Canyons of the Colorado | Page 5

and the bast of the
juniper. In such shelters, they lived in winter, but in summer they
erected extensive booths of poles and willows, sometimes large enough
for the accommodation of a tribe of 100 or 200 persons. A wide gap in
culture separates the Pimas, Maricopas, and Papagos from the
Chemehuevas. The first were among the most advanced tribes found in
the United States; the last were among the very lowest; they are the
original "Digger" Indians, called so by all the other tribes, but the name
has gradually spread beyond its original denotation to many tribes of
Utah, Nevada, and California.
The low desert, with its desolate mountains, which has thus been
described is plainly separated from the upper region of plateau by the
Mogollon Escarpment, which, beginning in the Sierra Madre of New
Mexico, extends northwestward across the Colorado far into Utah,
where it ends on the margin of the Great Basin. The rise by this
escarpment varies from 3,000 to more than 4,000 feet. The step from
the lowlands to the highlands which is here called the Mogollon
Escarpment is not a simple line of cliffs, but is a complicated and
irregular facade presented to the southwest. Its different portions have
been named by the people living below as distinct mountains, as
Shiwits Mountains, Mogollon Mountains, Pinal Mountains, Sierra
Calitro, etc., but they all rise to the summit of the same great plateau
region.
The upper region, extending to the headwaters of the Grand and Green
Rivers, constitutes the great Plateau Province. These plateaus are
drained by the Colorado River and its tributaries; the eastern and
southern margin by the Rio Grande and its tributaries, and the western
by streams that flow into the Great Basin and are lost in the Great Salt
Lake and other bodies of water that have no drainage to the sea. The
general surface of this upper region is from 5,000 to 8,000 feet above
sea level, though the channels of the streams are cut much lower.
This high region, on the east, north, and west, is set with ranges of
snow-clad mountains attaining an altitude above the sea varying from
8,000 to 14,000 feet. All winter long snow falls on its mountain-crested

rim, filling the gorges, half burying the forests, and covering the crags
and peaks with a mantle woven by the winds from the waves of the sea.
When the summer sun comes this snow melts and tumbles down the
mountain sides in millions of cascades. A million cascade brooks unite
to form a thousand torrent creeks; a thousand torrent creeks unite to
form half a hundred rivers beset with cataracts; half a hundred roaring
rivers unite to form the Colorado, which rolls, a mad, turbid stream,
into the Gulf of California.
Consider the action of one of these streams. Its source is in the
mountains, where the snows fall; its course, through the arid plains.
Now, if at the river's flood storms were falling on the plains, its channel
would be cut but little faster than the adjacent country would be washed,
and the general level would thus be preserved; but under the conditions
here mentioned, the river continually deepens its beds; so all the
streams cut deeper and still deeper, until their banks are towering cliffs
of solid rock. These deep, narrow gorges are called canyons.
For more than a thousand miles along its course the Colorado has cut
for itself such a canyon; but at some few points where lateral streams
join it the canyon is broken, and these narrow, transverse valleys divide
it into a series of canyons.
The Virgen, Kanab, Paria, Escalante, Fremont, San Rafael, Price, and
Uinta on the west, the Grand, White, Yampa, San Juan, and Colorado
Chiquito on the east, have also cut for themselves such narrow winding
gorges, or deep canyons. Every river entering these has cut another
canyon; every lateral creek has cut a canyon; every brook runs in a
canyon; every rill born of a shower and born again of a shower and
living only during these showers has cut for itself a canyon; so that the
whole upper portion of the basin of the Colorado is traversed by a
labyrinth of these deep gorges.
Owing to a great variety of geological conditions, these canyons differ
much in general aspect. The Rio Virgen, between Long Valley and the
Mormon town of Rockville, runs through Parunuweap Canyon, which
is often not more than 20 or 30 feet in width and is from 600 to 1,500
feet deep. Away to the north the Yampa empties into the Green by a
canyon that I essayed to cross in the fall of 1868, but was baffled from
day to day, and the fourth day had nearly passed before I could find my
way