conquering stranger; they have at last become for him foster-parents.
Their verdant banks have sheltered and protected him; their skies
have smiled upon his crops. With grateful memories, therefore, is
clothed for us the sound of such river names as Thames, Danube,
Hudson, Mississippi. Through the centuries their kindly waters have
borne down ancestral argosies of profit without number, establishing
thus the wealth and happiness of the people. Well have rivers been
termed the "Arteries of Commerce"; well, also, may they be considered
the binding links of civilisation.

Then, by contrast, it is all the more remarkable to meet with one
great river which is none of these helpful things, but which, on the
contrary, is a veritable dragon, loud in its dangerous lair, defiant,
fierce, opposing utility everywhere, refusing absolutely to be
bridled by Commerce, perpetuating a wilderness, prohibiting mankind's
encroachments, and in its immediate tide presenting a formidable host
of snarling waters whose angry roar, reverberating wildly league
after league between giant rock-walls carved through the bowels of
the earth, heralds the impossibility of human conquest and smothers
hope. From the tiny rivulets of its snowy birth to the ferocious
tidal bore where it dies in the sea, it wages a ceaseless battle as
sublime as it is terrible and unique. Such is the great Colorado
River of the West, rising amidst the fountains of the beautiful Wind
River Mountains of Wyoming, where also are brought forth the gentler
Columbia and the mighty, far-reaching Missouri. Whirling down ten
thousand feet in some two thousand miles, it meets the hot level of
the Red Sea, once the Sea of Cortes, now the Gulf of California, in
tumult and turmoil. In this long run it is cliff bound nine-tenths of
the way, and the whole country drained by it and its tributaries has
been wrought by the waters and winds of ages into multitudinous