A NAVAJO MAID ON A PAINTED PONY.
All along the plateau there are by-trails and half-trails and old trails where immense herds of wild burros congregate, and the bleached bones of their ancestors lie thick on the ground. Not an hour’s ride from the Bright Angel Trail is hidden one of the prettiest spots on earth. A little side path which few take leads from it around a great porphyry-colored cliff. Here we made camp after a dry, burning trip, our horses reeking with lather, and gasping with thirst. We rode along a little stream choked with cotton wood saplings.
“Ride ahead,” ordered our sympathetic guide, who had a sense of the dramatic common to most of his profession. He wanted to give us the pleasure of discovering for ourselves. In a moment we came upon it, amazed. Gone was the arid Golgotha we had been struggling through. The stream had widened just where a rocky shelf dropped down to shelter it with a high wall. Low-growing trees and shrubs on the other side left an opening only wide enough to penetrate, and we suddenly entered a miniature grotto which seemed more the work of a landscape artist than of nature. The rock and shrubs enclosed completely a green pool, wide and deep enough to swim in. The water was cold and clear, its bottom fringed with thick velvety moss. The trees met overhead so densely that the sky showed only in tiny flecks on an emerald surface vivified by the reflection of sunlit leaves. The curved rock hiding the pool on three sides was covered arm-deep from top to bottom with maidenhair fern, and sprinkled through this hanging garden were the bright scarlet blossoms of the Indian paintbrush. As a crowning delight three little white cascades trickled through this greenery into the pool. A nymph would want to bathe here. We were not nymphs, but the weather was hot, the guide discreet and the pool so hidden it could not be seen ten feet away.
We camped gratefully over-night here. When Indians were plentiful in the Canyon this was one of their favorite camps. Around the corner of the ledge, we came upon some dry caves showing traces of former habitation. In a little stone oven they may have built I saw the dusty tail of a rattler flicker and disappear among the warm ashes of our fire. The refreshed horses munched all night on the luxuriant grass, sometimes coming perilously near to stepping on our sleeping-bags. Toby woke me at dawn. “Look!” One hundred asses were circled about, gazing fascinated at us. When we moved they galloped to the four winds.
From Bass Camp, kept by William Bass, one of the pioneer guides of the Canyon, it is twenty odd miles by an uncertain wagon trail to Hilltop, for which we started the next morning. Very few of those thousands who visit Grand Canyon yearly even know of the existence of Havasupai Canyon, whose starting point is Hilltop. Fewer visit it. Within its high, pink walls is a narrow, fertile valley, watered by a light blue ribbon of water,—the Land of the Sky Blue water, celebrated in the popular song by Cadman, the home of a little known and very neglected tribe of Indians, the Havasupai. Havasupai means literally Children of the Blue Water. It is a fairy vale, with grottoes and limestone caverns, seven cataracts, three of them higher than Niagara, jungles of cacti, mines of silver and lead, springs running now above, now beneath the earth’s surface, groves of tropical and semi-tropical fruit, in a summer climate as moist and warm as the interior of a hothouse.
THE LAND OF THE SKY-BLUE WATER, HAVASUPAI CANYON, ARIZONA.
We reached this heaven over an unimproved trail so nearly vertical that had it been any steeper our heads would have preceded our feet. Sometimes our horses balked, and had to be pulled forward by the bridle, the more nervous becoming panicky, and trying to turn back. It takes a bad trail to make a Western broncho do that. Frequently we had to dismount, and avoiding their hoofs, urge them to leap obstructing boulders. Except for the usual mesquite and sage, the trail was barren of vegetation, and the sun found us out and scourged us. Old travelers will speak of Havasupai Canyon as the hottest resort in this world, with even odds on the next. We rejoiced when, an hour later, we rested under a jutting ledge of cliffs where springs called Topocoba made a malodorous pool which had been fouled by many wild horses. Trees and overhanging rocks gave us moderate relief from the burning sun. We reclined, panting, while the horses’ packs were loosened and they made friends with a band of Indian horses which roam the Canyon.
This oasis is one of the last links in the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the horror of the fifties. Few know that when John Lee escaped by what afterward was named Lee’s Ferry into the Grand Canyon, and thence by some devious route then known only to himself, and even now known to very few, to this refuge, he subsisted here for nearly two years on what he could shoot and trap while Federal officers scoured Utah for him. He found a rich vein of lead which is still unworked, and by melting ore from it traded it to the Navajos for ammunition. He finally worked his way back to Lee’s Ferry, where he was recognized and captured. I was told that he was a relative,—I believe an uncle,—of Gen. Robert E. Lee.
We looked up, on reaching the bottom of the trail, to find Hilltop almost directly overhead, or so it seemed. The descent at this part of the canyon actually measures about 2600 feet, and a plumb line dropped from a horizontal one drawn over the precipice for 42 rods would strike the bottom of the trail. Every bit of merchandise reaching the little village of the Havasupai must be carried on mule-back down this helter-skelter mass of boulders and winding ledges. Once an enterprising superintendent (of whom the Havasupai have had all too few) tried to import a melodeon for the benefit of the church services he instituted for the Indians. It reached the bottom, but it was too entangled with burro bones and twisted wires to be of any use except as a curiosity.