CASA GRANDE

In this day of massive buildings, the Casa Grande still impresses the traveler with its size, rising as it does four stories high. To the eighteenth-century Pima Indians it was an even greater marvel-one which they explained by saying that two supernatural beings, Wind and Storm Cloud, had built it.

In the earliest recorded story concerning the Casa Grande ruins, the Franciscan missionary Pedro Font, in 1775 put down the narrative given him by the Pimas. Travelers who came after Font, and saw the great adobe building which dominated the plain south of the Gila River, also heard similar stories from the Pimas.

A long time ago, the Pimas told Father Font, a strange chief called Bitter Man came to live with the Pimas. With him came his two powerful servants, Wind and Storm Cloud, as well as his beautiful daughter and son-inlaw. Then the old man, with the help of Wind and Storm Cloud, built the Casa Grande. He went to the mountains and cut the huge timbers for the roof himself. At that time the Pimas had no plants or trees but Bitter Man had brought many kinds of seeds with him, and, helped by Wind and Cloud, he reaped large harvests and the Pimas had plenty to eat. But Bitter Man was, as his name indicates, very ill-natured, and he became angry with his two servants and drove them into a far land. After that the crops failed and the Pimas began to starve. Bitter Man then set out to find his servants, convinced them that they should return, and for a long time the Pimas lived well for the crops were good. Then, "they went away and nothing more was ever heard of them."

While the archaeologists who have worked at the Casa Grande and other ruins in southern Arizona can't be said to have found traces of Bitter Man and Wind and Cloud, they have found in the pottery and other artifacts some confirmation for part of the story a strange people did come to the desert and build the Casa Grande, living side by side with the earlier dwellers on the site. The earlier people, who had lived in the desert for over a thousand years, are called the Hohokam. This is a name given by the Pimas and means The Ancient Ones. There is evidence to show that the Pimas themselves are descended, though perhaps not directly, from the Hohokam.

The Hohokam, who, by 800 A. D., occupied much of southern and central Arizona, were dependent upon irrigated farms for their livelihood. For this reason the remains of their villages are to be found only in the river valleys close to a constant supply of water. These village sites show that the houses, very much like the modern Pima homes, were of one room, built of wattle and daub construction. The floors were a little below ground level. The buff pottery with its designs applied in red paint was well made and decorated. So common is this pottery, and so distinctive, that the Hohokam culture is often called "the Red-onBuff culture."

The Hohokam planted maize, beans, pumpkirs or squash, cotton and tobacco. They undoubtedly supplemented their diet with cactus fruits, mesquite beans, and other wild foods.

Many burials have been found which show that the Hohokam cremated their dead. Pottery, carved shell and stone ornaments, and implements were placed as offerings in the graves.

Although many Hohokam artifacts are found near the Casa Grande, the Hohokam did not build the great structure. About 1300 A. D. groups of Pueblo Indians began to come into the desert from the region of the Mogollon Rim. It is thought that a disastrous period of drouth as well as attacks by enemies had forced these people to move into the Hohokam country. These Pueblo Indians are called the Salado, for they had formerly lived on the upper stretches of the Salt River. For 100 years they stayed in the desert, then scattered to the southeast or up the Gila towards New Mexico.

The Salado built the Casa Grande about 1350. It was designed as a watch-tower for the fortified village which surrounded it, and perhaps for other neighboring villages. The entire village may have been built by the Salado. Some Hohokam house floors inside the walls of the compound have been excavated but they may not have been contemporaneous with the massive clay houses of the Salado, whose walls stand conspicuously around the Casa Grande.

The Salado builders were accustomed to stone walls and also to building on hilltops or ridges, which gave them a vantage point. They appear to have been afraid of walls built of nothing but clay, and there is no other building material near the Casa Grande. In order to build as high a structure as possible, and

PHOTOGRAPHS - NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

CASA

Yet have substantial walls, they filled the first floor of the building with dirt, so that the center walls of the structure were braced with fill to a point about eight feet above the foundations. Then only the center walls extended high enough to form the walls of a fourth floor.

The Casa Grande, though distinctively Salado, is not typical of their buildings. It is likely that even in those prehistoric days such a large structure was a curiosity. There were other Salado watch towers but few which had so definite a ground plan or were so high, and none of the others remain today.

A ground floor, rectangular in shape was first laid out and walls for the five rooms it contained were built to a height of eight feet. As it was never planned to use these rooms, no openings for doors or windows were included, and the inside walls were left unplastered. All the walls were then built up two stories higher, while the center walls extended one story more, giving the building its greatest height of four stories and left the other four rooms three stories high. The whole purpose of filling in the ground floor was to give added strength to the center walls so that the Indians would feel safer in carrying up the middle room to its 32-foot height. Since the whole first floor with its five rooms was sacrificed to gain the one room with its greater height, it becomes evident that the primary purpose of the Casa Grande was to serve as a watch tower, although it was also used as a dwelling.

The inner walls of the Casa Grande still bear the original plaster-fine, evenly applied caliche plaster which the builders put on, but roof, floors and outside plaster are now gone. Of the smaller houses in the compound surrounding the Casa Grande only badly eroded walls remain.

The compound (from the Malay kam pung. or walled town) was a village of 50 or 60 houses surrounded by a rectangular defensive wall ten feet high. There was no gate through the walls and access to the village must have been by ladders. Within the walls the houses were constructed in irregular blocks of rooms, some one story, some two stories in height. At the southwest corner of the compound is one three story house.

Between the blocks of houses are large plazas in which hearths, post holes for ramadas, and many tools were found. It was in these plazas, apparently, that the daily activities of the village were carried on. The houses, with their small doorways, and lack of windows, must have been ill-smelling, hot, and stuffy.

Within a radius of a few hundred yards of the Casa Grande village are the remains of three small and four large compounds, all of which were occupied at the time the Casa Grande was in use. This group of villages is located near the end of an irrigation canal which brought water from the Gila River. The beginning of the canal is just east of the present town of Florence; the canal may yet be traced for a part of its length, but most of it has been obliterated within the last 20 years. State Highway 87, just outside the north boundary of the National Monuments covers a portion of the old canal. The fields lie between the canal and the river. Other villages east of the Casa Grande were served by the same canal.

In 1891 the Bureau of American Ethnology excavated the Casa Grande and the following year the ruins were declared by Congress as the Casa Grande Ruins National Park. In 1906 the name of the reservation was changed to Casa Grande National Monument. Now the area is administered by the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior. A museum on the monument houses many artifacts which were excavated from the compounds and from other sites in the vicinity.

If Bitter Man could come back to see the Casa Grande today he would be surprised to find the huge steel and cement roof which protects his old home, and the lonely appearance of the building now that the smaller buildings around it are gone. The rebuilt doorways and steps going into the ruin might confuse him. Perhaps some of the pictographs on the walls, the spider, the human figure, the spiral, would be familiar, but he would wonder at the labyrinth scratched on the wall of the center room and at the names of pioneers and other early travelers. He would find no way to climb to the top of his tower but if he could see around the Casa Grande he would notice fields planted by present day Pimas, who raise much the same sort of crops as the Hohokam and Salado and who have seen yet another invasion of the rich and fertile Gila Valley.

GRANDE

By MARY AND CHARLIE R. STEEN