Butterfly Basket and the salt of the Lost City

On Saturday we took a drive up the North Shore road of Lake Mead to Overton, resolutely not stopping for no matter how lovely a view, to go to the Lost City Museum. (It looks closed because a) it's summer and you keep the door closed lest all the heat of Nevada creep inside and b) it was closed by the time we left/took the photo.)

Perhaps not many people realise that the ancient Puebloans settled this far west and had lived here for over a thousand years when Columbus's umpty-great-grandmother was hardly a twinkle in her mother's eye. The Lost City, the Pueblo Grande de Nevada, was a complex of villages and roads stretched over 25 or 30 miles in Moapa Valley, inhabited between about 300 BC and 1150 AD. After being "discovered" by Anglos in the 1920s, it acquired its evocative English name to satisfy the excitable newspaperfolks of the time. Some of it was excavated in the 20s and then more hastily while the Hoover Dam was a-building. Much of it is probably still to find under farmhouses or fields in the valley of the Muddy River.

Fragments of pottery at Lost City Museum, Overton NV

The ancient Puebloans, sometimes also known as Anasazi, made beautiful ceramics of just renown, which a visitor can see in poignant scraps and rare recovered or reconstructed whole vessels. (I first heard of Anasazi pottery from an English art historian I once knew. I am glad I lived to see it here, where it came from - and wish the same for him.) They traded far and wide - there is lovely abalone shell jewellery in the museum. They raised, hunted and gathered food; and mined turquoise, ochre, and salt - for use and trade.

Salt, in chunks as large as two fists, in great discs a yard across. Gemmy salt, as clear as glass. (Early Anglo settlers, over eight hundred years afterwards, which is over a hundred years ago now, experimented with it for window panes.) The ancient Puebloans traded it at least as far away as Arizona, and maybe further. Salt's even more fragile than pottery, much harder to trace. One good flood and it's washed away. One flood of biblical proportions has done for the ancient salt mine, dating from Christ's time, that was a source of wealth, probably convenience, and - I'm sure - delight to the people who lived here in the pit houses and multi-roomed adobe buildings all that time ago.

That flood was the rising of Lake Mead in the 1930s. Although the water has receded now through the ferocious thirst of the southwest's farms and market gardens, the old salt tunnels are gone, eroded and collapsed by decades of inundation. You can still hike to the site. It's about four hours' walking east of the road in the Lake Mead National Recreational Area. The salt tastes salty, the man at the museum told me sheepishly (it's in a National Rec Area, you're probably not really supposed even to taste it ...) but the caverns, he added sadly, are gone. I can almost picture the crystalline caves and corridors - there are perhaps still a few people alive who have seen them face to face.


But the museum is not only about the Pueblo Grande or the ancient mines - although the original CCC built adobe museum has been expanded to surround an actual ruin, partly excavated.

Butterfly basket from Pahrump area, NV

There are also displays on natural history and local climate change. Likewise, other eras of history of the area and region - Mormon settlement in the Moapa valley; drowned St Thomas town; railways in the Meadow Valley up to Caliente (note to self: go to Elgin); the work of the CCC in the Lake Mead area; the exquisite basketwork of Paiute artists from the Pahrump area west of Las Vegas over the Spring Mountains.



On rather a different cultural note, it has about the best t-shirts anywhere if you happen to like gold paint and symmetrical or stylised designs with Southwest motifs. The first time we were there, Simon bought a magnificent pony shirt with gold everywhere, and the other day, I picked up a hummingbird and cactus flower sort of mandala ish design.

And, happily, they also had salt ... and I feel it would be ungracious to complain that it was not glass-clear or from an ancient mine.

More reading on the fascinating Lost City in this great book review: http://nevadamagazine.com/home/archives/nevadas-lost-city/