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 Cañon, 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 Cañon. 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. Major Powell, than whom few men have done more to enlighten the world concerning the wonders of the Far West, describes the cañon very aptly, and speaks in a most attractive manner of the countless cañons and caverns, whirlpools and eddies, brooklets and rivers, fords and waterfalls, that abound on every side. In his first extended description of the cañon, he stated that "every river entering it has cut another cañon; every lateral creek has also cut another cañon; every brook runs in a cañon; every rill born of a shower and living only in the showers, has cut for itself a cañon; 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 cañon 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."