Show the old settler my dear san Jua ners some of my most profitable I 1 hours are devoted to the study of I 1 the scriptures especially to the wondrous von drous book of chronicles cf san juan a ponderous volume more than a hundred miles in width with much of its message written large on the cover and a record of infinite events engraved in solemn words on the huge tablets of stone beneath in chapter paragraph pardon the fixed habit f giving chapter and verse a brief account is given of a place near the colorado which is now there the remoteness mot eness of silence and solitude it is known by very few and has been visited by fewer still by the old aiutes it was called meaning standing water but even the water is now gone and the chambers of what was once a busy castle are left in ruin to the wind and the rain on top of a smooth and naked r reek ck some time in very recent centuries as centuries are coun counted in that history possibly in the time lime of the first pharaoh or maybe as late as the reign of a great cloudburst cloud burst struck in taeup the upper branches of what is now known as east fork A mad torrent of mud and drift thundered down the fork towards the colorado halfway to the river it roared past the mouth of another box canyon from a clear stream was fed by two springs across the mouth of this spring canyon the flood built a huge sand dam impounding the water cf the springs in a lake a mile long and this darn dam was so well covered with drift and trash that the overflow of the lake cut no channel and wiregrass wi soon formed a heavy sod through which the water could not cut at all then the sand drifting in from the hills caught in and became part of the sod As the dam grew a little higher the water of the lake found outlets in springs below in the gulch this lake reached up into two canyons and the point be between a bald smooth rock feet high continued on page four the old settler continued from pan 1 I and wide was surround surrounded on three sides by the deep blus blue lake on to this point over the lake about a thousand years ago came a band of robbers and built there an impregnable castle they had a mighty wall wal of limestone on the one unprotected side a wall extending down over the rounding brow of the cliff where it had to be anchored by pegs driven in to holes drilled in the solid ty it was suicidal to undertake ste around it or climbing over it down the sai slid M smooth point they cut hand holes in the rock to the surface of tha water where a boat could be tied thus with a wall and a mighty moat they had a place placa of absolute security but no fortress is stronger than the fidelity of its sentries there was a traitor the castle was be brayed robbed sacked burned the mute ruin on the bleak rock tells the story when the san juan pioneers c crossed ossed the gulch at that point in the sprang of 1880 the he wiregrass wi and rushes grew thick on the ancient dam and the lake dating back to pharaoh or was a wonder of beamut beauty Y B but ut the pioneers brought cattle and evv st and horses and in thirty baij t I 1 when these animals had eaten off I 1 grass and caused the sod to die a flood coming down into the lake roared over the old dam and where it poured off into a wash below it eroded back through what was once a heavy so sod and released the water of the old lake t U rush down the gulch to the colorado leaving a ghastly hole where the lake with its swarms of ducks and waving rushes had bad been for centuries nothing but a picture of the lake can Z give ive a poor idea of what it joked d like in the days I 1 of its As beauty and nothing but a knowledge of the language in which the book of chronicles of san juan is written can give an idea of the castle which once stood in glory above the blue sur fare face ALBERT R LYMAN |