Pueblo Grande

Other institutions of higher learning. The war effort has become a major function. The OSYA (out of school youth and adult) has been in operation and in the past year one hundred seventy have received training. Also engineering, drawing and training of nurse's aides have been offered to women. Pilot training under the Civil Aeronautics Authority was begun in September, 1939. After Pearl Harbor applicants to secure this training were required to be in some branch of the armed forces. Now the Army sends candidates to the Phoenix Junior College for full time training. They are fed in the College cafeteria and use the gymnasium as a dormitory. Since the beginning of the program at Phoenix Junior College over eight hundred men have been trained, many of whom are now in active service.

Thus the Phoenix Union High Schools System including Summer High School, Correspondence School and KTAR School of the Air have served over twenty thousand people during the past year.

In addition to her public schools, Phoenix has a number of fine private and parochial schools which serve specific groups and are also maintaining a high standard of instruction.

The Judson School for Boys, located North of Camelback Mountain, at the edge of Paradise Valley, is a boarding and day school. There the boy is taught, besides the regular school work, how to ride, swim, play tennis, and to enjoy Arizona's unbeatable climate.

The Jokake School for Girls, located in the shadow of Camelback Mountain, is a boarding and day school, featuring riding, dramatics and college preparation.

The Arizona Academy, maintained as a boarding school by the Board of the Seventh Day Adventists, serves Arizona and part of California with a full high school course, featuring Pre-medical and Pre-dental courses. At present many of their boys are taking a course as medical cadets from which they are admitted into the Army Medical Corps.

The Catholic schools are several: St. Mary's Boys High School, under the Franciscan Fathers, offers work in college preparatory and commercial from the ninth through the twelfth grades and serves a group of some two hundred boys; St. Mary's Girls High School, under the direction of the Sisters of the Precious Blood, offers like training to a group of one hundred seventy-five girls. St. Mary's Grammar School, also under the Sisters of the Precious Blood, are training around seven hundred fifty students through the first eight grades. These three schools, centrally located, are easily accessible by bus and street car.

St. Francis Xavier, a grammar school under the Sisters of Blessed Virgin Mary, administers to the educational needs of the North side. Their growth and enlargement includes a high school for girls which will start this year with the ninth grade and an additional grade to be added each year. The St. Matthews and St. Agnes Schools, under the Sisters of Blessed Virgin Mary, now offer grades one to four and plan to add a grade a year. The Catholic Schools are all housed in beautiful. well constructed buildings, adequately maintained.

The school systems of Phoenix stand ready to train the children from the kindergarten through two years of college, including many vocational choices. These services will be continued and enhanced as time passes. My experience of a lifetime in Arizona prompts me to say that Phoenix will continue her schools among the best in America and for as many children as may come within her boundaries.

Phoenix had its first public school September 5, 1872, and there were 20 pupils in attendance. Incidentally, at that time there were 15 saloons and four dance halls operating that fall.

PUEBLO Grande TURNING BACK THE SUN-LIT CENTURIES TO A PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATION THAT LIVED AND FLOURISHED IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN BEFORE MODERN MAN CAME AND BUILT PHOENIX

ARIZONA Highways has asked for a brief and air had the same health giving qualities, their basic stage of culture would be both un word-picture of ancient life in the Valley of the Sun, such as it may be interpreted by the records of research at the municipal laboratory of the Pueblo Grande museum. This could be most easily done by presenting a so-called scientific report of stratigraph tests, material culture analyses, percentatge charts and other graphs, and let the reader make his own interpretations; but in as much as the Arizona Highways is not restricted to a circulation among a few esoterically minded students of archaeological techniques, it seems best to keep the laboratory records in the background and bring to the front such historical lessons as comparison and contrast may give to social values instead of to chronological events. To begin with, we must realize that the his tory of the ancient Valley of the Sun covered about ten times the span of our own recorded events, and all of it took place before Columbus brought historians to this continent. When Jack Swilling and his fellow settlers came to the valley in the middle of the 19th century, they found it much the same as it had been some twelve hundred years earlier when it was first discovered by the Indian settlers. The sunthe rich soil held the same promise of freedom from want to any one willing to bend his back in agricultural toil, and the small rainfall made farming possible only by means of artificial irrigation. The river was still a deep and narrow stream with a permanent flow of water to be used for that purpose. Both groups of settlers were fundamentally the same and were urged by the same human drives which for ever have driven man towards the goals of freedom and security. Freedom from want and fear had not yet been fully attained by eith er group, while the freedom of speech and of religious practices had not yet been lost by one group and only recently had been regained by the other. Whereas the modern settlers were traveling on the roller-coaster of civilization and enjoyed the freedom of exploitation without the restric tions of social responsibility, the prehistoric settlers were still in what anthropologists refer to as a cultural stage of social evolution. The Indians had neither the knowledge nor the op portunities to exploit their fellow men or nature for individual gains, and to endow them with virtues and accomplishments beyond those ofjust and historically incorrect.

If we were to say that they created a “mil lion dollar” irrigation project without steam shovels, bond issues, political wrangling and graft, it undoubtedly would be true, but the comparison belongs in the scale of social evolu tion rather than in the consideratiion of innate human tendencies. With the Indians the meaning of the word “welfare” still held a tribal or communal connotation and no one had as yet acquired individual wealth and leisure for the exploitation of his fellow man. Neither did they have the opportunities to exploit na ture for immediate individual profit. They had no cattle or sheep or other industries with which to destroy the watershed and disturb the regular flow of water and thereby necessi tating the construction of storage dams in the mountains above the valley. This happened only a few years after the civilized settlers ar rived on the scene. If we were to say that the prehistoric set tlers were a primitive people it could not be denied and it should lend some virtue to the meaning of that word. If their actions were based on simplicity it was because their systemof education was basic and their social relationships fundamental. How the world of today is yearning for such primitive doctrines! And how much the thinkers of today are trying to recapture this quality in the non-material phases of modern life without realizing that the snowball of material civilization grows more cumbersome as it rolls steadily away from primitive beginnings.

The Pueblo Grande laboratory building and the ruins of the Hohokam granary on the bank of the Grand Canal. About one thousand years earlier a Hohokam canal followed the same contours.

Any possible tribal and linguistic affiliations of the prehistoric settlers with Indians of today is unknown. Likewise in the realm of spec-ulation the problems of where they came from and where they went when they finally abandoned the Valley of the Sun. At any rate the valley was abandoned about the beginning of the 15th century, to lie fallow until it invitingly met the eyes of the white settlers who saw not only the opportunity to reclaim the land for agriculture, but visualized new communities rising from the ruins of the old ones. Hence they named their first city after the Phoenix bird of mythology.

gions involved and give them names of their own choice. The dry-farming culture of the plateau region of the southwest is named the "Pueblo Culture," after the Spanish name for the little towns they found there in the 16th century. The people who developed the irri-gation farming culture in the Valley of the Sun and adjacent areas are spoken of as the "vanished people" by the present Pima Indians, in whose language it becomes "Hohokam," and this name has been in turn adopted by archaeologists when they refer to the local culture.

This "Hohokam Culture" had its inception along the Gila River at an unknown date, probably during the early centuries of the Christian era. The Gila, with its lower terraces, of fered a number of small but ideal areas for flood-irrigation farming to the small group of Indians who then entered that valley, undoubtedly with some knowledge of agriculture and with seeds of corn and other crops in their possession. As this pioneer group increased and needed more land than was available on the river terrace it became necessary to invent some method to bring irrigation to the unlimited upper terrace, or the desert level itself, and the simple solution to this problem was the construction of rock and brush diversion dams and canals to carry off the diverted water. Once this was done it became possible to farm in the Valley of the Sun also, where the ab sence of flood terraces made it impossible before. This expansion took place some time around the beginning of the 8th century, or a little before, and it marked the end of several settlements along the Gila River and the beginning of the Valley of the Sun settlement.

For some 700 years this valley was the scene of constant growth and development with new villages springing up wherever canals could be dug to bring new lands under irrigation. When they abandoned this area they left behind them the ruins of some 20 villages and a total of some 125 miles of main canals. How large the population was then or at any given period of their occupation will never be known. It cannot be estimated on the basis of the size of village areas, nor the number of canals and possible acreage under cultivation. Too many unknown factors are involved in such guessing. But it may be said with reasonable accuracy that for some 500 years the Valley of the Sun was haven of peace and prosperity and its inhabitants must have enjoyed the security and happiness which comes from a well balanced social organization.

Their material world was limited to what nature provided of stone, clay, shell, bone, woods, grasses and fibres with which they produced tools and implements, shelter and cloth ing, jewelry, ornaments and a number of other articles needed in their daily life. They had trade connections with other Indian tribes from the Gulf of California to the Pueblos in the mountains of northeastern Arizona, and up till the beginning of the 13th century everything in their culture deposits points to a peaceful existence. Their social organizations, geared as it was to the success of their undertaking must have been planned on the communistic principle, with each village responsible for its own welfare and each individual responsible for the village welfare. Cooperation between vil lages must also be taken for granted and this spirit of brotherly fellowship probably ex tended to the limits of their known world. Delicately carved stone and shell ornaments and well designed decorations on their pottery utensils speak of the same esthetic qualities which has driven mankind of all ages toward the freedom from ugliness, and spiritually the Hohokam people were as close to their god as children of nature always have been. Much of their artistic labor went into objects of a religious character. For recreation they prob ably had gathered with the wise men of their tribe and learned the traditions of the past and the codes of the prevailing ethics, but they also had sports and games, such as races and ball games. Each village had its own ball court and whatever the rules and method of play may have been the game was competitive and probably was played between villages as well as intra-mural.

From such implied conditions one may draw many pictures of daily life in the ancient Valley of the Sun. People going to work on the canals aand toiling in the fields, or repairing a diversion dám; or a woman grinding corn while another weaves a blanket or a garment from cotton or grass or perhaps strips of rabbit fur; or, again, children gathered around a com munity cooking pit, waiting hungrily for the uncovering of the mountain sheep and other foods which have roasted in the heated earth oven for a day or more, and which may be for a feast welcoming a returned trading party, or hunters coming home, or visitors from an other village. Religious dances, the cremation and burial of one of their loved ones, the building of a new house, the medicine man's prayer for the sun's help to cure his patient, or the old man sitting around a pile of stones to be fashioned into smooth axes and rough grinding stones, these and many other scenes may be projected into a picture of local activities.

But the Hohokam people still had to learn that both man and nature can be enemy. About the turning of the 13th century this became increasingly evident as the seepage water from irrigation stored up under the valley and caused land to become useless from water logging or alkali deposits and the newly arrived marauders from the nearby mountains came down to raid their villages. For a while they struggled against both. As the water table rose high enough to bring moisture into their granary floors and rot the crops, they raised the floor level with dirt fill by a few feet at the time. At Pueblo Grande this was done eight times within a couple of hundred years, each time by rebuilding a one story wattle and mud structure on a new level until the foun dation was higher than the structure itself.

This gave the ruins the superficial appearance of an original multi-storied building similar to the Pueblo dwellings and caused the name Pueblo to be connected with the local culture. Around this structure were built lean-to rooms and the whole was enclosed by a high wall, forming a compound similar to the stock-ades around the blockhouses the early European settlers used in the east to protect themselves against hostile Indians. Thus, when the alarm was given for a raid, the Hohokam people could leave the fields and villages for the compounds and by removing the ladders from the walls have a measure of protection against their enemies. But the safety measures against both nature and man were only temporary and about 1400 A. D. our archaeological picture ends. The Hohokam left the valley and for good reasons. Speculation about droughts or eroded river channels which left the canals high and dry, or pestilence and other unprovable reasons for their disappearance is only idle pastime with no added significance. A more proProfitable speculation would be one projected into the future of the valley and other valleys where men live the world over. Today we have the electric pumps to combat a threatened water table, and many other means to overcome some of nature's seemingly unfriendly behavior, but how far have we progressed in the matter of combating man's aggression against his fellowman? Materially we are vastly higher in the scale of progress than the Hohokam were, but spiritually and socialogically we cannot make such a claim. If the picture could be reversed so that the ancient Indians could look down on our present civilization, perhaps they would have none of it and be thankful they lived when they did.

Now a word from our sponsors: The ruins known as Pueblo Grande became municipal property and about 3 acres including the mound of the old granary compound were es tablished as a municipal prehistoric monument in 1924. Later some land containing rem nants of ancient canals was acquired near the river, as well as a portion of the main village site adjacent to the granary mound. In 1929 the city administration appointed an archaeological commission to make plans for the future development and use of monument area