I
In making the journey to the great Southwest,--Colorado, New
Mexico, and Arizona,--if one does not know his geology, he is pretty
sure to wish he did, there is so much geology scattered over all
these Southwestern landscapes, crying aloud to be read. The book of
earthly revelation, as shown by the great science, lies wide open in
that land, as it does in few other places on the globe. Its leaves
fairly flutter in the wind, and the print is so large that he who
runs on the California Limited may read it. Not being able to read
it at all, or not taking any interest in it, is like going to Rome
or Egypt or Jerusalem, knowing nothing of the history of those
lands.
Of course, we have just as much geology in the East and Middle West,
but the books are closed and sealed, as it were, by the enormous
lapse of time since these portions of the continent became dry land.
The eroding and degrading forces have ages since passed the meridian
of their day's work, and grass and verdure hide their footsteps. But
in the great West and Southwest, the gods of erosion and degradation
seem yet in the heat and burden of the day's toil. Their unfinished
landscapes meet the eye on every hand. Many of the mountains look as
if they were blocked out but yesterday, and one sees vast naked
flood-plains, and painted deserts and bad lands and dry
lake-bottoms, that suggest a world yet in the making.
Some force has scalped the hills, ground the mountains, strangled
the rivers, channeled the plains, laid bare the succession of
geologic ages, stripping off formation after formation like a
garment, or cutting away the strata over hundreds of square miles,
as we pry a slab from a rock--and has done it all but yesterday. If
we break the slab in the prying, and thus secure only part of it,
leaving an abrupt jagged edge on the part that remains, we have
still a better likeness of the work of these great geologic
quarrymen. But other workmen, invisible to our eyes, have carved
these jagged edges into novel and beautiful forms.
The East is old, old! the West, with the exception of the Rocky
Mountains, is of yesterday in comparison. The Hudson was an ancient
river before the Mississippi was born, and the Catskills were being
slowly carved from a vast plateau while the rocks that were to form
many of the Western ranges were being laid down as sediment in the
bottom of the sea. California is yet in her teens, while New England
in comparison is an octogenarian. Just as much geology in the East
as in the West, did I say? Not as much visible geology, not as much
by many chapters of earth history, not as much by all the later
formations, by most of the Mesozoic and Tertiary deposits. The vast
series of sedimentary rocks since the Carboniferous age, to say
nothing of the volcanic, that make up these periods, are largely
wanting east of the Mississippi, except in New Jersey and in some of
the Gulf States. They are recent. They are like the history of our
own period compared with that of Egypt and Judea. It is mainly these
later formations--the Permian, the Jurassic, the Triassic, the
Cretaceous, the Eocene,--that give the prevailing features to the
South-western landscape that so astonish Eastern eyes. From them
come most of the petrified remains of that great army of extinct
reptiles and mammals--the three-toed horse, the sabre-toothed
tiger, the brontosaurus, the fin-backed lizard, the imperial
mammoth, the various dinosaurs, some of them gigantic in form and
fearful in aspect--that of late years have appeared in our museums
and that throw so much light upon the history of the animal life of
the globe. Most of the sedimentary rocks of New York and New England
were laid down before these creatures existed.
Now I am not going to write an essay on the geology of the West, for
I really have little first-hand knowledge upon that subject, but I
would indicate the kind of interest in the country I was most
conscious of during my recent trip to the Pacific Coast and beyond.
Indeed, quite a geologic fever raged in me most of the time. The
rocks attracted me more than the birds, the sculpturing of the
landscapes engaged my attention more than the improvements of the
farms--what Nature had done more than what man was doing. The purely
scenic aspects of the country are certainly remarkable, and the
human aspects interesting, but underneath these things, and striking
through them, lies a vast world of time and change that to me is
still more remarkable, and still more interesting. I could not look
out of the car windows without seeing the spectre of geologic time
stalking across the hills and plains.
As one leaves the prairie States and nears the great Southwest, he
finds Nature in a new mood--she is dreaming of canyons; both cliffs
and soil have canyon stamped upon them, so that your eye, if alert,
is slowly prepared for the wonders of rock-carving it is to see on
the Colorado. The canyon form seems inherent in soil and rock. The
channels of the little streams are canyons, vertical sides of adobe
soil, as deep as they are broad, rectangle grooves in the ground.
Through all this arid region nature is abrupt, angular, and
sudden--the plain squarely abutting the cliff, the cliff walling the
canon; the dry water-course sunk in the plain like a carpenter's
groove into a plank. Cloud and sky look the same as at home, but the
earth is a new earth--new geologically, and new in the lines of its
landscapes. It seems by the forms she develops that Nature must use
tools that she long since discarded in the East. She works as if
with the square and the saw and the compass, and uses implements
that cut like chisels and moulding-planes. Right lines,
well-defined angles, and tablelike tops of buttes and mesas
alternate with perfect curves, polished domes, carved needles, and
fluted escarpments.
In the features of our older landscapes there is little or nothing
that suggests architectural forms or engineering devices; in the Far
West one sees such forms and devices everywhere.
In visiting the Petrified Forests in northern Arizona we stood on
the edge of a great rolling plain and looked down upon a wide,
deeply eroded stretch of country below us that suggested a vast army
encampment, covered as it was with great dome-shaped, tent-like
mounds of a light terra-cotta color, with open spaces like streets
or avenues between them. There were hundreds or thousands of these
earthy tents stretching away for twenty-five miles. Along the
horizon was a gigantic stockade of red, rounded pillars, or a solid
line of mosque-like temples. How unreal, how spectral it all seemed!
Not a sound or sign of life in the whole painted solitude--a
deserted camp, or one upon which the silence of death had fallen.
Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the gigantic fern-like trees, the
Sigillaria and Lepidodendron, whose petrified trunks, for aeons
buried beneath the deposit of the Permian seas, and then, during
other aeons, slowly uncovered by the gentle action of the eroding
rains, we saw scattered on the ground.
You first see Nature beginning to form the canon habit in Colorado
and making preliminary studies for her masterpiece, the Grand
Canon. Huge square towers and truncated cones and needles and
spires break the horizon-lines. Here all her water-courses, wet or
dry, are deep grooves in the soil, with striking and pretty carvings
and modelings adorning their vertical sides. In the railway cuts you
see the same effects--miniature domes and turrets and other canon
features carved out by the rains. The soil is massive and does not
crumble like ours and seek the angle of repose; it gives way in
masses like a brick wall. It is architectural soil, it seeks
approximately the right angle--the level plain or the vertical wall.
It erodes easily under running water, but it does not slide; sand
and clay are in such proportions as to make a brittle but not a
friable soil.
Before you are out of Colorado, you begin to see these novel
architectural features on the horizon-line--the canon turned bottom
side up, as it were. In New Mexico, the canon habit of the erosion
forces is still more pronounced. The mountain-lines are often as
architectural in the distance, or arbitrary, as the sky-line of a
city. You may see what you half persuade yourself is a huge brick
building notching the horizon,--an asylum, a seminary, a hotel,--but
it is only a fragment of red sandstone, carved out by wind and rain.
Presently the high colors of the rocks appear--high cliffs with
terra-cotta facades, and a new look in the texture of the rocks, a
soft, beaming, less frowning expression, and colored as if by the
Western sunsets. We are looking upon much younger rocks geologically
than we see at home, and they have the tints and texture of youth.
The landscape and the mountains look young, because they look
unfinished, like a house half up. The workmen have but just knocked
off work to go to dinner; their great trenches, their freshly opened
quarries, their huge dumps, their foundations, their cyclopean
masonry, their half-finished structures breaking the horizon-lines,
their square gashes through the mountains,--all impress the eyes of
a traveler from the eastern part of the continent, where the
earth-building and earth-carving forces finished their work ages
ago.