Rutland weekly herald. [volume] (Rutland, Vt.) 1859-1877, 1861-01-17

The DEVILS CANON IN CALIFORNIA.
Rev. L. Starr King, the noted Unita-
rian clergyman who went from Boston a
year ago to take charge of a CT ngregation
in San Francisco, gives in letter to the
Boston Transcript the following descrip-
ton of the Geysers Of California, in a ra-
vine called the Devils Canon: The Gey-
serS-boiling sprng3-are situated in a
rayine called, not inappropriately, " The
Devils Canon pronounced Kanyon-
which is a vast trench, a quarter OF mile
long, cut out Of another large ravine nearly
fifteen hundred feet deep. We hurried
by many of the lesser wonders in order to
reach the great steamboat spring on the
right hand wall of the canon. This is the
spout whose loud wheezing we heard,
nearly a mile off, while descending into the
larger ravine on horseback. Around it
is huge pile of slags and frightful clink-
ers, over which rises the continual roar of
escaping steam from an oriice two feet in
diameter, and impulsations precisely like
those of huge engine hard at work.
Each bed sends the vapor up visibly to a
hundred feet; but in the early morning,
when the air was cool, saw column five
hundred feet high, and widened to a cloud
above, belched from the strange boiler that
relieves its wrath through the mountain
side. Often, a little after sunrise, too, a
rainbow can be seen on the steam cloud,
spanning the whole length of the awful
trench with hues. To describe all the
strange substances and gases that lie along
Il H., oft ho
canon, would overload your columns and
repel your readers. How chemist would
| reyel in noxious and mephitic vapors that
puff or whistle out of the leached, hot
walls! Here he would turn up a patch
| of brown, crumbly soil, and find a clay
| that looks like blue vitrol nearly under
a shelving ledge is brisk, bubbling pool,
| overhung with verdigris incrustlngs; few
| feet off spirits beaded jet of hot water,
which sheds dismal brown casting over
the surrounding earth; little way farther
still is spring that looks like pure hot
| ink; then we discover a rock OF alum that
weighs two or three hundred pounds; then
| a small fountain of EPSON salts not far
off, again, a basin apparently OF boiling
soap suds then iron springs, white, red
| ana Diack sulphur opiAhSS' anu ooOh
foul Stygian sluice, close to the wall from
which a steam exhales that covers the
overhanging earth with Shiny deposit
which eats your clothes, if you touch it
it bites you as ravenously as aqua fortis
Whether the origin of the heats and va
pors is volcanic, or simply chemical, is not
decided yet, / believe, by the scientific
gentlemen who have visited the ravine.-
! After leaving the canon we tried bath il
the Holam, which is conducted at blood
heat to bath-house an eighth of mile
distant. 1t was refreshing, as bath
ought to be when the water is medleated
with every kind of drug and yapor thai
separately is accounted serviceable to the
human frame. One ablutipn IN such a
tide ought to save man from the possl'
bility Of rheumatism for life. And more
grateful than the bath was the breathing
Of pure air, and the sight OF healthtu
bloom after tno hours rambling over the
hot ashes and through the Tartareaf
streams.