iversally 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
ac