Part 12 (2/2)
It was in the Gila Canon that the Forestry Service boys found him. By some chance, they at once dubbed the little mummy ”Zeke.” The Gila is a typical box-canon, walled as a tunnel, colored in fire tints like the Grand Canon, literally terraced and honeycombed with the cave dwellings of a prehistoric race. It lies some fifty miles as the crow flies from Silver City; but the way the crow flies and the way man travels are an altogether different story in the wild lands of the Gila Mountains.
You'll have to make the most of the way on horseback with tents for hotels, or better still the stars for a roof. Besides, what does it matter when or how the little scrub of a twenty-three-inch man lived anyway? We moderns of evolutionary smattering have our own ideas of how cave men dwelt; and we don't want those ideas disturbed. The cave men--ask Jack London if you don't believe it--were hairy monsters, not quite tailless, just cotton-tail-rabbity in their caudal appendage--hairy monsters, who munched raw beef and dragged women by the hair of the head to pitch-black, dark as night, smoke-begrimed caves.
That is the way they got their wives. (Perhaps, if Little Zeke could speak, he would think he ought to sue moderns for libel. He might think that our ”blond-beast” theories are a reflex of our own civilization. He might smile through his grinning jaws.)
Anyway, there lies Little Zeke, a long time asleep, wrapped in cerements of fine woven cloth with fluffy-ruffles and fol-de-rols of woven blue jay and bluebird and hummingbird feathers round his neck. Zeke's people understood weaving. Also Zeke wears on his feet sandals of yucca fiber and matting. I don't know what our ancestors wore--according to evolutionists, it may have been hair and monkey pads. So if you understood as much about Zeke's history as you do about the Pyramids, you'd settle some of the biggest disputes in theology and ethnology and anthropology and a lot of other ”ologies,” which have something more or less to do with the salvation and d.a.m.nation of the soul.
How is it known that Zeke is a type of a race, and not a freak specimen of a dwarf? Because other like specimens have been found in the same area in the last ten years; and because the windows and the doors of the cave dwellings of the Gila would not admit anything but a dwarf race.
They may not all have been twenty-four and thirty-six and forty inches; but no specimens the size of the mummies in other prehistoric dwellings have been found in the Gila. For instance, down at Casa Grande, they found skeletons buried in the gypsum dust of back chambers; but these skeletons were six-footers, and the roofs of the Casa Grande chambers were for tall men. Up in the Frijoles cave dwellings, they have dug out of the _tufa_ dust of ten centuries bodies swathed in woven cloth; but these bodies are of a modern race five or six feet tall. You have only to look at Zeke to know that he is not, as we understand the word, an Indian. Was he an ancestor of the Aztecs or the Toltecs?
Though you cannot go out to the Gila by motor to a luxurious hotel, there are compensations. You will see a type of life unique and picturesque as in the Old World--countless flocks of sheep herded by soft-voiced peons. It is the only section yet left in the West where freighters with double teams and riders with bull whips wind in and out of the narrow canons 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 canons; but as many as thirteen bear have been killed on the Gila in three weeks. The alt.i.tude 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 alt.i.tude 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 Canon,”
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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Enchanted Mesa of Acoma, as high as three Niagaras, and its top as flat as a billiard table]
Where can one see these cliff and cave dwellings of a prehistoric dwarf?
Please note the points. Cliff and cave dwellings are not the same. Cliff dwellings are houses made by building up the front of a natural arch.
This front wall was either in stone or sun-baked adobe. Cave dwellings are houses hollowed out of the solid rock, a feat not so difficult as it sounds when you consider the rock is only soft pumice or tufa, that yields to sc.r.a.ping more readily than bath brick or soft lime. The cliff dwellings are usually only one story. The cave dwellings may run five stories up inside the rock, natural stone steps leading from tier to tier of the rooms, and tiny porthole windows looking down precipices 500 to 1,000 feet. The cliff dwellings are mostly entered by narrow trails leading along the ledge of a precipice sheer as a wall. The first story of the cave dwellings was entered by a light ladder, which the owner could draw up after him. Remember it was the Stone Age: no metals, no firearms, no battering rams, nor devices for throwing projectiles. A man with a rock in his hand in the doorway of either type of dwelling could swiftly and deftly and politely speed the parting guest with a brickbat on his head. Similar types of pottery and sh.e.l.l 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 p.r.o.nounce--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 Canon, near Flagstaff, that explanation seems to hold good. There certainly must have been water once at the bottom of this rocky box-canon. 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 canons 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 pa.s.sages 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-canons afforded ideal corn fields. The central stream permitted easy irrigation on each side by tapping the waterfall higher up; and the wash of the silt of centuries ensured fertility to men, whose plowing must have been accomplished by the shoulder blade of a deer used as a hoe.
Modern pueblo Indians claim to be descendants of these prehistoric dwarf races. So are we descendants of Adam; but we don't call him our uncle; and if he had a say, he might disown us. Anyway, how have modern descendants of the dwarf types developed into six-foot modern Pimas and Papagoes? It is said the Navajo and Apache came originally from Athabasca stock. Maybe; but the Pimas and Papagoes claim their Garden of Eden right in the Southwest. They call their Garden of Eden by the picturesque name of ”Morning Glow.”
How reach the caves of the dwarf race?
To the Gila group, you must go by way of Silver City; and better go in with Forest Service men, for this is the Gila National Forest and the men know the trails. You will find ranch houses near, where you can secure board and room for from $1.50 to $2 a day. The ”room” may be a boarded up tent; but that is all the better. Or you may take your own blanket and sleep in the caves. Perfectly safe--believe me, I have fared all these ways--when you have nearly broken your neck climbing up a precipice to a sheltered cave room, you need not fear being followed.
The caves are clean as if kalsomined from centuries and centuries of wash and wind. You may hear the wolves bark--bark--bark under your pillowed doorway all night; but wolves don't climb up 600-foot precipice walls. Also if it is cold in the caves, you will find in the corner of nearly all, a small, high fireplace, where the glow of a few burning juniper sticks will drive out the chill.
What did they eat and how did they live, these ancient people, who wore fine woven cloth at an era when Aryan races wore skins? Like all desert races, they were not great meat eaters; and the probabilities are that fish were tabooed. You find remains of game in the caves, but these are chiefly feather decorations, prayer plumes to waft pet.i.tions to the G.o.ds, or bones used as tools. On the other hand, there is abundance of dried corn in the caves, of gourds and squash seeds; and every cave has a _metate_, or grinding stone. In many of the caves, there are alcoves in the solid wall, where meal was stored; and of water jars, urns, ollas, there are remnants and whole pieces galore. It is thought these people used not only yucca fiber for weaving, but some species of hemp and cotton; for there are tatters and strips of what might have been cotton or linen. You see it wrapped round the bodies of the mummies and come on it in the acc.u.mulation 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 skysc.r.a.pers, these denizens lived. The most of the mummies have been found in sealed up chambers at the backs of the main houses; but these could hardly have been general burying places, for comparatively few mummies have yet been found. Who, then, were these dwarf mummies, placed in sealed vaults to the rear of the Gila caves? Perhaps a favorite father, brother, or sister; perhaps a governor of the tribe, who perished during siege and could not be taken out to the common burial ground.
Picture to yourself a precipice face from 300 to 700 feet high, literally punctured with tiny porthole windows and doll house open cave doors. It is sunset. The rocks of these box-canons in the Southwest are of a peculiar wine-colored red and golden ocher, or else dead gray and gypsum white. Owing to the great alt.i.tude--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 gla.s.s in splitting the rays of white light into its prismatic colors; but this hardly explains these high box-canons, 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 alt.i.tudes 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-canons 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 p.r.i.c.k through the indigo blue of a desert sky like lighted candles; and there flames up in the doorway of cavern window and door the deep red of juniper and cedar log glow in the fireplaces at the corner of each room. The mourning dove utters his plaintive wail. You hear the yap-yap of fox and coyote far up among the big timbers between you and the snows. Then a gong rings. (Gong? In a metal-less age? Yes, the gong is a flint bar struck by the priest with a bone clapper.) The dancers come down out of the caves to the dancing floors in the middle of the narrow canon. 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 s.e.x dances. They are dances of thanks to the G.o.ds for the harvest home of corn; or for victory. The gong ceases clapping. The campfires that scent the canon with juniper smells, flicker and fade and die. The rhythmic beat of the feet that dance ceases and fades in the darkness.
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