The Book of the National Parks Part 24

The Indian Territory became the State of Oklahoma in 1907; the story of the white man's peaceful invasion is one of absorbing interest; the human spectacle of to-day is complex, even kaleidoscopic. In the thirties and forties the government had established in the territory the five civilized Indian nations, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, each with its allotted boundaries, its native government, its legislatures, and its courts. In many respects these were foreign nations within our boundaries. Besides them, the Osage Indians had their reservation in the north, and fragments of no less than seventeen other tribes lived on a.s.signed territory.

Gradually white men invaded the land, purchased holdings from the Indian nations, built cities, established businesses of many kinds, ran railroads in all directions. In time, the nations were abolished and their remaining lands were divided up among the individuals composing them; the Indians of these nations became American citizens; their negro slaves, for they had been large slaveholders, received each his portion of the divided land. Then came Oklahoma.

To-day there is only one Indian reservation in the State, that of the Osages. Oil has been found on their land and they are the wealthiest people in the world to-day, the average cash income of each exceeding five thousand dollars a year. In a state with a total population of two and a quarter millions live 336,000 Indians representing twenty-three tribes and 110,000 negroes descended from slaves. There has been much intermarrying between Indians and whites, and some between Indians and blacks. Here is a mixture of races to baffle the keenest eye.

Elsewhere than in the Osage Reservation, wealth also has come to the Indians. Many have very large incomes, large even for the rich of our Eastern cities. Asphalt also has enriched many. Cotton is raised extensively in the southern counties. Grazing on a large scale has proved profitable. Many Indians own costly and luxurious homes, ride in automobiles, and enter importantly into business, politics, and the professions; these usually have more or less white blood. Many full-bloods who have grown rich without effort possess finely furnished bedrooms, and sleep on the floor in blankets; elaborate dining-rooms with costly table equipments, and eat cross-legged on the kitchen floor; gas-ranges, and cook over chip fires out-of-doors; automobiles, and ride blanketed ponies. Many wealthy men are deeply in debt because of useless luxuries which they have been persuaded to buy.

Platt National Park lies about the centre of what was once the Chickasaw nation. It is a grazing and a cotton country. There are thousands of Indians, many of them substantial citizens, some men of local influence.

Native dress is seldom seen.

Quoting again from my correspondence with Colonel Sneed, here is the legend of the last of the Delawares:

"Along about 1840, a very few years after the Chickasaws and Choctaws had arrived in Indian Territory, a small band of about sixty Delaware Indians arrived in the Territory, having roved from Alabama through Mississippi and Missouri, and through the northwest portion of Arkansas.

Being a small band, they decided to link their fortunes with those of some other tribe of Indians, and they first pitched their tepees with those of the Cherokees. But the Cherokee Chief and old Chief Wahpanucka of the Delawares did not agree. So the little band of Delawares continued rambling until they reached the Choctaw Nation, where they again tried to make terms with the Chief of the tribe. Evidently no agreement was reached between that Chief and Wahpanucka, for the Delawares continued their roving until they reached the Chickasaw Nation, where they remained.

"Old Chief Wahpanucka had a beautiful daughter whose name was Deerface; two of the Delaware braves were much in love with her, but Deerface could not decide which one of these warriors she should take to become Chief after the death of Wahpanucka.

"Chief Wahpanucka called the two warriors before him and a powwow was agreed upon. The council was held around the Council Rocks (which is now a point of interest within the Platt National Park), and a decision was reached to the effect that at a certain designated time the Delawares should all a.s.semble on the top of the Bromide Cliff, at the foot of which flow the now famous Bromide and Medicine Springs, and that the two braves should ride their Indian ponies to the edge of the cliff, which was at that time known as Medicine Bluff, and jump off to the bed of the creek about two hundred feet below. The one who survived was to marry Deerface, and succeed Wahpanucka as Chief of the Delawares.

"The race was run and both Indian braves made the jump from the bluff, but both were killed. When Deerface saw this she threw herself from the bluff and died at the foot of the cliff where her lovers had met their death. To-day her image may be seen indelibly fixed on one of the rocks of the cliff where she fell, and the water of the Medicine Spring is supposed to be the briny tears of the old Chief when he saw the havoc his decision had wrought. These tears, filtering down through the cliff where the old Chief stood, are credited with being so purified that the water of the spring which they form is possessed with remedial qualities which make it a cure for all human ailments."

THE GRAND CANYON AND OUR NATIONAL MONUMENTS

ON THE SCENERY OF THE SOUTHWEST

To most Americans the southwest means the desert, and it is true that most of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and portions of Colorado and southern California, are arid or semiarid lands, relieved, however, by regions of fertility and agricultural prosperity. In popular conception the desert has been the negative of all that means beauty, richness, and sublimity; it has been the synonym of poverty and death. Gradually but surely the American public is learning that again popular conception is wrong, that the desert is as positive a factor in scenery as the mountain, that it has its own glowing beauty, its own intense personality, and occasionally, in its own amazing way, a sublimity as gorgeous, as compelling, and as emotion-provoking as the most stupendous snow-capped range.

The American desert region includes some of the world's greatest scenery. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is sunk in a plateau which, while sprinkled with scant pine, is nearly rainless. Zion Canyon is a palette of brilliant color lying among golden sands. A score of national monuments conserve large natural bridges, forests of petrified trees, interesting volcanic or other phenomena of prehistoric times, areas of strange cactus growths, deposits of the bones of monstrous reptiles, and remains of a civilization which preceded the discovery of America; and, in addition to these, innumerable places of remarkable magnificence as yet unknown except to the geologist, the topographer, the miner, the Indian, and the adventurer in unfrequented lands.

This arid country consists of rolling sandy plains as broad as seas, dotted with gray sage-brush and relieved by bare craggy monadnocks and naked ranges which the rising and the setting sun paints unbelievable colors. Here and there thin growths of cottonwood outline thin ribbons of rivers, few and far between. Here and there alkali whitens the edges of stained hollows where water lies awhile after spring cloudbursts.

Here and there are salt ponds with no outlet. Yet even in the desolation of its tawny monotony it has a fascination which is insistent and c.u.mulative.

But the southwest is not all desert. There are great areas of thin grazing ranges and lands where dry farming yields fair crops. There are valleys which produce fruits and grains in abundance. There are hamlets and villages and cities which are among the oldest in America, centres of fertile tracts surrounded by deserts which need only water to become the richest lands on the continent. There are regions reclaimed by irrigation where farming has brought prosperity. In other places the plateau covers itself for hundreds of square miles with scrubby pine and cedar.

All in all, it is a land of rare charm and infinite variety.

To appreciate a region which more and more will enter into American consciousness and divide travel with the mountains, the reader should know something of its structural history.

The southwestern part of the United States rose above sea-level and sank below it many times during the many thousands of centuries preceding its present state, which is that of a sandy and generally desert plateau, five to ten thousand feet in alt.i.tude. How many times it repeated the cycle is not fully known. Some portions of it doubtless were submerged oftener than others. Some were lifting while others were lowering. And, meantime, mountains rose and were carried away by erosion to give place to other mountains which also wore away; river systems formed and disappeared, lakes and inland seas existed and ceased to exist. The history of our southwest would have been tempestuous indeed had it been compa.s.sed within say the life of one man; but, spread over a period of time inconceivable to man, there may have been no time when it might have seemed to be more active in change than its still hot deserts seem to-day to the traveller in pa.s.sing trains.

Other parts of the continent, no doubt, have undergone as many changes; our southwest is not singular in that. But nowhere else, perhaps, has the change left evidences so plain and so interesting to the unscientific observer. The page of earth's history is more easily read upon the bare deserts of our southwest than on the gra.s.s-concealed prairies of the Mississippi Valley or the eroded and forested ranges of the Appalachians.

Before the Rockies and the Sierra even existed, in the shallow sea which covered this part of the continent were deposited the ooze which later, when this region rose above the sea, became the magnificent limestones of the Grand Canyon. Muds acc.u.mulated which to-day are seen in many highly colored shales. Long ages of erosion from outlying mountain regions spread it thick with gravels and sands which now appear in rocky walls of deep canyons. A vast plain was built up and graded by these deposits. The trunks of trees washed down by the floods from far distant uplands were buried in these muds and sands, where, in the course of unnumbered centuries, they turned to stone. They are the petrified forests of to-day.

Mountains, predecessors of our modern Sierra, lifted in the south and west, squeezed the moisture from the Pacific winds, and turned the region into desert. This was in the Jura.s.sic Period. Sands thousands of feet deep were acc.u.mulated by the desert winds which are to-day the sandstones of the giant walls of Zion Canyon.

But this was not the last desert, for again the region sank below the sea. Again for half a million years or more ooze settled upon the sands to turn to limestone millions of years later. In this Jura.s.sic sea sported enormous marine monsters whose bones settled to the bottom to be unearthed in our times, and great flying reptiles crossed its water.

Again the region approached sea-level and acc.u.mulated, above its new limestones, other beds of sands. New river systems formed and brought other acc.u.mulations from distant highlands. It was then a low swampy plain of enormous size, whose northern limits reached Montana, and which touched what now is Kansas on its east. Upon the borders of its swamps, in Cretaceous times, lived gigantic reptiles, the Dinosaurs and their ungainly companions whose bones are found to-day in several places.

For the last time the region sank and a shallow sea swept from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Again new limestones formed, and as the surface very slowly rose for the last time at the close of the Cretaceous Period many new deposits were added to the scenic exhibit of to-day.

Meantime other startling changes were making which extended over a lapse of time which human mind cannot grasp. Responding to increasing pressures from below, the continent was folding from north to south. The miracle of the making of the Rockies was enacting.

During all of Tertiary times earth movements of tremendous energy rocked and folded the crust and hastened change. The modern Sierra rose upon the eroded ruins of its predecessor, again shutting off the moisture-laden western winds and turning the southwest again into a desert. One of the mountain-building impulses spread eastward from the Sierra to the Wasatch Mountains, but Nature's project for this vast granite-cored tableland never was realized, for continually its central sections caved and fell. And so it happened that the eastern edge of the Sierra and the western edge of the Wasatch Mountains became the precipitous edges, thousands of feet high, of a mountain-studded desert which to-day is called the Great Basin. It includes southeastern Oregon, nearly all of Nevada, the western half of Utah, and a large area in the south of California, besides parts of Idaho and Wyoming. It is 880 miles north and south and 572 miles wide. Its elevation is five thousand feet, more or less, and its area more than two hundred thousand square miles.

This enormous bowl contained no outlet to the sea, and the rivers which flowed into it from all its mountainous borders created a prehistoric lake with an area of fifty-four thousand square miles which was named Lake Bonneville after the army officer whose adventures in 1833 were narrated by Washington Irving; but it was Fremont who first clearly described it. Lake Bonneville has evaporated and disappeared, but in its place are many salty lakes, the greatest of which is Great Salt Lake in Utah. Attenuated rivers still flow into the Great Basin, but are lost in their sands. The greatest of these, the Mohave River, is a hundred miles long, but is not often seen because it hides its waters chiefly under the surface sands. Lake Bonneville's prehistoric beaches exist to-day.

Transcontinental pa.s.sengers by rail cross its ancient bed, but few know it.

The Great Basin to-day is known to travellers princ.i.p.ally by the many lesser deserts which compose it, deserts separated from each other by lesser mountain ranges and low divides. Its southern and southeastern boundaries are the plateaus and mountains which form the northern watershed of the muddy Colorado River and its confluents. South of the Colorado, the plateaus of New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California gradually subside to the Rio Grande.

During this period and the Quaternary which followed it, volcanoes appeared in many places; their dead cones diversify our modern landscape. It was during the Quaternary Period, in whose latter end lives man, that erosion dug the mighty canyons of our great southwest.

The Colorado was sweeping out the Grand Canyon at the same time that, far in the north, the glaciers of the Great Ice Age were carving from Algonkian shales and limestones the gorgeous cirques and valleys of Glacier National Park.

XVI

A PAGEANT OF CREATION

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, ARIZONA. AREA, 958 SQUARE MILES

There is only one Grand Canyon. It lies in northern Arizona, and the Colorado River, one of the greatest of American rivers, flows through its inner gorge. It must not be confused with the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, or with any of the _grande canons_ which the Spaniards so named because they were big canyons.

The Grand Canyon is 217 miles long, 8 to 12 miles wide at the rim, and more than a mile deep. It is the Colossus of canyons, by far the hugest example of stream erosion in the world. It is gorgeously colored. It is by common consent the most stupendous spectacle in the world. It may be conceived as a mountain range reversed. Could its moulded image, similarly colored, stand upon the desert floor, it would be a spectacle second only to the vast mould itself.

More than a hundred thousand persons visit the Grand Canyon each year.

In other lands it is our most celebrated scenic possession. It was made a national park in 1919.

I

The Grand Canyon is not of America but of the world. Like the Desert of Sahara and the monster group of the Himalayas, it is so entirely the greatest example of its kind that it refuses limits. This is true of it also as a spectacle; far truer, in fact, for, if it is possible to compare things so dissimilar, in this respect certainly it will lead all others. None see it without being deeply moved--all to silence, some even to tears. It is charged to the rim with emotion; but the emotion of the first view varies. Some stand astounded at its vastness. Others are stupefied and search their souls in vain for definition. Some tremble.

Some are uplifted with a sense of appalling beauty. For a time the souls of all are naked in the presence.

This reaction is apparent in the writings of those who have visited it; no other spectacle in America has inspired so large a literature.

Joaquin Miller found it fearful, full of glory, full of G.o.d. Charles Dudley Warner p.r.o.nounced it by far the most sublime of earthly spectacles. William Winter saw it a pageant of ghastly desolation.

Hamlin Garland found its lines chaotic and disturbing but its combinations of color and shadow beautiful. Upon John Muir it bestowed a new sense of earth's beauty.

Marius R. Campbell, whose geological researches have familiarized him with Nature's scenic gamut, told me that his first day on the rim left him emotionally cold; it was not until he had lived with the spectacle that realization slowly dawned. I think this is the experience of very many, a fact which renders still more tragic a prevailing public a.s.sumption that the Grand Canyon is a one-day stop in a transcontinental journey.