ingle year would bury the springs
four feet deep. A truer indication of the great age of the reservoir is
the old tree growing up out of the center; and that brings up the
question how we know the age of these ancient ruins--that is, the age
within a hundred years or so. Ask settlers round how old Casa Grande is;
and they will tell you five or six hundred years. Yet on the very face
of things, Casa Grande must be thousands of years older than the other
ruins of the Southwest.

Why?

First as to historic records: did Coronado see Casa Grande in 1540, when
he marched north across the country? He records seeing an ancient Great
House, where Indians dwelt. Bandelier, Fewkes and a dozen others who
have identified his itinerary, say this was not Casa Grande. Even by
1540, Casa Grande was an abandoned ruin. Kino, the great Jesuit, was
the first white man known to have visited the Great House; and he
gathered the Pimas and Papagoes about and said mass there about 1694.
What a weird scene it must have been--the Sacaton Mountains glimmering
in the clear morning light; the shy Indians in gaudy tunics and yucca
fiber pantaloons crowding sideways through the halls to watch what to
them must have been the gorgeous vestments of the priest. Then followed
the elevation of the host, the bowing of the heads, the raising of the
standard of the Cross; and a new era, that has not boded well for the
Pimas and Papagoes, was ushered in. Then the Indians scattered to their
antelope plains and to the mountains; and the priest went on to the
Mission of San Xavier del Bac.

The Jesuits suffered expulsion, and Garcez, the Franciscan, came in
1775, and also held mass in Casa Grande. Garcez says that it was a
tradition among the Moki of the northern desert that they had originally
come from the south, from the Morning Glow of Casa Grande, and that they
had inhabited the box-canyons of the Gila in the days when they were "a
little people." This establishes Casa Grande as prior to the cave
dwellings of the Gila or Frijoles; and the cave dwellings were
practically contemporaneous with the Stone Age and the last centuries of
the Ice Age. Now, the cave dwellings had been abandoned for centuries
before the Spaniards came. This puts the cave age contemporaneous with
or prior to the Christian era.

In the very center of the Casa Grande reservoir, across the doorways of
caves in Frijoles Canyon, grew trees that have taken centuries to come to
maturity.