1 BABY SAGUARO. This little white-spined cactus, an infant less than ten years old now, will grow up in a hundred years or so to look like the towering giants scattered over these hills. Young saguaros (sah-WAR-ohs) are delicate and need a “nurse tree” like this mesquite to shelter them from the sun.
2 HEDGEHOG CACTUS. The first cactus to bloom each spring; the large magenta blossoms of this many-headed plant must have been a welcome sight to the Salado, for they signalled relief to come from the monotonous winter diet of dried foods.
3 BARREL CACTUS. Though the barrel cactus is fabled as a source of emergency water in the desert, it is not at all reliable. The amount of unpleasant-tasting liquid in it varies with the amount and recency of rainfall.
Not much use was made of the barrel cactus; its fruit is unpalatable, but several finger rings made of its hooked red spines were found in the cliff dwelling. Recent desert Indians sometimes made cooking pots of the barrel: they cut off its top and removed some of the pulp from the stump, then put food in the cavity and dropped in hot stones to cook it.
4 TESAJO (tess-AH-hoe). Tiny edible tomato-red fruits, ready in November and December, give this little member of the cholla (CHOY-ya) cactus group its other name: Christmas cactus.
5 YUCCA (YUH-ca). This very useful plant provides many things. Leaf fibers make strong thread for mats, string, rope, sandals, nets and snares; the buds, flowers, fruit, stalks and seeds are edible. The root contains saponin, useful as a medicine or as soap or an excellent shampoo. Sharp leaf tips make good awls.
[Illustration: _A prehistoric sandal woven of loosely spun yucca fiber._]
[Illustration: _Mesquite leaves and beans_]
6 MESQUITE. Pods and beans of the mesquite (mes-KEET), nutritious and sweet, are still an important part of the desert Indian’s diet. Pods are ground into flour and pressed to make little loaves of staple bread. Fermented, the same flour makes an intoxicating drink. The sweet sap of the tree can be used to make candy, black dye, or even glue for broken pottery.
Mesquite has invaded vast areas during the past century, areas once desert grasslands. Cattle, grazing this land since the 1870s, have eaten away the grasses, encouraging growth of woody species like mesquite. The sweet mesquite pods are a favorite cattle food, and the beans pass unharmed through the digestive tract to be deposited far and wide. A natural cycle of drought and erosion coupled with heavy grazing has destroyed much of the desert grassland and converted it to mesquite. With loss of the grasses, erosion has accelerated, springs have dried up, and formerly sandy and smooth canyon floors (once suitable for small-scale farming) have eroded to boulder-strewn wastes. In less than a century we have made drastic changes in the desert, changes whose consequences we are only beginning to see.