322 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



and explore some distance above, named it the Rio 

 de Buena Guia, or river of good guidance. In the 

 same year Melchior Diaz called it the Rio del Tizon, 

 river of the firebrand, because he found the savages 

 carrying torches for warmth. Juan de Onate in 1605 

 christened it the Rio Grande de Esperanza, river of 

 hope, but in 1700 it received from Padre Eusebio 

 Kino the ominous name of the Rio de los Martires, 

 prophetic of the massacre, eighty years later, at the 

 infant Missions near Yuma. But the name by which 

 we know it, the Rio Colorado, the red river, is em- 

 phatically its own, stamped upon it by Nature. Red 

 it is, both water and shores, approaching actual 

 vermilion, and the hue is accentuated by the com- 

 plementary green of the bordering vegetation.^ I 

 should like to view it again in late fall, when cotton- 

 wood and willow had changed to that tint of au- 

 tumn gold which gives such depth and brilliance to 

 the blue of the sky. 



. I whiled away an hour with the shades of the old 

 padres and conquistadores, not forgetting the mod- 

 em conqueror. Major John Wesley Powell, whose 

 /exploration in 1869 has lately been commemorated 

 iin a monument built on a point above the wonderful 

 '.canon. All the afternoon we moved slowly along, 

 ■flanked ever by barren red mountains, these in Cali- 

 •fornia, those in Arizona. Reach after reach of the 



^ In an old map, printed in Paris in the sixteenth century, and 

 showing California as an island, the Gulf is set down as Mar Bermejo, 

 the Vermilion Sea, the name probably deriving from one of the "re- 

 ports and narrations" from which the map was avowedly drawn, 

 traceable to some early explorer, perhaps Alargon, or Ulloa (one year 

 earlier) who may have observed the discoloration of the Gulf water 

 by that of the river, near its mouth. 



