Indians, or what people now call “Native Americans,” roamed the area Heber now occupies. The tribe that lived in the area was probably the Navajo tribe since Heber is closest to the Navajo Indian Reservation, but there could have been some from the Apache tribe as well. Some of the people who lived in Heber spent a lot of their free time looking for Indian ruins. Their success and the mystique of it all caused me to be on the lookout for Indian ruins or relics as well, as I roamed the hills around Heber.
I was never successful in finding burial grounds or anything like that, but I became pretty good at looking for pottery. On the hill north of town it was quite easy to find small broken pieces of pottery. The most common type of pottery was made with red clay the color of adobe bricks. As I played on the hill, I would pick up pieces of pottery that were an inch square or larger in size. They were the ones worth keeping. I put them in my pockets and carried them home where I had a bucket to store them in. There were lots of smaller pieces scattered in different places on the hill.
If I was really lucky, I sometimes found pottery painted black and white. These were much more special and I picked them up regardless of the size. I don’t know whether the two types of pottery were made by the same tribe or not, but the black and white painted pottery had designs on it. The clay colored pottery just had a pattern on it like overlapping shells or something.
On rare occasions, I would find pieces of an arrowhead or even whole arrowheads lying on the ground. Those were very special finds. I used to keep all the arrowheads or parts of arrowheads I had found in my desk drawer in the bedroom which was reserved for “special treasures.”
Down Buckskin Canyon from Heber was a place called the “Three Mile Indian Fort.” Charlie Reidhead and I sometimes went down there to look around. It was on the top of a hill that had sheer bluffs going from the base all the way up to the top. It would have been a good place to fend off an attack. I don’t know whether it was a real “Indian Fort” or not, but I did find an arrowhead there once. One time we also found a large stone used by the Indians to grind their grain. It had a smooth cavity in it where a special stone was used to grind the grain. We didn’t find the stone used for grinding but we did find the bottom part which unfortunately, was too large for us to move.
Another Indian relic fairly common in the area were the “Indian bath houses”. They were made by leaning short logs together at the top and covering the logs with dirt. The inside of the little “bath house” was probably four or five feet tall from floor to ceiling and maybe six feet across at the floor. There was a door in one side. I never saw one used but the idea was that the Indians would heat the rocks from the creek in a fire, put the hot rocks inside the “bath house,” and then throw water on the rocks to create steam. The Indian would then sit in the house and essentially take a sauna steam bath. I never saw one in use but it was not uncommon to come upon them in the area around Heber. We knew where several different ones were located. They were obvious because there was always a stack of rocks outside the bath house. I assume the story is true.
Indians or Native Americans obviously lived around Heber long before I was born. By the time I came along, the Indians were either living on the reservation or living in society off the reservation. Quite a number of them lived in Heber and worked in the woods cutting logs or pulp wood or worked on the mill.