86 
The Colorado River 
charms. One seems to inhale fresh vitality from its unpeopled 
immensity. I never could understand why a desert is not 
generally considered beautiful; the kind, at least, we have in 
the South-west, with all the cacti, the yucca, and the other 
flowering plants unfamiliar to European or Eastern eyes, and 
the lines of coloured cliffs and the deep canyons. There is far 
more beauty and variety of colour than in the summer meadow- 
stretches and hills of the Atlantic States. So the good Padre 
Kino, after all, was perhaps to be congratulated on having 
those thirty years, interesting years, before the wilds could be 
made commonplace. 
Arizona did not seem to yield kindly to the civilisers; in¬ 
deed, it was like the Colorado River, repellent and unbreakable. 
The padres crossed it and recrossed it on the southwestern 
corner, but they made no impression. After Kino’s death in 
1711 there was a lull in the entradas to the Colorado, though 
Ugarte, coming up along the eastern coast of Lower California, 
sailed to the mouth of the river in July, 1721. Twenty-four 
years later (1744) Padre Jacobo Sedelmair went down the Gila 
from Casa Grande to the great bend, and from there cut across 
to the Colorado at about the mouth of Bill Williams Fork, but 
his journey was no more fruitful than those of his predecessors 
in the last two centuries. It seems extraordinary in these days 
that men could traverse a country, even so infrequently, dur¬ 
ing two whole centuries and yet know almost nothing about it. 
Two years after Sedelmair touched the Colorado, Fernando 
Consag, looking for mission sites, came up the gulf to its 
mouth, and when he had sailed away there was another long 
interval before the river was again visited by Europeans. This 
time it was over a quarter of a century, but the activity then 
begun was far greater than ever before, and the two padres 
who now became the foremost characters in the drama that so 
slowly moved upon the mighty and diversified stage of the 
South-west, were quite the equals in tireless energy of the 
Jesuit Kino. These two padres were Garces and Escalante, 
more closely associated with the history of the Basin of the 
Colorado than any one who had gone before. Francisco 
Garces, as well as Escalante, was of the Franciscan order, and 
