The Place, the People, and the Preservation of Fourmile Petroglyph
The Place, the People, and the Preservation of Fourmile Petroglyph
By Courtney Agenten
Sand Gulch Quarry. Tribes traveled along Fourmile Creek to the quarry to get stones for making hunting tools. Photo by Heston Mosher
THE PLACE
Fourmile Petroglyph is a landmark along Fourmile Creek in the Arkansas River Basin of Southcentral Colorado. The sandstone boulder is on the side of a county road north of Canon City, Colorado. Following the creek leads to a campsite and what was once a quarry for stone tool making. Long bands of limestone cliffs dominate the landscape north of the rock art site. Stunning rock features paired with the piñon pine and juniper vegetation enhance the dramatic vistas and a picturesque camping environment.
Fourmile Petroglyph rock art site consists of a single petroglyph panel pecked on the southeast face of a sandstone boulder. The petroglyph panel is a series of stipple-pecked circles, abstract lines, and tridents. While most rock art in this region is attributed to the Ute tribe, the tridents indicate a possible connection to an ancestor of the Pawnee tribe as the artist. For the Pawnee:
Representational art work was the province of men whose purpose it was to communicate with sky powers in performing public ceremonial duties, hunting, or warfare. Their designs (on pipe stems, war shields, musical instruments, etc.) had to be easily recognizable to both their “audiences” (villagers, prey, or enemy) and the deities. Birds were messengers who conveyed information between the heaven and the earth, and they appeared frequently in the men’s art work. Stars (four- and five-pointed) were another important Pawnee motif (Willets 1997, 45).
One of the prominent interpretations of the petroglyph panel is that it depicts a constellation. According to Warren Pratt, a citizen of the Pawnee tribe, the Pawnee had the best star maps of all the Plains Indians.
THE PEOPLE
(adapted from Willets 1997)
The ancestors of the Pawnee lived on the plains in the place we now call Nebraska and parts of Kansas. The earliest earthlodges can be dated to A.D. 400. Oral history tells that the first Pawnee man was taught how to build an earthlodge by animals at a Sacred Site on the Missouri River two thousand years ago. Each of the tribe’s four bands built their gardening towns along the drainages on the Solomon River, Smoky Hill River, Blue River, Republican River (north-central Kansas) and the Platte and Loup Rivers (south-central Nebraska). The four bands of the Pawnee tribe are the Chaui (Grand), the Kitkihahki (Republican), the Pitahawirata (Tappage), and the Skidi (Wolf). The Pawnee called themselves “chahiksichahiks,” meaning “people from people.”
The movement of the stars above and the seasons of the earth below guided the village through cycles of work and ceremony. A complex belief system, attuned to celestial rhythms, defines the times for hunting and for gardening. In the