Lieutenant Whipple describes extensive ruins on the small streams forming the head-waters of the Rio Verde. Both stone and adobe structures were numerous, and the walls usually were found to be about five feet thick.[457] Emory has described some Pueblo buildings of singular structure on the upper Gila and its tributaries; most interesting of these is one with a labyrinthine plan of inner circular walls. The region also abounds in rock inscriptions of a rude though no doubt conventional character.[458] It is quite natural to suppose that remains of this ancient people would have been found extensively on the greatest river of the region—the Colorado. Mr. Bancroft passes the subject with the statement that “no relics of antiquity are reported by reliable authorities,” and fitly explains that it is unlikely, in view of the peculiarity of the region, that none will ever be found in the immediate vicinity of the river.[459] Whipple and his associates state that “upon the lower part of the Rio Colorado no traces of permanent dwellings have been discovered.”[460] Since the publication of Mr. Bancroft’s fourth volume, the public has been made acquainted with the details of Major J. W. Powell’s exploration of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.[461] The descent of the river was accomplished by the Major and his companions in the summer of 1869, amid dangers so appalling and privations so distressing, that we need not hesitate in pronouncing it an exhibition of heroism having few parallels in the history of exploration. The Major has since repeated his perilous journey of which we have enjoyed the pleasure of a verbal description in part from the explorer himself. Groups of ruins were discovered in the gloomy depths of the Grand Cañon at three different points. In referring to them we will reverse the order in which they were discovered. A hundred or more miles (for we are unable to estimate the distance from the account) above the Virgen River, where the granite walls rise perpendicularly from the water’s edge thousands of feet, the cañon widened somewhat and a considerable group of ruined buildings were discovered on a terrace of trap. There had evidently been quite a village in that solitary spot, shut in by hundreds of miles of granite walls either up or down the river’s course. Mealing stones and fragments of broken pottery were scattered about the ruins, and so many beautiful flint chips that the discoverers conjectured that it might have been the home of an ancient arrow-maker. Major Powell found on a natural shelf in the rock, back of the ruin, a globular basket, badly broken, and so decayed that when taken up it fell to pieces.[462] Some distance farther up the river, the grim walls of more than a mile in height parted to admit the clear waters of a stream named by the explorers “Bright Angel River.” In a little gulch above the creek the foundations of two or three Pueblo houses were discovered.