The Land of Enchantment: From Pike's Peak to the Pacific

by Lilian Whiting

There is now a project to erect a memorial to Major John W. Powell, the pioneer explorer of the Grand Cañon, to be placed on the rim at the head of Bright Angel Trail at El Tovar. This most fitting plan to honor the name of the great scientist and explorer whose research contributed the first authoritative knowledge of the cañon is the thought of the American Scenic Association, which will petition Congress to grant the requisite appropriation. No monument to human greatness could be more ideally placed than this to perpetually repeat to every visitor and sojourner the name of the explorer who successfully achieved the most startling and heroic journey in all history,—that made through the complete extent of the Grand Cañon.

It was in 1869 that Major Powell, with four boats and nine men, inaugurated this expedition, starting from Green River City in Utah. He was dissuaded and importuned in the most urgent way by those most familiar with the region not to attempt the feat. The Indians especially insisted that no boat could live in any one of the score of rapids to be passed. There was also a tradition that for some hundreds of miles the river lost itself in the earth, and Major Powell and his men would thus be imprisoned within a Titantic fortress from which escape would be impossible. But men of destiny do not hesitate when they are led to great achievements. Major Powell set out on May 24, 1869, with his nine men and four boats, and landed on August 3, with four men and two boats, at the mouth of the Virgin River, after having sailed the boiling torrent of the Colorado River, at the bottom of the cañon, for more than a thousand miles. Mr. C. A. Higgins characterizes this feat as "the most wonderful geological and spectacular phenomenon known to mankind."

The first authentic knowledge of the existence of the Grand Cañon dates back to August of 1540, when the Spanish friar, Alvar Nuñez, after years of romantic wanderings among the pueblos of the Southwest, returned to Mexico with tales of this mighty chasm. Coronado, who had discovered the Seven Cities of Cibola (of which now only Zuñi remains), ordered Garcia Lopez to take a band of men and Indian guides and search for this chasm, which he succeeded in discovering; with the more difficulty, surely, in that one has to gain its very rim before he has hardly an intimation of its proximity. The spectacle of the cañon always presents itself as a sudden surprise. It was not, however, until 1884 that, by the building of the great transcontinental line, the Santa Fé, the Grand Cañon became accessible. Then for some twenty years it was reached, as has already been noted, by stage from Flagstaff. Now one can travel in his sleeper without change from Chicago to El Tovar, and thousands of tourists annually visit the extraordinary scene. Not the least of the interesting data regarding the cañon is this gulf of more than three hundred years that divides its discovery from its taking rank as the most phenomenal scenic resort of the world. The mills of the gods grind slowly. The visitors to the Grand Cañon present singularly cosmopolitan groups, there being hardly a country in the world that is not represented at some time during the year.

For the cañon has all seasons for its own. It is almost as much of an object of winter as of summer pilgrimage. One season is found, on the whole, to be almost as enjoyable here as another. It is cool in summer, and it is warm and sunny in winter. Sometimes there is a fairy snowfall, but hardly more lasting than a spring frost, and when it comes it only adds another flitting variety to the stupendous scene.

With untold tons of the water of the Colorado River pouring itself in torrents through the bottom of the cañon, all the water used for the table, for toilet, and for laundry purposes has to be brought from a distance of a hundred and twenty miles, and twenty thousand gallons are in daily use. An electric-light plant furnishes brilliant illumination.

The Hopi House, built in imitation of an Indian pueblo, with a group of quaintly garbed Hopi Indians within in attendance, is a curiosity; and besides the Hopis there are Navajos and Supais coming to sell their handiwork,—that of pottery, silver ornaments, blankets, and baskets. Cataract Cañon, forty miles from El Tovar, is the home of the Supais, and it is a place that well repays visiting for an entirely new point of view of the vast cañon that it affords. There are peaceful Indians to be seen daily riding their horses through the pine woods, journeying from El Tovar to Grand View, to "Hance's Trail," to "Moran's Point," and other localities, to sell or barter their wares. One old Indian who seems to roam about alone has developed an ingenious manner of procuring food when he is hungry. He enters the hotel office and seeks the proprietor himself, recognizing with unerring instinct that this gentleman's liberal endowment of sympathy and unfailing generosity never permits him to "turn down" a request for aid. The wily old savage seeks him out and makes conspicuous overtures of his affection.

"You is heap my son; pale face heap my son!" the dusky visitor declares, and when this assurance is emphasized to the proprietor he realizes that it means he is "heap my son" because his visitor is hungry. These outbursts of devotion occur only when the old Indian is at his wits' end to know where to procure something to eat. Once fed he is off, and thinks no more of the man whom he assured that he was "heap my son" until hunger again assails him and stimulates his parental affection.

So the little trifles and pleasantries of the comédie humaine assert their place in the general life even on the rim of the sublime spectacle of the Carnival of the Gods.

For more than two hundred miles the cañon offers its innumerable panoramas, no one ever duplicating that of another. There are thousands of cañons in it—it is a complicated system of colossal cañons. Every wall is an aggregation of hundreds of walls. Every pinnacle is formed of hundreds of pinnacles. When the sun shines in splendor on the vermilion walls, the glory is almost beyond what man can bear. When from the trail below a star seems to float in the air and rest on the verge of the cliff, what words can convey any image of this ineffable beauty?

The cloud-effects are another of the phases of faëry. A rain creates a panorama of clouds creeping out of one cañon and flying into another, all "as if they had souls and wills of their own," says Major Powell; and he adds, "In the imagination the clouds belong to the sky, and when they are in the cañon the skies come down into the gorges and cling to the cliffs and lift them up to immeasurable heights, for the sky must still be far away; thus they lend infinity to the walls." The cañon mirrors the color and the state of the sky as water does. This is one of the most curious facts connected with it. "Yet form and color do not exhaust all the divine qualities of the Grand Cañon," continues Major Powell; "it is the land of music. The river thunders in perpetual roar, swelling in floods of music when the storm-gods play upon the rocks, and fading away in soft and low murmurs when the infinite blue of heaven is unveiled.... The adamant foundations of the earth have been wrought into a sublime harp upon which the clouds of heaven play with mighty tempests or with gentle showers."