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Show Record and started down the river. When we found the boat it was tied up on the shore above the water. I got everything in good shape, 1919 got up steam and said goodbye. There were three of us on the Major Powell when we left Wheeler's ranch. One of my companions is now dead and I don't know what became of the other man. The boat had been built originally for coal oil burner and had then been changed so it would burn wood. We spent a good many hours getting wood for the boat and would run as far as we could with the wood and then cut another load and go on until that gave out. Going down the river on our first trip we tried to mark the channel 1920 as near as we could by markings on the rocks. We experienced plenty of difficulty with sand bars going down; sometimes we would pull off with block and tackle and sometimes dig the boat out. This trip was made in March or April. We didn't have any capstan with which to wind a line and at times used a block and 1921 tackle, which we operated with our own muscle. As I recall, we had sand bar trouble all the way down to where we stopped at a point about a quarter of a mile above the first rapid in the Colorado River. Coming back up the trip was not quite as hard as going down because we had a chance to back off bars and try other places, but it took ten times as much wood coming upstream as going down. Our marking of the channel was of no value because it had changed before we got back. The water had risen in the meantime. We 1922 took the Major Powell back up to Wheeler's ranch and didn't try to take it farther up because I didn't think it was possible to do so - too much rock and rough water. I made another round trip, my second trip being ten days after my first trip, I made no changes in the boat and on the second trip there were four men in the 1923 party. On our first trip we were gone about three weeks, consuming about the same amount of time going down as coming upstream. When we took the second trip the river was at a higher stage and it had shifted the bars so that our information gained on our first trip didn't do us much good and we had to go through all the prelimi- |
