Unknown Mexico Part 4

Chapter IV

A Splendid Field Prepared for Us by the Ancient Agriculturists of Cave Valley--House Groups in Caves Along a Pretty Stream--Well-preserved Mummies Found in Caves--More Trincheras--Our Excavations in Caves and Mounds Confirm to the Mormons their Sacred Stories--We Move to the Plains of San Diego--Visit to Casas Grandes and the Watch-tower--Successful Excavations of the Mounds near San Diego.

Finding the locality so inviting for research, I decided to remain here, returning to Pacheco only to despatch the rest of my party to make excavations at the ranch of San Diego, thirty miles to the east, down on the plains of Chihuahua. The ranch was temporarily leased by an American, Mr. Galvin, who received my expedition hospitably, and invited the members to remain as long as they pleased and to make excavations wherever they wanted.

Cave Valley is the widening of a long, low-walled canon through which the Piedras Verdes River flows. As its name implies, it contains many caves in the felsitic conglomerate overlying the region. It is from one-quarter to half a mile wide, and has a fine, rich, loamy soil. The stream is ten to twenty feet wide and from one to three feet deep. Fine forests of pine, oak, cedar, and maple surround it, and make it an ideal dwelling-place for a peaceful, primitive people.

The little knoll on which we were encamped rises on the north side of a brook which empties itself in the river. It was in equally close proximity to the dwellings of the living and the dwellings of the dead.

Up the main stream, on the western wall of the canon, and about a mile from our camp, is a large cave containing the curious cupola-shaped structure already mentioned. The cave is easy of approach up a sloping bank from its south side, and arriving at it we found it quite commodious and snug. It is about eighty feet wide at its mouth, and about a hundred feet deep. In the central part it is almost eighteen feet high, but the roof gradually slopes down in the rear to half that height.

A little village, or cl.u.s.ter of houses, lies at its back and sides. The interior of most of the rooms must have been quite dark, though the light reaches the outside of all the houses. The walls are still standing about six feet high. The compartments, though small, are seldom kennel-like. Some of the houses have shallow cellars. The roof of the cave was thickly smoked over its entire surface. From traces of walls still remaining on it, we may infer that a second story had been built toward the centre of the cave, though this could only have been five feet high. These traces of walls on the roof further prove the important fact that this second story had been built in terrace-fashion, receding about four feet back from the front of the ground story.

The cave had evidently been occupied for a very long time, the houses showing many alterations and additions, and on the walls I counted as many as twelve coatings of plaster and whitewash. The conventional design of the ear of corn is well preserved in every doorway. Rude scrawlings of soot and water cover nearly all the front walls, mixed here and there with a few traces of red ochre. There are meander designs, lightning, and drawings of cows and horses; but the latter were doubtless put on after the walls were demolished, and their general appearance denotes recentness.

Several of the cyclopean riffles lead from the cave cliff to the stream.

The houses here, as well as in all other caves we examined, were built entirely of a powdery substance, the decomposed material of the cave itself. Great quant.i.ties of it were found on the floors of caves which had not been occupied by man. It is not of a sandy nature, and its colour is light brown, sometimes almost grey, or even white. The ancient builders simply had to mix it with water and mould it into bricks, which, though fairly uniform in thickness, were very irregular in size. There were no marks of implements on the walls; all the work seems to have been done by hand and smoothed over with some wetted fabric. In one cave of this valley the walls show finger-marks on the plaster. Occasionally we found a small boulder of hard stone embedded in the wall.

The most unique feature of this cave, however, is the cupola-shaped structure which stands in an open s.p.a.ce in front of the house group, near the mouth of the cave, but still under its roof. Its height, measured inside, is twelve feet, and its widest inside diameter is eleven feet. Its walls average eight inches in thickness. It has one aperture three feet wide at the top, another one of the same dimension near the base, and there are several others nearly opposite each other. In the two upper ones are seen distinct impressions of timber in the plaster.

The building was made by twisting long gra.s.s into a compact cable and laying it up, one round upon another. As the coil proceeded, thick coats of plaster were laid on inside and outside. This plaster, which is the same material as that of which the houses are constructed, got thoroughly mixed with the straw during the process of building, and the entire structure was finished without any opening except the one at the top. The other apertures were undoubtedly cut out afterward. There is no trace of withes or other binding material to hold the straw cables in place. They are kept in position only by the plaster, which here, as in the houses, is almost as hard as the conglomerate of the surrounding rocks.

My Mexicans from Sonora called it _olla_, a jar, and insisted that it was a vessel used for keeping water; but this is entirely improbable, for several reasons, mainly because the river is in close proximity and easy of access. It was without the slightest doubt a granary. Similar structures, used for that purpose to the present day, may be seen in the States of Vera Cruz and Tlaxcala. In a cave only a short distance away, the rear portion of which also contained a group of houses, we found between the mouth of the cave and the house walls the remains of five of these peculiar buildings which I call granaries. They, too, were made of straw and plaster, similar to the one described, but the walls here were only two inches thick. The remains showed that they had not been set up in any special arrangement, nor were all five alike. Two of them were deeply sunken into the floor of the cave, and inside of them we found, between the rubbish and debris that filled them, several grains of corn and some beans.

The other caves which we examined in this valley were of the same general character as these two, although we found no granaries in them. On this page is shown the ground plan of a cave on the east side of the river, and attention is drawn to the singular concrete seats or blocks against the wall in the house on the west side of the cave. A floor of concrete had been made in this cave extending inward and fairly level.

Evidence of two-storeyed groups of houses was clearly noticeable in many caves; but our investigations were somewhat impeded by the destruction wrought by some Mormon relic-hunter, who had carried off almost everything removable. He had even taken away many of the door lintels and hand-grips, in fact, most of the woodwork, from the houses.

In the rear of some of the caves it was so dark that we had to light a candle to find our way, crawling from house to house. In one instance we found a stone stairway of three steps.

In spite of the tremendous dust which is raised by digging into the ground, and which makes the work very arduous, we searched diligently and succeeded in bringing to light a number of objects which fairly welt ill.u.s.trate the culture of the ancient people. Among them were needles and awls of bone; a complete fire drill with a stick showing drilling, basketry work covered with pinon pith mats and girdles, threads of fibre or hair, and sandals plaited of yucca leaves. Wads of cotton and pieces of pottery were found in many places; and an interesting find was a "boomerang" similar to that used to this day by the Moqui Indians for killing rabbits. The handle is plainly seen, but the top is broken. The implement, which is made of very hard, reddish wood, has but a slight curve. We discovered many smooth pieces of iron ore that had probably been used for ceremonial purposes, and a bow that had been hidden away on a ledge.

That the ancient cave-dwellers were agriculturists is evident from the numerous corncobs, as well as grains of corn and beans, that we came upon. Datems, a green, sweet fruit still eaten by the Mexicans, were identified everywhere in the cave-dwellings.

Having effectually started the work of investigation here, I went to look after the second section of my expedition, which had been sent to San Diego. I covered the thirty-five miles with four pack mules in one day. There is a charming view from the brow of the sierra over the plains of San Diego, which are fully ten miles wide; but after descending to them I found a hard, cold wind blowing. The weather here is not at all as pleasant as in the sheltered Cave Valley up in the mountains.

I went to Casas Grandes, a village of 1,200 souls, six miles north of San Diego, and succeeded in getting a draft cashed. On learning that Mr. Moses Thatcher, a prominent Mormon apostle from Utah, was on a tour of inspection of the colonies, I proceeded to Colonia Juarez, a prosperous Mormon settlement on the Piedras Verdes River, ten miles from Casas Grandes and six miles from San Diego. It was only four years old, but had already a number of well laid-out broad streets, set on both sides with cottonwood trees, and all the houses were surrounded by gardens. I explained to Mr. Thatcher that I desired to make excavations in Cave Valley, and he courteously acceded to my wishes, adding that I might take away anything of interest to science.

To reduce expenses, I paid off many of my Mexican men, who then returned to their homes in Sonora, going over the sierra by the trail we had made in coming east. A few months later several of them returned, bringing others with them, and asked to work again in the camp, which remained in San Diego for about nine months longer--long enough for us to see quite a little trade in oranges, sugar, tobacco, etc., developing between Sonora and Chihuahua by way of the road cut out by us, and called, after me, _el camino del doctor_.

Excavations in Cave Valley were continued, and the burial caves gave even better results than the cave-dwellings. They were located in the eastern side of the canon, which is rarely touched by the sun's rays. With one exception the ceilings and sides of these caves were much blackened by smoke. There was not the slightest trace of house walls, and no other sign that the place had ever been inhabited; therefore, a fire here could have had no other purpose than a religious one, just as the Tarahumares to this day make a fire in the cave in which they bury their dead. Indeed, at first sight there was nothing in the cave to indicate that they had ever been utilised by man; but below the dust we came upon a hard, concrete floor, and after digging through this to a depth of three feet, we fortunately struck a skull, and then came upon the body of a man. After this we disinterred that of a mother holding a child in her arms, and two other bodies, all lying on their left sides, their knees half drawn up, and their faces turned toward the setting sun. All were in a marvellous state of preservation, owing to the presence of saltpetre in the dust. This imparted to the dead a mummy-like appearance, but there was nothing to suggest that embalming or other artificial means of preservation of the bodies had been used. The entire system was simply desiccated intact, merely shrunken, with the skin on most of the bodies almost unbroken. The features, and even the expression of the countenance, were in many cases quite distinct. Some had retained their eyebrows and part of their hair, and even their intestines had not all disappeared.

The hair of these people was very slightly wavy, and softer than that of the modern Indian; in fact, almost silky. The statures were quite low, and in general appearance these ancients bear a curious resemblance to the Moqui Indians, who have a tradition that their ancestors came from the south, and who, to this day, speak of their "southern brethren"; but it would be very rash to conclude from this that the cave-dwellers of northwestern Chihuahua are identical with the Moqui ancestors. I afterwards brought to light several other bodies which had been interred under similar conditions. The bottom of the burial caves seems to have always been overlaid with a roughly level, concrete floor. There was no trace here of cysts, or other formal sepulture.

None of the remains wore ornaments of metal, but various sh.e.l.l ornaments, anklets and bracelets of beautifully plaited straw, which, however, crumbled into dust when touched. Their clothing consisted of three layers of wrappings around the loins. Next to the body was placed a coa.r.s.e cotton cloth; then a piece of matting, and over that another cotton cloth. Between the legs was a large wad of cotton mixed with the feathers of the turkey, the large woodp.e.c.k.e.r, and the bluejay. In a few instances, the cotton cloth was dyed red or indigo. Near the head of each body stood a small earthenware jar of simple design; in some cases we also found drinking gourds placed at the head, though in one instance the latter had been put on the breast of the dead. Buried with the person we found a bundle of "devil's claws"

(_Martynia_). These are used by the Mexicans of to-day for mending pottery. They drill holes through the fragments to be joined and pa.s.s into them one of these claws, just as we would a rivet. The claw is elastic and strong, and answers the purpose very well. My Mexicans understood at once to what use they had been put.

As already alluded to, trincheras were also found in Cave Valley, where they were quite numerous. There was one or more in every ravine and gully, and what was a new feature, some were built across shallow drainages on the very summit of a hill. This summit was a bald conglomerate, about 150 feet above the valley. In one place we observed eight trincheras within 150 feet of each other, all built of large stones in the cyclopean style of masonry. The blocks were lava and hard felsite, measuring one and a half to three feet. As a rule, these trincheras had a lateral extent of thirty feet, and in the central part they were fifteen feet high. After all the great labour expended in their construction, the builders of these terraces had secured in each only a s.p.a.ce thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide; in other words, these eight terraces yielded together barely 3,000 square feet, which means s.p.a.ce enough for planting five or six hundred hills of corn. People who do not know the Indians would consider this too small a result to favour the theory that these terraces were erected for agricultural purposes. But the Indian's farming is, in proportion to his wants, conducted on a small scale, and he never thinks of raising more corn than he actually needs; in fact, many tribes, as for instance the Tarahumares, seldom raise enough to last the family all the year through.

Further groups of cave-dwellings were found some ten miles higher up the river, in what is called the "Strawberry Valley," probably through the prevalence of the strawberry tree, of which several beautiful specimens were seen. The largest cave there contained fourteen houses. Unlike the dwellings in the Cave Valley, here a gallery ran in front of the houses. The woodwork here was fresher than that of the Cave Valley houses, and as the walls had only three coats of plaster and whitewash, and the corners did not show much wear, these dwellings were undoubtedly of more recent origin. But the general character of the structures was similar to those we first investigated. No implements were found in these caves. In the same locality were quite a number of smaller caves containing houses in demolition. In one of them the walls were composed of stones and mud, and here we also saw the first circular-shaped house in a cave.

By digging below the concrete floor of one of the rooms, we came upon the skeletons of five adults. This was a singular fact, showing that these ancient cave-dwellers observed the custom of burying their dead under the floors of their houses when conditions permitted it. Cave-dwellings comprising twenty rooms were also seen by the Mormons at the head of Bavispe River.

My relations with the Mormons continued to be friendly, and in my dealings with them I found them honest and business-like. While thriftily providing for the material requirements of this life, they leave all their enjoyment of existence for the future state. Their life is hard, but they live up to their convictions, though these, in some points, date from a by-gone stage in the development of the human race.

They were much interested in our work, never doubting but that it could only be to their advantage to have light thrown upon the mysteries buried in their caves, as, in their opinion, our researches would only confirm the statements made in the "Book of Mormon,"

which mentions the prehistoric races of America. They told me that the book speaks of the arrival of three races in America. The first landing was made at Guaymas in Sonora, the people being fugitives from the divine wrath that destroyed the Tower of Babel. They were killed. The second race landed in New England, coming from Jerusalem; and the third, also coming from Jerusalem, landed in Chile.

We spent altogether about six weeks in Cave Valley, and the weather, as far as our experience went, was pleasant enough, although in February, for several days, a strong, cold wind was blowing, so as to interfere with our work in the mounds at daytime and with our sleep at night. In addition to the discomforting feeling that at any moment my tent might be blown down, I was worried by the possibility of its falling on the results of our excavations, the pottery and skeletons, which, for safety's sake, I kept in my tent. The situation was not improved by some indiscreet burro (donkey), who would stray into the camp and get himself entangled in the tent ropes.

On January 30th nearly seven inches of snow fell. One day a flock of twenty-five turkeys was observed near our camp; but our efforts to get within shooting distance proved futile, as these cunning birds, who apparently move about so unconcernedly, always disappeared as if they had vanished into the ground, whenever one of us, no matter how cautiously, tried to approach them.

News of Apaches was again afloat, and one day a Mexican officer called at the camp obviously in pursuit of Apaches from whom he had recently taken twelve horses: but unfortunately the men had escaped. The presidente of Casas Grandes had been advised of the killing of two Americans near San Bernardino by some Apaches, and had also ordered some men to look for the miscreants in the sierra.

Having thoroughly investigated the caves, we turned our attention to the mounds, which are very numerous in this part of the country. They are always covered with gra.s.s, and sometimes even trees grow on them. When excavated they disclosed the remains of houses of a type similar to that of the cave-dwellings. Some of the mounds were high enough to justify the supposition that the houses had two stories, each six or seven feet high, and containing a number of rooms. From the locality in which the mounds were found it becomes at once evident that the houses which once stood there were not destroyed by inundations and covered by diluvial deposits. The mounds are composed of gravelly cement and fine debris of house walls, and the rooms left are completely filled with this material. It is easy to imagine how the mounds were formed by the gradual demolition of the ceilings, plastering, and roofs, forming a heap which to-day appears as shapely as if it had been made by man for some definite purpose.

The houses were communal dwellings, each consisting of one room, which generally was not quite ten feet square. The walls, eight to nine inches thick, built of a mixture of clay and earth, were fairly well preserved in places. In one house, which had unusually solid compartments, the walls were twenty, and in some places even thirty-three, inches thick. Here nothing could be found, either in the rooms or by excavating below the floor. The same conventional doorways were met with in all the mound houses, but there was hardly any trace Of woodwork.

Excavations in one of the mounds near our camp disclosed very interesting composite structures. One part of the walls consisted of large posts set in the ground and plastered over, forming a stuccoed palisade. At right angles with this was a wall of cobble-stones, and among the buried debris were fragments of adobe bricks. In one room of this group, at a depth of less than five feet, we struck a floor of trodden concrete. Breaking through we found a huddle of six or seven skeletons, which, however, were not entire.

Rarely if ever was any object found in these rooms, except, perhaps, some stray axe, or some metates and grinding stones, and in one case a square stone paint pot. But by digging below the concrete floors we came upon skeletons which seemed to have been laid down without regard to any rule, and with them were invariably buried some household utensils, such as earthenware jars and bowls, beautifully decorated; axes and mauls, fairly carved and polished. One very rare object was secured: a doubled-grooved axe. The skeletons were badly preserved, but we were able to gather several skulls and some of the larger bones.

The floor material was so hard that only by means of heavy iron bars could we break through it. As it was impracticable for us to make complete excavations, the number of rooms each mound contained cannot be stated. There were in the immediate neighbourhood of Cave Valley at least ten or twelve separate groups, each of which had from four to eight rooms on the ground floor. The entire district is richly studded with mounds. On an excursion three or four miles down Piedras Verdes River I saw several groups of mounds, some of which, no doubt, contained many objects of antiquity. On top of one low hill was a large group, and half a mile north of this another, 160 paces long and containing two oblong mounds. Some of the mounds were ten or twelve feet high.

A very trustworthy Mormon informed me that there were no ruins, in caves or otherwise, along the river between this settlement and Colonia Juarez; nor were there any, he said, for a hundred miles south of Pacheco, though mounds could be seen in several places. Therefore when I at last departed from Cave Valley, I took his advice and did not follow the course of the Piedras Verdes River down to San Diego, but led the pack train the safer, though longer, way over the regular road. The country along the river was afterward explored by members of my expedition. They came upon several small caves high up on the side of the canon, some of which had once been inhabited, to judge from the many potsherds and the smoky roofs; but no cave-houses were found until higher up the river, where some were seen in the sandstone cliffs.

I broke camp in Cave Valley on March 11th, and arrived on the same day at Old Juarez, a few miles from my camp at San Diego. Now the weather was warm; the gra.s.s was sprouting, and I noticed a flock of wild geese going northward.

The plains of San Diego used to swarm with antelopes, and even at the time of my visit herds of them could be seen now and then. One old hunter near Casas Grandes resorted to an ingenious device for decoying them. He disguised himself as an antelope, by means of a cloak of cotton cloth (manta) painted to resemble the colouring of the animal. This covered his body, arms, and legs. On his head he placed the antlers of a stag, and by creeping on all fours he could approach the antelopes quite closely and thus successfully shoot them. The Apaches, according to the Mexicans, were experts at hunting antelopes in this manner.

We excavated a mound near Old Juarez and found in it a small basin of black ware. There were twelve or fifteen other mounds, all containing house groups. The largest among them was 100 feet long, fifty feet wide, and ten feet high; others, while covering about the same s.p.a.ce, were only three or four to six feet high. They were surrounded, in an irregular way, by numerous stone heaps, some quite small, others large and rectangular, inclosing a s.p.a.ce thirty by ten feet.

From an archaeological point of view, the district we now found ourselves in is exceedingly rich, and I determined to explore it as thoroughly as circ.u.mstances permitted. One can easily count, in the vicinity of San Diego, over fifty mounds, and there are also rock carvings and paintings in various places. Some twenty miles further south there are communal cave-dwellings, resembling those in Cave Valley, which were examined by members of the expedition at the San Miguel River, about eight miles above the point at which the river enters the plains. Inside of one large cave numerous houses were found. They had all been destroyed, yet it was plainly evident that some of them had originally been three stories high.

But the centre of interest is Casas Grandes, the famous ruin situated about a mile south of the town which took its name, and we soon went over to investigate it.

The venerable pile of fairly well preserved ruins has already been described by John Russell Bartlett, in 1854, and more recently by A. F. Bandelier; a detailed description is therefore here superfluous. Suffice it to say that the Casas Grandes, or Great Houses, are a ma.s.s of ruined houses, huddled together on the western bank of the river. Most of the buildings have fallen in and form six or eight large mounds, the highest of which is about twenty feet above the ground. Low mesquite bushes have taken root along the mounds and between the ruins. The remaining walls are sufficiently well preserved to give us an idea of the mode of building employed by the ancients. At the outskirts of the ruined village the houses are lower and have only one story, while in its central part they must have been at one time at least four stories high. They were not palaces, but simply dwellings, and the whole village, which probably once housed 3,000 or 4,000 people, resembles, in its general characteristics, the pueblos in the Southwest, and, for that matter, the houses we excavated from the mounds. The only features that distinguish these from either of the other structures are the immense thickness of the walls, which reaches as much as five feet, and the great height of the buildings. The material, too, is different, consisting of enormous bricks made of mud mixed with coa.r.s.e gravel, and formed in baskets or boxes.

A striking fact is that the houses apparently are not arranged in accordance with any laid-out plan or regularity. Nevertheless they looked extremely picturesque, viewed from the east as the sun was setting. I camped for a few days on top of the highest mound, between the ruined walls.

No circular building, nor any trace of a place of worship, could be found. The Mexicans, some of whom have nestled on the eastern part of the ruins, have from time to time come upon beautiful jars and bowls, which they sold to relic hunters or used themselves. Such pottery is far superior in quality and decoration to anything now made in Mexico. The ancient metates of Casas Grandes, which are much appreciated by the present inhabitants of the valley, are decidedly the finest I have ever seen. They are square in shape, resting on four legs, and well finished. There have also been taken out some stone axes and arrowheads, which are much like those found in the Southwest of the United States.

Some years ago a large meteorite was unearthed in a small room on the first floor of one of the highest of the buildings. When discovered it was found carefully put away and covered with cotton wrappings. No doubt it once had served some religious purpose. On account of its glittering appearance, the Mexicans thought it was silver, and everybody wanted to get a piece of it. But it was taken to Chihuahua, and the gentleman who sent it to Germany told me that it weighed 2,000 pounds.

There are still traces of well-constructed irrigation ditches to be seen approaching the ruins from the northwest. There are also several artificial acc.u.mulations of stones three to fifteen feet high and of various shapes. One of them has the form of a Latin cross measuring nineteen feet along its greatest extent. Others are rectangular, and still others circular. About three miles off, toward the west, are found pictures pecked on large stones, one representing a bird, another one the sun.