FEWKES] HISTORY Tal 
who had means of acquiring personal knowledge, having been one of the early mis- 
sionaries in Sonora. The Spaniards had an opportunity of experiencing its use to 
their own detriment, and the edifice was so strong that its inmates had to be driven 
from it by fire. Such a place of retreat, in case of attack, the Casa Grande and analo- 
gous constructions in Arizona seem to have been. The strength of the walls, the 
openings in them, their commanding position and height, favor the suggestion. That 
they may also have been inhabited is not impossible; Mr. Cushing’s investigations 
seem to prove it. 
After mentioning certain Pima traditions, Bandelier continues 
as follows: 
The gist of these traditions is that the Pimas claim to be the lineal descendants 
of the Indians who built and inhabited the large houses and mounds on the Gila 
and Lower Salado Rivers, as well as on the delta between the two streams; that 
they recognize the Sonoran Pimas as their kindred, who separated from them many 
centuries ago; that they attribute the destruction and abandonment of the Casa 
Grande and other clusters now in ruins to various causes; and, lastly, that they claim 
the villages were not all contemporaneously inhabited. Further than that, I do not 
at present venture to draw conclusions from the traditions above reported; but enowgh 
is contained in them to justify the wish that those traditions may be collected and 
recorded at the earliest possible day, and in the most complete manner, in order that 
they may be critically sifted and made useful. ’ 
Regarding the kinship of the inhabitants of Casa Grande, Bandelier 
writes :* 
Here the statements of the Pimas, which Mr. Walker has gathered, are of special 
value; and to him I owe the following details: The Pimas claim to have been created 
where they now reside, and after passing through a disastrous flood,—out of which 
only one man, Ci-hé, was saved—they grew and multiplied on the south bank of the 
Gila until one of their chiefs, Ci-vi-né, built the Casa Grande. They call it to-day 
““Ci-vi-nd-qi” (house of Ci-vi-nd), also ‘‘Vat-qi” (ruin). A son of Ci-vi-no settled 
on Lower Salt River, and built the villages near Phoenix and Tempe. At the same 
time a tribe with which they were at war occupied the Rio Verde; to that tribe they 
ascribe the settlements whose ruins I have visited, and which they call “‘O-6t-g6m- 
vitqi” (gravelly ruins). The Casa Blanca and all the ruins south of the Gila were 
the abodes of the forefathers of the Pimas, designated by them as ‘‘ Vi-pi-s¢t”’ (great- 
grandparents), or ‘‘Ho-ho-qsm” (the extinct ones). (Ci-vi-nd had 20 wives, etc. 
[‘‘each of whom wore on her head, like a headdress, the peculiar half-hood, half-basket 
contrivance called Ki/-jo.”—Papers Archxol. Inst. Amer., tv, 463.]) At one time the 
Casa Grande was beset by enemies who came from the east in several bodies, and who 
compelled its abandonment; but the settlements at Zacaton, Casa Blanca, etc., still 
remained, and there is even a tale of an intertribal war between the Pimas of Zacaton 
and those of Casa Blanca after the ruin of Casa Grande. Finally, the pueblos fell 
one after the other, until the Pimas, driven from their homes, and moreover, decimated 
by a fearful plague, became reduced to a small tribe. A portion of them moved 
south into Sonora, where they still reside; but the main body remained on the site 
of their former prosperity. I asked particularly why they did not again build houses 
with solid walls like those of their ancestors. The reply was that they were too weak 
in numbers to attempt it, and had accustomed themselves to their present mode 
of living. But the construction of their winter houses—a regular pueblo roof bent 
to the ground over a central scaffold—their organization and arts—all bear testimony 
to the truth of their sad tale—that of a powerful sedentary tribe reduced to distress 
and decadence in architecture long before the advent of the Spaniards. 
1In Fifth Annual Report of the Archzological Institute of America, 1883-84, pp. 80, 81, Cambridge, 1884. 
