The brochures at the visitor center
make no mention of it. None of the magazines I've seen promoting New
Mexico tourism mention it in connection with the Gila Cliff
Dwellings. Yet, there is an under-the-radar story that keeps
surfacing of a mummy found in these once-inhabited caves in the Gila
National Forest north of Silver City and Pinos Altos. A story that,
at the same time, won't go away and won't quite manifest as fully
credible.
The Gila Cliff Dwellings are at the
dead-end of NM 15 and at the convergence of the three main forks of
the Gila River. The drive into the valley is steep, winding, and
guard-rail free, dropping a couple of thousand feet rapidly past
spectacular views and teeth-clenching precipices. The river valley
itself is a wreck. A massive flood two years ago left behind a vast
scoured mess of broken trees, gravel, rock and other debris. An easy
1/4-mile climb leads up a narrow side canyon to the cliff dwellings
at about 100 feet above the canyon floor.
Modest compared to Mesa Verde and other
cliff dwellings of the Southwest, this former home of the Mogollón
people consists of 40 small structures in seven mostly connected
caves. Based on tree-ring analysis of the timbers used to shore up
their stone-and-mortar houses, the Mogollón
lived here from about 1267 to 1300 A.D. They appear to have been
related to the Pueblos of the Tularosa region about 60 miles
northwest, sharing cultural characteristics with those people as
revealed in their pottery and in the construction of their homes.
They also may have had influences from as far south as Mexico through
trade.
I first came across mention of a mummy
in the autobiography of H.B. Ailman, miner, merchandiser, and banker
during the 1880s, whose former home now houses the Silver City
Museum. He describes visiting the caves in 1878, on a hunting trip he
undertook expressly to escape a jury duty call by the Sheriff.
He himself found only a few dried
corncobs, four to five inches long and about the width of his middle
finger. However, he says that the following year another party
stopped in to explore the caves and, underneath a stone discovered a
hole "in which lay a package." Unwrapped, the package
revealed the mummy of an infant evidently only a few days old. Here's
his description of the find:
It was thoroughly
dried up and weighed only a few ounces. The face was still quite
distinguishable, and there was a little tuft of hair still on the
back of its head. Later it fell into the hands of a friend of mine
who photographed it, making several pictures, one of which is within
my reach as I write.
|
Photo courtesy of the Silver
City Museum |
The photographer was Rev. R.E. Pierce,
pastor of the Methodist Church in Silver City. The remains reportedly
were sent on to the Smithsonian Institution.
There
is no record, however, of those remains in Washington D.C.
The next recorded visit to the Gila
Dwellings was by archeologist Adolph F. Bandelier in January 1884.
His book, published by the Archaeological Institute in 1890-1892,
makes no mention of artifacts found in the caves. Nor of any mummies.
However, quite a number of homesteaders had moved into the Gila River
headwaters area by 1883, and several showed him stone axes, sandals
woven from yucca fiber, and a vessel for carrying water which they
said had been taken from the site. In his report, Bandelier noted
that the dwellings had been thoroughly "rifled" when he
visited.
One homesteader and prospector, James
A. McKenna, reports exploring the upper cliff dwellings in the summer
of 1884, about 6 months after Bandelier's archaeological probings.
In his _Black Range Tales_, McKenna tells of uncovering pottery with
exotic depictions of animals, such as deer, elk, and bears, as well
as corn cobs, beans, and pumpkin seeds, and:
The most
interesting thing we found was a perfect mummy with cottonwood fiber
woven around it. The sex 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.
This mummy was sent off to Washington
D.C. with a man named Webster who said he was with the Smithsonian
Institution. He promised to return the mummy to Silver City in a few
months. When McKenna checked, the Smithsonian responded they knew no
one named Webster doing research for them in the Gila headwaters
area. Subsequently, they did not have the mummy.
The Hill brothers, owners of a hot
springs resort on the Gila River, were the next to find a mummy.
Newspapers in Silver City, Chicago, St. Louis, and Tuscon in 1892
described the find. On the website for the National Park Service, a
document titled _Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument; An
Administrative History_ describes it:
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.
Based on the description in these
newspaper reports, the author of the park service document suggests
the child may not have been a Mogoll
ón
cliff dweller of the late 13th Century at all, but an Apache of a
more contemporary period. The Hill brothers may have instead found
the body on a funeral platform of yucca stalks, located about 150
feet up the canyon wall opposite the caves.
This discovery also was allegedly sent
on to the Smithsonian Institution. Benjamin Elmer Pierce, son of Rev.
R.E. Pierce, was the photographer this time. There is no evidence the
Smithsonian has either the photograph or the body of this child.
Yet a fourth claim for a mummy found in
"Gila Canyon" was registered in the popular press. Manitoba
journalist and editorial writer Agnes C. Laut wrote about it for the
February 13, 1913 issue of Sunset magazine. In her article
"Walking Among Cavemen," she called the mummy "Zeke,"
and expressed the view that here at last was evidence of a dwarf race
of homo sapiens. (!) In her estimation, the mummy was 8,000 years old
and, though only 23" long, an adult. In her lively style, Laut
offers this description:
Anyway, there lies little Zeke -- a long time asleep, wrapped in
cerements of fine woven cloth with fluffy ruffles and folderols of
woven blue-jay and bluebird and hummingbird feathers round his neck.
You will please to remember that in the trifling long ago of 8,000 or
10,000 years our ancestors wore chiefly their birthday suits. Yet
Zeke's people understood weaving. Also Zeke wears on his feet sandals
of yucca fiber and matting.
She goes on to say:
How is it known that Zeke is a type of race and not a freak specimen
of a dwarf? Because other like specimens have been found in the same
area in the last 10 years, and because the windows and doors of the
cave dwellings of the Gila would not admit anything but a dwarf race.
They may not all have been 24 and 36 and 40 inches, but no specimens
the size of the mummies in other prehistoric dwellings have been
found in the Gila.
This fourth mummy was found in 1912,
and according to the document on the National Park Service web site,
was the only mummy to reach the Smithsonian. The author of that piece
further questions whether, in recounting their experiences, Ailman
and McKenna may not have remembered correctly, whether, in fact,
there may have been only one mummy found ever.
Again, my search in the Smithsonian
online record of its archives calls up nothing about the Gila Cliff
Dwellings related to "mummy," "Zeke," or even
"dwarf homo sapiens."
Yet,
through other searches, I do come across an entity that
existed during 1881-1911 called the United States National Museum, a
kind of short-lived offshoot of the Smithsonian that included the
following entry in its Bulletin (now a Google e-book):
Mr. A.J. Connell,
acting forest supervisor of the Gila National Forest, sent to the
Museum, through the United States Department of Agriculture, a mummy
of infant [sic] from a cave on the West Fork of the upper Gila River
called Gila Cliff Dwelling. This mummy (pl. 29, fig. 1) is a child a
few months old. It lies on a wildcat skin, and was so buried in the
débris of the cave. With
the body is a hank of fiber of yucca... held by a winding of
yucca cord, the material of which appears to be the wool of the
mountain goat. A small mass, apparently dried food, and a small
section of wildcat skin... also accompany the mummy. The
clothing consists of a sleeveless jacket of rabbit fur and a waist
garment in form of a band made of pretty downy feathers of the blue
jay and other birds. This band is wrapped around the body, and at one
extremity is attached a rabbit-fur band which passes between the legs
and is secured by a cord at the other end of the band. The weaving of
both the garments is of fiber cord; the rabbit skin is cut in strips,
twisted and held in place by twined weaving. The doll and mass of
fiber (doll bed) were found close to the body. Some needles of
longleaf pine were with the mummy. The burial was in that described
in the Tularose Cave in a bed of grass and was covered with cinders
and débris from the
walls of the cave. (Cat. No. 27340, U.S.N.M.)
And here's pl. 29,
fig 1. from that publication...
What a puzzle!
Yet, still other contradictions can be found in this still unresolved
mystery:
i. An editor's footnote in Ailman's book describing the mummy states
as follows:
The mummy was
discovered in 1899 by the Hill brothers who owned the Hot
Springs ranch. In 1892 they conducted a representative of the
Smithsonian Institution through the cliff dwellings and turned the
mummy over to him.
Okay, the 1899 is
a typo. However, look again, could the mummy in the photograph that
Ailman held in his hand while writing his memoirs be that of a
4-year-old child?
|
Photo
courtesy of the Silver City Museum. |
ii. Ailman's description of the mummy as being a few days old does not seem quite right either -- though I do not doubt these were the
images he was looking at. A few months old seems more accurate to me.
iii. Next, look again at McKenna's description of the mummy he claims
he found. Can a 2-year-old child be only 18 inches long?
iv. Last and maybe least
, in January of 1884,
Bandelier writes that the roofs of sticks, grass, and adobe mud that
once covered the cliff houses were all burnt by Apaches. In
summer
of 1884, McKenna describes the roofs as still intact. Further
complicating matters, despite the notes in his on-site journals,
Bandelier in his final report in
1890 writes that the roofs
were intact.
Is the mystery solved? Apparently
not... Perhaps an Hercule Poirot or an Agatha Christie will want to
take a stab at it some day. Until then, I will continue to enjoy
going about digging up the next history-mystery.
References
_Pioneering in Territorial Silver City;
H.B. Ailman's Recollections of Silver City and the Southwest,
1871-1992_ , by Henry B. Ailman, edited and annotated by Helen J.
Lundwall, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1983.
_Final Report of Investigations among
the Indians of the Southwestern United States, Carried on Mainly in
the Years from 1880 to 1885_ by Adolph F. Bandelier, published by the
Archaeological Institute in two parts, Part I in 1890 and Part II in
1892.
_Black Range Tales_ by James A.
McKenna, The Rio Grande Press, Inc., Glorietta, NM, first published
in 1936, Third Printing, 1971.
_Gila Cliff Dwellings; An
Administrative History_ by Peter Russell, Southwest Cultural
Resources Center, Professional Papers No. 48, Southwest Region
Division of History, Santa Fe, NM, 1992.
"Why Go Abroad? Walking Among the
Cavemen," Sunset 30 (February 13, 1913):156-164, by Agnes C.
Laut, as recorded in _Bulletin of the Pan American Union, Volume 36_,
Congressional edition, Volume 6475 of 1913. Published in San
Francisco.
_United States National Museum Bulletin
87_, "Culture of the Ancient Pueblos of the Upper Gila River,
Regions New Mexico and Arizona," Second Museum-Gates Expedition,
by Walter Hough, Curator Division of Ethnology, United States
National Museum, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1914.