118 GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. 
Along the walls of this canyon, 5 miles southeast of Cliffs, is a well- 
known group of cliff dwellings, shown in Plate XXIX, A. They be- 
longed to Indians of a race that existed many centuries ago and lived 
hidden in these canyons. They built stone houses under the over- 
hanging ledges of limestone a hundred feet above the stream bed. 
These ledges are due to the variations in hardness of the beds of 
Kaibab limestone, the soft beds weathering away, leaving the hard 
beds in the form of ledges. One soft bed in particular which has 
weathered out along both sides of Walnut Canyon for some distance 
gave the Indians an excellent site for many houses of this character. 
It has been estimated that 1,000 persons lived in these cliff dwell- 
ings, which are easily accessible by an excellent carriage road from 
Flagstaff, the principal town of this region. 
A short distance beyond milepost 342 the railway passes along the 
north edge of a small lava field occupying a valley, and in slopes north 
of the track is an outlying mass of the red Moencopie sandstone, which 
extends for a mile and a half, or nearly to Flagstaff. The sandstone 
is overlain by an older sheet of lava (basalt), which caps the mesa 
northeast of Flagstaff. This sandstone has been extensively quarried 
a few rods north of milepost 343, furnishing a beautiful red stone 
which has been used at many places in the West, notably in the 
Brown Palace Hotel, Denver, and the city hall at Los Angeles. 
Flagstaff is a growing city, largely sustained by the lumbering 
business and surrounding ranches. It was named from a pole set by 
a party of immigrants who camped near by and cele- 
Flagstaff. brated the Fourth of July. Formerly it was the 
oo —— point of departure for stages for the Grand Canyon, 
Kansas City 1,265 miles, 60 miles to the northwest, but this service has been 
mostly superseded by the railway line from Williams. 
An excellent road, however, has been built to the canyon. It 
passes around the east side of the Elden and San Francisco moun- 
tains to a point near Sunset Peak and thence north across the vol- 
canic field and plateau, reaching the edge of the canyon at Grand- 
view. When conditions are favorable this trip can be made in five 
or six hours by automobile. 
There are large lumber mills at Flagstaff deriving much of their 
supply from the pine timber of the Coconino National Forest , which 
they purchase ‘‘on the stump” from the Government. In accord- 
ance with the regulations of the Forest Service, only the mature 
trees are cut. The average age of old pine trees in the Coconino 
Forest has been determined to be 348 years, but some have been found 
as old as 520 years, dating back a century before the first visit of 
Columbus to America. Recent investigations made to ascertain rain- 
fall conditions in the past as indicated by variations in rings of growth 
