Titan of Chasms/Greatest Thing
The Greatest Thing in the World
By Charles F. Lummis
“The greatest thing in the world.” That is a large phrase and an over-worked one, and hardened travelers do not take it lightly upon the tongue. Noticeably it is most glibly in use with those but lately, and for the first time, wandered beyond their native state or county, and as every province has its own local brag of biggest things, the too credulous tourist will find a superlative everywhere. And superlatives are unsafe without wide horizons of comparison.
Yet in every sort there is, of course, somewhere “the biggest thing in the world” of its kind, It is a good word, when spoken in season and not abused in careless ignorance.
I believe there is and can be no dispute that the term applies literally to several things in the immediate region of the Grand Canyon of Arizona. As I have more than once written (and it never yet has been controverted), probably no other equal area on earth contains so many supreme marvels of so many kinds—so many astounding sights, so many masterpieces of Nature’s handiwork, so vast and conclusive an encyclopedia of the world-building processes. So impressive monuments of prehistoric man, so many triumphs of man still in the tribal relation—as what I have called the Southwestern Wonderland. This includes a large part of New Mexico and Arizona, the area which geographically and ethnographically we may count as the Grand Canyon region. Let me mention a few wonders:
The largest and by far the most beautiful of all petrified forests, with several hundred square miles whose surface is carpeted with agate chips and dotted with agate trunks two to four feet in diameter; and just across one valley a buried “forest” whose huge silicified—not agatized—logs show their ends under fifty feet of sandstone.
The largest natural bridge in the world—200 feet high, over 500 feet span, and over 600 feet wide, up and down stream, and with an orchard on its top and miles of stalactite caves under its abutments.
The largest variety and display of geologically recent volcanic action in North America; with 60-mile lava flows, 1,500-foot blankets of creamy tufa cut by scores of canyons; hundreds of craters and thousands of square miles of lava beds, basalt, and cinders, and so much “volcanic glass” (obsidian) that it was the chief tool of the prehistoric population.
The largest and the most impressive villages of cave-dwellings in the world, most of them already abandoned “when the world-seeking Genoese” sailed.
The peerless and many-storied cliff-dwellings—castles and forts and homes in the face of wild precipices or upon their tops—an aboriginal architecture as remarkable as any in any land.
The twenty-six strange communal town republics of the descendants of the “cliff-dwellers,” the modern Pueblos; some in fertile valleys, some (like Acoma and Moki) perched on barren and dizzy cliff tops. The strange dances, rites, dress, and customs of this ancient people who had solved the problem of irrigation, 6-story house building, and clean self-government, and even women’s rights—long before Columbus was born.
The noblest Caucasian ruins in America, north of Mexico—the great stone and adobe churches reared by Franciscan missionaries, near three centuries ago, a thousand miles from the ocean, in the heart of the Southwest.
Some of the most notable tribes of savage nomads—like the Navajos, whose blankets and silver work are pre-eminent, and the Apaches, who, man for man, have been probably the most successful warriors in history.
All these, and a great deal more, make the Southwest a wonderland without a parallel, There are ruins as striking as the storied ones along the Rhine, and far more remarkable, There are peoples as picturesque as any in the Orient, and as romantic as the Aztecs and the Incas of whom we have learned such gilded fables, and there are natural wonders which have no peers whatever.
At the head of the list stands the Grand Canyon of the Colorado; whether it is the “greatest wonder of the world” depends a little on our definition of “wonder.” Possibly it is no more wonderful than the fact that so tiny a fraction of the people who confess themselves the smartest in the world have ever seen it. As a people we dodder abroad to see scenery incomparably inferior.
But beyond peradventure it is the greatest chasm in the world, and the most superb. Enough globe-trotters have seen it to establish that fact. Many have come cynically prepared to be disappointed; to find it overdrawn and really not so stupendous as something else. It is, after all, a hard test that so be-bragged a wonder must endure under the critical scrutiny of them that have seen the earth and the fullness thereof. But I never knew the most self-satisfied veteran traveler to be disappointed in the Grand Canyon, or to patronize it. On the contrary, this is the very class of men who can best comprehend it, and I have seen them fairly break down in its awful presence.
I do not know the Himalayas except by photograph and the testimony of men who have explored and climbed them, and who found the Grand Canyon an absolutely new experience. But I know the American continents pretty well, and have tramped their mountains, including the Andes—the next highest mountains in the world, after half a dozen of the Himalayas—and of all the famous quebradas of the Andes there is not one that would count 5 per cent on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. For all their 25,000-foot peaks, their blue-white glaciers, imminent above the bald plateau, and green little bolsones (“pocket valleys”) of Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador; for all their tremendous active volcanoes, like Saugay and Cotopaxi; for all an earthquake activity beside which the “shake” at Charleston was mere paper-doll play; for all the steepest gradients in the world (and Peru is the only place in the world where a river falls 17,000 feet in 100 miles)—in all that marvelous 3,000-mile procession of giantism there is not one canyon which any sane person would for an instant compare with that titanic gash that the Colorado has chiseled through a comparatively flat upland. Nor is there anything remotely approaching it in all the New World. So much I can say at first hand. As for the Old World, the explorer who shall find a gorge there one-half as great will win undying fame.
The quebrada of the Apu-Rimac is a marvel of the Andes, with its vertiginous depths and its suspension bridge of wild vines. The Grand Canyon of th Arkansas, in Colorado, is a noble little slit in the mountains. The Franconia and White Mountain notches in New Hampshire are beautiful. The Yosemite and the Yellowstone canyons surpass the world, each in its way. But if all of these were hung up on the opposite wall of the Grand Canyon from you the chances are fifty to one that you could not tell t’other from which, nor any of them from the hundreds of other canyons which rib that vast vertebrate gorge. If the falls of Niagara were installed in the Grand Canyon between your visits and you knew it by the newspapers—next time you stood on that dizzy rimrock you would probably need good field-glasses and much patience before you could locate that cataract which in its place looks pretty big. If Mount Washington were plucked up bodily by the roots—not from where you see it, but from sea-level—and carefully set down in the Grand Canyon, you probably would not notice it next morning, unless its dull colors distinguished it in that innumerable congress of larger and painted giants.
All this, which is literally true, is a mere trifle of what might be said in trying to fix a standard of comparison for the Grand Canyon. But I fancy there is no standard adjustable to the human mind. You may compare all you will—eloquently and from wide experience, and at last all similes fail. The Grand Canyon is just the Grand Canyon, and that is all you can say. I never have seen anyone who was prepared for it. I never have seen anyone who could grasp it in a week’s hard exploration; nor anyone, except some rare Philistine, who could even think he had grasped it. I have seen people rave over it; better people struck dumb with it, even strong men who cried over but I have never yet seen the man or woman that expected it.
It adds seriously to the scientific wonder and the universal impressiveness of this unparalleled chasm that it is not in some stupendous mountain range, but in a vast, arid, lofty floor of nearly 100,000 square miles—as it were, a crack in the upper story of the continent. There is no preparation for it. Unless you had been told, you would no more dream that out yonder amid the pines the flat earth is slashed to its very bowels, than you would expect to find an iceberg in Broadway. With a very ordinary running jump from the spot where you get your first glimpse of the canyon you could go down 2,000 feet without touching. It is sudden as a well.
But it is no mere cleft. It is a terrific trough 6,000 to 7,000 fect deep, ten to twenty miles wide, hundreds of miles long, peopled with hundreds of peaks taller than any mountain east of the Rockies, yet not one of them with its head so high as your feet, and all ablaze with such color as no eastern or European landscape ever knew, even in the Alpen-glow. And as you sit upon the brink the divine scene-shifters give you a new canyon every hour. With each degree of the sun’s course the great countersunk mountains we have been watching fade away, and new ones, as terrific, are carved by the westering shadows. It is like a dissection of the whole cosmogony. And the purple shadows, the dazzling lights, the thunderstorms and snowstorms, the clouds and the rainbows that shift and drift in that vast subterranean arena below your feet! And amid those enchanted towers and castles which the vastness of the scale leads you to call “rocks,” but which are in fact as big above the river-bed as the Rockies from Denver, and bigger than Mount Washington from Fabyan’s or the Glen!
The Grand Canyon country is not only the hugest, but the most varied and instructive example on earth of one of the chief factors of earth-building—erosion, It is the mesa country—the Land of Tables. Nowhere else on the footstool is there such an example of deep-gnawing water or of water high-carving. The sandstone mesas of the Southwest, the terracing of canyon walls, the castellation, battlementing, and cliff making, the cutting down of a whole landscape except its precipitous islands of flat-topped rock, the thin lava table-cloths on tables 100 feet high—these are a few of the things which make the Southwest wonderful alike to the scientist and the mere sight-seer.
That the canyon is not “too hard” is perhaps sufficiently indicated by the fact that I have taken thither ladies and children and men in their seventies, when the easiest way to get there was by a 70-mile stage ride, and that at six years old my little girl walked all the way from rim to bottom of canyon and came back on a horse the same day, and was nest morning ready to go on a long tramp along the rim.
The North Wall from Grand Scenic Divide