Volume XIII.

The person who has ever ridden through Black Canon-the part of it that is traversed by the railroad, some fifteen miles-always is pleased to have the opportunity to have the experience repeated, for the beauties and wonders of this remarkable gorge of the Gunnison River are ever new and interesting. They have never been half told, and never will be until a Ruskin with a knowledge of geology devotes a volume to this tremendous ravine, the strangest of all the chasms of Colorado. It is a canon with a history.

The story is told of Captain John W. Gunnison, after whom the Gunnison River was named, that he and the members of his exploring party halted, wonder-struck, at the precipitous portals of the gorge that has been aptly denominated Black Canon, but is sometimes called the Gunnison Canon. The Indians told him it was impassable to man; so the intrepid leader made a slight defour and continued on his way westward through the trackless wilderless to the Uncompahgre Valley. A uarter of a century later (in the ate '70s) the engineers of the Den

ver and Rio Grande Railroad penetrated the gorge and with difficulty blasted a roadbed out of the cliffs of granite and sandstone along the river's banks, from Sapinero to Cimarron. This railroad crosses and re-crosses the winding stream.

The sightseer goes into raptures over the magnificent panorama spread out before him to either side of the deep gash cut by the flood of angry waters. Beneath him he hears the river's roar; he looks down upon the surging mass of dark and green water, swirling and eddying around gigantic boulders; glancing upward, he sees massive abutments rising, ledge above ledge, terrace-like, for thousands of feet, the rocky walls eroded by wind and rain into a thousand curious forms, the strata stained with gorgeous colors. Here and there the lofty escarpment is broken by side ravines. Far away loom the snow-lined summits of huge mountains, whose bases seem to rise almost from the water's edge. One of the freaks of Nature is the conical tower named Curricanti Needle. This solitary monument of colia

6

the center of a spacious a spacious amphiThe rugged pinnacle of theater. mass flaunts the this mountain clouds. The train glides along, and after a little distance it passes the mouth of a mighty canon that seems like the arcade to fathomless caverns of which one gets only a fleet

recorded her impressions in musical stanzas of the majestic monolith Fannie Isabel that soars high above the beetling cliffs of the canon. Sherrick has caught something of the grandeur of the scenery, which only a Byron could describe in Her beautiful poem does, words.