The drawings were found only on the northeast wall of the canyon, where it cuts the Vermillion cliff sandstone. The chief parts are etched, apparently by pounding with a sharp point. The outline of a figure is usually more deeply cut than the body. Other marks are produced by rubbing or scraping, and still others by laying on colors. Some, not all, of the colors are accompanied by a rubbed appearance, as though the material had been a dry chalk.
I could discover no tools at the foot of the wall, only fragments of pottery, flints, and a metate.
Several fallen blocks of sandstone have rubbed depressions that may have been ground out in the sharpening of tools. There have been many dates of inscriptions, and each new generation has unscrupulously run its lines over the pictures already made. Upon the best protected surfaces, as well as the most exposed, there are drawings dimmed beyond restoration and others distinct. The period during which the work accumulated was longer by far than the time which has passed since the last. Some fallen blocks cover etchings on the wall, and are themselves etched.
Colors are preserved only where there is almost complete shelter from rain. In two places the holes worn in the rock by swaying branches impinge on etchings, but the trees themselves have disappeared. Some etchings are left high and dry by a diminishing talus (15 to 20 feet), but I saw none partly buried by an increasing talus (except in the case of the fallen block already mentioned).
The painted circles are exceedingly accurate, and it seems incredible that they were made without the use of a radius.
In the collection contributed by Mr. Gilbert there are at least fifteen series or groups of figures, most of which consist of the human form (from the simplest to the most complex style of drawing), animals, either singly or in long files--as if driven--bird tracks, human feet and hands, etc. There are also circles, parallel lines, and waving or undulating lines, spots, and other characters.
Mr. Gilbert also reports the discovery, in 1883, of a great number of pictographs, chiefly in color, though some are only incised, in a canyon of the Book cliff containing Thompson’s spring, about 4 miles north of Thompson’s station, on the Denver and Colorado Railroad, Utah. He has also furnished a collection of drawings of pictographs at Black rock spring, on Beaver creek, north of Milford, Utah. A number of fallen blocks of basalt at a low escarpment are filled with etchings upon the vertical faces. The characters generally are of an “unintelligible” nature, though the human figure is drawn in complex forms. Footprints and circles abound.