Public-domain ebook
by Higgins, C. A. (Charles A.); Lummis, Charles Fletcher; Powell, John Wesley
Language: en368 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Adventure·Travel Writing·History - Other
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #50355.
The opening · free to read
The Colorado is one of the great rivers of North America. Formed in Southern Utah by the confluence of the Green and Grand, it intersects the northwestern corner of Arizona, and, becoming the eastern boundary of Nevada and California, flows southward until it reaches tidewater in the Gulf of California, Mexico. It drains a territory of 300,000 square miles, and, traced back to the rise of its principal source, is 2,000 miles long. At two points, Needles and Yuma on the California boundary, it is crossed by a railroad. Elsewhere its course lies far from Caucasian settlements and far from the routes of common travel, in the heart of a vast region fenced on the one hand by arid plains or deep forests and on the other by formidable mountains.
The early Spanish explorers first reported it to the civilized world in 1540, two separate expeditions becoming acquainted with the river for a comparatively short distance above its mouth, and another, journeying from the Moki Pueblos northwestward across the desert, obtaining the first view of the Big Canyon, failing in every effort to descend the canyon wall, and spying the river only from afar.
Again, in 1776, a Spanish priest traveling southward through Utah struck off from the Virgin River to the southeast and found a practicable crossing at a point that still bears the name “Vado de los Padres.”
For more than eighty years thereafter the Big Canyon remained unvisited except by the Indian, the Mormon herdsman, and the trapper, although the Sitgreaves expedition of 1851, journeying westward, struck the river about 150 miles above Yuma, and Lieutenant Whipple in 1854 made a survey for a practicable railroad route along the thirty-fifth parallel, where the Santa Fe Pacific has since been constructed.
The establishment of military posts in New Mexico and Utah having made desirable the use of a waterway for the cheap transportation of supplies, in 1857 the War Department dispatched an expedition in charge of Lieutenant Ives to explore the Colorado as far from its mouth as navigation should be found practicable. Ives ascended the river in a specially constructed steamboat to the head of Black Canyon, a few miles below the confluence of the Virgin River in Nevada, where further navigation became impossible; then, returning to the Needles, he set off across the country toward the northeast. He reached the Big Canyon at Diamond Creek and at Cataract Creek in the spring of 1858, and from the latter point made a wide southward detour around the San Francisco Peaks, thence northeastward to the Moki Pueblos, thence eastward to Fort Defiance, and so back to civilization.
That is the history of the explorations of the Colorado up to forty years ago. Its exact course was unknown for many hundred miles, even its origin being a matter of conjecture. It was difficult to approach within a distance of two or three miles from the channel, while descent to the river’s edge could be hazarded only at wide intervals, inasmuch as it lay in an appalling fissure at the foot of seemingly impassable cliff terraces that led down from the bordering plateau; and to attempt its navigation was to court death. It was known in a general way that the entire channel between Nevada and Utah was of the same titanic character, reaching its culmination nearly midway in its course through Arizona.
In 1869 Maj. J. W. Powell undertook the exploration of the river with nine men and four boats, starting from Green River City, on the Green River, in Utah. The project met with the most urgent remonstrance from those who were best acquainted with the region, including the Indians, who maintained that boats could not possibly live in any one of a score of rapids and falls known to them, to say nothing of the vast unknown stretches in which at any moment a Niagara might be disclosed. It was also currently believed that for hundreds of miles the river disappeared wholly beneath the surface of the earth. Powell launched his flotilla on May 24th, and on August 30th landed at the mouth of the Virgin River, more than one thousand miles by the river channel from the place of starting, minus two boats and four men. One of the men had left the expedition by way of an Indian reservation agency before reaching Arizona, and three, after holding out against unprecedented terrors for many weeks, had finally become daunted, choosing to encounter the perils of an unknown desert rather than to brave any longer the frightful menaces of that Stygian torrent. These three, unfortunately making their appearance on the plateau at a time when a recent depredation was colorably chargeable upon them, were killed by Indians, their story of having come thus far down the river in boats being wholly discredited by their captors.
Powell’s journal of the trip is a fascinating tale, written in a compact and modest style, which, in spite of its reticence, tells an epic story of purest heroism. It definitely established the scene of his exploration as the most wonderful geological and spectacular phenomenon known to mankind, and justified the name which had been bestowed upon it—The Grand Canyon—sublimest of gorges; Titan of chasms. Many scientists have since visited it, and, in the aggregate, a large number of unprofessional lovers of nature; but until a few years ago no adequate facilities were provided for the general sight-seer, and the world’s most stupendous panorama was known principally through report, by reason of the discomforts and difficulties, of the trip, which deterred all except the most indefatigable enthusiasts. Even its geographical location is the subject of widespread misapprehension.
Its title has been pirated for application to relatively insignificant canyons in distant parts of the country, and thousands of tourists have been led to believe that they saw the Grand Canyon, when, in fact, they looked upon a totally different scene, between which and the real Grand Canyon there is no more comparison “than there is between the Alleghanies or Trosachs and the Himalayas.”
There is but one Grand Canyon. Nowhere in the world has its like been found.
Stolid, indeed, is he who can front the awful scene and view its unearthly splendor of color and form without quaking knee or tremulous breath. An inferno, swathed in soft celestial fires; a whole chaotic under-world, just emptied of primeval floods and waiting for a new creative word; eluding all sense of perspective or dimension, outstretching the faculty of measurement, overlapping the confines of definite apprehension; a boding, terrible thing, unflinchingly real, yet spectral as a dream. The beholder is at first unimpressed by any detail; he is overwhelmed by the ensemble of a stupendous panorama, a thousand square miles in extent, that lies wholly beneath the eye, as if he stood upon a mountain peak instead of the level brink of a fearful chasm in the plateau, whose opposite shore is thirteen miles away. A labyrinth of huge architectural forms, endlessly varied in design, fretted with ornamental devices, festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from the upper cliffs and painted with every color known to the palette in pure transparent tones of marvelous delicacy. Never was picture more harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes instant communication of all that architecture and painting and music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is the soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.
A canyon, truly, but not after the accepted type. An intricate system of canyons, rather, each subordinate to the river channel in the midst, which in its turn is subordinate to the whole effect. That river channel, the profoundest depth, and actually more than 6,000 feet below the point of view, is in seeming a rather insignificant trench, attracting the eye more by reason of its somber tone and mysterious suggestion than by any appreciable characteristic of a chasm. It is perhaps five miles distant in a straight line, and its uppermost rims are nearly 4,000 feet beneath the observer, whose measuring capacity is entirely inadequate to the demand made by such magnitudes. One can not believe the distance to be more than a mile as the crow flies, before descending the wall or attempting some other form of actual measurement.
Mere brain knowledge counts for little against the illusion under which the organ of vision is here doomed to labor. Yonder cliff, darkening from white to gray, yellow, and brown as your glance descends, is taller than the Washington Monument. The Auditorium in Chicago would not cover one-half its perpendicular span. Yet it does not greatly impress you. You idly toss a pebble toward it, and are surprised to note how far the missile falls short. By and by you will learn that it is a good half mile distant, and when you go down the trail you will gain an abiding sense of its real proportions. Yet, relatively, it is an unimportant detail of the scene. Were Vulcan to cast it bodily into the chasm directly beneath your feet, it would pass for a bowlder, if, indeed, it were discoverable to the unaided eye.
Yet the immediate chasm itself is only the first step of a long terrace that leads down to the innermost gorge and the river. Roll a heavy stone to the rim and let it go. It falls sheer the height of a church or an Eiffel Tower, according to the point selected for such pastime, and explodes like a bomb on a projecting ledge. If, happily, any considerable fragments remain, they bound onward like elastic balls, leaping in wild parabola from point to point, snapping trees like straws; bursting, crashing, thundering down the declivities until they make a last plunge over the brink of a void; and then there comes languidly up the cliff sides a faint, distant roar, and your bowlder that had withstood the buffets of centuries lies scattered as wide as Wycliffe’s ashes, although the final fragment has lodged only a little way, so to speak, below the rim. Such performances are frequently given in these amphitheaters without human aid, by the mere undermining of the rain, or perhaps it is here that Sisyphus rehearses his unending task. Often in the silence of night some tremendous fragment has been heard crashing from terrace to terrace with shocks like thunder peal.
The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the outside world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty one can acquire any notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep, half as broad, it would be no less bewildering, so utterly does it baffle human grasp.
Only by descending into the canyon may one arrive at anything like comprehension of its proportions, and the descent can not be too urgently commended to every visitor who is sufficiently robust to bear a reasonable amount of fatigue. There are four paths down the southern wall of the canyon in the granite gorge district—Mystic Spring, Bright Angel, Berry’s and Hance’s trails. The following account of a descent of the old Hance trail will serve to indicate the nature of such an experience to-day, except that the trip may now be safely made with greater comfort.
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