"The fearful descent into this terrific cañon," Mr. Langford adds, "was accomplished with great difficulty by Messrs. Hauser and Stickney, at a point about two miles below the falls. By trigonometrical measurement they found the chasm at that point to be 1,190 feet deep. Their ascent from it was perilous, and it was only by making good use of hands and feet, and keeping the nerves braced to the utmost tension, that they were enabled to clamber up the precipitous rocks to a safe landing-place."
Lieutenant Doane also made the descent, somewhat further down the river, accompanied by one of his company. Selecting the channel of a small creek, they scrambled down its steep descent, wading in the stream.
"On entering the ravine, we came at once to hot springs of sulphur, sulphate of copper, alum, steam jets, etc., in endless variety, some of them of very peculiar form. One of them in particular, of sulphur, had built up a tall spire, standing out from the slope of the wall like an enormous horn, with hot water trickling down its sides. The creek ran on a bed of solid rock, in many places smooth and slippery, in others obstructed by masses of débris from the overhanging cliffs of the sulphureted limestone above. After descending for three miles in the channel we came to a sort of bench or terrace, the same one seen previously in following down the creek from our first camp in the basin. Here we found a large flock of mountain sheep, very tame, and greatly astonished, no doubt, at our sudden appearance. McConnell killed one and wounded another, whereupon the rest disappeared, clambering up the steep walls with a celerity truly astonishing. We were now 1,500 feet below the brink. From here the creek channel was more precipitous, and for a mile we made our way down over masses of rock and fallen trees, splashing in warm water, ducking under cascades, and skirting close against sidelong places to keep from falling into boiling caldrons in the channel. After four hours of hard labor we reached the bottom of the gulf and the margin of the Yellowstone, famished with thirst, wet and exhausted. The river-water here is quite warm, and of a villainously alum and sulphurous taste. Its margin is lined with all kinds of chemical springs, some depositing craters of calcareous rock, others muddy, black, blue, slaty, or reddish water. The internal heat renders the atmosphere oppressive, though a strong breeze draws through the cañon. A frying sound comes constantly to the ear, mingled with the rush of the current. The place abounds with sickening and purgatorial smells. We had come down the ravine at least four miles, and looking upward the fearful wall appeared to reach the sky. It was about three o'clock P.M., and stars could be distinctly seen, so much of the sunlight was cut off from entering the chasm. Tall pines on the extreme verge appeared the height of two or three feet. The cañon, as before said, was in two benches, with a plateau on either side, about half way down. This plateau, about a hundred yards in width, looked from below like a mere shelf against the wall; the total depth was not less than 2,500 feet, and more probably 3,000. There are perhaps other cañons longer and deeper than this one, but surely none combining grandeur and immensity with such peculiarity of formation and profusion of volcanic or chemical phenomena."
The history of this tremendous chasm is not hard to read. Ages ago this whole region was the basin of an immense lake. Then it became a centre of volcanic activity; vast quantities of lava was erupted, which, cooling under water, took the form of basalt; volumes of volcanic ash and rock-fragments were thrown out from the craters from time to time, forming breccia as it sunk through the water and mingled with the deposits from silicious springs. Over this were spread the later deposits from the waters of the old lake. In time the country was slowly elevated, and the lake was drained away. The easily eroded breccia along the river channel was cut out deeper and deeper as the ages passed, while springs and creeks and the falling rain combined to carve the sides of the cañon into the fantastic forms they now present, by wearing away the softer rock, and leaving the hard basalt and the firmer hot-spring deposits standing in massive columns and Gothic pinnacles. The basis material of the old hot spring deposits in silica, originally white as snow, are now stained by mineral waters with every shade of red and yellow—from scarlet to rose color, from bright sulphur to the daintiest tint of cream. When the light falls favorably on these blended tints the Grand Cañon presents a more enchanting and bewildering variety of forms and colors than human artist ever conceived.
The erosion was practically arrested at the upper end of the cañon by a sudden transition from the softer breccia to hard basalt, and the falls are the result. From below the Upper Fall the vertical wall of basalt can be clearly seen passing diagonally across the rim. The Lower Fall was formed in the same way.
"A grander scene than the lower cataract of the Yellowstone," writes Mr. Langford, "was never witnessed by mortal eyes. The volume seemed to be adapted to all the harmonies of the surrounding scenery. Had it been greater or smaller it would have been less impressive. The river, from a width of two hundred feet above the fall, is compressed by converging rocks to one hundred and fifty feet, where it takes the plunge. The shelf over which it falls is as level and even as a work of art. The height, by actual line measurement, is a few inches more than 350 feet. It is a sheer, compact, solid, perpendicular sheet, faultless in all the elements of grandeur and picturesque beauties. The cañon which commences at the upper fall, half a mile above this cataract, is here a thousand feet in depth. Its vertical sides rise grey and dark above the fall to shelving summits, from which one can look down into the boiling, spray-filled chasm, enlivened with rainbows, and glittering like a shower of diamonds. From a shelf protruding over the stream, 500 feet below the top of the cañon, and 180 above the verge of the cataract, a member of our company, lying prone upon the rock, let down a cord, with a stone attached, into the gulf, and measured its profoundest depths. The life and sound of the cataract, with its sparkling spray and fleecy foam, contrasts strangely with the sombre stillness of the cañon a mile below. There all was darkness, gloom, and shadow; here all was vivacity, gayety, and delight. One was the most unsocial, the other the most social scene in nature. We could talk, and sing, and whoop, waking the echoes with our mirth and laughter in presence of the falls, but we could not thus profane the silence of the cañon. Seen through the cañon below the falls, the river for a mile or more is broken by rapids and cascades of great variety and beauty.
"Between the Lower and Upper Falls the cañon is two hundred to nearly four hundred feet deep. The river runs over a level bed of rock, and is undisturbed by rapids until near the verge of the lower fall. The upper fall is entirely unlike the other, but in its peculiar character equally interesting. For some distance above it the river breaks into frightful rapids. The stream is narrowed between the rocks as it approaches the brink, and bounds with impatient struggles for release, leaping through the stony jaws, in a sheet of snow-white foam, over a precipice nearly perpendicular, 115 feet high.[1] Midway in its descent the entire volume of water is carried, by the sloping surface of an intervening ledge, twelve or fifteen feet beyond the vertical base of the precipice, gaining therefrom a novel and interesting feature. The churning of the water upon the rocks reduces it to a mass of foam and spray, through which all the colors of the solar spectrum are reproduced in astonishing profusion. What this cataract lacks in sublimity is more than compensated by picturesqueness. The rocks which overshadow it do not veil it from the open light. It is up amid the pine foliage which crowns the adjacent hills, the grand feature of a landscape unrivalled for beauties of vegetation as well as of rock and glen. The two confronting rocks, overhanging the verge at the height of a hundred feet or more, could be readily united by a bridge, from which some of the grandest views of natural scenery in the world could be obtained—while just in front of, and within reaching distance of the arrowy water, from a table one-third of the way below the brink of the fall, all its nearest beauties and terrors may be caught at a glance."
"We rambled around the falls and cañon two days, and left them with the unpleasant conviction that the greatest wonder of our journey had been seen."
A few scattered sentences, culled from Dr. Hayden's calmly scientific account of the falls, will suffice to show that Mr. Langford's description "o'ersteps not the modesty of nature."