The Romance of the Colorado River | Page 8

Ashley in Green River Valley, 1824--Pattie along the Grand Canyon, 1826--Lieutenant Hardy, R.N., in a Schooner on the Lower Colorado, l826--Jedediah Smith, Salt Lake to San Gabriel, 1826--Pattie on the Lower Colorado in Canoes, 1827-28
CHAPTER VI.
Fremont, the Pathfinder--Ownership of the Colorado--The Road of the Gold Seekers--First United States Military Post, 1849--Steam Navigation--Captain Johnson Goes to the Head of Black Canyon
CHAPTER VII.
Lieutenant Ives Explores to Fortification Rock--By Trail to Diamond Creek, Havasupai Canyon, and the Moki Towns--Macomb Fails in an Attempt to Reach the Mouth of Grand River--James White's Masterful Fabrication
CHAPTER VIII.
The One-armed Knight--A Bold Attack on the Canyons--Powell and His Men--The Wonderful Voyage--Mighty Walls and Roaring Rapids--Capsizes and Catastrophes
CHAPTER IX.
A Canyon of Cataracts--The Imperial Chasm--Short Rations--A Split in the Party--Separation--Fate of the Howlands and Dunn--The Monster Vanquished
CHAPTER X.
Powell's Second Attack on the Colorado--Green River City--Red Canyon and a Capsize--The Grave of Hook--The Gate of Lodore--Cliff of the Harp--Triplet Falls and Hell's Half-Mile--A Rest in Echo Park
CHAPTER XI.
An Island Park and a Split Mountain--The White River Runaways--Powell Goes to Salt Lake--Failure to Get Rations to the Dirty Devil--On the Rocks in Desolation--Natural Windows--An Ancient House--On the Back of the Dragon at Last--Cataracts and Cataracts in the Wonderful Cataract Canyon--A Lost Pack-Train--Naming the Echo Peaks
CHAPTER XII.
Into the Jaws of the Dragon--A Useless Experiment--Wheeler Reaches Diamond Creek Going Up-stream--The Hurricane Ledge--Something about Names--A Trip from Kanab through Unknown Country to the Mouth of the Dirty Devil
CHAPTER XIII.
A Canyon through Marble-Multitudinous Rapids--Running the Sockdologer--A Difficult Portage, Rising Water, and a Trap--The Dean Upside Down--A Close Shave--Whirlpools and Fountains--The Kanab Canyon and the End of the Voyage
CHAPTER XIV.
A Railway Proposed through the Canyons--The Brown Party, 1889, Undertakes the Survey--Frail Boats and Disasters--The Dragon Claims Three--Collapse of the Expedition--Stanton Tries the Feat Again, 1889-90--A Fall and a Broken Leg--Success of Stanton--The Dragon Still Untrammelled
Epilogue
Appendix
{photo p. xvii} The Steamer "Undine." Wrecked while trying to ascend a rapid on Grand River above Moab. Photograph by R. G. Leonard. His experience on this river ran through a period of some 20 years from about 1892. He died in the autumn of 1913. Every year he built one or more boats trying to improve on each. The Stone model (see cut, page 129) was the final outcome. The usual high-water mark at Bright Angel Trail is 45 feet higher than the usual low-water mark. Stanton measured the greatest declivity in Cataract Canyon and found it to be 55 feet in two miles. The total fall in Cataract Canyon he made 355 feet. With a fall per mile of 27 1/2 feet. Cataract holds the record for declivity, though this is only for two miles, while in the Granite Falls section of the Grand Canyon there is a fall of 21 feet per mile for ten miles.

THE ROMANCE OF THE COLORADO RIVER
CHAPTER I.
The Secret of the Gulf--Ulloa, 1539, One of the Captains of Cortes, Almost Solves it, but Turns Back without Discovering--Alarcon, 1540, Conquers.
In every country the great, rivers have presented attractive pathways for interior exploration--gateways for settlement. Eventually they have grown to be highroads where the rich cargoes of development, profiting by favouring tides, floated to the outer world. Man, during all his wanderings in the struggle for subsistence, has universally found them his friends and allies. They have yielded to him as a conquering stranger; they have at last become for him foster-parents. Their verdant banks have sheltered and protected him; their skies have smiled upon his crops. With grateful memories, therefore, is clothed for us the sound of such river names as Thames, Danube, Hudson, Mississippi. Through the centuries their kindly waters have borne down ancestral argosies of profit without number, establishing thus the wealth and happiness of the people. Well have rivers been termed the "Arteries of Commerce"; well, also, may they be considered the binding links of civilisation.
Then, by contrast, it is all the more remarkable to meet with one great river which is none of these helpful things, but which, on the contrary, is a veritable dragon, loud in its dangerous lair, defiant, fierce, opposing utility everywhere, refusing absolutely to be bridled by Commerce, perpetuating a wilderness, prohibiting mankind's encroachments, and in its immediate tide presenting a formidable host of snarling waters whose angry roar, reverberating wildly league after league between giant rock-walls carved through the bowels of the earth, heralds the impossibility of human conquest and smothers hope. From the tiny rivulets of its snowy birth to the ferocious tidal bore where it dies in the sea, it wages a ceaseless battle as sublime as it is terrible and unique. Such is the great Colorado River of the West, rising amidst the fountains of the beautiful Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, where also are brought forth the gentler Columbia and the mighty, far-reaching Missouri. Whirling down ten thousand feet in some two thousand miles,