The Grand Cañon of the Colorado | Page 8

and juicier the hotter the sunshine and sand. Some are
spherical, like rolled-up porcupines, crouching in rock hollows beneath
a mist of gray lances, unmoved by the wildest winds. Others, standing
as erect as bushes and trees or tall branchless pillars crowned with
magnificent flowers, their prickly armor sparkling, look boldly abroad

over the glaring desert, making the strangest forests ever seen or
dreamed of. Cereus giganteus, the grim chief of the desert tribe, is
often thirty or forty feet high in southern Arizona. Several species of
tree yuccas in the same deserts, laden in early spring with superb while
lilies, form forests hardly less wonderful, though here they grow singly
or in small lonely groves. The low, almost stemless Yucca baccata,
with beautiful lily-flowers and sweet banana-like fruit, prized by the
Indians, is common along the cañon rim, growing on lean, rocky soil
beneath mountain-mahogany, nut-pines, and junipers, beside dense
flowery mats of Spiraea caespitosa and the beautiful pinnate-leaved
Spiraea millefolium. The nut-pine, Pinus edulis, scattered along the
upper slopes and roofs of the cañon buildings, is the principal tree of
the strange Dwarf Cocanini Forest. It is a picturesque stub of a pine
about twenty-five feet high, usually-with dead, lichened limbs thrust
through its rounded head, and grows on crags and fissured rock tables,
braving heat and frost, snow and drought, and continues patiently,
faithfully fruitful for centuries. Indians and insects and almost every
desert bird and beast come to it to be fed.
To civilized people from corn and cattle and wheat-field countries the
cañon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse, utterly
silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of a multitude of our
fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants. Centuries ago it was
inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw
America, built thousands of stone houses in its crags, and large ones,
some of them several stories high, with hundreds of rooms, on the
mesas of the adjacent regions. Their cliff-dwellings, almost numberless,
are still to be seen in the cañon, scattered along both sides from top to
bottom and throughout its entire length, built of stone and mortar in
seams and fissures like swallows' nests, or on isolated ridges and peaks.
The ruins of larger buildings are found on open spots by the river, but
most of them aloft on the brink of the wildest, giddiest precipices, sites
evidently chosen for safety from enemies, and seemingly accessible
only to the birds of the air. Many caves were also used as
dwelling-places, as were mere seams on cliff-fronts formed by unequal
weathering and with or without outer or side walls; and some of them
were covered with colored pictures of animals. The most interesting of

these cliff-dwellings had pathetic little ribbon-like strips of garden on
narrow terraces, where irrigating-water could be carried to them--most
romantic of sky-gardens, but eloquent of hard times.
In recesses along the river and on the first plateau flats above its gorge
were fields and gardens of considerable size, where irrigating-ditches
may still be traced. Some of these ancient gardens are still cultivated by
Indians, descendants of cliff dwellers, who raise corn, squashes, melons,
potatoes, etc., to reinforce the produce of the many wild
food-furnishing plants, nuts, beans, berries, yucca and cactus fruits,
grass and sunflower seeds, etc., and the flesh of animals, deer, rabbits,
lizards, etc. The cañon Indians I have met here seem to be living much
as did their ancestors, though not now driven into rock dens. They are
able, erect men, with commanding eyes, which nothing that they wish
to see can escape. They are never in a hurry, have a strikingly measured,
deliberate, bearish manner of moving the limbs and turning the head,
are capable of enduring weather, thirst, hunger, and over-abundance,
and are blessed with stomachs which triumph over everything the
wilderness may offer. Evidently their lives are not bitter.
The largest of the cañon animals one is likely to see is the wild sheep,
or Rocky Mountain bighorn, a most admirable beast, with limbs that
never fail, at home on the most nerve-trying precipices, acquainted with
all the springs and passes and broken-down jumpable places in the
sheer ribbon cliffs, bounding from crag to crag in easy grace and
confidence of strength, his great horns held high above his shoulders,
wild red blood beating and hissing through every fiber of him like the
wind through a quivering mountain pine.
Deer also are occasionally met in the cañon, making their way to the
river when the wells of the plateau are dry. Along the short spring
streams beavers are still busy, as is shown by the cotton-wood and
willow timber they have cut and peeled, found in all the river
drift-heaps. In the most barren cliffs and gulches