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Title: Titan of Chasms - The Grand Canyon of Arizona
Author: Lummis, Charles Fletcher, Higgins, C. A., Powell, John Wesley
Language: English
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Regional Railroad Museum at Poplar Bluff, Missouri and the
Titan of Chasms
The Grand Canyon of Arizona
THE TITAN OF CHASMS
By C. A. HIGGINS
THE SCIENTIFIC EXPLORER
By J. W. POWELL
THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD
By CHAS. F. LUMMIS
INFORMATION FOR TOURISTS
[Illustration: Sante Fe]
Fortieth Thousand
PASSENGER DEPARTMENT
THE SANTA FE
CHICAGO, 1903.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.
Bright Angel Creek and North Wall of the Canyon.]
[Illustration: Uncaptioned vista]
THE TITAN OF CHASMS
BY C. A. HIGGINS
Its History
The Colorado is one of the great rivers of North America. Formed in
Southern Utah by the confluence of the Green and Grand, it intersects
the northwestern corner of Arizona, and, becoming the eastern boundary
of Nevada and California, flows southward until it reaches tidewater in
the Gulf of California, Mexico. It drains a territory of 300,000 square
miles, and, traced back to the rise of its principal source, is 2,000
miles long. At two points, Needles and Yuma on the California boundary,
it is crossed by a railroad. Elsewhere its course lies far from
Caucasian settlements and far from the routes of common travel, in the
heart of a vast region fenced on the one hand by arid plains or deep
forests and on the other by formidable mountains.
The early Spanish explorers first reported it to the civilized world in
1540, two separate expeditions becoming acquainted with the river for a
comparatively short distance above its mouth, and another, journeying
from the Moki Pueblos northwestward across the desert, obtaining the
first view of the Big Canyon, failing in every effort to descend the
canyon wall, and spying the river only from afar.
Again, in 1776, a Spanish priest traveling southward through Utah struck
off from the Virgin River to the southeast and found a practicable
crossing at a point that still bears the name “Vado de los Padres.”
For more than eighty years thereafter the Big Canyon remained unvisited
except by the Indian, the Mormon herdsman, and the trapper, although the
Sitgreaves expedition of 1851, journeying westward, struck the river
about 150 miles above Yuma, and Lieutenant Whipple in 1854 made a survey
for a practicable railroad route along the thirty-fifth parallel, where
the Santa Fe Pacific has since been constructed.
The establishment of military posts in New Mexico and Utah having made
desirable the use of a waterway for the cheap transportation of
supplies, in 1857 the War Department dispatched an expedition in charge
of Lieutenant Ives to explore the Colorado as far from its mouth as
navigation should be found practicable. Ives ascended the river in a
specially constructed steamboat to the head of Black Canyon, a few miles
below the confluence of the Virgin River in Nevada, where further
navigation became impossible; then, returning to the Needles, he set off
across the country toward the northeast. He reached the Big Canyon at
Diamond Creek and at Cataract Creek in the spring of 1858, and from the
latter point made a wide southward detour around the San Francisco
Peaks, thence northeastward to the Moki Pueblos, thence eastward to Fort
Defiance, and so back to civilization.
That is the history of the explorations of the Colorado up to forty
years ago. Its exact course was unknown for many hundred miles, even its
origin being a matter of conjecture. It was difficult to approach within
a distance of two or three miles from the channel, while descent to the
river’s edge could be hazarded only at wide intervals, inasmuch as it
lay in an appalling fissure at the foot of seemingly impassable cliff
terraces that led down from the bordering plateau; and to attempt its
navigation was to court death. It was known in a general way that the
entire channel between Nevada and Utah was of the same titanic
character, reaching its culmination nearly midway in its course through
Arizona.
[Illustration: The Colorado, Foot of Bright Angel Trail.]
In 1869 Maj. J. W. Powell undertook the exploration of the river with
nine men and four boats, starting from Green River City, on the Green
River, in Utah. The project met with the most urgent remonstrance from
those who were best acquainted with the region, including the Indians,
who maintained that boats could not possibly live in any one of a score
of rapids and falls known to them, to say nothing of the vast unknown
stretches in which at any moment a Niagara might be disclosed. It was
also currently believed that for hundreds of miles the river disappeared
wholly beneath the surface of the earth. Powell launched his flotilla on
May 24th, and on August 30th landed at the mouth of the Virgin River,
more than one thousand miles by the river channel from the place of
starting, minus two boats and four men. One of the men had left the
expedition by way of an Indian reservation agency before reaching
Arizona, and three, after holding out against unprecedented terrors for
many weeks, had finally become daunted, choosing to encounter the perils
of an unknown desert rather than to brave any longer the frightful
menaces of that Stygian torrent. These three, unfortunately making their
appearance on the plateau at a time when a recent depredation was
colorably chargeable upon them, were killed by Indians, their story of
having come thus far down the river in boats being wholly discredited by
their captors.
Powell’s journal of the trip is a fascinating tale, written in a compact
and modest style, which, in spite of its reticence, tells an epic story
of purest heroism. It definitely established the scene of his
exploration as the most wonderful geological and spectacular phenomenon
known to mankind, and justified the name which had been bestowed upon
it—The Grand Canyon—sublimest of gorges; Titan of chasms. Many
scientists have since visited it, and, in the aggregate, a large number
of unprofessional lovers of nature; but until a few years ago no
adequate facilities were provided for the general sight-seer, and the
world’s most stupendous panorama was known principally through report,
by reason of the discomforts and difficulties, of the trip, which
deterred all except the most indefatigable enthusiasts. Even its
geographical location is the subject of widespread misapprehension.
Its title has been pirated for application to relatively insignificant
canyons in distant parts of the country, and thousands of tourists have
been led to believe that they saw the Grand Canyon, when, in fact, they
looked upon a totally different scene, between which and the real Grand
Canyon there is no more comparison “than there is between the
Alleghanies or Trosachs and the Himalayas.”
There is but one Grand Canyon. Nowhere in the world has its like been
found.
As Seen From the Rim
Stolid, indeed, is he who can front the awful scene and view its
unearthly splendor of color and form without quaking knee or tremulous
breath. An inferno, swathed in soft celestial fires; a whole chaotic
under-world, just emptied of primeval floods and waiting for a new
creative word; eluding all sense of perspective or dimension,
outstretching the faculty of measurement, overlapping the confines of
definite apprehension; a boding, terrible thing, unflinchingly real, yet
spectral as a dream. The beholder is at first unimpressed by any detail;
he is overwhelmed by the _ensemble_ of a stupendous panorama, a thousand
square miles in extent, that lies wholly beneath the eye, as if he stood
upon a mountain peak instead of the level brink of a fearful chasm in
the plateau, whose opposite shore is thirteen miles away. A labyrinth of
huge architectural forms, endlessly varied in design, fretted with
ornamental devices, festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from
the upper cliffs and painted with every color known to the palette in
pure transparent tones of marvelous delicacy. Never was picture more
harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes instant
communication of all that architecture and painting and music for a
thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is the soul of
Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.
The River and the Canyon Wall.]
A canyon, truly, but not after the accepted type. An intricate system of
canyons, rather, each subordinate to the river channel in the midst,
which in its turn is subordinate to the whole effect. That river
channel, the profoundest depth, and actually more than 6,000 feet below
the point of view, is in seeming a rather insignificant trench,
attracting the eye more by reason of its somber tone and mysterious
suggestion than by any appreciable characteristic of a chasm. It is
perhaps five miles distant in a straight line, and its uppermost rims
are nearly 4,000 feet beneath the observer, whose measuring capacity is
entirely inadequate to the demand made by such magnitudes. One can not
believe the distance to be more than a mile as the crow flies, before
descending the wall or attempting some other form of actual measurement.
Mere brain knowledge counts for little against the illusion under which
the organ of vision is here doomed to labor. Yonder cliff, darkening
from white to gray, yellow, and brown as your glance descends, is taller
than the Washington Monument. The Auditorium in Chicago would not cover
one-half its perpendicular span. Yet it does not greatly impress you.
You idly toss a pebble toward it, and are surprised to note how far the
missile falls short. By and by you will learn that it is a good half
mile distant, and when you go down the trail you will gain an abiding
sense of its real proportions. Yet, relatively, it is an unimportant
detail of the scene. Were Vulcan to cast it bodily into the chasm
directly beneath your feet, it would pass for a bowlder, if, indeed, it
were discoverable to the unaided eye.
Yet the immediate chasm itself is only the first step of a long terrace
that leads down to the innermost gorge and the river. Roll a heavy stone
to the rim and let it go. It falls sheer the height of a church or an
Eiffel Tower, according to the point selected for such pastime, and
explodes like a bomb on a projecting ledge. If, happily, any
considerable fragments remain, they bound onward like elastic balls,
leaping in wild parabola from point to point, snapping trees like
straws; bursting, crashing, thundering down the declivities until they
make a last plunge over the brink of a void; and then there comes
languidly up the cliff sides a faint, distant roar, and your bowlder
that had withstood the buffets of centuries lies scattered as wide as
Wycliffe’s ashes, although the final fragment has lodged only a little
way, so to speak, below the rim. Such performances are frequently given
in these amphitheaters without human aid, by the mere undermining of the
rain, or perhaps it is here that Sisyphus rehearses his unending task.
Often in the silence of night some tremendous fragment has been heard
crashing from terrace to terrace with shocks like thunder peal.
The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the outside
world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty one can
acquire any notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep, half as
broad, it would be no less bewildering, so utterly does it baffle human
grasp.
The Trip to the River
Only by descending into the canyon may one arrive at anything like
comprehension of its proportions, and the descent can not be too
urgently commended to every visitor who is sufficiently robust to bear a
reasonable amount of fatigue. There are four paths down the southern
wall of the canyon in the granite gorge district—Mystic Spring, Bright
Angel, Berry’s and Hance’s trails. The following account of a descent of
the old Hance trail will serve to indicate the nature of such an
experience to-day, except that the trip may now be safely made with
greater comfort.
For the first two miles it is a sort of Jacob’s ladder, zigzagging at an
unrelenting pitch. At the end of two miles a comparatively gentle slope
is reached, known as the blue limestone level, some 2,500 feet below the
rim, that is to say—for such figures have to be impressed objectively
upon the mind—five times the height of St. Peter’s, the Pyramid of
Cheops, or the Strasburg Cathedral; eight times the height of the
Bartholdi Statue of Liberty; eleven times the height of Bunker Hill
Monument. Looking back from this level the huge picturesque towers that
border the rim shrink to pigmies and seem to crown a perpendicular wall,
unattainably far in the sky. Yet less than one-half the descent has been
made.
Overshadowed by sandstone of chocolate hue the way grows gloomy and
foreboding, and the gorge narrows. The traveler stops a moment beneath a
slanting cliff 500 feet high, where there is an Indian grave and pottery
scattered about. A gigantic niche has been worn in the face of this
cavernous cliff, which, in recognition of its fancied Egyptian
character, was named the Temple of Sett by the painter, Thomas Moran.
A little beyond this temple it becomes necessary to abandon the animals.
The river is still a mile and a half distant. The way narrows now to a
mere notch, where two wagons could barely pass, and the granite begins
to tower gloomily overhead, for we have dropped below the sandstone and
have entered the archæan—a frowning black rock, streaked, veined, and
swirled with vivid red and white, smoothed and polished by the rivulet
and beautiful as a mosaic. Obstacles are encountered in the form of
steep, interposing crags, past which the brook has found a way, but over
which the pedestrian must clamber. After these lesser difficulties come
sheer descents, which at present are passed by the aid of ropes.
The last considerable drop is a 40-foot bit by the side of a pretty
cascade, where there are just enough irregularities in the wall to give
toe-hold. The narrowed cleft becomes exceedingly wayward in its course,
turning abruptly to right and left, and working down into twilight
depth. It is very still. At every turn one looks to see the embouchure
upon the river, anticipating the sudden shock of the unintercepted roar
of waters. When at last this is reached, over a final downward clamber,
the traveler stands upon a sandy rift confronted by nearly vertical
walls many hundred feet high, at whose base a black torrent pitches in a
giddying onward slide that gives him momentarily the sensation of
slipping into an abyss.
[Illustration: A Party on Bright Angel Trail.]
With so little labor may one come to the Colorado River in the heart of
its most tremendous channel, and gaze upon a sight that heretofore has
had fewer witnesses than have the wilds of Africa. Dwarfed by such
prodigious mountain shores, which rise immediately from the water at an
angle that would deny footing to a mountain sheep, it is not easy to
estimate confidently the width and volume of the river. Choked by the
stubborn granite at this point, its width is probably between 250 and
300 feet, its velocity fifteen miles an hour, and its volume and turmoil
equal to the Whirlpool Rapids of Niagara. Its rise in time of heavy rain
is rapid and appalling, for the walls shed almost instantly all the
water that falls upon them. Drift is lodged in the crevices thirty feet
overhead.
For only a few hundred yards is the tortuous stream visible, but its
effect upon the senses is perhaps the greater for that reason. Issuing
as from a mountain side, it slides with oily smoothness for a space and
suddenly breaks into violent waves that comb back against the current
and shoot unexpectedly here and there, while the volume sways tide-like
from side to side, and long curling breakers form and hold their outline
lengthwise of the shore, despite the seemingly irresistible velocity of
the water. The river is laden with drift (huge tree trunks), which it
tosses like chips in its terrible play.
Standing upon that shore one can barely credit Powell’s achievement, in
spite of its absolute authenticity. Never was a more magnificent
self-reliance displayed than by the man who not only undertook the
passage of Colorado River but won his way. And after viewing a fraction
of the scene at close range, one can not hold it to the discredit of
three of his companions that they abandoned the undertaking not far
below this point. The fact that those who persisted got through alive is
hardly more astonishing than that any should have had the hardihood to
persist. For it could not have been alone the privation, the infinite
toil, the unending suspense in constant menace of death that assaulted
their courage; these they had looked for; it was rather the unlifted
gloom of those tartarean depths, the unspeakable horrors of an endless
valley of the shadow of death, in which every step was irrevocable.
Returning to the spot where the animals were abandoned, camp is made for
the night. Next morning the way is retraced. Not the most fervid
pictures of a poet’s fancy could transcend the glories then revealed in
the depths of the canyon; inky shadows, pale gildings of lofty spires,
golden splendors of sun beating full on façades of red and yellow,
obscurations of distant peaks by veils of transient shower, glimpses of
white towers half drowned in purple haze, suffusions of rosy light
blended in reflection from a hundred tinted walls. Caught up to exalted
emotional heights the beholder becomes unmindful of fatigue. He mounts
on wings. He drives the chariot of the sun.
[Illustration: Uncaptioned vista]
Having returned to the plateau, it will be found that the descent into
the canyon has bestowed a sense of intimacy that almost amounts to a
mental grasp of the scene. The terrific deeps that part the walls of
hundreds of castles and turrets of mountainous bulk may be approximately
located in barely discernible pen-strokes of detail, and will be
apprehended mainly through the memory of upward looks from the bottom,
while towers and obstructions and yawning fissures that were deemed
events of the trail will be wholly indistinguishable, although they are
known to lie somewhere flat beneath the eye. The comparative
insignificance of what are termed grand sights in other parts of the
world is now clearly revealed. Twenty Yosemites might lie unperceived
anywhere below. Niagara, that Mecca of marvel seekers, would not here
possess the dignity of a trout stream. Your companion, standing at a
short distance on the verge, is an insect to the eye.
Still, such particulars can not long hold the attention, for the
panorama is the real overmastering charm. It is never twice the same.
Although you think you have spelt out every temple and peak and
escarpment, as the angle of sunlight changes there begins a ghostly
advance of colossal forms from the farther side, and what you had taken
to be the ultimate wall is seen to be made up of still other isolated
sculptures, revealed now for the first time by silhouetting shadows. The
scene incessantly changes, flushing and fading, advancing into
crystalline clearness, retiring into slumberous haze.
Should it chance to have rained heavily in the night, next morning the
canyon is completely filled with fog. As the sun mounts, the curtain of
mist suddenly breaks into cloud fleeces, and while you gaze these
fleeces rise and dissipate, leaving the canyon bare. At once around the
bases of the lowest cliffs white puffs begin to appear, creating a scene
of unparalleled beauty as their dazzling cumuli swell and rise and their
number multiplies, until once more they overflow the rim, and it is as
if you stood on some land’s end looking down upon a formless void. Then
quickly comes the complete dissipation, and again the marshaling in the
depths, the upward advance, the total suffusion and the speedy
vanishing, repeated over and over until the warm walls have expelled
their saturation.
Long may the visitor loiter upon the verge, powerless to shake loose
from the charm, tirelessly intent upon the silent transformations until
the sun is low in the west. Then the canyon sinks into mysterious purple
shadow, the far Shinumo Altar is tipped with a golden ray, and against a
leaden horizon the long line of the Echo Cliffs reflects a soft
brilliance of indescribable beauty, a light that, elsewhere, surely
never was on sea or land. Then darkness falls, and should there be a
moon, the scene in part revives in silver light, a thousand spectral
forms projected from inscrutable gloom; dreams of mountains, as in their
sleep they brood on things eternal.
[Illustration: Uncaptioned vista]
[Illustration: Uncaptioned vista]
THE SCIENTIFIC EXPLORER
BY J. W. POWELL
The Ives and Wheeler Expeditions
In the fall of 1857 Lieutenant Ives, of the engineer corps of the army,
ascended the Colorado River on a trip of exploration with a little
steamer called the Explorer; he went as far as the mouth of the Rio
Virgin. Falling back down river a few miles, Lieutenant Ives met a pack
train which had followed him up the bank of the stream. Here he
disembarked, and on the 24th of March started with a land party to
explore the eastern bank of the river; making a long detour he ascended
the plateau through which the Grand Canyon is cut, and in an adventurous
journey he obtained views of the canyon along its lower course. On this
trip J. S. Newberry was the geologist, and to him we are indebted for
the first geological explanation of the canyon and the description of
the high plateau through which it is formed. Doctor Newberry was not
only an able geologist, but he was also a graphic writer, and his
description of the canyon as far as it was seen by him is a classic in
geology.
In 1869 Lieutenant Wheeler was sent out by the chief engineer of the
army to explore the Grand Canyon from below. In the spring he succeeded
in reaching the mouth of Diamond Creek, which had previously been seen
by Doctor Newberry in 1858. Mr. Gilbert was the geologist of this
expedition, and his studies of the canyon region during this and
subsequent years have added greatly to our knowledge of this land of
wonders.
Major Powell’s Several Trips
In this same year I essayed to explore the Grand Canyon of the Colorado,
together with the upper canyons of that stream and the great canyons of
the lower portion of Green River. For this purpose I employed four
rowboats and made the descent from what is now Green River station
through the whole course of canyons to the mouth of the Rio Virgin, a
distance of more than a thousand miles.
[Illustration: From Kaibab Plateau, Looking South.]
In the spring of 1870 I again started with three boats and descended the
river to the Crossing of the Fathers, where I met a pack train and went
out with a party of men to explore ways down into the Grand Canyon from
the north, and devoted the summer, fall, winter, and following spring to
this undertaking.
In the summer of 1871 I returned to the rowboats and descended through
Marble Canyon to the Grand Canyon of Arizona, and then through the
greater part of the Grand Canyon itself. Subsequent years were then
given to exploration of the country adjacent to the Grand Canyon. On
these trips Mr. Gilbert, the geologist, who had been with Lieutenant
Wheeler, and Capt. C. E. Dutton, were my geological companions. On the
second boat trip, and during all the subsequent years of exploration in
this region, Prof. A. H. Thompson was my geographical companion,
assisted by a number of topographical engineers.
In 1882 Mr. C. D. Walcott, as my assistant in the United States
Geological Survey, went with me into the depths of the Grand Canyon. We
descended from the summit of the Kaibab Plateau on the north by a trail
which we built down a side canyon in a direction toward the mouth of the
Little Colorado River. The descent was made in the fall, and a small
party of men was left with Mr. Walcott in this region of stupendous
depths to make a study of the geology of an important region of
labyrinthian gorges. Here, with his party, he was shut up for the
winter, for it was known when we left him that snows on the summit of
the plateau would prevent his return to the upper region before the sun
should melt them the next spring. Mr. Walcott is now the Director of the
United States Geological Survey.
After this year I made no substantial additions to my geologic and
scenic knowledge of the Grand Canyon, though I afterward studied the
archæology to the south and east throughout a wide region of ruined
pueblos and cliff dwellings.
Since my first trip in boats many others have essayed to follow me, and
year by year such expeditions have met with disaster; some hardy
adventurers are buried on the banks of the Green, and the graves of
others are scattered at intervals along the course of the Colorado.
In 1889 the brave F. M. Brown lost his life. But finally a party of
railroad engineers, led by R. B. Stanton, started at the head of Marble
Canyon and made their way down the river as they extended a survey for a
railroad along its course.
Other adventurous travelers have visited portions of the Grand Canyon
region, and Mr. G. Wharton James has extended his travels widely over
the region in the interest of popular science and the new literature
created in the last decades of the nineteenth century. And now I once
more return to a reminiscent account of the Grand Canyon, for old men
love to talk of the past.
The Plateau Region
The Grand Canyon of Arizona and the Marble Canyon constitute one great
gorge carved by a mighty river through a high plateau. On the northeast
and north a line of cliffs face this plateau by a bold escarpment of
rock. Climb these cliffs and you must ascend from 800 to 1,000 feet, but
on their summit you will stand upon a plateau stretching away to the
north. Now turn to face the south and you will overlook the cliff and
what appears to be a valley below. From the foot of the cliff the
country rises to the south to a great plateau through which the Marble
and the Grand canyons are carved. This plateau terminates abruptly on
the west by the Grand Wash Cliffs, which is a high escarpment caused by
a “fault” (as the geologist calls it), that is, the strata of sandstone
and limestone are broken off, and to the west of the fracture they are
dropped down several thousand feet, so that standing upon the edge of
the plateau above the Grand Wash Cliffs you may look off to the west
over a vast region of desert from which low volcanic mountains rise that
seem like purple mounds in sand-clad lands.
On the east the great plateau breaks down in a very irregular way into
the valley of the Little Colorado, and where the railroad ascends the
plateau from the east it passes over picturesque canyons that run down
into the Little Colorado. On the south the plateau is merged into the
great system of mountains that stand in Southern Arizona. Where the
plateau ends and the mountains begin is not a well-defined line. The
plateau through which the Grand Canyon is cut is a region of great
scenic interest. Its surface is from six to more than eight thousand
feet above the level of the sea. The Grand Plateau is composed of many
subsidiary plateaus, each one having its own peculiar and interesting
feature.
The Kaibab Plateau, to the northeast of the Grand Canyon, is covered
with a pine forest which is intercepted by a few meadows with here and
there a pond or lakelet. It is the home of deer and bear.
To the west is the Shinumo Plateau in which the Shinumo Canyon is
carved; and on the cliffs of this canyon and in the narrow valley along
its course the Shinumo ruins are found—the relics of a prehistoric race.
To the west of the Shinumo Plateau is the Kanab Plateau, with ruins
scattered over it, and on its northern border the beautiful Mormon town
of Kanab is found, and the canyon of Kanab Creek separates the Shinumo
Plateau from the Kanab Plateau. It begins as a shallow gorge and
gradually increases in depth until it reaches the Colorado River itself,
at a depth of more than 4,000 feet below the surface. Vast amphitheaters
are found in its walls and titanic pinnacles rise from its depths. One
Christmas day I waded up this creek. It was one of the most delightful
walks of my life, from a land of flowers to a land of snow.
To the west of the Kanab Plateau are the Uinkaret Mountains—an immense
group of volcanic cones upon a plateau. Some of these cones stand very
near the brink of the Grand Canyon and from one of them a flood of
basalt was poured into the canyon itself. Not long ago geologically, but
rather long when reckoned in years of human history, this flood of lava
rolled down the canyon for more than _fifty miles_, filling it to the
depth of _two_ or _three hundred feet_ and diverting the course of the
river against one or the other of its banks. Many of the cones are of
red cinder, while sometimes the lava is piled up into huge mountains
which are covered with forest. To the west of the Uinkaret Mountains
spreads the great Shiwits Plateau, crowned by Mount Dellenbough.
Past the south end of these plateaus runs the Colorado River; southward
through Marble Canyon and in the Grand Canyon, then northwestward past
the Kaibab and Shinumo Canyon, then southwestward past the Kanab
Plateau, Uinkaret Mountains to the southernmost point of the Shiwits
Plateau, and then northwestward to the Grand Wash Cliffs. Its distance
in this course is little more than 300 miles—but the 300 miles of river
are set on every side with cliffs, buttes, towers, pinnacles,
amphitheaters, caves, and terraces, exquisitely storm-carved and painted
in an endless variety of colors.
The plateau to the south of the Grand Canyon, which we need not describe
in parts, is largely covered with a gigantic forest. There are many
volcanic mountains and many treeless valleys. In the high forest there
are beautiful glades with little stretches of meadow which are spread in
summer with a parterre of flowers of many colors. This upper region is
the garden of the world. When I was first there bear, deer, antelope,
and wild turkeys abounded, but now they are becoming scarce. Widely
scattered throughout the plateau are small canyons, each one a few miles
in length and a few hundred feet in depth. Throughout their course
cliff-dweller ruins are found. In the highland glades and along the
valley, pueblo ruins are widely scattered, but the strangest sights of
all the things due to prehistoric man are the cave dwellings that are
dug in the tops of cinder cones and the villages that were built in the
caves of volcanic cliffs. If now I have succeeded in creating a picture
of the plateau I will attempt a brief description of the canyon.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.
Bissell Point and Colorado River.]
Marble Canyon
Above the Paria the great river runs down a canyon which it has cut
through one plateau. On its way it flows with comparative quiet through
beautiful scenery, with glens that are vast amphitheaters which often
overhang great springs and ponds of water deeply embosomed in the
cliffs. From the southern escarpment of this plateau the great Colorado
Plateau rises by a comparatively gentle acclivity, and Marble Canyon
starts with walls but a few score feet in height until they reach an
altitude of about 5,000 feet. On the way the channel is cut into beds of
rock of lower geologic horizon, or greater geologic age. These rocks are
sandstones and limestones. Some beds are very hard, others are soft and
friable. The friable rocks wash out and the harder rocks remain
projecting from the walls, so that every wall presents a set of stony
shelves. These shelves rise along the wall toward the south as new
shelves set in from below.
In addition to this shelving structure the walls are terraced and the
cliffs of the canyon are set back one upon the other. Then these canyon
walls are interrupted by side streams which themselves have carved
lateral canyons, some small, others large, but all deep. In these side
gorges the scenery is varied and picturesque; deep clefts are seen here
and there as you descend the river—clefts furnished with little streams
along which mosses and other plants grow. At low water the floor of the
great canyon is more or less exposed, and where it flows over limestone
rocks beautiful marbles are seen in many colors; saffron, pink, and blue
prevail. Sometimes a façade or wall appears rising vertically from the
water for thousands of feet. At last the canyon abruptly ends in a
confusion of hills beyond which rise towering cliffs, and the group of
hills are nestled in the bottom of a valley-like region which is
surrounded by cliffs more than a mile in altitude.
The Grand Canyon
From here on for many miles the whole character of the canyon changes.
First a dike appears; this is a wall of black basalt crossing the river;
it is of lava thrust up from below through a huge crevice broken in the
rock by earthquake agency. On the east the Little Colorado comes; here
it is a river of salt water, and it derives its salt a few miles up the
stream. The main Colorado flows along the eastern and southern wall.
Climbing this for a few hundred feet you may look off toward the
northwest and gaze at the cliffs of the Kaibab Plateau.
This is the point where we built a trail down a side canyon where Mr.
Walcott was to make his winter residence and study of the region; it is
very complicated and exhibits a vast series of unconformable rocks of
high antiquity. These lower rocks are of many colors; in large part they
are shales. The region, which appears to be composed of bright-colored
hills washed naked by the rain, is, in fact, beset with a multitude of
winding canyons with their own precipitous walls. It is a region of many
canyons in the depths of the Grand Canyon itself.
In this beautiful region Mr. Walcott, reading the book of geology, lived
in a summerland during all of a long winter while the cliffs above were
covered with snow which prevented his egress to the world. His
companions, three young Mormons, longing for a higher degree of
civilization, gazed wistfully at the snow-clad barriers by which they
were inclosed. One was a draughtsman, another a herder of his stock, and
the third his cook. They afterward told me that it was a long winter of
homesickness, and that months dragged away as years, but Mr. Walcott
himself had the great book of geology to read, and to him it was a
winter of delight.
A half dozen miles below the basaltic wall the river enters a channel
carved in 800 or 1,000 feet of dark gneiss of very hard rock. Here the
channel is narrow and very swift and beset with rapids and falls. On the
south and southwest the wall rises abruptly from the water to the summit
of the plateau for about 6,000 feet, but across the river on the north
and west mountains of gneiss and quartzites appear, sometimes rising to
the height of a thousand feet. These are mountains in the bottom of a
canyon. The buttes and plateaus of the inter-canyon region are composed
of shales, sandstones, and limestones, which give rise to vast
architectural shelving and to pinnacles and towers of gigantic
proportions, the whole embossed with a marvelously minute system of
fretwork carved by the artistic clouds. Looking beyond these mountains,
buttes, and plateaus vistas of the walls of the great plateau are seen.
From these walls project salients, and deep re-entrant angles appear.
The whole scene is forever reminding you of mighty architectural
pinnacles and towers and balustrades and arches and columns with lattice
work and delicate carving. All of these architectural features are
sublime by titanic painting in varied hues—pink, red, brown, lavender,
gray, blue, and black. In some lights the saffron prevails, in other
lights vermilion, and yet in other lights the grays and blacks
predominate. At times, and perhaps in rare seasons, clouds and cloudlets
form in the canyon below and wander among the side canyons and float
higher and higher until they are dissolved in the upper air, or perhaps
they accumulate to hide great portions of the landscape. Then through
rifts in the clouds vistas of Wonderland are seen. Such is that portion
of the canyon around the great south bend of the Colorado River past the
point of the Kaibab Plateau.
As Seen by the Geologist
In the last chapter of my book entitled “The Canyons of the Colorado” I
have described the Grand Canyon in the following terms:
The Grand Canyon is a gorge 217 miles in length, through which flows a
great river with many storm-born tributaries. It has a winding way, as
rivers are wont to have. Its banks are vast structures of adamant, piled
up in forms rarely seen in the mountains.
Down by the river the walls are composed of black gneiss, slates, and
schists, all greatly implicated and traversed by dikes of granite. Let
this formation be called the black gneiss. It is usually about 800 feet
in thickness.
Then over the black gneiss are found 800 feet of quartzites, usually in
very thin beds of many colors, but exceedingly hard, and ringing under
the hammer like phonolite. These beds are dipping and unconformable with
the rocks above. While they make but 800 feet of the wall or less they
have a geologic thickness of 12,000 feet. Set up a row of books aslant;
it is ten inches from the shelf to the top of the line of books, but
there may be three feet of the books measured directly through the
leaves. So these quartzites are aslant, and though of great geologic
thickness they make but 800 feet of the wall. Your books may have
many-colored bindings and differ greatly in their contents; so these
quartzites vary greatly from place to place along the wall, and in many
places they entirely disappear. Let us call this formation the
variegated quartzite.
Above the quartzites there are 500 feet of sandstones. They are of a
greenish hue, but are mottled with spots of brown and black by iron
stains. They usually stand in a bold cliff, weathered in alcoves. Let
this formation be called the cliff sandstone.
Above the cliff sandstone there are 700 feet of bedded sandstones and
limestones, which are massive sometimes and sometimes broken into thin
strata. These rocks are often weathered in deep alcoves. Let this
formation be called the alcove sandstone.
Over the alcove sandstone there are 1,600 feet of limestone, in many
places a beautiful marble, as in Marble Canyon. As it appears along the
Grand Canyon it is always stained a brilliant red, for immediately over
it there are thin seams of iron, and the storms have painted these
limestones with pigments from above. Altogether this is the red-wall
group. It is chiefly limestone. Let it be called the red-wall limestone.
Above the red wall there are 800 feet of gray and bright red sandstone,
alternating in beds that look like vast ribbons of landscape. Let it be
called the banded sandstone.
And over all, at the top of the wall, is the Aubrey limestone, 1,000
feet in thickness. This Aubrey has much gypsum in it, great beds of
alabaster that are pure white in comparison with the great body of
limestone below. In the same limestone there are enormous beds of chert,
agates, and carnelians. This limestone is especially remarkable for its
pinnacles and towers. Let it be called the tower limestone.
These are the elements with which the walls are constructed, from black
buttress below to alabaster tower above. All of these elements weather
in different forms and are painted in different colors, so that the wall
presents a highly complex façade. A wall of homogeneous granite, like
that in the Yosemite, is but a naked wall, whether it be 1,000 or 5,000
feet high. Hundreds and thousands of feet mean nothing to the eye when
they stand in a meaningless front. A mountain covered by pure snow
10,000 feet high has but little more effect on the imagination than a
mountain of snow 1,000 feet high—it is but more of the same thing—but a
façade of seven systems of rock has its sublimity multiplied sevenfold.
[Illustration: A Panoramic View of the Canyon.]
Consider next the horizontal elements of the Grand Canyon. The river
meanders in great curves, which are themselves broken into curves of
smaller magnitude. The streams that head far back in the plateau on
either side come down in gorges and break the wall into sections. Each
lateral canyon has a secondary system of laterals, and the secondary
canyons are broken by tertiary canyons; so the crags are forever
branching, like the limbs of an oak. That which has been described as a
wall is such only in its grand effect. In detail it is a series of
structures separated by a ramification of canyons, each having its own
walls. Thus, in passing down the canyon it seems to be inclosed by
walls, but oftener by salients—towering structures that stand between
canyons that run back into the plateau. Sometimes gorges of the second
or third order have met before reaching the brink of the Grand Canyon,
and then great salients are cut off from the wall and stand out as
buttes—huge pavilions in the architecture of the canyon. The scenic
elements thus described are fused and combined in very different ways.
Its Length
We measured the length of the Grand Canyon by the length of the river
running through it, but the running extent of wall can not be measured
in this manner. In the black gneiss, which is at the bottom, the wall
may stand above the river for a few hundred yards or a mile or two; then
to follow the foot of the wall you must pass into a lateral canyon for a
long distance, perhaps miles, and then back again on the other side of
the lateral canyon; then along by the river until another lateral canyon
is reached, which must be headed in the black gneiss. So for a dozen
miles of river through the gneiss there may be a hundred miles of wall
on either side. Climbing to the summit of the black gneiss and following
the wall in the variegated quartzite, it is found to be stretched out to
a still greater length, for it is cut with more lateral gorges. In like
manner there is yet greater length of the mottled (or alcove) sandstone
wall, and the red wall is still farther stretched out in ever-branching
gorges.
To make the distance for ten miles along the river by walking along the
top of the red wall it would be necessary to travel several hundred
miles. The length of the wall reaches its maximum in the banded
sandstone, which is terraced more than any of the other formations. The
tower limestone wall is less tortuous. To start at the head of the Grand
Canyon on one of the terraces of the banded sandstone and follow it to
the foot of the Grand Canyon, which by river is a distance of 217 miles,
it would be necessary to travel many thousand miles by the winding way;
that is, the banded wall is many thousand miles in length.
As Seen Traveling Down Stream
For eight or ten miles below the mouth of the Little Colorado, the river
is in the variegated quartzites, and a wonderful fretwork of forms and
colors, peculiar to this rock, stretches back for miles to a labyrinth
of the red-wall cliff; then below, the black gneiss is entered and soon
has reached an altitude of 800 feet and sometimes more than 1,000 feet,
and upon this black gneiss all the other structures in their wonderful
colors are lifted. These continue for about seventy miles, when the
black gneiss below is lost, for the walls are dropped down by the West
Kaibab Fault and the river flows in the quartzites.
Then for eighty miles the mottled (or alcove) sandstones are found in
the river bed. The course of the canyon is a little south of west and is
comparatively straight. At the top of the red-wall limestone there is a
broad terrace, two or three miles in width, composed of hills of
wonderful forms carved in the banded beds, and back of this is seen a
cliff in the tower limestone. Along the lower course of this stretch the
whole character of the canyon is changed by another set of complicating
conditions. We have now reached a region of volcanic activity. After the
canyons were cut nearly to their present depth, lavas poured out and
volcanoes were built on the walls of the canyon, but not in the canyon
itself, though at places rivers of molten rock rolled down the walls
into the Colorado.
The canyon for the next eighty miles is a compound of that found where
the river is in the black gneiss and that found where the dead volcanoes
stand on the brink of the wall. In the first stretch, where the gneiss
is at the foundation, we have a great bend to the south, and in the last
stretch, where the gneiss is below and the dead volcanoes above, another
great southern detour is found. These two great beds are separated by
eighty miles of comparatively straight river.
Let us call this first great bend the Kaibab reach of the canyon, and
the straight part the Kanab reach, for the Kanab Creek heads far off in
the plateau to the north and joins the Colorado at the beginning of the
middle stretch. The third great southern bend is the Shiwits stretch.
Thus there are three distinct portions of the Grand Canyon: The Kaibab
section, characterized more by its buttes and salients; the Kanab
section, characterized by its comparatively straight walls with
volcanoes on the brink, and the Shiwits section, which is broken into
great terraces with gneiss at the bottom and volcanoes at the top.
The Work of Erosion
The erosion represented in the canyons, although vast, is but a small
part of the great erosion of the region, for between the cliffs blocks
have been carried away far superior in magnitude to those necessary to
fill the canyons. Probably there is no portion of the whole region from
which there have not been more than a thousand feet degraded, and there
are districts from which more than 30,000 feet of rock have been carried
away; altogether there is a district of country more than 200,000 square
miles in extent, from which, on the average, more than 6,000 feet have
been eroded. Consider a rock 200,000 square miles in extent and a mile
in thickness, against which the clouds have hurled their storms, and
beat it into sands, and the rills have carried the sands into the
creeks, and the creeks have carried them into the rivers, and the
Colorado has carried them into the sea.
We think of the mountains as forming clouds about their brows, but the
clouds have formed the mountains. Great continental blocks are upheaved
from beneath the sea by internal geologic forces that fashion the earth.
Then the wandering clouds, the tempest-bearing clouds, the
rainbow-decked clouds, with mighty power and with wonderful skill, carve
out valleys and canyons and fashion hills and cliffs and mountains. The
clouds are the artists sublime.
Winter and Cloud Effects
In winter some of the characteristics of the Grand Canyon are
emphasized. The black gneiss below, the variegated quartzite, and the
green or alcove sandstone form the foundation for the mighty red wall.
The banded sandstone entablature is crowned by the tower limestone. In
winter this is covered with snow. Seen from below, these changing
elements seem to graduate into the heavens, and no plane of demarcation
between wall and blue firmament can be seen. The heavens constitute a
portion of the façade and mount into a vast dome from wall to wall,
spanning the Grand Canyon with empyrean blue. So the earth and the
heavens are blended in one vast structure.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.
The Lower Gorge, Foot of Bright Angel Trail.]
When the clouds play in the canyon, as they often do in the rainy
season, another set of effects is produced. Clouds creep out of canyons
and wind into other canyons. The heavens seem to be alive, not moving as
move the heavens over a plain, in one direction with the wind, but
following the multiplied courses of these gorges. In this manner the
little clouds seem to be individualized, to have wills and souls of
their own and to be going on diverse errands—a vast assemblage of
self-willed clouds faring here and there, intent upon purposes hidden in
their own breasts. In imagination the clouds belong to the sky, and when
they are in the canyon the skies come down into the gorges and cling to
the cliffs and lift them up to immeasurable heights, for the sky must
still be far away. Thus they lend infinity to the walls.
You can not see the Grand Canyon in one view as if it were a changeless
spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have
to toil from month to month through its labyrinths. It is a region more
difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength
and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil a concept of
sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side
of paradise.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.
On Grand View Point.]
[Illustration: Uncaptioned vista]
THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD
BY CHARLES F. LUMMIS
“The greatest thing in the world.” That is a large phrase and an
over-worked one, and hardened travelers do not take it lightly upon the
tongue. Noticeably it is most glibly in use with those but lately, and
for the first time, wandered beyond their native state or county, and as
every province has its own local brag of biggest things, the too
credulous tourist will find a superlative everywhere. And superlatives
are unsafe without wide horizons of comparison.
Yet in every sort there is, of course, somewhere “the biggest thing in
the world” of its kind. It is a good word, when spoken in season and not
abused in careless ignorance.
I believe there is and can be no dispute that the term applies literally
to several things in the immediate region of the Grand Canyon of
Arizona. As I have more than once written (and it never yet has been
controverted), probably no other equal area on earth contains so many
supreme marvels of so many kinds—so many astounding sights, so many
masterpieces of Nature’s handiwork, so vast and conclusive an
encyclopedia of the world-building processes, so impressive monuments of
prehistoric man, so many triumphs of man still in the tribal relation—as
what I have called the Southwestern Wonderland. This includes a large
part of New Mexico and Arizona, the area which geographically and
ethnographically we may count as the Grand Canyon region. Let me mention
a few wonders:
The largest and by far the most beautiful of all petrified forests, with
several hundred square miles whose surface is carpeted with agate chips
and dotted with agate trunks two to four feet in diameter; and just
across one valley a buried “forest” whose huge silicified—not
agatized—logs show their ends under fifty feet of sandstone.
The largest natural bridge in the world—200 feet high, over 500 feet
span, and over 600 feet wide, up and down stream, and with an orchard on
its top and miles of stalactite caves under its abutments.
The largest variety and display of geologically recent volcanic action
in North America; with 60-mile lava flows, 1,500-foot blankets of creamy
tufa cut by scores of canyons; hundreds of craters and thousands of
square miles of lava beds, basalt, and cinders, and so much “volcanic
glass” (obsidian) that it was the chief tool of the prehistoric
population.
The largest and the most impressive villages of cave-dwellings in the
world, most of them already abandoned “when the world-seeking Genoese”
sailed.
The peerless and many-storied cliff-dwellings—castles and forts and
homes in the face of wild precipices or upon their tops—an aboriginal
architecture as remarkable as any in any land.
The twenty-six strange communal town republics of the descendants of the
“cliff-dwellers,” the modern Pueblos; some in fertile valleys, some
(like Acoma and Moki) perched on barren and dizzy cliff tops. The
strange dances, rites, dress, and customs of this ancient people who had
solved the problem of irrigation, 6-story house building, and clean
self-government, and even women’s rights—long before Columbus was born.
The noblest Caucasian ruins in America, north of Mexico—the great stone
and adobe churches reared by Franciscan missionaries, near three
centuries ago, a thousand miles from the ocean, in the heart of the
Southwest.
Some of the most notable tribes of savage nomads—like the Navajos, whose
blankets and silver work are pre-eminent, and the Apaches, who, man for
man, have been probably the most successful warriors in history.
All these, and a great deal more, make the Southwest a wonderland
without a parallel. There are ruins as striking as the storied ones
along the Rhine, and far more remarkable. There are peoples as
picturesque as any in the Orient, and as romantic as the Aztecs and the
Incas of whom we have learned such gilded fables, and there are natural
wonders which have no peers whatever.
Of the Canyon, and Other Wonders
At the head of the list stands the Grand Canyon of the Colorado; whether
it is the “greatest wonder of the world” depends a little on our
definition of “wonder.” Possibly it is no more wonderful than the fact
that so tiny a fraction of the people who confess themselves the
smartest in the world have ever seen it. As a people we dodder abroad to
see scenery incomparably inferior.
But beyond peradventure it is the greatest chasm in the world, and the
most superb. Enough globe-trotters have seen it to establish that fact.
Many have come cynically prepared to be disappointed; to find it
overdrawn and really not so stupendous as something else. It is, after
all, a hard test that so be-bragged a wonder must endure under the
critical scrutiny of them that have seen the earth and the fullness
thereof. But I never knew the most self-satisfied veteran traveler to be
disappointed in the Grand Canyon, or to patronize it. On the contrary,
this is the very class of men who can best comprehend it, and I have
seen them fairly break down in its awful presence.
I do not know the Himalayas except by photograph and the testimony of
men who have explored and climbed them, and who found the Grand Canyon
an absolutely new experience. But I know the American continents pretty
well, and have tramped their mountains, including the Andes—the next
highest mountains in the world, after half a dozen of the Himalayas—and
of all the famous quebradas of the Andes there is not one that would
count 5 per cent on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. For all their
25,000-foot peaks, their blue-white glaciers, imminent above the bald
plateau, and green little bolsones (“pocket valleys”) of Chile, Peru,
Bolivia, and Ecuador; for all their tremendous active volcanoes, like
Saugay and Cotopaxi; for all an earthquake activity beside which the
“shake” at Charleston was mere paper-doll play; for all the steepest
gradients in the world (and Peru is the only place in the world where a
river falls 17,000 feet in 100 miles)—in all that marvelous 3,000-mile
procession of giantism there is not one canyon which any sane person
would for an instant compare with that titanic gash that the Colorado
has chiseled through a comparatively flat upland. Nor is there anything
remotely approaching it in all the New World. So much I can say at first
hand. As for the Old World, the explorer who shall find a gorge there
one-half as great will win undying fame.
The quebrada of the Apu-Rimac is a marvel of the Andes, with its
vertiginous depths and its suspension bridge of wild vines. The Grand
Canyon of the Arkansas, in Colorado, is a noble little slit in the
mountains. The Franconia and White Mountain notches in New Hampshire are
beautiful. The Yosemite and the Yellowstone canyons surpass the world,
each in its way. But if all of these were hung up on the opposite wall
of the Grand Canyon from you the chances are fifty to one that you could
not tell t’other from which, nor any of them from the hundreds of other
canyons which rib that vast vertebrate gorge. If the falls of Niagara
were installed in the Grand Canyon between your visits and you knew it
by the newspapers—next time you stood on that dizzy rimrock you would
probably need good field-glasses and much patience before you could
locate that cataract which in its place looks pretty big. If Mount
Washington were plucked up bodily by the roots—not from where you see
it, but from sea-level—and carefully set down in the Grand Canyon, you
probably would not notice it next morning, unless its dull colors
distinguished it in that innumerable congress of larger and painted
giants.
All this, which is literally true, is a mere trifle of what might be
said in trying to fix a standard of comparison for the Grand Canyon. But
I fancy there is no standard adjustable to the human mind. You may
compare all you will—eloquently and from wide experience, and at last
all similes fail. The Grand Canyon is just the Grand Canyon, and that is
all you can say. I never have seen anyone who was prepared for it. I
never have seen anyone who could grasp it in a week’s hard exploration;
nor anyone, except some rare Philistine, who could even think he had
grasped it. I have seen people rave over it; better people struck dumb
with it, even strong men who cried over it; but I have never yet seen
the man or woman that _expected_ it.
It adds seriously to the scientific wonder and the universal
impressiveness of this unparalleled chasm that it is not in some
stupendous mountain range, but in a vast, arid, lofty floor of nearly
100,000 square miles—as it were, a crack in the upper story of the
continent. There is no preparation for it. Unless you had been told, you
would no more dream that out yonder amid the pines the flat earth is
slashed to its very bowels, than you would expect to find an iceberg in
Broadway. With a very ordinary running jump from the spot where you get
your first glimpse of the canyon you could go down 2,000 feet without
touching. It is sudden as a well.
But it is no mere cleft. It is a terrific trough 6,000 to 7,000 feet
deep, ten to twenty miles wide, hundreds of miles long, peopled with
hundreds of peaks taller than any mountain east of the Rockies, yet not
one of them with its head so high as your feet, and all ablaze with such
color as no eastern or European landscape ever knew, even in the
Alpen-glow. And as you sit upon the brink the divine scene-shifters give
you a new canyon every hour. With each degree of the sun’s course the
great countersunk mountains we have been watching fade away, and new
ones, as terrific, are carved by the westering shadows. It is like a
dissection of the whole cosmogony. And the purple shadows, the dazzling
lights, the thunderstorms and snowstorms, the clouds and the rainbows
that shift and drift in that vast subterranean arena below your feet!
And amid those enchanted towers and castles which the vastness of the
scale leads you to call “rocks,” but which are in fact as big above the
river-bed as the Rockies from Denver, and bigger than Mount Washington
from Fabyan’s or the Glen!
The Grand Canyon country is not only the hugest, but the most varied and
instructive example on earth of one of the chief factors of
earth-building—erosion. It is the mesa country—the Land of Tables.
Nowhere else on the footstool is there such an example of deep-gnawing
water or of water high-carving. The sandstone mesas of the Southwest,
the terracing of canyon walls, the castellation, battlementing, and
cliff-making, the cutting down of a whole landscape except its
precipitous islands of flat-topped rock, the thin lava table-cloths on
tables 100 feet high—these are a few of the things which make the
Southwest wonderful alike to the scientist and the mere sight-seer.
That the canyon is not “too hard” is perhaps sufficiently indicated by
the fact that I have taken thither ladies and children and men in their
seventies, when the easiest way to get there was by a 70-mile stage
ride, and that at six years old my little girl walked all the way from
rim to bottom of canyon and came back on a horse the same day, and was
next morning ready to go on a long tramp along the rim.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.
The North Wall from Grand Scenic Divide.]
[Illustration: Uncaptioned vista]
INFORMATION FOR TOURISTS
Preliminary
There is only one way by which to directly reach the Grand Canyon of
Arizona, and that is via the Santa Fe (The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe
Railway System).
There are three ways of reaching the Canyon from the Santa Fe—rail from
Williams, private conveyance from Flagstaff and Peach Springs.
The route from Flagstaff is not available in winter. The Peach Springs
route is open in winter, but now little used. The bulk of the travel is
via Williams, sixty-five miles north to Bright Angel—open all the year.
Three Gateways
There are but three points from which an easy descent may be made of the
south wall to the granite gorge of the Grand Canyon:
1. At Grand View, down Berry’s (Grand View) or Hance’s (Red Canyon)
trails.
2. At Bright Angel, down Bright Angel Trail.
3. At Bass’ Camp, down Mystic Spring Trail.
While the canyon may be reached over trails at other places outside of
the district named (such as Lee’s Ferry Trail, by wagon from Winslow;
Moki Indian Trail, by way of Little Colorado Canyon; and Diamond Creek
road to Colorado River from Peach Springs station), most tourists prefer
the Bright Angel, Grand View, and Bass’ Camp routes, because of the
superior facilities and views there offered. The Peach Springs route is
the only other one now used by the public to any extent.
It is near Grand View that Marble Canyon ends and the Grand Canyon
proper begins. Northward, a few miles away, is the mouth of the Little
Colorado Canyon. Here the granite gorge is first seen.
Bright Angel is approximately in the center, and Bass’ Camp at the
western end of the granite gorge. By wagon road it is eighteen miles
from Bright Angel east to Grand View, and twenty-three miles west to
Bass’ Camp.
In a nutshell, the Grand Canyon at Grand View is accounted most
sublime—a scene of wide outlooks and brilliant hues; at Bright Angel,
deepest and most impressive—a scene that awakens the profoundest
emotions; at Bass’ Camp, the most varied—a scene of striking contrasts
in form and color.
Each locality has its special charm. All three should be visited, if
time permits, as only by long observation can one gain even a
superficial knowledge of what the Grand Canyon is. To know it intimately
requires a longer stay and more careful study.
The Ride from Williams
Because of recent improvements in service the Grand Canyon of Arizona
may now be visited, either in summer or winter, with reasonable comfort
and without any hardship. No one need be deterred by fear of inclement
weather or a tedious stage ride. The trip is entirely feasible for the
average traveler every day in the year.
Leaving the Santa Fe transcontinental train at Williams, Arizona,
passengers change in same depot to a local train of the Grand Canyon
Railway, which leaves Williams daily, and arrives at destination after a
three hours’ run.
Williams is a busy town of 1,500 inhabitants, 378 miles west of
Albuquerque, on the Santa Fe. Here are located large sawmills, smelters,
numerous well-stocked stores, and railroad division buildings. Prior to
the disastrous fire in July, 1901, there were several excellent hotels.
The one not destroyed affords good accommodations; it has been recently
enlarged and otherwise improved.
There is usually ample time at Williams, between trains, for the ascent
of Bill Williams Mountain, which rises near the town to a height of
9,000 feet. Tourists will find the trip thoroughly enjoyable. It can be
made in five hours on horseback in perfect safety. The trail is an easy
one, first leading through a gently sloping path of pines, then steeply
up to the wind-swept summit alongside a pretty stream bordered by
thickets of quaking aspens. Chimney Rock, with its eagle’s nest, is a
noteworthy rock formation. On the summit is buried the historic pioneer
scout, Bill Williams. From his resting-place there is a wide outlook,
embracing, on clear days, the wall of the Grand Canyon, Verde River,
Chino Valley, Jerome, Hell Canyon, Seligman, Ash Fork, and many
neighboring peaks.
The railroad track to the canyon is remarkably smooth for a new line. It
is built across a slightly rolling mesa, in places thickly wooded, in
others open. The snow-covered San Francisco Peaks are on the eastern
horizon. Kendricks, Sitgreaves, and Williams mountains are also visible.
Red Butte, thirty miles distant, is a prominent local landmark. Before
the terminus is reached the train climbs a long, high ridge and enters
Coconino Forest, which resembles a natural park. The route here is amid
fragrant pines, over low hills, and along occasional gulches and
“washes.” Taken under the favorable conditions which generally prevail
at this high altitude, the journey is a novelty and a delight.
At Destination
The hotel at head of Bright Angel Trail is reached early in the evening.
The tourist then finds himself on the verge of a high precipice, from
which is obtained by moonlight a magnificent view of the opposite wall
and of the intervening crags, towers, and slopes. The suddenness, the
surprise, the revelation come as a fitting climax to a unique trip.
After nightfall the air becomes cold, for here you are 7,000 feet above
the sea; yet the absence of humidity, peculiar to these high altitudes,
makes the chill less penetrating than on lower levels. By day, in the
sunshine, there is usually a genial warmth—then overcoats, gloves, and
wraps are laid aside.
Bright Angel Hotel
The Bright Angel Hotel is managed by Mr. M. Buggeln, who also controls
the stage line, trail stock, guides, etc. The hotel comprises a
combination log and frame structure of eight rooms, with three frame
annexes containing forty-six sleeping rooms, and (for summer use)
several rows of tents, all clustered on the rim and surrounded by pines
and spruces. Each room in the annexes has one or two beds, a stove,
dressing table, and Navajo rugs. In the log-cabin part of the main
edifice are two large rooms. One is used for reception purposes, being
warmed by means of an old-fashioned fireplace and tastefully carpeted
with Indian rugs, also furnished with capacious rocking chairs and a
piano; the other of these two rooms is for the office.
Good meals are prepared by expert cooks and served in a pleasant
dining-room. In a word, the hotel facilities are good, far better than
one might expect to find for the reasonable rate charged. There is no
“roughing it”; everything is homelike and comfortable. One must not,
however, expect all the city luxuries. A telephone and telegraph line
directly connects the hotel with the outer world at Williams.
Note.—A fine modern hotel of fifty rooms, with cottage annexes, to be
known as Bright Angel Tavern, will be built in this vicinity during
1903 and managed by Mr. Fred Harvey. It will be a permanent affair and
will provide all the latest conveniences.
While one ought to remain at least a week, a stop-over of three days
from the transcontinental trip will allow practically two days at the
canyon. One full day should be devoted to an excursion down Bright Angel
Trail, and the other to walks and drives along the rim. Another day on
the rim—making a four-days’ stop-over in all—will enable visitors to get
more satisfactory views of this stupendous wonder.
Down Bright Angel Trail
The trail here is perfectly safe and is generally open the year round.
In midwinter it is liable to be closed for a few days at the top by
snow, but such blockade is only temporary. It reaches from the hotel
four miles to the top of the granite wall immediately overlooking the
Colorado River. At this point the river is 1,200 feet below, while the
hotel on the rim is 4,300 feet above. The trip is commonly made on
horseback, accompanied by a guide; charges for trail stock and services
of guide are moderate. A strong person, accustomed to mountain climbing,
can make the round trip on foot in one day, by starting early enough;
but the average traveler will soon discover that a horse is a necessity,
especially for the upward climb.
Eight hours are required for going down and coming back, allowing two
hours for lunch, rest, and sight-seeing. Those wishing to reach the
river leave the main trail at Indian Garden Spring and follow the
downward course of Willow and Pipe creeks. Owing to the abrupt descent
from this point, part of the side trail must be traversed on foot.
Provision is made for those wishing to camp out at night on the river’s
edge.
The famous guide, John Hance, is now located at Bright Angel.
What to Bring
If much tramping is done, stout, thick shoes should be provided. Ladies
will find that short walking skirts are a convenience; divided skirts
are preferable, but not essential, for the horseback journey down the
zigzag trail. Traveling caps and (in summer) broad-brimmed straw hats
are useful toilet adjuncts. Otherwise ordinary clothing will suffice. A
good field glass and camera should be brought along.
[Illustration: Bright Angel Hotel.]
The round-trip ticket rate, Williams to Grand Canyon and return, is only
$6.50. Adding $6 for two days’ stay at Canyon Hotel, $1 for part of a
day at hotel in Williams, $1.50 for probable proportion of cost of
guide, $3 for trail stock, and the total necessary expense of the three
days’ stop-over is about $18 for one person; each additional day only
adds $3 to the cost for hotel.
Stop-overs will be granted at Williams on railroad and Pullman tickets
if advance application is made to train and Pullman conductors. Trunks
may be stored in the station at Williams free of charge by arrangement
with ticket agent.
Grand View
Grand View (previously mentioned) may be reached in summer by private
conveyance from Flagstaff, a distance of seventy-five miles; or at any
time of the year by stage from Bright Angel, sixteen miles along the
rim. The rate for round trip, Bright Angel to Grand View, is $2.50 to $5
each person, according to size of party. While Flagstaff is an
interesting place to visit—with its near-by cliff and cave dwellings and
San Francisco Peaks—and the trip thence to the Grand Canyon is a novel
one, distance and time are such that most travelers prefer to go in by
railroad from Williams.
Grand View Hotel is a large, rustic structure, built near the head of
Berry’s Trail and about three miles from Hance’s Trail, in the midst of
tall pines and overlooking the mighty bend of the Colorado. This is the
point to which visitors were conducted in the days of the old stage line
from Flagstaff.
It is noted for its wide views of the Coconino Forest and Painted
Desert, as well as for the beautiful forms and color of the canyon
itself. A favorite trip here is to go down one trail and up the other.
The hotel accommodations are quite good; capacity, forty guests; rate,
$3 per day.
Bass’ Camp
At the western end of the granite gorge is Mystic Spring Trail, an easy
route down to the Colorado River and up the other side to Dutton’s Point
and Powell’s Plateau. The magnificent panorama eastward from Havasupai
Point takes in fifty miles of the canyon, while westward is the unique,
table-like formation which characterizes the lower reaches of the river.
The views from both rims are pronounced by noted artists and explorers
to be unequaled.
Present accommodations at Havasupai Hotel (Bass’ Camp), near head of
this trail, are fairly good, consisting of a cabin, several tents, and
good trail stock; wholesome meals are served in comfortable style. A new
hotel is to be built here during 1903. Bass’ Camp is now reached by
stage from Coconino, a station on the Grand Canyon Railway, or one may
take a team direct from Bright Angel.
A visit should be made to the Havasupai Indian village in Cataract
Canyon. Any bona fide tourist can procure an introductory letter from
the railroad agent at Williams or Grand Canyon. On presenting same to
the U. S. Indian agent at Supai, permission will be granted to enter the
reservation. This is an unique trip of about forty miles, first by wagon
across a timbered plateau, then on horseback down precipitous Topocobya
Trail, along the rocky floors of Topocobya and Cataract canyons, deep in
the earth, to a place of gushing springs, green fields, and enchanting
waterfalls. Here live the Havasupai Indians, one of the most interesting
tribes in Arizona. The round trip from Bright Angel or Bass’ Camp is
made in three or four days at an expense of $35 to $50 each for a party
of three persons.
Peach Springs Route
The trip in winter from Peach Springs station down to the Colorado
River, through Diamond Creek Canyon, is most enjoyable. Owing to the low
altitude here (4,780 feet at Peach Springs and approximately 2,000 feet
at the river) the air is usually balmy from November to April; in summer
the heat is a considerable drawback.
A journey of but twelve miles leads you through a miniature Grand Canyon
with scenery increasingly sublime. On either side are abrupt walls and
wonderfully suggestive formations—castles, domes, minarets. On your
left, glancing backward, is an exact reproduction of Westminster Abbey.
This comparatively easy jaunt brings you by team to the very brink of
the swift-rolling Colorado, whereas by the other Grand Canyon gateways
you are landed on the rim and must go down thousands of feet by a steep
trail. The outlook here is restricted to the river itself and the great
walls rising precipitously from its banks—a scene well worth while, but
not so impressive as the wide sweep of the canyon visible from the rim.
Following Diamond Creek to its source you may walk along the bed of the
stream between walls thousands of feet high and glistening in the white
sunlight as if varnished. The upper part of Diamond Creek is a veritable
terrace of fern bowers, luxuriant vegetation, crystal cascades, and
sequestered meadow parks.
Flagstaff and Vicinity
The town itself is an interesting place, prettily situated in the heart
of the San Francisco uplift and surrounded by a pine forest.
Its hotels, business houses, lumber mills, and residences denote thrift.
On a neighboring hill is the Lowell Observatory, noted for its many
contributions to astronomical science.
[Illustration: San Francisco Peaks.]
Eight miles southwest from Flagstaff—reached by a pleasant drive along a
level road through tall pines—is Walnut Canyon, a rent in the earth
several hundred feet deep and three miles long, with steep terraced
walls of limestone. Along the shelving terraces, under beetling
projections of the strata, are scores of quaint cliff dwellings, the
most famous group of its kind in this region. The larger abodes are
divided into several compartments by cemented walls, many parts of which
are still intact. It is believed that these cliff dwellers were of the
same stock as the Pueblo Indians of to-day and that they lived here
about 800 years ago.
Nine miles from Flagstaff and only half a mile from the old stage road
to the Grand Canyon, upon the summit of an extinct crater, the
remarkable ruins of the cave-dwellers may be seen.
The magnificent San Francisco Peaks, visible from every part of the
country within a radius of a hundred miles, lie just north of Flagstaff.
There are three peaks which form one mountain. From Flagstaff a road has
been constructed up Humphrey’s Peak, whose summit is 12,750 feet above
sea level. It is a good mountain road, and the entire distance from
Flagstaff is only about ten miles. The trip to the summit and back is
easily made in one day.
Announcement
The Santa Fe has published a new and beautiful book on the Grand Canyon.
It contains articles by Hamlin Garland, Harriet Monroe, Robert Brewster
Stanton, Chas. S. Gleed, John L. Stoddard, Charles Dudley Warner, R. D.
Salisbury, “Fitz Mac,” Nat M. Brigham, Joaquin Miller, Edwin Burritt
Smith, David Starr Jordan, C. E. Beecher, Henry P. Ewing, and Thomas
Moran, as well as the authors represented in this pamphlet. The book has
more than a hundred pages, illustrated with half-tones and portraits;
the cover is from a painting of the Canyon by Thomas Moran, and is
lithographed in seven colors. It will be forwarded on receipt of fifty
cents.
A beautiful and unique color picture of the Grand Canyon, mounted to
show all its colors as in nature, may be had for twenty-five cents.
Address W. J. BLACK,
Gen’l Passenger Agent, A., T. & S. F. Ry., CHICAGO.
Ad. 71—2-3-03. 10M.
Transcriber’s Notes
--Retained publication information from the printed exemplar (this eBook
is in the public domain in the country of publication.)
--Only in the text versions, delimited italicized text with
_underscores_.
--Silently corrected several typos.
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