OCR Text |
Show Record at Bluff before I went down and made a substantially full explora-tion of the San Juan River down to its confluence with the Colorado. 397 However, the time we took our families and moved in there we came up over that rough country between Hole- In- The- Rock and Bluff. We did not touch the San Juan River until we got ten miles below Bluff. It was 15 or 20 years before I had acquired a sub-stantial knowledge of the characteristics of the San Juan from 398 Bluff down to the confluence. I gained a familiarity with the San Juan from Bluff down to Chinle Creek during the first 5 year. The first big floods I experienced was in 1884 or 1886. I arrived at Bluff in 1880 and the flood occurred about 5 years after my arrival. The flood tore out some of the farms and did 399 more damage to our canal than anything else. The next flood that I recall was in 1895 or 1898 or about 15 or 18 years after my arrival at Bluff. By this time I had been down the river about 25 400 or 30 miles, or 10 or 15 miles below Chinle Creek. There is no changing channel or changing course in the river below Chinle Creek to the confluence. The stream is confined in a box canyon. Through that stretch there is a little shifting of the channel, but the channel is stable, in making my examination of the territory at and in the vicinity of Bluff upon my arrival there, I found no evidence of the river having changed its course within any recent period. There were no marks then visible upon the ground of any other or different channels than the one it occupied when I arrived there, except there were exac-tions where I saw some very large trees away from the stream that had come down the river sometimes years before that. I could 401 not tell how many. Some of the other men said the river had been through there. I was able to tell from appearances that that was many, many years before my arrival at Bluff. I could not even guess how many. If there had been any other channel visible at the time of my arrival at Bluff then the channel the river then occupied, the existence of that other channel was a very, very long time |