Beyond The Hundredth Meridian Part 5

Nothing came of that, neither book nor articles. Either Powell had no time then to write them, or decided to wait until he could satisfy the request that both Houghton and Alden had made for a full-sized ma.n.u.script. On April 13 Alden returned the ma.n.u.script12 and photographs and Powell apparently did nothing more about them for over a year, leaving the field to Beaman. Beaman's book eventually landed in and photographs and Powell apparently did nothing more about them for over a year, leaving the field to Beaman. Beaman's book eventually landed in Appleton's Journal, Appleton's Journal, which printed it in seven installments during April and May, 1874. Its appearance may have had something to do with Powell's decision to omit all mention of the second expedition from his own book. which printed it in seven installments during April and May, 1874. Its appearance may have had something to do with Powell's decision to omit all mention of the second expedition from his own book.

But it did not discourage him from trying to publish in a popular journal. On July 17, 1874, he signed an elaborate contract 13 13 with Richard Watson Gilder of with Richard Watson Gilder of Scribner's Scribner's which did credit both to Gilder's eye for publishing innovations and Powell's knack of carrying water on both shoulders. Scribner's agreed to pay Major Powell $500 for three or four articles plus twelve engravings on wood which Powell was to supply. But in addition to these twelve pictures, which did credit both to Gilder's eye for publishing innovations and Powell's knack of carrying water on both shoulders. Scribner's agreed to pay Major Powell $500 for three or four articles plus twelve engravings on wood which Powell was to supply. But in addition to these twelve pictures, Scribner's, Scribner's, at that moment moving to revolutionize the art of magazine ill.u.s.tration, would spend $2000 for others, which after use in the magazine would become Powell's property. By this stroke the Major not only made himself a modest sum, but he a.s.sured himself a spectacular spread in the magazine, and obtained besides an excellent collection of ill.u.s.trations for his projected report. at that moment moving to revolutionize the art of magazine ill.u.s.tration, would spend $2000 for others, which after use in the magazine would become Powell's property. By this stroke the Major not only made himself a modest sum, but he a.s.sured himself a spectacular spread in the magazine, and obtained besides an excellent collection of ill.u.s.trations for his projected report.

So the scientific report was first written as a popular adventure story of original exploration and ill.u.s.trated lavishly for a popular magazine. It was written, moreover, after Beaman had already published a highly-colored account, so that there may have been some inclination to outdo what had already been made public. To some such combination of motives are due the persistent height enings and dramatizings that make the Exploration exciting reading but weaken its accuracy: the tendency (the opposite of what Bradley had grumbled at) to overestimate the drop of rapids, to dwell ominously on the dangers ahead, to "touch up."

As if to make amends for literary license in the first part, the second half of the Exploration Exploration is sober treatise ent.i.tled "The Physical Features of the Valley of the Colorado." It was serialized too, but not in a general magazine: is sober treatise ent.i.tled "The Physical Features of the Valley of the Colorado." It was serialized too, but not in a general magazine: The Popular Science Monthly The Popular Science Monthly was not popular in that sense. was not popular in that sense.

Some river historians, notably Stanton and Chalfant and Julius Stone, have taken a good deal of delight in pointing out inaccuracies or distortions of fact in Powell's account. Some of their criticism is legitimate, some a part of that curious jealousy which seems to persuade every man who ever ran the Colorado that he invented it. The distortions are there, most of them traceable to this literary motive and the complex circ.u.mstances under which his all-purpose narrative was written and published. But it is not possible to accuse Major Powell of the ordinary sort of inaccuracy-through-ignorance that fills the travel writing of his time or any other. He was no nature faker. He did not distort natural laws or misinterpret natural scenery. In his own way he was part of that inevitable slow movement toward realism whose local literary beginnings in John Hay and Edward Eggleston were almost precisely contemporary with his own beginnings as a scientist. Writer and scientist in that tradition do not differ so widely: Powell's method of observing natural phenomena did not differ in kind from Mark Twain's - especially that Mark Twain who lampooned so mercilessly the romantic inaccuracies of Fenimore Cooper. But both Powell and Twain, realists and even factualists, might on occasion be led to follow Twain's own advice to Kipling: "Young man, first get your facts and then do with them what you will." In literature, if not in science, an unintentional lie is worse than a deliberate one.

The element of the spectacular in Powell's story is therefore not remarkable. He had shown before then that he was a vigorous and sharply intelligent young man on the make, with a considerable instinctive and some trained knowledge of the arts of self promotion. But the Exploration is the last real demonstration of any such motive - a kind of last fling, a farewell to his Wanderjahre. Wanderjahre. After 1876 he delegated both his geological speculations and his scenic and dramatic enthusiasms and settled down to organize government science. But first he firmly clinched the reputation as a geologist that the second half of his first book had established. After 1876 he delegated both his geological speculations and his scenic and dramatic enthusiasms and settled down to organize government science. But first he firmly clinched the reputation as a geologist that the second half of his first book had established.

Many of the generalizations that Powell made in the Exploration and in the Uinta Mountains have at this date an air of the obvious; yet when he made them they were either new or newly emphatic. His homemade education fitted him to grasp the obvious and state it without embarra.s.sment - he had not been educated into scholarly caution and that squidlike tendency to retreat, squirting ink, which sophisticated learning often displays. He was intellectually a plunger, not a retreater. As it turned out, the obvious clearly stated, and combined with new observations, was some times close to revolutionary. And the obvious in the Plateau Province was so much more obvious than it was anywhere else that it demanded statement and at the same time presented incontrovertible proofs.

As a single example, consider his remarks on the behavior of streams. He observed that often they paid no attention to the terrain through which they ran. The Yampa, the Green, the Escalante, with valleys at hand to run through, chose instead to cut straight into ma.s.sive ridges or mountain ranges. Since water does not run uphill, he had to conclude that these rivers were older than the mountains, and that as the mountains rose across their path they rose slowly enough to be cut like a log held against a revolving saw. Out of that simple observation arose a whole complex of ideas: that mountains were relatively ephemeral earth features, that nature abhorred an elevation almost as fiercely as it was said to abhor a vacuum, and persistently cut it down and carried it away; that in this case at least, and probably in most, earth movements were slow, not catastrophic as Dana and King and some other geologists held; and in particular that drainage upon this slowly altering earth-surface could be divided into three cla.s.ses which he called antecedent, consequent, and superimposed. In the first, a previously existing river such as the Green cut through a rising mountain range as fast as the range rose, and held its course; in the second, an obstruction that rose too fast ponded the rivers, or diverted them to new channels established by the new topography; in the third, a drainage produced by the topography of one age held its course while erosion leveled and obliterated all those elevations and valleys it had been born among, so that the rivers were "superimposed" upon an entirely different topography exposed underneath.

These general cla.s.sifications seem simple and obvious enough; they have become the alphabet of the study of drainage, in the Plateau Province or anywhere else.

Working from the same observed facts, Powell made certain generalizations about erosion, which he instantly recognized as the prime agent in the land forms of the region. He put together things already well known: That the corrasion of a stream's bed was relatively swift, and increased with the declivity by a much more than arithmetical ratio. That the weathering away of elevated country proceeded much more slowly, so that a stream would cut a deep, narrow canyon before its walls or the surface of the country back from them would be much affected by erosion. That the erosion of low country was near a minimum, and that this minimum was always being approached. He called it the "base level of erosion" and gave another fundamental concept to the science. He noted the way in which cliffs were eaten back by the weathering out of soft layers and the caving in of the undermined hard strata, and he gave it a name; the recession of cliffs. Dutton would elaborate the idea, and point out among other things that the profile of such a retreating cliff would, once established, remain constant. But the original observation and the rubric were Powell's.

The characteristic flat crest lines and the vertical cliff-edges of b.u.t.te and mesa and plateau Powell noted as the product of horizontal strata and arid climate, and he isolated a good many of the effects of climate upon the processes of erosion. His conclusions began to reach outside the area of the obvious when he insisted that this region, where the rivers had cut gorges sometimes more than a mile deep, and where weathering had demonstrably swept away thousands of feet of solid rock from a territory totaling thousands of square miles, was actually not a region of maximum erosion, but one of minimum. With an incorrigible l.u.s.t to put things into categories, he cla.s.sified the types of mountain and plateau structure found in the Plateau Province and found that some of them had never been revealed or studied elsewhere, and had no relation to the Appalachian structure and the tight plica tion that the textbooks thought characteristic of all mountains. These mountains - the Uintas, say - were not folded and tangled; they were simply a great arch, like an asymmetrical Quonset hut, carved and furrowed by the erosional processes eager to reduce it to a plain again. The plateaus of the Grand Canyon region and northward were sometimes arches, or half arches, and sometimes flat blocks sheared upward along fault lines. Sometimes the shear of a fault broke into a series of step faults, and sometimes into a simple monoclinal fold. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no essential difference between fault and monocline, and his evidence was so plain, revealed along bare exposed fronts that could be traced for dozens of miles, that there was no disputing it. These generalizations too Gilbert and Dutton would amplify, doc.u.ment, and elaborate, but not alter. From the time of their publication, first in the American Journal of Science American Journal of Science14 and later in the Exploration and the Uinta Mountains, they were part of the basic textbook of geology. and later in the Exploration and the Uinta Mountains, they were part of the basic textbook of geology.

Though he collected fossils, Powell was no paleontologist; though he took geological sections, he was no stratigrapher; though he had a lively and even excited interest in the historical geology of the Plateau Province, what most took his eye and his imagination was the land forms, the plateaus, mesas, b.u.t.tes, canyons, cliffs, the fantastic erosional remains that simply by their shapes and their positions on a denuded plain told of the forces that had created them. Quite alone, his generalizations about earth movements (with his support of uniformitarianism when it was still widely disputed), about the character of rivers and the forms of earth sculpture and the laws that govern erosion, would more than justify his years of work in the West. In his two monographs, according to Emmons,15 was born the modem science of physical geology. was born the modem science of physical geology.

7. Geology: Grove Karl Gilbert

IN THE YEARS of the Powell Survey between 1874 and 1879, and later in the eighties when the United States Geological Survey was growing into a major federal bureau, Grove Karl Gilbert was Major Powell's right hand. Geological ideas that Powell touched and left, sketched and pa.s.sed on from, Gilbert grappled with and exhausted. Powell's broad principles were divided, subdivided, reduced to that near-mathematical certainty that was Gilbert's ideal. A genial, kindly, much-loved man, he was in his own way as brilliantly speculative as Powell, and as far removed from a laboratory drudge, but he operated on some other kind of fuel. He built a bridge of equations where Powell leaped by intuition, and he tidied things up as he went so that everything was solid behind him - a thing that could not, always be said for the Major.

The chapter on erosion in his Geology of Geology of the Henry Mountains the Henry Mountains does not alter Powell's systematic observations, but it systematizes them further and develops them so fully that that chapter needs practically no revision even today. Neither does his study of those mountains which had been a Powell Survey discovery in geographical terms and which Gilbert made into a discovery of another kind. He described and dissected them so precisely and exactly that they have been known ever since as the cla.s.sic type of a special kind of mountain structure. Gilbert called them "laccolites" but others corrected his Greek to "laccoliths." These are "bubble mountains," formed of strata domed upward by lava ma.s.ses from beneath, the layers of sedimentary rock interleaved by sheets of lava and penetrated by dikes. Marvine, Holmes, and others had speculated on some such structure; does not alter Powell's systematic observations, but it systematizes them further and develops them so fully that that chapter needs practically no revision even today. Neither does his study of those mountains which had been a Powell Survey discovery in geographical terms and which Gilbert made into a discovery of another kind. He described and dissected them so precisely and exactly that they have been known ever since as the cla.s.sic type of a special kind of mountain structure. Gilbert called them "laccolites" but others corrected his Greek to "laccoliths." These are "bubble mountains," formed of strata domed upward by lava ma.s.ses from beneath, the layers of sedimentary rock interleaved by sheets of lava and penetrated by dikes. Marvine, Holmes, and others had speculated on some such structure;1 Gilbert demonstrated it not only for the Henrys but for the La Sals, the Abajo, and Navajo Mountain. Gilbert demonstrated it not only for the Henrys but for the La Sals, the Abajo, and Navajo Mountain.

The Geology of the Henry Mountains appeared as a Powell Survey monograph in 1877, at a time when, as we shall see, Powell needed every evidence of scientific accomplishment his survey could muster if he was to induce Congress to prolong its life. Much later, after his own a.s.sistants and other geologists had taken some of the bloom from the subject, Gilbert produced a second report, this one on Lake Bonneville, appeared as a Powell Survey monograph in 1877, at a time when, as we shall see, Powell needed every evidence of scientific accomplishment his survey could muster if he was to induce Congress to prolong its life. Much later, after his own a.s.sistants and other geologists had taken some of the bloom from the subject, Gilbert produced a second report, this one on Lake Bonneville,2 and this like his first was so careful, so thorough, so perceptive of those lost or buried or effaced traces by which geological history must be known that it became at once a landmark. The Pleistocene lake that used to spread deep water across much of the western Utah and eastern Nevada desert has needed little study since. But it is worth noting that at the foundation of Gilbert's reconstruction of the extent, history, drainage, climate, and character of the extinct lake are Powell's rules of erosion, modified and extended to the habits of lakes rather than rivers, and traceable by sh.o.r.e cliffs, beach terraces, embankments, spits, and bars instead of by canyons, cliffs of erosion, alluvial fans, and cameo b.u.t.tes. The basic laws are still to some extent Powell's, and the focus of attention is still, as with Powell, the land forms, the sculpture of the earth, and the processes by which it is created. and this like his first was so careful, so thorough, so perceptive of those lost or buried or effaced traces by which geological history must be known that it became at once a landmark. The Pleistocene lake that used to spread deep water across much of the western Utah and eastern Nevada desert has needed little study since. But it is worth noting that at the foundation of Gilbert's reconstruction of the extent, history, drainage, climate, and character of the extinct lake are Powell's rules of erosion, modified and extended to the habits of lakes rather than rivers, and traceable by sh.o.r.e cliffs, beach terraces, embankments, spits, and bars instead of by canyons, cliffs of erosion, alluvial fans, and cameo b.u.t.tes. The basic laws are still to some extent Powell's, and the focus of attention is still, as with Powell, the land forms, the sculpture of the earth, and the processes by which it is created.

Like several of Major Powell's later professional colleagues, Gilbert 3 3 was borrowed, not developed, by the Survey. After graduation from the University of Rochester and a general scientific apprenticeship in Ward's Natural History Establishment, that fantastic business house, still extant, which provided and will still provide anything from trays of fossils to live black widows, from platypus eggs to relief maps, from laboratory insects to articulated skeletons of men or mastodons, he had worked briefly for the Ohio State Geological Survey and developed an acquaintance with the habits of living lakes that he later used effectively in the study of a dead one. In 1871, with his friend Archibald Marvine, he had gone out with Lieutenant Wheeler's Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian. was borrowed, not developed, by the Survey. After graduation from the University of Rochester and a general scientific apprenticeship in Ward's Natural History Establishment, that fantastic business house, still extant, which provided and will still provide anything from trays of fossils to live black widows, from platypus eggs to relief maps, from laboratory insects to articulated skeletons of men or mastodons, he had worked briefly for the Ohio State Geological Survey and developed an acquaintance with the habits of living lakes that he later used effectively in the study of a dead one. In 1871, with his friend Archibald Marvine, he had gone out with Lieutenant Wheeler's Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian.

He had not been happy with Wheeler, for Wheeler dragged his geologists from place to place on a leash, covering enormous stretches of country in very hasty reconnoissance so that they barely got to sniff an exciting problem before their noses were dragged away from it. They were not scientists, but a.s.sistants to topographers. Late in 1872 Gilbert's path crossed that of the Powell party when Wheeler's outfit camped near Kanab, and though Powell was not there at the time, being busy about some Paiute investigations, Gilbert visited with Clem Powell and others, and bought a Navajo rug from Nellie Thompson.4 Apparently he met the Major in Washington, where community of interests and mutual membership in scientific societies would have thrown them together naturally, in that winter or the next. In November, 1874, just after his marriage, Gilbert accepted Powell's offer of a job, and moved at once out of a restricting, frustrating, military organization into complete freedom. Apparently he met the Major in Washington, where community of interests and mutual membership in scientific societies would have thrown them together naturally, in that winter or the next. In November, 1874, just after his marriage, Gilbert accepted Powell's offer of a job, and moved at once out of a restricting, frustrating, military organization into complete freedom.

Under Powell, once the two of them decided on an area for field study, Gilbert went as he pleased, stayed until the budget or the weather chased him home, studied what he wanted, lingered where he wished, returned if he felt like it for another visit or another whole field season. The freedom with which he was allowed to work, and the liberality with which Powell gave away his most illuminating ideas,5 cemented a personal friendship that was as close as any in either man's life. As ranking geologist and for a time as acting director of the United States Geological Survey, Gilbert loyally subordinated his personal wishes and his own studies to help Powell in one or another promotional scheme. At the end of the eighteen-seventies and again at the end of the eighteen-eighties, as we shall see in later chapters, Powell focused most of his incredible energy on the political fight to establish scientific laws and policies for the administration of the Public Domain. While he did so, his bureaus were expected to run themselves. Translated, this means that Powell's a.s.sistants, notably Gilbert, took over. He let himself, though among geologists he was quite as respected as his chief and more universally liked, become a tail to Powell's kite. When Powell died it was Gilbert who acted as his executor and Gilbert who was his first and most respectful biographer. cemented a personal friendship that was as close as any in either man's life. As ranking geologist and for a time as acting director of the United States Geological Survey, Gilbert loyally subordinated his personal wishes and his own studies to help Powell in one or another promotional scheme. At the end of the eighteen-seventies and again at the end of the eighteen-eighties, as we shall see in later chapters, Powell focused most of his incredible energy on the political fight to establish scientific laws and policies for the administration of the Public Domain. While he did so, his bureaus were expected to run themselves. Translated, this means that Powell's a.s.sistants, notably Gilbert, took over. He let himself, though among geologists he was quite as respected as his chief and more universally liked, become a tail to Powell's kite. When Powell died it was Gilbert who acted as his executor and Gilbert who was his first and most respectful biographer.6 The only thing he did not do that he might have been expected to do was to succeed the Major in one of his several administrative jobs. The only thing he did not do that he might have been expected to do was to succeed the Major in one of his several administrative jobs.

Actually it was pure kindness that Powell did not urge one of these positions on him. Gilbert was a scholar, not a promoter or an administrator. He disliked politics and hated even scientific controversy so much that with evidence enough to hang a man he corrected him hesitantly and apologetically and gave him every opportunity to save face. There was no better loved man in all of Washington's scientific company. But though he outlived Powell by sixteen years, his productivity in those years was not so great as many would have expected of him - perhaps because with all his virtues he needed the galvanizing influence of his one-armed friend and collaborator. His monographs, though greatly admired by geologists and less in need of modernization or revision than the work of any geologist of his time, make tough reading for the unenlightened.

8. Geological Aesthetics: Clarence Edward Dutton

NOT SO THE WRITINGS of Powell's left hand, Captain Dutton. A Yale cla.s.smate of O. C. Marsh, two years ahead of Clarence King, he had been like King a college athlete and like King he was attractive, charming, many-sided. An apt.i.tude for mathematics had led him after the war to take a permanent commission in the Ordnance Corps, but he had a literary flair too. As an undergraduate he had won the Yale Literary Prize; his reading all his life was so various and extensive that he called himself omnibiblical. During his years in Washington he developed a considerable reputation as a public lecturer, and there is plenty of testimony to the charm and instructiveness of his conversation.1 Altogether he was a somewhat less sybaritic and less spectacular King. Altogether he was a somewhat less sybaritic and less spectacular King.

He arrived at geology by a process almost as circuitous as Powell's own. Trained for the ministry, diverted to the army, he found himself at the war's end stationed at the Watervliet a.r.s.enal in West Troy, New York. There was nothing much for a peacetime officer to do; his wounds were healed, he was young and vigorous and interested in many things. Before long he got to studying the Bessemer Steel Works; his first scientific paper dealt with the chemistry of the Bessemer process and the mysterious and debated differences between iron and steel. But the influence of the local wise men touched him too: James Hall and R. P. Whitfield of Albany's paleontological museum gave him a competing interest in geology. By 1871, when after two transfers he landed in Washington, geology had won, and most of the members of the Washington Philosophical Society with whom he a.s.sociated - Henry and Baird of the Smithsonian, Hilgard of the Coast Survey, Newcomb, Hall, and Harkness of the Naval Observatory, Woodward and Billings of the Medical Department, Powell and Hayden of the Western surveys - confirmed his scientific bent. By 1874 Powell was sufficiently impressed with his capacities to urge him to take a field party west. In the next year the Major and Joseph Henry maneuvered a special act of Congress that released Dutton from the army for detached duty with the Powell Survey.2 In that work he spent at least part of every year for the next fifteen. In that work he spent at least part of every year for the next fifteen.

There is every evidence that Powell looked upon Dutton as his geological heir; like Gilbert, Dutton built upon the same base of Powell generalizations and Powell specialties. But the country into which his work led him, plus his earlier flirtation with chemistry, threw him a little to one side. Erosion and land-forms interested him - they had to, in that country - and he did his share toward amplifying and doc.u.menting Powell's doctrine of antecedent, consequent, and superimposed drainage, his recession of cliffs, his h.o.m.ology between faults and monoclines, and his theory of plural erosion cycles postulated on nature's tendency to approach a base level of erosion. These ideas were not so much his own as part of the common store. When he dealt with erosion, he started from Gilbert's brilliant chapter in the Henry Mountains. When he cla.s.sified structural forms he followed Powell's Uinta Mountains and his "Physical Features of the Valley of the Colorado." But when he became interested in the earth movements which caused the displacements of the Plateau Province, he speculated further and more brilliantly than Powell did.

Powell had used the plain observable facts of the province, with their implications, to reshape the science of physiography. Dutton used them to establish Herschel's neglected theory of isostasy, which postulated the slow sinking of sea bottoms loaded with sediment and the corresponding rise of eroded land ma.s.ses, with bending and fracturing along the margins or coastlines. Yet in his speculations about the creaking difficult adjustments by which the earth maintains its equilibrium Dutton was still drawing on the collaborative work of the survey. Powell had marked the h.o.m.ology between faults and monoclines, discounted the still prevalent theories of catastrophism, cla.s.sified the basic structures of the great upraised and down-thrown blocks of plateaus, valleys, and mountains. Gilbert had proposed, probably for the first time in this country, the idea of an earth which was plastic without being necessarily fluid. Dutton, corroborating the beliefs of his old friend James Hall, took the step beyond.

His interests consistently led him to abstruse problems. Knowing blast furnaces from West Troy, he turned his attention to nature's own blast furnaces. Volcanism was his most abiding interest - volcanism and the earth movements which accompanied it. As early as 1880, pondering the lava flows of southern Utah, he was coming to the conclusion that volcanic loci were not funnels down into a molten core of the earth, but relatively shallow and limited cysts, and even then he was groping for the source of volcanic heat, though it was not until thirty years later that he satisfied himself he had found it in radioactivity.3 Before he was through, he had studied extinct volcanoes in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oregon, and had spent several months among the calderas of Hawaii. He had made the most exhaustive study of the Charleston earthquake of 1884, and had reported to Congress on the quake-threatened right of way of the proposed Nica raguan Ca.n.a.l. He had examined volcanic rocks microscopically and chemically and in the field, and had made adjustments in Richthofen's theory of the order of extrusive lavas. Part of his work, like Gilbert's, was done with the Powell Survey, part with its successor. When the Western surveys were consolidated in 1879 into the United States Geological Survey, with Clarence King as the first director, Dutton continued under King and the new bureau the precise work he had been doing under the Powell Survey, and when Powell succeeded King in the spring of 1881 Dutton was still at it. It is the part of his work which grew directly out of Powell's delegation of his own interests that gives Dutton a special position; and it is not his geological contributions, which were great, but his literary flair, which would seem quite irrelevant, that has kept his name fresh. Gilbert was perhaps a more important geologist, but Dutton is better known, because he was the first literary tourist in a country where tourist travel has become the number one business. Before he was through, he had studied extinct volcanoes in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oregon, and had spent several months among the calderas of Hawaii. He had made the most exhaustive study of the Charleston earthquake of 1884, and had reported to Congress on the quake-threatened right of way of the proposed Nica raguan Ca.n.a.l. He had examined volcanic rocks microscopically and chemically and in the field, and had made adjustments in Richthofen's theory of the order of extrusive lavas. Part of his work, like Gilbert's, was done with the Powell Survey, part with its successor. When the Western surveys were consolidated in 1879 into the United States Geological Survey, with Clarence King as the first director, Dutton continued under King and the new bureau the precise work he had been doing under the Powell Survey, and when Powell succeeded King in the spring of 1881 Dutton was still at it. It is the part of his work which grew directly out of Powell's delegation of his own interests that gives Dutton a special position; and it is not his geological contributions, which were great, but his literary flair, which would seem quite irrelevant, that has kept his name fresh. Gilbert was perhaps a more important geologist, but Dutton is better known, because he was the first literary tourist in a country where tourist travel has become the number one business.

To the traveler from east or west - and most tourist travel comes from those directions - the Plateau Province presents difficulties. It is easy to skirt the region, hard to cross it, for from Bear Lake at its northern border to the Vermilion Cliffs along the south, Utah has a spine like a Stegosaurus. The northern half of the spine is the Wasatch, true mountains whose gorges used to spill glaciers into the waters of Lake Bonneville. The southern half is a triple chain of lofty plateaus separated by broad but profound valleys. The plateau chains overlap with the end of the Wasatch at Mount Nebo, near the modern town of Nephi, and gradually widen toward the south like a three-fingered hand. The western chain, from north to south, is composed of the Pahvant (Sigurd Mountain), the Tushar (Beaver Mountain), and the Markagunt, which terminates in the cliffs and temples of Zion National Park; these three form the eastern wall of the Great Basin and mark the ancient Mesozoic sh.o.r.eline. The traveler between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles on Highway 91 skirts it from Levan nearly to St. George. The plateaus are deceptively high; the Tushar goes up above twelve thousand feet, and many others are well above eleven thousand, higher than many major mountain ranges. Roads across from chain to chain are opportunistic jogs through the few pa.s.ses or laborious grapevines across the roofs. East of the Pahvant-Tushar-Markagunt chain the land falls away into the green garden-valleys of the Sevier and the Sanpete settled by Danish converts to Mormonism in the fifties and sixties. Eastward, walling the valleys, tower the flat crests of the Sevier and Paunsagunt Plateaus, and across those and down again is Gra.s.s Valley tipping southward past the Koosharem Paiute reservation and along Otter Creek to its junction with the East Fork of the Sevier at the head of East Fork Canyon which splits the Sevier Plateau to its base. Straight across Gra.s.s Valley the struggling traveler is confronted with the eleven-thousand-foot rampart of the Fish Lake Plateau, which is linked southward with the Awapa, which in turn steps up to the last of this chain, the Aquarius, with its outliers Thousand Lake Mountain and Table Mountain.

These "High Plateaus" const.i.tute a special and clearly marked division of the Plateau Province. The route by which Gunnison and later Fremont crossed them - Gunnison to his death - in 1853 remains undeveloped either as road or railroad.4 The tourist routes flow along lines of less resistance and come westward through the Wasatch at Salt Lake or Ogden; or around the southern end of the Plateau Province by Highway 66 and the Santa Fe, south of the Grand Canyon; or out through a break in the Great Basin wall along the Virgin River. The High Plateaus are only a part of the barrier, for eastward from the Wasatch, Thousand Lake, or Aquarius Plateaus one looks out across Castle Valley and the San Rafael Swell and the desert badlands, the emptiest part of America, that separate them from the Green River. Westward, Pahvant and Tushar and Markagunt overlook the twisted ranges and the whirlwind-haunted alkali valleys of the Great Basin. Southward, Markagunt, Paunsagunt, and Aquarius break off in plunging cliffs to the lower platforms, and these rise steadily southward into the Paria, Kaibab, and Kanab Plateaus across which the Colorado has cut Marble Canyon and most of the Grand Canyon. The geography which made its exploration difficult and late continues to make its development even for tourist travel an enormous undertaking. Powell himself, though on several occasions he supported moves to make the Grand Canyon a national park, thought the difficulties of access and the lack of adequate water supplies might prove insuperable. The tourist routes flow along lines of less resistance and come westward through the Wasatch at Salt Lake or Ogden; or around the southern end of the Plateau Province by Highway 66 and the Santa Fe, south of the Grand Canyon; or out through a break in the Great Basin wall along the Virgin River. The High Plateaus are only a part of the barrier, for eastward from the Wasatch, Thousand Lake, or Aquarius Plateaus one looks out across Castle Valley and the San Rafael Swell and the desert badlands, the emptiest part of America, that separate them from the Green River. Westward, Pahvant and Tushar and Markagunt overlook the twisted ranges and the whirlwind-haunted alkali valleys of the Great Basin. Southward, Markagunt, Paunsagunt, and Aquarius break off in plunging cliffs to the lower platforms, and these rise steadily southward into the Paria, Kaibab, and Kanab Plateaus across which the Colorado has cut Marble Canyon and most of the Grand Canyon. The geography which made its exploration difficult and late continues to make its development even for tourist travel an enormous undertaking. Powell himself, though on several occasions he supported moves to make the Grand Canyon a national park, thought the difficulties of access and the lack of adequate water supplies might prove insuperable.

Intimately linked, by geological history, scenery, and at least rudimentary communications with the Grand Canyon, the High Plateaus have a character of their own. Tucked away in the cliffs and canyons of those remarkable mountains that are not mountains at all but greatly elevated rolling plains, are two national parks and three national monuments. Of the parks, Zion is carved in the southwestern flank of the Markagunt by one fork of the Virgin River, and Zion National Monument is carved by the other. (The first description of both of these was in Powell's Exploration.) Exploration.) Bryce Canyon is a horseshoe amphitheater gaudily eroded back into the strawberry-ice-cream colors of the Pink Cliffs crowning the Paunsagunt. Capitol Reef National Monument is a stretch on the upper Fremont or Dirty Devil River, where the Waterpocket Fold turns up a domed wall of white Jura.s.sic sandstone between the Aquarius and Thousand Lake Plateaus. Cedar Breaks is another amphitheater on the western rim of the Markagunt, above ten thousand feet, where an even more colorful but less bizarre Bryce has been chewed and dissolved out of the Pink Cliffs. Bryce Canyon is a horseshoe amphitheater gaudily eroded back into the strawberry-ice-cream colors of the Pink Cliffs crowning the Paunsagunt. Capitol Reef National Monument is a stretch on the upper Fremont or Dirty Devil River, where the Waterpocket Fold turns up a domed wall of white Jura.s.sic sandstone between the Aquarius and Thousand Lake Plateaus. Cedar Breaks is another amphitheater on the western rim of the Markagunt, above ten thousand feet, where an even more colorful but less bizarre Bryce has been chewed and dissolved out of the Pink Cliffs.

Add to these the other reservations in the rest of the Plateau Province - the Arches National Monument near Moab, the Natural Bridges in White Canyon under the Bear's Ears Plateau, the Hovenweep in the barren canyons of San Juan County, the Rainbow Natural Bridge on the flank of Navajo Mountain near the junction of the Colorado and the San Juan, and the Grand Canyon itself, the granddaddy of all spectacles, that divides the northern and southern parts of the Plateau Province - and it is clear that as a tourist attraction this part of the world justifies every superlative of the chambers of commerce. Culturally it is a kind of Ozarks, an isolated and wonderful pocket in industrial America, but that is another story. Traffic flows in and out of its better-advertised reservations, and fishermen and hunters' come in from a thousand miles away in season and find their way up into the high marvelous weather of the Tushar or Fish Lake or Aquarius or Markagunt. But hundreds of square miles of country that anywhere else would be thought superlative lie unmarked and unadvertised, and the parts of the Plateau Province that asphalt has not reached are not greatly different from what they were when , Gilbert, Thompson, and Dutton worked through them in the seventies.

Much of the region will never have anything to offer but scenery. But scenery it has in superlative degree and extravagant forms. High Plateaus, Grand Canyon, or sandrock wilderness, the scenery is no raw material exported by a colonial dependency, but the finished product. It is not merely finished, but unparalleled; not merely superlative, but utterly new. What the Plateau Province at large and the Grand Canyon in particular presented the country in the way of scenery was an innovation as surely as Gilbert's laccolithic mountains were a geological innovation, or the laws of physical geology that Powell derived from the cloven and eroded strata. Strangest and newest of our regions, last to be opened and last known, the northern part of the Plateau Province compelled new sensibilities and new aesthetic perceptions as well as new geological laws. It was Dutton's distinction (and pleasure), while Powell in the eighteen-eighties acquired more and more power and more and more responsibility as the simultaneous head of two great and growing Washington bureaus, and while he solidified his position as the organizer and champion of government-sponsored science, to take over and elucidate the strange region Powell had opened.

The tourist and nature lover occupied a good large corner of Dutton. He never quite made up his mind whether he was literary traveler or sober scientific a.n.a.lyst: the temptations were essentially equal. He escaped his dilemma by being both, and in his reports a rich and embroidered nineteenth-century traveler's prose flows around bastions of geological fact as some of the lava coulees on the Uinkaret flow around gables of sedimentary strata. The literary tendency is progressive; it is apparent in The Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah The Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah (1880) and dominant in (1880) and dominant in The Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District The Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District ( 1882 ) . With hardly an apology, Dutton forsook the "severe ascetic style" of science when he came to deal with the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon was beyond the reach of superlatives, it compelled effusion of a kind. The result is a scientific monograph of great geological importance which contains whole chapters as ebullient as the writing of John Muir, and deviates constantly into speculations so far from geological that they sound more like Ruskin than Lyell. ( 1882 ) . With hardly an apology, Dutton forsook the "severe ascetic style" of science when he came to deal with the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon was beyond the reach of superlatives, it compelled effusion of a kind. The result is a scientific monograph of great geological importance which contains whole chapters as ebullient as the writing of John Muir, and deviates constantly into speculations so far from geological that they sound more like Ruskin than Lyell.

Dutton loved a grand view, a sweeping panorama. In the verbal landscape-painting into which he was constantly tempted it is easy to see the influence of that school which, painting from nature and with careful attention to the rocky bones of the earth, still threw over its pictures a romantic and exciting aura. That Tur neresque philosophy was ill.u.s.trated by no one better than by Thomas Moran, who for a time traveled with Dutton's party in the canyon country. It was, in fact, the method of a growing Western landscape school of which Moran was perhaps the greatest exemplar. What Moran loved to paint - the big, spectacular, colorful view - Dutton loved to describe. He took his stance like a painter and he composed like a painter, and his drift, like Moran's, was constantly away from the meticulous and toward the suggestive. Consider: From the southwest salient of the Markagunt we behold one of those sublime spectacles which characterize the loftiest standpoints of the Plateau Province. Even to the mere tourist there are few panoramas so broad and grand; but to the geologist there comes with all the visible grandeur a deep significance. The radius of vision is from 80 to 100 miles. We stand upon the great cliff of Tertiary beds which meanders to the eastward till lost in the distance, sculptured into strange and even startling forms, and lit up with colors so rich and glowing that they awaken enthusiasm in the most apathetic. To the southward the profile of the country drops down by a succession of terraces formed by lower and lower formations which come to the daylight as those which overlie them are successively terminated in lines of cliffs, each formation rising gently to the southward to recover a portion of the lost alt.i.tude until it is cut off by its own escarpment. Thirty miles away the last descent falls upon the Carboniferous, which slowly rises with an unbroken slope to the brink of the Grand Canon. But the great abyss is not discernible, for the curvature of the earth hides it from sight. Standing among evergreens, knee-deep in succulent gra.s.s and a wealth of Alpine blossoms, fanned by chill, moist breezes, we look over terraces decked with towers and temples and gashed with canons to the desert which stretches away beyond the southern horizon, blank, lifeless, and glowing with torrid heat. To the southwestward the Basin Ranges toss up their angry waves in characteristic confusion, sierra behind sierra, till the hazy distance hides them as with a veil. Due south Mount Trumbull is well in view, with its throng of black basaltic cones looking down into the Grand Canon. To the southeast the Kaibab rears its n.o.ble palisade and smooth crest line, stretching southward until it dips below the horizon more than a hundred miles away .... 5 5 That is relatively precise and relatively restrained nineteenth-century nature writing. By the time Dutton came to describe the same scene two years later something had changed.

Before the observer who stands upon a southern salient of the Markagunt Plateau is spread out a magnificent spectacle. The alt.i.tude is nearly 11,000 feet above the sea, and the radius of vision reaches to the southward nearly a hundred miles. In the extreme distance is the calm of the desert platform, its surface mottled with indistinct lights and shades, too remote to disclose their meaning. Against the southeastern horizon is projected the pale blue escarpment of the Kaibab, which stretches away to the south until the curvature of the earth carries it out of sight. To the southward rise in merest outline, and devoid of all visible details, the dark ma.s.s of Mount Trumbull and the waving cones of the Uinkaret....6 What was precise in the first description has been hazed over by an act not so much of the eye as of the imagination - or perhaps what was reported too precisely before has been newly seen and more accurately rendered. The distant desert is now "mottled with indistinct lights and shades," the Kaibab has acquired the romantic blue of distance, the Grand Canyon which was drawn in before is omitted now, because it cannot be seen, and the cones of the Uinkaret, distinct before, now shimmer with haze and heat. In the first pa.s.sage Dutton supplied details which he knew but could not see; in the second he described only what the eye observed, with all its uncertainties. That change in temper presents a nice problem not only in scientific reporting but in art criticism; the first pa.s.sage, diagrammatic and precise, is actually an improvement on nature. The second, for all its romantic haze and blurring, is the more realistic; it is closer to what the eye sees. And yet it is also, by normal standards either of science or of art, the more atmospheric and "literary."

Like a j.a.panese painter, the observer of the Grand Canyon must deal with an atmosphere which is a fact, whatever its romantic connotations. The eighteenth-century English landscapists who wore gauze spectacles while painting could have taken off their gla.s.ses at the canyon: Those who are familiar with western scenery have, no doubt, been impressed with the peculiar character of its haze - or atmosphere, in the artistic sense of the word - and have noted its more prominent qualities. When the air is free from common smoke it has a pale blue color which is quite unlike the neutral gray of the east. It is always apparently more dense when we look towards the sun than when we look away from it, and this difference in the two directions, respectively, is a maximum near sunrise and sunset. This property is universal, but its peculiarities in the Plateau Province become conspicuous when the strong rich colors of the rocks are seen through it. The very air is then visible. We see it, palpably, as a tenuous fluid, and the rocks beyond it do not appear to be colored blue as they do in other regions, but reveal themselves clothed in colors of their own. The Grand Canon is ever full of this haze. It fills it to the brim. Its apparent density, as elsewhere, is varied according to the direction in which it is viewed and the position of the sun; but it seems also to be denser and more concentrated than elsewhere. This is really a delusion arising from the fact that the enormous magnitude of the chasm and of its component ma.s.ses dwarfs the distances; we are really looking through miles of atmosphere under the impression that they are only so many furlongs. This apparent concentration of haze, however, greatly intensifies all the beautiful or mysterious optical defects which are dependent upon the intervention of the atmosphere.7 Thus far the a.n.a.lyst. On his heels comes the man of sensibility, as subjective as a Muir or Burroughs: Whenever the brink of the chasm is reached the chances are that the sun is high and these abnormal effects in full force. The canon is asleep. Or it is under a spell of enchantment which gives its bewildering mazes an aspect still more bewildering. Throughout the long summer forenoon the charm which binds it grows in potency. At midday the clouds begin to gather, first in fleecy flecks, then in c.u.muli, and throw their shadows into the gulf. At once the scene changes. The slumber of the chasm is disturbed. The temples and cloisters seem to raise themselves half awake to greet the pa.s.sing shadow. Their wilted, drooping, flattened faces expand into relief. The long promontories reach out from the distant wall as if to catch a moment's refreshment from the shade. The colors begin to glow; the haze loses its opaque density and becomes more tenuous. The shadows pa.s.s, and the chasm relapses into its dull sleep again. Thus through the midday hours it lies in fitful slumber, overcome by the blinding glare and withering heat, yet responsive to every fluctuation of light and shadow like a delicate organism.8 Call it, with some justice, an example of that pathetic fallacy that Ruskin thought the resource of second and third rate poets. Recognize it as part of the same rather effusive school of nature writing to which Powell himself, in his literary moments, subscribed. But compare it with the effusions of others on the Grand Canyon, with the "G.o.d-finding," 9 9 the extravagance, the gasping, the clutching of the overburdened heart. It is part of both the romantic and the tourist creeds to be overcome by grand scenery. Compare Henry Van d.y.k.e's iambics the extravagance, the gasping, the clutching of the overburdened heart. It is part of both the romantic and the tourist creeds to be overcome by grand scenery. Compare Henry Van d.y.k.e's iambics10 in which timorous Dawn trips through the pines of the Kaibab and half expiring on the brink, pants for more light like the dying Goethe. Compare John Gould Fletcher's secondhand Thunder Spirit sulking in the depths, in which timorous Dawn trips through the pines of the Kaibab and half expiring on the brink, pants for more light like the dying Goethe. Compare John Gould Fletcher's secondhand Thunder Spirit sulking in the depths,11 or Harriet Monroe's Earth, a victim of fluvial rape, lying "stricken to the heart, her masks and draperies torn away, confessing her eternal pa.s.sion to the absolving sun." or Harriet Monroe's Earth, a victim of fluvial rape, lying "stricken to the heart, her masks and draperies torn away, confessing her eternal pa.s.sion to the absolving sun." 12 12 Dutton was as little likely to address apostrophes to the river, that "sullen, laboring slave of Gravitation," as he was to believe with Joaquin Miller that the canyon had been formed by the collapse of the crust over an underground stream. Dutton was as little likely to address apostrophes to the river, that "sullen, laboring slave of Gravitation," as he was to believe with Joaquin Miller that the canyon had been formed by the collapse of the crust over an underground stream.13 And Fletcher's poetic summation of the canyon, the message he saw written all over it "in bright invisible words, 'It is finished,' " would have made Dutton smile. And Fletcher's poetic summation of the canyon, the message he saw written all over it "in bright invisible words, 'It is finished,' " would have made Dutton smile.

The physical structures of the earth, Powell had taught them all, were ephemeral. The primordial river draining'the great lake of Eocene times had established its course and held it across rising blocks of country, gouging its channel deeper as the land rose. Its walls had weathered back, and the walls of every side canyon and gulch had weathered back, under the tiny blows of rain and sand and wind. Ten thousand feet of rock that still showed in the terraces stepping up to the lava-capped High Plateaus had once stretched unbroken over the whole Plateau Province and had been swept away. The Grand Canyon itself was but one phase of a new denudation that would eventually sweep away the Marble Canyon Platform, and the Kaibab, Uinkaret, Kanab, Shivwits, the Coconino Plateau reaching southward, and level them down toward the ancient peneplain of dark Archaean schist that Powell's boatmen had hated and feared. And at some immeasurably remote time beyond human caring the whole uneasy region might sink again beneath the sea and begin the cycle all over again by the slow deposition of new marls, shales, limestones, sandstones, deltaic conglomerates, perhaps with a fossil poet pressed and silicified between the leaves of rock.

It was so far from finished that it would have no end, as for human purposes it had never had a beginning. From one of the points of vantage that he liked, up on the eastern rim of the Wasatch Plateau, Dutton had looked down across the San Rafael Swell and seen how erosion, starting at a high central dome, had eaten that dome down until it was now a depression, and had eaten back into the surrounding country until now the swell was a hollow ringed with concentric lines of receding cliffs - an immense, rainbow-colored intaglio. He had studied the b.u.t.tes on the Kanab Desert and knew them to be other remnants of the same denudation, this time in the form of isolated cameos. He had followed the tracks of erosion in the retreating tiers of cliffs, and in the great amphitheaters like that of the Paria eaten back into the edges of the High Plateaus. Intaglio, cameo, cliff-line, amphitheater, they were all evidences of endless cyclic change. Perhaps for that reason Dutton found no G.o.ds or thunder spirits in the canyon, but only itself, self-created, protean, and immortal.

What marks Captain Dutton off from the temperate pedestrians of science is a temperamental habit of metaphor, which revealed itself not only in his literary effusions but in a consistent playfulness and informality. He wrote to Clarence King about catching earth-faults in flagrante delicto, in flagrante delicto, and described the behavior of certain volcanoes in orgastic similes. and described the behavior of certain volcanoes in orgastic similes.14 Where Major Powell delighted in Scott and Longfellow and the Standard Poets, and sometimes read them aloud to edify his men, Dutton admired Mark Twain. There was no echo in him of Powell's quaint formality of address: he called King and Powell familiarly by their last names even though they were his official superiors and in a time when official correspondence even between close friends was sprinkled with Obedient Servants and Beg-to-Remains. Some of the poet's iconoclasm was in him, making him stretch beyond known laws in search of the geological mysteries, and forcing him, upon provocation, to burst the bounds of the formal scientific monograph. A man is all of a piece. Dutton was of a metaphorical, a.s.sociative, speculative kind. He was lured as surely into aesthetic as into geological speculations, and there is ample evidence that Powell delighted in his ungeological deviations, having been tempted in that way himself. Where Major Powell delighted in Scott and Longfellow and the Standard Poets, and sometimes read them aloud to edify his men, Dutton admired Mark Twain. There was no echo in him of Powell's quaint formality of address: he called King and Powell familiarly by their last names even though they were his official superiors and in a time when official correspondence even between close friends was sprinkled with Obedient Servants and Beg-to-Remains. Some of the poet's iconoclasm was in him, making him stretch beyond known laws in search of the geological mysteries, and forcing him, upon provocation, to burst the bounds of the formal scientific monograph. A man is all of a piece. Dutton was of a metaphorical, a.s.sociative, speculative kind. He was lured as surely into aesthetic as into geological speculations, and there is ample evidence that Powell delighted in his ungeological deviations, having been tempted in that way himself.

Scenic illusions such as those caused by the haze, or the apparent diminution of scale where everything was enormous, intrigued Dutton. He labored to achieve an "abiding sense" of a cliff a half mile high. Looking at the dark rim of the Sevier Plateau above Richfield in the Sevier Valley of Utah, he wondered why a nearly vertical wall over a mile high above the valley was not more impressive, and eventually blamed the lack of detail or emphasis or variety in the forms: a row of peaks that high and abrupt would have been as spectacular as the Tetons from Jackson Hole. Or he asked himself (and his geological reader) why a forest such as the Kaibab, composed primarily of coniferous trees, should strike him and all his party as the loveliest place any of them had ever visited, and went digging into all the possible causes. Several million tourists since Dutton's time have found that climax forest as charming as he described it, but perhaps have not wondered quite so seriously why.

For the characteristic forms and colors of the Plateau Province there were no precedents, and he was compelled toward architectural terminology and architectural speculations, for the angular vertical-and-horizontal lines of the country aped human architecture in startling ways.15 The parallel, Dutton insisted, was no mere suggestion, but a "vivid resemblance," and it was revealed not occasionally but everywhere, and with a curious persistence because of the way in which individual strata maintained their profiles under weathering. In any one place the piled effect might be bewildering - Baroque on Doric and Byzantine on Baroque and Churrigueresque on Byzantine, magenta on chocolate on yellow on pink - but the consistency with which any group of strata produced the same forms was very striking. The ma.s.sive sandstone layer that Dutton knew as the White Wall The parallel, Dutton insisted, was no mere suggestion, but a "vivid resemblance," and it was revealed not occasionally but everywhere, and with a curious persistence because of the way in which individual strata maintained their profiles under weathering. In any one place the piled effect might be bewildering - Baroque on Doric and Byzantine on Baroque and Churrigueresque on Byzantine, magenta on chocolate on yellow on pink - but the consistency with which any group of strata produced the same forms was very striking. The ma.s.sive sandstone layer that Dutton knew as the White Wall 16 16 changes from sugar-white in Zion and the Capitol Reef to salmon-color in Glen Canyon, but most of the strata maintain their coloring over scores or hundreds of miles. And even the White Wall is always vividly recognizable. In Zion or Capitol Reef, in Glen or Split Mountain Canyons, in Navajo Mountain, on the Colob Plateau, it is always ma.s.sive, cross-bedded, intricately filagreed by weathering; and it always erodes into domes, caves, baldheads, arches. What Powell and Dutton called the Shinarump series changes from sugar-white in Zion and the Capitol Reef to salmon-color in Glen Canyon, but most of the strata maintain their coloring over scores or hundreds of miles. And even the White Wall is always vividly recognizable. In Zion or Capitol Reef, in Glen or Split Mountain Canyons, in Navajo Mountain, on the Colob Plateau, it is always ma.s.sive, cross-bedded, intricately filagreed by weathering; and it always erodes into domes, caves, baldheads, arches. What Powell and Dutton called the Shinarump series 17 17 has always the gray, mingled, banded colors, the erosional statuary like a continuous frieze in high relief, above a flowing slope of chocolate and variegated shales. Wherever the Eocene Pink Cliffs are exposed, they are layered in pink and yellow and white, and carved into statuary even more fantastic than the frieze of the Organ Rock or the Shinarump. For endless miles, in all the formations, the forms are as repet.i.tive as if carved to a master plan, the strata level or nearly so, the thickness and colors persistent or changing only by imperceptible degrees. has always the gray, mingled, banded colors, the erosional statuary like a continuous frieze in high relief, above a flowing slope of chocolate and variegated shales. Wherever the Eocene Pink Cliffs are exposed, they are layered in pink and yellow and white, and carved into statuary even more fantastic than the frieze of the Organ Rock or the Shinarump. For endless miles, in all the formations, the forms are as repet.i.tive as if carved to a master plan, the strata level or nearly so, the thickness and colors persistent or changing only by imperceptible degrees.

Dutton first taught the world to look at that country and see it as it was. He corrected the common belief that the canyons were impressive because they were deep and narrow. The grandest views in all the Grand Canyon are those from such observation posts as Point Sublime, where the chasm is widest and a just proportion of width to depth is obtained. He was a student of form, as of color, and he dismissed the alpine, craggy forms among which the romantic imagination has loved to wander since Childe Harold showed it how. Those alpine forms, which are "only big and rough," do not appear in the Plateau Province. The forms that do appear have no counterparts among those which have shaped and trained our appreciation. What shall we make, he asks, of the Temples of the Virgin?

.. Directly in front of us a complex of white towers, springing from a central pile, mounts upwards to the clouds. Out of their midst, and high over all, rises a dome-like ma.s.s, which dominates the entire landscape. It is almost pure white, with brilliant streaks of carmine descending its vertical walls. At the summit it is truncated, and a flat tablet is laid upon the top, showing its edge of deep red. It is impossible to liken this object to any familiar shape, for it resembles none. Yet its shape is far from being indefinite; on the contrary, it has a definiteness and individuality which extort an exclamation of surprise when first beheld. There is no name provided for such an object, nor is it worth while to invent one. Call it a dome; not because it has the ordinary shape of such a structure, but because it performs the function of a dome.The towers which surround it are of inferior ma.s.s and alt.i.tude, but each of them is a study of fine form and architectural effect. They are white above, and change to a strong, rich red below. Dome and towers are planted upon a substructure no less admirable. Its plan is indefinite, but its profiles are perfectly systematic. A curtain wall 1400 feet high descends vertically from the eaves of the temples and is succeeded by a steep slope of ever-widening base courses leading down to the esplanade below. The curtain wall is decorated with a lavish display of vertical mold ings, and the ridges, eaves, and mitered angles are fretted with serrated cusps. This ornamentation is suggestive rather than precise, but it