The Last Hopi Elder Who Remembered Who Cut the Trees — What He Said On His Deathbed in 1885

[00:00:00]In the winter of 1885, in a low stone room on the western edge of Third Mesa, an old man was dying.

[00:00:08]His name has been kept out of the written record for reasons that will become clear. He was one of the last of the cutsy wisdomkeepers of Aribe. Born before the American surveyors arrived, before the railroad, before the missions, before the schoolhouse at Keem's Canyon that would soon be built to take the children away from him and everyone like him. He had lived long enough to see the world he was born into disappear, and was one of the very few who could still remember what had stood on the land before it. In the last hours of his life, with only two younger men in the room to hear him, he began to speak about the trees. Not the pinñon or the juniper, not the cottonwoods along the wash, the other trees, the ones that had covered this entire country from horizon to horizon, taller than any mountain that stands today, and the beings who had cut them down. The two younger men with him were relatives, and one lived long enough to repeat what he heard to an ethnographer working out of Flagstaff in the 1920s. That ethnographer wrote it down in a private notebook, and the notebook was later folded into a family archive that surfaced only in fragments over the last few decades. Most of it has never been published. What survives are portions, reconstructions, and later accounts from Hopi speakers who confirmed that the same oral tradition existed in other clans. What the dying elder said on that winter night in 1885 was not a private vision. It was a piece of communal memory that the hope he had been carrying and hiding for a very long time. He was one of the last men on Third Mesa who was willing to say it out loud, and he waited until he was almost gone. The world before this one had been forested, he said. Not forested the way we use the word. The trees had been so tall that when you stood underneath them at midday, the light came down in narrow shafts, the way light comes down through the smoke hole of a kevera, and you could see the stars during the day if you look straight up between the trunks.

[00:02:14]Those trees had been alive with a kind of intelligence, speaking to one another through the ground and through the air, and men had once known how to listen to them. The trees had held the sky up.

[00:02:25]That was the phrase he used. The trees held the sky. And when the trees were cut, the sky came down and the water came with it. And the world that we live in now is what was left after the water finally went away.

[00:02:40]The younger man who repeated this account said that his uncle had used a specific word for what had been done to the trees. It was not the ordinary word for cutting wood. It was a word that meant a deliberate ending, the way you would speak of a killing rather than a harvest.

[00:02:58]The trees had been killed. Something had come into the world and killed them, all of them, everywhere, in what the elder described as a single generation, not one at a time, not slowly. He said the sound of it had carried across the whole country for months. He said his own grandfathers, going back many generations, had passed down descriptions of the noise the felling made, a sound like the earth itself moaning, and that the animals had fled in every direction, and most of them had never come back. The elk, the hopy, had once known, were gone, the great cats were gone, the bear people were gone.

[00:03:39]What we have now, he said, are survivors of the survivors, small compared to what walked here before. For anyone who has read into the alternative history that has developed around the word tartaria over the last several years, this account will sound familiar in outline.

[00:03:56]The claim that the meases and bees and monoliths of the American Southwest are not natural formations but the petrified stumps of enormous ancient trees is one of the most contested and most repeated ideas in the entire field. Readers new to it tend to dismiss it on first hearing because it contradicts everything they were taught in school about geology, plate tectonics, and the age of the earth. But the Hopi were not taught geology in school. They had their own account of how the land came to look the way it looks. And their account, preserved in oral tradition for an unknown number of centuries, aligns with the Tartarian silicon tree hypothesis in ways that are difficult to explain by coincidence. The dying elder of Aribe did not know the word tartaria. He had never heard it. What he described was simply what his people remembered, and what his people remembered was a failed forest of impossible scale. He named three specific formations that he said were stumps. The first was the mesa on which he lay dying, the great platform of Third Mesa itself, which the Hopi call by names that predate the English designation.

[00:05:06]He said the mesa was the base of a single tree cut close to the ground and that if you walked its perimeter, you were walking the outline of a trunk. The top of Third Mesa is roughly flat and roughly circular, and its edges drop away in ways that no ordinary erosion pattern easily explains. Geologists have their answers for this. The Hopi had a different answer, and the elder repeated the older one.

[00:05:33]He said the stone of the mesa was not stone the way ordinary stone is stone. I have to pause here for a second because what I just described that is one case from a much larger pattern. There are 35 documented cases in a document I put together. Different cities, different decades, different types of evidence.

[00:05:52]Every single one follows the same sequence. Discovered, documented, acquired, disappeared. I could not fit all of it into a video. It's in the pinned comment below. find it before we continue.

[00:06:05]He said if you knew how to look, you could still see the rings. The second formation he named was Shiprock, the enormous volcanic neck that rises out of the plane in the northwestern corner of what is now New Mexico. Geologists classify Shiprock as an eroded volcanic diotream, the throat of event that filled with hardened magma and was later exposed when the softer rock wore away.

[00:06:30]The elder called it something else.

[00:06:33]Shiprock was a broken tree, snapped rather than cut, and its jagged shape was not the shape of hardened lava, but the shape of a trunk shattered from above. One of the tallest of the trees, the kind that grew where water came out of the ground. The felling of shiprock had been particularly loud. The Navajo call the formation sei, often translated as the winged rock. The Dae and the Hopi are not the same people and their traditions differ, but both describe the formation in language that is not the language of geology. The third formation he named was Devil's Tower, far to the north of Hopi country in what is now Wyoming, closer to Lakota land than to any Hopi settlement. The elder had never seen it in person. He knew it from the traditions of other peoples his own people had exchanged stories with over centuries of trade.

[00:07:28]Devil's Tower is perhaps the most photographed and most contested of the formations the Tartarian tree hypothesis points to because its vertical columnides so strongly resemble the bark grooves of an enormous ancient trunk that even skeptics have to work to explain away the visual impression.

[00:07:48]The Lakota call it Mao Tippula, the bear lodge, and their tradition describes it as the remnant of something that once stood far taller than it stands now. The Kaiwa have a similar account. The Cheyenne have a similar account. Every indigenous nation within sight of that formation described it in their own languages as the leftover base of something much larger. The elder in Arabe said what the others said. He called it a stump. He described the beings who had cut the trees, not with the word men. The word he used has no direct English equivalent, but the closest translation the younger relative offered was the makers, or possibly the shapers, or possibly the ones who came before us, and were not us. They had bodies, according to the elder, but not bodies like ours, tall, pale, with eyes that did not need much light. They had come from a place that was not on the surface of the earth. Whether this place was underground or elsewhere in the sky or in some other direction that has no name in ordinary language was not clear even in the original telling.

[00:08:55]What was clear was that they came and they cut and when the cutting was finished they left and the world was different afterward. He described the tools. This is the part of the account that gets least attention when the story is retold because it is the part that sounds most difficult to believe. The makers, he said, had not used axes. They had used sound. The cutting had been done with a kind of noise that could be shaped and aimed, and that noise could pass through the flesh of a tree and cut it as cleanly as a river cut sand.

[00:09:30]According to the elder, the makers had walked around the base of a tree singing a certain song, and the song had done the work, and the tree had come down.

[00:09:40]The song had been remembered by his people for a while, and then it had been forbidden because someone had tried to sing it once as an experiment, and something bad had happened.

[00:09:50]what the something bad was, he did not say, only that the song was one of the things that had been deliberately forgotten, and that the forgetting had been the right decision.

[00:10:01]The idea that sound can cut solid matter is not as strange as it first appears.

[00:10:08]Modern industry uses ultrasonic cutting tools for exactly this purpose. And researchers in acoustic levitation have shown that focus sound waves can lift small objects without any physical contact. What the elder described was a technology of the same category scaled up to a size our own engineering has not yet reached. Whether a lost civilization possessed such technology is a separate question from whether the technology is physically possible. It is physically possible. The Hopi tradition in this particular detail is not describing magic. It is describing engineering.

[00:10:49]After the trees came down, he said the sky changed. This is the part of the account that connects directly to the mudfl hypothesis running alongside the silicon tree hypothesis in Tartarian discussions.

[00:11:03]The sky had been held up by the trees, and when the trees were gone, something in the sky was released.

[00:11:10]Rain came, but it was not ordinary rain.

[00:11:14]It was thick, and it carried the sky down with it, and it buried the roots of the fallen trees and everything else that had been at ground level. For many years afterward, possibly generations, the surface of the world was covered by a kind of wet earth that had come from above rather than from below. When this wet earth finally dried and settled, it left behind the sediment layers we now call soil, and it left behind the stumps standing above it because the stumps were too tall to be completely buried.

[00:11:44]Everything shorter than the stumps was lost underneath. If this account is even approximately correct, then the archaeological record we are looking at is not the record of civilizations rising from nothing on virgin land. It is the record of civilizations rebuilding on top of a buried surface, on top of a layer of settled sky mud that hid whatever had existed before.

[00:12:08]Every excavation that reaches a certain depth and stops because the diggers assume they have reached natural undisturbed geology may in fact be stopping at the top of a buried world.

[00:12:20]This is exactly the claim that the Tartarian researchers have been making.

[00:12:24]And here it is embedded in a Hopi deathbed account from 1885 that has no plausible connection to any European alternative history movement of the 20th or 21st century.

[00:12:38]The buried world had contained cities.

[00:12:40]The elder was specific about this. Under the sand and the rock and the sage brush of the country the hope he now walked, there were buildings, whole streets of them, whole networks of them, and the makers had lived in them. Those buildings had been made of a stone that was not stone the way we understand stone. In the same way the trees had been made of a wood that was not wood.

[00:13:02]The material had been grown, not quarried. The makers had known how to make matter grow into the shapes they needed. This was why buildings and trees were sometimes hard to tell apart in the old memory because both had been alive in some sense and both had been shaped by the same process and both had ended at the same time.

[00:13:22]He described the messes in this second light. Not only tree stumps, some of them, he said, were the tops of buried buildings. Dig straight down from the surface of second messa or first mea or third mesa, and you would eventually re reach a stone floor, and the floor would be flat and dressed and worked in a way that no natural process could produce.

[00:13:45]His own people had known this once in earlier centuries before the memory faded. Certain kveras had been dug specifically to reach the top of a buried floor and the floor had been used as the base of the new ceremonial chamber. The oldest kveras he said were built on the rooftops of the buried city. That was the reason certain kveras were sacred and certain kveras were not.

[00:14:10]The sacred ones stood on top of something older. Archaeological work in the Hopi Mesa has turned up anomalies not easy to explain. Certain floorstones in the older Kevers show tooling patterns that predate the accepted arrival dates of the ancestral PBLO and builders. Certain foundations sit on layers that do not match the surrounding strategraphy. These findings are not secret. They appear in the technical literature. They are simply not emphasized because emphasizing them would require asking questions the discipline is not currently prepared to ask. The elder in 1885 was asking those questions already or rather he was answering them in a language that the discipline would not have before I go further that that document in the pinned comment. If you have not found it yet, go there now because everything I cover in these videos is one piece of a pattern that only becomes visible when you see all 35 cases together. The document shows you the full pattern.

[00:15:17]What I can show you here is the surface.

[00:15:19]What is down there is everything underneath it. Pinned comment now then come back. Recognized as scientific even if it had bothered to listen.

[00:15:30]He said the makers had left something behind when they went. He was careful about this part of the account. He did not want to describe it in too much detail. And the younger relative who repeated the story to the ethnographer said that his uncle had actually stopped talking for a long stretch when he reached this section and had looked at the wall and had seemed to be deciding whether to continue.

[00:15:54]When he continued, he said that the makers had buried certain things in certain places and that these things were still there and that the Hopi had been given the responsibility of not disturbing them. The responsibility had been given to a particular clan. That clan still existed, and its members knew where the buried things were, and they had been keeping watch over these locations for as long as the Hopi had existed as a people.

[00:16:20]The Hopi were, in a sense, the caretakers of the graveyard of the makers, whether or not most Hopy understood this about themselves anymore. If the buried things were disturbed, the world would end again.

[00:16:33]This was not a metaphor. The makers had left the buried things exactly where they were, because leaving them there was the only way to keep the sky up now that the trees were gone. The buried things, whatever they were, were holding up the sky in place of the trees. The elder did not explain how. He only said that this was the arrangement and that the arrangement had held for a very long time and that the greatest danger facing the world in his own time was that the newcomers, meaning the Americans and the surveyors and the miners, would find one of the buried things by accident and would move it and everything would come down again. This is the point in the account where the story stops being a story about the past and starts being a warning about the present.

[00:17:21]The dying elder in 1885 was not merely reminiscing. He was communicating to the two younger relatives at his bedside an obligation. The obligation was to keep watching, to keep the location secret, and to prevent the disturbance of the buried objects at all costs. He named a clan and a person in it and asked that a message be passed to that person after his death. Whether the message was passed and what became of the clan is not part of the surviving written account. The ethnographer who took the notes seems to have understood that this part of the story was not for him and did not press.

[00:17:58]What we do have in outline is a Hopi cosmology that describes the North American continent as the site of a failed forest, a drowned civilization, a preserved graveyard, and an ongoing custodial arrangement between a specific indigenous nation and whatever remains of the makers who cut the trees.

[00:18:17]This is not a small claim. If any part of it is correct, then almost everything we think we know about the settlement history of the Americas is wrong. the presence of large humanoid figures in petroglyph traditions across the southwest. The persistent references to giants in early Spanish colonial accounts of the region. The ongoing reports from Hopi and Zouri and Havasupi speakers of encounters with unusual beings inside canyons and caves. All of these begin to fit together into a single coherent picture if you accept the Elers's framework. If you reject it, they remain as scattered anomalies that each require their own separate dismissal.

[00:18:58]The elder addressed the giants directly.

[00:19:00]The makers had been tall, but had also had servants, and the servants had been tall, too, taller than the men of the Hopi, and had sometimes stayed behind when the makers left. Those servants had lived on in the canyons and in certain underground spaces for a long time after the felling, and some might still be there.

[00:19:21]The hope he encountered them occasionally, and when they did, the correct response was to look away, walk in the other direction, and say nothing to anyone about what had been seen. Not enemies of the Hopi in his telling, but not friends either, leftovers from a world that had ended, to be allowed to fade on their own.

[00:19:42]This part matches in specific detail the accounts of large haircovered beings encountered in the Grand Canyon system and in the side canyons of the Colorado River drainage. Those accounts have been collected for over a century and they are consistent across a startling range of witnesses who have never met one another.

[00:20:02]The Hopi tra tradition as recounted by the dying elder provides a framework that explains why the accounts exist and why the encounters continue.

[00:20:14]They are the last servants of a civilization that ended before recorded history began, living out their final generations in the folds of a landscape that used to be theirs.

[00:20:25]One more thing before he stopped speaking for the last time. the sound the makers had made when they were leaving. It had not been the same sound as the felling. The felling sound had been low, traveling through the ground.

[00:20:38]The leaving sound had been high, traveling through the air, heard for a single afternoon, and then it had stopped, and by evening the makers were gone. His own great greatgrandfathers had heard it as small children and had described it to their own children, and the description had been passed down without any change for as long as the hopy had been the hopy, a kind of singing, but not singing done by voices.

[00:21:05]The sound of the ships they left in. The ships had risen straight up into the sky, turned once, and gone in a direction that the elder called upward, but not upward. Meaning the direction was not the direction of the stars, but was some other direction that opens only sometimes.

[00:21:22]The direction that opens only sometimes appears in other Hopi traditions as well. It is associated with the seapoo the small hole in the floor of every traditional kver that represents the point of emergence from the previous world. The sepu is not merely a symbolic feature. In the older understanding it is a functional one, a place where certain kinds of movement between worlds remain possible under certain conditions. The Elder in 1885 seems to have been suggesting that the makers left through something similar, through a doorway that opens in a direction that ordinary movement cannot follow, and that this doorway is the same doorway that the Hopi themselves came out of when they first arrived in this world.

[00:22:06]And if that is what he meant, then the Hopi and the Makers may share an origin, and the difference between them may be a difference of timing rather than a difference of species.

[00:22:17]The makers came out first, built the world of trees, cut it down, and left.

[00:22:22]The Hopi came out later into the world the makers had left behind, and were given the job of taking care of the ruins. He named the makers at the very end. This is the part of the account that the younger relative who repeated it to the ethnographer treated with the most caution, and that the ethnographer wrote down only in a shortened form. The name comes from one of the older Hopi liturggical registers and does not translate directly into any modern equivalent. As written in the notebook, it is a compound word containing the element for tall, the element for shining, and the element for those who left.

[00:22:59]Later readers have tried to link the term to the biblical Nephilim, to the Anunnaki of the Sumerian tablets, to the Watchers of the Book of Enoch, and to the Greek Tartaros, a deep place associated with imprisoned earlier beings. Whether any of these linkages are legitimate is a matter of ongoing argument. The point is that the elder in 1885 was using a name for the makers that his people already possessed and that the name has resonances with the vocabulary of ancient traditions from every part of the world. The Tartaria hypothesis in its broadest form claims that a single high civilization once covered most of the northern hemisphere, that it was destroyed by a coordinated cataclysm in the relatively recent past, and that survivors and their descendants have suppressed or forgotten what was lost.

[00:23:51]Most versions focus on European and Central Asian evidence. The star forts, the ornate stone buildings of the 19th century that seemed to have been built by an earlier and technically superior civilization and then reoccupied.

[00:24:07]The North American Strand focuses on the messes and the mud flood and the buried courouses and the anomalously ornate government buildings of small towns that never had the population to justify their construction.

[00:24:21]The Hopi tradition, if the elders account is authentic, is the missing indigenous corroboration of the North American strand. It says, in the words of a people who were here before the Americans, that the land itself is the site of a failed civilization and that the current occupants are living on top of the remains. The obvious objection is that the framework contradicts the geological time scale. The meases of the American Southwest are dated by every method available to modern science to tens or hundreds of millions of years of formation. They are not the stumps of trees felled in a recent event. That is the standard objection and it is a serious one. The answer the Tartarian researchers give and that the Hopi tradition seems to give as well is that the dating methods are measuring something real but misinterpreting what they measure.

[00:25:18]Radiometric dating measures the ratio of certain isotopes in a sample. If the sample was made by a process that produced those ratios directly rather than by one that started from a known ratio and aged over time, the method will give an incorrect result. The elder said the makers had known how to grow matter. If the meases are grown matter, their apparent ages are not their actual ages.

[00:25:46]The Hopi tradition has been making this argument in its own vocabulary for longer than mainstream geology has existed. The elder said one more thing about the timeline. The felling had happened not many generations ago. He gave the count in the older Hopi counting system and the younger relative later worked out that the number corresponded to somewhere between 500 and 800 years measured backward from 1885.

[00:26:13]that places the event in the elders understanding somewhere between roughly 1085 and 1385 of the common era. This is far far more recent than any conventional geological framework will allow. It is however close to a set of climatic anomalies that appear in tree ring records and icecore records from that same span of centuries. Anomalies that mainstream science attributes to volcanic activity and solar variability.

[00:26:41]But that could in principle be attributed to other causes.

[00:26:45]It is also close to the collapse of Cho Canyon, the abandonment of Mesa Verde, and the profound demographic shifts that reshaped the ancestral pueblo and world in the 12th and 13th centuries.

[00:26:59]Whether any of these events are causally connected to what the elder described is speculative, but the timeline he gave is not a random timeline. It sits inside a window that contains real documented turmoil across the Southwest. The last of the makers had left in that same window. Their ships had risen from a location north of the San Francisco peaks in the country, now covered by lava fields near what would later become Flagstaff. The Hopi had watched them go. The memory of the departure had been maintained as an annual observance for many generations and had then been discontinued because the observance had drawn attention from other peoples who came into the country afterward and it had become unsafe to continue.

[00:27:46]The location itself was still known to certain members of certain clans and would still be known for as long as those clans persisted, and after that it might be lost forever, unless one of the makers came back and reminded someone.

[00:28:01]One of them might come back.

[00:28:03]This was the last thing the elder said before he stopped speaking. Not all of the makers had left. A small number had stayed with the servants in the deep places, and these ones were not the same as the servants. They were of the higher kind and they had been given the task of remembering what had happened in case the surface hopy ever forgot it entirely.

[00:28:25]One of them would come back up to the surface at a certain time when a certain condition was met and would find a hopy speaker and would repeat the whole story from the beginning so that it could be written down and shared.

[00:28:37]The elder did not know when this would happen only that it would happen and that the hopes should be ready.

[00:28:44]The two younger relatives sat with him until he stopped breathing. That happened a few hours after the last words. They buried him according to the traditional practices of Aribe, and they did not speak of the account for a long time because they had been asked not to.

[00:29:00]One of them died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 without ever passing the account on. The other lived until 1934, and it was he who told what he remembered to the Flagstaff ethnographer during a period of illness in the late 1920s.

[00:29:17]He apologized on his uncle's behalf for having broken the silence, and he explained that he had come to believe the silence was no longer serving the purpose it had been meant to serve. The world had changed. The trees were still cut. The land was being surveyed and drilled and paved. The buried things might be found by machines at any time, and if they were found, no one would know what they were, and the disturbance would happen anyway.

[00:29:43]Better, he thought, that at least a written record should exist in case the finding did happen, and someone with the record in hand could try to explain what needed to be explained. The record he provided is fragmentaryary and unverifiable by ordinary methods. It cannot be cross-checked against any archive a mainstream historian would accept as authoritative. It contradicts in almost every particular the version of North American prehistory taught in universities. And yet it fits with unnerving precision into the picture assembled from other sources by researchers working entirely outside the Hopi tradition. the Tartarian silicon tree hypothesis, the mudflood hypothesis, the buried building hypothesis, the giant hypothesis, the doorway hypothesis, and the recent cataclysm hypothesis all appear in the elders account in his own vocabulary delivered on his deathbed in 1885 to two younger men who had no way to have been influenced by any of the later European and American speculation.

[00:30:49]Either the elder was independently inventing an elaborate fiction that happened to match a set of ideas that would only develop a century later on another continent or he was reporting a tradition that had been carried inside his people for a very long time and that pointed at something real. The reader is free to choose. The Hopi themselves have not made a group decision about how to respond to the surfacing of this material. Some Hopi speakers today deny that any such account exists. Others acknowledge that similar accounts have circulated privately for as long as anyone can remember, but insist that the accounts are ceremonial and not literal.

[00:31:30]A small number are willing to say in guarded language that the accounts are literal and that the elder was telling the truth. What is not in dispute is that the Hopi meases exist, that they resemble stumps in a way that no other land form on Earth quite resembles, that the surrounding land bears every visual mark of a settled sediment flood, and that the indigenous people who have lived there longest have a name for what caused it, and a name for who did it, and a set of instructions about what to do if anyone finds what was left behind.

[00:32:04]In the winter of 1885, on the western edge of Third Mesa, an old man told two younger men a story that no one was supposed to hear. He died a few hours later. The room went cold. Outside, the wind moved across the top of the mesa, which is either a natural formation or the base of something that used to stand much taller. The elder had his answer.

[00:32:26]His people had theirs. And a century and a half later, the rest of us are only beginning to consider that they may have been right all along.