Several centuries ago (you can check the history books) the Jesuits
pushed up from Mexico into the great northern deserts where they had
followed the stories of the seven cities of gold.  There being scant
gold, but fertile ground for religious conversions, Father Kino made
quite a loop and stopped longest at the agrarian centers of the people
they named the Papago.  His astonishingly original mission San Xavier
del Bac is known as the White Dove, and still astonishes those wandering
west of present day Tucson, Arizona.

Elsewhere the tribes showed less interest in conversion.  The hard Apache
near Chiracahua, the nomadic Navajo to the northeast, the insular Hopi
and Tewa were less aproachable.  Although Kino completed his loop and
returned to the nearly cosmopolitan centers south of Casa Grande, one of
his acolytes peeled off at the northern loop, north of the Apache and the
Shoshone, and stopped where the Paiute made their camps in the rocky
canyons of the Owyhee mountains.

The area first gained public attention when the U.S. Army was attempting
a final cleansing of the renegade tribes.  The ghost dance which began as
a blending of Christian and animist ritual near Schurz, Nevada, had
caused a frenzy of belief in immunity from gunfire among the tribes
remaining on their ancestral lands.  The army had conscripted troops from
a newly colonized island kingdom in the Pacific, variously transliterated
Ha-wai'i or Owyhee, and these troops were used in battles against the
Paiutes.  Through an unusual reversal of geographical logic, the
mountains where these battles decimated the Paiutes were named for the
Pacific native conscripts who were wiped out instead.

The Owyhee River cuts from near the Duck River Reservation (Paiute, of
course), through the stark Owyhee range and empties into the Snake River
which feeds the great Columbia.  The waterfalls in the rocky gorges are
only accessible to the most serious adventurer, but are unique and
breathtaking to those who appreciate their stark beauty.  Check this out
on the Web.

This area is still quite desolate and remote.  Bighorn sheep graze like
phantoms in the peaks, and Basque shepherds manage their flocks in the
lower foothills in warmer weather.  Hikers occasionally die from eating
the wrong kind of wild celery, and mountain men and sociopaths shop at
the Murphy Mercantile at the Owyhee County seat in Idaho where both
Claude Dallas and the Fish and Game wardens he murdered used to buy their
supplies.  There is no bridge across the Snake River there, all the
better for nearby Ada County and the Idaho state capital.  You can visit
the silver mining districts, active and ghost variety, if you have
suitable transportation, and the Murphy museum is open Thursdays from
1 to 4 PM during the summer.

It is not clear what parts of this history closely apply to the unusual
construction which has been recently revealed about forty miles over from
the trail at Silver City.  This area has not been populated even by the
Paiute since the 1870s but it is impossible to date the work that has
been found, since it uses almost no organic material and does not lend
itself to carbon dating.

At the base of one of the falls is a relatively flat ledge system on one
side of the gorge and a steep rock wall on the other side.  The cataract
apparently drops into a undercut which has been eroded naturally in the
rock.  The falling water pulls air down into the plunge and the air
becomes trapped under the ledge system and issues through a number of
crevices.  Most of the crevices have been blocked off by dense growth of
native mosses, and some crevices clearly feed a ledge halfway up the
vertical face along side the falls.  Here are found the remains of a
single rank of stopped pipes constructed of fired red clay.

This is the basic recipe for a simple hydraulus.  It is not surprising
that the natural situation suggested the enterprise, but the method of
valving is unique and, if accurately interpreted, of extraordinary
ingenuity, overshadowing the rest of the work and indicating the need for
a much more thorough investigation of the situation and possible
intellectual source for such development.

The system is apparently a lock-and-cancel arrangement for the pallet
valves.  A pair of parallel channels is cut into the rock and the pipes
were logically fitted into foot holes in a lintel covering these
channels, the foot hole being located midway between these channels.
Some sort of rocking or sliding pallet valve was apparently placed
beneath each foot hole and was dislodged by a device in the channel on
one side and closed by a device in the channel on the other side.  There
is a corresponding pair of channels with no lintel some eighty feet away
where there is no visual contact with the organ or its audience which
would have heard it from across the gorge.

Wear on these channels, remaining shards, and tracks in the surface show
that four runs of small-diameter fired-clay piping, with cemented sleeve
joints, connected the ends of these channels.  There was some care taken
so that the runs of clay piping were each of exactly the same length, and
the reason for this was not immediately apparent.  The theory is that
some sort of flexible tubing, probably hide, was laid in the channels
themselves and tied over the ends of the clay piping.  Thus there were
two complete loops with duplicate pairs flexible sections.

The theory continues that these tube loops were filled with water and,
when an impulse was made on the remote tube, a shock wave would travel
out of both ends of that flexible remote tube, through the pottery tubes,
and meet in the flexible tube under the clay organ pipes.  When the
pulses met under the pipes, the pallet valve would shift, opening the
wind channel to speak.  A hit on the same position of the second tube
loop would similarly push the pallet valve closed.

Although remnants of local lore normally could shed some light on this,
the rival Shoshoni and Paiute who now populate the reservation upstream
are in rare agreement in that they are really rather disinterested in
this, as they even now consider it to be old non-native construction
without tribal value.

Shifting geologic structure has created a new main channel for the falls,
stopping the air pressure at this site, and the lack of access has helped
preserve the remaining traces of this construction.  The lintels bearing
foot holes were only recently removed by vandals, however it has been
several decades since the clay pipe and tube shards were scavenged by pot
hunters.  It is unclear what its future will be.

Karl Petersen¶
Meridian, Idaho