Excerpt from Exploring the American West, 1803-1879

Beyond the plains loomed the Rockies, foothills at first, then towering masses of craggy peaks, cut by passes and separated by parks or upland prairies. Great rivers - the Missouri, the Snake, the Green, the Colo rado and the Yellowstone tore through them, affording paths for the explorers. The mountains, too, abounded with game, but it was their rich, cold beaver streams that attracted the earliest pathfinders. Beyond the mountains stretched a real desert the Great Basin - where a whole generation searched for that one river - the mythical Rio Buenaventura - that would provide easy access across to the Pacific. They never found it.

The southern Great Plains were more arid than the northern, and the southern Rockies were a formidable obstacle to travelers, but the old Spanish city of Santa Fe provided a welcome destination. Beyond Santa Fe was a country of terrifying grandeur that included the rugged valley of the San Juan River, the high plateaus of Utah, the gorges of the Little Colorado, and the Grand Canyon. Farther south there was little but desert and isolated volcanic mountain peaks. Beyond all these to the West, before one reached California, lay the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, hundreds of miles of sand dunes, 120-degree temperatures, and little water. After sur mounting these obstacles, a traveler reached the south ern Sierra, crossed over them, and, descending in stages to the coast, saw whales spouting out in the endless Pacific. The trans-mississippi West was big country, so big it took a generation to even begin to assimilate it to the imagination.

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