274 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
iam Winter. “Your heart is moved with 
feeling that is far too deep^ for words." 
"It has a thousand differing moods," 
writes Hamlin Garland. “No one can know 
it for what it is who has not lived with it 
every day of the year. It is like a moun- 
tain range — a cloud today, a wall of mar- 
ble tomorrow. W'hen the light falls into 
it, harsh, direct and searching, it is great, 
but not beautiful. The lines are chaotic, 
poured forth as from one glorious foun- 
tain, hooding both earth and sky." 
Even the most superficial description of 
this enormous spectacle may not be put 
in w'ords. The watcher upon the rim 
overlooks a thousand square miles of pyra- 
mids and minarets carved from the painted 
depths. Many miles away and more than 
a mile below the level of his feet he sees 
a tiny silver thread wdiich he knows is the 
No exploration of the Grand Canyon 
was made until 1869, when Major J. W. 
Powell, who afterward founded the United 
States Geological Survey, made a perilous 
passage with a party of nine men in four 
small ' boats. This exploration constitutes 
one of the most romantic adventures in 
American history. Until then it was un- 
known!. 
“Yet enough had been seen to foment 
ALONG THE LOWER STRETCH OF' HERMIT TRAIL, GRANT) 
CANYON, 
ON THE- WAY TO GRAND VIEW, GRAND CANYON OF THE 
COLORADO, 
disturbing — but wait ! The clouds and the 
sunset, the moonrise and the storm will 
» 
transform it into a splendor no mountain 
range can surpass. Peaks will shift and 
glow, walls darken, crags take fire, apd 
gray-green mesas, dimly seen, take on the 
gleam of opalescent lakes of mountain 
water." 
“It seems a gigantic statement for even 
Nature to make all in one mighty stone 
word," writes John kluir, "Wildness so 
Godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new 
sense of earth’s beauty and size. * * * 
But the colors, the living, rejoicing colors, 
chanting, morning and evening, in chorus 
to heaven ! Whose brush or pencil, how- 
ever lovingly inspired, can give us these? 
In the supreme flaming glory of sunset the 
whole canyon is transfigured, as if all the 
life and light of centuries of sunshine 
stored up in the rocks w-ere now being 
giant Colorado. He is numbed by the spec- 
tacle. At first he cannot comprehend it. 
There is no measure, nothing which the 
eye can grasp, the mind fathom. 
It may be hours before he can even 
slightly adjust himself to the titanic spec- 
tacle, before it ceases to be utter chaos ; 
and not until then does he begin to ex- 
claim in rapture. And he never wholly 
adjusts himself, for wuth dawning appre- 
ciation comes growing wonder. Compre- 
hension lies alw'ays just beyond his reach. 
Rut it will help to descend one of these 
trails which zigzag down the precipitous 
cliffs to the river’s muddy edge. 
The Grand Canyon was first reported to 
the civilized world by the early Spanish 
explorers in 1540. Tt was first described 
in 1851 by the Sitgreaves Expedition. The 
War Department explored the navigable 
waters from the south in 1858, but 
stopped at the foot of the canyons. 
rumor,” Major Powell wrote in his re- 
port to the Smithsonian Institution, “and 
many wonderful stories have been told in 
the hunter's cabin and prospector’s camp. 
Stories were related of parties entering the 
gorge in boats and being carried down 
with fearful velocity into whirlpools, 
where all were overwhelmed in the abyss 
of waters ; others, of underground passages 
for the great river, into which boats had 
passed never to be seen again. It was 
currently believed that the river was lost 
under the rocks for several hundred miles. 
There were other accounts of great falls 
whose roaring music could be heard on 
distant mountain summits.” 
The passage, while it developed none of 
these reported dangers, was sufficiently 
perilous. Boats were repeatedly upset in 
the rapids, food was nearly exhausted, and 
the adventurers many times barely escaped 
destruction. Four men who deserted the 
A 
