Footnotes
[3] Professor Blake of the University of Arizona has called my attention to this.
CHAPTER III
THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL
Early geological days.
The former Gulf.
In the ancient days when the shore of the Pacific was young, when the white sierras had only recently been heaved upward and the desert itself was in a formative stage, the ocean reached much farther inland than at the present time. It pushed through many a pass and flooded many a depression in the sands, as its wave-marks upon granite bases and its numerous beaches still bear witness. In those days that portion of the Colorado Desert known as the Salton Basin did not exist. The Gulf of California extended as far north as the San Bernardino Range and as far west as the Pass of San Gorgonio. Its waters stood deep where now lies the road-bed of the Southern Pacific railway, and all the country from Indio almost to the Colorado River was a blue sea. The Bowl was full. No one knew if it had a bottom or imagined that it would ever be emptied of water and given over to the drifting sands.
Sea-beaches on desert.
Harbors and reefs.
No doubt the tenure of the sea in this Salton Basin was of long duration. The sand-dunes still standing along the northern shore—fifty feet high and shining like hills of chalk—were not made in a month; nor was the long shelving beach beneath them—still covered with sea-shells and pebbles and looking as though washed by the waves only yesterday—formed in a day. Both dunes and beach are plainly visible winding across the desert for many miles. The southwestern shore, stretching under a spur of the Coast Range, shows the same formation in its beach-line. The old bays and lagoons that led inland from the sea, the river-beds that brought down the surface waters from the mountains, the inlets and natural harbors are all in place. Some of them are drifted half full of sand, but they have not lost their identity. And out in the sea-bed still stand masses of cellular rock, honeycombed and water-worn (and now for many years wind-worn), showing the places where once rose the reefs of the ancient sea.
Indian remains.
The Cocopas.
These are the only records that tell of the sea’s occupation. The Indians have no tradition about it. Yet when the sea was there the Indian tribes were there also. Along the bases of the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Ranges there are indications of cave-dwelling, rock-built squares that doubtless were fortified camps, heaps of stone that might have been burial-mounds. Everywhere along the ancient shores and beaches you pick up pieces of pottery, broken ollas, stone pestels and mortars, axe-heads, obsidian arrow-heads, flint spear-points, agate beads. There is not the slightest doubt that the shores were inhabited. It was a warm nook, accessible to the mountains and the Pacific; in fact, just the place where tribes would naturally gather. Branches of the Yuma Indians, like the Cocopas, overran all this country when the Padres first crossed the desert; and it was probably their forefathers who lived by the shores of this Upper Gulf. No doubt they were fishermen, traders and fighters, like their modern representatives on Tiburon Island; and no doubt they fished and fought and were happy by the shores of the mountain-locked sea.
The Colorado River.
The delta dam.
But there came a time when there was a disturbance of the existing conditions in the Upper Gulf. Century after century the Colorado River had been carrying down to the sea its burden of sedimental sand and silt. It had been entering the Gulf far down on the eastern side at an acute angle. Gradually its deposits had been building up, banking up; and gradually the river had been pushing them out and across the Gulf in a southwesterly direction. Finally there was formed a delta dam stretching from shore to shore. The tides no longer brought water up and around the bases of the big mountains. Communication with the sea was cut off and what was once the top of the Gulf changed into an inland lake. It now had no water supply from below, it lay under a burning sun, and day by day evaporation carried it away.
The inland lake.
No one knows how many days, how many years, elapsed before the decrease of the water became noticeable. Doubtless the lake shrunk away slowly from the white face of the sand-dunes and the red walls of the mountains. The river-mouths that opened into the lake narrowed themselves to small stream-beds. The shelving beaches where the waves had fallen lazily year after year, pushing themselves over the sand in beautiful water-mirrors, shone bare and dry in the sunlight. The ragged reefs, over which the chop sea had tumbled and tossed so long, lifted their black hulks out of the water and with their hosts of barnacles and sea-life became a part of the land.
The first fall.
Springs and wells in the sea-bed.
The New River.
The waters of the great inland lake fell perhaps a hundred feet and then they made a pause. The exposed shores dried out. They baked hard in the sun, and were slowly ground down to sand and powdered silt by the action of the winds. The waters made a long pause. They were receiving reinforcements from some source. Possibly there was more rainfall in those days than now, and the streams entering the lake from the mountains were much larger. Again there may have been underground springs. There are flowing wells to-day in this old sea-bed—wells that cast up water salter than the sea itself. No one knows their fountain-head. Perhaps by underground channels the water creeps through from the Gulf, or comes from mountain reservoirs and turns saline by passing through beds of salt. These are the might-bes; but it is far more probable that the Colorado River at high water had made a breach of some kind in the dam of its own construction and had poured overflow water into the lake by way of a dry channel called the New River. The bed of this river runs northward from below the boundary-line of Lower California; and in 1893, during a rise in the Colorado, the waters rushed in and flooded the whole of what is called the Salton Basin. When the Colorado receded, the basin soon dried out again.
New beaches.
It was undoubtedly some accident of this kind that called the halt in the original recession. During the interim the lake had time to form new shores where the waves pounded and washed on the gravel as before until miles upon miles of new beach—pebbled, shelled, and sloping downward with great uniformity—came into existence. This secondary beach is intact to-day and looks precisely like the primary except that it is not quite so large. Across the basin, along the southern mountains, the second water-tracery is almost as apparent as the first. The rocks are eaten in long lines by wave-action, and are honeycombed by the ceaseless energies of the zoöphite.
The second fall.
Nor was the change in beach and rock alone. New bays and harbors were cut out from where the sea had been, new river-channels were opened down to the shrunken lake, new lagoons were spread over the flat places. Nature evidently made a great effort to repair the damage and adapt the lake to its new conditions. And the Indians, too, accepted the change. There are many indications in broken pottery, arrow-heads, and mortars that the aboriginal tribes moved down to the new beach and built wickiups by the diminished waters. And the old fishing-foraging-fighting life was probably resumed.
The third beach.
The failing water.
Then once more the waters went down, down, down. Step by step they receded until the secondary beach was left a hundred feet above the water level. Again there was a pause. Again new beaches were beaten into shape by the waves, new bays were opened, new arroyos cut through from above. The whole process of shore-making—the fitting of the land to the shrunken proportions of the lake—was gone through with for the third time; while the water supply from the river or elsewhere was maintained in decreased volume but with some steadiness of flow. Possibly the third halt of the receding water was not for a great length of time. The tertiary beach is not so large as its predecessors. There never was any strong wave-action upon it, its pebbles are few, its faults and breaks are many. The water supply was failing, and finally it ceased altogether.
Evaporation.
What fate for a lake in the desert receiving no supplies from river or sea—what fate save annihilation? The hot breath of the wind blew across the cramped water and whipped its surface into little waves; and as each tiny point of spray rose on the crest and was lifted into the air the fiery sunbeam caught it, and in a twinkling had evaporated and carried it upward. Day by day this process went on over the whole surface until there was no more sea. The hollow reefs rose high and dark above the bed, the flat shoals of silt lifted out of the ooze, and down in the lowest pools there was the rush and plunge of monster tortuabas, sharks and porpoises, caught as it were in a net and vainly struggling to get out. How strange must have seemed that landscape when the low ridges were shining with the slime of the sea, when the beds were strewn with algæ, sponges, and coral, and the shores were whitening with salt! How strange, indeed, must have been the first sight of the Bottom of the Bowl!
Bottom of the Bowl.
Drying out of the sea-bed.
Advance of desert.
But the sun never relaxed its fierce heat nor the wind its hot breath. They scorched and burned the silt of the sea-bed until it baked and cracked into blocks. Then began the wear of the winds upon the broken edges until the blocks were reduced to dry fine powder. Finally the desert came in. Drifts upon drifts of sand blown through the valleys settled in the empty basin; gravel and bowlder-wash came down from the mountains; the grease wood, the salt-bush, and the so-called pepper-grass sprang up in isolated spots. Slowly the desert fastened itself upon the basin. Its heat became too intense to allow the falling rain to reach the earth, its surface was too salt and alkaline to allow of much vegetation, it could support neither animal nor bird life; it became more deserted than the desert itself.
Below sea-level.
Desolation of the basin.
And thus it remains to this day. When you are in the bottom of it you are nearly three hundred feet below the level of the sea. Circling about you to the north, south, and west are sierras, some of them over ten thousand feet in height. These form the Rim of the Bowl. And off to the southwest there is a side broken out of the Bowl through which you can pass to the river and the Gulf. The basin is perhaps the hottest place to be found anywhere on the American deserts. And it is also the most forsaken. The bottom itself is, for the great part of it, as flat as a table. It looks like a great plain leading up and out to the horizon—a plain that has been ploughed and rolled smooth. The soil is drifted silt—the deposits made by the washings from the mountains—and is almost as fine as flour.
Beauty of the sand-dunes.
The long line of dunes at the north are just as desolate, yet they are wonderfully beautiful. The desert sand is finer than snow, and its curves and arches, as it builds its succession of drifts out and over an arroyo, are as graceful as the lines of running water. The dunes are always rhythmical and flowing in their forms; and for color the desert has nothing that surpasses them. In the early morning, before the sun is up, they are air-blue, reflecting the sky overhead; at noon they are pale lines of dazzling orange-colored light, waving and undulating in the heated air; at sunset they are often flooded with a rose or mauve color; under a blue moonlight they shine white as icebergs in the northern seas.
Cactus and salt-bush.
But neither the dunes nor the flats grow vegetation of consequence. About the high edges, up near the mountain slopes, you find growths of mesquite, palo verde, and cactus; but down in the basin there are many miles where no weed or grass breaks the level uniformity. Not even the salt-bush will grow in some of the areas. And this is not due to poverty of soil but to absence of water and intense heat. Plants cannot live by sunlight alone.
Desert animals in the basin.
Birds.
Lizards and snakes.
Nor will the desert animals inhabit an absolute waste. The coyote and the wild-cat do not relish life in this dip in the earth. They care little for heat and drouth, but the question of food appeals to them. There is nothing to eat. Even the abstemious jack-rabbit finds living here something of a difficulty. Many kinds of tracks are found in the uncrusted silt—tracks of coyotes, gray wolves, sometimes mountain lions—but they all run in straight trails, showing the animals to be crossing the basin to the mountains, not prowling or hunting. So, too, you will occasionally find birds—linnets, bobolinks, mocking-birds, larks—but they are seen one at a time, and they look weary—like land birds far out at sea that seek a resting-place on passing vessels. They do not belong to the desert and are only stopping there temporarily on some long flight. Snakes and lizards are not particular about their abiding-place, and yet they do not care to live in a land where there is no bush or stone to creep under. You meet with them very seldom. Practically there is no life of any kind that is native to the place.
Mirage.
The water illusion.
Is there any beauty, other than the dunes, down in this hollow of the desert? Yes. From a picturesque point of view it has the most wonderful light, air, and color imaginable. You will not think so until you see them blended in that strange illusion known as mirage. And here is the one place in all the world where the water-mirage appears to perfection. It does not show well over grassy or bushy ground, but over the flat lake-beds of the desert its appearance is astonishing. Down in the basin it is accompanied by a second illusion that makes the first more convincing. You are below sea-level, but instead of the ground about you sloping up and out, it apparently slopes down and away on every side. You are in the centre of a disk or high point of ground, and around the circumference of the disk is water—palpable, almost tangible, water. It cannot be seen well from your horse, and fifty feet up on a mountain side it would not be visible at all. But dismount and you see it better; kneel down and place your cheek to the ground and now the water seems to creep up to you. You could throw a stone into it. The shore where the waves lap is just before you. But where is the horizon-line? Odd enough, this vast circling sea does not always know a horizon; it sometimes reaches up and blends into the sky without any point of demarcation. Through the heated air you see faint outlines of mountains, dim glimpses of foot-hills, suggestions of distance; but no more. Across them is drawn the wavering veil of air, and the red earth at your feet, the blue sky overhead, are but bordering bands of flat color.
Decorative landscapes.
Sensuous qualities in nature.
And there you have the most decorative landscape in the world, a landscape all color, a dream landscape. Painters for years have been trying to put it upon canvas—this landscape of color, light, and air, with form almost obliterated, merely suggested, given only as a hint of the mysterious. Men like Corot and Monet have told us, again and again, that in painting, clearly delineated forms of mountains, valleys, trees, and rivers, kill the fine color-sentiment of the picture. The great struggle of the modern landscapist is to get on with the least possible form and to suggest everything by tones of color, shades of light, drifts of air. Why? Because these are the most sensuous qualities in nature and in art. The landscape that is the simplest in form and the finest in color is by all odds the most beautiful. It is owing to just these features that this Bowl of the desert is a thing of beauty instead of a dreary hollow in the hills. Only one other scene is comparable to it, and that the southern seas at sunset when the calm ocean reflects and melts into the color-glory of the sky. It is the same kind of beauty. Form is almost blurred out in favor of color and air.
Changing the desert.
Irrigation in the basin.
Yet here is more beauty destined to destruction. It might be thought that this forsaken pot-hole in the ground would never come under the dominion of man, that its very worthlessness would be its safeguard against civilization, that none would want it, and everyone from necessity would let it alone. But not even the spot deserted by reptiles shall escape the industry or the avarice (as you please) of man. A great company has been formed to turn the Colorado River into the sands, to reclaim this desert basin, and make it blossom as the rose. The water is to be brought down to the basin by the old channel of the New River. Once in reservoirs it is to be distributed over the tract by irrigating ditches, and it is said a million acres of desert will thus be made arable, fitted for homesteads, ready for the settler who never remains settled.
Changing the climate.
Dry air.
A most laudable enterprise, people will say. Yes; commercially no one can find fault with it. Money made from sand is likely to be clean money, at any rate. And economically these acres will produce large supplies of food. That is commendable, too, even if those for whom it is produced waste a good half of what they already possess. And yet the food that is produced there may prove expensive to people other than the producers. This old sea-bed is, for its area, probably the greatest dry-heat generator in the world because of its depression and its barren, sandy surface. It is a furnace that whirls heat up and out of the Bowl, over the peaks of the Coast Range into Southern California, and eastward across the plains to Arizona and Sonora. In what measure it is responsible for the general climate of those States cannot be accurately summarized; but it certainly has a great influence, especially in the matter of producing dry air. To turn this desert into an agricultural tract would be to increase humidity, and that would be practically to nullify the finest air on the continent.
Value of the air supply.
And why are not good air and climate as essential to human well-being as good beef and good bread? Just now, when it is a world too late, our Government and the forestry societies of the country are awakening to the necessity of preserving the forests. National parks are being created wherever possible and the cutting of timber within them is prohibited. Why is this being done? Ostensibly to preserve the trees, but in reality to preserve the water supply, to keep the fountain-heads pure, to maintain a uniform stage of water in the rivers. Very proper and right. The only pity is that it was not undertaken forty years ago. But how is the water supply, from an economic and hygienic stand-point, any more important than the air supply?
Value of the deserts.
Grasses, trees, shrubs, growing grain, they, too, may need good air as well as human lungs. The deserts are not worthless wastes. You cannot crop all creation with wheat and alfalfa. Some sections must lie fallow that other sections may produce. Who shall say that the preternatural productiveness of California is not due to the warm air of its surrounding deserts? Does anyone doubt that the healthfulness of the countries lying west of the Mississippi may be traced directly to the dry air and heat of the deserts. They furnish health to the human; why not strength to the plant? The deserts should never be reclaimed. They are the breathing-spaces of the west and should be preserved forever.
Destruction of natural beauty.
Effects of mining, lumbering, agriculture.
Ploughing the prairies.
“Practical men”
To speak about sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The æsthetic sense—the power to enjoy through the eye, the ear, and the imagination—is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it. The “practical men,” who seem forever on the throne, know very well that beauty is only meant for lovers and young persons—stuff to suckle fools withal. The main affair of life is to get the dollar, and if there is any money in cutting the throat of Beauty, why, by all means, cut her throat. That is what the “practical men” have been doing ever since the world began. It is not necessary to dig up ancient history; for have we not seen, here in California and Oregon, in our own time, the destruction of the fairest valleys the sun ever shone upon by placer and hydraulic mining? Have we not seen in Minnesota and Wisconsin the mightiest forests that ever raised head to the sky slashed to pieces by the axe and turned into a waste of tree-stumps and fallen timber? Have we not seen the Upper Mississippi, by the destruction of the forests, changed from a broad, majestic river into a shallow, muddy stream; and the beautiful prairies of Dakota turned under by the plough and then allowed to run to weeds? Men must have coal though they ruin the valleys and blacken the streams of Pennsylvania, they must have oil though they disfigure half of Ohio and Indiana, they must have copper if they wreck all the mountains of Montana and Arizona, and they must have gold though they blow Alaska into the Behring Sea. It is more than possible that the “practical men” have gained much practice and many dollars by flaying the fair face of these United States. They have stripped the land of its robes of beauty, and what have they given in its place? Weeds, wire fences, oil-derricks, board shanties and board towns—things that not even a “practical man” can do less than curse at.
Fighting wind, sand, and heat.
Nature eternal.
Return of desolation.
And at last they have turned to the desert! It remains to be seen what they will do with it. Reclaiming a waste may not be so easy as breaking a prairie or cutting down a forest. And Nature will not always be driven from her purpose. Wind, sand, and heat on Sahara have proven hard forces to fight against; they may prove no less potent on the Colorado. And sooner or later Nature will surely come to her own again. Nothing human is of long duration. Men and their deeds are obliterated, the race itself fades; but Nature goes calmly on with her projects. She works not for man’s enjoyment, but for her own satisfaction and her own glory. She made the fat lands of the earth with all their fruits and flowers and foliage; and with no less care she made the desert with its sands and cacti. She intended that each should remain as she made it. When the locust swarm has passed, the flowers and grasses will return to the valley; when man is gone, the sand and the heat will come back to the desert. The desolation of the kingdom will live again, and down in the Bottom of the Bowl the opalescent mirage will waver skyward on wings of light, serene in its solitude, though no human eye sees nor human tongue speaks its loveliness.
CHAPTER IV
THE SILENT RIVER
Rise of the Colorado.
In the canyon.
On the desert.
The career of the Colorado, from its rise in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming to its final disappearance in the Gulf of California, seems almost tragic in its swift transitions. It starts out so cheerily upon its course; it is so clear and pure, so sparkling with sunshine and spirit. It dashes down mountain valleys, gurgles under bowlders, swirls over waterfalls, flashes through ravines and gorges. With its sweep and glide and its silvery laugh it seems to lead a merry life. But too soon it plunges into precipitous canyons and enters upon its fierce struggle with the encompassing rock. Now it boils and foams, leaps and strikes, thunders and shatters. For hundreds of miles it wears and worries and undermines the rock to its destruction. During the long centuries it has cut down into the crust of the earth five thousand feet. But ever the stout walls keep casting it back, keep churning it into bubbles, beating it into froth. At last, its canyon course run, exhausted and helpless, it is pushed through the escarpments, thrust out upon the desert, to find its way to the sea as best it can. Its spirit is broken, its vivacity is extinguished, its color is deepened to a dark red—the trail of blood that leads up to the death. Wearily now it drifts across the desert without a ripple, without a moan. Like a wounded snake it drags its length far down the long wastes of sand to where the blue waves are flashing on the Californian Gulf. And there it meets—obliteration.
The lower river.
After the clash and roar of the conflict in the canyons how impressive seems the stillness of the desert, how appalling the unbroken silence of the lower river! Day after day it moves seaward, but without a sound. You start at its banks to find no waves, no wash upon gravel beaches, no rush of water over shoals. Instead of the soothing murmur of breaking falls there is at times the boil of currents from below—waters flung up sullenly and soon flattened into drifting nothingness by their own weight.
Sluggish movement.
Stillness of river.
And how heavily the stream moves! Its load of silt is gradually settling to the bottom, yet still the water seems to drag upon the shores. Every reef of sand, every island of mud, every overhanging willow or cottonwood or handful of arrow-weed holds out a restraining hand. But slowly, patiently, winding about obstructions, cutting out new channels, creeping where it may not run, the bubbleless water works its way to the sea. The night-winds steal along its shores and pass in and out among its sedges, but there are no whispering voices; and the stars emerge and shine upon the flat floor of water, but there is no lustre. The drear desolation of it! The blare of morning sunlight does not lift the pall, nor the waving illusions of the mirage break the stillness. The Silent River moves on carrying desolation with it; and at every step the waters grow darker, darker with the stain of red—red the hue of decay.
The river’s name.
Its red color.
It was not through paucity of imagination that the old Spaniards gave the name—Colorado.[4] During the first fifty years after its discovery the river was christened many times, but the name that finally clung to it was the one that gave accurate and truthful description. You may see on the face of the globe numerous muddy Missouris, blue Rhones, and yellow Tibers; but there is only one red river and that the Colorado. It is not exactly an earthy red, not the color of shale and clay mixed; but the red of peroxide of iron and copper, the sang-du-bœuf red of oriental ceramics, the deep insistent red of things time-worn beyond memory. And there is more than a veneer about the color. It has a depth that seems luminous and yet is sadly deceptive. You do not see below the surface no matter how long you gaze into it. As well try to see through a stratum of porphyry as through that water to the bottom of the river.
Compared with the Nile.
The blood hue.
To call it a river of blood would be exaggeration, and yet the truth lies in the exaggeration. As one walks along its crumbling banks there is the thought of that other river that changed its hue under the outstretched rod of the prophet. How weird indeed must have been the ensanguined flow of the Nile, with its little waves breaking in crests of pink foam! How strange the shores where the receding waters left upon sand and rock a bordering line of scarlet froth! But the Colorado is not quite like that—not so ghastly, not so unearthly. It may suggest at times the heavy welling flow of thickening blood which the sands at every step are trying to drink up; but this is suggestion only, not realization. It seems to hint at blood, and under starlight to resemble it; but the resemblance is more apparent than real. The Colorado is a red river but not a scarlet one.
River changes.
Red sands and silt.
It may be thought odd that the river should change so radically from the clear blue-green of its fountain-head to the opaque red of its desert stream, but rivers when they go wandering down to the sea usually leave their mountain purity behind them. The Colorado rushing through a thousand miles of canyons, cuts and carries seaward with it red sands of shale, granite, and porphyry, red rustings of iron, red grits of carnelian, agate and garnet. All the tributaries come bearing their tokens of red copper, and with the rains the whole red surface of the watershed apparently washes into the smaller creeks and thus into the valleys. When the river reaches the desert carrying its burden of silt, it no longer knows the bowlder-bed, the rocky shores, the breaking waterfalls that clarify a stream. And there are no large pools where the water can rest while the silt settles to the bottom. Besides, the desert itself at times pours into the river an even deeper red than the canyons. And it does this not through arroyos alone, but also by a wide surface drainage.
River-banks.
Often the slope of the desert to the river is gradual for many miles—sometimes like the top of a huge table slightly tilted from the horizontal. When the edge of the table is reached the mesa begins to break into terraces (often cut through by small gullies), and the final descent is not unlike the steps of a Roman circus leading down into the arena. During cloud-bursts the waters pour down these steps with great fury and the river simply acts as a catch-basin for all the running color of the desert.
“Bottom” lands.
The green bands.
The “bottom” lands, forming the immediate banks of the river, are the silt deposits of former years. Often they are several miles in width and are usually covered with arrow-weed, willows, alders, and cottonwoods. The growth is dense if not tall and often forms an almost impenetrable jungle through which are scattered little openings where grass and flowers grow and Indians build reed wickiups and raise melons and corn in season. The desert terraces on either side (sometimes there is a row of sand-dunes) come down to meet these “bottom” lands, and the line where the one leaves off and the other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of a knife. Seen from the distant mountain tops the river moves between two long ribbons of green, and the borders are the gray and gold mesas of the desert.
Bushes and flowers.
Afloat and drifting down between these lines of green your attention is perhaps not at first attracted by the water. You are interested in the thickets of alders and the occasional bursts of white and yellow flowers from among the bushes. They are very commonplace bushes, very ordinary flowers; but how lovely they look as they seem to drift by the boat! How silent again are these clumps of alder and willow! There may be linnets and sparrows among them but they do not make their presence obtrusive in song. A hawk wheels along over the arrow-weed looking for quail, but his wings cut the air without noise. How deathly still everything seems! The water wears into the soft banks, the banks keep sloughing into the stream, but again you hear no splashing fall.
Soundless water.
Wild fowl.
And the water itself is just as soundless. There is never a sunken rock to make a little gurgle, never a strip of gravel beach where a wave could charm you with its play. The beat of oars breaks the air with a jar, but breaks no bubbles on the water. You look long at the stream and fall to wondering if there can be any life in it. What besides a polywog or a bullhead could live there? Obviously, and in fact—nothing. Perhaps there are otter and beaver living along the pockets in the banks? Yes; there were otter and beaver here at one time, but they are very scarce to-day. But there are wild fowl? Yes; in the spring and fall the geese and ducks follow the river in their flights, but they do not like the red water. What proof? Because they do not stop long in any one place. They swing into a bayou or slough late at night and go out at early dawn. They do not love the stream, but wild fowl on their migratory flights must have water, and this river is the only one between the Rockies and the Pacific that runs north and south.
Herons and bitterns.
Snipe.
The blue herons and the bitterns do not mind the red mud or the red water, in fact they rather like it; but they were always solitary people of the sedge. They prowl about the marshes alone and the swish of oars drives them into the air with a guttural “Quowk.” And there are snipe here, bands of them, flashing their wings in the sun as they wheel over the red waters or trip along the muddy banks singly or in pairs. They are quite at home on the bars and bayou flats, but it seems not a very happy home for them—that is judging by the absence of snipe talk. The little teeter flies ahead of you from point to point, but makes no twitter, the yellow-leg seldom sounds his mellow three-note call, and the kill-deer, even though you shoot at him, will not cry “Kill-deer!” “Kill-deer!”
Sad bird-life.
It may be the season when birds are mute, or it may merely happen so for to-day, or it may be that the silence of the river and the desert is an oppressive influence; but certainly you have never seen bird-life so hopelessly sad. Even the kingfisher, swinging down in a blue line from a dead limb and skimming the water, makes none of that rattling clatter that you knew so well when you were a child by a New England mill-stream. And what does a kingfisher on such a river as this? If it were filled with fish he could not see them through that thick water.
The forsaken.
Solitude.
The voiceless river! From the canyon to the sea it flows through deserts, and ever the seal of silence is upon it. Even the scant life of its borders is dumb—birds with no note, animals with no cry, human beings with no voice. And so forsaken! The largest river west of the mountains and yet the least known. There are miles upon miles of mesas stretching upward from the stream that no feet have ever trodden, and that possess not a vestige of life of any kind. And along its banks the same tale is told. You float for days and meet with no traces of humanity. When they do appear it is but to emphasize the solitude. An Indian wickiup on the bank, an Indian town; yes, a white man’s town, what impression do they make upon the desert and its river? You drift by Yuma and wonder what it is doing there. Had it been built in the middle of the Pacific on a barren rock it could not be more isolated, more hopelessly “at sea.”
Beauty of the river.
Its majesty.
After the river crosses the border-line of Mexico it grows broader and flatter than ever. And still the color seems to deepen. For all its suggestion of blood it is not an unlovely color. On the contrary, that deep red contrasted with the green of the banks and the blue of the sky, makes a very beautiful color harmony. They are hues of depth and substance—hues that comport excellently well with the character of the river itself. And never a river had more character than the Colorado. You may not fancy the solitude of the stream nor its suggestive coloring, but you cannot deny its majesty and its nobility. It has not now the babble of the brook nor the swift rush of the canyon water; rather the quiet dignity that is above conflict, beyond gayety. It has grown old, it is nearing its end; but nothing could be calmer, simpler, more sublime, than the drift of it down into the delta basin.
The delta.
Disintegration.
The mountains are receding on every side, the desert is flattening to meet the sea, and the ocean tides are rising to meet the river. Half human in its dissolution, the river begins to break joint by joint. The change has been gradually taking place for miles and now manifests itself positively. The bottom lands widen, many channels or side-sloughs open upon the stream, and the water is distributed into the mouths of the delta. There is a break in the volume and mass—a disintegration of forces. And by divers ways, devious and slow, the crippled streams well out to the Gulf and never come together again.
The river during floods.
It is not so when the river is at its height with spring freshets. Then the stream is swollen beyond its banks. All the bottom lands for miles across, up to the very terraces of the mesas, are covered; and the red flood moves like an ocean current, vast in width, ponderous in weight, irresistible in strength. All things that can be uprooted or wrenched away, move with it. Nothing can check or stop it now. It is the Grand Canyon river once more, free, mighty, dangerous even in its death-throes.
The “bore.”
Meeting of river and sea.
And now at the full and the change of the moon, when the Gulf waters come in like a tidal wave, and the waters of the north meet the waters of the south, there is a mighty conflict of opposing forces. The famous “bore” of the river-mouth is the result. When the forces first meet there is a slow push-up of the water which rises in the shape of a ridge or wedge. The sea-water gradually proves itself the greater and the stronger body, and the ridge breaks into a crest and pitches forward with a roar. The undercut of the river sweeps away the footing of the tide, so to speak, and flings the top of the wave violently forward. The red river rushes under, the blue tide rushes over. There is the flash and dash of parti-colored foam on the crests, the flinging of jets of spray high in air, the long roll of waves breaking not upon a beach, but upon the back of the river, and the shaking of the ground as though an earthquake were passing. After it is all done with and gone, with no trace of wave or foam remaining, miles away down the Gulf the red river slowly rises in little streams through the blue to the surface. There it spreads fan-like over the top of the sea, and finally mingles with and is lost in the greater body.
The blue tomb.
Shores of the Gulf.
The river is no more. It has gone down to its blue tomb in the Gulf—the fairest tomb that ever river knew. Something of serenity in the Gulf waters, something of the monumental in the bordering mountains, something of the unknown and the undiscovered over all, make it a fit resting-place for the majestic Colorado. The lonely stream that so shunned contact with man, that dug its bed thousands of feet in the depths of pathless canyons, and trailed its length across trackless deserts, sought out instinctively a point of disappearance far from the madding crowd. The blue waters of the Gulf, the beaches of shell, the red, red mountains standing with their feet in the sea, are still far removed from civilization’s touch. There are no towns or roads or people by those shores, there are no ships upon those seas, there are no dust and smoke of factories in those skies. The Indians are there as undisturbed as in the days of Coronado, and the white man is coming but has not yet arrived. The sun still shines on unknown bays and unexplored peaks. Therefore is there silence—something of the hush of the deserts and the river that flows between.