Little Colorado River

“ The terrible mythical whirlpool at the innocent mouth of the Little Colorado was the end of the turmoil, though he said the canyon went on, the course of the river being exceedingly crooked, and shut in by precipices of white sand rock! There is no white “sand-rock” in the Grand Canyon. All through this terrific gorge wherein the river falls some eighteen hundred feet, White found a slow current and his troubles from rapids were over! For 217 miles of the worst piece of river in the world, he found no difficulty. ”

“ It would be vain recapitulation to tell just how many times each of the poor struggling communities had to rally back on the sands of the river bed to built up anew the structure of gravel and brush that must be depended upon, if bread were to be secured from the land. The Little Colorado is a treacherous stream at best, with a broad channel that wanders at will through the alluvial country that melts like sugar or salt at the touch of water. ”

“ Its highest elevation does not exceed 7,000 ft., which, with its southern location and mild climate, makes it well adapted to agriculture. The park is watered by the Rio Grande and its numerous tributaries, which flow in a southerly direction, and afford abundant water power. Other smaller parks, presenting similar features, are scattered through the mountains W. of the main range. Of this vast region little is known.—The river system of Colorado embraces the principal tributaries of the Rio Colorado, Rio Grande, Arkansas, Platte, and Smoky Hill and Republican forks of the Kansas. ”

“ It is with no little misgiving that we see the river enter these black, hard walls. At its very entrance we have to make a portage; then let down with lines past some ugly rocks. We run a mile or two farther, and then the rapids below can be seen.
About eleven o'clock we come to a place in the river which seems much worse than any we have yet met in all its course. A little creek comes down from the left. We land first on the right and clamber up over the granite pinnacles for a mile or two, but can see no way by which to let down, and to run it would be sure destruction. ”

“ If President Heber and Chief Engineer Rockwood had been aware of the fact that the Colorado was even then preparing to pour its waters into the Salton Sink, by making one of its semi-millennial changes of course, they might perhaps have fortified the western bank instead of cutting through it; but there was little or nothing to show the extreme instability of the conditions that were then determining the trend of the river across its delta, and the idea that it might burst through this intake and again turn the Valley into a fresh-water lake does not seem to have occurred to anyone. ”

“ Sometimes in new lands explorers like to have their own way. They went down the Colorado, after a party had examined the river a little above the mouth of the Bill Williams Fork, meeting with various bands of friendly natives, among whom we recognise the Mohaves and the Cocopas. Not far below where Oñate reached the Esperanza he entered the Great Colorado Valley and soon crossed the highest point attained by Alarçon in 1340, probably near the upper end of the valley. ”

“ It means that the First Granite Gorge is beginning, and this First Granite Gorge, in the Kaibab division of the canyon, less than fifty miles in length as the stream runs, contains the wildest, swiftest, steepest piece of river on this continent except a portion in Cataract Canyon. The declivity is tremendous. Between the Little Colorado and the Kanab the total fall is 890 feet, and the bulk of this drop occurs in the granite. In one stretch of ten miles the descent is 210 feet. All through this granite the character of the river is different from anything above. ”

“ So that, if the extreme rule of the common law were enforced, Oklahoma, having the same right to insist that there should be no diversion of the stream in Kansas for the purposes of irrigation that Kansas has in respect to Colorado, the result would be that the waters, except for the meager amount required for domestic purposes, would flow through eastern Colorado and Kansas of comparatively little advantage to either state, and both would lose the great benefit which comes from the use of the water for irrigation. The drainage area of the Arkansas river in Colorado is 26,000 suqare miles ”

“ We land, and camp on a sand beach, above its mouth, under a great, overspreading tree, with willow-shaped leaves.
August 16. We must dry our rations again to-day, and make oars.
The Colorado is never a clear stream, but for [Pg 142] the past three or four days it has been raining much of the time, and the floods, which are poured over the walls, have brought down great quantities of mud, making it exceedingly turbid now. The little affluent, which we have discovered here, is a clear, beautiful creek, or river, as it would be termed in this Western country, where streams are not abundant. ”

“ Very little irrigable land has been found, less than one-fourth of one per cent., as the tributaries of the Colorado are all very small and the great river itself runs at a profound depth below the general surface of the country, so that it cannot be used. Extensive and valuable grazing lands are included in the survey and some valuable forests of pine, spruce, and fir, the extent and characteristics of which have been carefully determined. ”

“ We will tell the Indians who live on the other side of the great river that we have seen Ka'purats, and that he is the Indians' friend. We will tell them he is Jacob's
322
CANYONS OF THE COLORADO.
friend. We are very poor. Look at our women and children; they are naked. We have no horses; we climb the rocks and our feet are sore. We live among rocks and they yield little food and many thorns. When the cold moons come, our children are hungry. We have not much to give ”

“ Lieutenant Wheeler several times claims the honour of naming it (1868-71) , but the name occurs on Lieutenant Ives’s map of 1858. This plateau breaks sharply along its south-west line to the lowland district, and on its north-westerly edge slopes to the Little Colorado. It bears a noble pine forest, and from its summit rise to over 12,000 feet the volcanic peaks of the San Francisco Mountains. Its northern edge is the Grand Canyon, which separates it from its kindred on the other side. ”

“ From the tiny rivulets of its snowy birth to the ferocious tidal bore where it dies in the sea, it wages a ceaseless battle as sublime as it is terrible and unique. Such is the great Colorado River of the West, rising amidst the fountains of the beautiful Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, where also are brought forth the gentler Columbia and the mighty, far-reaching Missouri. Whirling down ten thousand feet in some two thousand miles, it meets the hot level of the Red Sea, once the Sea of Cortes, now the Gulf of California, in tumult and turmoil. ”

“ The Colorado is almost the only other large river created from many tributaries, which debouches between the Columbia and the Isthmus,—and that rises east of the mathematical axis of the Rocky Mountains. The Yo-Semite valley is one of the cradles through which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach the ocean; its threading stream is the Merced ”

“ The Colorado River in flood is a terrible stream. Unlike the Eastern rivers, there are no populous cities—with apologies to Needles and Yuma—along its shores, to be inundated with the floods. Unlike the rivers of the South, few great agricultural districts spread across its bottoms. Along the upper seven hundred miles there are not a half-dozen ranches with twenty-five acres under cultivation. But if destructive power and untamed energy are terrible, the Colorado River, in flood, is a terrible stream. ”

“ The bottom lands of the Colorado in its course across Patagonia are fertile and wooded, but their area is too limited to support more than a small, scattered population.
COLORADO RIVER, a stream in the south-west of the United States of America, draining a part of the high and arid plateau between the Rocky mountains and the Sierra Nevada in California. The light rainfall scarcely suffices over much of the river’s course to make good the loss by evaporation from the waters drained from mountain snows at its source. ”

“ Equally untenable is the contention of Colorado that there are really two rivers, one commencing in the mountains of Colorado and terminating at or near the state line, and the other commencing at or near the place where the former ends, and, from springs and branches, starting a new stream to flow onward through Kansas and Oklahoma towards the Gulf of Mexico. From time immemorial the existence of a single continuous river has been recognized by geographers, explorers, and travelers. ”

“ The great Western wilderness was now no longer “unknown” to white men. By the year 1840 the American had traversed it throughout, excepting the canyons of the Colorado, which yet remained, at least below the mouth of Grand River, almost as much of a problem as before the fur trade was born. Like some antediluvian monster the wild torrent stretched a foaming barrier miles on miles from the mountains of the north to the seas of the south, fortified in a rock-bound lair, roaring defiance at conquistadore, padre, and trapper alike. ”

“ There are two grand divisions: the lowland or desert, below the Virgen, and the plateau, but the topography of the immediate river course separates itself into four parts, the Green River Valley, the canyon, the valley-canyon, and the alluvial. The canyon part is the longest, occupying about two-thirds of the whole, or about 1200 miles. It is cut mainly through the plateaus. The last of these southward is the Colorado, a vast upheaval reaching from the lower end of the Grand Canyon south-east to about where the 34th parallel crosses the western line of New Mexico. ”

“ It is too immense, too sublime, too unearthly for mere words to convey one iota of its might and majesty. One struggles with the futility of mere expression by words where such a spectacle is concerned and finds that all the known phrases and well-used artifices of speech are useless to convey to another the sense of infinite grandeur that only sight can appreciate—and that so feebly!
The Canyon is a titanic rift in the earth, over 200 miles in length. The Colorado River, hardly ever seen from its brinks, lies 6,000 feet below the surface of the plain through which it has cut. ”

“ It was one of those necessary places of refuge and meeting, established when the trappers were pursuing their extermination of the beaver, which once were so numerous in all the Western country. The river enters this park from the solitudes of Red Canyon, a splendid chasm, 25 miles long, 2500 feet deep, and abounding in plunging waters. The name is from the colour of the sandstone walls. Above it are three short canyons, Kingfisher, Horseshoe, and Flaming Gorge, aggregating about 10 miles. There are there no rapids worth mentioning, but the scenic beauty is entrancing. ”

“ The Virgen, Kanab, Paria, Escalante, Fremont, San Rafael, Price, and Uinta on the west, the Grand, White, Yampa, San Juan, and Colorado Chiquito on the east, have also cut for themselves such narrow winding gorges, or deep canyons. Every river entering these has cut another canyon; every lateral creek has cut a canyon; every brook runs in a canyon; every rill born of a shower and born again of a shower and living only during these showers has cut for itself a canyon ”

“ By a fundamental law of hydrostatics water always seeks its level and flows in the direction of least resistance. If water ever made the Grand Canon it had to climb a hill and cut its way through the backbone of the Buckskin mountains, which are not a range of peaks but a broad plateau of solid rock. Into this rock the canon is sunk more than a mile deep, from six to eighteen miles wide and over two hundred miles long.
In order to make the theory of water erosion tenable it is assumed that the Colorado river started in its incipiency like any other river. ”

“ The most serious problem with which engineers have to deal in the irrigation of arid land from a turbid river is the getting rid of silt, and this problem is a particularly difficult one in the Imperial Valley, owing to the immense amount of sediment that the irrigating water contains. The Colorado River, until after it passes the Grand Cañon, is almost everywhere a swift, turbulent stream, with great eroding capacity. ”

“ The Colorado River rises in the heart of the continent on the dividing ranges and ridges between the two oceans, drains thousands of snowy mountains through narrow or spacious valleys, and thence through canons of every color, sheer-walled and deep, all of which seem to be represented in this one grand canon of canons. ”

“ It receives a number of tributaries, chiefly from the south; among these are Sulphur Creek, and the Concho, San Saba, and Llano rivers. The chief towns on its course are Bay City, Wharton, Columbus, Lagrange, Bastrop, and Austin. It is about 900 miles long, and in winter is navigable for river steamboats to Austin. ”

“ A young man from New York City, with his companion, walked down the Bright Angel Trail to the Colo [Pg 160] rado River. Everybody knows, or should know, that the Colorado River is a most treacherous river. One glance at the sullen, silt-filled current tells that story. It seldom gives up its dead. ”

“ The ranges of the Colorado Rockies form rank upon rank of ridges and peaks, roughly north-south in trend, about 100 miles across from east to west, extending from the northern to the southern border of the state. Here, in mountain springs and lakes, are born the rivers of Colorado: the Platte, the Arkansas, the Yampa, the Colorado. Crags and cliffs tower above tree-covered slopes, the rocks always a dominant part of the landscape. The continental divide runs through the state along the summit ridges. West of the divide, all streams flow to the Colorado River and the Pacific ”