l6o SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



ing and late afternoon would naturally have thrown into greater relief 

 those slight elevations which mark ancient house sites and irrigation 

 ditches. 



But, despite handicaps of various sorts, our air survey proceeded 

 about as we had planned it. First of all there was the Gila River val- 

 ley, from its union with the Rio Salado to the northwestern slopes of 

 the Tortilla Mountains — a far-reaching plain whereon Pima and 

 Papago farmers tilled favored patches of irrigable land long before 

 the advent of missionaries, trappers, Pony Express riders, and other 

 pioneers of a period now all but forgotten. 



American settlers trailed into the upper Gila valley during the third 

 quarter of the nineteenth century and drew so heavily upon the avail- 

 able water supply that the Indian farmers below were finally brought 

 to a state of destitution. Government promises of relief were made 

 and remade but a half century passed before the Coolidge Dam was 

 completed and provision thus made to meet the needs of whites and 

 Indians alike. The great reservoir is slowly filling and, 70 miles away, 

 farm lands wait thirstily for the life-giving waters. 



With huge, snorting machines that make an Indian's home-made 

 tools seem, by comparison, as nothing at all, 56,000 acres of desert 

 land are being cleared, leveled, and otherwise prepared for irrigation 

 at the rate of 20 acres a day. But the mechanical monsters of the 

 modern engineer are no respecters of prehistoric canals! The latter 

 were being destroyed along with other heritages from the past. Ours 

 was the task of discerning and recording some vestige of those ancient 

 irrigation systems while fleeting opportunity permitted. 



Up one side of the Gila and down the other, Lieutenant Bobzien 

 held his blue Douglas observation plane on a fixed course at 10,000 

 feet elevation while Sergeant Stockwell pointed his camera through a 

 hole in the floor and snapped the shutter with clock-like precision to 

 picture a square mile on each successive negative. Over famed Casa 

 Grande ruins the ship sailed lower in search of those ancient canals 

 seen by Kino and which new cotton fields seem to have erased abso- 

 lutely. And then back to the Indian gardens that border the meander- 

 ing Gila from Sacaton to Pima Butte and beyond. 



Like strips of Grandmother's quilt those gardens are ! Queer, mis- 

 shapen patches with thin ribbons of dark green running this way and 

 that where lesser irrigation ditches crazy-stitched the variegated scraps 

 together. Yet, hopelessly confused and insignificant as these minia- 

 ture farms appear from a height of nearly two miles, they played a 

 not unimportant part in the conquest of southern Arizona. 



