The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It Part 13

Next morning we retraced our steps down the canyon and kept on in its bed until we reached the wonderful blue spring above described and the wonderful rancheria of the Indians, a distance from last night's camp of about twenty-five miles, as we had struck the canyon some twenty miles above the living water."

Other Trails to the Canyon. Garces came into the canyon by another trail, entirely distinct from this, commonly known as the Wallapai Trail. He left Havasu Canyon by still another trail, known as the Moki Trail, which leads directly from this canyon to the home of the Hopis.

In 1857, Lieutenant Joseph C. Ives made the descent into Havasu Canyon down the Wallapai Trail. His account of the journey reads like a novel, and people who are unfamiliar with the wonderful engineering feats of the Havasu Indians can scarcely believe that Ives did not allow his imagination to run away with him, in his descriptions of the Havasupais' trails.

Later, Lieutenant Cushing, guided by his Indian friends, rode across country to the Hopis, and then secured a Hopi guide who took him to see the Havasupais over the Moki Trail. He confirms all that Ives and Coues have written of the astonishing character of these trails. Having been up and down these trails many times during the last dozen years, I can say without hesitation that there are no more startling trails to be found in our Southwest.

Trip from El Tovar. One of the most enjoyable of the more arduous trips taken by visitors to El Tovar is this trip to Havasu (Cataract) Canyon.

Only those who enjoy a strenuous outing should arrange for this trip, and then plenty of time should be allowed to do it without too great rushing.

The first portion, to the head of the Topocobya Trail, is generally done in a buckboard. The distance is thirty-five to forty miles, over a varying road,--good in places, fair in others, and wretchedly poor now and again.

Arrived at the "hill-top," as the Indians call this point, the conveyance must be abandoned, and all the outfit for sleeping, cooking, and eating is transferred to the backs of pack animals, which have been sent on ahead.

The visitors take saddle animals. There are those who make this drive, and then ride to the village, fifteen miles further down the trail, in one day.

A better plan is either to make "dry camp" at the head of the Topocobya Trail; or, if time permits, descend to the Topocobya Spring, which flows out of the base of the immense cliff down which one fork of the trail descends. For there are now two ways of descending at Topocobya,--to the right or the left of a mountain which overlooks the Canyon. The trail by which I first entered Havasu Canyon is the one to the left, looking into the Canyon.

Topocobya Spring. Arrived at the spring, the stock can be watered, packs removed, beds unrolled, and camp made for the night. The water, however, is not of the best for drinking purposes, though the Indians habitually use it.

Pictographs. The following morning an early start may be made, and the winding course of Topocobya Canyon followed to its entrance into the main Havasu Canyon. Here a number of interesting pictographs may be seen on the wall to the left, reminding one somewhat of those found in Mallery Grotto at El Tovar.

Havasupai Gardens.* Except in the rainy season, the upper portions of the main Havasu Canyon and all its tributaries are dry and sandy. Just before one reaches the village, however, the barrenness disappears. A thousand springs appear, and unite to form a stream which, in less than a hundred yards, will measure from four to six feet deep and fully eight feet across.

It is this stream that renders life possible for the Indians. For the distance of about two miles, the bed of the Canyon, which is here filled with sandy earth, is irrigated from this rapidly flowing stream. The result is that with comparatively little labor the Havasupais are able to produce excellent crops of corn, beans, chillis, onions, melons, squash and other vegetables. After the advent of the Spaniards, they obtained peach trees, and they now grow far more peaches than they can eat, drying large quant.i.ties, some of which they sell to ranchers, miners and other outsiders. They also have fine figs.

* Since this chapter was put into type, the Havasupai village has been swept nearly out of existence by a flood. The winter of agog-igto saw a large fall of snow on the plateau, which, melting suddenly during a hot spell in January, rushed down the Canyon in a body, destroyed the school, agent's house, and took away nearly all the hawas, fields, and orchards of the Indians. This catastrophe has several times occurred to them (according to their traditions), so there is little doubt but that they will ere long replant their cornfields and reestablish their homes in the spot they love so well.

The Havasupai "Hawa." The house of a Havasupai is called a "hawa." It is a primitive structure, generally built of cottonwood poles, willows and earth. Occasionally one of the leading men will put up a more pretentious home, whose sides will be of matted willows, plastered inside and out with mud, and with a mud-covered roof which will turn the rain.

A Basket-maker's Paradise. There are about thirty basket-makers among the Havasupais, and specimens of their work may be found in the Hopi House. As Havasu Creek is lined with willows that are admirably adapted for basket-making, and as an abundant supply of martynia, or cat's-claw, is found on the plateaus above, this Canyon is a veritable basket-makers'

paradise. Their best work is done in the coiled st.i.tch. The esuwas, or water-bottles, are made out of the twined weave, and then covered with pinion gum.

Beautiful Waterfalls. Havasu Canyon is interesting, not only on account of its Indians, but because of its narrow walls reaching up to the very heavens and shutting out the sun except for the midday hours, and the beautiful blue water flowing in its willow-fringed bed, which finally dashes in successive leaps into the lower depths, making several cataracts, one of which I regard as the most exquisite waterfall in the world. As a consequence, it is becoming a great attraction for travelers.

Bridal Veil Falls. There are five falls in all, occurring in the following order: Havasupai, Navaho, Bridal Veil, Mooney and Beaver. The last three are the most important. Bridal Veil is about one hundred and seventy feet high, and five hundred feet broad, but this s.p.a.ce is not entirely covered with water. The edge is so broken that the water dashes over the precipice in a large number of stream and falling upon several different ledges, is again broken into a dashing spray, which, light and feathery, again leaps into the air. The general effect is indescribably beautiful.

The visitor should not fail to cross the Creek either above or below the Bridal Veil Falls, for on the further side are a number of water concretions well worth seeing.

Mooney Falls. Mooney Falls, one mile farther down, is a much higher cataract, but the water falls in an undivided stream. It gets its name from an unfortunate miner, who, in trying to descend a rope ladder to the bottom of the falls, fell, and was dashed to pieces.

Beaver Falls. Beaver Falls are about four miles farther down the Canyon, and receive their name from the large number of beavers that used to be at work in the stream close by.

By recent survey of this region, it has been found that these falls are not included in the Havasupai reservation. It is to be hoped, however, that, before it is too late, this Canyon, its waterfalls and surroundings, will be made into a National Park, forever and inalienably to belong to the people.

CHAPTER XXIII. The First Discoverers And Inhabitants Of The Grand Canyon

A Barren Waste of Rock. While the Grand Canyon, its vast system of tributaries, and its plateau were being uplifted from the primeval ocean, it consisted of nothing but a wild, barren waste of rock. Not a tree, not a shrub, not a flower, not a blade of gra.s.s relieved the monotony of the wilderness of rocks which emerged from the great Eocene sea. Not a lizard, horned toad, centipede, tarantula, chuckwalla, campamouche,* frog, tree-toad, turtle or snake was to be found on the long stretching areas of its lifeless sh.o.r.es. Not a chipmunk, prairie-dog, coyote, rat, mouse, porcupine, fox, bear, mountain-lion, badger, deer, antelope or other four-footed creature ran over its new-born surfaces. The sun shone unhindered; the rain beat with pitiless fury; the winds swept unhampered; the snows piled up undeterred over the whole plateau and canyon country. It was plateau and canyon, canyon and plateau; red rock, gray rock, creamy rock, yellow, pink, blue, chocolate, carmine, crimson rock, soft rock, hard rock; sunshine, shadow, wind and quietude; winter, summer, autumn, spring-and that was all! A lifeless world, as yet unprepared for insect, reptile, beast, man, flower or tree. Perhaps a solitary sea-bird with strong pinion flew over it, and gazed into its lifeless depths with wonder, or a dove flew from some earlier and habitable land over this wonderful ma.s.s of rock, and returned to its nest and its mate. But no olive or other leaf was in its bill.

*An insect that looks like a tiny dried wisp of hay, well-known in Arizona.

And so the land was born, and rested; while silence, sunshine and solitude brooded over it.

Creation of Soil and Verdure. But in the course of ages, soil was created by the disintegration of the rocks by the weather and the atmosphere, seeds were blown in from regions where flowers and plants bloomed, or were carried in by birds, and later distributed by the four-footed creatures.

Then verdure sprang into life; the gentle gra.s.ses and flowers began to cover the slopes and level places where soil had gathered, and the trees came to sway and swing in the breezes, and sing their songs of coming life to the hitherto barren rocks.

Fossils of Sea Creatures. Yet they had not been altogether lifeless. Many of the rocks had known life, but it was not insect, reptile, bird, beast or man life; neither did they known anything of gra.s.s, flower, shrub or tree life. In the far-away ages, when they were being deposited deep under the surface of the Eocene sea, they saw vast monsters floating in the salty deep, and later, fishes of all sizes, and even great beds of waving sea-moss and ferns floated back and forth, as the tides ebbed and flowed.

And fishes and ferns, monsters and moss were occasionally caught in the flowing deposits of lime and sand and silt and clay, and were embedded in their ma.s.s. Thus imprisoned, their otherwise forgotten life and history is told to the ages of man that were as yet unborn.

Coming of Man. But now the new life is coming! With verdure and animal life in existence, these hitherto uninhabitable regions became capable of sustaining human life. And the restless spirit of the human race, wherever and howsoever it originated, drove bands of men and women into this region.

Who were they? What were they like? Whence did they come? How long did they stay? Whither did they go? are questions one naturally asks in regard to these first discoverers and inhabitants. If I were to say "I do not know,"

I would be saying what every other thinking man is compelled to say. Yet there is pleasure in conjecture.

Traces of Ruins. Before looking at these conjectures, however, it is appropriate that we look first at what facts there are to justify them.

Suppositions without any facts are mere fictions of the imagination, and this we are not indulging in. When in our day men began to explore the Grand Canyon and its numberless tributaries, a great number of indications of man's presence were found on the rim, on the fault lines or breaks in the sheer precipitous walls, on the plateaus and in the Canyon beneath, in the shape of crude house ruins, lookout houses or forts, indifferent trails, cliff-dwellings, hewn-out water cisterns, mescal pits, with countless pieces of broken pottery, arrowheads, stone axes, hammers, mortars, pestles and even cemeteries. or places of cremation.

Evidences of Superior Civilization. Major J. W. Powell, in his journal of explorations, writes that when he and his party reached the mouth of the Uinta River, they went up to the agency of the Indians of the same name.

While visiting the Indians, and noting their fertile, irrigated farms, he found many evidences that "this beautiful valley has been the home of a people of a higher grade of cultivation than the present Utes. On our way here yesterday, we discovered, in many places along the trail, fragments of pottery, and wandering about the little farms to-day I find the foundations of ancient houses and mealing stones that were not used by nomadic people, as they are too heavy to be transported by such tribes, and are deeply worn. The Indians, seeing that I am interested in these matters, take pains to show me several other places where these evidences remain, and tell me.

that they know nothing about the people who formerly dwelt here. They further tell me that up in the Canyon the rocks are covered with pictures."

Ancient Dwellings. When Powell and his party reached the junction of the San Juan with the Colorado, they might have found a large number of ancient dwellings in the cliffs not far away from where Bluff City now stands.

Further on, when the Bright Angel was discovered (the beautiful stream and canyon on the north side of the Canyon directly opposite El Tovar), the story of which is told in a separate chapter, Major Powell went up a little gulch, just above Bright Angel Creek, about two hundred yards from their camp on the Colorado, and there he discovered the ruins of two or three old houses, which were originally of stone, laid in mortar. Only the foundations were left, but irregular blocks, of which the houses were constructed, were found lying scattered about. In one room he found an old mealing stone, deeply worn, as if it had been much used. A great deal of pottery was strewn around, and old trails, which in some places were deeply worn into the rocks, were seen.

Ruins of a Village. Between the foot of what is now the Bright Angel Trail and Ba.s.s's Cable Crossing, Major Powell discovered another group of ruins.

"There was evidently quite a village on this rock. Again we find the mealing stones, and much broken pottery, and up in a little natural shelf in the rock, back of the ruins, we find a globular basket, that would hold perhaps a third of a bushel. It is badly broken, and, as I attempt to take it up, it falls to pieces. There are many beautiful flint chips, as if this had been the home of an old arrow-maker."

Old Gardens. Later, when white men began to go down the trail now known as the Bright Angel Trail (the one near to El Tovar), the remnants of gardens, with irrigating ditches, in which small pieces of Indian pottery were scattered about, were discovered. The place is known today as Indian Garden, and is seen from the upper porch of the hotel.

Stone Huts. In his account of Powell's second expedition, Dellenbaugh tells of ancient ruins found below Labyrinth Canyon. "Small huts for storage were found there in the cliffs, and on a promontory, about thirty feet above the water, were the ruins of stone buildings, one of which, twelve by twenty feet in dimensions, had walls still standing about six feet high. The Canyon here was some six hundred feet high, though the top of the plateau through which the Canyon is carved is at least fifteen hundred feet above the river. We discovered the trail by which the old Puebloans had made their way in and out. Where necessity called for it, poles and tree-trunks had been placed against the rocks to aid the climbers. Some of our party trusted themselves to these ancient ladders, and with the aid of a rope also, reached the summit." These Indians had tilled a small piece of arable land in an alcove near by.

An Old Indian Fortress. Hance found a number of cliff ruins and the remnants of old houses on and near his trail, and on the Red Canyon Trail.

It was the discovery of an old Indian lookout fortress, located on the very edge of the Canyon where Ba.s.s Camp now is, that led Ba.s.s to hunt for the trail into the Canyon. This fortress is about fifteen feet square, outside measurement, and consists of one room, twelve feet square, with a lookout in the eastern wall, which is still to be seen. Remnants of the walls still stand, and at one corner are fully ten feet high. About a mile below this fortress, were discovered two large native water-storage tanks or reservoirs, which, when cleaned out, were capable of holding many hundreds of gallons of water. Further down, on the plateaus beneath, several large pits for the cooking of mescal were discovered.

Cooking of Mescal. This mescal is the succulent and sweet inner leaf of the agave deserti, which is found in large quant.i.ties in this region. The Indians still prepare it in the same manner as did their forefathers. The larger thick leaves are taken from the plants when they are full of sap.

Great pits are dug and lined with rocks. Into these pits dry wood, roots, pine cones, etc., are thrown and set on fire, until the whole oven is thoroughly heated. On the hot rocks are then laid the pulpy stalks of the agave; over these is placed a layer of wet gra.s.s; then more agave or mescal leaves, more gra.s.s, and so on, until the pit is full. Then the oven and its contents are banked over with earth, and allowed to steam and cook for three or four days. The woman in charge is an expert in determining when her "bread is baked." She thrusts stalks of the agave into the heart of the pit before it is finally closed up, and when she deems "time up," she pulls forth one of these stalks. If it is not done to her liking, she allows the process to continue; otherwise the banked up earth is removed, and the contents of the pit withdrawn and placed upon adjacent rocks to dry. It now looks like large cakes of brownish fibres, thoroughly saturated in mola.s.ses. In taste it is sweet and fairly palatable, though the fibres render it a food that requires a large amount of mastication. It has great staying qualities, contains much nutrition, and will keep for months, even years. I have eaten pieces of it that were sweet and good over three years after it was made.

Unlimited Fragments of Pottery. In my own wanderings of nearly twenty years in the Grand and Havasu Canyons and their smaller tributary gorges, I have discovered scores of these cliff-dwellings. Ruins uncounted are to be found scattered along the rim, within five to ten miles of the Canyon, and thousands of pieces of pottery of old design have been picked up by the visitors of the past fifteen years.

On the Shinumo, opposite the Ba.s.s Trail, are several cliff-dwellings, and as late as the summer of 1908 a young couple camped there for a month on their wedding trip, excavated and discovered a fine stone axe, numbers of pieces of pottery of three different kinds, several pieces with holes bored with the primitive drill of flint or obsidian, a fine spearhead of flint, and a number of arrow points.

Similarity of Cliff Ruins. The whole region of Arizona, New Mexico, Southern Utah, and Southern Colorado abounds in these cliff ruins. The likeness of their appearance, and the fact that everything excavated is of a similar kind, seems to indicate a relationship, both in time of occupancy and in the peoples who built and tenanted them.

The questions now naturally arise: Who were these people? What was their life? Whence did they come? Whither have they gone?

The Race of the Cliff Dwellers. In the earlier days of America's serious researches into her own archaeology, those who led our thought on the subject, though personally they had not seen the cliff-dwellings, declared them to be the homes of the Aztecs, one of the Mexican races found by Cortes below the City of Mexico. Hence today we find people talking about the Aztecs and their ruined homes in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. We used to read of the wonder of the discoverers of these dwellings, at finding them so small. The doorways were small, the rooms themselves less than six feet in width and length, and the ceilings so low that a five-foot man could not stand upright in them. It was reasonable therefore to infer, said these discoverers, that the builders and inhabitants of the cliff-dwellings were an exceedingly small people, dwarfs, as in no other way could the rooms be occupied. And thousands of people who have read about these ruins still hold to the idea that they were inhabited by dwarfs. But who the dwarfs were, or where they have gone to, no one seems to have the remotest idea. But by and by, such men as Bandelier, the Mendeleffs, Stevenson, Cushing, Fewkes, Hough, Hodge and Hewett, began to investigate. They took the field, and carefully explored hundreds of ruins.

Then, some of them with a profound knowledge of the Spanish tongue, went through all the records and diaries of the old conquistadores and the padres who accompanied them. They found out all that the early Spaniards had discovered and conjectured. In the meantime, they began to study the languages of the Indians of the regions nearest to the ruins, and question them as to their myths, legends, and traditions bearing upon the ruins, and their researches speedily bore fruit.

Storage Houses. First of all they cla.s.sified their discoveries. Though scores of skeletons were found, there was not a single dwarf specimen among them. This seemed to be a death blow to the dwarf theory. Stone slabs were used as doors. Necessarily these were comparatively small, since even though large slabs might have been found, they could not have been moved by the cliff-dwellers, on account of their weight. This, in itself, accounted for the size of the doorways. It had long been noticed that these small dwellings were scattered profusely where there were larger dwellings, and finally it became known that the small dwellings were not used for habitations at all. They were merely storage houses for corn and other edibles, farmed by the inhabitants of the larger dwellings. On one occasion, some years ago, I was exploring one of the side gorges of the Havasu. We had seen scores of the cliff dwellings, perched high in the walls of the canyons, until at length one particularly well-built, though exceedingly small structure attracted my attention. My guide was the most intelligent and communicative of the Havasupai Indians, and he immediately responded to my query by crying out: "Meala-hawa! Meala-hawa!" (Corn house). Further inquiry revealed the fact that all the small dwellings were but storage houses for corn and other foods.