The pictured rocks (plate XCVII) near Cliff's ranch, on Beaver creek, four miles from Montezuma Well, have a great variety of objects depicted upon them. These rocks, which rise from the left bank of the creek opposite Cliff's ranch, bear over a hundred different rock pictures, figures of which are seen in the accompanying illustration. The rock surface is a layer of black malpais, through which the totem signatures have been pecked, showing the light stone beneath, and thus rendering them very conspicuous. Among these pictographs many familiar forms are recognizable, among them being the crane or blue heron, bears' and badgers' paws, turtles, snakes, antelopes, earth symbols, spirals, and meanders.
Among these many totems there was an unusual pictograph in the form of the figure 8, above which was a bear's paw accompanied by a human figure so common in southwestern rock etchings. A square figure with interior parallel squares extending to the center is also found, as elsewhere, in cliff-dweller pictography.
[Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
After the road from old Camp Verde to Flagstaff passes a deserted cabin at Beaver Head, it winds up a steep hill of lava or malpais to the top of the Mogollones. If, instead of ascending this hill, one turns to the left, taking an obscure road across the river bed, which is full of rough lava blocks, and in June, when I traveled its course, was without water, he soon finds himself penetrating a rugged country with bright-red cliffs on his right (plate XCVIII). Continuing through great parks and plains he finally descends to the well-wooded valley of Oak creek, an affluent of Rio Verde. Here he finds evidences of aboriginal occupancy on all sides--ruins of buildings, fortified hilltops, pictographs, and irrigating ditches--testifying that there was at one time a considerable population in this valley. The fields of the ancient inhabitants have now given place to many excellent ranches, one of the most flourishing of which is not far from a lofty butte of red rock called the Court-house, which from its great size is a conspicuous object for miles around. In many of these canyons there are evidences of a former population, but the country is as yet almost unexplored; there are many difficult places to pass, yet once near the base of the rocks a way can be picked from the mouth of one canyon to another. It does not take long to discover that this now uninhabited region contains, like that along the Verde and its tributaries, many ancient dwellings, for there is scarcely a single canyon leading into these red cliffs in which evidences of former human habitations are not found in the form of ruins. There is little doubt that these unfrequented canyons have many and extensive cliff houses, the existence of which has thus far escaped the explorer. The sandstone of which they are composed is much eroded into caves with overhanging roofs, forming admirable sites for cliff houses as distinguished from cavate dwellings like those we have described. They are the only described ruins of a type hitherto thought to be unrepresented in the valley of the Verde.[23]