OCR Text |
Show 237 at the mouth of Comb Wash, and put a big flat- bottom boat there. The Indians rode that with their loads on their ponies, set there, fifteen or twenty of them at a time, and came over. A couple of years afterwards the rains come and kept cutting the bottoms more; the floods drifted in, you see, that country is a sandstone country. The LaPlats is the top formation of that country between the base of the Chuckawala Mountain and the mouth of Chinle Wash; there the lime is raised again in the sandstone formation; on both sides of the river you have that fine drift sand on it. The heavy rain storms in the country there washes gutters though it, little washes ten or twelve feet deep; then we have a dry season and the wind whips that and blows the sand along the ground like frozen snow; it fills these little gulches and washes all full of that fine sand. A rain comes and washes that into the river, carries it right down, worlds the river plumb full of it. " That helped to cut the bottom out more than anything; helped to cut the big cottonwood bottoms out. R. 597. BY THE SPECIAL MASTER: " Q. You mean the river bottom, you don't mean the channel? " A. I mean the channel has a tendency to fill with this sand; it fills the channel of the river bed a foot or two with this loose, soft sand. It has a tendency to throw the heavy body of the current of water against the banks at the sides; it undermines them and caves them in, cuts in a half- circle, moon shape, until it will cut the bottom entirely in two, and probably the next day will go back to its old channel again |