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Show The Hike to Rainbow Bridge 261 through the years and had often visited each other. Leland had been overseas with the U.S. Army during World War I and had returned to work for his father's La Sal Livestock Company in 1919. The firm was managed by his cousin, Charlie Redd, who, by 1959, was Utah's leading stockman. Leland was the foreman and bookkeeper of the firm from 1919 to 1942. The group had first taken the Hole-in-the Rock Trail, of which Wayne's grandparents had been in 1880. A participants direct supply and access road connecting southeastern and southwestern Utah, this trail penetrated through the Colorado River gorge and shortened the wagon route from southwestern to southeastern Utah by hundreds of miles. Mormon pioneers "called" to settle southeastern Utah chiseled and blasted a path through the steep crevice in the sandstone cliffs so that wagons and animals could pass through the Colorado River gorge, and, after a six-month trek, they founded Bluff where Leland's City, parents raised their family. Their ordeal forged them into a self reliant colony ready for the formidable tasks of nurturing peace with the Indians, controlling the lawless who sought refuge in the area, irrigating with water from the San unruly and eking a living from the sunbaked land." Juan River, The Colorado is one of the most dramatic and roughest inland waterways in the United States. River running and tourism had begun, particularly after World War II, with most of the expeditions being launched at Mexican Hat. There was white water and red rock abounded enough to provide adven ture for and Leland and Alice. Madelyn Harold, The trip down the Colorado River was, among the extensive travels of Madelyn and Harold, a comparatively minor excur sion, yet it was in its own way unique and more significant than most of the other journeys. The previous travels of Madelyn and Harold had been essen tially in regions where the presence of man was everywhere evi dent, if not in his works of engineering and art, at least in his presence in such areas as rural India or Samoa. If the Silvers felt isolated in Africa or the Orient, at least they were in the presence of other, though perhaps alien, men. Indeed, the mere ancient places of Africa or the Orient made them feel the age of |
