The Romance of the Colorado River. Frederick Samuel DellenbaughЧитать онлайн книгу.

THE ROMANCE OF THE COLORADO RIVER

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER I.

       Table of Contents

      The Secret of the Gulf—Ulloa, 1539, One of the Captains of Cortes, Almost Solves it, but Turns Back without Discovering—Alarcon, 1540, Conquers.

      In every country the great, rivers have presented attractive pathways for interior exploration—gateways for settlement. Eventually they have grown to be highroads where the rich cargoes of development, profiting by favouring tides, floated to the outer world. Man, during all his wanderings in the struggle for subsistence, has universally found them his friends and allies. They have yielded to him as a conquering stranger; they have at last become for him foster-parents. Their verdant banks have sheltered and protected him; their skies have smiled upon his crops. With grateful memories, therefore, is clothed for us the sound of such river names as Thames, Danube, Hudson, Mississippi. Through the centuries their kindly waters have borne down ancestral argosies of profit without number, establishing thus the wealth and happiness of the people. Well have rivers been termed the "Arteries of Commerce"; well, also, may they be considered the binding links of civilisation.

      Then, by contrast, it is all the more remarkable to meet with one great river which is none of these helpful things, but which, on the contrary, is a veritable dragon, loud in its dangerous lair, defiant, fierce, opposing utility everywhere, refusing absolutely to be bridled by Commerce, perpetuating a wilderness, prohibiting mankind's encroachments, and in its immediate tide presenting a formidable host of snarling waters whose angry roar, reverberating wildly league after league between giant rock-walls carved through the bowels of the earth, heralds the impossibility of human conquest and smothers hope. From the tiny rivulets of its snowy birth to the ferocious tidal bore where it dies in the sea, it wages a ceaseless battle as sublime as it is terrible and unique. Such is the great Colorado River of the West, rising amidst the fountains of the beautiful Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, where also are brought forth the gentler Columbia and the mighty, far-reaching Missouri. Whirling down ten thousand feet in some two thousand miles, it meets the hot level of the Red Sea, once the Sea of Cortes, now the Gulf of California, in tumult and turmoil. In this long run it is cliff bound nine-tenths of the way, and the whole country drained by it and its tributaries has been wrought by the waters and winds of ages into multitudinous plateaus and canyons. The canyons of its tributaries often rival in grandeur those of the main stream itself, and the tributaries receive other canyons equally magnificent, so that we see here a stupendous system of gorges and tributary gorges, which, even now bewildering, were to the early pioneer practically prohibitory. Water is the master sculptor in this weird, wonderful land, yet one could there die easily of thirst. Notwithstanding the gigantic work accomplished, water, except on the river, is scarce. Often for months the soil of the valleys and plains never feels rain; even dew is unknown. In this arid region much of the vegetation is set with thorns, and some of the animals are made to match the vegetation. A knowledge of this forbidding area, now robbed of some of its old terrors by the facilities in transportation, has been finally gained only by a long series of persistent efforts, attended by dangers, privations, reverses, discouragements, and disasters innumerable. The Amerind,* the red man, roamed its wild valleys. Some tribes built stone houses whose ruins are now found overlooking its waters, even in the depths of the Grand Canyon itself, or in the cliffs along the more accessible tributaries, cultivating in the bottoms their crops. Lands were also tilled along the extreme lower reaches, where the great rock-walls fall back and alluvial soils border the stream. Here and there the Amerind also crossed it, when occasion required, on the great intertribal highways which are found in all districts, but it was neither one thing nor another to him.

      *This name is a substitute for the misnomer "Indian." Its use avoids

      confusion.

      So the river rolled on through its solemn canyons in primeval freedom, unvexed by the tampering and meddling of man. The Spaniards, after the picturesque conquest of the luckless Aztecs, were eagerly searching for new fields of profitable battle, and then they dreamed of finding among the mysteries of the alluring northland, stretching so far away into the Unknown, a repetition of towns as populous, as wealthy in pure gold, as those of the valley of Mexico whose despoiled treasures had fired the cupidity of Europe and had crammed the strong boxes of the Spanish king. And there might be towns even richer! Who could say? An Amerind named Tejo, who belonged to Guzman when he was president of New Spain, that is, about 1530, told of journeys he had made with his father, when a boy, to trade in the far north where he saw very large villages like Mexico, especially seven large towns full of silver-workers, forty days' journey through the wilderness. This welcome story was fuel to the fire. Guzman organised a party and started for these wonderful seven cities, but numerous difficulties prevented the fulfilment of his plans, and caused a halt after traversing but a small portion of the distance. Cortes had now also returned from a visit to Spain, and he and Guzman were at the point of the sword. Then shortly arrived from the north (1536), after incredible wanderings between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande, that man of wonderful endurance, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca,* with his surviving companions, Dorantes, Maldonado, and Estevan. The latter, a negro, was afterwards very prominent by his connection with the fatal expedition sent out under the Friar Marcos to investigate the north country. The negro, if not the other men, gave a highly colored account of the lands they had traversed, and especially of what they had heard, so that more fuel was added to the fire, and the desire to explore the mysteries burned into execution. Cortes, harassed by his numerous enemies in Mexico and Spain, determined on a new effort to carry out his cherished plan of reaping further glories in the fascinating regions of the north so full of possibilities. There consequently sailed from Acapulco, July 8, 1539, a fleet of three vessels under Francisco de Ulloa. Cortes was prevented by circumstances from going with this expedition. After many difficulties Ulloa at length found himself at the very head of the Sea of Cortes in shallow water.

      * For a full account of the experiences of Alvar Nunez, see the

      translation of Buckingham Smith. Also Bandolier, Contributions to the

      History of the Southwestern Portions of the United States.

      "And thus sailing [he writes] we always found more shallow water, and the sea thick, black, and very muddy, and came at length into five fathom water; and seeing this we determined to pass over to the land which we had seen on the other side, and here likewise we found as little depth or less, whereupon we rode all night in five fathom water, and we perceived the sea to run with so great a rage into the land that it was a thing much to be marveled at; and with the like fury it returned back again with the ebb, during which time we found eleven fathom water, and the flood and ebb continued from five to six hours. The next day the captain and the pilot went up to the ship's top and saw all the land full of sand in a great round compass and joining itself with the other shore; and it was so low that whereas we were a league from the same we could not discern it, and it seemed there was an inlet of the mouths of certain lakes, whereby the sea went in and out. There were divers opinions amongst us, and some thought that that current entered into these lakes, and also that some great river there might be the cause thereof."*

      * From Hakluyt's Voyages. The spelling has been modernised.

      This seems to have been the very first visit of Europeans to the mouth of the Colorado, but as Ulloa did not see the river, and only surmised that there might be one there, it cannot be considered in any way a discovery. It has been supposed by some that Friar Juan de la Asumpcion, in 1538, might have reached the Colorado in his deep river which he could not cross, but this river was more likely a branch of the Yaqui, for the friar was told that ten days beyond, to the north, there was another larger river settled