Our Italy

by Charles Dudley Warner

The point where we struck the Grand Cañon, approaching it from the south, is opposite the promontory in the Kaibab Plateau named Point Sublime by Major Powell, just north of the 36th parallel, and 112° 15' west longitude. This is only a few miles west of the junction with the Little Colorado. About three or four miles west of this junction the river enters the east slope of the east Kaibab monocline, and here the Grand Cañon begins. Rapidly the chasm deepens to about 6000 feet, or rather it penetrates a higher country, the slope of the river remaining about the same. Through this lofty plateau—an elevation of 7000 to 9000 feet—the chasm extends for sixty miles, gradually changing its course to the north-west, and entering the Kanab Plateau. The Kaibab division of the Grand Cañon is by far the sublimest of all, being 1000 feet deeper than any other. It is not grander only on account of its greater depth, but it is broader and more diversified with magnificent architectural features.

The Kanab division, only less magnificent than the Kaibab, receives the Kanab Cañon from the north and the Cataract Cañon from the south, and ends at the Toroweap Valley.

The section of the Grand Cañon seen by those who take the route from Peach Springs is between 113° and 114° west longitude, and, though wonderful, presents few of the great features of either the Kaibab or the Kanab divisions. The Grand Cañon ends, west longitude 114°, at the Great Wash, west of the Hurricane Ledge or Fault. Its whole length from Little Colorado to the Great Wash, measured by the meanderings of the surface of the river, is 220 miles; by a median line between the crests of the summits of the walls with two-mile cords, about 195 miles; the distance in a straight line is 125 miles.

In our journey to the Grand Cañon we left the Santa Fé line at Flagstaff, a new town with a lively lumber industry, in the midst of a spruce-pine forest which occupies the broken country through which the road passes for over fifty miles. The forest is open, the trees of moderate size are too thickly set with low-growing limbs to make clean lumber, and the foliage furnishes the minimum of shade; but the change to these woods is a welcome one from the treeless reaches of the desert on either side. The cañon is also reached from Williams, the next station west, the distance being a little shorter, and the point on the cañon visited being usually a little farther west. But the Flagstaff route is for many reasons usually preferred. Flagstaff lies just south-east of the San Francisco Mountain, and on the great Colorado Plateau, which has a pretty uniform elevation of about 7000 feet above the sea. The whole region is full of interest. Some of the most remarkable cliff dwellings are within ten miles of Flagstaff, on the Walnut Creek Cañon. At Holbrook, 100 miles east, the traveller finds a road some forty miles long, that leads to the great petrified forest, or Chalcedony Park. Still farther east are the villages of the Pueblo Indians, near the line, while to the northward is the great reservation of the Navajos, a nomadic tribe celebrated for its fine blankets and pretty work in silver—a tribe that preserves much of its manly independence by shunning the charity of the United States. No Indians have come into intimate or dependent relations with the whites without being deteriorated.

TOURISTS IN THE COLORADO CAÑON.

Flagstaff is the best present point of departure, because it has a small hotel, good supply stores, and a large livery-stable, made necessary by the business of the place and the objects of interest in the neighborhood, and because one reaches from there by the easiest road the finest scenery incomparably on the Colorado. The distance is seventy-six miles through a practically uninhabited country, much of it a desert, and with water very infrequent. No work has been done on the road; it is made simply by driving over it. There are a few miles here and there of fair wheeling, but a good deal of it is intolerably dusty or exceedingly stony, and progress is slow. In the daytime (it was the last of June) the heat is apt to be excessive; but this could be borne, the air is so absolutely dry and delicious, and breezes occasionally spring up, if it were not for the dust. It is, notwithstanding the novelty of the adventure and of the scenery by the way, a tiresome journey of two days. A day of rest is absolutely required at the cañon, so that five days must be allowed for the trip. This will cost the traveller, according to the size of the party made up, from forty to fifty dollars. But a much longer sojourn at the cañon is desirable.

Our party of seven was stowed in and on an old Concord coach drawn by six horses, and piled with camp equipage, bedding, and provisions. A four-horse team followed, loaded with other supplies and cooking utensils. The road lies on the east side of the San Francisco Mountain. Returning, we passed around its west side, gaining thus a complete view of this shapely peak. The compact range is a group of extinct volcanoes, the craters of which are distinctly visible. The cup-like summit of the highest is 13,000 feet above the sea, and snow always lies on the north escarpment. Rising about 6000 feet above the point of view of the great plateau, it is from all sides a noble object, the dark rock, snow-sprinkled, rising out of the dense growth of pine and cedar. We drove at first through open pine forests, through park-like intervals, over the foot-hills of the mountain, through growths of scrub cedar, and out into the ever-varying rolling country to widely-extended prospects. Two considerable hills on our right attracted us by their unique beauty. Upon the summit and side of each was a red glow exactly like the tint of sunset. We thought surely that it was the effect of reflected light, but the sky was cloudless and the color remained constant. The color came from the soil. The first was called Sunset Mountain. One of our party named the other, and the more beautiful, Peachblow Mountain, a poetic and perfectly descriptive name.

We lunched at noon beside a swift, clouded, cold stream of snow-water from the San Francisco, along which grew a few gnarled cedars and some brilliant wild flowers. The scene was more than picturesque; in the clear hot air of the desert the distant landscape made a hundred pictures of beauty. Behind us the dark form of San Francisco rose up 6000 feet to its black crater and fields of spotless snow. Away off to the north-east, beyond the brown and gray pastures, across a far line distinct in dull color, lay the Painted Desert, like a mirage, like a really painted landscape, glowing in red and orange and pink, an immense city rather than a landscape, with towers and terraces and façades, melting into indistinctness as in a rosy mist, spectral but constant, weltering in a tropic glow and heat, walls and columns and shafts, the wreck of an Oriental capital on a wide violet plain, suffused with brilliant color softened into exquisite shades. All over this region nature has such surprises, that laugh at our inadequate conception of her resources.