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Title: The Two Great Canyons
       Excerpts From Letters Written on a Western Journey

Author: Cyrenus Cole

Release Date: April 20, 2022 [eBook #67891]

Language: English

Produced by: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
             https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TWO GREAT CANYONS ***





  The Two Great Canyons

  Excerpts From
  Letters Written on a Western
  Journey

  BY
  Cyrenus Cole

  [Illustration]

  Cedar Rapids, Iowa
  The Torch Press
  Nineteen Hundred Eight




  _To Mrs. N. D. Pope
  of Lake Charles, Louisiana,_

_These excerpts from letters written for the Cedar Rapids Republican
and Evening Times are dedicated, because she made all the ways pleasant
ones and all the places happy ones for three men--one of whom is her
husband_




I


Yellowstone National Park, Mammoth Springs Hotel, August 14, 1908: We
have reached the first hotel station on the tour of the Yellowstone
National Park, which, according to the legend on the arch over the
entrance, has been set aside “For the benefit and enjoyment of the
people.” We left Minneapolis on the night train and found ourselves
the next morning in the wheat country, on the state lines of Minnesota
and North Dakota. In the wheat country there is nothing impressive,
except the magnificent distances. As far as the eye can reach, and
that is very far, one sees a level expanse, covered with wheat, some
in the shock and some still on the stalk. The towns, also, lack
impressiveness. Most of them are mere wheat stations. Fargo and
Bismarck and Mandan are, however, not without commercial and historic
interest.

At Bismarck, I recalled what Mr. Bryce wrote in “The American
Commonwealth.” He was present, in 1883, when the corner stone of the
state house was laid, with imposing ceremonies, General U. S. Grant
and “Sitting Bull” being among the honored guests. Mr. Bryce records
that one of the orators upon that occasion remarked that Bismarck was
destined to “be the metropolitan hearth of the world’s civilization.”
Mr. Bryce says he asked why the state house was “not in the city,” but
“a mile off, on the top of a hill in the brown and dusty prairie,” and
he was told, by the enthusiastic spirits of the place, that in a few
years that hill would be the center of the city that was to be. But the
state house still stands out of town. Many hopes in real estate are
unrealized, but let us hope they have only been deferred. A hundred
years from now all the open country may be teeming with populations. In
much of the wheat country there are no country homes, only places in
which the wheat growers live long enough to plant and to gather their
crops. The wheat fields end in the Bad Lands, and these would not be
so interesting, were they not so dreary. On the Little Missouri one
begins to see patches of alfalfa. It was on this river that Theodore
Roosevelt ranched, equipped with a college diploma and his indomitable
spirit. One ascends gradually into the mountains, up the Yellowstone
River, to Livingston, where they break the transcontinental journey
for the Yellowstone National Park trip. It is fifty-five miles from
Livingston to Gardner and five or six miles from Gardner to the Mammoth
Springs Hotel, the last five miles being covered by stages.

The hotel is crowded. People are coming and going. They jostle each
other and rush about frantically, looking for baggage and worried about
many things. Those who have “done” the Park are anxious to get away,
and those who are about to “do it” are as anxious to be on their way.
All sorts and conditions of people are here, the aged and the young,
the rich and the poor, women always predominating in numbers and in
activity. The postal card fad is at its height here. The postage that
is paid on these trifles ought to pay the government a dividend on the
money it has invested in the Park.




II.


Yellowstone National Park, Old Faithful Inn, August 15: It has been
raining in the Park. The weather has been lowering before a blustering
wind, with snow and sleet. People sat shivering in the stage coaches
today, but they tell us we are more fortunate than those who have been
compelled to make the journey in the dust. Mr. Jones and Mr. Pope came
in dusters, but they have donned their overcoats, instead. Every one
who has made the tour of the Park thinks he can tell you all about it,
but the truth is that no one knows anything about the weather here, it
is so variable and there is so much of it. It is clearing now and every
one is buoyant. It is sunshine after a storm that makes people happy,
especially the women. They like sunshine.

This inn is an interesting point in the journey. It is built entirely
out of logs, seven stories high, at the peak. It has great fire places
and a rustic dining room, where the food begins to taste “shippy.”
In these places one’s appetite always craves the things that are not
placed before you. Resort hotels are the most contrary places in the
world. The name of the inn is taken from that of the geyser, the
largest now in action in the Park basin, Old Faithful, so named because
it gives an exhibition every hour. The water is thrown a hundred
feet in the air and the spray that accompanies it, and the vapor,
are beautiful to see. The basin, in front of the hotel, is filled
with miniature geysers and in whichever direction one looks he can
see vapor rising from crevices. In many places the crust is thin and
treacherous. Some of the pools have the most delicate formations and
the most exquisite colorings, comparable with nothing except the colors
in precious stones. Some are green and some are blue and some are like
morning glories. The smell of sulphur is in the air. There are also the
ugly things, mud geysers, unwholesome holes bubbling with and spouting
out mud, like toads. Some people insist on seeing every crevice. They
tramp about until they are all tired out. That is what they call
“doing” the Park. The poor Park, and the poorer mortals! But to me it
seems easier and better to sit down quietly and absorb the spirit of
things. The mountains clad with the green timber, the rich blue sky,
fleeced with delicate clouds, over all. It is a great joy to be in the
midst of these natural wonders. Why weary one’s self with the details?
Why make it a place of weariness? It is a great picture gallery of
the gods. Here they have left unfinished the work of creation. But
people go through it, rushing about it as about bargain counters in the
stores.




III.


Yellowstone National Park, Lake Hotel, August 15, 1908: We left
Old Faithful Inn this morning with some regrets. One could spend
several days there with profit. The inn itself is comfortable and the
surroundings attractive. We have had the misfortune to be overtaken
by a party of excursionists, who entered the Park from the west. An
excursionist is an uninteresting traveler. He is apt to be some one who
is traveling because the rates are cheap. The regular tourists were
very much put out by the overcrowding. But if one wants to be alone, or
with a few friends, he must not follow the beaten paths of the Park.

There are many ways of traveling in vogue. The easiest way is by the
stages of the transportation company, which owns and operates the
hotels. In the hotels one is apt to get a good bed and, sometimes, a
bath. The food served in the dining rooms is of the conventional hotel
variety. All the supplies are brought into the Park in heavy freight
wagons. Most of the things are taken out of cans, but a few fresh
vegetables are supplied from gardens cultivated by the hotel company.
The milk also is fresh, drawn from cows kept in the Park. Cheaper
modes of travel and subsistence are supplied by camping outfits. One
company maintains a series of permanent camps, and others use movable
camps, carrying all their bedding and their utensils with them from
place to place. But whichever way one travels, he is apt to pick up
many friends. Friendships, in fact, are easily made in the Park. For
the time they seem very real, and partings at the end of a journey seem
almost like partings with old friends. It all comes from the fact that
the people one meets here are, for the time being, all the people there
are in this little miniature world.

But we are still leaving Old Faithful Inn, so far as this letter is
concerned. The regrets that many felt in leaving the inn were increased
by the disagreeableness of the weather outside. It was a miserable
rainy morning. It drizzled all the time and, intermittently, there were
downpours of water. It fell to my lot to ride on the outside of the
coach, with the driver, which is a very choice seat in fair weather.
When it is rainy, the ladies, and the ladies’ men always prefer to ride
inside. But there is so much chattering inside, often about nothing,
that a quiet man prefers to be outside, even in the rain. The driver
is a good fellow. He does not talk much. He is too intent on watching
his horses moving on a slippery road, often around abrupt curves. The
four fine chestnut horses were real good company, so intelligent and so
willing and so eager. It was hard work this morning to pull the coach,
for there was a gradual ascent, from one hundred to two hundred feet to
the mile. Plenty of clear water was running in the mountain streams. We
crossed the continental divide, at an elevation of about 8,300 feet,
but we soon recrossed the line and found ourselves once more on the
Atlantic slope. The driver pointed out many objects of interest, among
them Shoshone Lake, resting in the laps of mountain peaks, a beautiful
body of water. But the persons inside the coach seemed oblivious to
many things, except the mileposts which they counted, audibly, with
great regularity--there were thirty-four of them to count to the next
lodging place. And it rained all the time!

It was on this part of the journey that I learned most about the
animal life in the Park. It was one of the things in which the driver
was interested. There is all manner of life in the Park, from weasels
to antlered deer and bear, and in the air, birds from the tiniest
creatures picking their livings in the pine trees, to the stately
waterfowls that strut about in seven league boots. All the birds and
animals; all the creatures that crawl and burrow in the earth, or that
fly in the air, are protected by the omnipotent arm of the government
in Washington. The soldiers who patrol the Park are the only ones who
are allowed to bring guns into the preserve. Not a shot is fired to
break the stillness of the surroundings. The squirrels romp in the tree
tops and the beavers carry on their prodigious works just as they did
before there was a man on this continent. Here the foxes have holes
in the ground and the birds have nests in the trees, and there is no
one to disturb them. The results are wonderful. The birds and animals
hardly know what fear is, they seem so greatly unconcerned about the
presence of passing people. Here they find

                      “_No enemy
  But winter and rough weather_,”

and of these they find a great deal during the winter months. The
tinges of winter are already in the air, even in August, for winter
comes early on this high elevation and when it comes it is severe, the
mercury falling to forty degrees below zero and the snow piling up to
depths of ten or twelve feet.

On our thirty-four mile journey we were shown many objects of interest,
pools the bottoms of which rival the rarest flowers and gems in their
colorings. But also some ugly things, mud geysers, filthy and bad
smelling. At noon we halted for luncheon at one end of the Yellowstone
Lake, and some persons took boats, making the rest of the day’s journey
by water. We reached the Lake Hotel at about four o’clock in the
afternoon, tired enough to appreciate the comforts and hospitalities
of the place. This hotel is one of the best in the Park, lighted
by electricity and heated with steam, the rooms all cheerful ones.
The meals in the dining room, also, were good. The lake itself is a
wonderful body of water, considering its extent and its elevation.
The tops of the mountains stand all around it. It lies in the hollows
formed between mountain ranges. But aside from these features, it is
not more interesting than other bodies of water.

After the rains, the sun went down in mountain splendors. How good it
seemed to see the light flooding through the breaking clouds! We have
been very anxious about the sun for tomorrow is our day at the Canyon
of the Yellowstone and there, if anywhere, one needs the sun to bring
out the colors. I have heard so much about this Canyon, since coming
to the Park, and read so much about it before coming here, that I am
very anxious to see it and to measure it with my expectations. So far,
I must confess, nothing has exceeded my expectations, and much has
fallen far below them. The things as they are, often play havoc with
the things as we have imagined them.




IV.


Yellowstone National Park, Canyon Hotel, August 16: We were not
disappointed in the weather today. A rarer Sunday morning never dawned,
not even in the mountains. There were still some remnant clouds in the
sky. Fortunately, too, these did not disappear entirely. All day bits
of fleecy clouds floated between the sun and the earth, not enough to
darken, but just enough for contrasts. The air was bracing and there
was plenty of it.

As usual, our coach led all the rest. Forty or fifty came trailing
behind. Every one was filled with persons in high glee and in great
expectations. The road was a winding one along the Yellowstone River,
up ridges and dipping down into hollows, with many a curve and a few
short angles, the rolling and tumbling river nearly always in sight.
The river is the outlet for the lake, or rather, the lake is but an
extension, in width, of the river, forming a large reservoir for
the waters from the mountains and from the springs, thus insuring a
constant flow for the river.

After leaving the lake, the waters in the river flow on as they do in
any other river, leisurely and calmly. The water is wonderfully clear,
coming from the snows in the mountains. The rocky bottoms of the river
are visible from the tops of the coaches and fishes may often be seen
swimming and darting about. Across the river there is a gradual ascent
of ground, until it forms a skyline of miniature mountain peaks. There
are vast mountain meadows clothed in grays and browns, autumn colors
mingled with the colors of the sage. It makes an indescribable color
and the effect of it also is an indescribable one. On our own side of
the river we are riding through endless beds of flowers, the kind of
beds that nature makes in a large and liberal country. Their colors
are blue and purple and red. Of mountain daisies, yellow flowers on
delicate stems, there are millions. The flowers alone would be worth
coming to see, to say nothing of the furzy mountain meadows, like vast
oriental rugs spread out by the hand of a generous God!

The water in the river is green, when it flows over beds of moss and
black and foreboding when it runs under the shadows of the overhanging
rocks. As we proceed on our journey, these projecting rocks become more
numerous. The banks gradually grow more precipitous and the channel,
narrower. The waters grow more disturbed. Signs of some impending
catastrophe to the river multiply. The waters now roll and surge. From
side to side they dash themselves against the rocks, filling the air
with a spray. The river becomes furious and it makes a great commotion.
Finally, in one great dash the waters rush over the upper falls, a
distance of one hundred and ten feet down. Then, imprisoned in a narrow
gorge, seething and foaming and roaring, they rush forward until they
come to the lower falls, where they make a spectacular descent of three
hundred and six feet, filling the air with foam and spray and the scene
with glory, all the way down. The whole thing is God-like, that is the
only phrase that can describe it. God-like in power, in beauty and in
majesty.

The lower falls is the beginning of the greater glory of the
Yellowstone river. At the bottom of the gorge the tumultuous waters
continue on their way, so far down that what is a river looks like
a yellow ribbon. From the river bed the gorge widens and makes the
magnificent spectacle of the Canyon of the Yellowstone river. If such a
gorge had been cut in the dullest stone, it would be an awe-inspiring
thing, but cut through rocks of the brightest hues the scene is
bewildering, amazing and enthralling. And the longer you look at it,
the more the wonder grows. What at first appears to be a wild riot of
colors, yellow predominating, becomes a fabric of the most delicate
colorings, blended as nature blends colors and softened as time softens
them. There is no color and no shade that is missing. There is as much
there as the eye has time or capacity to develop. No one has seen it
all, no one will ever see it all. Each man sees but a fraction and a
fragment of it. All the eyes of the world cast into one with all time
at its command could not exhaust the possibilities of the combinations
in forms and colors.

Here, I thought, is the one place where no traveler can be
disappointed, no dreamer disillusioned. Here the things that are, are
more than the things imagined. This is the transformation scene of
all the earth. This is the one great masterpiece in nature, perfect in
all its details, endless in all its combinations of colors and forms,
imposing in its grandeur. As I looked at it, I felt that nature had
nothing more to say to me and that in the way of scenery my heart had
nothing more to long for. Here is the throne of majesty in the temple
of the beautiful. With unuttered thoughts in his mind and unfinished
sentences on his lips, one must turn away from the Canyon of the
Yellowstone.

Monday morning, when we rode away from the scene, a dense fog hung
over the river. Others were coming where we were leaving. Our day’s
journey was back to the Mammoth Springs Hotel. For us the Park was a
finished book, however many the pages which we had skipped, and however
imperfectly we may have read the few passages that fell under our eyes.
Streams and meadows, cliffs and mountain peaks covered with snow, lined
the way outward bound, but it seemed to me that, somehow, the falling
of the waters and the glimmering of the colors of the Canyon, dimmed
all other things.




V


Seattle, Washington, August 19: After spending a few hours in
Livingston, which has a sightly location, at the mouth of a canyon and
in sight of a mountain on which the snow lies for ten months in the
year, we proceeded westward. From Montana we passed into Idaho, where
the tree butchers are cutting up the last remnants of the white pine.
It is, for the most part, a dreary country, where the timber has been
cut over and where forest fires have left masses of charred stumpage.
Waste everywhere and nothing but waste! The American lumberman in the
past has picked out the best and left the rest to the desolation that
follows the man with the axe and the torch. It has been the working out
of the practical American idea of getting the most money with the least
care about the future. It is pity and disgust and indignation that one
feels. But such are the ravages of commerce in a commercial era among
a commercial people.

The next day we reached Spokane, on the other side of the Rockies,
mistress of a vast industrial area, reaching up into the mountains on
one side, with their mines and their lumber, and stretching out over
the Washington wheat fields, on the other. A great city, the creation
of a few years, but to the casual traveler, more or less uninteresting,
broiling and sizzling in the August sun, treeless, for the most part,
and to that extent cheerless. But the volume of business transacted is
large and the business buildings are fine and the people, grown richer,
are building new houses and surrounding themselves with the luxuries
which American people everywhere seek after and prize.

Leaving Spokane, going westward, one enters the great wheat country, a
plateau lying between the Rocky Mountains and the coast ranges. Where
the railroads run, the country is more or less rough, with here and
there formations that suggest “bad lands,” but much of the country is
level and productive. It is a vast treeless region; rainless in summer.
The mercury rises as high as 100 in the night time. When the wind
blows, which it is apt to do, dust fills the air. Much of the soil
seems to be as fine as flour and very light when it is very dry. We
rode for hours without seeing a drop of water, in creek or lake. What a
precious thing water must be to the people--in summer time, when they
need it most! There are no homes in these wheat fields. Here and there
are scattered hovels which the sowers and the reapers use in their
seasons, but no permanent abodes. Wire fences are stretched across the
fields, far apart. How different it all is from the farming countries
of the Mississippi Valley, with their well fenced farms, the homes of
the farmers in the midst of groves and orchards and the grazing herds
of cattle and flocks of sheep. Here and there one saw a horseman riding
in a pillar of dust. The trails of dust one sees are the only evidences
of highways, or of travel. It is a great wheat producing country, when
it has been revived by the rains of winter, but the men who grow that
wheat ought to be well paid for their labors. It was night when we
reached the Columbia River, the mighty stream that wends across these
wheat fields, deep down in its channel, so deep that the use of its
waters for purposes of irrigation seems almost hopeless. The winds that
blow across the plateau may solve the question.

Seattle is a marvel in the way of city building. It is growing in every
direction and in every way. Located on a great inland sea, in sight of
the mountains and blest with a climate of wonderful evenness, at the
end of the great transcontinental railways and where the large vessels
are loaded and unloaded for the orient and the coastwise trade, the
destiny of this city can hardly be overdrawn. Seattle has absorbed
the major energies of the American northwest. The men who founded the
city laid out its streets in almost impossible places, but modern
engineering is cutting down the hills and filling up the hollows. There
is no end to the enterprise of the people in these respects. Every
breath one breathes in Seattle is a city breath. Men from the prairies
of Iowa have become city builders in Seattle. Industrial reverses may
overtake them, they likely will, and their winters are said to be
atrociously foggy and wet, but they are going to make Seattle a place
of which all Americans will be proud, one of the great commercial
cities of the Pacific Ocean.




VI


San Francisco, August 24: After spending a few days in Seattle we
started southward, with Los Angeles as the end of our journeying in
that direction. Tacoma has been out-distanced by Seattle, but it is
itself a great and growing city. Portland, in Oregon, is a city of
older appearances than Seattle. It has more leisure and more culture
and, perhaps, more realized riches. It has a great river, mountains
around it and the ocean only a few miles away. Portland is building for
the future and the growth of Pacific Ocean commerce is in the dreams of
all the business men.

On the way to San Francisco we rode up the Rogue River valley, which
we found not equal to its fame, and around Mount Shasta, grand and
glorious in the sunshine that fell around its snow-covered peak. The
next morning we were in the wheat belt of California, the wonderful
Sacramento Valley. In August it is barren enough, nothing green in
it except the fields of alfalfa, an occasional plum orchard and the
wonderful live oaks scattered over the landscapes, always with the
range of mountains in the perspective. Wheat growing in these valleys
has about reached its limit. The continual cropping has left the soil
impoverished and there is talk of cutting up the big ranches into
individual small farms, watered artificially. What there may come out
of this form of development is problematical. Some persons who had
lived in the valley assured us that the heat is often so intense that
it scalds the fruit on the trees. On the western slope of the coast
range the climate is much better for fruit and also for gardening.
Incidentally, it may be remarked that the American is hardly the
race that will develop this form of intensive farming. They want to
do things on a bigger scale and they shun the manual labor that is
necessary to make it successful. Portuguese colonies are said to be
prospering in the culture of fruit and the Japanese also are making
headway. They are willing to do such work and to do it for wages that
are not considered adequate by Americans. Under present conditions
nothing seems to me more hopeless than the establishment of fruit
farms, by American farmers from the Mississippi Valley, in the
valley of the Sacramento, the Rogue River or even the Yakima and the
Yellowstone.

San Francisco has recovered marvelously from the earthquake and the
fire. It is a city in the process of rebuilding and the rebuilding
is all along greater and better lines. Old Chinatown is no longer a
city of rookeries, but of substantial brick and steel, with shops that
would do credit to any city. The haunts of vice are fewer and the
old devotees of oriental vices complain bitterly that the “town” has
lost its “atmosphere.” If it has, it is so much for the better. San
Francisco has been hampered and handicapped, but its business men are
striving to retain the commerce of the Pacific for which so many other
cities are now striving and for which Seattle has made so much headway.




VII


Los Angeles, August 27: At San Francisco our party was broken up. Mr.
Jones and I proceeded to Los Angeles, while Mr. and Mrs. Pope elected
to linger longer in that city and to make many breaks in their journey,
to visit the seaside resorts.

Southern California in August is not an inviting place. There is
drouth, and dust. The famed orchards are simply patches of trees in
plowed ground, the trees covered with dust as well as with ripening
fruit. When we think of orchards at home, we think of beautiful plats
of grass, with trees. But that is not the California idea. They are
far from being sylvan dreams. They are places for hard work and, from
all reports, meager incomes. To pick and pack peaches for distant
markets is laborious and hazardous. The vineyards were filled with
distress over grapes at six dollars a ton. But in the real estate
offices in Los Angeles, rosier views of fruit growing were to be had
and that freely. Los Angeles is city mad. They have done wonders and
they think of the future without dismay. All things seem possible to
the promoters. On the one side they have “the back country” where the
products are going to enrich all the people and on the other side they
have the ocean on which they are going to carry the commerce of the
orient, all paying tribute to Los Angeles. The ocean, at Long Beach
and other points is beautiful, restful and invigorating, but the great
ships have found no harbors in the vicinity of Los Angeles. The harbors
must be made artificially and the commerce must be wrested away from
San Francisco, Portland and Seattle and Tacoma. It will be a great
struggle for supremacy. No American can ride down this great Pacific
coast line without feelings of pride in the developments of this
western country. It is all American, intensely American. They call it
the Golden West, but the man who has to work for a living finds the
conditions no easier here than “back east.” In many places he finds it
harder, for he has Japanese competition and the climate of which they
boast so much makes men lazy.




VIII


El Tovar, Grand Canyon, Arizona, September 3: We left Los Angeles
yesterday morning. It was without any regrets that we turned our faces
homeward. California in September has no charms that can be compared
with those of September in Iowa.

From Los Angeles to San Bernardino is a matter of two hours, through
the San Gabriel Valley, one of the famous valleys of the state. We
were rather disappointed. Where we had expected to see an unbroken
succession of cultivated groves and gardens, we found half of the land
still in sage brush. Like most of the far west, the land is cultivated
in spots only. They said there was not enough water for all the fields.
After leaving San Bernardino we went through a mountain pass and
emerged, early in the afternoon, on the fringes of the Mojave desert,
perhaps the dreariest area on the American continent. Hundreds of
miles of utter barrenness! The famous Death Valley, 400 feet below the
top of the ocean, is part of this desert. It is on this journey that
one learns the value of water. Water, the great alchemist, the creator
and sustainer of life. How men and women follow the water, here in the
semi-arid west! There is no place in the mountains where a bit of a
stream trickles down that human beings are not found. A little house, a
little garden, and a cow, all gathered about that bit of water which is
all of life to them. In these regions water is everything and even real
estate men do not sell land, but water. A hot, dusty, disagreeable ride
this is, through the Mojave desert. Nothing of the kind could be worse.
We were favored, too, for all afternoon thunder clouds were toying
with mountain peaks, black clouds and vivid lightning and the deep
reverberations of thunder--all so suggestive of copious falls of water,
but only once did our train succeed in overtaking one of these showers.
And of what use is a shower in a desert?

We retired for the night, after we had passed the Needles, on the
Colorado River, between California and Arizona. When we arose in the
morning we were in a green country again. The desert had faded away and
trees and flowers had come in again. Strange freak of nature, that the
clouds should pass over the intervening desert and drop their moisture
in central Arizona, where July and August are the rainy months of the
year. It was good to see the trees again, the big trees, and the grass
and the flowers in the green fields. Our train reached Williams early
in the morning. From Williams it is sixty miles to the rim of the
Canyon, a side journey which one can make in the comfort of a Pullman
car. I had heard so much about the Grand Canyon that I was afraid to
look at it, though now within a stone’s throw of it--afraid of being
disappointed. The disillusionments had been so many on this western
journey, so many things had proved to be less than they had been
reported in the guide books and in the letters of travelers that I was
minded to save one dreamed of great thing from the wrecks of travel,
at least a little while longer. So we sat down to breakfast first--the
Grand Canyon would wait.

It was a beautiful morning, the heavens filled with sunshine, with just
enough of autumn in it to give it a dreamy effect. Fifty steps from
the hotel brought us to the rim of the canyon. Those fifty steps took
one into a new world. Unlike mountains and oceans, unlike anything
else in the world, is this first view of the great gorge which is
called the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. In that first moment
one is bewildered--and still disappointed. One had anticipated a more
instantaneous grandeur. But what is a first look here? Nothing, we
learned afterwards. It is nothing more than a blinding of the eyes,
a numbing of the senses. Before one lies an unutterable immensity of
things that is appalling. You think you see everything, and yet you
see nothing. You simply realize that you are looking on something
that is beyond you, out of your grasp, out of your reach, beyond your
comprehension. There is a certain dizziness in the air that you look
through. The earth has suddenly opened up before you and instead of
seeing mountains lifted in the air you see them in the earth beneath
you. Everything is at first without form and void. It is a dream, a
fantasy of the mind. But as you linger and look longer, gradually
things begin to assume forms and shapes and they begin to be real.
Objects begin to express themselves in colors also, in great masses of
colors, all colors and all variations of all colors. It is a creation
that is going on before you. The void begins to be filled with all
manner of formations. It is some such hour as when God said, “Let there
be light, and there was light.” In those first moments we are present
at another creation, and it is a creation, that is enacted for every
one who comes to partake of the glories of this canyon. To attempt to
describe it further would be like trying to weave a garland of roses
around a star.

The learned of the world, the poets, the painters and the writers have
lingered on this same rim, not for a day, but for weeks, charmed,
fascinated, bewildered, enthralled, but without being able to reproduce
either in colors or in words what they saw. Each one has picked up a
bit of color, where there are oceans of color. The scientist knows
that through countless ages the waters of the Colorado River have cut
this gorge into the earth, through the solid rock and the drifting
sand alike. It is a mile deep, thirteen miles from rim to rim and over
two hundred miles long. At the bottom of the gorge flows the creator
of this wonderful masterpiece of nature, the Colorado River. It is a
dashing, roaring river, maddened in its fury to get to the level of the
ocean, through unnumbered obstructions, but of all the fury with which
it lashes its sides, there is not a murmur that reaches you standing
at the rim of the canyon--the river is a mile below you and six miles
away. The deathlike stillness of dead ages hangs over the canyon.
Before Christ was, before Adam was, this work was completed. Still
a mighty river, in those primeval days the Colorado must have been
infinitely mightier to have removed the mountains that stood in its
course. To wear away the solid stone, disintegrate it and, in solution,
to carry it with its own waters to the ocean, that was the work that
the Colorado River had to perform to make this bed for itself. In
the Mojave desert the thought came to us, how precious is water, the
life of the world; here the thought comes to us, how mighty are the
waters when they are assembled together, the might of the world. There
glistening in the rainbow above the barren mountain peaks; here roaring
in their fury, dark and mirky and foreboding at the bottom of the
gorge.

As at the Yellowstone Canyon, so here every step brings a new view of
the canyon. It is not the same from any two points of observation. Of
its mere immensity one can form no adequate idea. The opposite side
looks hardly a mile off, but it is thirteen miles, in fact. All of
Pike’s Peak might be tumbled into it and hardly make a dam to hold the
waters back. In the drowsiness of the afternoon’s sun I thought one of
the mountains that stand in the bottom of the canyon looked like a huge
pulpit. I thought I saw terrace rise above terrace, up the slopes, and
fifty miles up and down the river. I thought how all the nations of the
earth might be gathered there and seated, and how an archangel might
speak to them and be heard by all. Not only terraces, but temples,
pagodas, castles, battleships, everything that one has ever seen that
is great or grand seems to be reproduced in this canyon, in such varied
ways has the water chiseled itself upon the rocks. Every conceivable
form of things, every imaginable color, has been worked out in this
great gorge. The sun goes down upon it, throwing the shadows of ragged
peaks across yawning chasms, multiplying the awfulness of things seen.
The full sun can not light the depths of it. In the darkness of the
night one walks on the rim of this canyon as on the shores of some
unexplored world, a world still in the process of creation.

Day after day, little parties of sightseers go down into the canyon,
down Bright Angel trail, on the backs of donkeys. It is thirteen miles
by the trail and then the river is still far below them, so far that
they can hardly hear the noise it makes between its rocky banks.

Many had said that when one has seen the Grand Canyon he has forgotten
all about the Canyon of the Yellowstone. But I did not find it so.
Nothing can ever make me forget the Canyon of the Yellowstone. The
two canyons are so different and so distinct that comparisons are
not possible, but contrasts are. In the Grand Canyon the colors are
heavier; in the Yellowstone Canyon the colors have the brightness
of the butterfly. The one is compact, the other immense. The one
is definite, conceivable and comprehensible; the other indefinite,
inconceivable and incomprehensible. The one produces the sensations of
nearness and dearness; the other of aloofness and vagueness. The one is
like a beautiful woman arrayed in many colors; the other like an angel
clothed in austerity.

When one has seen these two canyons, the west has nothing more to offer
him in the way of scenery. They sum up all the wonders that nature has
wrought in these cyclopean regions of the continent. One wants to see
them again, to see them many times again. In the last year of his life
he might desire to take a last look at them. And, if in the providence
of the theologians, we are all translated into angels, for one I shall
often be tempted to desert the glories celestial for these glories
terrestial, to hover over the scene where the Yellowstone River tumbles
over its precipices into the gorgeous depths below and where the
Colorado River roars at the bottom of the canyon which is the creation
of its own might and fury.




Transcriber’s Notes

Page 29: “Portugese colonies” changed to “Portuguese colonies”

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