Ernest Ingersoll

“ Think of swinging a train round a curve of only thirty degrees, on a very stiff grade, and with a bridge directly in the center of the turn! That is what this audacious railway does every few hours in the “toe” of the Muleshoe. From our lonely night-gripped dot of a house on the wild hill side, we could see squarely facing us both the Cyclopean blaze of the fierce headlight, and the two watchful red eyes glaring scornfully from the rear platform; by that we knew that the train had doubled on its own length of only six cars. ”

“ Turning one’s back upon the town and looking toward the north and west, one sees the snow-crowned summit of the Collegiate range, with all the differences between Princeton and Harvard and Yale entirely eliminated by that distance which ever adds enchantment to the view. Closer at hand, and towering grandly into the sky, a tremendous watch-tower in the west, stands Shavano, while lesser peaks and nameless pinnacles cluster and crowd around. Great plains, broken by buttes, stretch away to the northward, but mountains and foothills circle round to the east and south and west. ”

“ Looking out from one of their houses, with a great dome of solid rock overhead, that echoed and re-echoed every word uttered with marvelous distinctness, and below them a steep descent of one hundred feet, to the broad, fertile valley of the Rio San Juan, covered with waving fields of maize and scattered groves of majestic cottonwoods, these old people, whom even the imagination can hardly clothe with reality, must have felt a sense of security that even the incursions of their barbarous foes could hardly have disturbed. ”

“ In this deep hollow only the noonday sun ever shines, and a narrow bank of snow lies against one side in the shadow of the cliff. Going up the Cañon, with the roar of the waters ahead and the wild path before one, the loftiness and savage wildness of the walls catch only a dizzying glance, but coming out, their sides seem to touch the heavens and to be measureless. The eye can hardly take in the vast height, and with the afternoon sun touching only the extreme tops, one realizes in what a crevice and fissure of the rocks the Cañon winds. ”

“ Twenty-eight miles north of Gunnison the narrow valley lets us into a snug little basin among the hills which border upon the Elk range, Slate river comes winding through it from the north, while Coal creek sweeps abruptly around a lofty spur at the left. Straight ahead, behind a green ridge, a white conical mountain stands challenging our admiration, and on our right a still nearer height rises like a mighty pyramid of gray stone from a richly verdant base. ”

“ He strives for language large enough to picture the heights that with ceaselessly growing altitude hasten to meet him. He searches his fancy after images and similitudes that shall help him comprehend and recall the swiftly crowding forms of Nature’s massive architecture. He taxes his eyes and mind and memory to see and preserve, until he can have leisure to study this exhibition of the depth and breadth of the barrier that so long has loomed before him in silent majesty, yet for which the world has found no better name than the Rocky mountains. ”

“ The station, with its half dozen accompanying houses, all owned and occupied by those in the service of the railway, stands in the midst of acres of sunflowers, which all summer long spread their yellow disks to the full gaze of the sun, and dare him to outshine them. I have seen sunflowers before, but never in such masses and splendor of tone as here. Near by one catches sight of the green of the leaves and stems between, like the mottled plumage of some canaries, while the mass of chrome-yellow atop is picked off with maroon dots of seed-centers. ”

“ Whisking round the curves, rattling through long tunnels, dodging out into the sunlight to catch a glimpse of a sparkling waterfall, or a bit of plain seen away down the cañon, then back again into the tunnel, where gophers and chip-munks and cotton tails were continually perking up their heads and then scuttling into some small cave of refuge as we rushed past—on and on, down and down in the face of the stiff breeze and under lofty walls, without an instant’s check, until we glided into the little terminus, just twenty-five minutes out of Alta! ”

“ Yet, as though Nature meant to teach that a bit of motion,—a suggestion of glee was needed to relieve the sombreness of utter immobility and grandeur however shapely, she has led to the sunlight by a crevice in the upper part of the eastern wall that we cannot see, a brisk torrent draining the snowfields of some distant plateau. This little stream, thus beguiled by the fair channel that led it through the spruce woods above, has no time to think of its fate, but is flung out over the sheer precipice eighty feet into the valley below. ”

“ Like Veta mountain, which it closely resembles, this peak is of white volcanic rock that has decomposed into small blocks. The sides then are loose “slides,” as steep as the fragmentary stuff will lie, and the top is a narrow summit with smooth, rounded outlines. We are only a few hundred feet from the topmost timber, yet the bald white summit rears its head to almost unmeasured heights above, and claims our admiration by its simple majesty, far more than does the broken, cliff-furnished upthrust of Exchequer peak opposite, though its black head is held quite as high. ”

“ Though the auditorium in front is rather narrow for a large audience, the platform is grand, and may be reached without great difficulty. Music sounds finely as it rolls down from the overhanging sounding-board of stone. From the platform deep cavernous recesses are seen at the sides, which time has wrought, but which are invisible from below. Moreover, the action of water slowly percolating through the back walls, carrying lime and spar in solution, has coated them with crystals, which gleam in sparkling beauty when the sunlight touches them early in the day. ”

“ The descent from the Divide is rapid, and our attention is absorbed by the swiftly changing panorama. Close by are the mountains—their snowy pyramids holding entranced your eyes from far, far out on the plains. “In variety and harmony of form,” said Bayard Taylor of them: “in effect against the dark blue sky, in breadth and grandeur, I know of no external picture of the Alps which can be placed beside it. If you could take away the valley of the Rhone, and unite the Alps of Savoy with the Bernese Oberland, you might obtain a tolerable idea of this view of the Rocky Mountains.” ”

“ All about us are the never-silent pines, and the breezes that whisper among their rugged branches blow laden with balsamic odors. Close by is the Rio Chama, hidden between dense and continuous thickets, through which the cattle can tell you of winding and mysterious paths. Everything in the landscape is soft and peaceful. The grass lies green and tender; the rounded clusters of willows, blending with the glowing masses of poplar behind them, bright in their new autumn colors, make no sharp line against the pine copse, nor this against the swelling, gaily-clothed background of the hills above. ”

“ It is the repose of utter silence and quietude, a netherworld only half lighted by the worn-out moon. Yet it has a fearful beauty, found in the magnitude of the space—the grandeur of the huge rocky masses faintly but continuously outlined against the bright sky north of us—the wide realms of gray darkness southward—the marvelous brilliance of the moon—the luminous glory of the overspreading dome, unbroken from horizon to horizon, almost as at sea, and so seeming really a part of the globe and not an external thing. ”

“ Prospectors went everywhere seeking for carbonates, radiating from this center up all the gulches, and over the foot-hills, delving almost everywhere at a venture. One day, at a hitherto unheard-of point, wealth comes up by the bucketful out of the deep narrow hole, that has been pierced so unostentatiously. Instantly the transformation begins, and the lately green hill-side, refreshing to the townsman’s eye, becomes forlorn in its ragged exposure of rock and soil where the forest has been swept away, while trial-mines grow as thickly upon its surface as pits on the rind of a strawberry. ”

“ A mile or so above Wasatch station, the tramway entered a snow-shed; and with momentary exceptions, it never got out of it for seven miles. To the sight-seer this was discouraging; but it was compensated by the coolness, for in the stillness of the cañon, the sunshine, reflected from the dazzling walls, was fiercely hot, and our occasional emergences into it was like passing before the door of a blast furnace. These sheds are said to have cost one hundred thousand dollars, though the timber was close at hand and sawed in the cañon. ”

“ Far above and on all sides I see nothing but fragments of rocks. For centuries, wind, frost, rain and snow have been hard at work leveling the mountains. They have broken up the hard masses of yellowish white trachyte, and the dikes of black basalt into small pieces—some as minute as walnuts, but most of them much larger, with sharp-pointed edges that cut my feet. Across these vast fields the wild sheep, thinking nothing of jumping and gamboling over such steep slopes of broken stones, have made trails that cross and criss-cross everywhere. ”

“ Just east of the Grand are the finest cliffs of all,—great piles of ponderous masonry, fit for the bulwarks of a world, each massive block, a hundred feet or so square, set firmly upon its underlying tier, and the whole rising two or three thousand feet in majestic proportions and colors that please by their softness and harmony. Past these we roll slowly out upon the longest bridge in the state—950 feet—spanning the swift yellow flood of the Grand river just above where the Gunnison enters, and find ourselves at Grand Junction. ”

“ Beyond, for miles and miles, the country seems to have been one continuous wheat-field, for the golden stubble stretches in vast unfenced spaces, and we can count dozens of huge yellow stacks that have been reaped. A long ridge of dry gravel is traversed, a vista of valley land, filled full of groves, and orchards, market gardens and neat houses, opens at the base of high rocky walls and the locomotive gives its last long shriek, for this is Ogden, the terminus of our westward jaunt,—771 miles from Denver, 2,500 miles from New York, 864 miles from San Francisco. ”

“ Growing so close to the water that they are reflected in its depths, are sweet-smelling trees, tall, graceful, luxuriant, but in winter they bend beneath the snow that clings to them. Reaching to the top of the hills and completely covering them, are tangled masses of brush, pushed aside at times by forests of pines and torn asunder in places by the rocks that have lost their balance on some far summit and been rolled to the river below. ”

“ What a voyage was that of Powell’s! The fantastic architecture of the Alcove foothills, with the gleaming points of the Uinta range in the south; the ever-changing panorama of the badlands—scenery for Hades; the vermillion gateway opened through the snow-capped mountains, called Flaming Gorge, where lies a vast amphi-theatre, each step built of naked red sandstone, and a glacis clothed with verdure! Then the cautious advance, after letting the unladen boats down with ropes over foaming rapids ”

“ Following the river, the valley narrows into a ravine, and some interesting masses of broken volcanic rocks, injected edgewise into the general sandstone strata, attract the eye.
It is the far-away landscape, nevertheless, that holds attention as we look backward. Rising above the level of the plain upon which the city is built, you can span with your vision hills and mesas southward, and behold “striking up the azure” a vast length of the ever-magnificent San Juan mountains,—the same glorious pinnacles that towered about us, near at hand, in Baker’s park. ”

“ How narrow apparently are these curved and smooth embankments that carry us across the ravines, and how spidery look the firmly-braced bridges that span the torrents! All the way the road-bed is heaped up or dug out artificially. It is merely a shelf near the summit. It hugs the wall like a chamois-stalker, creeping stealthily out to the end of and around each projecting spur; it explores every in-bending gulch, boldly strides across the water channels, and walks undismayed upon the utmost verge, where rough cliffs overhang it, and the gulf sinks away hundreds of feet beneath. ”

“ The stream is still quiet, and we glide along through a strange, wierd, grand region. The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock—cliffs of rock; tables of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms. Rocks everywhere and no vegetation; no soil; no sand. In long gentle curves the river winds about these rocks. When speaking of these we must not conceive of piles of bowlders, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet ”

“ Pleasant houses, surrounded by trees, stand in the midst of wide fields of grain and low-lying meadows of natural hay. The cliffs still rise hundreds of feet high and are redder even than those above,—as brightly vermillioned as the crest of the treasure-mountain I have compared to a cardinal’s hat. Those on the eastern side (we are heading squarely northward) are sparsely wooded with spruces and cedars that get a foothold on the rocky shelves and lean outward craving the light; those on the left are almost bare, even of herbage. ”

“ Yet here are masses many hundreds of feet high and wide, that have been riven as I might halve a piece of clay. You may say it was done thus, or so. No matter, the impression of stupendous power remains and imprints itself deeply on the mind. Here for miles we pass between escarpments of rock, a thousand, fifteen hundred—ay, here and there more than two thousand feet high. This is not a valley between mountains with sloping sides slowly worn away. ”