Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 16

Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 16

That interesting 120 mile automobile highway called the Apache Trail

finds at Phoenix its western terminus. Its eastern end is at Globe, a

mining town on modern lines in the center of a rich copper district.[90]

This point is connected by rail with Bowie, 124 miles distant, on the

Southern Pacific Railway. Transcontinental travelers by this route,

either east- or west-bound, are now given the opportunity of varying

their trip by taking this motor drive over the Apache Trail, linking up

with the train again at the point of ending. The feature of the motor

trip, which consumed 9 to 12 hours, is the chance it yields the traveler

to get a more intimate acquaintance with the Arizona countryside than is

possible from a car window. Mines and cattle ranges, stupendous cañons,

strange rock-sculpturings in glowing colors, the desert with its

entrancing vistas, its grotesque and often beautiful plant-life, even a

glimpse of prehistoric ruins—all this the drive affords; and to it is

added the impressive sight of the Roosevelt Dam with its beautiful,

winding driveway upon the breast and its exhibition of man-made

waterfalls and 30-mile lake, an unoffended Nature looking indulgently

down from surrounding precipices and mountain crests and seeming to say,

“Son, not so bad.” There is a hotel at the Dam, on a promontory

overlooking the water—and in the water bass and “salmon” are said to be.

A stop-over here is necessary if you wish to visit the Cliff Dwellings,

5 miles to the eastward, officially known as the Tonto National

Monument.

 

The Apache Trail detour cuts the traveler out of stopping off at one of

the most interesting little cities of the Southwest—Tucson.[91] It may

be that not all will find this oasis town, lapped in the desert and girt

about with low mountains, as much to their liking as I do, but I believe

it possesses features worth going back on one’s tracks to see; for it

has a decided character of its own. With an out-and-out modern American

side, there is the grace of an historic past, whose outward and visible

sign is a picturesque Spanish quarter in adobe, pink, blue and glaring

white, clustering about a sleepy old plaza and trailing off through a

fringe of Indian _ranchería_ to the blazing desert. The region

roundabout is associated with pretty much all the history that Arizona

had until it became part of the United States. The Santa Cruz Valley, in

which Tucson lies, was a highway of travel during three centuries

between Old Mexico and the Spanish settlements and Missions of Pimería

Alta. Through this valley or the neighboring one of San Pedro (there is

a difference of opinion on this point), Brother Marcos de Niza, the

first white man to put foot in Arizona, must have passed in 1539 on his

way to Zuñi’s Seven Cities; and this way, the following year, came

Coronado upon the expedition that made of New Mexico a province of

Spain. A century later the region was the scene of the spiritual labors

of Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino, a devoted Jesuit missionary to the

Indians—a man of mark in his time, to whom is credited the founding of

the Spanish Mission San Francisco Xavier del Bac, about 9 miles south of

Tucson. The present beautiful structure, however (Tucson’s crack sight

for tourists), was not erected until long after Padre Kino’s day.

 

San Xavier is, in itself, worth a stop-over at Tucson. You may make the

round trip from the railway station in a couple of hours by automobile,

getting en route a taste of genuine desert scenery, with its scattered

covering of creosote bush, mesquite, cat’s claw, ocotillo and sahuaro.

The Mission building is one of the most beautiful examples of Spanish

ecclesiastical architecture in our country; and the pure white

structure, lonely in the desert, its glistening walls and stately towers

and dome silhouetted against a sapphire sky, makes a striking sight,

oriental in its suggestion. The church part is still used for religious

services, and other portions form the residence of Sisters of a Catholic

order who conduct a school for the children of the Papago Indians. The

primitive habitations of the latter, scattered about within easy access

of the Mission, are the Mission’s only near neighbors. A small fee

admits one to the church. A feature of interest at the front is the

coat-of-arms in relief of the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi.[92] This

is evidence enough that the present structure, which was begun in 1783

and finished in 1797, was erected by Franciscans, although, as already

stated, the Mission itself was founded about a century previously by

Jesuits. In 1768 and for ten succeeding years, the resident missionary

at San Xavier was Padre Francisco Garcés, one of the most remarkable

characters in the Southwest’s history. An enthusiastic young priest in

his early thirties when he came to San Xavier, and possessed of a

powerful physique, he journeyed on foot up and down the valleys of the

Gila and the Colorado (even penetrating into California and to the Hopi

village of Oraibi), tirelessly searching out Indians, and preaching to

them Christ and the gospel of reconciliation. He was indeed the original

Christian Pacifist of the Southwest, urging upon the Indian tribes

everywhere that they should settle their differences peaceably and live

together as brothers. To prove his faith he would never suffer a

military escort to accompany him in his wilderness pioneering, but took

only an Indian companion or two as interpreter, and a mule to carry his

ecclesiastical impedimenta. Neither would he bear any weapon for

defense, but went “equipped only with charity and apostolic zeal.”[93]

His kindly, joyous character, so endeared him to the aborigines, that,

as he himself records, a village would often refuse to supply him a

guide to the next tribe, wanting to keep him for themselves. Under such

circumstances, he would set out alone. He was a rare puzzle to those

barbarians, both because they found it difficult to decide whether in

his long gown and clean-shaven face he was man or woman, and because he

strangely wanted nothing of them but the chance to give them a free

passport to Heaven—an inexplicable sort of white man, indeed!

 

While on your Mission pilgrimage, it will be worth while to continue

southward some 50 miles more to Mission San José de Tumacácori. The road

is fairly good and about 7 hours will suffice for the round from Tucson

by automobile; or the train may be taken on the Nogales branch of the

Southern Pacific to Tubac station, whence a walk southward a couple of

miles brings you to the Mission.[94] The buildings, mostly of adobe, are

in ruins and very picturesque with a domed sanctuary and a huge square

belfry, now broken and dismantled. They and a few acres surrounding them

now form the Tumacácori National Monument, under the care of the United

States Government. This Mission in the wilderness was once, next to San

Xavier, the most important in what is now Arizona. It was established by

Jesuits in 1754, though the present church building is of Franciscan

structure of much later date, having been completed in 1822, replacing

one destroyed by the ceaselessly raiding Apaches.[95] Of interest, too,

in this vicinity, is the ancient village of Tubac, 2 miles north of

Tumacácori. Here in the 18th century was a Spanish presidio thought

needful for supplementing the preaching of the friars by the argument of

the sword. To Californians and those interested in the history of the

Golden State, the place has an appeal because here during several years

Don Juan Bautista Anza was commandant—the sturdy soldier who conceived

the idea of a practicable overland route from Mexico across the deserts

to the Spanish settlements on the California coast, and in 1775-6

convoyed over this route the colonists who founded San Francisco. Today

Tubac is an unpretentious little adobe hamlet sprawling about a

gravelly, sunny knoll, and looking across the Santa Cruz River with its

fringe of billowy cottonwoods to the blue line of the Santa Rita and San

Gaetano ranges. At Rosy’s Café I got a modest but comforting luncheon,

and on your way to Tumacácori you, too, might do worse.

 

West of Tucson 65 miles is the little town of Casa Grande, which takes

its name from one of the most famous prehistoric ruins in the United

States, standing about 18 miles to the northeast, near the Gila River.

If you have a taste for prehistoric architecture, you will enjoy Casa

Grande, for it is _sui generis_ among our country’s antiquities. If, on

the other hand, you are just an ordinary tourist, you must decide for

yourself whether a half day’s motor trip across the desert to see a

ruinous, cubical mud house topped with a corrugated iron roof, in the

midst of a sunburnt wilderness, will or will not be worth your while.

What touches the fancy is that here, centuries doubtless before Columbus

(perhaps before the time of the Cliff Dwellers) dwelt and toiled an

unknown people whose remains are of a type that possesses important

points of difference from those found elsewhere within the limits of the

United States, though similar ruins exist in Mexico. Casa Grande is

Spanish for Great House, and is given to this ruin because its

outstanding feature is a huge block of a building of three or four

stories in height, and thick walls of _caliche_—a mixture of mud, lime

and pebbles molded into form and dried, somewhat as modern concrete

walls are built up. The unique character of the Casa Grande caused it to

be set aside 25 years ago as a National Monument, and important work has

since been done there by Government ethnologists, in the way of

strengthening and repairing the crumbling walls and cleaning up the

rooms. Extensive excavations have also been made close by, resulting in

uncovering the foundations of a numerous aggregation of houses plazas,

enclosing walls, etc. These reveal the fact that in some age the place

was a walled city of importance, even if it was of mud—a sort of

American Lutetia, to which Fate denied the glory of becoming a Paris.

The huge building in the center—the Casa Grande—probably served partly

as a religious temple, but principally as a citadel where in time of

attack by enemies the people took refuge. Access to the upper stories

was doubtless by ladders outside, as in modern pueblos. Indeed, this is

but one of several walled-in compounds of buildings that formerly

existed in the Gila Valley, and are now but shapeless heaps of earth.

Some of these close to the main Casa Grande ruin have been excavated and

their plan laid bare. The remains of an extensive irrigation system are

still in evidence, water having been drawn from the Gila.

 

The first white man of unimpeachable record to see Casa Grande was that

Padre Eusebio Kino, of whom we heard at San Xavier and who gave the ruin

its Spanish name. He learned of it from his Indians, and in 1694 visited

the place, saying mass in one of its rooms. There is some reason to

identify the spot with Chichiticale, or Red House, a ruin noted in the

reports of Fray Marcos de Niza and of Coronado, both of whom probably

passed not far from Casa Grande on their way to Zuñi, but most scholars

now reject this theory of identity. After Kino the ruin was frequently

examined by explorers and written about up to the American occupation.

Anza and his San Francisco colonists camped a few miles distant, and the

commandant with his two friars, Padres Garcés and Font, inspected the

place with great interest on October 31, 1775. Font in his diary gives a

circumstantial account of it, calling it _La Casa de Moctezuma_

(Montezuma’s House), and narrates a tradition of the neighboring Pima

Indians as to its origin. It seems[96] that long ago, nobody knows how

long, there came to that neighborhood an old man of so harsh and crabbed

a disposition that he was called Bitter Man (_el Hombre ’Amargo_, in

Padre Font’s version). With him were his daughter and son-in-law, and

for servants he had the Storm Cloud and the Wind. Until then the land

had been barren, but Bitter Man had with him seeds which he sowed, and

with the help of the two servants abundant crops grew year after year,

and were harvested. It was these people who built the Great House, and

they dwelt there, though not without quarrels because of Bitter Man’s

character, so that even Storm Cloud and Wind left him at times, but they

came back. After many years, however, all went away—whither, who knows—and were heard of no more forever.