THE TRADITION OF KATZÍMO AND ÁCOMA
Katzímo—a towering isolated mesa with vertical sides several
hundred feet in height and utterly inaccessible. It is one of
the most imposing cliffs in that portion of the Southwest and
it is claimed by the Ácoma Indians that while the top of the
mesa is to-day utterly beyond reach, it was accessible many
centuries ago by an easy trail, and that their forefathers
had built a pueblo on it after the manner of their present
village.—BANDELIER.
Of all the features of the great lonely stretches of country that one
passes under the burning sky of the Southwest, most characteristic
are the mesas, those level-topped tables that rise abruptly from the
sandy plains, many-colored, and of irregular outline, catching the late
afternoon sunlight in such fashion as to bring into view mysterious
caverns that often were the early homes of cliff-dwellers. None, of all
the mesas, is more striking than Katzímo, rising isolated and abrupt four
hundred and thirty feet from a waste of sand. Here, says the long-revered
tradition of the Ácomas, their ancestors dwelt after their slow progress
from the north[136] until driven forth by disaster, whence comes the
appellation of the “Enchanted” Mesa, to build a final home upon the great
white rock where we find them to-day.
[Illustration: THE CLIFFS OF ÁCOMA
KATZÍMO IN DISTANCE; SMALL RESERVOIR ON RIGHT
_Bolton_]
The first impression of Katzímo as one approaches it by the sandy road
is of its extraordinary beauty of color. Buff blended with rose is
delicately veiled by the haze which almost everywhere softens severe
outlines in the desert, so that the gazer from afar finds one more reason
for its baptism of the Enchanted. Nearly circular in form, Katzímo seems
to be composed of sheer perpendicular walls fantastically pinnacled and
turreted, but on nearer scrutiny a sort of amphitheatre or cave hollowed
out by long erosion is found both on the northern and on the western
sides; yet so glassy are the walls that there is little encouragement to
attempt their conquest.
The legend of Katzímo relates that then as now the inhabitants were an
agricultural people, cultivating their crops in the plain below. Once,
in the timeless yesterday of their race when the season of planting had
arrived, the Sun Priest issued a proclamation that all the people must
descend the mesa to their fields.[137] There were left on the top only
three women, too ill for the work, and one boy to care for them. At night
he was directed to stand watch, lest the dreaded Apaches might raid
the pueblo in the absence of its warriors. A fearful storm of rain and
thunder such as had never been known made his task dangerous the second
night, but he stayed at his post till called by his mother, upon whom a
portion of her house had fallen. She told him to go down and bring back
some of the men to help.... The boy with infinite peril reached the plain
and started for the fields.
Suddenly [says Lummis] he felt the ground quiver beneath his
feet. A strange rushing sound filled his ears; and whirling
about, he saw the great Ladder Rock rear, throw its head out
from the cliff, reel there an instant in mid-air, and then
go toppling out into the plain like some wounded Titan. As
thousands of tons of rock smote upon the solid earth with a
hideous roar, a great cloud went up, and the valley seemed to
rock to and fro. From the face of the cliff three miles away,
great rocks came leaping and thundering down, and the tall
pines swayed and bowed as before a hurricane. A-chi-te was
thrown headlong by the shock, and lay stunned. The Ladder Rock
had fallen—the unprecedented flood had undermined its sandy
bed.[138]
Thus are we led to think that some portentous convulsion of nature had
toppled off the pueblo, destroyed the ladder trail, and left the colony
homeless. No effort is recorded of any attempt to save the hapless
women, and the chapter is abruptly closed. It was apparently after this
terrible disaster that the mesa was called Katzímo, the “accursed” or
“enchanted,” and many is the spot that has earned such title for less
cause. How the mesa top looked before it was accursed we can never know,
but a few piñons and cedars on its top suggest the probability of its
having been sparsely wooded. This is a land of tempestuous thunder-storms
and heavy rains, when the water falls in cataracts over the mesa summit,
carrying fresh detritus to the heaps of talus below. Since this has been
going on for centuries, it is of course almost hopeless to find much
genuine record on the cliff itself of the origin and development of its
people. Nevertheless a few faint traces do exist, and because the legends
and the folk-lore of Katzímo and of Ácoma are so closely intertwined, we
cannot envisage the story of Ácoma without including Katzímo, however
slight the hope of disentangling solid fact from poetic legend.
We have good reason to believe that there are still shrines in the
recesses of Katzímo, and that in all probability there takes place either
in these clefts or on the summit periodic performance of rituals by the
Ácoma people. One clue to such use of the mesa is given by Miss McLain
of the Indian Service. She reported that an Indian family told her that,
when an Ácoma youth is being instructed in the _kiva_ into the mysteries
of the faith, the last step in his initiatory discipline before giving
him full freedom as a man, is to blindfold him and send him to the top
of the Mesa Encantada for a night’s lonely vigil, bearing a jar of water
as oblation to the spirits. It was explained to her that a boy could
climb blindfolded where he could not go open-eyed, “a fact all mountain
engineers will substantiate.”[139] There is also reason to think that
these novices as well as the worshippers at other ceremonies on Katzímo
have their own undivulged means of reaching the summit.
The desire to solve the mystery of Katzímo has impelled several students
of ethnology to scale its fearful cliffs and to gather whatever
fragmentary tales the Indians of the tribe can be induced to impart. Here
it may be well to note certain things that it is necessary to have in
mind when questioning an Indian. He is more likely to tell you the facts
or the legends of some other tribe than of his own, and even when he does
not exactly prevaricate, he is willing to embroider upon the truth in the
hope that he may mislead the foreign visitor, whose questions seem to him
an unwarranted intrusion upon his own particular preserves. Very little
from any source is to be learned of Katzímo. Bandelier, the distinguished
student of the history of the Southwest, has only this to say:
It is certain that its appearance and the amount of detritus
accumulated around its base give some color to the legend.
Together with other tales it indicates that the Ácomas
successively occupied several villages between San Mateo and
their present location.
The men who have written the most about Ácoma and Katzímo are Bandelier,
Lummis, Hodge, and James. They all lived for considerable periods among
the Indians of this region, winning their friendship and confidence, so
that if any Indian traditions are trustworthy it would seem that this
must be so. But the fact is that the Ácomas are more secretive to-day,
probably, than any other Indian tribe.
Although the mesa is called inaccessible, Lummis made its ascent in 1883,
the earliest by a white man in our time. He published his account in
1885. A decade later (1895) Hodge, then of the Bureau of Ethnology in
Washington, attempted the ascent but was stopped sixty feet below the
actual top by a sheer wall of rock. He did, however, examine the talus,
piled high at the southwestern corner, and found many fragments of very
ancient pottery, which it is easy to distinguish from the modern ware
because decorated with a vitreous glaze, an art no longer practised by
the pueblo potters. Hodge also found unmistakable toe and finger holes in
the walls of the cliffs by which he climbed, which apparently justified
the tradition that it was up this part of the mesa that the ancient trail
had gone. A verbal account of the tradition was given Hodge at this time
by Tsiki, a chief and famous medicine man, of Ácoma.
In July, 1897, Professor William Libbey, of Princeton University, made
the ascent of the mesa with what he describes as almost superhuman
effort. He remained for two hours on the summit and was of the opinion
that there was “not the slightest indication that the top of the Mesa had
ever been the prehistoric home of the Ácomas or had ever been inhabited
at all,” since no bits of pottery or traces of construction of any sort
were visible. Consequently he named it “The Disenchanted Mesa.”[140]
Libbey admitted, however, that he made no exploration of the southwest
cove up which the ancient trail was reputed to have passed, nor of the
talus at its foot. As soon as Libbey published his account a new interest
was aroused in its history, and the Bureau of Ethnology requested Hodge,
who was at work in Arizona, to go to Katzímo and see what he could find.
Accordingly, in September of that year Hodge made his second ascent, and
since then George Wharton James has made further explorations. Setting
aside, then, the slight allusions of Bandelier and Libbey, let us look
at the experiences of the other three, who, on the whole, agree in their
deductions, though with some inevitable minor variations of detail.
James says very reasonably that, if the whole Katzímo tradition is
discredited, all Indian tradition is discredited and more obstacles added
to the unravelling of the obscurities of prehistoric Indian life. But he
also makes the good point that evidences of human presence and of human
occupation of any place are quite separate and diverse things.
[Illustration: THE ASCENT OF THE GREAT CLEFT OF KATZÍMO
1897
_Reprinted from the Century Magazine by permission of the Century Co._]
Hodge’s first experience had taught him that light extension ladders
and some half-inch rope would suffice to enable him to scale the sixty
feet of cliff which unaided he had been obliged to forego in 1895.
Accordingly, when he reached Laguna, he secured as companions a United
States surveyor of long residence in the region, Major G. H. Pradt, A.
C. Vroman, a well-known photographer of Pasadena, Mr. H. C. Hayt of
Chicago, and two Laguna Indian boys. They made their camp in some cedars
at the base of the cleft on the southwest, and while the ladder and other
equipment were got into position for the climb, Major Pradt determined
“that the elevation of the foot of the talus is 33 feet above the plain;
the apex of the talus 224 feet, and the top of the highest pinnacle on
the summit of the mesa overlooking the great cleft is 431 feet above the
same level.” [141]
Their climb, achieved with heroic effort and some danger, convinced
them that the toe and finger holes, without question originally chipped
out by human hands, had lost their first form by reason of the erosion
during the long lapse of years. Near the place where Hodge had been
stopped two years before was a great boulder in the corner of a terrace,
to which their ropes were now secured. Just below it ran a long crack
through the thirty-foot wall, and while resting on the boulder Hodge
suddenly saw four oak sticks about two and a half feet long and one
inch thick, pointed at both ends by some sharp tool. Soon afterward a
potsherd of modern make and an unfeathered prayer-stick were discovered,
and by digging in the sand the rest of the broken jar was found—evident
proof of some recent sacrificial offering. A few moments’ search on the
summit revealed a potsherd of very ancient type. A rude stone “monument”
was examined which Libbey had dismissed as being a natural phenomenon,
but which Hodge regards as indubitably a work of man. A slab thirty
inches long of vertical stratification is held erect by smaller slabs or
boulders of horizontal stratification—a variation that could hardly be
fantastic erosion.
Next morning the party was surprised by the appearance of three Ácoma
Indians, who had seen the fire built by the explorers for warmth on the
summit, and who were at first in no friendly mood. These men were two
_principales_ and a medicine man of their tribe. They had threatened the
Laguna Indians left in the camp below with cutting the ladder-rope and
compelling the descent of the invading white man. They were soon pacified
when told the visitors were only searching for curios and not prospecting
for territory. Luciano, the lieutenant-governor, said their “Ancients”
had once occupied the mesa, but that the destructive storms, to which
the region is subject, would prevent any relics of their time ever being
found. Then the ancient potsherd was produced and the Indians showed
excitement about it, as well as great “surprise” at the cairn, which they
did not explain. Whether or not their attitude might have come from a
desire to conceal their sacred treasures, Hodge does not intimate. At all
events, they helped in the search for more potsherds, and a number were
found in the scattered débris, as well as portions of a shell bracelet
and a blade-end of a white stone axe. This seemed important, as the upper
side was bleached by exposure, while the lower was soiled and damp.
After they had all descended the mesa, one of these Indians showed Hodge
another axe-blade notched similarly to the one they had found on top, and
admitted it had come from the ledge just below the summit and that he was
keeping it for ceremonial purposes. Thus the proofs of human occupation
of Katzímo seem well established, but whether permanent or only periodic
may perhaps never be known. In a personal letter to the writer in
February, 1922, Dr. J. W. Fewkes says:
I have always had more or less doubt as to the use of the name
Enchanted Mesa for Katzímo and was glad to see that you use the
Indian word for it.... I have come to the conclusion that those
who hold that the Pueblo once existed on its top have not made
their point, archaeologically speaking. That they visited the
top goes without saying, but to my mind the evidence is more
mythical than scientific, that any considerable number lived on
Katzímo in prehistoric times. The same story is also told by
the Navajo of the settlement upon the top of Ship Rock and I
believe is one of those legends which are not based wholly upon
facts, or at any rate cannot be proven.