Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
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rrhrou^ the GRAND CANYON I from WYOMING to MEXICO '^ ;? iF 'F Si^S55Sras«<5**; SWOT i. *Tr»"> .- > •i^ 11 ' i 1 i 1 Class Book Gopyiiglit}^". COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO Copyright by Kolb Bros THE GRAND CANYON AT THE MOUTH OF HA VA SU CREEK Through the Grand Canyon from IVyoming to Mexico ETL. Kolb With a Foreword by Owen Wister With 48 Plates from Photographs by the Author and his brother New York The Macmillan Company igi4 All rights reserved r-'7ss Copyright, 1914, By the macmillan company. Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1914. ^1^ Tfortaooli lltesa J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. OCT 22 1914 ©C!.A387138 H)eMcation TO THE MANY FRIENDS WHO " PULLED " FOR US, IF NOT WITH US DURING THE ONE HUNDRED ONE DAYS OF OUR RIVER TRIP THIS VOLUME IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED \C| FOREWORD It is a twofold courage of which the author of this book is the serene possessor — shared equally by his daring brother ; and one side of this bravery is made plain throughout the following pages. Every youth who has in him a spark of adventure will kindle with desire to battle his way also from Green River to the foot of Bright Angel Trail ; while every man whose bones have been stiffened and his breath made short by the years, will remember wistfully such wild tastes of risk and conquest that he, too, rejoiced in when he was young. Whether it deal with the climbing of dangerous peaks, or the descent (as here) of some fourteen hundred miles of water both mysterious and ferocious, the well-told tale of a perilous journey, planned with head and carried through with daunt- less persistence, always holds the attention of its readers and gives them many a thrill. This tale is very well told. Though it is the third of its kind, it differs from its predecessors more than enough to hold its own : no previous explorers have attempted to take moving pictures of the Colorado River with themselves weltering in its foam. More than this : while the human race lasts it will be true, that any man who is lucky enough to fix upon a hard goal and win it, and can in direct and simple words tell us how he won it, will write a good book. viii FOREWORD Perhaps this planet does somewhere else contain a thing like the Colorado River — but that is no matter ; we at any rate in our continent possess one of nature's very vastest works. After The River and its tributaries have done with all sight of the upper world, have left behind the bordering plains and streamed through the various gashes which their floods have sliced in the mountains that once stopped their way, then the culminating wonder begins. The River has been flowing through the loneliest part which remains to us of that large space once denominated "The Great American Desert" by the vague maps in our old geographies. It has passed through regions of emptiness still as wild as they were before Columbus came; where not only no man lives now nor any mark is found of those forgotten men of the cliff's, but the very surface of the earth itself looks monstrous and extinct. Upon one such region in particular the author of these pages dwells, when he climbs up out of the gulf in whose bottom he has left his boat by the River, to look out upon a world of round gray humps and hollows which seem as if it were made of the backs of huge elephants. Through such a country as this, scarcely belonging to our era any more than the mammoth or the pterodactyl, scarcely belonging to time at all, does the Colorado approach and enter its culminating marvel. Then, for 283 miles it inhabits a nether world of its own. The few that have ventured through these places and lived are a handful to those who went in and were never seen again. The white bones of some have been found on the FOREWORD ix shores; but most were drowned; and in this water no bodies ever rise, because the thick sand that its torrent churns along clogs and sinks them. This place exerts a magnetic spell. The sky is there above it, but not of it. Its being is apart; its chmate ; its light ; its own. The beams of the sun come into it like vis- itors. Its own winds blow through it, not those of outside, where we live. The River streams down its mysterious reaches, hurrying ceaselessly ; sometimes a smooth sliding lap, sometimes a falling, broken wilderness of billows and whirlpools. Above stand its walls, rising through space upon space of silence. They glow, they gloom, they shine. Bend after bend they reveal themselves, endlessly new in endlessly changing veils of colour. A swimming and jewelled blue pre- dominates, as of sapphires being melted and spun into skeins of shifting cobweb. Bend after bend this trance of beauty and awe goes on, terrible as the Day of Judgment, sublime as the Psalms of David. Five thousand feet below the opens and barrens of Arizona, this canyon seems like an avenue con- ducting to the secret of the universe and the presence of the gods. Is much wonder to be felt that its beckoning enchantment should have drawn two young men to dwell beside it for many years ; to give themselves wholly to it; to descend and ascend among its buttressed pinnacles ; to discover caves and water- falls hidden in its labyrinths ; to climb, to creep, to hang in mid-air, in order to learn more and more of it, and at last X FOREWORD to gratify wholly their passion in the great adventure of this journey through it from end to end? No siren song could have lured travellers more than the siren silence of the Grand Canyon : but these young men did not leave their bones to whiten upon its shores. The courage that brought them out whole is plain throughout this narrative, in spite of its mod- esty ; but they have had to exert and maintain an equal cour- age against another danger. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway is the most majestic system between Chicago and the Pacific. Years in advance of its imitators, it established along its course hotels and restaurants where both architecture and cooking made part of an immense plan that was something not far from genius. The very names of these hotels, chosen from the annals of the Spanish explorers, stamp them with distinction. Outside and in, they conform alike to climate and tradition. They are like shells in the desert, echoing the tale of Coro- nado, the legend of the Indian. No corporation equals the Santa Fe in its civilized regard for beauty. To any traveller asking what way to go to California for scenery, comfort, pleasure, and good food, I should answer, by this way. But is the Santa Fe wise in its persecution of the brothers Kolb ? Of course it has made the Grand Canyon accessible to thousands where only scores could go before. And for the money and the enterprise spent upon this, nobody but a political mad-dog would deny the railroad's right to a generous return. But why try to swallow the whole canyon ? Why, FOREWORD xi because the brothers Kolb are independent, crush their little studio, stifle their little trade, push these genuine artists and lovers of nature away from the Canyon that nobody has photo- graphed or can photograph so well ? This isn't to regard Beauty. You're hurting your own cause. The attempt, so far, has failed to extinguish these indepen- dent brothers. But is such an attempt wise ? Isn't it a good specimen of that high-handed disregard of everybody but yourself, which has bred (and partly justified) the popular rage that now undiscriminatingly threatens honest and dis- honest dollars alike, so that the whole nation is at the mercy of laws passed by the overdone emotions and the underdone intelligence of the present hour ? OWEN WISTER. PREFACE This is a simple narrative of our recent photographic trip down the Green and Colorado rivers in rowboats — our ob- servations and impressions. It is not intended to replace in any way the books published by others covering a similar journey. Major J. W. Powell's report of the original explo- ration, for instance, is a classic, literary and geological ; and searchers after excellence may well be recommended to his admirable work. Neither is this chronicle intended as a handbook of the territory traversed — such as Mr. F. S. Dellenbaugh's two^-*--^ volumes: "The Romance of the Grand Canyon," and "A Canyon Voyage." We could hardly hope to add anything of value to his wealth of detail. In fact, much of the data given here — such as distances, elevations, and records of other expeditions — is borrowed from the latter volume. And I take this opportunity of expressing our appreciation to Mr. Dellenbaugh for his most excellent and entertaining books. We are indebted to Mr. Julius F. Stone, of Columbus, ^^TT*"^ Ohio, for much valuable information and assistance. Mr. Stone organized a party and made the complete trip down the Green and Colorado rivers in the fall and winter of 1909, xiv PREFACE arriving at Needles, California, on November 27, 1909.