18 GROVE KARL GILBERT— DAVIS [Memoirs Nat ional 



No stove. A dirt floor." A tersely expressed opinion of the editor is added, but is not here 

 quoted. Great changes have taken place since that early time, for in the present era of state- 

 hood, Arizona is, according to the competent testimony of one of its own officials, entering 

 upon a career of progress " that shall be equal to none." 



The notebooks of the second season contain somewhat fuller records than those of the first. 

 A rather wide range of home reading is suggested by an entry made on August 8, 1872, in a 

 narrow shelter from the glaring sunshine of the Sevier desert: 



I write this in the shade of a telegraph pole. " Bless the good Duke of Argyle." 



But in case any reader itches for an explanation of this remote and aristocratic allusion, 

 he will be barking up the wrong pole if he consults a telegrapher. An increasing range of field 

 experience appears to have been reached after leaving the arid basin ranges and entering the 

 moister province of the high plateaus, for note was made on October 14 of an item characteristic 

 of practical geological exploration : 



Just at camp we had to cross a creek at a steep spot & my saddle went forward. I "nat'rally " went over- 

 board into the creek. No damage reported beyond a wetting. 



This confession is illustrated by a faint little pencil outline of the horse stopping on the 

 rapid incline and the rider plunging head first into the water below. 



Not long before, on October 3, Gilbert had his first view of the fantastically sculptured 

 slope beneath the south-facing escarpment of one of the high plateaus in southern Utah, 

 which appears to have excited more admiration in the minds of the senior members of his 

 party than was felt by one of the assistants. 



Up the Sevier a few miles & then to the left a few miles more until we came suddenly on the grandest of 

 views. We stand on a cliff 1000 ft. high, the "Summit of the Rim" . . . Just before starting down the slope 

 we caught a glimpse of a perfect wilderness of red pinnacles, the stunningest thing out for a picture. 



Later on the same day is written, under "Incidents": 



When Mr. Hoxie and I reached the jumping off place & were entranced & exclamatory at the grandeur of 

 the view & its topographical excellence, up comes Mr. Kilp & remarks with a smile: " Well, we're nicely caught, 

 ■aint we?" 



This trifling incident merits citation here, because it remained in Gilbert's mind long 

 afterwards and was retold in California with much fuller account, drawn from memory, of the 

 wide prospect than is entered in the notes, "to illustrate the relation of the traveler's appreciation 

 to his point of view," as follows: 



One summer afternoon, 35 years ago, I rode along a high plateau in southern Utah. My companions were 

 Hoxie, a young army officer; Weiss, a veteran topographer, who mapped our route as we went, and Kipp, an 

 assistant whose primary duty was to carry a barometer. Not far behind us was a pack-train. We were ex- 

 plorers, studying the geography and geology of a strange land. About us was a forest of pine and fir, but we 

 rode through a lane of sunlit prairie cradled in a shallow valley. Suddenly the floor of the prairie came to an 

 end, and we halted on the crest of a cliff overlooking a vast expanse of desert lowland. The desert was not a 

 monotonous plain, like that of northwestern Utah, but a land of mesas, canons, buttes, and cliffs, all so bare 

 that the brilliant colors of their rocks shone forth — orange, red, chocolate, blue, and white — fading slowly into 

 the gray of the remote distance. We were looking across the broad barren tract through which the Colorado 

 winds in Glen and Marble canons, and of which the Painted Desert of Arizona is a minor division. To most 

 of us it was a supreme vision of beauty and grandeur as well as desolation, a scene for which words were in- 

 adequate; and we stood spellbound. The silence was at last broken by Kipp, who exclaimed, "Well, we're 

 nicely caught!" and his discordant note so carried us from the sublime to the ridiculous that our tense emotion 

 found first expression in a laugh. . . . Kipp saw only that the cliff at our feet barred further progress in that 

 direction, and all that had appealed most strongly to the others was lost on him." ' 



The wretchedness imposed upon certain settlers who, for reasons that are best not in- 

 quired into, seek isolation in a barren desert where living is barely possible, is strikingly de- 

 scribed in the notes of November 10, 1872, at a camp by a small spring under the Verm ili on 

 cliffs of the plateau province, east of the Kaibab and north of the Marble Canyon of the 

 Colorado: 



1 Sierra Club Bulletin, 1908, 225. 



