Montezuma Well

In the summer of 1891, when Charles Lummis first visited the spring-fed limestone sinkhole in north-central Arizona called Montezuma Well, explorers hadn’t yet found the bottom of the dark pool of water. Or so Lummis claimed. "I am assured that a sounding line has been sent down three hundred and eighty feet, in a vain attempt to find bottom, and that is easily credible," Lummis asserted in an article he wrote for St. Nicholas magazine shortly after his visit.

That purported mystery made for a nice, spine-tingling anecdote in his article for St. Nicholas, which had a target audience of adolescent boys. "One can wade out a few feet in knee-deep water – if one has the courage in that creepy place – and then, suddenly, as walking from a parapet, step off into the bottomless," he wrote.

In fact, the pool in the sinkhole 100 feet below the floor of the surrounding desert, replenished with a constant flow of more than 1 million gallons per day of warm water, is about 50 feet deep.

In his article, Lummis told another fanciful tale or two including one about a tunnel complex that reached deep into the limestone cliff that forms the eastern wall of the sinkhole. Lummis claimed he explored the gloomy network of chambers with a smoldering branch of buckthorn to light the way. He found mummified corncobs, stone hammers and other relics and even the handprint of a child in the mortar on one of the walls. In one room deep beneath ground, a stream bubbled up through a crack in the floor. It was here that the peaceful Sinagua took refuge from bands of marauders from other tribes that regularly preyed on them.

That, in any event, is how Lummis told it in his article for St. Nicholas. But if any such cave complex exists, contemporary archaeologists evidently don’t know about it. Thousand-year-old cliff dwellings of the Sinagua Indians cling to the walls of the pit. But just several small caves burrowing a short way into the limestone have been found. They were occupied by Apaches in the 1800s, long after the Sinagua mysteriously vanished in the 1400s.

It’s easy to forgive Lummis for his occasionally excessive use of literary license. The future nationally-renowned editor and Indian rights activist was a struggling freelance writer scratching out a living for himself and a young wife in the pueblo of Isleta when he wrote about Montezuma Well and other Southwestern travel destinations for eastern magazines – essays later reprinted in Some Strange Corners of Our Country and other books. He badly needed to sell his writings to barely make ends meet. And what sold in those days to St. Nicholas, one of his most reliable markets, were swashbuckling stories in the style of one of the most popular writers of juvenile novels at the time, Captain Mayne Reid.

Reid’s melodramatic epics about sultry Spanish senoritas in a wild west full of lecherous Spanish friars and murderous savages had been young Lummis’s favorite books. So he readily gravitated toward the genre.

Montezuma Well, today a national monument, is indeed a marvelous and intriguing oasis in the Upper Sonoran desert. It became a mysterious wonder with a decidedly sinister aura in Lummis’s telling. The body of water was a "terrible subterranean abyss," a "gruesome black lake," "deadly." The cliffs encircling it were "grim," "appalling," "scowling." And the cliff dwellers were a brave "eagle-breed" forced to live in their "dizzy nests" to escape the "obsidian knives" of "merciless wandering savages."

Some archaeologists today theorize that the Sinagua abruptly disappeared around 1400 in a final apocalyptic spasm of intertribal warfare. Why else would they have lived in dangerous perches half way up cliffs and then vanished so suddenly? That’s a mystery that remains unresolved. Perhaps Lummis’s rendering of the past isn’t entirely off base.

Lummis’s hyperbole served a larger purpose. He was one of the first writers who succeeded in drawing the nation’s attention toward its southwestern territories -- and the rich history and culture that the region brought to the nation at large.

Outflow Feeds Prehistoric 
Irrigation System

The level of the water in Montezuma Well and its 76-degree temperature are unchanged from Lummis’s day more than 110 years ago. The constant inflow of 1,100 gallons per minute is perfectly matched by the outflow through a subterranean channel. That stream bubbles up through a cleft in the rock at the base of a hillside east of the well.

For at least 2,000 years, the outflow from Montezuma Well (which by the way, is a misnomer, having no connection at all with the 16^th Century Aztec ruler) has been directed through a channel to fields where Hohokam and Sinagua farmers tended corn, beans, squash, cotton and other crops. Lummis’s description of the outlet written in 1891 aptly describes the scene today. though the farm he mentions is long gone. The ancient irrigation channel now empties untapped into Beaver Creek.

Wall of ancient structure on the rim 
of the well beside the valley where 
Sinagua farmers tended their crops

Outflow from the Montezuma Well 
empties into Beaver Creek, a rare 
watercourse in the central Arizona desert

Montezuma Well outlet

"Here is the outlet of the subterranean stream from the well. From a little hole in the very base of the cliff the glad rivulet rolls out into the light of day, and tumbles heels over head down a little ledge to a pretty pool of the creek. The water of the well is always warmish, and in winter a little cloud of vapor hovers over the outlet.

"Between the cliff and the creek is pinched an irrigating ditch, which carries the waters of the well half a mile south to irrigate the ranch of a small farmer. Probably no other man waters his garden from so strange a source."

--Charles Fletcher Lummis
(1891)