62 THE CLIMATIC FACTOR AS ILLUSTRATED IN ARID AMERICA. 



of the winter showers in March of the first year to the beginning of the rains of the second 

 winter, 18 months later, in October or November of the succeeding year. The Indians 

 obtained no crops whatever; they killed or sold some of their cattle, got credit at the stores, 

 or went off to work in the mines. They would have starved without the resources furnished 

 by the white man; they would have perished of thirst, had they been forced to stay in the 

 region without his deeply sunken wells, the work of tools of iron. We can scarcely empha- 

 size too strongly the dire straits to which the Indians would to-day be driven if dependent 

 only upon their own primitive resources. Even in the well-watered Santa Cruz Valley 

 the struggle for subsistence would be hard enough, l^ut in the drier regions farther west 

 it would be far worse. 



In spite of the inhospitable character of the country west of Tucson, it once was much 

 more densely populated than now ; at least, it is full of ruins. I shall not attempt to describe 

 the small ones in the immediate vicinity of Artesa, nor shall I dwell on those described by 

 various persons, including Americans, Mexicans, and Indians, but which I have not seen. 

 A few lying off to the northwest of Artesa will serve to illustrate all. Beginning at a point 

 aljout 4 miles northwest of Ai-tesa, a line of volcanic buttes extends northward with plains 

 on either side. Floods flow past them from the low mountains of Comovavi* to the 

 northeast, but there is no long-continuing source of water until Nohk is reached, 11 miles 

 from Artesa. Even there the water is not derived from springs or brooks, but from a 

 deep well. Nevertheless, the buttes are covered with defensive walls and with Uttle in- 

 closures Uke those on the hills above the villages of the Santa Cruz. On the first butte we 

 saw from 50 to 100 of the little, rudely walled platforms, wherein we have inferred that 

 famiUes took refuge in time of danger. Down below on the south side of the butte we 

 found pottery scattered about, not thickly, but in such quantities that it could only have 

 been left there by long occupation of the site. How many other villages and forts there 

 may be is unknown. We saw defensive walls on two buttes, and a prosperous Indian at 

 Nohk informed us that they are found on many others. 



Thirty miles to the northwest of Artesa the modern village of Covered Wells, the 

 home of the Papago chief, spreads its scattered houses here and there along the sides of a 

 valley in the Quijotoa Mountains, about 65 miles west of Tucson. As usual the site of the 

 modern village does not at all resemble that of the villages of the past. It is determined 

 by the location of one or two wells. Close to the modern houses no sign of ruins is apparent, 

 for the Hohokam, unlike the modern Indians, deemed good land as necessary as good 

 water. Six miles east of the upper part of Covered Wells, however, and 4 miles from the 

 lower village, on the way toward Tucson, an Indian youth showed us the rums of Maisk, 

 or "Hidden," as the name was interpreted by the guide. They lie far out from the moun- 

 tains, beyond the Hmit of stones and gravel, where the soil is fine and fertile, and where the 

 floods from the mountains can spread abroad and water the plain. Just at this point the 

 road runs nearly parallel to a dry "wash" which sometunes brings down a considerable 

 quantity of flood water. At present no attempt at cultivation is made here, although 

 farther down the wash, where the floods finally spread into a thin, playa-like sheet and 

 soak slowly into the ground, the Indians from the villages beside the wells at the base of 

 the mountains Uve for a time, and sow then- seed. Nevertheless, for three-quarters of a 

 mile at Maisk the wash, which hes just south of the road, is flanked by an area thickly 

 strewn with pottery, which spreads to a distance of nearly 1,000 feet on either side. In 

 one place my companion, Mr. Godfrey Sykes, of the Desert Botanical Laboratory, found 

 a straight channel which looked as if it might have been an irrigation ditch. In another 

 he found what seemed to be the dam of a simple little reservoir 3 or 4 feet deep. Such a 

 shallow reservoir can not have remained full for many months, for one 15 feet deep at the 

 mountain village of Comovavi lasts only six or seven months, so rapid is the process of 



* Often written Comobabi, properly Com Vahia. 



