The nut-pine, _Pinus edulis_, scattered along the
upper slopes and roofs of the canon buildings, is the principal tree of
the strange Dwarf Cocanini Forest. It is a picturesque stub of a pine about
twenty-five feet high, usually-with dead, lichened limbs thrust through
its rounded head, and grows on crags and fissured rock tables, braving
heat and frost, snow and drought, and continues patiently, faithfully
fruitful for centuries. Indians and insects and almost every desert bird
and beast come to it to be fed.
To civilized people from corn and cattle and wheat-field countries the
canon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse, utterly
silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of a multitude of our
fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants. Centuries ago it was
inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw America,
built thousands of stone houses in its crags, and large ones, some of
them several stories high, with hundreds of rooms, on the mesas of the
adjacent regions. Their cliff-dwellings, almost numberless, are still
to be seen in the canon, scattered along both sides from top to bottom
and throughout its entire length, built of stone and mortar in seams and
fissures like swallows' nests, or on isolated ridges and peaks. The ruins
of larger buildings are found on open spots by the river, but most of them
aloft on the brink of the wildest, giddiest precipices, sites evidently
chosen for safety from enemies, and seemingly accessible only to the birds
of the air.
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