Where Springs Gush From The Rocks There Are Willow Thickets,
Grassy Flats, And Bright, Flowery Gardens, And In The Hottest Recesses
The Delicate Abronia, Mesquite, Woody Compositae, And Arborescent
Cactuses.
The most striking and characteristic part of this widely varied
vegetation are the cactaceae - strange, leafless, old-fashioned plants
with beautiful flowers and fruit, in every way able and admirable.
While grimly defending themselves with innumerable barbed spears, they
offer both food and drink to man and beast. Their juicy globes and
disks and fluted cylindrical columns are almost the only desert wells
that never go dry, and they always seem to rejoice the more and grow
plumper 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 desert, laden in early
spring with superb white 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 canyon
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 millefolia. The nut pine (Pinus
edulis) scattered along the upper slopes and roofs of the canyon
buildings, is the principal tree of the strange dwarf Coconino 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 continuing 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
canyon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse,
utterly silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of the
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 canyon, 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 canyon 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 canyon 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 canyon, 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 cottonwood and
willow timber they have cut and peeled, found in all the river drift-heaps. In the most barren cliffs and gulches there dwell a multitude
of lesser animals, well-dressed, clear-eyed, happy little beasts - wood
rats, kangaroo rats, gophers, wood mice, skunks, rabbits, bobcats, and
many others, gathering food, or dozing in their sun-warmed dens.
Lizards, too, of every kind and color are here enjoying life on the
hot cliffs, and making the brightest of them brighter.
Nor is there any lack of feathered people.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 79 of 81
Words from 79734 to 80734
of 82482