Hell Or High Water. Eilean Adams. Published by Utah State University Press. For additional information about this book

Transcription

1 Hell Or High Water Eilean Adams Published by Utah State University Press Adams, Eilean. Hell Or High Water: James White's Disputed Passage through Grand Canyon, Logan: Utah State University Press, Project MUSE., For additional information about this book No institutional affiliation (26 Jul :13 GMT)

2 Chapter 1 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. 11

3 12 Hell or High Water 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),

4 Callville 13 Figure 2 Ruins of Callville, 1926 (Courtesy of Lost City Museum of Archaeology, Overton, Nevada) 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.

5 14 Hell or High Water 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.