Abstract
UNTIL a few years ago the geography of the high grounds of the western part of North America was depicted, even on the best maps, in a manner which now appears almost like a caricature of nature. So much had been said and written about the Rocky Mountains that the popular imagination was wont to picture them as a colossal, rugged, and almost impassable range, extending continuously down the backbone of the continent, and serving generally as the watershed between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The progress of research, however, dissipated this delusion by showing that, instead of one continuous chain of mountains, a vast area of country, extending from the British possessions far down into the Southern States, has been upraised into elevated plains or table-lands, and that these at various distances have been ridged up by lenticular mountain-chains, sometimes parallel, sometimes en écheton, and trending generally in a meridional direction. The term “Rocky Mountains” is now commonly restricted to the most easterly line of mountains, which serves as a divide or water-parting between the Atlantic slope and the regions lying to the west. But though the traditional glories of the Rocky Mountains have thus been dimmed, and though the most enthusiastic traveller through their still little-known solitudes must in fairness admit that they cannot boast among their innumerable ranges, hitherto visited and described, one which for variety and majesty of outline can be named with the Bernese Oberland, yet this merely nominal degradation is more than compensated by the discovery that these western territories contain a type of high ground to which there is probably no adequate parallel elsewhere on the face of the globe—a type so strange and overwhelming in its first aspect,-so weird and almost incredible in its history, that the ordinary language of scenic description fails to convey the impression whieh the overawed beholder wishes to produce, and he finds himself obliged to borrow a new vocabulary, yet even with its aid is conscious that his narrative, exaggerated as it may seem, falls infinitely short of doing justice to the marvels he has seen.
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GEIKIE, A. The High Plateaux of Utah 1 . Nature 22, 324–327 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/022324a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/022324a0