Hell Or High Water: James White's Disputed Passage through Grand Canyon, 1867 - Softcover

Adams, Eilean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874214254 ISBN 13: 9780874214253

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Although John Wesley Powell and party are usually given credit for the first river descent through the Grand Canyon, the ghost of James White has haunted those claims. White was a Colorado prospector, who, almost two years before Powell's journey, washed up on a makeshift raft at Callville, Nevada. His claim to have entered the Colorado above the San Juan River with another man (soon drowned) as they fled from Indians was widely disseminated and believed for a time, but Powell and his successors on the river publically discounted it. Colorado River runners and historians have since debated whether White's passage through Grand Canyon even could have happened.

Hell or High Water is the first full account of White's story and how it became distorted and he disparaged over time. It is also a fascinating detective story, recounting how White's granddaughter, Eilean Adams, over decades and with the assistance of a couple of notable Colorado River historians who believed he could have done what he claimed, gradually uncovered the record of James White's adventure and put together a plausible narrative of how and why he ended up floating helplessly down a turbulent river, entrenched in massive cliffs, with nothing but a driftwood raft to carry him through.

About this title

About the Author

Eilean Adams is one of James White's five grandchildren. She spent over forty years researching and collaborating with "Dock" Marston and Dr. R. C. Euler in order to reconstruct her grandfather's journey. She has two Children and two grandchildren and lives in Seattle with her husband.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hell or High Water

James White's Disputed Passage through Grand Canyon 1867By Eilean Adams

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2001 Eilean Adams
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-425-3

Contents

List of Illustrations..............................................................viiiIntroduction.......................................................................1Prologue...........................................................................8Chapter 1 Callville................................................................11Chapter 2 Who Was James White?.....................................................15Chapter 3 White's War..............................................................19Chapter 4 The Road to Gold.........................................................24Chapter 5 The Rescue...............................................................32Chapter 6 Downriver Crier..........................................................35Chapter 7 The News Spreads East....................................................42Chapter 8 General Palmer and the Railroad Survey...................................53Chapter 9 Dr. Parry's Report.......................................................59Chapter 10 Major Calhoun's Version.................................................68Chapter 11 Major Powell............................................................77Chapter 12 On the Road Again.......................................................84Chapter 13 Powell's Conquest of the Grand Canyon...................................91Chapter 14 Enter Robert Brewster Stanton...........................................101Chapter 15 Senate Document No. 42..................................................111Chapter 16 Battle of The Trail.....................................................123Chapter 17 The White Family and Dock Marston.......................................127Chapter 18 Grand Canyon History: Discoveries and Rediscoveries.....................133Chapter 19 Bob Euler and Square One................................................141Chapter 20 In James White's Footsteps..............................................149Chapter 21 Summary and Conclusions: Part A.........................................154Chapter 22 Summary and Conclusions: Part B.........................................160Chapter 23 Summary and Conclusions: Part C.........................................169Chapter 24 Resolution..............................................................181Appendix A: James White's 1867 Letter..............................................184Appendix B: James White's 1917 Statement...........................................186Chapter Notes......................................................................192References and Sources.............................................................209Author's Note......................................................................218

Chapter One

Callville

When Hoover Dam was completed in 1935 and its diversion tunnels closed forever, the waters of the Colorado River began to rise behind the giant structure. They filled the vast, rugged landscape to the north and east, swallowing the mouth of the Virgin River, drowning the little town of St. Thomas, lapping at the foot of the Grand Canyon at Grand Wash Cliffs, and creating Lake Mead, a twentieth-century wonderland of recreational tourism. A few miles upstream from the dam and roughly twenty-five miles east of Las Vegas lie a resort and marina known as Callville Bay, home to cruising houseboats, water-ski power boats, graceful sailboats, and, hopefully, happy tourists.

But hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the glittering waters, buried beyond recognition in the Colorado River's notorious silt, lie the remains of the nineteenth-century Mormon settlement of Callville, its short history virtually unknown to the visitors above.

It was in the year 1864 that Brigham Young, understandably concerned about the safety of his Mormon flock in Utah, sent out a party to investigate the possibility of establishing a port on the Colorado River in what was then Arizona Territory. The party was led by Bishop Anson Call, but its point man was Jacob Hamblin.

Call and Hamblin and a small group of men came down from the town of St. George and set to work finding a suitable site. Nine years earlier, the Mormons had built a small fort at Las Vegas, then abandoned it; a dusty village remained, but it was too far from the river for consideration as a port.

Hamblin's almost encyclopedic knowledge of this country led him to site the settlement on the northwest bank of the river a few miles north of Las Vegas Wash. Washes are inescapable in this country where flash floods are both the lifeblood and scourge of the desert; Las Vegas Wash was notoriously wicked: dry most of the year but deadly when the floodwaters came with a roar that could be heard for miles around, carrying enormous boulders, whole trees, and dead animals down with them. There was no guarantee of safety from the washouts that plagued all such riverside settlements, but Hamblin's choice offered a good chance that Call's Landing would avoid all but the worst of them.

There was little to clear in the sparse landscape; the settlers laid out a plat for a large warehouse, several corrals, and about forty house lots. Despite having to haul nearly all of their building materials from miles away, the settlers built their massive stone warehouse in record time, along with a few small houses. Seventy miles downstream, Bill Hardy's little trading post was fast becoming a town with the predictable name of Hardyville. Call's Landing followed suit with Callville.

Whatever one chose to name it, it was still an isolated outpost lying foursquare and lonely in the harsh Mojave Desert, a land searingly hot and chokingly dry, empty and desolate, with the tortured beauty of relentless sun and pastel shadow, barren rock forms and hidden rattlesnakes, parched scrub and delicate flowers, all blended together in a landscape of awesome dimensions.

For many years, steamboats had been navigating the river from Fort Yuma to the El Dorado Canyon silver mines, carrying goods and people upriver and down; it was not long before they attempted the run to the new settlement. The only real obstacle was Black Canyon; its rapids had run Lieutenant Ives's 1857 iron-hulled steamboat Explorer aground during his effort to establish the farthest limit of upstream travel. But Black Canyon could not stop the commercial boats-the rapids just added spice to the trip. By 1867, the Esmeralda had come to Callville (and some say the Nina Tilden had made it that far as well), but business was not really flourishing. The only materials shipped from Callville between 1865 and 1868 were the salt and lime from Utah Territory needed for the downstream mills that processed gold from the local mines. And for this traffic, barges proved to be more efficient. These dumpy little vessels relied on mule or Indian power; where no towpath existed in the canyon, huge iron ringbolts set in the granite walls, combined with ropes and onboard winches, ingeniously defeated the rapids. Needless to say, the downstream run must have been easy, discounting the odd wayward sandbar or a precarious landing on some tricky piece of riverbank.

By 1867, Callville was on the downhill slope of its short existence. Its connection to the Mormon communities up north was tenuously held via roads barely deserving of the name, over which mail agents rode their own version of the Pony Express. Its link to the south was provided by the swift current of the muddy Colorado or slow, dusty trails past El Dorado Canyon to Hardyville. From there, the river reached south to Fort Yuma, while trails and stagecoach ruts led east to Prescott and west to California.

Callville was never a boomtown, and only a few of the small lots were ever used. Still, it had a bona fide post office (from which nothing was actually postmarked) and enjoyed a brief existence as the seat of Pah Ute County for Arizona Territory until 1866, when the politicians in Washington decided to give everything on the west bank of the Colorado to Nevada and California. Three years later, it no longer mattered to Callville what state it was in; by 1869, it had been abandoned. The completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in that year gave Brigham Young all the access to the outside world he needed; the trains made Callville a ghost town before it even had much of a chance to become a town.

It was here-on September 7, 1867-in this hot, dusty, and remote spot in the Mojave Desert that a raft carrying a man named James White appeared around the bend of the Colorado River, ending a strange voyage and launching more than a century of controversy.

Chapter Two

Who Was James White?

Despite the bizarre manner of his arrival, Callville's unexpected visitor was, in fact, quite an ordinary thirty-year-old prospector, who, less than four months before, had been making his way through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado Territory in search of gold. Since leaving home to seek his fortune, he had been through a number of adventures not uncommon in the American West, the last of which had consigned him to the silty Colorado.

James White was born on November 19, 1837, in the small town of Rome, New York. Neither his fair complexion, light hair, blue eyes, and sturdy build, nor his surname, nor any sort of family history reveals his ethnic heritage; one guess is as good as another. The only clue is that his grandparents were Connecticut Yankees who had come to the American colonies before the Revolution.

James's father, Daniel, was born in Connecticut in 1789, one-and-a-half years after the state had ratified the new Constitution and six months after George Washington had become the first president of the United States. The 1790 census counted Daniel as one of the 3,929,214 people who constituted the entire known (white) population of the country. The cities of New York and Philadelphia were no larger than towns and the roads that stretched between them merely stagecoach ruts.

James's mother, Mary, was born in 1794. In 1810, she and Daniel married and soon started west. They settled in Rome, New York, where Dan worked as a carpenter. Over the next twenty-six years, Mary produced twelve children, of which James was the youngest.

No family documents or written recollections exist to reveal anything about their lives in Rome, but the town itself and its canal furnish a few general clues. Rome was a growing town, and the decision to build the Erie Canal gave it considerable importance. In 1817, after years of planning, groundbreaking ceremonies for the canal were held in Rome; from then until the official and festive opening in October 1819, the town was alive with the activity and excitement generated by this great engineering feat. The resultant commerce offered plenty of work for a good carpenter. From what little is known, the White family was neither prosperous nor burdened with poverty.

In 1840, Daniel White, possibly encouraged by the great pageant of westward migration before his eyes, decided to move on again. There was less work than in Rome's young heyday, and the promise of more in the new territories of the West must have been a compelling force. Whatever the reason, Daniel, Mary, ten-year-old Joshua, seven-year-old Martha, five-year-old Jane, and baby James, not yet three, settled in Pike Creek Village on the shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin Territory after what was, in those days, a difficult and often dangerous journey. In 1848,Wisconsin became a state, the twenty-ninth, and two years later Pike Creek Village became Kenosha.

Kenosha schools were models of excellence in their time, but Joshua and James had scant opportunity to attend them. Daniel put strong emphasis on the nineteenth century work ethic and did not consider even a high school education a priority for his sons. The boys went to work instead. In any case, young James was more interested in physical activities and practical pursuits than in books; he lacked a contemplative nature. He did, however, possess a common-sense intelligence, and this, combined with a stubborn determination, fueled his major ambitions: one, to be free and independent and, two, to make his fortune in gold out West. In 1861, he left Kenosha. Leaving the family home announced that he was no longer his mother's baby James or his father's run-of-the-mill carpenter's apprentice, but his own man, eager for adventure, with a modest "grubstake" eked out of hard-earned and slowly acquired savings.

His railroad ticket took him as far as the line went: St. Joseph, Missouri. There, Russell, Majors, and Waddell advertised their Overland Coach to Denver: for $125 they would take a lucky passenger over the Oregon Trail to Ft. Kearney, along the South Platte River to the Upper California Crossing, and then to the way station at Julesburg, where the Denver stages turned south. It was a fast journey, a mere twenty bone-shaking days, but it was too expensive a waste of White's money.

The alternative was joining one of the wagon trains which started at St. Joseph to go to Colorado, Wyoming, and along the trail to Oregon. There was always room for another hand, someone willing to do chores, scout the trail, fix broken wagons, shoot game, or handle any of the other jobs that were part of the westward push in the 1860s.

White arrived at last in Denver, that ultimate of Wild West towns. Denver! It had everything: bankers and merchants, blacksmiths and carpenters, joiners, coopers, painters and stonecutters, not to mention saloons, houses of ill repute, gambling dens, and lynchings, even an enterprising carpenter named Joe Walley, maker of "pinch-toe" coffins for prospectors who left town feet first. Fashionable Larimer Street boasted "smart" establishments whose wicked attractions gave the Ladies Aid Society severe competition. By the time White got there, however, the much heralded Pike's Peak gold "find" had been exposed as a hoax; there were almost as many "Go Backs" headed east as newcomers on the road west.

There is little question that White was a greenhorn with a hole in his pocket. His money trickled away, spent on "bargain" prospecting tools and mining claims urged on new suckers by old ones. He departed the magic city just one step ahead of total pennilessness and made his way (with a few thousand others) to Virginia City, Nevada, land of the Comstock Lode.

Virginia City was nothing more than an enormous mining camp clinging precariously to a hillside. It had a huge population in constant flux; if you weren't looking for silver, you were looking for a way out. Neither activity was very rewarding. And those awful little mines everywhere, hellholes waiting to collapse on unsuspecting heads-which they did with terrible frequency. You wonder how many dreams vanished amid the rubble of that incredible community.

But-sound the trumpet-the army actually came to the rescue! It was almost farcical. In the late fall of 1861, the Fifth California Volunteer Infantry came to town, looking to enlist the broke, the hungry, and the disillusioned into the Union Army, offering a hundred dollars to anyone who would sign on the dotted line. The recruiters were smart; they arrived during the first winter snowfall. They were even smarter when they told the lucky enlistees, after they had signed up, that they wouldn't get their bonus until they mustered out in three years. Still, things must have been bad; they had plenty of takers, and James White was one of them. The experience would not be edifying.

Chapter Three

White's War

The stagecoach conveyed White to the army fort at Sacramento. He was shortly transformed into an infantry private, described for the official records as: "Ht: 5' 7"-Eyes: blue-Complexion: Fair." Posted to San Francisco, he found his brief stay memorable only because he spent it standing guard at the military stockade on Alcatraz Island. In February 1862, his outfit sailed down the coast to San Diego and Camp Wright, his first and only voyage on the Pacific Ocean. In May the unit marched over the mountains and through the sand dunes to Fort Yuma.

As a teamster in the Quartermaster Corps, White spent a lot of time waiting around on the riverbank, getting acquainted with the steamboats and hearing vague bits of trivia about remote upriver settlements. And of course he learned the ubiquitous joke about the Fort Yuma soldier who died and went to hell but came back the next day for his blanket.

In February of 1863, his outfit made the long march from Fort Yuma to Tucson, then, in the following May, to Cooke's Spring, New Mexico Territory. That June the soldiers ended up in Franklin (now El Paso), Texas. White had a brief stint riding herd on army cattle at Las Cruces, New Mexico, in July, the only break from the monotonous, boring, and repetitive wartime activities of an army unit that encounters no enemy and does no action. It was a strange war for these forgotten soldiers. But, in the end, White did find himself engaged in a battle, not against the Confederacy, but against the military itself. The opening shot came in early September 1864; he had only three months left on his enlistment.

White was on guard duty at the post stockade when the lieutenant appeared with a small Mexican boy in tow and ordered all guards and prisoners lined up outside; the officer asked the boy, "Which one?" After a brief hesitation, the boy pointed at James. The officer immediately ordered White to a cell in the stockade.

It would be useless to speculate on White's state of mind at that moment-shock, fear, anger, or confusion. As was his way, he went to the cell in silence. Within an hour, he was joined by a Private Higgins and another soldier; they soon heard the charges against them: stealing two hundred pounds of coffee from the post commissary, taking it across the Rio Grande into El Paso (now Juarez), Mexico, and trading it for whiskey. It was stated, with remarkable vagueness, that the crime had occurred on either September 8, 9, or 10.

The three men spent a month in the stockade listening to the rumors: Mexican border guards had seen several soldiers crossing the Rio Grande with sacks, which they dropped when shouted at; the guards did not know the soldiers; the dealer who had received the coffee said he knew them; this dealer, Butshoffsky, was an American, a former army man who had apparently helped build the commissary and later deserted and skipped over the border to safety.

The soldiers at Franklin had always crossed to the Mexican border town freely, drawn by friendly people, cheap Mexican goods, and the colorful sights, especially the brightly dressed women and children. Most of them knew who Butshoffsky was; they bought goods from his store but were not on friendly terms with the man.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0874214254
• ISBN 13: 9780874214253
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 226