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.
