"Between the Lower and Upper Falls the cañon is two hundred to nearly four hundred feet deep. The river runs over a level bed of rock, and is undisturbed by rapids until near the verge of the lower fall. The upper fall is entirely unlike the other, but in its peculiar character equally interesting. For some distance above it the river breaks into frightful rapids. The stream is narrowed between the rocks as it approaches the brink, and bounds with impatient struggles for release, leaping through the stony jaws, in a sheet of snow-white foam, over a precipice nearly perpendicular, 115 feet high.[1] Midway in its descent the entire volume of water is carried, by the sloping surface of an intervening ledge, twelve or fifteen feet beyond the vertical base of the precipice, gaining therefrom a novel and interesting feature. The churning of the water upon the rocks reduces it to a mass of foam and spray, through which all the colors of the solar spectrum are reproduced in astonishing profusion. What this cataract lacks in sublimity is more than compensated by picturesqueness. The rocks which overshadow it do not veil it from the open light. It is up amid the pine foliage which crowns the adjacent hills, the grand feature of a landscape unrivalled for beauties of vegetation as well as of rock and glen. The two confronting rocks, overhanging the verge at the height of a hundred feet or more, could be readily united by a bridge, from which some of the grandest views of natural scenery in the world could be obtained--while just in front of, and within reaching distance of the arrowy water, from a table one-third of the way below the brink of the fall, all its nearest beauties and terrors may be caught at a glance."
"We rambled around the falls and cañon two days, and left them with the unpleasant conviction that the greatest wonder of our journey had been seen."
A few scattered sentences, culled from Dr. Hayden's calmly scientific account of the falls, will suffice to show that Mr. Langford's description "o'ersteps not the modesty of nature."
[Illustration: UPPER FALLS OF THE YELLOWSTONE.]
"Above the Upper Falls the Yellowstone flows through a grassy, meadow-like valley, with a calm, steady current, giving no warning, until very near the falls, that it is about to rush over a precipice 140 feet, and then, within a quarter of a mile, again to leap down a distance of 350 feet.