GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS Administrative History

Bandelier

A scientific description of the cliff dwellings that Ailman visited was not made until the winter of 1883-84, when Adolph F. Bandelier spent a few days on the headwaters of the Gila. The son of a prosperous Illinois banker who had emigrated from Switzerland, Bandelier developed an early interest in Mexico and the American Southwest, and through family connections and a series of scholarly monographs he managed to attract the attention of Henry Lewis Morgan, author of the seminal book Ancient Society, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the foremost anthropologist of his time. [40]

In 1879, Morgan had been asked by the newly organized Archaeological Institute of America to develop a plan for research in the American field, and in 1880 his paper "Study of the Houses of American Aborigines" was included in the society's first annual report. The paper urged the scientific exploration of ruins in the American Southwest and in Central America. Morgan privately urged the executive committee of the society to appoint Bandelier to conduct special research in New Mexico. With an annual stipend of $1,200, Bandelier arrived in Santa Fe in 1880, and for the next five years traveled through New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico visiting pueblos and exploring hundreds of ruins. His Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States, Carried on Mainly in the Years from 1880 to 1885 was published by the Archaeological Institute in two parts, Part I in 1890 and Part II in 1892.

On January 2, 1884, after spending a few days in the Mimbres Valley talking with settlers and exploring ruins, Bandelier departed alone and on foot for the headwaters of the Gila River, where he had heard there were sandstone cliffhouses. At the Gila Hot Springs, he was received by Niels Nelson, a Danish immigrant who made a house available to the explorer, providing him with a bed and even board. The country that had been empty when Ailman visited five years earlier was quickly being settled. In fact Ailman himself now had a ranch near the head of the Sapillo trail into the Gila.

Bandelier's journal entry for January 5 reveals that a romantic sense of place accompanied the scientist's meticulous attention to topography and archeology.

The tops of the high mesas of the Divide are volcanic, making a horrible trail. The mouth of the Sapillo is about 20 miles west of here, and is a deep canon; so is the whole course of the Gila for nearly 40 miles west and high up to the source which is 40 miles northeast from here. There is no snow visible on any mountain, and the tall grass has its stalks still green. The Rio Gilita [East Fork] empties into the Gila a mile south of the Ojo Caliente. All these tributaries flow in deep stately canons, very narrow and grand, but there is vegetation everywhere. On the whole it is a beautiful spot. The hot springs are right opposite, on the banks, oozing out of the declivity. Some of them steam very strongly....

Started for the caves about 8:30 A.M. The valley winds around, past the springs, to the west, and then forms a bottom scarcely a half mile wide, heavily timbered with pines and cottonwood, also oak, which extends, accidently wandering, and leaving very fertile bottoms, all timbered along the river, for nearly four miles. These bottoms were originally timbered, and there are cleared spaces where Mr. Williams and Mr. Rogers [sic] have their ranches. The river, beyond the latter runs near to the West side and the mountains are picturesque vertical craigs. [41]

The caves were in a thickly-wooded side canyon, sheltered beneath an overhanging bluff that protected the prehistoric dwellings from weather. "As a place of concealment," Bandelier observed, the site was also well-chosen, protecting the inhabitants from observation and direct assault, as well. The location's major drawback, he conceded, was the facility with which an enemy could deprive access to water that flowed 100 feet below.

Bandelier noted in his journals that some of the dwellings had been constructed without roofs, a fact that he attributed to the mild climate and the perfect shelter of the caves. Other rooms had roofs that had been destroyed with fire, reportedly by Apaches. Aside from a lot of corn cobs, he also noted, there were few prehistoric remains left on the site--very little pottery and none of the stone axes that others had apparently found in abundance.

After recording some architectural dimensions, Bandelier hobbled out of the ruins on a very sore foot, returning to his lodgings where he spent a painful and lonely night. It was his wedding anniversary. Over the next few days, Bandelier explored the hills around Nelson's house, noting and drawing small ruins, including a pueblo site that is the TJ site. [42]

Sketches of the Gila cliff dwellings that Bandelier made in his notebooks, in January 1884. These mnemonic artifacts are the first representations of this prehistoric architecture and were later reproduced with greater draftsmanship and more detail in his Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States, Part II.

The detail of Bandelier's journal entries and the unrevised immediacy of their style--almost stream-of-consciousness--give an unchallengeable authority to his observations: in early 1884 there were very few artifacts in Gila Cliff Dwellings, a fact he attributes to rifling. Indeed, a few days later on his way back to the Mimbres, he visited a man who showed him "a fine collection of sandals, about seven pieces, which he dug out of the cliffhouses on the Gila, also a ring for carrying water, and a piece of pita wound around with rabbit skin, evidently for a mantle similar to that made and worn by the Moqui [Hopi]!" [43] It is also clear from the journals that many people knew about the Gila cliff dwellings by 1884. Bandelier heard about the site from several informants in the Mimbres Valley and along the Sapillo and also from the settlers around the Gila Hot Springs, at least three of whom he mentioned by name. The first survey of the township, completed in the fall of the same year, also locates the ruins.

As Bandelier rode on a burro back to the Mimbres Valley, the bands of Nachez, Chato, Mangas, and Geronimo were slowly straggling into San Carlos from the Sierra Madre in Mexico as they had agreed after their surrender to Brig. Gen. George Crook in May 1883. Bandelier--who "traveled armed only with a stick a meter long and graduated for measuring ruins" and who had once escaped an encounter with raiding Apaches by feigning insanity--saw no Indians.

McKenna

Another early visitor to Gila Cliff Dwellings was James A. McKenna, a miner from a silver camp in the Black Range, who suffered in 1883 "from a touch of lead poisoning and decided to go with a party of miners and muckers for a few baths in the Gila Hot Springs." [44] After three weeks of bathing, hunting, and fishing on the headwaters of the Gila, he returned to Kingston, settled his affairs and filed a homestead claim on 160 acres of government land close to the hot springs. In the summer of 1884, by his own reckoning, McKenna visited the cliff dwellings with his friend Jason Baxter.

They explored the ruins in four caves, noting especially the solidity of construction. Still intact were the roofs, which were formed of pine beams covered with twigs and grasses and a layer of adobe plaster, and even the floors were in good condition, with adobe mortar sealing any cracks. Within the ruins, McKenna found many "stone hammers and war axes," turquoise beads, and ollas painted with images of bear, elk and deer, as well as other designs.

In addition, he found a "perfect mummy" with cottonwood fiber woven around it.

The sex signs had either decayed or been removed, but all who saw the mummy believed it to be the remains of a female. The length of the figure was about eighteen inches. It lay with knees drawn up and the palms of the hands covering the face. The features were like those of a Chinese child, with high cheek bones and coarse, dark hair. The age of the child at the time of death was thought to be two years. The body was kept for weeks in the show window of a store in Silver City. [45]

This relic soon afterwards disappeared when it was lent to a man representing himself as an agent of the Smithsonian Institution. McKenna later opined in his autobiography that the body had been sold to a private collector.

One interesting issue in McKenna's account is the comments he made about the roofs: he found them intact while Bandelier found them burned. Since Bandelier's observations are too precise to be mistaken, it is possible that McKenna visited the cliff dwellings before the fire that brought down the roof and therefore earlier than Bandelier--in 1883 and not a year later as suggested by the memoirs, which, after all, were written nearly 50 years after the visit.

Curiously, Bandelier himself implied in his final 1890 report that the roofs were intact, contradicting the more immediate evidence of his journals. [46] Twice in his entry for January 5, Bandelier had written that Apaches had burned the roofs, a repetition that possibly reflects the insistence of his informants and the immediacy in January 1884 of the event. That Apaches would burn the roofs of a cliff dwelling, however, is also curious--unlikely even given the fact that apart from several brief raids around Tombstone and Lordsburg Apache renegades spent most of 1883 on the lam and in another country. [47]