another
canon; every lateral creek has also cut another canon; every brook runs
in a canon; every rill born of a shower and living only in the showers,
has cut for itself a canon; so that the whole upper portion of the basin
of the Colorado is traversed by a labyrinth of these deep gorges. About
the basin are mountains; within the basin are canon gorges; the
stretches of land from brink to brink are of naked rock or of drifting
sands, with here and there lines of volcanic cones, and of black scoria
and ashes scattered about."

Of late years thousands of people have been attracted to this great
canon, although but very few have succeeded in exploring its entire
length. Few, indeed, have been able to pass along the balcony of the
canon, and to gaze up at the countless wonders of nature, piled one
above the other, apparently up to the very region of the clouds. The
common notion of a canon, as Captain C. E. Dutton tells us, is that of a
deep, narrow gash in the earth, with nearly vertical walls, like a great
and neatly cut trench. There are hundreds of chasms in the plateau
country which answer very well to this notion. It is, however,
unfortunate that the stupendous passway for the Colorado River through
the Kaibabs was ever called a canon, for the name identified it with the
baser conception. At places the distance across the chasm to the nearest
point on the summit of the opposite wall is about seven miles. A more
correct statement of the general width would be from eleven to twelve
miles. It is hence somewhat unfortunate that there is a prevalent idea,
in some way, that an essential part of the grandeur of the Grand Canon
is the narrowness of its defile.

As Major Powell expresses it, there are rather a series of canons, than
one huge one. Wherever the river has cut its way through the sandstones,
marbles and granites of the Kaibab Mountains, beautiful and
awe-inspiring pictures are seen, while above there are domes and peaks,
some of red sandstone and some of snowy whiteness. Cataract Canon alone
is forty-one miles long, and has seventy-five cataracts and rapids, of
which fifty-seven are within a space of nineteen miles. A journey along
the bank of a river with a waterfall every twenty feet, on the average,
is no joke, and only the hardiest men have been able to accomplish it.
In the spring of 1889, the survey party of a projected railroad from
Grand Junction to the Gulf of California, made this journey, and from
i