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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 25, 1914)
Twenty-eight Pages Pendleton. Oregon. Friday. September 25. 1914 Page Six East Orcgoni&n Round-Up Souvenir Edition "THE PLACE OF THE MORNING GLOW 5 Something About Cat a Grande, the Garden of Eden of the Southwest Indians I don't know hat reason there I Tor H. tii !Ui r do the Imlian of the itniiit wci, hut Grunde the "UreiH Huiim-." or the "Place of the Morning Glow" I to them the Gar den "1 Kd( n of their race tradition, the wiiii- of thlr mythloal golden go, when there Mif no Apaches raU:is ' rojin nor white men steal tnx unA n y, when life a per vntiial Hii').v .Hunting Ground, only the )iuntir ilhln't kill, and all th nlriil ioiiM tiilk. and the desert WJl n hTlteld (lowers, and the full of running a- Tuma nd made Imperial valley. Twenty years ago you could squat on Imperial valley land. Today it costs 11000 an acre and yields high percentage on that Invest ment. Today you can buy Casa Grande lands for front IS to S25 an acre. Walt till the water is turned on the ditch and it will not seem such hard sledding. If you want to know just how hard I and lonely it is, drive past the home- ' 1 Btjki.1. a r.lvhtf.ill nd TV. A plain knee-deep in ; n lh- ,mju of a. barbed wire strung along juniper poles and cedar shakes no house, no stable, no buildings of any sort. The horses are staked out. A wo- . man is. cooking a meal above the chin fire. A lantern hn on a bush twenty-five mil.-, according to the, tent. flan. AH1a riiMii yea inatiw, uuioi iu vnu piwuwj nlWl t that name in Ariiona on Jhr .Southern Pacific railroad. The j drive c;in lie made with ease in an! aftirro.m, but better give yourself; two Jays and May out for ft night i t ire trnU of Mr. Finkley, the gov-j rnmiT.t custodian of the ruin. j The ruin has twt-n set aside as a iMM-i'i'tual monument. You drive out over a low rmna xml grease wood th.i ciar.i suaharo stands like a JlSiSi ill ' nrtnirx were Ml ler. Cam tirar.de is undoubtedly the I ,lili ol all the ruin In the United 11 !ii Mne eighteen or ; the, mill, according to ahead you see another lantern gleam and swing, and dimly discern the outlines of another tent the home steader's nearest neighbor. Just now a Grande town boasts 400 people, housed chiefly in one-story adobe j dwellings. Come in five years, anJ i Casa Grande will be boasting her I ten or 20.000 people. Like mush- ! - ... t ...... ,(.-H, 1U.I. ..... a of rolling mesquite ,.,,,., where ?rrin up in Irrigation lands, and eaaus. w nere n .v ,.f cer.turie of bygone timiied ghost of ngey. "How eld are they?" I asked my driver we passed a huge cactus, high as a house and twisted in con tortions as if in pain. From tip to root the great trunk was literally liittod with the holes pecked through by little desert birds for water, "Oh. centuries and centuries old," he Kid; "and the queer part is that. In this section of the mesa, water is sixty feet below the surface. Their root don't go down sixty feet Win re do they get the water? I Kue.K Uie bark acts as cement or rub tier, preventing evaporation. , The spires keep the desert animals off. and during the rainy season the cac tus drinks up all the water he's go ing to need for the year and stores it up in that t ig tank reservoir of his; but his time is up round these parts. tttiers have homesteaded all round here for twenty-five miles, and next time you come back we'll have or t ange groves and pecan orchards." Far as y ou vuld look were the lit tle shack and white tents of the jiioreen. stretching barbed wire lines round ISO-acre patches of sagebrush, with a faith to put Moses to shame when he struck the rock for a spring. Th-.e settW-rs have had to bore down from thirty to sixty feet to water lev- el with verv Inadequate tools: and you see little burros chasing home' made w indlasses round and round, to I ruin about eighteen miles out a red roof put on by the government, then a huge square four-story mass of ruins surrounded by broken walls, with remnants of big elevated court yards, and four or five other com pounds the size of this central house, like the bastions at the four corners of a large old-fashioned walled fort. The walls are adobe of tremendous thickness; six feet in the house or temple part, from one to three in the stockade, a thickness that in an age of only stone weapons must have teen impenetrable. The doors are so very low as to compel a person of ordinary height to bend almost dou ble to enter, and the supposition is this was to prevent the entrance of an enemy and give the doorkeeper a chance to eject unwelcome visitors. Once inside, the ceilings are high, timbered with vigas of cedar strength ened by heavier logs that must have been carried in a horseless age a hundred miles from the mountains. The house Is laid out on rectangular lines, and the halls straight enough but so narrow as to compel passage sidewise. In every room is a feature that has puzzled scientists both here and in the cave dwellings. Doors were, of course, open squares off the halls, or other rooms; but in addition to these openings you will find, close to the floor of each room, little round "cat V, nna ai tvn r,r thrAA of them. pun.p up water. It looks like "the, big enough for a beam but withut a ladih that lays It down and dies" vUtv, hard sledding, this kind of farm; but it is this kind of dauntless lalth that made Phoenix and made beam. In the cave dwellings these little round holes through walls four and five feet thick are frequently on the side of the room opposite the fireplace; and Fewkes and others think they may have been ventilator shafts to keep the smoke from blow ing back Into the room; but In Casa Grande they are in rooms where there Is no fireplace. What were they for? Others think thy were whispering tubes, for use In time of war or rell gious ceremony, but In a house of open doors would it not have been as simple to call through the opening? let another explanation Is that they were for drainage purposes, the cave man's first rude attempt at modern plumbing; but that explanation falls down, too, for these openings don' drain In any regular direction. Such a structure as Casa Grande must have housed a whole tribe in time of religious festival or war; so you come back to the explanation of ventilator shafts. The ceilings of Osa Grande are ex trardinarlly high and bodies found buried in sealed-up chambers behind the ruins of the other compounds ars five to six feet long .showing this was no dwarf race. ("For there were giants In those days.") The rooms do not run off rectangular halls, as our rooms do. Tou tumble down stone steps, through passage so nar row as to catch your shoulders, into a room deep and narrow as a grave. Then you crack your head going up other steps off this room to another compartment. Bodies found at Casa Grande lay flat-headed to the east. Bodies found in the caves were truss ed up, knees to chin, as at birth; but, as usual, the bodies found at Casa Grande have been shipped away east to bo stored in cellars, instead of be ing left, carefully glassed over, where they were found. . Lower altitude, or the great age, or( the quality of the clays may account; for the peculiarly rich shades of the' pottery found at Casa' Grande. Thej purples and reds and browns are. tinged an almost iridescent green. Running back from the Great House. Is a heavv wall as of a former court-1 yard, the only walled Indian ruin' that I know in the southwest. Back ing and flanking the walls, appear ; to have been other houses, smaller but built in the same fashion as Casa Grande. Stand on these ruined walls or in the doorway of t he Great House, and you can see that five such big houses have once existed in this compound. Two or three curious features mark Casa Grande. ' Inside what must have been the main court' of the compound are elevated earth- en stages or platforms three to six feet high, solid mounds. Were these. the foundations of other Great Hous es, or platforms for the religious the atricals and ceremonials which enter so largely Into the lives of the south western Indians? At one place is the dry bed of a very ancient reservoir, but how was water conveyed to this big community well? The river Is two miles away and no spring is vis ible here. Though you can see the path of sandaled feet worn in the very rocks of eternity, un irrigation ditch has not yet been located. This, however, proves nothing, for the sand-storms of a single year would bury the springs four feet deep. A truer indication of the great age of the reservoir is the old tree growing out of the center; and that brings up the question, how we know the age of these ancient ruins that is, the age within a hundred years or so. Ask settlers round how old Casa Grande is and they will tell you five or six hundred years. Yet on the very face of thinks Cusa Grande must be thou sands of years older than the other ruins of the southwest. Why? First as to historic records: did Coronado see Casa Grande in 1504 when he marched north across the country? He records seeing an an cient Great House, where Indians dwelt. Bandelier, ' Fewkea and dosen others who have identified his Itinerary say this was not Casa Grande. Even by 1540 Casa Grande was an abandoned ruin. Kino, tne great Jesuit, was the first white man known to have visited the Great House, and he gathered the Pimas and Papagos about and said mass there about 1694. What a weird scene It must have been, the purple Saca i ton mountains glimmering in the 1 The Finest Equipped Amusement Parlors in Eastern Oregon frMsi J 1 . ' " -jst wn T l - . 1 i i . I- . . . ? Tho OIiorloB 1 M ompony Charles J. Greulich, Prop. CIGARS. TOUACCO -AND SMOKERS' SUPPLIES CONFECTIONS, SOFT DRINKS BILLIARD PARLORS 715 Main Street Pendleton, Oregon m clear morning lilac light, the many (Continued on Page Seven) m rortlaiul lLize1v(HHl Ice Cream IuukUimI exclusively the Year TOitnl I IMV mum: (1 pBStf . WISE PEOPLE of this day and age demand Quality. One of the foremost merchants of this country says "Quality remains after the price isforgotten" That is our aim. We want you to get value received for your money. 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