Chapter 8

THE BLUFFS OF GREEN RIVER, UTAH.—If the traveler should come suddenly in front of the towering bluff to the right, with its striped and pillared front, it would require no great stretch of the imagination for him to conclude that he was sailing up the ancient Nile and viewing the ruins of Thebes or some other of the great cities that flourished with life and commerce many centuries ago, but now sit in solemn silence contemplating the glory of the dead past. This scene is a very striking one, and the splendid photograph does it full justice. It stands on the printed page just as nature made it, solemn, grand and silent. There is something really sphinxlike in the wrinkled front of the large bluff in the foreground.

MOYEA FALLS, IDAHO.

“Not quite so massive is the picture as is Niagara, but it has more lights and shades and loveliness, as though a hand more divinely skilled had mixed the tints, and with more delicate art had transfixed them upon that picture suspended there in its rugged and somber frame. As one watches, it is not difficult to fancy that, away back in the immemorial and unrecorded past, the angel of love bewailed the fact that mortals were to be given existence in a spot so forbidding, a spot that, apparently, was never to be warmed with God’s smile, which was never to make a sign through which God’s mercy was to be discerned; that then omnipotence was touched, that with His hand He smote the hills and started the great river in its flow; that with His finger He traced out the channel across the corpse of that other river that had been fire, mingled the sunbeams with the raging waters, and made it possible in that fire-blasted frame ofscoriato swing a picture which should be, first to the red man and later to the pale races, a certain sign of the existence, the power, and the unapproachable splendor of Jehovah.

“And as the red man, through the centuries, watched the spectacle, comprehending nothing except that an infinite voice was smiting his ears, and insufferable glories were blazing before his eyes; so, through the centuries to come, the pale races will stand upon the shuddering shore and watch, experiencing a mighty impulse to put off the sandals from their feet, under an overmastering consciousness that the spot on which they are standing is holy ground.

SHOSHONE FALLS, IDAHO.—Shoshone Falls are in Snake River, in the southern part of Idaho, and they constitute one of the greatest curiosities of our western country. In some respects they resemble Niagara, and have accordingly been designated as the Niagara of the west. The place is rapidly becoming a popular resort for tourists, and this popularity will greatly increase as it becomes better known. The surrounding scenery is beautiful, consisting of prairie valleys fringed with distant mountains. A splendid description of the Falls is given on page 110 ofGlimpses of America.

THE FERRY AT SHOSHONE FALLS.

NATURAL BRIDGE, SHOSHONE FALLS.

“There is nothing elsewhere like it, nothing half so weird, so beautiful, so clothed in majesty, so draped with terror; nothing else that awakens impressions at once so startling, so winsome, so profound. While journeying through the desert, to come suddenly upon it, the spectacle gives one something of the emotions that would be experienced in beholding a resurrection from the dead. In the midst of what seems like a dead world, suddenly there springs into irrepressible life something so marvelous, so grand, so caparisoned with loveliness and irresistible might, that the head is bowed, the strained heart throbs tumultuously, and the awed soul sinks to its knees.” The time is fast approaching when the sublime glories of Shoshone Falls will be appreciated by tourists, and by that large class of summer vacationists who are always searching for sights and places that will drive away theennuifrom which they chiefly suffer. The beat of ocean billow, the roar of waterfall, the stretch of landscape from lofty mountain peak, the lonely quietude of glen and wilderness, each have their votaries; but about Shoshone’s chasm there is more to charm than all of these, for the very desolation of its environments adds fascination to the wild and tameless scenery of the falls. The poet and the painter find here an inspiration for their genius; while the most prosaic spectator is thrilled by the matchless grandeur, the majestic awfulness of a mad-cantering river plunging through a gigantic rent, and over a precipice so high that the waters are scattered into mist and dissolve in rainbows when they meet the seething caldron below. It is a strange exhibition of nature’s power and freakishness, a manifestation of mysterious force, a blending of results precipitated by vomiting volcano and an irresistible flood of waters, the joining of rivers of fire with streams breaking over the barriers of mountains and pouring down upon the plains. Considering the surroundings, the bleak sterility of what appears to be a boundless extent of lava fields, and the mighty, awe-compelling avalanche of waters that cleaves it, Shoshone Falls is perhaps the most remarkable waterfall to be found anywhere on either continent, a wonder in which Snake River has an almost equal part. Indeed, this extraordinary river exhibits many equally astonishing features along its extreme length, for while a greater part of the stream flows through a belt of scoria, the lower portion is a succession of waterfalls, second only to those of Shoshone.

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