No American antiquities except, perhaps, the Old Mill at Newport, have
figured so largely in imagination and in print as the pre-historic
ruins along the Gila River, in Pinal County, Arizona. More than
thirty years ago antiquarian hearts were deeply stirred by accounts
of travellers, then very rare, describing the Casas Grandes as great
cities of hewn stone built in a rich and noble architecture like that
of Egypt. Rhetorical flourishes and bold flights of fancy, colored
the pictures drawn before the days of photography. Communication
with this region was difficult, and travelling hundreds of miles the
stories naturally grew along the way, taking wider outlines and warmer
coloring. The gold seekers of California varied their explorations
by ascending the Gila, almost as unknown to them as the White Nile.
Rapturous reports came back, and for years the Casas Grandes ranked
with Veii and Karnak. I greatly regret having no copy of those Pacific
newspapers to compare the impressions of the last generation, groping
in the misty twilight of half-seen wonders, with plain facts come to
actual sight and touch in the light of to-day.
The walled cities, capable of holding many thousand souls, were
supplied with water by acequias leading from the river. They were
represented by enthusiastic Bohemians as aqueducts of solid masonry
and fairly equal in durability and strength to the Maxima Cloaca of
Rome. Charming traditions embellished the beguiling descriptions,
lovely myths and airy fables floated in the warm, blue silence above
the House of Montezuma, whose lordly name is itself a stimulus to
imagination. They were the work, so ran the tales, of lost races,
mysterious, invincible, all-conquering, vanished into the voiceless
past. They had reached a high civilization, as the magnificent remains
attest, and had passed from the earth leaving no sign but colossal
ruins, no records but strange hieroglyphs, which, engraven on rocks in
the neighborhood of the Casas, undoubtedly formed their history.
These mural records are heaps of weather-worn rocks and detached
boulders covered with figures rudely scratched or painted, bearing
signs of great age. They possibly served as boundary lines, the
hieroglyphs being tribal signs of treaties. One flighty romancer who
understood his own language imperfectly, testified that the “pictured
rocks” were written over with deeply carved inscriptions like the
Hebrew, Chaldean and Gothic characters. They have been foundation
stones for imaginary pyramids with sculptured facades, which were
compared to the temples of Palenque and Tuloom, “made of hewn stone so
admirably fitted they seem ‘born so’ and require neither mortar nor
clamps.” Pottery was found in profusion, glazed and painted, always
in fragments too small and scattered to be fitted together. Yet the
visionaries likened the miserable scraps to ceramics of antique India
and the inimitable vases of Etruria.
From the early times the Apache, savagest of savages--the red man
incurably wild--has swept the plains and has held the mountain
fastnesses, carrying terror and torture from the upper waters of the
Pecos far into old Mexico. The shadowy region, mountain-locked like
some vast stronghold guarded by naked sentinels, was a resistless
temptation to lovers of the marvellous. The deserted cities slowly
crumbling down by the shallow waters of the Gila must have been
the work of a people who maintained their supremacy in the face of
savagery. There was much to stir the fancy, ever strongest of flight
under skies most unknown, in the idea of walled and fortified cities
in the centre of barbarian hordes, able to withstand their warfare and
beat back their encroachments. Poet, sightseer, archæologist, reporter,
padre, missionary, rovers of every sort came by turns to the Casas
Grandes, and gave their impressions in poetic coloring; and over all,
like the dreamy mountain haze whose soft radiance purples hill and
plain, hung a delicious mystery. Who should lift the secret veil and
question the past till it gave back some answer? It was an alluring
borderland between civilization and barbarism; on the North American
Continent the last footing of phantoms peopling the unknown, till the
whistle of the locomotive, which has broken so many illusions, put the
pale shades to flight, and brushed away the cobweb and rose-bloom of
the old Spanish poets.
The Maricopa is a dreary country, arid and inhospitable. Even the
Mark Tapley of travellers observed, while there: “This is not a jolly
place.” The days are hot as the desert where the White Nile rises; so
hot the very lion’s manes are burnt off. The nights are heavenly.
The rivers are tricksy streams--sometimes wet, sometimes dry--but give
enough water to irrigate meagre cornfields. Occasionally they rise in
the very centre of barrenness, flow a mile or so, and are lost in the
sand; then rise unexpectedly and run again.
The season, I remember, was unusually dry. Every one described by
travellers and official papers for whole generations contain that
report. From this concurrent testimony it is safe to conclude that
every season is unusually dry. I testify that one party was made dry
as mummies; but, being under bonds to see all that was to be seen, we
were bound for the Casas Grandes.
To reach them, we must enter the fabled realm of the visionaries; where
the Indian emperor, garlanded by beauty, reclining on crimson and gold,
floated among opal mountains (the name still attaches to a snowy range)
and far-reaching valleys, sown thick with jewels--a region fearful to
land in, because of the one-horned rhinoceros and the monstrous Cibola
(buffalo).
As we walked about while waiting for the ambulance, the Indian men
tagged after us, eyeing the travellers with their intolerable fixed
stare; but the women sat still in their places. There was no breeze
to stir the air, no changing clouds enlivening the bare and brilliant
sky, no sound of wheels, no tramp of men audible in the sandy soil. The
isolation was perfect as that of a reef in mid-ocean.
The earth lay in stillness unbroken, and the mute and moveless Indian
woman was the type of a deadness which rests on the land forever.
Wonderful are the works of an inspired imagination! This is the region
where the West Indian king reveled as he sailed, and, like another
Antony, kissed away kingdoms and provinces. We had read the chronicles
and saw that day the favorite of the harem, whose voice was like
running water in the ear of the thirsty, her step like the bounding
fawn, her grace like the swaying reed, her smile a glance of the Great
Spirit. She is known in our times as the Pimo Squaw. She leaned against
a crazy mud wall, which she appeared to prop, and was so nearly the
same shade of clay that at first the statuesque shape seemed carved in
it. A stumpy figure, nude to the waist draped in one buckskin skirt.
The leathery skin, tanned by long exposure to the fierce sun’s beat
and roughening wind, was darkly veined and coarse. To eyes accustomed
to see in woman’s form the fairest of all fairness--
“A thing to dream of, not to tell”--
the sight is not alluring. She was scarcely twenty-five years of age;
but the pitiless climate (which we are constantly called upon to
admire) had worn wrinkles in her face deep enough to bury her youth in.
Her small, shapely feet were cased in moccasins; the slim hands, idly
resting in her lap, were burnt to a mahogany color (the cinnamon tint
entirely lost) and knotted with the hard work of corn-grinding. Her one
ornament was a sea-shell, tied round her throat by a deer-skin string.
Nourmahal had a Mongol cast of features--narrow button-hole eyes,
almost no eye-brows, high cheek-bones, thick lips, tattooed chin. As
the angelic portion of our party (delicately referring to the writer)
approached for nearer view, she made no sign, except to turn the dull
Chinese eyes, which a short study of inscriptions on tea-boxes would
give the right oblique, and fix them on us with a tireless, unwinking
gaze.
The ruins are twenty miles from the villages of the Pimos, a branch of
the Pueblo Indians, and only twelve miles from the town of Florence on
the South Pacific Railroad. The wagon road runs along the Gila Valley,
a level bottom of varying width with abrupt scarped banks of earth. The
plain is of a pale gray color, with a low mossy grass, its monotony
being relieved by groves of mezquit, a species of acacia resembling
our locust, but with foliage more delicate and almost shadeless. The
stunted trees grow branching from the ground so low as to be nearly
trunkless; knotted, gnarled, dwarfed, black of bark, vaster of root
than of top, yet with a certain grace derived from the small emerald
green leaves delicately set on trembling fronds. Occasionally a
val-de-verde appears, a peculiar and striking growth of green body,
bark, leaf and limb, never very large and not over eight inches in
diameter; and here and there is a prickly pear, twenty feet in height,
loaded with red, pear-shaped fruit.
The shifting outlines of the Tucson Mountains, never five minutes
the same, are drawn in perfect relief against a sky of unrivalled
brilliance; the purest sapphire, free from every taint of mist, fog, or
vapor. The exquisite fineness of the atmosphere shows clearly the high
and rugged peaks of the Sierra Catarina, and one picture-like summit,
called Pichaco, overlooks the chain of hills below through a veil of
dying blue. Close to the river’s brim the willow tosses its branches in
the eternal west wind, lightly as a lady’s plume, and bears a profusion
of lilac flowers rarely beautiful. On the sterile mesa appears the
suwarrow (Cereus Giganteus) of a peculiar and fantastic shape, and a
wild verbena repeats the shade of the far-off hill purples.
Miles away from the dead cities we struck the bed of an ancient
acequia, very large and perfectly defined, the main artery by which
the river bottom, only a mile or so wide here, was irrigated in former
times. Mezquit trees, apparently falling into decay from age, stand
in the dry, abandoned ditches, whose various branches may be traced
in every direction, a network of irrigating canals. Here and there
elevations in the plain proclaim the existence of fallen walls; and
depressions, from which the earth was used to make the adobe are close
by. Nearer the city of silence, immense quantities of broken pottery
strew the ground, an arrowhead or stone axe comes to light, and
the least excitable visitor must admit that the Gila Valley, where
desolation reigns supreme, was once densely populated. We have, in
addition, the strong testimony of adjacent artificial mounds, supposed
to have been burial places; but the mythical mines of silver and gold
laid down on the oldest maps, referred to by the oldest missionaries,
do not yet appear. A popular theory has been held that the Casas were
habitations of companies of miners who worked undiscovered placers hard
by. Happily this conceit has been exploded.
The ruins stand on a low, broad mesa, or table-land, rising slightly
from the main road, and are covered by a thicket of mezquit trees not
exceeding twenty feet in height, but concealing the dun-colored walls
till we were close on them. Passing beyond the leafy screen we saw,
within the space of one hundred and fifty yards, three buildings.
Two are battered and decaying, so ruinous as to baffle the effort of
the tourist to form an idea of their original size, the shape being,
as in all these remains, a parallelogram. Their walls were standing
sufficiently to trace the plan thirty five years ago.
We bent our steps to the main building, largest and best preserved, and
with a keen sense of disappointment beheld the structure so dear to
archæologists and known for three centuries as the House of Montezuma.
Though familiar by picture and description, I had thought to find some
display of regal power in architectural grace and finish; remnants of
mouldings, broken lines of cornices, and at least one lofty portal
through which the tawny courtiers might have filed in barbaric pomp to
salute the Rocky Mountain King. It is merely a tremendous mud house,
on which the centuries have spent their strength in vain, standing in
the hush of utter solitude, battling time and the elements. There is
nothing picturesque about it. No friendly lichen, running creeper or
trailing ivy can live in this dry dewless air and with tender verdure
clothe the nakedness of the ragged structure. Against the sand blast
no wreathing vine can cling, and in its embrace soften the mass of
ugliness harshly outlined against the bare and brilliant sky, unflecked
by cloud or shadow. Our spirits went down, down before the legendary
Palace of Montezuma we had come so far to see. For this we had strained
over lava beds, through the sunburnt ways of the wilderness, across
valleys of sand, sage desert, and greasewood plain, breathing, eating,
drinking alkali, and wearing its dust like a dingy travelling suit!
Instead of poetry here was certainty.
The mountain rim was a refreshment to the vision. There the aerial
hues, so like the stuff which dreams are made of, gave the only ideal
touch to a scene forbiddingly real. No hint of beauty or excellence of
workmanship is found in a near view of the Casa, which is entitled to
admiration only on account of its age, and to a hold on fancy because
its origin and uses are unknown. Desolate and isolated now, time
was when it was encircled by similar buildings grouped in villages
scattered broadly over the wide plateau. In every direction are broken
lines of fallen walls, oblong heaps crumbled down to the dust whence
they sprung; and the extent of irrigation must have made the valley a
cultivated garden, or a field of corn large enough to sustain a vast
population.
But there was little time for sentiment. Our surveys must be made in
haste. The walls are entirely adobe; in no portion is there any stone
used. Instead of the modern Spanish-American adobes, moulded to about
six times the size of our ordinary bricks, this aboriginal “palace” is
built of large blocks of concrete (called by Mexicans tapia), three
feet or more in length, by two feet in width and thickness. They are
of irregular size, indicating that a box or mould was used in the
manufacture into which the mortar was cast where it was to remain
in the walls; and as it dried the cases were moved along. A recent
chemical analysis of the concrete shows the secret of its durability
under the wasting and wearing of ages in a structure certainly a ruin
for three hundred years, and with a pre-Spanish existence of a century
and perhaps more. Seventeen per cent. of the mortar is carbonate of
lime. Probably lime was burned and mixed with the sand and gravel of
the country, which contains a very adhesive clay, tough and lasting.
The walls are perpendicular within, slightly tapering without, four
feet thick, facing the cardinal points of the compass, almost the true
meridian. The building was fifty-eight feet long and forty-three feet
wide, the highest point of the standing wall being thirty-five feet.
It was originally four or five stories high, being about eight feet
from floor to ceiling. In the centre of each wall were narrow doors for
entrance into the main compartments, three feet wide, five feet high,
and growing narrower at the top, except the one in the west front,
which is two feet by seven or eight. Over each door is a port-hole
whose dimensions I am unable to give. The Indian’s love of dark houses
is apparent here; the only light admitted into the small numerous rooms
was through these holes in the deep walls. The central room, with
only one opening, must have been as dismal as a dungeon. It has been
surmised that this was a sort of watch-tower, eight or ten feet higher
than the outer stories, probably one story above all the rest when the
Casa was entire. Some of the port-holes have been filled in with mortar
as though the window, if window it was, admitted too much light.
Father Font, who visited this ruin in 1776, writes: “It is perceptible
the edifice had three stories. The Indians say it had four; the last
being a kind of subterranean vault. For the purpose of giving light to
the rooms nothing is seen but the doors, and some round holes in the
middle of the walls which face to the east and west, and the Indians
said that the Prince, whom they called the ‘Bitter Man,’ used to salute
the sun through these holes (which are pretty large) at its rising and
setting. All the roofs are burnt out except that of one low room, in an
adjoining house, which had beams, apparently cedar, small and smooth,
and over them reeds of equal size and a layer of hard mud and mortar,
forming a very curious roof, or floor.”
The different stories are easily identified by the ends of beams
remaining in the walls, or by the holes into which the beams projected.
They are round rafters of cedar, or sabino, supporting the floors,
being perhaps six inches in diameter and half a foot apart. The nearest
mountain bearing such trees is many a weary mile away. The charred
ends of beams prove that the interior was destroyed by fire, but the
massive four-foot wall suffered no change by flaming floor, rafter,
or roof. The trees were hacked by a blunt tool, probably a stone
hatchet; evidently iron was unknown to the architect of Casas Grandes.
The Indigene substituted for it tempered copper and tools of wrought
obsidian. A few bone awls, or flakers, for making arrow heads, have
been dug out of the gravel, and a metate, or corn grinder, broken jars
and a tomahawk of flint, have been found, but there is no tracery made
by iron.
Adobe walls are wonderfully durable in this dry, equable climate, and
with slight repairs last a thousand years. Disintegration begins at the
base, where moisture gathers, and the walls, seamed and furrowed near
the earth by the action of heavy yearly rains, are held together merely
by their great thickness. Their inner surface is smoothly plastered
with lime cement, little wrinkled marks standing as they appeared when
first dried after the finish was laid on. There is no sign of stairway,
and ascent was probably made outside on scaling ladders, as the Pueblos
go up their terraced domiciles throughout New Mexico and Arizona. The
rough coating without is flaked off in some places by the continuous
action of warring winds which carry sand. Even more than rain, this
incessant agent is operating on the old dun-colored adobes, and unless
repairs are made in the scarred and furrowed foundations, this most
interesting of antiquities must before long become a shapeless wreck.
There can have been no considerable shock of earthquake in the period
during which it has been known to us; even a slight tremble would bring
the time-worn fabric down to hopeless destruction.
Standing on the mesa, the traveller sees in every direction heaps
of ruins, of which the Casas Grandes was the centre and principal.
About two hundred yards to the northwest is a circular inclosure,
also a ruin. It is supposed to have been a corral for cattle, which,
unless, as some assume, it was used as a menagerie, would make it of
more recent date, as the Indians were without domestic animals before
the conquest. Architectural remains have been well called the balance
wheels of tradition. After actual sight and touch there is no room for
dreams and visions. Temples and towers proclaim worship, sculptures
hint of refinement, wealth and elegant tastes. Coins tell of commerce,
and frescoes like those of Pompeii and Rome are illuminated books of
Chronicles.
This antique pile is expressive of a low condition of art. Its size is
impressive when we consider that it was completed without the aid of
domestic animals or iron, but by hand labor alone. The only idea left
in the mind of the visitor is that it was designed to accommodate great
numbers of persons; a cumbrous human hive. There is no forest growth
above it by which to date the passage of years; and the ceaseless
delving of the archæologist has failed to find a key, accepted by all
as the true one, to the age and purpose of so remarkable a building.
Excavations made on an appropriation by the Legislature of Arizona
resulted in nothing. A citizen of Florence reports finding a piece of
gold resembling coin in the debris, and it is said that a hollow sound
has been heard by those jumping on the floor of the inner room. Part
of the walls have fallen, which may account for the noise. That ghost
is laid and no voice or breath of living thing disturbs the dreaming
pilgrim and baffled antiquarian as in mournful procession they carry
off their relics--bits of broken plaster and pottery.
The earliest reporters describe eleven buildings in close proximity to
each other, and there can be no reason to doubt their record, judging
by the high heaps of mud and gravel lying in every direction about the
great Casa. Compassing it is a prostrate wall extending four hundred
and twenty feet from north to south, and two hundred and sixty feet
from east to west, which they believed was a part of the Casa itself--a
natural mistake which has given many a highly exaggerated idea of the
structure inclosed by it.
The first recorded mention of Casas Grandes is made in 1540, by
Captains Diaz and Saldibar, who with twelve intrepid men marched from
the city of Culiacan and ascended the Gila as far as Chichiticale, or
Red House, on the border of the Colorado Desert. They had from friendly
Indians glowing descriptions of the seven cities of Cibola, in which
whole streets were said to be occupied exclusively by workers in gold
and silver. “They had sculptured silver and spear heads and drinking
cups of precious metals.” Fired by these beguiling fables Coronado
led a little army of picked men, fifty soldiers, a few infantry,
his particular friends and the monks, in search of fairy land, the
vanishing seven cities of Cibola. His secretary records that when the
general passed through all the inhabited region to the place where the
desert begins and saw there was “nothing good,” he could not repress
his sadness notwithstanding the marvels which were promised further on.
The traveller of 1880 has much the same sensation as that which smote
the soul of the dashing Coronado of 1540. In the time of the latter
the whole of the North American Continent east of the Rio Grande was
called Florida. It is not surprising that much inaccurate information
prevailed regarding the geography of Nueva Espagna, but it is easy
to identify Casas Grandes with the “Red House” standing in a mezquit
jungle on the edge of the desert, the first ruin seen on the Gila
by one ascending from its mouth. In certain lights the walls have a
reddish tint, and again appear white on account of pebbles contained in
the plaster.
In 1694 Father Kino visited the Casas Grandes. He heard traditions of
the Pimos running back four hundred years; it had been a ruin for
ages, and was destroyed by fire in the war with the Apaches. “The
principal room in the middle is four stories, the adjoining rooms on
its four sides are of three stories, with walls so smooth and shining
that they appear like burnished tables. At the distance of an arquebuss
shot, twelve other houses were to be seen, also half fallen, having
thick walls, and all the ceilings burnt except in the lower room of one
house.” He mentions also canals for irrigation, “which had capacity for
carrying half the water of the river.” The good priest took peaceable
possession of the forsaken spot, set up the cross within the dreary
walls and made the place a holy shrine with the celebration of mass.
Of the old descriptions that of Father Font, who visited the scene in
1779, is most valuable. I regret not having space for a longer extract
from his journal: “The large house or Palace of Montezuma,” he says,
“according to the histories and meagre accounts of it which we have
from the Indians, may have been built some 500 years ago; for, as it
appears, this building was erected by the Mexicans when, during their
transmigration, the Devil led them through various countries until
they arrived at the promised land of Mexico; and in their sojourns,
which were long ones, they formed towns and built edifices.” He further
speaks of ruins in every direction. “The land is partially covered with
pieces of pots, jars, plates, etc.” He was the first one who discovered
that the outer wall was a fortification, “a fence which surrounded this
house and other buildings.” Within the last thirty years the Casa de
Montezuma has been often described, and so much speculation has been
expended as to its origin and uses that I hesitate to push out into
that dark sea.
There is a succession of ruined cities, forming a continuous chain
of evidence, from Utah to the City of Mexico. I have examined many
of these dead pueblos and can discover no essential in which they
differ from each other, from the living pueblos now inhabited, or from
the Casas Grandes. All are community houses, where a whole tribe may
dwell, built of adobe in the shape of an oblong square around an open
court. Inclosing this was an outer wall or fortification with towers
at regular intervals for the posting of sentinels. The old pueblos
were built on a table land so as to afford an outlook for sentries
and an opportunity for watching depredations on the corn lands in
the valleys below; and often at a distance are found the remains of
a circular watch-tower, a signal station near the city. Such are the
prehistoric vestiges along the McElmo, Colorado, San Juan and the Rio
Mancos, and the widely dispersed remains in the Ehaco and Mancho. Such
is the solitary watch-tower in the Cañon of the Hovenweep, Utah. The
northernmost buildings discovered in Arizona and Colorado are exact
copies of the Southern and Moqui pueblos, varying with situation and
with the quality of material used. Generally the earth of the country
was mixed with ashes and clay. The lack of individuality in the Indian
race gives you the feeling that if you see one you have seen all; so
it is in regard to their habitations. The sameness of the remains, and
their close likeness to the Casas Grandes and the modern buildings,
must strike the most careless observer. Yet they are not more alike
than the builders themselves.
There are few, if any antiquities, that have not been searched through
and through and reported on. The hunter, miner, scout, surveyor, priest
and sightseer have overlooked no hill or plain where there is a trace
of human dwelling. Undoubtedly the adobe houses wherever found are the
work of a semi-civilized, agricultural people with whom the Spaniards
came in conflict, and who are described by them as Pueblo, or Town
Indians, to distinguish them from the nomads or wandering tribes of the
primitive race. An immense amount of romance has been wasted on the old
mud houses, which makes them hardly less wonderful than the enchanted
city Tiahuanco, which was built in a single night by an invisible hand;
but the time is come to put out wavering lights and to banish shifting
shadows.
I am convinced that the Palace of Montezuma was designed as a fortress,
a centre from which many villages radiated and to which the inhabitants
fled for refuge in a last extremity. The lightness of the floor rafters
in the lower story precludes the possibility that the building was used
as a granary. Any one of the many rooms full of grain must have crushed
the floors, if not the walls themselves. Again, it has been declared
to have been a temple for the sun worshippers; but the smallness and
multiplicity of the rooms and the many doors and port holes oppose such
a surmise, though the dismal central room and the circular passages
between the rooms might suggest priestcraft, and heathen rites and
sorceries.
It may have been, like the castle of the middle ages, the nucleus
around which the city gradually grew up, but more probably it rose
from the needs of the citizens, many of whom must have toiled in its
erection. For many, many years the Apache has harried this land. It
is the Indian law to destroy all that he cannot carry away, and the
pottery is always broken, the interiors are always fired. The builders
of adobe houses, wherever found, were open to incursions of the same
enemy which still infests the Mexican border. To me these remains have
no new meanings. They merely prove that the North American Continent
has been inhabited from a remote period; something which I believe has
never been disputed.
The undated tradition is that the spot which I am trying to describe
is one of the stopping places of Montezuma on his southward march to
Anahuac. All legends point to an emigration from north to south. Coming
from the ends of the earth, or from fabled Azatlan, the first halt the
Montezumas made was at old Zuni; this was the second station; the third
was near Chihuahua, Mexico, where enormous ruins, exact reproductions
of these are standing isolated in a luxuriant valley, the tottering
monuments of a peculiar tribe or tribes of a bygone nationality.
Nothing is to be learned from the natives there, who, like all Pueblos,
love to call themselves sons of Montezuma, or from the Mexicans round
about. Whatever requires a moment’s thought is dismissed by the
ever-ready, meaningless, _Quien sabe?_ “Who knows?”