CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA
If someone should tell you of a second Grand Canyon gashed through
wine-colored rocks in the purple light peculiar to the uplands of very
high mountains--a second Grand Canyon, where lived a race of little men
not three feet tall, where wild turkeys were domesticated as household
birds and every man's door was in the roof and his doorstep a ladder
that he carried up after him--you would think it pure imagination,
wouldn't you? The Lilliputians away out in "Gulliver's Travels," or
something like that? And if your narrator went on about magicians who
danced with live rattlesnakes hanging from their teeth and belted about
their waists, and played with live fire without being burned, and walked
up the faces of precipices as a fly walks up a wall--you would think him
rehearsing some Robinson Crusoe tale about two generations too late to
be believed.
Yet there is a second Grand Canyon not a stone's throw from everyday
tourist travel, wilder in game life and rock formation if not so large,
with prehistoric caves on its precipice walls where sleeps a race of
little mummied men behind doors and windows barely large enough to admit
a half-grown white child. Who were they? No one knows. When did they
live? So long ago that they were cave men, stone age men; so long ago
that neither history nor tradition has the faintest echo of their
existence. Where did they live? No, it was not Europe, Asia, Africa or
Australia. If it were, we would know about them. As it happens, this
second Grand Canyon is only in plain, nearby, home-staying America; so
when boys of the Forest Service pulled Little Zeke out of his gypsum and
pumice stone dust and measured him up and found him only twenty-three
inches long, though the hair sticking to the skull was gray and the
teeth were those of an adult--as it happened in only matter-of-fact,
commonplace America, poor Little Zeke couldn't get shelter. They
trounced his little dry bones round Silver City, New Mexico, for a few
months. Then they boxed him up and shipped him away to be stored out of
sight in the cellars of the Smithsonian, at Washington. As Zeke has been
asleep since the Ice Age, or about ten to eight thousand years B. C., it
doesn't make very much difference to him; but one wonders what in the
world New Mexico was doing allowing one of the most wonderful specimens
of a prehistoric dwarf race ever found to be shipped out of the country.
It was in the Gila Canyon that the Forestry Service boys found him. By
some chance, they at once dubbed the little mummy "Zeke." The Gila is a
typical box-canyon, walled as a tunnel, colored in fire tints like the
Grand Canyon, literally terraced and honeycombed with the cave dwellings
of a prehistoric race. It lies some fifty miles as the crow flies from
Silver City; but the way the crow flies and the way man travels are an
altogether different story in the wild lands of the Gila Mountains.
You'll have to make the most of the way on horseback with tents for
hotels, or better still the stars for a roof. Besides, what does it
matter when or how the little scrub of a twenty-three-inch man lived
anyway? We moderns of evolutionary smattering have our own ideas of how
cave men dwelt; and we don't want those ideas disturbed. The cave
men--ask Jack London if you don't believe it--were hairy monsters, not
quite tailless, just cotton-tail-rabbity in their caudal
appendage--hairy monsters, who munched raw beef and dragged women by the
hair of the head to pitch-black, dark as night, smoke-begrimed caves.
That is the way they got their wives. (Perhaps, if Little Zeke could
speak, he would think he ought to sue moderns for libel. He might think
that our "blond-beast" theories are a reflex of our own civilization. He
might smile through his grinning jaws.)
Anyway, there lies Little Zeke, a long time asleep, wrapped in cerements
of fine woven cloth with fluffy-ruffles and fol-de-rols of woven blue
jay and bluebird and hummingbird feathers round his neck. Zeke's people
understood weaving. Also Zeke wears on his feet sandals of yucca fiber
and matting. I don't know what our ancestors wore--according to
evolutionists, it may have been hair and monkey pads. So if you
understood as much about Zeke's history as you do about the Pyramids,
you'd settle some of the biggest disputes in theology and ethnology and
anthropology and a lot of other "ologies," which have something more or
less to do with the salvation and damnation of the soul.
How is it known that Zeke is a type of a race, and not a freak specimen
of a dwarf? Because other like specimens have been found in the same
area in the last ten years; and because the windows and the doors of the
cave dwellings of the Gila would not admit anything but a dwarf race.
They may not all have been twenty-four and thirty-six and forty inches;
but no specimens the size of the mummies in other prehistoric dwellings
have been found in the Gila. For instance, down at Casa Grande, they
found skeletons buried in the gypsum dust of back chambers; but these
skeletons were six-footers, and the roofs of the Casa Grande chambers
were for tall men. Up in the Frijoles cave dwellings, they have dug out
of the _tufa_ dust of ten centuries bodies swathed in woven cloth; but
these bodies are of a modern race five or six feet tall. You have only
to look at Zeke to know that he is not, as we understand the word, an
Indian. Was he an ancestor of the Aztecs or the Toltecs?
Though you cannot go out to the Gila by motor to a luxurious hotel,
there are compensations. You will see a type of life unique and
picturesque as in the Old World--countless flocks of sheep herded by
soft-voiced peons. It is the only section yet left in the West where
freighters with double teams and riders with bull whips wind in and out
of the narrow canyons with their long lines of tented wagons. It is still
a land where game is plentiful as in the old days, trout and turkey and
grouse and deer and bear and mountain lion, and even bighorn, though the
last named are under protection of closed season just now. I'm always
afraid to tell an Easterner or town dweller of the hunt of these old
trappers of the box canyons; but as many as thirteen bear have been
killed on the Gila in three weeks. The altitude of the trail from Silver
City to the Gila runs from 6,000 to 9,150 feet. When you have told that
to a Westerner, you don't need to tell anything else. It means burros
for pack animals. In the Southwest it means forests of huge yellow
pines, open upland like a park, warm, clear days, cool nights, and
though in the desert, none of the heat nor the dust of the desert.
It is the ideal land for tuberculosis, though all invalids should be
examined as to heart action before attempting any altitude over 4,000
feet. And the Southwest has worked out an ideal system of treatment for
tuberculosis patients. They are no longer housed in stuffy hotels and
air tight, super-heated sanitariums. Each sanitarium is now a tent
city--portable houses or tents floored and boarded halfway up, with the
upper half of the wall a curtain window, and a little stove in each
tent. Each patient has, if he wants it, a little hospital all to
himself. There is a central dining-room. There is also a dispensary. In
some cases, there are church and amusement hall. Where means permit it,
a family may have a little tent city all to itself; and they don't call
the tent city a sanitarium. They call it "Sun Mount," or "Happy Canyon,"
or some other such name. The percentage of recoveries is wonderful; but
the point is, the invalids must come in time. Wherever you go along the
borders of Old and New Mexico searching for prehistoric ruins, you come
on these tent cities.
[Illustration: The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma, as high as three Niagaras,
and its top as flat as a billiard table]
Where can one see these cliff and cave dwellings of a prehistoric dwarf?
Please note the points. Cliff and cave dwellings are not the same. Cliff
dwellings are houses made by building up the front of a natural arch.
This front wall was either in stone or sun-baked adobe. Cave dwellings
are houses hollowed out of the solid rock, a feat not so difficult as it
sounds when you consider the rock is only soft pumice or tufa, that
yields to scraping more readily than bath brick or soft lime. The cliff
dwellings are usually only one story. The cave dwellings may run five
stories up inside the rock, natural stone steps leading from tier to
tier of the rooms, and tiny porthole windows looking down precipices 500
to 1,000 feet. The cliff dwellings are mostly entered by narrow trails
leading along the ledge of a precipice sheer as a wall. The first story
of the cave dwellings was entered by a light ladder, which the owner
could draw up after him. Remember it was the Stone Age: no metals, no
firearms, no battering rams, nor devices for throwing projectiles. A
man with a rock in his hand in the doorway of either type of dwelling
could swiftly and deftly and politely speed the parting guest with a
brickbat on his head. Similar types of pottery and shell ornament are
found in both sorts of dwellings; but I have never seen any cliff
dwellings with evidences of such religious ceremony as in the cave
houses. Perhaps the difference between cliff folk and cave folk would be
best expressed by saying that the cliff people were to ancient life what
the East Side is to us: the cave people what upper Fifth Avenue
represents. One the riff-raff, the weak, the poor, driven to the wall;
the other, the strong, the secure and defended.
You go to one section of ruins, and you come to certain definite
conclusions. Then you go on to another group of ruins; and every one of
your conclusions is reversed. For instance, what drove these races out?
What utterly extinguished their civilization so that not a vestige, not
an echo of a tradition exists of their history? Scientists go up to the
Rio Grande in New Mexico, see evidence of ancient irrigation ditches, of
receding springs and decreasing waters; and they at once
pronounce--desiccation. The earth is burning up at the rate of an inch
or two of water in a century; moisture is receding toward the Poles as
it has in Mars, till Mars is mostly arid, sun-parched desert round its
middle and ice round the Poles. Good! When you look down from the cliff
dwellings of Walnut Canyon, near Flagstaff, that explanation seems to
hold good. There certainly must have been water once at the bottom of
this rocky box-canyon. When the water sank below the level of the
springs, the people had to move out. Very well! You come on down to the
cave dwellings of the Gila. The bottom falls out of your explanation,
for there is a perpetual gush of water down these rock walls from
unfailing mountain springs. Why, then, did the race of little people
move out? What wiped them out? Why they moved in one can easily
understand. The box canyons are so narrow that half a dozen pigmy boys
deft with a sling and stones could keep out an army of enemies. The
houses were so built that a child could defend the doorway with a club;
and where the houses have long hallways and stairs as in Casa Grande,
the passages are so narrow as to compel an enemy to wiggle sideways; and
one can guess the inmates would not be idle while the venturesome
intruder was wedging himself along. Also, the bottoms of these
box-canyons afforded ideal corn fields. The central stream permitted easy
irrigation on each side by tapping the waterfall higher up; and the wash
of the silt of centuries ensured fertility to men, whose plowing must
have been accomplished by the shoulder blade of a deer used as a hoe.
Modern pueblo Indians claim to be descendants of these prehistoric dwarf
races. So are we descendants of Adam; but we don't call him our uncle;
and if he had a say, he might disown us. Anyway, how have modern
descendants of the dwarf types developed into six-foot modern Pimas and
Papagoes? It is said the Navajo and Apache came originally from
Athabasca stock. Maybe; but the Pimas and Papagoes claim their Garden of
Eden right in the Southwest. They call their Garden of Eden by the
picturesque name of "Morning Glow."
How reach the caves of the dwarf race?
To the Gila group, you must go by way of Silver City; and better go in
with Forest Service men, for this is the Gila National Forest and the
men know the trails. You will find ranch houses near, where you can
secure board and room for from $1.50 to $2 a day. The "room" may be a
boarded up tent; but that is all the better. Or you may take your own
blanket and sleep in the caves. Perfectly safe--believe me, I have fared
all these ways--when you have nearly broken your neck climbing up a
precipice to a sheltered cave room, you need not fear being followed.
The caves are clean as if kalsomined from centuries and centuries of
wash and wind. You may hear the wolves bark--bark--bark under your
pillowed doorway all night; but wolves don't climb up 600-foot precipice
walls. Also if it is cold in the caves, you will find in the corner of
nearly all, a small, high fireplace, where the glow of a few burning
juniper sticks will drive out the chill.
What did they eat and how did they live, these ancient people, who wore
fine woven cloth at an era when Aryan races wore skins? Like all desert
races, they were not great meat eaters; and the probabilities are that
fish were tabooed. You find remains of game in the caves, but these are
chiefly feather decorations, prayer plumes to waft petitions to the
gods, or bones used as tools. On the other hand, there is abundance of
dried corn in the caves, of gourds and squash seeds; and every cave has
a _metate_, or grinding stone. In many of the caves, there are alcoves
in the solid wall, where meal was stored; and of water jars, urns,
ollas, there are remnants and whole pieces galore. It is thought these
people used not only yucca fiber for weaving, but some species of hemp
and cotton; for there are tatters and strips of what might have been
cotton or linen. You see it wrapped round the bodies of the mummies and
come on it in the accumulation of volcanic ash.
Near many of the ruins is a huge empty basin or pit, which must have
been used as a reservoir in which waters were impounded during siege of
war. Like conies of the rocks, or beehives of modern skyscrapers, these
denizens lived. The most of the mummies have been found in sealed up
chambers at the backs of the main houses; but these could hardly have
been general burying places, for comparatively few mummies have yet been
found. Who, then, were these dwarf mummies, placed in sealed vaults to
the rear of the Gila caves? Perhaps a favorite father, brother, or
sister; perhaps a governor of the tribe, who perished during siege and
could not be taken out to the common burial ground.
Picture to yourself a precipice face from 300 to 700 feet high,
literally punctured with tiny porthole windows and doll house open cave
doors. It is sunset. The rocks of these box-canyons in the Southwest are
of a peculiar wine-colored red and golden ocher, or else dead gray and
gypsum white. Owing to the great altitude--some of the ruins are 9,000
feet above sea level, 1,000 above valley bottom--the atmosphere has that
curious quality of splitting white light into its seven prismatic hues.
Artists of the Southwestern School account for this by the fact of
desert dust being a silt fine as flour, which acts like crystal or glass
in splitting the rays of white light into its prismatic colors; but this
hardly explains these high box-canyons, for there is no dust here. My own
theory (please note, it is only a theory and may be quite wrong) is that
the air is so rare at altitudes above 6,000 feet, so rare and pure that
it splits light up, if not in seven prismatic colors, then in elementary
colors that give the reds and purples and fire tints predominance.
Anyway, at sunset and sunrise, these box-canyons literally swim in a
glory of lavender and purple and fiery reds. You almost fancy it is a
fire where you can dip your hand and not be burned; a sea in which
spirits, not bodies, swim and move and have their being; a sea of fiery
rainbow colors.
The sunset fades. The shadows come down like invisible wings. The
twilight deepens. The stars prick through the indigo blue of a desert
sky like lighted candles; and there flames up in the doorway of cavern
window and door the deep red of juniper and cedar log glow in the
fireplaces at the corner of each room. The mourning dove utters his
plaintive wail. You hear the yap-yap of fox and coyote far up among the
big timbers between you and the snows. Then a gong rings. (Gong? In a
metal-less age? Yes, the gong is a flint bar struck by the priest with a
bone clapper.) The dancers come down out of the caves to the dancing
floors in the middle of the narrow canyon. You can see the dancing rings
yet, where the feet of a thousand years have beaten the raw earth hard.
Men only dance. These are not sex dances. They are dances of thanks to
the gods for the harvest home of corn; or for victory. The gong ceases
clapping. The campfires that scent the canyon with juniper smells,
flicker and fade and die. The rhythmic beat of the feet that dance
ceases and fades in the darkness.
That was ten thousand years agone. Where are the races that danced to
the beat of the priest's clapper gong?
I wakened one morning in one of the Frijoles caves to the mournful wail
of the turtle dove; and there came back that old prophecy--it used to
give me cold shivers down my spine as a child--that the habitat of the
races who fear not God shall be the haunt of bittern and hoot owl and
bat and fox.
* * * * *
I don't know what reason there is for it, neither do the Indians of the
Southwest know; but Casa Grande, the Great House, or the Place of the
Morning Glow, is to them the Garden of Eden of their race traditions;
the scene of their mythical "golden age," when there were no Apaches
raiding the crops, nor white men stealing land away; when life was a
perpetual Happy Hunting Ground, only the hunters didn't kill, and all
animals could talk, and the Desert was an antelope plain knee-deep in
pasturage and flowers, and the springs were all full of running water.
Casa Grande is undoubtedly the oldest of all the prehistoric ruins in
the United States. It lies some eighteen to twenty-five miles, according
to the road you follow, south of the station called by that name on the
Southern Pacific Railroad. It isn't supposed to rain in the desert after
the two summer months, nor to blow dust storms after March; but it was
blowing a dust storm to knock you off your feet when I reached Casa
Grande early in October; and a day later the rain was falling in floods.
The drive can be made with ease in an afternoon; but better give
yourself two days, and stay out for a night at the tents of Mr. Pinkey,
the Government Custodian of the ruins.
The ruin itself has been set aside as a perpetual monument. You drive
out over a low mesa of rolling mesquite and greasewood and cactus, where
the giant suaharo stands like a columned ghost of centuries of bygone
ages.
"How old are they?" I asked my driver, as we passed a huge cactus high
as a house and twisted in contortions as if in pain. From tip to root,
the great trunk was literally pitted with the holes pecked through by
little desert birds for water.
"Oh, centuries and centuries old," he said; "and the queer part is that
in this section of the mesa water is sixty feet below the surface. Their
roots don't go down sixty feet. Where do they get the water? I guess the
bark acts as cement or rubber preventing evaporation. The spines keep
the desert animals off, and during the rainy season the cactus drinks up
all the water he's going to need for the year, and stores it up in that
big tank reservoir of his. But his time is up round these parts;
settlers have homesteaded all round here for twenty-five miles, and next
time you come back we'll have orange groves and pecan orchards."
Far as you could look were the little adobe houses and white tents of
the pioneers, stretching barb wire lines round 160-acre patches of
mesquite with a faith to put Moses to shame when he struck the rock for
a spring. These settlers have to bore down the sixty feet to water level
with very inadequate tools; and you see little burros chasing homemade
windlasses round and round, to pump up water. It looks like "the faith
that lays it down and dies." Slow, hard sledding is this kind of
farming, but it is this kind of dauntless faith that made Phoenix and
made Yuma and made Imperial Valley. Twenty years ago, you could squat on
Imperial Valley Land. To-day it costs $1,000 an acre and yields high
percentage on that investment. To-day you can buy Casa Grande lands from
$5 to $25 an acre. Wait till the water is turned in the ditch, and it
will not seem such tedious work. If you want to know just how hard and
lonely it is, drive past the homesteads just at nightfall as I did. The
white tent stands in the middle of a barb wire fence strung along
juniper poles and cedar shakes; no house, no stable, no buildings of any
sort. The horses are staked out. A woman is cooking a meal above the
chip fire. A lantern hangs on a bush in front of the tent flap. Miles
ahead you see another lantern gleam and swing, and dimly discern the
outlines of another tent--the homesteader's nearest neighbor. Just now
Casa Grande town boasts 400 people housed chiefly in one story adobe
dwellings. Come in five years, and Casa Grande will be boasting her ten
and twenty thousand people. Like mushrooms overnight, the little towns
spring up on irrigation lands.
You catch the first glimpse of the ruins about eighteen miles out--a red
roof put on by the Government, then a huge, square, four story mass of
ruins surrounded by broken walls, with remnants of big elevated
courtyards, and four or five other compounds the size of this central
house, like the bastions at the four corners of a large, old-fashioned
walled fort. The walls are adobe of tremendous thickness--six feet in
the house or temple part, from one to three in the stockade--a thickness
that in an age of only stone weapons must have been impenetrable. The
doors are so very low as to compel a person of ordinary height to bend
almost double to enter; and the supposition is this was to prevent the
entrance of an enemy and give the doorkeeper a chance to eject unwelcome
visitors. Once inside, the ceilings are high, timbered with _vigas_ of
cedar strengthened by heavier logs that must have been carried in a
horseless age a hundred miles from the mountains. The house is laid out
on rectangular lines, and the halls straight enough but so narrow as to
compel passage sidewise. In every room is a feature that has puzzled
scientists both here and in the cave dwellings. Doors were, of course,
open squares off the halls or other rooms; but in addition to these
openings, you will find close to the floor of each room, little round
"cat holes," one or two or three of them, big enough for a beam but
without a beam. In the cave dwellings these little round holes through
walls four or five feet thick are frequently on the side of the room
opposite the fireplace. Fewkes and others think they may have been
ventilator shafts to keep the smoke from blowing back in the room, but
in Casa Grande they are in rooms where there is no fireplace. Others
think they were whispering tubes, for use in time of war or religious
ceremony; but in a house of open doors, would it not have been as simple
to call through the opening? Yet another explanation is that they were
for drainage purpose, the cave man's first rude attempt at modern
plumbing; but that explanation falls down, too; for these openings don't
drain in any regular direction. Such a structure as Casa Grande must
have housed a whole tribe in time of religious festival or war; so you
come back to the explanation of ventilator shafts.
The ceilings of Casa Grande are extraordinarily high; and bodies found
buried in sealed up chambers behind the ruins of the other compounds are
five or six feet long, showing this was no dwarf race. The rooms do not
run off rectangular halls as our rooms do. You tumble down stone steps
through a passage so narrow as to catch your shoulders into a room deep
and narrow as a grave. Then you crack your head going up other steps off
this room to another compartment. Bodies found at Casa Grande lie flat,
headed to the east. Bodies found in the caves are trussed up knees to
chin, but as usual the bodies found at Casa Grande have been shipped
away East to be stored in cellars instead of being left carefully
glassed over, where they were found.
Lower altitude, or the great age, or the quality of the clays, may
account for the peculiarly rich shades of the pottery found at Casa
Grande. The purples and reds and browns are tinged an almost iridescent
green. Running back from the Great House is a heavy wall as of a former
courtyard. Backing and flanking the walls appear to have been other
houses, smaller but built in the same fashion as Casa Grande. Stand on
these ruined walls, or in the doorway of the Great House, and you can
see that five such big houses have once existed in this compound. Two or
three curious features mark Casa Grande. Inside what must have been the
main court of the compound are elevated earthen stages or platforms
three to six feet high, solid mounds. Were these the foundations of
other Great Houses, or platforms for the religious theatricals and
ceremonials which enter so largely into the lives of Southwestern
Indians? At one place is the dry bed of a very ancient reservoir; but
how was water conveyed to this big community well? The river is two
miles away, and no spring is visible here. Though you can see the
footpath of sandaled feet worn in the very rocks of eternity, an
irrigation ditch has not yet been located. This, however, proves
nothing; for the sand storms of a single year would bury the springs
four feet deep. A truer indication of the great age of the reservoir is
the old tree growing up out of the center; and that brings up the
question how we know the age of these ancient ruins--that is, the age
within a hundred years or so. Ask settlers round how old Casa Grande is;
and they will tell you five or six hundred years. Yet on the very face
of things, Casa Grande must be thousands of years older than the other
ruins of the Southwest.
Why?
First as to historic records: did Coronado see Casa Grande in 1540, when
he marched north across the country? He records seeing an ancient Great
House, where Indians dwelt. Bandelier, Fewkes and a dozen others who
have identified his itinerary, say this was not Casa Grande. Even by
1540, Casa Grande was an abandoned ruin. Kino, the great Jesuit, was
the first white man known to have visited the Great House; and he
gathered the Pimas and Papagoes about and said mass there about 1694.
What a weird scene it must have been--the Sacaton Mountains glimmering
in the clear morning light; the shy Indians in gaudy tunics and yucca
fiber pantaloons crowding sideways through the halls to watch what to
them must have been the gorgeous vestments of the priest. Then followed
the elevation of the host, the bowing of the heads, the raising of the
standard of the Cross; and a new era, that has not boded well for the
Pimas and Papagoes, was ushered in. Then the Indians scattered to their
antelope plains and to the mountains; and the priest went on to the
Mission of San Xavier del Bac.
The Jesuits suffered expulsion, and Garcez, the Franciscan, came in
1775, and also held mass in Casa Grande. Garcez says that it was a
tradition among the Moki of the northern desert that they had originally
come from the south, from the Morning Glow of Casa Grande, and that they
had inhabited the box-canyons of the Gila in the days when they were "a
little people." This establishes Casa Grande as prior to the cave
dwellings of the Gila or Frijoles; and the cave dwellings were
practically contemporaneous with the Stone Age and the last centuries of
the Ice Age. Now, the cave dwellings had been abandoned for centuries
before the Spaniards came. This puts the cave age contemporaneous with
or prior to the Christian era.
In the very center of the Casa Grande reservoir, across the doorways of
caves in Frijoles Canyon, grew trees that have taken centuries to come to
maturity.
The Indian tradition is that soon after a very great flood of turbulent
waters, in the days when the Desert was knee-deep in grass, the Indian
Gods came from the Underworld to dwell in Casa Grande. (Not so very
different from theories of evolution and transmigration, is it?) The
people waxed so numerous that they split off in two great families. One
migrated to the south--the Pimas, the Papagoes, the Maricopas; the
others crossed the mountains to the north--the Zunis, the Mokis, the
Hopis.
Yet another proof of the great antiquity is in the language. Between
Papago and Moki tongue is not the faintest resemblance. Now if you trace
the English language back to the days of Chaucer, you know that it is
still English. If you trace it back to 55 B. C. when the Roman and Saxon
conquerors came, there are still words you recognize--thane, serf, Thor,
Woden, moors, borough, etc. That is, you can trace resemblances in
language back 1,900 years. You find no similarity in dialects between
Pima and Moki, and very few similarities in physical conformation. The
only likenesses are in types of structure in ancient houses, and in arts
and crafts. Both people build tiered houses. Both people make wonderful
pottery and are fine weavers, Moki of blankets and Pima of baskets; and
both people ascribe the art of weaving to lessons learned from their
goddess, the Spider Maid.
There are few fireplaces among the ancient dwellings of the Pimas and
Papagoes, but lots of fire pits--_sipapus_--where the spirits of the
Gods came through from the Underworld. Dancing floors, may pole rings,
abound among the cave dwellings: mounds and platforms and courts among
the Casa Grande ruins. The sun and the serpent were favored symbols to
both people, a fact which is easily understood in a cloudless land,
where serpents signified nearness of water springs, the greatest need of
the people. You can see among the cave dwellings where earthquakes have
tumbled down whole masses of front rooms; and both Moki and Papago have
traditions of "the heavens raining fire."
It has been suggested by scientists that the cliffs were cities of
refuge in times of war, the caves and Great Houses were permanent
dwellings. This is inferred because there were no _kivas_ or temples
among the cliff ruins, and many exist among the caves and Great Houses.
Cushing and Hough and I think two or three others regard Casa Grande as
a temple or great community house, where the tribes of the Southwest
repaired semi-annually for their religious ceremonies and theatricals.
We moderns express our emotions through the rhythm of song, of dance, of
orchestra, of play, of opera, of art. The Indian had his pictographs on
the rocks for art, and his pottery and weaving to express his
craftsmanship; but the rest of his artistic nature was expressed chiefly
by religious ceremonial or theatrical dance, similar to the old miracle
plays of the Middle Ages. For instance, the Indians have not only a
tradition of a great flood, but of a maiden who was drawn from the
Underworld by her lover playing a flute; and the Flute Clans celebrate
this by their flute dance. The yearly cleansing of the springs was as
great a religious ceremony as the Israelites' cleansing of personal
impurity. Each family belonged to a clan, and each clan had a religious
lodge, secret as any modern fraternal order.
[Illustration: It isn't America at all! It's Arabia, and the Bedouins of
the Painted Desert are Navajo boys]
The mask dances of the Southwest are much misunderstood by white people.
We see in them only what is grotesque or perhaps obscene. Yet the
spirits of evil and the spirits of goodness are represented under the
Indian's masked dances, just as the old miracle plays represented Faith,
Hope, Charity, Lust, Greed, etc. There is the Bird Dance representing
the gyrations of hummingbird, mocking-bird, quail, eagle, vulture. There
is the dance of the "mud-heads." Have we no "mud-heads" befuddling life
at every turn of the way? There is the dance of the gluttons and the
monsters. Have we no unaccountable monsters in modern life? Read the
record of a single day's crime; and ask yourself what mad motive tempted
humans to such certain disaster. We explain a whole rigmarole of motives
and inheritance and environment. The Indian shows it up by his dance of
the monsters.
Perhaps one of the most beautiful ceremonials is the corn dance. Picture
to yourself the _kivas_ crowded with spectators. The priests come down
bearing blankets in a circle. The blanket circle surrounds the altar
fire. The audience sits breathless in the dark. Musicians strike up a
beating on the stone gong. A flute player trills his air. The blankets
drop. In the flare of the altar fire is seen a field of corn, round
which the actors dance. The priests rise. The blankets hide the fire. It
is the Indian curtain drop. When you look again, there is neither
pageant of dancers, nor field of corn. So the play goes on--a dozen acts
typifying a dozen scenes in a single night.
Good counsel, too, they gave in those miracle plays and ceremonial
dances. "If wounded in battle, don't cry out like a child. Pull out the
arrow. Slip off and die with silence in the throat." "When you go to the
hunt, travel with a light blanket." We talk of getting back to Mother
Earth. The Indian chants endless songs to the wonder of the Great Earth
Magician, creator of life and crops. Fire, too, plays a mysterious part
in all theories of life creation; and this, too, is the subject of a
dance.
Then came dark days. Tribes from the far Athabasca came down like the
Vandals of Europe--Navajo and Apache, relentless warriors. From Great
Houses the people of the Southwest retired to cliffs and caves. When the
Spaniards came with firearms and horses, the situation was almost one of
extermination for the sedentary Indians; and they retired to such
heights as the high mesas of the Tusayan Desert. Whether when white man
stopped raid by the warlike tribes, it was better or worse for the
peaceful Pima and Papago and Moki, it is hard to say; for the white man
began to take the Indian's water and the Indian's land. It's a story of
slow tragedy here. In the days of the overland rush to California, when
every foot of the trail was beset by Apache and Navajo, it was the Pima
and Papago offered shelter and protection to the white overlander. What
does the Indian know of "prior rights" in filing for water? Have not
these waters been his since the days of his forefathers, when men came
with their families from the Morning Glow to the box-canyons of the Gila
and Frijoles? If prior rights mean anything, has not the Pima prior
rights by ten thousand years? But the Pima has not a little slip of
government paper called a deed. The big irrigation companies have tapped
the streams above the Indian Reserve; and the waters have been diverted.
They don't come to the Indians any more. All the Indian gets is the
overflow of the torrential rains--that only brings the alkali wash to
the surface of the land and does not flush it off. The Pima can no
longer raise crops. Slowly and very surely, he is being reduced to
starvation in a country overflowing with plenty, in a country which has
taken his land and his waters, in a country whose people he loyally
protected as they crossed the continent to California.
What are the American people going to do about it? Nothing, of course.
When the wrong has been done and the tribe reduced to extermination by
inches of starvation, some muckraker will rise and write an article
about it, or some ethnologist a brochure about an exterminated people.
Meantime, the children of the Pimas and Papagoes have not enough to eat
owing to the white man taking all their water. They are the people of
"the Golden Age," "the Morning Glow."
We drove back from Casa Grande by starlight over the antelope plains. I
looked back to the crumbling ruins of the Great House, and its five
compounds, where the men and women and children of the Morning Glow came
to dance and worship according to all the light they had. Its falling
walls and dim traditions and fading outlines seemed typical of the
passing of the race. Why does one people pass and another come?
Christians say that those who fear not God, shall pass away from the
memory of men, forever.
Evolutionists say that those who are not fit, shall not survive.
The Spaniard of the Southwest shrugs his gay shoulders under a tilted
sombrero hat, and says _Quien sabe?_ "Who knows?"