GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS Administrative History

Settlers

McKenna also mentioned finding many grooved stone hammers and war axes, which Bandelier did not see. The scientist did write, however, that many stone axes had been carried off, and this information again must have come from the local settlers, of which McKenna was one. That Ailman failed to see stone tools can perhaps be explained if he collected only from the surface. Bandelier's later report includes both physical and anecdotal evidence of excavation at the cliff dwellings, and as late as the mid-twentieth century axes like those McKenna described were recovered from soil within the ruin. The miner may have dug up axes. At any rate, since McKenna claimed to have recovered a lot of artifacts and to have seen intact roofs, the early despoliation of the Gila Cliff Dwellings might date from around 1883, the same year that the first homestead was patented in the area.

Sketch from the government survey completed in 1884. The map denotes the location of the Gila cliff dwellings in Section 27, Township 12 South, Range 14 West. Already at least three settlers have located five cabins within two miles of the prehistoric architecture, and a road leads from the mouth of Cliff Dweller Canyon to cultivated fields.

After the removal in 1877 of the Mimbres band of Apaches to the San Carlos reservation in Arizona, and despite periodic assaults by renegades, settlers began moving cautiously into the mountains around the Gila headwaters. James B. Huffman, who had settled on 160 acres near the mouth of the Middle Fork, was the first to "prove up" a homestead on the forks of the Gila, receiving his patent in 1883 for land that coincidentally contained the TJ site. [48] The five-years-of-residence requirement places his arrival no later than 1878, possibly after Ailman's visit in July of the same year to the cliff dwellings.

Eighteen eighty-three is the same year that James McKenna filed a homestead on 160 acres not far from the Gila Hot Springs, where he had "boiled out" a touch of lead poisoning not long before with a bunch of miners and muckers from Kingston. Already, according to his memoirs, the hot springs were well-known. The Hill brothers, who were developing the waters, had built bathhouses and a sixteen-mile road from Sapillo Creek to their spa and had twenty-five acres under cultivation, a small herd of cattle, and an adobe house with a good supply of groceries. This building is the same one that sheltered Bandelier. One hundred and sixty acres of land that included these hot springs were ultimately patented by Spencer Hill in 1890. Other local homesteaders known to McKenna in 1883 included Jordan Rodgers, John Lester, a man named "Grudgins" who worked for him, and a Tom Wood who had settled with a wife and six children near the mouth of the East Fork. Farther up the forks of the river and on the mesas were John Lilley, Thomas Prior, Presley Papenoe, and another man named Tom Woods, who was unrelated to the married settler on the East Fork. Country that had been empty five years earlier, when Ailman visited, was filling up fast.

In the government survey of 1884, when the subdivisional lines for T12S R14W were laid out to facilitate homestead claims, Richard Powell, the U.S. deputy surveyor, also noted the location of Gila Cliff Dwellings and the presence of a road that led from the cultivated fields of Rodgers more or less to the mouth of Cliff Dweller Canyon. Although still remote, the cliff dwellings were increasingly accessible.

McKenna spent two years prospecting and market-hunting game for miners in Silver City, before suddenly abandoning his homestead in the summer of 1885--not long after a desperate escape on the upper West Fork from a band of Apaches, who killed his best friend, Jason Baxter. Sixteen other people in southwestern New Mexico were also killed in May. Late in the fall of the same year, Papenoe, Lilly, and Prior were killed in the Mogollons, along with 35 others between the Rio Grande and the San Pedro rivers. The killers were a band of nine warriors, who rode out of the Sierra Madre on a 1,200 mile raid led by Josanie, a Mimbreno and a younger brother to Chihuahua. Josanie's furious raid marked the last Apache attack in New Mexico: three months later, in April, captive Chiricahua and Mimbreno bands began their long trip in freight cars to Florida, and their broncho relatives followed after their surrender in September to Brig. Gen. Nelson Miles, who had ferreted the last resisters out of the Sierra Madre. [49]

Violence on the headwaters of the Gila did not end with the exile of the Apaches, however. In 1892, the young son of Tom Woods who ranched far up the Middle Fork and a Mexican companion were mysteriously murdered while asleep in their camp about two miles above the Grudgings' cabin on the West Fork. [50] A year later, William Grudgings, who had worked for McKenna years before, was shot and killed. James B. Hoffman (Huffman) claimed to have witnessed the assault and swore out a warrant of arrest for Tom Woods, stating that the accused, disguised but still identifiable under a headdress of weeds, had ambushed Grudgings. [51] Shortly afterwards, at his arraignment in Mogollon, Woods acknowledged that he had indeed cut down Grudgings because the man had killed his son. [52]

In a curious turn of events, Woods was released in a nearby canyon by a citizen, who had somehow gained custody of the accused and who the same night went on to kill a former partner in a wood contract. Woods escaped in the confusion. [53] Years later, Woods claimed to have spent the next two years hunting down William Grudgings' brother, Tom. One day, emerging with a greeting and a leveled gun from a canebrake in Louisiana, Woods shot Grudgings, who was about to cross a river in a canoe. [54]

Woods himself crossed into folklore. There are several variants to the Woods-Grudgings feud that favor both sides and that involve death by fast draw, a rifle shot in the back, or an axe. Although Woods eventually stood trial and was acquitted for William Grudgings' death, the trial papers have been lost. The only hard and uncontested facts of the case are carved in stone:

William
Grudgings
WAYLAID AND
MURDERED
BY
Tom Woods
OCTOBER 8, 1893
AGE
37
YEARS 8 MONTHS

The foot of this grave lies just outside the northern boundary of Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. Beside this tombstone is the grave of William B. Huffman, the first settler on the forks of the Gila, who was killed not long after the Woods-Grudgings feud by his neighbor Jordan Rodgers, concluding in this way a disagreement about cattle ranges. Rodgers was also acquitted. [55]

Not long after Huffman was killed, the settled land around the forks of the Gila began to change hands--and character. C. A. Burdick, who owned the large O-Bar-O outfit a little farther north, bought out Lester, Rodgers, another man named Clifford, and the heirs of Huffman, consolidating their marginal homesteads under the TJ brand. [56] Shortly afterwards, John Converse, a Princeton graduate and the son of a wealthy Philadelphia locomotive builder, bought the TJ Ranch, reportedly for $80,000. [57] Included in Converse's vision of the West was a string of polo ponies, which he reportedly exercised on the site of the TJ Ruin. A little farther east, along the streams feeding the East Fork, a friend of Converse's who was also a Philadelphian and a graduate of Princeton to boot, Hugh Hodge, bought up patented land from debt-ridden homesteaders to build the Diamond Bar Ranch. Eventually he acquired the old Tom Wood homestead on the East Fork, as well. In 1899, Thomas Lyons of the huge LC Ranch and Cattle Company bought a 160-acre patented homestead just upstream from the Wood place, where he built for $50,000 a hunting lodge with accommodations for 30 or 40 guests. [58] In just over a decade, the small hard-scrabble homesteads around the cliff dwellings were yielding to the interests of wealthy men.

Unhappily, the cattle these men brought to the Gila headwaters in the years between 1885 and 1895 severely damaged the area's range and riparian ecologies. The thick tangles of growth noted by Pattie and the lush beautiful vegetation that Bandelier had seen were eaten and trampled until there was "scarcely a vestige of grass for miles" in 1927. [59] In the river where trout could formerly and easily be taken, "there [was] a sluggish and unshaded stream, filled from bank to bank with flood waters during the summer rainy season." [60]

Meanwhile during the 1890s, at the Gila Hot Springs, the Hill brothers were serving game, fish, and wine to parties that came for the baths--"vapor, Turkish, Russian, hot, cold or temperature as one may prefer." [61] Although the resort was small, life was surprisingly gay with the grounds laid out for games, dances held at night, and the society reported on by the Silver City Enterprise. Fishing trips were occasionally organized to go up the West Fork, where the ladies of at least one group decorated with wildflowers the grave of Jason Baxter, who had been killed there by Apaches only six years earlier. [62]

Another place familiar to the Hill brothers was Cliff Dweller Canyon, where parties were entertained with lunches among the cave ruins. [63] Several years earlier, in 1889, the brothers had also found a burial at the cliff dwellings: the desiccated body of a child who appeared to be about four years old. Wrapped in cloths and bound to a piece of wood, the body was well preserved with still perfect fingernails, intact teeth, and soft black hair. Reportedly, the body was sent to the Smithsonian despite efforts of the Silver City Enterprise to purchase the relic. [64]