Major Powell, than whom few men have done more to enlighten the world concerning the wonders of the Far West, describes the canon very aptly, and speaks in a most attractive manner of the countless canons and caverns, whirlpools and eddies, brooklets and rivers, fords and waterfalls, that abound on every side.  In his first extended description of the canon, he stated that “every river entering it has cut another canon; every lateral creek has also cut another canon; every brook runs in a canon; every rill born of a shower and living only in the showers, has cut for itself a canon; so that the whole upper portion of the basin of the Colorado is traversed by a labyrinth of these deep gorges.  About the basin are mountains; within the basin are canon gorges; the stretches of land from brink to brink are of naked rock or of drifting sands, with here and there lines of volcanic cones, and of black scoria and ashes scattered about.”

Of late years thousands of people have been attracted to this great canon, although but very few have succeeded in exploring its entire length.  Few, indeed, have been able to pass along the balcony of the canon, and to gaze up at the countless wonders of nature, piled one above the other, apparently up to the very region of the clouds.  The common notion of a canon, as Captain C. E. Dutton tells us, is that of a deep, narrow gash in the earth, with nearly vertical walls, like a great and neatly cut trench.  There are hundreds of chasms in the plateau country which answer very well to this notion.  It is, however, unfortunate that the stupendous passway for the Colorado River through the Kaibabs was ever called a canon, for the name identified it with the baser conception.  At places the distance across the chasm to the nearest point on the summit of the opposite wall is about seven miles.  A more correct statement of the general width would be from eleven to twelve miles.  It is hence somewhat unfortunate that there is a prevalent idea, in some way, that an essential part of the grandeur of the Grand Canon is the narrowness of its defile.

As Major Powell expresses it, there are rather a series of canons, than one huge one.  Wherever the river has cut its way through the sandstones, marbles and granites of the Kaibab Mountains, beautiful and awe-inspiring pictures are seen, while above there are domes and peaks, some of red sandstone and some of snowy whiteness.  Cataract Canon alone is forty-one miles long, and has seventy-five cataracts and rapids, of which fifty-seven are within a space of nineteen miles.  A journey along the bank of a river with a waterfall every twenty feet, on the average, is no joke, and only the hardiest men have been able to accomplish it.  In the spring of 1889, the survey party of a projected railroad from Grand Junction to the Gulf of California, made this journey, and from its published description more actual information can be gleaned concerning the canon itself than almost any mere verbal description.