and other animals.

Then came the fire period with its darkening showers of ashes and
cinders and its vast floods of molten lava, making quite another Oregon
from the fair and fertile land of the preceding era. And again, while
yet the volcanic fires show signs of action in the smoke and flame of
the higher mountains, the whole region passes under the dominion of ice,
and from the frost and darkness and death of the Glacial Period, Oregon
has but recently emerged to the kindly warmth and life of today.

XXIV. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado

Happy nowadays is the tourist, with earth's wonders, new and old, spread
invitingly open before him, and a host of able workers as his slaves
making everything easy, padding plush about him, grading roads for him,
boring tunnels, moving hills out of his way, eager, like the Devil, to
show him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory and foolishness,
spiritualizing travel for him with lightning and steam, abolishing space
and time and almost everything else. Little children and tender,
pulpy people, as well as storm-seasoned explorers, may now go almost
everywhere in smooth comfort, cross oceans and deserts scarce accessible
to fishes and birds, and, dragged by steel horses, go up high mountains,
riding gloriously beneath starry showers of sparks, ascending like
Elijah in a whirlwind and chariot of fire.

First of the wonders of the great West to be brought within reach of the
tourist were the Yosemite and the Big Trees, on the completion of
the first transcontinental railway; next came the Yellowstone and
icy Alaska, by the northern roads; and last the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado, which, naturally the hardest to reach, has now become, by a
branch of the Santa Fe, the most accessible of all.

Of course, with this wonderful extension of steel ways through our
wildness there is loss as well as gain. Nearly all railroads are
bordered by belts of desolation. The finest wilderness perishes as if
stricken with pestilence. Bird and beast people, if not the dryads, are
frightened from the groves. Too often the groves also vanish, leaving
nothing but ashes. Fortunately, nature has a few big places beyond man's
power to spoil--the ocean, the two icy ends of the globe, and the Grand
Canyon.

When I first heard of the Santa Fe trains running to the edge of
the Grand Canyon of Arizona, I was troubled with thoughts of the
disenchantment likely to follow. But last winter, when