The Lost City Museum occupies a little knoll just south of Overton. This region was once a westernmost outpost of the Anasazi, the Ancient Ones, and the museum exhibits one of the most complete collections of artifacts of the early Pueblo Indians in the Southwest. The exhibit begins with the mammoth hunters of the Desert Culture 10,000 years ago, then continues through successive phases of Pueblo culture as their settlements grew up along the river courses where they farmed. They built irrigation canals, and homes like hives of mud and sticks. Most of their structures were modest, but some were immense and complex. The largest found at “El Pueblo Grande de Nevada” — Lost City — had 94 rooms.

Twelve hundred years ago their flourishing villages stretched up the Virgin and the Muddy Rivers, with El Pueblo Grande de Nevada dominating the peninsula at the joining of the rivers. Five hundred years later they had abandoned their homes and farms and gone.

The exhibits continue with the Paiute people who still live in the area, and with the Mormon farmers who were the first of the present migratory wave to arrive from the east.

In addition to the exhibits, and the store selling nice examples of Native American workmanship, a small Pueblo residence cluster was constructed on an original foundation as a CCC project during the 1930s. It is as exact a replica as governmental hands can build, and as long as you don’t climb on the fragile tops of the structures, you can crawl inside and see life from the Anasazi perspective.