surface of the river, is 220 miles; by a median line between the crests
of the summits of the walls with two-mile cords, about 195 miles; the
distance in a straight line is 125 miles.

In our journey to the Grand Canon we left the Santa Fe line at
Flagstaff, a new town with a lively lumber industry, in the midst of a
spruce-pine forest which occupies the broken country through which the
road passes for over fifty miles. The forest is open, the trees of
moderate size are too thickly set with low-growing limbs to make clean
lumber, and the foliage furnishes the minimum of shade; but the change
to these woods is a welcome one from the treeless reaches of the desert
on either side. The canon is also reached from Williams, the next
station west, the distance being a little shorter, and the point on the
canon visited being usually a little farther west. But the Flagstaff
route is for many reasons usually preferred. Flagstaff lies just
south-east of the San Francisco Mountain, and on the great Colorado
Plateau, which has a pretty uniform elevation of about 7000 feet above
the sea. The whole region is full of interest. Some of the most
remarkable cliff dwellings are within ten miles of Flagstaff, on the
Walnut Creek Canon. At Holbrook, 100 miles east, the traveller finds a
road some forty miles long, that leads to the great petrified forest, or
Chalcedony Park. Still farther east are the villages of the Pueblo
Indians, near the line, while to the northward is the great reservation
of the Navajos, a nomadic tribe celebrated for its fine blankets and
pretty work in silver--a tribe that preserves much of its manly
independence by shunning the charity of the United States. No Indians
have come into intimate or dependent relations with the whites without
being deteriorated.

[Illustration: TOURISTS IN THE COLORADO CANON.]

Flagstaff is the best present point of departure, because it has a small
hotel, good supply stores, and a large livery-stable, made necessary by
the business of the place and the objects of interest in the
neighborhood, and because one reaches from there by the easiest road the
finest scenery incomparably on the Colorado. The distance is seventy-six
miles through a practically uninhabited country, much of it a desert,
and with water very infrequent. No work has been done on the road; it is
made simply by driving over it. There are a few miles here and there of
fair wheeling, but a good deal of it is intolerably