The Mystery of Western Messaging Petroglyphs (2024)

There is a style of petroglyphs or rock writing that is not Native American. Neither is it historic inscriptions left by Westward-moving 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 sign-gestures. 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.