THE DESERT
Silence and Desolation.
THE DESERT
FURTHER STUDIES IN NATURAL
APPEARANCES
BY
JOHN C. VAN DYKE
AUTHOR OF “NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE,”
“ART FOR ART’S SAKE,” ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901
Copyright, 1901, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1901.
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
PREFACE-DEDICATION
To
A. M. C.
After the making of Eden came a serpent, and after the gorgeous furnishing of the world, a human being. Why the existence of the destroyers? What monstrous folly, think you, ever led Nature to create her one great enemy—man! Before his coming security may have been; but how soon she learned the meaning of fear when this new Œdipus of her brood was brought forth! And how instinctively she taught the fear of him to the rest of her children! To-day, after centuries of association, every bird and beast and creeping thing—the wolf in the forest, the antelope on the plain, the wild fowl in the sedge—fly from his approach. They know his civilization means their destruction. Even the grizzly, secure in the chaparral of his mountain home, flinches as he crosses the white man’s trail. The boot mark in the dust smells of blood and iron. The great annihilator has come and fear travels with him.
“Familiar facts,” you will say. Yes; and not unfamiliar the knowledge that with the coming of civilization the grasses and the wild flowers perish, the forest falls and its place is taken by brambles, the mountains are blasted in the search for minerals, the plains are broken by the plow and the soil is gradually washed into the rivers. Last of all, when the forests have gone the rains cease falling, the streams dry up, the ground parches and yields no life, and the artificial desert—the desert made by the tramp of human feet—begins to show itself. Yes; everyone must have cast a backward glance and seen Nature’s beauties beaten to ashes under the successive marches of civilization. The older portions of the earth show their desolation plainly enough, and the ascending smoke and dust of the ruin have even tainted the air and dimmed the sunlight.
Indeed, I am not speaking figuratively or extravagantly. We have often heard of “Sunny Italy” or the “clear light” of Egypt, but believe me there is no sunlight there compared with that which falls upon the upper peaks of the Sierra Madre or the uninhabitable wastes of the Colorado Desert. Pure sunlight requires for its existence pure air, and the Old World has little of it left. When you are in Rome again and stand upon that hill where all good romanticists go at sunset, look out and notice how dense is the atmosphere between you and St. Peter’s dome. That same thick air is all over Europe, all around the Mediterranean, even over in Mesopotamia and by the banks of the Ganges. It has been breathed and burned and battle-smoked for ten thousand years. Ride up and over the high table-lands of Montana—one can still ride there for days without seeing a trace of humanity—and how clear and scentless, how absolutely intangible that sky-blown sun-shot atmosphere! You breathe it without feeling it, you see through it a hundred miles and the picture is not blurred by it.
It is just so with Nature’s color. True enough, there is much rich color at Venice, at Cairo, at Constantinople. Its beauty need not be denied; and yet it is an artificial, a chemical color, caused by the disintegration of matter—the decay of stone, wood, and iron torn from the neighboring mountains. It is Nature after a poor fashion—Nature subordinated to the will of man. Once more ride over the enchanted mesas of Arizona at sunrise or at sunset, with the ragged mountains of Mexico to the south of you and the broken spurs of the great sierra round about you; and all the glory of the old shall be as nothing to the gold and purple and burning crimson of this new world.
You will not be surprised then if, in speaking of desert, mesa and mountain I once more take you far beyond the wire fence of civilization to those places (unhappily few now) where the trail is unbroken and the mountain peak unblazed. I was never over-fond of park and garden nature-study. If we would know the great truths we must seek them at the source. The sandy wastes, the arid lands, the porphyry mountain peaks may be thought profitless places for pilgrimages; but how often have you and I, and that one we both loved so much, found beauty in neglected marshes, in wintry forests, and in barren hill-sides! The love of Nature is after all an acquired taste. One begins by admiring the Hudson-River landscape and ends by loving the desolation of Sahara. Just why or how the change would be difficult to explain. You cannot always dissect a taste or a passion. Nor can you pin Nature to a board and chart her beauties with square and compasses. One can give his impression and but little more. Perhaps I can tell you something of what I have seen in these two years of wandering; but I shall never be able to tell you the grandeur of these mountains, nor the glory of color that wraps the burning sands at their feet. We shoot arrows at the sun in vain; yet still we shoot.
And so it is that my book is only an excuse for talking about the beautiful things in this desert world that stretches down the Pacific Coast, and across Arizona and Sonora. The desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise these many years. It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover. But I trust that you, and the nature-loving public you represent, will accept this record of the Colorado and the Mojave as at least truthful. Given the facts perhaps the poet with his fancies will come hereafter.
John C. Van Dyke.
La Noria Verde
February, 1901.
CONTENTS
[Chapter I. The Approach.]—Desert mountain ranges—Early morning approach—Air illusions—Sand forms—The winds—Sun-shafts—Sunlight—Desert life—Antelope—The Lost Mountains—The ascent—Deer trails—Footprints—The stone path—Defensive walls—The summit—The fortified camp—Nature’s reclamations—The mountain dwellers—Invading hosts—Water and food supplies—The aborigines—Historic periods—The open desert—Perception of beauty—Sense of beauty—Mountain “view” of the desert—Desert colors—The land of fire—Drouth and heat—Sand and gypsum—Sand-whirls—Desert storms—Drift of sands—Winter cold in the basin—Snow on desert—Sea and sand—Grim desolation—Love for the desert—The descent—The Padres in the desert—The light of the cross—Aboriginal faith [1]
[Chapter II. The Make of the Desert.]—The sea of sand—Mountain ranges on desert—Plains, valleys, and mesas—Effect of drouth—The rains—Harshness of desert—A gaunt land—Conditions of life—Incessant strife—Elemental warfare—Desert vegetation—Protruding edges—Shifting sands—Desert winds—Radiation of heat—Prevailing winds—Wear of the winds—Erosion of mountains—Rock-cutting—Fantastic forms—Wash-outs—Sand-lines in caves—Cloud-bursts—Canyon waters—Desert floods—Power of water—Water-pockets—No surface-streams—Oases in the waste—Catch-basins—Old sea-beds—Volcanic action—Lava-flows—Geological ages—Kinds of rock—Glaciers—Land slips—Movement of stones—The talus—Stages of the talus—Desert floors—Sandstone blocks—Salt-beds—Sand-beds—Mountain vegetation—Withered grasses—Barren rock—Mountain colors—Saw-toothed ridges—Seen from the peaks—The Sun-fire kingdom [23]
[Chapter III. The Bottom of the Bowl.]—Early geological days—The former Gulf—Sea-beaches on desert—Harbors and reefs—Indian remains—The Cocopas—The Colorado River—The delta dam—The inland lake—The first fall—Springs and wells in the sea-bed—The New River—New beaches—The second fall—The third beach—The failing water—Evaporation—Bottom of the Bowl—Drying out of the sea-bed—Advance of the desert—Below sea-level—Desolation of the basin—Beauty of the sand-dunes—Cactus and salt-bush—Desert animals—Birds—Lizards and snakes—Mirage—The water illusion—Decorative landscapes—Sensuous qualities in Nature—Changing the desert—Irrigation in the basin—Changing the climate—Dry air—Value of the air supply—Value of the desert—Destruction of natural beauty—Effects of mining, lumbering, agriculture—Ploughing the prairies—“Practical men”—Fighting wind, sand, and heat—Nature eternal—Return of desolation [44]
[Chapter IV. The Silent River.]—Rise of the Colorado—In the canyon—On the desert—The lower river—Sluggish movement—Stillness of the river—The river’s name—Its red color—Compared with the Nile—The blood hue—River changes—Red sands and silt—River-banks—“Bottom” lands—Green bordering bands—Bushes and flowers—Soundless water—Wild fowl—Herons and bitterns—Snipe—Sadness of bird-life—The forsaken shores—Solitude—Beauty of the river—Its majesty—The delta—Disintegration—The river in flood—The “bore”—Meeting of river and sea—The blue tomb—Shores of Gulf [63]
[Chapter V. Light, Air, and Color.]—Popular ideas—Sunlight on desert—Glare and heat—Pure sunlight—Atmospheric envelope—Vapor particles in air—Clear air—Dust particles—Hazes—Seeing the desert air—Sea-breezes on desert—Colored air—Different hues—Producing color—Refracted rays—Cold colors, how produced—Warm colors—Sky colors—Color produced by dust—Effect of heat—Effect of winds—Sand-storms—Reflections upon sky—Blue, yellow, and pink hazes—The dust-veil—Summer coloring—Local hues—Greens of desert plants—Color of the sands—Sands in mirage—Color of mountain walls—Weather staining—Influence of the air—Peak of Baboquivari—Buttes and spires—Sun-shafts through canyons—Complementary hues in shadow—Colored shadows—Blue shadows upon salt-beds—How light makes color—Desert sunsets [77]
[Chapter VI. Desert Sky and Clouds.]—Commonplace things of Nature—The blue sky—Changes in the blue—Dawns on the desert—Blue as a color—Sky from mountain heights—Blackness of space—Bright sky-colors—Horizon skies—Spectrum colors—Bands of yellow—The orange sky—Desert-clouds—Rainfall—Effect of the nimbus—Cumuli—Heap-clouds at sunset—Strati—Cirri—Ice-clouds—Fire-clouds—The celestial tapestry—The desert moon—Rings and rainbows—Moonlight—Stars—The midnight sky—Alone in the desert—The mysteries—Space and immensity—The silences—The cry of the human [95]
[Chapter VII. Illusions.]—Reality and appearance—Preconceived impressions—Deception by sunlight—Distorted forms and colors—Changed appearance of mountains—Changes in line and light—False perspective—Abnormal foreshortening—Contradictions and denials—Deceptive distances—Dangers of the desert—Immensity of valley-plains—Shadow illusions—Color-patches on mountains—Illusions of lava-beds—Appearance of cloud-shadows—Mirage—Need of explanation—Refraction of light-rays—Dense air-strata—Illustration of camera-lens—Bent light-rays—Ships at sea and upside down—Wherein the illusion—“Looming” of vessels, cities, and islands—Reversed image of mountains—Horses and cattle in mirage—Illusion of rising buttes—Other causes of mirage—Water-mirage—The lake appearance—How produced—Objects in water—Confused mirage—The swimming wolf—Colors and shadows in mirage—Trembling air—Beauty of mirage [109]
[Chapter VIII. Cactus and Grease Wood.]—Views of Nature—Growth and decay—Nature’s plan—The law of change—Nature foiling her own plans—Attack and drouth—Preservation of species—Means of preservation—Maintaining the status quo—The plant-struggle for life—Fighting heat and drouth—Prevention of evaporation—Absence of large leaves—Exhaust of moisture—Gums and varnishes of bushes—The ocatilla—Tap roots—Underground structure—Feeding the top growth—Storage reservoirs below ground—Reservoirs above ground—Thickened barks—Gathering moisture—Attacks upon desert plants—Browsing animals—Weapons of defence—The spine and thorn—The crucifixion thorn—The sting of flowers—Fierceness of the plant—Odors and juices—Saps astringent and cathartic—Expenditure of energy—The desert covering—Use of desert plants—Their beauty—Beauty in character—Forms of the yucca and maguey—The lluvia d’oro—Grotesque forms—Abnormal colors—Blossoms and flowers—Many varieties—Wild flowers—Salt-bush—The grasses and lichens—The continuous struggle [128]
[Chapter IX. Desert Animals.]—Meeting desert requirements—Peculiar desert character—Desert Indians—Life without water—Endurance of the jack-rabbit—Prairie dogs and water—Water famine—Coyotes and wild-cats living without water—Lean, gaunt life—Fierceness of animals—Attack and escape—The wild-cat—Spring of the cat—Mountain lion—His habits—The gray wolf—Home of the wolf—The coyote—His cleverness—His subsistence—His background—The fox—The prey—Devices for escape—Senses of the rabbit—Speed of the jack-rabbit—His endurance—The “cotton-tail”—Squirrels and gophers—Desert antelope—His eyes, nose, and ears—His swiftness—The mule-deer—Deer in flight—White-tailed deer—The reptiles—Defence of poison—The fang and sting—The rattlesnake and his poison—Spiders and tarantulas—Centipedes and scorpions—Lizards and swifts—The hydrophobia skunk—The cutthroat band—The eternal struggle—Brute courage and character—Beauty in character—Graceful forms of animals—Colors of lizards—Mystery of motion [150]
[Chapter X. Winged Life.]—First day’s walk—Tracks in the sand—Scarcity of birds—Dangers of bird-life—No cover for protection—Food problem—Heat and drouth again—A bird’s temperature—Innocent-looking birds—The road-runner—Wrens and fly-catchers—Development of special characteristics—Birds of the air—The vulture—His hunting and sailing—The southern buzzard—The crow—The great condor—Eagles and hawks—Bats and owls—The burrowing owl—Ground-birds—The road-runner’s swiftness—The vicious beak—The desert-quail—Wings of the quail—Travelling for water—Habits of the quail—His strong legs—Bush-birds—Woodpeckers and cactus—Finches and mocking-birds—Humming-birds—Doves and grosbeaks—The lark and flickers—Jays and magpies—Water fowl—Beetles and worms—Fighting destruction by breed—Blue and green beetles—Butterflies—Design and character—Beauty of birds—Beauty also of reptiles—Nature’s work all purposeful—Precious jewel of the toad [174]
[Chapter XI. Mesas and Foot-Hills.]—Flat steps of the desert—Across Southern Arizona—Rising from the desert—The great mesas—“Grease wood plains”—Upland vegetation—Grass plains—Spring and summer on the plains—Home of the antelope—Beds of soda and gypsum—Riding into the unexpected—The Grand Canyon country—Hills covered with juniper—The Painted Desert—Riding on the mesas—The reversion to savagery—The thin air again—The light and its deceptions—Distorted proportions—Changed colors—The little hills—Painting the desert—Worn-down mountains—Mountain wash—Flattening down the plain—Mountain making—The foot-hills—Forms of the foot-hills—Mountain plants—Bare mountains—The southern exposures—Gray lichens—Still in the desert—Arida Zona—Cloud-bursts in the mesas—Wash of rains—Gorge cutting—In the canyons—Walls of rock—Color in canyon shadows—Blue sky—Desert landscape—Knowledge of Nature—Nature-lovers—Human limitations [194]
[Chapter XII. Mountain Barriers.]—The western mountains—Saddles and passes—View from mountain top—Looking toward the peaks—Lost streams—Avalanches and bowlder-beds—Ascent by the arroyo—Growth of the stream—Rising banks—Waterfalls—Gorges—Ascent by the ridges—The chaparral—Home of the grizzly—Ridge trails—Among the live-oaks—Birds and deer—Yawning canyons—Canyon streams—Snow—Water wear—The pines—Barrancas and escarpments—Under the pines—Bushes, ferns, and mosses—Mountain quail—Indigo jays—Warblers—The mountain air—The dwarf pines—The summit—The look upward at the sky—The dark-blue dome—White light—Distant views—The Pacific—Southern California—The garden in the desert—Reclaiming the valleys—Nature’s fight against fertility—The desert from the mountain top—The great extent of desert—The fateful wilderness—All shall perish—The death of worlds—The desert the beginning of the end—Development through adversity—Sublimity of the waste—Desolation and silence—Good-night to the desert [213]
THE DESERT
CHAPTER I
THE APPROACH
Desert mountains.
Unknown ranges.
It is the last considerable group of mountains between the divide and the low basin of the Colorado desert. For days I have been watching them change color at sunset—watching the canyons shift into great slashes of blue and purple shadow, and the ridges flame with edgings of glittering fire. They are lonesome looking mountains lying off there by themselves on the plain, so still, so barren, so blazing hot under the sun. Forsaken of their kind, one might not inappropriately call them the “Lost Mountains”—the surviving remnant no doubt of some noble range that long centuries ago was beaten by wind and rain into desert sand. And yet before one gets to them they may prove quite formidable heights, with precipitous sides and unsurmountable tops. Who knows? Not those with whom I am stopping, for they have not been there. They do not even know the name of them. The Papagoes leave them alone because there is no game in them. Evidently they are considered unimportant hills, nobody’s hills, no man’s range; but nevertheless I am off for them in the morning at daylight.
Early morning on the desert.
Air illusions.
I ride away through the thin mesquite and the little adobe ranch house is soon lost to view. The morning is still and perfectly clear. The stars have gone out, the moon is looking pale, the deep blue is warming, the sky is lightening with the coming day. How cool and crystalline the air! In a few hours the great plain will be almost like a fiery furnace under the rays of the summer sun, but now it is chilly. And in a few hours there will be rings and bands and scarves of heat set wavering across the waste upon the opalescent wings of the mirage; but now the air is so clear that one can see the breaks in the rocky face of the mountain range, though it is fully twenty miles away. It may be further. Who of the desert has not spent his day riding at a mountain and never even reaching its base? This is a land of illusions and thin air. The vision is so cleared at times that the truth itself is deceptive. But I shall ride on for several hours. If, by twelve o’clock, the foot hills are not reached, I shall turn back.
Sand forms in the valleys.
Winds of the desert.
The summer heat has withered everything except the mesquite, the palo verde,[1] the grease wood, and the various cacti. Under foot there is a little dry grass, but more often patches of bare gravel and sand rolled in shallow beds that course toward the large valleys. In the draws and flat places the fine sand lies thicker, is tossed in wave forms by the wind, and banked high against clumps of cholla or prickly pear. In the wash-outs and over the cut banks of the arroyos it is sometimes heaped in mounds and crests like driven snow. It blows here along the boundary line between Arizona and Sonora almost every day; and the tailing of the sands behind the bushes shows that the prevailing winds are from the Gulf region. A cool wind? Yes, but only by comparison with the north wind. When you feel it on your face you may think it the breath of some distant volcano.
Sun shafts.
How pale-blue the Lost Mountains look under the growing light. I am watching their edges develop into broken barriers of rock, and even as I watch the tallest tower of all is struck with a bright fawn color. It is the high point to catch the first shaft of the sun. Quickly the light spreads downward until the whole ridge is tinged by it, and the abrupt sides of porphyry begin to glow under it. It is not long before great shafts of light alternating with shadow stretch down the plain ahead of me. The sun is streaming through the tops of the eastern mountains and the sharp pointed pinnacles are cutting shadows in the broad beam of light.
The beauty of sunlight.
That beam of light! Was there ever anything so beautiful! How it flashes its color through shadow, how it gilds the tops of the mountains and gleams white on the dunes of the desert! In any land what is there more glorious than sunlight! Even here in the desert, where it falls fierce and hot as a rain of meteors, it is the one supreme beauty to which all things pay allegiance. The beast and the bird are not too fond of its heat and as soon as the sun is high in the heavens they seek cover in the canyons; but for all that the chief glory of the desert is its broad blaze of omnipresent light.
Desert life.
Antelope.
Yes, there is animal and bird life here though it is not always apparent unless you look for it. Wrens and linnets are building nests in the cholla, and finches are singing from the top of the sahuaro.[2] There are plenty of reptiles, rabbits and ground squirrels quietly slipping out of your way; and now that the sun is up you can see a long sun-burned slant-of-hair trotting up yonder divide and casting an apprehensive head from side to side as he moves off. It is not often that the old gray wolf shows himself to the traveller. He is usually up in the mountains before sunrise. And seldom now does one see the desert antelope along the mesas, and yet off to the south you can see patches of white that come and go almost like flashing mirrors in the sun. They are stragglers from some band that have drifted up from central Sonora. No; they are not far away. A little mirage is already forming over that portion of the mesa and makes them look more distant than they are in reality. You can be deceived on the desert by the nearness of things quite as often as by their remoteness.
The Lost Mountains.
Mountain walls.
These desert mountains have a fashion of appearing distant until you are almost up to them. Then they seem to give up the game of deception and come out of their hiding-places. It is just so with the mountains toward which I am riding. After several hours they seem to rise up suddenly in front of me and I am at their base. They are not high—perhaps fifteen hundred feet. The side near me is precipitous rock, weather-stained to a reddish-black. A ride around the bases discloses an almost complete perpendicular wall, slanting off half way down the sides into sloping beds of bowlders that have been shaken loose from the upper strata. A huge cleft in the western side—half barranca half canyon—seems to suggest a way to the summit.
The ascent.
Deer trails.
Footprints.
The walking up the mountain is not the best in the world. It is over splintered rock, stepping from stone to stone, creeping along the backbone of bowlders, and worrying over rows of granite blocks. Presently the course seems to slip into a diagonal—a winding up and around the mountain—and ahead of me the stones begin to look peculiar, almost familiar. There seems to be a trail over the ledges and through the broken blocks; but what should make a trail up that deserted mountain? Mule-deer travelling toward the summit to lie down in the heat of the day? It is possible. The track of a band of deer soon becomes a beaten path, and animals are just as fond of a good path as humanity. By a strange coincidence at this very moment the sharp-toed print of a deer’s hoof appears in the ground before me. But it looks a little odd. The impression is so clear cut that I stoop to examine it. It is with no little astonishment that I find it sunk in stone instead of earth—petrified in rock and overrun with silica. The bare suggestion gives one pause. How many thousands of years ago was that impression stamped upon the stone? By what strange chance has it survived destruction? And while it remains quite perfect to-day—the vagrant hoof-mark of a desert deer—what has become of the once carefully guarded footprints of the Sargons, the Pharaohs and the Cæsars? With what contempt Nature sometimes plans the survival of the least fit, and breaks the conqueror on his shield!
The stone path.
Following the trail.
Defensive walls.
Further up the mountain the deer-trail theory is abandoned—at least so far as recent times are concerned. The stones are worn too smooth, the larger ones have been pushed aside by something more intelligent than a mule-deer’s hoof; and in one place the trail seems to have been built up on the descending side. There is not the slightest evidence, either by rub upon the rocks, or overturned stones, or scrape in the gravel, that any living thing has passed up this pathway for many years; and yet the trail is a distinct line of lighter colored stone stretching ahead of me. It is a path worn in the rocks, and there is no grass or vine or weed to obliterate it. It leads on and up to the saddle of the mountain. There is a crevasse or chasm breaking through this saddle which might have been bridged at one time with mesquite trunks, but is now to be leaped if one would reach the summit. It is narrow only in one place and this is just where the trail happens to run. Across it, on the upper side, there is a horseshoe shaped enclosure of stone. It is only a few feet in diameter, and the upper layers of stone have fallen; but the little wall still stands as high as one’s waist. Could this have been a sentinel box used to guard the passage of the trail at this place?
The summit.
Higher and still higher until at last the mountain broadens into a flat top. I am so eager to gain the height and am expecting so much that at first I overlook what is before me. Gradually I make out a long parapet of loose stone on the trail side of the mountain which joins on to steep cliffs on the other sides. A conclusion is instantly jumped at, for the imagination will not make haste slowly under such circumstances. These are the ruins of a once fortified camp.
The fortified camp.
I wander about the flat top of the mountain and slowly there grows into recognizable form a great rectangle enclosed by large stones placed about two feet apart. There is no doubt about the square and in one corner of it there seems an elevated mound covered with high-piled stones that would indicate a place for burials. But not a trace of pottery or arrow-heads; and about the stones only faint signs of fire which might have come from volcanic action as readily as from domestic hearths. Upon the side of one of the large rocks are some characters in red ochre; and on the ground near a pot-hole in the rock, something that the imagination might torture into a rude pestle for grinding maize.
Nature’s reclamations.
The traces of human activity are slight. Nature has been wearing them away and reclaiming her own on the mountain top. Grease wood is growing where once a floor was beaten hard as iron by human feet; out of the burial mound rises a giant sahuaro whose branching arms give the look of the cross; and beside the sahuaro rests a tall yucca with four feet of clustering bellflowers swinging from its top.
Mountain dwellers.
Invading hosts.
And who were they who built these stone walls, these primitive entrenchments? When and where did they come from and what brought them here? The hands that executed this rough work were certainly untrained. Indians? Very likely. Perhaps some small band that had taken up a natural defence in the mountains because too feeble in numbers to fight in the open. Here from this lookout they could watch the country for a hundred miles around. Here the scouts could see far away the thin string of foemen winding snake-like over the ridges of the desert, could see them grow in size and count their numbers, could look down upon them at the foot of the mountain and yell back defiance to the challenge coming up the steep sides. Brave indeed the invaders that would pluck the eagles from that eerie nest! Climbing a hill against a shower of arrows, spears, and bowlders is to fight at a terrible disadvantage.
Water and food supplies.
Starve them out? Yes; but the ones at the bottom would starve as quickly as those at the top. Cut off their water supply? Yes; but where did either besieged or besieger get water? If there was ever a spring in the mountain it long ago dried up, for there is no trace of it to-day. Possibly the mountain-dwellers knew of some arroyo where by digging in the sand they could get water. And possibly they carried it in ollas up the stone trail to their mountain home where they stored it in the rocks against the wrath of a siege to come. No doubt they took thought for trouble, and being native to the desert they could stand privation better than their enemies.
The aborigines.
Historic periods.
How long ago did that aboriginal band come trailing over these trackless deserts to find and make a home in a barren mountain standing in a bed of sand? Who can tell? A geologist might make the remains of their fort an illustration of the Stone Age and talk of unknown centuries; an iconoclast might claim that it was merely a Mexican corral built to hide stolen horses; but a plain person of the southwest would say that it was an old Indian camp. The builders of the fortification and the rectangle worked with stone because there was no other material. The man of the Stone Age exists to-day contemporary with civilized man. Possibly he always did. And it may be that some day Science will conclude that historic periods do not invariably happen, that there is not always a sequential evolution, and that the white race does not necessarily require a flat-headed mass of stupidity for an ancestor.
The open desert.
Perception of beauty.
But what brought them to seek a dwelling place in the desert? Were they driven out from the more fertile tracts? Perhaps. Did they find this a country where game was plentiful and the conditions of life comparatively easy? It is possible. Or was it that they loved the open country, the hot sun, the treeless wastes, the great stretches of mesa, plain and valley? Ah; that is more than likely. Mankind has always loved the open plains. He is like an antelope and wishes to see about him in all directions. Perhaps, too, he was born with a predilection for “the view,” but that is no easy matter to prove. It is sometimes assumed that humanity had naturally a sense and a feeling for the beautiful because the primitives decorated pottery and carved war-clubs and totem-posts. Again perhaps; but from war-clubs and totem-posts to sunsets and mountain shadows—the love of the beautiful in nature—is a very long hark. The peons and Indians in Sonora cannot see the pinks and purples in the mountain shadows at sunset. They are astonished at your question for they see nothing but mountains. And you may vainly exhaust ingenuity trying to make a Pagago see the silvery sheen of the mesquite when the low sun is streaming across its tops. He sees only mesquite—the same dull mesquite through which he has chased rabbits from infancy.
Sense of beauty.
No; it is not likely that the tribe ever chose this abiding place for its scenery. A sensitive feeling for sound, or form, or color, an impressionable nervous organization, do not belong to the man with the hoe, much less to the man with the bow. It is to be feared that they are indicative of some physical degeneration, some decline in bone and muscle, some abnormal development of the emotional nature. They travel side by side with high civilization and are the premonitory symptoms of racial decay. But are we correct in assuming that because the red man does not see a colored shadow therefore he is blind to every charm and sublimity of nature?
Mountain “view.”
The desert colors.
These mountain-dwellers, always looking out from their height, must have seen and remarked the large features of the desert—the great masses of form, the broad blocks of color. They knew the long undulations of the valley-plain were covered with sharp, broken rock, but from this height surely they must have noticed how soft as velvet they looked, how smoothly they rolled from one into another, how perfectly they curved, how symmetrically they waved. And the long lines of the divides, lessening to the west—their ridges of grease wood showing a peculiar green like the crests of sea-waves in storm—did they not see them? Did they not look down on the low neighboring hills and know that they were pink, terra-cotta, orange-colored—all the strange hues that may be compounded of clay and mineral—with here and there a crowning mass of white quartz or a far-extending outcrop of shale stained blue and green with copper? Doubtless, a wealth of color and atmospheric effect was wasted upon the aboriginal retina; but did it not take note of the deep orange sunsets, the golden fringed heaps of cumulus, and the tongues of fire that curled from every little cirrus cloud that lingered in the western sky?
Looking down to the desert.
The land of fire.
And how often they must have looked out and down to the great basin of the desert where cloud and sky, mountain and mesa, seemed to dissolve into a pink mist! It was not an unknown land to them and yet it had its terrors. Tradition told that the Evil Spirit dwelt there, and it was his hot breath that came up every morning on the wind, scorching and burning the brown faces of the mountain-dwellers! Fire!—he dwelt in fire. Whence came all the fierce glow of sunset down over that desert if it was not the reflection from his dwelling place? The very mountain peaks flared red at times, and in the old days there were rivers of fire. The petrified waves and eddies of those rivers were still visible in the lava streams. Were there not also great flames beneath the sands that threw up hot water and boiled great volcanoes of mud? And along the base of many a cliff were there not jets of steam and smoke blown out from the heart of the mountains?
Drought and heat.
It was a land of fire. No food, no grass, no water. There were places in the canyons where occasionally a little stream was found forcing itself up through the rock; but frequently it was salt or, worse yet, poisoned with copper or arsenic. How often the tribe had lost from its numbers—slain by the heat and drought in that waste! More than once the bodies had been found by crossing bands and always the same tale was told. The victims were half buried in sand, not decayed, but withered like the grass on the lomas.
Desert mystery.
Sand and gypsum.
Sand-whirls.
Mystery—a mystery as luminous and yet as impenetrable as its own mirage—seemed always hanging over that low-lying waste. It was a vast pit dug under the mountain bases. The mountains themselves were bare crags of fire in the sunlight, and the sands of the pit grew only cactus and grease wood. There were tracts where nothing at all grew—miles upon miles of absolute waste with the pony’s feet breaking through an alkaline crust. And again, there were dry lakes covered with silt; and vast beds of sand and gypsum, white as snow and fine as dust. The pony’s feet plunged in and came out leaving no trail. The surface smoothed over as though it were water. Fifty miles away one could see the desert sand-whirls moving slowly over the beds in tall columns two thousand feet high and shining like shafts of marble in the sunlight. How majestically they moved, their feet upon earth, their heads towering into the sky!
Desert storms.
And then the desert winds that raised at times such furious clouds of sand! All the air shone like gold dust and the sun turned red as blood. Ah! what a stifling sulphureous air! Even on the mountain tops that heavy air could be felt, and down in the desert itself the driving particles of sand cut the face and hands like blizzard-snow. The ponies could not be made to face it. They turned their backs to the wind and hung their heads between their fore feet. And how that wind roared and whistled through the thin grease wood! The scrubby growths leaned and bent in the blast, the sand piled high on the trunks; and nothing but the enormous tap-roots kept them from being wrenched from the earth.
Drift of sand.
And danger always followed the high winds. They blew the sands in clouds that drifted full and destroyed the trails. In a single night they would cover up a water hole, and in a few days fill in an arroyo where water could be got by digging. The sands drove like breakers on a beach, washing and wearing everything up to the bases of the mountains. And the fine sand reached still higher. It whirled up the canyons and across the saddles, it eddied around the enormous taluses, it even flung itself upon the face walls of the mountain and left the smoothing marks of its fingers upon the sharp pinnacles of the peak.
Winter cold.
Snow on desert.
It was in winter when the winds were fiercest. With them at times came a sharp cold, the more biting for the thin dry air of the desert. All the warmth seemed blown out of the basin with a breath, and its place filled by a storm-wind from the north that sent the condor wheeling down the blast and made the coyote shiver on the hill. How was it possible that such a furnace could grow so cold! And once or more each winter, when the sky darkened with clouds, there was a fall of snow that for an hour or so whitened the desert mountains and then passed away. At those times the springs were frozen, the high sierras were snow-bound, and down in the desert it seemed as though a great frost-sheet had been let down from above. The brown skins for all their deer-hide clothing were red with cold, and the breath blown from the pony’s nostrils was white as smoke.
Sea and sand.
Grim desolation.
A waste of intense heat and cold, of drouth and cloud-bursts, of winds and lightning, of storm and death, what could make any race of hunters or band of red men care for it? What was the attraction, wherein the fascination? How often have we wondered why the sailor loves the sea, why the Bedouin loves the sand! What is there but a strip of sky and another strip of sand or water? But there is a simplicity about large masses—simplicity in breadth, space and distance—that is inviting and ennobling. And there is something very restful about the horizontal line. Things that lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peaceful with them. Furthermore, the waste places of the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts forsaken of men and given over to loneliness, have a peculiar attraction of their own. The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think that very strange perhaps? Well, the beauty of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but to-day people admit its truth; and the grandeur of the desolate is just as paradoxical, yet the desert gives it proof.
Love for the desert.
But the sun-tanned people who lived on this mountain top never gave thought to masses, or horizontal lines, or paradoxes. They lived here, it may be from necessity at first, and then stayed on because they loved the open wind-blown country, the shining orange-hued sands, the sweeping mesas, the great swing of the horizontal circle, the flat desolation, the unbroken solitude. Nor ever knew why they loved it. They were content and that was enough.
The descent.
The Padres.
What finally became of them? Who knows? One by one they passed away, or perhaps were all slaughtered in a night by the fierce band newly come to numbers called the Apaches. This stone wall stands as their monument, but it tells no date or tale of death. As I descend the trail of stone the fancy keeps harping on the countless times the bare feet must have rubbed those blocks of syenite and porphyry to wear them so smooth. Have there been no others to clamber up these stairs of stone? What of the Padres—were they not here? As I ride off across the plain to the east the thought is of the heroism, the self-abnegation, the undying faith of those followers of Loyola and Xavier who came into this waste so many years ago. How idle seem all the specious tales of Jesuitism and priestcraft. The Padres were men of soul, unshrinking faith, and a perseverance almost unparalleled in the annals of history. The accomplishments of Columbus, of Cortez, of Coronado were great; but what of those who first ventured out upon these sands and erected missions almost in the heart of the desert, who single-handed coped with dangers from man and nature, and who lived and died without the slightest hope of reward here on earth? Has not the sign of the cross cast more men in heroic mould than ever the glitter of the crown or the flash of the sword?
Light of the cross.
Aboriginal faith.
And thinking such thoughts I turn to take a final view of the mountain; and there on the fortified top something rears itself against the sky like the cross-hilt of a sword. It is the giant sahuaro with its rising arms, and beside it the cream-white bloom of the yucca shining in the sunlight seems like a lamp illuminating it. The good Padres have gone and their mission churches are crumbling back to the earth from which they were made; but the light of the cross still shines along the borders of this desert land. The flame, that through them the Spirit kindled, still burns; and in every Indian village, in every Mexican adobe, you will see on the wall the wooden or grass-woven cross. On the high hills and at the cross-roads it stands, roughly hewn from mesquite and planted in a cone of stones. It is now always weather-stained and sun-cracked, but still the sign before which the peon and the Indian bow the head and whisper words of prayer. The dwellers beside the desert have cherished what the inhabitants of the fertile plains have thrown away. They and their forefathers have never known civilization, and never suffered from the blight of doubt. Of a simple nature, they have lived in a simple way, close to their mother earth, beside the desert they loved, and (let us believe it!) nearer to the God they worshipped.
Footnotes
[1] The use of Spanish names is compulsory. There are no English equivalents.
[2] Properly Saguaro.
CHAPTER II
THE MAKE OF THE DESERT
Sea of sand.
The first going-down into the desert is always something of a surprise. The fancy has pictured one thing; the reality shows quite another thing. Where and how did we gain the idea that the desert was merely a sea of sand? Did it come from that geography of our youth with the illustration of the sand-storm, the flying camel, and the over-excited Bedouin? Or have we been reading strange tales told by travellers of perfervid imagination—the Marco Polos of to-day? There is, to be sure, some modicum of truth even in the statement that misleads. There are “seas” or lakes or ponds of sand on every desert; but they are not so vast, not so oceanic, that you ever lose sight of the land.
Mountain ranges on the desert.
Plains, valleys, and mesas.
What land? Why, the mountains. The desert is traversed by many mountain ranges, some of them long, some short, some low, and some rising upward ten thousand feet. They are always circling you with a ragged horizon, dark-hued, bare-faced, barren—just as truly desert as the sands which were washed down from them. Between the ranges there are wide-expanding plains or valleys. The most arid portions of the desert lie in the basins of these great valleys—flat spaces that were once the beds of lakes, but are now dried out and left perhaps with an alkaline deposit that prevents vegetation. Through these valleys run arroyos or dry stream-beds—shallow channels where gravel and rocks are rolled during cloud-bursts and where sands drift with every wind. At times the valleys are more diversified, that is, broken by benches of land called mesas, dotted with small groups of hills called lomas, crossed by long stratified faces of rock called escarpments.
Effect of drought.
With these large features of landscape common to all countries, how does the desert differ from any other land? Only in the matter of water—the lack of it. If Southern France should receive no more than two inches of rain a year for twenty years it would, at the end of that time, look very like the Sahara, and the flashing Rhone would resemble the sluggish yellow Nile. If the Adirondack region in New York were comparatively rainless for the same length of time we should have something like the Mojave Desert, with the Hudson changed into the red Colorado. The conformations of the lands are not widely different, but their surface appearances are as unlike as it is possible to imagine.
The effect of rains.
For the whole face of a land is changed by the rains. With them come meadow-grasses and flowers, hillside vines and bushes, fields of yellow grain, orchards of pink-white blossoms. Along the mountain sides they grow the forests of blue-green pine, on the peaks they put white caps of snow; and in the valleys they gather their waste waters into shining rivers and flashing lakes. This is the very sheen and sparkle—the witchery—of landscape which lend allurement to such countries as New England, France, or Austria, and make them livable and lovable lands.
Harshness of the desert.
A gaunt land.
But the desert has none of these charms. Nor is it a livable place. There is not a thing about it that is “pretty,” and not a spot upon it that is “picturesque” in any Berkshire-Valley sense. The shadows of foliage, the drift of clouds, the fall of rain upon leaves, the sound of running waters—all the gentler qualities of nature that minor poets love to juggle with—are missing on the desert. It is stern, harsh, and at first repellent. But what tongue shall tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it, the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sublimity of its lonely desolation! And who shall paint the splendor of its light; and from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the moon over the iron mountains, the glory of its wondrous coloring! It is a gaunt land of splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies. And at every step there is the suggestion of the fierce, the defiant, the defensive. Everything within its borders seems fighting to maintain itself against destroying forces. There is a war of elements and a struggle for existence going on here that for ferocity is unparalleled elsewhere in nature.
Conditions of life.
The incessant struggle.
The feeling of fierceness grows upon you as you come to know the desert better. The sun-shafts are falling in a burning shower upon rock and dune, the winds blowing with the breath of far-off fires are withering the bushes and the grasses, the sands drifting higher and higher are burying the trees and reaching up as though they would overwhelm the mountains, the cloud-bursts are rushing down the mountain’s side and through the torn arroyos as though they would wash the earth into the sea. The life, too, on the desert is peculiarly savage. It is a show of teeth in bush and beast and reptile. At every turn one feels the presence of the barb and thorn, the jaw and paw, the beak and talon, the sting and the poison thereof. Even the harmless Gila monster flattens his body on a rock and hisses a “Don’t step on me.” There is no living in concord or brotherhood here. Everything is at war with its neighbor, and the conflict is unceasing.
Elemental warfare.
Yet this conflict is not so obvious on the face of things. You hear no clash or crash or snarl. The desert is overwhelmingly silent. There is not a sound to be heard; and not a thing moves save the wind and the sands. But you look up at the worn peaks and the jagged barrancas, you look down at the wash-outs and piled bowlders, you look about at the wind-tossed, half-starved bushes; and, for all the silence, you know that there is a struggle for life, a war for place, going on day by day.
Desert vegetation.
Protruding edges.
How is it possible under such conditions for much vegetation to flourish? The grasses are scanty, the grease wood and cactus grow in patches, the mesquite crops out only along the dry river-beds. All told there is hardly enough covering to hide the anatomy of the earth. And the winds are always blowing it aside. You have noticed how bare and bony the hills of New England are in winter when the trees are leafless and the grasses are dead? You have seen the rocks loom up harsh and sharp, the ledges assume angles, and the backbone and ribs of the open field crop out of the soil? The desert is not unlike that all the year round. To be sure there are snow-like driftings of sand that muffle certain edges. Valleys, hills, and even mountains are turned into rounded lines by it at times. But the drift rolled high in one place was cut out from some other place; and always there are vertebræ showing—elbows and shoulders protruding through the yellow byssus of sand.
Shifting sands.
The shifting sands! Slowly they move, wave upon wave, drift upon drift; but by day and by night they gather, gather, gather. They overwhelm, they bury, they destroy, and then a spirit of restlessness seizes them and they move off elsewhere, swirl upon swirl, line upon line, in serpentine windings that enfold some new growth or fill in some new valley in the waste. So it happens that the surface of the desert is far from being a permanent affair. There is hardly enough vegetation to hold the sands in place. With little or no restraint upon them they are transported hither and yon at the mercy of the winds.
Desert winds.
Radiation of heat.
Yet the desert winds hardly blow where they list. They follow certain channels or “draws” through the mountain ranges; and the reason for their doing so is plain enough. During the day the intense heat of the desert, meeting with only a thin dry air above it, rises rapidly skyward leaving a vast vacuum below that must be filled with a colder air from without. This colder air on the southern portion of the Colorado Desert comes in from the Gulf region. One can feel it in the passes of the mountains about Baboquivari, rushing up toward the heated portions of Arizona around Tucson. And the hotter the day the stronger the inward rush of the wind. Some days it will blow at the rate of fifty miles an hour until sunset, and then with a cessation of radiation the wind stops and the night is still.
Prevailing winds.
On the western portions of the Colorado the wind comes from the Pacific across Southern California. The hot air from the desert goes up and out over the Coast Range, reaching seaward. How far out it goes is unknown, but when it has cooled off it descends and flows back toward the land as the daily sea-breeze. It re-enters the desert through such loop holes in the Coast Range as the San Gorgonio Pass—the old Puerta de San Carlos—above Indio. The rush of it through that pass is quite violent at times. For wind is very much like water and seeks the least obstructed way. Its goal is usually the hottest and the lowest place on the desert—such a place, for example, as Salton, though I am not prepared to point out the exact spot on the desert that the winds choose as a target. On the Mojave Desert at the north their action is similar, though there they draw down from the Mount Whitney region as well as from the Pacific.
Wear of the winds.
Erosion of mountains.
In open places these desert winds are sometimes terrific in force though usually they are moderate and blow with steadiness from certain directions. As you feel them softly blowing against your cheek it is hard to imagine that they have any sharp edge to them. Yet about you on every side is abundant evidence of their works. The sculptor’s sand-blast works swifter but not surer. Granite and porphyry cannot withstand them, and in time they even cut through the glassy surface of lava. Their wear is not here nor there, but all over, everywhere. The edge of the wind is always against the stone. Continually there is the slow erosion of canyon, crag, and peak; forever there is a gnawing at the bases and along the face-walls of the great sierras. Grain by grain, the vast foundations, the beetling escarpments, the high domes in air are crumbled away and drifted into the valleys. Nature heaved up these mountains at one time to fulfil a purpose: she is now taking them down to fulfil another purpose. If she has not water to work with here as elsewhere she is not baffled of her purpose. Wind and sand answer quite as well.
Rock-cutting.
Fantastic forms.
But the cutting of the wind is not always even or uniform, owing to the inequalities in the fibre of rock; and often odd effects are produced by the softer pieces of rock wearing away first and leaving the harder section exposed to view. Frequently these remainders take on fantastic shapes and are likened to things human, such as faces, heads, and hands. In the San Gorgonio Pass the rock-cuttings are in parallel lines, and occasionally a row of garnets in the rock will make the jewel-pointed fingers of a hand protruding from the parent body.[3] Again shafts of hard granite may make tall spires and turrets upon a mountain peak, a vein of quartz may bulge out in a white or yellow or rose-colored band; and a ridge of black lava, reaching down the side of a foot-hill, may creep and heave like the backbone of an enormous dragon.
Wash-outs.
Sand-lines in caves.
Perhaps the greatest erosion is in the passes through which the winds rush into the desert. Here they not only eat into the ledges and cut away the rock faces, but they make great wash-outs in the desert itself. These trenches look in every respect as though caused by water. In fact the effects of wind and water are often so inextricably mixed that not even an expert geologist would be able to say where the one leaves off and the other begins. The shallow caves of the mountains—too high up for any wave action from sea or lake, and too deep to be reached by rains—have all the rounded appearance of water-worn receptacles. One can almost see the water-lines upon the walls. But the sand-heaped floor suggests that the agent of erosion was the wind.
Cloud-bursts.
Canyon streams.
Yes; there is some water on the deserts, some rainfall each year. Even Sahara gets its occasional showers, and the Colorado and the Mojave show many traces of the cloud-burst. The dark thunder-clouds that occasionally gather over the desert seem at times to reserve all their stores of rain for one place. The fall is usually short-lived but violent; and its greatest force is always on the mountains. There is no sod, no moss, to check or retard the flood; and the result is a great rush of water to the low places. In the canyons the swollen streams roll down bowlders that weigh tons, and in the ravines many a huge barranca is formed in a single hour by these rushing waters. On the lomas and sloping valleys they are not less destructive, running in swift streams down the hollows, and whirling stones, sand, and torn bushes into the old river-beds.
Desert floods.
Power of water.
In a very short time there is a great torrent pouring down the valley—a torrent composed of water, sand, and gravel in about equal parts. It is a yellow, thick stream that has nothing but disaster for the man or beast that seeks to swim it. Many a life has been lost there. The great onset of the water destroys anything like buoyancy, and the tendency is to drag down and roll the swimmer like a bowlder. Even the enormous strength of the grizzly bear has been known to fail him in these desert rivers. They boil and seethe as though they were hot; and they rush on against banks, ripping out the long roots of mesquite, and swirling away tons of undermined gravel as though it were only so much snow. At last after miles of this mill-racing the force begins to diminish, the streams reach the flat lake-beds and spread into broad, thin sheets; and soon they have totally vanished, leaving scarce a rack behind.
Water-pockets.
No running streams.
The desert rainfall comes quickly and goes quickly. The sands drink it up, and it sinks to the rock strata, where, following the ledges, it is finally shelved into some gravel-bed. There, perhaps a hundred feet under the sand, it slowly oozes away to the river or the Gulf. There is none of it remains upon the surface except perhaps a pool caught in a clay basin, or a catch of water in a rocky bowl of some canyon. Occasionally one meets with a little stream where a fissure in the rock and a pressure from below forces up some of the water; but these springs are of very rare occurrence. And they always seem a little strange. A brook that ran on the top of the ground would be an anomaly here; and after one lives many months on the desert and returns to a well-watered country, the last thing he becomes accustomed to is the sight of running water.
Oases in the waste.
In every desert there are isolated places where water stands in pools, fed by underground springs, where mesquite and palms grow, and where there is a show of coarse grass over some acres. These are the so-called oases in the waste that travellers have pictured as Gardens of Paradise, and poets have used for centuries as illustrations of happiness surrounded by despair. To tell the truth they are wretched little mud-holes; and yet because of their few trees and their pockets of yellow brackish water they have an appearance of unreality. They are strange because bright-green foliage and moisture of any kind seem out of place on the desert.
Catch-basins.
Old sea-beds.
Yet surely there was plenty of water here at one time. Everywhere you meet with the dry lake-bed—its flat surface devoid of life and often glimmering white with salt. These beds are no doubt of recent origin geologically, and were never more than the catch-basins of surface water; but long before ever they were brought forth the whole area of the desert was under the sea. To-day one may find on the high table-lands sea-shells in abundance. The petrified clams are precisely like the live clams that one picks up on the western coast of Mexico. The corals, barnacles, dried sponge forms, and cellular rocks do not differ from those in the Gulf of California. The change from sea to shore, and from shore to table-land and mountain, no doubt took place very slowly. Just how many centuries ago who shall say? Geologists may guess and laymen may doubt, but the Keeper of the Seals says nothing.
Volcanic action.
Lava streams.
Nor is it known just when the porphyry mountains were roasted to a dark wine-red, and the foot-hills burnt to a terra-cotta orange. Fire has been at work here as well as wind and water. The whole country has a burnt and scorched look proceeding from something more fiery than sunlight. Volcanoes have left their traces everywhere. You can still see the streams of lava that have chilled as they ran. The blackened cones with their craters exist; and about them, for many miles, there are great lakes and streams of reddish-black lava, frozen in swirls and pools, cracked like glass, broken into blocks like a ruined pavement. Wherever you go on the desert you meet with chips and breaks of lava, showing that at one time there must have been quantities of it belched out of the volcanoes.
Geological ages.
Kinds of rock.
There were convulsions in those days when the sea washed close to the bases of the mountains. Through the crevasses and fissures in the rocks the water crept into the fires of the earth, and explosions—volcanic eruptions—were the result. Wandering over these stony tracks you might fancy that all strata and all geological ages were blown into discord by those explosions. For here are many kinds of splintered and twisted rocks—rocks aqueous and igneous, gritstones, conglomerates, shales, slates, syenite, basalt. And everywhere the white coatings of carbonate of lime that look as though they were run hot from a puddling furnace; and the dust of sulphur, copper, and iron blown upon granite as though oxidized by fire.
Glaciers.
Land slips.
The evidence for glaciers is not so convincing. There is no apparent sign of an ice age. Occasionally one sees scratches upon mountain walls that are suspicious, or heaps of sand and gravel that look as though pushed into the small valleys by some huge force. And again there are places on the Mojave where windrows of heavy bowlders are piled on either side of mountain water-courses, looking as though ice may have caused their peculiar placing. But there is no certainty about any of these. Land slips may have made the windrows as easily as ice slips; and water can heap mounds of sand and gravel as readily as glaciers. One cannot trace the geological ages with such facility. Things sometimes “just happen,” in spite of scientific theories.
Movement of stones.
The talus.
Besides, the movement of the stones into the valleys is going on continuously, irrespective of glaciers. They are first broken from the peaks by erosion, and then they fall into what is called a talus—a great slope of stone blocks beginning half way down the mountain and often reaching to the base or foot. Many of them, of course, are rolled over steep declivities into the canyons and thence carried down by flood waters; but the talus is the more uniform method for bowlders reaching the plain.
Stages of the talus.
In the first stage of the talus the blocks are ragged-edged and as large as a barrel. Nothing whatever grows upon the slope. It is as bare as the side of a volcanic crater. And just as difficult to walk over. The talus is added to at the top by the falling rock of the face-wall, and it is losing at the bottom by the under blocks grinding away to stone and gravel. The flattening out at the bottom, the breaking up of the blocks, and the push-out of the mountain foot upon the plain is the second stage of the talus. In almost all the large valleys of the desert the depressed talus extends, sometimes miles in length, out from the foot of the mountain range. When it finally slips down into the valley and becomes a flat floor it has entered upon its third and last stage. It is then the ordinary valley-bed covered with its cactus and cut by its arroyos. Yet this valley-floor instead of being just one thing is really many things—or rather made up of many different materials and showing many different surfaces.
Desert-floors.
Sandstone blocks.
Salt-beds.
Sand-beds.
You may spend days and weeks studying the make-up of these desert-floors. Beyond Yuma on the Colorado there are thousands of acres of mosaic pavement, made from tiny blocks of jasper, carnelian, agate—a pavement of pebbles so hard that a horse’s hoof will make no impression upon it—wind-swept, clean, compact as though pressed down by a roller. One can imagine it made by the winds that have cut and drifted away the light sands and allowed the pebbles to settle close together until they have become wedged in a solid surface. For no known reason other portions of the desert are covered with blocks of red-incrusted sandstone—the incrustation being only above the sand-line. In the lake-beds there is usually a surface of fine silt. It is not a hard surface though it often has a crust upon it that a wild-cat can walk upon, but a horse or a man would pound through as easily as through crusted snow. The salt-beds are of sporadic appearance and hardly count as normal features of the desert. They are often quite beautiful in appearance. The one on the Colorado near Salton is hard as ice, white, and after sunset it often turns blue, yellow, or crimson, dependent upon the sky overhead which it reflects. Borax and gypsum-beds are even scarcer than the salt-beds. They are also white and often very brilliant reflectors of the sky. The sand-beds are, of course, more frequently met with than any others; and yet your horse does not go knee-deep in sand for any great distance. It is too light, and is drifted too easily by the winds. Bowlders, gravel, and general mountain wash is the most common flooring of all.
Mountain vegetation.
Withered grasses.
The mountains whence all the wash comes, are mere ranges of rock. In the canyons, where there is perhaps some underground water, there are occasionally found trees and large bushes, and the very high sierras have forests of pine belted about their tops; but usually the desert ranges are barren. They never bore fruit. The washings from them are grit and fry of rock but no vegetable mould. The black dirt that lies a foot or more in depth upon the surface of the eastern prairies, showing the many years accumulations of decayed grasses and weeds, is not known anywhere on the desert. The slight vegetation that grows never has a chance to turn into mould. And besides, nothing ever rots or decays in these sands. Iron will not rust, nor tin tarnish, nor flesh mortify. The grass and the shrub wither and are finally cut into pieces by flying sands. Sometimes you may see small particles of grass or twigs heaped about an ant-hill, or find them a part of a bird’s nest in a cholla; but usually they turn to dry dust and blow with the wind—at the wind’s will.
Barren rock.
Mountain colors.
The desert mountains gathered in clusters along the waste, how old and wrinkled, how set and determined they look! Somehow they remind you of a clinched hand with the knuckles turned skyward. They have strength and bulk, the suggestion of quiescent force. Barren rock and nothing more; but what could better epitomize power! The heave of the enormous ridge, the loom of the domed top, the bulk and body of the whole are colossal. Rising as they do from flat sands they give the impression of things deep-based—veritable islands of porphyry bent upward from a yellow sea. They are so weather-stained, so worn, that they are not bright in coloring. Usually they assume a dull garnet-red, or the red of peroxide of iron; but occasionally at sunset they warm in color and look fire-red through the pink haze.
Saw-toothed ridges.
The more abrupt ranges that appear younger because of their saw-toothed ridges and broken peaks, are often much finer in coloring. They have needles that are lifted skyward like Moslem minarets or cathedral spires; and at evening, if there is a yellow light, they shine like brazen spear-points set against the sky. It is astonishing that dull rock can disclose such marvellous coloring. The coloring is not local in the rock, nor yet again entirely reflected. Desert atmosphere, with which we shall have to reckon hereafter, has much to do with it.
Seen from the peaks.
Sun-fire kingdom.
And whether at sunset, at sunrise, or at midnight, how like watch-towers these mountains stand above the waste! One can almost fancy that behind each dome and rampart there are cloud-like Genii—spirits of the desert—keeping guard over this kingdom of the sun. And what a far-reaching kingdom they watch! Plain upon plain leads up and out to the horizon—far as the eye can see—in undulations of gray and gold; ridge upon ridge melts into the blue of the distant sky in lines of lilac and purple; fold upon fold over the mesas the hot air drops its veilings of opal and topaz. Yes; it is the kingdom of sun-fire. For every color in the scale is attuned to the key of flame, every air-wave comes with the breath of flame, every sunbeam falls as a shaft of flame. There is no questioning who is sovereign in these dominions.
Footnotes
[3] Professor Blake of the University of Arizona has called my attention to this.
CHAPTER III
THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL
Early geological days.
The former Gulf.
In the ancient days when the shore of the Pacific was young, when the white sierras had only recently been heaved upward and the desert itself was in a formative stage, the ocean reached much farther inland than at the present time. It pushed through many a pass and flooded many a depression in the sands, as its wave-marks upon granite bases and its numerous beaches still bear witness. In those days that portion of the Colorado Desert known as the Salton Basin did not exist. The Gulf of California extended as far north as the San Bernardino Range and as far west as the Pass of San Gorgonio. Its waters stood deep where now lies the road-bed of the Southern Pacific railway, and all the country from Indio almost to the Colorado River was a blue sea. The Bowl was full. No one knew if it had a bottom or imagined that it would ever be emptied of water and given over to the drifting sands.
Sea-beaches on desert.
Harbors and reefs.
No doubt the tenure of the sea in this Salton Basin was of long duration. The sand-dunes still standing along the northern shore—fifty feet high and shining like hills of chalk—were not made in a month; nor was the long shelving beach beneath them—still covered with sea-shells and pebbles and looking as though washed by the waves only yesterday—formed in a day. Both dunes and beach are plainly visible winding across the desert for many miles. The southwestern shore, stretching under a spur of the Coast Range, shows the same formation in its beach-line. The old bays and lagoons that led inland from the sea, the river-beds that brought down the surface waters from the mountains, the inlets and natural harbors are all in place. Some of them are drifted half full of sand, but they have not lost their identity. And out in the sea-bed still stand masses of cellular rock, honeycombed and water-worn (and now for many years wind-worn), showing the places where once rose the reefs of the ancient sea.
Indian remains.
The Cocopas.
These are the only records that tell of the sea’s occupation. The Indians have no tradition about it. Yet when the sea was there the Indian tribes were there also. Along the bases of the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Ranges there are indications of cave-dwelling, rock-built squares that doubtless were fortified camps, heaps of stone that might have been burial-mounds. Everywhere along the ancient shores and beaches you pick up pieces of pottery, broken ollas, stone pestels and mortars, axe-heads, obsidian arrow-heads, flint spear-points, agate beads. There is not the slightest doubt that the shores were inhabited. It was a warm nook, accessible to the mountains and the Pacific; in fact, just the place where tribes would naturally gather. Branches of the Yuma Indians, like the Cocopas, overran all this country when the Padres first crossed the desert; and it was probably their forefathers who lived by the shores of this Upper Gulf. No doubt they were fishermen, traders and fighters, like their modern representatives on Tiburon Island; and no doubt they fished and fought and were happy by the shores of the mountain-locked sea.
The Colorado River.
The delta dam.
But there came a time when there was a disturbance of the existing conditions in the Upper Gulf. Century after century the Colorado River had been carrying down to the sea its burden of sedimental sand and silt. It had been entering the Gulf far down on the eastern side at an acute angle. Gradually its deposits had been building up, banking up; and gradually the river had been pushing them out and across the Gulf in a southwesterly direction. Finally there was formed a delta dam stretching from shore to shore. The tides no longer brought water up and around the bases of the big mountains. Communication with the sea was cut off and what was once the top of the Gulf changed into an inland lake. It now had no water supply from below, it lay under a burning sun, and day by day evaporation carried it away.
The inland lake.
No one knows how many days, how many years, elapsed before the decrease of the water became noticeable. Doubtless the lake shrunk away slowly from the white face of the sand-dunes and the red walls of the mountains. The river-mouths that opened into the lake narrowed themselves to small stream-beds. The shelving beaches where the waves had fallen lazily year after year, pushing themselves over the sand in beautiful water-mirrors, shone bare and dry in the sunlight. The ragged reefs, over which the chop sea had tumbled and tossed so long, lifted their black hulks out of the water and with their hosts of barnacles and sea-life became a part of the land.
The first fall.
Springs and wells in the sea-bed.
The New River.
The waters of the great inland lake fell perhaps a hundred feet and then they made a pause. The exposed shores dried out. They baked hard in the sun, and were slowly ground down to sand and powdered silt by the action of the winds. The waters made a long pause. They were receiving reinforcements from some source. Possibly there was more rainfall in those days than now, and the streams entering the lake from the mountains were much larger. Again there may have been underground springs. There are flowing wells to-day in this old sea-bed—wells that cast up water salter than the sea itself. No one knows their fountain-head. Perhaps by underground channels the water creeps through from the Gulf, or comes from mountain reservoirs and turns saline by passing through beds of salt. These are the might-bes; but it is far more probable that the Colorado River at high water had made a breach of some kind in the dam of its own construction and had poured overflow water into the lake by way of a dry channel called the New River. The bed of this river runs northward from below the boundary-line of Lower California; and in 1893, during a rise in the Colorado, the waters rushed in and flooded the whole of what is called the Salton Basin. When the Colorado receded, the basin soon dried out again.
New beaches.
It was undoubtedly some accident of this kind that called the halt in the original recession. During the interim the lake had time to form new shores where the waves pounded and washed on the gravel as before until miles upon miles of new beach—pebbled, shelled, and sloping downward with great uniformity—came into existence. This secondary beach is intact to-day and looks precisely like the primary except that it is not quite so large. Across the basin, along the southern mountains, the second water-tracery is almost as apparent as the first. The rocks are eaten in long lines by wave-action, and are honeycombed by the ceaseless energies of the zoöphite.
The second fall.
Nor was the change in beach and rock alone. New bays and harbors were cut out from where the sea had been, new river-channels were opened down to the shrunken lake, new lagoons were spread over the flat places. Nature evidently made a great effort to repair the damage and adapt the lake to its new conditions. And the Indians, too, accepted the change. There are many indications in broken pottery, arrow-heads, and mortars that the aboriginal tribes moved down to the new beach and built wickiups by the diminished waters. And the old fishing-foraging-fighting life was probably resumed.
The third beach.
The failing water.
Then once more the waters went down, down, down. Step by step they receded until the secondary beach was left a hundred feet above the water level. Again there was a pause. Again new beaches were beaten into shape by the waves, new bays were opened, new arroyos cut through from above. The whole process of shore-making—the fitting of the land to the shrunken proportions of the lake—was gone through with for the third time; while the water supply from the river or elsewhere was maintained in decreased volume but with some steadiness of flow. Possibly the third halt of the receding water was not for a great length of time. The tertiary beach is not so large as its predecessors. There never was any strong wave-action upon it, its pebbles are few, its faults and breaks are many. The water supply was failing, and finally it ceased altogether.
Evaporation.
What fate for a lake in the desert receiving no supplies from river or sea—what fate save annihilation? The hot breath of the wind blew across the cramped water and whipped its surface into little waves; and as each tiny point of spray rose on the crest and was lifted into the air the fiery sunbeam caught it, and in a twinkling had evaporated and carried it upward. Day by day this process went on over the whole surface until there was no more sea. The hollow reefs rose high and dark above the bed, the flat shoals of silt lifted out of the ooze, and down in the lowest pools there was the rush and plunge of monster tortuabas, sharks and porpoises, caught as it were in a net and vainly struggling to get out. How strange must have seemed that landscape when the low ridges were shining with the slime of the sea, when the beds were strewn with algæ, sponges, and coral, and the shores were whitening with salt! How strange, indeed, must have been the first sight of the Bottom of the Bowl!
Bottom of the Bowl.
Drying out of the sea-bed.
Advance of desert.
But the sun never relaxed its fierce heat nor the wind its hot breath. They scorched and burned the silt of the sea-bed until it baked and cracked into blocks. Then began the wear of the winds upon the broken edges until the blocks were reduced to dry fine powder. Finally the desert came in. Drifts upon drifts of sand blown through the valleys settled in the empty basin; gravel and bowlder-wash came down from the mountains; the grease wood, the salt-bush, and the so-called pepper-grass sprang up in isolated spots. Slowly the desert fastened itself upon the basin. Its heat became too intense to allow the falling rain to reach the earth, its surface was too salt and alkaline to allow of much vegetation, it could support neither animal nor bird life; it became more deserted than the desert itself.
Below sea-level.
Desolation of the basin.
And thus it remains to this day. When you are in the bottom of it you are nearly three hundred feet below the level of the sea. Circling about you to the north, south, and west are sierras, some of them over ten thousand feet in height. These form the Rim of the Bowl. And off to the southwest there is a side broken out of the Bowl through which you can pass to the river and the Gulf. The basin is perhaps the hottest place to be found anywhere on the American deserts. And it is also the most forsaken. The bottom itself is, for the great part of it, as flat as a table. It looks like a great plain leading up and out to the horizon—a plain that has been ploughed and rolled smooth. The soil is drifted silt—the deposits made by the washings from the mountains—and is almost as fine as flour.
Beauty of the sand-dunes.
The long line of dunes at the north are just as desolate, yet they are wonderfully beautiful. The desert sand is finer than snow, and its curves and arches, as it builds its succession of drifts out and over an arroyo, are as graceful as the lines of running water. The dunes are always rhythmical and flowing in their forms; and for color the desert has nothing that surpasses them. In the early morning, before the sun is up, they are air-blue, reflecting the sky overhead; at noon they are pale lines of dazzling orange-colored light, waving and undulating in the heated air; at sunset they are often flooded with a rose or mauve color; under a blue moonlight they shine white as icebergs in the northern seas.
Cactus and salt-bush.
But neither the dunes nor the flats grow vegetation of consequence. About the high edges, up near the mountain slopes, you find growths of mesquite, palo verde, and cactus; but down in the basin there are many miles where no weed or grass breaks the level uniformity. Not even the salt-bush will grow in some of the areas. And this is not due to poverty of soil but to absence of water and intense heat. Plants cannot live by sunlight alone.
Desert animals in the basin.
Birds.
Lizards and snakes.
Nor will the desert animals inhabit an absolute waste. The coyote and the wild-cat do not relish life in this dip in the earth. They care little for heat and drouth, but the question of food appeals to them. There is nothing to eat. Even the abstemious jack-rabbit finds living here something of a difficulty. Many kinds of tracks are found in the uncrusted silt—tracks of coyotes, gray wolves, sometimes mountain lions—but they all run in straight trails, showing the animals to be crossing the basin to the mountains, not prowling or hunting. So, too, you will occasionally find birds—linnets, bobolinks, mocking-birds, larks—but they are seen one at a time, and they look weary—like land birds far out at sea that seek a resting-place on passing vessels. They do not belong to the desert and are only stopping there temporarily on some long flight. Snakes and lizards are not particular about their abiding-place, and yet they do not care to live in a land where there is no bush or stone to creep under. You meet with them very seldom. Practically there is no life of any kind that is native to the place.
Mirage.
The water illusion.
Is there any beauty, other than the dunes, down in this hollow of the desert? Yes. From a picturesque point of view it has the most wonderful light, air, and color imaginable. You will not think so until you see them blended in that strange illusion known as mirage. And here is the one place in all the world where the water-mirage appears to perfection. It does not show well over grassy or bushy ground, but over the flat lake-beds of the desert its appearance is astonishing. Down in the basin it is accompanied by a second illusion that makes the first more convincing. You are below sea-level, but instead of the ground about you sloping up and out, it apparently slopes down and away on every side. You are in the centre of a disk or high point of ground, and around the circumference of the disk is water—palpable, almost tangible, water. It cannot be seen well from your horse, and fifty feet up on a mountain side it would not be visible at all. But dismount and you see it better; kneel down and place your cheek to the ground and now the water seems to creep up to you. You could throw a stone into it. The shore where the waves lap is just before you. But where is the horizon-line? Odd enough, this vast circling sea does not always know a horizon; it sometimes reaches up and blends into the sky without any point of demarcation. Through the heated air you see faint outlines of mountains, dim glimpses of foot-hills, suggestions of distance; but no more. Across them is drawn the wavering veil of air, and the red earth at your feet, the blue sky overhead, are but bordering bands of flat color.
Decorative landscapes.
Sensuous qualities in nature.
And there you have the most decorative landscape in the world, a landscape all color, a dream landscape. Painters for years have been trying to put it upon canvas—this landscape of color, light, and air, with form almost obliterated, merely suggested, given only as a hint of the mysterious. Men like Corot and Monet have told us, again and again, that in painting, clearly delineated forms of mountains, valleys, trees, and rivers, kill the fine color-sentiment of the picture. The great struggle of the modern landscapist is to get on with the least possible form and to suggest everything by tones of color, shades of light, drifts of air. Why? Because these are the most sensuous qualities in nature and in art. The landscape that is the simplest in form and the finest in color is by all odds the most beautiful. It is owing to just these features that this Bowl of the desert is a thing of beauty instead of a dreary hollow in the hills. Only one other scene is comparable to it, and that the southern seas at sunset when the calm ocean reflects and melts into the color-glory of the sky. It is the same kind of beauty. Form is almost blurred out in favor of color and air.
Changing the desert.
Irrigation in the basin.
Yet here is more beauty destined to destruction. It might be thought that this forsaken pot-hole in the ground would never come under the dominion of man, that its very worthlessness would be its safeguard against civilization, that none would want it, and everyone from necessity would let it alone. But not even the spot deserted by reptiles shall escape the industry or the avarice (as you please) of man. A great company has been formed to turn the Colorado River into the sands, to reclaim this desert basin, and make it blossom as the rose. The water is to be brought down to the basin by the old channel of the New River. Once in reservoirs it is to be distributed over the tract by irrigating ditches, and it is said a million acres of desert will thus be made arable, fitted for homesteads, ready for the settler who never remains settled.
Changing the climate.
Dry air.
A most laudable enterprise, people will say. Yes; commercially no one can find fault with it. Money made from sand is likely to be clean money, at any rate. And economically these acres will produce large supplies of food. That is commendable, too, even if those for whom it is produced waste a good half of what they already possess. And yet the food that is produced there may prove expensive to people other than the producers. This old sea-bed is, for its area, probably the greatest dry-heat generator in the world because of its depression and its barren, sandy surface. It is a furnace that whirls heat up and out of the Bowl, over the peaks of the Coast Range into Southern California, and eastward across the plains to Arizona and Sonora. In what measure it is responsible for the general climate of those States cannot be accurately summarized; but it certainly has a great influence, especially in the matter of producing dry air. To turn this desert into an agricultural tract would be to increase humidity, and that would be practically to nullify the finest air on the continent.
Value of the air supply.
And why are not good air and climate as essential to human well-being as good beef and good bread? Just now, when it is a world too late, our Government and the forestry societies of the country are awakening to the necessity of preserving the forests. National parks are being created wherever possible and the cutting of timber within them is prohibited. Why is this being done? Ostensibly to preserve the trees, but in reality to preserve the water supply, to keep the fountain-heads pure, to maintain a uniform stage of water in the rivers. Very proper and right. The only pity is that it was not undertaken forty years ago. But how is the water supply, from an economic and hygienic stand-point, any more important than the air supply?
Value of the deserts.
Grasses, trees, shrubs, growing grain, they, too, may need good air as well as human lungs. The deserts are not worthless wastes. You cannot crop all creation with wheat and alfalfa. Some sections must lie fallow that other sections may produce. Who shall say that the preternatural productiveness of California is not due to the warm air of its surrounding deserts? Does anyone doubt that the healthfulness of the countries lying west of the Mississippi may be traced directly to the dry air and heat of the deserts. They furnish health to the human; why not strength to the plant? The deserts should never be reclaimed. They are the breathing-spaces of the west and should be preserved forever.
Destruction of natural beauty.
Effects of mining, lumbering, agriculture.
Ploughing the prairies.
“Practical men”
To speak about sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The æsthetic sense—the power to enjoy through the eye, the ear, and the imagination—is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it. The “practical men,” who seem forever on the throne, know very well that beauty is only meant for lovers and young persons—stuff to suckle fools withal. The main affair of life is to get the dollar, and if there is any money in cutting the throat of Beauty, why, by all means, cut her throat. That is what the “practical men” have been doing ever since the world began. It is not necessary to dig up ancient history; for have we not seen, here in California and Oregon, in our own time, the destruction of the fairest valleys the sun ever shone upon by placer and hydraulic mining? Have we not seen in Minnesota and Wisconsin the mightiest forests that ever raised head to the sky slashed to pieces by the axe and turned into a waste of tree-stumps and fallen timber? Have we not seen the Upper Mississippi, by the destruction of the forests, changed from a broad, majestic river into a shallow, muddy stream; and the beautiful prairies of Dakota turned under by the plough and then allowed to run to weeds? Men must have coal though they ruin the valleys and blacken the streams of Pennsylvania, they must have oil though they disfigure half of Ohio and Indiana, they must have copper if they wreck all the mountains of Montana and Arizona, and they must have gold though they blow Alaska into the Behring Sea. It is more than possible that the “practical men” have gained much practice and many dollars by flaying the fair face of these United States. They have stripped the land of its robes of beauty, and what have they given in its place? Weeds, wire fences, oil-derricks, board shanties and board towns—things that not even a “practical man” can do less than curse at.
Fighting wind, sand, and heat.
Nature eternal.
Return of desolation.
And at last they have turned to the desert! It remains to be seen what they will do with it. Reclaiming a waste may not be so easy as breaking a prairie or cutting down a forest. And Nature will not always be driven from her purpose. Wind, sand, and heat on Sahara have proven hard forces to fight against; they may prove no less potent on the Colorado. And sooner or later Nature will surely come to her own again. Nothing human is of long duration. Men and their deeds are obliterated, the race itself fades; but Nature goes calmly on with her projects. She works not for man’s enjoyment, but for her own satisfaction and her own glory. She made the fat lands of the earth with all their fruits and flowers and foliage; and with no less care she made the desert with its sands and cacti. She intended that each should remain as she made it. When the locust swarm has passed, the flowers and grasses will return to the valley; when man is gone, the sand and the heat will come back to the desert. The desolation of the kingdom will live again, and down in the Bottom of the Bowl the opalescent mirage will waver skyward on wings of light, serene in its solitude, though no human eye sees nor human tongue speaks its loveliness.
CHAPTER IV
THE SILENT RIVER
Rise of the Colorado.
In the canyon.
On the desert.
The career of the Colorado, from its rise in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming to its final disappearance in the Gulf of California, seems almost tragic in its swift transitions. It starts out so cheerily upon its course; it is so clear and pure, so sparkling with sunshine and spirit. It dashes down mountain valleys, gurgles under bowlders, swirls over waterfalls, flashes through ravines and gorges. With its sweep and glide and its silvery laugh it seems to lead a merry life. But too soon it plunges into precipitous canyons and enters upon its fierce struggle with the encompassing rock. Now it boils and foams, leaps and strikes, thunders and shatters. For hundreds of miles it wears and worries and undermines the rock to its destruction. During the long centuries it has cut down into the crust of the earth five thousand feet. But ever the stout walls keep casting it back, keep churning it into bubbles, beating it into froth. At last, its canyon course run, exhausted and helpless, it is pushed through the escarpments, thrust out upon the desert, to find its way to the sea as best it can. Its spirit is broken, its vivacity is extinguished, its color is deepened to a dark red—the trail of blood that leads up to the death. Wearily now it drifts across the desert without a ripple, without a moan. Like a wounded snake it drags its length far down the long wastes of sand to where the blue waves are flashing on the Californian Gulf. And there it meets—obliteration.
The lower river.
After the clash and roar of the conflict in the canyons how impressive seems the stillness of the desert, how appalling the unbroken silence of the lower river! Day after day it moves seaward, but without a sound. You start at its banks to find no waves, no wash upon gravel beaches, no rush of water over shoals. Instead of the soothing murmur of breaking falls there is at times the boil of currents from below—waters flung up sullenly and soon flattened into drifting nothingness by their own weight.
Sluggish movement.
Stillness of river.
And how heavily the stream moves! Its load of silt is gradually settling to the bottom, yet still the water seems to drag upon the shores. Every reef of sand, every island of mud, every overhanging willow or cottonwood or handful of arrow-weed holds out a restraining hand. But slowly, patiently, winding about obstructions, cutting out new channels, creeping where it may not run, the bubbleless water works its way to the sea. The night-winds steal along its shores and pass in and out among its sedges, but there are no whispering voices; and the stars emerge and shine upon the flat floor of water, but there is no lustre. The drear desolation of it! The blare of morning sunlight does not lift the pall, nor the waving illusions of the mirage break the stillness. The Silent River moves on carrying desolation with it; and at every step the waters grow darker, darker with the stain of red—red the hue of decay.
The river’s name.
Its red color.
It was not through paucity of imagination that the old Spaniards gave the name—Colorado.[4] During the first fifty years after its discovery the river was christened many times, but the name that finally clung to it was the one that gave accurate and truthful description. You may see on the face of the globe numerous muddy Missouris, blue Rhones, and yellow Tibers; but there is only one red river and that the Colorado. It is not exactly an earthy red, not the color of shale and clay mixed; but the red of peroxide of iron and copper, the sang-du-bœuf red of oriental ceramics, the deep insistent red of things time-worn beyond memory. And there is more than a veneer about the color. It has a depth that seems luminous and yet is sadly deceptive. You do not see below the surface no matter how long you gaze into it. As well try to see through a stratum of porphyry as through that water to the bottom of the river.
Compared with the Nile.
The blood hue.
To call it a river of blood would be exaggeration, and yet the truth lies in the exaggeration. As one walks along its crumbling banks there is the thought of that other river that changed its hue under the outstretched rod of the prophet. How weird indeed must have been the ensanguined flow of the Nile, with its little waves breaking in crests of pink foam! How strange the shores where the receding waters left upon sand and rock a bordering line of scarlet froth! But the Colorado is not quite like that—not so ghastly, not so unearthly. It may suggest at times the heavy welling flow of thickening blood which the sands at every step are trying to drink up; but this is suggestion only, not realization. It seems to hint at blood, and under starlight to resemble it; but the resemblance is more apparent than real. The Colorado is a red river but not a scarlet one.
River changes.
Red sands and silt.
It may be thought odd that the river should change so radically from the clear blue-green of its fountain-head to the opaque red of its desert stream, but rivers when they go wandering down to the sea usually leave their mountain purity behind them. The Colorado rushing through a thousand miles of canyons, cuts and carries seaward with it red sands of shale, granite, and porphyry, red rustings of iron, red grits of carnelian, agate and garnet. All the tributaries come bearing their tokens of red copper, and with the rains the whole red surface of the watershed apparently washes into the smaller creeks and thus into the valleys. When the river reaches the desert carrying its burden of silt, it no longer knows the bowlder-bed, the rocky shores, the breaking waterfalls that clarify a stream. And there are no large pools where the water can rest while the silt settles to the bottom. Besides, the desert itself at times pours into the river an even deeper red than the canyons. And it does this not through arroyos alone, but also by a wide surface drainage.
River-banks.
Often the slope of the desert to the river is gradual for many miles—sometimes like the top of a huge table slightly tilted from the horizontal. When the edge of the table is reached the mesa begins to break into terraces (often cut through by small gullies), and the final descent is not unlike the steps of a Roman circus leading down into the arena. During cloud-bursts the waters pour down these steps with great fury and the river simply acts as a catch-basin for all the running color of the desert.
“Bottom” lands.
The green bands.
The “bottom” lands, forming the immediate banks of the river, are the silt deposits of former years. Often they are several miles in width and are usually covered with arrow-weed, willows, alders, and cottonwoods. The growth is dense if not tall and often forms an almost impenetrable jungle through which are scattered little openings where grass and flowers grow and Indians build reed wickiups and raise melons and corn in season. The desert terraces on either side (sometimes there is a row of sand-dunes) come down to meet these “bottom” lands, and the line where the one leaves off and the other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of a knife. Seen from the distant mountain tops the river moves between two long ribbons of green, and the borders are the gray and gold mesas of the desert.
Bushes and flowers.
Afloat and drifting down between these lines of green your attention is perhaps not at first attracted by the water. You are interested in the thickets of alders and the occasional bursts of white and yellow flowers from among the bushes. They are very commonplace bushes, very ordinary flowers; but how lovely they look as they seem to drift by the boat! How silent again are these clumps of alder and willow! There may be linnets and sparrows among them but they do not make their presence obtrusive in song. A hawk wheels along over the arrow-weed looking for quail, but his wings cut the air without noise. How deathly still everything seems! The water wears into the soft banks, the banks keep sloughing into the stream, but again you hear no splashing fall.
Soundless water.
Wild fowl.
And the water itself is just as soundless. There is never a sunken rock to make a little gurgle, never a strip of gravel beach where a wave could charm you with its play. The beat of oars breaks the air with a jar, but breaks no bubbles on the water. You look long at the stream and fall to wondering if there can be any life in it. What besides a polywog or a bullhead could live there? Obviously, and in fact—nothing. Perhaps there are otter and beaver living along the pockets in the banks? Yes; there were otter and beaver here at one time, but they are very scarce to-day. But there are wild fowl? Yes; in the spring and fall the geese and ducks follow the river in their flights, but they do not like the red water. What proof? Because they do not stop long in any one place. They swing into a bayou or slough late at night and go out at early dawn. They do not love the stream, but wild fowl on their migratory flights must have water, and this river is the only one between the Rockies and the Pacific that runs north and south.
Herons and bitterns.
Snipe.
The blue herons and the bitterns do not mind the red mud or the red water, in fact they rather like it; but they were always solitary people of the sedge. They prowl about the marshes alone and the swish of oars drives them into the air with a guttural “Quowk.” And there are snipe here, bands of them, flashing their wings in the sun as they wheel over the red waters or trip along the muddy banks singly or in pairs. They are quite at home on the bars and bayou flats, but it seems not a very happy home for them—that is judging by the absence of snipe talk. The little teeter flies ahead of you from point to point, but makes no twitter, the yellow-leg seldom sounds his mellow three-note call, and the kill-deer, even though you shoot at him, will not cry “Kill-deer!” “Kill-deer!”
Sad bird-life.
It may be the season when birds are mute, or it may merely happen so for to-day, or it may be that the silence of the river and the desert is an oppressive influence; but certainly you have never seen bird-life so hopelessly sad. Even the kingfisher, swinging down in a blue line from a dead limb and skimming the water, makes none of that rattling clatter that you knew so well when you were a child by a New England mill-stream. And what does a kingfisher on such a river as this? If it were filled with fish he could not see them through that thick water.
The forsaken.