SALINAS "In the Midst of a Loneliness": The Architectural History of the Salinas Missions

LAS HUMANAS (continued)

Adolph Bandelier, 1883

Adolph Bandelier spent two days at Las Humanas in early January, 1883. While there he took seven photographs of the church, convento, and pueblo, and prepared rough sketches of their plans. He noted the dimensions of San Isidro and prepared a sketch plan of San Buenaventura with dimensions. The sketch of the convento was inaccurate in many details of the plan. He said very little about the structural details of the buildings in his journal, and added little more in his final report. It is his photographs that are of the greatest interest.

Figure 39. San Buenaventura in 1883, as photographed by Bandelier. The door and window openings high on the wall of the church are still sharp-edged and the tops of the walls flat, straight lines. Biblioteca Apostólica Vaticana, Archivo Fotographico, #14116-49, courtesy Charles Lang.

Figure 40. The interior of the church of San Buenaventura as Bandelier saw it in January, 1883. The right stub of the viga that formed the main support for the choir loft, and its corbel, are both still set into the north wall. These are the same corbel and viga sketched by Morrison in 1877. The entablature running from the viga to the front wall of the church, however, has been removed. The rubble fill against the walls in the nave of the church is only 1-1/2 to two feet higher than the present floor surface. Biblioteca Apostólica Vaticana, Archivo Fotographico, # 485-50, courtesy Charles Lang.

Only three views of San Buenaventura are available. They show the buildings from the southeast and the far northwest, and one view of the interior of the nave. In the nave, the rotted remains of about five feet of the primary beam of the choir loft, with its corbel in place, can be seen.

The distant view from the northwest shows that the wall above the doorway into the baptistry was in place, indicating that the lintel beams survive here. The tops of the walls of the church were very level, with irregularities of less than one or two feet. The nave wall up to the transept is higher than the transept walls, which in turn are higher than the apse walls. The apse and sacristy wall tops are almost perfectly straight.

The view from the southeast, almost exactly the same view as that drawn by Morrison ten years before, shows the changes that had occurred in that time. The lintels of the three eastward-facing windows along the front of the convento had failed or been removed, allowing the walls above to collapse. This resulted in the loss of almost the entire front wall. The southwest corner of the stairwell to the choir loft (room 1), next to the portería entrance doorway, had partially collapsed. The outermost beam over the church entrance doorway had been pulled out, although it is difficult to be sure that it was surviving in 1877 using Morrison's drawing. The wall tops along the south side of the church were more level than those along the north side. Again, the transept walls are distinctly lower by perhaps two feet than those of the nave. The doorway into the choir loft at the second level of room 1 is sharply defined, with a square upper corner to the stonework at its east side and traces of the splay visible. The top of the north wall of the nave can be seen through the opening. West of the choir doorway, the first nave window is equally sharp and clear, along with its splay. The second, westernmost window is more irregular, with extensive collapse of its upper corners. The sockets for the vigas of rooms 1 and 16 are visible at the level of the bottom edges of the windows and doorway through the nave wall. The splay surfaces of the front doorway and the choir window above can be seen, as well as the lintel beam above the doorway.

On his plan of the pueblo, Bandelier showed the walls of a hut and a "dry well" built between kiva J and mound 7. [55] Hayes located the foundations of this hut, and described it as feature 9 in his report on excavations at Gran Quivira. Hayes found Bandelier's "dry well" to be a trial mine shaft. Hayes considered the hut to have been a line shack for herdsmen, or a prospector's hut. [56]

Charles Lummis, 1890

Charles Lummis visited Las Humanas in 1890 and made a number of photographs of the ruins. Only five of these have been located so far, although at least three more are known to have existed.

Lummis later described some of what he had seen at the ruins. He thought that the structure was "little shorn of its first stature." He remarked that the lintels over the main doorway of the church held up "fifteen feet of massive masonry." In the convento,

in one of the apartments of the honeycomb is still a perfect fireplace; and here and there over the vacant doorways are carved-wood lintels, their arabesques softened but not lost in the weathering of centuries. Some of the rafters must have weighed a ton and a half to two tons. [57]

Figure 41. San Buenaventura from the south in 1890, as photographed by Charles Lummis. Courtesy Southwest Museum, # 24834.

Figure 42. The interior of the church of San Buenaventura in 1890. Lummis photographed the south end of the main viga that supported the choir loft, with its corbel, and the outside of the lintel over the front door of the church. It was this photograph that allowed the identification of the beam presently over the door as the beam closest to the camera in the lintel, by the distinctive pattern of knots and cracks. Courtesy Southwest Museum, # 24825.

Figure 43. The doorway from the church of San Buenaventura into the sacristy in 1890. This photograph by Lummis shows the decorative carving on the beam over the doorway, and the appearance of the sacristy window. Courtesy Southwest Museum, # 24836.