Adventures in the Canyons of the Colorado By Two of Its Earliest Explorers (Classic Reprint)

Bv GeoKCE Whai(3n James Author of In and A round the Grand Canyon, Arizona the Wonderland, The Grand Canyon of A rizona, New Mexico, the Land of the Delightmakers. etc., etc. The more the people of the United States know of their scenic wonderlands the more interest will there be aroused as to who first saw this or the other of them. .T he arousement of this especial interest in regard to the Grand Canyon and its tributaries is growingly apparent. A hundred thousand Americans see the Grand Canyon today where one saw it at the time of my first visit, nearly forty yca.rs ago. A mong the hordes of people attracted to the Grand Canyon by curiosity, scenic allurement, business, pleasure or what not, but two have gained any fame as guides to its wondrous depths and rim revelations. These two gre John Hance and William Wallace Bass. I knew Hance long before he had dreamed that the Canyon would help make him famous; I ate venison stew with him when he was but a cowboy in the employ of the proprietor of the Hull ranch; I wrote the first account of those peculiar and exaggerated yarns of his that gained him his fame as the Munchausen of the West. It was on these yarns alone that his fame reposed. He was never a guide. He knew nothing of the Canyon, east or west, twenty miles from the trail that unfortunately was named after him. He never read a line of its history, and never eared to know who first discovered it. He got lost years after the Canyon was being visited by great numbers of whites, when he attempted to guide a party to the home of the Havasupai I ndians, whose ancestors made the trail which he discovered and claimed as his own. On the other hand, William Wallace Bass, who came to the Canyon some years ahead of Hance, felt its peculiar allurements from the first moment he saw it. There is no man living who has been more deeply interested in studying its geol
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)