Chapter V: Part 5

Then the genie stood on the bank overlooking the falls and shouted: "Ho, afrits! Dig me here a deep hole!" And immediately they went to work with great activity. When they had dug down a hundred feet, the genie commanded them to tunnel under the falls. "We will unearth this giant and prove his strength!" he cried defiantly.

So they dug a tunnel until they reached a great mass of rock underneath the brink of the falls; and here they hewed out a huge cavern, and carried into it strange machines and many wheels, fastening them all strongly. And they hung wires from those machines, stringing them a long distance through dense woods and across ghostly ravines to where many men lived and worked. When all was ready the genie grasped a great lever and shouted, "Ho, Menuhkesen! Come forth now, and get busy!"

Then he pressed down the lever, and instantly the spirit sprang out of the falls, and leaping upon a wire, rushed along it with such swiftness that no one could see him. The next moment he was many miles away, performing marvelous feats of strength--pushing great street-cars at incredible speed, turning the wheels in mills and factories, and lighting stores and dwellings. In fact, he did whatever the genie ordered him to do, without an instant's delay or any demur.

All over these big, resourceful United States, Menuhkesen is found, but the modern captains of industry call him "Electricity." The genii also are with us, graduates of technical colleges or of engineering departments of great factories, who, donning khaki clothes and high-laced leather boots, camp out in the wild mountain fastnesses, or on the weird deserts, or in the dense forests, and invoke the giants they meet everywhere in this wonderful country.

But it is the western mountain regions which chiefly hold the romance, the tragedy, and the gigantic power of the mythical old giant. All up and down the Rockies and the Sierras, and in the network of stupendous mountains which cross the five or six hundred miles between, are mountain torrents tearing down from summits perhaps two or three thousand feet high to the valleys below. Some of them are very small in appearance, but possessed of tremendous force.

Let us trace one of these and discover the giant. We hike, or ride a sure-footed horse, six miles up one of the somber gashes in the mountains, called cañons, arriving at the origin of a stream we have seen growing smaller as we ascended. We find a little spring gushing from beneath a huge boulder and trickling down through the ferns and brush. Soon it is joined by other little streams on the right or left. Presently, as we stumble along down the rocky trail, we see on one side a wide, deep gulch, with walls of sandstone or granite rising almost perpendicularly on either side. And that gulch has snow lying in it, perhaps forty feet deep--the drifts of last winter or slides from the slopes above it.

The snow may then have been sixty or a hundred feet deep, but now, in midsummer, it is dwindling fast, and its water doubles or triples the size of our little stream. Suddenly we see that the wild, rocky, torrent bed has been cleaned out, and that the banks are lined up with rock. The genie has been giving orders.

A few rods farther that torrent bed gives place to a timber flume; and the next moment that flume, instead of keeping on the sharply sloping floor of the cañon, rises on trestles, holding an almost level position. The trestle increases in height as the ground beneath them slopes downward, and cross a deep gulch, still holding the little torrent running between the wooden walls of the flume.

From our trail beneath we see the flume now skirting round the waist of some stupendous mountain, then crossing other gulches, and soon appearing on the summit of a peak, eight hundred feet above where we are standing. Below, at the foot of that peak, is a small, plain, stone building, and, wriggling down from the summit, is, apparently, a huge black snake, poking its nose into the basement of that house.

The house holds the generators for turning the force of that torrent into electricity. The snake is the penstock--a great black steel pipe, twisting and turning to avoid the huge boulders in its path as it conducts that water from the summit into the turbines in the house.

The turbine is an enclosed water-wheel in which every particle of force in the rushing water is used to turn a great steel shaft. On the other end of that shaft is geared the generator--the wonderful machine with wire-wound arms which makes the electric current. At this particular power-house the little torrent which reaches the summit in a flume thirty inches wide and two feet deep turns out 800 horse-power.

It is the force, not the size, of the stream which gives that power, for water has a pressure of about fifty pounds per square inch for every hundred feet of the height of its source. So this water has a pressure at the turbine of four hundred pounds per square inch--a far greater pressure than that in the cylinders of a great Mogul mountain locomotive.

The little stream, freed from the turbines, whirls furiously round a small basin and rollicks off on a wild, headlong dash through an open sluiceway for a short distance. Then another flume arrests it; and as we hike along down the trail, that flume rises above us, straddling gulches on high trestles, and at two points tunneling through a great mountain.

We get back to the mouth of the cañon, and there see, on the level we have then reached, another power-house, larger than the first. Behind it is another huge, bare mountain of rock; and coming down that, another gigantic black snake, also poking its head into the power-house. This snake--or penstock--is 1600 feet long, and the same stream which developed 800 horse-power at the upper house is now--with the addition of a little water picked up on the way--reeling off 2600 horse-power at this house.

This imprisoned, raging torrent is now released, and flows in a subdued, gentle stream down a natural stream-bed. It is less than eight feet wide and not deep enough to wet our horses' knees as we ford across. But we gaze upon it with the awe and amazement it deserves when we remember that, but a few moments before, it has sent its great power over eleven miles of wire to a small town, is operating several factories, and will, at night, light all the streets and the houses.

And that is only half its work! Before us is a great stretch of orchards and fields, vividly green, although they have not had one drop of water from the heavens for three or four months. All their health and vigor and wonderful productivity is due to that little stream, which irrigates over three thousand acres of the land.

Within twenty miles of where this is written, at the foot of the great Wasatch Mountains, in Utah, are five such cañons with power-houses--two of them with two houses in each cañon. All over this mountain country, from the middle of Utah to the Canadian line, are hundreds of such mountain torrents, only a small proportion of which are yet harnessed for work.

Some of them are very much larger than the one we have visited. Come with me to one of these larger houses.

It is in a cañon of awful sublimity, so deep and so nearly unapproachable that the construction teams had to haul over eight miles of zigzag trail to make the descent of less than half a mile to the torrent. We scramble down over the rocks and brush; and although the roar of the water reaches us for ten or fifteen minutes before we see it, we are by no means prepared for the astounding scene when it at last comes into view.

Out from the depths of the great ugly building belch forth four gleaming, horizontal columns of water, big as barrels, with a force, speed, and roar as though the discharge were from giant cannon. Straight across the tail-race they gleam and quiver for a hundred feet, impinging upon a solid ledge of granite, in which they have worn huge caverns. The spray dashes up the face of the ledge for sixty or seventy feet. Up and down the stream, swirling and writhing in a thousand rushing, crowding whirlpools, the water, just freed from its maddening confinement, is seeking to make good its escape. But it is jammed back into the upper race, and for fifty yards you will see it hanging, ledge upon ledge, fighting, snarling, surging, and struggling for its chance to slip beneath those terrific outlet volleys and gain the lower stream and liberty and peace.

The mighty Niagara has no such background of wild beauty, nor does it ever convey such an instant impression of water force. Once I saw a big two-inch plank dropped into one of those furious water columns. It seemed scarcely to touch the water, but flew, faster than the eye could follow, over to the granite ledge and was instantly smashed into ten thousand splinters, and I knew that even before the plank had reached the ledge, the mighty power which hurled it, transmuted into electricity, had already reached, and was operating, street-cars in a city seventy miles away.

Come into the power-house. Look at the four gigantic generators, whirling and humming like leviathan June-bugs--see the wicked, sputtering little blue sparks from the commutators. From the windows at the back of the building we look up a very sharp slope, 1500 feet high, and see the penstocks--twenty-four-inch steel tubes, black, ungainly, and, at twilight, very uncanny. They follow in curves the profile of the rough ground, bringing the furious rush of water from the summit down to the turbines in the lower basement, turning out 26,000 horse-power.

The force of the water in these penstocks is terrific. Tests of a four-inch jet from one of them have been made. A rifle-bullet glances off as from chilled steel; a jet from it, no bigger than a penholder, will drill a hole in sheet steel in a few moments. At the reservoir on the summit a fly-line may be played in the water--at the foot of the penstock no mortal could thrust a bayonet one inch into it.

A United States trooper once essayed, on a wager, to cut a two-inch jet with his sword; a shattered weapon and a broken wrist resulted.

In the harnessing and curbing of these mountain streams the utmost engineering skill and ingenuity has been called into play. Often the power-house has to be situated miles back in such inaccessible wilds that the greatest difficulty has been encountered in carrying machinery and supplies to the spot. At one point in the Sierras men and material were transported across two yawning chasms by means of wire cables, under which ran a freight-carrier.

The Feather River in California makes a big horseshoe bend twenty-five miles above Oroville, coming within three miles of itself again. An enormous mountain intervenes, but the engineers tunneled that and diverted the water into that tunnel. In the lower end of that black, rushing, underground torrent are placed the great turbines and generators.

The most striking instance of the results of securing a big headway for a small stream is shown in San Juan County, Colorado. The Animus River in its course between Silverton and Durango, a distance of twenty miles, has a gradual fall of about fifteen hundred feet. Although called a river, it is but a mountain stream, tumbling over little falls and through rock-strewn gullies, at no point showing more power than would be sufficient to drive a very small grist-mill. But the genius of science has so cunningly diverted it and concentrated its energy as to develop at last 40,000 horse-power.

A dam was built a few miles below Silverton, and the water turned into a flume which is only six by eight feet in size. It will be seen that it must be a very small stream whose waters can be run through such a restricted channel. Across fearful cañons and around great mountains, through tunnels and cuttings that flume carries the water for sixteen miles to the edge of a great cliff near Durango. The cliff is over one thousand feet high, and the pipe runs over the edge and makes a perpendicular drop into the power-house below.

From the four-foot steel pipe, nozzles five-eighths of an inch in diameter conduct the water into the turbines, whirling them at a speed of four thousand revolutions per minute. The speed of the jets of water shooting from those nozzles is 25,000 feet, or over four miles per minute.

Note how the wizards of industry further concentrate and control the giant they have evoked. That forty-thousand horse-power making that mighty plunge over the cliff is met by magical machines and switched into a wire but little larger than a lead-pencil. Forty feet of that unyielding steel flume which held the power is a load for a freight car; forty feet of the wire which carries the power is but a small load for a six-year-old boy.

At one moment the power is in that roaring, headlong, terrific plunge--the next, it is miles away, invisible, noiseless, and mysterious, illuminating great arc-lamps, running heavy cars, and--to come from great to small--whirling dainty fans or cooking an egg.

There are other marvelous power-plants situated on rivers where, although the force is far less than that of the mountain torrents, the volume of water is far greater. Idaho shows the most remarkable of the developments of such water-power, and the astounding ingenuity and determination of the genii are shown as much as in the mountains. The Bear River, which runs through Idaho and Utah, carries a very large flow at an exceedingly rapid rate--for a river. At one point in Idaho no less than six great power-houses have been installed on that river, producing a total of nearly 200,000 horse-power. In order to secure good headway, and the force which this gives, two enormous pipe-lines have been built to take the water from upper reaches of the river, and, while holding that pipe almost to a level, run it across country to a lower reach, where a power-house is built, thus increasing the headway from nothing to two or three hundred feet.

One of these lines is of eleven-foot pipe, nearly five miles long; the other is a sixteen-foot pipe, half a mile long. Almost all of the current produced at these plants is transmitted by cable to Salt Lake City, 135 miles away.

It has been said by expert engineers of electrical development that it will be but a short time before the intermountain region will use no coal, that all smoke-stacks and chimneys will be abolished and electricity furnish all the power, heat, and light not only to cities and towns, but to farming communities.

We are on the way. There are some districts now where villages, towns, and farms all use electricity for power and for lighting and cooking. This is notably so in Rupert, Idaho, the home of the famous electric high school, described in "St. Nicholas" in September, 1913.

All through that town the lighting and cooking in even the humblest homes is by electricity. The few small factories use no coal or steam-power. In the mountain region over one hundred cities, towns, and rural communities have electric wires in their houses. All are lighted by them and very many have thrown out coal ranges and cook by electricity.

The region is one of mines everywhere, some of them the largest in the world; and nearly all of them have discarded their gigantic steam-, hoisting-, and pumping-engines for electric motors. There is, it is asserted, more than enough water-power running to waste to do every particle of work now done by steam, horses, and men and women in the region, from impelling the enormous sixteen-wheeled mountain Moguls to rocking the babies' cradles by motor.

Across the northern part of Idaho and Montana, over a wicked country of mountains and cañons, the western division of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad runs all its trains by electricity, as you have read in your last month's number of "St. Nicholas," while farther south, across Utah and Colorado, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Company completed its plans three years ago for the electrification of its road to Denver; but the scheme of the kaiser to lick the world in ninety days failing, material became too costly to warrant the change from steam to electricity.

But the power is ready or could quickly be made ready. Every year the two great companies which have been formed by the consolidation of numerous small owners of power-plants, are building dams and reservoirs and flumes, getting ready for the not far distant day when steam-engines will have to be looked for in the Museum of Antiques and Curiosities in Salt Lake City.

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OUT IN THE BIG-GAME COUNTRY

BY CLARENCE H. ROWE

In the big-game country! Is there a healthy, red-blooded American boy who does not feel a thrill of excitement at the thought? In spite of our civilization, there is, in many, a lingering thrill in the very thought of the chase, handed down through a long line of ancestry dating back to the time when the chase meant food rather than sport.

The stage setting for big game is perfect. In the sheep country of Wyoming or the deer country of Colorado it is at an altitude of from nine to thirteen thousand feet above sea-level, where the air is clear and crisp with the tang of winter, the huge stretches of wild open country lying like a picture at one's feet. Could anything be more beautiful and invigorating?

A reconnoitering-point will sometimes reveal a view of almost a hundred miles. Across a gulch of some twenty miles the distant buttresses of red sandstone rock are painted with slashes of golden copper, the somber pines straggling almost to the top, interwoven with the delicate tracery of the quaking asps, now beautifully colored by the frosts. At our feet nestles a "park" (as the valleys are called), and possibly a silvery thread of water winds in and out. Nature paints with a full, rich palette in this glorious Western country! The skies rival those of Italy in depth, and, while possibly a bit more crude in raw color, are, for this very reason, more in keeping with the broad, vigorous landscape.

In the big-game country everything is big--not only the game, but the mountains, the valleys, and the people. Small statures bred in these surroundings expand and broaden--it is only natural.

All this seems far removed from the subject of elk, Rocky Mountain sheep, and bear, but to every true sportsman these constitute fully one half of the game.

The Rocky Mountain sheep are by far the most majestic and dignified of the animals of this locality. They are fond of the rock-studded mountain-sides, and often a huge sentinel ram, silhouetted against the sky, will reveal the feeding-place of a group of ewes and lambs. The task now, if one is fortunate enough to be to the windward of him, is, after tethering your horse, to work slowly and carefully to within range, usually from two to four hundred yards. Distances out there are most deceptive, owing to the clear, rarefied air, and an object that seems to be a few hundred yards distant may prove to be almost a mile.

Elk come next, and the lucky hungry hunter who has bagged his "six-point" buck would need more space than at my command to tell how he did it.

Antelope surpass both sheep and elk for timidity. They are extremely wary and possibly the most difficult of all game to get within range. They are found in the lower and open country.

Underlying all the hopes and expectations in the hunter's mind is the thought of _bear_, and of course first of these stands the grizzly. These are getting scarcer every year, and most of us, if we _must_ get a bear, will have to be content with a yearling or a two-year-old black bear. There is no special country for them. As a rule, in the summer and fall they come down in the low parks to feast on the berries. Toward winter they are more likely to be found higher up the slopes. After the first snow an occasional raid on the highest and loneliest ranches is looked upon by Bruin as "the thing." At one of the ranches nestling at the foot of Mount Evans in Colorado, miles away from any other habitation, a rancher put a cow-bell on each of his horses when turned loose, thinking to frighten the bears. Bruin had a penchant for the frisky little colts gamboling about the mountain-side and thought it quite neighborly to chase the whole herd, mares and all, helter-skelter down to the ranch. It was quite common for the rancher to be aroused at night by the clanging of bells and the clatter of hoofs as the horses scampered into the corral.

Sheep, elk, and bear all go above the timber-line. The height of this line varies in different sections; ten thousand to ten thousand five hundred feet is an average.

A good wiry horse that isn't gun-shy and will allow packing the game back to camp is a necessity, for often a bag is made too far from camp for a regular pack-animal to bring in.

Above all, in the confusion of getting together the regular camp outfit, don't forget to slip a paper of trout flies and line into the duffle bag. The little streams winding through the parks will reward an hour's casting with half a dozen or so delicious mountain trout running from six to ten inches in length. They are small, but make up in quality and flavor. When the hunt is over, we take our parting look at the grim old mountains, so silent and peaceful, and wend our way back to civilization, happy and humble in the overpowering glory and majesty of what the natives call "God's own country."

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Transcriber's Notes

Possible printer errors have been silently changed; proper nouns have been standardised; other non-standard spelling has been retained.

Italic text in the original is shown with _underscores_.

End of Project Gutenberg's Travel Stories Retold from St. Nicholas, by Various