Abacus nuc Granada, Monetzuma city?

I have sought after the elusive city of Abacus nuc Granada, shown on several old 14th, 15th and 16th Century maps, it was known as their "Capital City" but whose Capital city? in most cases the city is shown on the North side of the Grand Canyon, this city is believed to have been built as early as 100 AD by Indio Greeks, the precursor of the Roman Colonies.

Due to an old document that came my way several years ago I and my colleagues have searched for what we believe "may" be connected to this ancient city. Not many years ago my friend discovered what is no doubt 300 acres of irrigation canals, the problem is, we cant find the ruins of a city to go with it. We did however notice that it appears as on one of the canals, it appears the lava when it was flowing flowed into one of the canals, this has not yet been confirmed. Is it possible we have another Pompey?

This occurrence has led me to believe and in addition to much other evidence, that the lava flowed in this place in about 900 AD coinciding with several other sources. It has since come to our attention that through certain recent geologic studies in that area, geologist have discovered pottery in the lava and have determined that the lave was flowing about 1000 years ago… Imagine that… However in our search, one cannot discount other possibilities, two of the many maps show Abacus nuc Granada as being on the south side of the Grand Canyon. Being on the south side would certainly not take away from the irrigation canals, because they certainly are present, but the following story is suspiciously coincidental and must of course be investigated as a profound possibility.

The Story of Montezuma City in 1858

An Apache chief named Esconolea, having no knowledge of the 1924 discovery of the buried Tuscon lead crosses or the story told within them, believed in the  mid nineteenth century on the basis of a tradition handed down from father to son over an indeterminate time, of the same details found written upon the artifacts. He could also unerringly locate the rung valley of the ruined city spoken of within, or at least one of the cities....

A genial, responsible, 22 year old Iowan adventurer, James H. Tevis, who had done a year's hitch in Central America with the filibuster William Walker, took charge of the Butterfield Overland Mail station at Apache Pass in 1858. The stone corralled station stood about halfway, or six miles along the precarious road of the 5115foot Pass in southeast Arizona. Captain Tevis made a daily burro trip with two ten gallon kegs to a spring about a quarter of a mile east of the station. (It was on a little strip of tableland about 300 yards beyond this spring that Fort Bowie was established in 1862.) The first Apache word Tevis heard happened to be the Indians' name for him: Sandaisy ("Mule"). These were Chiricahua Apaches, whose principal chief, young six foot Cochise, who commanded 700 warriors, later became notorious. The second chief, Old Jack, commanded 500 warriors, about 200 of whom went off and warred with Mexicans in the Sierra Madres every winter. The third, also an aged chief, Esconolea, commanded somewhat over 300. His brother was medicine chief of the whole Chiricahua Apache tribe. With all my hatred for the Indians," said Tevis, "I had no other feeling but that of affection for Esconolea, and never have I met a man in all my life who deserved affection from me so fully as he."

Old Jack's young warriors, wearing red headbands, had just returned from Sonora in the spring of 1858 when Tevis one day descried them from the top of a divide reinforcing a line of about 200 warriors, thus giving a decided advantage against Esconolea's force drawn up opposite. When the battle joined with a whoop, Tevis charged down through the red bands firing his six shooters, ending up amidst Esconolea's men. Esconolea gave him a good Mexican hug saying "Ushah slonk" (Very good). Tevis had already pleased Esconolea by giving a girl of his tribe two sacks of corn on the water burro during the severe December of 1857 while the men were away on their new

moon foray to Sonora. Esconolea's tribal camp lay but a half mile from the stage station. He undertook, that winter, to teach Tevis Apache. Now, after the battle on the divide, Tevis acquired a new name: Cheese Go-ulee ("White Chief"). After Jack in some disgrace from not prevailing on the field pulled his division of the tribe southeast to Laguna de Guzman in northern Chihuahua, Esconolea rarely left Tevis by day except when on campaign in Sonora, determined to verse him in the Apache tradition. Thus Tevis could record:

The Apaches say that, at one time, they were a great war tribe, but that a great army invaded their country with such terrible war implements that their people were killed before their arrows could reach the enemy.

Those who did reach close enough for hand to hand fighting could not match the invaders' broad blade hatchets and broke their lances on the invaders' shields.

Even though the Apaches numbered twenty to one, the enemy was successful in every engagement, and kept driving them north. Behind this vast army came a great number of people in charge of priests. They settled along all the watercourses, building forts and churches. In the mountains they also built furnaces and melted the rocks like water. Finally, the Apaches had to succumb to the tyranny of the invaders, and they were no better than slaves, for warriors, squaws, and children worked for them. 

Esconolea said that about ten days' journey northwest of Apache Pass lay an abundantly timbered valley somewhat like a tableland, many miles long and very wide, with a fine stream.

Here a large city was founded. Pack trains of hundreds of animals would come and go every few days. This went on for years, and the Apaches became more burdened, until secretly they began planning their release. 

At last they attacked and massacred every one of the foreigners caught outside the city, halted their farming, drove their livestock away, and starved the surrounded stronghold into submission in about a year. Those then still alive were easily captured and, from that time to Esconolea's narration, the Apaches had resumed sole occupancy of the former foreign empire. Esconolea did not call Empire their capital or Rhoda but he called it Montezuma City. Tevis assumed that the invaders had entered Arizona from the Pacific coast of Mexico and inquired if the vicinity of Guaymas, halfway up the Gulf of California, might have been the landfall. No, a great many miles farther west, Esconolea replied, through what was known at the time he was speaking as Yaqui country. The Rio Yaqui in fact stretches perpendicular to Guaymas east of that port and flows into Guaymas Bay southeast of it. If Esconolea, who was not ignorant of Sonora, did not mean east, he had in mind a point near the mouth of the Colorado.

I told Esconolea I did not think such an account was to be found in history, and he asked me what history was, and how old my country was. He laughed.

Tevis said there were churches still standing in Old and New Mexico that were over 300 years old, so something must be left of the city Esconolea described. Esconolea consented to lead him to it.

They took horses a few days afterward for about ten days northwest. Late the ninth day they camped at the foot of a large mountain near a magnificent spring which spilled into a little valley where an old acequia (primitive irrigation ditch) ran which had once carried spring water out over the valley. If this had been Montezuma Well on Wet Beaver Creek southeast of Cottonwood, Tevis 'would have mentioned the numerous ruins still visible atop the well, and the cliff type dwellings between the water and the rim of the deep cenote. Esconolea said at the spring campsite that the mountain ahead was the last they would have to climb; just over the top lay Montezuma City. 

It was very hard the first three hours of the early morning, Tevis said, but through a thick growth of pines they ascended to an old trail that rose more gradually. They reached the summit about 2 p.m. overlooking a wooded tableland valley with a fair stream running through it, just as Esconolea had described; "and there, just a short distance into the valley, lay Montezuma City." 

After we had ridden about a mile, we began to pass a great number of mounds of various sizes, which lasted until we reached the stream, where we camped. Large herds of elk and deer could be seen on either side, and wild turkeys everywhere. The stream was filled with mountain trout. Here we spent two days, riding over the valley, examining mounds which extended for miles on both sides of the stream. The courses of the acequias were quite discernible. Esconolea took me to a very large mound, where he said the commander had lived; and as we went around the old crumbled walls, we found old pottery and copper implements, and some articles which resembled helmets and breastplates. While I was examining these things, old Esconolea watched me very intently and said, "Ton, oo, ga," or "What is the name of it?" I explained to him why their arrows and lances had no effect upon the invaders of their country. I told him that it was a metal covering which even the balls of a rifle could not penetrate, much less arrows. Inside these ruins were signs everywhere of a once populous city. . . .It was certainly one of the loveliest valleys I had ever seen. . . .

Tevis asked Esconolea why his tribe did not live here. Aghast, he said this was sacred ground, which the Great Spirit forbade their living on. 

Esconolea stated that the stream running through Montezuma City flowed into the TooIntza ("Large Waters"), i.e. the Colorado; by which Tevis judged the valley lay east of the Colorado. Through a low place atop a mountain range extending about eight to ten miles wide east and west as far as the eye could see, Esconolea said one would find a mountain as large as the one the two had just come up. Tevis estimated from the distance they had traveled that it would stand between 3 and 400 miles northwest of what is today the town of Bowie just above the north entrance to Apache Pass. (San Francisco Peak, above Flagstaff?) While gazing north, Esconolea went on to describe the Grand Canyon, which he called Terustooshodo ("Bad Mountains"), the walls perpendicular on either side of the river, which had cut its way through the bad mountains. He said he had frequently heard his people say that the invaders had an underground passage through the Grand Canyon but that he had never found it. 

He and Tevis took the same trail back except for not turning off at the thicket of pines." On their left they could see what they took to be old shafts made by the Jesuits (sic), and a few miles farther on the remains of an old reduction works. Each day, they kept passing old abandoned shafts, the last ones between the San Francisco and Gila Rivers, about twelve miles from their confluence.

This 700 mile or so round trip took place apparently in the summer or fall of 1858. In 1859 Tevis opened a trading post at the pass station but in 1860 joined the Confederate forces at Mesilla, New Mexico, and was hospitalized for wounds at Hempstead, Texas when mustered out. He married on Christmas Eve 1866 in St. Louis. Ten years later he transferred a general store he had started in East St. Louis to Empire, Kansas and, in 1880, via Austin, Texas to a site fourteen miles north of Fort Bowie and five miles from the Chiricahua foothills. Thus he founded Tevis town, which in 1912 was renamed Bowie. His wife, son, and five daughters joined him around two years later by way of the just opened Southern Pacific Railroad. He shortly enlarged his store to a hotel. He had lost the diaries he had kept during the '50s but, with the help of his daughter Belle, completed his book of the Arizona years 185760 in 1886. While he was working as commissary of a mining and milling company in Virginia Chief Canyon in 1902, an old squaw of perhaps ninety showed him a silver watchcase he had given her in 1858. Esconolea had died at some undisclosed year at the San Carlos Reservation well to the north of Apache Pass. Tevis died at Tucson in 1905 at seventy, leaving his book manuscript along with many letters and diaries. Belle and another daughter, Minnie, prepared the book (Arizona in the '50's) for its publication by the University of New Mexico in 1954. Tevis and his wife Emma, who died seven weeks after him, are buried in the Bowie cemetery.

 

Discovery of a Lost Viking Ship...

And lost again...

FROM THE DESERT TO THE SEA-AND BACK

Long ago a great flood came to the desert and everyone was forced to move up into the hills to await the leaving of the water. Almost every year in the time of the spring there was a flood, but this was the greatest flood of all and it lasted the longest time. One day, after the third dance had been held, there appeared a great bird with white wings that moved slowly across the top of the water. It came to rest on the top of a hill that the water barely covered, and never was it able to free itself. Soon the waters went away and the great bird fell over on its side and died. The wind blew away its white wings and the body of the great bird slowly slid down the hill where soon the wind threw sand over it to bury it. Sometimes the wind blows away the sand and the body of the great bird can be seen again, but the bird is an omen of evil and harm will come to whoever draws near.

—Old Indian Legend 

A FEW CENTURIES PAST, the Colorado River was much more mighty than it is today. Almost every year when the spring runoff poured down from the distant Rocky Mountains the Colorado River alternated its course like a long wet pendulum. It knew no boundaries when it poured into the desert floor over which it must travel in its race to the Gulf of California. To a passenger on a high flying jet the desert today resembles a huge piece of wormwood, testimony to the thousands of scars left in the land by the erratic and often vicious Colorado River. There is geological evidence that, at certain times in the past, the river furrowed such a deep channel into the gulf during spring rampages that salt water from the sea poured back into the channel after the flood subsided.

On the California side of the desert is the Salton Sink, the lowest area of land within the United States, some two hundred feet below sea level. Each time the sink was visited by the Colorado, it became a lake. Each time it was deprived of water, it dried up. Fossil evidence indicates that on at least two occasions in the past, the gulf broke through the delta-plain and joined it with the sea. No one knows with certainty how many times it has been filled and emptied, but the most recent inundation occurred in 1906 when the Colorado created the present Salton Sea.

These countless transitions from sand pit to sea have left many paradoxes. Grotesque concretion; like giant mushrooms, skeletons, serpents, and mythical monsters litter vast regions of the desert floor. One such area is in the Anza-Borrego State Park where there are acres upon acres of round concretions. Made up of sandstone cemented into shape with calcium carbonate, there is no dispute about their connection with bodies of water that have filled the Salton Sea. Another curious spectacle in the Salton Sink is a vast oyster-shell bed formed during one of the sink's unions with the Gulf of California. Averaging eight inches across, these petrified shells of the Ostrea vespertine, or ruffled oyster species, lived here about ten million years ago. In nearby areas are many thousands of tiny fresh-water shells deposited during a later epoch. Many, many years past, the sink was the bottom of a vast fresh-water body known as Lake Cahuilla, and primitive fish traps of the Indians still may be seen on the old water line of this lake a few miles south of Palm Desert. It was fed by the Colorado River and drained into the gulf, and there is a legend that the earth shook and that this huge body of water, covering hundreds of square miles, disappeared within a day and a night. All of this lends credence to the legend of an ancient ship, partially buried in sand in a desolate canyon of the California desert badlands.

One of the more intriguing versions is the story told by the Sefiora Petra Tucker who, before she married her prospecting husband, was the widow of one Santiago Socia. It was Santiago who first found the ancient ship of the desert. A wealthy Mexican of quick temper, he had fled Los Angeles to escape a hangman's noose. He took up residence in the border city of Tecate where he awaited the arrival of Petra. While he waited, he heard from an Indian peon that several ollas of gold were buried in the desert mountains of the United States about forty kilometers northeast of Tecate. The peon just happened to have a map of the gold's location, just happened to need some quick cash, and thus was willing to sell Santiago the chart. A transaction was quickly consummated. Santiago waited for Petra to arrive, then waited in Tecate for another couple of months before chancing the trip across the border to pick up his treasure. He returned a month later with no ollas of gold, but he told Petra a strange story.

While searching for the treasure, he had entered several canyons near the floor of the desert and in the bottom of one with high sheer walls was an ancient ship with round discs on its side. Only a portion of the ship projected from the sand. On the wall above the ship was some strange writing carved into the rock, not Indian, not English nor Spanish, not any other language with recognizable letters. The bow of the ship was curved and carved like the long neck of a bird. Santiago had brought back a souvenir of his find, a shield made of metal in the shape of a tortilla, only larger, which was one of a series attached to the side of the ship. What happened to it? It was heavy and worthless and was thrown away. What happened to Santiago? He was a man of quick temper, and he died within a year of bullet wounds received in Sonora. The location of the strange vessel was forgotten, other than that it lies in a narrow canyon some forty kilometers northeast of Tecate.

Myrtle and Louis Botts of Julian, California, often came down from their mountain village near San Diego to camp in the desert. Their favorite spot was near an area of natural mineral springs, some hot and some cold, which today are maintained as a resort by the United States Park Service. In the thirties, however, hardly anyone knew about Agua Caliente Springs, and it was then that the Bottses arrived with their tent and enough supplies to remain for a week. 

Myrtle Botts was, and still is, the librarian in charge of the Public Library of Julian. She is also a serious amateur botanist and was one of the founders of the famous wildflower show held annually in Julian. Desert wildflowers depend entirely upon the rain that falls during early winter months. If the desert receives heavy rains in January or February, its floor will be wild with color in March. If the rains fail to materialize, the seeds are unable to germinate and must wait another year or more until the seasonal rains do fall. It was to survey the rain situation and to search for possible new specimens that the Bottses came to the remote desert area near Agua Caliente Springs in the spring of 1933. 

On their second or third night out, they camped near the entrance to a deep canyon where there was a cold water spring. While preparing their supper, a dusty and semi-illiter­ate prospector arrived to replenish his water supply. Some days earlier, he told the Bottses, he had been well into the canyon where he had seen an old ship sticking out of some dirt right in the side of the mountain. The Bottses were interested, but the prospector could tell them nothing more, other than that the ship was "yonder up the canyon." When he told them that he also knew where the lost Peg Leg Mine was located, the Bottses dismissed him as a garrulous old man and rejected his tale of the lost ship. 

The following morning the Bottses hiked into the canyon in their quest for wildflower specimens for the upcoming show. They followed the floor of the defile, eyes fastened to the ground; then, as the grade became steeper, they paused for a brief rest. Mrs. Botts noticed it first.

Jutting out of the canyon wall, almost immediately over­head, was the forward portion of a large and very ancient vessel. A curved stem head swept up from its prow. Along both sides of the vessel were clearly discernible circular marks in the wood, quite possibly left by shields which at one time had been attached to the vessel. Near the bow, on one side of the ship, were four deep furrows in the wood. The craft was high enough to hide its interior from the Bottses' view and the side of the canyon was so steep that it could be scaled only by an expert mountain climber. Indeed, he might have trouble be­cause the wall was composed of shale and clay, too unstable to support his weight. 

For a long tune, the Bottses studied the curious sight, then slowly retraced their steps to their camp, taking careful note of landmarks in order to experience no difficulty in returning to the ship. The earthquake struck at almost the moment they emerged from the canyon. Both were thrown to the ground, and as they clutched the moving earth in terror, they could see their camp shaking itself to pieces in front of them. Mrs. Botts remembers their empty car bouncing across the desert floor as if it were being driven slowly over railroad ties. When the rum­ble had subsided and the earth once again had become calm, the Bottses retrieved their wandering automobile and gathered up their scattered camp supplies. The spring that had been cold the night before, Mrs. Botts discovered, had now become hot. 

The earthquake had been a severe one, causing extensive damage in Long Beach and many other sections of southern California, but as is the case in most natural disasters, it was soon forgotten. Not forgotten by the Bottses was the strange ship in the desert canyon. Preliminary research in her library told Mrs. Botts that the vessel most nearly resembled an old Viking ship, yet she could not believe that the craft could be one of those ancient piratical vessels. Before she reported her discovery, she decided to have another look at the craft and to support her announcement with some photographs. Thus, the following weekend, the Bottses once again set out for the desert area near Agua Caliente Springs. 

Once again, the couple hiked up the steep canyon, but this time when they came to the spot where they had paused to rest, their passage was blocked. Half the mountainside had fallen into the canyon, the unstable earth shaken loose by the heavy temblor. There was no sign of the ancient ship. If the earthquake had occurred a short time earlier, the Bottses realized uncomfortably, they also would have been buried under the tons of earth shaken from the mountain. 

Today, Mrs. Botts is not sure what kind of an ancient ship she and her husband, and an old prospector, saw in the desert canyon. It could have been Phoenician, or it could have been Roman, but she feels that it was Viking. Eventually there will be another earthquake around Agua Caliente Springs and possibly the earth will open to display this ancient vessel.

There are other legends and tales of lost ships in the vast California desert. The Seri Indians, who live on Tiburon Island in the Gulf of Mexico, sing of one. This once hostile and murderous tribe preserves its history through song, a curious lilting monotone that is passed down through generations by tribal historians trained for their task from childhood. One song recounts the arrival of the "Came From Afar Man." Many, many years in the past there appeared at Tiburon Island a huge boat that contained many, many men with yellow hair and a woman with red hair. They remained at the island for many, many days while the men went hunting with their arrows and spears. One man, who was their chief, remained behind and lay with the red-haired woman on the boat. When the hunters returned with their game, the boat departed from the land of the Seris. 

No mention is made in the song of how the visitors escaped with their lives. It was a Viking custom for captains to have their wives along. Another story in the lost-ship syndrome involves a modern Viking, one Nels Jacobsen, a rancher in California's Imperial Valley. Jacobsen reportedly found the skeleton of an ancient boat near his house some six miles cast of Imperial City in 1907 and thriftily salvaged the lumber from it to build a pigpen.

 

 Borrowed From the book, 

The Mysterious West 

By Brad Williams and Choral Pepper