Even in area, the canon is extraordinary.  It is large enough to contain more than one Old World country.  It is long enough to stretch across some of the largest States in the Union.  Some of the smaller New England States would be absolutely swallowed up in the yawning abyss could they, by any means, be removed to it bodily.  An express train running at a high rate of speed, without a single stop and on a first-class road-bed, could hardly get from one end of the canon to the other in less than five hours, and an ordinary train with the usual percentage of stoppage would about make the distance between morning and evening.

Reduced to the record of cold figures, the Grand Canon is made up of a series of chasms measuring about 220 miles in length, as much as 12 miles in width, and frequently as much as 7,000 feet in depth.

This marvelous feature of American scenery is very fully described in “Our Own Country,” published by the National Publishing Company.  In describing the canon, that profusely illustrated work says that the figures quoted “do not readily strike a responsive chord in the human mind, for the simple reason that they involve something utterly different from anything that more than 99 per cent. of the inhabitants of the world have ever seen.  The man who gazes upon Niagara for the first time, is astounded at the depth of the gorge as well as at the force of the water; and he who has seen Niagara can appreciate somewhat the marvels of the Grand Canon, when he bears in mind that the great wonder of the Western World is for miles at a stretch more than fifty times as deep as the falls and the gorge, generally admitted to be the most awful scenic grandeur within reach of the ordinary traveler.  Nor is this all.  Visitors to Paris who have enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of the gay city from the summit of Eifel Tower, have felt terribly impressed with its immense altitude, and have been astounded at the effect on the appearance of living and inanimate objects so far below them.  How many of the Americans who have been thus impressed by French enterprise, have realized that in their own country there is a natural gorge, at points of which the distance between the summit and the base is more than five times as great as the height of the Eifel Tower?”

The Colorado River rises in the Rocky Mountains, crosses the Territories of Utah and Arizona, and then running between the last named and the State of California, finally empties its waters into the gulf bearing the name of the Golden State.  For more than two hundred miles of its course it runs through the gorge known as the Grand Canon, and hence it has been a very difficult river to explore.  During the Sixteenth Century, some of the Spanish explorers, to whom this country is indebted so much for early records and descriptions, crossed the then undeveloped deserts of the Southwest and discovered the Grand Canon.  Many of the reports they made of the wonders of the New World read so much like fairy tales, and seemed so obviously exaggerated, that little credence was given to them.  Hence it was that their estimates concerning the gorge through which the Rio Colorado Grande flows were treated as fables, and laughed at rather than believed.