EXPLORING THE WALLS.
EXPLORING THE WALLS.
While these resources are all of importance Montrose depends mainly upon the farming which she says is to make her valley and the dun-colored mesas, “blossom as the rose.”
“They tell me,” says Chum, “and they prove it, too, that there is nothing you cannot raise here short of tropical fruits, and they’re not quite sure about that, for they propose peaches, nectarines, and apricots. And as for grain, great Injuns! why I saw stalks of oats as big as a walking-stick, and stems of barley that looked like gun-barrels.”
The Madame raises her eyebrows and coughs slightly, but I take no notice.
“And as for wheat, sir,—wheat? why it’s immense! Thirty-five and forty bushels to the acre is the regular yield, and of oats they will produce fifty or sixty bushels, and of barley eighty or ninety. As for corn, I forget the figures, but when we go down the road this afternoon you’llsee great green fields of it that’ll make you think you’re back on the banks of the Wabash. There isn’t anything they can’t raise in these bottoms, where they have more water than they know what to do with, and it’ll be only a few years before this whole great patch of greasewood and chalk will be verdant with—with potatoes and corn.”
It was a bit of a break, but when this young man gets a fair grip upon poetry he don’t let go so easy. He frowned down the suspicion of a smile round the corner of our eyes, and rising to his feet, continued:
“I tell you, sir, in five years from now the people of this favored spot can say in the words of the immortal singer—speaking historically, of course, you understand—can say,
“Behind, they saw the snow-cloud tossedBy many an icy horn”* * * * * * * *“Before, warm valleys, wood-embossedAnd green with vines—
“Behind, they saw the snow-cloud tossedBy many an icy horn”* * * * * * * *“Before, warm valleys, wood-embossedAnd green with vines—
“Behind, they saw the snow-cloud tossed
By many an icy horn”
* * * * * * * *
“Before, warm valleys, wood-embossed
And green with vines—
(watermelons, squashes, pumpkins, hops, morning glories, grapes, strawberries, parsley, honeysuckles—I’ve seen ’em all!)
“—and corn.”
“—and corn.”
“—and corn.”
We exploded with laughter, and even the enthusiastic orator smiled grimly as he sat down.
“May be Mr. Whittier wouldn’t have seen so much poetry in the way I used his words, but I tell you Montrose knows there’s a heap of truth in it.”
“Yes, no doubt. But how about the ‘icy horn’—these high and dry benches up here?”
“Well, they say the very strongest and most productive soil of all is on those same gravelly mesas. It’s lighter and different from the saline clays of the bottoms. Now, over there”—pointing to the great upland, which lay elevated a hundred feet or so above the river on the southern side of the Uncompahgre—”lies a mesa that contains about twenty-two thousand acres. Then down below, at the mouth of the river, is another stretch just twice as large. All that is needful to make that productive farming land is water. A company here is building a canal which will be twenty-seven miles long and will cost a hundred thousand dollars. It takes the water out of the Uncompahgre away up by the Cantonment, leads it along the foot of the wooded bluffs behind the mesa, and can furnish enough to water the whole expanse. If you have a farm there, all you have to do is to select half a mile square or so—there’s heaps of it left untouched as yet,—pay $1.25 an acre, dig side ditches and draw as much water as you need at so much an inch rental from the company. That’s going to make one vast wheat-field.”
“I see, but what next?”
“Well, by the time your wheat is grown there will be mills here togrind it. There is one now at Montrose which will make from seventy-five to one hundred barrels of flour per day, and when the crops get ahead of it other mills will be built. This is not poetry and fancy and talk; it is a settled fact, for the soil has been tried in more places than one, and—but, hello! there’s our train!”
Precipitately retreating to our “parlor,” we don our dusters and go steaming down toward Grand Junction.
The mountains whence I have just come lift their snow-embroidered heights grandly to the sky, and I can point out nearly all the separate peaks though they are fifty miles away.
“You should have seen that long hill-rangeWith gaps of brightness riven—How through each pass and hollow streamedThe purpling lights of heaven—“Rivers of golden-mist flowing downFrom far celestial fountains,—The great sun flaming through the riftsBeyond the wall of mountains.”
“You should have seen that long hill-rangeWith gaps of brightness riven—How through each pass and hollow streamedThe purpling lights of heaven—“Rivers of golden-mist flowing downFrom far celestial fountains,—The great sun flaming through the riftsBeyond the wall of mountains.”
“You should have seen that long hill-range
With gaps of brightness riven—
How through each pass and hollow streamed
The purpling lights of heaven—
“Rivers of golden-mist flowing down
From far celestial fountains,—
The great sun flaming through the rifts
Beyond the wall of mountains.”
On the right, extended a long line of bluffs, close at hand, sprinkled with cedars between which the brick-red soil showed queerly. The strata in the base of these bluffs were yellowish white and had been cut by water into a series of little knolls and spurs like sand-dunes and equally bare of vegetation. They were hot, desolate, and glaring.
The train ran along the edge of the bottom-lands of which these bluffs were the boundary, and on the left stretched a continuous line of farms watered from the river which was hidden in a distant grove of cottonwoods. That the land was rich was shown not only by the flourishing fields of grain, and of Indian corn, but by the luxuriance of sagebrush and greasewood in the uncultivated spaces. This was the Uncompahgre we were following, and at Delta, where the bottom-lands spread out into a spacious plain, we reached its junction with the Gunnison, and passed to its right bank over a long bridge.
Dominating everything here to the northward is that vast plateau, protected from decay by its roofing of lava over the softer substances that make its bulk, which forms the watershed between the Gunnison and the Grand rivers, and is called the Grand Mesa. We know that its surface is hilly and rough, but from here and everywhere else, its edge, as far as can be seen, cuts the sky with a perfectly straight and even line as though it were as level on top as a table. In color it appears dark crimson above the brown and green of mingled forest and exposed rocks that cover its lower front. Looking past it, up the river, we can see the snowy Elks, and a line of rails is surveyed from Crested Butte right down to this point through a series of cañons. There is little opportunity for farming below the mouth of the Uncompahgre, where abrupt walls of red sandstone shut in the river, and sometimes hem itso closely that a road bed had to be blasted out of the cliff. The river has grown, since we saw it last in the Black cañon, to be a hundred yards wide. It still flows deeply and swiftly, but has lost the cataracts. Its color, too, after so much contact with loose earth, has changed from green to turbid yellow. The run along its banks is straight and swift. Generally the track is laid just at the brink, upon the solid rock, and the river is occasionally crossed upon admirable bridges. One of these bridges, I remember, is at a place where enormous cliffs of carmine-tinted sandstone most curiously worn full of little pits and round holes as though moth-eaten, rise sheer from the water to a great height. The strata of these cliffs—which also have bands of yellow—wear away unequally but always in a rounded shape, so that you can see them edgewise, as at a bend, the protuberances take the form of “volutes;” and this will continue for long distances unchanged, as if the cliff had been adorned with gigantic beads of molding. It is one of the most interesting stages of the whole journey.
Just east of the Grand are the finest cliffs of all,—great piles of ponderous masonry, fit for the bulwarks of a world, each massive block, a hundred feet or so square, set firmly upon its underlying tier, and the whole rising two or three thousand feet in majestic proportions and colors that please by their softness and harmony. Past these we roll slowly out upon the longest bridge in the state—950 feet—spanning the swift yellow flood of the Grand river just above where the Gunnison enters, and find ourselves at Grand Junction.
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in Paradise was more favorably situated, on the whole, than a backwoodsman in this country.
—Thoreau.
A very honest little circular—quite a phenomenon among prospectuses—had come into our hands, which gave in terse language the claims that Grand Junction made to the notice of the world and upon the attention of the man who was looking for a place of residence in western Colorado. This honest little circular, toward its end, contains the following paragraph:
We desire, however, to inform all eastern people who may be thinking of coming west, that, while this is one of the most productive valleys in Colorado, it is anything but this in appearance now. Excepting along the banks of the streams or near them, there is probably not a tree to be seen in the valley, unless it was planted since the valley was settled, or within the past eighteen months. The soil has a dull grayish appearance, with hardly a blade of grass growing in it for several miles back from the river, and it produces naturally only sagebrush and greasewood. It is uninviting and desolate looking in the extreme, and yet it is far from being so in reality. We are thus explicit in speaking of the desolate appearance of the country, so that no homesick wanderer in this far-off western land will say when his heart fails him in looking over our valley, that he has been deceived, and that all that has been said of Grand Junction and its surrounding country is a delusion and a snare. If the reader of this lives in the east, he will almost surely be disappointed at first, if he comes out here. It will be the disappointment of ignorance though, for it is only a man who is ignorant of the productiveness of this country who will refuse to believe what is said of it in this respect.
That paragraph put us upon our metal. We were eastern people undoubtedly, but then we had seen “a heap” of Colorado, and the word “ignorance,” we would not confess applied in our case. It was therefore with no little curiosity, and something of a resolution to be pleased anyhow (since we had been told we might not be,) that we detached our peripatetic home and slipped into a resting-place upon the customary siding. The glow of the sunset filled the valley with a blaze of yellow light, and the mesas wore chevrons of indigo shadow and pink light to the northward, while the scarred bluffs across the Grand reflected the last rays from burning crests of red sandstone. Weary with travel we threw open our doors, brushed and dusted and bathed,while the kitchen was busy, and then sat down to dinner in the cool soft air of the twilight. When it was over a multitude of twinkling lights alone showed where the town lay, and so we left until morning learning more about it.
CASTLE GATE.
CASTLE GATE.
When we came to the learning, there were persons enough to teach us, besides all the explicit information Mr. William E. Pabor and others have put into type about the new town—the western Denver, the metropolis of—
“Didn’t we hear Gunnison called that, too? and Montrose? and—?”asks the Madame, whose serious mind can never quite become accustomed to local flowers of speech.
Undoubtedly we had; but who shall say which one of them, a century from now, shall not deserve the name? Describe it? That would be merely repetition. Situated, as I have said, in the midst of a level sage-plain, utterly treeless, it is an orderly jumble of brick buildings, frame buildings, log cabins, tents, and vacant spaces. It is South Pueblo or Salida or Durango, or Gunnison of two years ago over again. The more important question to be answered, is, why is a town built here at all? It is here in anticipation of the agricultural productions of the valley by which it is surrounded, water for the irrigation of which is supplied by the largest river in Colorado, and therefore inexhaustible.
A year before the railway came, speculators, chiefly from Ruby and Irwin, who had no dread of loneliness, went to this point and started the town. “They staked off several ranches,” says the report, “and located one irrigating ditch and a town site.” This town, which they called Granville, is situated across the Grand from the mouth of the Gunnison. A town site was afterwards staked by the Crawford party, and given the name of Grand Junction.
That is the way these marvelously new and flourishing towns are started out here. They reverse the proverb and may be said to bemadenotborn; or, as Chum puts it,fititur non nasce. I couldn’t have done that, but it was easy enough for Chum who has been to college; he don’t mind a little gymnastics in Latin like that.
In the mountains dividing Middle park from North park the clustering streamlets pour steadily into Grand lake, whose surface is rarely free from gusts of chilling wind or the shadow of gathering storms. Hidden in heavy forests, it occupies a basin scooped out by the mighty plow of a glacier and held back by moraines andmontonnesthat record a geological history of the utmost interest to the student. About this solitary lake gather gloomy traditions of fierce warfare between Ute and Arapahoe, and since the Indian owners have yielded it to the white men, one of the darkest crimes in the history of the Rockies has happened upon its shores.
From this dark mountain-tara flows a strong outlet fed by the snows. Its whole youth lies in the depths and gloom of cañons, for range after range open their gates to let it pass, but the gates are narrow and the pathway rough. Thus this river, constantly recruited, more and more theGrand, fights its way from the center almost to the western edge of the state. There, when its labor is fairly done, and aid is no longer needed, comes the help of the powerful Gunnison, and doubly strong it rolls westward to the Utah line, and then southwestward till it meets the flood of the Green and both become the Rio Colorado.
Where the Gunnison now empties into the larger stream was once a wide lake embanked by the abrupt and lofty bluffs that now bound theplain, and whose mesa-top indicates the ancient level of the whole country, out of which the valleys, cañons and lake-beds were eroded.
Into this old expansion of the rivers, had been poured the freight of soil brought down from the mountain-sides, where the varied rocks were being ground to powder under the feet of glaciers, and swept along by gigantic torrents fed with endless meltings. Hither was carried by the swift waters the mingled dust and pebbles of primeval granite, volcanic overflows and sedimentary sands, lime, and argillaceous rock. It was the latest mixture of all that before this had been handled again and again through the fires that upheaved the inner ranges, and the waters that laid down the rocky tables, leaning against their flanks. Into the river-lakes went all this mixture to sink into mud upon the bottom of the quiet sea,—a union of the best elements in all the composition of the western slope of the Rockies. In the whole world you could not find a soil made after a better recipe. Slow changes in the climate proceeded, and the lake drained away and left a valley twenty-five miles long and half as wide, waiting to nourish the farmer’s grain and the children’s flowers.
The first requisite to adapt it to human service, however, was that the valley should be watered. Thousands of acres of good land in the Rocky mountains from Kootenai to Chihuahua remain worthless because there is not enough water available to spread over them, but at Grand Junction there is no such deficiency. The great drainage of the Grand would not miss all the water that could possibly be used. Already along its margin miles of ranches have been begun, by men digging small and temporary ditches bringing water to irrigate a single farm or a small group of fields in the bottom. These were the first comers who had choice of the whole area. Later two or three larger ditches were made having a greater scope, and now there has just been finished a waterway, led for twenty-five miles along the benches at the base of the Roan or Little Book Cliffs, bounding the plain on the north, which will bring under cultivation thirty thousand acres of valley heretofore unwatered, and may be extended when the population demands. This ditch comes out twelve miles above town. It is fifty feet wide across the top, and is thirty-five feet at the bottom; the depth is five feet, and it delivers seven hundred cubic feet of water each second, at a speed of two miles an hour, though there is only twenty-two inches of slope in each mile of length. A ditch like this costs $200,000, yet dividends are confidently expected. If anybody can invent a steamer which will not wash the banks, pleasure yachts and freight barges will be put upon it, for it is of considerably greater dimensions than the Erie Canal when first opened. There is no lack of water, therefore. Competent observers say the supply is sufficient for half a million acres, so that the intricate and expensive lawsuits vexing the farmers of the eastern slope can hardly arise here. This abundance is a matter of vital importance,and an inestimable advantage. Water has a value above that of land everywhere in Colorado. Where land, in the valley of the Cache la Poudre, is valued at ten dollars per acre, a water right carries a cash valuation of fifteen dollars per acre and is more easily disposed of. The blessing attending the cultivation of the soil where the water-supply exceeds the area of land, can only be appreciated by those who have seen their crops wither for want of it.
IN SPANISH FORK CAÑON.
IN SPANISH FORK CAÑON.
It is only recently that this water-supply has become available, however, through the medium of the canals, for any extended farming. Large crops, therefore, cannot be expected until next year, but enough has been learned to make it sure that when the peculiarities of this adobe soil and the looser mesa soil are understood, so that the farmers may know exactly how to supply their irrigation to the best advantage, the most plentiful crops of all the cereals can be produced. We were told that the experiments right here at Grand Junction already, had yieldedcorn-stalks eleven feet seven inches high; a bunch of wheat having seventy-four stalks in one stool; barley with seventy-six stalks in a stool; oats five and a half feet high; Egyptian millet, one hundred and five stalks from a single seed, weighing thirty-six pounds; four cuttings of alfalfa; Irish potatoes weighing from two to four pounds apiece; cabbages from five to twenty-three pounds apiece; beets, carrots, parsnips, and all the vegetables of equally prodigious dimensions. There can be no question of the extraordinary productivity of this region, and that its agricultural future is to be a very prosperous one.
Equally large expectations are held at Grand Junction, Delta, Montrose on the North Fork, and in all the adjacent lowlands, that this whole region will prove a great fruit-bearing country. The plentitude and excellence of the wild fruits along the streams and in the foothills is remarkable, and formed one of the attractions of the reservation in the eyes of the Indian. The similarity in soil, climate and altitude to the fruit-growing region of Utah is adduced, and, in respect to grapes, peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, and all the small fruits, successful experiments have justified all the arguments. Just below Ouray, last year, a ranchman raised seven thousand quarts of strawberries for market. I saw watermelons and muskmelons growing finely on Surface creek at the foot of the Grand Mesa near Delta, and everywhere you will find young fruit trees doing well and uninjured by winter, which is always mild so far as known, the thermometer rarely indicating cold below zero, and the snowfall in the valleys being light. “This new Colorado has a climate essentially different from that of old Colorado and the country east of the Continental Divide. It is the climate of the Pacific coast modified only by altitude and latitude. The air currents come up over the valleys, plateaus, hills and mountain sides, fresh from the ocean currents that wash the Pacific shores. These ocean streams are heated under an equatorial sun and sweeping north around the circle of the earth, temper the whole western slope.”
In this neighborhood, too, are splendid grazing regions, which are rapidly filling with cattle. I have before me a trustworthy scrap from theColorado Farmeron this point: “The face of the country,” says the writer, referring to the hill regions of the Uncompahgre and the grand plateaus, “is gently sloping but cut by gulches, ravines and cañons; grass grows luxuriantly from the creek and river bottom to the very tops of the highest plateaus; on the higher uplands there are plenty of pine and piñon trees, in many places interspersed with cedars and aspens; many small brooks and springs course their way down the hillsides; natural shelter is found in every neighborhood from storms when they come, which is seldom. Game abounds in the greatest plenty and taken all in all, it is probably the finest stock range in the state. The quality of the grass is excellent and cures completely. It is different from the plains grass, grows tall with an abundant wealthof leaf, stem and seed. This country is to be the great cattle country of the state. The Rio Grande railway runs through it and will carry the fattened beeves to the market of the mountains and to Denver and even start them on their way to the great markets of the East. There are already cattle there and they are but forerunners of the thousands yet to come.”
The important point is, that the wide mountain areas insure summer pasturage without driving to great distances; while the valleys afford good winter grazing. I have been in every cattle region in the United States, and I never saw anywhere such magnificent grass as I have ridden through for miles and miles along the upper part of Surface creek in Delta county. When the herds have so increased that the winter pasturage falls short—some years must elapse before that—the valley lands will furnish an abundance of millet, oats, alfalfa and other grasses, by means of the inexhaustible supply of water which is possible for irrigation.
As further aids to her progress, Grand Junction has easy access to coal, both hard and soft; has limestone in great abundance, and excellent white sandstone for building purposes; while the soil is adapted for making sun-dried adobes or for being made into burned brick, of which material most of the buildings and many of the sidewalks in town are now constructed. Game is common in the neighboring mountains, especially throughout the great wilderness which stretches northwest, and the rivers abound in edible fishes.
At length there comes a day when we are ready to leave Grand Junction and “go West.” It is a long ride that lies ahead and we turn our parlor car into a sleeper by setting up the cots and curtains that have not been needed for several weeks. It is late in the afternoon, and when the morrow’s light dawns we shall be out of Colorado and among the lakes and deserts, the mountains and Mormons of Utah.
And then the moon like a goddess cameOver the mountains far,Wrapping her mantle of silver lightOver each golden star;And the cliffs grew grand in the dazzling light,High as the skies, and still and white.
And then the moon like a goddess cameOver the mountains far,Wrapping her mantle of silver lightOver each golden star;And the cliffs grew grand in the dazzling light,High as the skies, and still and white.
And then the moon like a goddess came
Over the mountains far,
Wrapping her mantle of silver light
Over each golden star;
And the cliffs grew grand in the dazzling light,
High as the skies, and still and white.
—Fannie I. Sherrick.
The sweet clear twilight was fading from the cliffs, and had long since left the valley, when it came time to leave Grand Junction. The rising moon beckoned us on, however, and we look forward with eagerness to our journey, for to-night we are to cross “the desert,” to span the cañon-begirt current of Green river, and beheld the mountains of Utah. Doubtless the silent hours of the dog watch would finally close our eyelids; but now we bade Bert be sure that the lamps in the parlor car were well filled and trimmed, for none of us would confess the least desire for sleep.
In a short time the valley of Grand Junction had been left behind, and we quickly passed through the gravelly, grass-covered hills that lie between the river and the cliffs in this region. It was not quite dark, therefore, when all this had disappeared, and our train ran in a swift straight course across an open and level, though by no means smooth plain. Northward it was bounded at a few miles distant by the frowning and banded wall of the Book cliffs, colorless now in the wan light, but distinct in their majestic outline; southward it stretched to the horizon, save where it was broken by the splendid file of the Sierra La Sal—an isolated group of eruptive mountains singularly graceful in contours. The surface of the ground was drab or blue or yellow in color, nowhere quite flat, but divided into low, rounded ridges and conical mounds, by the shallow dry channels, down which have coursed the waters of the powerful storms that at long intervals burst over the desert. Stimulated by the occasional moisture in these channels, a few spears of grass and twigs of wormwood are thrust up through the soil, along their depressions; but between—over the general face of the country,—not a sign of water, vegetation, or animal life appears. It is the repose of utter silence and quietude, a netherworld only half lighted by the worn-out moon. Yet it has a fearful beauty, found in the magnitude ofthe space—the grandeur of the huge rocky masses faintly but continuously outlined against the bright sky north of us—the wide realms of gray darkness southward—the marvelous brilliance of the moon—the luminous glory of the overspreading dome, unbroken from horizon to horizon, almost as at sea, and so seeming really a part of the globe and not an external thing. These things impress us greatly and emphasize the sense of loneliness and remoteness. No other railway journey in the country, I believe, could reproduce as this does the impressions of an ocean-voyage.
At Grand Junction we leave the Grand river, though our course for some miles is parallel with it and not far remote. Skirting the edge of the great Uncompahgre plateau which lies between the Uncompahgre and Gunnison rivers and the Rio Dolores, the river flows west and southwest through deep gorges in the Jurassic and Triassic rocks as far as the mouth of the Dolores. This river comes in from the southeast, taking its origin in the Sierra de La Plata, and running a most picturesque course. Through its mouth it is supposed the Gunnison, before it was deflected toward its more northern outlet by the slow upheaval of the plateau, once flowed by the way of a cañon which connects the present valleys of the two rivers. This deserted cañon was called by the Utes Unaweep (Red Rock), describing the scenery it presents. The granite rises vertically from the bottom of the valley, in narrow, bas-relief columns, for some hundreds of feet; above, the beds of red sandstone cap it in broken precipices. In some places massive promontories of the granite, whose slow elevation has raised the whole breadth of the plateau upon its shoulders, juts out into the valley worn down through it. The scenery reminds one strongly of the Yosemite.
In the acute angle between the Rio Dolores and the southward bending Grand lies the Sierra La Sal,—a center of drainage in all directions. It is a mass of volcanic rocks thrust up from beneath. Like the Henry mountains, the Sierra Abajo and other groups of that region, these peaks were once covered by a great thickness of sedimentary strata bent over them; but they have been cleaned away, leaving the hard core of porphyritic rock exposed. The original shape of the upthrust was probably that of a huge dome, but the tooth of time has gnawed it into a score or more of clustered mountains rising eight and nine thousand feet above the level of the adjacent rivers. Yet there is no doubt that the summits of mountains like these, as I remarked of the elevations about Abiquiu in New Mexico, mark the depressions in the primitive surface before this prodigious work of erosion and corrosion had begun. One of the streams flows with strong brine, suggesting the name Salt mountains to the group; but the rest give pure, sweet currents when they flow at all, which with many of them is only for a few hours following a storm. The source of Salt creek is in Sinbad’s valley,—a steep-walled nook in the mountain-side abounding in crystallized salt.
After receiving the Dolores the Grand river flows straight southwest to its junction with the Green, burying itself at first in a deep, narrow, winding cañon in the red beds, then emerging into a valley of erosion surrounded by tremendous cliffs of deep red sandstone, 1,600 to 2,500 feet high, carved in fantastic forms. It rose 8,150 feet above the sea, 350 miles away; it has fallen to 3,900 feet, or an average of more than ten feet in every mile, and delivers to the Rio Colorado about 5,000 cubic feet of water every second. Considering this weight and speed we need not wonder at the profound cañons it has cut, and is still chiseling deeper and deeper, nearly keeping pace with the slow elevation of the land.
The line of ragged, roan-tinted, book-edged cliffs on the north, behind whose battlements stretched an invisible plateau of broken wilderness, covered with grass, but almost treeless and waterless, where the traveler must not leave the Indian trails,—this line of massive andvari-colored cliffs stretched all the way to Green river (and far beyond it,) rising there into the loftier and bluer bluffs which have been named Azure, and, in the sunlight, seemed carved from cobalt. Between their towering portals, through the corridors of Gray cañon, came the yellow flood of the Green river, sweeping with enormous power from north to south, and crossed by us toward midnight upon a long and lofty bridge. We looked down with eager eyes upon its swift flood of chocolate-colored water, half as broad as the Missouri—twice as deep and impetuous. We wished it had been daylight, that the pregnant mysteries of the half-darkness might be revealed, wherein distant forms full of curious interest were dimly suggested. They told us that here, at noonday, the passenger upon the railway can see the summits of the broken walls that form the Grand cañons of the Colorado, fifty miles to the south.
But all the “grand cañons” are not away in the southern drylands. The whole track of Green river from its birth to its death runs in gorges whose depth and splendor excite our amazement. There are few rivers in the world that have a history so striking; and if, as is fair, we count it one stream from the Wind River mountains to the Pacific, the mighty river is without a peer in its erosive work.
Its source is at the southwestern corner of Yellowstone park, in Wyoming; its mouth, two thousand miles southward, at the head of the Gulf of California. The present writer pens with gratification the record that he has seen both these points. Its upper course lies in open, or wooded valleys, where sparkling, trout-haunted rapids alternate with pools in whose mirror-smooth surface the images of fleecy clouds play with the tremulous forms of snowy peaks. Then it learns lessons for the hard-working future among the plains and buttes of southern Wyoming, cutting through its first obstacle where the Alcove bluffs rear their gaudy crests abreast of Bitter creek.
Here is a little village, settled long ago by emigrants and cattle-breeders, and here, in 1869, Major J. W. Powell, now Director of the United States Geological Survey, and chief of the Bureau of Ethnology, began his celebrated exploration of the river in small boats, which ultimately navigated all the thousand miles of almost continuous cañons that lay unexplored, uncanny and perilous before them. Wonderful stories of it were believed by the frontiersmen. Boats, they told Major Powell, had been carried into overwhelming whirlpools, or had been sucked with fearful velocity underground, never to reappear, for the river was lost in subterranean channels for hundreds of miles. Falls were reported, whose roaring music could be heard on distant mountain-tops; and the walls were so steep in the desert, that persons wandering on the brink had died of thirst, vainly endeavoring to reach the waters they could see below. The Indians believed the river had been rolled into an old trail that once led from their hard home to the beautifulbalmy land of the Hereafter in the great west, in order to keep them away until death gave their release.
Undeterred by these tales, the explorers started. Their story has been told by Major Powell himself in his report to the government, and in magazine articles. Before him Macomb, Ives, and Newburry had seen the southern gorges; since then Dutton, Homes and others of the Geological Surveys have surveyed, mapped and sketched the strange scenery of that strange river. Yet to no one can anything but seeing with his own eyes bring more than the faintest conception of the reality. And here we are, at midnight, in the very midst of it—northward and southward lie the profound chasms, the immeasurable and uncountable cliffs;—under our feet flows the mighty river that carved them out and connects them into one.
What a voyage was that of Powell’s! The fantastic architecture of the Alcove foothills, with the gleaming points of the Uinta range in the south; the ever-changing panorama of the badlands—scenery for Hades; the vermillion gateway opened through the snow-capped mountains, called Flaming Gorge, where lies a vast amphi-theatre, each step built of naked red sandstone, and a glacis clothed with verdure! Then the cautious advance, after letting the unladen boats down with ropes over foaming rapids; threading gorge and cañon and flume, each characteristic in some new way, and separated by little parks and lowlands filled with trees and quaintly shaped rocks from the next; always hemmed in by lofty and brilliant walls; on to the Cañon of Lodore and Ashley’s Falls where years ago a party of men were drowned and where Powell loses one of his boats. “Just before us,” he says at one point, “the cañon divides, a little stream coming down on the right, and another on the left, and we can look away up either of these cañons, through an ascending vista, to cliffs and crags and towers, a mile back, and two thousand feet over head. To the right a dozen gleaming cascades are seen. Pines and firs stand on the rocks, and aspens overhang the brooks. The rocks below are red and brown, set in deep shadows, but above they are buff and vermillion, and stand in the sunshine. The light above, made more brilliant by the bright-tinted rocks, and the shadows below more gloomy by the somber hues of the brown walls, increase the apparent depth of the cañons.... Never before have I received such an impression of the vast heights of these cañon walls; not even at the Cliff of the Harp, where the very heavens seemed to rest on their summits.”
Below the Cañon of Lodore was found the wonderful Echo Rock, where the Yampa enters; next the Whirlpool, where the boats waltz down the tortuous and bowlder-strewn rapids in a merry dance of eddies over which the oars have no control. “What a headlong ride it is! Shooting past rocks and islands! I am soon filled with an exhilaration only experienced before in riding a fleet horse over the outstretchedprairie.” Passing through the “broad, flaring, brilliant gateway” of Split mountain, and down a series of rapids in a more open region, the mouths of the White and Uinta rivers are passed, and the river brings them to the chaotic scenery of the Cañon of Desolation.
This cañon is very tortuous, and many lateral cañons enter on either side. The great plateau, in which they are sunken, extends across the river east and west from the foot of the Colorado Rockies to the base of the Wasatch. It is eight thousand feet above the sea, and therefore in a region of moisture, as is attested by the forests and grassy vales. On these high table lands elk and deer abound, and they are favorite hunting-grounds for the Utes, whose trails cross them. Nothing of this, however, is seen from the river level, where the voyager is surrounded by a wilderness of gray and brown crags. “In several places,” says Powell, “these lateral cañons are only separated from each other by narrow walls, often hundreds of feet high, but so narrow in places, that where softer rocks are found below, they have crumbled away and left holes in the wall, forming passages from one cañon into another.... Piles of broken rock lie against these walls; crags and tower-shaped peaks are seen everywhere; and away above them long lines of broken cliffs, and above and beyond the cliffs are pine forests.... A few dwarf bushes are seen here and there, and cedars grow from the crevices—not like the cedars of a land refreshed with rains, great cones bedecked with spray, but ugly clumps, like war clubs beset with spines.”
Various adventures carry the plucky party through and beyond this gorge down to where our railway bridge spans the river with its tenacious links. They note the existence of an Indian ferry of rude log-rafts somewhere near here, but there was nothing to induce their stoppage for more than a night. Now, those of us who are minded some day to behold the wild crags of Desolation cañon will reverse Major Powell’s course, and embarking at this railway station on the river bank go up the Green, through the Azure Cliffs and fifty miles beyond. Or, turning southward, our boat may equip itself for a longer journey, and our minds make ready for even more marvelous and memorable sights, in the profundities of the cañons of the Rio Colorado, below the junction of the Green and the Grand. If so long a journey is forbidden, there is much delight, with the advantage of easy and safe navigation, to be found between the railway and the mouth of Grand river.
A few miles after leaving the railway, downward bound, the voyager would get among curious bluffs and buttes that would interest him all the way to the mouth of the San Rafael, a strong tributary from the west, up which passed one of the principal overland trails from New Mexico to Utah. If he is interested in archæology, Indian “relics” in abundance will reward his search along the banks. The river is tortuous here, but deep and quiet. Sometimes there is a narrow flood-plainbetween the river and the wall on one side or the other, the peninsulas being pleasantly wooded. The walls are orange-colored sandstone, and vertical, but not very high. At one point, where the river sweeps around a curve under a cliff, a vast hollow dome may be seen, with many caves and deep alcoves. The doublings of the river are many; one loop carries you nine miles around, yet makes only six hundred yards of headway. Gradually the chasm of the river grows deeper; the walls are systematically curved and grandly arched; of beautiful color, and reflected in the quiet waters with deceiving distinctness.
This is Labyrinth cañon, or, as the Indians called it,Toom´-pin wu-neár,—the Land of Standing Rocks. “The stream is still quiet, and we glide along through a strange, wierd, grand region. The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock—cliffs of rock; tables of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms. Rocks everywhere and no vegetation; no soil; no sand. In long gentle curves the river winds about these rocks. When speaking of these we must not conceive of piles of bowlders, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet; cliffs that cannot be scaled, and cañon-walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast hollow domes, and tall pinnacles, and shafts set on the verge overhead, and all highly colored—buff, gray, red, brown and chocolate; never lichened; never moss-covered; but bare, and often polished.”
Below the Labyrinth is Stillwater cañon, forty miles long. Its walls at the lower end are beautifully curved, as the river sweeps in its meandering course. Suddenly gathering swiftness it rushes hastily forward to unite with the current of the Grand. These streams join their floods in solemn depths, more than twelve hundred feet below the general surface of the country. Up the Grand you look into another “labyrinth.” It is the central artery toward which innumerable side-cañons concentrate. In every direction they ramify, deep, dark and impassable to everything but the winged bird. Through such underground passages are sent the waters from the distant highlands, and their confluence fills the whole chasm of the Grand with a turbid stream.
Climb out, laboriously and cautiously, ascend one of the fantastically-formed buttes that rise above the level of the plateau, and what a world of grandeur is spread before the eye! Nothing one can say will give an adequate idea of the singular and surprising landscape,—nothing in art or nature offers a parallel. Below lies the cañon through which the Colorado begins its wonderful course. It can be traced for miles, and occasional glimpses of the river caught. From the northwest comes the Green, in a narrow, winding gorge; from the northeast the Grand, hidden in a cañon that seems bottomless. “Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rock,—not such ledges as you may have seen wherethe quarryman splits his blocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains, that, rolled out on the plain below, would stand a lofty range; and not such cliffs as you may have seen where the swallow builds its nest, but cliffs where the soaring eagle is lost to view ere he reaches the summit.... Away to the east a group of eruptive mountains are seen—the Sierra La Sal. Their slopes are covered with pines, and deep gulches are flanked with great crags, and snow fields are seen near the summits. So the mountains are in uniform—green, gray and silver. Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction; and beyond them, mountains blending with the clouds.”
I cannot go on to tell of the profound crevices in the crust of the globe beyond, where the Rio Colorado, taking its name from its vermillioned borders, flows a full mile below the surface. A whole volume like this would not suffice to portray fully the pictures and the teaching of a single day’s ride down that engulfed stream, or an hour’s march along the giddy brink. Only one man, Captain C. E. Dutton, has ever given anything approaching an adequate description. He lived on the plateau and studied it for years; and he tells us that it is a long time before the unaccustomed mind can come to have any real comprehension of the magnitude and the sublimity and the exquisite beauty of what the cañons above and below have to show to the attentive eye. Nothing in the wide world equals or compares with it in its peculiar and amazing beauty and force.
But the fanes and museums of these rock-gods are guarded against the too easy profanation of human curiosity. The terrors of personal discomfort and danger surround them. Enduring and brave must be the horseman or canoeist—what a trip for the Rob Roys of the future!—who penetrates this naked wilderness and feasts his eyes on the riches of novel color and form spread before him in the glory of the setting sun!
The dog watch comes. The gray waste of sterile land sweeps steadily past. The stars wheel slowly along their cosmical paths. Utter loneliness envelopes us as we rush forward with direct and tireless speed. The rolling music of our progress, and the solemnity of our thoughts as we ponder what we have seen and heard, quiet mind and body, the lamps are turned down, the curtains drawn, and silence and darkness reigns in our car, as over the night-beleaguered desert save where some official passes silently through, shading his lantern with his hand.
SALT LAKE CITY.
SALT LAKE CITY.