The Owyhee Hydraulus
By Karl Petersen
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 |
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