THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL
[Sidenote: Early geological days.]
[Sidenote: The former Gulf.]
In the ancient days when the shore of the Pacific was young, when the
white sierras had only recently been heaved upward and the desert
itself was in a formative stage, the ocean reached much farther inland
than at the present time. It pushed through many a pass and flooded
many a depression in the sands, as its wave-marks upon granite bases
and its numerous beaches still bear witness. In those days that portion
of the Colorado Desert known as the Salton Basin did not exist. The
Gulf of California extended as far north as the San Bernardino Range
and as far west as the Pass of San Gorgonio. Its waters stood deep
where now lies the road-bed of the Southern Pacific railway, and all
the country from Indio almost to the Colorado River was a blue sea. The
Bowl was full. No one knew if it had a bottom or imagined that it would
ever be emptied of water and given over to the drifting sands.
[Sidenote: Sea-beaches on desert.]
[Sidenote: Harbors and reefs.]
No doubt the tenure of the sea in this Salton Basin was of long
duration. The sand-dunes still standing along the northern shore--fifty
feet high and shining like hills of chalk--were not made in a month;
nor was the long shelving beach beneath them--still covered with
sea-shells and pebbles and looking as though washed by the waves only
yesterday--formed in a day. Both dunes and beach are plainly visible
winding across the desert for many miles. The southwestern shore,
stretching under a spur of the Coast Range, shows the same formation in
its beach-line. The old bays and lagoons that led inland from the sea,
the river-beds that brought down the surface waters from the mountains,
the inlets and natural harbors are all in place. Some of them are
drifted half full of sand, but they have not lost their identity. And
out in the sea-bed still stand masses of cellular rock, honeycombed and
water-worn (and now for many years wind-worn), showing the places where
once rose the reefs of the ancient sea.
[Sidenote: Indian remains.]
[Sidenote: The Cocopas.]
These are the only records that tell of the sea’s occupation. The
Indians have no tradition about it. Yet when the sea was there the
Indian tribes were there also. Along the bases of the San Bernardino
and San Jacinto Ranges there are indications of cave-dwelling,
rock-built squares that doubtless were fortified camps, heaps of stone
that might have been burial-mounds. Everywhere along the ancient shores
and beaches you pick up pieces of pottery, broken ollas, stone pestels
and mortars, axe-heads, obsidian arrow-heads, flint spear-points, agate
beads. There is not the slightest doubt that the shores were inhabited.
It was a warm nook, accessible to the mountains and the Pacific; in
fact, just the place where tribes would naturally gather. Branches of
the Yuma Indians, like the Cocopas, overran all this country when the
Padres first crossed the desert; and it was probably their forefathers
who lived by the shores of this Upper Gulf. No doubt they were
fishermen, traders and fighters, like their modern representatives on
Tiburon Island; and no doubt they fished and fought and were happy by
the shores of the mountain-locked sea.
[Sidenote: The Colorado River.]
[Sidenote: The delta dam.]
But there came a time when there was a disturbance of the existing
conditions in the Upper Gulf. Century after century the Colorado River
had been carrying down to the sea its burden of sedimental sand and
silt. It had been entering the Gulf far down on the eastern side at
an acute angle. Gradually its deposits had been building up, banking
up; and gradually the river had been pushing them out and across the
Gulf in a southwesterly direction. Finally there was formed a delta
dam stretching from shore to shore. The tides no longer brought water
up and around the bases of the big mountains. Communication with the
sea was cut off and what was once the top of the Gulf changed into an
inland lake. It now had no water supply from below, it lay under a
burning sun, and day by day evaporation carried it away.
[Sidenote: The inland lake.]
No one knows how many days, how many years, elapsed before the
decrease of the water became noticeable. Doubtless the lake shrunk
away slowly from the white face of the sand-dunes and the red walls
of the mountains. The river-mouths that opened into the lake narrowed
themselves to small stream-beds. The shelving beaches where the waves
had fallen lazily year after year, pushing themselves over the sand in
beautiful water-mirrors, shone bare and dry in the sunlight. The ragged
reefs, over which the chop sea had tumbled and tossed so long, lifted
their black hulks out of the water and with their hosts of barnacles
and sea-life became a part of the land.
[Sidenote: The first fall.]
[Sidenote: Springs and wells in the sea-bed.]
[Sidenote: The New River.]
The waters of the great inland lake fell perhaps a hundred feet and
then they made a pause. The exposed shores dried out. They baked hard
in the sun, and were slowly ground down to sand and powdered silt
by the action of the winds. The waters made a long pause. They were
receiving reinforcements from some source. Possibly there was more
rainfall in those days than now, and the streams entering the lake from
the mountains were much larger. Again there may have been underground
springs. There are flowing wells to-day in this old sea-bed--wells
that cast up water salter than the sea itself. No one knows their
fountain-head. Perhaps by underground channels the water creeps through
from the Gulf, or comes from mountain reservoirs and turns saline by
passing through beds of salt. These are the might-bes; but it is far
more probable that the Colorado River at high water had made a breach
of some kind in the dam of its own construction and had poured overflow
water into the lake by way of a dry channel called the New River. The
bed of this river runs northward from below the boundary-line of Lower
California; and in 1893, during a rise in the Colorado, the waters
rushed in and flooded the whole of what is called the Salton Basin.
When the Colorado receded, the basin soon dried out again.
[Sidenote: New beaches.]
It was undoubtedly some accident of this kind that called the halt in
the original recession. During the interim the lake had time to form
new shores where the waves pounded and washed on the gravel as before
until miles upon miles of new beach--pebbled, shelled, and sloping
downward with great uniformity--came into existence. This secondary
beach is intact to-day and looks precisely like the primary except
that it is not quite so large. Across the basin, along the southern
mountains, the second water-tracery is almost as apparent as the first.
The rocks are eaten in long lines by wave-action, and are honeycombed
by the ceaseless energies of the zoöphite.
[Sidenote: The second fall.]
Nor was the change in beach and rock alone. New bays and harbors were
cut out from where the sea had been, new river-channels were opened
down to the shrunken lake, new lagoons were spread over the flat
places. Nature evidently made a great effort to repair the damage
and adapt the lake to its new conditions. And the Indians, too,
accepted the change. There are many indications in broken pottery,
arrow-heads, and mortars that the aboriginal tribes moved down to the
new beach and built wickiups by the diminished waters. And the old
fishing-foraging-fighting life was probably resumed.
[Sidenote: The third beach.]
[Sidenote: The failing water.]
Then once more the waters went down, down, down. Step by step they
receded until the secondary beach was left a hundred feet above the
water level. Again there was a pause. Again new beaches were beaten
into shape by the waves, new bays were opened, new arroyos cut through
from above. The whole process of shore-making--the fitting of the land
to the shrunken proportions of the lake--was gone through with for
the third time; while the water supply from the river or elsewhere
was maintained in decreased volume but with some steadiness of flow.
Possibly the third halt of the receding water was not for a great
length of time. The tertiary beach is not so large as its predecessors.
There never was any strong wave-action upon it, its pebbles are few,
its faults and breaks are many. The water supply was failing, and
finally it ceased altogether.
[Sidenote: Evaporation.]
What fate for a lake in the desert receiving no supplies from river
or sea--what fate save annihilation? The hot breath of the wind blew
across the cramped water and whipped its surface into little waves;
and as each tiny point of spray rose on the crest and was lifted into
the air the fiery sunbeam caught it, and in a twinkling had evaporated
and carried it upward. Day by day this process went on over the whole
surface until there was no more sea. The hollow reefs rose high and
dark above the bed, the flat shoals of silt lifted out of the ooze,
and down in the lowest pools there was the rush and plunge of monster
tortuabas, sharks and porpoises, caught as it were in a net and vainly
struggling to get out. How strange must have seemed that landscape
when the low ridges were shining with the slime of the sea, when the
beds were strewn with _algæ_, sponges, and coral, and the shores were
whitening with salt! How strange, indeed, must have been the first
sight of the Bottom of the Bowl!
[Sidenote: Bottom of the Bowl.]
[Sidenote: Drying out of the sea-bed.]
[Sidenote: Advance of desert.]
But the sun never relaxed its fierce heat nor the wind its hot breath.
They scorched and burned the silt of the sea-bed until it baked and
cracked into blocks. Then began the wear of the winds upon the broken
edges until the blocks were reduced to dry fine powder. Finally the
desert came in. Drifts upon drifts of sand blown through the valleys
settled in the empty basin; gravel and bowlder-wash came down from
the mountains; the grease wood, the salt-bush, and the so-called
pepper-grass sprang up in isolated spots. Slowly the desert fastened
itself upon the basin. Its heat became too intense to allow the falling
rain to reach the earth, its surface was too salt and alkaline to allow
of much vegetation, it could support neither animal nor bird life; it
became more deserted than the desert itself.
[Sidenote: Below sea-level.]
[Sidenote: Desolation of the basin.]
And thus it remains to this day. When you are in the bottom of it you
are nearly three hundred feet below the level of the sea. Circling
about you to the north, south, and west are sierras, some of them
over ten thousand feet in height. These form the Rim of the Bowl. And
off to the southwest there is a side broken out of the Bowl through
which you can pass to the river and the Gulf. The basin is perhaps the
hottest place to be found anywhere on the American deserts. And it is
also the most forsaken. The bottom itself is, for the great part of
it, as flat as a table. It looks like a great plain leading up and
out to the horizon--a plain that has been ploughed and rolled smooth.
The soil is drifted silt--the deposits made by the washings from the
mountains--and is almost as fine as flour.
[Sidenote: Beauty of the sand-dunes.]
The long line of dunes at the north are just as desolate, yet they are
wonderfully beautiful. The desert sand is finer than snow, and its
curves and arches, as it builds its succession of drifts out and over
an arroyo, are as graceful as the lines of running water. The dunes are
always rhythmical and flowing in their forms; and for color the desert
has nothing that surpasses them. In the early morning, before the sun
is up, they are air-blue, reflecting the sky overhead; at noon they
are pale lines of dazzling orange-colored light, waving and undulating
in the heated air; at sunset they are often flooded with a rose or
mauve color; under a blue moonlight they shine white as icebergs in the
northern seas.
[Sidenote: Cactus and salt-bush.]
But neither the dunes nor the flats grow vegetation of consequence.
About the high edges, up near the mountain slopes, you find growths
of mesquite, palo verde, and cactus; but down in the basin there are
many miles where no weed or grass breaks the level uniformity. Not
even the salt-bush will grow in some of the areas. And this is not due
to poverty of soil but to absence of water and intense heat. Plants
cannot live by sunlight alone.
[Sidenote: Desert animals in the basin.]
[Sidenote: Birds.]
[Sidenote: Lizards and snakes.]
Nor will the desert animals inhabit an absolute waste. The coyote and
the wild-cat do not relish life in this dip in the earth. They care
little for heat and drouth, but the question of food appeals to them.
There is nothing to eat. Even the abstemious jack-rabbit finds living
here something of a difficulty. Many kinds of tracks are found in the
uncrusted silt--tracks of coyotes, gray wolves, sometimes mountain
lions--but they all run in straight trails, showing the animals to be
crossing the basin to the mountains, not prowling or hunting. So, too,
you will occasionally find birds--linnets, bobolinks, mocking-birds,
larks--but they are seen one at a time, and they look weary--like land
birds far out at sea that seek a resting-place on passing vessels. They
do not belong to the desert and are only stopping there temporarily on
some long flight. Snakes and lizards are not particular about their
abiding-place, and yet they do not care to live in a land where there
is no bush or stone to creep under. You meet with them very seldom.
Practically there is no life of any kind that is native to the place.
[Sidenote: Mirage.]
[Sidenote: The water illusion.]
Is there any beauty, other than the dunes, down in this hollow of the
desert? Yes. From a picturesque point of view it has the most wonderful
light, air, and color imaginable. You will not think so until you
see them blended in that strange illusion known as mirage. And here
is the one place in all the world where the water-mirage appears to
perfection. It does not show well over grassy or bushy ground, but over
the flat lake-beds of the desert its appearance is astonishing. Down in
the basin it is accompanied by a second illusion that makes the first
more convincing. You are below sea-level, but instead of the ground
about you sloping up and out, it apparently slopes down and away on
every side. You are in the centre of a disk or high point of ground,
and around the circumference of the disk is water--palpable, almost
tangible, water. It cannot be seen well from your horse, and fifty feet
up on a mountain side it would not be visible at all. But dismount and
you see it better; kneel down and place your cheek to the ground and
now the water seems to creep up to you. You could throw a stone into
it. The shore where the waves lap is just before you. But where is the
horizon-line? Odd enough, this vast circling sea does not always know
a horizon; it sometimes reaches up and blends into the sky without any
point of demarcation. Through the heated air you see faint outlines of
mountains, dim glimpses of foot-hills, suggestions of distance; but no
more. Across them is drawn the wavering veil of air, and the red earth
at your feet, the blue sky overhead, are but bordering bands of flat
color.
[Sidenote: Decorative landscapes.]
[Sidenote: Sensuous qualities in nature.]
And there you have the most decorative landscape in the world, a
landscape all color, a dream landscape. Painters for years have been
trying to put it upon canvas--this landscape of color, light, and air,
with form almost obliterated, merely suggested, given only as a hint of
the mysterious. Men like Corot and Monet have told us, again and again,
that in painting, clearly delineated forms of mountains, valleys,
trees, and rivers, kill the fine color-sentiment of the picture. The
great struggle of the modern landscapist is to get on with the least
possible form and to suggest everything by tones of color, shades
of light, drifts of air. Why? Because these are the most sensuous
qualities in nature and in art. The landscape that is the simplest in
form and the finest in color is by all odds the most beautiful. It is
owing to just these features that this Bowl of the desert is a thing
of beauty instead of a dreary hollow in the hills. Only one other
scene is comparable to it, and that the southern seas at sunset when
the calm ocean reflects and melts into the color-glory of the sky. It
is the same kind of beauty. Form is almost blurred out in favor of
color and air.
[Sidenote: Changing the desert.]
[Sidenote: Irrigation in the basin.]
Yet here is more beauty destined to destruction. It might be thought
that this forsaken pot-hole in the ground would never come under the
dominion of man, that its very worthlessness would be its safeguard
against civilization, that none would want it, and everyone from
necessity would let it alone. But not even the spot deserted by
reptiles shall escape the industry or the avarice (as you please) of
man. A great company has been formed to turn the Colorado River into
the sands, to reclaim this desert basin, and make it blossom as the
rose. The water is to be brought down to the basin by the old channel
of the New River. Once in reservoirs it is to be distributed over the
tract by irrigating ditches, and it is said a million acres of desert
will thus be made arable, fitted for homesteads, ready for the settler
who never remains settled.
[Sidenote: Changing the climate.]
[Sidenote: Dry air.]
A most laudable enterprise, people will say. Yes; commercially no one
can find fault with it. Money made from sand is likely to be clean
money, at any rate. And economically these acres will produce large
supplies of food. That is commendable, too, even if those for whom it
is produced waste a good half of what they already possess. And yet the
food that is produced there may prove expensive to people other than
the producers. This old sea-bed is, for its area, probably the greatest
dry-heat generator in the world because of its depression and its
barren, sandy surface. It is a furnace that whirls heat up and out of
the Bowl, over the peaks of the Coast Range into Southern California,
and eastward across the plains to Arizona and Sonora. In what measure
it is responsible for the general climate of those States cannot
be accurately summarized; but it certainly has a great influence,
especially in the matter of producing dry air. To turn this desert into
an agricultural tract would be to increase humidity, and that would be
practically to nullify the finest air on the continent.
[Sidenote: Value of the air supply.]
And why are not good air and climate as essential to human well-being
as good beef and good bread? Just now, when it is a world too late,
our Government and the forestry societies of the country are awakening
to the necessity of preserving the forests. National parks are being
created wherever possible and the cutting of timber within them is
prohibited. Why is this being done? Ostensibly to preserve the trees,
but in reality to preserve the water supply, to keep the fountain-heads
pure, to maintain a uniform stage of water in the rivers. Very proper
and right. The only pity is that it was not undertaken forty years ago.
But how is the water supply, from an economic and hygienic stand-point,
any more important than the air supply?
[Sidenote: Value of the deserts.]
Grasses, trees, shrubs, growing grain, they, too, may need good air as
well as human lungs. The deserts are not worthless wastes. You cannot
crop all creation with wheat and alfalfa. Some sections must lie fallow
that other sections may produce. Who shall say that the preternatural
productiveness of California is not due to the warm air of its
surrounding deserts? Does anyone doubt that the healthfulness of the
countries lying west of the Mississippi may be traced directly to the
dry air and heat of the deserts. They furnish health to the human; why
not strength to the plant? The deserts should never be reclaimed. They
are the breathing-spaces of the west and should be preserved forever.
[Sidenote: Destruction of natural beauty.]
[Sidenote: Effects of mining, lumbering, agriculture.]
[Sidenote: Ploughing the prairies.]
[Sidenote: “Practical men”]
To speak about sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste
one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The æsthetic sense--the
power to enjoy through the eye, the ear, and the imagination--is just
as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal
sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the
world would admit it. The “practical men,” who seem forever on the
throne, know very well that beauty is only meant for lovers and young
persons--stuff to suckle fools withal. The main affair of life is to
get the dollar, and if there is any money in cutting the throat of
Beauty, why, by all means, cut her throat. That is what the “practical
men” have been doing ever since the world began. It is not necessary
to dig up ancient history; for have we not seen, here in California
and Oregon, in our own time, the destruction of the fairest valleys
the sun ever shone upon by placer and hydraulic mining? Have we not
seen in Minnesota and Wisconsin the mightiest forests that ever raised
head to the sky slashed to pieces by the axe and turned into a waste of
tree-stumps and fallen timber? Have we not seen the Upper Mississippi,
by the destruction of the forests, changed from a broad, majestic
river into a shallow, muddy stream; and the beautiful prairies of
Dakota turned under by the plough and then allowed to run to weeds? Men
must have coal though they ruin the valleys and blacken the streams of
Pennsylvania, they must have oil though they disfigure half of Ohio
and Indiana, they must have copper if they wreck all the mountains of
Montana and Arizona, and they must have gold though they blow Alaska
into the Behring Sea. It is more than possible that the “practical
men” have gained much practice and many dollars by flaying the fair
face of these United States. They have stripped the land of its robes
of beauty, and what have they given in its place? Weeds, wire fences,
oil-derricks, board shanties and board towns--things that not even a
“practical man” can do less than curse at.
[Sidenote: Fighting wind, sand, and heat.]
[Sidenote: Nature eternal.]
[Sidenote: Return of desolation.]
And at last they have turned to the desert! It remains to be seen what
they will do with it. Reclaiming a waste may not be so easy as breaking
a prairie or cutting down a forest. And Nature will not always be
driven from her purpose. Wind, sand, and heat on Sahara have proven
hard forces to fight against; they may prove no less potent on the
Colorado. And sooner or later Nature will surely come to her own again.
Nothing human is of long duration. Men and their deeds are obliterated,
the race itself fades; but Nature goes calmly on with her projects. She
works not for man’s enjoyment, but for her own satisfaction and her own
glory. She made the fat lands of the earth with all their fruits and
flowers and foliage; and with no less care she made the desert with its
sands and cacti. She intended that each should remain as she made it.
When the locust swarm has passed, the flowers and grasses will return
to the valley; when man is gone, the sand and the heat will come back
to the desert. The desolation of the kingdom will live again, and down
in the Bottom of the Bowl the opalescent mirage will waver skyward on
wings of light, serene in its solitude, though no human eye sees nor
human tongue speaks its loveliness.