USA > Colorado > History of the State of Colorado, Vol. I > Part 6
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*El Gringo.
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number, in some cases a family, in others an individual, and in others still, only a pair, whence sprang the new races and the rehabilitation of mankind. And it is equally interesting to know that in every instance it was the ancestry of the people who related the legend, reminding one of Dante's Inferno, which peoples Hades with Italians, and devises the most awful punishments for those who in their lifetime persecuted him, his family, or particular friends. Among these traditions are many which relate to the arrival of Europeans about the close of the tenth century. "Most of the tribes possess traditions of the first appearance of white men amongst them, and some name the place." " Montezuma told Cortez* of a foreign connection between the Aztecs and the natives of the Old World, and led him to assure the con- queror of a relationship with the Spanish crown in the line of sovereigns." Clavigero, in confirmation of this idea, reports the fol- lowing speech by Montezuma to Cortez : "I would have you to under- stand before you begin your discourse, that we are not ignorant, or stand in need of your persuasions to believe that the great Prince you obey is descended from our ancient Quetzalcoatl, Lord of the Seven Caves of the Navatlaques, and lawful king of those seven nations which gave beginning to our Mexican Empire. By one of his prophecies, which we receive as an infallible truth, and by a tradition of many ages preserved in our annals, we know that he departed from these countries to conquer new regions in the East, leaving a promise that in process of time his descendants should return to model our laws, and mend our government."
" But whatever their origin," says Schoolcraft, "when first ob- served, the Indians presented all the leading traits and characteristics of the present day. Of all races on the face of the earth, in features, manners and customs, they have apparently changed the least, pre- serving their physical and mental types with the fewest alterations. They continue to reproduce themselves as a race, even when their manners are comparatively polished and their intellects enlightened, as
*Schoolcraft.
let Mees
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if they were bound by the iron fetters of an unchanging type. In this unvarying and indomitable individuality, and in their fixity of opinion and general idiosyncracy, they certainly remind the reader of Oriental races-of the Semitic family of man. The same indestruct- ibility of type, the same non-progressiveness of the Indian-Oriental mind, is perceived in the race in every part of the continent. The Indian mind appears to have no intellectual propulsion, no analytic tendencies. It reproduces the same ideas in 1880 as in 1492."
In cultivation, intelligence, forms of government, discipline, councils of peace or war, the same variations appear in the tribes of to-day as have characterized all ages. While some are rich and pros- perous, well governed and powerful, others occupy the lowest stations. For example, compare the Sioux with the Diggers. Verily, our historians are correct in defining the situation of the Indian of all prior epochs as unchanging and unchangeable, making no progress, and without ambition, except for war and the chase.,
The Aztecs descended upon, overthrew the Toltecs, and occupied their country about three centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards, founding their capital on the site of the present City of Mexico. Thus they became the rulers of an immense empire, extending from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. As one tribe after another rebelled and repossessed themselves of their hereditary territory, the original limits were from time to time restricted. When Cortez came the Toltec mal- contents joined him in his war upon the Aztecs, and rendered excellent service in his campaigns. When asked as to the country of their origin, the Toltecs, Chichimecs and Aztecs alike pointed to the north. They moved southward because the lands were more fertile, and the climate more genial. It is not improbable that their exodus southward was hastened by a more barbarous and warlike people. Pursuing this line of thought, we are led to the Mound Builders as the progenitors of all the southern and western races, until we are met by a counter proposition evolved from recent discoveries, that there is no reasonable ground for supposing that the builders of the remarkable and fre-
5
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quently beautiful monuments and temples in Mexico, and those in Central America, were in any way connected.
Nadaillac concludes his investigations with this striking summary: " Multitudes of races and nations have arisen upon the American Con- tinent, and have disappeared, leaving no trace but ruins, mounds, a few wrought stones, or fragments of pottery. * * All those whom we are disposed to call aborigines are, perhaps, but the conquerors of other races that preceded them. Conquerors and conquered are for- gotten in a common oblivion, and the names of both have passed from the memory of man." But he finds one fact to be incontestibly estab- lished, that "man existed in the Old World in the quaternary period. He was the contemporary, and often the victim, of large animals, the strength of which can be estimated from the skeletons preserved in the museums." Again, we have undeniable proof that "the first Ameri- cans too, were contemporary with gigantic animals, which, like their con- querors of Europe, have passed away, never to return."
Referring to the glacial period, and the inundations, accompanied by violent torrents, which ensued, whereby we have the modifications of the earth's surface of the present time, Putnam says, "Man lived through these convulsions ; he survived the floods, as the recent dis- coveries by Dr. Abbott, in the glacial deposits of the Delaware, near Trenton, New Jersey, seem to prove beyond a doubt." Like testimony, in the form of human and animal remains, with stone and other imple- ments, curiously and quaintly fashioned, which could only have been done by the hand of man, is abundant in many localities.
Bancroft relates that, in the Sierra Nevadas, and at various places on the Pacific coast, numerous traces of the presence of man are met with. "The discovery of implements or weapons, at a depth of sev- eral hundred feet, in diversely stratified beds, showing no trace of dis- placement, simply implies that the country was peopled many centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards, and that the inhabitants were wit- nesses of the convulsions of nature, of the volcanic phenomena which brought about such remarkable changes. But when the bones of man,
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and the results of his very primitive industry, are associated with the remains of animals which have been extinct for a period of time of which it is difficult to estimate the length, it is impossible not to date the existence of that man from the most remote antiquity. These facts are confirmed in California, Colorado, and Wyoming, wherever a search has been possible."
At many points throughout the country, traces of ancient mining, too, are found, manifestly long anterior to the Spanish invasion. This is notably true of the old cinnabar mines, in California, in one of which, beneath a mass of debris, the skeletons of primitive miners were found, and beside them the rude implements with which the excavations were made. The same is true of some of the copper mines of Lake Supe- rior. But perhaps the most remarkable discovery has been announced by Professor J. D. Whitney, which, for a time, until more fully investi- gated, gave rise to doubt, and was seriously questioned by scientists. Whitney was the director of the Geological Survey of California, and in the course of his explorations, discovered in Calaveras county a skull nearly complete, at a depth of about one hundred and thirty feet, in a bed of auriferous gravel. "The deposit rested upon a bed of lava, and was covered with several layers, some of lava, some of volcanic deposits, overlying beds of gravel." From which Nadaillac argues : "If the facts reported be correct, the waters have more than once in- vaded the districts inhabited by mar., and burning lava from volcanoes has dried up the rivers at their sources. The skull was embedded in consolidated gravel, in which were several other fragments of human bones, the remains of some small mammals, which it was impossible to class, and a shell of a land snail. Beside these lay some completely fos- silized wood." Gravels identical with those just mentioned, in various sections of the Sierra Nevadas, have yielded the remains of extinct animals. "There are deposits in California and Oregon where, to use a popular expression, the remains of elephants and mastodons might be had by the wagon load." Certain sections of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, once covered by a vast inland sea, are filled with wonderful
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remains of the cretaceous age, but thus far, we believe, few remains of importance have been exhumed. In the regions previously men- tioned, gigantic pachydermata, with the Palæolama, the Elotherium, the bones of extinct oxen, Hipparion, and several kinds of horses, have been brought to light.
Professor Whitney sustains his theory respecting the great antiq- uity of man upon the Pacific Coast, by citing the discovery of many implements, as lance points, stone hatchets, mortars for pulverizing maize, and so on, all buried deeply beneath beds of lava and gravel. He writes: "My chief interest now centers in the human remains, and in the works from the hand of man, that have been found in the ter- tiary strata of California, the existence of which I have been able to verify within the last few months. Evidence has now accumulated to such an extent that I feel no hesitation in saying that we have unequivocal proofs of the existence of man on the Pacific Coast prior to the glacial period, prior to the period of the mastodon and the elephant, at a time when animal and vegetable life were entirely different from what they are now, and since which a vertical erosion of from two to three thou- sand feet of hard rock strata has taken place." This positive announce- ment gave rise to some rather heated discussions among the wise men of the schools; but, though doubted, the statement has not been over- thrown. The American editor of Nadaillac, after a critical survey of all the facts, comes to Whitney's support with the declaration that "no reasonable person, who has impartially reviewed the evidence brought together by Whitney, and who saw, as we did, the Calaveras skull, in its original condition, can doubt that it was found, as alleged by the discoverers, in the auriferous gravels below the lava," but adds, "The only question to which some uncertainty still attaches itself among ge- ologists, is that of the true age of these gravels, in geological time, and whether all the extinct species of which remains are found in them were contemporaneous with the deposition of the gravels, and with the then undoubted presence of man." Nadaillac himself continues, "If, how- ever, we hesitate as yet to admit "-observe the caution-"the exist-
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ence of man on the American Continent in the tertiary period, it is difficult to deny that long centuries have rolled by since the time when these unknown men lived amongst animals as little known as them- selves. This is, in the present stage of prehistoric science, the only decision possible."
This much, however, has been settled beyond controversy, that men inhabited caves, notably in various parts of France and Belgium in the quaternary period, since their remains in a remarkable state of preservation have been found. Like remains have also been dis- covered by the very earliest explorers in the ancient caves of Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. Add to this the well authenticated dis- coveries nearer home in California, among caves, whose walls were covered with admirably preserved drawings representing men and animals of which we have little if any knowledge, and in others of well preserved mummies, brought to light by the Spaniards when they came and began to scour the country in their fierce thirst for gold and valuable plunder accumulated, and, as they believed, concealed by the natives, and the story is measurably complete. Clavigero writes that "these men differed as much in their features as in the garments with which they were covered, from the races met with by the Spaniards." Again, we are told by authority of those who saw, that from a cave in the Rio Narvaez Valley in the State of Durango, Mexico, a considerable number of mummies have been taken, of an appear- ance very distinct from the present inhabitants. Near them were the characteristic implements and weapons of their race, hatchets, arrow points and pottery vases, the decorations of the latter resembling those of the ancient Egyptians. Other discoveries of mummies have been found in our own day, within the present year, upon the Gila River, evidently of much antiquity.
In summing up his conclusions of the Mound Builders, Nadaillac decides, after a complete analysis of all the testimony that has been adduced, that the mystery hitherto surrounding them disappears under the statement from easily traceable sources of their history that they
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were no more or less than the ancestors of the very Indians whom De Soto encountered in his wonderful tour of conquest from Tampa Bay to the Mississippi. "As in the far north, the Aleuts, up to the time of their discovery were, by the testimony of the shell heaps, as well as their language, the direct successors of the early Eskimo, so in the fertile basin of the Mississippi, the Indians were the builders of the singular and varied structures, to which scientists have for years directed their keenest researches." This opinion is shared by a large number of eminent archæologists, and is generally accepted as conclusive.
Carr, a distinguished authority, says, "Summing up the results that have been obtained, it may be safely said that so far from there being any a priori reason why the red Indians could not have erected these works, the evidence shows conclusively that in New York and the Gulf States they did build the mounds and embankments that are essen- tially of the same character as those found in Ohio. In view of these results, and of the additional fact that these same Indians are the only people, except the whites, who, so far as we know, ever held the region over which these works were scattered, it is believed we are fully justified in claiming that the mounds and inclosures of Ohio, like those of New York and the Gulf States, were the work of the red Indians, or of their immediate ancestors. To deny this conclusion, and to accept its alternative, ascribing these remains to a mythical people of a different civilization, is to reject a simple fact in favor of one that is far-fetched and incomplete, and this is neither science nor logic."
Thus one by one the scientific iconoclasts have overturned and cast down our cherished idols, dissipated our myths and legends until it would appear that all the shadowy mysteries which have shrouded antiquity, are but mere commonplace events, no more striking or startling than the current history of our own day and generation.
Since 1812, when the explorer Stephens made his famous and very charming report on the celebrated ruins of Yucatan, we have been lost in wonder as to who could have built them. In the absence of facts
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the imagination raised from the depths of time a people different from any of the known races, and induced the conviction that owing to their similarity in some respects to the remotest works of the Egyptians, the builders might have migrated from that country to this by some means unknown to us, and continued in a strange land the labors interrupted by some historic change. But now comes the French ethnologist, M. De Charnay, with the latest developments of incontestible evidence gathered by himself on the spot, under the joint patronage of Pierre Lorillard of New York, and the Mexican Government, in a full and explicit publication of the facts. It is unnecessary for our present purpose to probe deeper into this interesting record than to recite the essential particulars. These are obtained from a review of De Charnay's elaborate work, entitled "The Ancient Cities of the New World," which appeared in "Harper's Magazine" for October, 1887. In dedicating the book to Mr. Lorillard, he expresses the belief that he has accomplished the main object of his mission, which was the recon- struction of the civilizations that have passed away, but more particu- larly in demonstrating that these civilizations had but one and the same origin ; that they were Toltec, and comparatively modern. Humboldt, Stephens, and other learned investigators reached similar conclusions many years ago, but from less extensive examination. But M. De Charnay feels entirely convinced that he has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that "the original inhabitants of the continent came from the extreme East, and long after the flood," basing his conclusions upon the fact that their "architecture is so like that of the Japanese as to seem identical with it; that their decorative designs resemble those of the Chinese, and that their customs, habits, sculpture, language, castes, and policy, recall those of the Malays." The Toltecs, he states, "were one of the Nahuan tribes, which from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries spread over Mexico and Central America. They were, by common consent of historians, the most cultured of all their race, and better acquainted with the methods of perpetuating the traditions of their antiquity and their origin. They invented hiero-
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glyphs and characters which, arranged after a certain method, recorded their history, on skins of animals, on aloe, or palm leaves; or they pre- served their annals by means of knots of different colors, and also by simple allegorical songs. This manner of writing history by maps, knots (the knots are Chinese), and of songs, was handed down from father to son, and thus has come to the present time. All that the Toltecs did was well done, and their art and architecture were not only graceful, but delicate," as evidenced by their pottery and other works. Leaving the question of origin to conjecture, or later revelations, and confining himself to historical testimony, he begins with the arrival of the cultured Toltecs in Mexico, noting their establishment by colonies in the Valley of the Tula, their development on high plateaux, the disruption of their empire, showing how their industries and mechanical arts were transmitted from generation to generation, and to their successors, the Aztecs, and finally following them in their exodus, traces their civilization throughout Central America, where we will leave them, and resume the thread of our narrative, which relates more especially to the prehistoric peoples of our own country, or Colorado.
And now, after a careful examination of the better authorities who have attempted to discover the origin of man upon this continent, and especially the origin of the people who built the cliff dwellings, the ancient pueblos, who excavated and inhabited the caves found within our State, in New Mexico and Arizona, we go back to the original question,-Were they Toltec or Aztec? without a definite answer. All we know, or can unravel, is that they were a very ancient people, and here our knowledge ends.
Since the foregoing was written, Mr. W. H. Jackson, whose report has been quoted, has intimated to me a project he has long had under serious contemplation, of returning to the ruins in South- western Colorado, and making a more thorough examination of them and of those in Chaco Cañon than it was possible to accomplish during the first visit. He proposed to enter upon, in this connection, a very
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extensive system of excavations, and thereby endeavor to exhume some further and more interesting traces of the ancient history of this remarkable people, and, it may be added, he has strong hopes of finding numerous skeletons, implements and other remains that will enable our antiquarians to determine something more than is now known concerning them. Mr. Jackson is better qualified for such an undertaking than any other explorer of our time, and being convinced by the observations he made while attached to the United States Geological Survey in 1874-5 that wisely conducted exploitation will bring to light much new evidence relating to their antiquity, and pos- sibly to their origin, we trust his purpose will be carried into effect. As yet we have only the surface indications, which give the outlines merely, leaving the deeper secrets to conjecture. All men who may be interested in the solution of the mystery will unite with us in hoping that his enterprise will be wholly successful. It is not improb- able that the expedition will be undertaken during the current year -1889. With his permission, the discoveries he shall make, if important, will be summarized in one of the succeeding volumes of this history. It is one of the great enigmas sent down from the ages, and it may be that our highly respected fellow-citizen has been raised up for the disclosure, if not of as complete a record in this field of inquiry as M. De Charnay has given us from his late researches among the old temples of Yucatan, at least some fresh traces that will lead to a better conception of the subject.
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CHAPTER V.
INDIAN CHARACTER, TRADITIONS, AND RELIGIOUS IMPRESSIONS-THE ANCIENT AZTECS AND MODERN PUEBLOS-WERE THE RUINS IN COLORADO OF AZTEC OR TOLTEC DE- VELOPMENT ?- LEGEND OF THE EXPULSION OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS FROM THE SAN JUAN MOUNTAINS, AND THEIR DISPERSION THROUGH NEW MEXICO AND ARIZONA- REMOTE ANTIQUITY OF THESE RUINS-VAST POPULATION OF THE ANCIENT TOWNS- TRADITIONS OF THE MOQUIS AND ZUNIS-PRIMEVAL RESERVOIRS AND IRRIGATION. - BEAUTY AND COMPREHENSIVENESS OF THE AZTEC LANGUAGE.
The oral traditions of the Indian, founded in fact, no doubt, but in transmission from generation to generation becoming strongly tinc- tured with fiction, are all we have from that source to indicate his de- scent of the ages. We have the statement from one who dwelt many years among the roving tribes of the West, that wherever an Indian sentiment is expressed, there is a tendency to the pensive and the rem- iniscent. In old age his mind dwells longest and most fervently upon the past, the achievements of his fathers, the battles won and lost, the glories of their heroic deeds, and his own; the warriors slain, and cap- tives taken ; of hosts overcome in the field, and lastly, with deep sor- row and lamentation, over the rapid decay of his race. Therefore, when we attempt to discover the hidden secrets of their lives, and those of their ancestors, having first gained their confidence in our sin- cerity and worth, it is always their desire to tell, as ours to hear, what- ever they may have retained from the past. Though often interwoven with poetic fiction, much truth is secured by these recitals, thousands of which have been gathered into books, which constitute the base of much of our knowledge of the primitive history of our continent. Some of their ideas and legends are found graphically portrayed in pic- ture writing upon rocks, the walls of their dwellings, upon skins, and
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the bark of trees. This is their literature, crudely, but oftentimes pow- erfully, communicated. To the unlettered in these forms of expres- sion, their pictography is a dead language, with no apparent meaning, but interpreted it is the meaning of Homer to the Greeks, or of Virgil to the Latins. In the procession of the ages, there has been but little change in the habits, temperament, or ambition of the savage races. Born in the open air, where his whole life is passed, addicted to war and the chase, he has peopled earth and air, the wind, the forests and streams, the clouds and the firmament, with an imagery as fanciful, and often as beautiful, as any known to man. It is written that the Great Spirit of the Indian worship is a purer deity than the Greeks or Romans, with all their refinement, possessed. We have innumerable accounts of their beliefs respecting the future life, the power of good and evil spirits ; legends of their dealings with men, and of their after pilgrimage beyond the stars, the works and wonders wrought for them by the Great Master of Life here on earth. Said a venerable chief of one of the plains tribes, when informed that a railroad to the Pacific was to be built through his hunting grounds, in forecasting its effect upon the herds of buffalo, which were his sole means of subsistence : " The Great Father, who made us and gave us these lands to live upon, made also the buffalo and other game to afford us the means of life ; his meat is our food; with his skin we clothe ourselves, and build our houses ; he is our only means of life-food, fuel, and raiment. I fear we shall soon be deprived of the buffalo ; then starvation and cold will diminish our numbers, and we shall all be swept away. The buffalo is fast disappearing. As the white man advances, our game and our means of life grow less, and before many years they will all be gone."
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