TONTO NATIONAL MONUMENT ARIZONA The Lower Ruin in 1910 Lubken photo, courtesy H. B. Clark Although Tonto National Monument was established in 1907 it received little protection until 1930. Considerable vandalism and thoughtless destruction of much of the prehistoric material took place in the 1920s. In recent years some prehistoric Indian ruins have had to be closed to visitors to preserve these fragile structures. Please help us keep the Lower Ruin open for many years to come: restrain children

Along the trail and in the ruin are numbered stakes indicating features of interest. Corresponding numbered paragraphs in this booklet describe them. Typical Desert Landscape and the Lower Ruin...

Brutal heat in summer, hard frosts in winter, strong shrivelling winds of spring, and always erratic rainfall combine here to make a desert, a place of extremes. The world’s arid lands are of many kinds; here is the Upper Sonoran Desert, with its giant cactus and remarkably varied plant life. Here are found many creatures which have adapted in behavior or body features to arid conditions. Man too has evolved in the desert in many ways, over at least ten thousand years, from roving bands of primi

A thousand years ago the Salado first arrived in this basin, coming here around A.D. 900 from the region north of the Little Colorado River drainage. Though we do not know what they called themselves, it is here where later they were given their modern name. In Spanish, Salado means salty, referring to the Salt River near which these Indians lived. When the Salado first entered the Roosevelt Basin they lived in the lowlands, along the Salt River floodplain where they could easily irrigate their