This ruin was situated near the Rio Grande, twenty-three miles from Mule Spring, on the road to the Mimbres. Bartlett does not tell us how he learned that this was an early mission site, but from the pottery it is evident that it was an "ancient Indian settlement."
After having examined the configuration of the country through which Bartlett passed, and having compared it with statements in his description, the present writer thinks that Bartlett camped on May 1, 1853, near the Oldtown ruin and that the place then bore the name Pachetehu. This camp was nineteen [eighteen?] miles from Cow Spring and thirteen miles from the copper mines.
Bartlett records that he found, near his camp, "several old Indian encampments with their wigwams standing and about them fragments of pottery." Although not very definite, these references might apply either to the Oldtown ruin and some others a few miles up the river, or to more modern Apache dwellings.
Mr. F. S. Dellenbaugh claims that Coronado, in 1540, passed through the valley of the Mimbres on his way to Cibola, and that this place was somewhere in this region, instead of at Zuñi, as taught by Bandelier and others. The present writer recognizes that the question of the route of Coronado is one for historical experts to answer, but believes that new facts regarding the ruins in the Mimbres may have a bearing upon this question and are desirable. While it can no longer be said in opposition to Dellenbaugh's theory that there are no ruins in the valley between Deming and the Mexican border, we have not yet been able to discover whether the ruins here described were or were not inhabited in 1540.
The fragmentary notice of the ruins in the Upper Mimbres and Silver City region by Bandelier is one of the best thus far published, although he denies the existence of ruins now known in the great stretch of desert from Deming to the Mexican boundary. Regarding the ruins on the Upper Mimbres, Bandelier writes:[4]
Toward this center of drainage the aboriginal villages on the Rio Mimbres have gravitated as far south nearly as the flow of water is now permanent. They are very abundant on both sides of the stream, wherever the high overhanging plateaux have left any habitable and tillable space; they do not seem to extend east as far as Cook's Range, but have penetrated into the Sierra Mimbres farther north, as far as twenty miles from the river eastward.... The total number of ruins scattered as far north as Hincks' Ranch on a stretch of about thirty miles along the Mimbres in the valley proper, I estimate at about sixty.... I have not seen a village whose population I should estimate at over one hundred, and the majority contained ten. They were built of rubble in mud or adobe mortar, the walls usually thin, with overwings, and a fireplace in the corner, formed by a recess bulging out of a wall. Toward the lower end of the permanent water course, the ruins are said to be somewhat extensive.
Professor U. Francis Duff, in an article on the "Ruins of the Mimbres Valley,"[5] adds a number of new sites to those mentioned above and contributes important additions to our knowledge of the prehistoric culture of the valley.
Dr. Walter Hough, who compiled from Bandelier and Duff, and made use of unpublished information furnished by Professor De Lashmutt and others, enumerates twenty-seven ruins in the Silver City and Mimbres region to which he assigns the numbers 147–174. Many more ruins[6] might have been included in this list, but it is not the author's purpose, at this time, to mention individual pueblo sites but rather to call attention to the evidences of ruins in the Lower Mimbres Valley as an introduction to the study of pottery there collected. The ruin from which the majority of the bowls here considered were obtained does not appear to have been mentioned by Bandelier, Duff, or Hough.
The last-mentioned author makes the following reference to figures on the pottery from the Mimbres region: "The decoration is mainly geometric. From the Mimbres he [Professor De Lashmutt] has seen a realistic design resembling a grasshopper, and from Fort Bayard another representing a four-legged creature. Mrs. Owen has a specimen from Fort Bayard bearing what is described as a 'fish design.'"[7] Dr. Hough likewise points out that
pottery from some sites [ruins] is also different from that of any other [Pueblo] region and is affiliated, in some respects, with that of the Casas Grandes, in Chihuahua which lies in the low foot-hills of Sierra Madre. This is especially true in reference to fragments of yellow ware found here [the Florida Mountains] which in both form and color of decoration is manifestly like that of Casas Grandes.[8]