Lieutenant Jacob Almy, Fifth Cavalry, with whose command I was on duty, scoured the northwest portion of the Tonto Basin, and met with about the same experiences as the other detachments; but I wish to tell that at one of our camping-places, on the upper Verde, we found a ruined building of limestone, laid in adobe, which had once been of two or three stories in height, the corner still standing being not less than twenty-five feet above the ground, with portions of rafters of cottonwood, badly decayed, still in place. It was the opinion of both Almy and myself, after a careful examination, that it was of Spanish and not of Indian origin, and that it had served as a depot for some of the early expeditions entering this country; it would have been in the line of advance of Coronado upon Cibola, and I then thought and still think that it was most probably connected with his great expedition which passed across Arizona in 1541. All this is conjecture, but not a very violent one; Coronado is known to have gone to “Chichilticale,” supposed to have been the “Casa Grande” on the Gila; if so, his safest, easiest, best supplied, and most natural line of march would have been up the valley of the Verde near the head of which this ruin stands.
Another incident was the death of one of our packers, Presiliano Monje, a very amiable man, who had made friends of all our party. He had caught a bad cold in the deep snows on the summit of the Matitzal Range, and this developed into an attack of pneumonia; there was no medical officer with our small command, and all we could do was based upon ignorance and inexperience, no matter how much we might desire to help him. Almy hoped that upon descending from the high lands into the warm valley of the Verde, the change would be beneficial to our patient; but he was either too far gone or too weak to respond, and the only thing left for us to do was to go into bivouac and try the effect of rest and quiet. For two days we had carried Monje in a chair made of mescal stalks strapped to the saddle, but he was by this time entirely too weak to sit up, and we were all apprehensive of the worst. It was a trifle after midnight, on the morning of the 23d of March, 1873, that “the change” came, and we saw that it was a matter of minutes only until we should have a death in our camp; he died before dawn and was buried immediately after sunrise, under the shadow of a graceful cottonwood, alongside of two pretty springs whose babbling waters flowed in unison with the music of the birds. In Monje’s honor we named the cañon “Dead Man’s Cañon,” and as such it is known to this day.