MOUNT AGASSIZ. 171 
beautiful, varying in width from three to five miles, for fifty 
miles farther, when it is merged in a huge cafion which 
extends with unbroken walls to the Rio Colorado. 
Leaving the valley of the Colorado Chiquito, the line 
next passes for one hundred miles through the most beautiful 
country on any part of the route from Kansas to California. 
To the south lie the Mogollon Mountains, thickly timbered 
and well watered; towards the north and north-west extend 
the parks and grassy plateaux from which the San Francisco 
peaks rise so superbly. Winter and summer the whole 
country is thickly covered with nutritious grasses; the soil 
is black and rich, from the decomposition of the lava that has 
been ejected in immense quantities from the extinct crater of 
Mount Agassiz and its three companions, and is capable of 
producing, without irrigation, wheat, barley, oats, potatoes, 
and all temperate produce in abundance. This is the country 
of which Beal—himself a great traveller—declares, ‘It is 
the most beautiful region I ever remember to have seen in 
any part of the world. A vast forest of gigantic pines, inter- 
sected frequently by extensive open glades, sprinkled all over 
with mountains, meadows and wide savannahs, and covered 
with the richest grasses, was traversed by our party for many 
successive days.”? (See Frontispiece Vol. I.) 
,» The most attractive place of summer resort on the line of 
the road will be here on the slopes of Mount Agassiz. It has 
every attraction—scenery, sky, water, elevation, climate; and 
proximity to the greatest natural curiosity known on the 
American continent,—the Great Caiion of the Colorado, from 
which it is distant some forty or fifty miles. 
The streams which flow from the San Francisco peaks into 
the Rio Verde, a northern tributary of the Gila, cut their 
several ways deeply into the plateaux lying to the southward 
