DEAN OF THE SOUTHWEST

Hold it must be, and to what purpose it was probably put. He fondled one which he said was as fine as anything which had come out of the Southwest. "See how the neck gives the impression of beading and on the body is the zigzag of lightning and the driving 'he rain.' It is a water jar, beautiful not only in form and design, but exhibiting a wonderful harmony with the uses it was made to serve. It was an expression of the esthetic ideals of the builder and of her constant prayers to the spirits she thought controlled the chief forces upon which she and her family depended for life and happiness."

He replaced the jar almost reverently and went on to cases of sandals, tools of bone and jewelry. His fingers lingered on a card where a string of tiny beads lay coiled. "There are 1700 of these tiny beads, about 50 to the inch. They came out of 2 child burials. Some mother had taken her most precious possession to wrap around the wrist of her dead child. Mother love, at least, hasn't changed in these last 900 years."

The light in the museum room was fading. We knew that there was no electricity and that it would be well to get our beds ready before dark. On a previous visit we had set up our cots under the sky, but this time our host said with pardonable pride: "I have a little guest house and if you would like to use one of the rooms come, let me show you."

We followed him out back of the museum to a building of the same stone as makes up Kinishba. It had been cleverly fused with the foundations of a ruin, and in its simplicity, made us feel that we were in an ancient dwelling. I noticed (thinking with amusement of "that woman" as I catalogued her in my mind) the large doorway and the comparatively ample floor space.

With our camp cots set up and sleeping bags spread on them, it was time to think of supper.

"Won't you please use my kitchen?"

It was Dr. Cummings, speaking from the doorway of his living quarters. So we brought in some of our canned goods and helped to prepare the first of a number of meals that we shared with him. I soon found that it was necessary to be first in the kitchen and with my impromptu menus or our host would raid his own cupboards and have the meal ready and set out on the dining room table before I realized what was happening.

At those meals, we sat at the feet of the master, and were privileged to join him on trips into the past.

"There were primitive people here at some unknown time before Christ," he told us, "living with only such protection as trees or rocky shelters gave them. Taking a cue perhaps from the rabbit and the ground squirrel they developed 'pithouses' partially dug into the earth with branches and mud for a roof."

"The major part of the ruin here represents the Great Pueblo Period, the highest point in the development of the civilization which flourished in the Southwest."

In the evenings we sat in the dining room with a Coleman lamp for illumination and talked until we were too sleepy to continue. As the story of Kinishba took shape and became increasingly real to us, the character of our host and his vision of the world grew, overshadowing even his accomplishment in resurrecting a noble and beautiful yesterday.

His spiritual kinship with a self-sufficient people made him content to live in a simplicity that to others would have seemed harsh and inadequate.

"I would like electricity," he said, "but since I haven't it, I usually go to bed when it gets dark and get up with the sun. You saw the poles for the telephone wire, as you drove up. The wire hasn't come because only as much could be ordered as was ordered last year. We weren't ready for it last year and so 6 miles of wire is more than we used. I did hope it would be in by this spring."

Wasn't there some way he could get mechanical refrigeration, we wondered. He was interested in the possibilities of natural gas under pressure, or electricity generated by the wind.

"Milk gets sour in about a day and a half, and though I keep meat (when I get it) down in the basement, it has to be eaten almost immediately."

The basement was reached through a trap door in the kitchen floor, and I shuddered at the thought of his sometime forgetting to close it, and coming in, perhaps in the dark, and falling down the steps. There would be no one to help him until the next morning when one of the Apache Indian workers would report at 7:00 o'clock.We noticed a small radio that stood in one corner of the room.

"I haven't been able to get any batteries for it for a long time," he volunteered when we spoke of it.

Then, and only reluctantly, he admitted that his eyes were not functioning properly. The doctor had not been able to discover what was wrong but he had a blind spot when he tried to read. So the next day, when we picked up mail at the Whiteriver post office, I read several letters to him.When I wasn't busy, would I perhaps read a little from the latest newspaper or from one of the news magazines? I would and did, gladly, and was rewarded by a glimpse into the spacious chambers of his mind, where the past was only the prelude and foundation for the present's throbbing realities.

Lest anyone think that this 40 acres of fenced land, on the Apache Indian Reservation has been the circumference of Dean Cumming's contribution, let me mention only a few things about his life. As a young archeologist at the University of Utah, he awakened that institution to the necessity of preserving the vestiges of early man in that state. But Arizona has been the scene of most of his labors. As head of the University's Department of Archeology, he has been the teacher and guide of almost every person who has achieved distinction in the field of Southwestern Archeology. He was president of the institution several times. The State Museum grew under his hands from a mere beginning to its present guardianship of artifacts worth millions of dollars. Not a few, but thousands of dollars of his own money have gone into buying things for the museums and into the work of excavation and restoration.

It was not until he was seventy years old, when most men are through with new projects, that he undertook the gargantuan task of restoring Kinishba. It was done, typically, not as a straight research and construction job, but in connection with summer sessions, so that young students might not only assist, but “learn by doing” under his wise and kindly directorship.

The only quarrel, I found, that I could pick with this man was that he was too modest. But beating upon drums, either ancient or modern, has no part in his creed. Let his work stand for itself. And it will. His personality, will stand for itself, as well. People who know him speak with a warmth that is unmistakable. Friends in Whiteriver and many scattered about the world, several of whose letters I read to him, were concerned about his health and about his living alone. It was my own deep-ening sense of his worth as a human being which brought me back, time after time to “that woman” until she seemed to be the epitome of all undiscerning people. “Who’s Who” fails to list him. His living quarters prove that in government circles no one has felt it is his due to be better provided for. The University has retired him as “too old to teach.” What other man of 85 would say that sadly, wistfully, while his wide awake brain was turning over such new plans as the enlargement of the museum offerings, a new guest house, further excavations?

It was Dr. Cummings himself who finally helped me resolve the difficulty in my own mind. I had brought up “that woman” again. “But you must remember, that I didn’t look to her like some one who really knew,’ and his eyes laughed at the whole world that since time immemorial has been satisfied with the mere look of things.

To people who came before him into this quiet river valley, Kinishba had looked like a slightly raised mound of rocks. Dr. Cummings saw it as an ancient city, its walls lifted against the Arizona sky. To the hurried world in general, his life work and his irreplaceable human spirit may look to be just another old man interested in broken pots. It may take the clarifying action of the years to lift his work from its present casual recognition to such a height above the plain of common men, as the warm brown walls of his own Kinishba have achieved above the floor of the White River Valley.

"Kinishba"

Kinishba means Brown House, in Apache. Its name prepares one for the long buildings of brown stone that seem so much a part of the landscape on Ft. Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona. They are the symbol and monument of a pueblo people who lived here centuries ago. A large portion of them are still in ruins, being only the excavated foundations of what were once dwelling places, but the higher walls, rising in some places to three stories are also the monument to men of our own time who have made them rise from the grey-green sage to mirror an age long since gone. They give us a picture of the life of the pre-historic pueblo Indians at the height of their civilization.

The ruins were first mentioned by a white man when Adolph Bandelier recorded that in 1883 he visited them in the White River Valley, standing on "both sides of a deep ravine in the bed of which white pines are growing." Pines still grow there and during the earlier years of excavation, the ravine was the site of the kitchen and dining room for the camp of students who assisted in the work, coming during summer sessions to learn archeology while they helped. Dr. Byron Cummings, then Director of the Department of Archeology for the University of Arizona was directing the restoration. He learned about the ruins from a teacher at the Ft. Apache Indian School and in 1931 started the work. Since then it has yielded its secrets and its treasures as the walls gradually rose again to their former glory.

For about 300 years, during the Great Pueblolo Period, these rooms were being built and then occupied. From the artifacts that were buried by tumbling walls, we can know a great deal of what kind of life they enjoyed. Probably from about 1050 to 1350 A. D. Kinishba was a thriving community, its houses built over an older ruin and the area itself points to having been a favorite spot even in the earlier pithouse era. A look about the valley easily explains why it might have enjoyed such popularity. There is a gently sloping plain about 6 miles long and 3 miles wide, down to the edge of the White River. Springs from the White Mountains to the north provided excellent water and there is enough rainfall to insure one good crop in dryland farming. The natives raised corn, of course, and beans and squash and made use of many herbs and roots that grew wild. The Yucca had a thousand uses.

In the Museum at Kinishba and in the Museum of Arizona, as well as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington are housed the many things which have been recovered from the ruins. The early pothunters, many of them soldiers from Ft. Apache, carried off only the surface treasures, as has been true wherever it was known locally that ruins existed. One cannot help being amazed at the amount of labor that went into the restoration of the