| OCR Text |
Show Record to the junction is a plateau country, bisected by the Colorado Canyon and its tributary canyons, and between each of the canyons there are flat topped divides or mesas on which there is vegetation, and in some cases vegetation in the valley bottoms. Perhaps sagebrush is the dominant type of the mesas. There is also scanty grass and extensive cedars. It is desert vegetation and not very abundant. On the LaSalle and Blue mountains there is yellow pine and some spruce. There are very few inhabitants outside of Moab Valley and Castle Creek Valley; an isolated settler and one or two ranches which employ a few men; I would say less than one hundred people outside of Moab Valley and Castle Creek 109 Valley. Between Moab and the junction with the Green River I know of nobody within ten miles of the river and know of no houses or dwellings, except uninhabited dwellings at the old oil wells. 110 Mexican Hat on the San Juan River is a trading post where one family resides at this time. Goodrich ( on the San Juan) is now the same place as Mexican Hat, although during the oil excitement twenty years ago the two places were differentiated. Aside from a few Indians at Mexican Hat there are three families, and one man dry farming in the country between Chinle Creek and the Colorado River, living on the 800 to 1000 square miles of country examined by me. I have been on an Evenrude motor boat from Moab to the oil well, twenty- eight miles below. It was about a 16 or 18 foot boat. On another occasion I made that trip in a Slightly larger boat of 111 the Moab Garage Company. On the first of these trips we did not know anything about the channel and were continually running on sand bars and dodging rocks and jumping overboard and pulling the boat over riffles. We would operate it with a man sitting on the bow constantly, trying to pick the channel; sometimes he would pick it and sometimes he would not. We would jump overboard or fall off when we got stuck. On the second trip the boat was operated by Virgil Baldwin of Moab, who operated Moab Garage Company boats on - 16- |
