Part 21 of the Book of the National Parks. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling Yard. Rock Records of a Vanished Race. Mesa Verde National Park, southwestern Colorado, area 77 square miles. 1. Many years, possibly centuries, before Columbus discovered America, a community of cliff-dwellers inhabiting a group of canyons in what is now southwestern Colorado entirely disappeared. Many generations before that, again possibly centuries, the founders of this community, abandoning the primitive pueblos of their people elsewhere, had sought new homes in the valley's tributary to the Mancos River. Perhaps they were enterprising young men and women dissatisfied with the poor and unprogressive life at home. Perhaps they were dissenters from ancient religious forms, outcasts and pilgrims, for there is abundant evidence that the prehistoric sun worshippers of our southwest were deeply religious, and human nature is the same under skins of all colors in every land and age. More likely they were merely thrifty pioneers, attracted to the green cedar-grown maces by the hope of better conditions. Whatever the reason for their pilgrimage, it is a fair inference that, like our own pilgrim fathers, they were sturdy of body and progressive of spirit, for they had a culture which their descendants carried beyond that of other tribes and communities of prehistoric people in America, north of the land of the Aztecs. Beginning with modest stone structures of the usual cliff-dweller's type built in deep cliffs in the maces' perpendicular cliff, safe from enemies above and below, these enterprising people developed in time a complicated architecture of a high order. They advanced the arts beyond the practice of their forefathers and their neighbors. They herded cattle upon the maces. They raised corn and melons in clearings in the forests, and watered their crops in the dry seasons by means of simple irrigation systems as soundly scientific so far as they went, as those of today. Outgrowing their cliff-homes, they invaded the neighboring maces, where they built pueblos and more ambitious structures. Then apparently suddenly, for they left behind them many of their household goods, and left unfinished an elaborate temple to their god, the sun, they vanished. There is no clue to the reason or the manner of their going. Meantime European civilization was pushing in all directions. Columbus discovered America, De Soto explored the southeast and ascended the Mississippi. Cortez pushed into Mexico and conquered the Aztecs. Spanish priests carried the gospel north and west from the Antilles to the continent. Raleigh sent explorers to Virginia. The Pilgrim Fathers landed in Massachusetts. The white man pushed the Indian aside, and at last the European pioneer sought a precarious living on the sands of the southwest. One December day in 1888, Richard and Alfred's Weather Hill hunted lost cattle on the top of one of the green maces north and west of the Mancos River. They knew this mace so well. Many a time before had they rounded up their herds and stalked the deer among the thin cedar and pinion forest. Often doubtless, in their explorations of the broad Mancos Valley below, they had happened upon ruins of primitive, isolated or group stone buildings, hidden by sagebrush, half buried in rock and sand. No doubt, around their ranch fire, they had often speculated concerning the manner of men that had inhabited these lowly structures so many years before that sometimes aged cedars grew upon the broken walls. But this December day brought to Weather Hill's the surprise of their uneventful lives. Some of the cattle had wandered far, and the search led to the very brink of a deep and narrow canyon across which, in a long deep cleft along the overhang of the opposite cliff, they saw what appeared to be a city. Those who have looked upon the stirring spectacle of Cliff Palace from this point can imagine the astonishment of these ranchmen. Whether or not the lost cattle were ever found is not recorded, but we may assume that living on the mesa was not plentiful enough to make the Weather Hill's forget them in the pleasure of discovering a ruin. But they lost no time in investigating their find, and soon after crossed the canyon and climbed into this prehistoric city. They named it Cliff Palace, most inappropriately, by the way, for it was in fact that most democratic of structures a community dwelling. Pushing their explorations farther, presently they had discovered also a smaller ruin, which they named Spruce Tree House, because a prominent spruce grew in front of it. These are the largest two cliff dwellings in the Mesa Verde National Park, and until Dr. J. Walter Fuchs on Earth's Sun Temple in 1915, among the most extraordinary prehistoric buildings north of Mexico. There are thousands of prehistoric ruins in our southwest, and many besides those of the Mesa Verde are examples of an aboriginal civilization. Hundreds of canyons tell the story of the ancient cliff dwellers, and still more numerous are the remains of communal houses built of stone or sun-dried brick under the open sky. These playblows in the open are either isolated structures like the lesser cliff dwellings, or are crowded together till they touch walls as in our modern cities. Often they were several stories high, the floors connected by ladders. Sometimes, for protection against the elements, whole villages were built in caves. Pueblos occasionally may be seen from the car window in New Mexico. The least modified of the prehistoric type, which are occupied today, are the eight villages of the Hopi near the Grand Canyon in Arizona. A suggestive reproduction of a modern Pueblo, familiar to many thousands who have visited the canyon, stands near the El Tavaar Hotel. It was not therefore because of the rarity of prehistoric dwellings of either type that the cliff villages of the Mesa Verde were conserved as a national park, nor only because they are the best preserved of all North American ruins, but because they disclose a type of this culture in advance of all others. The builders and inhabitants of these dwellings were Indians having physical features common to all American tribes, that their accomplishment differed in degree from that of the shiftless, war-making tribes north and east of them, and from that of the cultured and artistic mayas of Central America, was doubtless due to differences in conditions of living. The struggle for bare existence in the southwest, like that of the habitats of other North American Indians, was intense, but these were agriculturalist and protected by environment. The desert was a handicap, of course, but it offered opportunity in many places for dry farming. The Indian raised his corn. The winters, too, were short. It is only in the southwest that Enterprise developed the architecture of stone houses, which distinguished Pueblo Indians from others in North America. The dwellers in the Mesa Verde were more fortunate even than their fellow Pueblo dwellers. The forested maces, so different from the arid cliffs farther south and west, possessed constant moisture and fertile soil. The grasses lured the deer within capture. The Mancos River provided fish. Above all, the remoteness of these fastness canyons from the trails of raiders and traitors and their ease of defense made for long generations of peace. The Enterprise innate in the spirit of man did the rest. 2. The history of the Mesa Verde National Park began with the making of America. All who have traveled in the southwest have seen maces from the car window. New Mexico, Arizona and parts of Colorado and Utah, the region of the Pueblos, constitute an elevated plateau, largely arid. Many millions of years ago all was submerged in the intercontinental sea. In fact, the region was sea many times, for it rose and fell alternately, accumulating thousands of feet of sands and gravels, much of which hardened into stone, after the slow great uplifting which made it the lofty plateau of today. Erosion did its work. For a million years or more, the floods of spring have washed down the sands and gravels, and the rivers have carried them into the sea. Thousands of vertical feet have disappeared in this way from the potential altitude of the region. The spring floods are still washing down the sands and gravels, and the canyons, cliffs and mesas of the desert are disclosed today as stages in the eternal leveling. Thus were created the canyons and mesas of the Mesa Verde. Mesa, by the way, is Spanish for table, and Verde for green. These then are the green tablelands, forest covered and during the summer grown scantily with grass and richly with flowers. The Mesa Verde National Park was created by active Congress in June 1906, and enlarged seven years later. The Mancos River on its way to the San Juan and then to the Colorado, and the passage of the Grand Canyon, forms its southern boundary. Scores of canyons large and small, nearly all dry except at the spring floods, are tributary. All of these trend south. In a general way they are parallel. Each of the greater stems has its lesser tributaries, and each of these its lesser forks. Between the canyons lie the mesas. Their tops, if continued without break, would form a more or less level surface, that is, all had been a plain, before floods cut the separating canyons. The region has a wonderful scenic charm. It is markedly different in quality from other national parks, but in its own way is quite as startling and beautiful. Comparison is impossible because of the lack of elements in common. But it may be said that the Mesa Verde represents our great south west in one of its most fascinating phases, combining the fundamentals of the desert with the flavor of the nearby mountains. The canyons, which are seven or eight hundred feet deep, and two or three times as wide where the cliff dwellings gather, are prevailingly tawny yellow. Masses of sloping talus reach more than half way up. Above them the cliffs are perpendicular. It is in cavities in these perpendiculars that the cliff dwellings hide. Above the cliffs are low growths of yellowish-green cedar with pinions and other conifers of darker foliage. Beneath the trees and covering the many opens grows the familiar sage of the desert, a gray which hints at green and yellow both, but realizes neither. But the sagebrush shelters desert grasses, and around the occasional springs and their slender outlets, grass grows rank and plenteous. A little water counts for a great deal in the desert. Summer then is delightful on the Mesa Verde. The plateau is high and the air invigorating. Summer by day in mid-summer, always cool at night. The atmosphere is marvelously clear and the sunsets are famous. The winter snows, which reach three or four feet in depth, disappear in April. From May to Thanksgiving the region is in its prime. It is important to realize that this land has much for the visitor, besides its ruins. It has vigor, distinction, personality, and remarkable charm. It is the highest example of one of America's most distinctive and important scenic phases, and this without reference to its prehistoric dwellings. No American traveler knows his America, even the Great Southwest, who does not know the borderland where desert and forest mingle. The southern Indian Reservation bites a large rectangle from the southeast corner of the park, but its inhabitants are very different in quality of mind and spirit from the ancient and reverent builders of Sun Temple. Reservation Indians frequently enter the park, but they cannot be persuaded to approach the cliff dwellings, though little people, they tell you, live there, and neither teaching nor example will convince them that these invisible inhabitants will not injure intruders. Some of these Indians allege that it was their own ancestors who built the cliff dwellings, but there is neither record nor tradition to support such a claim. The fact appears to be that the youths were the ancient enemies of this people. There is a youth tradition of a victory over the ancient Pueblo dwellers at Battle Rock in McElmel Canyon. There are, on the other hand, many reasons for the opinion that the Hopi Indians of the present day, so far at least as culture goes, are descendants of this remarkable prehistoric people. Besides the many similarities between the architectural types of the Mesa Verde and the Pueblos of the modern Hopi, careful investigators have found suggestive points of similarity in their utensils, their art forms, and their customs. Dr. Fuchs cites a Hopi tradition to that effect by mentioning the visit of a Hopi courier a few years ago to prehistoric ruins in the Navajo National Monument to obtain water from an ancestral spring for use in a Hopi religious ceremonial. If these traditions are founded in fact, the promising civilization of the Mesa Verde has sadly retrograded in its transplanting. Hopi architecture and masonry shows marked retrogression from the splendid types of the Mesa Verde. When the telephone line was under construction to connect the park with the outside world, the Indians from the adjoining ute reservation became suspicious and restless. Upon hearing its purpose, they begged the superintendent not to go on with the work, which was certain to bring evil to the neighborhood. The little people, they solemnly declared, will not like it. They assured the superintendent that the wires would not talk. The little people will not let them talk, they told him. But the line was completed and the wires talked. The park is reached by motor and rail. From Denver, Salt Lake City, and Santa Fe, railroad lines offer choice of some of the biggest country of the Rockies. From either direction a night is spent en route in a mountain mining town, an experience which has its usefulness in preparation for the contrasted and unusual experience to come. Entrance is through mancos from which motor stages thread the maze of canyons and maces from the highlands of the northern border to the deep canyons of the south where cluster the ruins of distinction. This entry is delightful. The road crosses the northern boundary at the base of a loft debut known as Point Lookout, the park's highest elevation. Encircling its eastern side and crossing the Moorfield Canyon, the road perches for several miles upon the sinuous crest of a ridge, more than 8,000 feet in altitude, whose north side plunges 1,800 feet into the broad Montezuma Valley, and whose gentle southern slope holds the small beginnings of the great canyons of the cliff-dwellers. Both north and south the panorama unfolds an impressive grandeur, eloquent of the beautiful scanty land and of the difficult conditions of living, which confronted the sturdy builders whose ancient masterpieces we are on our way to see. At the northern end of Chapin Mesa we swing sharply south and follow its slope, presently entering the warm glowing scented forests through which we speed to the hotel camp perched upon a bluff overlooking the depths of Spruce Canyon. Upon the top and under the ease of this Mesa are found very fine types of prehistoric civilization. At Mummy Lake, halfway down the Mesa, we passed on the way a good example of Pueblo architecture, and within an easy walk of our terminal camp we find some of the noblest examples of cliff dwellings in existence. Here it was, near the head of this remote, nearly inaccessible canyon guarded by nature's ramparts that Aboriginal American genius, before the coming of the Anglo-Saxon, found its culminating expression. In this spirit the thoughtful American of today enters the Mesa Verde National Park and examines its precious memorials. 3. Although the accident of the road brings the traveler first to the Mesa top Pueblos of the Mummy Lake district, historical sequence suggests that examination begin with the cliff dwellings. Of the many examples of these remains in the park, Cliff Palace, Spruce Tree House, and Balcony House are the most important, because they concisely and completely cover the range of life and the fullness of development. This is not the place for detailed descriptions of these ruins, the special publications of the National Park Service, and particularly the writings of Dr. J. Walter Fuchs of the Smithsonian Institution, who has devoted many years of brilliant investigation to American prehistoric remains, are obtainable from government sources. Here we shall briefly consider several types. It is impossible, without reference to photographs, to convey a concise adequate idea of Cliff Palace. Seen from across its canyon, the splendid crescent-shaped ruin offers to the unaccustomed eye little that is common to modern architecture. Prominently in the foreground, large circular wells at once challenge interest. These were the kivas, or ceremonial rooms of the community, centers of the religious activities which counted so importantly in Pueblo life. Here it was that men gathered monthly to worship their gods. In the floors of some kivas are small holes representing symbolically the entrance to the underworld, and around these from time to time, priests doubtless performed archaic ceremonies and communicated with the dead. Each family or clan in the community is supposed to have had its own kiva. The kiva walls of Cliff Palace show some of the finest prehistoric masonry in America. All are subterranean, which in a few instances, necessitated excavation in floors of solid rock. The roofs are supported by pedestals rising from mural banquets, usually six pedestals to a kiva. The kiva supposed to have belonged to the chief's clan had eight pedestals, and one, perhaps belonging to a clan of lesser prominence, had only two. Several kivas which lack roof supports may have been of different type, or used for lesser ceremonials. All except these have fireplaces and ventilators. Entrance was by ladder from the roof. Other rooms identified are living rooms, storage rooms, milling rooms, and round and square towers, besides which there are dark rooms of unknown use, and several round rooms which are neither kivas nor towers. Several of the living rooms have raised benches evidently used for beds, and in one of them pegs for holding clothing still remain in the walls. These rooms are smoothly plastered or painted. Mills for grinding corn were found in one room in rows, and others singly. The work was done by women, who rubbed the upper stone against the lower by hand. The rest for their feet while at work still remain in place. Also the brushes were sweeping up the meal. The small storage rooms had stone doors carefully sealed with clay to keep out mice and prevent moisture from spoiling the corn and meal. One of the most striking buildings in Cliff Palace is the round tower, two stories high, which not only was an observatory, as is indicated by its peep holes, but also served purposes in religious festivals. Its masonry belongs to the finest north of Mexico. The stones are beautifully fitted and dressed. The square tower, which stands at the southern end of the village, is four stories high, reaching the roof of the cave. The inner walls of its third story are elaborately painted with red and white symbols, triangles, zigzags, and parallels, the significance of which is not known. The ledge under which Cliff Palace is built forms a roof that overhangs the structure. An entrance, probably the principal one, came from below to a court at a lower level than the floor, from which access was by ladder. Spruce Tree House, which may have been built after Cliff Palace, has a circular room with windows, which were originally supposed to have been portholes for defense. Dr. Fuchs, however, suggests a more probable purpose, as the position of the room does not specifically suggest a fortress. Through the openings in this room, the Sun Priest may have watched the setting sun to determine the time for ceremonies. The room was entered from above like a kiva. Another room differing from any in other cliff dwellings has been named the Warrior's Room, because, unlike sleeping rooms, its bench surrounds three sides, and because, unlike any other room, it is built above a kiva. Only the exigencies of defense, it is supposed, would warrant so marked a departure from the prescribed religious form of the room. Balcony House has special interest apart from its commanding location, perfection of workmanship and unusual beauty, and because of the ingenuity of the defenses of its only possible entrance. At the top of a steep trail, a cave-like passage between rocks is walled so as to leave a door capable of admitting only one at a time, behind which two or three men could strike down, one by one, an attacking army. Out of these simple architectural elements, together with the utensils and weapons found in the ruins, the imagination readily constructs a picture of the austere, laborious, highly religious, and doubtless happy lives led by the earnest people who built these ancient dwellings in the caves. When all the neighborhood caves were filled to overflowing with increasing population and generations of peace had wrought a confidence which had not existed when the pioneers had sought safety in caves, these people ventured to move out of cliffs and to build upon the tops of the mesa. Whether all the cave dwellers were descended from the original pilgrims or whether others had joined them afterwards is not known, but it seems evident that the separate communities had found some common bond, probably tribal, and perhaps evolved some common government. No doubt they intermarried, no doubt the blood of many cliff-dwelling communities mingled in the new communities which built pueblos upon the mesa. In time there were many of these pueblos, and they were widely scattered. There are mounds at intervals all over the mesa Verde. The largest group of pueblos, one in first from the numbers of visible mounds, was built upon the chapeen mesa several miles north of the above-mentioned cliff-dwelling near a reservoir known today as Mummy Lake. It is there, then, that we shall now go in continuation of our story. Mummy Lake is not a lake and no mummies were ever found there. This old-time designation applies to an artificial depression surrounded by a low, rude stone wall, much crumbled, which was evidently a storage reservoir for an irrigation system of some size. A number of conspicuous mounds in the neighborhood suggest the former existence of a village of pueblos dependent upon the farms for which the irrigation system had been built. One of these, from which a few stones protruded, was excavated in 1916 by Dr. Fuchs and has added a new and important chapter to the history of this people. This pueblos has been named Farview House. Its extensive vista includes four other groups of similar mounds. Each cluster occurs in the fertile sagebrush clearings, which bloom in summer with asters and Indian paintbrush. There is no doubt that good crops of Indian corn could still be raised from these sands today by dry farming methods. Farview House is a pueblo, a hundred and thirteen feet long by more than fifty feet wide, not including a full-length plaza, about thirty-five feet wide in which religious dances are supposed to have taken place. The differences between this fine structure and the cliff cities are considerable. The most significant evidence of progress, perhaps, is the modern regularity of the ground plan. The partitions separating the secular rooms are continuous through the building, and the angles are generally accurately right angles. The pueblos had three stories. It is oriented approximately to the cardinal points, and was terraced southward to secure a sunny exposure. The study of the solar movements became an advanced science with these people in the latter stages of their development. It must be remembered that they had no compasses, knowing nothing of the north or any other fixed point. Nevertheless, there is evidence that they successfully worked out the solstices and planned their later buildings accurately according to the cardinal points of their own calculation. Another difference indicating development is the decrease in the number of kivas and the construction of a single very large kiva in the middle of the building. Its size suggests at once that the individual clan organization of cliff dwelling days had here given place to a single priestly fraternity, sociologically a marked advance. Drawing parallels with the better-known customs of other primitive people we are at liberty, if we please, to infer similar progress in other directions. The original primitive Communism was developing naturally, though doubtless very slowly, into something akin to organized society, probably involving more complicated economic relationships in all departments of living. While their masonry did not apparently improve in proportion, Farview House shows increase in the number and variety of the decorative figures incised on Hewn's stones. The spiral, representing the coiled serpent, appears a number of times, as do many combinations of squares, curves, and angles arranged in fanciful design, which may or may not have had symbolic meanings. A careful examination of the neighborhood discloses few details of the irrigation system, but it shows a cemetery near the southeast corner of the building in which the dead were systematically buried. Large numbers of minor antiquities were found in this interesting structure. Besides the usual stone implements of the mason and the housekeeper, many instruments of bone, such as needles, dirks, and bodkins, were found. Figurines of several kinds were unearthed, carved from soft stone, including several intended to symbolize Indian corn. All of these may have been idols. Fragments of pottery were abundant in full variety of form, decoration, and color, but always the most ancient types. Among the bones of animals, the frequency of those of rabbit, deer, antelope, elk, and mountain sheep indicate that meat formed no inconsiderable part of the diet. Fabrics and embroideries were not discovered, as in the cliff dwellings, but they may have disappeared in the centuries through exposure to the elements. Farview House may not show the highest development of the mummy-lake cluster of pueblos, and further exhumations here in enabrene groups may throw further light upon this interesting people in their gropings from darkness to light. Meantime, however, returning to the neighborhood of the cliff dwellings, let us examine a structure so late in the history of these people that they left it unfinished. Sun Temple stands on a point of Chapin Mesa, somewhat back of the region of Cliff Canyon, commanding an extraordinary range of country. It is within full view of Cliff Palace and other cliff dwellings of importance and easy of access. From it one can look southward to the Mancos River. On every side a wide range of Mesa and Canyon lies in full view. The site is unrivaled for a temple in which all could worship with devotion. When Dr. Fuchs in the early summer of 1915 attacked the mound which had been designated Community House under the supposition that it covered a ruined Pueblo, he had no idea of the extraordinary nature of the find awaiting him, although he was prepared from its shape and other indications for something out of the usual. So wholly without parallel was the disclosure, however, that it was not till it was entirely uncovered that he ventured a public conjecture as to its significance. The ground plan of Sun Temple is shaped like the letter D. It encloses another D-shaped structure, occupying nearly two-thirds of its total area, within which are two large kivas. Between the outer and the inner D are passages and rooms, and at one end a third kiva is surrounded by rooms, one of which is circular. Sun Temple is also impressive in size. It is 121 feet long and 64 feet wide. Its walls average four feet in thickness and are double faced, enclosing a central core of rubble. They are built of the neighborhood sandstone. The masonry is of fine quality, this together with its symmetrical architectural design, its fine proportions, and its many decorated stones, mark it the highest type of Mesa Verde architecture. It was plainly unfinished. Walls had risen in some places higher than in others, as yet there was no roofing. No rooms had been plastered. Of internal finishing little was completed, and of contents, of course, there was none. The stone hammers and other utensils of the builders were found lying about as if thrown down at day's close. The kivas, although circular, are unlike those of Cliff Palace, in as much as they are above ground, not subterranean. The mortar used in pointing shows the impress of human hands. No trowels were used. The walls exhibit many stones in size with complicated designs, largely geometric. Some may be mason's marks, others are decorative or symbolic. These designs indicate a marked advance over those in Farview House. In fact, they are far more complicated and artistic than any in the Southwest. Bear and ineliquent, though its unfinished condition left it, the religious purposes of the entire building are clear to the archaeologist in its form, and as if to make conjecture certainty, a shrine was uncovered at the cornerstone of the outer wall, which frames in solid stone walls a large fossil palm leaf whose rays strongly suggest the sun. It requires no imagination to picture the effect which the original discovery of this image of their god must have had upon a primitive community of sun worshipers. It must have seemed to them a divine gift, a promise, like the Ark of the Covenant, of the favour of the Almighty. It may even have first suggested the idea of building this temple to their deity. This is all the story. Go ahead and study it in detail. Enlightened, profoundly impressed, nevertheless you will finish at this point. The tail has no climax. It just stops. What happened to the people of Mesa Verde? Some archaeologists believe that they emigrated to neighboring valleys southwest. But why should they have left their prosperous farms and fine homes, for regions would seem to us less desirable? And why, a profoundly religious people, should they have left Sun Temple unfinished? What other supposition remains? Only, I think, that perhaps, because of their prosperity and the unpreparedness that accompanies long periods of peace, they were suddenly overwhelmed by enemies. End of Part 21. Part 22 of the Book of the National Parks. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling Yard. The Healing Waters. Hot Springs Reservation Arkansas, Platte National Park, Oklahoma. One. From a hillside on the edge of the Ozark Mountains in Central Arkansas, issues springs of hot water which are effective in alleviation of rheumatic and kindred ills. Although chemical analysis fails to explain the reason, the practice of many years has abundantly proved their worth. Before the coming of the white man, they were known to the Indians, who are said to have proclaimed them neutral territory in time of war. Perhaps it was rumor of their fame, upon which Ponce de Lyon founded his dream of a fountain of youth. In the early years of the last century, hundreds of settlers toiled many miles over forest trails to camp beside them and bathe daily in their waters. The bent and suffering were carried there on stretchers. So many and so striking were the cures that the fame of these springs spread throughout the young nation, and in 1832, to prevent their falling into hands outstretched to seize and exploit them for private gain, Congress created them a national reservation. The Hot Springs Reservation was our first national park. Previous to this, a couple of log houses built by visitors served for shelter for the pilgrims at the Shrine of Health. Soon after, other buildings quite as primitive were erected. A road was constructed through the forest, from the settled portions of the state, and many drove laboriously in with tents and camping outfits. I have seen a copy of a photograph, which was taken when photographs were new, showing several men and women in the odd conventional costume of that period sitting solemnly upon the banks of a steaming spring, their clothes drawn up, their bare legs calf-deep in the hot water. Once started, Hot Springs grew rapidly. Unfortunately, this first act of national conservation failed to foresee the great future of these springs, and the reservation line was drawn so that it barely enclosed the brook of steaming vapors which was their outlet. Today, when the nation contemplates spending millions to beautify the national spa, it finds the city built solidly opposite. Railroads soon pushed their way through the Ozark foothills and landed thousands yearly beside the healing waters. Hotels became larger and more numerous. The government built a public bathhouse into which the waters were piped for the free treatment of the people. Concessioners built more elaborate structures within the reservation to accommodate those who preferred to pay for pleasanter surroundings or for private treatment. The village became a town, and the town a city. Boarding houses sprang up everywhere, with accommodations to suit the needs or purses of all lengths. Finally, large and costly hotels were built for the prosperous and fashionable who began to find rare enjoyment in the beautiful Ozark country while they drank their hot water and took their invigorating baths. Hot springs became a national resort. It will be seen that, in its way, hot springs has reflected the social development of the country. It has passed through the various stages that marked the national growth in taste and morals. During the period when gambling was a national vice, it was noted for its high play, and then gamblers of all social grades look forward to their season in the south. During the period of national dissipation, when polite drunkenness was a badge of class, and new year's day and orgy, it became the periodic resort of inebriates. Just as later, with the elevation of the national moral sense, it became instead the most conservative of resorts, the periodic refuge of thousands of work-worn business and professional men seeking the astonishing recuperative power of its water. True again to the spirit of the times, hot springs reflects to the full the spirit of today. It is a southern mountain resort of quiet charm and wonderful natural beauty, set on the edge of a broad region of hills, ravines, and sweet smelling pines, a paradise for the walker, the hiker, and the horseback rider. Down on the street, a long row of handsome modern bath houses, equipped with all the scientific luxuries, and more besides, of the most elaborate European spa, concentrates the business of bath and cure. Back of this rise directly the beautiful Ozark Hills. One may have exactly what he wishes at hot springs. He may live with the sick, if that is his bent, or he may spend weeks of rich enjoyment of the south in holiday mood, and have his baths besides, without a suggestion of the sanitarium or even of the spa. Meantime the mystery of the water's potency seems to have been solved. It is not chemical in solution, which clears the system of its ills and restores the jaded tissues to buoyancy, but the newly discovered principle of radioactivity. Somewhere deep in nature's laboratory, these waters become charged with an uplifting power which is imparted to those who bathe, according to the rules which many years of experience have prescribed. Many physicians refuse to verify the water's virtues. Some openly scoff. But the fact stands that every year, hundreds who come helpless cripples walk jauntily to the station on their departure, and many thousands of sufferers from the rheumatic ills and the wear and tear of strenuous living return to their homes restored. I myself can testify to the surprising recuperative effect of only half a dozen daily baths, and I know businessmen who habitually go there whenever the stress of overwork demands measures of quick relief. It is not surprising that more than a hundred thousand persons visit hot springs every year. The recognized season begins after the winter holidays. Then it is that gaiety in pleasuring, riding, driving, motoring, golfing, and the social life of the fashionable hotels reach their height. But for sheer enjoyment of the quieter kind, the spring, early summer, and the autumn are unsurpassed. South, though it lies, hot springs is delightful, even in midsummer. Two railroads land the visitor almost at the entrance of the reservation. A fine road brings the motorist sixty miles from the lively city of Little Rock. The elaborate bathhouses line the reservation side of the principal street, opposite the brick city. But back of them rises abruptly the beautiful forested mountain, from whose side gushed the healing waters. And back of this roll the beautiful pine grown Ozarks. The division is sharply drawn. He who chooses may forget the city, except at the hour of his daily bath. The plans for realizing in stone and landscape gardening, the ideal of the great American spa, which this spot is, in fact, contemplate the work of years. Two. In southern Oklahoma, not far from the Texas boundary, a group of thirty healing springs, those of cold sparkling water, were set apart by Congress in 1904, under the title of the Platte National Park. Most of them are sulfur springs. Others are impregnated with bromides and other mineral salts. Many thousands visit yearly, the prosperous bordering city of sulfur, to drink these waters. Many camp in or near the reservation. The bottled waters bring relief to thousands at home. Through the national park, from its source in the east to its entry into Rock Creek, Wine's Travertine Creek, the outlet of most of these springs, Rock Creek outlines the park's western boundary, and on its farther bank lies the city. Springs of importance within the park pour their waters directly into its current. All these platte springs, like those of Hot Springs, Arkansas, were known to the Indians for their curative properties for many generations before the coming of the white settler. The park is the center of a region of novelty and charm for the visitor from the north and east. The intimate communion of prairie and rich forested valley, the sophistication of the bustling little city, in contrast with the rough life of the outlying ranches, the mingling in common intercourse of such differing human elements as the eastern tourist, the free and easy western townsmen, the cowboy and the Indian, give rare spice to a visit, long enough to impart the spirit of a country of so many kinds of appeal. The climate, too, contributes to enjoyment. The long spring lasts from February to June. During the short summer, social life is at its height. The fall lingers to the holidays before it gives way to a short winter, which the Arbuckle Mountains soften by diverting the colder winds. The pleasures are those of prairie and valley. It is a great land for riding. There is swimming, rowing, and excellent black bass fishing in the larger lakes. It is a region of deer and many birds. Its altitude is about a thousand feet. The rolling Oklahoma Plateau attains in this neighborhood its pleasantest outline and variety. Broad plains of grazing land alternate with bare rocky heights and low mountains. The creeks and rivers which accumulate the waters of the springs, scattered widely among these prairie hills, are outlined by winding forested belts and flowered thickets of brush. Great areas of thin prairie yield here and there to rounded hills, some of which bear upon their summits columns of flat rocks heaped one upon the other high enough to be seen for miles against the low horizon. These which are known as the chimney hills for many years have been a cause of speculation among the settlers who have nearly replaced the Indians since the state of Oklahoma replaced the Indian territory with which we became familiar in the geographies of earlier days. Who were the builders of these chimneys and what was their purpose? At a hearing in Ardmore a few years ago before a United States court taking testimony upon some ancient Indian depredation claims writes Colonel R. A. Snead for years the superintendent of the Platte National Park. Practically all the residents of the Chickasaw Nation, Indian and Negro whose memories of that country extend back 50 years or more were in attendance. In recounting his recollection of a Comanche raid in which his master's horses were stolen one old Negro incidentally gave a solution of the chimney hills which is the only one the writer ever heard and which probably accounts for all of them. He said that his master lived at Big Sulphur Springs farthest west of any of the Chickasaws. The Tequiawas and Comanches raided the country every summer and drove out horses or cattle wherever they could find them unprotected. That he had often gone with his master to find these stolen cattle. That these forages were so frequent that the Chickasaws had never undertaken to occupy any of their lands west of Rock Creek north of Big Sulphur Springs nor west of the Rashida River south of the springs. That the country west of Sulphur Springs was dry and water was hard to find unless one knew just where to look. And that the Comanches had a custom of marking all the springs they could find by building rock chimneys on the hills nearest to the spring. Only one chimney would be built if the spring flowed from beneath the same hill but if the spring was distant from the hill two chimneys would be built either upon the same hill or upon two distant hills and a site along the two chimneys would indicate a course toward the spring. The old man said that every hill in their pasture land had a Comanche chimney on it and that his master would not disturb them because he did not want to make the wild Indians mad. There never was open war between Chickasaws and the Comanches but individual Chickasaws often had trouble with Comanche hunting parties. The Big Sulphur Springs on Rock Creek in the Chickasaw Nation afterward became the center around which the city of Sulphur was built and after the town was grown to a population of two thousand or more it was removed bodily to make room for the Platte National Park around which has been built the new city of Sulphur which now has a population of forty five hundred. Many of the Comanche monuments are extant and the great bluff above the bromide springs of the National Park looks out toward the north and west over a prairie that extends to the Rocky Mountains. The monument that stood on the brow of that bluff must have been visible for many miles to the keen vision of the Comanche who knew how to look for it. The Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma in 1907. The story of the white man's peaceful invasion is one of absorbing interest. The human spectacle of today is complex even kaleidoscopic. In the 30s and 40s the government had established in the territory five civilized Indian nations the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles each with its allotted boundaries, its native government, its legislatures and its courts. In many respects these were foreign nations within our boundaries. Besides them the Osage Indians had their reservation in the north and fragments of no less than 17 other tribes lived unassigned territory. Gradually white men invaded the land purchased holdings from the Indian nations, built cities, established businesses of many kinds, brand railroads in all directions. In time the nations were abolished and the remaining lands were divided up among the individuals composing them. The Indians of these nations became American citizens, their Negro slaves, for they had been large slave holders, received each his portion of the divided land. Then came Oklahoma. Today there is only one Indian reservation in the state, that of the Osages. Oil has been found on their land and they are the wealthiest people in the world today. The average cash income of each exceeding five thousand dollars a year. In a state with a total population of two and a quarter millions live three hundred and thirty six thousand Indians representing 23 tribes and 110,000 Negroes descended from slaves. There has been much intermarrying between Indians and whites and some between Indians and blacks. Here is a mixture of races to baffle the keenest eye. Elsewhere than in the Osage reservation wealth has also come to the Indians. Many have very large incomes, large even for the rich of our eastern cities. Asphalt also has enriched many. Cotton is raised extensively in the southern counties.  Many Indians own costly and luxurious homes, ride in automobiles, and enter importantly into business, politics, and the professions. These usually have more or less white blood. Many full-bloods who have grown rich without effort possess finely furnished bedrooms and sleep on the floor in blankets, elaborate dining rooms with costly table equipments, and eat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, gas ranges, and cook over chip fires out of doors, automobiles, and ride blanketed ponies. Many wealthy men are deeply in debt because of useless luxuries which they have been persuaded to buy. Platte National Park lies about the center of what was once the Chickasaw Nation. It is a grazing in a cotton country. There are thousands of Indians, many of them substantial citizens, some men of local influence. Native dress is seldom seen. Quoting again from my correspondence with Colonel Snead, here is the legend of the last of the Delaware's. Along about 1840, a very few years after the Chickasaws and Choctaws had arrived in Indian territory, a small band of about 60 Delaware Indians arrived in the territory, having roved from Alabama through Mississippi and Missouri, and through the northwest portion of Arkansas. Being a small band, they decided to link their fortunes with those of some of the other tribe of Indians, and they first pitched their tepees with those of the Cherokees. But the Cherokee chief, an old chief, Wapanuka of the Delaware's, did not agree. So the little band of Delaware's continued rambling until they reached the Choctaw Nation, where they again tried to make terms with the chief of the tribe. Evidently no agreement was reached between that chief and Wapanuka, for the Delaware's continued their roving until they reached the Chickasaw Nation, where they remained. Old chief Wapanuka had a beautiful daughter whose name was Dearface. Two of the Delaware Brays were very much in love with her, but Dearface could not decide which one of these warriors she should take to become chief after the death of Wapanuka. Chief Wapanuka called the two warriors before him, and a powwow was agreed upon. The council was held around the council rocks, which is now a point of interest within the Platte National Park, and a decision was reached to the effect that at a certain designated time the Delaware should all assemble on the top of the bromide cliff, at the foot of which flow the now famous bromide and medicine springs, and that the two Braves should ride their Indian ponies to the edge of the cliff, which was at that time known as Medicine Bluff, and jump off to the bed of the creek about two hundred feet below. The one who survived was to marry Dearface and succeed Wapanuka as chief of the Delaware's. The race was run, and both Indian Braves made the jump from the bluff, but both were killed. When Dearface saw this, she threw herself from the bluff, and died at the foot of the cliff where her lovers had met their death. Today her image may be seen, indelibly fixed on one of the rocks of the cliff where she fell, and the water of the medicine spring is supposed to be the briny tears of the old chief when he saw the havoc his decision had wrought. These tears, filtering down through the cliff where the old chief stood, are credited with being so purified that the water of the spring which they form is possessed with remedial qualities which make it a cure for all human ailments. End of part twenty-two. Part twenty-three of the Book of the National Parks, this LibriVox recording, is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling Yard. The Grand Canyon and our National Monuments. On the scenery of the Southwest. To most Americans, the Southwest means the desert. And it is true that most of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and portions of Colorado and Southern California, are arid or semi-arid lands, relieved, however, by regions of fertility and agricultural prosperity. In popular conception, the desert has been the negative of all that means beauty, richness, and sublimity, and it has been the synonym of poverty and death. Gradually, but surely, the American public is learning, that again, popular conception is wrong. That the desert is as positive a factor in scenery as the mountain. That it has its own glowing beauty, its own intense personality, and occasionally, in its own amazing way, a sublimity as gorgeous, as compelling, and as emotion-provoking as the most topendous, snow-capped range. The American desert region includes some of the world's greatest scenery. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is sunk in a plateau which, while sprinkled with scant pine, is nearly rainless. Zion Canyon is a palette of brilliant color lying among golden sands. A score of national monuments can serve large natural bridges, forests of petrified trees, interesting volcanic or other phenomena of pre- historic times, areas of strange cactus growths, deposits of the bones of monstrous reptiles, and remains of a civilization which preceded the discovery of America. And, in addition to these, innumerable places of remarkable magnificence as yet unknown except to the geologist, the topographer, the miner, the Indian, and the adventurer in unfrequented lands. This arid country consists of rolling, sandy plains as broad as seas, dotted with gray sagebrush and relieved by bare craggy monad knocks and naked ranges, which the rising and the setting sun paints unbelievable colors. Here and there thin gross of cottonwood outline thin ribbons of rivers few and far between. Here and there alkali whitens the edges of stained hollows where water lies a while after spring cloudbursts. Here and there are salt ponds with no outlet. Yet even in the desolation of its tawny monotony it has a fascination which is insistent and cumulative. But the southwest is not all desert. There are great areas of thin grazing ranges and lands where dry farming yields fair crops. There are valleys which produce fruits and grains in abundance. There are hamlets and villages and cities which are among the oldest in America, centers of fertile tracks surrounded by deserts which need only water to become the richest lands on the continent. There are regions reclaimed by irrigation where farming has brought prosperity. In other places the plateau covers itself for hundreds of square miles with scrubby pine and cedar. All in all it is a land of rare charm and infinite variety. To appreciate a region which more and more will enter into American consciousness and divide travel with the mountains the reader should know something of its structural history. The southwestern part of the United States rose above sea level and sank below it many times during the many thousands of centuries preceding its present state which is that of a sandy and generally desert plateau five to ten thousand feet in altitude. How many times it repeated this cycle is not fully known. Some portions of it doubtless were submerged oftener than others. Some were lifting while others were lowering. And meantime mountains rose and were carried away by erosion to give place to other mountains which also were away. River systems formed and disappeared. Lakes and inland seas existed and ceased to exist. The history of our southwest would have been tempestuous indeed had it been compassed within say the life of one man. But spread over a period of time inconceivable to man there may have been no time when it might have seemed to be more active in change than its still hot desert seem today to the traveler in passing trains. Other parts of the continent no doubt have undergone as many changes. Our southwest is not singular in that. But nowhere else perhaps has the change left evidences so plain and so interesting to the unscientific observer. The page of earth's history is more easily read upon the bare deserts of our southwest than on the grass concealed prairies of the Mississippi Valley or the eroded and forested ranges of the Appalachians. Before the Rockies in the Sierra even existed in the shallow sea which covered this part of the continent were deposited the ooze which later when this region rose above the sea became the magnificent limestones of the Grand Canyon. Muds accumulated which today are seen in many highly colored shales. Long ages of erosion from outlying mountain regions spread it thick with gravels and sands which now appear in rocky walls of deep canyons. A vast plain was built up and graded by these deposits. The trunks of trees washed down by the floods from far distant uplands were buried in these muds and sands where in the course of unnumbered centuries they turned to stone. They are the petrified forests of today. Mountains, predecessors of our modern Sierra lifted in the south and west squeezed the moisture from the Pacific winds and turned the region into desert. This was in the Jurassic period. Sands thousands of feet deep were accumulated by the desert winds which are today the sandstones of the Great Walls of Zion Canyon. But this was not the last desert for again the region sank below the sea. Again for half a million years or more ooze settled upon the sands to turn to limestone millions of years later. In this Jurassic sea sported enormous marine monsters whose bones settled to the bottom to be unearthed in our times and great flying reptiles crossed its water. Again the region approached sea level and accumulated above its new limestones other beds of sands. New river systems formed and brought other accumulations from distant highlands. It was then a low swampy plane of enormous size whose northern limits reached Montana and which touched what is now Kansas on its east. Upon the borders of its swamps in cretaceous times lived gigantic reptiles the dinosaurs and their ungainly companions whose bones are found today in several places. For the last time the region sank and a shallow sea swept from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Again new limestones formed and as the surface very slowly rose for the last time at the close of the cretaceous period many new deposits were added to the scenic exhibit of today. Meantime other startling changes were making which extended over a lapse of time which human mind cannot grasp. Responding to increasing pressures from below the continent was folding from north to south. The miracle of the making of the Rockies was enacting. During all of tertiary times earth movements of tremendous energy rocked and folded the crust and hastened change. The modern Sierra rose upon the eroded ruins of its predecessor again shutting off the moisture laden western winds and turning the southwest again into a desert. One of the mountain building impulses spread eastward from the Sierra to the Wasatch Mountains but nature's project for this vast granite core table land never was realized for continually its central sections caved and fell and so it happened that the eastern edge of the Sierra and the western edge of the Wasatch Mountains became the precipitous edges thousands of feet high of a mountain-studded desert which today is called the Great Basin. It includes southeastern Oregon nearly all of Nevada the western half of Utah and a large area in the south of California besides parts of Idaho and Wyoming. It is 880 miles north and south and 572 miles wide its elevation is 5000 feet more or less and its area more than 200,000 square miles. This enormous bowl contained no outlet to the sea and the rivers which flowed into it from all its mountainous borders created a prehistoric lake was an area of 54,000 square miles which was named Lake Bonneville after the army officer whose adventures in 1833 were narrated by Washington Irving but it was Fremont who first clearly described it. Lake Bonneville has evaporated and disappeared but in its place are many salty lakes the greatest of which is Great Salt Lake in Utah. Attenuated rivers still flow into the Great Basin but are lost in their sands. The greatest of these the Mojave River is a hundred miles long but it is not often seen because it hides its waters chiefly under the surface sands. Lake Bonneville's prehistoric beaches exist today. Transcontinental passengers by rail cross its ancient bed but few know it. The Great Basin today is known to travelers principally by the many lesser deserts which compose it. Deserts separated from each other by lesser mountain ranges and low divides. Its southern and southeastern boundaries are the plateaus and mountains which form the northern watershed of the muddy Colorado River and its confluence. South of Colorado the plateaus of New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California gradually subside to the Rio Grande. During this period in the Craternery which followed it volcanoes appeared in many places. Their dead cones diversify our modern landscape. It was during the Craternery period in whose latter end lives man that erosion dug the mighty canyons of our great southwest. The Colorado was sweeping out the Grand Canyon at the same time that far in the north the glaciers of the Great Ice Age were carving from Algonquian shales and limestones the gorgeous cirques and valleys of Glacier National Park. And of Part 23. Part 24 of the Book of the National Parks this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling Yard. A pageant of creation Grand Canyon National Park Arizona Area 958 square miles. There is only one Grand Canyon. It lies in Northern Arizona and the Colorado River one of the greatest of American rivers flows through its inner gorge. It must not be confused with the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone or with any of the Grande Canyons which the Spaniards so named because they were big canyons. The Grand Canyon is 217 miles long 8 to 12 miles wide at the rim and more than a mile deep. It is the Colossus of Canyons. By far the hugest example of stream erosion in the world. It is gorgeously colored. It is by common consent the most opendous spectacle in the world. It may be conceived as a mountain range reversed. Could its molded image similarly colored stand upon the desert floor? It would be a spectacle second only to the vast mold itself.  In other lands it is our most celebrated scenic possession. It was made a national park in 1919. 1. The Grand Canyon is not of America but of the world. Like the desert of the Sahara and the monster group of the Himalayas it is so entirely the greatest example of its kind that it refuses limits. This is true of it also as a spectacle far truer in fact for if it is possible to compare things so dissimilar in this respect certainly it will lead all others. None will see it without being deeply moved all to silence some even to tears. It is charged to the rim with emotion but the emotion of the first view varies. Some stand astounded at its vastness others are stupefied and search their souls in vain for definition. Some tremble some are uplifted with a sense of appalling beauty. For a time the souls of all are naked in the presence. This reaction is apparent in the writings of those who have visited it. No other spectacle in America has inspired so large a literature.  Charles Studley Warner pronounced it by far the most sublime of earthly spectacles. William Winter saw it as a pageant of ghastly desolation. Hamlin Garland found its lines chaotic and disturbing but its combinations of color and shadow beautiful. Upon John Muir it bestowed a new sense of earth's beauty. Marius R. Campbell whose geological researches have familiarized him with nature's scenic gamut told me that his first day on the rim left him emotionally cold. It was not until he had lived with the spectacle that realization slowly dawned. I think this is the experience of very many. A fact which renders still more tragic a prevailing public assumption that the Grand Canyon is a one day stop in a transcontinental journey. It is not surprising that wonder is deeply stirred by its vastness, its complexity and the realization of nature's titanic labor in its making. It is far from strange that extreme elation sometimes follows upon a revelation so stupendous and different. That beauty so extraordinary should momentarily free emotion from control is natural enough. But why the expressions of repulsion not infrequently encountered upon the printed pages of the past? I have personally inquired of many of our own day without finding one even among the most sensitive whom it repelled. Perhaps a clue is discovered in the introductory paragraphs of an inspired word picture which the late Clarence E. Dutton hid in a technical geological paper of 1880. The lover of nature, he wrote, whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps in Italy, Germany or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras in Scotland or Colorado would enter this strange region with a shock and dwell there with a sense of oppression and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never see and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but beautiful or noble. Whatsoever might be bold or striking would seem at first only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry or bizarre, the tones and shades, modest and tender, subdued yet rich in which his fancy had always taken special delight would be the ones which are conspicuously absent. I suspect that this revulsion, this horror, as several have called it, was born of the conventions of an earlier generation which bound conceptions of taste and beauty as of art, dress, religion and human relations generally and shackles which do not exist these days of individualism and broad horizons. Today we see the Grand Canyon with profound astonishment but without prejudice. Its amazing size, its bewildering configuration, its unprecedented combinations of color affect the freed and elated consciousness of our times as another and perhaps an ultimate revelation in nature of law, order and beauty. In these pages I shall make no attempt to describe the Grand Canyon. Nature has written her own description, graving it with a pen of water in rocks which run the series of the eternal ages. Her story can be read only in the original. Translations are futile. Here I shall try only to help a little in the reading. Two. The Grand Canyon was cut by one of the Great Rivers of the Continent, the Colorado, which enters Arizona from the north and swings sharply west. Thence it turns south to form most of Arizona's western boundary and a few miles over the Mexican border empties into the head of the Gulf of California. It drains 300,000 square miles of Arizona, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. It is formed in Utah by the confluence of the Green and the Grand Rivers. Including the greater of these, the Green River, it makes a stream 1500 miles in length which collects the waters of the divide south and east of the Great Basin and of many ranges of the Rocky Mountain System. The Grand River for its contribution collects the drainage of the Rocky's mighty western slopes in Colorado. The lower reaches of these great tributaries and practically all of the Colorado River itself flow through more than 500 miles of canyons which they were obliged to dig through the slowly upheaving sandstone plateaus in order to maintain their access to the sea. Succeeding canyons bear names designating their scenic or geologic character. Progressively southward they score deeper into the strata of the Earth's crust until as they approach their climax they break through the bottom of the Paleozoic limestone deep into the heart of the Archean niece. This limestone trench is known as the Marble Canyon the Archean Trench as the Granite Gorge. The lower part of the Marble Canyon and all the Granite Gorge together with their broad vividly colored and fantastically carved upper canyon 10 miles across from Rim to Rim a mile high from water to Rim level the climax of the world of canyons and the most gorgeous spectacle on earth is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It lies east and west in the northern part of the state. To comprehend it recall one of those ditches which we all have seen crossing level fields or bordering country roads. It is broad from Rim to Rim and deeply indented by the side washes which follow heavy showers. Its sides descend by terraces steep in places with gentle slopes between the steeps and on these slopes are elevations of rock or mud which floods have failed to wash away. Finally in the middle is the narrow trench which now in dry weather carries a small trickling stream. Not only does this ditch roughly typify the Grand Canyon reproducing in clumsy inefficient miniature the basic characteristics of its outline but it also is identical in the process of its making. Imagining it in cross section we find its sides leading down by successive precipices to broad intermediate sloping surfaces. We find upon these broad surfaces enormous maces and lofty ornately carved edifices of rock which the floods have left standing. We find in its middle winding snake-like from side to side the narrow gorge of the river. The parallel goes further. It is not at all necessary to conceive that either the wayside ditch or the Grand Canyon was once brimful of madly dashing waters. On the contrary neither may ever have held much greater streams than they hold today. In both cases the power of the stream has been applied to downward trenching. The greater spreading sides were cut by the erosion of countless side streamlets resulting temporarily from periods of melting snow or of local rainfall. It was these streamlets which cut the side canyons and left standing between them the bold promontories of the rim. It was these streamlets working from the surface which separated portions of these promontories from the plateau and turned them into isolated maces. It was the erosion of these maces which turned many of them into the gigantic and fantastic temples and towers which rise from the canyon's bowl. Standing upon the rim and overlooking miles of these successive precipices and intermediate temple levels we see the dark gorge of the granite trench and deep within it wherever its windings permit a view of its bottom a narrow ribbon of brown river. This is the Colorado, a rill. But when we have descended 6,000 feet of altitude to its edge we find it a rushing, turbulent torrent of muddy water. Its average width is 300 feet its average depth 30 feet. It is industriously digging the Grand Canyon still deeper and perhaps as rapidly as it ever dug since it entered the granite. Developing the thought in greater detail let us glance at the illustrations of this chapter and at any photographs which may be at hand and realization will begin. Let imagination dart back a million years or more to the time when this foreground rim and that far run across the vast chasm are one continuous plain. Perhaps it is a pine forest with the river no greater than today perhaps not so great winding through it close to the surface level. As the river cuts downward the spring floods following the winter snows cave in its banks here and there forming sharply slanted valleys which enclose promontories between them. Spring succeeds spring and these side valleys deepen and eat backward while the promontories lengthen and grow. The harder strata resist the disintegration of alternate heat and cold and while always receding hold their form as cliffs. The softer strata between the cliffs crumbles and the waste of spring waters spreads them out in long flattened slopes. The centuries pass the ruin buries itself deep in the soft sandstone. The side valleys work miles back into the pine forest. Each valley acquires its own system of erosion into each from either side enter smaller valleys which themselves are eating backward into the promontories. The great valley of the Colorado now has broad converging cliff broken sides. Here and there these indentations meet far in the background behind the promontories isolating island like maces. The rest of the story is simple repetition. Imagine enough thousands of centuries and you will imagine the Grand Canyon. Those myriad temples and castles and barbaric shrines are all that the rains and melting snows have left of noble maces some of which when originally isolated enclosed as the marble encloses the future statue scores of the lesser but mighty structures which compose the wonder city of the depths. These architectural operations of nature may be seen today in midway stages. Find on the map the Powell Plateau in the northwest of the canyon. Once it was continuous with the rim a noble promontory. It was cut out from the rim perhaps within the existence of the human race. A few hundred thousand years from now it will be one or more Aladdin palaces. Find on the map the Great Valhalla Plateau in the east of the canyon. Note that its base is nearly separated from the parental rim a thousand centuries or so and its isolation will be complete. Not long after that as geologists reckon length of time it will divide into two plateaus. It is easy to pick the place of the vision. The tourist of a million years hence we'll see where now it stands a hundred glowing castles. Let us look again at our photographs which now we can see with understanding to realize the spectacle of the canyon let imagination paint these strata their brilliant colors. It will not be difficult but here again we must understand. It is well to recall that these strata were laid in the sea and that they hardened into stone when the earth's skin was pushed thousands of feet in air. Originally they were washing of distant highlands brought down by rivers. The coloring of the shales and sandstones is that of the parent rock modified. No doubt by chemical action in seawater. The limestone product of the sea is gray. As these differently colored strata were once continuous across the canyon it follows that their sequence is practically identical on both sides of the canyon. That the colors seem confused is because viewing the spectacle from an elevation we see the enormous indentations of the opposite rim in broken and disorganized perspective. Few minds are patient and orderly enough to fully disentangle the kaleidoscopic disarray but if we can identify the strata by form as well as color we can at least comprehend without trouble our principal outline and comprehension is the broad highway to appreciation. To identify these strata it is necessary to call them by name. The names that geologists have assigned them have no scientific significance other than identity. They are Indian and local. Beginning at the canyon rim we have a stalwart cliff of gray limestone known as the K-Bab limestone or conversationally the K-Bab. It is about 700 feet thick. Of this product of a million years of microscopic life and death on sea bottoms is formed the splendid south rim cliffs from which we view the chasm. Across the canyon it is always recognizable as the rim. Below the talus of the K-Bab is the Coconinio sandstone light yellowish gray coarse of grain the product of swift currents of untold thousands of centuries ago. This strata makes a fine bright cliff usually about 400 feet in thickness an effective roofing for the glowing reds of the depths. Immediately below the Coconinio are the splendid red shales and sandstones known as the Supe formation. These lie in many strata of varying shades qualities and thicknesses but all seen across the canyon merging into a single enormous horizontal body of gorgeous red. The Supe measures 1100 feet in perpendicular thickness but as it is usually seen in slopes which sometimes are long and gentle it presents to the eye a surface several times as broad. This is the most prominent single mass of color in the canyon for not only does it form the broadest feature of the opposite wall and of the enormous promontories which jut there from but the main bodies of Buddha, Zoroaster and many others of the fantastic temples which rise from the floor. Below the Supe a perpendicular wall of intense red 500 feet high forces its personality upon every foot of the canyon's vast length. It is the famous red wall a gray limestone stained crimson with the drip of Supe die from above. Harder than the sloping sandstone above and the shale below it pushes aggressively into the picture squared perpendicular glowing. It winds in and out of every bay and gulf and fronts precipitously every flaring promontory. It roofs with overhanging eaves many a noble palace and turns many a towering monument into a pagoda. Next below in series is the Tonto a deep broad shallow slant of dull green and yellow shale which with the thin broad sandstone base on which it rests forms the floor of the outer canyon the tessellated pavement of the city of flame. Without the Tonto's green the spectacle of the Grand Canyon would have missed its contrast and its fullness. Through this floor the granite gorge winds its serpentine way two thousand feet deep dark with shadows shining in places where the river swings in view. These are the series of form and color. They occur with great regularity except in several spots deep in the canyon where small patches of gleaming quartzites and brilliant red shales show against the dark granite. The largest of these lies in the depths directly opposite El Tavaar. These rocks are all that one sees of ancient Algonquian strata which once overlay the granite to a depth of 13,000 feet more than twice the present total depth of the canyon. The erosion of many thousands of centuries wore them away before the rocks that now composed the floor the temples and the precipice walls of the Great Canyon were even deposited in the sea as sand and limestone ooze. A fact that strikingly emphasizes the enormous age of this exhibit. Geologists speak of these splashes of Algonquian rocks as the Unkar Group another local Indian designation. There is also a similar Chuar Group which need not concern any except those who make a close study of the canyon. This is the picture. The imagination may realize a fleet vivid impression from the photograph. The visitor upon the rim outline in hand may trace its twisting elements in a few moments of attentive observation and thereafter enjoy his canyon as one only enjoys a new city when he has mastered its scheme and spirit and can mentally classify its details as they pass before him. To one thus prepared the Grand Canyon ceases to be the brew pot of chaotic emotion and becomes the orderly revelation of nature the master craftsman and the divine artist. And of part 24 Part 25 of The Book of the National Parks This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling-Yard. A pageant of creation continued. 3. Entrance is from the south. The motor road to Grandview is available for most of the year. The railroad to the El Tovar Hotel serves the year round for the Grand Canyon is an all year resort. There is a short winter of heavy snows on the rim but not in the canyon which may be descended at all seasons. Both routes terminate on the rim. Always dramatic The Grand Canyon welcomes the pilgrim in the full panoply of its appalling glory. There is no waiting in the anti-room, no sounding of trumpets, no ceremony of presentation. He stands at once in the presence. Most visitors have bought tickets at home which permit only one day's stay. The irrecoverable sensation of the first view is broken by the necessity for an immediate decision upon how to spend that day. For if one is to descend horseback to the river he must engage his place and on his riding clothes at once. Under this stress the majority elect to remain on the rim for reasons wholly apart from any question of respective merit. After all, if only one day is possible it is the wise decision. With the rim road over which various drives are scheduled and several commanding points to whose precipices one may walk it will be a day to remember for a lifetime. One should not attempt too much in this one day. It is enough to sit in the presence of the spectacle. Fortunate is he who may stay another day and descend the trail into the streets of this vast city. Many times fortunate he who may live a little amid its glories. Because of this general habit of seeing the Grand Canyon between sunrise and sunset the admirable hotel accommodations are not extensive but sufficient. There are cottage accommodations also at cheaper rates. Hotels and cottages are well patronized summer and winter. Upon the rim are unique rest houses and one of which is a high-power telescope. There is a memorial altar to John Wesley Powell the first explorer of the canyon. There is an excellent reproduction of a Hopi house. There is an Indian camp. The day's wanderer upon the rim will not lack entertainment when his eyes turn for rest from the chasm. From the hotel coaches make regular trips daily to various viewpoints. Hopi Point, Mojave Point, Yavapai Point, and Granger Point may all be visited. The run of eight miles along the famous Hermit Rim Road permits brief stops at Hopi, Mojave, and Pima points. Automobiles also make regular runs through the gorgeous spectacle from Grand View. Still more distant points may be made in private or hired cars. Navajo Point offers unequal views up and down the full length of the canyon and an automobile road will bring the visitor with an easy reach of Bass Camp near Havasupé Point in the far west of the reservation. Many one-day visitors take none of these stage and automobile trips contented to dream the hours away upon Yavapai or Hopi Points nearby. After all, it is just as well. A single viewpoint cannot be mastered in one's first day, so what's the use of others? On the other hand, seeing the same view from different viewpoints miles apart will enrich and elaborate it. Besides, one should see many views in order to acquire some conception, however small, of the intricacy and grandeur of the canyon. Besides, these trips help to rest the eyes and mind. It is hard indeed to advise the unlucky one-day visitor. It is as if a dispeptic would lead you to an elaborate banquet of a dozen courses and say, I have permission to eat three bites. Please help me choose them. Wherever he stands upon the rim, the appalling silence hushes the voice to whispers. No cathedral imposes stillness so complete. It is sacrilege to speak, almost to move, and yet the Grand Canyon is a moving picture. It changes every moment. Always shadows are disappearing here, appearing there, shortening here, lengthening there. With every passing hour it becomes a different thing. It is a sundial of monumental size. In the early morning the light streams down the canyon from the east. Certain promontories shoot miles into the picture, gleaming in vivid color, backed by dark shadows. Certain palaces and temples stand in magnificent relief. The inner gorge is brilliantly outlined in certain places. As the day advances, these prominences shift positions. Some fade, some disappear, still others spring into view. As midday approaches, the shadows fade. Their promontories flatten. The towering edifices move bodily backward and merge themselves in the opposite rim. There is a period of several hours when the whole canyon has become a solid wall. Strata fail to match. Eye and mind become confused. Comprehension is baffled by the tangle of disconnected bands of color. The watcher is distressed by an oppressive sense of helplessness. It is when afternoon is well advanced that the magician's son begins his most astonishing miracles in the canyon's depths. Out of the blazing wall, one by one, step the mighty obelisk and palaces, defined by ever-changing shadows. Unsuspected promontories emerge. Undreamed of gulfs sink back in the perspective. The serpentine gorge appears here, fades there, seems almost to move in the slow-changing shadows. I shall not try even to suggest the sole uplifting spectacle which culminates in sunset. Days may be spent upon the rim in many forms of pleasure. Short camping trips may be made to distant points. The descent into the canyon is usually made from El Tavar down the Bright Angel Trail, so-called because it faces the splendid Bright Angel Canyon of the north side, and by the newer Hermit Trail, which starts a few miles west. There are trails at Grandview, eight miles east, and at Bass Camp, twenty-four miles west of El Tavar, which our seldom use now. All go to the bottom of the granite gorge. The commonly used trails may be traveled afoot by those physically able and on muleback by any persons of any age who enjoys ordinary health. The Bright Angel Trip returns the traveler to the rim at day's end. The Hermit Trail trip camps him overnight on the floor of the canyon at the base of a magic temple. The finest trip of all takes him down the Hermit Trail, gives him a night in the depths, and returns him to the rim by the Bright Angel Trail. Powell named Bright Angel Creek during that memorable first passage through the canyon. He had just named a muddy creek Dirty Devil, which suggested by contrast the name of Bright Angel for a stream so pure and sparkling. The Havasupa Indian Reservation may be visited in the depths of Cataract Canyon by following the trail from Bass Camp. The first experience usually noted in the descent is the fine quality of the trail, gentle in slope, and bordered by rock on the steep side. The next experience is the disappearance of the straight uncompromising horizon of the opposite rim, which is a distinctive feature of every view from above. As soon as the descent fairly begins, even the smaller bluffs and promontories assume towering proportions, and from the tonto floor the mighty elevations of Cheops, Isis, Zoroaster, Shiva, Wotan, and the countless other temples of the Abyss become mountains of enormous height. From the river's side the elevations of the Granite Gorge present a new series of precipitous towers, back of which in places loom the tops of the painted palaces, and back of them from occasional favored view spots the far distant rim. Here and here only does the Grand Canyon reveal the fullness of its meaning. 4. The Grand Canyon was discovered in 1540 by El Tavar, one of the captains of Cardinias, in charge of one of the expeditions of the Spanish explorer Díaz who was hunting for seven fabled cities of vast wealth. They reached the banks of a river, which seemed to be more than three or four leagues above the stream that flowed between them. It was seen in 1776 by a Spanish priest who sought a crossing and found one at a point far above the canyon. This still bears the name Vedo de los Padres. By 1840 it was probably known to the trappers who overran the country. In 1850 Lieutenant Whipple, surveying for a Pacific route, explored the Black Canyon and ascended the Grand Canyon to Diamond Creek. In 1857 Lieutenant Ives sent by the War Department to test the navigability of the Colorado ascended as far as the Virgin River in a steamboat which he had shipped in pieces from Philadelphia. From there he entered the Grand Canyon afoot, climbed to the rim, and making a detour, encountered the river again higher up. In 1867 James White was picked up below the Virgin River, lashed to floating logs. He said that his hunting party near the head of the Colorado River, attacked by Indians, had escaped upon a raft. This presently broke up in the rapids and his companions were lost. He lashed himself to the wreckage and was washed through the Grand Canyon. About this time Major John Wesley Powell, a schoolteacher who had lost an arm in the Civil War, determined to explore the great canyons of the Green and Colorado Rivers. Besides the immense benefit to science, the expedition promised a great adventure. Many lives had been lost in these canyons and wonderful were the tales told concerning them. Indians reported that huge cataracts were hidden in their depths and that in one place the river swept through an underground passage. Nevertheless, with the financial backing of the state institutions of Illinois and the Chicago Academy of Science, Powell got together a party of ten men with four open boats, provisions for ten months, and all necessary scientific instruments. He started above the canyons of the Green River on May 24, 1869. There are many canyons on the Green and Colorado Rivers. They vary in length from 8 to 150 miles, with walls successively rising from 1,300 to 3,500 feet in height. The climax of all, the Grand Canyon, is 217 miles long, with walls 6,000 feet in height. On August 17, when Powell and his adventurers reached the Grand Canyon, their rations had been reduced by upsets and other accidents to enough musty flour for ten days, plenty of coffee and a few dried apples. The bacon had spoiled. Most of the scientific instruments were in the bottom of the river. One boat was destroyed. The men were wet to the skin and unable to make a fire. In this plight they entered the Grand Canyon, somewhere in whose depths a great cataract had been reported. The story of the passage is too long to tell here. Chilled, hungry, and worn, they struggled through it. Often they were obliged to let their boats down steep rapids by ropes and clamber after them along the slippery precipices. Often there was nothing to do but to climb into their boats and run down long foaming slants around the corners of which death perhaps awaited. Many times they were upset and barely escaped with their lives. With no wraps or clothing that were not soaked with water, there were nights when they could not sleep for the cold. So the days passed and the food lessened to a few handfuls of wet flour. The dangers increased. Some falls were twenty feet in height. Finally three of the men determined to desert. They believed they could climb the walls and that their chances would be better with the Indians than with the canyon. Powell endeavored to dissuade them, but they were firm. He offered to divide his flour with them, but this they refused. These men, two Howlins, brothers, and William Dunn, climbed the canyon walls and were killed by Indians. Two or three days later Powell and the rest of his party emerged below the Grand Canyon where they found food and safety. Tut by the experience of this great adventure Powell made a second trip two years later which was a scientific achievement. Later on he became director of the United States Geological Survey. Since then the passage of the Grand Canyon has been made several times. Arby Stanton made it in 1889 in the course of a survey for a proposed railroad through the canyon. One of the leaders of the party was drowned. Five. The history of the Grand Canyon has been industriously collected. It remains for others to gather the legends. It is enough here to quote from Powell the Indian story of its origin. Long ago he writes, there was a great and wise chief who mourned the death of his wife and would not be comforted until Tavoatz, one of the Indian gods, came to him and told him that his wife was in a happier land and offered to take him there that he might see for himself. If upon his return he would cease to mourn. The great chief promised. Then Tavoatz made a trail through the mountains that intervened between that beautiful land, the balmy region of the great west, and this, the desert home of the poor Numa. This trail was the canyon gorge of the Colorado. Through it he led him, and when they had returned the deity exacted from the chief a promise that he would tell no one of the trail. Then he rolled a river into the gorge, a mad raging stream that shouldn't gulf any that might attempt to enter thereby. 6. The bill creating the Grand Canyon National Park passed Congress early in 1919 and was signed by President Wilson on February 26. This closed an intermittent campaign of 33 years, begun by President Harrison, then Senator from Indiana, in January 1886, to make a national park of the most opendous natural spectacle in the world. Politics, private interests, and the deliberation of governmental procedure were the causes of delay. A self-evident proposition from the beginning, it illustrates the enormous difficulties which confront those who labor to develop our national park system. The story is worth the telling. Senator Harrison's bill of 1886 met an instant response from the whole nation. It called for a national park 56 miles long and 69 miles wide. There was opposition from Arizona and the bill failed. In 1893 the Grand Canyon National Forest was created. In 1898, depredations and unlawful seizures of land having been reported, the Secretary of the Interior directed the land office to prepare a new national park bill. In 1899 the land office reported that the bill could not be drawn until the region was surveyed. It took the Geological Survey five years to make the survey. The bill was not prepared because meantime it was discovered that the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, now the Santa Fe, owned rights which first must be eliminated. Failing to become a national park, President Roosevelt proclaimed the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908. In 1909 a bill was introduced entitling Ralph H. Cameron to build a scenic railway along the canyon rim which created much adverse criticism and failed. In 1910 the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society proposed a bill to create the Grand Canyon in National Park of large size. The Geological Survey to which it was referred recommended a much smaller area. By the direction of President Taft Senator Flint introduced a national park bill which differed from both suggestions. The opposition of grazing interests threw it into the hands of conferees. In 1911 Senator Flint introduced the conferees bill but it was opposed by private interest and failed. Meantime the country became aroused. Patriotic societies petitioned for a national park and the National Federation of Women's Clubs began an agitation. The Department of the Interior prepared a map upon which to base a bill and for several years negotiated with the Forest Service which administered the Grand Canyon as a national monument concerning boundaries. Finally the boundaries were reduced to little more than the actual rim of the canyon and a bill was prepared with Senator Ash Hurst introduced in February 1917. It failed in committee in the House owing to opposition from Arizona. It was the same bill again introduced by Senator Ash Hurst in the new Congress two months later which finally passed the House and became a law in 1919 but it required a favoring resolution by the Arizona legislature to pave the way. Meantime many schemes were launched to utilize the Grand Canyon for private gain. It was plastered thickly with mining claims though the geological survey showed that it contained no minerals worth mining. Mining claims helped delay. Schemers sought capital to utilize its waters for power. Railroads were projected. Plans were drawn to run sightseeing cars across it on wire cables. These were the interest and many others which opposed the National Park. End of Part 25 Part 26 of the Book of the National Parks This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Book of the National Parks by Robert Sterling Yard The Rainbow of the Desert Zion National Monument Southern Utah Area 120 square miles When in the 70s Major J. W. Powell the daring adventurer of the Grand Canyon faced Salt Lake City on his return from one of his notable geological explorations of the Southwest he laid his course by a temple of rock lifting its opalescent shoulders against the eastern sky. His party first sighted it across 70 miles of a desert which rose in a series of Cyclopean steps. When climbing these they had seen the West Temple of the Virgin revealed in the glory of Vermilion body and shining white dome and had gazed between the glowing gates of Little Zion into the gorgeous valley within these scenery sated veterans of the Grand Canyon and the painted desert passed homeward profoundly impressed and planning quick return. No wonder that Brigham Young who had visited it many years before with a party of Mormons seeking a refuge in event of Indian raids or of exile from their Zion Salt Lake City had looked upon its glory as prophetic and named it Little Zion. Geologists found the spot a fruitful field of study. They found it also a masterpiece of desert beauty. Again we are impressed with the marvelous beauty of outline the infinite complication of these titanic buttes. Wrote F. S. Delenbow. Topographer of the Powell Party on his second visit. It is doubtful if in this respect the valley has its equal. Not even the Grand Canyon offers a more varied spectacle. Yet all is welded together in a superb ensemble. Nothing can exceed the wondrous beauty of Little Zion Canyon. Wrote C. E. Dutton. In its proportions it is about equal to Yosemite but in the nobility and beauty of its sculptures there is no comparison. It is Hyperion to a Seder. No wonder the fierce Mormon zealot who named it was reminded of the Great Zion on which his fervid thoughts were bent of houses not built with hands eternal in the heavens. And Dr. G. K. Gilbert whose intimate study of its recesses has become a geological classic declared it the most wonderful defile that it had been even his experience fortune to behold. Technical literature contains other outbursts of enthusiastic admiration, some of eloquence, hidden however among pages so incomprehensible to the average lover of the sublime in nature that the glory of Little Zion was lost in its very discovery. So remote did it lie from the usual lines of travel and traffic that though its importance resulted in its conservation as a national monument in 1909 it was six or seven years more before its fame as a spectacle of the First Order began to get about. The tales of adventurous explorers as usual were discounted. It was not until agencies seeking new tourist attractions sent parties to verify reports that the public gaze was centered upon the canyon's supreme loveliness. To picture Zion one must recall that the great plateau in which the Virgin River has sunk these canyons was once enormously higher than now. The erosion of hundreds of thousands or if you please millions of years has cut down and still is cutting down the plateau. These Cyclopean steps each step the thickness of a stratum or a series of strata of hardened sands mark progressive stages in the decomposition of the whole. Little Zion Canyon is an early stage in nature's process of leveling still another sandstone step that is all. This one fortunately of many gorgeous hues. From the top of this layer we may look down thousands of vertical feet into the painted canyon whose river still is sweeping out the sands that nature chisels from the cliffs. Or from the canyon's bottom we may look up thousands of feet to the cliffed and serrated top of the doomed plateau. These ornate precipices were carved by trickling water and tireless winds. These fluted and towered temples of master decoration were disclosed when watery chisels cut away the sands that formerly had merged them with the ancient rock. Just as the Lion of Lucerne was disclosed for the joy of the world when Thurvaldson's chisel chipped away the alpine rock surrounding its unformed image. The colors are even more extraordinary than the forms. The celebrated Vermilion Cliff which for more than a hundred miles streaks the desert landscape with vivid red here combines spectacularly with the White Cliff another famous desert feature. Two thousand feet of the red surmounted by a thousand feet of the white these constitute the body of color. But there are other colors. The Vermilion Cliff rests upon the so cold painted desert stratum three hundred and fifty feet of a more insistent red relieved by mauve and purple shale. That in turn rests upon a hundred feet of brown conglomerate streaked with gray the grave of reptiles whose bones have survived a million years or more. And that rests upon the greens and grays and yellows of the belted shales. Nor is this all. For far in the air above the wonderful White Cliff rise in places six hundred feet of drab shales and chocolate limestones intermix with crimson's whose escaping dye drips in broad vertical streaks across the glistening white. And even above that in places lie remnants of the mottled many colored beds of St. Elmo's shales and limestones in whose embrace a few hundred miles away lie embedded the bones of many monster dinosaurs of ages upon ages ago. Through these successive layers of sands and shales and limestones the deposits of a million years of Earth's evolution colored like a Roman sash glowing in the sun like a rainbow the Virgin River has cut a vertical section and out of its sides the reins of centuries of centuries have detached monster monoliths and temples of marvelous size and fantastic shape upon whose many angled surfaces water and wind have sculptured ten thousand fanciful designs and decorations. The way into this desert masterpiece of Southern Utah is a hundred miles of progressive preparation. From railroad to canyon there is not an unuseful mile or hour. It is as if all were planned step by step to make ready the mind of the traveler to receive the revelation with fullest comprehension. To one approaching who does not know the desert the motion picture on the screen of the car window is exciting in its mystery. These vast arid bottomlands of prehistoric Lake Bonneville girded by mountain groups and ranges as arid as the sands from which they lift their tawny sides provoke suggestive questions of the past. In this receptive mood the traveler reaches Lund and an automobile. The ride to Cedar City where he spends the night shows him the sage-dotted desert at close range. His horizon is one of bare rugged mountains. In front of him rise the Cyclopean steps in long irregular deeply indented sweeps. The vivid pink cliff which had it not long since been washed away from little Zion would have added another tear of color to its top. Here on the desert remains a distant horizon. The road climbs Lake Bonneville's southern shore and at Cedar City reaches the glorified sandstones. From Cedar City to the canyon one sweeps through Mormon settlements founded more than 60 years ago. A region of streamwatered valleys known of old as Dixie. The road is part of the Arrowhead Trail once in fact a historic trail now a motor highway between Salt Lake and Los Angeles. The valleys bloom. Pomegranates, figs, peaches, apricots, melons, walnuts and almonds reach a rare perfection. Cotton which Brigham Young started here as an experiment in 1861 is still grown. Lusty cottonwood trees line the banks of the Little Rivers. Cedars dot the valleys and cover thickly the lower hills. And everywhere on every side the arid cliffs close in. The pink cliff has been left behind but the vermilion cliff constantly appears. The white cliff enters and stays. Long stretches of road overlie one and another colored stratum. Presently the ground is prevailingly red with here and there reaches of mauve, yellow, green and pink. Cedar City proves to be a quaint straggling Mormon village with a touch of modern enterprise. South of Cedar City the villages lack the enterprise. The houses are of a gray composition resembling Adobe and many of them are half a century old and more. The lapidated square forts reminders of pioneer struggles with the Indians are seen here and there. Compact Mormon churches are in every settlement however small. The men are bearded, coatless and wear baggy trousers suggestive of Holland. Bronze and deliberate women who drive teams and work the fields with the men wear old-fashioned sun bonnets. Many of these people have never seen a railroad train. Newspapers are scarce and long past date. Here Mormonism of the older fashion is a living religion affecting the routine of daily life. Dixie is a land of plenty but it is a foreign land. It is reminiscent with many differences of an Algerian oasis. The traveler is immensely interested. Somehow these strange primitive villages these simple earnest God-fearing people merge into unreality with the desert the sage-dotted mountains the cedar-covered slopes the blooming valleys the colored sands and the vivid cliffs. Through Bellevue, Tocqueville the ruins of Virgin City Rockville and finally to Springdale winds the road. Meantime the traveler has speeded south under the hurricane cliff which is the ragged edge left when all the land west of it sank two thousand feet during some geologic time long past. He reaches the Virgin River where it emerges from the great cliffs in whose recesses it is born and whence it carries in its broad muddy surge the products of their steady disintegration. From here on swinging easterly upstream sensation hastens to its climax. Here the hurricane cliff sends aloft an impressive butte painted in slanting colors and capped with black basalt. Farther on a rugged promontory striped with vivid tints pushes out from the southern wall nearly to the river's brink. The cliffs on both sides of the river are carved from the stratum which geologists call the belted shales. Greenish greys, brownish yellows, many shades of bright red are prominent. It is hard to name a color or shade which is not represented in its horizontal bands. The eye tires and the mind flags in their presence writes Professor Willis T. Lee. To try to realize in an hour's time the beauty and variety of detail here presented is as useless as to try to grasp the thoughts expressed in whole rows of volumes by walking through a library. Far up the canyon which North Creek pushes through this banded cliff two towering cones of glistening white are well-named guardian angels of the stream which roars between their feet. Eagle crag, which Moran painted, looms into view. On the south appears the majestic massing of needle-pointed towers which Powell named the pinnacles of the Virgin. The spectacular confuses with its brilliant variations. At the confluence of the Virgin River and its North Fork known of old as the Perunaweep and the Mukundaweep the road sweeps northward up the Mukundaweep. There have been differing reports of the meaning of this word which gave the original name to the National Monument. It has been popularly accepted as meaning land of God but John R. Wallace of St. George Utah has traced it to its original Indian source. Mukundaweep he writes means land of the springs and Perunaweep land of the birds. Reaching Springdale at the base of the Vermilion cliff the traveler looks upstream to the Valley Mouth through which the river emerges from the cliffs and a spectacle without parallel meets his eye. Left of the gorgeous entrance rises the unbelievable West Temple of the Virgin and merging with it from behind loom the lofty towers of the Virgin. Opposite these and back from the canyon's eastern brink rises the loftier and even more majestic East Temple of the Virgin. Between them he sees a perspective of red and white walls, domes and pinnacles which thrills him with expectation. And so fully prepared in mind and spirit awed and exultant he enters Zion. Few natural objects which have been described so seldom have provoked such extravagant praise as the West Temple. It is seen from a foreground of gliding river cottonwood groves and talus slopes dotted with manzanita sage, cedars and blooming cactus. From a stairway of mingled yellows, reds, greys, mauves, purples and chocolate brown it springs abruptly four thousand feet. Its body is a brilliant red. Its upper third is white. It has the mass and proportions the dignity and grandeur of a cathedral. It is supremely difficult to realize that it was not designed so true to human conception are the upright form and mass of its central structure, the proportioning and modeling of its extensive wings and buttresses. On top of the lofty central rectangle rests above its glistening white a low, squared cap of deepest red. It is a temple in the full as well as the noblest sense of the word. The east temple which rises directly opposite and two miles back from the rim is a fitting companion. It is a thousand feet higher. Its central structure is a steep truncated cone capped like the West Temple. Its wings are separated half way down one in elongated pyramid and the other a true cone both of magnificent size and bulk but truly proportioned to the central mass. Phrase does not convey the suggestion of architectural calculation in both of these stupendous monuments. One can easily believe that the Mormon prophet in naming them saw the design creations of a personal deity. A more definite conception of nature's gigantic processes follows upon realization that these lofty structures once joined across the canyon stratum for stratum color for color. The rock that joined them disintegrated by the frosts and rains has passed down the muddy current of the virgin down the surging tide of the Colorado through the Grand Canyon and into the Pacific. Some part of these sands doubtless help to build the peninsula of lower California. Passing the gates the traveler stands in a trench of nearly perpendicular sides more than half a mile deep half a mile wide at the bottom and a mile wide from crest to crest. The proportions and measurements suggest Yosemite but there is little else in common. These walls blaze with color. On the west the streaked wall carved from the white cliff is stained with the drip from the red and drab and chocolate shales and limestones not yet wholly washed from its top. It is a vivid thing wonderfully eroded. Opposite is the brown wall rich in hue supporting three stupendous structures of gorgeous color two of which are known as the mountain of the sun and the watchman. Together they are the sentinels. Passing these across a plaza apparently broadened for their better presentation rise on the west the three patriarchs. Yosemite like in form height in bulk but not in personality or color. The brilliance of this wonder spot passes description. Here the canyon contracts and we come to the comfortable hotel camp terminal of the automobile journey. It is on the river side in a shady alcove of the east wall near a spring. Here horses may be had for exploration. A mile above the camp stands one of the most remarkable monoliths of the region. El Gobernado is a colossal truncated dome red below and white above. The white crown is heavily marked in two directions suggesting the web and wolf of drapery. Directly opposite a lesser monolith nevertheless gigantic is suggestively if sentimentally called angels landing. A natural bridge which is still in nature's workshop is one of the interesting spectacles of this vicinity. Its splendid arch is fully formed but the wall against which it rests its full length remains broken through in one spot only. How many thousands or hundreds of thousands of years will be required to wipe away the wall and leave the bridge complete is for those to guess who will. Here also is the valley end of a wire cable which passes upward twenty five hundred feet to cross a break in the wall to a forest on the mace's top. Lumber is Dixie's most hardly furnished need. For years sawn timbers have been cabled down into the valley and carted to the villages of the virgin river. In some respects the most fascinating part of Little Zion is still beyond. A mile above El Gobernado the river swings sharply west and doubles on itself. Raspberry bend is far nobler than its name implies and the great organ which the river here encircles exacts no imaginative effort. Beyond this the canyon narrows rapidly. The road has long since stopped and soon the trail stops. Presently the river now a shrunken stream concealing occasional quicksands offers the only footing. The walls are no less lofty no less richly colored and the weary traveler works his difficult way forward. There will come a time if he persists when he may stand at the bottom of a chasm more than two thousand feet deep and nearly touching the walls on either side look up and see no sky. At the water's edge the walls are perpendicular writes Dr. G. K. Gilbert of the U.S. Geological Survey who first described it but in the deeper parts they open out toward the top. As we entered and found our outlook of sky contracted as we had never before seen it between canyon cliffs I measured the aperture above and found it 35 degrees. We had thought this a minimum but soon discovered our error. Nearer and nearer the walls approached and our strip of blue narrowed down to 20 degrees then 10 and at last was even intercepted by the overhanging rocks. There was perhaps no point from which neither forward nor backward could we discover a patch of sky but many times our upward view was completely cut off by the interlocking of the walls which remaining nearly parallel to each other warped in and out as they ascended. Here he surprises the secret of the making of Zion. As a monument of denudation this chasm is an example of downward erosion by sand bearing water. The principle on which the cutting depends is almost identical with that of the marble saw but the sand grains instead of being embedded in rigid iron are carried by a flexible stream of water. By gravity they have been held against the bottom of the cut so that they should make it vertical. But the current has carried them in places against one side or the other and so far modified the influence of gravity that the cut undulates somewhat in its vertical section as well as in its horizontal. This then is how nature began on the original surface of the plateau perhaps with the output of a spring shower to dig this whole mighty spectacle for our enjoyment today. We may go further we may imagine the beginning of the titanic process that dug the millions of millions of chasms big and little contributing to the mighty Colorado that dug the Grand Canyon itself that reduced to the glorified thing it now is the enormous plateau of our great southwest which would have been many thousands of feet higher than the highest pinnacle of little Zion had not erosion more than counteracted the uplifting of the plateau. Little else need be said to complete this picture. The rains and melting snows of early spring produce Mesa top torrents which pour into the valley and hasten for a period the process of decorating the walls and leveling the plateau. So it happens that waterfalls of power and beauty then enrich this wondrous spectacle but this added beauty is not for the tourist who may come in comfort only after its disappearance but springs are many trickling from various levels in the walls they develop new tributary gorges gushing from the foundations they create alcoves and grottos which are in sharp contrast with their desert environment enriching by dampness the colors of the sandstone and decorating these refreshment places with trailing ferns and flowering growths in these we see the origin of the Indian name Mukuntuweep land of the springs the Indians however always stood in awe of little Zion they entered it but feared the night in 1918 President Wilson changed the name from Mukuntuweep to Zion at the same time he greatly enlarged the reservation Zion National Monument now includes a large area of great and varied desert magnificence including the sources and canyons of two other streams besides Mukuntuweep End of Part 26