CHAPTER XIII

MONTEZUMA’S CASTLE AND WELL, WHICH MONTEZUMA NEVER SAW

If you happen never to have speculated in copper or archaeology and are not a Southwesterner, it is quite likely that you have not heard of the Verde Valley. It is a somewhat sinuous cleft up and down the very center of Arizona, holding in its heart the Verde River (_el Rio Verde_, or Green River, of the Spaniards) which has its source under the San Francisco Peaks, and after 150 miles or so through cramped cañons and sunny bottomlands of more or less fertility, joins the Salt River about 50 miles east of the latter’s junction with the Gila. On the western edge of its upper reaches are the smelter towns of Clarkdale and Jerome,[83] and the famous copper mines of the United Verde Company. Across the valley from these, to the eastward and bordering the great Mogollon Mesa that divides the basin of the Little Colorado and the Gila, is that Red Rock country referred to in a previous chapter, together with the Verde’s beautiful tributary, Oak Creek; while some 30 miles to the south there enters the Verde another stream called Beaver Creek. It is upon the latter the scene of this present chapter is laid.

OLD GOVERNOR’S PALACE, SANTA FE, N. M.

The center for three centuries of the political life of New Mexico, under the successive regimes of Spaniard, Indian, Mexican and American.

MONTEZUMA’S CASTLE

Near Camp Verde, Arizona. A beautiful specimen of prehistoric Cliff architecture, with which, however, Montezuma had nothing to do.

Today the valley of the Verde maintains but a sparse population. Here and there is a white man’s hamlet; here and there are wickiups of the now peaceable Apaches; and where, between the cliffs that wall in much of the valley, there is level land enough to make farming operations possible, there are scattering ranches strung along. Time was, however, when the valley was the home of an abounding aboriginal population. How long ago that was no one knows, further than that it was before—and probably long before—the 16th century Spaniards discovered the Upper Verde and reported silver outcroppings there. The bordering cliffs and hilltops are dotted and honeycombed with the ruins of pueblos, stone fortresses and cave dwellings to an extent that has made the region unusually attractive to the archaeologists. Two of these prehistoric remains on Beaver Creek hold especial interest also for the lay traveler. They are the so-called Casa Montezuma, or Montezuma’s Castle, and Montezuma’s Well. The former, a strikingly fine example of a cliff ruin as imposing in its way as a castle on the Rhine, has been made a National Monument and is under such protection of the United States government as goes with a printed notice tacked upon a tree nearby, for there is no resident guardian. The Well is upon a private ranch 8 miles north of the Castle. It need hardly be said that Montezuma, whose name is popularly joined to both, had nothing whatever to do with either; nor indeed had any Aztec, though people who get their ancient history from newspapers, will tell you that the ruins are of Aztec construction. Both Castle and Well are close to the Arizona State Highway, and may be reached by a 50 or 60 mile drive from Flagstaff, or half that from Jerome. Another way to reach them is from Prescott by automobile livery. Yet another is by rail from Prescott to Cherry Creek (Dewey Postoffice) on the Crown King branch of the Santa Fe, and then by auto-stage through the picturesque Cherry Creek Cañon 32 miles to Campe Verde on the Verde River. Campe Verde was formerly an army post of importance during the Apache wars, but is now peaceful enough for the most pacific, maintaining a hotel, a garage, a barber shop, an ice-cream and soda-pop saloon, a store or two, and similar amenities of 20th century living as delightful as unexpected in this out-of-the-way corner of our country.

And I think here is as good a place as any to say a word about the modern Southwestern mail stage. It is, of course, motor-driven in this mechanical age, and lacks the peculiar dash and picturesqueness of the 4- and 6-horse vehicles of other days. Nevertheless, much of the charm that enveloped western stage travel then clings to the modern auto-stage. There is the same immersion in glorious, wild scenery; the same thrill of excitement as you spin down mountain grades and around curves with a cañon yawning hungrily beside you; the same exhilaration of association with fellow passengers of types foreign to Broadway or La Salle Street; many times there is the same driver, who, surrendering the ribbon for a steering wheel, has not at all changed his nature. The seat beside him is still the premium place, and if he takes a fancy to you, he will exude information, anecdote and picturesque fiction as freely as a spring its refreshing waters. To travel a bit by stage, when occasion offers, gives a flavor to your Southwestern outing that you will be sorry to have missed. Besides, it sometimes saves you money and time.

From Camp Verde to Montezuma’s Castle is a pleasant 3 mile jaunt. Of course you may miss the trail, as I did, and walk six, but if you keep close to Beaver Creek, with a sharp eye ahead, you can detect the ruin from nearly a mile away, snugly ensconced high up in a niche of a pale cliff, overlooking the valley. It is a comparatively small ruin, but there is a charm in its very compactness. And there is the charm, too, of color, the general tone of the buildings being pink set in a framing of white. The base is about 75 feet above the level of the creek that flows at the foot of the cliff—flows, that is, when water happens to be in it, which is not always. The structure itself is perhaps 30 feet high, with substantial squared walls of masonry, and is in 5 stories, access from one to another being either by openings in the ceilings or by modern ladders fastened against the outside walls. How the ancients managed the ascent from the ground, there is none to tell us. An interesting feature is a bowed parapet or battlement (the height of one’s shoulder), which surmounts the fourth story, and from below hides the fifth story rooms which are placed well back against the innermost part of the cliff recess and roofed by its overhang. Be sure you climb to that battlemented upper story (it will be no easy job, for you have to swing yourself up to it through the ceiling of the fourth), and leaning upon the parapet, enjoy the solitude that stretches before you—from the sycamores lining Beaver Creek at the cliff’s foot, across the mesquite-dotted mesa, and the green bottomlands of the Verde to the long purple range of the Black Hills in the dim southwest. If any sound there be, it is the whisper of the wind in the trees far below, or the cooing of the wild doves, which haunt the place. So do bats, and a certain queer acidulous smell that pervades the rooms is attributable to them. As you walk about, your feet stir up the dust of ages. Here and there on the mud-plastered walls are human finger prints dried in the material when it was laid on by prehistoric hands. In some of the rooms, particularly in certain cave dwellings (which, following the natural ledges, you will find scooped out of the tufa cliff beside the Castle), the ceiling and walls are blackened still with soot from the smoke of pre-Columbian fires. You may pick up bits of pottery, as you stroll, corn-cobs wizened of the ages, broken metates, or malpais rubbing stones, mute reminders of the human drama once enacted here. The airy battlement is pierced with downward-pointing loopholes through which arrows were doubtless shot at foes below. It is this abounding and evident human touch, this mystery of a long vanished human life, that lends to Southwestern travel a unique fascination, reaching to something in us that is not awakened by purely natural aspects more sublime but disassociated from man. In spite of the fact that men will kill one another, mistreat, enslave and exploit one another, men never lose a supreme interest in men; stronger than all is the yearning of the human heart for other human hearts. Is it love outwearing love’s antithesis?

Montezuma’s Well is 8 miles further up Beaver Creek, and is reached by a public highway quite practicable for automobiles when the fords of the creek are not running high water. You pass a ranch every mile or so, and the Well itself is found to be situated inside the wire fences of one. After the hospitable and unexacting solitude of Montezuma’s Castle, you will experience a bit of a shock, perhaps, at the fences and in finding that a fee of half a dollar is imposed for entrance to the Well. Nevertheless the sight is worth the money. Proceeding from the ranch house across an eighth of a mile of open, treeless mesa, you come quite without warning, to a crater-like[84] opening 500 feet across, yawning at your feet. Its walls drop almost perpendicularly some 60 feet or more to a round pool of clear water steel blue, except around the margins, where accumulations of pondweed give it a brown tinge. There is a precipitous, stony trail down which you may pick your way to the water’s edge; and there, as in the bottom of a colossal mush-bowl, you are hid from the world and the world from you. Catclaw and wild grape, hackberry and wild walnut and salt-bush make a scrubby cover roundabout, with datura and cleome and blooming wild tobacco adding a flower-touch. There is here as at Montezuma’s Castle a peculiar sense of loneliness and silence—broken only by an occasional bird note, or the hum of vagabond bees. In the clear, still waters of the pool are reflections of the cliffs, and raising your eyes to them you recognize in the southern side a few squat little stone houses wedged in between the strata of the rock walls. You can, if you choose, easily climb to some of them, and stooping through the small doorways get a taste of what it was like to be a cliff dweller. At the north end of the pond there is a thicket of willows and cottonwoods, and there the waters find their exit by an underground passage that would lead them into Beaver Creek (which flows beyond the hill) were it not that they are diverted to irrigate the ranch lands. Near this place of disappearance, is a very interesting feature of the Well—a series of natural caverns reaching far back under the hill, forming an irregular dwelling of many rooms, with occasional bits of built-in wall of mud-plastered stone. Upon such a wall at the very entrance of the cavern is the tiny imprint of a child’s hand, left we must suppose, by some prehistoric toddler steadying itself—how many, many centuries ago, who can tell?—against the freshly plastered surface, just as a baby, uncertain of its feet, would do to-day. At the time Mr. Chas. F. Lummis wrote his fascinating volume, “Some Strange Corners of our Country,” and described Montezuma’s Castle and Well, the precious imprint was perfect; but some witless latter-day visitor has pecked out the palm with his vandal jack-knife, destroying in a moment what Time, the arch-destroyer, had respected for centuries. Still the marks of the baby fingers were left when I visited the place a year ago and I hope still are, to link the fancy tenderly with that ancient people, our elder brethren.

The proprietor of the Well, Mr. W. B. Back, will guide you about and light you into the cavern’s recesses, piloting you with a lantern through passages so low and narrow at times that you must go almost on hands and knees until he brings you, far within, into a spacious and utterly dark rock-chamber with a stream of living water coursing musically through it, where further investigation is barred. He will also transport you in an anachronous row-boat across the bosom of the Well. It seems the soundings deepen suddenly from 80 feet at the outer part to 500 feet and no bottom at the center. There the water rises as in a funnel from its unknown source. At the outlet beyond the hill the waters gush from beneath a high, darkling cliff in an impetuous stream that varies little in volume throughout the year, the measurement being about 112 miner’s inches. Your guide takes you there, too (passing on the way the ruins of an ancient pueblo that once occupied the mesa near the Well’s edge), and you will enjoy the sight of that brisk little torrent fringed with a riot of maiden-hair fern and columbine, and darkened by the shadows from huge sycamores that foregather about it. The ancient Well-dweller, knew perfectly the value of that water and led it by ditches, the remains of which you may yet see, to irrigate their corn- and bean-fields a mile away. Apaches, who within recent years have been the only Indians dwelling in the region, profess no knowledge of the people who built the houses here. Mr. Back (who, by the way, in 1889 filed as a homesteader on the land about the Well including the Well itself as a water right) informed me that the Apaches regard the place with disfavor. “_Aqua no ’ueno_,” one old man told him, “water no good. Long time ago, you _sabe_, three Indian _mujeres_ all same women, you _sabe_, she swim out in water, and go round and round, you _sabe_, in the middle, and by ’em by, she go down, all three. Never come back. No, no—_no ’ueno_.” The water is warmish, but quite drinkable—if you can forget about those Apache ladies who are still in it.

It would seem reasonable that so remarkable a natural phenomenon as is the Well, situated in a region as populous with aborigines as the Verde Valley once was, would have a place in Indian folk lore; and as a matter of fact Dr. J. W. Fewkes[85] has learned that the Hopis know of its existence, and claim it as the home of some of their ancestors. Moreover, the tales of some of their old men indicate that they regard the place as the house of the Plumed Serpent, a divinity peculiarly dear to the desert dwelling Hopis of today, as the guardian of the waters and springs. Indeed, it is, perhaps, as a shrine of the divine that the Well is most truly to be considered; and in view of the extensive pueblo that once flourished on the rim, it may be that the houses of the Well walls were used in connection with religious observances rather than as a habitation of the common people.