Canyons of the Colorado | Page 8

built stairways to the waters below
and to the hunting grounds above, and lived in the caves. They walled
the fronts of the caves with rock, which they covered with plaster, and
divided them into compartments or rooms; and now many hundreds of
these dwellings are found. Such is the cliff village of Walnut Canyon.

In the ruins of these cliff houses mortars and pestles are found in great
profusion, and when first discovered many articles of pottery were
found, and still many potsherds are seen. The people were very skillful
in the manufacture of stone implements, especially spears, knives, and
arrows.
East of San Francisco Peak there is another low volcanic cone,
composed of ashes which have been slightly cemented by the processes
of time, but which can be worked with great ease. On this cone another
tribe of Indians made its village, and for the purpose they sunk shafts
into the easily worked but partially consolidated ashes, and after
penetrating from the surface three or four feet they enlarged the
chambers so as to make them ten or twelve feet in diameter. In such a
chamber they made a little fireplace, its chimney running up on one
side of the wellhole by which the chamber was entered. Often they
excavated smaller chambers connected with the larger, so that
sometimes two, three, four, or even five smaller connecting chambers
are grouped about a large central room. The arts of these people
resembled those of the people who dwelt in Walnut Canyon. One thing
more is worthy of special notice. On the very top of the cone they
cleared oif a space for a courtyard, or assembly square, and about it
they erected booths, and within the square a space of ground was
prepared with a smooth floor, on which they performed the ceremonies
of their religion and danced to the gods in prayer and praise.
Some twelve or fifteen miles farther east, in another volcanic cone, a
rough crater is found, surrounded by piles of cinders and angular
fragments of lava. In the walls of this crater many caves are found, and
here again a village was established, the caves in the scoria being
utilized as habitations of men. These little caves were fashioned into
rooms of more symmetry and convenience than originally found, and
the openings to the caves were walled. Nor did these people neglect the
gods, for in this crater town, as in the cinder-cone town, a place of
worship was prepared.
Many other caves opening into the canyon and craters of this plateau
were utilized in like manner as homes for tribal people, and in one cave
far to the south a fine collection of several hundred pieces of pottery
has been made.
On the northeast of the San Francisco Plateau is the valley of the Little

Colorado, a tributary of the Colorado River. This river is formed by
streams that head chiefly on the San Francisco Plateau, but in part on
the Zuni Plateau. The Little Colorado is a marvelous river. In seasons
of great rains it is a broad but shallow torrent of mud; in seasons of
drought it dwindles and sometimes entirely disappears along portions
of its course. The upper tributaries usually run in beautiful box canyons.
Then the river flows through a low, desolate, bad-land valley, and the
river of mud is broad but shallow, except in seasons of great floods.
But fifty miles or more above the junction of this stream with the
Colorado River proper, it plunges into a canyon with limestone walls,
and steadily this canyon increases in depth, until at the mouth of the
stream it has walls more than 4,000 feet in height. The contrast between
this canyon portion and the upper valley portion is very great. Above,
the river ripples in a broad sheet of mud; below, it plunges with
violence over great cataracts and rapids. Above, the bad lands stretch
on either hand. This is the region of the Painted Desert, for the marls
and soft rocks of which the hills are composed are of many
colors--chocolate, red, vermilion, pink, buff, and gray; and the naked
hills are carved in fantastic forms. Passing to the region below,
suddenly the channel is narrowed and tumbles down into a deep,
solemn gorge with towering limestone cliffs.
All round the margin of the valley of the Little Colorado, on the side
next to the Zuni Plateau and on the side next to the San Francisco
Plateau, every creek and every brook runs in a beautiful canyon. Then
down in the valley there are stretches of desert covered with sage and
grease wood. Still farther down we come to the bad lands of the Painted
Desert; and scattered through the entire region low mesas or smaller
plateaus are everywhere found.