JURASSIC TERRACE OF THE CALAB, GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO.
The Colorado River is formed by a union of the Grand and Green Rivers, the former taking its rise near Long’s Peak, and the latter having its source in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, within a few miles of Fremont’s Peak. The two streams form a junction near a point known as Fort Morrison, in southeast Utah, at the head of the most appalling gorge in the world, called the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. The scenery along both the Grand and Green Rivers is inexpressibly sublime, rising into towering buttes out of the plains; soaring to the clouds in the form of mountains; revelling in the wildest disorder of landscape, and the most turbulent panorama of mad-dashing streams between walls of amazing height; but the wild passions of both rivers seem to be united with more than double intensity when they mingle their waters and thence become one turbid flood gnawing a way through the southwest desert. How hard it is for the inexperienced eye to catch a mental view of the tremendous chasm of the Colorado, however realistic a descriptive writer may paint it, for height and depth almost lose their significance when we apply the terms to dizzy crags above, and the dark lonesomeness of Plutonian recesses beneath.
BUFFALO BILL AND PARTY AT POINT SUBLIME, GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO.—During the summer succeeding his triumphal tour of Europe, General W. F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), accompanied by a party of friends, visited and explored the famous Grand Cañon of the Colorado. The photograph on this page represents the party at lunch on Point Sublime. Buffalo Bill is a warm friend and admirer of the author of Glimpses of America, and loaned this photograph to him for reproduction in this work. It was taken by the special photographer who accompanied the party on the tour referred to.
SKULLS OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS.
The region through which the chafing waters of the Colorado run is forbidding in the extreme, a vast Sahara of waste and inutility; a desert too dreary for either vegetable or animal life; a land that is haunted with wind-storm, on which ride the furies of desolation. But there is in its very bleakness and consumptive degeneracy something that appeals to the observer; a sympathy is aroused that stimulates contemplation of the wondrous works of Deity, of the omnipotent hand that sows seeds of plenty in one place and scatters tares of poverty in another; that makes the valleys to laugh with verdure, and the plains to wail with nakedness. In this sterile domain, this borderland of phantasy and reality, nature is so distraught that the supernatural seems to hold carnival, and in the forms which we here behold there is constant suggestion of chaos. The earth is parched to sterility, and yet there are abundant evidences that in centuries long ago this same land was abundantly blessed with an amazing fertility. Depressions ramifying the region are the dry beds of what were once water-courses, and the whole plateau is garish with rocks over which life-giving floods once poured their vivifying nourishment. But the friable nature of both soil and rock has given way before the action of the river, which has constantly deepened its path and drained the moisture from the earth. Now it is like the Moon, a parched district, save for the single stream which, instead of supplying sustenance, is eating its vitals. The channel is worn more than 5,000 feet deep, with stupendous banks terraced and wrought into shapes most fantastic, and at places diabolic. Imagine a chasm that at times is less than a quarter of a mile wide and more than a mile deep, the bed of which is a tossing, roaring, madly impetuous flood; winding its way in a sinuous course along walls that are painted with all the pigments known to nature! What an imposing spectacle; what a scene of awesome grandeur; what a sublime vision of mightiness! But the geologist sees in the crags and precipices, the strata and bed of that brawling stream, the handwriting of nature, the easily decipherable physical history and geology of the land. The antiquarian and ethnologist, following after, translate the relics of rude habitations found along the cliffs, and the skulls fortunately recovered from the ruins, into a story of the ancient people who in the long centuries ago dared to make their homes in these almost inaccessible fastnesses, driven to such refuges by the ruthless hand of persecution.