The Pueblo of Zuñi stands alone. The early Spanish explorers who penetrated from Mexico northward into what is now the territory of the United States dignified a group of villages in the region of Zuñi as the ‘Seven Cities of Cibola.’ There were wonders enough in the new world to kindle the imagination into a blaze that illumined everything with the light of exaggeration, and the little rude stone villages of the savages were published to the world as great cities.

Early in 1540 an expedition set forth from Compostela, a town about 6° west of what is now the City of Mexico, to explore the regions far to the north in search of cities and gold. Alvar Nuñez, a priest, had wandered for years on the most romantic journey ever made in America. He went from Florida northward, then westward, and ultimately southward until he reached Mexico. In the main he traveled in the capacity of a priest–doctor, and his advent was heralded from tribe to tribe, for his presence was usually made welcome and sometimes eagerly sought.

Alvar Nuñez told the Spaniards in Mexico of the peoples he had encountered and the cities he had seen, and, though his account was not exaggerated, yet the fervid imagination of the Spaniards and their prodigious greed for gold soon caused them to organize an expedition to this country. Coronado was its leader, a commander of great capacity, who wandered far to the north and then to the east as far as the mouth of the Republican River in eastern Kansas, then turning westward he at last recrossed what is now called the Rio Grande del Norte and discovered the Seven Cities of Cibola. Of these cities only Zuñi remains. The fact that it is one of those cities was proved by Cushing. When Alvar Nuñez approached Zuñi one of his companions was killed; this was Steven—a Barbary negro; and Cushing found these Zuñi Indians still recounting the story of the death of Steven as one of the most important episodes in their history. Through the genius of Cushing the fame of Zuñi has spread throughout the world, for what he committed to writing future generations will read with delight.

In the villages round about, the Spaniards were told of a mighty river and giant people living in the west. Garcia Lopez was instructed by Coronado to take a party of men with Indian guides to verify these reports. His authority for exploration was extended to eighty days. He started August the 25th and within the term of his authority he succeeded in reaching the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Thus what is now popularly known as the Grand Canyon of Arizona was discovered by Europeans.

In the fall of 1857 Lieutenant Ives, of the engineer corps of the army, ascended the Colorado River on a trip of exploration with a little steamer called the Explorer; he went as far as the mouth of the Rio Virgin. Falling back down river a few miles, Lieutenant Ives met a pack train which had followed him up the bank of the stream. Here he disembarked, and on the 24th of March started with a land party to explore the eastern bank of the river; making a long detour he ascended the plateau through which the Grand Canyon is cut, and in an adventurous journey he obtained views of the canyon along its lower course. On this trip J. S. Newberry was the geologist, and to him we are indebted for the first geological explanation of the canyon and the description of the high plateau through which it is formed. Dr. Newberry was not only an able geologist, but he was also a graphic writer, and his description of the canyon as far as it was seen by him is a classic in geology.

In 1869 Lieutenant Wheeler was sent out by the chief engineer of the army to explore the Grand Canyon from below. In the spring he succeeded in reaching the mouth of Diamond Creek, which had previously been seen by Dr. Newberry in 1858. Mr. Gilbert was the geologist of this expedition, and his studies of the canyon region during this and subsequent years have added greatly to our knowledge of this land of wonders.

In this same year I essayed to explore the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, together with the upper canyons of that stream and the great canyons of the lower portion of Green River. For this purpose I employed four rowboats and made the descent from what is now Green River station through the whole course of canyons to the mouth of the Rio Virgin, a distance of more than a thousand miles.

In the spring of 1870 I again started with three boats and descended the river to the Crossing of the Fathers, where I met a pack train and went out with a party of men to explore ways down into the Grand Canyon from the north, and devoted the summer, fall, winter, and following spring to this undertaking.

In the summer of 1871 I returned to the rowboats and descended through Marble Canyon to the Grand Canyon of Arizona, and then through the greater part of the Grand Canyon itself. Subsequent years were then given to exploration of the country adjacent to the Grand Canyon. On these trips Mr. Gilbert, the geologist, who had been with Lieutenant Wheeler, and Capt. C. E. Dutton, were my geological companions. On the second boat trip, and during all the subsequent years of exploration in this region, Prof. A. H. Thompson was my geographical companion, assisted by a number of topographical engineers.

In 1882 Mr. C. D. Walcott, as my assistant in the United States Geological Survey, went with me into the depths of the Grand Canyon. We descended from the summit of the Kaibab Plateau on the north by a trail which we built down a side canyon in a direction toward the mouth of the Little Colorado River. The descent was made in the fall, and a small party of men was left with Mr. Walcott in this region of stupendous depths to make a study of the geology of an important region of labyrinthian gorges. Here, with his party, he was shut up for the winter, for it was known when we left him that snows on the summit of the plateau would prevent his return to the upper region before the sun should melt them the next spring. Mr. Walcott is now the Director of the United States Geological Survey.

After this year I made no substantial additions to my geologic and scenic knowledge of the Grand Canyon, though I afterward studied the archæology to the south and east throughout a wide region of ruined pueblos and cliff dwellings.

Since my first trip in boats many others have essayed to follow me, and year by year such expeditions have met with disaster; some hardy adventurers are buried on the banks of the Green, and the graves of others are scattered at intervals along the course of the Colorado.

In 1889 the brave F. M. Brown lost his life. But finally a party of railroad engineers, led by R. B. Stanton, started at the head of Marble Canyon and made their way down the river as they extended a survey for a railroad along its course.

Other adventurous travelers have visited portions of the Grand Canyon region, and Mr. G. Wharton James has extended his travels widely over the region in the interest of popular science and the new literature created in the last decades of the nineteenth century. And now I once more return to a reminiscent account of the Grand Canyon, for old men love to talk of the past.

The Grand Canyon of Arizona and the Marble Canyon constitute one great gorge carved by a mighty river through a high plateau. On the northeast and north a line of cliffs face this plateau by a bold escarpment of rock. Climb these cliffs and you must ascend from 800 to 1,000 feet, but on their summit you will stand upon a plateau stretching away to the north. Now turn to face the south and you will overlook the cliff and what appears to be a valley below. From the foot of the cliff the country rises to the south to a great plateau through which the Marble and the Grand canyons are carved. This plateau terminates abruptly on the west by the Grand Wash Cliffs, which is a high escarpment caused by a ‘fault’ (as the geologist calls it), that is, the strata of sandstone and limestone are broken off, and to the west of the fracture they are dropped down several thousand feet, so that standing upon the edge of the plateau above the Grand Wash Cliffs you may look off to the west over a vast region of desert from which low volcanic mountains rise that seem like purple mounds in sand–clad lands.

On the east the great plateau breaks down in a very irregular way into the valley of the Little Colorado, and where the railroad ascends the plateau from the east it passes over picturesque canyons that run down into the Little Colorado. On the south the plateau is merged into the great system of mountains that stand in Southern Arizona. Where the plateau ends and the mountains begin is not a well–defined line. The plateau through which the Grand Canyon is cut is a region of great scenic interest. Its surface is from six to more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. The Grand Plateau is composed of many subsidiary plateaus, each one having its own peculiar and interesting feature.

The Kaibab Plateau, to the northeast of the Grand Canyon, is covered with a pine forest which is intercepted by a few meadows with here and there a pond or lakelet. It is the home of deer and bear.

To the west is the Shinumo Plateau in which the Shinumo Canyon is carved; and on the cliffs of this canyon and in the narrow valley along its course the Shinumo ruins are found—the relics of a prehistoric race.

To the west of the Shinumo Plateau is the Kanab Plateau, with ruins scattered over it, and on its northern border the beautiful Mormon town of Kanab is found, and the canyon of Kanab Creek separates the Shinumo Plateau from the Kanab Plateau. It begins as a shallow gorge and gradually increases in depth until it reaches the Colorado River itself, at a depth of more than 4,000 feet below the surface. Vast amphitheaters are found in its walls and titanic pinnacles rise from its depths. One Christmas day I waded up this creek. It was one of the most delightful walks of my life, from a land of flowers to a land of snow.

To the west of the Kanab Plateau are the Uinkaret Mountains—an immense group of volcanic cones upon a plateau. Some of these cones stand very near the brink of the Grand Canyon and from one of them a flood of basalt was poured into the canyon itself. Not long ago geologically, but rather long when reckoned in years of human history, this flood of lava rolled down the canyon for more than fifty miles, filling it to the depth of two or three hundred feet and diverting the course of the river against one or the other of its banks. Many of the cones are of red cinder, while sometimes the lava is piled up into huge mountains which are covered with forest. To the west of the Uinkaret Mountains spreads the great Shiwits Plateau, crowned by Mount Dellenbough.

Past the south end of these plateaus runs the Colorado River; southward through Marble Canyon and in the Grand Canyon, then northwestward past the Kaibab and Shinumo Canyon, then southwestward past the Kanab Plateau, Uinkaret Mountains to the southernmost point of the Shiwits Plateau, and then northwestward to the Grand Wash Cliffs. Its distance in this course is little more than 300 miles—but the 300 miles of river are set on every side with cliffs, buttes, towers, pinnacles, amphitheaters, caves, and terraces, exquisitely storm–carved and painted in an endless variety of colors.

The plateau to the south of the Grand Canyon, which we need not describe in parts, is largely covered with a gigantic forest. There are many volcanic mountains and many treeless valleys. In the high forest there are beautiful glades with little stretches of meadow which are spread in summer with a parterre of flowers of many colors. This upper region is the garden of the world. When I was first there bear, deer, antelope, and wild turkeys abounded, but now they are becoming scarce. Widely scattered throughout the plateau are small canyons, each one a few miles in length and a few hundred feet in depth. Throughout their course cliff–dweller ruins are found. In the highland glades and along the valley, pueblo ruins are widely scattered, but the strangest sights of all the things due to prehistoric man are the cave dwellings that are dug in the tops of cinder cones and the villages that were built in the caves of volcanic cliffs. If now I have succeeded in creating a picture of the plateau I will attempt a brief description of the canyon.

Go with me to the mouth of the Paria River, at the head of Marble Canyon; for this is continuous with the Grand Canyon. The river cuts the great plateau into two unequal parts, the larger one to the north. A little glen two or three miles above the mouth of the Paria has become historic ground, for it was for several years the resort and hiding place of a man who is famous in the history of Utah, whom I met as I wandered up this canyon valley on my second exploring trip to the region.

When a mile or two above the mouth of the Paria, in making a turn around the cliff, I was surprised to see a little rude stone house, and as I approached it a woman opened the door and hastily reappeared with a gun in her hand. She was quickly followed by a man, also with a gun. In a threatening attitude they came out to meet me; being unarmed myself I spoke to them by bidding them good-day and making some pleasant remark, but not until I had heard the woman say to the man, “Don't shoot, he's all right.” I entered into a conversation with them and they invited me to eat melons, which I did with gusto, and we parted with expressions of good will—for they seemed very much interested in my explorations and came down to the river to see me off.

In subsequent years I renewed the acquaintance and learned their history. This was John D. Lee and his wife Emma. John D. Lee is well known as a man who was executed for the part he took in the Mountain Meadow Massacre. I need not say more of him than that he was a man of very remarkable character, exceedingly devout and willing to die for the Mormon religion, for which, from the standpoint of his friends, he fell a martyr.

His wife was a convert to the religion of the Latter Day Saints in England, or perhaps in Wales, and came to this country as a Mormon immigrant. She was a member of a party that went from the Missouri River to Salt Lake with handcarts. She was an athlete, and as she expressed it to me at one time, she could “whip her weight in wild–cats”—a figure of speech which she got from the Mormon pioneers. She speedily developed great skill in the use of the rifle, and on the march she was detailed with the hunters to kill game, such as buffalo, antelope, deer, sheep and the many game–birds found on the plains, and her success as a hunter relieved her of the toil of pushing a cart.

On reaching Salt Lake City she became one of the wives of John D. Lee and went with him on missionary work to the frontier settlements, where she lived to some extent among the Indians. Subsequently she fled with her husband into the depths of the canyon region. This was after the Mountain Meadow Massacre was investigated by the general government, and the pair naturally went for prudential reasons. After his surrender she was true to him in his imprisonment, and wrote him letters of encouragement and received letters from him. Some time after his death she married a ranchman from southern California who brought a herd of horses into the valley of the Paria. With him she migrated to Arizona, where the pair kept a boarding house for men who were building the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad.

Finally they settled at Holbrook and built a hotel. When I was there last she was still keeping the hotel, but the majestic woman with piercing eyes and beautiful form—the herculean Venus was now older and somewhat corpulent.

Above the Paria the great river runs down a canyon which it has cut through one plateau. On its way it flows with comparative quiet through beautiful scenery, with glens that are vast amphitheaters which often overhang great springs and ponds of water deeply embosomed in the cliffs. From the southern escarpment of this plateau the great Colorado Plateau rises by a comparatively gentle acclivity, and Marble Canyon starts with walls but a few score feet in height until they reach an altitude of about 5,000 feet. On the way the channel is cut into beds of rock of lower geologic horizon, or greater geologic age. These rocks are sandstones and limestones. Some beds are very hard, others are soft and friable. The friable rocks wash out and the harder rocks remain projecting from the walls, so that every wall presents a set of stony shelves. These shelves rise along the wall toward the south as new shelves set in from below.

In addition to this shelving structure the walls are terraced and the cliffs of the canyon are set back one upon the other. Then these canyon walls are interrupted by side streams which themselves have carved lateral canyons, some small, others large, but all deep. In these side gorges the scenery is varied and picturesque; deep clefts are seen here and there as you descend the river—clefts furnished with little streams along which mosses and other plants grow. At low water the floor of the great canyon is more or less exposed, and where it flows over limestone rocks beautiful marbles are seen in many colors; saffron, pink, and blue prevail. Sometimes a façade or wall appears rising vertically from the water for thousands of feet. At last the canyon abruptly ends in a confusion of hills beyond which rise towering cliffs, and the group of hills are nestled in the bottom of a valley–like region which is surrounded by cliffs more than a mile in altitude.

From here on for many miles the whole character of the canyon changes. First a dike appears; this is a wall of black basalt crossing the river; it is of lava thrust up from below through a huge crevice broken in the rock by earthquake agency. On the east the Little Colorado comes; here it is a river of salt water, and it derives its salt a few miles up the stream. The main Colorado flows along the eastern and southern wall. Climbing this for a few hundred feet you may look off toward the northwest and gaze at the cliffs of the Kaibab Plateau.

This is the point where we built a trail down a side canyon where Mr. Walcott was to make his winter residence and study of the region; it is very complicated and exhibits a vast series of unconformable rocks of high antiquity. These lower rocks are of many colors; in large part they are shales. The region, which appears to be composed of bright–colored hills washed naked by the rain, is, in fact, beset with a multitude of winding canyons with their own precipitous walls. It is a region of many canyons in the depths of the Grand Canyon itself.

In this beautiful region Mr. Walcott, reading the book of geology, lived in a summerland during all of a long winter while the cliffs above were covered with snow which prevented his egress to the world. His companions, three young Mormons, longing for a higher degree of civilization, gazed wistfully at the snow–clad barriers by which they were inclosed. One was a draughtsman, another a herder of his stock, and the third his cook. They afterward told me that it was a long winter of homesickness, and that months dragged away as years, but Mr. Walcott himself had the great book of geology to read, and to him it was a winter of delight.

A half dozen miles below the basaltic wall the river enters a channel carved in 800 or 1,000 feet of dark gneiss of very hard rock. Here the channel is narrow and very swift and beset with rapids and falls. On the south and southwest the wall rises abruptly from the water to the summit of the plateau for about 6,000 feet, but across the river on the north and west mountains of gneiss and quartzites appear, sometimes rising to the height of a thousand feet. These are mountains in the bottom of a canyon. The buttes and plateaus of the inter–canyon region are composed of shales, sandstones, and limestones, which give rise to vast architectural shelving and to pinnacles and towers of gigantic proportions, the whole embossed with a marvelously minute system of fretwork carved by the artistic clouds. Looking beyond these mountains, buttes, and plateaus vistas of the walls of the great plateau are seen. From these walls project salients, and deep re–entrant angles appear.

The whole scene is forever reminding you of mighty architectural pinnacles and towers and balustrades and arches and columns with lattice work and delicate carving. All of these architectural features are sublime by titanic painting in varied hues—pink, red, brown, lavender, gray, blue, and black. In some lights the saffron prevails, in other lights vermilion, and yet in other lights the grays and blacks predominate. At times, and perhaps in rare seasons, clouds and cloudlets form in the canyon below and wander among the side canyons and float higher and higher until they are dissolved in the upper air, or perhaps they accumulate to hide great portions of the landscape. Then through rifts in the clouds vistas of Wonderland are seen. Such is that portion of the canyon around the great south bend of the Colorado River past the point of the Kaibab Plateau.

In the last chapter of my book entitled ‘The Canyons of the Colorado’ I have described the Grand Canyon in the following terms:

The Grand Canyon is a gorge 217 miles in length, through which flows a great river with many storm–born tributaries. It has a winding way, as rivers are wont to have. Its banks are vast structures of adamant, piled up in forms rarely seen in the mountains.

Down by the river the walls are composed of black gneiss, slates, and schists, all greatly implicated and traversed by dikes of granite. Let this formation be called the black gneiss. It is usually about 800 feet in thickness.

Then over the black gneiss are found 800 feet of quartzites, usually in very thin beds of many colors, but exceedingly hard, and ringing under the hammer like phonolite. These beds are dipping and unconformable with the rocks above. While they make but 800 feet of the wall or less they have a geologic thickness of 12,000 feet. Set up a row of books aslant; it is ten inches from the shelf to the top of the line of books, but there may be three feet of the books measured directly through the leaves. So these quartzites are aslant, and though of great geologic thickness they make but 800 feet of the wall. Your books may have many–colored bindings and differ greatly in their contents; so these quartzites vary greatly from place to place along the wall, and in many places they entirely disappear. Let us call this formation the variegated quartzite.

Above the quartzites there are 500 feet of sandstones. They are of a greenish hue, but are mottled with spots of brown and black by iron stains. They usually stand in a bold cliff, weathered in alcoves. Let this formation be called the cliff sandstone.

Above the cliff sandstone there are 700 feet of bedded sandstones and limestones, which are massive sometimes and sometimes broken into thin strata. These rocks are often weathered in deep alcoves. Let this formation be called the alcove sandstone.

Over the alcove sandstone there are 1,600 feet of limestone, in many places a beautiful marble, as in Marble Canyon. As it appears along the Grand Canyon it is always stained a brilliant red, for immediately over it there are thin seams of iron, and the storms have painted these limestones with pigments from above. Altogether this is the red–wall group. It is chiefly limestone. Let it be called the red–wall limestone.

Above the red wall there are 800 feet of gray and bright red sandstone, alternating in beds that look like vast ribbons of landscape. Let it be called the banded sandstone.

And over all, at the top of the wall, is the Aubrey limestone, 1,000 feet in thickness. This Aubrey has much gypsum in it, great beds of alabaster that are pure white in comparison with the great body of limestone below. In the same limestone there are enormous beds of chert, agates, and carnelians. This limestone is especially remarkable for its pinnacles and towers. Let it be called the tower limestone.

These are the elements with which the walls are constructed, from black buttress below to alabaster tower above. All of these elements weather in different forms and are painted in different colors, so that the wall presents a highly complex façade. A wall of homogeneous granite, like that in the Yosemite, is but a naked wall, whether it be 1,000 or 5,000 feet high. Hundreds and thousands of feet mean nothing to the eye when they stand in a meaningless front. A mountain covered by pure snow 10,000 feet high has but little more effect on the imagination than a mountain of snow 1,000 feet high—it is but more of the same thing—but a façade of seven systems of rock has its sublimity multiplied sevenfold.

Consider next the horizontal elements of the Grand Canyon. The river meanders in great curves, which are themselves broken into curves of smaller magnitude. The streams that head far back in the plateau on either side come down in gorges and break the wall into sections. Each lateral canyon has a secondary system of laterals, and the secondary canyons are broken by tertiary canyons; so the crags are forever branching, like the limbs of an oak. That which has been described as a wall is such only in its grand effect. In detail it is a series of structures separated by a ramification of canyons, each having its own walls. Thus, in passing down the canyon it seems to be inclosed by walls, but oftener by salients—towering structures that stand between canyons that run back into the plateau. Sometimes gorges of the second or third order have met before reaching the brink of the Grand Canyon, and then great salients are cut off from the wall and stand out as buttes—huge pavilions in the architecture of the canyon. The scenic elements thus described are fused and combined in very different ways.

We measured the length of the Grand Canyon by the length of the river running through it, but the running extent of wall can not be measured in this manner. In the black gneiss, which is at the bottom, the wall may stand above the river for a few hundred yards or a mile or two; then to follow the foot of the wall you must pass into a lateral canyon for a long distance, perhaps miles, and then back again on the other side of the lateral canyon; then along by the river until another lateral canyon is reached, which must be headed in the black gneiss. So for a dozen miles of river through the gneiss there may be a hundred miles of wall on either side. Climbing to the summit of the black gneiss and following the wall in the variegated quartzite, it is found to be stretched out to a still greater length, for it is cut with more lateral gorges. In like manner there is yet greater length of the mottled (or alcove) sandstone wall, and the red wall is still farther stretched out in ever–branching gorges.

To make the distance for ten miles along the river by walking along the top of the red wall it would be necessary to travel several hundred miles. The length of the wall reaches its maximum in the banded sandstone, which is terraced more than any of the other formations. The tower limestone wall is less tortuous. To start at the head of the Grand Canyon on one of the terraces of the banded sandstone and follow it to the foot of the Grand Canyon, which by river is a distance of 217 miles, it would be necessary to travel many thousand miles by the winding way; that is, the banded wall is many thousand miles in length.

The traveler in the region of mountains sees vast masses piled up in gentle declivities to the clouds. To see mountains in this way is to appreciate the masses of which they are composed. But the climber among the glaciers sees the elements of which this mass is composed—that it is made of cliffs and towers and pinnacles, with intervening gorges, and the smooth billows of granite seen from afar are transformed into cliffs and caves and towers and minarets.

These two aspects of mountain scenery have been seized by painters, and in their art two classes of mountains are represented; mountains with towering forms that seem ready to topple in the first storm, and mountains in masses that seem to frown defiance at the tempests. Both classes have told the truth. The two aspects are sometimes caught by our painters severally; sometimes they are combined. Church paints a mountain like a kingdom of glory. Bierstadt paints a mountain cliff where an eagle is lost from sight ere he reaches the summit. Thomas Moran marries these great characteristics, and in his infinite masses, cliffs of immeasurable height are seen.

Thus the elements of the facade of the Grand Canyon change vertically and horizontally. The details of structure can be seen only at close view, but grand effects of structure can be witnessed in great panoramic scenes. Seen in detail, gorges and precipices appear; seen at a distance, in comprehensive views, vast massive structures are presented. The traveler on the brink looks from afar and is overwhelmed with the sublimity of massive forms; the traveler among the gorges stands in the presence of awful mysteries—profound, solemn and gloomy.

For eight or ten miles below the mouth of the Little Colorado, the river is in the variegated quartzites, and a wonderful fretwork of forms and colors, peculiar to this rock, stretches back for miles to a labyrinth of the red–wall cliff; then below, the black gneiss is entered and soon has reached an altitude of 800 feet and sometimes more than 1,000 feet, and upon this black gneiss all the other structures in their wonderful colors are lifted. These continue for about seventy miles, when the black gneiss below is lost, for the walls are dropped down by the West Kaibab Fault and the river flows in the quartzites.

Then for eighty miles the mottled (or alcove) sandstones are found in the river bed. The course of the canyon is a little south of west and is comparatively straight. At the top of the red–wall limestone there is a broad terrace, two or three miles in width, composed of hills of wonderful forms carved in the banded beds, and back of this is seen a cliff in the tower limestone. Along the lower course of this stretch the whole character of the canyon is changed by another set of complicating conditions. We have now reached a region of volcanic activity. After the canyons were cut nearly to their present depth, lavas poured out and volcanoes were built on the walls of the canyon, but not in the canyon itself, though at places rivers of molten rock rolled down the walls into the Colorado.

The canyon for the next eighty miles is a compound of that found where the river is in the black gneiss and that found where the dead volcanoes stand on the brink of the wall. In the first stretch, where the gneiss is at the foundation, we have a great bend to the south, and in the last stretch, where the gneiss is below and the dead volcanoes above, another great southern detour is found. These two great beds are separated by eighty miles of comparatively straight river.

Let us call this first great bend the Kaibab reach of the canyon, and the straight part the Kanab reach, for the Kanab Creek heads far off in the plateau to the north and joins the Colorado at the beginning of the middle stretch. The third great southern bend is the Shiwits stretch. Thus there are three distinct portions of the Grand Canyon: The Kaibab section, characterized more by its buttes and salients; the Kanab section, characterized by its comparatively straight walls with volcanoes on the brink, and the Shiwits section, which is broken into great terraces with gneiss at the bottom and volcanoes at the top.

The erosion represented in the canyons, although vast, is but a small part of the great erosion of the region, for between the cliffs blocks have been carried away far superior in magnitude to those necessary to fill the canyons. Probably there is no portion of the whole region from which there have not been more than a thousand feet degraded, and there are districts from which more than 30,000 feet of rock have been carried away; altogether there is a district of country more than 200,000 square miles in extent, from which, on the average, more than 6,000 feet have been eroded. Consider a rock 200,000 square miles in extent and a mile in thickness, against which the clouds have hurled their storms, and beat it into sands, and the rills have carried the sands into the creeks, and the creeks have carried them into the rivers, and the Colorado has carried them into the sea.

We think of the mountains as forming clouds about their brows, but the clouds have formed the mountains. Great continental blocks are upheaved from beneath the sea by internal geologic forces that fashion the earth. Then the wandering clouds, the tempest–bearing clouds, the rainbow–decked clouds, with mighty power and with wonderful skill, carve out valleys and canyons and fashion hills and cliffs and mountains. The clouds are the artists sublime.

In winter some of the characteristics of the Grand Canyon are emphasized. The black gneiss below, the variegated quartzite, and the green or alcove sandstone form the foundation for the mighty red wall. The banded sandstone entablature is crowned by the tower limestone. In winter this is covered with snow. Seen from below, these changing elements seem to graduate into the heavens, and no plane of demarcation between wall and blue firmament can be seen. The heavens constitute a portion of the façade and mount into a vast dome from wall to wall, spanning the Grand Canyon with empyrean blue. So the earth and the heavens are blended in one vast structure.

When the clouds play in the canyon, as they often do in the rainy season, another set of effects is produced. Clouds creep out of canyons and wind into other canyons. The heavens seem to be alive, not moving as move the heavens over a plain, in one direction with the wind, but following the multiplied courses of these gorges. In this manner the little clouds seem to be individualized, to have wills and souls of their own and to be going on diverse errands—a vast assemblage of self–willed clouds faring here and there, intent upon purposes hidden in their own breasts. In imagination the clouds belong to the sky, and when they are in the canyon the skies come down into the gorges and cling to the cliffs and lift them up to immeasurable heights, for the sky must still be far away. Thus they lend infinity to the walls.

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail. The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse.

Besides the elements of form there are elements of color, for here the colors of the heavens are rivaled by the colors of the rocks. The rainbow is not more replete with hues.

But form and color do not exhaust all the divine qualities of the Grand Canyon. It is the land of music. The river thunders in perpetual roar, swelling in floods of music when the storm gods play upon the rocks, and fading away in soft and low murmurs when the infinite blue of heaven is unveiled. With the melody of the great tide rising and falling, swelling and vanishing forever, other melodies are heard in the gorges of the lateral canyons, while the waters plunge in the rapids among the rocks or leap in great cataracts. Thus the Grand Canyon is a land of song. Mountains of music swell in the rivers, hills of music billow in the creeks and meadows of music murmur in the rills that ripple over the rocks. Altogether it is a symphony of multitudinous melodies. All this is the music of waters. The adamant foundations of the earth have been wrought into a sublime harp, upon which the clouds of the heavens play with mighty tempests or with gentle showers.

The glories and the beauties of form, color and sound unite in the Grand Canyon—forms unrivaled even by the mountains, colors that vie with sunsets, and sounds that span the diapason from tempest to tinkling raindrop, from cataract to bubbling fountain.

But more—it is a vast district of country. Were it a valley plain it would make a state. It can be seen only in parts from hour to hour and from day to day and from week to week and from month to month. A year scarcely suffices to see it all.

It has infinite variety and no part is ever duplicated. Its colors, though many and complex at any instant, change with the ascending and declining sun; lights and shadows appear and vanish with the passing clouds and the changing seasons mark their passage in changing colors.

You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths. It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side of paradise.


J.W. Powell

© 1909 John Wesley Powell