Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 88, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 April 1916 — GREATEST in the WORLD [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

GREATEST in the WORLD

/ / r'| HE GREATEST thing in • * I the world.” That is a large | phrase and an overworked ■* one, and hardened travelers do not take it lightly upon the tongue. Noticeably it is most glibly in use with those who but lately, and for the first-time, have wandered beyond their native state or county. Yet in every sort there is, of course, somewhere “the best thing in the world” of its kind. There is and can be no dispute that the term applies literally to several things in the immediate region of the Grand canyon of Arizona. As has more than once been said, probably no other equal area on earth contains so many supreme marvels of so many kinds — so many astounding sights, so many masterpieces of nature's handiwork, so vast and conclusive an encyclopedia of the world-building processes, so Impressive monuments of prehistoric man, so many triumphs of man still in the tribal relation —as does what has been called the “Southwestern Wonderland.” This includes a large part of New Mexico and Arizona, the area which geographically and ethnographically we may count as the Grand canyon region. A few wonders are: The largest and by far the most beautiful of all petrified forests, with several hundred square miles whose surface is carpeted with agate chips

and dotted with agate trunks two to four feet in diameter; and just across one valley a buried “forest" whose huge silicified —not agatized—logs show their ends under fifty feet of sandstone. The largest natural bridge in the world, 2GO feet high, over 500 feet span and over 600 feet wide, up and down stream, and with an orchard on its top and miles of stalactite caves under Its abutments. The largest variety, and display of geologically recent volcanic action in North America, with 60-mile Java flows, 1,500-foot blankets of creamy tufa cut by scores of cannons; hundreds of craters and thousands of square miles of lava beds, basalt and cinders, and so much “volcanic glass” (obsidian) that it was the chief tool of the prehistoric population. Cave and Cliff Dwellings. The largest and the most impressive villages of cave-dwellings in the world, most of them already abandoned when the “world-seeking Genoese” sailed. The many-storied cliff dwellings, castles and forts and homes, in the faces of wild precipices or tjpon their tops —an aboriginal architecture as remarkable as any in the land. The 26 strange communal town republicsof the descendants of the “cliff dwellers,” the modern Pueblos; some in fertile valleys, some (like Acoma and Hop!) perched on barren and dizzy cliff tops. The strange dances, rites, dress and customs of these ancient peoples who have solved the problem of irrigation, six-story house building and clean self-government, and even women’s rights—‘long before Columbus was born. Some of the most notable tribes of savage nomads, like the Navajos, whose blankets and silver work are pre-eminent, and the Apaches, who man for man, have been probably the most successful warriors in history. Greatest Chasm in the World. At the head of the list stands the Grandcanyon of Arizona; whether It Is the “greatest wonder of the world” depends a little on our definition of “wonder.” Possibly It is no more wonderfut than the fact that so tiny a fraction of the people who confess themselves the smartest' in the world have ever seen it As a people we go abroad to see scenery incomparably inferior. But beyond peradventure it is the greatest chasm in the world, and the

most superb. Enough globe-trotters have seen it to establish that fact. Many have come cynically prepared to be disappointed; to find it overdrawn and really not so stupendous as something else. It is, after all, a hard test that so be-bragged a wonder must endure under the critical scrutiny of them that have seen the earth and the fullness thereof. But never has the most self-satisfied veteran traveler been disappointed in the Grand canyon. or dared to patronize it. The quebrada of the Apu-Rlmac is a marvel of the Andes, with its vertiginous depths and its suspension bridge of wild vines. The Grand canyon of the Arkansas, in Colorado, is a noble little slit in the mountains. The Franconia and White mountain notches in New Hampshire are beautiful. The Yosemite and the Yellowstone canyons surpass the world, each in its way; but if all these were hung up on the opposite wall of the Grand canyon from you, the chances are fifty to one that you could not tell t’other from which, nor any of them from the hundreds of other canyons which rib that vast gorge. If the falls of Niagara were installed in the Grand canyon between your visits —next time you stood on that dizzy rimrock you would probably need good field glasses and much patience before you could locate that cataract which in its place looks pretty big. If Mount Washing-

ton were plucked up bodily by the roots —not from where you see it, but from sea-level —and carefully set down in the Grand canyon you probably would not notice it next morning, unless its dull colors distinguished it in that innumerable congress of larger and painted giants. All this, which is literally true, is a mere trifle of what might be said in trying to fix a standard of comparison for the Grand canyon. You may compare all you will, eloquently and from wide experience, and at last all similes fail. The Grand canyon is just the Grand canyon, and that is all you can say. It is no mere cleft. It is a terrific trough 6,000 to 7,000 feet deep, ten to twenty miles wide, hundreds of miles long, peopled with hundreds of peaks taller than any mountain east of the Rockies, yet not one of them with its head so high as your feet, and all ablaze with such color as no eastern or European landscape ever knew. And as you sit upon the brink the divine scene-shifters give you a new canyon every hour. With each degree of the sun’s course the great counter-sunk mountains fade away and new ones, as terrific, are carved by the westering shadows. •' The Grand canyon country is not only the hugest, but the most varied and instructive example on earth of one of the chief factors of earth-build-ing erosion. It is the mesa country—the land of tables. Nowhere else on the footstool is there such an example of deep-gnawing water or of water high carving. The sandstone mesas of the Southwest, the terracing of canyon walls, the castellation, battlementing and cliff-making, the cutting down of a whole landscape except its precipitous islands of flat-topped rock, the thin lata tablecloths on tables 100 feet high—these are a few of the things which make the Southwest wonderful alike to the scientist and the sightseer. „