The Fortress at Gila Bend

PREHISTORIC FORTRESS IN THE DESERT

AS I STOOD ON A ROAD AT THE EDGE OF THE TOWN OF GILA BEND AND LOOKED to the north, I could easily see the inclined mesa and the remnants of an ancient Ho-hokam fortified village, arguably the most spectacular Indian ruins in southern Arizona.Called Fortaleza, Spanish for "fortified hill," the little-known ruins lay on the north bank of the Gila River, baking in the desert sun as they had for centuries. Through binoculars I could see the clus-ters of stone dwellings, massive defensive walls, and the sheer cliffs that would have made this village easily defensible by local Indians who felt threatened by enemy in-cursions in prehistoric times. Many think the ruins are the finest example of a forti-fied Indian village in the entire state. Although Fortaleza is just a short hike across the dry, sandy riverbed, I couldn't seem to get there from here.

"The ruins are only three and a half miles from Gila Bend, and they might as well be 300 miles as far as finding a way to get to them," said John Laird, 63, director of the Gila Bend Museum.Laird, a native of the area and an expert desert outdoors-man, had been there before. So had I. Now we were stopped dead by an accident of nature. The culprit was the lowly salt cedar.

This spindly little tree brought to Arizona by pioneers looking for a windbreak shrub that could withstand heat and arid conditions has invaded the bottomlands of the Gila River from Phoenix to Yuma. Normally this isn't much of a problem since the river is usually dry.

But beginning about 15 years ago, a series of winter storms repeatedly struck the state. The Gila River, which carries all the runoff from southern and central Arizona, had four or five "100-year floods" during that period. Painted Rock Dam, some 25 miles west of Gila Bend, backstopped most of the flooding, creating a lake almost 40 miles long. (See Arizona Highways, March '94.) Light diffused by a rose-colored sunset illuminates the stone walls of Fortaleza, a classic period Hohokam fortified village. (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 4 AND 5) (LEFT) From their granite redoubt, the residents of the village had a spectacular view of the Gila River valley and the Crater Mountains beyond. ADRIEL HEISEY The lake has since dried, but the under-ground water table has risen, sparking the growth of salt cedars from pencil-size twigs to trees with trunks as thick as your arm and 10 to 15 feet high. Moreover, salt cedars grow so densely that a man on foot is hard pressed to fight his way through them. It is quite possible to become completely lost in a salt cedar thicket because the high, compact vegeta-tion hides landmarks.

The new growth has covered all the dirt roads that once crossed the riverbed except one or two on privately owned land that farmers keep open with bulldozers.

Laird and I tried to reach the ruins from the north by driving 50 roundabout miles through the desert. But we never even got close. Another time Laird tried to bulldoze a way through the cedars with his four-wheel-drive pickup. That didn't work, either. Next he appealed to Gila Bend Justice of the Peace Polly Getzwiller, whose husband, Marion, has a farm with a road leading to the river.

Marion Getzwiller unlocked the gate, and Laird and I bounced, battered, and bludgeoned our way through the remaining cedars, crossed the loose sand of the riverbed, and four-wheeled across arroyos, mesquite bosques, and mesas to finally reach the ruins. We probably traveled 20 miles for what once was just a 3.5-mile drive.

The ruins lie on a tilted volcanic escarpment. Think of a slanted deck of cards. Sheer cliffs protect three sides of the site. Near the base of the escarpment are fissures that appear to have been fortified, like prehistoric slit trenches. On the sides of the cliff, in natural niches, are tiny walled rooms that appear to me like World War II "pillboxes" that could hold one to three warriors. Across the middle of the tilted deck, from cliff to cliff, runs a 200-yard-long, six-foot-high, four-foot-wide wall of rock backed up by a number of stone dwellings. A second lower wall of rock, the last defense of the Hohokam Indians, seals off the upper end of the fortress, very near the

PREHISTORIC FORTRESS

Edge of the 200-foot-high cliff. This wall, too, is tied into several dwellings.

Along the sides of the cliffs are numerous shelters or small caves that served as dwellings. Some have large cylinder-shaped mortar holes, worn deep into the lava stone floors, which the occupants used to grind corn and seeds into flour.

Below the south cliff in a saddle between Fortaleza and another hill lies a huge block of stone covered with petroglyphs. Nearby is a rock shrine and a small stone circle, one of what some archaeologists call "sleeping circles." The rocks are believed to have been used to anchor brush wickiup shelters.

Beneath the south cliff are the ruins of four dwellings, three of which are in natural alcoves in the cliff with rock walls built over the entrances. Seven more rooms were found on the talus slopes under the cliffs. But the most impressive ruins are on the slanted top of the escarpment. More than 70 rooms, most of them intact, are scattered from the base of the hill to the top. They consist of three types: dwellings, storerooms, and ceremonial structures.

The late William Wasley, an archaeologist with the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, excavated the site in 1964 with the help of local Tohono O'odham Indians. The tribal name for the place was KoKleetset, which means "rocks all around."

According to Wasley, the site dates to between A.D. 1200 and A.D. 1300 and was built purely for defensive purposes. Just who were the enemies of the Hohokams who farmed the Gila River bottoms with the help of an extensive, highly engineered irrigation system - is not known.

Evidently the threat was longstanding, Wasley said, and the Hohokam farmers would retreat to their fortress village for lengthy periods long enough for the women using stone manos to grind large mortar holes up to 11 inches deep in the hard volcanic stone.

The major fault of the fortress was a lack of enough water on the site. Water had to be carried up from the river below or a nearby spring and stored in clay jars. Food, too, had to be stockpiled in case of a siege or a bad growing season.

There is no evidence that the fortress was ever conquered or even that it was attacked. The site was abandoned sometime around A.D. 1300, about the time the Hohokams dispersed. The same thing happened about the same time to almost all the agricultural peoples in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Scientists differ over cause. Some believe the departure was due to a lengthy drought, others attribute it to a religious revolution, still others blame diminishing natural resources.

Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, the famed Spanish missionary, explorer, and colonizer, is believed to have been the first European to visit the ruins when he traveled the lower Gila River in the late 1600s. In 1877 a map locating the ruins was published on the cover of a book promoting Arizona Territory, and in 1905 a newsman wrote a story about the fortress he had seen in the late 1880s. In 1909-10 Carl Lumholtz, an early Southwestern scientist, surveyed the site and found it to be "admirably adapted to defense."

What is so surprising about the ruins is the state of preservation despite the passage of nearly 700 years. Wasley said both defensive walls were intact, and many of the dwellings still had their original walls. Of course the mud and wattle roofs as well as the interior wall plaster had long since rotted and washed away.

In the 1960s, the Tohono O'odham Indians (then known as Papagos), the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Town of Gila Bend wanted the site restored as a tourist attraction. So after the archaeological work was completed, Indian laborers hired by Wasley rebuilt the collapsed structures.

John Laird, a friend of Wasley, said the Indian workers didn't stop adding stone when they were rebuilding the walls."

The original walls were about five feet high because the Hohokams weren't a very tall people. But the laborers didn't pay any attention to height, and so the restored walls are much higher, so high that they ran out of rock to finish the remainder of the houses, Laird said.

Most of the building material — rocks, wood, earth for making mud for plaster and roof covering - had to be carried up the steep incline of the Fortaleza mesa. The thousands of pieces of heavy stone that went into building the breastworks and dwellings came from five quarry sites found below the escarpment. Long lines of Hohokam workers, bent under the weight of the large rocks, must have been used to carry the stones to the top of the mesa.

"Wasley found two burial sites at the base where the Indians cremated their dead. After the cremation ceremony, the ashes and bone fragments were put into jars and buried in the soft alluvial soil at the bottom of the hill," Laird said.

He led me up the path, visible at places with stones smoothed and polished by countless feet, that the ancient Indians used to reach their fortress homes. At the first fortified wall, he showed me how the Indians had cleverly made an opening at the very edge of the north cliff. Any attack-er, trying to come through, could easily be pushed off the cliff by the defenders.

The last wall was much shorter in length than the lower wall. Perhaps the Indians knew that if they ever had to fall back to its protection, a smaller fortification could more easily be defended.

"I used to play up here when I was a boy," Laird said. "My friends and I would look around the cliffs for hidden rooms and imagine that the Indians were still around."

At the summit of the escarpment are two rock points. One is called Gossip Point be-cause the metate holes there at the edge of the cliffs are believed to be where the Indian women gathered to work and talk. The other is a rock extension over the 200foot void called Suicide Point.

"The story that went around was that this was where the Indian captives were forced to jump off the cliff. There's no basis in fact for that, but we boys truly believed that's what happened," said Laird.

He showed me another site some 400 feet down and a half mile to the east where Wasley had found a large stone-walled circle that once surrounded a wooden-walled building. Only post holes remained of what was probably a granary, which the Indians would have sealed with a thick coat of dried mud to keep out rodents.

"They [the Indians] farmed this whole area," he said. "You can still see their irrigation canals, eight feet deep and 25 feet wide. Over there to the southeast is the Gatlin Site. My uncle, Slick Gatlin, once owned it. It's a huge ruin, 110 acres with platform mounds, ball courts, and everything. And it's just three miles east of here and three miles from Gila Bend. Archaeologists partially excavated it in 1958-60, and the site is now owned by the town. We'd like to open it as a park, maybe in conjunction with this ruin. That was the original idea 30 years ago."

Chuck Turner, Gila Bend's mayor, said an Indian ruin park complex would be great because tourism is what the town thrives on.

"We get a great number of winter visitors who stop at our museum, and it's amazing how many of them seem to know all about Fortaleza," he said. "We'd like to open the Gatlin Site to tourists and make Fortaleza more accessible," Turner added.

"But the biggest problem, as you found out, is keeping a road open to the site. The Town of Gila Bend is willing to work with the Bureau of Land Management, which administers some public land we need to cross, the San Lucy District [a division of the Tohono O'odham Tribe that has jurisdiction over the 15-acre site contain-ing Fortaleza], and the owners of private land in the area.

"If we can all work together, we can open these ruins to the public. There are a lot of people wanting to visit the site, but they can't get there, even though it's only three miles away," Turner said.

In the community of San Lucy, which is less than a mile from Gila Bend, tribal chairperson Ernestine Marquez echoed the wish to open a road. The problem, she said, is the cost of continued maintenance because a road must be kept graded to prevent the salt cedars from growing back.

Meanwhile, anyone who wants to attempt a visit to the ruins can do so by obtaining a free permit from her office, Marquez said.

WHEN YOU GO

For more information about the Fortaleza site, call the Gila Bend Museum, (520) 683-2002. The museum has a fine collection of Hohokam artifacts, historical photographs, and material on early Gila Bend. Museum Director John Laird will give the best directions and advice on reaching Fortaleza. To obtain a free permit to visit Fortaleza, contact the San Lucy office, one mile west of Gila Bend on San Lucy Road (307th Avenue); (520) 683-6315.