Unraveling the Mummy Mystery...

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 Mogollón 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.