THE INTELLECTUAL OBSERVES. 



DECEMBER, 1863. 



THE GREAT CANONS OF THE COLORADO RIVER. 



BY GEORGE E. ROBERTS. 

 (With a Coloured, Plate.) 



The nautical enterprise undertaken in 1857-8 by Lieutenant 

 St. Ives, at the command of the American Government, to 

 ascertain the navigability of the Colorado River of the West has 

 been productive of high scientific results, as well as successful 

 in its more immediate object of opening an economical avenue 

 for the transportation of supplies to military posts in New Mexico 

 and Utah. The memoir of the expedition, published by the War 

 Department of the United States in 1861, has not received the 

 attention in this country which its merit deserves, and which it 

 fairly claims from all geographers and geologists. The enor- 

 mous difficulties which beset the course of the explorers after 

 the navigable, or lower portion of the Colorado River had been 

 passed, render it extremely unlikely that any second party will 

 ever penetrate into the inhospitable, but marvellously beautiful 

 country, which headed off all their attempts at progression. 

 " Ours has been the first, and will, doubtless, be the last party 

 of whites to visit it," writes the leader of the exploring band. 

 " Everywhere our reconnoitring parties have been stopped by 

 impassable obstacles. It seems intended by Nature that the 

 Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and 

 majestic way, shall be for ever unvisited and undisturbed." 

 Arid table-lands, channeled in every conceivable direction with 

 the deepest and most dismal abysses existing upon earth; 

 tenantless, both by Indian tribes and by animals and birds, for 

 even those which inhabit the surrounding territories seem to 

 have deserted it, down to the smallest reptile ; without water — ■ 

 " a more frightfully arid region probably does not exist upon the 

 face of the earth •" and, as a natural consequent, almost without 

 vegetation ; the territory which shuts in the rise of the Colorado 

 VOL. IV. — NO. V. T 



