Historic Petroglyphs to be found along the San Juan River

By Andrew Gulliford
Along the San Juan River, thousands of prehistoric petroglyphs from ancient Native cultures are written in stone. What is less common are historic glyphs, but in special places these stories on stone are carved on rock by Indigenous people.
Those stories trace events as well as document newly arrived technologies in the 18th and 19th centuries as Spanish explorers and traders moved through the landscape bringing horses, saddles, and weapons.
Other glyphs show horses and wagons probably representing Mormon settlers in San Juan County, UT or San Juan County, NM.
Many Anglo or Euro-American settlers carved their names and dates into stone as they traversed canyon country for the first time or brought in livestock.
I’ve found numerous names and dates from the 1880s into the 1920s and also engraved horseheads, horses, steers, and even a jolly pig with its curlicue tail.
Pioneer cowboys and ranchers etched their initials and dates on trail switchbacks and where creeks and washes flow towards rivers. Earlier, Paiutes, Utes, and Navajos observing Anglos, pecked and incised on rock what they saw including Spanish soldiers from the mid-1800s, a spectacular gunfight or shoot-out on the San Juan River, and later steam locomotives, trucks, and cars.
One of the earliest historic glyphs I’ve been to is north of the San Juan River on a slice of sandstone hidden behind a much larger boulder.
The person who carved it could see quite a distance to the south and yet not be seen by anyone moving north from the river towards Bears Ears.
Documented and drawn by the Comb Ridge Heritage Initiative, the glyph is of a single Spanish rider on a horse or mule and carrying a long lance with a metal spearpoint at one end and on the other end, an odd crossbar on the lance that resembles a sword. Dating the glyph gets complicated.
The Don Juan Maria de Rivera Expedition of 1765 traversed parts of the Dolores River, and in 1776 Fray Atansio Dominguez and Fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante moved north from Abiquiu, NM on what is now the La Posta Road, crossed the Animas River, and proceeded towards Mancos and on to the Colorado River.
Neither group, however, traveled as far west as the Comb Ridge drainage into the San Juan. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, Spanish soldiers chased Navajo families off their Indigenous lands as reprisal raids for Navajo theft of Hispanic sheep, but the soldiers almost never caught the Natives, who knew where to cross the river at the Rincon and then swiftly guide their herds north towards Bears Ears.
The glyph may have been carved by a Southern Paiute or Navajo who had seen a Spanish soldier in hot pursuit.
In The Spanish Frontier in North America, historian David Weber shows an 1803 drawing from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, of a “soldado de cuera” [leather jacket soldier] carrying a lance, but without the distinctive cross bar.
Maybe the Native carver sought to combine sword and a lance into one weapon as part of rock art imagery.
“He’s got to be a Spanish soldier, unless he’s a Comanche or cibolero,” offers Spanish colonial historian John Kessell, who adds, “It’s curious that he doesn’t have one hand on the lance. Is that a sword on the ground behind the horse, and why? The glyph’s a first-class artifact (and mystery)!”
Latin American history professor Michael Fry, of Fort Lewis College, offers additional details. Fry explains, “Spanish lances had a special L-shaped hook toward the bottom that would be looped through a leather attachment. The lance would be hooked when riding and not in use.”
Dr. Fry continues, “But the man who drew the picture seems to think that [the L-shaped hook] is the hilt of a sword. I think he may be right. Yet if so, the sword was being dragged upside down. No doubt such things could happen in battle.”
Fry concludes, “If it is a sword, it is not the kind of sword used by cavalry in the late 19th century, but an older style, particularly the hilt.” That is interesting speculation about a historic petroglyph.
Even more intriguing is a fight scene or shoot-out involving nine images sprawled across 30 feet of a cliff face.
Archaeologist Winston Hurst wrote “Utah Gunfight Panel, San Juan River” in the Fall 2011 issue of Blue Mountain Shadows. Hurst argues that the panel “rendered in typical historic Ute style, clearly depicts a skirmish between men armed with rifles and men armed with bows-and-arrows.”
I’ve been to this scene many times and find it fascinating because the action flows both left to right and right to left.
On the left side, three Natives with drawn bows, two near a horse with a distinctive high pommel saddle, shoot towards three Anglos who are shooting at them with rifles.
Another Anglo or Spaniard lies dead with his hat off and an arrow with a large arrowhead through his skull. Behind the dead man stands another rifleman poised to shoot and behind him an archer aims an arrow with swirling lines to indicate swift motion.
On the far-right side of the panel is a third rifleman aiming at the archer to complete a frontier melee. It is unclear what the fight has been about.
Dr. Kessell notes, “Small parties of undocumented New Mexican traders and prospectors, especially out of Abiquiu in the later Spanish colonial or Mexican periods, could well have followed the San Juan to the Bluff area. Yet nothing about the glyphs nails them. I suspect they’re later.”
Winston Hurst writes that the dramatic scene “likely depicts a fight between Indians, identified by their use of bows, and Anglos, identified by their rifles.”
Because both groups are wearing Anglo style clothing, he suggests that it might represent a 1915 skirmish between a White posse and Polk Narraguinip’s band of Utes. During that fight a Colorado posse member, Joseph Akin, died from a head wound, but from a bullet not an arrow.
The bows and arrows would be representational because at that time Natives were as well armed with guns as Whites.
But the actual story represented by the rock art is obscure. I think the hat styles reflect an earlier era different from the distinctive wide-brimmed and high-crowned Stetsons then commonly worn across the Four Corners by 1915. We’ll never know exactly what historic event the rock art panel depicts, but that’s one of many riddles that go with trying to interpret rock art.
Equally compelling are scenes of machines carved into sandstone ledges beside creeks flowing into the San Juan. Off one shallow arroyo, I hit a gold mine of glyphs.
It includes a carefully etched steam locomotive, a large freight or dump truck, and a fun soft cloth four-door touring car, probably a Ford, with fading words on the back that spelled out IGNACIO 1928.
Perhaps the vehicle’s occupants were Southern Utes driving to visit relatives at White Mesa south of Blanding. In that decade roads towards Bluff would have wound up and down through sandy washes and been a trial for any traveler. That explains the truck and car. Whoever carved the steam locomotive must have visited Dolores or Durango to see one.
From the San Juan River to historic images found at Newspaper Rock in Canyonlands, historic petroglyphs in the Four Corners continue to raise questions and prompt smiles.
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Andrew Gulliford, an award-winning author and editor, is professor of history at Fort Lewis College. Reach him at andy@agulliford.com.