Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1879 — A Terrible Situation. [ARTICLE]

A Terrible Situation.

The Denver (Col.) Tribune tells the following story of the Grand Canon. Chas May and his brother Robert, in the spring of 1870. offered to pass sixty thousand railroad ties down the Arkansas from the mountain source. He says: “Our offer was accepted, when we started into the upper entrance of the canon with a large skiff, provided with six days’ provisions and 2(X)feet of rope, with which, by taking a running turn around some firmly planted object, we could lower our boat a hundred feet at a time. In this way, at the end of three days, having set adrift many

hundried ties, we reached the entrance to the Royal George Hereßwe discovered that an attempt to descend the first waterfall with two in the boat was certain destruction, and to return was impossible. Accordingly, I determined to lower my brother down the fall in the boat, a distance of 200 feet, gave him the rope and let him take the chance of the canon (life seemed more certain in that direction), while I would risk my physical ability to climb the canon wall, which was two thousand feet high. “About ten o’clock in the morning I shook hands with my brother, lowered hi n in the boat safely to the foot of the fall, gave him the rope and Saw him no more. Then, throwing-aside my coat, hat and boots, and stripping the socks from my feet. I commenced my climbing way, often reaching the height of one or two hundred feet, only to be compelled to return to try some other way. At length, about four o’clock in the afternoon, I reached a height upon the smooth canon wall of about a thousand feet. Here my further progress was arrested by a shelving ledge of rock that jutted out from the canon side a foot or more. To advance was without hope; to return, certain death. Reaching upward and outward, I grasped the arm of the ledge with one hand and then with the other, my feet slipped from the smooth side of the canon, and my body hung suspended in the air a thousand feet above the roaring waters of the Arkansas.

At that moment I looked downward to measure the distance I would have to fall when my arms gave out. A stinging sensation crept through my kair as my eye caught the strong root of a cedar bush that projected out over the ledge, a little beyond my reach. My grasp upon the rim of the ledge was fast yielding to the weight of my person. Then I determined to make my beet effort to raise my body and throw it sideways toward the root, so as to bring it within my grasp. At the moment of commencing the effort, I saw my mother’s face as sheP leaned out over the ledge, reached down her hand and caught me by the hair. Stranger, my mother died while yet a young woman, when I and my brother were small boys, but I remember her face. I was successful in making the side leap of my arms, when I drew myself upon the ledge and rested for a short time. From here upwards my climbing way was laborious, but less dangerous. I reached the top of the canon just as the sun was sinking behind the snowy range, and hastened to our camp at the mouth of the canon, where I fouhd my brother all safe. ‘Charley,’ said he, ‘have yoif had your head in a flour sack?’ It was then’that I discovered that my hair was white as you see it new.”