Through Our Unknown Southwest Part 13

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 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-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 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 shipped 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 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 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.

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.

[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.

Good counsel, too, they gave in those miracle plays and ceremonial dances. "If wounded in battle, don't cry out like a child. Pull out the arrow. Slip off and die with silence in the throat." "When you go to the hunt, travel with a light blanket." We talk of getting back to Mother Earth. The Indian chants endless songs to the wonder of the Great Earth Magician, creator of life and crops. Fire, too, plays a mysterious part in all theories of life creation; and this, too, is the subject of a dance.

Then came dark days. Tribes from the far Athabasca came down like the Vandals of Europe--Navajo and Apache, relentless warriors. From Great Houses the people of the Southwest retired to cliffs and caves. When the Spaniards came with firearms and horses, the situation was almost one of extermination for the sedentary Indians; and they retired to such heights as the high mesas of the Tusayan Desert. Whether when white man stopped raid by the warlike tribes, it was better or worse for the peaceful Pima and Papago and Moki, it is hard to say; for the white man began to take the Indian's water and the Indian's land. It's a story of slow tragedy here. In the days of the overland rush to California, when every foot of the trail was beset by Apache and Navajo, it was the Pima and Papago offered shelter and protection to the white overlander. What does the Indian know of "prior rights" in filing for water? Have not these waters been his since the days of his forefathers, when men came with their families from the Morning Glow to the box-canons of the Gila and Frijoles? If prior rights mean anything, has not the Pima prior rights by ten thousand years? But the Pima has not a little slip of government paper called a deed. The big irrigation companies have tapped the streams above the Indian Reserve; and the waters have been diverted.

They don't come to the Indians any more. All the Indian gets is the overflow of the torrential rains--that only brings the alkali wash to the surface of the land and does not flush it off. The Pima can no longer raise crops. Slowly and very surely, he is being reduced to starvation in a country overflowing with plenty, in a country which has taken his land and his waters, in a country whose people he loyally protected as they crossed the continent to California.

What are the American people going to do about it? Nothing, of course.

When the wrong has been done and the tribe reduced to extermination by inches of starvation, some muckraker will rise and write an article about it, or some ethnologist a brochure about an exterminated people.

Meantime, the children of the Pimas and Papagoes have not enough to eat owing to the white man taking all their water. They are the people of "the Golden Age," "the Morning Glow."

We drove back from Casa Grande by starlight over the antelope plains. I looked back to the crumbling ruins of the Great House, and its five compounds, where the men and women and children of the Morning Glow came to dance and worship according to all the light they had. Its falling walls and dim traditions and fading outlines seemed typical of the pa.s.sing of the race. Why does one people pa.s.s and another come?

Christians say that those who fear not G.o.d, shall pa.s.s away from the memory of men, forever.

Evolutionists say that those who are not fit, shall not survive.

The Spaniard of the Southwest shrugs his gay shoulders under a tilted sombrero hat, and says _Quien sabe?_ "Who knows?"

CHAPTER XV

SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION, TUCSON, ARIZONA

It is the Desert. Incense and frankincense, fragrance of roses and resin of pines, cedar smells smoking in the sunlight, scent the air. Sunrise comes over the mountain rim in shafts of a chariot wheel; and the mountains, engirting the Desert round and round, are themselves veiled in a mist, intangible and shimmering as dreams--a mist shot with the gold of sunlight; and the air is champagne, ozone, nectar. Except in the dead heat of midsummer, snow shines opal from the mountain peaks; and in the outline of yon Tucson Range, the figure of a giant can be seen lying p.r.o.ne, face to sunlight, face to stars, face to the dews of heaven, as the faces of G.o.d-like races ever are.

You wind round a juniper grove--"cedars of Lebanon," the Old Testament would call it. There is the silver tinkle of a bell; and the flocks come down to the watering pools, flocks led by maidens, as in the days of Rachael and Jacob; and the shepherds--only they call them "herders,"

fight for first place round the water pool, as they did in the days of Rachael and Jacob. Then, you come to a walled spring where date palms shade the ground. And the maidens are there, "drawing water from the well," carrying water in ollas on their heads, bronzed statues of perfect poise and perfect grace, daughters of the Desert, hard lovers, hard haters, veiled as all mysteries are veiled.

You turn but a spur in the mountains: you dip into a valley smoking with the dews of the morning; or come up a mesa,--and a winged horseman spurs past, hair tied back by red scarf, pantaloons of white linen, sash of rainbow colors; and you are amid the dwellings of men. Strings of red chile like garlands of huge red corals hang against the sun-baked brick or clay. Curs come out and bark at the heels of your horse--that is why the Oriental always called an enemy "a dog." Pottery makers look up from their kiln fires of sheep manure, at you, the remote pa.s.serby. The basket workers weave and weave like the Three Fates of Life. One old woman is so aged and wizened and infirm that she must sit inside her basket to carry out the pattern of what life is to her; and the sunlight strikes back from the heat-baked walls in a glare that stabs the eye; and you hear the tinkle of the bells from the watering pools.

Then, suddenly, for the first time, you see It.

You have turned a spur of the Mountains, dipped into a valley, come up on the Mesa into the sunlight, and there It is--the eternal mountains with their eternal lavender veil round the valley like the tiered seats of a coliseum, the mist like a theater drop curtain where you may paint your own pictures of fancy, and in the midst of the great amphitheater rises an island rock; and on the island rock is a grotto; and in the grotto is the figure of the Mother of Christ--in purplish blue, of course, as betokens eternal purity--and below the island of rock in the midst of the amphitheater something swims into your ken that is neither of Heaven nor earth. White, glaringly white as the very spotlessness of Heaven, twin-towered as befitting the dual nature of man, flesh and spirit; pointed in its towers and minarets and belfries, betokening the reaching of the spirit of Man up to G.o.d; lions between the arches of the roofed piazzas, as betokening the lion-hearted spirit of Man fighting his enemies of Flesh and Spirit up to G.o.d!

Palms before arched white walls shut out the world--Peace and Seclusion and Purity!

You dip into a valley, the scent of the cedars in your nostrils and lungs, the peace of G.o.d in your heart. Then you come up to a high mesa and you see the vision of the white symbol swimming between earth and sky but always pointing skyward.

Where are you, anyway: in Persia amid floating palaces, on the Nile, approaching the palaces of Allahabad in India, or coming up to Moorish minarets and twin towns of the Alhambra in Spain?

Believe me, you are in neither Europe, Asia, nor Africa. You are in a much despised land called "America," whence wealth and culture run off to Europe, Asia and Africa, to find what they call "art" and "antiquity."

It is October 3rd in Tucson, Arizona; not far from the borders of Old Mexico as the rest of the world reckon distance. The rain has been falling in torrents. Rain is not supposed to fall in the Desert, but it has been coming down in slant torrents and the sky is reflected everywhere in the roadside pools. The air is soft as rose petals, for the alt.i.tude is only 2,000 feet; too high to be languid, too low for the sting of autumn frosts.

We motor, first, through the old Spanish town--relics of a grandeur that America does not know to-day, a grandeur more of spirit than display.

The old Spanish grandee never counted his dollars, nor measured up the value of a meal to a guest. But he counted honor dear as the Virgin Mary, and made a gamble of life, and hated tensely as he loved. The old mansion houses are fallen in disrepute, to-day. They are given over, for the most part to Chinese and j.a.panese merchants; but through the open windows you can still see plazas and patios of inner courtyards, where oleanders are in perpetual bloom and roses climb the trellis work, and the parrot calls out "swear words" of Spanish pirate and highwayman. St.