CHAPTER XII

THE GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO RIVER IN ARIZONA

From Williams, on the Santa Fe’s transcontinental line, a branch runs due north across 65 miles of the great Colorado Plateau and lands the traveler at the very rim of the Grand Cañon—one of the most enjoyable, most novel, most awakening sights among the Southwest’s marvels. Even if your arrival be at darkest midnight, you will _feel_ the nearness of that awful void in the unseen—a strange and humbling experience. For accommodations you have the choice of American plan and what passes in the wilderness for luxury at the big El Továr Hotel,[77] or of lodging yourself more economically but comfortably enough in cabin or tent at the nearby Bright Angel Camp with meals _á la carte_ at the Harvey Café. Then you will want to know what to see.

The Grand Cañon is among those stupendous natural wonders that the traveler needs time to adjust himself to; and I am inclined to believe that his first act in wisdom is to sit down at the rim with a comprehensive map before him and spend a leisurely hour studying geography. Fortunately a very good practical map is included in the Santa Fe’s folder that describes the Cañon, and this may be had of any agent for the asking. The names, taken from all sorts of mythologies and philosophies—Hindu, Chinese, Norse, British, Greek, Egyptian, with a dash of Aztec and latter day American—and given to the various prominent shapes simulating temples, pagodas, castles, towers, colonnades and what not, are rather bewildering and indeed seem out of place in mid-Arizona. In better taste, I think, are the more simply named spots that commemorate adjacent native tribes as Hopi, Walapai, Zuñi; old white dwellers by the rim like Bass, Rowe and Hance; and explorers associated with the Cañon, such as Powell, Escalante and Cárdenas. Cárdenas, it may not be amiss to state, was the officer dispatched by Coronado from Zuñi to learn the truth about the great gorge and river, the report of which Tovar had brought him from the Hopis. It was Cárdenas and his little company of a dozen soldiers, who, one autumn day of 1540, were the first white men to look into the mighty chasm. At the bottom they could detect the great river flowing, seemingly a mere thread of a rivulet; but their attempts to reach it were fruitless, so precipitous they found the Cañon walls.[78] The stream that first received the name of Colorado, is the one we now call Little Colorado. Oñate dubbed it so—Spanish for red—because of the color of its turbid waters. The greater river in Cárdenas’s day was known as _el Rio del Tizón_, the river of the Fire-brand—a name given it by explorers of its lower waters because of certain Indians on its bank whom the Spaniards saw warming themselves with brands taken from the fire. The Colorado River as we now know it, and including its tributaries the Grand and the Green, drains a region only secondary to the basin of the Mississippi. Its length from the headwaters of the Green in Wyoming to the outlet into the Gulf of California is about 2000 miles. The Grand Cañon (including 65 miles above the junction with the Little Colorado and known as Marble Cañon) is 283 miles in length, the walls varying from 3000 to nearly 6000 feet high and rising from the river in a series of huge steps or terraces, so that the width, which at the river is from about 100 to 600 feet, increases to several miles at the rim. The deepest part of the chasm is near the hotels, and the river there flows over a mile below them.[79] The Cañon walls are the delight of geologists, who find there in orderly arrangement (stratum upon stratum in banded colors) the deposits of the successive ages of the earth from the archaean granite to the lava flows of recent geologic time. A succinct and readable account of the geological features of the Cañon will be found in the United States Geological Survey’s admirable Guide Book of the Western United States,