CHAPTER XXV. TO THE CASAS GRANDES.

The Casas Grandes on the Laguna de Guzman in Northwestern Chihuahua are similar in every respect to the ruined fortresses of New Mexico and Arizona. The points of resemblance are so close and so numerous as to be decisive, proving them to be the work of the same people under similar, though somewhat superior, institutions. On my table is an unbroken vase unearthed from this most venerable ruin of North America: a veritable antique, rare and valuable. It is of a light clay color, glazed without and within. The shape, the peculiar markings in geometrical lines, white, black and maroon red, prove the hand of its manufacturer. I should recognize it instantly in any collection as a Pueblo water jar of ancient workmanship, better made than any which we have from the Pueblos now. It contains the following memorandum: “This _olla_ or _tanaja_ was excavated from the ruins of the Montezuma Casas Grandes in the State of Chihuahua in the year 1864, and according to Indian tradition is 800 years old. These Casas Grandes (great houses) were reduced to ruin, by siege, in 1070.” This is signed, “William Pierson, American Consul in 1873.”

[Illustration: Tesuke Water Vases.]

It is the only whole jar and much the finest specimen I have ever seen. Still it is greatly inferior to the coarsest Wedgwood china in our shops. There has never appeared a monument or relic proving the existence of a people of more advanced culture than the red race with which the European came in contact. How the peculiar civilization which this vase represents came from the North, as every tradition declares it did, is a question that has been argued many times in many ways. Among a vanquished, declining people, without even the lowest forms of picture-writing, language rapidly alters; and philologists tell us that American languages are the most changeful forms of human speech. Legends soon become confused; the links of connection are easily lost; and even in its best estate tradition is treacherous as memory. Scholars have held that the adobe houses are traces of the Toltecs, the polished predecessors of the fierce and bloody Aztecs, under whose dominion the former broke and scattered. Plausible theories, more or less conclusive, have perplexed the student of indigenous races. One solution, as soon as it was suggested, touched me with the force of absolute conviction, because it was so direct and simple an answer to the puzzling questions following an examination of the antiquities of North America.

The Pueblo or town-building Indians were the skirmish line of the Aztec nation when the Mexican Empire was in the height of its greatness. The Aztecs were restless, aggressive, greedy of power and insatiate in their lust for dominion. To rove and to conquer was the national pastime. The green banners of Anahuac floated defiantly in the tropic airs of the remotest provinces on the Gulf of Mexico, and dauntless warriors upheld their colors in pristine splendor along the extreme coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua. They formed the unshackled, sovereign nation, possessing the highest civilization in North America, speaking a language by far the most finished and elegant of the native tongues, said to be of exceeding richness.

The Pueblos, whom we believe to be a rough off-shoot of that stock, degraded descendants of haughty princes, are yet a self-sustaining people, independent of the Government, the only aborigines among us not a curse to the soil. In some old time whereof history is silent and about which there are no traditions, nor even the airy hand of a misty legend to beckon us back and point the way, the half-civilized tribes of Mexico must have sought fresh fields for conquest and occupation. They probably marched in detached clans speaking different dialects, but more or less united under one central government, and with the arts and means of instruction brought from Anahuac they set forth to colonize outlying countries to the north. A glance at the map shows only one route by which they could advance. West of the Sierra Madre and up the Gila and its tributaries, toward the great cañon of the Colorado, colonies were planted along the river banks, and possibly the emigrant fraternized with the native. Captain Fernando Alarcon discovered the Rio Colorado in 1540, and passed various tribes without being able to communicate with them, except by signs, until he reached a people who understood the language of an Indian whom he had brought from Mexico. From this tribe he learned of a similar people, far to the eastward, who lived in great houses built of stone. From Mexico the Southerners brought the art of building with adobe and with stones laid in mud mortar, which alone distinguishes them from the tribes dwelling in wigwams, shifting tents and lodges of buffalo skins and boughs. There was a system of communication between their fortified towns, worn footpaths betraying a constant coming and going, and deep trails furrowed by the tread of busy feet through centuries.

The ancient builders invariably chose commanding positions overlooking their cultivated fields for their pueblos, and added story after story to the houses, usually terraced from without, where a few defenders could defy almost any number of assailants with savage arms. Apaches were treated as barbarian hordes. There is no mention of these Bedouins until a century after Coronado’s day, from which fact we may infer that they were kept at bay.

Gradually the tide of emigration pressed up to the Aztec Mountains and San Francisco Peaks, but there the march of the victorious invader was suddenly stopped by a barrier utterly impassable--the cañons of the Colorado and Chiquito Rivers, which, united, form a gulf at least 300 miles long, and which in places are a mile in depth. It lay directly across their course, a stupendous chasm which wings only would have enabled them to cross. No sea or desert could so effectually have hindered their progress northward. They turned toward the East, took possession of the rich valleys of the Colorado and Chiquito, where streets of towns and irrigating canals are still traceable for miles, and followed its branches to their sources. All the towns are along the river. The bottom lands are fertile with alluvial deposits. There are large cotton-wood trees and impenetrable thickets of arrow and greasewood among the numberless lagoons and sloughs which, at the annual rise of the river, are filled to overflowing and irrigate the soil. But no vegetation can live beyond the limit of these overflows. A white efflorescence covers the ground, where it is useless to plant, where nothing edible for man or beast will grow.

On the neighboring streams the chiefs founded the kingdom of Cibola, where now we see extensive ruins attesting the size of the old towns, all of which were fortified and built on the same general plan. Old Tuni was the capital city, set on a hill of rock and reached only by one zigzag path, where a handful of soldiers could defy the cavalry of the world. In a similar condition the ruins of the seven Moqui villages are found, and North of them is the site of an adjacent colony. To the northeast they moved from the head of Flax River to the southern tributaries of the San Juan, the Cañon de Chaco and the Valle de Chelly, “where,” says Lieutenant McCormick, “half a million might have lived,” being strewn with the ruins of dead cities.

[Illustration: ABANDONED PUEBLO.]

At last, by following up the headwaters of the Rio de San Juan to the Colorado Mountains, they penetrated the Rio Grande Valley, a fertile and widely extended region destined to be subdued and colonized. From this point their imperious course was down the valley from the north, as all traditions point; and, naturally, the conquerors built a vast stronghold at Taos to protect that beautiful valley from attacks of the wild tribes, mainly Utes--a gloomy, forbidding citadel of savage aspect, set on a hill overlooking the Rio Grande. So strong a retreat is it that in 1847, when the Mexicans of the modern village of Taos could no longer defend themselves against the armies of the United States, they fled to this abandoned pueblo, a few miles distant, and there sustained a protracted siege, yielding finally when provisions utterly failed. The grim and threatening fortress was never captured by the Spaniards, though many times attacked. The terraces bristled with spears and battle-axes, through the little windows arrows were showered, and stones and burning balls of cotton dipped in oil were hurled from slings. The lower story, a well-filled granary--and the cisterns within the court, enabled the red men “to laugh a siege to scorn.”

The route which we have rapidly sketched was discovered and maintained by the armies of many generations; the changes described in a paragraph were brought about by wars lasting through ages. Well did those migratory tribes know the fierce delight of battle which thrills alike the blood of the white man and the red, when once within the heat and fury of its deadly charm.

In the course of time the entire valley of the Rio Grande from latitude 37° to latitude 32°, a distance of over 400 miles, was thickly settled. It must have been a scene of constant activity, with its clusters of towns, whose streets are yet plainly visible and may be followed for miles; and becoming the dominant nation, in the main valley where the villages are nearest to each other, the Aztecs found it unnecessary to fortify their dwelling places. Out-lying settlements, such as Pecos and Grand Quivira, in the country swept by Comanches and Arapahoes, and Laguna and Acoma, near the Navajos, were defended by outworks like those in the Colorado basin.

Near El Paso are widespread ruins of the prehistoric epoch, and it is so short a march from that crossing to the lovely and productive valley of Rio Corralites and its lake, the Laguna de Guzman, that it is most reasonable to suppose the casas on this stream were built by a colony from that region. The Indians and Mexicans of our day are exactly right in asserting that the “great houses” are the work of Montezumas who came from the North, and at various stations fortified themselves against the roving tribes. So it comes that the Town Builders of New Mexico and Arizona, who are without history or hieroglyphic writing, have no record or even legend of the dim and distant starting point when the exodus from Mexico began. They brought a species of civilization quite foreign to the nomads who confronted them, battled for supremacy, and disputed their sway. The civilization was necessarily inferior to that of the source whence it sprung. This is the condition in all migratory movements. The wealthy, cultured classes are conservative, slow to change; the dissatisfied spirits, adventurers with little to leave or to take, strike out of the beaten paths in hope of bettering their fortunes.

The colonial beginnings were a poor representation of the splendors of Tezcuco where North American civilization, under the commanding genius of the second Montezuma, reached its height. But the pilgrims brought with them glorious memories. They must have seen the sacred city Cholula, with its 400 temples, its huge pyramid, wrought by the giant Haloc, nearly 200 feet high, the sides measuring 450 yards at its base. It was a terraced tower, a landmark, a beacon and a shrine to all Anahuac, where the smoke from the undying altar-fires went up as incense to the gods, new every morning and fresh every evening. There were no writhing victims on that hill of sacrifice; the gentle Quetzelcoatl delighted not in blood; his offerings were bread and roses and all sweet perfumes. The townsmen in their new homes built council-houses, meagre and poverty-stricken compared with the Southern temples, and kindled the sacred fires. Each village had one or more of these estufas, where holy rites were conducted in the utmost secrecy. A priesthood of chosen warriors, consecrated to the ministry, watched the altar-fire, and it was never suffered to die out.

In all probability the later emigrants brought with them the Montezuma idol. Possibly some had been in the kneeling ranks of those who kissed the earth at the sound of conch and atabal which heralded the approach of the great king, the child of the sun. Hardly had they dared to lift their eyes, before the splendor of the canopy of green featherwork fringed with sparkling pendants, which shaded his jewelled plumes. They could not fail to remember the floating robes of gorgeous dyes, the blazing arms making the glance dizzy with the shining of precious stones; and, best of all, that princely presence in the midst of worshipping subjects, who held themselves but as dust beneath the golden soles of the royal sandals. They could not forget the wall of orbed shields about his sacred person, the keen sparkle of burnished spear tips, the flying flags of various colors which the Indian loves so well, and the shouts of thousands on thousands of loyal subjects who counted not their lives dear unto themselves but for their service to their emperor. The all-conquering Montezuma was at first only a proud memory. By degrees a halo and a light appeared round the name of the king of kings. Men love to trace their descent back to some storied greatness, and all barbarous nations delight to associate their origin with the deities. The yearning to be as gods is one of the instinctive impulses of the human heart. It began in Eden and is as old as the first man.

From reverence of the compelling spirit which left its imprint on vast regions, various tribes and long periods of time, it is easy to pass to adoration. The valley of the Rio Grande was once a valley of gods; they breathed in the winds, frowned in the storms; their wrath was the earthquake and their smile was fair weather. The central idea ceaselessly recurring in the pantheistic religion of the Pueblos of the nineteenth century is the shining figure of Montezuma, and their belief in his return is the dearest of all their faiths. As in the Greek legends, we cannot define the line between myth and history, but we are forced to believe so widespread a religion must have had a beginning remote from the degraded, broken-hearted creatures who pray to him daily. The dim memories of a great past never quite fade away from among any people. The dreamy, mythical, departed grandeur of their ancestors has led the Pueblos to the hope of a restoration; for with them the vague past and the indefinite future are both better than the dull, tame present. The hope in every breast, slow to die, if indeed it ever dies, looks to a regeneration, a lifting up of the bowed race so mercilessly stricken down by the Spaniards. The caciques who guard the sacred fires watch at the daybreak for the second coming of the lawgiver, prophet and priest, and pray with faces toward the sun-house where he takes his kingly rest in the abode of his fathers. In the golden dawn of some morning, fairest where all are fair, he shall push back the curtains of his tabernacle intolerably bright, and with roll of drums, music of reeds and beauty of banners shall return to his own again.

It is the tendency, even in carefully recorded annals, to make one man the doer of all heroic deeds. The unnamed dead live in the life of one king of men. The lesser lights wane and pale before its splendor, and finally all mingle in a resplendent focus, and one immortal stands forever the representative of the epoch, a sceptred deity. Such are the demigods of Southern Europe: such is the fair-haired Odin of the mead-drinking warriors in sheepskin and horsehide; such is King Arthur, gone away under promise to return from

The island valley of Avilion, Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly.

And such is the Messiah of the Town Builders, brother of the sun, equal of the one Omnipotent God, uncreated and eternal, whose name it is death to utter.

Tried by the delicate test of language, there is no analogy between the modern Town Builder and the Mexican of the South; but this is not conclusive. Centuries of changing environment work miraculous changes in any people. How much is the modern Briton like his ancestor, the cave dweller, clad in skins of the beasts which almost shared his den, living on roots and bowing down at strange altars? Even in the same generation, in the best age of the most enlightened of kingdoms, how much does the Irish gentleman resemble his degraded tenant, the peat-digger? Nay, they can scarcely comprehend each other’s speech. Of the heroes, numbered by hundreds of thousands, who upheld our victorious banner during the great Rebellion, how many names will remain at end of the year 2880? Possibly one. The least observant traveller through the country of the Pueblos must notice that it has changed for the worse since the “great houses” were built. They stand on the rim of the Colorado Desert, and if we accept the theory of the geologists that this is the dry bed of an inland sea, the climate must once have been very unlike what it is now--waterless ten months of the year, and at summer noon as hot and as stifling as the air of a limekiln. Scientists unite in testifying that the rainfall west of the Rio Grande is much less than formerly. The present streams are shrunken threads of those which once flowed in their channels when forests were more abundant. Northern Arizona has hills whose bases are covered with dead cedar trees, immense belts untouched by fire, proving that the conditions friendly to the growth of vegetation are restricted to narrowing limits. Spots that have been productive are barren; springs gushed from the ground which at present is dry and parched, and an agricultural people has lived where now no living being could maintain existence. Everything indicates that this region was formerly better watered. Many rivers of years ago are now rivers of sand, and the Gila at its best, after gathering the confluent streams, San Pedro and Salado, is not so large in volume as an Indiana creek. Ethnologists try to prove that the Town Builders came from the extreme North, perhaps originally from Kamtchatka, and that the adobe houses and Montezuma worship were of indigenous growth, founded by the monarch who bears the proudest name in Indian history. There are no Pueblos North of the thirty-seventh parallel, and the decline of the race began long before the Spanish invasion. It will be remembered that the Casas Grandes was a roofless, crumbling ruin, without a history more than 300 years ago. The Pueblos must have been a mighty nation in the prime of their strength, and legends of their ancient glory before they passed under the hated Spanish yoke are cherished among the different tribes. Reduced as they were in numbers and power, their battle for freedom was a long and gallant struggle. They were finally brought into subjection, even to the Moquis who lived perched in tiny houses on scarred, seamed cliffs of volcanic rock, where nature’s fires are burnt out, in a barren country, arid and inhospitable, absolutely worthless to white men.

[Illustration: Zuñi Paint and Condiment Cups.]

Never was life so lonely and cheerless as in the desolate hovels of the Moquis. Their land is not a tender solitude, but a forbidding desolation of escarped cliffs, overlooking wastes of sand where the winds wage war on the small shrubs and venturesome grasses, leaving to the drouth such as they cannot uproot. A few scrubby trees, spotting the edge of the plain as if they had looked across the waterless waste and crouched in fear, furnish a little brushwood for the fires of the Moquis, who are fighting out the battle for existence that is hardly worth the struggle. Fixed habitation anywhere implies some sort of civilization. The flinty hills are terraced, and by careful irrigation they manage to raise corn enough to keep body and soul together. The seven villages within a circuit of ten miles have been isolated from the rest of the world through centuries, yet they have so little intercourse with each other that their tribal languages, everywhere subject to swift mutations, are entirely unlike. Diminutive, low-set men wrapped in blankets passively sitting on the bare, seared rocks in the sun, are the ghastly proprietors of a reservation once the scene of busy activities. They number only 1,600 souls; shreds of tribes almost exhausted, surrounded by dilapidated cities unquestionably of great antiquity. The sad heirship of fallen greatness is written in the emptiness of their barren estates. Fragments of pottery are profusely scattered about; and deeply-worn foot-paths leading from village to village, down the river bank and winding up to the plain, mark the ancient thoroughfares which are now slightly trodden or utterly deserted.

How the Indians were enslaved and driven to the mines, and how they perished there by thousands, is a matter of familiar history. They were an abject and heart-broken people after the Conquest, and their decline still goes steadily on. Whole tribes are extinct. Others have united with each other for safety, and within the memory of citizens of Santa Fé the feeble remnant of the tribe at Pecos joined that at Jemez, which speaks the same language.

After all, the question is not so much whence they come as whither they go. The human family is never at rest; its condition is one of change. From the beginning nations and peoples have come and gone--vanished, where? Who knows? Who cares? They moved forward in the resistless march, served the end for which they were created, died and were forgotten. They come like shadows, so depart. Across these desolate Rocky Mountain ranges a turbulent stream of humanity once ebbed and flowed in perpetual unrest. Then there were tribes chasing, tribes fleeing, nation rising up against nation, scattering, absorbing, driving each other into annihilation; and the hills echoed the triumphant music of the scalp dances over the graves of slain thousands. The history of those mighty turmoils and revolutions must remain forever unwritten. The present aborigines are but a forlorn wreck of what they were in the long ago, when mountain princes from the South were supreme rulers in a realm of confederacies, whose boundaries cannot be measured.

[Illustration: Pueblo Wristlets, Moccasins, etc.]

The civilization of the Town Builders is not so much overthrown as it is worn out. Their bows are broken, their fires burn low; and the sluggish, stolid sons of Montezuma creep at a petty pace “along the way to dusty death.” The inroads of warring bands are not fatal as their own system of communism. A closely-kept people must become effete; and marriage within the forbidden degrees, for ages on ages, produces a diminutive, emasculate growth. In the tribes most isolated, where race distinctions are sharply drawn, this blood degeneration is most apparent. Very many are scrofulous, and albinos with pink eyes and wiry, white hair (strange sights!) are frequent among the Zunis and Moquis. Physicians tell us that it is a species of American leprosy, consequent on the poverty of blood through lack of alien infusion.

The weakening of this most interesting nationality resembles the quiet decline of one stricken in years. As in the empire, so in the individual; according to the predetermined doom it cannot last, another must have its place. A peculiar people, utterly lacking in self assertion, through whole decades living in servitude under an enforced religion, they have run their race, worked out their destiny, and in the decrepitude of extreme old age, ruins and tribes, the dead and the dying, are crumbling away together.