was the prevailing mode of disposing of the dead, as it was also on the lower Gila and the Salt river. Nothing was learned to indicate that the Sobaipuris of the San Pedro practised incineration. If some of the clans of the Hopis or Zuñis are to be identified with the Hohokam of the Gila, as is maintained by some of the most able authorities upon Southwestern archeology,[1] how is the total disappearance of this primal custom to be explained?
There is a strong belief among the Pimas that they came from the east. It is in that quarter that the abode of their dead is located. Their gods dwell there. Their beliefs do not seem to have been influenced in this respect in the least through contact with the tribes of Yuman stock who have sought a paradise in the opposite direction. There are vestiges of a tradition that the Pimas were once overwhelmed by a large force of warriors who came from the east and destroyed nearly all the people and devastated the entire Gila valley. This does not appear to be another version of the account of the invasion by the underworld clans. While the majority of the Pimas declare that their people have always lived where they now are, or that they came from the east, there are some who say that the Hohokam were killed by an invasion from the east before the Pimas came.
The Pimas formerly regarded the ruins with the same reverence or aversion which they felt toward their own burial places. After the excavations made by the Hemenway Expedition on the Salt river, as no disasters followed the disturbance of the dead, they grew less scrupulous and can now readily be hired as workmen to excavate the ruins or ancient cemeteries.
Contact with Spaniards
From the meager records of the Coronado Expedition of 1540–1542 it has been surmised that Chichilticalli was the Casa Grande, but this statement lacks verification. After traversing the entire southern and eastern part of Arizona the writer can not but believe that it is extremely improbable that Coronado saw the Casa Grande and the
- ↑ The earliest mention of the Gila origin of the Hopi theory is that of Garcés: "Also they knew that I was padre ministro of the Pimas, who likewise are their enemies. This hostility had been told me by the old Indians of my mission, by the Gileños, and Coco-Maricopas, from which information I have imagined (he discurrido) that the Moqui nation anciently extended to the Rio Gila itself. I take my stand (fundome, ground myself) in this matter on the ruins that are found from this river as far as the land of the Apaches, and that I have seen between the Sierras de la Florida and San Juan Nepomuzeno. Asking a few years ago some Subaipuris Indians who were living in my mission of San Xavier if they knew who had built those houses whose ruins and fragments of pottery (losa for loza) are still visible—as, on the supposition that neither Pimas nor Apaches knew how to make (such) houses or pottery, no doubt it was done by some other nation—they replied to me that the Moquis had built them, for they alone knew how to do such things, and added that the Apaches who are about the missions are neither numerous nor valiant; that toward the north was where there were many powerful people; 'there went we,' they said, 'to fight in former times (antiguamente); and even though we attained unto their lands we did not surmount the mesas whereon they lived.'" Diary in Coues, On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer, New York, 1900, II, 386, 387.
