Part 31

Various adventures carry the plucky party through and beyond this gorge down to where our railway bridge spans the river with its tenacious links. They note the existence of an Indian ferry of rude log-rafts somewhere near here, but there was nothing to induce their stoppage for more than a night. Now, those of us who are minded some day to behold the wild crags of Desolation cañon will reverse Major Powell's course, and embarking at this railway station on the river bank go up the Green, through the Azure Cliffs and fifty miles beyond. Or, turning southward, our boat may equip itself for a longer journey, and our minds make ready for even more marvelous and memorable sights, in the profundities of the cañons of the Rio Colorado, below the junction of the Green and the Grand. If so long a journey is forbidden, there is much delight, with the advantage of easy and safe navigation, to be found between the railway and the mouth of Grand river.

A few miles after leaving the railway, downward bound, the voyager would get among curious bluffs and buttes that would interest him all the way to the mouth of the San Rafael, a strong tributary from the west, up which passed one of the principal overland trails from New Mexico to Utah. If he is interested in archæology, Indian "relics" in abundance will reward his search along the banks. The river is tortuous here, but deep and quiet. Sometimes there is a narrow flood-plain between the river and the wall on one side or the other, the peninsulas being pleasantly wooded. The walls are orange-colored sandstone, and vertical, but not very high. At one point, where the river sweeps around a curve under a cliff, a vast hollow dome may be seen, with many caves and deep alcoves. The doublings of the river are many; one loop carries you nine miles around, yet makes only six hundred yards of headway. Gradually the chasm of the river grows deeper; the walls are systematically curved and grandly arched; of beautiful color, and reflected in the quiet waters with deceiving distinctness.

This is Labyrinth cañon, or, as the Indians called it, _Toom'-pin wu-neár_,--the Land of Standing Rocks. "The stream is still quiet, and we glide along through a strange, wierd, grand region. The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock--cliffs of rock; tables of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock--ten thousand strangely carved forms. Rocks everywhere and no vegetation; no soil; no sand. In long gentle curves the river winds about these rocks. When speaking of these we must not conceive of piles of bowlders, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet; cliffs that cannot be scaled, and cañon-walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast hollow domes, and tall pinnacles, and shafts set on the verge overhead, and all highly colored--buff, gray, red, brown and chocolate; never lichened; never moss-covered; but bare, and often polished."

Below the Labyrinth is Stillwater cañon, forty miles long. Its walls at the lower end are beautifully curved, as the river sweeps in its meandering course. Suddenly gathering swiftness it rushes hastily forward to unite with the current of the Grand. These streams join their floods in solemn depths, more than twelve hundred feet below the general surface of the country. Up the Grand you look into another "labyrinth." It is the central artery toward which innumerable side-cañons concentrate. In every direction they ramify, deep, dark and impassable to everything but the winged bird. Through such underground passages are sent the waters from the distant highlands, and their confluence fills the whole chasm of the Grand with a turbid stream.

Climb out, laboriously and cautiously, ascend one of the fantastically-formed buttes that rise above the level of the plateau, and what a world of grandeur is spread before the eye! Nothing one can say will give an adequate idea of the singular and surprising landscape,--nothing in art or nature offers a parallel. Below lies the cañon through which the Colorado begins its wonderful course. It can be traced for miles, and occasional glimpses of the river caught. From the northwest comes the Green, in a narrow, winding gorge; from the northeast the Grand, hidden in a cañon that seems bottomless. "Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rock,--not such ledges as you may have seen where the quarryman splits his blocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains, that, rolled out on the plain below, would stand a lofty range; and not such cliffs as you may have seen where the swallow builds its nest, but cliffs where the soaring eagle is lost to view ere he reaches the summit.... Away to the east a group of eruptive mountains are seen--the Sierra La Sal. Their slopes are covered with pines, and deep gulches are flanked with great crags, and snow fields are seen near the summits. So the mountains are in uniform--green, gray and silver. Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction; and beyond them, mountains blending with the clouds."

* * * * *

I cannot go on to tell of the profound crevices in the crust of the globe beyond, where the Rio Colorado, taking its name from its vermillioned borders, flows a full mile below the surface. A whole volume like this would not suffice to portray fully the pictures and the teaching of a single day's ride down that engulfed stream, or an hour's march along the giddy brink. Only one man, Captain C. E. Dutton, has ever given anything approaching an adequate description. He lived on the plateau and studied it for years; and he tells us that it is a long time before the unaccustomed mind can come to have any real comprehension of the magnitude and the sublimity and the exquisite beauty of what the cañons above and below have to show to the attentive eye. Nothing in the wide world equals or compares with it in its peculiar and amazing beauty and force.

But the fanes and museums of these rock-gods are guarded against the too easy profanation of human curiosity. The terrors of personal discomfort and danger surround them. Enduring and brave must be the horseman or canoeist--what a trip for the Rob Roys of the future!--who penetrates this naked wilderness and feasts his eyes on the riches of novel color and form spread before him in the glory of the setting sun!

* * * * *

The dog watch comes. The gray waste of sterile land sweeps steadily past. The stars wheel slowly along their cosmical paths. Utter loneliness envelopes us as we rush forward with direct and tireless speed. The rolling music of our progress, and the solemnity of our thoughts as we ponder what we have seen and heard, quiet mind and body, the lamps are turned down, the curtains drawn, and silence and darkness reigns in our car, as over the night-beleaguered desert save where some official passes silently through, shading his lantern with his hand.

XXXIII

CROSSING THE WASATCH.

The splendor falls on castle walls And snowy summits, old in story; The long light shakes across the lakes And the wild cataracts leap in glory. Blow bugle, blow; set the wild echoes flying; Answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. --TENNYSON.

With the first full light of dawn, on the morning after leaving Grand Junction, the vigilant Madame was awake, and we heard her calling upon us from her curtained corner to wake up and look out of the window. Well, as the Shaughran said when punished for his fox-hunt on the Squire's horse, "It was worth it," even at the expense of the morning nap. Here was something different from anything seen before.

We were far inside the boundary of Utah Territory and were already beginning to climb the first steps toward the heights of the Wasatch--the western bulwark of the Rocky mountains. The way lay up the South Fork of the Price river, along a broad valley sunken between enormously high walls of sedimentary rock whose horizontal stratification betrayed no signs of disturbance. How long must the waters of the paleazoic sea have surged against the primitive granitic caves and lava-masses--how steady must this part of the earth's crust have remained for ages--to let these thousands of feet of rocky tablets be piled up! And then, when it was done; when the slow upheaval had come, and the water had gradually been drawn off; how patiently did the centuries wait while these great depressed spaces were cut down and the material carried away to be spread--who knows where?

Here mountain-like table-lands stretched their white and cedar-spiked terraces, one above another to the plateau-top, for scores of miles out from the range against which they were braced. The water and the sand-blast of the fierce winds had worn their exposed cliff-faces, and sometimes carved their crests (now gold-tipped by the first sunbeams) into fantastic shapes that recalled pictures in the Dakota badlands or the grotesque monuments near Colorado Springs. In some places they were honeycombed with round holes, connecting pits and fissures, like a prodigious display of Arabesque fret-work; elsewhere they would stand massive and plain. As we proceeded colors began to appear,--yellows, warm browns and pale reds, against which, in thorough keeping, grew the bent and aged forms of junipers. In the soft gray of the morning light, nothing could be more pleasing than these worn and variegated battlements, between which for miles and miles the road winds its way. Every stupendous headland was a new rendering of the general idea--a novel design coherent with hundreds of its fellows; and of each the eye was afforded several altered aspects as the train changed its point of view.

Finally we attained a higher level, and the cliffs came nearer, became more precipitous and the inter spaces more green. This was Castle Valley. We had risen and dressed ourselves and were thinking of breakfast. The sun had come high enough over the "great, lone land" in our rear to shoot his beams half way down the projections of the dewy and glittering cliffs, when the train came to a stop, though there was only a side-track. Stepping to the platform to enquire why, we came with all the shock of complete surprise face to face with what to me, is the most inspiring, as a single object, of all the marvelous scenes between the Plains and the Salt Sea. This was Castle Gate.

The cañon here becomes very narrow and tortuous, with picturesque defiles opening here and there and conducting tiny streams, swelled in spring to noisy torrents. Trees and bushes in great abundance grow on the narrow banks of the river and swarm up the rough heaps of rocks that bury the foot of the cliff on each side. Just here, these cliffs are several hundred feet high and exceedingly steep, showing great ledge-fronts as upright and clean of vegetation as the side of a house. All the rocks are bright rust-red, darker and lighter here and there; and over all arches a sky, violet-blue, vivid, and immeasurably deep, for you may look far into it, as into water that lies quiet and luminous under the sunshine.

Now out from this wall on one side pushes a great projection half way across the valley, crowned on its point by a round turret. This is on the left or southern side. Opposite it has been left standing an enormous natural wall--a thin promontory projected from the face of the mountain as Sandy Hook stretches narrow and straight out in the ocean beyond the Atlantic coast-line. From base to combing it rises sheer and toppling whichever way you scan it; and on the western side the topmost ledges overhang. Here the face is scarred not only by the horizontal lines denoting the separate strata, but also by vertical gashes of cleavage some of which are strongly marked cracks extending from top to bottom. These show how, by the continual scaling off of enormous slabs on each side, under the prying levers of heat and cold, moisture and weight, this once thick headland has been reduced to a thinness so contracted that its thickness in proportion to its height is no greater than that of Cleopatra's Needle or any other monumental shaft; while the narrowed peninsular, which connects it with the main crag, has only the proportions of a garden wall: but what a wall! for it is eight hundred feet from its weedy top to the foundation. You can count in the patches of freshly exposed rock on its surface how season by season it is diminishing; and one great crack almost splits its extreme edge in twain so that some day, with an earth-jarring crash, half the thickness of this noble remnant will drop to its base and burst into dust and fragments.

Heedless of such a catastrophe, and unmindful of the grandeur of their home in human eyes, birds build their nests in the crevices and crannies that are nicked into its crimson front, and bats shrink from the light into the seams that make a network upon its sides. Great gaps mar the regularity of its sky line; but these mark the ruinous hand of time and add to the antique grandeur of the pile. We cannot take our eyes from it, and forget the even more lofty walls and pinnacles opposite, which have not the advantage of the isolation, and the Olympian dignity and pose, of this daring pier.

A little group of Indians on horseback, in the full toggery of Uinta Utes, were jogging along the road beside the track when presently we emerged from Castle Valley and drew up at Pleasant Valley Junction. Here a branch road comes from some important coal mines sixteen miles to the westward. This coal occurs in a bed eleven feet in thickness, and so situated as to be worked very conveniently. The mines were opened four years ago, and a railway built to them from Provo--a distance of sixty miles. This was bought by the Denver and Rio Grande and a part of it was utilized. Now all the coal comes down from the mines by gravity, and the locomotive is required only to haul up the empty cars.

This coal is bituminous, and of better quality than that from Rock Springs, in Wyoming, which it is gradually displacing in the Utah markets, since it is found to give more heat, ton for ton. Its introduction was a boon to the people generally, for instead of seven dollars and fifty cents a ton, with occasional extra prices, they now pay only five dollars, and get a better article. The mines are operated by the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, who employ about one hundred men and produce a daily output of three hundred tons, which is constantly increasing to meet the growing demand.

After leaving Pleasant Valley Junction the ascent of the Wasatch was begun in earnest, but, though a long pull, the grade was not remarkably steep, nor was the cañon (worn through a red pudding-stone,) astonishing in any way, while always interesting. By the time breakfast was fairly out of the way, the summit had been reached and the descent began through the cañon of the Spanish Fork into Mormondom.

A few miles down we came to Thistle Station, a place of some consequence because it is the railway outlet for the large San Pete valley, which stretches nearly along the western foot of the Wasatch until it emerges into the valley of the Sevier. This valley is reached from the westward by a narrow-gauge railway line, built years ago by Mormon capital. It enters it from Nephi by the way of Salt creek and terminates at Wales, where there are coal mines worked by Welchmen and operated by English capital. The San Pete valley is not particularly interesting. Yet the little settlements back in the eastern foothills where the many streams come down are pleasant enough.

This valley became famous in 1865-67 as the scene of the San Pete Indian War. "Several companies of the Mormon militia were mustered here, and held the mountains and passes on the east against the Indians, guarded the stock gathered here from the other settlements that had been abandoned, and took part in the fights at Thistle creek, ... and the rest, where Black Hawk and his flying squadron of Navajos and Piutes showed themselves such plucky men."

Toward the lower end of the valley stands the important town of Manti, its suburbs encroaching on the sagebrush. "As a settlement," says Phil Robinson, the most recent traveller thither, "Manti is pretty, well ordered and prosperous.... The abundance of trees, the width of the streets, the perpetual presence of running water, the frequency and size of the orchards, and the general appearance of simple, rustic comfort, impart to Manti all the characteristic charm of the Mormon settlements." Robinson says that the people in that region are chiefly Danes and Scandinavians. "These nationalities contribute more largely than any other--unless Great-Britishers are all called one nation--to the recruiting of Mormonism, and when they reach Utah maintain their individuality more conspicuously than any others." The temple at Manti will be something worth going far to see when it is completed. "The site, originally, was a rugged hill slope, but this has been cut out into three vast semicircular terraces, each of which is faced with a wall of rough hewn stone, seventeen feet in height. Ascending these by wide flights of steps you find yourself on a fourth level, the hill-top, which has been leveled into a spacious plateau, and on this, with its back set against the hill, stands the temple. The style of Mormon architecture, unfortunately, is heavy and unadorned, and in itself, therefore, this massive pile, one hundred and sixty feet in length by ninety wide, and about one hundred high, is not prepossessing. But when it is finished, and the terrace-slopes are turfed, and the spaces planted out with trees, the view will undoubtedly be very fine, and the temple be a building that the Mormons may well be proud of."

The lower part of the valley is undulating,--"for the most part a sterile-looking waste of greasewood, but having an almost continual threat of cultivation running along the center," until it suddenly opens, at Mayfield, into a great meadow of several thousand acres. Passing on to the Sevier, volcanic hills and benches shut in the valley, but the bottoms along the river were level, grassy, "clumped with shrubs and patched with corn-fields." Here there are frequent settlements, one of the most important of which is Salina, where the alkalies that infect the soil of all this region are concentrated in salt-beds that have long been dug for export. The Denver and Rio Grande Company have projected a track from this point due east to join its main line and thus secure not only the salt trade, but tap this farming and grazing region, which some day will be of great consequence, for there is plenty of water. Furthermore, this same company has laid a sort of preëmption right upon a railway route surveyed westward from Salina toward the Pacific coast through southern Nevada and central California, which will pass close by the Yosemite and the Caleveras groves of Big Trees.

We had gathered all this information from books and good friends, and the recollection of former reading, while

"like Iser, rolling rapidly,"

we descended the Spanish Fork. This cañon is not rough and cliff-bound, but its sides, though steep, are rounded, and soft walls of greenery--small bushes, rank grass and tufted groves of aspen and oak; while the river purls along the narrow depression under the continuous shade of young maples, alders, oaks and other shrubbery. A wagon road is to be seen most of the way showing long use. The rude kennels built for temporary use by the railway-makers have not yet had time to crumble, and add a picturesque note to the pleasant vale. Here and there were camps of emigrants, or of railway people. That they were Mormons was plain by the comfortable, home-like appearance of each bivouac, where buxom women were tending to the children and carrying on the ordinary duties of housekeeping in houses of cloth and kitchens made under booths of maple boughs. Children and dogs and donkeys abounded, and at two or three camps we caught sight of pet fawns. This cañon was formerly an Indian highway, and through it, in days gone by, more than one incursion of Navajos and Piutes has swept down upon the settlements, "bringing fire and the sword." Through it also came, long, long ago, the pious friars,--explorer-priests--bent upon the conversion of the Indians; and the digging up of a few coins and other relics of their visits has given the name of Spanish Fork to the stream, which really is a "fork" of no other water course, but empties directly into Lake Utah.

As we emerge from the cañon a wide, haze tinted sketch of mountains and green-gray plains, with a touch of steel-white water, greets the eye to the westward, where stretch the arid deserts and volcanic ranges of Utah and Nevada. Southward, nobly tall and rugged, rise the hights of the Wasatch, with the magnificent pyramid of Mt. Nebo, overtopping the rest, exalted above the sunlit clouds and crowned with early snow wreaths. It is the last of the great, lone, Rocky Mountain peaks that we shall see, and a worthy reminder of the splendid scenery in whose presence our life has been expanded and glorified during the bygone months.

XXXIV

BY UTAH LAKES.

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the landscape round it measures; Russet lawns, and fallows gray, Where the nibbling flocks do stray; Mountains, on whose barren breast The laboring clouds do often rest; Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks and rivers wide; Towers and battlements it sees, Bosomed high in tufted trees, Where, perhaps some Beauty lies The Cynosure of neighboring eyes. --MILTON.

Nebo does not long remain in sight from our windows; for speedily we swing out into the sloping valley land, bringing into close companionship on the right the northern half of the Wasatch range, which, were it a trifle more arctic and bristling aloft, would remind us strongly of the Sangre de Cristo. On each side now are spread wide areas of grain field and grassland, with abundant hedges and thickets and orchards surrounding clusters of houses and barns. The train makes frequent halts at little villages, which seem to have been built along both sides of the track, because the reverse process occurred and the rails were laid in the middle of the main street. The first of these farmer-settlements was Spanish Fork (the Palmyra of old settlers) where, not long ago, a copper image of the Virgin Mary was dug up, together with some fragments of a human skeleton. "This takes back the Mormon settlement of to-day to the long ago time when Spanish missionaries preached of the Pope to the Piutes, and gave but little satisfaction to either man or beast, for their tonsured scalps were but scanty trophies, and the coyote found their lean bodies but poor picking." A few miles further is Springville, hidden in well-watered trees, where a stream tumbling out of a mysteriously dark cañon just behind the town, turns the wheels of extensive flour mills and woolen factories.