PREHISTORIC POTTERY FROM MESA VERDEPREHISTORIC POTTERY FROM MESA VERDEColoring and design as well as form show high artistic sense and clean workmanship
Mummy Lake is not a lake and no mummies were ever found there. This old-time designation applies to an artificial depression surrounded by a low rude stone wall, much crumbled, which was evidently a storage reservoir for an irrigation system of some size. A number of conspicuous mounds in the neighborhood suggest the former existence of a village of pueblos dependent upon the farms for which the irrigation system had been built. One of these, from which a few stones protruded, was excavated in 1916 by Doctor Fewkes, and has added a new and important chapter to the history of this people. This pueblo has been named Far View House. Its extensive vista includes four other groups of similar mounds. Each cluster occurs in the fertile sage-brush clearings which bloom in summer with asters and Indian paint-brush; there is no doubt that good crops of Indian corn could still be raised from these sands to-day by dry-farming methods.
Far View House is a pueblo, a hundred and thirteen feet long by more than fifty feet wide, not including a full-length plaza about thirty-five feet wide in which religious dances are supposed to have taken place. The differences between this fine structure and the cliff-cities are considerable. The most significant evidence of progress, perhaps, is the modern regularity of the ground-plan. The partitions separating the secular rooms are continuous through the building, and the angles are generally accurately right angles.
The pueblo had three stories. It is orientedapproximately to the cardinal points and was terraced southward to secure a sunny exposure. The study of the solar movements became an advanced science with these people in the latter stages of their development. It must be remembered that they had no compasses; knowing nothing of the north or any other fixed point, nevertheless there is evidence that they successfully worked out the solstices and planned their later buildings accurately according to cardinal points of their own calculation.
Another difference indicating development is the decrease in the number of kivas, and the construction of a single very large kiva in the middle of the building. Its size suggests at once that the individual clan organization of cliff-dwelling days had here given place to a single priestly fraternity, sociologically a marked advance. Drawing parallels with the better-known customs of other primitive people, we are at liberty, if we please, to infer similar progress in other directions. The original primitive communism was developing naturally, though doubtless very slowly, into something akin to organized society, probably involving more complicated economic relationships in all departments of living.
While their masonry did not apparently improve in proportion, Far View House shows increase in the number and variety of the decorative figures incised on hewn stones. The spiral, representing the coiled serpent, appears a number of times, as do many combinations of squares, curves, and angles arranged infanciful design, which may or may not have had symbolic meanings.
A careful examination of the neighborhood discloses few details of the irrigation system, but it shows a cemetery near the southeast corner of the building in which the dead were systematically buried.
Large numbers of minor antiquities were found in this interesting structure. Besides the usual stone implements of the mason and the housekeeper, many instruments of bone, such as needles, dirks, and bodkins, were found. Figurines of several kinds were unearthed, carved from soft stone, including several intended to symbolize Indian corn; all these may have been idols. Fragments of pottery were abundant, in full variety of form, decoration, and color, but always the most ancient types. Among the bones of animals, the frequency of those of rabbits, deer, antelope, elk, and mountain-sheep indicate that meat formed no inconsiderable part of the diet. Fabrics and embroideries were not discovered, as in the cliff-dwellings, but they may have disappeared in the centuries through exposure to the elements.
Far View House may not show the highest development of the Mummy Lake cluster of pueblos, and further exhumations here and in neighboring groups may throw further light upon this interesting people in their gropings from darkness to light. Meantime, however, returning to the neighborhood of the cliff-dwellings, let us examine a structure so late in the history of these people that they left it unfinished.
Sun Temple stands on a point of Chapin Mesa, somewhat back from the edge of Cliff Canyon, commanding an extraordinary range of country. It is within full view of Cliff Palace and other cliff-dwellings of importance and easy of access. From it, one can look southward to the Mancos River. On every side a wide range of mesa and canyon lies in full view. The site is unrivalled for a temple in which all could worship with devotion.
When Doctor Fewkes, in the early summer of 1915, attacked the mound which had been designated Community House under the supposition that it covered a ruined pueblo, he had no idea of the extraordinary nature of the find awaiting him, although he was prepared from its shape and other indications for something out of the usual. So wholly without parallel was the disclosure, however, that it was not till it was entirely uncovered that he ventured a public conjecture as to its significance. The ground-plan of Sun Temple is shaped like the letter D. It encloses another D-shaped structure occupying nearly two-thirds of its total area, within which are two large kivas. Between the outer and the inner D are passages and rooms, and at one end a third kiva is surrounded by rooms, one of which is circular.
Sun Temple is also impressive in size. It is a hundred and twenty-one feet long and sixty-four feet wide. Its walls average four feet in thickness, and are double-faced, enclosing a central core of rubble; they are built of the neighborhood sandstone. The masonry is of fine quality. This, together with its symmetrical architectural design, its fine proportions, and its many decorated stones, mark it the highest type of Mesa Verde architecture.
SUN TEMPLE, MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARKFrom a photograph by George L. BeamSUN TEMPLE, MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARKBuilt by prehistoric people to their god, the sun, and unfinished when they suddenly disappeared
From a photograph by George L. Beam
SPRUCE TREE HOUSE FROM ACROSS THE CANYONFrom a photograph by George L. BeamSPRUCE TREE HOUSE FROM ACROSS THE CANYONShowing the overhanging rock roof and the forest which tops the Mesa Verde
From a photograph by George L. Beam
It was plainly unfinished. Walls had risen in some places higher than in others. As yet there was no roofing. No rooms had been plastered. Of internal finishing little was completed, and of contents, of course, there was none. The stone hammers and other utensils of the builders were found lying about as if thrown down at day's close.
The kivas, although circular, are unlike those of Cliff Palace, inasmuch as they are above ground, not subterranean. The mortar used in pointing shows the impress of human hands; no trowels were used. The walls exhibit many stones incised with complicated designs, largely geometric; some may be mason's marks; others are decorative or symbolic. These designs indicate a marked advance over those in Far View House; in fact they are far more complicated and artistic than any in the southwest.
Bare and ineloquent though its unfinished condition left it, the religious purposes of the entire building are clear to the archæologist in its form. And, as if to make conjecture certainty, a shrine was uncovered on the corner-stone of the outer wall which frames in solid stone walls a large fossil palm-leaf whose rays strongly suggest the sun!
It requires no imagination to picture the effect which the original discovery of this image of their godmust have had upon a primitive community of sun-worshippers. It must have seemed to them a divine gift, a promise, like the Ark of the Covenant, of the favor of the Almighty. It may even have first suggested the idea of building this temple to their deity.
This is all the story. Go there and study it in detail. Enlightened, profoundly impressed, nevertheless you will finish at this point. The tale has no climax. It just stops.
What happened to the people of the Mesa Verde?
Some archæologists believe that they emigrated to neighboring valleys southwest. But why should they have left their prosperous farms and fine homes for regions which seem to us less desirable? And why, a profoundly religious people, should they have left Sun Temple unfinished?
What other supposition remains?
Only, I think, that, perhaps because of their prosperity and the unpreparedness that accompanies long periods of peace, they were suddenly overwhelmed by enemies.
Hot Springs Reservation, Arkansas. Platt National Park, Oklahoma
Froma hillside on the edge of the Ozark Mountains in central Arkansas issue springs of hot water which are effective in the alleviation of rheumatic and kindred ills. Although chemical analysis fails to explain the reason, the practice of many years has abundantly proved their worth. Before the coming of the white man they were known to the Indians, who are said to have proclaimed them neutral territory in time of war. Perhaps it was rumor of their fame upon which Ponce de Leon founded his dream of a Fountain of Youth.
In the early years of the last century hundreds of settlers toiled many miles over forest trails to camp beside them and bathe daily in their waters. The bent and suffering were carried there on stretchers. So many and so striking were the cures that the fame of these springs spread throughout the young nation, and in 1832, to prevent their falling into hands outstretched to seize and exploit them for private gain, Congress created them a national reservation. The Hot Springs Reservation was our first national park.
Previous to this a couple of log houses built by visitors served for shelter for the pilgrims at the shrine of health. Soon after, other buildings quite as primitive were erected. A road was constructed through the forests from the settled portions of the State, and many drove laboriously in with tents and camping outfits. I have seen a copy of a photograph which was taken when photographs were new, showing several men and women in the odd conventional costume of that period sitting solemnly upon the banks of a steaming spring, their clothes drawn up, their bare legs calf deep in the hot water.
Once started, Hot Springs grew rapidly. Unfortunately, this first act of national conservation failed to foresee the great future of these springs, and the reservation line was drawn so that it barely enclosed the brook of steaming vapors which was their outlet. To-day, when the nation contemplates spending millions to beautify the national spa, it finds the city built solidly opposite.
Railroads soon pushed their way through the Ozark foothills and landed thousands yearly beside the healing waters. Hotels became larger and more numerous. The government built a public bathhouse into which the waters were piped for the free treatment of the people. Concessioners built more elaborate structures within the reservation to accommodate those who preferred to pay for pleasanter surroundings or for private treatment. The village became a town and the town a city. Boarding-housessprang up everywhere with accommodations to suit the needs of purses of all lengths. Finally, large and costly hotels were built for the prosperous and fashionable who began to find rare enjoyment in the beautiful Ozark country while they drank their hot water and took their invigorating baths. Hot Springs became a national resort.
It will be seen that, in its way, Hot Springs has reflected the social development of the country. It has passed through the various stages that marked the national growth in taste and morals. During the period when gambling was a national vice it was noted for its high play, and then gamblers of all social grades looked forward to their season in the South. During the period of national dissipation, when polite drunkenness was a badge of class and New Year's day an orgy, it became the periodic resort of inebriates, just as later, with the elevation of the national moral sense, it became instead the most conservative of resorts, the periodic refuge of thousands of work-worn business and professional men seeking the astonishing recuperative power of its water.
True again to the spirit of the times, Hot Springs reflects to the full the spirit of to-day. It is a Southern mountain resort of quiet charm and wonderful natural beauty set on the edge of a broad region of hills, ravines, and sweet-smelling pines, a paradise for the walker, the hiker, and the horseback rider. Down on the street a long row of handsome modern bath-houses, equipped with all the scientific luxuries, and morebesides, of the most elaborate European spa, concentrates the business of bath and cure. Back of this rise directly the beautiful Ozark hills. One may have exactly what he wishes at Hot Springs. He may live with the sick if that is his bent, or he may spend weeks of rich enjoyment of the South in holiday mood, and have his baths besides, without a suggestion of the sanitarium or even of the spa.
Meantime the mystery of the water's potency seems to have been solved. It is not chemical in solution which clears the system of its ills and restores the jaded tissues to buoyancy, but the newly discovered principle of radioactivity. Somewhere deep in Nature's laboratory these waters become charged with an uplifting power which is imparted to those who bathe according to the rules which many years of experience have prescribed. Many physicians refuse to verify the waters' virtues; some openly scoff. But the fact stands that every year hundreds who come helpless cripples walk jauntily to the station on their departure, and many thousands of sufferers from rheumatic ills and the wear and tear of strenuous living return to their homes restored. I myself can testify to the surprising recuperative effect of only half a dozen daily baths, and I know business men who habitually go there whenever the stress of overwork demands measures of quick relief.
ON HOT SPRINGS MOUNTAIN, HOT SPRINGS OF ARKANSASON HOT SPRINGS MOUNTAIN, HOT SPRINGS OF ARKANSAS
BATH HOUSE ROW, HOT SPRINGS OF ARKANSASBATH HOUSE ROW, HOT SPRINGS OF ARKANSAS
It is not surprising that more than a hundred thousand persons visit Hot Springs every year. The recognized season begins after the winter holidays; then it is that gayety and pleasuring, riding, driving, motoring, golfing, and the social life of the fashionable hotels reach their height. But, for sheer enjoyment of the quieter kind, the spring, early summer, and the autumn are unsurpassed; south though it lies, Hot Springs is delightful even in midsummer.
Two railroads land the visitor almost at the entrance of the reservation. A fine road brings the motorist sixty miles from the lively city of Little Rock. The elaborate bath-houses line the reservation side of the principal street, opposite the brick city. But back of them rises abruptly the beautiful forested mountain from whose side gush the healing waters, and back of this roll the beautiful pine-grown Ozarks. The division is sharply drawn. He who chooses may forget the city except at the hour of his daily bath.
The plans for realizing in stone and landscape gardening the ideal of the great American spa, which this spot is in fact, contemplate the work of years.
In southern Oklahoma not far from the Texas boundary, a group of thirty healing springs, these of cold sparkling water, were set apart by Congress in 1904 under the title of the Platt National Park. Most of them are sulphur springs; others are impregnated with bromides and other mineral salts. Many thousands visit yearly the prosperous bordering city of Sulphur to drink these waters; many camp in or nearthe reservation; the bottled waters bring relief to thousands at home.
Through the national park, from its source in the east to its entry into Rock Creek, winds Travertine Creek, the outlet of most of these springs. Rock Creek outlines the park's western boundary, and on its farther bank lies the city. Springs of importance within the park pour their waters directly into its current. All these Platt springs, like those of Hot Springs, Arkansas, were known to the Indians for their curative properties for many generations before the coming of the white settler.
The park is the centre of a region of novelty and charm for the visitor from the North and East. The intimate communion of prairie and rich forested valley, the sophistication of the bustling little city in contrast with the rough life of the outlying ranches, the mingling in common intercourse of such differing human elements as the Eastern tourist, the free and easy Western townsman, the cowboy and the Indian, give rare spice to a visit long enough to impart the spirit of a country of so many kinds of appeal. The climate, too, contributes to enjoyment. The long spring lasts from February to June. During the short summer, social life is at its height. The fall lingers to the holidays before it gives way to a short winter, which the Arbuckle Mountains soften by diverting the colder winds.
The pleasures are those of prairie and valley. It is a great land for riding. There is swimming, rowing, and excellent black-bass fishing in the larger lakes.It is a region of deer and many birds. Its altitude is about a thousand feet.
The rolling Oklahoma plateau attains in this neighborhood its pleasantest outline and variety. Broad plains of grazing-land alternate with bare rocky heights and low mountains. The creeks and rivers which accumulate the waters of the springs scattered widely among these prairie hills are outlined by winding forested belts and flowered thickets of brush. Great areas of thin prairie yield here and there to rounded hills, some of which bear upon their summits columns of flat rocks heaped one upon the other high enough to be seen for miles against the low horizon.
These, which are known as the Chimney Hills, for many years have been a cause of speculation among the settlers who have nearly replaced the Indians since the State of Oklahoma replaced the Indian Territory with which we became familiar in the geographies of earlier days. Who were the builders of these chimneys and what was their purpose?
"At a hearing in Ardmore a few years ago before a United States court taking testimony upon some ancient Indian depredation claims," writes Colonel R.A. Sneed, for years the superintendent of the Platt National Park, "practically all the residents of the Chickasaw Nation, Indian and negro, whose memories of that country extend back fifty years or more, were in attendance. In recounting his recollections of a Comanche raid in which his master's horses were stolen, one old negro incidentally gave a solution ofthe Chimney Hills which is the only one the writer ever heard, and which probably accounts for all of them.
"He said that his master lived at Big Sulphur Springs, farthest west of any of the Chickasaws; that the Kiowas and Comanches raided the country every summer and drove out horses or cattle wherever they could find them unprotected; that he had often gone with his master to find these stolen cattle; that these forages were so frequent that the Chickasaws had never undertaken to occupy any of their lands west of Rock Creek, north of Big Sulphur Springs, nor west of the Washita River south of the springs; that the country west of Sulphur Springs was dry, and water was hard to find unless one knew just where to look; and that the Comanches had a custom of marking all the springs they could find by building rock chimneys on the hills nearest to the springs. Only one chimney would be built if the spring flowed from beneath the same hill, but if the spring was distant from the hill two chimneys would be built, either upon the same hill or upon two distant hills, and a sight along the two chimneys would indicate a course toward the spring.
"The old man said that every hill in their pasture had a Comanche chimney on it and that his master would not disturb them because he did not want to make the wild Indians mad. There never was open war between the Chickasaws and the Comanches, but individual Chickasaws often had trouble with Comanche hunting-parties.
"The Big Sulphur Springs on Rock Creek in the Chickasaw Nation afterward became the centre around which the city of Sulphur was built, and after the town was grown to a population of two thousand or more it was removed bodily to make room for the Platt National Park, around which has been built the new city of Sulphur, which now has a population of forty-five hundred.
"Many of the Comanche monuments are extant and the great bluff above the Bromide Springs of the national park looks out toward the north and west over a prairie that extends to the Rocky Mountains; the monument that stood on the brow of that bluff must have been visible for many miles to the keen vision of the Comanche who knew how to look for it."
The Indian Territory became the State of Oklahoma in 1907; the story of the white man's peaceful invasion is one of absorbing interest; the human spectacle of to-day is complex, even kaleidoscopic. In the thirties and forties the government had established in the territory the five civilized Indian nations, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, each with its allotted boundaries, its native government, its legislatures, and its courts. In many respects these were foreign nations within our boundaries. Besides them, the Osage Indians had their reservation in the north, and fragments of no less than seventeen other tribes lived on assigned territory.
Gradually white men invaded the land, purchasedholdings from the Indian nations, built cities, established businesses of many kinds, ran railroads in all directions. In time, the nations were abolished and their remaining lands were divided up among the individuals composing them; the Indians of these nations became American citizens; their negro slaves, for they had been large slaveholders, received each his portion of the divided land. Then came Oklahoma.
To-day there is only one Indian reservation in the State, that of the Osages. Oil has been found on their land and they are the wealthiest people in the world to-day, the average cash income of each exceeding five thousand dollars a year. In a state with a total population of two and a quarter millions live 336,000 Indians representing twenty-three tribes and 110,000 negroes descended from slaves. There has been much intermarrying between Indians and whites, and some between Indians and blacks. Here is a mixture of races to baffle the keenest eye.
Elsewhere than in the Osage Reservation, wealth also has come to the Indians. Many have very large incomes, large even for the rich of our Eastern cities. Asphalt also has enriched many. Cotton is raised extensively in the southern counties. Grazing on a large scale has proved profitable. Many Indians own costly and luxurious homes, ride in automobiles, and enter importantly into business, politics, and the professions; these usually have more or less white blood. Many full-bloods who have grown rich without effortpossess finely furnished bedrooms, and sleep on the floor in blankets; elaborate dining-rooms with costly table equipments, and eat cross-legged on the kitchen floor; gas-ranges, and cook over chip fires out-of-doors; automobiles, and ride blanketed ponies. Many wealthy men are deeply in debt because of useless luxuries which they have been persuaded to buy.
Platt National Park lies about the centre of what was once the Chickasaw nation. It is a grazing and a cotton country. There are thousands of Indians, many of them substantial citizens, some men of local influence. Native dress is seldom seen.
Quoting again from my correspondence with Colonel Sneed, here is the legend of the last of the Delawares:
"Along about 1840, a very few years after the Chickasaws and Choctaws had arrived in Indian Territory, a small band of about sixty Delaware Indians arrived in the Territory, having roved from Alabama through Mississippi and Missouri, and through the northwest portion of Arkansas. Being a small band, they decided to link their fortunes with those of some other tribe of Indians, and they first pitched their tepees with those of the Cherokees. But the Cherokee Chief and old Chief Wahpanucka of the Delawares did not agree. So the little band of Delawares continued rambling until they reached the Choctaw Nation, where they again tried to make terms with the Chief of the tribe. Evidently no agreement was reached between that Chief and Wahpanucka, for the Delawarescontinued their roving until they reached the Chickasaw Nation, where they remained.
"Old Chief Wahpanucka had a beautiful daughter whose name was Deerface; two of the Delaware braves were much in love with her, but Deerface could not decide which one of these warriors she should take to become Chief after the death of Wahpanucka.
"Chief Wahpanucka called the two warriors before him and a powwow was agreed upon. The council was held around the Council Rocks (which is now a point of interest within the Platt National Park), and a decision was reached to the effect that at a certain designated time the Delawares should all assemble on the top of the Bromide Cliff, at the foot of which flow the now famous Bromide and Medicine Springs, and that the two braves should ride their Indian ponies to the edge of the cliff, which was at that time known as Medicine Bluff, and jump off to the bed of the creek about two hundred feet below. The one who survived was to marry Deerface, and succeed Wahpanucka as Chief of the Delawares.
"The race was run and both Indian braves made the jump from the bluff, but both were killed. When Deerface saw this she threw herself from the bluff and died at the foot of the cliff where her lovers had met their death. To-day her image may be seen indelibly fixed on one of the rocks of the cliff where she fell, and the water of the Medicine Spring is supposed to be the briny tears of the old Chief when he saw the havoc his decision had wrought. These tears,filtering down through the cliff where the old Chief stood, are credited with being so purified that the water of the spring which they form is possessed with remedial qualities which make it a cure for all human ailments."
Tomost Americans the southwest means the desert, and it is true that most of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and portions of Colorado and southern California, are arid or semiarid lands, relieved, however, by regions of fertility and agricultural prosperity. In popular conception the desert has been the negative of all that means beauty, richness, and sublimity; it has been the synonym of poverty and death. Gradually but surely the American public is learning that again popular conception is wrong, that the desert is as positive a factor in scenery as the mountain, that it has its own glowing beauty, its own intense personality, and occasionally, in its own amazing way, a sublimity as gorgeous, as compelling, and as emotion-provoking as the most stupendous snow-capped range.
The American desert region includes some of the world's greatest scenery. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is sunk in a plateau which, while sprinkled with scant pine, is nearly rainless. Zion Canyon is a palette of brilliant color lying among golden sands. A score of national monuments conserve large natural bridges, forests of petrified trees, interesting volcanic or other phenomena of prehistoric times, areas of strange cactus growths, deposits of the bones of monstrous reptiles, and remains of a civilizationwhich preceded the discovery of America; and, in addition to these, innumerable places of remarkable magnificence as yet unknown except to the geologist, the topographer, the miner, the Indian, and the adventurer in unfrequented lands.
This arid country consists of rolling sandy plains as broad as seas, dotted with gray sage-brush and relieved by bare craggy monadnocks and naked ranges which the rising and the setting sun paints unbelievable colors. Here and there thin growths of cottonwood outline thin ribbons of rivers, few and far between. Here and there alkali whitens the edges of stained hollows where water lies awhile after spring cloudbursts. Here and there are salt ponds with no outlet. Yet even in the desolation of its tawny monotony it has a fascination which is insistent and cumulative.
But the southwest is not all desert. There are great areas of thin grazing ranges and lands where dry farming yields fair crops. There are valleys which produce fruits and grains in abundance. There are hamlets and villages and cities which are among the oldest in America, centres of fertile tracts surrounded by deserts which need only water to become the richest lands on the continent. There are regions reclaimed by irrigation where farming has brought prosperity. In other places the plateau covers itself for hundreds of square miles with scrubby pine and cedar.
All in all, it is a land of rare charm and infinite variety.
To appreciate a region which more and more will enter into American consciousness and divide travel with the mountains, the reader should know something of its structural history.
The southwestern part of the United States rose above sea-level and sank below it many times during the many thousands of centuries preceding its present state, which is that of a sandy and generally desert plateau, five to ten thousand feet in altitude. How many times it repeated the cycle is not fully known. Some portions of it doubtless were submerged oftener than others. Some were lifting while others were lowering. And, meantime, mountains rose and were carried away by erosion to give place to other mountains which also wore away; river systems formed and disappeared, lakes and inland seas existed and ceased to exist. The history of our southwest would have been tempestuous indeed had it been compassed within say the life of one man; but, spread over a period of time inconceivable to man, there may have been no time when it might have seemed to be more active in change than its still hot deserts seem to-day to the traveller in passing trains.
Other parts of the continent, no doubt, have undergone as many changes; our southwest is not singular in that. But nowhere else, perhaps, has the change left evidences so plain and so interesting to the unscientific observer. The page of earth's history is more easily read upon the bare deserts of our southwest than on the grass-concealed prairies of the MississippiValley or the eroded and forested ranges of the Appalachians.
Before the Rockies and the Sierra even existed, in the shallow sea which covered this part of the continent were deposited the ooze which later, when this region rose above the sea, became the magnificent limestones of the Grand Canyon. Muds accumulated which to-day are seen in many highly colored shales. Long ages of erosion from outlying mountain regions spread it thick with gravels and sands which now appear in rocky walls of deep canyons. A vast plain was built up and graded by these deposits. The trunks of trees washed down by the floods from far distant uplands were buried in these muds and sands, where, in the course of unnumbered centuries, they turned to stone. They are the petrified forests of to-day.
Mountains, predecessors of our modern Sierra, lifted in the south and west, squeezed the moisture from the Pacific winds, and turned the region into desert. This was in the Jurassic Period. Sands thousands of feet deep were accumulated by the desert winds which are to-day the sandstones of the giant walls of Zion Canyon.
But this was not the last desert, for again the region sank below the sea. Again for half a million years or more ooze settled upon the sands to turn to limestone millions of years later. In this Jurassic sea sported enormous marine monsters whose bones settled to the bottom to be unearthed in our times, and great flying reptiles crossed its water.
Again the region approached sea-level and accumulated, above its new limestones, other beds of sands. New river systems formed and brought other accumulations from distant highlands. It was then a low swampy plain of enormous size, whose northern limits reached Montana, and which touched what now is Kansas on its east. Upon the borders of its swamps, in Cretaceous times, lived gigantic reptiles, the Dinosaurs and their ungainly companions whose bones are found to-day in several places.
For the last time the region sank and a shallow sea swept from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Again new limestones formed, and as the surface very slowly rose for the last time at the close of the Cretaceous Period many new deposits were added to the scenic exhibit of to-day.
Meantime other startling changes were making which extended over a lapse of time which human mind cannot grasp. Responding to increasing pressures from below, the continent was folding from north to south. The miracle of the making of the Rockies was enacting.
During all of Tertiary times earth movements of tremendous energy rocked and folded the crust and hastened change. The modern Sierra rose upon the eroded ruins of its predecessor, again shutting off the moisture-laden western winds and turning the southwest again into a desert. One of the mountain-building impulses spread eastward from the Sierra to the Wasatch Mountains, but Nature's project for thisvast granite-cored tableland never was realized, for continually its central sections caved and fell. And so it happened that the eastern edge of the Sierra and the western edge of the Wasatch Mountains became the precipitous edges, thousands of feet high, of a mountain-studded desert which to-day is called the Great Basin. It includes southeastern Oregon, nearly all of Nevada, the western half of Utah, and a large area in the south of California, besides parts of Idaho and Wyoming. It is 880 miles north and south and 572 miles wide. Its elevation is five thousand feet, more or less, and its area more than two hundred thousand square miles.
This enormous bowl contained no outlet to the sea, and the rivers which flowed into it from all its mountainous borders created a prehistoric lake with an area of fifty-four thousand square miles which was named Lake Bonneville after the army officer whose adventures in 1833 were narrated by Washington Irving; but it was Fremont who first clearly described it. Lake Bonneville has evaporated and disappeared, but in its place are many salty lakes, the greatest of which is Great Salt Lake in Utah. Attenuated rivers still flow into the Great Basin, but are lost in their sands. The greatest of these, the Mohave River, is a hundred miles long, but is not often seen because it hides its waters chiefly under the surface sands. Lake Bonneville's prehistoric beaches exist to-day. Transcontinental passengers by rail cross its ancient bed, but few know it.
The Great Basin to-day is known to travellers principally by the many lesser deserts which compose it, deserts separated from each other by lesser mountain ranges and low divides. Its southern and southeastern boundaries are the plateaus and mountains which form the northern watershed of the muddy Colorado River and its confluents. South of the Colorado, the plateaus of New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California gradually subside to the Rio Grande.
During this period and the Quaternary which followed it, volcanoes appeared in many places; their dead cones diversify our modern landscape. It was during the Quaternary Period, in whose latter end lives man, that erosion dug the mighty canyons of our great southwest. The Colorado was sweeping out the Grand Canyon at the same time that, far in the north, the glaciers of the Great Ice Age were carving from Algonkian shales and limestones the gorgeous cirques and valleys of Glacier National Park.
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. Area, 958 Square Miles
Thereis only one Grand Canyon. It lies in northern Arizona, and the Colorado River, one of the greatest of American rivers, flows through its inner gorge. It must not be confused with the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, or with any of thegrande cañonswhich the Spaniards so named because they were big canyons.
The Grand Canyon is 217 miles long, 8 to 12 miles wide at the rim, and more than a mile deep. It is the Colossus of canyons, by far the hugest example of stream erosion in the world. It is gorgeously colored. It is by common consent the most stupendous spectacle in the world. It may be conceived as a mountain range reversed. Could its moulded image, similarly colored, stand upon the desert floor, it would be a spectacle second only to the vast mould itself.
More than a hundred thousand persons visit the Grand Canyon each year. In other lands it is our most celebrated scenic possession. It was made a national park in 1919.
The Grand Canyon is not of America but of the world. Like the Desert of Sahara and the monstergroup of the Himalayas, it is so entirely the greatest example of its kind that it refuses limits. This is true of it also as a spectacle; far truer, in fact, for, if it is possible to compare things so dissimilar, in this respect certainly it will lead all others. None see it without being deeply moved—all to silence, some even to tears. It is charged to the rim with emotion; but the emotion of the first view varies. Some stand astounded at its vastness. Others are stupefied and search their souls in vain for definition. Some tremble. Some are uplifted with a sense of appalling beauty. For a time the souls of all are naked in the presence.
This reaction is apparent in the writings of those who have visited it; no other spectacle in America has inspired so large a literature. Joaquin Miller found it fearful, full of glory, full of God. Charles Dudley Warner pronounced it by far the most sublime of earthly spectacles. William Winter saw it a pageant of ghastly desolation. Hamlin Garland found its lines chaotic and disturbing but its combinations of color and shadow beautiful. Upon John Muir it bestowed a new sense of earth's beauty.
Marius R. Campbell, whose geological researches have familiarized him with Nature's scenic gamut, told me that his first day on the rim left him emotionally cold; it was not until he had lived with the spectacle that realization slowly dawned. I think this is the experience of very many, a fact which renders still more tragic a prevailing public assumption that the Grand Canyon is a one-day stop in a transcontinental journey.
It is not surprising that wonder is deeply stirred by its vastness, its complexity, and the realization of Nature's titanic labor in its making. It is far from strange that extreme elation sometimes follows upon a revelation so stupendous and different. That beauty so extraordinary should momentarily free emotion from control is natural enough. But why the expressions of repulsion not infrequently encountered upon the printed pages of the past? I have personally inquired of many of our own day without finding one, even among the most sensitive, whom it repelled. Perhaps a clew is discovered in the introductory paragraphs of an inspired word-picture which the late Clarence E. Dutton hid in a technical geological paper of 1880. "The lover of nature," he wrote, "whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock and dwell there with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but beautiful or noble. Whatsoever might be bold or striking would seem at first only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry or bizarre. The tones and shades, modest and tender, subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight, would be the ones which are conspicuously absent."
I suspect that this repulsion, this horror, as several have called it, was born of the conventions of an earlier generation which bound conceptions of taste and beauty, as of art, dress, religion, and human relations generally, in shackles which do not exist in these days of individualism and broad horizons. To-day we see the Grand Canyon with profound astonishment but without prejudice. Its amazing size, its bewildering configuration, its unprecedented combinations of color affect the freed and elated consciousness of our times as another and perhaps an ultimate revelation in nature of law, order, and beauty.
In these pages I shall make no attempt to describe the Grand Canyon. Nature has written her own description, graving it with a pen of water in rocks which run the series of the eternal ages. Her story can be read only in the original; translations are futile. Here I shall try only to help a little in the reading.
The Grand Canyon was cut by one of the great rivers of the continent, the Colorado, which enters Arizona from the north and swings sharply west; thence it turns south to form most of Arizona's western boundary, and a few miles over the Mexican border empties into the head of the Gulf of California. It drains three hundred thousand square miles of Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. It is formed in Utah by the confluence of the Green and the Grand Rivers.Including the greater of these, the Green River, it makes a stream fifteen hundred miles in length which collects the waters of the divide south and east of the Great Basin and of many ranges of the Rocky Mountain system. The Grand River, for its contribution, collects the drainage of the Rockies' mighty western slopes in Colorado.
The lower reaches of these great tributaries and practically all of the Colorado River itself flow through more than five hundred miles of canyons which they were obliged to dig through the slowly upheaving sandstone plateaus in order to maintain their access to the sea. Succeeding canyons bear names designating their scenic or geologic character. Progressively southward they score deeper into the strata of the earth's crust until, as they approach their climax, they break through the bottom of the Paleozoic limestone deep into the heart of the Archean gneiss. This limestone trench is known as the Marble Canyon, the Archean trench as the Granite Gorge. The lower part of the Marble Canyon and all the Granite Gorge, together with their broad, vividly colored and fantastically carved upper canyon ten miles across from rim to rim, a mile high from water to rim-level, the climax of the world of canyons and the most gorgeous spectacle on earth, is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It lies east and west in the northern part of the State.
To comprehend it, recall one of those ditches which we all have seen crossing level fields or bordering country roads. It is broad from rim to rim and deeplyindented by the side washes which follow heavy showers. Its sides descend by terraces, steep in places with gentle slopes between the steeps, and on these slopes are elevations of rock or mud which floods have failed to wash away. Finally, in the middle, is the narrow trench which now, in dry weather, carries a small trickling stream. Not only does this ditch roughly typify the Grand Canyon, reproducing in clumsy, inefficient miniature the basic characteristics of its outline, but it also is identical in the process of its making.
Imagining it in cross-section, we find its sides leading down by successive precipices to broad intermediate sloping surfaces. We find upon these broad surfaces enormous mesas and lofty, ornately carved edifices of rock which the floods have left standing. We find in its middle, winding snakelike from side to side, the narrow gorge of the river.
The parallel goes further. It is not at all necessary to conceive that either the wayside ditch or the Grand Canyon was once brimful of madly dashing waters. On the contrary, neither may ever have held much greater streams than they hold to-day. In both cases the power of the stream has been applied to downward trenching; the greater spreading sides were cut by the erosion of countless side streamlets resulting temporarily from periods of melting snow or of local rainfall. It was these streamlets which cut the side canyons and left standing between them the bold promontories of the rim. It was these streamlets,working from the surface, which separated portions of these promontories from the plateau and turned them into isolated mesas. It was the erosion of these mesas which turned many of them into the gigantic and fantastic temples and towers which rise from the canyon's bowl.
Standing upon the rim and overlooking miles of these successive precipices and intermediate templed levels, we see the dark gorge of the granite trench, and, deep within it, wherever its windings permit a view of its bottom, a narrow ribbon of brown river. This is the Colorado—a rill; but when we have descended six thousand feet of altitude to its edge we find it a rushing turbulent torrent of muddy water. Its average width is three hundred feet; its average depth thirty feet. It is industriously digging the Grand Canyon still deeper, and perhaps as rapidly as it ever dug since it entered the granite.
Developing the thought in greater detail, let us glance at the illustrations of this chapter and at any photographs which may be at hand, and realization will begin. Let imagination dart back a million years or more to the time when this foreground rim and that far run across the vast chasm are one continuous plain; perhaps it is a pine forest, with the river, no greater than to-day, perhaps not so great, winding through it close to the surface level. As the river cuts downward, the spring floods following the winter snows cave in its banks here and there, forming sharply slanted valleys which enclose promontories between them.Spring succeeds spring, and these side valleys deepen and eat backward while the promontories lengthen and grow. The harder strata resist the disintegration of alternate heat and cold, and, while always receding, hold their form as cliffs; the softer strata between the cliffs crumbles and the waste of spring waters spreads them out in long flattened slopes. The centuries pass. The ruin buries itself deep in the soft sandstone. The side valleys work miles back into the pine forest. Each valley acquires its own system of erosion; into each, from either side, enter smaller valleys which themselves are eating backward into the promontories.
The great valley of the Colorado now has broad converging cliff-broken sides. Here and there these indentations meet far in the background behind the promontories, isolating island-like mesas.
The rest of the story is simple repetition. Imagine enough thousands of centuries and you will imagine the Grand Canyon. Those myriad temples and castles and barbaric shrines are all that the rains and melting snows have left of noble mesas, some of which, when originally isolated, enclosed, as the marble encloses the future statue, scores of the lesser but mighty structures which compose the wonder city of the depths.
These architectural operations of Nature may be seen to-day in midway stages. Find on the map the Powell Plateau in the northwest of the canyon. Once it was continuous with the rim, a noble promontory. It was cut out from the rim perhaps within the existenceof the human race. A few hundred thousand years from now it will be one or more Aladdin palaces.
Find on the map the great Walhalla Plateau in the east of the canyon. Note that its base is nearly separated from the parental rim; a thousand centuries or so and its isolation will be complete. Not long after that, as geologists reckon length of time, it will divide into two plateaus; it is easy to pick the place of division. The tourist of a million years hence will see, where now it stands, a hundred glowing castles.
Let us look again at our photographs, which now we can see with understanding. To realize the spectacle of the canyon, let imagination paint these strata their brilliant colors. It will not be difficult; but here again we must understand.
It is well to recall that these strata were laid in the sea, and that they hardened into stone when the earth's skin was pushed thousands of feet in air. Originally they were the washings of distant highlands brought down by rivers; the coloring of the shales and sandstones is that of the parent rock modified, no doubt, by chemical action in sea-water. The limestone, product of the sea, is gray.
As these differently colored strata were once continuous across the canyon, it follows that their sequence is practically identical on both sides of the canyon. That the colors seem confused is because, viewing the spectacle from an elevation, we see the enormous indentations of the opposite rim in broken anddisorganized perspective. Few minds are patient and orderly enough to fully disentangle the kaleidoscopic disarray, but, if we can identify the strata by form as well as color, we can at least comprehend without trouble our principal outline; and comprehension is the broad highway to appreciation.
To identify these strata, it is necessary to call them by name. The names that geologists have assigned them have no scientific significance other than identity; they are Indian and local.
Beginning at the canyon rim we have a stalwart cliff of gray limestone known as the Kaibab Limestone, or, conversationally, the Kaibab; it is about seven hundred feet thick. Of this product of a million years of microscopic life and death on sea-bottoms is formed the splendid south-rim cliffs from which we view the chasm. Across the canyon it is always recognizable as the rim.
Below the talus of the Kaibab is the Coconino sandstone, light yellowish-gray, coarse of grain, the product of swift currents of untold thousands of centuries ago. This stratum makes a fine bright cliff usually about four hundred feet in thickness, an effective roofing for the glowing reds of the depths.
Immediately below the Coconino are the splendid red shales and sandstones known as the Supai formation. These lie in many strata of varying shades, qualities, and thicknesses, but all, seen across the canyon, merging into a single enormous horizontal body of gorgeous red. The Supai measures eleven hundredfeet in perpendicular thickness, but as it is usually seen in slopes which sometimes are long and gentle, it presents to the eye a surface several times as broad. This is the most prominent single mass of color in the canyon, for not only does it form the broadest feature of the opposite wall and of the enormous promontories which jut therefrom, but the main bodies of Buddha, Zoroaster, and many others of the fantastic temples which rise from the floor.
Below the Supai, a perpendicular wall of intense red five hundred feet high forces its personality upon every foot of the canyon's vast length. This is the famous Redwall, a gray limestone stained crimson with the drip of Supai dye from above. Harder than the sloping sandstone above and the shale below, it pushes aggressively into the picture, squared, perpendicular, glowing. It winds in and out of every bay and gulf, and fronts precipitously every flaring promontory. It roofs with overhanging eaves many a noble palace and turns many a towering monument into a pagoda.
Next below in series is the Tonto, a deep, broad, shallow slant of dull-green and yellow shale, which, with the thin broad sandstone base on which it rests, forms the floor of the outer canyon, the tessellated pavement of the city of flame. Without the Tonto's green the spectacle of the Grand Canyon would have missed its contrast and its fulness.
Through this floor the Granite Gorge winds its serpentine way, two thousand feet deep, dark withshadows, shining in places where the river swings in view.
These are the series of form and color. They occur with great regularity except in several spots deep in the canyon where small patches of gleaming quartzites and brilliant red shales show against the dark granite; the largest of these lies in the depths directly opposite El Tovar. These rocks are all that one sees of ancient Algonkian strata which once overlay the granite to a depth of thirteen thousand feet—more than twice the present total depth of the canyon. The erosion of many thousands of centuries wore them away before the rocks that now compose the floor, the temples and the precipiced walls of the great canyon were even deposited in the sea as sand and limestone ooze, a fact that strikingly emphasizes the enormous age of this exhibit. Geologists speak of these splashes of Algonkian rocks as the Unkar group, another local Indian designation. There is also a similar Chuar group, which need not concern any except those who make a close study of the canyon.
This is the picture. The imagination may realize a fleet, vivid impression from the photograph. The visitor upon the rim, outline in hand, may trace its twisting elements in a few moments of attentive observation, and thereafter enjoy his canyon as one only enjoys a new city when he has mastered its scheme and spirit, and can mentally classify its details as they pass before him.
To one thus prepared, the Grand Canyon ceasesto be the brew-pot of chaotic emotion and becomes the orderly revelation of Nature, the master craftsman and the divine artist.
Entrance is from the south. The motor-road to Grand View is available for most of the year. The railroad to the El Tovar Hotel serves the year around, for the Grand Canyon is an all-year resort. There is a short winter of heavy snows on the rim, but not in the canyon, which may be descended at all seasons. Both routes terminate on the rim. Always dramatic, the Grand Canyon welcomes the pilgrim in the full panoply of its appalling glory. There is no waiting in the anteroom, no sounding of trumpets, no ceremony of presentation. He stands at once in the presence.
Most visitors have bought tickets at home which permit only one day's stay. The irrecoverable sensation of the first view is broken by the necessity for an immediate decision upon how to spend that day, for if one is to descend horseback to the river he must engage his place and don his riding-clothes at once. Under this stress the majority elect to remain on the rim for reasons wholly apart from any question of respective merit.