84 
NARRATIVE AND ITINERARY—MPTO-LY-AS CANON. 
As we were about to start, a horse, becoming entangled in the cords of the office tent, threw 
jt down and broke the barometer. I sent the rest of the party forward, and Mr. Anderson and 
Dr. Sterling remained with me to repair it. As this detained us about two hours, we were 
compelled to travel rapidly to overtake the train, already considerably in advance. Our course 
lay through a thick pine and fir forest. The land gradually descended for about ten miles, 
when we reached a fine open prairie, half a mile wide, lying at the foot of the black conical 
butte, which Lieut. Williamson had selected as a connecting point for our surveys. A little 
stream, called by the Indians Que-y-ee, trickled through the prairie, and then disappeared in a 
small meadow to the eastward. Fine bunch grass was very abundant in this vicinity, and it 
would have been an excellent camping place. After passing down the stream about a mile we 
left it, and, again entering the thick forest, followed for about nine miles the western base of a 
ridge east of the black butte. It conducted us to the dry bed of a stream. We afterwards found 
a little water, about two hundred yards below the place where the trail left this bed. About 
three miles from this point we suddenly found ourselves upon the edge of a ravine, then dry, 
but doubtless, in the rainy season, the bed of a mountain torrent. The banks were about 300 
feet high and very steep. It was about two miles wide, and in places thickly timbered. We 
crossed it, and climbing up the other side soon beheld a prospect whose wild beauty I have 
seldom seen equalled. The sun was just setting behind the snowy peaks on our left; before us 
lay an immense canon, the sides of which were rough with basalt, and heavily timbered with 
pine and fir. In the dim twilight, which had already settled in its bottom, we could occa¬ 
sionally see, between the trees, the waters of a large river, called by the Indians Mpto-ly-as. 
But we had no time to admire the scenery, for the train was still an unknown distance in 
advance. We hurried our mules as fast as possible down the rocky side of the canon, which, 
by actual measurement, was subsequently found to be 1,200 feet deep. It soon became dark, 
and we were beginning to anticipate the pleasures of spending the night without food or 
blankets, when a sudden bend in the trail revealed the cheerful light of the camp fires 
shining before us on the river bank. 
September 7.—We were encamped in a narrow part of the canon, and as its steep sides were 
crowned by vertical walls of columnar basalt, it would have been impossible for a pack mule to 
get out of it, in most places. There was but little grass near camp. As a plain although 
very bad Indian trail led out of the canon on the south side, we followed it for about three miles, 
hoping that it might lead to a better ford ; but finding that it turned to the south, we returned 
to our camp ; crossed the river, which is a rushing torrent that swept away and nearly drowned 
one of the mules ; and then followed down the canon, trying to find a place where we could 
ascend its northern side. This river canon is very remarkable. Its sides vary from 800 to 
2,000 feet in height. The river has cut down its bed to this immense depth through successive 
strata of basalt, with occasionally a deposit of infusorial marl and volcanic tula, which has 
sometimes hardened into a kind of conglomerate sandstone, ten or twenty feet in thickness, and 
of a white, gray, or reddish color. Often, as the banks have gradually receded, a slender 
column of this deposit, capped by a huge piece of basalt protecting it from the weather, has been 
left projecting high above the mass of detritus around it, its sides washed smooth and often 
worn into fanciful forms by the rains of ages. It required but little imagination to see, in these 
light colored figures, giants and monsters guarding the dark, frowning sides of the canon. The 
entire absence of all signs of life, the dull sound of the river rushing over its rocky bed, and 
the dark green of the stunted cedars and pines, clinging to the precipices which confined it, 
