By Tom Martin
River running in the Colorado River Basin has a very rich tradition of people hunting, prospecting, and recreating with watercraft. The first people to float watercraft on these rivers were Indigenous peoples using dugout canoes, rafts made of bullrushes, and skin-on-frame craft. The Spanish came next, boating up the Colorado from the Sea of Cortez in 1540. They were joined in the 1830s by the French and other Europeans soon after, using the Colorado and its many tributaries to trap for furs where they could. In the early 1900s the United States Geological Survey, Southern California Edison, and the Bureau of Reclamation launched river trips locating damsites.
The San Juan River was awash in prospectors floating mining equipment in the 1890s. Powerboats and oar powered craft worked the flat-water sections of the Green and Grand Rivers between Green River, Utah, and Moab, Utah, as well as Glen Canyon, from the 1890s through the 1920s. During this same time period, do-it-yourself adventurers began embarking on long river trips from Green River, Wyoming, all the way down through the Grand Canyon.
The Otis Reed Marston Collection at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California gives us an amazing look into these early river trips. Marston identifies over fifty river trips in the 1920s alone, from oil prospectors and USGS expeditions, to do-it-yourself folks like Frank “Bunny” Barnes. A prospector working the river sands for gold and living along the river for pleasure, Barnes spent a quarter century boating above, in, and below Cataract Canyon. He worked a large scow by himself through Cataract Canyon in 1921. Nathaniel Galloway’s son John is credited with traveling through Cataract Canyon in 1924. These are just two of many fascinating journeys on the river during this time period.[1]
By 1920, two units of the National Park Service included sections of the river, Grand Canyon National Park and Dinosaur National Monument. The fledgling Park Service paid little attention to river runners until February 20, 1929, when Park Service employees Glen Sturdevant and Fred Johnson drowned in low water Horn Creek Rapid in Grand Canyon National Park. Accompanied by James Brooks, the three men were exploring the Colorado River below Bright Angel Creek when their small and overloaded canvas canoe was swept into the rapid. Only Brooks survived. Searchers for the missing men included Grand Canyon National Park superintendent Miner Tillotson. At least one Colorado riverman, Frank Dodge, viewed the deaths of the two Park Service rangers as negligence. Dodge blamed the Park Service for not training their staff about how to handle the river with appropriate boats and life jackets.[2]
Superintendent Tillotson’s response to the tragic loss of Sturdevant and Johnson was simple. He would do all in his power to keep NPS employees and all other river runners off of his section of river. When three French kayakers asked him for access through Grand Canyon National Park on the Colorado River route in 1938, Tillotson required them to post a $10,000 bond ($184,000 in 2021 dollars). The trio launched from Green River, Wyoming, and exited the river at Lee’s Ferry. When Dr. Elzada Clover successfully ushered a group of fighting men that included Norm Nevills through Grand Canyon in Cataract boats in 1938, Tillotson wrote Nevills that while “a formal permit . . . is not required by regulations, . . . we naturally do all in our power to discourage such trips.” Nevills continued running Grand Canyon in the 1940s, as well as the San Juan River to Glen Canyon.[3]
Tillotson became Director of Region III overseeing Grand Canyon National Park. During his tenure between 1930 and 1955 he banned all NPS employees from making any river cruise in the park. Two NPS employees were able to circumvent Tillotson during this time period by getting approval from the NPS director.[4]
While Tillotson tried to keep river runners away, do-it-yourself river running on the Colorado became ever more popular following a huge explosion in the use of folding kayaks in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s. Al Launer and Chuck Plummer paddled a two-seater folding kayak through the heart of Dinosaur National Monument, including Flaming Gorge, the Gates of Lodore, and Split Mountain in the fall of 1932. Many other river runners, including Harold Leich and Charles Mann, plied the Colorado River Basin in the 1930s. Traveling solo in his folding kayak, Mann paddled from Green River, Wyoming, to Lee’s Ferry, Arizona. Of course, river people did not only use kayaks. Twice in the 1930s Buzz Holmstrom rowed his home-made wooden boat from Green River, Wyoming, to Lake Mead below the Grand Canyon.[5]
In 1940, the first National Whitewater Championship was held in America near Middledam, Maine, on the Rapid River. This growth slowed during World War II, but then took off so much that by 1949 the First Through Royal Gorge Race (today’s FIBArk), as well as the Wind River Races in Thermopolis, Wyoming, made banner headlines. Although few in number compared with river runners today, a surprisingly large number of people were floating the Colorado in kayaks and home-made wooden boats by midcentury.
An event in the Grand Canyon in 1946 stimulated additional Park Service control when, with much press, Harry Aleson and Georgie White floated in lifejackets from Parashant Canyon to Lake Mead. In July 1946, Regional Director Tillotson wrote the director of the Park Service that he had already “proposed a rule which would prohibit people from running the rapids of the Grand Canyon unless they were able to show proper qualification.[6]
A few months later, NPS director Tolson notified all National Parks that “the two parties who floated down the Colorado River from Parashant Wash, Arizona . . . was clearly prohibited by section 2.54 of the General Rules and Regulations, which prohibit the placing of any privately owned boat, canoe, raft, or other floating craft upon the waters of any park or monument without a permit from the superintendent. Every reasonable effort should be made to discourage hazardous expeditions into Service areas.”[7]
The following year, NPS director Newton Drury clarified future river running management: “we owe it both to ourselves and to the venturesome to assert such control over these attempts as we can legally without impeding undertakings such as those conducted by Norman Nevills.” With clear direction from the director, in April 1947 Nevills received the first Grand Canyon river permit issued by Grand Canyon National Park superintendent, Harold Bryant. Discussions ensued between Bryant and Nevills about giving Nevills a concession on the river in Grand Canyon. Nevills died in the fall of 1949 before the concession was put in place.[8]
Ed Hudson applied for a permit for an uprun of the Grand Canyon in 1948. Superintendent Bryant issued Hudson the second permit, writing that “the main trouble with these expeditions seems to be that those who make them always want to make another trip, requiring more permits and more problems!” Dock Marston called it Rapid Rabies and wrote Bryant he was “well aware that it would meet your wishes if people would stay off the river but it seems they will not.” He forewarned Bryant of a huge increase in demand for do-it-yourself river running as his research showed river trips were far less dangerous than the NPS believed. Bryant wrote, “Our problem apparently will be to select those who have the proper preparation and equipment, but that is not going to be easy.”[9]
In 1950, Superintendent Bryant set a precedent still in place today. Any do-it-yourself river trip that attempted a river cruise without a permit, regardless of skill, supply, or craft used, would be considered illegal. Every effort would be made to remove this type of “illegal” trip from the river. It mattered little if the occupants were doing just fine or not. That summer, Bryant noted that “we feel it would be still more dangerous to attempt such a run without someone in the group who had run these rapids previously.”[10]
By 1953 Superintendent Bryant had implemented a new permit policy for river runners. Members “of the expedition should include someone with experience in running the Colorado of the Grand Canyon.” Only 165 individuals had made the river cruise all the way through Grand Canyon at that time. Almost all of the permit requests from individuals without that experience were denied and were encouraged to go with commercial river companies.[11]
Marston tried yet again to help the National Park Service get a better handle on how to manage their river runners. He wrote the superintendents of Grand Canyon National Park and Dinosaur National Monument that the “requirement of experienced river men is only a prayer as stated. . . . The talk of experience on the River borders on hokum and tends to create a false sense of security. I will take a good life preserver over an experienced riverman any day.” He noted that the historical record proved that “there has never been a loss of life from a good boat with the humans in good physical health and wearing a life preserver” and “that a good life preserver is almost the number one item for safety.”[12] Sixty-one years later, this simple maxim still stands.
Dinosaur National Monument superintendent, Jess Lombard, didn’t want to hear Marston’s suggestions. Instead, he paid attention to how Grand Canyon handled its river runners and followed suit. He implemented a Dinosaur river permit system that “does not encourage boating on these rivers without the services of a competent guide.” An immediate result of his river permit system was the formation of the Western River Guides Association in 1954.[13]
During the height of the Echo Park Dam fight between 1949 and 1953, Dinosaur National Monument was charged with not using their section of the river for the public good. In response, Dinosaur created a river running concession in 1952 and encouraged a Vernal, Utah, building contractor, Bus Hatch, to apply for the contract. The National Park Service even supplied Hatch with pontoon rafts. The concession was revoked the next year when Hatch failed to secure the necessary and inexpensive insurance.[14]
Both Dinosaur National Monument and Grand Canyon National Park temporarily gave up on the concessions idea for river trips and encouraged the commercial river operators to use Special Use Permits instead. By 1956 Grand Canyon National Park and Dinosaur National Monument’s River Permit Regulations were allowing for unlimited commercial river trips while turning away any do-it-yourself permit applicants if they had no prior river experience on the permitted river section. Dinosaur returned to the concession model in 1961, and Grand Canyon followed suit in 1972. Enforcement of the 1956 permit regulations resulted in skyrocketing commercial river use during the next fifteen years while do-it-yourself river running was held in check in these two National Park Service units.[15]
This explosion in commercial use required further actions by the NPS to manage river travel. The first ever River Management Plans for Dinosaur National Monument and Grand Canyon National Park were completed in 1979. None of the 1940s and 1950s river management actions were mentioned in any of the 1979 planning documents. This history of excluding one use group while benefiting another must be acknowledged in all future discussions of the history of river running and future river management.
Notes
[1] Eric Hedburg, “Rio Colorado History,” Mohave County Miner, in box 28, folder 14, Otis Reed Marston Papers, 1870-1978, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (hereafter ORMP); Testimony of John Galloway in Riverbed case, box 280, folder 49, ORMP.
[2] Otis Marston, From Powell To Power: A Recounting of the First One Hundred River Runners Through the Grand Canyon (Flagstaff: Vishnu Temple Press, 2014), 333; Patraw to Marston, March 28, 1955, box 59, folder 2, Records of the National Park Service, RG 79, National Archives and Records Administration, Riverside, California; Dodge to Campbell, February2, 1935, box 51, folder 19, ORMP; Brooks interview with Marston, November 1948, box 51, folder 19, ORMP.
[3] Marston, From Powell To Power, 401; Tillotson to de Colmont, July 9, 1937, Nevills to Tillotson, April 27, 1938, Tillotson to Nevills, May 3, 1938, folder 1, Section 49260, Grand Canyon Museum Collection (hereafter GCMC).
[4] “National Park Service Organization as of: 8-1-38 in effect until: 6-30-41,” October 1, 1938, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/olsen/images/adhi15.jpg; “Organizational Structure: 1933-1953,” n.d., https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/olsen/adhi-b4.htm; Notes at end of 1948 trip log, box 135, folder 3, ORMP.
[5] Altenhofer, Der Hadernkahn (Pollner Verlag, 1997), 18-24; “Green River Again Navigated Safely,” box 282, folder 25, ORMP; “Adventurer Finishes Long Trip In Small Boat,” box 284, folder 7, ORMP.
[6] Tillotson to NPS Director, July 5, 1946, folder 1, Section 49260, GCMC.
[7] Tolson to All Field Offices, November 18, 1946, folder 1, Section 49260, GCMC.
[8] Drury to Tillotson, September 30, 1947; Bryant to Nevills, April 17, 22, October 9, 27, 1947, folder 4, Section 49260, GCMC.
[9] Hudson to Bryant, April 21, 1948, Bryant to Hudson, April 23, 1948, folder 4, Section 49260, GCMC; Marston, From Powell To Power, 473; Garrison to Marston, October 20, 1948, Bryant to Marston, November 8, 1948, Marston to Bryant, May 30, 1949, box 334, folder 4, ORMP; Marston to Bryant, November 25, 1948, folder 4, Section 49260, GCMC.
[10] Bryant to Jensen, April 20, May 12, 1950, Jensen to Bryant, May 5, 1950, Bryant to Quayle, July 3, 1950, folder 5, Section 49260, GCMC.
[11] Bryant to Town, January 16, 1953, Marston to Bryant, February 21, 1953, Bryant to Mikes, April 13, 1953, Bryant to Ralph, May 21, 1953, box 59, folder 2, RG 79, NARA-Riverside.
[12] Marston to Patraw, June 23-24, 1955, box 59, folder 2, RG 79, NARA-Riverside, CA; Marston to Lombard, May 21, July 31, August 9, 1955, box 41, folder 1, ORMC.
[13] Boating Information Dinosaur National Park, box 60, folder 2, RG 79, NARA-Riverside; Leding to Reilly, August 25, 1955, box 59, folder 1, RG 79, NARA-Riverside.
[14] Superintendent’s Reports, February 5, June 7, 1952, Dinosaur National Monument; Region Two to Director, April 21, 1961, box 841, folder C3823 DINO, Administrative Files, General Records, RG 79, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland; F. X. Carr note, 1958, box 1855, folder L 3019 DINO 1958-61, Administrative Files, General Records, RG 79, NARA-College Park; Acting Superintendent to ROMO Superintendent, June 5, 1953, Baker to Superintendent, September 2, 1953, Quist to Lombard, October 27, 1953, Book 1, L34, box L9, 285987 General Files, RG 79, National Archives and Records Administration, Kansas City, Missouri.
[15] Revokable Concession Permit No. 14-10-02332-497, Folder C3823 General DINO 1-1-60 PT, Box 841, Administrative Files, RG 79, NARA-College Park; Evaluation of Offers, Colorado River Float Trips, December 20, 1971, Folder C3823 Gen. File GRCA 1-1-70 IO, Box 2684, Administrative Files, RG 79, NARA-College Park.