Travel Stories Retold from St. Nicholas

Many of those who seek and love earth's greatest scenery have declared that they found it at the Grand Cañon of Arizona. Travelers flock to it from the ends of the earth, though the majority of the visitors, numbering every year about a hundred thousand, are Americans.

The Grand Cañon of the Colorado River, in northern Arizona, is indeed a world wonder, and there is no other chasm in the world worthy to be compared with it. It is more than two hundred miles long, including Marble Cañon, is from ten to thirteen miles wide in the granite gorge section, and is more than a mile deep. It was created ages and ages ago by the erosive action of water, wind, and frost, and it is still being deepened and widened imperceptibly year by year.

The Colorado River, which drains a region of three hundred thousand square miles and is two thousand miles long from the rise of its principal source, is formed in southern Utah by the junction of the Grand and the Green Rivers, and, flowing through Utah and Arizona to tide-water at the Gulf of California, it dashes in headlong torrent through this titanic gorge--this dream of color, tinted like a rainbow or a sunset.

The cañon is reached by a railroad running to the rim, and may be visited any day in the year. It is unlike most other scenery, because when standing on its rim you look down instead of up. Imagine a gigantic trough, filled with bare mountains on each side and sloping to a narrow channel, which in turn is carved deeply and steeply out of solid granite. You come upon it unawares from the level, timbered, plateau country. The experience is an absolutely unique one. Only when you go down one of the trails to the bottom and look up is the view more nearly like other grand mountain vistas. The first glimpse always is from the upper edge, and, having no previous standard of measurement, you find it difficult to adjust yourself to this strange condition. The distant rim swims in a bluish haze. The nearer red rocks forming the inner cañon buttes--crowned with massive table-lands that look like temples, minarets, and battlements--reflect the sunlight in myriad hues. It seems a vast illusion rather than reality. No wonder that the first look often awes the spectator into silence and tears!

But, before you have been here long, you will wish to know how it all happened. You will ask how the cañon was made.

That question was asked by a little girl of Captain John Hance, one of the pioneer guides. Hance contests with a few other early comers the distinction of being the biggest "romancer" in Arizona. He told her that he dug it all himself.

"Why, Captain Hance!" she said, in astonishment, "what did you do with all the dirt?"

He quickly replied, "I built the San Francisco Peaks off there with it!"

Just between ourselves, no one absolutely can tell just how the miracle occurred, for no human being was there at the time. But the geologist has put together, bit by bit, thousands of facts, dug from the rocks which here lie exposed like a mammoth layer-cake and his explanation is so convincing that it must stand as at least the probable truth.

Here may be seen rocks of the four geological periods which are among the very oldest of our earth. The rocks of later periods were here once, too, making a layer more than two miles high resting on what is to-day the top, but in some remote age they were shaved off by some great natural force, perhaps a glacier.

The eating away of the rocks which formed the cañon itself is modern. Scientists say it was done, as it were, last Monday or Tuesday, for it was when the top two thirds had been "shaved off," as we have said, that the Colorado River began to cut the Grand Cañon through the rocks that formed the lower third.

While the cracking of the crust, caused by internal fires, may have helped the process of cañon-making, the result of erosion is seen everywhere. Every passing shower, every desert wind, every snowfall, changes the contour of the region imperceptibly but surely. The cañon is Nature's open book in which we may read how the earth was built.

With the coming of the railroad, when this century was yet a baby, tourists began to flock in, hotels were built, highways constructed, trails bettered, and other improvements made. To-day the traveler finds here every comfort.

Although first glimpsed by white men in 1540, when the Spanish conquistadors appeared,--one expedition journeying from the Hopi pueblos in Tusayan across the Painted Desert,--the big cañon remained unvisited, except for Indians and trappers, until 1858, when Lieutenant Ives, of the army engineer corps, made a brief exploration of the lower reaches of the Colorado, coming out at Cataract Creek. It was not thoroughly explored until the year 1869, when Major John W. Powell made his memorable voyage from the entrance to the mouth of the great gorge, passing down the Green and Colorado Rivers. Though he lost two boats and four men, he pushed on to the end. It is fitting that the United States Government has erected to his memory a massive monument of native rock with bronze tablets on one of the points near El Tovar Hotel.

Powell's outfit consisted of nine men and four rowboats. The distance traveled exceeded one thousand miles, from what is now Greenriver, Utah, through the series of cañons to the mouth of the Rio Virgin. In the spring of 1871 he again started with three boats and descended the river to the Crossing of the Fathers. The following summer Lee's Ferry was his point of departure and he went as far as the mouth of Kanab Wash.

Beginning with the Russell and Monett party, in 1907, several others have essayed to duplicate Powell's achievement, and successfully, too, though without adding to our scientific knowledge of the cañon. The trips are exceedingly dangerous, for the rapids conceal rocks that would wreck any boat, and the currents are treacherous. It is safer, by far, to sit at home and read Powell's story.

The average traveler spends too short a time at the cañon. He arrives in the morning and leaves in the evening. Those wise ones, who go about things in more leisurely fashion, stay from three days to a week.

There are certain things that everybody does. Simply by looking through the big telescope at the "lookout," an intimate view may be had of the far-off north rim and of the river gorge five miles below in an air line. It is easier than actually going to those places, though both are accessible. The north rim, or Kaibab Plateau, is about a quarter of a mile higher than the south rim, where you are standing, and is thickly forested with giant pines. Clear streams are found here, and wild game in abundance. Mountain-lions hide in the rocks, and bobcats haunt the trees. It is the home of the bear, too; you may see two "sassy" young sample specimens outside the house where the Indians stay, opposite El Tovar Hotel. The way across the cañon to the north side is not an easy one, as the Colorado must be crossed in a steel cage suspended from a cable, which stretches dizzily from bank to bank. Then follows the stiff climb up Bright Angel Creek, along a trail seldom used.

The Hopi House, where the Indians give their dances every evening for free entertainment of guests, is another attraction. It is occupied by representatives of the Snake Dance Hopis, whose home is many miles northeast across the Painted Desert. You won't see the Snake Dance, of course, but you will witness ceremonies just as interesting, participated in by men, women and children of the Hopi and Navajo tribes. The little tots, especially, are very "cute." They execute difficult steps in perfect time and with the utmost solemnity, while the drummer beats the tom-tom, and the singer chants his weird songs.

Here you may see Navajo silversmiths at work, fashioning curious ornaments from Mexican coins and turquoise, also deft weavers of blankets and baskets.

The Havasupai Reservation, in Cataract Cañon, is about sixty miles away, and Indians from that hidden place of the blue waterfalls are frequent visitors around the railway station.

All of these Indians understand the language of Uncle Sam. Many of them are Carlisle or Riverside graduates, and one young Hopi is writing a history of his tribe in university English.

Have you ever ridden a mule? If not, you will learn how at the cañon, for only on muleback can travelers easily make the trip down and up the trail. Walking is all right going down, but the climb coming back will tire out the strongest hiker: hence the mule, or burro, long as to ears, long as to memory, and "sad as to his songs."

Of the visitors, fat and lean, tall and short, old and young, to each is assigned a mule of the right size and disposition, together with a khaki riding-suit, which fits more or less, all surmounted by hats that are useful rather than ornamental. It is a motley crowd that starts off in the morning, in charge of careful guides, from the roof of the world--a motley crowd, but gay and suspiciously cheerful. It is likewise a motley crowd that slowly climbs up out of the earth toward evening--but subdued and inclined still to cling to the patient mule.

"What did you see?" asked curious friends.

Quite likely they saw more mule than cañon, being concerned with the immediate views along the trail rather than the thrilling vistas unfolding at each turn. Nine out of ten of them could tell you their mule's name, yet would hesitate to say much about Zoroaster or Angel's Gate. They could identify the steep descent of the Devil's Corkscrew, for they were a part of it; the mystery of the deep gulf, stretching overhead and all around, probably did not reach them. That is the penalty one pays for being too much occupied with things close at hand.

Yet only by crawling down into the awe-full depths can the cañon be fully comprehended afterward from the upper rim.

All trail parties take lunch on the river's bank. The Colorado is about two hundred feet wide here, and lashed into foam by the rapids. Its roar is like that of a thousand express-trains. The place seems uncanny. At night, under the stars, you appear to be in another world.

No water is to be found on the south rim for one hundred miles east and west of El Tovar, except what falls in the passing summer showers, and that is quickly soaked up by the dry soil. All the water used for the small army of horses and mules maintained by the transportation department, likewise for the big hotel and annex and other facilities, is hauled by rail in tank-cars from a point one hundred and twenty-five miles distant. The vast volume of water in the Colorado River, only seven miles away, is not available. No way has yet been found to pump economically the precious fluid from a river that to-day is thirty feet deep, and to-morrow is seventy feet deep, flowing below you at the depth of over a mile.

Another curious fact is this: the drainage on the south side is away from the cañon, not into it. The ground at the edge of the abyss is higher than it is a few miles back.