desert bird
and beast come to it to be fed.

To civilized people from corn and cattle and wheat-field countries the
canon 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 canon, 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
canon 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 t