West of Tucson 65 miles is the little town of Casa Grande, which takes its name from one of the most famous prehistoric ruins in the United States, standing about 18 miles to the northeast, near the Gila River. If you have a taste for prehistoric architecture, you will enjoy Casa Grande, for it is sui generis among our country’s antiquities. If, on the other hand, you are just an ordinary tourist, you must decide for yourself whether a half day’s motor trip across the desert to see a ruinous, cubical mud house topped with a corrugated iron roof, in the midst of a sunburnt wilderness, will or will not be worth your while. What touches the fancy is that here, centuries doubtless before Columbus (perhaps before the time of the Cliff Dwellers) dwelt and toiled an unknown people whose remains are of a type that possesses important points of difference from those found elsewhere within the limits of the United States, though similar ruins exist in Mexico. Casa Grande is Spanish for Great House, and is given to this ruin because its outstanding feature is a huge block of a building of three or four stories in height, and thick walls of caliche—a mixture of mud, lime and pebbles molded into form and dried, somewhat as modern concrete walls are built up. The unique character of the Casa Grande caused it to be set aside 25 years ago as a National Monument, and important work has since been done there by Government ethnologists, in the way of strengthening and repairing the crumbling walls and cleaning up the rooms. Extensive excavations have also been made close by, resulting in uncovering the foundations of a numerous aggregation of houses plazas, enclosing walls, etc. These reveal the fact that in some age the place was a walled city of importance, even if it was of mud—a sort of American Lutetia, to which Fate denied the glory of becoming a Paris. The huge building in the center—the Casa Grande—probably served partly as a religious temple, but principally as a citadel where in time of attack by enemies the people took refuge. Access to the upper stories was doubtless by ladders outside, as in modern pueblos. Indeed, this is but one of several walled-in compounds of buildings that formerly existed in the Gila Valley, and are now but shapeless heaps of earth. Some of these close to the main Casa Grande ruin have been excavated and their plan laid bare. The remains of an extensive irrigation system are still in evidence, water having been drawn from the Gila.
The first white man of unimpeachable record to see Casa Grande was that Padre Eusebio Kino, of whom we heard at San Xavier and who gave the ruin its Spanish name. He learned of it from his Indians, and in 1694 visited the place, saying mass in one of its rooms. There is some reason to identify the spot with Chichiticale, or Red House, a ruin noted in the reports of Fray Marcos de Niza and of Coronado, both of whom probably passed not far from Casa Grande on their way to Zuñi, but most scholars now reject this theory of identity. After Kino the ruin was frequently examined by explorers and written about up to the American occupation. Anza and his San Francisco colonists camped a few miles distant, and the commandant with his two friars, Padres Garcés and Font, inspected the place with great interest on October 31, 1775. Font in his diary gives a circumstantial account of it, calling it La Casa de Moctezuma (Montezuma’s House), and narrates a tradition of the neighboring Pima Indians as to its origin. It seems[96] that long ago, nobody knows how long, there came to that neighborhood an old man of so harsh and crabbed a disposition that he was called Bitter Man (el Hombre ’Amargo, in Padre Font’s version). With him were his daughter and son-in-law, and for servants he had the Storm Cloud and the Wind. Until then the land had been barren, but Bitter Man had with him seeds which he sowed, and with the help of the two servants abundant crops grew year after year, and were harvested. It was these people who built the Great House, and they dwelt there, though not without quarrels because of Bitter Man’s character, so that even Storm Cloud and Wind left him at times, but they came back. After many years, however, all went away—whither, who knows—and were heard of no more forever.
Casa Grande may also be reached by conveyance from Florence on the Arizona Eastern Railway, from which point it is distant a dozen miles or so. Owing to the extreme summer heat of this desert country, the trip to the ruin is most comfortably made in the late autumn, winter or early spring. There is a resident care-taker who acts as guide.
CHAPTER XVI
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
“Shall they say of you, you have been to Rome and not seen the Pope?” Yet that is what will be said if you turn back at the Colorado River and leave Southern California out of your Southwestern travels. However, few people do that. The fear is that in their haste to reach that tourist playground, they may neglect too much of what the preceding chapters have dwelt upon. Intent upon seeing the Pope, they may do scant justice to Rome.
By Southern California is meant California south of the Teháchapi Mountains and their western prolongation ending in Santa Barbara County at the sea. It is not a political division, but Nature’s—in its physical aspect differing quite markedly from Central and Northern California. Long regarded with a sort of mild contempt by the Americans who settled Central California and who habitually spoke of the South as “the cow counties,” Southern California has in the last quarter century attained a reputation not short of gilt-edged. Lonely, treeless plains and valleys and brush-clad mesas that a comparatively few years ago were counted desert and good for nothing except for cattle ranges and sheep runs, have become, with the development of water, pleasant lands of fruitfulness supporting a numerous and progressive population. The extensive cultivation of the orange, the lemon, the fig, the grape, the English walnut, the apricot, the olive; the planting of the eucalyptus, the palm and a hundred kinds of exotic shade and ornamental trees; the dotting of the landscape with villas of a distinguished sort of architecture patterned on Italian and Spanish models—all this has wrought a transformation that makes even more appropriate today than 25 years ago the sobriquet of “Our Italy” given the region by Charles Dudley Warner.
Here wealthy Easterners maintain winter homes as they keep summer estates on the Atlantic Coast, and less well-to-do folk—retired farmers, tradesmen or professional people—buy a bungalow and settle down to the enjoyment of a good climate and the luxury of having roses and green peas in their winter gardens. Not only Americans but those of other nationalities have discovered that Southern California totals a remarkable number of points in the problem of comfortable living—a healthful and delightful climate (notably in winter), a fruitful soil capable of raising everything natural to the temperate zone besides a large number of things sub-tropical, a beautiful and varied terrain embracing seaside, valley and mountain, and an admirable system of capital roads. For the tourist there is not only the attraction of this beauty and comfort, but there is the drawing of historic interest, touched with that indefinable sense of romance that attaches wherever Spain has had a foothold. In Southern California as elsewhere in the Southwest, that Spanish flavor is very evident, manifested in the presence of a considerable Spanish-speaking population, in the remains of Spanish-built Missions and ranch houses, and in the persistence of Spanish geographic nomenclature.
The hub of Southern California is Los Angeles, which in a generation has expanded from a sleepy little half-Spanish pueblo of a few thousand to a metropolis of half a million, with a taste for the latest in everything and the money to indulge it. It is the natural center from which to do one’s sightseeing, though Pasadena, adjoining it on the north, is almost as convenient and, indeed, preferred by many who are not in a hurry and prefer surroundings more rural. Pasadena is a little city of 40,000, beautifully situated on a shelving mesa at the base of the Sierra Madre and overlooking the fertile San Gabriel Valley. It is nationally famous for its numerous fine estates and the winter residences of wealthy Easterners; but outside of that it possesses mile upon mile of tree-lined streets where modest homes of the bungalow type look out from a setting of vine and shrub and flower. Each New Year’s Day the city becomes the objective of tens of thousands of visitors to view the Tournament of Roses, an outdoor fiesta whose distinctive feature is a street floral pageant.
From Los Angeles lines of transportation radiate to all points of interest. You have your pick of steam railways, electric lines, auto-stages and ocean steamers. Hundreds of miles of first class, hard-surfaced roads make Southern California a motorist’s paradise, and automobiling is here so notable a feature of tourist life that, if possible, the traveler should make provision for it when packing his pocket book. Public automobiles are abundant and the prices reasonable enough, from $1.50 per hour upward, with special rates for trips. If you are able to club with others for a car, you may find this the cheapest form of travel. Maps and specific information as to drives may be had at offices of the Automobile Club of Southern California.[97]
For those who do not care for motoring or find it too expensive, most of the desirable points are reached by electric and steam lines, or by auto-stages. There are several daily excursions scheduled by the Pacific Electric Railway, which afford at a minimum of expense a satisfactory means of getting a comprehensive idea of Southern California. One of these, to Mount Lowe (a prominent peak of the Sierra Madre), may be substituted for the automobile drive up Mount Wilson. The visit to San Juan Capistrano Mission may be made by train, the railway station being close by. There is a resident priest and religious services are regularly held in one of the restored rooms. The Mission was founded in 1775, and the church part—now a ruin, the result of an earthquake in 1812—marked in its prime the high-tide of Mission architecture in California.