ground, Jim showed what his bridge looked like.

"An effort was made to reach the bridge in December. Unfortunately Jim
could not be located. On reaching the Navajo trading-post, Oljato,
nothing was known of such a bridge, and the truth of Jim's statement was
questioned.

"The trip was abandoned until August of the following year, when Mr.
Douglass organized a second party at Bluff, Utah, and under Jim's
guidance, left for the bridge. At Oljato the party was augmented by
Professor Cummings, and a party of college students, with John Wetherill
as packer, who were excavating ruins in the Navajo Indian Reservation.
As the uninhabited and unknown country of the bridge was reached,
travel became almost impossible. All equipment, save what was absolutely
indispensable, was discarded. The whole country was a maze of box
canyons, as though some turbulent sea had suddenly solidified in rock.
Only at a few favored points could the canyon walls be scaled even by
man, and still fewer where a horse might clamber. In the sloping
sandstone ledges footholds for the horses must be cut, and even then
they fell, until their loss seemed certain. After many adventures the
party arrived at 11 o'clock, A.M., August 14, 1909.

"Jim had indeed made good. Silhouetted against a turquoise sky was an
arch of rainbow shape, so delicately proportioned that it seemed as if
some great sculptor had hewn it from the rock. Its span of 270 feet
bridged a stream of clear, sparkling water, that flowed 310 feet below
its crest. The world's greatest natural bridge had been found as Jim had
described it. Beneath it, an ancient altar bore witness to the fact that
it was a sacred shrine of those archaic people, the builders of the
weird and mysterious cliff-castles seen in the Navajo National Monument.

"The crest of the bridge was reached by Mr. Douglass and his three
assistants, John R. English, Jean F. Rogerson, and Daniel Perkins, by
lowering themselves with ropes to the south abutment, and climbing its
arch. Probably they were the first human beings to reach it.

"No Indian name for the bridge was known, except such descriptive
generic terms as the Paiute 'The space under a horse's belly between its
fore and hind legs,' or the 'Hole in the rock' (nonnezoshi) of the
Navajo, neither of which was deemed appropriate. While the question of a
name was still being debated, there appeared in the sky, as if in
answer, a beautiful rainbow, the 'Barahoni' of the P