Contemplating The Columbia Sweeping From Forest To Forest,
Across Plain And Desert, One Is Led To Say Of It, As Did Byron Of The
Ocean, -
"Such as Creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now."
How ancient appear the crumbling basaltic monuments along its banks,
and the gray plains to the east of the Cascades! Nevertheless, the
river as well as its basin in anything like their present condition
are comparatively but of yesterday. Looming no further back in the
geological records than the Tertiary Period, the Oregon of that time
looks altogether strange in the few suggestive glimpses we may get of
it - forests in which palm trees wave their royal crowns, and strange
animals roaming beneath them or about the reedy margins of lakes, the
oreodon, the lophiodon, and several extinct species of the horse, the
camel, 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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 143 of 159
Words from 74062 to 74561
of 82482
