Howdy folks I'm Hank Sheffer and welcome to another true life story right here with
Larry Hedrick on mysteries of the superstition mountains you know it's said by people who should
know that there's as many as 2 400 Indian ruins in and around superstition mountain
of course it takes a trained eye to be able to look at a pile of rubble and
say it was an end in ruined but there's at least 140 major rains in the superstitions
most of these were put together by the Hohokam or the Salado Indians the ho ho com came into the
Arizona picture about 300 a.d and the Salados came in about 800 a.d the Salados were cliff
dwellers but the ho-ho-com were desert people and they built their houses mostly in flatland
we have a picture here of a typical pit house that the early pioneer
phase of Hohokam but as the different phases came along they covered them in mud
and one of the tricks that they did was they would wet their hands and rub that
that clay until it's shown real bright and this of course made it impervious to rain
but they both left examples of their construction ability in that the ho ho calm down at
the Casa Grand ruins at Coolidge and over at the Salado over at the Tonto National cliff dwellings
where the Salado had major ruins there and the Tonto ruins has a very nice interpretive center
where you can go in and you can see the difference between the Salado pottery and in other places you
can see the the Hohokam pottery where the whole calm is distinctly different than any other
types of pottery these two ruins uh draw an yearly about 30 to 35 000 people but in the Superstitions
there's some pristine ruins particularly over in rogers canyon at angel springs
where we have the cliff dwellings by the Salado that are just absolutely perfect
some minor damage by uh by past hikers but uh you can actually see the fingerprints of the Indians
as they put the mud on the sides of the walls now probably a couple of thousand people have
been in to see these rains at angel springs but there's some very inaccessible canyons in the
Superstitions and there are several ruins that are in absolutely perfect condition the ho ho
calm occupied significant portions of the extreme western and southern sides of the Superstition
Mountains Hohokam pottery shards have been found throughout the entire Goldfield Mining District,
Gold Canyon and the Queen Valley regions the Hohokam did not venture deeply into the wilderness
areas in significant numbers the exception being in the collapsed caldera of Garden Valley
a cursory investigation of Garden Valley occurred in 1931. A large farming area ringed by the
perimeter of small formerly occupied caves was found unfortunately no record exists it would pin
down the exact date of the occupation but there is an amazing mystery ring in the Superstitions
it's going by the name of circle stone these days and really i have to give credit to Tom Kollinburn
for the exploration that took place tom was working summers at the Tex Barclay
Quarter Circle U ranch while he was still in high school in 1955
and he went to work full time for Tex after he got out of high school and he the first time he
heard about the ruins was 1955. I heard about it the first time from Tom in 1975. so in 1966
him and a couple other guys actually drove down to Reavis ranch because there used to be a road there
and it was private property at that time and this is the first time they were actually able to
locate the remains although they weren't able to really do any exploration there and then in 1975
Tom had an aerial view with a friend who had an airplane and they flew over it and in 1976
He took eight people up there and took a a bunch of measurements and about 1980 he had KPNX Phoenix
do a documentary on Circlestone and in 1981 he done two trips in there and this was the first
time that he actually took a geologist with him and an archaeologist with him you might
remember the story i told about tom having me take a couple of strings of horses up to jf ranch this
was the trip that he took the eight people on we took 11 head up there and I was supposed to go on
that but I was working with the Maricopa County Sheriff's office at that time and I was unable to
go and I might add here this is one of the few places that I've never made it to circlestone
the old cowboys always thought that this was a corral as time went by the others thought it
was an abandoned village and others thought it was a fortress and others thought it was a place
the Indians put together for religious ceremonies but when they took the archaeologists up there
in fact there's been a couple of them up there and they just they were throwing out
figures that this might be as old as 2 000 years and most of them thought that it was a
a celestial observatory anyway the uh the spokes that are inside the circle stone are aligned with
the summer and winter solstice and the whole thing is aligned with Polaris the north star
i have to give a lot of credit here to tom because he's done more than anybody else to bring the
the world to attention of of circlestone and although we may never know who built it for sure
there was a very small amount of pottery found at the scene some of it was Salado
some of it was Hohokam but none of this proved that they were the ones that build it
I have never i have not seen any of the pieces from there but it would have been
easy for me to believe that any archaeologist could have told what
phase of a whole compadre it was but I found no evidence that suggested anything like that
but that they actually operated out of there for short periods of time is highly probable
and then of course the Apache began to come into Arizona in the 1300s and it was the Apache that
the raids on the Salado and the Hohokam and the Superstitions and close to the superstitions that
drove them back into the valley and the Apaches finally took over the whole area
so circle stone's just going to have to remain for the time being another Mystery of the Superstition
now thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains