146 GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. 
native of the Colorado Desert, which is extensively utilized for orna- 
mental plantings in Los Angeles and other towns in the coastal 
region of southern California. 
Many Mohave Indians live along the flats at Needles, and they have 
a reservation of considerable size extending along the river bank some 
distance above the city, where they dwell in small, low buildings 
roofed with brush and sand. They cultivate small areas of the fertile 
bottom lands along the river and raise grain and vegetables for their 
own use and for the local market. Some of them come to the trains, 
offermg bead trinkets of various kinds for sale to the passengers. 
They are a branch of the Yuman stock, numbering about 1,400 and in 
general diminishing in number. The name Mohave mo-hah’vay is 
Yuman for the three pinnacles of the Needles south of Topock. 
Formerly these Indians were warlike, but this would not be inferred 
from their present appearance. 
In the western part of Needles there is a steep ascent to a long, 
moderately steep slope which rises to the foot of the Sacramento 
Mountains ' on the west. This slope is the surface of a thick body of 
sand, gravel, and bowlders derived from the mountains. It is inter- 
sected by many gullies or small valleys which carry large volumes of 
water on the rare occasions when there is rain. 
Leaving Needles the train begins to climb the slope, running north- 
westward toward a pass that separates the Sacramento Mountains on 
the south from the Dead Mountains on the north. On this slope 
there are many railway cuts that reveal the materials of which it is 
composed. Some of the deposits are fine silts; others are cross- 
bedded sands containing a large amount of coarse material. are 
of recent geologic age. 
Two miles beyond Java the rocks of the mountains are exposed in 
railway cuts and slopes of Sacramento Wash, the valley of a stream 
which has cut the pass through the mountains. The material is 
gneiss or mica schist, probably pre-Cambrian, which constitutes the 
greater part of the ranges north and south. 
Near Klinefelter siding this rock gives place to coarse, massive red 
conglomerate, which at several points rises in mounds of moderate 
height. This rock is not old, but appears to be a valley filling that 
accumulated before the deposition of the gravel and sand which form 
most of the slopes of the desert valley. The materials were derived 
Bes EE ol SE ee ee ae tr ieen, 
* The Sacramento Mountains consist of 
schists of supposed Archean age. The 
highest part of the mountains, 10 miles 
that some Paleozoic rocks also occur in the 
ear the foot of the range south- 
west of Needles masses of red conglom- 
a a Paes | . i a a £ hacalt 
rence of fragments of blue limestone in the 
slope southwest of Needles it is probable 
appear in small knobs and probably this 
material underlies the alluvium of the 
slopes. 
