Great River. Paul Horgan

      3.

       To the River

      Their departures were orderly. Not all occurred at the very same instant, but all took place late in the thirteenth century and early in the fourteenth, and all gave evidence of having been agreed upon. Their houses were left standing. Their rooms were neat and emptied of possessions needed for travel and new life elsewhere. But for occasional bits of corn and stalk and tassel the food bins were bare. The dead were left in peaceful burial according to regular custom. Few personal objects—clothing, jewelry, ceremonial effects—were left behind. Fires died in their proper places. There was no sign of the applied torch. Sudden natural calamity—earthquake, flood, lightning-set holocaust—played no part. The cities, one by one, at the point of their highest development, were left to time and the amber preservative of dry sunlit air.

      Again the people left no record, and carried none with them, written, or even pictorial, to explain these abandonments. Perhaps for a few generations memory told the story, until gradually it was lost in the recesses of time. The only records which can be consulted are those of the natural world. They have been much invoked and disputed by experts.

      The trees have testified. By counting the rings of annual growth in the cross section of a trunk, a system of dating has been devised. By comparing the thickness and thinness of the successive rings, periods of relative wetness or dryness have been tabulated. According to such information the century of the migrations from the plateaus coincided with a period of increasing dryness, until crops could no longer be watered, and the people were faced with living on the seed corn and finally starvation. A search for new watered lands was the only recourse.

      Erosion has been blamed. Too much timber was cut for building use. Bared forest lands permitted too rapid runoff of storm-water. Gullies were lengthened until their waters became ungovernable for flood-farming. Old fields had to be abandoned and new ones begun farther from the houses and from water sources.

      But erosion presupposes flow of water, and the drought theory contradicts the erosion theory. And though some scientists say that the entire region during its whole period of occupation by people has been slowly growing drier, they say further that the rate of desiccation would not in itself account for these migrations. And one of the greatest of the communities—in Chaco Canyon—was abandoned a century before the tree-ring evidence of the great drought. On top of this, lately, the whole responsibility of the tree-ring theory has been shaken by comparison of ancient rings formed when there were no written records with more recent rings which when checked against modern meteorological records show no consistent correlation with thickness and thinness of the rings in wet and dry periods as scientifically recorded. The drought theory holds no firm answer.

      In the canyon of the Rito de los Frijoles the river is an ever-flowing stream. Yet the cliff dwellings there and the houses of the canyon floor were abandoned just like communities near streams which were intermittent and for the most part dry. Lack of water was not a motive for the silencing of the Rito.

      The mystery has been attacked in other ways.

      Did the soft rock of the cliff dwellings disintegrate too fast and force the people to move? But the rooms are still intact today.

      Were there epidemics of other disease? Burials reveal no evidence of unusual numbers of deaths in any one period.

      Was the prevailing diet of corn meal—hard and coarse, and especially when old as hard as gravel—the cause of disease? Recovered skulls show teeth ground down to the bone as a result of chewing the tough meal. Tooth decay led to abscesses, lodged poisons, rheumatism, arthritis and diet deficiencies. Did the people go to look in new places for other foods? But wherever they resettled, corn remained their staple food, and does today.

      Did nomadic enemies cut off water supplies and drive the people from their towns? There would have been battles, and if defeated, the city dwellers would have left their homes in disarrayed flight. There was no evidence to indicate siege and defeat.

      Did the pattern of community life become so complex as the towns grew that political quarrels between clans and religious fraternities broke apart the order of existence and made communal life impossible and migration imperative? If so, then why did not one or more clans survive dissension and continue in possession of the houses? But no one was left behind. And when the people found their new homesites, they recreated the same social pattern they had expressed in the cliff cities, in some instances building even larger cities with greater populations and more group divisions.

      All efforts to explain the mystery on the basis of physical or material motives come to nothing. What is left? Where might the explanation lie? The people left beautiful cities and looked for new places to live. Consulting the favor of the natural world, many of them came at last through the barrier mountains to the river, the big river, P’osoge, or the big water, Haⁿn^yap’akwa, or just the river, Tšina, where they found scattered settlements of people raising corn and living in primitive pit-houses. Life was already blessed there. The new settlers joined the old. The Pueblos of the Rio Grande were founded. What drove the people from the silent cities they had left behind them might well have been something they carried within themselves; something with more power over their acts than heat or cold, rain or dust, sickness or war or dissension. If they had reason to believe that their gods had abandoned them where they lived, the people would have had to go and find them again, in order to live at peace with the world of nature. As everything had its abiding spirit, not only things that grew, but inanimate things, and places, so with the loss of that spirit would be lost blessing, protection, safety. In fear and trembling the people would have had to abandon a place, no matter how splendid, from which the ruling deity had withdrawn. Any event, natural or imaginary, which would withdraw the gods of a place would make it accursed, and dangerous to life; and no matter how great hitherto it may have become, it would be abandoned.

      They told stories through the centuries of such a motive for migration from various places. What was believed true of one place could be so of another.

      In cliff towns of the Pajarito Plateau west of the river the people said that A-wan-yu lived among them, their deity. He was the plumed snake, creature of both air and land. A time came when they lost favor with him. He abandoned them, retired to the sky, and became the major galaxy of stars which reached across the central heavens as the Milky Way. Without him the people were at a loss. They gathered their life and its objects and, leaving their rooms in modest order, went away to build new cities on the river.

      At the greatest of cliff cities (Mesa Verde) the people began to build a temple to the sun. It sat upon a crown of the mesa between valley and sky. Using the skin-colored stone of the place, they quarried and shaped their blocks and raised their walls in expert masonry. The temple contained many rooms. The largest was a round one in the center. Little junipers whose shape echoed the pull of the wind grew all about the temple. Close to its doors the mesa’s cliffs swept away to the valley floor far below. It was a noble site facing the rising sun. To reach it with stone and timber took prodigious work. The work went slowly. The walls rose carefully to the same successive heights day by day or year by year. But they were never finished. Before they could be, all human life departed from the mesa, with its fields on top, its farms below in the valley, and its magnificent community houses high up in the faces of the cliffs. What if before the sun temple could be completed there was no god to receive in it? The people could only leave what they had partially done, with all of its walls unfinished at the same height, and go away.

      Long later, in another ancient town, east of the river, the people kept a great black snake in the kiva, who had power over their life. They fed him the fruits of the hunt—deer, antelope, rabbit, bison, birds. From him they received all they needed to eat and