"'All right!' replied the big brother, 'I no like Havasu. I go hunt water and plant corn and watermelons and sunflowers. You go back to Havasu.'
"And he gave him a little bit of corn, and that explains why the Havasupais can grow only a small amount of corn in their canyon, though it is exceedingly sweet and delicious.
"But the big brother went on and found the places now occupied by the Hopi, and he settled there. And as he had taken lots of corn with him and he planted it, that explains" (to the Havasupai mind) "why the Hopi has so much corn.
"And the smaller brother found water when he got back to Havasu, and he planted his corn, and cared for it, and went and hunted and caught the deer and made buckskin. Then he found a squaw who made baskets, and helped him make mescal, and they stopped there all the time.
"The Hopi brother learned to make blankets, but no buckskin, so when he wants buckskin he has to come to his smaller brother in Havasu Canyon."
In the early days the Havasupais were undoubtedly cliff-dwellers, for in a score or more places in their canyons are houses in the cliffs—some of them inaccessible—which their traditions say were once occupied by certain families, the names of which are still remembered. All throughout the Grand Canyon region, too, from the Little Colorado River to Havasu Canyon, their cliff-dwellings, and smaller cliff "corn-houses" and mescal pits, are to be found. Indeed, the Havasupais built all the trails that are now being claimed as the work of white men into the heart of the Grand Canyon. The Tanner-French trail, the Red Canyon trail, the old Hance trail, the Grand View, Bright Angel, and Mystic Spring trails, are all old Indian trails. Not only are the cliff-dwellings and mescal pits proof of this, but the Havasupais can tell the families to whom they originally belonged and to whom the rights in them have descended. These rights they rigidly adhere to. It is the white man who knows no law as far as the Indian is concerned, and little by little the aborigine has lost springs, water-pockets, and trails, and is regarded and treated as an unwelcome visitor.
Havasupai Mother and Child.