A land of rich and florid coloring where the Master Artist has revelled in matchless combinations. It is a land of color,—sweet, gentle, tender colors that penetrate the soul as the words of a lover; fierce, glaring, bold colors that strike as with the clenched fist of a foe.
It is the stage upon which the bronze and white actors of three hundred and fifty years ago played their games of life with ambitions, high as they were selfish, determined as they were bold, and unscrupulous as they were successful.
CHAPTER II
DESERT RECOLLECTIONS
Of the flora and fauna of the Painted Desert Region I have made no study. That they are fascinating the works of Hart Merriam, Coville, Lemmon, Hough, and others of later days, and of the specialists of the earlier government surveys, abundantly testify. There are cacti of varieties into the hundreds, sagebrush, black and white grama, bunch grass, salt grass, hackberry, buck-brush, pines, junipers, spruces, cottonwoods, and willows, besides a thousand flowering plants. There are lizards, swifts, rattlesnakes, scorpions, Gila monsters, vinegerones, prairie dogs, hedgehogs, turtles, squirrels, cottontail and jack-rabbits, antelope, deer, mountain sheep, wildcats, and some bear.
It is more of its physiographic conditions in a general way, however, that I would here write.
Most people's conception of a desert is a flat, level place of nothing but sand. It is sand instead of water; a desert instead of an ocean. Few deserts conform to this conception,—none, indeed, that I know of in the boundaries of the United States. This Painted Desert Region is wonderfully diversified. There is sand, of course, but much rock, many trees, more canyons, some mountains and lava flows, extinct volcanoes, forests, and pastures. The Grand Canyon runs across its northern borders, and it is the vampire river that flows in that never-to-be-described water-way that drains away the water which leaves this the desert region it is; for the Colorado has many tributaries, and tributaries of tributaries,—the Little Colorado, Havasu (Cataract) Creek, Canyon Padre, Canyon Diablo, Walnut Creek, Oak Creek, Willow Creek, Diamond Creek, and a score or hundred others.
Its great mountains are the San Francisco range, on the shoulders of which Flagstaff is located, Mount San Mateo, seen from the Santa Fé train near Grants in New Mexico, and Williams Mountain, west of Flagstaff, at the foot of which the railway traveller will see the town of Williams.
Near Flagstaff are a number of extinct volcanoes and great masses of lava flow; from the train at Blue Water to the right a few miles one may see the crater Tintaro—the Inkstand. The Zuni Mountains have many craters, chief of which is the Agua Fria crater, and lava flows from the Zuni Mountains and Mount San Mateo meet in the valley, and one rides alongside them for miles coming west beyond Laguna.