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Show Record two boats going down the San Juan River but none coming up. These were flat bottom row boats. I went from a point about four miles above Bluff to the mouth of Comb Wash on the opposite side of Chinle Creek in midsummer, probably July or the first of August. 2532 On that trip we stayed in the boat but had to pull it over some sand bars " a time or two". I would imagine the stage of water was medium and have seen the water both lower and higher. In 1910 I was on the Colorado River at Lee's Ferry, going from Bluff to Lee's Ferry overland. We had some wagons and small machinery and crossed the San Juan River at Comb Wash on our way to Lee's 2533 Ferry, I myself riding horseback. There were several in out party and I went along to handle machinery and boats for a mining company whose Superintendent was Charles H. Spencer. At Lee's Ferry there was a gasoline launch which had not been put in the 2534 water when I arrived. It was about eighteen feet long, with a four and a half foot beam and a draft rated at eighteen inches. There were row boats there at the Johnson ranch and I believe we built one. As I remember it there was no row boat at that time but there was a ferry across the river. I operated the launch on an upstream trip about midsummer, just after flood water. We made a lot of trips to try the launch out for distances of three or four miles and made one trip with the boat and a row boat from 2535 Lee's Ferry up to Dandy Crossing. Three other men made that trip with me and as I recall we were thirteen days going up. We had to line the boat a good many times and were wrecked about three times. 2536 We did some stopping on the way to make placer mining locations. When I say we were wrecked, I mean that on two occasions the row boat turned over and the launch capsized once, when we got cross-ways in the rapids, and the launch was carried into a rock and turned over. We ran on to a sand bar and had to get out and force the launch off by hand. We had about five hundred pounds of provisions to start with and lost them the last time our row boat |