Part 13 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+vers down my spine as a child--that the habitat of the races who fear not G.o.d shall be the haunt of bittern and hoot owl and bat and fox.

I don't know what reason there is for it, neither do the Indians of the Southwest know; but Casa Grande, the Great House, or the Place of the Morning Glow, is to them the Garden of Eden of their race traditions; the scene of their mythical ”golden age,” when there were no Apaches raiding the crops, nor white men stealing land away; when life was a perpetual Happy Hunting Ground, only the hunters didn't kill, and all animals could talk, and the Desert was an antelope plain knee-deep in pasturage and flowers, and the springs were all full of running water.

Casa Grande is undoubtedly the oldest of all the prehistoric ruins in the United States. It lies some eighteen to twenty-five miles, according to the road you follow, south of the station called by that name on the Southern Pacific Railroad. It isn't supposed to rain in the desert after the two summer months, nor to blow dust storms after March; but it was blowing a dust storm to knock you off your feet when I reached Casa Grande early in October; and a day later the rain was falling in floods.

The drive can be made with ease in an afternoon; but better give yourself two days, and stay out for a night at the tents of Mr. Pinkey, the Government Custodian of the ruins.

The ruin itself has been set aside as a perpetual monument. You drive out over a low mesa of rolling mesquite and greasewood and cactus, where the giant suaharo stands like a columned ghost of centuries of bygone ages.

”How old are they?” I asked my driver, as we pa.s.sed a huge cactus high as a house and twisted in contortions as if in pain. From tip to root, the great trunk was literally pitted with the holes pecked through by little desert birds for water.

”Oh, centuries and centuries old,” he said; ”and the queer part is that in this section of the mesa water is sixty feet below the surface. Their roots don't go down sixty feet. Where do they get the water? I guess the bark acts as cement or rubber preventing evaporation. The spines keep the desert animals off, and during the rainy season the cactus drinks up all the water he's going to need for the year, and stores it up in that big tank reservoir of his. But his time is up round these parts; settlers have homesteaded all round here for twenty-five miles, and next time you come back we'll have orange groves and pecan orchards.”

Far as you could look were the little adobe houses and white tents of the pioneers, stretching barb wire lines round 160-acre patches of mesquite with a faith to put Moses to shame when he struck the rock for a spring. These settlers have to bore down the sixty feet to water level with very inadequate tools; and you see little burros chasing homemade windla.s.ses round and round, to pump up water. It looks like ”the faith that lays it down and dies.” Slow, hard sledding is this kind of farming, but it is this kind of dauntless faith that made Phoenix and made Yuma and made Imperial Valley. Twenty years ago, you could squat on Imperial Valley Land. To-day it costs $1,000 an acre and yields high percentage on that investment. To-day you can buy Casa Grande lands from $5 to $25 an acre. Wait till the water is turned in the ditch, and it will not seem such tedious work. If you want to know just how hard and lonely it is, drive past the homesteads just at nightfall as I did. The white tent stands in the middle of a barb wire fence strung along juniper poles and cedar shakes; no house, no stable, no buildings of any sort. The horses are staked out. A woman is cooking a meal above the chip fire. A lantern hangs on a bush in front of the tent flap. Miles ahead you see another lantern gleam and swing, and dimly discern the outlines of another tent--the homesteader's nearest neighbor. Just now Casa Grande town boasts 400 people housed chiefly in one story adobe dwellings. Come in five years, and Casa Grande will be boasting her ten and twenty thousand people. Like mushrooms overnight, the little towns spring up on irrigation lands.

You catch the first glimpse of the ruins about eighteen miles out--a red roof put on by the Government, then a huge, square, four story ma.s.s 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-fas.h.i.+oned walled fort. The walls are adobe of tremendous thickness--six feet in the house or temple part, from one to three in the stockade--a thickness that in an age of only stone weapons must have been impenetrable. The doors are so very low as to compel a person of ordinary height to bend almost double to enter; and the supposition is this was to prevent the entrance of an enemy and give the doorkeeper a chance to eject unwelcome visitors. Once inside, the ceilings are high, timbered with _vigas_ of cedar strengthened by heavier logs that must have been carried in a horseless age a hundred miles from the mountains. The house is laid out on rectangular lines, and the halls straight enough but so narrow as to compel pa.s.sage sidewise. In every room is a feature that has puzzled scientists both here and in the cave dwellings. Doors were, of course, open squares off the halls or other rooms; but in addition to these openings, you will find close to the floor of each room, little round ”cat holes,” one or two or three of them, big enough for a beam but without a beam. In the cave dwellings these little round holes through walls four or five feet thick are frequently on the side of the room opposite the fireplace. Fewkes and others think they may have been ventilator shafts to keep the smoke from blowing back in the room, but in Casa Grande they are in rooms where there is no fireplace. Others think they were whispering tubes, for use in time of war or religious ceremony; but in a house of open doors, would it not have been as simple to call through the opening? Yet another explanation is that they were for drainage purpose, the cave man's first rude attempt at modern plumbing; but that explanation falls down, too; for these openings don't drain in any regular direction. Such a structure as Casa Grande must have housed a whole tribe in time of religious festival or war; so you come back to the explanation of ventilator shafts.

The ceilings of Casa Grande are extraordinarily high; and bodies found buried in sealed up chambers behind the ruins of the other compounds are five or six feet long, showing this was no dwarf race. The rooms do not run off rectangular halls as our rooms do. You tumble down stone steps through a pa.s.sage 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 s.h.i.+pped away East to be stored in cellars instead of being left carefully gla.s.sed over, where they were found.

Lower alt.i.tude, 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 fas.h.i.+on as Casa Grande. Stand on these ruined walls, or in the doorway of the Great House, and you can see that five such big houses have once existed in this compound. Two or three curious features mark Casa Grande. Inside what must have been the main court of the compound are elevated earthen stages or platforms three to six feet high, solid mounds. Were these the foundations of other Great Houses, or platforms for the religious theatricals and ceremonials which enter so largely into the lives of Southwestern Indians? At one place is the dry bed of a very ancient reservoir; but how was water conveyed to this big community well? The river is two miles away, and no spring is visible here. Though you can see the footpath of sandaled feet worn in the very rocks of eternity, an irrigation ditch has not yet been located. This, however, proves nothing; for the sand storms of a single year would bury the springs four feet deep. A truer indication of the great age of the reservoir is the old tree growing up out of the center; and that brings up the question how we know the age of these ancient ruins--that is, the age within a hundred years or so. Ask settlers round how old Casa Grande is; and they will tell you five or six hundred years. Yet on the very face of things, Casa Grande must be thousands of years older than the other ruins of the Southwest.

Why?

First as to historic records: did Coronado see Casa Grande in 1540, when he marched north across the country? He records seeing an ancient Great House, where Indians dwelt. Bandelier, Fewkes and a dozen others who have identified his itinerary, say this was not Casa Grande. Even by 1540, Casa Grande was an abandoned ruin. Kino, the great Jesuit, was the first white man known to have visited the Great House; and he gathered the Pimas and Papagoes about and said ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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-canons 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 Canon, 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 gra.s.s, the Indian G.o.ds came from the Underworld to dwell in Casa Grande. (Not so very different from theories of evolution and transmigration, is it?) The people waxed so numerous that they split off in two great families. One migrated to the south--the Pimas, the Papagoes, the Maricopas; the others crossed the mountains to the north--the Zunis, the Mokis, the Hopis.

Yet another proof of the great antiquity is in the language. Between Papago and Moki tongue is not the faintest resemblance. Now if you trace the English language back to the days of Chaucer, you know that it is still English. If you trace it back to 55 B. C. when the Roman and Saxon conquerors came, there are still words you recognize--thane, serf, Thor, Woden, moors, borough, etc. That is, you can trace resemblances in language back 1,900 years. You find no similarity in dialects between Pima and Moki, and very few similarities in physical conformation. The only likenesses are in types of structure in ancient houses, and in arts and crafts. Both people build tiered houses. Both people make wonderful pottery and are fine weavers, Moki of blankets and Pima of baskets; and both people ascribe the art of weaving to lessons learned from their G.o.ddess, 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 G.o.ds 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 ma.s.ses of front rooms; and both Moki and Papago have traditions of ”the heavens raining fire.”

It has been suggested by scientists that the cliffs were cities of refuge in times of war, the caves and Great Houses were permanent dwellings. This is inferred because there were no _kivas_ or temples among the cliff ruins, and many exist among the caves and Great Houses.

Cus.h.i.+ng 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 craftsmans.h.i.+p; 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: It isn't America at all! It's Arabia, and the Bedouins of the Painted Desert are Navajo boys]

The mask dances of the Southwest are much misunderstood by white people.

We see in them only what is grotesque or perhaps obscene. Yet the spirits of evil and the spirits of goodness are represented under the Indian's masked dances, just as the old miracle plays represented Faith, Hope, Charity, l.u.s.t, Greed, etc. There is the Bird Dance representing the gyrations of hummingbird, mocking-bird, quail, eagle, vulture. There is the dance of the ”mud-heads.” Have we no ”mud-heads” befuddling life at every turn of the way? There is the dance of the gluttons and the monsters. Have we no unaccountable monsters in modern life? Read the record of a single day's crime; and ask yourself what mad motive tempted humans to such certain disaster. We explain a whole rigmarole of motives and inheritance and environment. The Indian shows it up by his dance of the monsters.

Perhaps one of the most beautiful ceremonials is the corn dance. Picture to yourself the _kivas_ crowded with spectators. The priests come down bearing blankets in a circle. The blanket circle surrounds the altar fire. The audience sits breathless in the dark. Musicians strike up a beating on the stone gong. A flute player trills his air. The blankets drop. In the flare of the altar fire is seen a field of corn, round which the actors dance. The priests rise. The blankets hide the fire. It is the Indian curtain drop. When you look again, there is neither pageant of dancers, nor field of corn. So the play goes on--a dozen acts typifying a dozen scenes in a single night.