They were now in the beginning of what has since been called Glen Canyon. Powell at first gave the name of Mound to the upper half, and Monument to the lower, but after 1871 Glen was substituted for the whole. On July 31st they passed the mouth of the San Juan, which enters through a canyon similar to that of the main river, about a thousand feet deep. They tried to climb out near this point, but failed to accomplish it. The next day they made camp in one of the peculiar alcoves or glens from which the canyon is named, worn by the waters into the homogeneous sandstone composing the walls. This particular glen is a beautiful spot. The wide entrance contains a number of cottonwood trees, and passing these one finds himself in a huge cavern some five hundred feet wide and two hundred feet high, with a narrow slit leading up to the sky, and extending back far beyond the limits of the glen. The men found this a delightful place. They sang songs, and their voices sounded so well that they bestowed upon the cavern the name of Music Temple. It now holds a special interest because three of them, O. G. Rowland, Seneca Howland, and William Dunn, carved their names on a smooth face of rock, and it forms their eternal monument, for these three never saw civilisation again.
The Depths of the Grand Canyon at Sunset.
Studio painting by F.S. DELLENBAUGH, in the possession of Prof. A.H. Thompson, who considers it the best representation of the canyon from below that he has seen, “the truest—far better than any photograph because more comprehensive.”
For 149 miles the easy waters of Glen Canyon bore them along, and by August 4th they had passed the Crossing of the Fathers, or Ute Ford, as it was called in that country before its identification as the point where Escalante crossed, and were at the mouth of the Paria, since 1873 better known as Lee’s Ferry. They had now before them the grandest of all the gorges, though only two hundred feet deep at the beginning; but they had not proceeded far into it before the walls ran rapidly up while the river ran rapidly down. Numerous falls appeared, one following another in quick succession, necessitating portages and much hard work. When Powell managed to climb out on the 7th, the walls had grown to twenty-three hundred feet. They soon increased to about thirty-five hundred feet, often vertical on one or the other side at the water, and even in the upper portions extremely precipitous. By the 10th they had reached the mouth of the Little Colorado, where White’s imagination had pictured the greatest terror of the whole river, and the end of all the dangerous part. The walls of this tributary are, as is usually the case, the same as those of the main gorge, but the stream itself was small, muddy, and saline. Powell walked up it three or four miles, having no trouble in crossing it by wading when desirable. He called the new gorge now before him, really only a continuation of the one ending with the canyon of the Little Colorado, the “Great Unknown,” and a party some twenty years later, emulating the early Spaniards in the art of forgetting, called it the same, but it was the Great Unknown only once, and that was when Powell on this occasion first faced the sublime, unfathomed depths that here lay in his course. Only one month’s rations remained as a reliance in this terrible passage. Powell says: “We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walk rise over the river, we know not.... The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is sombre and the jests are ghastly.” With anxiety and much misgiving they drifted on between mile-high cliffs, rising terrace on terrace to the very sky itself. Even now, when the dangers are known and tested, no man lives who can enter the great chasm for a voyage to the other end without feeling anxiety as to the result, and the more anxiety he feels, the more probability there is that he will pass the barriers safely. Running rapids and passing falls by portages and let-downs, they met no formidable obstacle till August 14th, when they ran into a granite formation, the “First Granite Gorge.” While the gorge was wide above, it grew narrower as the river level was approached, till the walls were closer than anywhere farther up; and they were ragged and serrated. They had noticed that hard rocks had produced bad river, and soft rocks smooth water; now they were in a series of rocks harder than any before encountered. There was absolutely no way of telling what the waters might do in such a formation, which ran up till a thousand feet of it stood above their heads, supporting more than four thousand feet more of sedimentary rocks, making a grand total of between five thousand and six thousand feet. The same day on which they entered the granite they arrived, after running, and portaging around, several bad rapids, at a terrific fall, announced by a loud roar like the steady boom of Niagara, reverberating back and forth from wall to wall, and filling the whole gorge with its ominous note. The river was beaten to a solid sheet of reeling foam for a third of a mile. There was but one choice, but one path for the boats, and that lay through the midst of it, for on each side the waves pounded violently against the jagged cliffs which so closely hemmed them in. Men might climb up to the top of the granite and find their way around the obstruction, one thousand feet above it, descending again a mile or two down, but they could not take the boats over such a road. They must, therefore, run the place, a fall of about eighty feet in the third of a mile, or give up the descent. So they got into their boats and started on the smooth waters, so soon shattered into raging billows. Though filled with water, the boats all rode successfully and came out below crowned with success. Often a rapid is greatly augmented by enormous boulders which have been washed into the river from some side canyon, and, acting like a dam, block the water up and cause it to roar and fret tenfold more. Black and dismal is this granite gorge; sharp and terrible the rapids, whose sheeted foam becomes fairly iridescent by contrast. The method of working around some of the worst places is illustrated well by the following extract:
“We land and stop for an hour or two to examine the fall. It seems possible to let down with lines, at least part of the way, from point to point, along the right-hand wall. So we make a portage over the first rocks, and find footing on some boulders below. Then we let down one of the boats to the end of her line, when she reaches a corner of the projecting rock, to which one of the men clings and steadies her, while I examine an eddy below. I think we can pass the other boats down by us, and catch them in the eddy. This is soon done and the men in the boats in the eddy pull us to their side. On the shore of this little eddy there is about two feet of gravel beach above water. Standing on this beach, some of the men take a line of the little boat and let it drift down against another projecting angle. Here is a little shelf on which a man from my boat climbs, and a shorter line is passed to him, and he fastens the boat to the side of the cliff. Then the second one is let down, bringing the line of the third. When the second boat is tied up, the two men standing on the beach above spring into the last boat, which is pulled up alongside ours. Then we let down the boats, for twenty-five or thirty yards, by walking along the shelf, landing them again in the mouth of a side canyon. Just below this there is another pile of boulders, over which we make another portage. From the foot of these rocks we can climb to another shelf, forty or fifty feet above the water. On this bench we camp for the night. We find a few sticks, which have lodged in the rocks. It is raining hard, and we have no shelter, but kindle a fire and have our supper. We sit on the rocks all night, wrapped in our ponchos, getting what sleep we can.”
The Grand Canyon. The “Sockdologer” Rapid.
Fall of about eighty feet in one third of a mile.
Photograph by J.K. HILLERS, U.S. Colo. Riv. Exp.
At this season of the year there is a good deal of cloudy and rainy weather in the Grand Canyon region, and this makes the gorge decidedly gloomy when one is compelled to stay in it and descend the river. The next morning with two hours of similar manoeuvring the rapid was passed. The same day they found a stretch where the river was so swift the boats were tossed from side to side like feathers, entirely unmanageable. Here they met with another rapid and two of the boats were in such a position they could not escape running it. But they went through without damage. Then the third crew tried to reach land, and succeeded, only to find that there was no foot-hold. They pushed out again, to be overwhelmed by a powerful wave which filled the boat full. She drifted helpless through several breakers and one of these capsized her. The men hung to the side, the only thing to do in the Colorado unless one has on a life preserver (and even then it is advisable), as she drifted down to the other boats, where she was caught and righted. It has always seemed strange to me that Powell on this crucial expedition did not provide himself and his men with cork life-jackets, a precaution that suggests itself immediately in such an undertaking. No one ought ever to attempt a descent without them.