Tour the Smithsonian After its First Fifty Years

A grand approach to the room devoted to architecture is afforded by the stately gateways which stood at the entrance to the Chinese section of the Centennial Exhibition, and were presented to the Museum by the Imperial Commissioners. These gateways are wed, which is taken from the gallery behind them, and includes the two pretty pagodas that accompany, and are so characteristic of Chinese Buddistic architecture. They consist of an archway for carriages and palanquins flanked on each side by a narrower one for pedestrians, the whole built of a frame work supported upon carved posts and bearing roofs carved after the Chinese style. The eaves are upheld by carved beams, and have exterior ridge poles of open green and gold scroll-work, with large blue and red dragons at each end. There are two roofs, one above the other, making the height of the whole structure over 25 feet.

The heavy wooden posts and crossbeams are painted yellow, and ornamented with blue, red and gold bosses, the spaces filled with red and blue flowers. "This florid coloring," as Mr. W. J. Rhees remarks, "is a peculiarity of Chinese architectural ornamentation. With the Chinese, colors have a marked significance; thus yellow is the imperial or royal color; red the felicitous color; white the emblem of mourning, etc. Since these gateways eminate directly from the Emperor, the predominating color is yellow. . . . If gateways of this kind open directly into a temple or a Mandarin's Yamun, they stand side by side. If as is usually the case, there is an open courtyard in front of the main building, the large one is in the centre and the smaller ones in the sides of the surrounding wall. Such gates may also be erected to commemorate distinguished individuals, or they may be built by influential persons to commemorate their parents. Some are put up in honor of women who have distinguished themselves by their chastity and filial duty, or to widows who have refused a second marriage. Permission to erect them is granted by the Emperor, and is considered a high honor.

"The large gilt characters on the shield near the top, read downwards according to the rule of Chinese literature, are Ta Tsing Kwob (Great Pure Kingdom), the name given to the Empire of China by the ruling dynasty. The horizontal row of characters on the principal lintel, read from right to left according to rule, are Wub Hwa T''ien Pao (Beautiful things, the prized objects of the Heavens), the last two characters being a term of Buddhistic origin and refer to heaven in the very highest, grandest sense. The inscription on the first right-hand post, read downward, means 'The splendor of the display of articles collected from the eighteen provinces (of China) may even surpass Nature ;' that on the opposite post, 'The establishment of this great and prosperous exhibition indicates the maintenance of friendly relations;' those on the extreme left hand post are, 'This pair of scrolls was composed by Li Kwai of the Kiang Su province ;' and 'The agent was Sun Sin Kiang of Ningpo City.' The extreme right hand inscription is 'The lucky day of the first month of the second year of the Emperor Kiang Su."' It will be seen that this inscription refers to the occasion for which the gateways were made.

The representation of architecture in a Museum must necessarily be confined to models, pictures and certain fragmentary remains. The room which is devoted to it, not only, but other parts of the Museum, are hung with very large and most excellent photographs of the principal buildings of the world, and the windows are fitted with transparencies largely derived from photographs of architectural subjects. Models exist in great numbers of the houses of the natives of various parts of the globe, made for the most part by the people who live in each style of house or hut. These include Eskimo igloos, redskin wickyups, the floating houses of Malaga. As the lacustrine prehistoric habitations of Switzerland and many puebloes, ancient and modern. The most striking object in the room, in fact, is the great model of the pueblo in New Mexico, with which the general public have lately become familiar through the picturesque writings signed by Frank Cushing, in recent volumes of The Century.

This model consists of clay and occupies a frame, standing two feet above the floor. The scale is one inch=five feet, and is about four times as big as a billiard table. The uneven surface of the site; the groups of pueblos set around their plazas; the goat corrals behind each; the estufas and ladders and chimney-pots, and all the details of the adobe Indian town, are here faithfully reproduced. This uniform blueish-clay tint,exactly the same in house and ground, through the utter bareness of everything, is exceedingly natural, and none admire this model (with other smaller ones) more than those who have visited those Indian towns.

Closely identified with this are the models and photographs of the prehistoric abodes of the cliff-dwellers, whose habitations are found upon the mesas and canyon-cliffs of Arizona, New Mexico and Southern Colorado.

Hints of these ruins appear in the chronicles of the earliest Spanish adventurers, who came northward from Cortez' headquarters in Mexico, and in various books of travel in the remote southwest. Almost no definite information was possessed, however, until 1874, when W. H. Jackson and Ernest Ingersoll, of the U. S. Geol. and Geogr. Survey went down the Rio Mancos to the Rio San Juan and made photographs and descriptions of ruins in the extreme corner of Colorado. These valleys were found strewn with the remains of pueblos which had been most substantially built of stone (for the most part) and contained many large structures still erect, together with vast quantities of broken pottery and other evidences of a large population. These valleys were bounded by abrupt cliffs of sandstone from l,000 to several thousand feet in height, the top of which represented the general level of the mesa or plateau into which the waterworn canyons were sunken. To reach the top of these cliffs was possible only in certain places. Along the brink of these promontories, and of lesser outlook, were set round and square towers of antique masonry which had served as watch-towers; and upon the faces of the cliffs, which had been worn by water or adrial decay into recessed ledges, and shallow grottoes, were placed houses of stone, sometimes single and isolated, but more frequently grouped into little villages which extended for several rods along some ledge, or occupied closely adjacent hollows, Some of these were not far above the slope or faces at the base of the cliffs, but most of them were nearer the top than the bottom, and we saw many from six to eight hundred feet above the valley. The present writer has been inside this house, and can testify (if any testimony is needed) to the accuracy with which the model of it in the Museum has been made.

In the Reports U. S. G. and G. Survey for 1871 and 1875 will be found extensive descriptions and illustrations of these ruins, while briefer accounts have been redrawn in modern books of archaeology, and more popularly in Ingersoll's "Crest of the Continent" (Donnelly & Sons, Chicago, 1885), from which the following general remarks are quoted:

"Just who and what were these aborigines (if so they were, which is very doubtful) opinions differ but that in the visage Indians of New Mexico and Arizona we see to-day their lineal descendants, seems indisputable. Traditions are few, that have any value, but the partial and imperfect researches which have already been made in the southwest enable us to make out dimly some strangely tragical scheme of history for this race of men whose sun set so long ago.

"It is evident, for example, that the most ancient of these prehistoric ruins are those found along the immediate banks of the watercourses in the valleys. There the forerunners of the troublous times to come dwelt in peace and prosperity among their fields, which seem to have stretched over many time the area of land now possible to be cultivated. There is no question, indeed, that in those days rains were more frequent and the climate far more favorable to agriculture than at present. But how many generations-how many centuries-ago was this? And how did the change of climate which turned the fertility of the land into desolation, come about-by slow degrees, through sudden cataclysm, or with comparatively rapid advance? Probably gradually.

"But it does not seem to have been as the result of meteorological disfavor that they abandoned their populous pueblos in the pleasant valleys and began to build refugee homes in the niches of the canyon's wall, or on the crest of inaccessible mesas. From the mountainous north came enemies they were unable to resist, and which devastated their fields and laid waste their towns. . . . No doubt they still cultivated their fields as well as they could between the times of attack, building temporary summerhouses and spending the idle winter in their rocky fastnesses, or retreating to them when warned of an attack. Their watch-towers on every exposed point tell how sharp and incessant was the lookout they kept against the well-mounted and savage nomadic tribes, the prehistoric Utes, and Apaches and Navajos, who were to them as the Scythians, and Vandals and Goths to the weakened empire of Rome. But after a time a breathing space seems to have come to the harrassed people, and they felt themselves safe to return to their ancient valleys and re-inhabit and re-cultivate them. Certain houses, built upon the substratum of older fallen structures, seem to show this new era of re-occupation, which in some places lasted only a short time before enemies and drought together compelled a complete abandonment, while in other more southern strongholds were founded the pueblos that still exist at Taos, Acoma, Zuni and on the Moqui mesas."

The next most Conspicuous objects in this room are the Lorillard Charnay collection of Central American antiquities, which were procured during explorations in Yucatan and other parts of Central America by M. Charnay, a few years ago, at the expense of Mr. Pierre Lorillard, of New York. An account of these explorations has been published in The North American Review and elsewhere. The laws of Central America forbid the taking away of any antiquities, permitting only casts and drawings to go out of the country where the object is found. M. Charnay, therefore, made moulds of inscriptions and whatever else he wished, which were sent to Paris, where one set of casts were made for the French government and another for our National Museum. As they are of full size, and reproduce with absolute fidelity the appearance of the original stone sculptures hidden in the forests, they often deceive visitors by their natural appearance, and are of quite as great service to the student both of architecture and hieroglyphics, as if the real relics were before him.

The makers of these ancient buildings and statues were the ancestors of the Mayas, concerning whom Dr. D. G. Brinton (Library of Aboriginal Literature) is an authority. The labels attached to each piece are so full that other explanation is needless here; the writings of Dr. Brinton, of Dr. Cyrus Thomas, (Rep't Bur. Ethn., II.) contain discussions and translations of the hieroglyphics. The principal pieces come from the temples at Palenque, and the great pillared halls of Chichen-Itza, in the interior of Yucatan.

To this set was added, at the close of the New Orleans Exposition of 1885, a goodly number of casts and sculpture historical and artistic, from Mexico and Central America The most noteworthy of these is a plaster cast of the great "sacrificial calender stone" of the Aztecs, which occupied a place in the principal temple of the Montezumas at their capital, and it is still to be seen in the City of Mexico. To those who are familiar with the history of Anahuae, or even recall Prescott's fascinating history of the conquest of Mexico, these objects will have peculiar interest.

Standing about this room, and in one or two places elsewhere in the Museum, will be observed tall columns grotesquely carved and colored, after the same patterns as ornament the canoes and utensils of the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte islands, British Columbia. They are, in fact, the work of the same people, though the tribes of the neighboring mainland fashion similar, but less pretentious ones, and are known as the totem-posts.

"These posts or pillars erected in front of the houses of the chiefs or principal men, upon which are carved the family totems or heraldic designs of the family occupying the house, or, if a large wooden lodge capable of containing several families, the carvings may be said to indicate the family names of the different occupants. Sometimes they are from fifty to sixty feet high, elaborately carved with stone and rude iron implements at a cost of hundreds of blankets, the best ones costing several thousand dollars. The backs are hollowed out to reduce the weight when the posts are raised to a perpendicular position. They are deeply and firmly set in the earth directly in front of the lodge, a circular opening near the ground often constituting the door or entrance to the house, though by some tribes they are set at a short distance from the front of their houses.

Return to Tour the Smithsonian After its First Fifty Years