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.
[Illustration]
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 and
vari-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
beautiful balmy 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 outstretched
prairie." 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-plain between 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 where the 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.
[Illustration: SALT LAKE CITY.]
XXXIII
CROSSING THE WASATCH.
The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits, old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes
And the wild cataracts leap in glory.
Blow bugle, blow; set the wild echoes flying;
Answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
--TENNYSON.
With the first full light of dawn, on the morning after leaving Grand
Junction, the vigilant Madame was awake, and we heard her calling upon
us from her curtained corner to wake up and look out of the window.
Well, as the Shaughran said when punished for his fox-hunt on the
Squire's horse, "It was worth it," even at the expense of the morning
nap. Here was something different from anything seen before.
We were far inside the boundary of Utah Territory and were already
beginning to climb the first steps toward the heights of the
Wasatch--the western bulwark of the Rocky mountains. The way lay up the
South Fork of the Price river, along a broad valley sunken between
enormously high walls of sedimentary rock whose horizontal
stratification betrayed no signs of disturbance. How long must the
waters of the paleazoic sea have surged against the primitive granitic
caves and lava-masses--how steady must this part of the earth's crust
have remained for ages--to let these thousands of feet of rocky tablets
be piled up! And then, when it was done; when the slow upheaval had
come, and the water had gradually been drawn off; how patiently did the
centuries wait while these great depressed spaces were cut down and the
material carried away to be spread--who knows where?
Here mountain-like table-lands stretched their white and cedar-spiked
terraces, one above another to the plateau-top, for scores of miles out
from the range against which they were braced. The water and the
sand-blast of the fierce winds had worn their exposed cliff-faces, and
sometimes carved their crests (now gold-tipped by the first sunbeams)
into fantastic shapes that recalled pictures in the Dakota badlands or
the grotesque monuments near Colorado Springs. In some places they were
honeycombed with round holes, connecting pits and fissures, like a
prodigious display of Arabesque fret-work; elsewhere they would stand
massive and plain. As we proceeded colors began to appear,--yellows,
warm browns and pale reds, against which, in thorough keeping, grew the
bent and aged forms of junipers. In the soft gray of the morning light,
nothing could be more pleasing than these worn and variegated
battlements, between which for miles and miles the road winds its way.
Every stupendous headland was a new rendering of the general idea--a
novel design coherent with hundreds of its fellows; and of each the eye
was afforded several altered aspects as the train changed its point of
view.
Finally we attained a higher level, and the cliffs came nearer, became
more precipitous and the inter spaces more green. This was Castle
Valley. We had risen and dressed ourselves and were thinking of
breakfast. The sun had come high enough over the "great, lone land" in
our rear to shoot his beams half way down the projections of the dewy
and glittering cliffs, when the train came to a stop, though there was
only a side-track. Stepping to the platform to enquire why, we came with
all the shock of complete surprise face to face with what to me, is the
most inspiring, as a single object, of all the marvelous scenes between
the Plains and the Salt Sea. This was Castle Gate.
The cañon here becomes very narrow and tortuous, with picturesque
defiles opening here and there and conducting tiny streams, swelled in
spring to noisy torrents. Trees and bushes in great abundance grow on
the narrow banks of the river and swarm up the rough heaps of rocks that
bury the foot of the cliff on each side. Just here, these cliffs are
several hundred feet high and exceedingly steep, showing great
ledge-fronts as upright and clean of vegetation as the side of a house.
All the rocks are bright rust-red, darker and lighter here and there;
and over all arches a sky, violet-blue, vivid, and immeasurably deep,
for you may look far into it, as into water that lies quiet and luminous
under the sunshine.
Now out from this wall on one side pushes a great projection half way
across the valley, crowned on its point by a round turret. This is on
the left or southern side. Opposite it has been left standing an
enormous natural wall--a thin promontory projected from the face of the
mountain as Sandy Hook stretches narrow and straight out in the ocean
beyond the Atlantic coast-line. From base to combing it rises sheer and
toppling whichever way you scan it; and on the western side the topmost
ledges overhang. Here the face is scarred not only by the horizontal
lines denoting the separate strata, but also by vertical gashes of
cleavage some of which are strongly marked cracks extending from top to
bottom. These show how, by the continual scaling off of enormous slabs
on each side, under the prying levers of heat and cold, moisture and
weight, this once thick headland has been reduced to a thinness so
contracted that its thickness in proportion to its height is no greater
than that of Cleopatra's Needle or any other monumental shaft; while
the narrowed peninsular, which connects it with the main crag, has only
the proportions of a garden wall: but what a wall! for it is eight
hundred feet from its weedy top to the foundation. You can count in the
patches of freshly exposed rock on its surface how season by season it
is diminishing; and one great crack almost splits its extreme edge in
twain so that some day, with an earth-jarring crash, half the thickness
of this noble remnant will drop to its base and burst into dust and
fragments.
Heedless of such a catastrophe, and unmindful of the grandeur of their
home in human eyes, birds build their nests in the crevices and crannies
that are nicked into its crimson front, and bats shrink from the light
into the seams that make a network upon its sides. Great gaps mar the
regularity of its sky line; but these mark the ruinous hand of time and
add to the antique grandeur of the pile. We cannot take our eyes from
it, and forget the even more lofty walls and pinnacles opposite, which
have not the advantage of the isolation, and the Olympian dignity and
pose, of this daring pier.
A little group of Indians on horseback, in the full toggery of Uinta
Utes, were jogging along the road beside the track when presently we
emerged from Castle Valley and drew up at Pleasant Valley Junction. Here
a branch road comes from some important coal mines sixteen miles to the
westward. This coal occurs in a bed eleven feet in thickness, and so
situated as to be worked very conveniently. The mines were opened four
years ago, and a railway built to them from Provo--a distance of sixty
miles. This was bought by the Denver and Rio Grande and a part of it was
utilized. Now all the coal comes down from the mines by gravity, and the
locomotive is required only to haul up the empty cars.
This coal is bituminous, and of better quality than that from Rock
Springs, in Wyoming, which it is gradually displacing in the Utah
markets, since it is found to give more heat, ton for ton. Its
introduction was a boon to the people generally, for instead of seven
dollars and fifty cents a ton, with occasional extra prices, they now
pay only five dollars, and get a better article. The mines are operated
by the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, who employ about one hundred men
and produce a daily output of three hundred tons, which is constantly
increasing to meet the growing demand.