A Visit to Montezuma Castle National Monument

A Visit To... Montezuma Castle National Monument By Earl Jackson Custodian

ARIZONA is the baby state of the Union, a mere youngster only 29 years old. Over three and a quarter centuries were spent in taming its wilderness and harnessing its primeval energies so that it could add a forty-eighth star to the flag. We know all that is true, because we read about it in our history books. But we don't find in our modern chronicle the story of what happened here before Marcos de Niza, in 1539, wearily trudged on foot across the southeastern part of the state and started the white man's written record of events in Arizona. Long before de Niza's time, while the white man was struggling through the darkness of the Middle Ages, there were people in the Southwest who had reached the peak of a remarkable civilization and were living out its closing chapters. Because they had no alphabet we have read their history by going out to look at the buildings they erected and the objects they made.

In Eastern Yavapai County, not a cannon shot from the geographic center of the state, is located one of America's outstanding memorials to these original citizens and their struggle to maintain life against ter-rific odds. This is Montezuma Castle Na-tional Monument, one of the various areas which the National Park Service protects and interprets for the benefit and enjoy-ment of modern man. Oddly enough, the cliff structure which is its principal feature had no connection with the man after whom it was named, and is not a castle in the true sense of the word. Rather, it is a combined prehistoric fortress and apart-ment house, where a number of Indian families built from desperate need for pro-tection against stronger enemies, and lived in close association with one another. If you scratch your memory for a jiffy you will remember that Montezuma was that ill-fated Aztec chieftain who was treacherously murdered in 1519 while a hostage to Cortez in his own capital city of Tenochtitlan, on the site of which the present Mexico City was built. The Aztec civilization belongs to the Valley of Mexico, and apparently did not in any way influence the culture of the Southwest Indians.

Rightly or wrongly named, Montezuma Castle is a spectacle you don't soon forget. Here, within ten minutes of civilization, you can leave your car at the parking area, and within five minutes of easy walking step into 900 years of forgotten yesterdays. You walk down a level trail on the north bank of Beaver Creek, and 300 yards takes you into a little open glade at the foot of a hill, surrounded by clusters of huge Sycamore and Hackberry trees. Suddenly you glance to your north, and there is the Castle, looking almost down your neck.

The ruins of the large cliff dwelling 100 yards west of the Castle. Only fragments remain of the walled rooms which once fronted these caves.

It almost takes your breath away. It is a hundred yards to the base of that limestone cliff, and forty-six feet above that point to the bottom of the building, but it doesn't look that far. The Castle is a five story structure, forty feet tall, nearly seventy feet wide, and contains 20 rooms, but is so remarkably compact, and it's brownish gray walls are so well pocketed into its white cliff cavern, that it looks much smaller.

The skull of the old lady on the left has a very flattened occiput. This means when she was a child the back of her head became very flat from being carried on a cradle board. She was found buried under the trash dump in front of the Castle.

You feel something like an interloper, catching this hoary old monster in tranquil repose, a sleep that has been unbroken for over five centuries. For it has been that long since human heads peered through its small windows and its dark peepholes, and since the echoes of its builders' voices reverberated through its hidden corridors. You sense that this sturdy, weather-beaten survival of long ago has a story to tell, perhaps a vital and tragic one of human lives, if you can pierce the mist of its shrouded past for an hour. Indeed it has, and your Park Service guide, as he takes you through the building, will help interpret it for you.

The story has its roots shortly after the beginning of the Christian era. While Christian martyrs were hiding from their oppressors in the catacombs of Rome, primitive nomadic Indians of the American Southwest were on the verge of an important discovery which was destined to change the entire course of their existence. They were about to develop agriculture. Somehow, probably by trade with more southerly Indians, they obtained corn, and what is more important, the knowledge that it could be planted and made to grow under controlled conditions.

The Verde Valley of Central Arizona, drained by the Verde River and numerous creek tributaries, was a very fertile country, with long expanses of rich alluvial soil on the river terraces. Groups of farmer Indians settled here long ago. Lack of any early cities or fortified structures indicates that for several centuries these little bands lived peacefully in the valley, industriously caring for their crops, hunting in the nearby hills, and developing the arts of pottery making, basket weaving, and stone implement manufacture to a high degree.

The Verde folk were due for a rude destruction of their security. Let any man gain something desirable, and there is another to covet it. For the second time the valley was entered by nomads, this time by the fierce and warlike Yavapais, some scientists believe. Their entry must have been in the vicinity a thousand years ago. The Apaches, an equally war-like people, also came, but were probably later comers.

The aggressive invaders found the fields of the scattered farmers easy to raid. Many a choice harvest of corn, beans, and squash must have suffered forays, and many a mud and stone hut entered for pillage and loot. A period of roaming in the hills would follow, to be again terminated by harvest stealing and booty gathering among the tillers of the soil.

The first law of nature forced the farmers to begin grouping together in self defense. A new era of large fortified villages was coming in to supplant the scattered rural habitations. The farmers were becoming village, or Pueblo, Indians, building large multiple storied aggregations of rooms capable in some cases of housing several hundred people. The tenth century A. D. apparently saw the inception of the fortified pueblos, constructed principally on hill tops adjacent to the fields, although occasionally a suitable cliff location was found. Tuzigoot National Monument, two miles east of Clarkdale, Arizona, contains an excellent example of the former.

Early in the 11th Century one hardy band of lowland emigrants pushed into a bend of Beaver Creek about four miles from its junction with the Verde River. Here, on the north side of the stream was a high limestone cliff which must have appeared like the answer to a prayer. For it was pitted with numerous caves, erosion pockets worn out in ages past by the waters of Beaver Creek as they cut soft rock from between harder ledges. There were two enormous hollows in the cliff, appropriate sites for large dwellings, and the whole set-up had a warm south exposure fronting on the rich creek terraces which came in places nearly to the cliff base. It was an ideal location.

Here is what remained of a skeleton found on the floor of a room in the burned cliff ruin west of the Castle. Was this person trapped in the burning building, or did a dead body remain, for unknown reasons, on the floor of a room abandoned a short time before the fire? We'll never know.

Thus Beaver Creek saw an 11th Century building boom. The smaller caves presum-ably were first occupied, for they required nothing but low front walls to render them habitable. As additional families joined the colony, however, they grew more ambitious and commenced construction of multiple story dwellings in the two large hollows. The westernmost was the largest, and contained what eventually became a six story building with at least forty rooms. The easternmost hollow, a hundred yards away, first contained a half dozen rooms, but was added onto in five additional building per-iods until it contained the five stories and twenty rooms of the present Montezuma Castle.

A quarter mile west of the larger cliff dwelling was a cluster of over twenty caves and their adjoining masonry and mud-walled houses, connected by a cliff trail with the main structure. Along this trail were several cave homes. On a rocky point projecting from the cliff between the main dwelling and the Castle was a group of about a dozen rooms. So it can be said without stretching the imagination that a maximum of 300 to 350 persons could once have lived in this Beaver Creek settlement.

As noted above, the various dwelling groups of Montezuma Castle vicinity were not all built in one period. It is doubtful if the settlement saw its chief population until about a hundred and fifty years after its founding. There is evidence that the closing years of the 13th Century were a period of intense activity. For in 1276 the famous twenty-three-year drought hit the Southwest, and after a few years of this many of the dryland farmers from the higher altitudes of the state were forced temporarily to abandon their homes and move into the lower river valleys, where there was still sufficient water to carry Showing what the Castle basket weavers could do. The bundle of bear grass leaves in the background is material commonly used in making the common twilled basketry. The inverted coiled basket, similar to the coiled baskets made by modern Apache and Yavapai Indians, was found over the face of a child who was buried under a floor 100 yards west of the Castle.

Picks and axes galore. It is unusual to find original handles in place. These hafted specimens were found in the largest prehistoric southwestern salt mine, seven miles south.

The cave in left background contained scattered fragments of over a dozen skeletons. Floor of room in foreground shows completely charred ceiling timbers, additional proof that this cliff dwelling burned down.

On irrigation projects to a limited extent. Broken pottery fragments found in trash dumps near the Castle tell a significant story. Many of these shards represent pottery tops which were being made in the Hopi country of Northern Arizona. Their quantity, and the period to which they belong, indicate that many of these northerners drifted during the drought into the Verde Valley, here to join the friendly farmers who so closely resembled themselves. This influx of peoples would have required construction of many additional houses.

During the few years that the Hopi type Indians lived here before returning, after the drought, to their homeland, it is believed the Verde folk reached the peak of their cultural attainment.

The beginning of the end, however, was in sight. The next century saw the decline and fall of a thousand years' attainment in the Verde Valley, a decay which left Montezuma Castle a dead and empty shell of vanished glory. The year 1400 A. D. saw most of the Valley pueblos abandoned, and many already falling into ruin. Why did all this happen? The question opens a fascinating field for speculation. We believe archaeologists have dug up the answer.

Obviously the Yavapais and Apaches would have found it practically impossible to invade the hilltop and cliff fortresses of the Pueblo Indians. It is unlikely that they even attempted such hazardous attack. Cat and mouse tactics of siege warfare could have starved the defenders out of Montezuma Castle or any of the other villages, but there is no evidence of that particular brand of military tactics having any popularity with the excitable and temperamental nomadic enemies.