Part 17

Keeping close under the mesa, on the western side (you never find houses on the eastern cliff of a cañon, where the morning sun could not strike them full with its first beams) one of us espied what he thought to be a house on the face of a particularly high and smooth portion of the precipice, which there jutted out into a promontory, up one side of which it seemed we could climb to the top of the mesa above the house, whence it might be possible to crawl down to it. Fired with the hope of getting some valuable relics of household furniture in such a place, one of the gentlemen volunteered to make the attempt, and succeeded. He found it well preserved, almost semi-circular in shape, of the finest workmanship yet seen, all the stones being cut true, a foot wide, sixteen inches long and three inches thick, ground perfectly smooth on the inside so as to require no plastering. It was about six by twenty feet in interior dimensions and six feet high. The door and window were bounded by lintels, sills and caps of single flat stones. Yet all this was done, so far as we can learn, with no other tools than those made of stone, and in such a place that you might drop a pebble out of the window 500 feet plumb.

Photographs and sketches completed, we pushed on, rode twenty miles or more, and camped two miles beyond Unagua springs. There were about these springs, which are at the base of the Ute mountain, the tallest summit of the Sierra ù Late, formerly many large buildings, the relics of which are very impressive. One of them is two hundred feet square, with a wall twenty feet thick, and inclosed in the center a circular building one hundred feet in circumference. Another, near by, was one hundred feet square, with equally thick walls, and was divided north and south by a very heavy partition. This building communicated with the great stone reservoir about the springs. These heavy walls were constructed of outer strong walls of cut sandstone, regularly laid in mortar, filled in with firmly packed fragments of stone. Some portions of the wall still stand twenty or thirty feet in height, but, judging from the amount of material thrown down, the building must originally have been a very lofty one. About these large edifices were traces of smaller ones, covering half a square mile, and out in the plain another small village indicated by a collection of knolls. Scarcely anything now but white sage grows thereabouts, but there is reason to believe that in those old times it was under careful cultivation. Evidently these thick walls were the foundations of old terraced pueblos, an unusually large community having grown up about these plentiful springs, just as at Taos, San Juan, Zuñi, and the present Moqui villages in Arizona.

Our next day's march was westerly, leaving the mesa bluffs on our right and gradually behind. The road was an interesting one, intellectually, but not at all so physically--dry, hot, dusty, long and wearisome. We passed a number of quite perfect houses, perched high up on rocky bluffs, and many other remains. One occupied the whole apex of a great conical bowlder, that ages ago had become detached from its mother mountain and rolled out into the valley. Another, worth mention, was a round tower, beautifully laid up, which surmounted an immense bowlder that had somehow rolled to the very verge of a lofty cliff overlooking the whole valley. This was a watch-tower, and we learned afterward that almost all the high points were occupied by such sentinel boxes. From it a deeply worn, devious trail led up over the edge of the mesa, by following which we should, no doubt, have found a whole town. But this was only a reconnoissance, and we could not now stop to follow out all indications.

Not far away the odd appearance of a cliff attracted my attention, and leaving the party I rode over the bare, white, rocky floors which capped all the low, broad ridges, to find a long series of shallow grottos in the escarpment filled with houses, some of which were roofed over, but most consisting simply of walls carried to the ceiling of the light, dry cavern in the sandstone, often only one or two houses occupying each of the small caves, whose openings were in the same water-worn stratum, and only a few feet or yards apart. Still more curious examples of these cave-dwellings have been seen since in the same neighborhood, and lower down. For example, on the San Juan, in 1875, Holmes and Jackson discovered, half way between top and bottom of a bluff where a stratum of shaly sandstone had been weathered and dug out to a depth of six feet, leaving a firm floor and a projecting ledge overhead, a continuous row of buildings, though none have their front walls now remaining. Doorways through each of the dividing walls afforded access along the whole line. A few rods up stream a little, niched cave-house, 14×5×6, divided into two equal compartments; a small, square window, just large enough for one to crawl through, was placed midway in the wall of each half. "We well might ask whether these little 'cubby-holes' had ever been used as residences, or, whether, as seems at first most likely, they might not have been 'caches,' or merely temporary places of refuge. While, no doubt, many of them were such, yet in the majority the evidences of use and the presence of long-continued fires, indicated by their smoke-blackened interiors, prove them to have been quite constantly occupied. Among all dwellers in mud-plastered houses, it is the practice to freshen up their habitations by repeated applications of clay, moistened to the proper consistency, and spread with the hands, the thickness of the coating depending upon its consistency. Every such application makes a building perfectly new, and many of the best sheltered cave-houses have just this appearance, as though they were but just vacated."

The grandest of all these cave shelters, perhaps, was that in the Montezuma cañon, the main building of which was forty-eight feet long, and built of well smoothed stones. "In the rubbish of the large house," says the report, "some small stone implements, rough, indented pottery in fragments, and a few arrow-points were found.... The whole appearance of the place and its surroundings indicates that the family or the little community who inhabited it were in good circumstances and the lords of the surrounding country. Looking out from one of their houses, with a great dome of solid rock overhead, that echoed and re-echoed every word uttered with marvelous distinctness, and below them a steep descent of one hundred feet, to the broad, fertile valley of the Rio San Juan, covered with waving fields of maize and scattered groves of majestic cottonwoods, these old people, whom even the imagination can hardly clothe with reality, must have felt a sense of security that even the incursions of their barbarous foes could hardly have disturbed."

But I cannot linger over these extremely interesting and instructive ruins, nor stop to tell of the variety and skill shown in their architecture, in their storage of water and food, in their means of defense, in their manufacture of utensils, and the art with which their life was adorned. Out of the hundreds of leveled pueblos, cave-houses, towers, water-reservoirs and wasted fields which once bore bountiful harvests, I have only culled one here and there. I may say that not only every cañon which cuts down through the mesa to the Rio San Juan and into all of its lower tributary valleys, but many of the plateaus between, are occupied by the ruins which show an Indian occupation previous to the present savages, and of a different rank, if not of another race.

Particularly accessible to the ordinary tourist are the ruins to be seen in the Animas valley, about twenty-five miles south of Durango. These are said to consist of a pueblo three hundred and sixteen feet long by nearly one hundred wide, which evidently rose to the height of many stories. Some of the lower rooms in this great house are still standing, and skeletons and relics of great interest have been taken from them. In the center of the ruins is a subterranean, cistern-like chamber, described as about sixty feet in diameter, and plastered everywhere within with hard cement. This, probably, was the main _estufa_ of the village. Other lesser ruins and remains of farming operations are scattered about the vicinity, and are well worthy of exploration.

Just who and what were these aborigines (if so they were, which is very doubtful), opinions differ; but that in the Village Indians of New Mexico and Arizona we see to-day their lineal descendants, seems indisputable.

Traditions are few, that have any value, but the partial and imperfect researches which have already been made in the southwest enable us to make out dimly some strangely tragical scheme of history for this race of men whose sun set so long ago.

It is evident, for example, that the most ancient of these prehistoric ruins are those found along the immediate banks of the water-courses in the valleys. There the forerunners of the troublous times to come dwelt in peace and prosperity among their fields, which seem to have stretched over many times the area of land now possible to be cultivated. There is no question, indeed, that in those days rains were more frequent and the climate far more favorable to agriculture than at present. But how many generations--how many centuries--ago was this? And how did the change of climate, which turned the fertility of the land into desolation, come about--by slow degrees, through sudden cataclysm, or with comparatively rapid advance? Probably gradually.

But it does not seem to have been as the result of meteorological disfavor that they abandoned their populous pueblos in the pleasant valleys and began to build refuge homes in the niches of the cañon's wall, or on the crest of inaccessible mesas. From the mountainous north came enemies they were unable to resist, and which devastated their fields and laid waste their towns, as we have seen at Ojo Caliente, and as is written in the ruins of a hundred spring-side pueblos throughout the San Juan valley. No doubt they still cultivated their fields as well as they could between the times of attack, building temporary summer-houses and spending the idle winter in their rocky fastnesses, or retreating to them when warned of an attack. Their watch-towers on every exposed point, tell how sharp and incessant was the lookout they kept against the well-mounted and savage nomadic tribes, the prehistoric Utes and Apaches and Navajos, who were to them as the Scythians and the Vandals and Goths to the weakened empire of effeminate Rome.

But after a time a breathing space seems to have come to the harassed people, and they felt themselves safe to return to their ancient valleys and reinhabit and recultivate them. Certain houses, built upon the substratum of older fallen structures, seem to show this new era of reoccupation, which in some places lasted only a short time before enemies and drought together compelled complete abandonment, while in other more southern strongholds were founded the pueblos that still exist, at Taos, Acoma, Zuñi, and on the Moqui mesas.

When, some day, you can ride down the Mancos in a railway car and get flying glimpses of the ruined houses--if your eyes are sharp to see and your mind quick to apprehend,--do not forget how populous was this dry and garish valley during those bygone days, when the Crusaders were waking up Europe, and all that was known of America was that the Basque fishermen went to the fog-banks of an icy western coast to catch codfish. I am more sure of your interest here, though, than in many other far-paraded precincts of this marvelous realm, I am taking you so swiftly through in my pilgrimage on wheels. And I cannot enforce my point better,--leave an impression more lasting and graceful on your minds of those gentle shepherds and husbandmen (but no less brave warriors), who were here so long before us, than by giving you the poem my clever-brained and genial friend has written in Swinburnian measure about them:

"In the sad South-west, in the mystical Sunland, Far from the toil, and the turmoil of gain; Hid in the heart of the only--the one land Beloved of the Sun, and bereft of the rain; The one weird land where the wild winds blowing, Sweep with a wail o'er the plains of the dead, A ruin, ancient beyond all knowing, Rears its head

"On the cañon's side, in the ample hollow, That the keen winds carved in ages past, The Castle walls, like the nest of a swallow Have clung and have crumbled to this at last. The ages since man's foot has rested Within these walls, no man may know; For here the fierce grey eagle nested Long ago.

"Above those walls the crags lean over, Below, they dip to the river's bed; Between, fierce wingéd creatures hover, Beyond, the plain's wild waste is spread. No foot has climbed the pathway dizzy, That crawls away from the blasted heath, Since last it felt the ever busy Foot of Death.

"In that haunted Castle--it must be haunted, For men have lived here, and men have died, And maidens loved, and lovers daunted, Have hoped and feared, have laughed and sighed-- In that haunted Castle the dust has drifted, But the eagles only may hope to see What shattered Shrines and what Altars rifted, There may be.

"The white, bright rays of the sunbeam sought it, The cold, clear light of the moon fell here, The west wind sighed, and the south wind brought it, Songs of Summer year after year. Runes of Summer, but mute and runeless, The Castle stood; no voice was heard, Save the harsh, discordant, wild and tuneless Cry of bird.

"The spring rains poured, and the torrent rifted A deeper way;--the foam-flakes fell, Held for a moment poised and lifted, Down to a fiercer whirlpool's hell. On the Castle tower no guard, in wonder, Paused in his marching to and fro, For on the turret the mighty thunder Found no foe.

"No voice of Spring,--no Summer glories May wake the warders from their sleep, Their graves are made by the sad Dolores, And the barren headlands of Hoven-weep. Their graves are nameless--Their race forgotten, Their deeds, their words, their fate, are one With the mist, long ages past begotten, Of the Sun.

"Those castled cliffs they made their dwelling, They lived and loved, they fought and fell, No faint, far voice comes to us telling More than those crumbling walls can tell. They lived their life, their fate fulfilling, Then drew their last faint, faltering breath, Their hearts, congealed, clutched by the chilling Hand of Death.

"Dismantled towers, and turrets broken, Like grim and war-worn braves who keep A silent guard, with grief unspoken, Watch o'er the graves by the Hoven-weep. The nameless graves of a race forgotten; Whose deeds, whose words, whose fate are one With the mist, long ages past begotten, Of the Sun."

XVI

ON THE UPPER RIO GRANDE.

O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful and after that out of all whooping. --MERCHANT OF VENICE iii, 2.

Off to Del Norte and Wagon Wheel Gap! That meant a long run. We might have gone afoot across the Cunningham Pass and down the Alpine fastness of the Rio Grande's birthplace almost as speedily as the train would take us, back to Durango, over the heights and glories of Toltec, down the mazy labyrinth of the Whiplash, and across the sheep pastures of San Luis. But we were in no hurry, and by preparing had the jolliest time you can imagine the whole way. At Alamosa we bid a reluctant farewell to our three companions, the Artist, the Photographer and the Musician, who can no longer spare to us their society. But our prospective loneliness is mitigated by a new comer,--an old college friend. I shall introduce him to the reader as _Chum_, because that was the ordinary way in which we dispensed with his name.

"A merrier man Within the limit of becoming mirth I never spent an hour's talk withal."

Here, the good-bye and the welcome given in the same breath, we change our cars to a new train headed westward toward the upper course of the Rio Grande, with its farms and mines and medicinal springs.

The track is laid right across San Luis park, which is to become, through irrigation, one of the richest agricultural regions in the world. By and bye, the dull line under the horizon began to form itself into trees, and among these we could distinguish the scattered log and adobe dwellings and the half-cultivated little farms of Mexican ranchmen. The bottoms of the Rio Grande now spread wide around us, with bushes and trees, and tall, rich grass, and a few miles further on we came to the town amid a group of picturesquely broken volcanic bluffs of great size. This is a sort of postern-gate for the San Juan mining region, and also for Lake City, Ouray and the San Miguel.

Only a postern-gate, for now the railway southward carries the passenger to Durango and Silverton, and the Salt Lake line makes an easy entrance to the northern slope of the Sierra Madre; but, a few years ago Del Norte was the last outfitting point for those going into all that region, and the first real civilization encountered on the return. Under the "boom" of this patronage the old Mexican ranch-center became an American town of some size and importance almost ten years ago, and its people thought they were soon to be the metropolis of the southwest. But such has not yet appeared to be their destiny, and a snug, stirring little village of twelve or fifteen hundred people is all that the settlement has developed into. It is charmingly placed, and there is so much land along the river, both above and below, which is cultivated by both Mexicans and Americans (chiefly in the line of hay), and so many sheep, cattle and horses are owned and sold there, that this interest alone will support the village and enable it to grow slowly.

But pleasant Del Norte has more than this to rely upon. Twenty-eight miles back in the mountains of the Continental divide are the famous Summit gold mines. The richness of these mines (as they appear at present) is almost inconceivable--it equals the fabled _El Dorado_ so many brave fellows have died in their effort to find. The railway express company, in the three months following the advent of the road at Del Norte, forwarded to the Denver mint $300,000 in gold bars. I have seen and handled many pieces of this reddish, rusty, honeycombed quartz, in which you could see the gold as thickly and plainly as the pepper on sliced cucumbers. There were streaks of it, maybe half an inch wide, where the material was more than half its weight, pure, visible gold.

Prospecting on South mountain in 1874 (or before that) men found these ledges, and various claims were staked off, and, in 1875, stamp mills were erected, which at once began grinding out thousands of dollars a day and saving only about sixty per cent. of the gold, the remainder running off in the tailings because it was too coarse and heavy to be caught quickly by the mercurial batteries; this was enough to set fire to the tinder of the gold-seeking population, which is always ready to stampede to a new camp, and in 1876 a great rush to the Summit district happened. The whole region was quickly put under claim-stakes and a dozen respectable mining beginnings were made. Among these was a group of claims, more or less worked, which became the property of a corporation called the San Juan Consolidated Mining Company. Their principal mine was the "Ida," and their most intelligent stockholder was Judge, now United States Senator, Thomas Bowen. He came to this region from Arkansas an exceedingly poor man, though in early life he had been a wealthy planter. Elected a justice of his judicial district, he plodded on foot from county to county, too poor to own a horse. For seven long years, the story goes, he put all his money into prospecting, and at last turned up here at the Summit. Watching the way in which the "Consolidated" property was being handled, he concluded that its managers were not on the right track and would speedily come to a halt; furthermore, he had faith that he could right the mistake if he had the power.

As he anticipated, the stock of that company went down to nothing. No further back than the winter of 1880-81, its shares were played at poker in Del Norte, and passed over the bars of saloons at the rate of two drinks for one share. Bowen quietly gathered them in, getting $300,000 worth, it is stated, for $75, or one-fourth of one mill on the dollar. Two or three others saved up smaller amounts. When the Judge had secured a controlling interest, he set on foot a scheme of new development, and very shortly struck this fabulously rich vein. He persuaded friends in Denver to erect a mill on terms which have resulted in the biggest profits a stamp-mill ever paid its manufacturer, I fancy, and Bowen suddenly found himself a Croesus. He had been heavily in debt, and some of the scores against him had long been charged to loss by his creditors, but he paid them all without noticing the drain upon his uncounted coffers. Having fought the demon of poverty in its most tenacious forms, for so many years, this sudden affluence did not spoil him, but he glories in it like a boy, and is never more pleased than when he can make it tell for the surprise and happiness of some old companion still in the grip of misfortune.

But "Bowen's bonanza" is not the only one. There are others of perhaps equal merit close by, and I have no doubt many more will be discovered. For, in spite of all the bullion which has this year been produced, these mines are as yet in their infancy. I suppose the measure of half a mile would include the total length of underground workings in all of them together. Who shall say what the future may not disclose?

Half a dozen miles across the mountain from the Summit is a flourishing little settlement of prospectors who believe they have struck a profitable lode of silver-galena; and still farther beyond, among the springs of the Rio San Juan, lie the Cornwall silver mines, where much work has been done. The principal properties are on the Perry lode, which gives sulphuret of silver. Other ores there vary from this, however, and are said to be best suited to the lixiviation process. A smelter has been purchased for that locality. Judge Jones, so well known all over southern Colorado for his steady allegiance to everything which savors of "San Juan" and for his equal hatred of whisky, has large visions of future wealth out of this district.

Now the whole of these mines and trials for a mine are so much grist to Del Norte's mill. So long as they keep men digging, so long she will thrive exceptionally and remain an important feeder to our railway.