by Willa Cather
pack-mules, and when one of us had to stay in town overnight he let us
sleep in his hay barn to save a hotel bill. He knew our expenses were
heavy, and did everything for us at bottom price.
By the first of July our money was nearly gone, but we had our road
made, and our cabin built on top of the mesa. We brought old Henry up by
the new horse-trail and began housekeeping. We were now ready for what
we called excavating. We built wide shelves all around our
sleeping-room, and there we put the smaller articles we found in the
Cliff City. We numbered each specimen, and in my day-book I wrote down
just where and in what condition we had found it, and what we thought it
had been used for. I'd got a merchant's ledger in Tarpin, and every
night after supper, while Roddy read the newspapers, I sat down at the
kitchen table and wrote up an account of the day's work.
Henry, besides doing the housekeeping, was very eager to help us in the
"rew-ins," as he called them. He was more patient than we, and would dig
with his fingers half a day to get a pot out of a rubbish pile without
breaking it. After all, the old man had a wider knowledge of the world
than either of us, and it often came in handy. When we were working in a
pale pink house, with two stories, and a sort of balcony before the
upper windows, we came on a closet in the wall of the upstairs room; in
this were a number of curious thing, among them a deerskin bag full of
little tools. Henry said at once they were surgical instruments; a stone
lancet, a bunch of fine bone needles, wooden forceps, and a catheter.
One thing we knew about these people; they hadn't built their town in a
hurry. Everything proved their patience and deliberation. The cedar
joists had been felled with stone axes and rubbed smooth with sand. The
little poles that lay across them and held up the clay floor of the
chamber above, were smoothly polished. The door lintels were carefully
fitted (the doors were stone slabs held in place by wooden bars fitted
into hasps). The clay dressing that covered the stone walls was tinted,
and some of the chambers were frescoed in geometrical patterns, on
colour laid on another. In one room was a painted border, little tents,
like Indian tepees, in brilliant red.
But the really splendid thing about our city, the thing that made it
delightful to work there, and must have made it delightful to live
there, was the setting. The town hung like a bird's nest in the cliff,
looking off into the box canyon below, and beyond into the wide valley
we called Cow Canyon, facing an ocean of clear air. A people who had the
hardihood to build there, and who lived day after day looking down upon
such grandeur, who came and went by those hazardous trails, must have
been, as we often told each other, a fine people. But what had become of
them? What catastrophe had overwhelmed them?
They hadn't moved away, for they had taken none of their belongings, not
even their clothes. Oh, yes, we found clothes; yucca moccasins, and what
seemed like cotton cloth, woven in black and white. Never any wool, but
sheepskins tanned with the fleece on them. They may have been mountain
sheep; the mesa was full of them. We talked of shooting one for meat,
but we never did. When a mountain sheep comes out on a ledge hundreds of
feet above you, with his trumpet horns, there's something noble about
him--he looks like a priest. We didn't want to shoot at them and make
them shy. We liked to see them. We shot a wild cow when we wanted fresh
meat.
At last we came upon one of the original inhabitants--not a skeleton,
but a dried human body, a woman. She was not in the Cliff City; we found
her in a little group of houses stuck up in a high arch we called the
Eagle's Nest. She was lying on a yucca mat, partly covered with rags,
and she had dried into a mummy in that water-drinking air. We thought
she had been murdered; there was a great wound in her side, the ribs
stuck out through the dried flesh. Her mouth was open as if she were
screaming, and her face, through all those years, had kept a look of
terrible agony. Part of the nose was gone, but she had plenty of teeth,
not one missing, and a great deal of coarse black hair. Her teeth were
even and white, and so little worn that we thought she must have been a
young woman. Henry named her Mother Eve, and we called her that. We put
her in a blanket and let her down with great care, and kept her in a
chamber in the Cliff City.
Yes, we found three other bodies, but afterward. One day, working in the
Cliff City, we came upon a stone slab at one end of the cavern, that
seemed to lead straight into the rock. It was set in cement, and when we
loosened it we found it opened into a small, dark chamber. In this there
had been a platform, of fine cedar poles laid side by side, but it had
crumbled. In the wreckage were three bodies, one man and two women,
wrapped in yucca-fibre, all in the same posture and apparently prepared
for burial. They were the bodies of old people. We believed when the
tribe went down to live on their farms in the summer season; that they
had died in the absence of the villages, and were put into this mortuary
chamber to await the return of the tribe, when they would have their
funeral rites. Probably these people burned their dead. Of course an
archaeologist could have told a great deal about that civilization from
those bodies. But they never got to an archaeologist--at least, not on
this side of the world.
Chapter 5
The first of August came, and everything was going well with us. We
hadn't met with any bad luck, and though we had very little money left,
there was Blake's untouched savings account in the bank at Pardee, and
we had plenty of credit in Tarpin. The merchants there took an interest
and were friendly. But the little new moon, that looked so innocent,
brought us trouble. We lost old Henry, and in a terrible way. From the
first we'd been a little bothered by rattlesnakes--you generally find
them about old stone quarries and old masonry. We had got them pretty
well cleared out of the Cliff City, hadn't seen one there for weeks. But
one Sunday we took Henry and went on an exploring expedition at the
north end of the mesa, along Black Canyon. We caught sight of a little
bunch of ruins we'd never noticed before, and made a foolhardy scramble
to get up to them. We almost made it, and then there was a stretch of
rock wall so smooth we couldn't climb it without a ladder. I was the
tallest of the three, and Henry was the lightest; he thought he could
get up there if he stood on my shoulders. He was standing on my back,
his head just above the floor of the cavern, groping for something to
hoist himself by, when a snake struck him from the ledge--struck him
square in the forehead. It happened in a flash. He came down and brought
the snake with him. By the time we picked him up and turned him over,
his face had begun to swell. In ten minutes it was purple, and he was so
crazy it took the two of us to hold him and keep him from jumping down
>
the chasm. He was struck so near the brain that there was nothing to do.
It lasted nearly two hours. Then we carried him home. Roddy dropped down
the ladder into Cow Canyon, caught his horse, and rode into Tarpin for
the coroner. Father Duchene was preaching there at the mission church
that Sunday, and came back with him.
We buried Henry on the mesa. Father Duchene stayed on with us a week to
keep us company. We were so cut up that we were almost ready to quit.
But he had been planning to come out to see our find for a long while,
and he got our minds off our trouble. He worked hard every day. He went
over everything we'd done, and examined everything minutely: the
pottery, cloth, stone implements, and the remains of food. He measured
the heads of the mummies and declared they had good skulls. He cut down
one of the old cedars that grew exactly in the middle of the deep trail
worn in the stone, and counted the rings under his pocket microscope.
You couldn't count them with the unassisted eye, for growing out of a
tiny crevice in the rock as that tree did, the increase of each year was
so scant that the rings were invisible except with a glass. The tree he
cut down registered three hundred and thirty-six years' growth, and it
could have begun to grow in that well-worn path only after human feet
had ceased to come and go there.
Why had they ceased? That question puzzled him, too. Smallpox, any
epidemic, would have left unburied bodies. Father Duchene suggested what
Dr. Ripley, in Washington, afterward surmised: that the tribe had been
exterminated, not here in their stronghold, but in their summer camp,
down among the farms across the river. Father Duchene had been among the
Indians nearly twenty years then, he had seventeen Indian pueblos in his
parish, and he spoke several Indian dialects. He was able to explain the
use of many of the implements we found, especially those used in
religious ceremonies. The night before he left us, he summed up the
results of his week's study, something like this:
"The two square towers on the mesa top, to which you have given little
attention, were unquestionably granaries. Under the stones and earth
fallen from the walls, there is a quantity of dried corn on the ear. Not
a great harvest, for life must have come to an end here in the summer,
when the new crop was not yet garnered and the last year's grain was
getting low. The semicircular ridge on the mesa top, which you can see
distinctly among the pi�ons when the sun is low and brings it into high
relief, is the buried wall of an amphitheatre, where probably religious
exercises and games took place. I advise you not to dig into it. It is
probably the most important thing here, and should be left for scholars
to excavate.
"The tower you so much admire in the cliff village may have been a watch
tower, as you think, but from the curious placing of those narrow slits,
like windows, I believe it was used for astronomical observations. I am
inclined to think that you tribe were a superior people. Perhaps they
were not so when they first came upon this mesa, but in an orderly and
secure life they developed considerably the arts of peace. There is
evidence on every hand that they lived for something more than food and
shelter. They had an appreciation of comfort, and went even further than
that. Their life, compared to that of our roving Navajos, must have been
quite complex. There is unquestionably a distinct feeling for design in
what you call the Cliff City. Buildings are not grouped like that by
pure accident, though convenience probably had much to do with it.
Convenience often dictates very sound design.
"The workmanship on both the wood and stone of the dwellings is good.
The shapes and decoration of the water jars and food bowls is better
than in any of the existing pueblos I know, better even than the pottery
made at Acoma. I have seen a collection of early pottery from the island
of Crete. Many of the geometrical decorations on these jars are not only
similar, but, if my memory is trustworthy, identical.
"I see your tribe as a provident, rather thoughtful people, who made
their livelihood secure by raising crops and fowl--the great number of
turkey bones and feathers are evidence that they had domesticated the
wild turkey. With grain in their storerooms, and mountain sheep and deer
for their quarry, they rose gradually from the condition of savagery.
With the proper variation of meat and vegetable diet, they developed
physically and improved in the primitive arts. They had looms and mills,
and experimented with dyes. At the same time, they possibly declined in
the arts of war, in brute strength and ferocity.
"I see them here, isolated, cut off from other tribes, working out their
destiny, making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man,
purifying life by religious ceremonies and observances, caring
respectfully for their dead, protecting the children, doubtless
entertaining some feelings of affection and sentiment for this
stronghold where they were at once so safe and so comfortable, where
they had practically overcome the worst hardships that primitive man had
to fear. They were, perhaps, too far advanced for their time and
environment.
"They were probably wiped out, utterly exterminated, by some roving
Indian tribe without culture or domestic virtues, some horde that fell
upon them in their summer camp and destroyed them for their hides and
clothing and weapons, or from mere love of slaughter. I feel sure that
these brutal invaders never even learned of the existence of this mesa,
honeycombed with habitations. If they had come here, they would have
destroyed. They killed and went their way.
"What I cannot understand is why you have not found more human remains.
The three bodies you found in the mortuary chamber were prepared for
burial by the old people who were left behind. But what of the last
survivors? It is possible that when autumn wore on, and no one returned
from the farms, the aged banded together, went in search of their
people, and perished in the plain.
"Like you, I feel reverence for this place. Wherever humanity has made
that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a
sacred spot. Your people were cut off here without the influence of
example or emulation, with no incentive but some natural yearning for
order and security. They built themselves into this mesa and humanized
it."
Father Duchene warmly agreed with Blake that I ought to go to Washington
and make some report to the Government, so that the proper specialists
would be sent out to study the remains we had found.
"You must go to the Director of the Smithsonian Institution," he said.
"He will send us an archaeologist who will interpret all that is obscure
to us. He will revive this civilization in a scholarly work. It may be
that you will have thrown light on some important points in the history
of your country."
After he left us, Blake and I began to make defin
ite plans for my trip
to Washington. Blake was to work on the railroad that winter and save as
much money as possible. The expense of my journey would be paid out of
what we called the jack-pot account, in the bank at Pardee. All our
further expenses on the mesa would be paid by the Government. Roddy
often hinted that we would get a substantial reward of some kind. When
we broke or lost anything at our work, he used to smile and say: "Never
mind. I guess our Uncle Sam will make that good to us."
We had a beautiful autumn that year, soft, sunny, like a dream. Even up
there in the air we had so little wind that the gold hung on the poplars
and quaking aspens late in November. We stayed out on the mesa until
after Christmas. We wanted our archaeologist, when he came, to find
everything in good order. We cleared up any litter we'd made in digging
things out, stored all the specimens, even the mummies, in our cabin,
and padlocked the doors and windows before we left it. I had written up
my day-book carefully to the very end, had even written out some of
Father Duchene's deductions. This book I left in concealment on the
mesa. I climbed up to the Eagle's Nest in which we had found the mummy
of the murdered woman we called Mother Eve, where I had noticed a
particularly neat little cupboard in the wall. I put my book in this
niche and sealed it up with cement. Mother Eve had greatly interested
Father Duchene, by the way. He laughed and said she was well named. He
didn't believe her death could throw any light on the destruction of her
people. "I seem to smell," he said slyly, "a personal tragedy. Perhaps
when the tribe went down to the summer camp, our lady was sick and would
not go. Perhaps her husband thought it worth while to return unannounced
from the farms some night, and found her in improper company. The young
man may have escaped. In primitive society the husband is allowed to
punish an unfaithful wife with death."
When the first snow began to fly, we said goodbye to our mesa and rode
into Tarpin. It took several days to outfit me for my journey to
Washington. We bought a trunk (I'd never owned one in my life), and a
supply off white shirts, an overcoat that was as heavy as lead and just
about as cold, and two suits of clothes. That conscienceless trader
worked off on me a clawhammer coat he must have had in stock for twenty
years. He easily persuaded Roddy that it was the proper thing for dress
occasions. I think Roddy expected that I would be received by
ambassadors--perhaps I did.
Roddy drew me six hundred dollars out of the bank to stake me, and
bought my ticket and Pullman through to Washington. He went to the
station with me the morning I left, and a hard handshake was good-bye.
For a long while after my train pulled out, I could see our mesa bulking
up blue on the sky-line. I hated to leave it, but I reflected that it
had taken care of itself without me for a good many hundred years. When
I saw it again, I told myself, I would have done my duty by it; I would
bring back with me men who would understand it, who would appreciate it
and dig out all its secrets.
Chapter 6
I got off the train, just behind the Capitol building, one cold bright
January morning. I stood for a long while watching the white dome
against a flashing blue sky, with a very religious feeling. After I had
walked about a little and seen the parks, so green though it was winter,
and the Treasury building, and the War and Navy, I decided to put off my
business for a little and give myself a week to enjoy the city. That was
the most sensible thing I did while I was there. For that week I was
wonderfully happy.
My sightseeing over, I got to work. First I went to see the
Representative from our district, to ask for letters of introduction. He