Here at Hance's river camp or a few miles above it brave Powell and his
brave men passed their first night in the canon on their adventurous
voyage of discovery thirty-three years ago. They faced a thousand dangers,
open or hidden, now in their boats gladly sliding down swift, smooth
reaches, now rolled over and over in back-combing surges of rough, roaring
cataracts, sucked under in eddies, swimming like beavers, tossed and beaten
like castaway drift--stout-hearted, undaunted, doing their work through it
all. After a month of this they floated smoothly out of the dark, gloomy,
roaring abyss into light and safety two hundred miles below. As the flood
rushes past us, heavy-laden with desert mud, we naturally think of its
sources, its countless silvery branches outspread on thousands of snowy
mountains along the crest of the continent, and the life of them, the
beauty of them, their history and romance. Its topmost springs are far
north and east in Wyoming and Colorado, on the snowy Wind River, Front,
Park, and Sawatch ranges, dividing the two ocean waters, and the Elk,
Wasatch, Uinta, and innumerable spurs streaked with streams, made famous
by early explorers and hunters. It is a river of rivers--the Du Chesne,
San Rafael, Yampa, Dolores, Gunnison, Cotchetopa, Uncompahgre, Eagle,
and Roaring rivers, the Green and the Grand, and scores of others with
branches innumerable, as mad and glad a band as ever sang on mountains,
descending in glory of foam and spray from snow-banks and glaciers through
their rocky moraine-dammed, beaver-dammed channels.
Pages:
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39