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The Mystery of Western Messaging Petroglyphs
By Andrew Gulliford Fort Lewis College
Sunday, Jun 9, 2024 12:00 AM
Rock art specialist and bibliographer Leigh Marymor has done atransliteration of the Durango rock art site to show with black lines
the full paneland the images in context within one another. (Courtesy of LeighMarymor)
There is a style of petroglyphs or rock writing that is not Native American. Neither is it historic inscriptions left by Westwardmoving pioneers. It is a coded set of symbols called Western Messaging, but what it means, who made it, and when the author or
authors engraved the symbols on boulders and 81 rock walls across the West remains an unsolved mystery.
Similar messaging panels have been found in eight western states including on public land within Durango city limits. Because
vandalism has occurred at the site, I will not give directions. The site is concealed by oak brush and pinion juniper trees and
looks down at the route of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad whose trains moved daily between Durango and Silverton. I saw
my first set of Western Messaging symbols at a mountain pass below Hickison Summit along Highway 50 in Nevada. I assumed
they were a form of graffiti and I didn’t bother to take photos of them. Now I wish I had.
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Rock art symbols found on sandstone boulders within Durango city limitsare fading over the years. The Western Messaging
images were never large and areoften only six to ten inches in size. (Courtesy of Andrew Gulliford)
In the American West most petroglyphs are prehistoric carvings on cliff faces or boulders by prehistoric and historic Native
Americans, but there are also inscriptions by Anglo pioneers. Both examples are protected by the 50-year rule. If it is half a
century old or older such rock art imagery or inscriptions with names and dates are valuable cultural resources. Western
Messaging Petroglyphs therefore qualify for protection and preservation because they seem to have been etched on rock
between 1880-1930.
Western Messaging sites have interesting similarities: they were engraved with metal-edged tools into local stone along
transportation corridors adjacent to developing mining towns like Durango would have been in the 1880s up through the 1930s.
The symbols were carved at a time in American history when fraternal organizations flourished like the Elks Lodge, the Moose
Lodge, Woodmen of the World, the Knights of Columbus and the Masons who used ancient temple symbols on their ritual
regalia. Popular interest in archaeology flourished in these decades with major discoveries around the world of the fallen city of
Troy, King Tut’s tomb and Mayan ruins in Mexico and Central America.
A Western Messaging Petroglyph, as this rock art style is called, includes ahandprint on rocks within Durango city limits. This is
part of a larger symbol set atthe same site. (Courtesy of Andrew Gulliford)
Religious groups utilized symbols such as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who created a Deseret
Alphabet, though it never saw much use. After 1846, Mormon scouts adhering to the Book of Mormon, searched for evidence of
Lamanites whom they thought had preceded Native Americans into the interior west. Railroad telegraphers used their own
codes to translate messages nationwide, and perhaps some of these telegraphers, who had read a few books on Egyptian or
Mayan civilizations, decided to create a unique visual code.
Here in Colorado, there is a Western Messaging Petroglyph overlooking an old horse trail at Cameo, east of Grand Junction, on
private property west of Grand Junction, near Del Norte on private property, and where Animas City had been platted before
General William Palmer founded his own town of Durango. Rock Art Bibliographic Expert Leigh Marymor and his wife Amy
have been searching for WMP sites for years. At Del Norte, he has noted that the local landscape witnessed streams of Mormon
men who supplemented meager incomes from struggling farms, passing just below the WMP site en route to work in local
mines and on the railroad. As a research associate with the Museum of Northern Arizona, he writes that there is “no escaping
the Western Messaging Petroglyph nexus of historic towns, routes, mines and Mormons.” Marymor has documented that 56%
of the 40 Western Messaging sites have overlapping associations with the Mormon cultural sphere during years of western
expansion and early industrialization in the West.
What appears to be the head of a dragon is found at a Western MessagingPetroglyph site which is rock carving from the 1890s1930s but no one knows whatindividual or groups of individuals carved these symbols. (Courtesy of Andrew Gulliford)
Plenty of laboring men flowed back and forth across the West in the developing decades between 1880 and 1930, yet no archivist
or researcher has yet to prove which group carved these glyphs and why. As a Western historian, I am baffled, intrigued and
more than a little skeptical, yet messages on rock walls and boulders remain scattered between mountain towns in the San
Juans, along railroad tracks at Lordsburg, New Mexico, and west to California’s San Francisco Bay Area.
“Western Message panels have essentially nothing in common with inscriptions done by Europeans, or Whites. There are no
names, dates or initials – items always included in nonnative inscriptions, whether by Whites, Spanish, Mexicans or Basques,”
say John and Mavis Greer of Greer Archaeology in Casper, Wyoming. They see a connection with Native American symbol sets
“like men with hats, sometimes with guns, buffalo heads, distinctive horse heads, tipis, meat-drying racks, moccasins, and
western style houses. Panels typically are composed of glyphs about the same size, usually aligned in text rows, something
different from early Indian rock art but inherent in other later Indian writing systems. These are clearly messages, with formal
glyph order and repeating glyph combinations.”
The Greers and other researchers link WMP panels and Algonquin symbols from Native Americans of the upper Midwest
including Ojibwa, Chippewa-Cree and Lakota. Yes, Native Americans also traveled across the West looking for work as did
thousands of immigrants and emigrants, but etching rock art panels takes time. What would the purpose have been? A common
symbol is of a weeping eye. There are also stick figures, hearts, triangles, squares and sunbursts at the Wooden Shoe Site in
Wyoming.
This map shows the locations of the various Western Messaging Petroglyph locations in the Southwest as well as some connecting
roads.
Western Messaging glyph patterns can be found near Filmore, Ogden, and Cedar City, Utah; Austin, Genoa, and Tonopah,
Nevada; Alabama Hills, Truckee, and Tilden Park in California; Tempe, Arizona; and at Silver City. Marymor says that of the 81
known panels, 34 have multiline narrative texts as if the glyphs are “prose poems.” He thinks he has found the main clue, a
smoking gun in the writings of Brevet Lieutenant Garrick Mallery who between 1877 and 1893 published numerous articles on
Native American sign-gesture language in the Smithsonian’s Annual Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology series.
“Mallery observed that the use of American Indian sign-gesture language was mutually intelligible among the tribes roaming
the plains,” says Marymor. But Mallery wrote about American Indian picture-writing following templates from Native signgestures. The author or authors of the glyphs tossed into the semiotic soup worldwide pan-cultural symbols. “Many of the world
pan cultural symbols found in Western Messaging panels also appear to be lifted directly out of Mallery’s essays where he
compares world symbols to Native American counterparts,” says Marymor. “By combining pan-Native American picture-writing
signs, graphic depictions of American Indian sign-gestures, and world pan-cultural icons, the Western Messaging Petroglyphs
author (or authors) created a ‘faux Indian’ expression.”
Translation – they borrowed or stole Native picture writing images and carved them into rock. Whoever did the engraving read
Smithsonian ethnological reports from the late 19th century.
But who did it and why? The main author or artist must have been well educated in anthropology, and certainly Mallery’s
compilation of Native American late historic picture writing was popular and widely distributed. His examples even made it into
William Tomkins’ Boy Scout Handbook published in 1926.
The search continues both for new sites to document and also to understand the identity or identities of the artist and his or her
helpers. “These picture sites are bound up with the history of the settlement of the American West during the last quarter of
the nineteenth century and opening years of the twentieth,” Marymor says. “Their typical settings in remote and elevated
locations overlook the adjacent historic landscape, and their use of a mix of pan-Native American and pan-cultural icons suggest
a restricted or private intent in their messaging.”
One of the most common motifs are weeping-eye or “Radiant-eye designs” similar to the lone eyeball hovering above the
truncated pyramid staring at us from the back of a dollar bill.
I’m not sure what all this means. I’m still trying to understand Western Messaging as lines of text to be read left to right. But
whatever it is, I’ll keep looking for it. I enjoy a good unsolved mystery in the American West.
Curious Herald readers might want to read Leigh Marymor’s article. Here’s the citation:
2023. “Western Message Petroglyphs: A Faux Indian Picture Writing Project in the American West” in World Rock Art, Special
Issue, R.G. Bednarik, ed. Arts. 12(1): article no. 7. MPDI AG. Basel. ISSN: 2076-0752. Retrieved from:
https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010007.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at
gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
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