THE SILENT RIVER
[Sidenote: Rise of the Colorado.]
[Sidenote: In the canyon.]
[Sidenote: On the desert.]
The career of the Colorado, from its rise in the Wind River Mountains
in Wyoming to its final disappearance in the Gulf of California, seems
almost tragic in its swift transitions. It starts out so cheerily upon
its course; it is so clear and pure, so sparkling with sunshine and
spirit. It dashes down mountain valleys, gurgles under bowlders, swirls
over waterfalls, flashes through ravines and gorges. With its sweep
and glide and its silvery laugh it seems to lead a merry life. But too
soon it plunges into precipitous canyons and enters upon its fierce
struggle with the encompassing rock. Now it boils and foams, leaps and
strikes, thunders and shatters. For hundreds of miles it wears and
worries and undermines the rock to its destruction. During the long
centuries it has cut down into the crust of the earth five thousand
feet. But ever the stout walls keep casting it back, keep churning it
into bubbles, beating it into froth. At last, its canyon course run,
exhausted and helpless, it is pushed through the escarpments, thrust
out upon the desert, to find its way to the sea as best it can. Its
spirit is broken, its vivacity is extinguished, its color is deepened
to a dark red--the trail of blood that leads up to the death. Wearily
now it drifts across the desert without a ripple, without a moan. Like
a wounded snake it drags its length far down the long wastes of sand to
where the blue waves are flashing on the Californian Gulf. And there it
meets--obliteration.
[Sidenote: The lower river.]
After the clash and roar of the conflict in the canyons how impressive
seems the stillness of the desert, how appalling the unbroken silence
of the lower river! Day after day it moves seaward, but without a
sound. You start at its banks to find no waves, no wash upon gravel
beaches, no rush of water over shoals. Instead of the soothing
murmur of breaking falls there is at times the boil of currents from
below--waters flung up sullenly and soon flattened into drifting
nothingness by their own weight.
[Sidenote: Sluggish movement.]
[Sidenote: Stillness of river.]
And how heavily the stream moves! Its load of silt is gradually
settling to the bottom, yet still the water seems to drag upon the
shores. Every reef of sand, every island of mud, every overhanging
willow or cottonwood or handful of arrow-weed holds out a restraining
hand. But slowly, patiently, winding about obstructions, cutting out
new channels, creeping where it may not run, the bubbleless water works
its way to the sea. The night-winds steal along its shores and pass in
and out among its sedges, but there are no whispering voices; and the
stars emerge and shine upon the flat floor of water, but there is no
lustre. The drear desolation of it! The blare of morning sunlight does
not lift the pall, nor the waving illusions of the mirage break the
stillness. The Silent River moves on carrying desolation with it; and
at every step the waters grow darker, darker with the stain of red--red
the hue of decay.
[Sidenote: The river’s name.]
[Sidenote: Its red color.]
It was not through paucity of imagination that the old Spaniards gave
the name--Colorado.[4] During the first fifty years after its discovery
the river was christened many times, but the name that finally clung to
it was the one that gave accurate and truthful description. You may
see on the face of the globe numerous muddy Missouris, blue Rhones, and
yellow Tibers; but there is only one red river and that the Colorado.
It is not exactly an earthy red, not the color of shale and clay mixed;
but the red of peroxide of iron and copper, the _sang-du-bœuf_ red of
oriental ceramics, the deep insistent red of things time-worn beyond
memory. And there is more than a veneer about the color. It has a depth
that seems luminous and yet is sadly deceptive. You do not see below
the surface no matter how long you gaze into it. As well try to see
through a stratum of porphyry as through that water to the bottom of
the river.
[Sidenote: Compared with the Nile.]
[Sidenote: The blood hue.]
To call it a river of blood would be exaggeration, and yet the truth
lies in the exaggeration. As one walks along its crumbling banks
there is the thought of that other river that changed its hue under
the outstretched rod of the prophet. How weird indeed must have been
the ensanguined flow of the Nile, with its little waves breaking in
crests of pink foam! How strange the shores where the receding waters
left upon sand and rock a bordering line of scarlet froth! But the
Colorado is not quite like that--not so ghastly, not so unearthly. It
may suggest at times the heavy welling flow of thickening blood which
the sands at every step are trying to drink up; but this is suggestion
only, not realization. It seems to hint at blood, and under starlight
to resemble it; but the resemblance is more apparent than real. The
Colorado is a red river but not a scarlet one.
[Sidenote: River changes.]
[Sidenote: Red sands and silt.]
It may be thought odd that the river should change so radically from
the clear blue-green of its fountain-head to the opaque red of its
desert stream, but rivers when they go wandering down to the sea
usually leave their mountain purity behind them. The Colorado rushing
through a thousand miles of canyons, cuts and carries seaward with it
red sands of shale, granite, and porphyry, red rustings of iron, red
grits of carnelian, agate and garnet. All the tributaries come bearing
their tokens of red copper, and with the rains the whole red surface
of the watershed apparently washes into the smaller creeks and thus
into the valleys. When the river reaches the desert carrying its burden
of silt, it no longer knows the bowlder-bed, the rocky shores, the
breaking waterfalls that clarify a stream. And there are no large pools
where the water can rest while the silt settles to the bottom. Besides,
the desert itself at times pours into the river an even deeper red
than the canyons. And it does this not through arroyos alone, but also
by a wide surface drainage.
[Sidenote: River-banks.]
Often the slope of the desert to the river is gradual for many
miles--sometimes like the top of a huge table slightly tilted from the
horizontal. When the edge of the table is reached the mesa begins to
break into terraces (often cut through by small gullies), and the final
descent is not unlike the steps of a Roman circus leading down into the
arena. During cloud-bursts the waters pour down these steps with great
fury and the river simply acts as a catch-basin for all the running
color of the desert.
[Sidenote: “Bottom” lands.]
[Sidenote: The green bands.]
The “bottom” lands, forming the immediate banks of the river, are
the silt deposits of former years. Often they are several miles in
width and are usually covered with arrow-weed, willows, alders, and
cottonwoods. The growth is dense if not tall and often forms an almost
impenetrable jungle through which are scattered little openings where
grass and flowers grow and Indians build reed wickiups and raise melons
and corn in season. The desert terraces on either side (sometimes there
is a row of sand-dunes) come down to meet these “bottom” lands, and
the line where the one leaves off and the other begins is drawn as with
the sharp edge of a knife. Seen from the distant mountain tops the
river moves between two long ribbons of green, and the borders are the
gray and gold mesas of the desert.
[Sidenote: Bushes and flowers.]
Afloat and drifting down between these lines of green your attention
is perhaps not at first attracted by the water. You are interested in
the thickets of alders and the occasional bursts of white and yellow
flowers from among the bushes. They are very commonplace bushes, very
ordinary flowers; but how lovely they look as they seem to drift by the
boat! How silent again are these clumps of alder and willow! There may
be linnets and sparrows among them but they do not make their presence
obtrusive in song. A hawk wheels along over the arrow-weed looking
for quail, but his wings cut the air without noise. How deathly still
everything seems! The water wears into the soft banks, the banks keep
sloughing into the stream, but again you hear no splashing fall.
[Sidenote: Soundless water.]
[Sidenote: Wild fowl.]
And the water itself is just as soundless. There is never a sunken
rock to make a little gurgle, never a strip of gravel beach where a
wave could charm you with its play. The beat of oars breaks the air
with a jar, but breaks no bubbles on the water. You look long at the
stream and fall to wondering if there can be any life in it. What
besides a polywog or a bullhead could live there? Obviously, and in
fact--nothing. Perhaps there are otter and beaver living along the
pockets in the banks? Yes; there were otter and beaver here at one
time, but they are very scarce to-day. But there are wild fowl? Yes;
in the spring and fall the geese and ducks follow the river in their
flights, but they do not like the red water. What proof? Because they
do not stop long in any one place. They swing into a bayou or slough
late at night and go out at early dawn. They do not love the stream,
but wild fowl on their migratory flights must have water, and this
river is the only one between the Rockies and the Pacific that runs
north and south.
[Sidenote: Herons and bitterns.]
[Sidenote: Snipe.]
The blue herons and the bitterns do not mind the red mud or the red
water, in fact they rather like it; but they were always solitary
people of the sedge. They prowl about the marshes alone and the swish
of oars drives them into the air with a guttural “Quowk.” And there
are snipe here, bands of them, flashing their wings in the sun as they
wheel over the red waters or trip along the muddy banks singly or in
pairs. They are quite at home on the bars and bayou flats, but it seems
not a very happy home for them--that is judging by the absence of snipe
talk. The little teeter flies ahead of you from point to point, but
makes no twitter, the yellow-leg seldom sounds his mellow three-note
call, and the kill-deer, even though you shoot at him, will not cry
“Kill-deer!” “Kill-deer!”
[Sidenote: Sad bird-life.]
It may be the season when birds are mute, or it may merely happen so
for to-day, or it may be that the silence of the river and the desert
is an oppressive influence; but certainly you have never seen bird-life
so hopelessly sad. Even the kingfisher, swinging down in a blue line
from a dead limb and skimming the water, makes none of that rattling
clatter that you knew so well when you were a child by a New England
mill-stream. And what does a kingfisher on such a river as this? If it
were filled with fish he could not see them through that thick water.
[Sidenote: The forsaken.]
[Sidenote: Solitude.]
The voiceless river! From the canyon to the sea it flows through
deserts, and ever the seal of silence is upon it. Even the scant life
of its borders is dumb--birds with no note, animals with no cry, human
beings with no voice. And so forsaken! The largest river west of the
mountains and yet the least known. There are miles upon miles of mesas
stretching upward from the stream that no feet have ever trodden, and
that possess not a vestige of life of any kind. And along its banks
the same tale is told. You float for days and meet with no traces of
humanity. When they do appear it is but to emphasize the solitude. An
Indian wickiup on the bank, an Indian town; yes, a white man’s town,
what impression do they make upon the desert and its river? You drift
by Yuma and wonder what it is doing there. Had it been built in the
middle of the Pacific on a barren rock it could not be more isolated,
more hopelessly “at sea.”
[Sidenote: Beauty of the river.]
[Sidenote: Its majesty.]
After the river crosses the border-line of Mexico it grows broader and
flatter than ever. And still the color seems to deepen. For all its
suggestion of blood it is not an unlovely color. On the contrary, that
deep red contrasted with the green of the banks and the blue of the
sky, makes a very beautiful color harmony. They are hues of depth and
substance--hues that comport excellently well with the character of the
river itself. And never a river had more character than the Colorado.
You may not fancy the solitude of the stream nor its suggestive
coloring, but you cannot deny its majesty and its nobility. It has not
now the babble of the brook nor the swift rush of the canyon water;
rather the quiet dignity that is above conflict, beyond gayety. It has
grown old, it is nearing its end; but nothing could be calmer, simpler,
more sublime, than the drift of it down into the delta basin.
[Sidenote: The delta.]
[Sidenote: Disintegration.]
The mountains are receding on every side, the desert is flattening
to meet the sea, and the ocean tides are rising to meet the river.
Half human in its dissolution, the river begins to break joint by
joint. The change has been gradually taking place for miles and now
manifests itself positively. The bottom lands widen, many channels or
side-sloughs open upon the stream, and the water is distributed into
the mouths of the delta. There is a break in the volume and mass--a
disintegration of forces. And by divers ways, devious and slow, the
crippled streams well out to the Gulf and never come together again.
[Sidenote: The river during floods.]
It is not so when the river is at its height with spring freshets.
Then the stream is swollen beyond its banks. All the bottom lands for
miles across, up to the very terraces of the mesas, are covered; and
the red flood moves like an ocean current, vast in width, ponderous in
weight, irresistible in strength. All things that can be uprooted or
wrenched away, move with it. Nothing can check or stop it now. It is
the Grand Canyon river once more, free, mighty, dangerous even in its
death-throes.
[Sidenote: The “bore.”]
[Sidenote: Meeting of river and sea.]
And now at the full and the change of the moon, when the Gulf waters
come in like a tidal wave, and the waters of the north meet the waters
of the south, there is a mighty conflict of opposing forces. The
famous “bore” of the river-mouth is the result. When the forces first
meet there is a slow push-up of the water which rises in the shape of
a ridge or wedge. The sea-water gradually proves itself the greater
and the stronger body, and the ridge breaks into a crest and pitches
forward with a roar. The undercut of the river sweeps away the footing
of the tide, so to speak, and flings the top of the wave violently
forward. The red river rushes under, the blue tide rushes over. There
is the flash and dash of parti-colored foam on the crests, the flinging
of jets of spray high in air, the long roll of waves breaking not upon
a beach, but upon the back of the river, and the shaking of the ground
as though an earthquake were passing. After it is all done with and
gone, with no trace of wave or foam remaining, miles away down the Gulf
the red river slowly rises in little streams through the blue to the
surface. There it spreads fan-like over the top of the sea, and finally
mingles with and is lost in the greater body.
[Sidenote: The blue tomb.]
[Sidenote: Shores of the Gulf.]
The river is no more. It has gone down to its blue tomb in the
Gulf--the fairest tomb that ever river knew. Something of serenity
in the Gulf waters, something of the monumental in the bordering
mountains, something of the unknown and the undiscovered over all, make
it a fit resting-place for the majestic Colorado. The lonely stream
that so shunned contact with man, that dug its bed thousands of feet in
the depths of pathless canyons, and trailed its length across trackless
deserts, sought out instinctively a point of disappearance far from
the madding crowd. The blue waters of the Gulf, the beaches of shell,
the red, red mountains standing with their feet in the sea, are still
far removed from civilization’s touch. There are no towns or roads or
people by those shores, there are no ships upon those seas, there are
no dust and smoke of factories in those skies. The Indians are there
as undisturbed as in the days of Coronado, and the white man is coming
but has not yet arrived. The sun still shines on unknown bays and
unexplored peaks. Therefore is there silence--something of the hush of
the deserts and the river that flows between.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Colorado is said to be the Spanish translation of the Piman name
_buqui aquimuti_, according to the late Dr. Elliot Coues; but the
Spanish word was so obviously used to denote the red color of the
stream, that any translation from the Indian would seem superfluous.