Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico); Grand Canyon (Ariz.); United States -- Discovery and exploration
lend a strange aspect to the landscape. Besides these necks, there are
a few volcanic mountains that tower over all the landscape and gather
about themselves the clouds of heaven. Mount Taylor, which stands over
the divide on the drainage of the Rio Grande del Norte, is one of
the most imposing of the dead volcanoes of this region. Still later
eruptions of lava are found here and there, and in the present valleys
and canyons sheets of black basalt are often found. These are known as
coulees, and sometimes from these coulees cinder cones arise.
This valley of the Little Colorado is also the site of many ruins, and
the villages or towns found in such profusion were of mueh larger size
than those on the San Francisco Plateau. Some of the pueblo-building
peoples yet remain. The Zuñi Indians still occupy their homes, and they
prove to be a most interesting people. They have cultivated the soil
from time immemorial. They build their houses of stone and line them
with plaster; and they have many interesting arts, being skilled potters
and deft weavers. The seasons are about equally divided between labor,
worship, and play.
50
A hundred miles to the northwest of the Zuñí pueblo are the seven
pueblos of Tusayan: Oraibi, Shumopavi, Shupaulovi, Mashongnavi,
Sichumovi, Walpi, and llano. These towns are built on high cliffs. The
people speak a language radically different from that of the Zuñi, but,
with the exception of that of the inhabitants of Hano, closely allied to
that of the Utes. The people of Hano are Tewans, whose ancestors moved
from the Rio Grande to Tusayan during the great Pueblo revolt against
Spanish authority in 1680-96.
Between the Little Colorado and the Rio San Juan there is a vast system
of plateaus, mesas, and buttes, volcanic mountains, volcanic cones, and
volcanic cinder cones. Some of the plateaus are forest-clad and have
perennial waters and are gemmed with lakelets. The mesas are sometimes
treeless, but are often covered with low, straggling, gnarled cedars and
pifions, trees that are intermediate in size between the bushes of
sage in the desert and the forest trees of the elevated regions. On the
western margin of this district the great Navajo Mountain stands, on the
brink of Glen Canyon, and from its summit many of the stupendous gorges
of the Colorado River can be seen. Central in the region stand the
Carrizo Mountains, the Lukachukai
50 powell-canyons-26.jpg
PANORAMA IN THE VALLEY OF THE PUERCO.
MESAS AND BUTTES. 51
Mountains, the Tunitcha Mountains, and the Chusca Mountains, which in
fact constitute one system, extending from north to south in the order
named. These are really plateaus crowned with volcanic peaks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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