USA > Arizona > Arizona, prehistoric, aboriginal, pioneer, modern; the nation's youngest commonwealth within a land of ancient culture, Vol. I > Part 42
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
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Photo by Putnam & Valentine, Los Angeles
IN THE GRAND CAÑON OF ARIZONA
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cañon region today has as few inhabitants and as little human activity as was known at the time of the coming of the first Spaniard.
Many of the attempts that have been made to penetrate the canon fastnesses have been left unrecorded and many of the explorers never returned from their quest. The river itself is known to have been dared as far back as 1824 by the Ashley expedition, which failed to even reach the main gorge. In 1844-5 Fré- mont explored the headwaters of the river. Early trouble fell upon every adven- turer who launched a boat upon the upper stream.
The Colorado never was mastered or the secret of its abysmal gorges unfolded until the expedition of Major John Wesley Powell in 1869. Powell, a one-armed veteran of the Civil War, had fallen under the lure of the river when he camped in 1867 on one of its main affluents, the Grand. A couple of years later his dream came true, and, securing funds from several educational associations in Illinois, where he had been a teacher, he started upon the trip that gave him world-wide fame. The only participation of the United States in the expedition was in a grant of rations for the party of ten.
Green River station, at the crossing of the Union Pacific railroad, was the starting point. The date of departure was May 24, 1869. The time, chosen probably on that account, was about the end of the spring flood season. Within the first few days a boat was lost on the rocks. Within sixty days, mainly by accident, had been lost eight of the ten months' provisions carried. Danger and toil were to be met with at almost every river turning, for only in few places was the stream placid. Portages had to be made around some of the rapids, but most of them were run at the risk of life. Not till July 31 did the party pass the mouth of the San Juan and about a week later, after compara- tively easy going, Lee's Ferry had been left behind and the Grand Cañon really had been entered. August 10 Powell stopped his boats at the mouth of the Little Colorado in order to walk up the side cañon a few miles.
Thence Powell in his diary called the journey one into the "great unknown," a journey that he viewed with grave forebodings. August 15 he ran into the granite gorge of the deepest part of the canon and there named Bright Angel Creek, simply to balance a prior designation further up stream of Dirty Devil Creek. Travel through the granite stretches was found especially arduous, the party additionally dispirited by the black and dismal nature of its surroundings. Near the lower end of the granite, late in August, when provisions remained for only a few days' consumption, there were encountered rapids that looked more dangerous than any that before had been passed. Then it was that dissension arose within the party and three of its members, failing to persuade its leader to abandon the expedition, entirely separated from it. They were O. G. and Seneca Howland, brothers, and Wm. H. Dunn. They were given firearms but refused to take any share of the rations, believing they could live on the game they shot. The trio climbed out of the cañon, bearing messages from the rest of the party and duplicate records of the trip. The men left behind felt that they were a forlorn hope, with probable death before them. The men who left were thought assured of life and safety, yet by a curious anomaly of fate, the situations developed contrariwise, for the Howlands and Dunn, a few days thereafter, were ambushed and murdered by the Ute Indians.
The passage of the falls proved not so arduous after all. By night the
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granite had been left behind and by noon of the following day there was reached the mouth of Grand Wash, the end of the Grand Canon. Soon there- after Powell again was in touch with civilization, represented by three Mormons who at the mouth of the Virgen River were found fishing. Powell and his brother here left the river and went out by way of the Mormon settlements. The balance of the party went down to Camp Mojave and the next year two of the members continued on to Yuma.
POWELL'S SECOND EXPEDITION
Powell's second expedition had behind it governmental authority and funds and was on a much more elaborate scale and with much greater safeguards. The leader made careful investigation of the region and found several points where provisions and supplies might be brought to the river. The trip was to be not merely one of river exploration, but of added geographical importance, for upon the party was placed the task of a survey of the country for twelve miles on either side of the river channel.
This party left Green River May 22, 1871. It had eleven members. Second in command was A. H. Thompson, a highly qualified topographer. Another member was F. S. Dellenbaugh, who rated as artist, but who has given to the world by far the best descriptive matter concerning the Grand Cañon ever pub- lished. Dellenbaugh, not content with this single trip, for years thereafter repeatedly visited the Canon at many points and by written word and delight- ful sketches has placed in the public eye the wonderful attractions of this most scenic section of the Nation's domain.
Owing to its larger field and benefited by the maps made and by the prior experience of several of the party, this second trip was far from being as dangerous as the first. It was also much slower, owing to the added work put upon it. The mouth of the San Juan was passed October 4th. At the Crossing of the Padres, Powell left for Salt Lake. 500 miles away and the party went overland to Kanab in southern Utah to go into winter quarters, from which expeditions were sent out for triangulations in the northern canon country.
The trip was resumed August 13, 1872, from Lee's Ferry, though with only seven men in two boats. Bright Angel was reached September 1, after a number of dramatic experiences, chief among them the running of Sockdolager rapids, wherein the river dropped eighty feet in one-third of a mile. The trip was abandoned at Kanab Wash, September 7. Indians were said to be waiting in ambush lower in the cañon and the risks of running the rapids below were con- sidered hardly commensurate with the benefit to be secured. Instead, the topographical work was taken up where it had been left the previous winter.
The fame of John Wesley Powell does not rest upon his canon work alone. He was the second Director of the Geological Survey, following Clarence King in 1881. In 1894 he resigned, to accept a paid appointment as Chief of the Bureau of Ethnology within the Smithsonian Institution, where he supervised the issuance of a large number of reports of the highest scientific value and interest, incidentally writing much on the basis of his own investigation of the western Indians and of the remains of the ancient races. Upon his initiative, the Geological Survey started upon the work of making a complete topographie
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map of the United States and much value attached to his ideas. He was a pioneer in the movement that finally led to national aid in the development of the arid valleys of the Southwest. He died September 23, 1902. Late in 1915, under authority of Congress, a monument was reared in his honor on a point above Bright Angel trail.
MISCELLANEOUS CANON EXPLORATIONS
In 1867 an individual named White claimed to have come through the Grand Canon on a raft when picked up near Collville by a trader. He told that he had come all the way from Grand River, where he and a companion named Strole had taken to the river to avoid the murderous Utes. The trouble with White was that he had too great a flow of language. His descriptions were altogether too vivid and he made the canon continuons through Arizona with- out reference to Lee's Ferry and a number of other points where he could just as well have left his raft. Added dramatic zest was given the tale by the loss of his companion. Dellenbaugh believes that White was one of the most artistic liars ever known. Fully as vague are three inscriptions cut at points far apart on the upper cañon's depths, "De Julian, 1856," possibly left by some unknown prospector.
An attempt to penetrate the fastnesses of the Grand Canon from below was started in September, 1871, by Lieut. Geo. M. Wheeler of the Topographical Engineering Corps, with a party of thirty-four, including boatmen, scientists and soldiers. Of these, P. W. Hamel, the topographer, Frederick W. Loring and one Salmon later met death in an attack of Apaches on the Wickenburg stage, as they were starting to leave the Southwest. Wheeler had had some information from O. D. Gass, who had been a member of a party that had worked up the Grand Canon a distance in 1864. Two land parties paralleled the river carrying supplies. The month of Vegas Wash and the Virgen River were passed and by hard rowing the expedition entered the Grand Canon itself, after work in the rapids, which seems to have brought special credit upon Geologist G. K. Gilbert. At places the boats had to be unloaded and hauled by main strength up the cataracts, sometimes with serious damage. The party reached only to the opening of Diamond Canon, from which point a good natural road exists to Peach Springs. The trip had taken four weeks of dreadful labor. A boat party that started back on the river reached Fort Mojave on the evening of the fifth day. Little was accomplished by this expedi- tion, for Powell had covered the same ground in the course of his first journey.
STANTON'S TWO TRIPS IN THE GORGE
It was not till May 25, 1889, that another noteworthy attempt was made to conquer the cañon. Frank M. Brown, a Colorado railroad man, conceived the idea that the mountains might be passed on a water grade by following the Colorado Cañon, thereby opening up a much more economical ronte to send the coal of the Rockies to the Pacific Coast. So he organized the Denver, Colorado & Pacific railway and sent some surveying parties into the field, the first of them down the Grand River and up the Green from the junction. He himself led the main expedition. On the date noted he started down the Green from the Rio Grande Western railroad's crossing of that stream. Ile had light boats
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and rather insufficient equipment, even without life preservers, though he had been cautioned by both Powell and Professor Thompson. The chief engineer of the party was Robert Brewster Stanton. The light hoats were badly used on the rocks, but the expedition managed to reach Lee's Ferry. A couple of days' passage below, Brown was thrown from his overturning boat into the maw of a whirlpool, from which his body never was recovered. Three days later, two more men, Hansborough and Richards, were drowned. Then it was that Stanton, appreciating his handicap, abandoned his boats and climbed out with the survivors.
Stanton, a determined man of large ability, feeling that he could follow where Powell had led, in the fall of the same year organized another party and provided equipment of the best, including boats that practically were non- sinkable. He started a bit down the river, as further mapping of the upper stream was unnecessary, and launched his boats below the upper Cataract Cañon late in November. By Christmas he had reached Lee's Ferry and on the last day of the year passed the place where Brown had been lost. An incident in travel came the very next day when Nims, photographer of the expedition, broke a leg and had to be carried up the terrific cliffs to the mesa edge, where Stanton had provided a wagon by walking thirty-five miles back to Lee's Ferry, where the injured man was left. January 13, 1873, they found in good condition the supplies they had cached on the first trip. Ten miles below they found and buried the body of Peter Hansborough, whose name they carved on a cliff above his grave.
Boats were injured and only their cork jackets saved Stanton and several of his men from drowning; and the usual vicissitudes were known till, on March 17, the rocky fastnesses finally were left behind and the lower. and calmer reaches of the river were entered upon. Stanton made a good job of it and continued on to the very mouth of the river. Salt water was reached April 26, 1890.
Following the Stanton expedition, the Grand Canon has been essayed by a number of adventurers, most of them practically unchronicled. Early in 1897, N. Galloway and William Richmond, Mormon trappers, shot the canons from Green river to Needles in light boats, consuming thirty-six days.
In the winter of 1909 at the time of low water, Galloway piloted J. F. Stone, a Columbus, Ohio, banker, most of the way through the canon in a couple of flatboats. George Clark, with two men made the journey through to Needles. The Kolb brothers made the trip to secure photographs and even took some of the rapids with a moving-picture machine. Loper and Russell made a couple of attempts in 1914. In the fall of the same year J. H. Hummell made the hazardous journey by himself in a small boat. This list by no means is complete and takes no account of the many who failed and of numbers whose lives were lost in the awful solitudes.
The Cañon has been the dramatic setting of many individual tragedies. One of the most notable of these was about 1900, when William Ashurst, father of Henry Ashurst, later Senator from Arizona, died alone on a sandbar at the very bottom of the cañon, seven miles above Bright Angel trail. He knew the region well and did not fear to invade it alone. He had gone to the river for water and had started to climb out when he overbalanced a boulder and under
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it fell backwards. With his legs crushed and no help possible to secure, he lay there for days, occasionally jotting his impressions in a note book. The body was found several weeks thereafter by a searching party headed by John Hance and was buried on the spot. A year or so later the remains were carried out, on the back of Miles Cameron, for proper burial elsewhere.
On the whole, the Grand Canon has been really known to singularly few men. Explorers usually have passed down the innermost gorge, seeing little beyond the immediate walls. Several parties of devoted and skillful govern- mental engineers have studied the topography and measured its abysses. A few names, however, will attach for many years. Possibly best known of all the guides was old "Cap." John Hance, who opened up the first trail used by the white man at a point north of Flagstaff and about sixteen miles east of Bright Angel. Hance's stories in themselves would make a large book and few are the old travelers to whom he did not tell how he jumped into the canon astride of his best horse and only saved himself by stepping off as he passed a erag he indicated, that lies about two thousand feet below the point where the awesome story was related.
Hance in his day opened up two trails. A short distance below him, the Cameron brothers, at what was called Grand View, made a trail down to some copper mines. Bright Angel trail, at present the principal thoroughfare, was an old Havasupai trail to Indian Gardens, opened up and improved by the Camerons and by Buckey O'Neill. A short distance below this is a trail lately built by the Santa Fé Railroad Company. Lowest of all is the Bass trail, built by another pioneer guide, W. W. Bass. Other well-known names of the region are Sanford Rowe, Al Doyle and Bill Ashurst and the Cañon is known to few as it is to Prof. G. Wharton James, who has written much upon its beauties and mysteries.
In 1900 the last-named headed a small commission that made investigation of the nomenclature of the region. In his report to the directorate of the United States Geological Survey, a number of suggestions for changes were accepted. Some of these changes were: Bissell Point to Comanche Point, Morgan to Ute Point, Grand View to Piute Point, Rowe's to Hopi Point, Bass to Havasupai Point.
CREATION OF THE GORGE
Though geologists generally have insisted that the Grand Cañon is the great- est known example of river erosion, formed from its very start by the flow of water, those who live along the Canon generally are of the opinion that the erosion started in a deep volcanic crack, where the earth had slipped during a cataclysm, much as the ground slipped along the Pacific Coast at the time of the San Francisco earthquake. Several similar slips are to be traced along the Cañon, while many smaller gorges in Arizona would appear to have had the same origin. In the lower part of the Grand Canon proper are several small volcanic cones, of recent origin in a geologie way of speaking, possibly in themselves sufficient to have riven the ground asunder. It should be appreciated also that very near rises the lordly San Francisco Mountain, the highest in the South- west, between its three peaks lying a stupendous crater, its northern lip broken where a torrent of lava once descended upon the plain below. From the summit
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of the peaks can be seen a half-dozen other extinct volcanoes of large size, as well as no less than 500 small volcanic cones scattered all over the forested region north of the Santa Fé railroad. The ground is covered with an immense pine forest, growing upon a deposit of volcanic scoriæ, which in places is 200 feet deep, all blown out of the earth by the nearby volcanoes. Surely these evidences indicate that volcanic action may have had some share in slicing across the long side-hill a gash into which fell the waters of the great lake that occupied the Utah valley and of that which once filled the valley of the Little Colorado in Arizona. These waters, under a "head" of thousands of feet had power enough to tear even iron apart and without a doubt the "erosion" of the upper- lying sandstone and limestone strata into the wide gulches and cañons of today was a matter that could have been accomplished within a very short period indeed by the fearful hydraulic forces that then were unchained.
TAMING THE RIVER'S MIGHT
Much of the Imperial Valley of Southern California lies below the level of the ocean, once a great inland sea, wherein the waters of the Colorado deposited their silty contents. Occasionally in later years the river overflowed its west- ern banks and the water ran as far down as the Salton Sea. In freshet periods following 1905, through a cut in the bank that had been made by careless irri- gation engineers, the entire flow of the river was diverted to the westward and, taking the route of the sloughs and of the Imperial canal, raced past Calexico into the Salton Basin, cutting a deep gorge through the alluvial lands of the valley back past the international line. A few miles more of cutting and there would have been established a permanent connection with the Colorado that might have led to the submergence of the entire Imperial Valley, with a loss to the nation of an agricultural area with a potential value of several hundred million dollars.
Epes Randolph of the Southern Pacific was called by his company to the task of damming the flood, which in January, 1907, was tearing through the bank crevasse with a flow of about forty thousand second feet. Randolph side-tracked passenger trains to rush in rock of large size from quarries as far away as southeastern Arizona, laid forty miles of steel cable and hundreds of cords of brush, built over this a trestle and dumped his rock till the river had been diverted to its proper channel. This break was closed in short order, but still another later had to be fought. This work and loans necessarily made to the canal company cost the railroad company nearly $2,000,000. A part of this sum later was repaid by Congress in accordance with a recommendation made by President Roosevelt. The railroad company's interest primarily lay in the fact that its tracks beside the Salton Sea had had to be moved several times to higher ground and, had the flood been unchecked, an entirely new line would have been necessary in that locality. Beyond this were the company's railroad interests leading into Imperial and the loss of one of its largest producing sec- tions. The company's work had many patriotic features, however, as was properly recognized in a message sent Congress by the President.
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