CHAPTER XXIV. THE RUINS OF MONTEZUMA’S PALACE.

No American antiquities except, perhaps, the Old Mill at Newport, have figured so largely in imagination and in print as the pre-historic ruins along the Gila River, in Pinal County, Arizona. More than thirty years ago antiquarian hearts were deeply stirred by accounts of travellers, then very rare, describing the Casas Grandes as great cities of hewn stone built in a rich and noble architecture like that of Egypt. Rhetorical flourishes and bold flights of fancy, colored the pictures drawn before the days of photography. Communication with this region was difficult, and travelling hundreds of miles the stories naturally grew along the way, taking wider outlines and warmer coloring. The gold seekers of California varied their explorations by ascending the Gila, almost as unknown to them as the White Nile. Rapturous reports came back, and for years the Casas Grandes ranked with Veii and Karnak. I greatly regret having no copy of those Pacific newspapers to compare the impressions of the last generation, groping in the misty twilight of half-seen wonders, with plain facts come to actual sight and touch in the light of to-day.

The walled cities, capable of holding many thousand souls, were supplied with water by acequias leading from the river. They were represented by enthusiastic Bohemians as aqueducts of solid masonry and fairly equal in durability and strength to the Maxima Cloaca of Rome. Charming traditions embellished the beguiling descriptions, lovely myths and airy fables floated in the warm, blue silence above the House of Montezuma, whose lordly name is itself a stimulus to imagination. They were the work, so ran the tales, of lost races, mysterious, invincible, all-conquering, vanished into the voiceless past. They had reached a high civilization, as the magnificent remains attest, and had passed from the earth leaving no sign but colossal ruins, no records but strange hieroglyphs, which, engraven on rocks in the neighborhood of the Casas, undoubtedly formed their history.

These mural records are heaps of weather-worn rocks and detached boulders covered with figures rudely scratched or painted, bearing signs of great age. They possibly served as boundary lines, the hieroglyphs being tribal signs of treaties. One flighty romancer who understood his own language imperfectly, testified that the “pictured rocks” were written over with deeply carved inscriptions like the Hebrew, Chaldean and Gothic characters. They have been foundation stones for imaginary pyramids with sculptured facades, which were compared to the temples of Palenque and Tuloom, “made of hewn stone so admirably fitted they seem ‘born so’ and require neither mortar nor clamps.” Pottery was found in profusion, glazed and painted, always in fragments too small and scattered to be fitted together. Yet the visionaries likened the miserable scraps to ceramics of antique India and the inimitable vases of Etruria.

From the early times the Apache, savagest of savages--the red man incurably wild--has swept the plains and has held the mountain fastnesses, carrying terror and torture from the upper waters of the Pecos far into old Mexico. The shadowy region, mountain-locked like some vast stronghold guarded by naked sentinels, was a resistless temptation to lovers of the marvellous. The deserted cities slowly crumbling down by the shallow waters of the Gila must have been the work of a people who maintained their supremacy in the face of savagery. There was much to stir the fancy, ever strongest of flight under skies most unknown, in the idea of walled and fortified cities in the centre of barbarian hordes, able to withstand their warfare and beat back their encroachments. Poet, sightseer, archæologist, reporter, padre, missionary, rovers of every sort came by turns to the Casas Grandes, and gave their impressions in poetic coloring; and over all, like the dreamy mountain haze whose soft radiance purples hill and plain, hung a delicious mystery. Who should lift the secret veil and question the past till it gave back some answer? It was an alluring borderland between civilization and barbarism; on the North American Continent the last footing of phantoms peopling the unknown, till the whistle of the locomotive, which has broken so many illusions, put the pale shades to flight, and brushed away the cobweb and rose-bloom of the old Spanish poets.

The Maricopa is a dreary country, arid and inhospitable. Even the Mark Tapley of travellers observed, while there: “This is not a jolly place.” The days are hot as the desert where the White Nile rises; so hot the very lion’s manes are burnt off. The nights are heavenly.

The rivers are tricksy streams--sometimes wet, sometimes dry--but give enough water to irrigate meagre cornfields. Occasionally they rise in the very centre of barrenness, flow a mile or so, and are lost in the sand; then rise unexpectedly and run again.

The season, I remember, was unusually dry. Every one described by travellers and official papers for whole generations contain that report. From this concurrent testimony it is safe to conclude that every season is unusually dry. I testify that one party was made dry as mummies; but, being under bonds to see all that was to be seen, we were bound for the Casas Grandes.

To reach them, we must enter the fabled realm of the visionaries; where the Indian emperor, garlanded by beauty, reclining on crimson and gold, floated among opal mountains (the name still attaches to a snowy range) and far-reaching valleys, sown thick with jewels--a region fearful to land in, because of the one-horned rhinoceros and the monstrous Cibola (buffalo).

As we walked about while waiting for the ambulance, the Indian men tagged after us, eyeing the travellers with their intolerable fixed stare; but the women sat still in their places. There was no breeze to stir the air, no changing clouds enlivening the bare and brilliant sky, no sound of wheels, no tramp of men audible in the sandy soil. The isolation was perfect as that of a reef in mid-ocean.

The earth lay in stillness unbroken, and the mute and moveless Indian woman was the type of a deadness which rests on the land forever.

Wonderful are the works of an inspired imagination! This is the region where the West Indian king reveled as he sailed, and, like another Antony, kissed away kingdoms and provinces. We had read the chronicles and saw that day the favorite of the harem, whose voice was like running water in the ear of the thirsty, her step like the bounding fawn, her grace like the swaying reed, her smile a glance of the Great Spirit. She is known in our times as the Pimo Squaw. She leaned against a crazy mud wall, which she appeared to prop, and was so nearly the same shade of clay that at first the statuesque shape seemed carved in it. A stumpy figure, nude to the waist draped in one buckskin skirt. The leathery skin, tanned by long exposure to the fierce sun’s beat and roughening wind, was darkly veined and coarse. To eyes accustomed to see in woman’s form the fairest of all fairness--

“A thing to dream of, not to tell”--

the sight is not alluring. She was scarcely twenty-five years of age; but the pitiless climate (which we are constantly called upon to admire) had worn wrinkles in her face deep enough to bury her youth in. Her small, shapely feet were cased in moccasins; the slim hands, idly resting in her lap, were burnt to a mahogany color (the cinnamon tint entirely lost) and knotted with the hard work of corn-grinding. Her one ornament was a sea-shell, tied round her throat by a deer-skin string.

Nourmahal had a Mongol cast of features--narrow button-hole eyes, almost no eye-brows, high cheek-bones, thick lips, tattooed chin. As the angelic portion of our party (delicately referring to the writer) approached for nearer view, she made no sign, except to turn the dull Chinese eyes, which a short study of inscriptions on tea-boxes would give the right oblique, and fix them on us with a tireless, unwinking gaze.

The ruins are twenty miles from the villages of the Pimos, a branch of the Pueblo Indians, and only twelve miles from the town of Florence on the South Pacific Railroad. The wagon road runs along the Gila Valley, a level bottom of varying width with abrupt scarped banks of earth. The plain is of a pale gray color, with a low mossy grass, its monotony being relieved by groves of mezquit, a species of acacia resembling our locust, but with foliage more delicate and almost shadeless. The stunted trees grow branching from the ground so low as to be nearly trunkless; knotted, gnarled, dwarfed, black of bark, vaster of root than of top, yet with a certain grace derived from the small emerald green leaves delicately set on trembling fronds. Occasionally a val-de-verde appears, a peculiar and striking growth of green body, bark, leaf and limb, never very large and not over eight inches in diameter; and here and there is a prickly pear, twenty feet in height, loaded with red, pear-shaped fruit.

The shifting outlines of the Tucson Mountains, never five minutes the same, are drawn in perfect relief against a sky of unrivalled brilliance; the purest sapphire, free from every taint of mist, fog, or vapor. The exquisite fineness of the atmosphere shows clearly the high and rugged peaks of the Sierra Catarina, and one picture-like summit, called Pichaco, overlooks the chain of hills below through a veil of dying blue. Close to the river’s brim the willow tosses its branches in the eternal west wind, lightly as a lady’s plume, and bears a profusion of lilac flowers rarely beautiful. On the sterile mesa appears the suwarrow (Cereus Giganteus) of a peculiar and fantastic shape, and a wild verbena repeats the shade of the far-off hill purples.

Miles away from the dead cities we struck the bed of an ancient acequia, very large and perfectly defined, the main artery by which the river bottom, only a mile or so wide here, was irrigated in former times. Mezquit trees, apparently falling into decay from age, stand in the dry, abandoned ditches, whose various branches may be traced in every direction, a network of irrigating canals. Here and there elevations in the plain proclaim the existence of fallen walls; and depressions, from which the earth was used to make the adobe are close by. Nearer the city of silence, immense quantities of broken pottery strew the ground, an arrowhead or stone axe comes to light, and the least excitable visitor must admit that the Gila Valley, where desolation reigns supreme, was once densely populated. We have, in addition, the strong testimony of adjacent artificial mounds, supposed to have been burial places; but the mythical mines of silver and gold laid down on the oldest maps, referred to by the oldest missionaries, do not yet appear. A popular theory has been held that the Casas were habitations of companies of miners who worked undiscovered placers hard by. Happily this conceit has been exploded.

The ruins stand on a low, broad mesa, or table-land, rising slightly from the main road, and are covered by a thicket of mezquit trees not exceeding twenty feet in height, but concealing the dun-colored walls till we were close on them. Passing beyond the leafy screen we saw, within the space of one hundred and fifty yards, three buildings. Two are battered and decaying, so ruinous as to baffle the effort of the tourist to form an idea of their original size, the shape being, as in all these remains, a parallelogram. Their walls were standing sufficiently to trace the plan thirty five years ago.

We bent our steps to the main building, largest and best preserved, and with a keen sense of disappointment beheld the structure so dear to archæologists and known for three centuries as the House of Montezuma. Though familiar by picture and description, I had thought to find some display of regal power in architectural grace and finish; remnants of mouldings, broken lines of cornices, and at least one lofty portal through which the tawny courtiers might have filed in barbaric pomp to salute the Rocky Mountain King. It is merely a tremendous mud house, on which the centuries have spent their strength in vain, standing in the hush of utter solitude, battling time and the elements. There is nothing picturesque about it. No friendly lichen, running creeper or trailing ivy can live in this dry dewless air and with tender verdure clothe the nakedness of the ragged structure. Against the sand blast no wreathing vine can cling, and in its embrace soften the mass of ugliness harshly outlined against the bare and brilliant sky, unflecked by cloud or shadow. Our spirits went down, down before the legendary Palace of Montezuma we had come so far to see. For this we had strained over lava beds, through the sunburnt ways of the wilderness, across valleys of sand, sage desert, and greasewood plain, breathing, eating, drinking alkali, and wearing its dust like a dingy travelling suit! Instead of poetry here was certainty.

The mountain rim was a refreshment to the vision. There the aerial hues, so like the stuff which dreams are made of, gave the only ideal touch to a scene forbiddingly real. No hint of beauty or excellence of workmanship is found in a near view of the Casa, which is entitled to admiration only on account of its age, and to a hold on fancy because its origin and uses are unknown. Desolate and isolated now, time was when it was encircled by similar buildings grouped in villages scattered broadly over the wide plateau. In every direction are broken lines of fallen walls, oblong heaps crumbled down to the dust whence they sprung; and the extent of irrigation must have made the valley a cultivated garden, or a field of corn large enough to sustain a vast population.

But there was little time for sentiment. Our surveys must be made in haste. The walls are entirely adobe; in no portion is there any stone used. Instead of the modern Spanish-American adobes, moulded to about six times the size of our ordinary bricks, this aboriginal “palace” is built of large blocks of concrete (called by Mexicans tapia), three feet or more in length, by two feet in width and thickness. They are of irregular size, indicating that a box or mould was used in the manufacture into which the mortar was cast where it was to remain in the walls; and as it dried the cases were moved along. A recent chemical analysis of the concrete shows the secret of its durability under the wasting and wearing of ages in a structure certainly a ruin for three hundred years, and with a pre-Spanish existence of a century and perhaps more. Seventeen per cent. of the mortar is carbonate of lime. Probably lime was burned and mixed with the sand and gravel of the country, which contains a very adhesive clay, tough and lasting.

The walls are perpendicular within, slightly tapering without, four feet thick, facing the cardinal points of the compass, almost the true meridian. The building was fifty-eight feet long and forty-three feet wide, the highest point of the standing wall being thirty-five feet. It was originally four or five stories high, being about eight feet from floor to ceiling. In the centre of each wall were narrow doors for entrance into the main compartments, three feet wide, five feet high, and growing narrower at the top, except the one in the west front, which is two feet by seven or eight. Over each door is a port-hole whose dimensions I am unable to give. The Indian’s love of dark houses is apparent here; the only light admitted into the small numerous rooms was through these holes in the deep walls. The central room, with only one opening, must have been as dismal as a dungeon. It has been surmised that this was a sort of watch-tower, eight or ten feet higher than the outer stories, probably one story above all the rest when the Casa was entire. Some of the port-holes have been filled in with mortar as though the window, if window it was, admitted too much light.

Father Font, who visited this ruin in 1776, writes: “It is perceptible the edifice had three stories. The Indians say it had four; the last being a kind of subterranean vault. For the purpose of giving light to the rooms nothing is seen but the doors, and some round holes in the middle of the walls which face to the east and west, and the Indians said that the Prince, whom they called the ‘Bitter Man,’ used to salute the sun through these holes (which are pretty large) at its rising and setting. All the roofs are burnt out except that of one low room, in an adjoining house, which had beams, apparently cedar, small and smooth, and over them reeds of equal size and a layer of hard mud and mortar, forming a very curious roof, or floor.”

The different stories are easily identified by the ends of beams remaining in the walls, or by the holes into which the beams projected. They are round rafters of cedar, or sabino, supporting the floors, being perhaps six inches in diameter and half a foot apart. The nearest mountain bearing such trees is many a weary mile away. The charred ends of beams prove that the interior was destroyed by fire, but the massive four-foot wall suffered no change by flaming floor, rafter, or roof. The trees were hacked by a blunt tool, probably a stone hatchet; evidently iron was unknown to the architect of Casas Grandes. The Indigene substituted for it tempered copper and tools of wrought obsidian. A few bone awls, or flakers, for making arrow heads, have been dug out of the gravel, and a metate, or corn grinder, broken jars and a tomahawk of flint, have been found, but there is no tracery made by iron.

Adobe walls are wonderfully durable in this dry, equable climate, and with slight repairs last a thousand years. Disintegration begins at the base, where moisture gathers, and the walls, seamed and furrowed near the earth by the action of heavy yearly rains, are held together merely by their great thickness. Their inner surface is smoothly plastered with lime cement, little wrinkled marks standing as they appeared when first dried after the finish was laid on. There is no sign of stairway, and ascent was probably made outside on scaling ladders, as the Pueblos go up their terraced domiciles throughout New Mexico and Arizona. The rough coating without is flaked off in some places by the continuous action of warring winds which carry sand. Even more than rain, this incessant agent is operating on the old dun-colored adobes, and unless repairs are made in the scarred and furrowed foundations, this most interesting of antiquities must before long become a shapeless wreck. There can have been no considerable shock of earthquake in the period during which it has been known to us; even a slight tremble would bring the time-worn fabric down to hopeless destruction.

Standing on the mesa, the traveller sees in every direction heaps of ruins, of which the Casas Grandes was the centre and principal. About two hundred yards to the northwest is a circular inclosure, also a ruin. It is supposed to have been a corral for cattle, which, unless, as some assume, it was used as a menagerie, would make it of more recent date, as the Indians were without domestic animals before the conquest. Architectural remains have been well called the balance wheels of tradition. After actual sight and touch there is no room for dreams and visions. Temples and towers proclaim worship, sculptures hint of refinement, wealth and elegant tastes. Coins tell of commerce, and frescoes like those of Pompeii and Rome are illuminated books of Chronicles.

This antique pile is expressive of a low condition of art. Its size is impressive when we consider that it was completed without the aid of domestic animals or iron, but by hand labor alone. The only idea left in the mind of the visitor is that it was designed to accommodate great numbers of persons; a cumbrous human hive. There is no forest growth above it by which to date the passage of years; and the ceaseless delving of the archæologist has failed to find a key, accepted by all as the true one, to the age and purpose of so remarkable a building. Excavations made on an appropriation by the Legislature of Arizona resulted in nothing. A citizen of Florence reports finding a piece of gold resembling coin in the debris, and it is said that a hollow sound has been heard by those jumping on the floor of the inner room. Part of the walls have fallen, which may account for the noise. That ghost is laid and no voice or breath of living thing disturbs the dreaming pilgrim and baffled antiquarian as in mournful procession they carry off their relics--bits of broken plaster and pottery.

The earliest reporters describe eleven buildings in close proximity to each other, and there can be no reason to doubt their record, judging by the high heaps of mud and gravel lying in every direction about the great Casa. Compassing it is a prostrate wall extending four hundred and twenty feet from north to south, and two hundred and sixty feet from east to west, which they believed was a part of the Casa itself--a natural mistake which has given many a highly exaggerated idea of the structure inclosed by it.

The first recorded mention of Casas Grandes is made in 1540, by Captains Diaz and Saldibar, who with twelve intrepid men marched from the city of Culiacan and ascended the Gila as far as Chichiticale, or Red House, on the border of the Colorado Desert. They had from friendly Indians glowing descriptions of the seven cities of Cibola, in which whole streets were said to be occupied exclusively by workers in gold and silver. “They had sculptured silver and spear heads and drinking cups of precious metals.” Fired by these beguiling fables Coronado led a little army of picked men, fifty soldiers, a few infantry, his particular friends and the monks, in search of fairy land, the vanishing seven cities of Cibola. His secretary records that when the general passed through all the inhabited region to the place where the desert begins and saw there was “nothing good,” he could not repress his sadness notwithstanding the marvels which were promised further on.

The traveller of 1880 has much the same sensation as that which smote the soul of the dashing Coronado of 1540. In the time of the latter the whole of the North American Continent east of the Rio Grande was called Florida. It is not surprising that much inaccurate information prevailed regarding the geography of Nueva Espagna, but it is easy to identify Casas Grandes with the “Red House” standing in a mezquit jungle on the edge of the desert, the first ruin seen on the Gila by one ascending from its mouth. In certain lights the walls have a reddish tint, and again appear white on account of pebbles contained in the plaster.

In 1694 Father Kino visited the Casas Grandes. He heard traditions of the Pimos running back four hundred years; it had been a ruin for ages, and was destroyed by fire in the war with the Apaches. “The principal room in the middle is four stories, the adjoining rooms on its four sides are of three stories, with walls so smooth and shining that they appear like burnished tables. At the distance of an arquebuss shot, twelve other houses were to be seen, also half fallen, having thick walls, and all the ceilings burnt except in the lower room of one house.” He mentions also canals for irrigation, “which had capacity for carrying half the water of the river.” The good priest took peaceable possession of the forsaken spot, set up the cross within the dreary walls and made the place a holy shrine with the celebration of mass.

Of the old descriptions that of Father Font, who visited the scene in 1779, is most valuable. I regret not having space for a longer extract from his journal: “The large house or Palace of Montezuma,” he says, “according to the histories and meagre accounts of it which we have from the Indians, may have been built some 500 years ago; for, as it appears, this building was erected by the Mexicans when, during their transmigration, the Devil led them through various countries until they arrived at the promised land of Mexico; and in their sojourns, which were long ones, they formed towns and built edifices.” He further speaks of ruins in every direction. “The land is partially covered with pieces of pots, jars, plates, etc.” He was the first one who discovered that the outer wall was a fortification, “a fence which surrounded this house and other buildings.” Within the last thirty years the Casa de Montezuma has been often described, and so much speculation has been expended as to its origin and uses that I hesitate to push out into that dark sea.

There is a succession of ruined cities, forming a continuous chain of evidence, from Utah to the City of Mexico. I have examined many of these dead pueblos and can discover no essential in which they differ from each other, from the living pueblos now inhabited, or from the Casas Grandes. All are community houses, where a whole tribe may dwell, built of adobe in the shape of an oblong square around an open court. Inclosing this was an outer wall or fortification with towers at regular intervals for the posting of sentinels. The old pueblos were built on a table land so as to afford an outlook for sentries and an opportunity for watching depredations on the corn lands in the valleys below; and often at a distance are found the remains of a circular watch-tower, a signal station near the city. Such are the prehistoric vestiges along the McElmo, Colorado, San Juan and the Rio Mancos, and the widely dispersed remains in the Ehaco and Mancho. Such is the solitary watch-tower in the Cañon of the Hovenweep, Utah. The northernmost buildings discovered in Arizona and Colorado are exact copies of the Southern and Moqui pueblos, varying with situation and with the quality of material used. Generally the earth of the country was mixed with ashes and clay. The lack of individuality in the Indian race gives you the feeling that if you see one you have seen all; so it is in regard to their habitations. The sameness of the remains, and their close likeness to the Casas Grandes and the modern buildings, must strike the most careless observer. Yet they are not more alike than the builders themselves.

There are few, if any antiquities, that have not been searched through and through and reported on. The hunter, miner, scout, surveyor, priest and sightseer have overlooked no hill or plain where there is a trace of human dwelling. Undoubtedly the adobe houses wherever found are the work of a semi-civilized, agricultural people with whom the Spaniards came in conflict, and who are described by them as Pueblo, or Town Indians, to distinguish them from the nomads or wandering tribes of the primitive race. An immense amount of romance has been wasted on the old mud houses, which makes them hardly less wonderful than the enchanted city Tiahuanco, which was built in a single night by an invisible hand; but the time is come to put out wavering lights and to banish shifting shadows.

I am convinced that the Palace of Montezuma was designed as a fortress, a centre from which many villages radiated and to which the inhabitants fled for refuge in a last extremity. The lightness of the floor rafters in the lower story precludes the possibility that the building was used as a granary. Any one of the many rooms full of grain must have crushed the floors, if not the walls themselves. Again, it has been declared to have been a temple for the sun worshippers; but the smallness and multiplicity of the rooms and the many doors and port holes oppose such a surmise, though the dismal central room and the circular passages between the rooms might suggest priestcraft, and heathen rites and sorceries.

It may have been, like the castle of the middle ages, the nucleus around which the city gradually grew up, but more probably it rose from the needs of the citizens, many of whom must have toiled in its erection. For many, many years the Apache has harried this land. It is the Indian law to destroy all that he cannot carry away, and the pottery is always broken, the interiors are always fired. The builders of adobe houses, wherever found, were open to incursions of the same enemy which still infests the Mexican border. To me these remains have no new meanings. They merely prove that the North American Continent has been inhabited from a remote period; something which I believe has never been disputed.

The undated tradition is that the spot which I am trying to describe is one of the stopping places of Montezuma on his southward march to Anahuac. All legends point to an emigration from north to south. Coming from the ends of the earth, or from fabled Azatlan, the first halt the Montezumas made was at old Zuni; this was the second station; the third was near Chihuahua, Mexico, where enormous ruins, exact reproductions of these are standing isolated in a luxuriant valley, the tottering monuments of a peculiar tribe or tribes of a bygone nationality. Nothing is to be learned from the natives there, who, like all Pueblos, love to call themselves sons of Montezuma, or from the Mexicans round about. Whatever requires a moment’s thought is dismissed by the ever-ready, meaningless, _Quien sabe?_ “Who knows?”