At the Junction of the Green and Grand on the Surface.
Photograph by E.O. BEAMAN, U.S. Colo. Riv. Exp.
He goes on to say that, while the great canyon, meaning the Grand Canyon, with its gigantic cliffs, presents grander scenes, they have less variety and beauty of detail than this. They were here able to see over an area of some fifty miles diameter, where, hemmed in by lines of lofty step-like mesas, a great basin lay before them as on a map. There was no vegetation, “nothing but bare and barren rocks of rich and varied colours shimmering in the sunlight. Scattered over the plain were thousands of the fantastically formed buttes to which I have referred... pyramids, domes, towers, columns, spires of every conceivable form and size.” There were also multitudes of canyons, ramifying in every direction, “deep, dark, and ragged, impassable to everything but the winged bird.” At the nearest point was the canyon of the Grand, while four miles to the south another great gorge was discerned joining it, which their Amerind guides pronounced to be that of Green River. Finding it utterly impossible for them to reach this place, they returned.
Thus, after all these years of endeavour, the mighty Colorado foamed away amidst this terrible environment as if no human element yet existed in the world. And as it continued to baffle all attempts to probe its deeper mysteries, the dread of it and the fear of it grew and grew, till he who suggested that a man might pass through the bewildering chasms and live, was regarded as light-headed. Then came the awful war of the Rebellion, and for several years little thought was bestowed on the problem.[[4]]
[4] The troops that were so foolishly and feebly sent against the Mormons in 1857 had some experience in Green River Valley, but it was not directly connected with this story and I will not introduce an account of it here.
Some few prospectors for mineral veins began investigations in the neighbourhood of the lower part of the Grand Canyon, and the gorge was entered from below, about 1864, by O. D. Gass and three other men. I met Gass at his home at Las Vegas (see cut, page 137) in 1875, but I did not then know he had been in the canyon and did not hear his story. It was not till 1866 that any one tried again to navigate the river above Mohave. In that year Captain Rodgers, who for four years had been on the lower Colorado, took the steamboat Esmeralda, ninety-seven feet long and drawing three and one-half feet of water, up as far as Callville, near the mouth of the Virgen, which was several miles beyond the highest point attained by Ives in his skiff, but little, if any, farther than Johnson had gone with his steamboat. He ascended the most difficult place, Roaring Rapids in Black Canyon, in seven minutes, and was of the opinion that it could as easily be surmounted at any stage of water, except perhaps during the spring rise. It does not matter much now, for it is not likely that any steam craft will soon again have occasion to traverse that canyon. The completion of the railways was a death blow to steam navigation on the Colorado, yet, in the future, when the fertile bottoms are brought under cultivation, small steamboats will probably be utilised for local transportation.
The Barrel Cactus Compared with the Height of a Man.
Photograph by C.R. SAVAGE.