Osages. Oil has been found on their land and they are the wealthiest
people in the world to-day, the average cash income of each exceeding
five thousand dollars a year. In a state with a total population of two
and a quarter millions live 336,000 Indians representing twenty-three
tribes and 110,000 negroes descended from slaves. There has been much
intermarrying between Indians and whites, and some between Indians and
blacks. Here is a mixture of races to baffle the keenest eye.
Elsewhere than in the Osage Reservation, wealth also has come to the
Indians. Many have very large incomes, large even for the rich of our
Eastern cities. Asphalt also has enriched many. Cotton is raised
extensively in the southern counties. Grazing on a large scale has
proved profitable. Many Indians own costly and luxurious homes, ride in
automobiles, and enter importantly into business, politics, and the
professions; these usually have more or less white blood. Many
full-bloods who have grown rich without effort possess finely furnished
bedrooms, and sleep on the floor in blankets; elaborate dining-rooms
with costly table equipments, and eat cross-legged on the kitchen floor;
gas-ranges, and cook over chip fires out-of-doors; automobiles, and ride
blanketed ponies. Many wealthy men are deeply in debt because of useless
luxuries which they have been persuaded to buy.
Platt National Park lies about the centre of what was once the Chickasaw
nation. It is a grazing and a cotton country. There are thousands of
Indians, many of them substantial citizens, some men of local influence.
Native dress is seldom seen.
Quoting again from my correspondence with Colonel Sneed, here is the
legend of the last of the Delawares:
"Along about 1840, a very few years after the Chickasaws and Choctaws
had arrived in Indian Territory, a small band of about sixty Delaware
Indians arrived in the Territory, having roved from Alabama through
Mississippi and Missouri, and through the northwest portion of Arkansas.
Being a small band, they decided to link their fortunes with those of
some other tribe of Indians, and they first pitched their tepees with
those of the Cherokees. But the Cherokee Chief and old Chief Wahpanucka
of the Delawares did not agree. So the little band of Delawares
continued rambling until they reached the Choctaw Nation, where they
again tried to make terms with the Chief of the tribe. Evidently no
agreement was reached between that Chief and Wahpanucka, for the
Delawares continued their roving until they reached the Chickasaw
Nation, where they remained.
"Old Chief Wahpanucka had a beautiful daughter whose name was Deerface;
two of the Delaware braves were much in love with her, but Deerface
could not decide which one of these warriors she should take to become
Chief after the death of Wahpanucka.
"Chief Wahpanucka called the two warriors before him and a powwow was
agreed upon. The council was held around the Council Rocks (which is now
a point of interest within the Platt National Park), and a decision was
reached to the effect that at a certain designated time the Delawares
should all assemble on the top of the Bromide Cliff, at the foot of
which flow the now famous Bromide and Medicine Springs, and that the two
braves should ride their Indian ponies to the edge of the cliff, which
was at that time known as Medicine Bluff, and jump off to the bed of the
creek about two hundred feet below. The one who survived was to marry
Deerface, and succeed Wahpanucka as Chief of the Delawares.
"The race was run and both Indian braves made the jump from the bluff,
but both were killed. When Deerface saw this she threw herself from the
bluff and died at the foot of the cliff where her lovers had met their
death. To-day her image may be seen indelibly fixed on one of the rocks
of the cliff where she fell, and the water of the Medicine Spring is
supposed to be the briny tears of the old Chief when he saw the havoc
his decision had wrought. These tears, filtering down through the cliff
where the old Chief stood, are credited with being so purified that the
water of the spring which they form is possessed with remedial qualities
which make it a cure for all human ailments."
THE GRAND CANYON AND OUR NATIONAL MONUMENTS
ON THE SCENERY OF THE SOUTHWEST
To most Americans the southwest means the desert, and it is true that
most of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and portions of Colorado and
southern California, are arid or semiarid lands, relieved, however, by
regions of fertility and agricultural prosperity. In popular conception
the desert has been the negative of all that means beauty, richness, and
sublimity; it has been the synonym of poverty and death. Gradually but
surely the American public is learning that again popular conception is
wrong, that the desert is as positive a factor in scenery as the
mountain, that it has its own glowing beauty, its own intense
personality, and occasionally, in its own amazing way, a sublimity as
gorgeous, as compelling, and as emotion-provoking as the most stupendous
snow-capped range.
The American desert region includes some of the world's greatest
scenery. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is sunk in a plateau
which, while sprinkled with scant pine, is nearly rainless. Zion Canyon
is a palette of brilliant color lying among golden sands. A score of
national monuments conserve large natural bridges, forests of petrified
trees, interesting volcanic or other phenomena of prehistoric times,
areas of strange cactus growths, deposits of the bones of monstrous
reptiles, and remains of a civilization which preceded the discovery of
America; and, in addition to these, innumerable places of remarkable
magnificence as yet unknown except to the geologist, the topographer,
the miner, the Indian, and the adventurer in unfrequented lands.
This arid country consists of rolling sandy plains as broad as seas,
dotted with gray sage-brush and relieved by bare craggy monadnocks and
naked ranges which the rising and the setting sun paints unbelievable
colors. Here and there thin growths of cottonwood outline thin ribbons
of rivers, few and far between. Here and there alkali whitens the edges
of stained hollows where water lies awhile after spring cloudbursts.
Here and there are salt ponds with no outlet. Yet even in the desolation
of its tawny monotony it has a fascination which is insistent and
cumulative.
But the southwest is not all desert. There are great areas of thin
grazing ranges and lands where dry farming yields fair crops. There are
valleys which produce fruits and grains in abundance. There are hamlets
and villages and cities which are among the oldest in America, centres
of fertile tracts surrounded by deserts which need only water to become
the richest lands on the continent. There are regions reclaimed by
irrigation where farming has brought prosperity. In other places the
plateau covers itself for hundreds of square miles with scrubby pine and
cedar.
All in all, it is a land of rare charm and infinite variety.
To appreciate a region which more and more will enter into American
consciousness and divide travel with the mountains, the reader should
know something of its structural history.
The southwestern part of the United States rose above sea-level and sank
below it many times during the many thousands of centuries preceding its
present state, which is that of a sandy and generally desert plateau,
five to ten thousand feet in altitude. How many times it repeated the
cycle is not fully known. Some portions of it doubtless were submerged
oftener than others. Some were lifting while others were lowering. And,
meantime, mountains rose and were carried away by erosion to give place
to other mountains which also wore away; river systems formed and
disappeared, lakes and inland seas existed and ceased to exist. The
history of our southwest would have been tempestuous indeed had it been
compassed within say the life of one man; but, spread over a period of
time inconceivable to man, there may have been no time when it might
have seemed to be more active in change than its still hot deserts seem
to-day to the traveller in passing trains.
Other parts of the continent, no doubt, have undergone as many changes;
our southwest is not singular in that. But nowhere else, perhaps, has
the change left evidences so plain and so interesting to the
unscientific observer. The page of earth's history is more easily read
upon the bare deserts of our southwest than on the grass-concealed
prairies of the Mississippi Valley or the eroded and forested ranges of
the Appalachians.
Before the Rockies and the Sierra even existed, in the shallow sea which
covered this part of the continent were deposited the ooze which later,
when this region rose above the sea, became the magnificent limestones
of the Grand Canyon. Muds accumulated which to-day are seen in many
highly colored shales. Long ages of erosion from outlying mountain
regions spread it thick with gravels and sands which now appear in rocky
walls of deep canyons. A vast plain was built up and graded by these
deposits. The trunks of trees washed down by the floods from far distant
uplands were buried in these muds and sands, where, in the course of
unnumbered centuries, they turned to stone. They are the petrified
forests of to-day.
Mountains, predecessors of our modern Sierra, lifted in the south and
west, squeezed the moisture from the Pacific winds, and turned the
region into desert. This was in the Jurassic Period. Sands thousands of
feet deep were accumulated by the desert winds which are to-day the
sandstones of the giant walls of Zion Canyon.
But this was not the last desert, for again the region sank below the
sea. Again for half a million years or more ooze settled upon the sands
to turn to limestone millions of years later. In this Jurassic sea
sported enormous marine monsters whose bones settled to the bottom to be
unearthed in our times, and great flying reptiles crossed its water.
Again the region approached sea-level and accumulated, above its new
limestones, other beds of sands. New river systems formed and brought
other accumulations from distant highlands. It was then a low swampy
plain of enormous size, whose northern limits reached Montana, and which
touched what now is Kansas on its east. Upon the borders of its swamps,
in Cretaceous times, lived gigantic reptiles, the Dinosaurs and their
ungainly companions whose bones are found to-day in several places.
For the last time the region sank and a shallow sea swept from the Gulf
of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Again new limestones formed, and as the
surface very slowly rose for the last time at the close of the
Cretaceous Period many new deposits were added to the scenic exhibit of
to-day.
Meantime other startling changes were making which extended over a lapse
of time which human mind cannot grasp. Responding to increasing
pressures from below, the continent was folding from north to south. The
miracle of the making of the Rockies was enacting.
During all of Tertiary times earth movements of tremendous energy rocked
and folded the crust and hastened change. The modern Sierra rose upon
the eroded ruins of its predecessor, again shutting off the
moisture-laden western winds and turning the southwest again into a
desert. One of the mountain-building impulses spread eastward from the
Sierra to the Wasatch Mountains, but Nature's project for this vast
granite-cored tableland never was realized, for continually its central
sections caved and fell. And so it happened that the eastern edge of the
Sierra and the western edge of the Wasatch Mountains became the
precipitous edges, thousands of feet high, of a mountain-studded desert
which to-day is called the Great Basin. It includes southeastern Oregon,
nearly all of Nevada, the western half of Utah, and a large area in the
south of California, besides parts of Idaho and Wyoming. It is 880 miles
north and south and 572 miles wide. Its elevation is five thousand feet,
more or less, and its area more than two hundred thousand square miles.
This enormous bowl contained no outlet to the sea, and the rivers which
flowed into it from all its mountainous borders created a prehistoric
lake with an area of fifty-four thousand square miles which was named
Lake Bonneville after the army officer whose adventures in 1833 were
narrated by Washington Irving; but it was Fremont who first clearly
described it. Lake Bonneville has evaporated and disappeared, but in its
place are many salty lakes, the greatest of which is Great Salt Lake in
Utah. Attenuated rivers still flow into the Great Basin, but are lost in
their sands. The greatest of these, the Mohave River, is a hundred miles
long, but is not often seen because it hides its waters chiefly under
the surface sands. Lake Bonneville's prehistoric beaches exist to-day.
Transcontinental passengers by rail cross its ancient bed, but few know
it.
The Great Basin to-day is known to travellers principally by the many
lesser deserts which compose it, deserts separated from each other by
lesser mountain ranges and low divides. Its southern and southeastern
boundaries are the plateaus and mountains which form the northern
watershed of the muddy Colorado River and its confluents. South of the
Colorado, the plateaus of New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California
gradually subside to the Rio Grande.
During this period and the Quaternary which followed it, volcanoes
appeared in many places; their dead cones diversify our modern
landscape. It was during the Quaternary Period, in whose latter end
lives man, that erosion dug the mighty canyons of our great southwest.
The Colorado was sweeping out the Grand Canyon at the same time that,
far in the north, the glaciers of the Great Ice Age were carving from
Algonkian shales and limestones the gorgeous cirques and valleys of
Glacier National Park.
XVI
A PAGEANT OF CREATION
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, ARIZONA. AREA, 958 SQUARE MILES
There is only one Grand Canyon. It lies in northern Arizona, and the
Colorado River, one of the greatest of American rivers, flows through
its inner gorge. It must not be confused with the Grand Canyon of the
Yellowstone, or with any of the _grande canyons_ which the Spaniards so
named because they were big canyons.
The Grand Canyon is 217 miles long, 8 to 12 miles wide at the rim, and
more than a mile deep. It is the Colossus of canyons, by far the hugest
example of stream erosion in the world. It is gorgeously colored. It is
by common consent the most stupendous spectacle in the world. It may be
conceived as a mountain range reversed. Could its moulded image,
similarly colored, stand upon the desert floor, it would be a spectacle
second only to the vast mould itself.
More than a hundred thousand persons visit the Grand Canyon each year.
In other lands it is our most celebrated scenic possession. It was made
a national park in 1919.
I
The Grand Canyon is not of America but of the world. Like the Desert of
Sahara and the monster group of the Himalayas, it is so entirely the
greatest example of its kind that it refuses limits. This is true of it
also as a spectacle; far truer, in fact, for, if it is possible to
compare things so dissimilar, in this respect certainly it will lead all
others. None see it without being deeply moved--all to silence, some
even to tears. It is charged to the rim with emotion; but the emotion of
the first view varies. Some stand astounded at its vastness. Others are
stupefied and search their souls in vain for definition. Some tremble.
Some are uplifted with a sense of appalling beauty. For a time the souls
of all are naked in the presence.
This reaction is apparent in the writings of those who have visited it;
no other spectacle in America has inspired so large a literature.
Joaquin Miller found it fearful, full of glory, full of God. Charles
Dudley Warner pronounced it by far the most sublime of earthly
spectacles. William Winter saw it a pageant of ghastly desolation.
Hamlin Garland found its lines chaotic and disturbing but its
combinations of color and shadow beautiful. Upon John Muir it bestowed a
new sense of earth's beauty.
Marius R. Campbell, whose geological researches have familiarized him
with Nature's scenic gamut, told me that his first day on the rim left
him emotionally cold; it was not until he had lived with the spectacle
that realization slowly dawned. I think this is the experience of very
many, a fact which renders still more tragic a prevailing public
assumption that the Grand Canyon is a one-day stop in a transcontinental
journey.
It is not surprising that wonder is deeply stirred by its vastness, its
complexity, and the realization of Nature's titanic labor in its making.
It is far from strange that extreme elation sometimes follows upon a
revelation so stupendous and different. That beauty so extraordinary
should momentarily free emotion from control is natural enough. But why
the expressions of repulsion not infrequently encountered upon the
printed pages of the past? I have personally inquired of many of our own
day without finding one, even among the most sensitive, whom it
repelled. Perhaps a clew is discovered in the introductory paragraphs of
an inspired word-picture which the late Clarence E. Dutton hid in a
technical geological paper of 1880. "The lover of nature," he wrote,
"whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or
New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or
Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock and dwell there
with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things
he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never
see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but
beautiful or noble. Whatsoever might be bold or striking would seem at
first only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned
to shun as tawdry or bizarre. The tones and shades, modest and tender,
subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight,
would be the ones which are conspicuously absent."
I suspect that this repulsion, this horror, as several have called it,
was born of the conventions of an earlier generation which bound
conceptions of taste and beauty, as of art, dress, religion, and human
relations generally, in shackles which do not exist in these days of
individualism and broad horizons. To-day we see the Grand Canyon with
profound astonishment but without prejudice. Its amazing size, its
bewildering configuration, its unprecedented combinations of color
affect the freed and elated consciousness of our times as another and
perhaps an ultimate revelation in nature of law, order, and beauty.
In these pages I shall make no attempt to describe the Grand Canyon.
Nature has written her own description, graving it with a pen of water
in rocks which run the series of the eternal ages. Her story can be read
only in the original; translations are futile. Here I shall try only to
help a little in the reading.
II
The Grand Canyon was cut by one of the great rivers of the continent,
the Colorado, which enters Arizona from the north and swings sharply
west; thence it turns south to form most of Arizona's western boundary,
and a few miles over the Mexican border empties into the head of the
Gulf of California. It drains three hundred thousand square miles of
Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. It is formed in Utah by the
confluence of the Green and the Grand Rivers. Including the greater of
these, the Green River, it makes a stream fifteen hundred miles in
length which collects the waters of the divide south and east of the
Great Basin and of many ranges of the Rocky Mountain system. The Grand
River, for its contribution, collects the drainage of the Rockies'
mighty western slopes in Colorado.
The lower reaches of these great tributaries and practically all of the
Colorado River itself flow through more than five hundred miles of
canyons which they were obliged to dig through the slowly upheaving
sandstone plateaus in order to maintain their access to the sea.
Succeeding canyons bear names designating their scenic or geologic
character. Progressively southward they score deeper into the strata of
the earth's crust until, as they approach their climax, they break
through the bottom of the Paleozoic limestone deep into the heart of the
Archean gneiss. This limestone trench is known as the Marble Canyon, the
Archean trench as the Granite Gorge. The lower part of the Marble Canyon
and all the Granite Gorge, together with their broad, vividly colored
and fantastically carved upper canyon ten miles across from rim to rim,
a mile high from water to rim-level, the climax of the world of canyons
and the most gorgeous spectacle on earth, is the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado. It lies east and west in the northern part of the State.
To comprehend it, recall one of those ditches which we all have seen
crossing level fields or bordering country roads. It is broad from rim
to rim and deeply indented by the side washes which follow heavy
showers. Its sides descend by terraces, steep in places with gentle
slopes between the steeps, and on these slopes are elevations of rock or
mud which floods have failed to wash away. Finally, in the middle, is
the narrow trench which now, in dry weather, carries a small trickling
stream. Not only does this ditch roughly typify the Grand Canyon,
reproducing in clumsy, inefficient miniature the basic characteristics
of its outline, but it also is identical in the process of its making.
Imagining it in cross-section, we find its sides leading down by
successive precipices to broad intermediate sloping surfaces. We find
upon these broad surfaces enormous mesas and lofty, ornately carved
edifices of rock which the floods have left standing. We find in its
middle, winding snakelike from side to side, the narrow gorge of the
river.
The parallel goes further. It is not at all necessary to conceive that
either the wayside ditch or the Grand Canyon was once brimful of madly
dashing waters. On the contrary, neither may ever have held much greater
streams than they hold to-day. In both cases the power of the stream has
been applied to downward trenching; the greater spreading sides were cut
by the erosion of countless side streamlets resulting temporarily from
periods of melting snow or of local rainfall. It was these streamlets
which cut the side canyons and left standing between them the bold
promontories of the rim. It was these streamlets, working from the
surface, which separated portions of these promontories from the plateau
and turned them into isolated mesas. It was the erosion of these mesas
which turned many of them into the gigantic and fantastic temples and
towers which rise from the canyon's bowl.
Standing upon the rim and overlooking miles of these successive
precipices and intermediate templed levels, we see the dark gorge of the
granite trench, and, deep within it, wherever its windings permit a view
of its bottom, a narrow ribbon of brown river. This is the Colorado--a
rill; but when we have descended six thousand feet of altitude to its
edge we find it a rushing turbulent torrent of muddy water. Its average
width is three hundred feet; its average depth thirty feet. It is
industriously digging the Grand Canyon still deeper, and perhaps as
rapidly as it ever dug since it entered the granite.