The Grand Cañon of the Colorado | Page 9

there dwell a
multitude of lesser animals, well-dressed, clear-eyed, happy little
beasts--wood-rats, kangaroo-rats, gophers, wood-mice, skunks, rabbits,
bob cats, and many others, gathering food, or dozing in their

sun-warmed dens. Lizards, too, of every kind and color are here
enjoying life on the hot cliffs, and making the brightest of them
brighter.
Nor is there any lack of feathered people. The golden eagle may be
seen, and the osprey, hawks, jays, humming-birds, the mourning-dove,
and cheery familiar singers--the black-headed grosbeak, robin, bluebird,
Townsend's thrush, and many warblers, sailing the sky and enlivening
the rocks and bushes through all the cañon wilderness.
Here at Hance's river camp or a few miles above it brave Powell and
his brave men passed their first night in the cañon on their adventurous
voyage of discovery thirty-three years ago. They faced a thousand
dangers, open or hidden, now in their boats gladly sliding down swift,
smooth reaches, now rolled over and over in back-combing surges of
rough, roaring cataracts, sucked under in eddies, swimming like
beavers, tossed and beaten like castaway drift--stout-hearted, undaunted,
doing their work through it all. After a month of this they floated
smoothly out of the dark, gloomy, roaring abyss into light and safety
two hundred miles below. As the flood rushes past us, heavy-laden
with desert mud, we naturally think of its sources, its countless silvery
branches outspread on thousands of snowy mountains along the crest of
the continent, and the life of them, the beauty of them, their history and
romance. Its topmost springs are far north and east in Wyoming and
Colorado, on the snowy Wind River, Front, Park, and Sawatch ranges,
dividing the two ocean waters, and the Elk, Wasatch, Uinta, and
innumerable spurs streaked with streams, made famous by early
explorers and hunters. It is a river of rivers--the Du Chesne, San Rafael,
Yampa, Dolores, Gunnison, Cotchetopa, Uncompahgre, Eagle, and
Roaring rivers, the Green and the Grand, and scores of others with
branches innumerable, as mad and glad a band as ever sang on
mountains, descending in glory of foam and spray from snow-banks
and glaciers through their rocky moraine-dammed, beaver-dammed
channels. Then, all emerging from dark balsam and pine woods and
coming together, they meander through wide, sunny park valleys, and
at length enter the great plateau and flow in deep cañons, the beginning
of the system culminating in this grand cañon of cañons.

Our warm cañon camp is also a good place to give a thought to the
glaciers which still exist at the heads of the highest tributaries. Some of
them are of considerable size, especially those on the Wind River and
Sawatch ranges in Wyoming and Colorado. They are remnants of a vast
system of glaciers which recently covered the upper part of the
Colorado basin, sculptured its peaks, ridges, and valleys to their present
forms, and extended far out over the plateau region--how far I cannot
now say. It appears, therefore, that, however old the main trunk of the
Colorado may be, all its wide-spread upper branches and the landscapes
they flow through are new-born, scarce at all changed as yet in any
important feature since they first came to light at the close of the glacial
period.
The so-called Grand Colorado Plateau, of which the Grand Cañon is
only one of its well-proportioned features, extends with a breadth of
hundreds of miles from the flanks of the Wasatch and Park Mountains
to the south of the San Francisco Peaks. Immediately to the north of the
deepest part of the cañon it rises in a series of subordinate plateaus,
diversified with green meadows, marshes, bogs, ponds, forests, and
grovy park valleys, a favorite Indian hunting-ground, inhabited by elk,
deer, beaver, etc. But far the greater part of the plateau is good sound
desert, rocky, sandy, or fluffy with loose ashes and dust, dissected in
some places into a labyrinth of stream-channel chasms like cracks in a
dry clay-bed, or the narrow slit crevasses of glaciers,--blackened with
lava-flows, dotted with volcanoes and beautiful buttes, and lined with
long continuous escarpments,--a vast bed of sediments of an ancient
sea-bottom, still nearly as level as when first laid down after being
heaved into the sky a mile or two high.
Walking quietly about in the alleys and byways of the Grand Cañon
City, we learn something of the way it was made; and all must admire
effects so great from means apparently so simple: rain striking light
hammer-blows or heavier in streams, with many rest Sundays; soft air
and light, gentle sappers and miners, toiling forever; the big river
sawing the plateau asunder, carrying away the eroded and ground waste,
and exposing the edges of the strata to the weather; rain torrents sawing
cross-streets and alleys, exposing the strata in the same way in

hundreds of sections,