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<h1>Titan of Chasms <br/>
<span class="smaller">The Grand Canyon of Arizona</span></h1>
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<div class="fig"><ANTIMG src="images/p001.jpg" alt="" width-obs="799" height-obs="537" /> <p class="caption"><span class="small">Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.</span> Bright Angel Creek and North Wall of the Canyon.</p>
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<div class="fig"><ANTIMG src="images/p001a.jpg" alt="Uncaptioned vista" width-obs="800" height-obs="279" /></div>
<h2><SPAN name="c1">THE TITAN OF CHASMS <br/><span class="smaller">BY C. A. HIGGINS</span></SPAN></h2>
<h3>Its History</h3>
<p>The Colorado is one of the great rivers of North America. Formed in
Southern Utah by the confluence of the Green and Grand, it intersects the
northwestern corner of Arizona, and, becoming the eastern boundary of
Nevada and California, flows southward until it reaches tidewater in the Gulf
of California, Mexico. It drains a territory of 300,000 square miles, and,
traced back to the rise of its principal source, is 2,000 miles long. At two
points, Needles and Yuma on the California boundary, it is crossed by a railroad.
Elsewhere its course lies far from Caucasian settlements and far from
the routes of common travel, in the heart of a vast region fenced on the one
hand by arid plains or deep forests and on the other by formidable mountains.</p>
<p>The early Spanish explorers first reported it to the civilized world in 1540,
two separate expeditions becoming acquainted with the river for a comparatively
short distance above its mouth, and another, journeying from the Moki
Pueblos northwestward across the desert, obtaining the first view of the Big
Canyon, failing in every effort to descend the canyon wall, and spying the
river only from afar.</p>
<p>Again, in 1776, a Spanish priest traveling southward through Utah struck
off from the Virgin River to the southeast and found a practicable crossing at
a point that still bears the name “Vado de los Padres.”</p>
<p>For more than eighty years thereafter the Big Canyon remained unvisited
except by the Indian, the Mormon herdsman, and the trapper, although the
Sitgreaves expedition of 1851, journeying westward, struck the river about
150 miles above Yuma, and Lieutenant Whipple in 1854 made a survey for a
practicable railroad route along the thirty-fifth parallel, where the Santa Fe
Pacific has since been constructed.</p>
<p>The establishment of military posts in New Mexico and Utah having made
desirable the use of a waterway for the cheap transportation of supplies, in
1857 the War Department dispatched an expedition in charge of Lieutenant
Ives to explore the Colorado as far from its mouth as navigation should be
found practicable. Ives ascended the river in a specially constructed steamboat
to the head of Black Canyon, a few miles below the confluence of the
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">4</span>
Virgin River in Nevada, where further navigation became impossible; then,
returning to the Needles, he set off across the country toward the northeast.
He reached the Big Canyon at Diamond Creek and at Cataract Creek in the
spring of 1858, and from the latter point made a wide southward detour around
the San Francisco Peaks, thence northeastward to the Moki Pueblos, thence
eastward to Fort Defiance, and so back to civilization.</p>
<p>That is the history of the explorations of the Colorado up to forty years
ago. Its exact course was unknown for many hundred miles, even its origin
being a matter of conjecture. It was difficult to approach within a distance of
two or three miles from the channel, while descent to the river’s edge could be
hazarded only at wide intervals, inasmuch as it lay in an appalling fissure at
the foot of seemingly impassable cliff terraces that led down from the bordering
plateau; and to attempt its navigation was to court death. It was known
in a general way that the entire channel between Nevada and Utah was of
the same titanic character, reaching its culmination nearly midway in its
course through Arizona.</p>
<div class="fig"><ANTIMG src="images/p002.jpg" alt="" width-obs="705" height-obs="600" /> <p class="caption">The Colorado, Foot of Bright Angel Trail.</p> </div>
<p>In 1869 Maj. J. W. Powell undertook the exploration of the river with nine
men and four boats, starting from Green River City, on the Green River, in
Utah. The project met with the most urgent remonstrance from those who
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were best acquainted with the region, including the Indians, who maintained
that boats could not possibly live in any one of a score of rapids and falls
known to them, to say nothing of the vast unknown stretches in which at any
moment a Niagara might be disclosed. It was also currently believed that for
hundreds of miles the river disappeared wholly beneath the surface of the earth.
Powell launched his flotilla on May 24th, and on August 30th landed at the
mouth of the Virgin River, more than one thousand miles by the river channel
from the place of starting, minus two boats and four men. One of the men had
left the expedition by way of an Indian reservation agency before reaching
Arizona, and three, after holding out against unprecedented terrors for many
weeks, had finally become daunted, choosing to encounter the perils of an
unknown desert rather than to brave any longer the frightful menaces of that
Stygian torrent. These three, unfortunately making their appearance on the
plateau at a time when a recent depredation was colorably chargeable upon
them, were killed by Indians, their story of having come thus far down the
river in boats being wholly discredited by their captors.</p>
<p>Powell’s journal of the trip is a fascinating tale, written in a compact and
modest style, which, in spite of its reticence, tells an epic story of purest
heroism. It definitely established the scene of his exploration as the most
wonderful geological and spectacular phenomenon known to mankind, and
justified the name which had been bestowed upon it—<span class="sc">The Grand Canyon</span>—sublimest
of gorges; Titan of chasms. Many scientists have since visited it,
and, in the aggregate, a large number of unprofessional lovers of nature; but
until a few years ago no adequate facilities were provided for the general
sight-seer, and the world’s most stupendous panorama was known principally
through report, by reason of the discomforts and difficulties, of the trip, which
deterred all except the most indefatigable enthusiasts. Even its geographical
location is the subject of widespread misapprehension.</p>
<p>Its title has been pirated for application to relatively insignificant canyons
in distant parts of the country, and thousands of tourists have been led to
believe that they saw the Grand Canyon, when, in fact, they looked upon a
totally different scene, between which and the real Grand Canyon there is no
more comparison “than there is between the Alleghanies or Trosachs and the
Himalayas.”</p>
<p>There is but one Grand Canyon. Nowhere in the world has its like been
found.</p>
<h3>As Seen From the Rim</h3>
<p>Stolid, indeed, is he who can front the awful scene and view its unearthly
splendor of color and form without quaking knee or tremulous breath. An
inferno, swathed in soft celestial fires; a whole chaotic under-world, just
emptied of primeval floods and waiting for a new creative word; eluding all
sense of perspective or dimension, outstretching the faculty of measurement,
overlapping the confines of definite apprehension; a boding, terrible thing,
unflinchingly real, yet spectral as a dream. The beholder is at first unimpressed
by any detail; he is overwhelmed by the <i>ensemble</i> of a stupendous panorama,
a thousand square miles in extent, that lies wholly beneath the eye, as if he
stood upon a mountain peak instead of the level brink of a fearful chasm in the
plateau, whose opposite shore is thirteen miles away. A labyrinth of huge
architectural forms, endlessly varied in design, fretted with ornamental devices,
festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from the upper cliffs and painted
with every color known to the palette in pure transparent tones of marvelous
delicacy. Never was picture more harmonious, never flower more exquisitely
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beautiful. It flashes instant communication of all that architecture and painting
and music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is the
soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.</p>
<div class="fig"><ANTIMG src="images/p003.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="634" /> <p class="caption"><span class="small">Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.</span> The River and the Canyon Wall.</p>
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<p>A canyon, truly, but not after the accepted type. An intricate system of
canyons, rather, each subordinate to the river channel in the midst, which in
its turn is subordinate to the whole effect. That river channel, the profoundest
depth, and actually more than 6,000 feet below the point of view, is in seeming
a rather insignificant trench, attracting the eye more by reason of its somber
tone and mysterious suggestion than by any appreciable characteristic of a
chasm. It is perhaps five miles distant in a straight line, and its uppermost
rims are nearly 4,000 feet beneath the observer, whose measuring capacity is
entirely inadequate to the demand made by such magnitudes. One can not
believe the distance to be more than a mile as the crow flies, before descending
the wall or attempting some other form of actual measurement.</p>
<p>Mere brain knowledge counts for little against the illusion under which
the organ of vision is here doomed to labor. Yonder cliff, darkening from
white to gray, yellow, and brown as your glance descends, is taller than the
Washington Monument. The Auditorium in Chicago would not cover one-half
its perpendicular span. Yet it does not greatly impress you. You idly toss a
pebble toward it, and are surprised to note how far the missile falls short.
By and by you will learn that it is a good half mile distant, and when you go
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down the trail you will gain an abiding sense of its real proportions. Yet,
relatively, it is an unimportant detail of the scene. Were Vulcan to cast it
bodily into the chasm directly beneath your feet, it would pass for a bowlder,
if, indeed, it were discoverable to the unaided eye.</p>
<p>Yet the immediate chasm itself is only the first step of a long terrace that
leads down to the innermost gorge and the river. Roll a heavy stone to the
rim and let it go. It falls sheer the height of a church or an Eiffel Tower,
according to the point selected for such pastime, and explodes like a bomb on
a projecting ledge. If, happily, any considerable fragments remain, they bound
onward like elastic balls, leaping in wild parabola from point to point, snapping
trees like straws; bursting, crashing, thundering down the declivities until they
make a last plunge over the brink of a void; and then there comes languidly
up the cliff sides a faint, distant roar, and your bowlder that had withstood the
buffets of centuries lies scattered as wide as Wycliffe’s ashes, although the
final fragment has lodged only a little way, so to speak, below the rim. Such
performances are frequently given in these amphitheaters without human aid,
by the mere undermining of the rain, or perhaps it is here that Sisyphus
rehearses his unending task. Often in the silence of night some tremendous
fragment has been heard crashing from terrace to terrace with shocks like
thunder peal.</p>
<p>The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the outside
world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty one can acquire any
notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep, half as broad, it would be no
less bewildering, so utterly does it baffle human grasp.</p>
<h3>The Trip to the River</h3>
<p>Only by descending into the canyon may one arrive at anything like
comprehension of its proportions, and the descent can not be too urgently
commended to every visitor who is sufficiently robust to bear a reasonable
amount of fatigue. There are four paths down the southern wall of the canyon
in the granite gorge district—Mystic Spring, Bright Angel, Berry’s and Hance’s
trails. The following account of a descent of the old Hance trail will serve to
indicate the nature of such an experience to-day, except that the trip may now
be safely made with greater comfort.</p>
<p>For the first two miles it is a sort of Jacob’s ladder, zigzagging at an unrelenting
pitch. At the end of two miles a comparatively gentle slope is reached,
known as the blue limestone level, some 2,500 feet below the rim, that is to say—for
such figures have to be impressed objectively upon the mind—five times
the height of St. Peter’s, the Pyramid of Cheops, or the Strasburg Cathedral;
eight times the height of the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty; eleven times the
height of Bunker Hill Monument. Looking back from this level the huge
picturesque towers that border the rim shrink to pigmies and seem to crown
a perpendicular wall, unattainably far in the sky. Yet less than one-half the
descent has been made.</p>
<p>Overshadowed by sandstone of chocolate hue the way grows gloomy and
foreboding, and the gorge narrows. The traveler stops a moment beneath a
slanting cliff 500 feet high, where there is an Indian grave and pottery scattered
about. A gigantic niche has been worn in the face of this cavernous cliff,
which, in recognition of its fancied Egyptian character, was named the Temple
of Sett by the painter, Thomas Moran.</p>
<p>A little beyond this temple it becomes necessary to abandon the animals.
The river is still a mile and a half distant. The way narrows now to a mere
notch, where two wagons could barely pass, and the granite begins to tower
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gloomily overhead, for we have dropped below the sandstone and have entered
the archæan—a frowning black rock, streaked, veined, and swirled with vivid
red and white, smoothed and polished by the rivulet and beautiful as a mosaic.
Obstacles are encountered in the form of steep, interposing crags, past which
the brook has found a way, but over which the pedestrian must clamber.
After these lesser difficulties come sheer descents, which at present are passed
by the aid of ropes.</p>
<p>The last considerable drop is a 40-foot bit by the side of a pretty cascade,
where there are just enough irregularities in the wall to give toe-hold. The
narrowed cleft becomes exceedingly wayward in its course, turning abruptly
to right and left, and working down into twilight depth. It is very still. At
every turn one looks to see the embouchure upon the river, anticipating the
sudden shock of the unintercepted roar of waters. When at last this is reached,
over a final downward clamber, the traveler stands upon a sandy rift confronted
by nearly vertical walls many hundred feet high, at whose base a black torrent
pitches in a giddying onward slide that gives him momentarily the sensation of
slipping into an abyss.</p>
<div class="fig"><ANTIMG src="images/p004.jpg" alt="" width-obs="662" height-obs="600" /> <p class="caption">A Party on Bright Angel Trail.</p> </div>
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<p>With so little labor may one come to the Colorado River in the heart of its
most tremendous channel, and gaze upon a sight that heretofore has had fewer
witnesses than have the wilds of Africa. Dwarfed by such prodigious mountain
shores, which rise immediately from the water at an angle that would deny
footing to a mountain sheep, it is not easy to estimate confidently the width and
volume of the river. Choked by the stubborn granite at this point, its width is
probably between 250 and 300 feet, its velocity fifteen miles an hour, and its
volume and turmoil equal to the Whirlpool Rapids of Niagara. Its rise in time
of heavy rain is rapid and appalling, for the walls shed almost instantly all the
water that falls upon them. Drift is lodged in the crevices thirty feet overhead.</p>
<p>For only a few hundred yards is the tortuous stream visible, but its effect
upon the senses is perhaps the greater for that reason. Issuing as from a
mountain side, it slides with oily smoothness for a space and suddenly breaks
into violent waves that comb back against the current and shoot unexpectedly
here and there, while the volume sways tide-like from side to side, and long
curling breakers form and hold their outline lengthwise of the shore, despite
the seemingly irresistible velocity of the water. The river is laden with drift
(huge tree trunks), which it tosses like chips in its terrible play.</p>
<p>Standing upon that shore one can barely credit Powell’s achievement, in
spite of its absolute authenticity. Never was a more magnificent self-reliance
displayed than by the man who not only undertook the passage of Colorado
River but won his way. And after viewing a fraction of the scene at close
range, one can not hold it to the discredit of three of his companions that they
abandoned the undertaking not far below this point. The fact that those who
persisted got through alive is hardly more astonishing than that any should
have had the hardihood to persist. For it could not have been alone the privation,
the infinite toil, the unending suspense in constant menace of death that
assaulted their courage; these they had looked for; it was rather the unlifted
gloom of those tartarean depths, the unspeakable horrors of an endless valley
of the shadow of death, in which every step was irrevocable.</p>
<p>Returning to the spot where the animals were abandoned, camp is made
for the night. Next morning the way is retraced. Not the most fervid pictures
of a poet’s fancy could transcend the glories then revealed in the depths of the
canyon; inky shadows, pale gildings of lofty spires, golden splendors of sun
beating full on façades of red and yellow, obscurations of distant peaks by veils
of transient shower, glimpses of white towers half drowned in purple haze,
suffusions of rosy light blended in reflection from a hundred tinted walls.
Caught up to exalted emotional heights the beholder becomes unmindful of
fatigue. He mounts on wings. He drives the chariot of the sun.</p>
<div class="fig"><ANTIMG src="images/p004a.jpg" alt="Uncaptioned vista" width-obs="800" height-obs="320" /></div>
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<p>Having returned to the plateau, it will be found that the descent into the
canyon has bestowed a sense of intimacy that almost amounts to a mental grasp
of the scene. The terrific deeps that part the walls of hundreds of castles and
turrets of mountainous bulk may be approximately located in barely discernible
pen-strokes of detail, and will be apprehended mainly through the memory of
upward looks from the bottom, while towers and obstructions and yawning
fissures that were deemed events of the trail will be wholly indistinguishable,
although they are known to lie somewhere flat beneath the eye. The comparative
insignificance of what are termed grand sights in other parts of the world
is now clearly revealed. Twenty Yosemites might lie unperceived anywhere
below. Niagara, that Mecca of marvel seekers, would not here possess the
dignity of a trout stream. Your companion, standing at a short distance on
the verge, is an insect to the eye.</p>
<p>Still, such particulars can not long hold the attention, for the panorama is
the real overmastering charm. It is never twice the same. Although you
think you have spelt out every temple and peak and escarpment, as the angle
of sunlight changes there begins a ghostly advance of colossal forms from the
farther side, and what you had taken to be the ultimate wall is seen to be made
up of still other isolated sculptures, revealed now for the first time by
silhouetting shadows. The scene incessantly changes, flushing and fading,
advancing into crystalline clearness, retiring into slumberous haze.</p>
<p>Should it chance to have rained heavily in the night, next morning the
canyon is completely filled with fog. As the sun mounts, the curtain of mist
suddenly breaks into cloud fleeces, and while you gaze these fleeces rise and
dissipate, leaving the canyon bare. At once around the bases of the lowest
cliffs white puffs begin to appear, creating a scene of unparalleled beauty as
their dazzling cumuli swell and rise and their number multiplies, until once
more they overflow the rim, and it is as if you stood on some land’s end looking
down upon a formless void. Then quickly comes the complete dissipation, and
again the marshaling in the depths, the upward advance, the total suffusion and
the speedy vanishing, repeated over and over until the warm walls have
expelled their saturation.</p>
<p>Long may the visitor loiter upon the verge, powerless to shake loose from
the charm, tirelessly intent upon the silent transformations until the sun is low
in the west. Then the canyon sinks into mysterious purple shadow, the far
Shinumo Altar is tipped with a golden ray, and against a leaden horizon the
long line of the Echo Cliffs reflects a soft brilliance of indescribable beauty, a
light that, elsewhere, surely never was on sea or land. Then darkness falls,
and should there be a moon, the scene in part revives in silver light, a thousand
spectral forms projected from inscrutable gloom; dreams of mountains, as in
their sleep they brood on things eternal.</p>
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