WONDERFUL CAVERNS.
VII.—THE CLIFF-DWELLERS OF NORTH AMERICA.
A Cliff-dwelling of North America.
If you take a map of North America, and trace the line of the Rocky Mountains downwards, you come to the State of Colorado, with New Mexico and Arizona lying below; and if you tried to explore this country you would find yourself in a perfect network of mountains. In Colorado there are magnificent snow-peaks, with richly wooded valleys lying between them, whilst in New Mexico and Arizona the land is much more bare, mountain ridges, often covered with stones and pebbles, dividing flat table-lands of great extent.
Common to all three States are wonderful gorges, or splits in the cliffs, of immense depth. Sometimes from below one can hardly see the sky between the precipices; at other times the gorge may open out into quite a broad valley; but, whether narrow or wide, we may be quite sure that wherever there is a canyon (as these rock-splits are called in Western America) there will be a river running down it.
One of these rivers, named the Colorado, travels for more than three hundred miles along a channel of its own cutting, never less than a mile below the level of the surrounding country. If we remember that we take from fifteen to twenty minutes to walk a mile, and then fancy that mile standing on end like a pole, we may get some idea of what the cliffs are like in these canyons.
The currents of the mountain rivers, like those of all waters flowing from high lands, are very strong and swift; and when the snows are melting, or after heavy rainfalls, the force of the stream is enormous. The result is that the channel is worn deeper and deeper, whilst the cliffs at the side are eaten away in places. The hardest rocks remain in jagged points and ledges, and the softer parts are in time washed away, leaving caverns of all shapes and sizes.
The kind of people who lived in this country of highlands and canyons were tribes of American Indians, whose food was chiefly found in hunting, and whose main interests lay in making war upon their neighbours. Some tribes were strong, and others weak, so that by degrees the powerful folk drove away the less warlike people from the rich hunting-grounds and wooded country into the barren rocks. Now, if these hunted tribes were to exist at all, it was clear they must find some means of protecting themselves; thus it may have happened that scrambling up the cliffs one day to avoid their foes, some fugitive Indian came into one of the dwelling-places hollowed out in bygone ages by the river which roared below. What joyful news he would carry home to his friends when he ventured to go back to them! Shelter from rain, and snow, and wind! Homes easily defended from marauding foes! What a new life of ease for the persecuted people! One by one families would climb the cliffs, until at last a great population looked down from their eyries in certain gorges of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, where only eagles or mountain-goats might be supposed to dwell.