private gain. It was plastered thickly with mining claims, though the
Geological Survey showed that it contained no minerals worth mining;
mining claims helped delay. Schemers sought capital to utilize its
waters for power. Railroads were projected. Plans were drawn to run
sightseeing cars across it on wire cables. These were the interests, and
many others, which opposed the national park.
XVII
THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT
ZION NATIONAL MONUMENT, SOUTHERN UTAH. AREA, 120 SQUARE MILES
When, in the seventies, Major J.W. Powell, the daring adventurer of the
Grand Canyon, faced Salt Lake City on his return from one of his notable
geological explorations of the southwest, he laid his course by a temple
of rock "lifting its opalescent shoulders against the eastern sky." His
party first sighted it across seventy miles of a desert which "rose in a
series of Cyclopean steps." When, climbing these, they had seen the West
Temple of the Virgin revealed in the glory of vermilion body and shining
white dome, and had gazed between the glowing Gates of Little Zion into
the gorgeous valley within, these scenery-sated veterans of the Grand
Canyon and the Painted Desert passed homeward profoundly impressed and
planning quick return.
No wonder that Brigham Young, who had visited it many years before with
a party of Mormons seeking a refuge in event of Indian raids or of exile
from their Zion, Salt Lake City, had looked upon its glory as prophetic,
and named it Little Zion.
Geologists found the spot a fruitful field of study. They found it also
a masterpiece of desert beauty.
"Again we are impressed with the marvellous beauty of outline, the
infinite complication of these titanic buttes," wrote F.S. Dellenbaugh,
topographer of the Powell party, on his second visit. "It is doubtful if
in this respect the valley has its equal. Not even the Grand Canyon
offers a more varied spectacle; yet all is welded together in a superb
ensemble."
"Nothing can exceed the wondrous beauty of Little Zion Canyon," wrote
C.E. Dutton. "In its proportions it is about equal to Yosemite, but in
the nobility and beauty of its sculptures there is no comparison. It is
Hyperion to a Satyr. No wonder the fierce Mormon zealot who named it was
reminded of the Great Zion on which his fervid thoughts were bent, of
'houses not built with hands, eternal in the heavens.'"
And Doctor G.K. Gilbert, whose intimate study of its recesses has become
a geological classic, declared it "the most wonderful defile" that it
had been even his experienced fortune to behold.
Technical literature contains other outbursts of enthusiastic
admiration, some of eloquence, hidden, however, among pages so
incomprehensible to the average lover of the sublime in Nature that the
glory of Little Zion was lost in its very discovery. So remote did it
lie from the usual lines of travel and traffic that, though its
importance resulted in its conservation as a national monument in 1909,
it was six or seven years more before its fame as a spectacle of the
first order began to get about. The tales of adventurous explorers, as
usual, were discounted. It was not until agencies seeking new tourist
attractions sent parties to verify reports that the public gaze was
centred upon the canyon's supreme loveliness.
[Illustration]
To picture Zion one must recall that the great plateau in which the
Virgin River has sunk these canyons was once enormously higher than now.
The erosion of hundreds of thousands, or, if you please, millions of
years, has cut down and still is cutting down the plateau. These
"Cyclopean steps," each step the thickness of a stratum or a series of
strata of hardened sands, mark progressive stages in the decomposition
of the whole.
Little Zion Canyon is an early stage in Nature's process of levelling
still another sandstone step, that is all; this one fortunately of many
gorgeous hues. From the top of this layer we may look down thousands of
vertical feet into the painted canyon whose river still is sweeping out
the sands that Nature chisels from the cliffs; or from the canyon's
bottom we may look up thousands of feet to the cliffed and serrated top
of the doomed plateau. These ornate precipices were carved by trickling
water and tireless winds. These fluted and towered temples of master
decoration were disclosed when watery chisels cut away the sands that
formerly had merged them with the ancient rock, just as the Lion of
Lucerne was disclosed for the joy of the world when Thorwaldsen's chisel
chipped away the Alpine rock surrounding its unformed image.
The colors are even more extraordinary than the forms. The celebrated
Vermilion Cliff, which for more than a hundred miles streaks the desert
landscape with vivid red, here combines spectacularly with the White
Cliff, another famous desert feature--two thousand feet of the red
surmounted by a thousand feet of the white. These constitute the body of
color.
But there are other colors. The Vermilion Cliff rests upon the so-called
Painted Desert stratum, three hundred and fifty feet of a more insistent
red relieved by mauve and purple shale. That in turn rests upon a
hundred feet of brown conglomerate streaked with gray, the grave of
reptiles whose bones have survived a million years or more. And that
rests upon the greens and grays and yellows of the Belted Shales.
Nor is this all, for far in the air above the wonderful White Cliff rise
in places six hundred feet of drab shales and chocolate limestones
intermixed with crimsons whose escaping dye drips in broad vertical
streaks across the glistening white. And even above that, in places, lie
remnants of the mottled, many-colored beds of St. Elmo shales and
limestones in whose embrace, a few hundred miles away, lie embedded the
bones of many monster dinosaurs of ages upon ages ago.
Through these successive layers of sands and shales and limestones, the
deposits of a million years of earth's evolution, colored like a Roman
sash, glowing in the sun like a rainbow, the Virgin River has cut a
vertical section, and out of its sides the rains of centuries of
centuries have detached monster monoliths and temples of marvellous size
and fantastic shape, upon whose many-angled surfaces water and wind have
sculptured ten thousand fanciful designs and decorations.
The way in to this desert masterpiece of southern Utah is a hundred
miles of progressive preparation. From railroad to canyon there is not
an unuseful mile or hour. It is as if all were planned, step by step, to
make ready the mind of the traveller to receive the revelation with
fullest comprehension.
To one approaching who does not know the desert, the motion-picture on
the screen of the car-window is exciting in its mystery. These vast arid
bottomlands of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, girded by mountain groups
and ranges as arid as the sands from which they lift their tawny sides,
provoke suggestive questions of the past.
[Illustration: THE WESTERN TEMPLE THE EASTERN TEMPLE OUTLINES OF THE
WESTERN AND EASTERN TEMPLES, ZION NATIONAL MONUMENT
_From drawings by William H. Holmes_]
In this receptive mood the traveller reaches Lund and an automobile.
The ride to Cedar City, where he spends the night, shows him the
sage-dotted desert at close range. His horizon is one of bare, rugged
mountains. In front of him rise the "Cyclopean steps" in long,
irregular, deeply indented sweeps. The vivid Pink Cliff, which, had it
not long since been washed away from Little Zion, would have added
another tier of color to its top, here, on the desert, remains a distant
horizon. The road climbs Lake Bonneville's southern shore, and, at Cedar
City, reaches the glorified sandstones.
From Cedar City to the canyon one sweeps through Mormon settlements
founded more than sixty years ago, a region of stream-watered valleys
known of old as Dixie. The road is part of the Arrowhead Trail, once in
fact a historic trail, now a motor-highway between Salt Lake and Los
Angeles. The valleys bloom. Pomegranates, figs, peaches, apricots,
melons, walnuts, and almonds reach a rare perfection. Cotton, which
Brigham Young started here as an experiment in 1861, is still grown.
Lusty cottonwood-trees line the banks of the little rivers. Cedars dot
the valleys and cover thickly the lower hills. And everywhere, on every
side, the arid cliffs close in. The Pink Cliff has been left behind, but
the Vermilion Cliff constantly appears. The White Cliff enters and
stays. Long stretches of road overlie one and another colored stratum;
presently the ground is prevailingly red, with here and there reaches of
mauve, yellow, green, and pink.
Cedar City proves to be a quaint, straggling Mormon village with a touch
of modern enterprise; south of Cedar City the villages lack the
enterprise. The houses are of a gray composition resembling adobe, and
many of them are half a century old and more. Dilapidated square forts,
reminders of pioneer struggles with the Indians, are seen here and
there. Compact Mormon churches are in every settlement, however small.
The men are bearded, coatless, and wear baggy trousers, suggestive of
Holland. Bronzed and deliberate women, who drive teams and work the
fields with the men, wear old-fashioned sunbonnets. Many of these people
have never seen a railroad-train. Newspapers are scarce and long past
date. Here Mormonism of the older fashion is a living religion,
affecting the routine of daily life.
Dixie is a land of plenty, but it is a foreign land. It is reminiscent,
with many differences, of an Algerian oasis. The traveller is immensely
interested. Somehow these strange primitive villages, these simple,
earnest, God-fearing people, merge into unreality with the desert, the
sage-dotted mountains, the cedar-covered slopes, the blooming valleys,
the colored sands, and the vivid cliffs.
Through Bellevue, Toquerville, the ruins of Virgin City, Rockville, and
finally to Springdale winds the road. Meantime the traveller has speeded
south under the Hurricane Cliff, which is the ragged edge left when all
the land west of it sank two thousand feet during some geologic time
long past. He reaches the Virgin River where it emerges from the great
cliffs in whose recesses it is born, and whence it carries in its broad
muddy surge the products of their steady disintegration.
From here on, swinging easterly up-stream, sensation hastens to its
climax. Here the Hurricane Cliff sends aloft an impressive butte painted
in slanting colors and capped with black basalt. Farther on a rugged
promontory striped with vivid tints pushes out from the southern wall
nearly to the river's brink. The cliffs on both sides of the river are
carved from the stratum which geologists call the Belted Shales.
Greenish-grays, brownish-yellows, many shades of bright red, are
prominent; it is hard to name a color or shade which is not represented
in its horizontal bands. "The eye tires and the mind flags in their
presence," writes Professor Willis T. Lee. "To try to realize in an
hour's time the beauty and variety of detail here presented is as
useless as to try to grasp the thoughts expressed in whole rows of
volumes by walking through a library."
Far up the canyon which North Creek pushes through this banded cliff,
two towering cones of glistening white are well named Guardian
Angels--of the stream which roars between their feet. Eagle Crag, which
Moran painted, looms into view. On the south appears the majestic
massing of needle-pointed towers which Powell named the Pinnacles of the
Virgin. The spectacular confuses with its brilliant variations.
At the confluence of the Virgin River and its North Fork, known of old
as the Parunuweap and the Mukuntuweap, the road sweeps northward up the
Mukuntuweap. There have been differing reports of the meaning of this
word, which gave the original name to the national monument. It has
been popularly accepted as meaning "Land of God," but John R. Wallis, of
St. George, Utah, has traced it to its original Indian source.
Mukuntuweap, he writes, means "Land of the Springs," and Parunuweap
"Land of the Birds."
Reaching Springdale, at the base of the Vermilion Cliff, the traveller
looks up-stream to the valley mouth through which the river emerges from
the cliffs, and a spectacle without parallel meets his eye. Left of the
gorgeous entrance rises the unbelievable West Temple of the Virgin, and,
merging with it from behind, loom the lofty Towers of the Virgin.
Opposite these, and back from the canyon's eastern brink, rises the
loftier and even more majestic East Temple of the Virgin. Between them
he sees a perspective of red and white walls, domes, and pinnacles which
thrills him with expectation.
And so, fully prepared in mind and spirit, awed and exultant, he enters
Zion.
Few natural objects which have been described so seldom have provoked
such extravagant praise as the West Temple. It is seen from a foreground
of gliding river, cottonwood groves, and talus slopes dotted with
manzanita, sage, cedars, and blooming cactus. From a stairway of mingled
yellows, reds, grays, mauves, purples, and chocolate brown, it springs
abruptly four thousand feet. Its body is a brilliant red. Its upper
third is white. It has the mass and proportions, the dignity and
grandeur, of a cathedral. It is supremely difficult to realize that it
was not designed, so true to human conception are the upright form and
mass of its central structure, the proportioning and modelling of its
extensive wings and buttresses. On top of the lofty central rectangle
rests, above its glistening white, a low squared cap of deepest red. It
is a temple in the full as well as the noblest sense of the word.
The East Temple, which rises directly opposite and two miles back from
the rim, is a fitting companion. It is a thousand feet higher. Its
central structure is a steep truncated cone capped like the West Temple.
Its wings are separated half-way down, one an elongated pyramid and the
other a true cone, both of magnificent size and bulk but truly
proportioned to the central mass. Phrase does not convey the suggestion
of architectural calculation in both of these stupendous monuments. One
can easily believe that the Mormon prophet in naming them saw them the
designed creations of a personal deity.
A more definite conception of Nature's gigantic processes follows upon
realization that these lofty structures once joined across the canyon,
stratum for stratum, color for color. The rock that joined them,
disintegrated by the frosts and rains, has passed down the muddy current
of the Virgin, down the surging tide of the Colorado, through the Grand
Canyon, and into the Pacific. Some part of these sands doubtless helped
to build the peninsula of Lower California.
Passing the gates the traveller stands in a trench of nearly
perpendicular sides more than half a mile deep, half a mile wide at the
bottom, a mile wide from crest to crest. The proportions and
measurements suggest Yosemite, but there is little else in common. These
walls blaze with color. On the west the Streaked Wall, carved from the
White Cliff, is stained with the drip from the red and drab and
chocolate shales and limestones not yet wholly washed from its top. It
is a vivid thing, wonderfully eroded. Opposite is the Brown Wall, rich
in hue, supporting three stupendous structures of gorgeous color, two of
which are known as the Mountain of the Sun and the Watchman. Together
they are the Sentinels. Passing these across a plaza apparently
broadened for their better presentation rise on the west the Three
Patriarchs, Yosemite-like in form, height, and bulk, but not in
personality or color. The brilliance of this wonder-spot passes
description.
Here the canyon contracts, and we come to the comfortable hotel-camp,
terminal of the automobile journey. It is on the river side in a shady
alcove of the east wall near a spring. Here horses may be had for
exploration.
A mile above the camp stands one of the most remarkable monoliths of the
region. El Gobernador is a colossal truncated dome, red below and white
above. The white crown is heavily marked in two directions, suggesting
the web and woof of drapery. Directly opposite, a lesser monolith,
nevertheless gigantic, is suggestively if sentimentally called Angel's
Landing. A natural bridge which is still in Nature's workshop is one of
the interesting spectacles of this vicinity. Its splendid arch is fully
formed, but the wall against which it rests its full length remains,
broken through in one spot only. How many thousands or hundreds of
thousands of years will be required to wipe away the wall and leave the
bridge complete is for those to guess who will.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Douglas White_
EL GOBERNADOR, ZION NATIONAL MONUMENT
Three thousand feet high; the lower two thousand feet is a brilliant
red, the upper thousand feet is white]
Here also is the valley end of a wire cable which passes upward
twenty-five hundred feet to cross a break in the wall to a forest on the
mesa's top. Lumber is Dixie's most hardly furnished need. For years sawn
timbers have been cabled down into the valley and carted to the villages
of the Virgin River.
In some respects the most fascinating part of Little Zion is still
beyond. A mile above El Gobernador the river swings sharply west and
doubles on itself. Raspberry Bend is far nobler than its name implies,
and the Great Organ which the river here encircles exacts no imaginative
effort. Beyond this the canyon narrows rapidly. The road has long since
stopped, and soon the trail stops. Presently the river, now a shrunken
stream, concealing occasional quicksands, offers the only footing. The
walls are no less lofty, no less richly colored, and the weary traveller
works his difficult way forward.
There will come a time if he persists when he may stand at the bottom of
a chasm more than two thousand feet deep and, nearly touching the walls
on either side, look up and see no sky.
"At the water's edge the walls are perpendicular," writes Doctor G.K.
Gilbert, of the U.S. Geological Survey, who first described it, "but in
the deeper parts they open out toward the top. As we entered and found
our outlook of sky contracted--as we had never before seen it between
canyon cliffs--I measured the aperture above, and found it thirty-five
degrees. We had thought this a minimum, but soon discovered our error.
Nearer and nearer the walls approached, and our strip of blue narrowed
down to twenty degrees, then ten, and at last was even intercepted by
the overhanging rocks. There was, perhaps, no point from which, neither
forward nor backward, could we discover a patch of sky, but many times
our upward view was completely cut off by the interlocking of the walls,
which, remaining nearly parallel to each other, warped in and out as
they ascended."
Here he surprises the secret of the making of Zion.
"As a monument of denudation, this chasm is an example of downward
erosion by sand-bearing water. The principle on which the cutting
depends is almost identical with that of the marble saw, but the sand
grains, instead of being embedded in rigid iron, are carried by a
flexible stream of water. By gravity they have been held against the
bottom of the cut, so that they should make it vertical, but the current
has carried them, in places, against one side or the other, and so far
modified the influence of gravity that the cut undulates somewhat in its
vertical section, as well as in its horizontal."
[Illustration: _From a photograph by the U.S. Geological Survey_
ZION CANYON FROM THE RIM]
[Illustration: THE THREE PATRIARCHS, ZION CANYON
These red-and-white structures rise more than two thousand feet above
the canyon floor]
This, then, is how Nature began, on the original surface of the
plateau, perhaps with the output of a spring shower, to dig this whole
mighty spectacle for our enjoyment to-day. We may go further. We may
imagine the beginning of the titanic process that dug the millions of
millions of chasms, big and little, contributing to the mighty Colorado,
that dug the Grand Canyon itself, that reduced to the glorified thing it
now is the enormous plateau of our great southwest, which would have
been many thousands of feet higher than the highest pinnacle of Little
Zion had not erosion more than counteracted the uplifting of the
plateau.
Little else need be said to complete this picture. The rains and melting
snows of early spring produce mesa-top torrents which pour into the
valley and hasten for a period the processes of decorating the walls and
levelling the plateau. So it happens that waterfalls of power and beauty
then enrich this wondrous spectacle. But this added beauty is not for
the tourist, who may come in comfort only after its disappearance.
But springs are many. Trickling from various levels in the walls, they
develop new tributary gorges. Gushing from the foundations, they create
alcoves and grottos which are in sharp contrast with their desert
environment, enriching by dampness the colors of the sandstone and
decorating these refreshment-places with trailing ferns and flowering
growths. In these we see the origin of the Indian name, Mukuntuweap,
Land of the Springs.
The Indians, however, always stood in awe of Little Zion. They entered
it, but feared the night.
In 1918 President Wilson changed the name from Mukuntuweap to Zion. At
the same time he greatly enlarged the reservation. Zion National
Monument now includes a large area of great and varied desert
magnificence, including the sources and canyons of two other streams
besides Mukuntuweap.
XVIII
HISTORIC MONUMENTS OF THE SOUTHWEST
Eleven national monuments in the States of Arizona, New Mexico, and
Colorado illustrate the history of our southwest from the times when
prehistoric man dwelt in caves hollowed in desert precipices down
through the Spanish fathers' centuries of self-sacrifice and the Spanish
explorers' romantic search for the Quivira and the Seven Cities of
Cibola.
The most striking feature of the absorbing story of the Spanish
occupation is its twofold inspiration. Hand in hand the priest and the
soldier boldly invaded the desert. The passion of the priest was the
saving of souls, and the motive of the soldier was the greed of gold.
The priest deprecated the soldier; the soldier despised the priest. Each
used the other for the realization of his own purposes. The zealous
priest, imposing his religion upon the shrinking Indian, did not
hesitate to invoke the soldier's aid for so holy a purpose; the soldier
used the gentle priest to cloak the greedy business of wringing wealth
from the frugal native. Together, they hastened civilization.
Glancing for a moment still further back, the rapacious hordes already
had gutted the rich stores of Central America and the northern regions
of South America. The rush of the lustful conqueror was astonishingly
swift. Columbus himself was as eager for gold as he was zealous for
religion. From the discovery of America scarcely twenty years elapsed
before Spanish armies were violently plundering the Caribbean Islands,
ruthlessly subjugating Mexico, overrunning Venezuela, and eagerly
seeking tidings of the reputed wealth of Peru. The air was supercharged
with reports of treasure, and no reports were too wild for belief;
myths, big and little, ran amuck. El Dorado, the gilded man of rumor,
became the dream, then the belief, of the times; presently a whole
nation was conceived clothed in dusted gold. The myth of the Seven
Cities of Cibola, each a city of vast treasure, the growth of years of
rumor, seems to have perfected itself back home in Spain. The twice-born
myth of Quivira, city of gold, which cost thousands of lives and
hundreds of thousands of Spanish ducats, lives even to-day in remote
neighborhoods of the southwest.