Chickapanagie's summer home is a type of the simplest character. Two upright poles with forks at the top, standing about six feet high, are placed in line with each other fifteen feet apart. A cross-beam is placed on these uprights. Then a row of poles, about eight to nine feet in length, is sloped against the cross-beam. These are covered with willows, and there is the completed hawa.
What queer dwelling-places men have, and ever have had, and possibly ever will have. At the Paris Exposition of 1889 one whole street was devoted to a history of inhabited dwellings. At one end were the earliest "homes" of the paleolithic age, caves and huts, followed by the Lake Dwellings and the wickiups, tepees, or tents of the present-day Indian, the latter being the same primitive structures the aborigines have ever used. The other end of the street was devoted to the domestic architecture of our own day, and there, in a few hours, one could study almost every known form of home structure. But who could ever reproduce some of the homes these Havasupais live in? Wicker huts in the open, and caves in the faces of solid sandstone walls two thousand feet and more in height, these in turn surmounted by domes and obelisks and towers and cupolas that no modern architect dare attempt to rival.
These massive walls absorb the heat of the sun in summer time and thus keep the canyon intensely hot both night and day. The large flow of water and the dense growth of willows and other verdure keep the soil constantly moist, so there is a humidity in the atmosphere which, in hot weather, makes it very oppressive.
This moisture renders the canyon cold in winter, although the thermometer never ranges very low. Snow falls but seldom, and then disappears almost as soon as it lights. In 1898 there was snow that stayed on the ground for several hours, but this was one of the severest winters they have had for many years.
A hundred yards or so below where the springs commence to flow Wallapai Canyon enters from the left. It is similar in appearance to, though narrower than, Havasu (Cataract) Canyon, the walls being of red sandstone, the strata of which are as regular as if laid by masons. A few hundred yards beyond the junction of the two canyons a remarkable piece of Indian engineering is in evidence, showing how the Indians ascend from a lower to an upper platform. There is a drop here in the stratum of some twenty-five or thirty feet, and to overcome this obstacle the Havasupais built a cage with logs which they filled with stones, and then from this stretched rude logs up and across, to which other logs were fastened, thus making a fairly substantial bridge from the lower to the upper stratum over which their horses as well as themselves could safely pass. The trail from this point ascends through tortuous canyons a distance of seven miles to the territory occupied by the Wallapais.