SHOSHONE FALLS, IDAHO.—Shoshone Falls are in Snake River, in the southern part of Idaho, and they constitute one of the greatest curiosities of our western country. In some respects they resemble Niagara, and have accordingly been designated as the Niagara of the west. The place is rapidly becoming a popular resort for tourists, and this popularity will greatly increase as it becomes better known. The surrounding scenery is beautiful, consisting of prairie valleys fringed with distant mountains. A splendid description of the Falls is given on page 110 of Glimpses of America.
THE FERRY AT SHOSHONE FALLS.
NATURAL BRIDGE, SHOSHONE FALLS.
“There is nothing elsewhere like it, nothing half so weird, so beautiful, so clothed in majesty, so draped with terror; nothing else that awakens impressions at once so startling, so winsome, so profound. While journeying through the desert, to come suddenly upon it, the spectacle gives one something of the emotions that would be experienced in beholding a resurrection from the dead. In the midst of what seems like a dead world, suddenly there springs into irrepressible life something so marvelous, so grand, so caparisoned with loveliness and irresistible might, that the head is bowed, the strained heart throbs tumultuously, and the awed soul sinks to its knees.” The time is fast approaching when the sublime glories of Shoshone Falls will be appreciated by tourists, and by that large class of summer vacationists who are always searching for sights and places that will drive away the ennui from which they chiefly suffer. The beat of ocean billow, the roar of waterfall, the stretch of landscape from lofty mountain peak, the lonely quietude of glen and wilderness, each have their votaries; but about Shoshone’s chasm there is more to charm than all of these, for the very desolation of its environments adds fascination to the wild and tameless scenery of the falls. The poet and the painter find here an inspiration for their genius; while the most prosaic spectator is thrilled by the matchless grandeur, the majestic awfulness of a mad-cantering river plunging through a gigantic rent, and over a precipice so high that the waters are scattered into mist and dissolve in rainbows when they meet the seething caldron below. It is a strange exhibition of nature’s power and freakishness, a manifestation of mysterious force, a blending of results precipitated by vomiting volcano and an irresistible flood of waters, the joining of rivers of fire with streams breaking over the barriers of mountains and pouring down upon the plains. Considering the surroundings, the bleak sterility of what appears to be a boundless extent of lava fields, and the mighty, awe-compelling avalanche of waters that cleaves it, Shoshone Falls is perhaps the most remarkable waterfall to be found anywhere on either continent, a wonder in which Snake River has an almost equal part. Indeed, this extraordinary river exhibits many equally astonishing features along its extreme length, for while a greater part of the stream flows through a belt of scoria, the lower portion is a succession of waterfalls, second only to those of Shoshone.
CHAPTER V.
OVER THE HEIGHTS AND INTO THE DEEPS OF WONDERLAND.
