Mata Ortiz pottery at Cabot's Pueblo Museum

Well we went over to the museum that was built by Cabot Yerxa, an early settler in this Desert Hot Springs area. When he came here at first, he had no water on his property, and had to go 14 miles in a return trip to get water. As he only had his mule Merry Christmas as transportation, it must have been quite a trip.

Then the natives told him there was water on his land, so he dug, and first he got scalding hot somewhat smelly water, then he dug again nearby and got pure artesian clean cool water, or so went the story the guide told us.

We toured the weird house that he built with largely reclaimed materials, he was very innovative, but it is still a bit of an unattractive heap. He used adobe bricks, with the refinement of added cement to the mix to make his bricks more waterproof. He was trained at Julienne School of Arts in Paris in the early 1900s. Some of his art was wonderful indeed. He appears to have been a bit of a Renaissance man, very self sufficient. His parents were traders, running trading posts throughout the United States. Most of the doors were very narrow, he must have been about 5 foot 7, but his wife was under 5 feet, so not necessary to have huge doorways.

There were a group of potters there from Mata Ortiz, and one man was painting his pot, and then he fired it by putting it under a big clay pot, and building up the fire around the edges of the bigger pot. Gradually he piled pieces of wood all around the big clay pot, and let it burn for about an hour. Once he took away the burning material, he removed the big pot, and there was his beautifully fired, carved and painted pot. It was just wonderful, luckily some man in the audience bought it. There were hundreds of pots, all different.

There was a lady from Tucson who did a lot of translating for the potters, apparently the village had been potters for hundreds of years, but the tradition was nearly lost, and then it was kind of rediscovered, until now it is again a thriving village full of very skilled artisans, there are about 450 people who now make their living from pottery.

It is very fine work, some of the colors are blacks, reds and off whites, many of the pots are very unusual looking, and very detailed, not crude at all. We really enjoyed seeing their work, and a lot of it was for sale in the museum store. What a wonderful opportunity to see what they were doing.

Apparently a whole new jewellry industry has also been developed as an offshoot of the rejected pots that break. The pottery shards are trimmed down, and enclosed by silver, to make very attractive jewellry. Another ingenious use of the by products of the pottery production.