How The Canyon Was Formed*
* This chapter, while in manuscript, was read by Dr. Charles D. Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and formerly Director of the United States Geological Survey, and also by Professor Matthis, of the Survey. It may therefore be accepted as a fairly accurate and authoritative presentation of the geological conditions existent at the Canyon, with their explanations, as accepted by the leading scientists of to-day.


The beginning of land. In the long ago centuries, when the world was "without form and void," waters covered the face of the earth, and darkness brooded over the waters. As the earth's crust began to shrink under the water, in the process of cooling, the first masses to crumple up, to wrinkle, were the first to arise above the surface of the vast, primeval, shoreless ocean. They appeared as tiny islands, pinnacles, or ridges thrust up, exactly as we see them sometimes on the coast,--hidden at high tide; appearing again at low tide.

The Laurentian Hills. Nature had plenty of time before her, so she did not hurry her work, and it took long centuries before there was any large amount of land thrust up out of the bosom of the sea. The scientists are able to tell us, with some definiteness, which came forth first. They say that on the continent of America the earliest born land was a mass of granitic rock in Canada,--the Laurentian Hills. The next to peer above the surface and feel the warmth of the sun were peaks and ridges that made islands of themselves, in what are now known as the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians. Now, at last, the great waves of the sea and the resistless storms had something to play with, and they pounced down upon the land as with tooth and claw. They rubbed and pounded, raged and smashed for a thousand years, and then another thousand, and still another, while Mother Earth uneasily thrust forth her rocky children out of the ocean into the light of day. Surprised at such treatment by the storms and seas, the newly born earth masses began to crumble and "weather." The detached fragments slipped back, or were washed back, into the deeper or shallower parts of the ocean, and were there tossed back and forth, pounded and ground into sand and silt, into pebbles and boulders, while more land was slowly being thrust out for the angry sea to work upon. Layer by layer, the ground-up masses were deposited in the inner ocean bed, parts of which were now practically shut off from the vast ocean beyond. How many centuries of centuries this process continued geologists do not tell us. Time is so vast, so long, that they cannot divide those early days into weeks, months and years, as we now do.