Canyons of the Colorado | Page 8

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.
On the northeast side of the Little Colorado a great mesa country stretches far to the northward. These mesas are but minor plateaus that are separated by canyons and canyon valleys, and sometimes by low sage plains. They rise from a few hundred to 2,000 or 3,000 feet above the lowlands on which they are founded. The distinction between plateaus and mesas is vague; in fact, in local usage the term mesa is usually applied to all of