In some cases, in the greater houses, walled into crypts that might have served as family lounging places, have been found the skeletons of those who were of esoteric standing, considered able, by the force of will, to separate spirit from body. In other cases the cleansing and disintegrating effects of fire secured the necessary separation of the spirit from the body.
With these mortuary evidences also are found domestic implements, stone clubs, arrow points and, particularly valuable, prayer sticks and religious implements that clearly show the archaeologist a connection with the pueblo-dwelling peoples who still live, under similar communal conditions, to the northward.
Northward Trend of the Ancient People
That these ancient peoples went north there can be no doubt. North of the valley, nearly fifty miles, on the Verde, is a great stone ruin and beyond it are cavate dwellings of remarkable sort. In Tonto Creek Valley, a dozen miles north of the Roosevelt dam, is an immense ruin built of gypsum blocks. To the eastward, Casa Grande, most famed of all Arizona prehistoric remains, still stands, iron-roofed by a careful government, probably of a later time of abandonment, but still a ruin when first seen by Father Eusebio Kino in 1694. All the way up the Gila, and with a notable southern stem through the Mimbres Valley, are found these same evidences of ancient occupation. Chichilticalli, "the Red House," mentioned by Marco de Niza and by Coronado's historians in 1539-40, lay somewhere near where another group of Mormons again reclaimed the desert soil by irrigation in the upper Gila Valley. Ruins extended from Pueblo Viejo ("Old Town"), above Solomonville, down to San Carlos.
Into the valleys of the Salt and of the Gila, from the north come many waterways. In none of these tributary valleys can there be failure to find evidences of the northward march of the Indians who lived in houses. In this intermediate region, the houses usually, for protection, were placed in the cliffs. Particularly notable are the cave dwellings of the upper Verde and in Tonto Basin, near Roosevelt, and in the Sierra Anchas and near Flagstaff.
[Illustration: THE ARIZONA TEMPLE AT MESA]
[Illustration: JONATHAN HEATON OF MOCCASIN AND HIS FIFTEEN SONS]
[Illustration: 1—Ira Hatch, Indian Missionary 2—Thales Haskell, Indian Missionary 3—Wm. C. Prows, Battalion Member 4—Nathan B. Robinson, killed by Indians]
Again there was debouchment upon a river valley, that of the Little Colorado. Possibly some of the tribes worked eastward into the valley of the Rio Grande. Another section, and for this there is no less evidence than that of Frank Hamilton Cushing, formed at least a part of the forefathers of the Zuni. Swinging to the northwest, the Water House and other clans formed the southern branch of the three from which the Moqui, or Hopi, people are descended. This last is history. The early Mormons remarked upon the pueblo ruins that lay near their first Little Colorado towns, above St. Joseph. These ruins are known to the Hopi as "Homolobi," and much is the information concerning them to be had from the historians of the present hilltop tribes.
Reports of similarity have been so many, there can be no surprise that the earlier settlers from Utah wrote home joyously, telling that proofs had been found of the northern migration so definitely outlined in their ecclesiastical writings, according to the Book of Mormon.