A fashionable metal-worker of Taos, New Mexico, who has not adhered to the native costumeA fashionable metal-worker of Taos, New Mexico, who has not adhered to the native costume
The last great uprising was just after the American Occupation. Bent, the great trader of Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, was governor. Kit Carson, who had run away from the saddler's trade at sixteen and for whom a reward of one cent was offered, had joined the Santa Fe caravans and was now living at Taos, an influential man among the Indians. According to Col. Twitchell, whose work is the most complete on New Mexico and who received the account direct from the governor's daughter, Governor Bent knew that danger was brewing. The Pueblos had witnessed Spanish power overthrown; then, the expulsion of Mexican rule. Why should they, themselves, not expel American domination?
It was January 18, 1847. Governor Bent had come up from Santa Fe to visit Taos. He was warned to go back, or to get a military escort; but a trader all his life among the Indians, he flouted danger. Traders' rum had inflamed the Indians. They had crowded in from their pueblo town to the plaza of Taos. Insurrectionary Mexicans, who had cause enough to complain of the American policy regarding Spanish land titles, had harangued the Indians into a flare of resentful passion. Governor Bent and his family were in bed in the house you can see over to the left of the Plaza. In the kraalwere plenty of horses for escape, but the family were awakened at daybreak by a rabble crowding into the central courtyard. Kit Carson's wife, Mrs. Bent, Mrs. Boggs and her children hurried into the shelter of an inner room. Young Alfredo Bent, only ten years old, pulled his gun from the rack with the words—"Papa, let us fight;" but Bent had gone to the door to parley with the leaders.
Taking advantage of the check, the women and an Indian slave dug a hole with a poker and spoon under the adobe wall of the room into the next house. Through this the family crawled away from the besieged room to the next house, Mrs. Bent last, calling for her husband to come; but it was too late. Governor Bent was shot in the face as he expostulated; clubbed down and literally scalped alive. He dragged himself across the floor, to follow his wife; but Indians came up through the hole and down over the roof and in through the windows; and Bent fell dead at the feet of his family.
The family were left prisoners in the room without food, or clothing except night dresses, all that day and the next night. At daybreak friendly Mexicans brought food, and the women were taken away disguised as squaws. Once, when searching Indians came to the house of the old Mexican who had sheltered the family, the rescuer threw the searchers off by setting his "squaws" to grinding meal on the kitchen floor. Kit Carson, at this time, unfortunately happened to be in California. He was the one man who could have restrained the Indians.
The Indians then proceeded down to the Arroyo Hondo to catch some mule loads of whiskey and provisions, which were expected through the narrow cañon. The mill where the mules had been unharnessed was surrounded that night. The teamsters plugged up windows and loaded for the fray that must come with daylight. Seven times the Indians attempted to rush an assault. Each time, a rifle shot puffed from the mill and an Indian leaped into the air to fall back dead. Then the whole body of 500 Indians poured a simultaneous volley into the mill. Two of the Americans inside fell dead. A third was severely wounded. By the afternoon of the second day, the Americans were without balls or powder. The Indians then crept up and set fire to the mill. The Americans hid themselves among the stampeding stock of the kraal. Night was coming on. The Pueblos were crowding round in a circle. The surviving Americans opened the gates and made a dash in the dark for the mountains. Two only escaped. The rest were lanced and scalped as they ran; and in the loot of the teams, the Indians are supposed to have secured some well-filled chests of gold specie.
By January 23rd, General Price had marched out at the head of five companies, from old Fort Marcy at Santa Fe for Taos. He had 353 men and four cannon. You can see the marks yet on the old Mission at Taos, where the cannon-balls battered down the adobe walls. The Indians did not wait his coming. They met him 1,500 strong on the heights of amesa at Santa Cruz. The Indians made wild efforts to capture the wagons to the rear of the artillery; but when an Indian rabble meets artillery, there is only one possible issue. The Indians fled, leaving thirty-six killed and forty-five wounded. No railway led up the Rio Grande at that early date; and it was a more notable feat for the troops to advance up the narrowing cañons than to defeat the foe. At Embudo, six or seven hundred Pueblos lined the rock walls under hiding of cedar and piñon. The soldiers had to climb to shoot; and again the Indians could not withstand trained fire. They left twenty killed and sixty wounded here. Two feet of snow lay on the trail as the troops ascended the uplands; and it was February 3rd before they reached Taos. Every ladder had been drawn up, every window barricaded, and the high walls of the tiered great houses were bristling with rifle barrels; but rifle defense could not withstand the big shells of the assailants. The two pueblos were completely surrounded. A six pounder was brought within ten yards of the walls. A shell was fired—the church wall battered down, and the dragoons rushed through the breach. By the night of Feb. 4th, old men, women and children bearing the cross came suing for peace. The ringleader, Tomas, was delivered to General Price; and the troops drew off with a loss of seven killed and forty-five wounded. The Pueblos loss was not less than 200. Thus ended the last attempt of the Pueblos to overthrow alien domination; and this attempt would not have been made if the Indians had notbeen spurred on by Mexican revolutionaries, with counter plots of their own.
We motored away from Taos by sunset. An old Indian woman swathed all in white came creeping down one of the upper ladders. They could not throw off white rule—these Pueblos—but for four centuries they have withstood white influences as completely as in the days when they sent the couriers spurring with the knotted cord to rally the tribes to open revolt.
If you want to plunge into America's Egypt, there are as many ways to go as you have moods. You explain that the ocean voyage is half the attraction to European travel. There may be a difference of opinion on that, as I know people who would like to believe that the Atlantic could be bridged; but if you are keen on an ocean voyage, you can reach the Egypt of America by boat to Florida, then west by rail; or by boat straight to any of the Texas harbors. By way of Florida, you can take your fill of the historic and antique and the picturesque in St. Augustine and Pensacola and New Orleans; and if there are any yarns of rarer flavor in all the resorts of Europe than in the old quarters of these three places, I have never heard of them. You can drink of the spring of the elixir of life in St. Augustine, and lose yourself in the trenches of old Fort Barrancas at Pensacola, and wander at will in the old French town of New Orleans. Each place was once a pawn in the gambles of European statesmen. Each has heard the clang of armed knights, the sword in one hand, the cross in the other. Each has seen the pirate fleet with death's head on the flag at the masthead come tacking upthe bays, sometimes to be shattered and sunk by cannon shot from the fort bastions. Sometimes the fort itself was scuttled by the buccaneers; once, at least, at Fort Barrancas, it suffered loot at terrible, riotous, drunken hands, when a Spanish officer's daughter who was captured for ransom succeeded in plunging into the sea within sight of her watching father.
But whether you enter the Egypt of America by rail overland, or by sea, San Antonio is the gateway city from the south to the land of play and mystery. It is to the Middle West what Quebec is to Canada, what Cairo is to Egypt—the gateway, the meeting place of old and new, of Latin and Saxon, of East and West, of North and South. Atmosphere? Physically, the atmosphere is champagne: spiritually, you have not gone ten paces from the station before you feel a flavor as of old wine. There are the open Spanish plazas riotous with bloom flanked by Spanish-Moorish ruins flush on the pavement, with skyscraper hotels that are the last word in modernity. Live oaks heavy with Spanish moss hang over sleepy streams that come from everywhere and meander nowhere. You see a squad of soldiers from Fort Sam Houston wheeling in measured tread around a square (only there isn't anything absolutely square in all San Antonio) and they have hardly gone striding out of sight before you see a Mexican burro trotting to market with a load of hay tied on its back. A motor comes bumping over the roads—such roads as only the antique can boast—andif it is fiesta time, or cowboy celebration, you are apt to see cowboys cutting such figure eights in the air as a motor cannot execute on antique pavement.
You enter a hotel and imagine you are in the Plaza, New York, or the Ritz, London; but stay! The frieze above the marble walls isn't gilt; and it isn't tapestry. The frieze is a long panel in bronzealto-relievo. I think it is a testimonial to San Antonio's sense of the fitness of things that that frieze is not of Roman gladiators, or French gardens with beringed ladies and tame fawns. It is a frieze of the cowboys taking a stampeding herd up the long trail—drifting and driving but held together by a rough fellow in top boots and sombrero; and the rotunda has a frieze of cowboys because that three million-dollar hotel was built out of "cow" money. Old and new, past and present, Saxon and Latin, North and South, East and West—that is San Antonio. You can never forget it for a minute. It is such a shifting panorama as you could only get from traveling thousands of miles elsewhere, or comparing a hundred Remington drawings. San Antonio is a curious combination of Remington and Alma Tadema in real life; and I don't know anywhere else in the world you can get it. There are three such huge hotels in San Antonio besides a score of lesser ones, to take care of the 30,000 tourists who come from the Middle West to winter in San Antonio; but remember that while 30,000 seems a large number of tourists for one place, that is onlyone-tenth the number of Americans who yearly see Europe.
And never for a moment can you forget that as Cairo is the gateway to Eastern travel, so San Antonio is on the road to Old Mexico and all the former Spanish possessions of the South. It was here that Madero's band of revolutionists lived and laid the plans that overthrew Diaz. Long ago, before the days of railway, it was here that the long caravans of mule trains used to come with, silver and gold from the mines of Old Mexico. It was here the highwaymen and roughs and toughs and scum of the earth used to lie in wait for the passing bullion; and it was here the Texas Rangers came with short, quick, sharp shrift for rustlers and robbers. There is one corner in San Antonio where you can see a Mission dating back to the early seventeen hundreds, and not a stone's throw away, one of the most famous gambling joints of the wildest days of the wild Southwest—the site of the old Silver King, where cowboys and miners from the South used to come in "to clean out" their earnings of a year, sometimes to ride horses over faro tables, or pot-shot rows of champagne. A man had "to smile" when he called his "pardner" pet names in the Silver King; or there would be crackle of more than champagne corks. Men would duck for hiding. A body would be dragged out, sand spread on the floor, and the games went on morning, noon and night. The Missions are crumbling ruins. So is the Silver King. Frontiersmen will tell you regretfully of the goodold days forever gone, when the night passed but dully if the cowboys did not shoot up all the saloons and "hurdle" the gaming tables.
Yesterday, it was cowboy and mines in San Antonio. To-day, it is polo and tourist; and the transition is a natural growth. One would hate to think of the risks of the Long Trail, for miners from Old Mexico to Fort Leavenworth, for cowboys from Fort Worth to Wyoming and St. Louis, and not see the risks rewarded in fortunes to these trail makers. The cowboy and miner of the olden days—the cowboy and miner who survived, that is—are the capitalists taking their pleasure in San Antonio to-day. It was natural that the cow pony bred to keeping its feet in mid-air, or on earth, should develop into the finest type of polo pony ever known. For years, the polo clubs of the North, Lenox, Long Island, Milbrook, have made a regular business of scouring Texas for polo ponies. Horses giving promise of good points would be picked up at $80, $100, $150. They would then be rounded on a ranch and trained. San Antonio is situated almost 700 feet up on a high, clear plateau rimmed by blue ridges in the distance. Recently, a polo ground of 3,200 acres has been laid out; and the polo clubs of the North are to be invited to San Antonio for the winter fiestas. As Fort Sam Houston boasts one of the best polo clubs of the South, competition is likely to attract the sportsmen from far and near.
You know how it is in all these new Western cities. They are feverish with a mania of progress. They have grown so fast they cannot keep track of their own hobble-de-hoy, sprawling limbs. They are drunk with prosperity. In real estate alone, fortunes have come, as it were, overnight. All this San Antonio has not escaped. They will tell you with pardonable pride how this little cow town, where land wasn't worth two cents an acre outside the Mission walls, has jumped to be a metropolitan city of over 100,000; how it is the center of the great truck and irrigation farm district. Fort Sam Houston always has 700 or 800 soldiers in garrison, and sometimes has as many as 4,000; and when army maneuvers take place, there is an immense reservation outside the city where as many as 20,000 men can practice mimic war. The day of two cents or even $20 an acre land round San Antonio is forever past. Land under the ditch is too valuable for the rating of twenty acres to one steer.
All this and more you will see of modern San Antonio; but still if at sundown you set out on a vagrant and solitary tour of the old Missions, I think you will feel as I felt that it was the dauntless spirit of the old régime that fired the blood of the moderns for the new day that is dawning. I don't know why it is, but anything in life that is worth having seems to demand service and sacrifice and, oftener than not, the martyrdom of heroic and terrible defeat. Then, when you think that the flag of the cause is trampled in a mire of bloodshed, phœnix-likethe cause rises on eagles' wings to new height, new daring, new victory. It was so in Texas.
When you visit the Missions of San Antonio, go alone; or go with a kindred spirit. Don't talk! Let the mysticism and wonder of it sink in your soul! Soak yourself in the traditions of the Past. Let the dead hand of the Past reach out and touch you. You will live over again the heroism of the Alamo, the heroism that preceded the Alamo—that of the Franciscans who tramped 300 leagues across the desert of Old Mexico to establish these Missions; the heroism that preceded the Franciscans—that of La Salle traveling thrice 300 leagues to establish the cross on the Gulf of Mexico, and perishing by assassin's hand as he turned on the backward march. You will see the iron cross to his memory at Levaca. It was because La Salle, the Frenchman, found his way to the Gulf, that Spain stirred up the viceroys of New Mexico to send sword and cross over the desert to establish forts in the country of the Tejas (Texans).
Do you realize what that means? When I cross the arid hills of the Rio Grande, I travel in a car cooled by electric fans, with two or three iced drinks between meals. These men marched—most of them on foot, the cowled priests in sandals, the knights in armor plate from head to heel—over cactus sands. Do you wonder that they died on the way? Do you wonder that the marchers coming into the well-watered plains of the San Antonio with festooned live oaks overhanging the green waters, paused here and built their string of Missions of which the chief was the one now known as "The Alamo"—the Mission of the cottonwood trees?
An excellent example of the entrance to an adobe house of the Southwest, embodying the best traditions of this kind of architectureAn excellent example of the entrance to an adobe house of the Southwest, embodying the best traditions of this kind of architecture
Six different flags have flown over the land of the Tejas: the French, the Spanish, the Mexican, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate, the Union. In such a struggle for ascendancy, needless to tell, much blood was shed righteously and unrighteously; but of the battle fought at the Alamo, no justification need be given. It is part of American history, but it is the kind of history that in other nations goes to make battle hymns. Details are in every school book. Santa Ana, the newly risen Mexican dictator, had ordered the 30,000 Americans who lived in Texas, to disarm. Sam Houston, Crockett, Bowie, Travis, had sprung to arms with a call that rings down to history yet:
"Fellow citizens and compatriots," wrote Travis from the doomed Alamo Mission, to Houston and the other leaders outside, "I am besieged by a thousand or more Mexicans under Santa Ana. I have sustained a continued bombardment for twenty-four hours and have not lost a man.... The garrison is to be put to the sword if the place is taken. I have answered the summons with a cannon shot and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender, nor retreat. I call on you in the name of liberty, and of everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid with all despatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily, andwill no doubt increase to 3,000 or 4,000 in four or five days. Though this call may be neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who forgets not what is due to his own honor and that of his country—Victory or Death!W. Barrett TravisLieut.-Col. Commanding."
"Fellow citizens and compatriots," wrote Travis from the doomed Alamo Mission, to Houston and the other leaders outside, "I am besieged by a thousand or more Mexicans under Santa Ana. I have sustained a continued bombardment for twenty-four hours and have not lost a man.... The garrison is to be put to the sword if the place is taken. I have answered the summons with a cannon shot and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender, nor retreat. I call on you in the name of liberty, and of everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid with all despatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily, andwill no doubt increase to 3,000 or 4,000 in four or five days. Though this call may be neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who forgets not what is due to his own honor and that of his country—Victory or Death!
W. Barrett TravisLieut.-Col. Commanding."
In the fort with Travis were 180 men under Bowie and Crockett. The siege began on Feb. 23, 1836, and ended on March 6th. Besides the frontiersmen in the fort were two women, two children and two slaves. The Mission was arranged in a great quadrangle fifty-four by 154 yards withacequiasor irrigation ditches both to front and rear. The garrison had succeeded in getting inside the walls about thirty bushels of corn and eighty beef cattle; so there was no danger of famine. The big courtyard was in the rear. The convent projected out in front of the courtyard. To the left angle of the convent was the chapel or Mission of the Alamo. Santa Ana had come across the desert with 5,000 men. To the demand for surrender, Travis answered with a cannon shot. The Mexican leader then hung the red flag above his camp and ordered the band to play "no quarter." For eight days, shells came hurtling inside the walls incessantly, dawn to dark, dark to dawn. Just at sunset on March 3rd, there was a bell. Travis collected his men and gave them their choice of surrendering and being shot, or cuttingtheir way out through the besieging line. The besiegers at this time consisted of 2,500 infantrymen bunched close to the walls of the Alamo—too close to be shot from above, and 2,500 cavalry and infantry back on the Plaza and encircling the Mission to cut off all avenue of escape.
Travis drew a line on the ground with his sword.
"Every man who will die with me, come across that line! Who will be first? March!"
Every man leaped over the line but Bowie, who was ill on a cot bed.
"Boys, move my cot over the line," he said.
At four o'clock next morning, the siege was resumed. The bugle blew a single blast. With picks, crowbars and ladders, the Mexicans closed in. The besieged waited breathlessly. The Mexicans placed the ladders and began scaling. The sharpshooters inside the walls waited till the heads appeared above the walls—then fired. As the top man fell back, the one beneath on the ladder stepped in the dead man's place. Then the Americans clubbed their guns and fought hand to hand. By that, the Mexicans knew that ammunition was exhausted and the defenders few. The walls were scaled and battered down first in a far corner of the convent yard. Behind the chapel door, piles of sand had been stacked. From the yard, the Texans were driven to the convent, from the convent to the chapel. Travis fell shot at the breach in the yard wall. Bowie was bayoneted on the cot where he lay. Crockett was clubbed to death just outside the chapel door to theleft. By nine o'clock, no answering shot came from the Alamo. The doors were rammed and rushed. Not a Texan survived. Two women, two children and a couple of slaves were pulled out of hiding from chancel and stalls. These were sent across to the main camp. The bodies of the 182 heroes were piled in a pyramid with fagots; and fired. So ended the Battle of the Alamo, one of the most terrible defeats and heroic defenses in American history. It is unnecessary to relate that Sam Houston exacted from the Mexicans on the battlefield of San Jacinto a terrible punishment for this defeat. Captured and killed, his toll of defeated Mexicans down at Houston came to almost 1,700.
Such is the story of one of San Antonio's Missions. One other has a tale equally tragic; but all but two are falling to utter ruin. I don't know whether it would be greater desecration to lay hand on them and save them, or let them fall to dust. It was nightfall when I went to the three on the outskirts of the city. Two have little left but the walls and the towers. A third is still used as place of worship by a little settlement of Mexicans. The slant light of sunset came through the darkened, vacant windows, the tiers of weathered stalls, the empty, twin-towered belfries. You could see where the well stood, the bake house, the school. Shrubbery planted by the monks has grown wild in the courtyards; but you can still call up the picture of the cowled priests chanting prayers. The Missionsare ruins; but the hope that animated them, the fire, the heroism, the dauntless faith, still burn in Texas blood as the sunset flame shines through the dismantled windows.
If someone should tell you of a second Grand Cañon gashed through wine-colored rocks in the purple light peculiar to the uplands of very high mountains—a second Grand Cañon, 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 Cañon 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 whitechild. 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 Cañon 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 Cañon that the Forestry Service boys found him. By some chance, they at once dubbed the little mummy "Zeke." The Gila is a typical box-cañon, walled as a tunnel, colored in fire tints like the Grand Cañon, literally terracedand 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 monkeypads. 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 thetufadust 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 leftin the West where freighters with double teams and riders with bull whips wind in and out of the narrow cañons 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 cañons; 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 Cañon," 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.
The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma, as high as three Niagaras, and its top as flat as a billiard tableThe 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 throwingprojectiles. 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 Cañon, near Flagstaff, that explanation seems tohold good. There certainly must have been water once at the bottom of this rocky box-cañon. 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 cañons 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-cañons 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 developedinto 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 theprobabilities 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 ametate, 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 to700 feet high, literally punctured with tiny porthole windows and doll house open cave doors. It is sunset. The rocks of these box-cañons 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-cañons, 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-cañons 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 juniperand 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 cañon. 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 cañon 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 MorningGlow, 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, thegreat 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 Phœnix 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 tillthe 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 toenter; 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 withvigasof 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 Grandemust 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 havebeen 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 greatJesuit, 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-cañons 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 Cañon, 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 Zuñis, 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 nokivasor 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.