Our Wonderlands: Facts and Fancies of America from the Harvest-Fields of Literature
A MELANGE OF EXCERPTa COLLATED BY
CHARLES C. BOMBAUGH, A.M., M.D.
From
FACTS AND FANCIES FOR THE CURIOUS
1905
Introduction
"Facts and Fancies for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of Literature" is a companion volume to the popular compilation "Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest Fields of Literature." Published by the J. B. Lippincott Company, this book offers a delightful collection of interesting facts, anecdotes, and stories from various fields of literature, history, and science.
As the preface of the book explains, the idea for this compilation came about after the electrotype plates of its predecessor were destroyed in a fire in 1899. The publishers requested the compiler to prepare a companion volume on similar lines, and the result is this engaging and informative book — written not just for a specific class of readers, but rather for the multitude.
Our Wonderlands
In repeated statements in the consular reports concerning the large extent of tourist travel in Switzerland, we are told that the “money-making asset” of that little republic, the greater portion of whose area is covered with mountains, is “scenery.” We go to Europe to see the accumulated treasures of centuries, to review the lessons of the past in historic localities, to observe social and industrial conditions, to enjoy musical and dramatic art, to study the development of the fine arts, to note the later acquisition of scientific research. But, as our consuls at Geneva and Lucerne and Berne and Zurich tell us, we go to Switzerland for “scenery.”
Switzerland is two hundred and ten miles in length. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in northern Arizona is two hundred and nineteen miles long, twelve to thirteen miles wide, and over a mile deep. If the main ranges of the Helvetian Alps, between the centre and the southern frontiers, running from the Bernese Oberland to the Grisons, could be lifted up and dumped into the colossal chasm of Arizona, there would still be left room in which to bury the Jura of the western border. Thousands of American tourists gaze with awe upon the panoramic displays from the view-points of the passes of the Simplon, the Furca, the St. Gotthard, and the Splügen, and from the ascent of the Rigi, Pilatus, Jungfrau, or Matterhorn. Many of our adventurous fellow-citizens contest the palm for hardihood and endurance with experienced Alpine climbers; but how few there are who are ambitious enough and venturesome enough to incur the hardships and to risk the dangers of scanning at close range, or from points of vantage, the towers, the temples, the terraces, the ramparts, the pyramids, the domes, the pillars, the buttresses, the buttes, the palisades, the white marble walls, the red sandstone steps, the green serpentine cliffs of the Grand Canyon.
Excursion parties go by way of the Williams branch of the Santa Fé to the rim of the Bright Angel trail because of its accessibility and hotel accommodation, and content themselves with descent of the zigzags to the deeply embedded river, or a drive of a few miles along the brink. But the earnest and determined explorers who follow the hazardous footsteps of the early pioneers, or of the later topographical engineers, are few and far between. There is nothing on earth that even remotely approaches this stupendous chasm in startling surprises, in grandeur and sublimity, yet our tourists ignore its indescribable wonders and go to the Alps for scenery that suffers by comparison.
When it comes to the question of orographic magnitude, our own physical geography gives a decisive answer. The great curve of the Alpine chain stretches from the shores of the Mediterranean to the plains of the Danube—a little more than six hundred miles in length. The narrowest width of the Rocky Mountains, from base to base, is three hundred miles, whereas, at their greatest width, between Cape Mendocino and Denver, the space enclosed by the two outer scarps of the plateau is nearly one thousand miles in breadth. If in measuring the area of the Rocky Mountains we include the long Coast Range, the Sierra Nevada and its northern continuation, the Cascade Range, according to the extent of surface they cover, we have a million square miles as the result, more than one-fourth of the territory of the republic.
With such immense differences in view, the vastly greater capabilities of the Rockies for scenic display are apparent. In the endless succession of views from the heights of Pike’s Peak, or Mt. Shasta, or Mt. Lowe, one can forget his most inspiring and exciting experiences in the Alps. Professor J. D. Whitney declares that no such views as those from Pike’s Peak, either for reach or magnificence, can be obtained in Switzerland. Even with the ever-increasing facilities of transcontinental travel, we but dimly realize the majestic proportions of the Rocky Mountain system, which, with its towering snow-capped peaks, its precipitous rock walls, its volcanic vestiges, its abysmal glens and canyons, and its splendid waterfalls, glorifies every landscape, and solves problems, as nowhere else, in chemical, physical, and dynamical geology.
As to comparative altitudes, it may be noted that Mount St. Elias, of the Alaska Coast Range, is three thousand five hundred feet higher than Mont Blanc, “the monarch of mountains,” as Byron calls it, while its namesake, the Sierra Blanca, the monarch of the Rockies, is nearly as lofty with its triple peak. The Rock of Gibraltar towers to the height of twelve hundred feet; its massive counterpart in the Yosemite, El Capitan, is three times as high as Gibraltar, while the great cliff known as Cloud’s Rest, admittedly the finest panoramic stand-point on earth, is more than six thousand feet high and ten thousand above sea level. As to glaciers, while it is worth a trip across the Atlantic to see the ice masses of the Rhone glacier from the Furca Pass, or the motionless billows of the Mer de Glace at Montanvert, they are overmatched in Alaska by the Muir, the Guyot, the Tyndall, and the Agassiz.
As to lakes, every school child knows that Lake Superior is the largest body of fresh water in the world. It is large enough to bury the whole of Scotland in its translucent depths. The area of the Lake of Geneva is greater than that of the Yellowstone Lake; but while the former is only twelve hundred feet above the sea, the latter is seven thousand seven hundred and forty feet—nearly a mile and a half—above the level of the sea. As to salt lakes, the Caspian Sea is not as salt as the ocean, while our American Dead Sea, the Salt Lake of Utah, has six times the saline strength of the waters of the ocean.
There is a lake in Italy—Castiglione—whose turquoise hues, paler than those of the Blue Grotto of Capri, command merited admiration. Yet the prismatic lakes in the Yellowstone Park are numerous, particularly in the Midway Geyser Basin, where they reflect with remarkable brilliancy different colors of the spectrum, prominently among them emerald green, peacock blue, and golden yellow. The most beautiful mirror lakes are in the Sierra Nevada region, and the gem of all mirrors is that of the Yosemite Valley, of which Mr. Hutchings, the historian and geographer of the valley, says,—
“There is one spot of earth known to man, where one mountain four thousand two hundred feet high, Mt. Watkins; another over six thousand feet, Cloud’s Rest; and another five thousand feet, the Half Dome, are all perfectly reflected upon one small lakelet. Here, moreover, the sun can be seen to rise many times on a single morning.”
In the lake district of the north of England there are sixteen lakes, with many attractive features, but largely centres of pilgrimage as the homes of Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Harriet Martineau. Our Canadian neighbors, in the highlands of Ontario, can point to eight hundred lakes in the Muskoka region, with five hundred islands studded with beautiful villas and summer hotels. Two of the Swiss waterfalls, the Falls of the Rhine at Neuhausen, with a plunge of eighty feet in three leaps, and the falls of the Aar at Handeck, with a broken plunge of two hundred feet, are said to be the largest in Europe. The former is surpassed in picturesque beauty by the Virginia Cascade of the Gibbon River in the Yellowstone Park, and the latter is not worth naming in the same week with the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, as, with a magnificent sweep of three hundred and ten feet, the heavy downpour, with its clouds of snowy spray, enters the canyon which is the culmination of all the bewildering “formations” of the great national reservation.
The cascades of the Reuss, near Andermatt, are justly famous for their tumultuous rush, but the rapids of the Gardiner River in the Yellowstone, and the Merced in the Yosemite, are more boisterous and more beautiful. The much vaunted Giessbach in the Bernese Oberland has a total fall of one thousand one hundred and forty-eight feet, but it is broken into seven sections. Of the various falls in the Yosemite Valley, the highest has a descent of two thousand six hundred feet, with only two interruptions, the upper division having a clear plunge of one thousand six hundred feet. Among great cataracts, as every one knows, Niagara holds the supremacy. In the majesty and sublimity reflected in the overwhelming torrents that are hurled over its precipice, in the resistless energy of its roaring rapids and its turbulent whirlpools, it sets its own standard, and “bears no brother near the throne.”
Caves and grottoes, calcareous and basaltic, are widely spread throughout Europe, but, numerous as they are, if they were all grouped together they could be packed in the heights and depths of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky. Of that stupendous cavern, with a main avenue of six miles and branches of more than a hundred miles in extent, Bayard Taylor said,—
“No description can do justice to its sublimity, or present a fair picture of its manifold wonders. It is the greatest natural curiosity I have ever visited, and he whose expectations are not satisfied by its marvellous avenues, domes, and sparry grottoes, must be either a fool or a demigod.”
The historic caves of Europe abound with the remains of ancient cave-dwellers which are of great interest to archæologists, but the lofty and almost inaccessible abodes of the cliff-dwellers in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona present a wider range of curious inquiry to the student of remote antiquity. Scientists propose to make more extended and comprehensive investigation of these hewn-out homes of the cliff-dwellers in the far West than has yet been made by neglectful explorers. In the ruins of the habitations of a long extinct race in Mancos Canyon, Colorado, they will find abundant material for anthropological research. Perched on narrow ledges seven hundred feet above the valley are numerous ancient dwellings, with well built sandstone walls, with rooms in a good state of preservation, and with scattered specimens of fine pottery and fragments of implements of war and peace. Here and there are watch-towers commanding views of the whole valley.
In the Chaco Canyon are ruins of pueblos still more extensive, once the homes of thousands of people who lived thousands of years ago, and, according to Hayden, in the Geological Survey for 1866, “pre-eminently the finest examples of the works of the unknown builders to be found north of the seat of ancient Aztec empire in Mexico.” A few miles southeast of Flagstaff, Arizona, are more of these retreats far up on rocky crags, and within a similar radius northward are many cave dwellings, but they only stimulate conjecture; they have left behind neither history nor tradition.
The pride of Vernayaz in the Rhone Valley is the Gorge du Trient. Very pretty, and very interesting, what there is of it, but a comparison with Watkins Glen reminds one of Hamlet’s “no more like my father than I to Hercules.” In the splendid description of Watkins by Porte Crayon it appears that that enthusiast was so fascinated by its wonderful succession of attractions, especially those between Glen Alpha and the Cathedral Cascade, that he prolonged his stay, climbing its ladders and descending its stairways again and again. Half an hour would have sufficed for a visit to the Trient.
The boast of the Splügen is the gorge of the Heinzenberg range, through which the four-mile Via Mala runs, and which is the outlet of the Hinter Rhine. Yet this narrow defile between ridges twelve to fifteen hundred feet in height is completely overshadowed in the length and height and ruggedness of the rock walls of the Arkansas, Eagle, and Grand River Canyons, through which the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad passes in Colorado. Our natural bridges have no transatlantic rivals. They are distinctly our own, without duplications abroad. For any favorable comparison with the majestic arch over Cedar Creek, in Virginia, two hundred feet from the summit of its wonderful span to the surface of the stream below, we must look to its resemblances in Walker County, Alabama, and Christian County, Kentucky. California abounds with rock bridges, notably those over Lost River, Trinity River, and Coyote Creek, while the arches at Santa Cruz are well known to all visitors.
Travellers over the St. Gotthard Railway, between Goschenen and Altorf, are apt to regard the forward and backward turns of its loops with wonder at the constructive genius which so boldly and skilfully triumphed over formidable natural obstacles. Yet its loops cut a small figure and look tame enough when placed in contrast with the coils and spirals and sharp curves and bends in the dizzy alignment of the Marshall Pass, the Veta Pass, the Ophir Loop, and the Toltec Gorge. Stupendous and awe-inspiring beyond description are these supreme achievements of modern engineering.
The woodlands of England, and prominently among them Sherwood Forest, boast of very old and very large oaks, elms, and yews. Visitors to Stoke Pogis church-yard, the scene of Gray’s Elegy, will remember the Burnham Beeches, near Slough. The Methuselah of the forests is the Greendale Oak of Welbeck, through which, a hundred and fifty years ago, an arch was cut ten feet high and six feet wide. The largest tree, the Swilcar Oak of Needwood Forest, is twenty-one feet in girth. But in age and dimensions they shrink before the giant growths of California. Of the surprises of the far West, few, if any, are as profoundly impressive as the Sequoias of the Mariposa, Calaveras, and South Park groves, more than eighteen hundred in number. Even the stately redwoods of Vera Cruz, of the sempervirens family, on the Coast Range, though inferior in diameter and height to the gigantea, or “big tree” group, amaze all beholders. The “Wawona” in the Mariposa Grove, twenty-seven feet in diameter, has been tunnelled to admit the passage of stage coaches. The age of the “Grizzly Giant” is estimated at 4680 years. Still older is the prostrate monarch of the Calaveras Grove, known as the “Father of the Forest,” with a circumference of a hundred and ten feet, and a height when standing of four hundred and thirty-five feet. Hundreds of these time-defying veterans had attained a considerable growth before the siege of Troy.
Next to the big trees in point of popular and scientific interest are the fossil forests, especially those in the northeastern part of the Yellowstone Park. The geological agencies through which the trees were petrified must have extended through periods of many thousand years. It was a tedious process, the percolation of silicious waters until the arboreal vegetation was turned to stone by the substitution of agate and amethyst and jasper and chalcedony. Some of the petrifactions are perfect. The rings of annual growth indicate for the large trees an age of not less than five hundred years.
The monoliths, which in the form of castellated rocks, chimney rocks, and cathedral spires, serve as landmarks of nature’s handiwork, are very imposing. The sugarloaf columns among the fantastic sandstone erosions of Monument Park, and the Tower Rock, prominent in the Garden of the Gods at Manitou, are frequently visited. Not less interesting are the Witches’ Rocks in Weber Canyon, Utah, the Monument Rock in Echo Canyon, the Buttes of Green River, and the Dial Rock and Red Buttes, Wyoming. One pinnacle, in Kanab Canyon, just north of the Arizona line, is eight hundred feet in height.
Among the noteworthy creations of the artist-gardeners of Europe, who have not learned “the art to conceal art,” are the Palmgarten at Frankfort, the Boboli Gardens at Florence, the Pallavicini at Genoa, and the Parterre at Fontainebleau. Their redundant embellishment and sharp-cut box hedges, their long perspective of vistas and alleys, the mathematical precision of their terraces, their ponds and fountains and grottoes and stone carvings become wearisome by familiarity. For landscape gardening that never tires we turn to the floral wealth in the grounds of the Hotel del Monte on the bay of Monterey, a hundred and twenty-six acres of fairy-land. Between the prodigal liberality of nature and the prodigal expenditure of cultivated taste, and in view of its alluring surroundings of ocean, mountain, and forest scenery, it is justly regarded as the loveliest and most favored spot in existence.
The Yellowstone National Park is the crowning wonder of our wonderlands. Within an area of 3312 square miles, exclusive of the additional tract known as the Forest Reserve, it includes several ranges of high mountains, three large rivers with their tributaries, thirty-six lakes, and twenty-five waterfalls. The ancient volcanic energy whose subterranean outpourings disappeared in remote ages, leaving the scars and cones behind, has been replaced by eruptive geysers, or water volcanoes, in frequently described groups or basins, together with thousands of non-eruptive hot springs, and the calcareous terraces with their exquisite incrustations. Champlin says that the geysers at the headwaters of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers are the most wonderful on the globe, those in Iceland and New Zealand sinking into insignificance when compared with them. The usual tour of a week or ten days terminates in a visit to the climax of scenic grandeur, the canyon of the Yellowstone River, with its walls of gorgeous coloring, “all the colors of the land, sea, and sky,” as Talmage said.
No description of this canyon, however complete in its details, no effort of the photographer or the landscape artist, however painstaking and elaborate, can give an adequate idea of its marvellous beauty and impressiveness. Twenty years ago one of the leading landscape painters of Germany went to the Yellowstone Park to sketch the views of the canyon from Point Lookout, below the Falls, and Inspiration Point, three-quarters of a mile beyond. In the fascination of the scene he remained for hours, silenced and bewildered, and finally gave up all attempt to delineate it on canvas. He returned again and again, several summers in succession, but was never able to “screw his courage to the sticking-point.” The artist Moran, with injudicious boldness, attempted what his superior had found beyond his reach, and, as was to be expected, with resultant failure and disappointment.
So with the indescribable beauties of the Yosemite Valley and the wonders of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. No stereoscopic reflex, no moving panorama, no vitagraph can even faintly approach the point of adequate representation. The only way to realize such sublimity is to stand in its presence, awed and abashed by creations whose stupendous character has no rival in the world. “None but itself can be its parallel.”
In the midst of a desolate alkali plain, in the Bad Lands of Arizona, is a formation of rock about an acre in extent, from fissures in which emanate melodious sounds, as though unseen hands were playing upon an instrument underneath, or the wind were sweeping among organ-like stalactites in a subterranean cavern. But while such “shallows murmur, the deeps are dumb.” In the presence of the might and majesty of the marvels and miracles of creation, silence is more eloquent than speech. The still, small voice of nature’s teachings, “from all around, earth and her waters and the depths of air,” speaks to us beyond the power of words.
As to our mineral springs, they are like the stars for multitude, presenting every variety. Some of our thermal springs, for example the hot, vaporous sulphur caves of Glenwood, Colorado, are constantly demonstrating their restorative efficiency. There is no need of resort to the hot waters of Carlsbad or the cold waters of Marienbad, to Aix la Chapelle or Kissingen.
As to ideal retreats for campers and fishers, limitless fields for hunters, and favoring chances for seekers of precious metals, the boundless continent is theirs; they are welcome guests of Lady Bountiful.