dead Horse Ranch State Park near Cottonwood, AZ. It was a gorgeous mountain drive through almost entirely National Forest Land. My trustee Honda Ridgeline really had to work hard on that drive. At times I felt like I should stop and unhook her, give her a rub down, and let her rest. 🙂

In the late afternoon I had time to visit the Tuzigoot National Monument which is just a stones throw from Dead Horse Ranch Campground. In the 1930s a major excavation project was undertaken at this site using out of work miners. One of the workers was a Yavapai Apache who gave the site it’s name, meaning crooked water.

These pueblo ruins were inhabited by the Sinagua People. They have a definite community plan in the way they were built.

The sides would have been built up and covered with the entrance being a hole in the roof with a ladder.

The inhabitants of these pueblos were contemporaries of the Cliff Dwellers down in Gila. There is a small cliff pueblo site called Montezuma’s Wall not far from this site at Tuzigoot. As at Gila, it is thought that they lived here for several hundred years and then just moved on. Up on the south rim of the Grand Canyon is a partially excavated pueblo ruins site called Tusayan. Historians seem to agree that these sites were home to a people for a definite period of time and then abandoned. As you read about and listen to guides at these sites, you get the impression that no one is certain if the people just died out or left. There is some evidence that a large migration happened throughout the southwest in this period. Whether it was caused or nomadic is uncertain.