Excerpt from Grand Canon of the Colorado River, Arizona

HE Colorado is one of the great rivers of North America. Formed in southern Utah by T the confluence of the Green and Grand, it intersects the northwestern corner of Arizona, and, becoming the eastern boundary of Nevada and California, flows southward until it reaches tidewater in the Gulf of California, Mexico. It drains a territory of square miles, and, traced back to the rise of its principal source, is miles long. At two points, the Needles and Yuma on the California boundary, it is crossed by a railroad. Elsewhere its course lies far from Caucasian settlements and far from the routes of common travel, in the heart of a vast region fenced on the one hand by arid plains and on the other by formidable mountains. The early Spanish explorers first reported it to the civilized world in 1540, two separate expeditions becoming acquainted with the river for a comparatively short distance above its mouth, and another, journeying from the Moqui Pueblos northwestward across the desert, obtaining the first view of the Big Cafion, failing in every effort to descend the canon wall, and Spying the river only from afar. Again, in 1776, a Spanish priest traveling southward through Utah struck off from the Virgen River to the southeast and found a practicable crossing at a point that still bears the name Vado de los Padres. For more than eighty years thereafter the Big Canon remained unvisited, except by the Indian, the Mormon herds man and the trapper, although the S'itgreaves expedition of 1851, journeying westward, struck the Colorado about one hundred and fifty milespabove Yuma, and Lieutenant Whipple in 1854 made a survey for a practicable 'railroad route along the thirty-fifth parallel, where the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad has since been constructed. The establishment of military posts in New Mexico and Utah having made desirable the use of a water-way for the cheap trans portation of supplies, in 1857 the War Department dispatched an expedition in charge of Lieutenant Ives to explore the Colorado as far from its mouth as navigation should be found practicable. Ives ascended the river in a specially constructed steamboat to the head of Black Canon, a few miles below the confluence of the Virgen River'in Nevada, where further navi gation became impossible; then, returning to the Needles, he set off across the country toward the northeast. He reached the Big Canon at Diamond Creek and at Cataract Creek in the spring of 1858, and from the latter point made a wide southward detour around the San Francisco peaks, thence northeastward to the Moqui Pueblos, thence eastward to Fort Defiance and so back to civilization.

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