THE HISTORY AND MYSTERY OF BLACK MOUNTAIN
Black Mountain’s history includes a tradition of preservation, which began with the Prehistoric Hohokam Tribe, which settled in the Desert Foothills in the twelfth or thirteenth century. For more than a thousand years, they protected Black Mountain’s rich supply of game and edible plants by living only in the Foothills. After they left, sometime around 1400, the region around Black Mountain was uninhabited until the first Anglo settlers came in the 1800s. In the meantime, other Indian tribes came to the Foothills to hunt and to gather seeds and plants, but they, like the Hohokam, never lived on Black Mountain. The nineteenth-century Anglo settlers were a mixture of miners and ranchers who were attracted to the area’s other resources: precious ore, lush grasses and warm climate. They gutted the mountain and hunted some of its game almost to extinction. But in 1973, a far-sighted group of citizens banded together to set aside 250 acres of Black Mountain’s summit as a public natural preserve to restore the mountain’s plant and wildlife balance and to make it available for everyone to enjoy.
THE DESERT FOOTHILLS HOHOKAM TRIBE
The spiritual connection many people feel with Black Mountain may be what attracted the earliest inhabitants to live in its vicinity. These inhabitants were members of the Hohokam Tribe, who migrated to the Desert Foothills from a larger Hohokam community along the Salt and Gila Rivers sometime between 850 and 1150 AD. All of the archaeological remains in the Black Mountain foothills region are distinctively Hohokam in style, which suggests that the Hohokam were the only people to actually live in this area until the first Anglo settlement in the 1800s.
The Hohokam are believed to have migrated from Mexico to the region we now know as south-central Arizona approximately 300 BC, where they flourished until approximately 1450 AD. The Hohokam are famous for building technologically-advanced, gravity-fed irrigation canals to water cotton, corn, beans, squash and tobacco. These prehistoric irrigation structures were so well engineered that they were still functional in 1867, when prospector and speculator Jack Swilling observed the extensive line of canals and realized the desert could become an agricultural oasis. He dredged one of the ancient ditches and began to irrigate crops. His success attracted more farmers, and thus sprouted the city of Phoenix.
During the time the Hohokam lived in the Black Mountain Foothills, the area was blessed with an abundance of water from two perennial streams and hundreds of springs (which today are almost all completely dry). It was a perfect place for the Foothills Hohokam to build irrigation canals and grow crops, just as their counterparts were doing along the Salt and Gila Rivers.
The Hohokam men caught fish and hunted big horn sheep, mule deer and rabbits while the women harvested the crops and gathered wild edible plants. Some of these plants provided more than just food. The Murpheyi agave, a remarkably versatile plant, provided the Hohokam with food, a beverage, building material, and fiber to make rope, clothing and soap. The Hohokam also made soap from yucca roots.
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Another plant that was integral to the Foothills Hohokam lifestyle was the great saguaro. The Hohokums had a deep spiritual bond with this majestic cactus, and assigned it supernatural, anthropomorphic qualities, believing that saguaros were actually Indians. They began their annual tribal calendar with the ripening of the saguaros’ bright red, sweet fruit. The Hohokam ate this fruit raw or dried, boiled it into syrup, and fermented it into wine.
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By 1200 AD the Foothills area supported a sizable population of Hohokam. As the villages grew larger, so did the homes. Previously, the dwellings had been one-room pit houses, constructed by raising a plastered wood frame above a shallow pit. But now multi-room homes appeared, perhaps indicating a class system. Evidence suggests that during this period, the Foothills Hohokam cut themselves off from trading and associating with the main tribe, perhaps because the rich supply of natural resources in the Black Mountain Foothills allowed them to be self-sufficient.
The Hohokam culture dominated all of south-central Arizona during the period in which their entire society flourished. Over the course of 1,400 years, the Hohokam grew from a small tribe that lived in simple farming villages along the Gila and Salt Rivers to a large political entity that covered a widespread and complex territory. They bolstered their economic base with a sophisticated canal irrigation system and an extensive trade network. They enjoyed a rich artistic culture that included highly stylized pottery, and jewelry made from sea shells (obviously obtained through trade). They even developed an etching technique centuries before the Europeans, who credited themselves with originating etching in the 1400s.
As vibrant as it was, the entire Hohokam society suddenly vanished. Sometime around 1400 the Foothills Hohokam left the Black Mountain area and moved back south to rejoin the people from whom their ancestors had split more than 500 years previously. Around 1450 the entire Hohokam tribe disappeared. Scientists who studied tree rings discovered that a severe drought hit northern Arizona between 1276 and 1299. But it is uncertain whether this drought brought about the Foothills Hohokam’s migration back south, or if it triggered the entire tribe’s demise, since Apaches used the Black Mountain Foothills as a hunting ground after the Foothills Hohokam left the area, and the Hohokam tribe prospered another 150 years after the start of the drought.
Fittingly, “Hohokam” is a Pima Indian word that means “Those who have gone.” But no one knows where the Hohokam went. It is possible that they joined with other tribes, because some of the characteristics that are associated with the Hohokam are visible in present-day Pima, Apache, Papago, Maricopa and Yavapai Indians.
After the Hohokam left the Black Mountain Foothills, no other Indian tribes settled near Black Mountain. As late as the 1800s, tribes traveled considerable distances to hunt mule deer, big horn sheep and rabbits, and gather fruit from the sacred Saguaro and fiber from the Murpheyi agave on and around Black Mountain. In the late 1800s, you could see Indian signal fires between Black Mountain, the Four Peaks and the McDowells.
Unlike the Hohokam, those of us who now live on and around Black Mountain, in the towns known as Carefree and Cave Creek, come from many different cultures. Our homes are larger, our streams and springs are drier, and the wildlife is scarcer than when the Hohokum lived in this area. We hunt for our food in supermarkets, and trade in U.S. currency. But some things haven’t changed. We share the Hohokam’s desire to break away from larger communities and live quieter, more peaceful lives amongst the flora and fauna that grace Black Mountain. We share the Hohokum’s reverence for this magnificent landmark and its bountiful resources. To that end, we are dedicated to sustaining the mountain’s precious vegetation and wildlife, and to preserving its unique splendor.
Between 1450 and the late 1800s, only flora and fauna made the region around Black Mountain their home. Nomadic Indian tribes came and went through the Foothills, hunting game and gathering plants. In 1865 the U.S. Army was dispatched to build Fort McDowell, eighteen miles east of Black Mountain, as part of the U.S. Government’s campaign to quell the Apaches and take their land for farming and mining.
Prospectors who arrived in the Black Mountain Foothills first struck gold on Continental Mountain and Gold Hill, both a few miles north of Black Mountain. Prospectors found gold, silver and copper on Black Mountain in the 1880s, in what was called the Mormon Girl Mine.
BLACK MOUNTAIN’S MINING DAYS
The disappearance of the Hohokam presented the Desert Foothills’ first mystery. The disappearance of a cache of gold from the Black Mountain’s Mormon Girl Mine presented another.
After the U.S. Army succeeded in driving out the Apaches from the Desert Foothills area, hopeful prospectors flooded in. In 1888, a man named Samuel Taylor began working Black Mountain’s Mormon Girl Mine. He brought out his brothers and father, and eventually co-owned the property with his father.
The Taylor men hired three more workers to help them mine the Mormon Girl’s gold ore. For 11 years they toiled, barely taking out enough gold to support themselves. Some time after Samuel’s father died in 1899, Samuel and his brothers decided to take their hoard of small gold buttons out of its hiding place in the mine. But it was gone. The Taylor brothers never learned who robbed them or what happened to the gold. They sold the mine and moved away. |
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