We have already spoken of Niagara as one of the wonders of the world, and one of the most sought-after beauty spots of America. We will now devote a few pages to a description of a far more remarkable natural wonder and to a phenomenon which, were it situated nearer the center of population, would have long since outclassed even Niagara as a tourist's Mecca.
Reference is made to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.
Few people have the slightest conception of the magnitude or awfulness of this cañon. It is clearly one of the wonders of the world, and its vastness is such that to explore it from end to end is a work of the greatest possible difficulty.
Even in area, the cañon is extraordinary. It is large enough to contain more than one Old World country. It is long enough to stretch across some of the largest States in the Union. Some of the smaller New England States would be absolutely swallowed up in the yawning abyss could they, by any means, be removed to it bodily. An express train running at a high rate of speed, without a single stop and on a first-class road-bed, could hardly get from one end of the cañon to the other in less than five hours, and an ordinary train with the usual percentage of stoppage would about make the distance between morning and evening.
Reduced to the record of cold figures, the Grand Cañon is made up of a series of chasms measuring about 220 miles in length, as much as 12 miles in width, and frequently as much as 7,000 feet in depth.
This marvelous feature of American scenery is very fully described in "Our Own Country," published by the National Publishing Company. In describing the cañon, that profusely illustrated work says that the figures quoted "do not readily strike a responsive chord in the human mind, for the simple reason that they involve something utterly different from anything that more than 99 per cent. of the inhabitants of the world have ever seen. The man who gazes upon Niagara for the first time, is astounded at the depth of the gorge as well as at the force of the water; and he who has seen Niagara can appreciate somewhat the marvels of the Grand Cañon, when he bears in mind that the great wonder of the Western World is for miles at a stretch more than fifty times as deep as the falls and the gorge, generally admitted to be the most awful scenic grandeur within reach of the ordinary traveler. Nor is this all. Visitors to Paris who have enjoyed a bird's-eye view of the gay city from the summit of Eifel Tower, have felt terribly impressed with its immense altitude, and have been astounded at the effect on the appearance of living and inanimate objects so far below them. How many of the Americans who have been thus impressed by French enterprise, have realized that in their own country there is a natural gorge, at points of which the distance between the summit and the base is more than five times as great as the height of the Eifel Tower?"
The Colorado River rises in the Rocky Mountains, crosses the Territories of Utah and Arizona, and then running between the last named and the State of California, finally empties its waters into the gulf bearing the name of the Golden State. For more than two hundred miles of its course it runs through the gorge known as the Grand Cañon, and hence it has been a very difficult river to explore. During the Sixteenth Century, some of the Spanish explorers, to whom this country is indebted so much for early records and descriptions, crossed the then undeveloped deserts of the Southwest and discovered the Grand Cañon. Many of the reports they made of the wonders of the New World read so much like fairy tales, and seemed so obviously exaggerated, that little credence was given to them. Hence it was that their estimates concerning the gorge through which the Rio Colorado Grande flows were treated as fables, and laughed at rather than believed.
Major Powell, than whom few men have done more to enlighten the world concerning the wonders of the Far West, describes the cañon very aptly, and speaks in a most attractive manner of the countless cañons and caverns, whirlpools and eddies, brooklets and rivers, fords and waterfalls, that abound on every side. In his first extended description of the cañon, he stated that "every river entering it has cut another cañon; every lateral creek has also cut another cañon; every brook runs in a cañon; every rill born of a shower and living only in the showers, has cut for itself a cañon; so that the whole upper portion of the basin of the Colorado is traversed by a labyrinth of these deep gorges. About the basin are mountains; within the basin are cañon gorges; the stretches of land from brink to brink are of naked rock or of drifting sands, with here and there lines of volcanic cones, and of black scoria and ashes scattered about."
Of late years thousands of people have been attracted to this great cañon, although but very few have succeeded in exploring its entire length. Few, indeed, have been able to pass along the balcony of the cañon, and to gaze up at the countless wonders of nature, piled one above the other, apparently up to the very region of the clouds. The common notion of a cañon, as Captain C. E. Dutton tells us, is that of a deep, narrow gash in the earth, with nearly vertical walls, like a great and neatly cut trench. There are hundreds of chasms in the plateau country which answer very well to this notion. It is, however, unfortunate that the stupendous passway for the Colorado River through the Kaibabs was ever called a cañon, for the name identified it with the baser conception. At places the distance across the chasm to the nearest point on the summit of the opposite wall is about seven miles. A more correct statement of the general width would be from eleven to twelve miles. It is hence somewhat unfortunate that there is a prevalent idea, in some way, that an essential part of the grandeur of the Grand Cañon is the narrowness of its defile.
As Major Powell expresses it, there are rather a series of cañons, than one huge one. Wherever the river has cut its way through the sandstones, marbles and granites of the Kaibab Mountains, beautiful and awe-inspiring pictures are seen, while above there are domes and peaks, some of red sandstone and some of snowy whiteness. Cataract Cañon alone is forty-one miles long, and has seventy-five cataracts and rapids, of which fifty-seven are within a space of nineteen miles. A journey along the bank of a river with a waterfall every twenty feet, on the average, is no joke, and only the hardiest men have been able to accomplish it. In the spring of 1889, the survey party of a projected railroad from Grand Junction to the Gulf of California, made this journey, and from its published description more actual information can be gleaned concerning the cañon itself than almost any mere verbal description.