In Arizona 
VI.—The Gila Valley and the Casa Grande Ruins 
—The Fight at the Mountain Sheep Tank 
By J. W. SCHULTZ 
Author of "My Life as an Indian ” "Life Among the Blackfeet” "Floating Down the Missouri.” etc. 
I HAVE another riding burro, vice Rumi- 
nator, deceased. This is a very large animal 
of his kind, so tall in fact that my feet 
are at least a foot from the ground when I sit 
astride him. He is dun colored, with a black 
stripe along the top of his back. His eyes are 
brown and kindly in expression, and thereby 
they deceive, for he has the devil of a temper. 
Three or four times in the course of a day’s 
ride, for no reason whatever and always at 
the most inauspicious moment for me—when I 
am about to shoot a cottontail or when passing 
under the low and thorny branches of a mes- 
quite—he suddenly starts in bucking, turning to 
the left at every jump until he has made a 
half circle and come back into his trail. At 
that point he always stops, looks longingly in 
the direction from which we have come, and bawls 
three times. In vain have I tried to stop him 
from bucking, and failing in that, to get him 
to wheel right instead of left; to end it all 
up in silence, or at least bawl twice or four 
times. He is certainly as set in his ways as 
some men I know. 
I had not intended to purchase another ani¬ 
mal. My plan was to use the pack burro for 
what little riding I might do until the close 
of this most pleasant outing, but Old Timer 
caused me to change my mind. Said he one 
day, after a trip to Red Dog—Florence, I mean: 
“I met old Roll Elders down there in the 
Blue Lizard an’ he asked me to look out for 
his bee ranch awhile, him goin’ to Agua 
Caliente to try an’ get shut of his rheumatics 
which is painin’ him somethin’ fierce. I told 
him I would. You better go with me. His 
place is down on the Gila, not far below the 
Casa Grande ruins, the which is an interestin’ 
place for the likes of you. There’s lots of old 
mounds you can dig into, you can worm some 
yarns out of the old Pima Injuns livin’ there¬ 
abouts, an’ I’ll sure feed you high. All the 
milk an’ honey an’ garden truck you can wal¬ 
ler in.” 
Who could resist such allurements? And be¬ 
sides, Old Timer gone, I felt that camp life 
there on the mountain side would become monot¬ 
onous. Forthwith I commissioned him to pur¬ 
chase a burro for me, and here I am tonight 
comfortably quartered, bag and baggage, at the 
aforementioned Roll Elder s bee ranch, and 
in my own tent. The adobe ranch house is an 
ancient structure, and the cracks in the walls, 
the dusty arrow weed roof, the piles of boxes, 
old clothing, empty bottles et cetera in the cor¬ 
ners suggest tarantulas, scorpions, centipedes 
and snakes. Along the outer wall of my own 
clean canvas shelter I have placed a continuous 
row of cholla cactus tips and I would like to 
see the rattler that can cross it. 
In order that I should see everything there 
is to be seen of the amazingly plentiful prehis¬ 
toric remains of this section, Old Timer guided 
me here by a rather circuitous route. Leaving 
the mountains we struck straight across the 
valley of the Gila to some "sculptured” rocks 
—a narrow ridge of black lava blocks rising a 
hundred feet or so above the plain. Ihe sculp¬ 
tures are a number of pictographs, some of ani¬ 
mals, some unrecognizable, others the well- 
known symbols of rain-clouds, the sun, and the 
coiled serpent. The signs for the turtle, and 
the lizard clans, or people, are also present. All 
these symbols are to be seen in the rock peck- 
ings of the cliff dwellers, and throughout south¬ 
ern Arizona into the northern part of the Mex¬ 
ican Sierra Madres, and indicate that the cliff 
dwellers of the Colorado, the Tonto Basin, and 
elsewhere, and the builders of the desert pueblos 
scattered from the Salt and Gila Rivers far to 
the south, were of common stock. 
From the sculptured rocks we retraced our 
steps to the Gila and thence down stream, fol¬ 
lowing for some distance a large prehistoric 
canal that in its time irrigated a large tract of 
the rich desert land. Not far below the point 
where it tapped the river, a large canal has been 
dug by the white settlers, but it has never been 
a success, floods, year after year, filling it with 
silt and tearing out the dam at its head. By 
what means the ancient irrigators overcame this 
difficulty is not known, but they did overcome 
it, and were as efficient constructors of irrigat¬ 
ing systems as are the common run of our sur¬ 
veying engineers. This very canal is a striking 
instance of it. The ancient and the modern 
one run side by side for fourteen miles out 
into the desert, and at the end of that distance 
there is the same variation in the level of the 
two that there was at the head. 
We reached Red Dog—Florence, I mean- 
about three o’clock and remained there for tl 
night. It was Sunday, but for all that the tow 
had somewhat of its old time, pre-railroad d; 
flavor. The two or three stores and four < 
five saloons were wide open. A church bo 
called for evening service but except for a ve 
few its notes fell upon unheeding ears, or we 
drowned in the clinking of glasses and tl 
laughter of the sombreroed crowds at the bar; 
"This is something like old times,” I r 
marked to Old Timer, as we sat at one of t 
tables in the Blue Lizard, watching the mer 
crowd of vaqueros, miners and ranchmen, Me? 
cans and whites. 
He sighed. “It’s just the shadow of wh 
’twas in my day,” said he. "Why, they doi 
even know how to drink. Let’s have a last ont 
he said, “and then go.” We walked toward t 
bar and wedged our way through the cro\ 
with some difficulty to speaking distance w:. 
a bartender. Old Timer elbowed a last gra 
haired individual who grunted, turned to s 
who had given him such a vicious jab, and f. 
on Old Timer’s neck with a wild whoop of (■ 
light. The two embraced and spun around a! 
around, in a sort of bear dance, to the amu 
ment of the crowd. At last they stopped, c: 
of breath. "Why, doggone your skin, Harve;' 
the stranger gasped, “whoever would ha: 
dreamed that we would meet again? I thoujt 
you had passed on long ago. Why ain’t yot- 
you’re old enough to die?” 
"Why, just because I'm bangin’ on to ft 
word from you what it’s like in the otk 
place,” Old Timer wheezed. “If it’s too It 
down there I shall refuse to go.” 
The listening crowd laughed. The Blue L- 
ard’s proprietor asked us all to have one i 
the house. I was introduced to the grizzl 
stranger, Sonora Graham, by which name! 
seems he was distinguished from another pr- 
pector named Red Graham. He and Old Tirr', 
I learned, had been close friends for many ye& 
The latter asked him to camp with us at ‘ 
bee ranch and as he agreed to this I left tht 
shortly and went to bed. 
We left the town early in the morning, p<" 
ing a notable ruin of many rooms at the c- 
skirts of it. Following a trail that wi s 
through lovely groves of cottonwoods, of n- 
quite and palo verde, with everywhere the git 
cactus studding the country like Turkish mo ¬ 
ments of the dead, we came to a modern rn, 
that of Adamsville, and my companions g:» 
melancholy at the sight. The silence and de¬ 
lation of it affected me, too, and I sorro'd 
with them. It brought to my mind more tJP 
one old time trading post of the North 1 lt 
also lies in ruins, and whose builders are dus 
Beyond Adamsville we left the trail 
followed the rim of the valley for three or f r 
d 
