eyes looked longingly northward. In 1539 Fray Marcos, a Franciscan, made
a reconnaissance from the Spanish settlements of Sonora into Arizona
with the particular purpose of locating the seven cities. The following
year Coronado, at his own expense, made the most romantic exploration in
human history. Spanish expectation may be measured by the cost of this
and its accompanying expedition by sea to the Gulf of California, the
combined equipment totalling a quarter million dollars of American money
of to-day. Coronado took two hundred and sixty horsemen, sixty
foot-soldiers, and more than a thousand Indians. Besides his
pack-animals he led a thousand spare horses to carry home the loot.
He sought the seven cities in Arizona and New Mexico, and found the
pueblo of Zuni, prosperous but lacking its expected hoard of gold; he
crossed Colorado in search of Quivira and found it in Kansas, a wretched
habitation of a shiftless tribe; their houses straw, he reported, their
clothes the hides of cows, meaning bison. He entered Nebraska in search
of the broad river whose shores were lined with gold--the identical
year, curiously, in which De Soto discovered the Mississippi. Many were
the pueblos he visited and many his adventures and perils; but the only
treasure he brought back was his record of exploration.
This was the first of more than two centuries of Spanish expeditions.
Fifty years after Coronado, the myth of Quivira was born again;
thereafter it wandered homeless, the inspiration of constant search, and
finally settled in the ruins of the ancient pueblo of Tabira, or, as
Bandelier has it, Teypana, New Mexico; the myth of the seven cities
never wholly perished.
It is not my purpose to follow the fascinating fortunes of Spanish
proselyting and conquest. I merely set the stage for the tableaux of the
national monuments.
I
The Spaniards found our semiarid southwest dotted thinly with the
pueblos and its canyons hung with the cliff-dwellings of a large and
fairly prosperous population of peace-loving Indians, who hunted the
deer and the antelope, fished the rivers, and dry-farmed the mesas and
valleys. Not so advanced in the arts of civilization as the people of
the Mesa Verde, in Colorado, nevertheless their sense of form was patent
in their architecture, and their family life, government, and religion
were highly organized. They were worshippers of the sun. Each pueblo and
outlying village was a political unit.
Let us first consider those national monuments which touch intimately
the Spanish occupation.
GRAN QUIVIRA NATIONAL MONUMENT
Eighty miles southeast of Albuquerque, in the hollow of towering desert
ranges, lies the arid country which Indian tradition calls the Accursed
Lakes. Here, at the points of a large triangle, sprawl the ruins of
three once flourishing pueblo cities, Abo, Cuaray, and Tabira. Once,
says tradition, streams flowed into lakes inhabited by great fish, and
the valleys bloomed; it was an unfaithful wife who brought down the
curse of God.
When the Spaniards came these cities were at the flood-tide of
prosperity. Their combined population was large. Tabira was chosen as
the site of the mission whose priests should trudge the long desert
trails and minister to all.
Undoubtedly, it was one of the most important of the early Spanish
missions. The greater of the two churches was built of limestone, its
outer walls six feet thick. It was a hundred and forty feet long and
forty-eight feet wide. The present height of the walls is twenty-five
feet.
The ancient community building adjoining the church, the main pueblo of
Tabira, has the outlines which are common to the prehistoric pueblos of
the entire southwest and persist in general features in modern Indian
architecture. The rooms are twelve to fifteen feet square, with ceilings
eight or ten feet high. Doors connect the rooms, and the stories, of
which there are three, are connected by ladders through trapdoors. It
probably held a population of fifteen hundred. The pueblo has well stood
the rack of time; the lesser buildings outside it have been reduced to
mounds.
The people who built and inhabited these cities of the Accursed Lakes
were of the now extinct Piro stock. The towns were discovered in 1581 by
Francisco Banchez de Chamuscado. The first priest assigned to the field
was Fray Francisco de San Miguel, this in 1598. The mission of Tabira
was founded by Francisco de Acevedo about 1628. The smaller church was
built then; the great church was built in 1644, but was never fully
finished. Between 1670 and 1675 all three native cities and their
Spanish churches were wiped out by Apaches.
Charles F. Lummis, from whom some of these historical facts are quoted,
has been at great pains to trace the wanderings of the Quivira myth.
Bandelier mentions an ancient New Mexican Indian called Tio Juan Largo,
who told a Spanish explorer about the middle of the eighteenth century
that Quivira was Tabira. Otherwise history is silent concerning the
process by which the myth finally settled upon that historic city, far
indeed from its authentic home in what now is Kansas. The fact stands,
however, that as late as the latter half of the eighteenth century the
name Tabira appeared on the official map of New Mexico. When and how
this name was lost and the famous ruined city with its Spanish churches
accepted as Gran Quivira perhaps never will be definitely known.
"Mid-ocean is not more lonesome than the plains, nor night so gloomy as
that dumb sunlight," wrote Lummis in 1893, approaching the Gran Quivira
across the desert. "The brown grass is knee-deep, and even this shock
gives a surprise in this hoof-obliterated land. The bands of antelope
that drift, like cloud shadows, across the dun landscape suggest less of
life than of the supernatural. The spell of the plains is a wondrous
thing. At first it fascinates. Then it bewilders. At last it crushes. It
is intangible but resistless; stronger than hope, reason, will--stronger
than humanity. When one cannot otherwise escape the plains, one takes
refuge in madness."
This is the setting of the "ghost city" of "ashen hues," that "wraith
in pallid stone," the Gran Quivira.
EL MORRO NATIONAL MONUMENT
Due west from Albuquerque, New Mexico, not far from the Arizona
boundary, El Morro National Monument conserves a mesa end of striking
beauty upon whose cliffs are graven many inscriptions cut in passing by
the Spanish and American explorers of more than two centuries. It is a
historical record of unique value, the only extant memoranda of several
expeditions, an invaluable detail in the history of many. It has helped
trace obscure courses and has established important departures. To the
tourist it brings home, as nothing else can, the realization of these
grim romances of other days.
El Morro, the castle, is also called Inscription Rock. West of its
steepled front, in the angle of a sharp bend in the mesa, is a large
partly enclosed natural chamber, a refuge in storm. A spring here
betrays the reason for El Morro's popularity among the explorers of a
semidesert region. The old Zuni trail bent from its course to touch this
spring. Inscriptions are also found near the spring and on the outer
side of the mesa facing the Zuni Road.
For those acquainted with the story of Spanish exploration this national
monument will have unique interest. To all it imparts a fascinating
sense of the romance of those early days with which the large body of
Americans have yet to become familiar. The popular story of this
romantic period of American history, its poetry and its fiction remain
to be written.
The oldest inscription is dated February 18, 1526. The name of Juan de
Onate, later founder of Santa Fe, is there under date of 1606, the year
of his visit to the mouth of the Colorado River. One of the latest
Spanish inscriptions is that of Don Diego de Vargas, who in 1692
reconquered the Indians who rebelled against Spanish authority in 1680.
The reservation also includes several important community houses of
great antiquity, one of which perches safely upon the very top of El
Morro rock.
CASA GRANDE NATIONAL MONUMENT
In the far south of Arizona not many miles north of the boundary of
Sonora, there stands, near the Gila River, the noble ruin which the
Spaniards call Casa Grande, or Great House. It was a building of large
size situated in a compound of outlying buildings enclosed in a
rectangular wall; no less than three other similar compounds and four
detached clan houses once stood in the near neighborhood. Evidently, in
prehistoric days, this was an important centre of population; remains of
an irrigation system are still visible.
[Illustration: CASA GRANDE NATIONAL MONUMENT]
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC CAVE HOMES IN THE BANDELIER NATIONAL MONUMENT
The holes worn by erosion have been enlarged for doors and windows]
The builders of these prosperous communal dwellings were probably Pima
Indians. The Indians living in the neighborhood to-day have traditions
indicated by their own names for the Casa Grande, the Old House of the
Chief and the Old House of Chief Morning Green. "The Pima word for green
and blue is the same," Doctor Fewkes writes me. "Russell translates the
old chief's name Morning Blue, which is the same as my Morning Green. I
have no doubt Morning Glow is also correct, no doubt nearer the Indian
idea which refers to sun-god. This chief was the son of the Sun by a
maid, as was also Tcuhu-Montezuma, a sun-god who, legends say, built
Casa Grande."
Whatever its origin, the community was already in ruins when the
Spaniards first found it. Kino identified it as the ruin which Fray
Marcos saw in 1539 and called Chichilticalli, and which Coronado passed
in 1540. The early Spanish historians believed it an ancestral
settlement of the Aztecs.
Its formal discovery followed a century and a half later. Domingo
Jironza Petriz de Cruzate, governor of Sonora, had directed his nephew,
Lieutenant Juan Mateo Mange, to conduct a group of missionaries into the
desert, where Mange heard rumors from the natives of a fine group of
ruins on the banks of a river which flowed west. He reported this to
Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, the fearless and famous Jesuit missionary
among the Indians from 1687 to 1711; in November, 1694, Kino searched
for the ruins, found them, and said mass within the walls of the Casa
Grande.
This splendid ruin is built of a natural concrete called culeche. The
external walls are rough, but are smoothly plastered within, showing the
marks of human hands. Two pairs of small holes in the walls opposite
others in the central room have occasioned much speculation. Two look
east and west; the others, also on opposite walls, look north and
south. Some persons conjecture that observations were made through them
of the solstices, and perhaps of some star, to establish the seasons for
these primitive people. "The foundation for this unwarranted
hypothesis," Doctor Fewkes writes, "is probably a statement in a
manuscript by Father Font in 1775, that the 'Prince,' 'chief' of Casa
Grande, looked through openings in the east and west walls 'on the sun
as it rose and set, to salute it.' The openings should not be confused
with smaller holes made in the walls for placing iron rods to support
the walls by contractors when the ruin was repaired."
TUMACACORI NATIONAL MONUMENT
One of the best-preserved ruins of one of the finest missions which
Spanish priests established in the desert of the extreme south of
Arizona is protected under the name of the Tumacacori National Monument.
It is fifty-seven miles south of Tucson, near the Mexican border. The
outlying country probably possessed a large native population.
The ruins are most impressive, consisting of the walls and tower of an
old church building, the walls of a mortuary chapel at the north end of
the church, and a surrounding court with adobe walls six feet high.
These, like all the Spanish missions, were built by Indian converts
under the direction of priests, for the Spanish invaders performed no
manual labor. The walls of the church are six feet thick and plastered
within. The belfry and the altar-dome are of burned brick, the only
example of brick construction among the early Spanish missions. There is
a fine arched doorway.
[Illustration: TUMACACORI MISSION]
[Illustration: _From a photograph by T.H. Bate_
MONTEZUMA CASTLE]
For many reasons, this splendid church is well worth a visit. It was
founded and built about 1688 by Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, and was
known as the Mission San Cayetano de Tumacacori. About 1769 the
Franciscans assumed charge, and repaired and elaborated the structure.
They maintained it for about sixty years, until the Apache Indians laid
siege and finally captured it, driving out the priests and dispersing
the Papagos. About 1850 it was found by Americans in its present
condition.
NAVAJO NATIONAL MONUMENT
The boundary-line which divides Utah from Arizona divides the most
gorgeous expression of the great American desert region. From the Mesa
Verde National Park on the east to Zion National Monument on the west,
from the Natural Bridges on the north to the Grand Canyon and the
Painted Desert on the south, the country glows with golden sands and
crimson mesas, a wilderness of amazing and impossible contours and
indescribable charm.
Within this region, in the extreme north of Arizona, lie the ruins of
three neighboring pueblos. Richard Wetherill, who was one of the
discoverers of the famous cliff-cities of the Mesa Verde, was one of the
party which found the Kit Siel (Broken Pottery) ruin in 1894 within a
long crescent-shaped cave in the side of a glowing red sandstone cliff;
in 1908, upon information given by a Navajo Indian, John Wetherill,
Professor Byron Cumming, and Neil Judd located Betatakin (Hillside
House) ruin within a crescent-shaped cavity in the side of a small red
canyon. Twenty miles west of Betatakin is a small ruin known as
Inscription House upon whose walls is a carved inscription supposed to
have been made by Spanish explorers who visited them in 1661.
While these ruins show no features materially differing from those of
hundreds of other more accessible pueblo ruins, they possess quite
extraordinary beauty because of their romantic location in cliffs of
striking color in a region of mysterious charm.
II
But the Indian civilization of our southwest began very many centuries
before the arrival of the Spaniard, who found, besides the innumerable
pueblos which were crowded with busy occupants, hundreds of pueblos
which had been deserted by their builders, some of them for centuries,
and which lay even then in ruins.
The desertion of so many pueblos with abundant pottery and other
evidences of active living is one of the mysteries of this prehistoric
civilization. No doubt, with the failure of water-supplies and other
changing physical conditions, occasionally communities sought better
living in other localities, but it is certain that many of these
desertions resulted from the raids of the wandering predatory tribes of
the plains, the Querechos of Bandelier's records, but usually mentioned
by him and others by the modern name of Apaches. These fierce bands
continually sought to possess themselves of the stores of food and
clothing to be found in the prosperous pueblos. The utmost cruelties of
the Spanish invaders who, after all, were ruthless only in pursuit of
gold, and, when this was lacking, tolerant and even kindly in their
treatment of the natives, were nothing compared to the atrocities of
these Apache Indians, who gloried in conquest.
Of the ruins of pueblos which were not identified with Spanish
occupation, six have been conserved as national monuments.
THE BANDELIER NATIONAL MONUMENT
Many centuries before the coming of the Spaniards, a deep gorge on the
eastern slope of the Sierra de los Valles, eighteen miles west of Santa
Fe, New Mexico, was the home of a people living in caves which they
hollowed by enlarging erosional openings in the soft volcanic sides of
nearly perpendicular cliffs. The work was done with pains and skill. A
small entrance, sometimes from the valley floor, sometimes reached by
ladder, opened into a roomy apartment which in many cases consisted of
several connecting rooms. These apartments were set in tiers or stories,
as in a modern flat-house. There were often two, sometimes three,
floors. They occurred in groups, probably representing families or
clans, and some of these groups numbered hundreds. Seen to-day, the
cliff-side suggests not so much the modern apartment-house, of which it
was in a way the prehistoric prototype, as a gigantic pigeon-house.
In time these Indians emerged from the cliff and built a great
semi-circular pueblo up the valley, surrounded by smaller habitations.
Other pueblos, probably still later in origin, were built upon
surrounding mesas. All these habitations were abandoned perhaps
centuries before the coming of the Spaniards. The gorge is known as the
Rito de la Frijoles, which is the Spanish name of the clear
mountain-stream which flows through it. Since 1916 it has been known as
the Bandelier National Monument, after the late Adolf Francis Bandelier,
the distinguished archaeologist of the southwest.
The valley is a place of beauty. It is six miles long and nowhere
broader than half a mile; its entrance scarcely admits two persons
abreast. Its southern wall is the slope of a tumbled mesa, its northern
wall the vertical cliff of white and yellowish pumice in which the caves
were dug. The walls rise in crags and pinnacles many hundreds of feet.
Willows, cottonwoods, cherries, and elders grow in thickets along the
stream-side, and cactus decorates the wastes. It is reached by
automobile from Santa Fe.
This national monument lies within a large irregular area which has been
suggested for a national park because of the many interesting remains
which it encloses. The Cliff Cities National Park, when it finally comes
into existence, will include among its exhibits a considerable group of
prehistoric shrines of great value and unusual popular interest.
"The Indians of to-day," writes William Boone Douglass, "guard with
great tenacity the secrets of their shrines. Even when the locations
have been found they will deny their existence, plead ignorance of their
meaning, or refuse to discuss the subject in any form." Nevertheless,
they claim direct descent from the prehistoric shrine-builders, many of
whose shrines are here found among others of later origin.
CHACO CANYON NATIONAL MONUMENT
For fourteen miles, both sides of a New Mexican canyon sixty-five miles
equidistant from Farmington and Gallup are lined with the ruins of very
large and prosperous colonies of prehistoric people. Most of the
buildings were pueblos, many of them containing between fifty and a
hundred rooms; one, known to-day as Pueblo Bonito, must have contained
twelve hundred rooms.
These ruins lie in their original desolation; little excavation, and no
restoration has yet been done. Chaco Canyon must have been the centre of
a very large population. For miles in all directions, particularly
westward, pueblos are grouped as suburbs group near cities of to-day.
It is not surprising that so populous a desert neighborhood required
extensive systems of irrigation. One of these is so well preserved that
little more than the repair of a dam would be necessary to make it again
effective.
MONTEZUMA CASTLE NATIONAL MONUMENT
Small though it is, Montezuma Castle is justly one of the most
celebrated prehistoric ruins in America. Its charming proportions, and
particularly its commanding position in the face of a lofty precipice,
make it a spectacle never to be forgotten. It is fifty-four miles from
Prescott, Arizona.
This structure was a communal house which originally contained
twenty-five rooms. The protection of the dry climate and of the shallow
cave in which it stands has well preserved it these many centuries. Most
of the rooms are in good condition. The timbers, which plainly show the
hacking of the dull primeval stone axes, are among its most interesting
exhibits. The building is crescent-shaped, sixty feet in width and about
fifty feet high. It is five stories high, but the fifth story is
invisible from the front because of the high stone wall of the facade.
The cliff forms the back wall of the structure.
Montezuma's Castle is extremely old. Its material is soft calcareous
stone, and nothing but its sheltered position could have preserved it.
There are many ruined dwellings in the neighborhood.
TONTO NATIONAL MONUMENT
Four miles east of the Roosevelt Dam and eighty miles east of Phoenix,
Arizona, are two small groups of cliff-dwellings which together form the
Tonto National Monument. The southern group occupies a cliff cavern a
hundred and twenty-five feet across. The masonry is above the average.
The ceilings of the lower rooms are constructed of logs laid lengthwise,
upon which a layer of fibre serves as the foundation for the four-inch
adobe floor of the chamber overhead.
There are hundreds of cliff-dwellings which exceed this in charm and
interest, but its nearness to an attraction like the Roosevelt Dam and
glimpses of it which the traveller catches as he speeds over the Apache
Trail make it invaluable as a tourist exhibit. Thousands who are unable
to undertake the long and often arduous journeys by trail to the greater
ruins, can here get definite ideas and a hint of the real flavor of
prehistoric civilization in America.
WALNUT CANYON NATIONAL MONUMENT
Thirty cliff-dwellings cling to the sides of picturesque Walnut Canyon,
eight miles from Flagstaff, Arizona. They are excellently preserved. The
largest contains eight rooms. The canyon possesses unusual beauty
because of the thickets of locust which fringe the trail down from the
rim. One climbs down ladders to occasional ruins which otherwise are
inaccessible. Because of its nearness to Flagstaff several thousand
persons visit this reservation yearly.
GILA CLIFFS NATIONAL MONUMENT
Fifty miles northeast of Silver City, New Mexico, a deep rough canyon in
the west fork of the Gila River contains a group of four cliff-dwellings
in a fair state of preservation. They lie in cavities in the base of an
overhanging cliff of grayish-yellow volcanic rock which at one time
apparently were closed by protecting walls. When discovered by
prospectors and hunters about 1870, many sandals, baskets, spears, and
cooking utensils were found strewn on the floors. Corn-cobs are all that
vandals have left.
XIX
DESERT SPECTACLES
The American desert, to eyes attuned, is charged with beauty. Few who
see it from the car-window find it attractive; most travellers quickly
lose interest in its repetitions and turn back to their novels. A little
intimacy changes this attitude. Live a little with the desert. See it in
its varied moods--for every hour it changes; see it at sunrise, at
midday, at sunset, in the ghostly night, by moonlight. Observe its
life--for it is full of life; its amazing vegetation; its varied
outline. Drink in its atmosphere, its history, its tradition, its
romance. Open your soul to its persuading spirit. Then, insensibly but
swiftly, its flavor will enthrall your senses; it will possess you. And
once possessed, you are charmed for life. It will call you again and
again, as the sea calls the sailor and the East its devotees.
This alluring region is represented in our national parks system by
reservations which display its range. The Zion National Monument, the
Grand Canyon, and the Mesa Verde illustrate widely differing phases. The
historical monuments convey a sense of its romance. There remain a few
to complete the gamut of its charms.
THE RAINBOW BRIDGE NATIONAL MONUMENT
Imagine a gray Navajo desert dotted with purple sage; huge mesas, deep
red, squared against the gray-blue atmosphere of the horizon; pinnacles,
spires, shapes like monstrous bloody fangs, springing from the sands; a
floor as rough as stormy seas, heaped with tumbled rocks, red, yellow,
blue, green, grayish-white, between which rise strange yellowish-green
thorny growths, cactus-like and unfamiliar; a pathless waste, strewn
with obsidian fragments, glaring in the noon sun, more confusing than
the crooked mazes of an ancient Oriental city.