Casa Grande of the Gila.
The buildings that still have upright walls are three in number, and in the largest of these both the exterior and interior walls are so nearly perfect as to show accurately not only the original form and size, but the division of the interior into apartments. Its dimensions on the ground are fifty feet from north to south, by forty feet from east to west. The outer wall is about five feet thick at the base, diminishing slightly towards the top, in a curved line on the exterior, but perpendicular on the inside.[XI-14] The interior is divided by partition walls, slightly thinner than the others, into five apartments, as shown in the accompanying ground plan taken from Bartlett. Font's plan given by Beaumont agrees with this, except that additional doors are represented at the points marked with a dot, and no doorway is indicated at a. The three central rooms are each about eight by fourteen feet, and the others ten by thirty-two feet, as nearly as may be estimated from Bartlett's plan and the statements of other writers.[XI-15] The doors in the centre of each façade are three feet wide and five feet high, and somewhat narrower at the top than at the bottom, except that on the western front, which is two by seven or eight feet. There are some small windows, both square and circular in the outer and inner walls. The following cut shows an elevation of the side and end, also from Bartlett.[XI-16]
Ground Plan of the Casa Grande.
Elevations of the Casa Grande.
Remains of floor timbers show that the main walls were three stories high, or, as the lower rooms are represented by Font as about ten English feet high, about thirty feet in height; while the central portion is eight or ten feet—probably one story—higher. Mr Bartlett judged from the mass of débris within that the main building had originally four stories; but as the earliest visitors speak of three and four stories—some referring to the central, others apparently to the outer portions—there would seem to be no satisfactory evidence that the building was over forty feet high, although it is possible that the outer and inner walls were originally of the same height. Respecting the arrangement of apartments in the upper stories, there is of course no means of judging, all the floors having fallen. There may, however, have been additional partition walls resting on the floors, and these may have helped to make up the débris noticed by Mr Bartlett. The floors were evidently supported by round timbers four or five inches in diameter, inserted in the walls and stretching across the rooms at regular intervals. The holes where the beams were placed, and in many cases the ends of the beams themselves are still visible. At the time of Padre Kino's visit one floor in an adjoining ruin was still perfect, and was formed by cross-sticks placed upon the round floor-timbers and covered with a thick cake of mud, or adobe.[XI-17] No marks of any cutting instrument were noticed by any visitor except Mr Browne, who says "the ends show very plainly marks of the blunt instrument with which they were cut—probably a stone hatchet."[XI-18] The timbers, of cedar, or sabino, show by their charred ends that the interior was ruined by fire; and Johnston found other evidences that the walls had been exposed to great heat.[XI-19] Nothing seems more natural than that the building should have been burned by some band of Apaches. No traces of stairways have been found even by the earliest visitors; so that the original means of communication with the upper stories may be reasonably supposed to have been wooden ladders, still used by the Pueblo natives in buildings not very unlike what this must originally have been. Mr Bartlett and also Johnston found and sketched some rude figures painted in red lines on the smooth wall of one apartment, but which had disappeared at the time of Mr Browne's visit.
The descriptions of successive explorers show clearly the gradually increasing effects of time and the elements on this ruin; from Browne's sketch it would seem that the walls, undermined at the base by the yearly rains, as is always the case with neglected adobe structures, must soon fall; although I learned from a band of Arizona natives who visited San Francisco in 1873 that the Casa was still standing. When the adobe walls have once fallen, they will require but one or two seasons to crumble and become reduced to a shapeless mound of mud and gravel; as has been the case with most of the eleven other buildings reported here by the first comers, and the existence of which there is no reason to doubt.
Of the additional casas seen by Kino and others no particular description was given, save that Font describes one of them as measuring twenty-six by eighteen feet on the ground. Only two of them show any remains of standing walls, one on the south-west and the other on the north-east of the Casa Grande. The standing portions of the former seemed to indicate a structure similar in plan to the chief edifice, although much smaller; the latter is of still smaller dimensions and its remains convey no idea of its original form. "In every direction," says Mr Bartlett, "as far as the eye can reach, are seen heaps of ruined edifices, with no portions of their walls standing," and Mange, Kino, and Font observed also shapeless heaps covering the plain for a distance of two leagues.
Father Font found "ruins indicating a fence or wall which surrounded the house and other buildings," mentioning a ruin in the south-west angle which had divisions and an upper story. This corner structure may be the same that has been mentioned as standing south-west of the Casa Grande, and Font very likely mistook the heaps of fallen houses for the remains of a wall, since no such wall was seen by Kino and Mange. The dimensions of this supposed wall, four hundred and twenty feet from north to south, and two hundred and sixty feet from east to west, were erroneously applied by Arricivita and Humboldt, followed by others, to the Casa Grande itself, an error which has given a very exaggerated idea of the size of that edifice.[XI-20]