266 
FOREST AND STREAM 
March 2, 1912 
Arizona Ruins 
By J. W. SCHULTZ 
he summons the others, for they are all one 
family. 
There is an art about catching whitefish. The 
trout or bass angler would suffer hunger were 
he to depend upon whitefish for food until after 
he learns the trick. The dainty little mouth of 
the whitefish is an inde.x to his dainty feed’ng 
habits. He does not rush up, seize the bait and 
scoot away like a negro stealing a watermelon, 
but creeps up carefully, nibbles with a touch so 
light that it requires trained fingers to detect his 
presence. A gentle lug on the line, or at most 
the slightest pull, and he is gone. The angler 
must twitch the line at the psychological moment 
if he wishes to succeed. 
I spent three days among the whitefishermen 
last winter, days chock full of fun and sport. 
My success the first and second days was not 
phenomenal. Six lonely fish were all I could 
show for a whole day in the cold, for I had no 
shelter. The second day was little better, but 
the third day redeemed my reputation. There 
is no more a royal road to whitefishing than 
there is to geometry. My hostess, Mrs. Burton 
Harris, stood within a few feet of me and hauled 
them out by the dozen, much to the amusement 
of the fishermen, who were delighted to see me 
“skunked” by a woman. 
The uninitiated must not suppose that pulling 
a whitefish through a hole in the ice is not sport, 
the fish are very much alive and very much dis¬ 
inclined to leave their element, the hook is small, 
the mouth tender, the fish must be “handled with 
care.” It is quite the common thing to see dense 
blue haze floating over one of the fishing shacks 
and hear language emanating therefrom. One 
of two things has happened—the angler has lost 
a fish just as it reached the hole in the ice, or 
a big charr trout has happened along and walked 
away with hook, Ime and sinker. This only hap¬ 
pens occasionally.' It requires something ap¬ 
proaching skill to juggle a ten-pound charr on a 
fourteen hook through a six-inch hole in the ice. 
It has been done, but not often. When it is 
done, it is not done quickly, and the doer is 
the envy of the whole fraternity. 
If the reader will accept apologies, I will allow 
the camera to tell the tale. 
The Old Trapper Speaks. 
■ ou are clever, they’re telling me, youngster, 
With your traps and your poisoned bait; 
You travel the plains in a wagon— 
We hoofed it with cautious gait; 
You sleep every night under canvas, 
You’ve comforts galore when you halt— 
But could you take traps and your rifle 
And live for a year without salt? 
You have kettles and pans—and your wagon 
Resembles a grocery store; 
We had to depend on our powder 
For grub and the clothes that we wore; 
You set up your tent in the open— 
To us every shadow cried “Halt.” 
Could you half roast your kill, like an Injun, 
And live for a year without salt? 
You are skillful, they tell me, oh, youngster, 
But would your skill answer their test? 
Would you hazard your life on one bullet 
With a savage’s knife at your breast? 
Those were giants—those hunters of beaver, 
Whose bravery rose to a fault. 
Could you turn to a land that was pathless 
And live, as they lived, without salt? 
—Denver Republican. 
The Forest and Stream may be obtained from any 
newsdealer on order. Ask your dealer to supply you 
regularly. 
H ere we are on onr third winter outing in 
Arizona, this time camped on Tonto 
Creek, sixteen miles north of Roosevelt 
Dam at Cline, in Gila county. We all agree—the 
madame, the young person, and I—that we made 
no mistake in choosing this locality. Since com¬ 
ing here in November the weather has been sim¬ 
ply perfect; the days warm and sunny, but not 
too warm, the nights cool, even frosty. 
Cline postoffice is a lone ranch house. E^p and 
down the valley within a distance of ten miles 
there live a half dozen cowmen; just such rough 
good fellows as we knew in Montana in early 
days, and that is some praise for them. 
The valley and mesas of Tonto, Creek are 
about five miles wide between the Sierra Anchas 
range on the east, and the Mazatzals on the west. 
Northward, about sixty miles away, we can see 
the sharp rim of the Mogollon range. Deer, 
wild turkeys and an enormous sized variety of 
the squirrel family are plentiful in the pines of 
the Sierra Anchas, twelve miles from camp. So 
are Mearn’s partridges—locally called fool quail 
—this being about their northern limit. In the 
Mazatzals—the divide between the Tonto and the 
Verde, deer are plentiful, and turkeys also in the 
more northern portion of them. 
Right down here on the Tonto the quail are 
almost unbelievably plentiful. Within two miles 
of the tents there are no less than thirty coveys, 
ranging in number from a couple of hundred up 
to a thousand or more birds. Ducks, mallards 
especially, feed in the sloughs of the creek in 
numerous small bunches, returning each n’ght 
to the great artificial Roosevelt Lake, now 
twenty-eight miles in length. 
The Tonto valley is especially noted for its 
prehistoric ruined pueblos, as yet unexploited 
except for the small amount of work I have done 
in them the past several months. They range in 
size from a few to a hundred or more ground 
floor rooms and some contained buildings of 
two, and even three stories. The walls are all 
of rock, laid up with adobe. The pueblos most¬ 
ly stand on the edge of the mesas overlooking 
the rich bottom lands of the valley, which the 
prehistoric people largely cultivated. By means 
of irrigation they raised large crops of corn, 
cotton, beans, squash and tobacco. I have traced 
one of the ancient canals a distance of more than 
three miles. 
It is now known that the Southern clans of 
the Hopi people lived at one time along the Gila 
River in Southern Arizona, and gradually moved 
northward to their present habitat either by way 
of the Verdi or Salt River and its Tonto tribu¬ 
tary, sometimes building pueblos in the open 
valleys, and again inhabiting the almost inacces¬ 
sible cliffs. From the finds I have made, I am 
satisfied in my own mind that the builders here 
were the Hopi, but I still lack conclusive proof 
of it. I have so far been unable to find a cere¬ 
monial room, or kiva, and its distinctive para¬ 
phernalia for religious rites, which would defi¬ 
nitely settle the question. 
In the ruins proper my work has been con¬ 
fined to the excavation of the 12 x 14 ground 
floor room of what was a two-story building. 
This ruin is a large one, consisting of the re¬ 
mains of ninety-four large ground floor rooms 
and several courts, or plazas, all inclosed by the 
usual defensive wall. In this room the walls 
still stand to a height of five feet, and level with 
the top of them it was filled with a mass of 
fallen wall material and charred, beams and char¬ 
coal. Mixed in with this stuff and on the floor 
I found twenty-two ollas and food bowls, all 
broken; a metate and ten grinders; a large sea 
shell; three awls, or daggers, made of deer leg 
bone; several varieties of paint, a number of 
stone and obsidian arrow heads, and two stone 
axes, one of which was perfect. Both here and 
elsewhere in the place was proof that the pueblo 
had been destroyed by fire. A cooking pot in 
which still remained the bone part of a meat 
stew was evidence that the occupants of the 
room had left it in a hurry. Certainly they would 
have taken the axe, and the still more valuable 
shell, had they deliberately abandoned the place. 
The largest of the ollas was thirty-five inches in 
diameter and thirty-nine inches high. 
Outside of the ruin, close to the defensive 
wall, I have uncovered one skeleton, that of an 
old woman. Beside her were two small food 
bowls, the usual mortuary offering, both unfor¬ 
tunately undecorated. 
But I have found a number of shrines at this 
and other ruins containing water-worn rocks pet¬ 
rified wood and queer shaped stone, these in no 
way different from prehistoric and present day 
Hopi shrines. And again, the pottery here is in 
color, quality and patterns of the beautifully 
laid-on geometrical figures, precisely like that 
from the ancient Hopi pueblos and cliff dwell¬ 
ings, both north and south of the Tonto. Some 
of these, in fact, are line for line duplicates of 
those on certain monuments and palaces in Cen¬ 
tral America, and this is significant: the seden¬ 
tary, pueblo-building, crop-raising peoples of our 
Southwest undoubtedly had their origin in tropi¬ 
cal America. 
Another important find, made by the young 
person, is a one-room ruin close to an ancient 
canal, in the floor of which is a small circular 
hole extending down into the ground the length 
of a man’s arm. This may have been a kiva, 
the hole in the floor a sipapu, or symbolic pas¬ 
sage to the under world, which is found in all 
Hopi kivas, prehistoric and modern. The young 
person has sharp eyes, proof of which is a tur¬ 
key, a bear and a deer, each of artistically carved 
stone and about a half inch in length. They 
were recovered from the gravelly mesas in the 
vicinity of the ruins. 
The cottonwoods are leafing out, a sign to us 
that we must soon move back to cool country. 
We hope, however, that another November will 
find us here again with health and strength to 
enable us to continue the search for the cere¬ 
monial room. Certainly no better spot than this 
for a winter camp can be found in all the land. 
No, I have not killed deer or turkeys this sea¬ 
son; the ruins have been more to me than shoot¬ 
ing. 
