Arizona's First Farmers

An authority of some note was dispatched not many years ago to northern Arizona, there to demonstrate to the Hopi Indians the latest revelations in the scientific cultivation of corn. He shaped his plots with geometric elegance, plowing with a small tractor, then seeding mechanically. All the while the Indians watched wryly, while they punctured with digging sticks their own fields nearby.

Spring on those high plateaus tends to be cloudless, and the winds of May a wringer of moisture, and so it was that year. Soon, the seedlings of the bahana (non-Hopi) were withered into surrealistic tangles. Those of the natives greened with promise. The expert departed abruptly, and only then did the residents, being too polite a people to rebuff a visitor, laugh aloud.

What the stranger had failed to grasp were the unyielding lessons learned through experience. The Hopi have grown corn in much the same manner and essentially in the same sandy places for at least seven centuries, as their forebears did even earlier elsewhere. By most modern agronomic standards, the result is less than spectacular. Usually the stalks stand truncated and thickset, which happen to be traits of the people themselves. Still, the Hopi and their crops have long prevailed in an environment that most agriculturists generally would dismiss as beyond redemption.

Even the approximate time when the arid southwestern soil first was farmed may never be wrested from the shadows of antiquity, although a crude corn had appeared by 2500 B.c., a small, shrunken pod corn (so primitive that it barely was recognizable as corn) unearthed in Bat Cave near Magdalena in western New Mexico. Each kernel was held in its own separate husk!

Scattered bands of Indians, and particularly those in the mountains where water would have been comparatively plentiful, must have amended their nomadic hunting and gathering thereafter by sporadically tilling that still-evolving grain.

Perhaps they followed the pattern of the latter-day Apache, who, as they raided and warred against the Mexicans and later the Americans, would sometimes insert some seed in the soil of sheltered canyons, maybe drop by later to pull a weed or two, but mainly hope that, whenever they got around to it, they might make a meal off the yield. These wanderers, incidentally, thought that a live cricket entombed with their seed would guarantee bounty; should the insect die before burial, the crop would suffer.

To truly domesticate plants, though, required a sedentary life-style. And according to the prevailing archaeological doctrine, the first Arizonans did not begin to gather into agricultural villages until nearly the time of Christ.

Once the dispersal of plant husbandry began, it was, if not explosive, at least inevitable. Not long before the Nativity, settlements began to take shape in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona, at what now is called Point of Pines, and soon thereafter great sprawling apartments were tucked securely into the cliffs at Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado.

Within a few centuries, the agriculturists at Point of Pines had learned to make the most of the infrequent precipitation by capturing runoff. They tailored their parcels to the piney, ridge-ribbed terrain, bordering or gridding them with low rock walls, all of this with tools that must have been simple, to say the least.

These techniques spread across northern Arizona and the Four Corners country, where now Arizona touches Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. South of the San Juan River, 800 years ago, prehistoric planters constructed check dams, wind screens, and even erosion barriers; one stone sluice spanned a stream.

Nowhere, however, was water control more mastered than around present-day Phoenix in central Arizona, where the Hohokam diverted the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers for irrigation.

The name Hohokam (ho-ho-KAM), a term in the Pima tongue roughly translatable as "all used up," was applied to those prehistoric canal builders because knowledge of their ultimate fate, like that of their origin, remains as elusive as a midsummer mirage. They are just gone, "all used up."

Historians, while they may be baffled By what became of these long-gone innovators, are nonetheless awed by their accomplishments. They carved out, by hand, canals that made possible the irrigation of fertile land as far as ten miles from the river; as much, some say, as 75,000 acres in all. Irrigation also emancipated the Hohokam in that they no longer had to settle immediately adjacent to a stream. Their later canals were narrower but deeper, apparently to reduce evaporation loss. The first Yankee settlers from the East arrived and used some of the minor canals; even now the Pima Indians utilize a few of the ancient ditches. The majority of the ancient waterworks were reclaimed long ago by the uncompromising desert or obliterated by urbanization.

Nonetheless, the concluding chapter is unfinished. If the Hohokam could claim a metropolis, that would have been Snaketown, huddled hard by the Gila River southeast of Phoenix. Its remains are not outwardly striking. Tamarisks parade the river's banks, and dust devils swirl from the barren bed of what once was a permanent stream a life line when the first farmers came. Although the Snaketown site has been declared a Registered National Historic Landmark and has been authorized to become part of the National Park System, only a trained eye is likely to detect the low earthen heaps of prehistoric dross thatmask the drama played out there. An important archeological site, it is fenced off and closed to unauthorized visitors at present.

Snaketown, over its considerable history, sprawled across 300 acres and it sheltered over a millennium and a half probably 5000 homes in total. It had a stable, peaceful, ordinarily-prosperous populace that was civilized far beyond any other north of central Mexico. All of this was brought about, remarkably, by a hydraulic society to which metal was unknown. This society first revealed itself to the spade in 1934, to a team financed by a private archaeological foundation. The field director was Emil W. Haury, Ph.D., who later would head the University of Arizona's anthropology department and become a scholar internationally esteemed.

Among other facts of Snaketown life, it was established by evidence in the mid-dens there that the people crafted pottery and built ball courts and ritual mounds, all remarkably reminiscent of those in Central America far to the south. The expedition also traced their irrigation net-work, found that newer canals often were superimposed upon the older, and dated the oldest of those uncovered as having been laboriously scooped out by hand about the year A.D. 800.

In the years following the 1930's exca-vations, Dr. Haury became increasingly haunted by the thought that there should be something else there at the ancient site, something from still further back in the mistiness of the past. A dozen years ago he earned a chance to test his hunch, and with a large supporting cast of scientists and technicians he revisited and re-exca-vated the Snaketown site in the mid 1960s.

vations, Dr. Haury became increasingly haunted by the thought that there should be something else there at the ancient site, something from still further back in the mistiness of the past. A dozen years ago he earned a chance to test his hunch, and with a large supporting cast of scientists and technicians he revisited and re-exca-vated the Snaketown site in the mid 1960s.

It is agreed among anthropologists that only a well-fed culture, having left behind the scramble for even a minimal subsis-tence, can afford artisans and priests that indeed the sophistication of tribal creativity and religion can be correlated with the fullness of its storage bins. The later excavations, made in 1964-65, reinforced this concept.

The artifacts found then, the tiny ceramic figures, stone vessels, and the like, were at least as exquisite as those uncovered a generation earlier during the first excavations. And this time it was found that the Hohokam had discovered etching. With the fermented juice of saguaro fruit (which turns into a mild acid) they etched sea shells with the likenesses of animals hundreds of years before the armorers of Europe utilized a similar process.

Their engineering skills were equally acute. The land they cultivated apparently was chosen carefully for its angle of slope. The main canal, which stretched out for 15 miles, dropped about five feet a mile, almost precisely the grade that modern irrigators recommend.

(Opposite page) Centuries before the arrival of the Spanish, Hopi farmers were successfully growing corn, beans, squash, and cotton with dry land farming techniques which are used to this day. Jerry Jacka A few weeks before the end of the 1964-65 project, trenching exposed a tantalizing segment of what seemed to be a canal of especially great age; all other tasks were put aside and the entire crew excitedly began trenching along its axis. This led, after 225 feet, to its end, surmounted by a jumble of evidence of obviously newer ditches. So was discovered the primordial canal, completed about 300 в.с.

It had been determined earlier that the village, or most of it, had fallen into disuse circa A.D. 1150; thus, discovery and dating of the ancient canal showed that Snaketown flourished for something like 1450 years. It antedated the rise of the Roman Empire, which it then outlasted by practically seven centuries. Haury, writing in his superb new review of this (The Hohokam: Desert Farmers and Craftsmen [University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1976]) concedes that they were not one of the world's great societies. But, he adds, “ . . . they revealed a strain of greatness characterized by a cultural form that assured unusual stability.” Because charred corn was recovered from a floor of one of the oldest houses, one can conclude that Snaketown was an agricultural community from the very outset. This would support Haury's hypothesis that these original Arizona (and United States) irrigators were immigrants from Mexico who brought with them the seeds of change and a way with water management. Even so, it is reasonably certain that there were other paths by which the cultivators of central Mexico made their way north, for the species at Snaketown also were under cultivation, or soon would be, throughout the region: beans, pumpkins, cotton, and, of course, the omnipresent corn. But here the pages are missing from agricultural history. Of all the episodes in human ascendancy, none was more momentous than the birth of agriculture when Man saw that he no longer needed to forage for plants, but could nurture them at will. This transformation did not occur in a single seedbed, as was commonly thought to be the case only a generation or two ago, but at times and in settings separated by thousands of years and as many miles. Seven thousand or so years ago, rude wheat and a basic barley were tilled in the Middle East. About 2000 years later, give or take a century or two, small men crawled from their caves in the valley of Tehuacán and possibly elsewhere in the southern Mexican highlands to tend the first maize or corn (the names are interchangeable). That plant bore hardly any resemblance to the plump ears we now know; it was a tenth the size or less. The husk was inconsequential, and the hard tiny kernels were encased in chaff.

How and when maize managed to enter our American Southwest may never be determined; it entered, though, while it still was evolving. The most archaic corn at Bat Cave and Snaketown were not dissimilar to that at Tehuacán and the development of the northern corn paralleled that of corn to the south. No doubt invigorated in Mexico by hybridization from the wild grasses that are its relatives, the plant gradually became larger and more palatable. (Moreover, it became so dependent on human intervention that, sheathed in husks, it no longer could reproduce in nature.) Beans followed shortly, tamed in roughly the same era and area. Whether this was by chance or through some strange Indian insight, it was fortuitous. Corn lacks an essential amino acid lysine in which beans are rich. If man lives by corn alone he is beset by pellagra.

When Cortez conquered Mexico, he found not only those two staples being husbanded, but chilis and tomatoes as well, each unique to the New World. The Aztecs also ate agave worms and newts and even feasted, during certain ceremonies, on one another.

Corn, especially, had a profound effect on the United States. It quickly reached the Great Salt Lake to the west and spread over the entire eastern seaboard. It was said to have spared the newly arrived Pilgrims from starvation, moving Plymouth Colony governor Bradford to write, “It was God's good providence that we found this Corne, for else we know not how we should have done.” Corn was so conducive to farming in the Southwest that it brought about great growth in the aboriginal population to levels unsurpassed still but also rendered it easy prey to disaster.

From tree-ring records we know that the years between A.D. 1150 and 1300 were far drier than the preceding period or that which followed, with a notably pernicious drought from 1276 to 1299. Just before 1300 the cliff dwellers abandoned Mesa Verde.

There were, concurrently, marked dislocations. Some sections, northern Arizona for one, were all but completely emptied of inhabitants. The remnant population remaining at Snaketown, in what Emil Haury terms “the suburbs,” left in 1450. Almost to the year, Point of Pines was abandoned.

No convenient consensus exists to explain why all these people migrated or even where they went. Although epidemics and enemy incursions may have been factors, more specialists than not suspect the climatic changes, though Haury doubts that climate alone could account for the departures from Snaketown.

Many of the migrants crowded into the pueblos along the Rio Grande to the east, which continued to be watered by the melting snows of the high Rockies. Hundreds of others must have been assimilated elsewhere, but some simply vanished. The Haury theory is that the Hohokam were the forebears of today's Pima and Papago, who occupy the same lowlands; Arizona State Museum ethnologist Dr. Bernard L. Fontana, on the other hand, leans to the view that a number of them may have moved north to join the Hopi.

At any rate, the Indian farmlands have never again encompassed so great a swath of the Southwest as they did prior to A.D. 1150. A cautious return, over time, brought some groups back to the locales most favored by nature, such as the Hopi mesas.

Black Mesa, on whose escarpment edges the Hopi live, serves as a huge subterranean collecting basin that unfailingly funnels water into the springs around which their gardens are clustered. Below, along the mesa bases, thick dunes have been blown over the bare sandstone, building up a blanket that retains dampness like a blotter.

And then there are flood and akchin (Papago for arroyo-mouth) farming; seeds are set out in parcels likely to be drenched by the summer showers. Partly because of these hydrologic assets and also because they devote to their plants an intensive care that would astonish a non-Indian agriculturist, the Hopi are highly successful farmers.

The Hopi farmers riddle the soil beneath each plant with a digging stick to entrap as much precipitation as possible. Not long ago an old Hopi was seen carrying a battered coffee can among the young plants in his field. At each plant he would pause, dip a stick into the can, then dabble the end of the stick around the base of each stalk. He explained, "It's dog manure. When you put it around the plants, the rabbits think there are dogs around." They harvest principally the same crops they had before the intrusion of the Euro-peans. These include gourds, which become ceremonial cups, and the long varieties used as phallic symbols, expressing fertility in ritual dances. Once there was a native cotton. There still are beans, squash, and corn most of all, corn. Maize not only is the staff of life to the Hopi and other Pueblo Indians and the Navajo, in addition it is of sacramental significance. Without corn pollen there could be no christenings. When a Hopi child is initiated, he receives an ear of corn that forever after will be his "mother."

These tribes grow corn in what appears to be an infinite number of varieties and in a rainbow of colors, each hue having to do religiously with a cardinal direction. Blue meal is used for piki, the waferthin bread that Hopi women bake atop searing-hot stones and deftly roll into little round bundles. Oral traditions offer histories of the colors. For instance, the Navajo say that a turkey hen once flew in from the direction of the rising sun. When she spread her wings, the first ear of blue corn fell to the ground. The botanists are less romantic. The pigmentation, they say, is a function of the laws of heredity. If the (Opposite page) People that the archaeologists call the Sinagua inhabited the area around Montezuma Castle National Monument and Montezuma Well between the 8th and 14th century A.D. Dick Dietrich placed (other than for rare ritual use) the native cottons that had been tended. There were several wild cottons, one of which even harbored its own authentic American boll weevil, a fact determined in 1912 by a government entomologist. The Hopi maintain they've always had watermelon, a claim that ethnologists reject. The ethnologists point out that the Hopi word for watermelon means "horse sweat" (which the melons presumably remind them of) and that before the Spanish entradas there were no horses, either.

kernel will be blue; if acid, red. Beans always have been a close second in significance. Before February's Hopi Powamu, or Bean Dance, lima beans are to this day seeded inside the subterranean kivas, which are heated to encourage emergence. How the seedlings fare is considered a forecast of the coming season's success. When the Spanish first rode into this country, in 1540, the farming they found was quite different in extent from what it would have been before its diminution by drought three centuries earlier. The Hopi were the most diligent planters, as they still are. The Yumans were watering a few fields from the Colorado River, and the Pima from the Salt and Gila. The Navajo had corn in isolated patches, while the Pima and Papago practiced akchin farming. Due to the erosion of their reservation lands, none of this is as prevalent at present.

But the conquistadores added to the crops from which Arizona's first farmers could choose: wheat and watermelons from Europe, and the chilis and tomatoes they marched up from Mexico. In a way, each became integral in the tribal scheme of things. Now, no Indian village would seem the same in the fall without the chilis draped in scarlet strings across the dun façades of the stone and adobe dwellings. Too, the Spaniards brought horses. These gave the Apache and Navajo foreboding mobility and made the tillage of plants seem to them a less manly endeavor. And because the Spanish introduced sheep to the area, wool ultimately dis-As the Mormons moved into Arizona from Utah late in the 1800s, they, in turn, introduced still other crops, among them sorghum and safflower. But the swelling tide of Anglo-Americans superimposed the even more effective catalysts of merchandising savvy and a wage-work economy, so that now except among the Hopi the Indian farmer is as much an anachronism as small farmers generally. Recently, Dr. Fontana and historian Charles Bowden sought out Papago who farm in the "old ways." They found none, although they came upon one, an old man near the Mexican border, who had done so only a few years earlier. He wasn't sure why he had nor why he intends to try the old ways again.

Arizona's first farmers, the Hohokam, carved out by hand nearly 300 miles of main canals (some of them thirty-three feet wide) as well as spider-webbing the valleys with many times that length in laterals, ditches, and diversions.