Note 82 — Chapter III · Concluding the Route to the Great Salt Lake City.

The Spanish cañon—Americanized to kanyon—signifies, primarily, a cannon or gun-barrel; secondarily, a tube, shaft of a mine, or a ravine of peculiar form, common in this part of America. The word is loosely applied by the Western men, but properly it means those gorges through a line of mountains whose walls are high and steep, even to a tunnel-like overhanging, while their soles, which afford passages to streams, are almost flat. In Northern Mexico the kanyon becomes of stupendous dimensions; it is sometimes a crack in the plains 2000 feet deep, exposing all the layers that clothe earth’s core, with a stream at the bottom, in sight, but impossible for the traveler dying of thirst to drink at.