Grand Canyon Deer Drive Was Doomed at the Start

GRAND CANYON Deer Drive Early Day Entrepreneurs Discover Deer Are More Temperamental Than Trainable

THE GREAT GRAND CANYON DEER DRIVE was born out of romance, desperation and charm. George McCormick, the idea's creator, possessed the latter in abundance, and it might've been his only noteworthy quality. Some describe the Ohio-born farmer and logger as a man of limited intelligence, few assets and, possibly, a shady past. But he must've been an extraordinary talker to convince the state of Arizona and the Forest Service that it was possible to drive up to 10,000 mule deer, like a herd of cattle, off the edge of Kaibab Plateau into the Grand Canyon, across the Colorado River, and up the other side to the South Rim. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt had established protection for the vast plateau north of the Canyon by declaring it the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve. Over the years, government-sponsored predator kills and unusually wet weather, which increased the forage supply, caused the deer population to explode from its original 4,000. Although there was no reliable method for counting the deer, 1924 estimates ranged from 26,000 to 100,000, and the number grew by as many as 6,000 a year. But when the wet spell ended in 1920, the for-age began diminishing rapidly, leaving thou-sands of starving animals on nearly ruined rangeland.

Moving quickly to address potential disaster, federal managers tried trapping and shipping the Kaibab deer elsewhere. But of the 18 caught in box traps, eight died of fright or were killed trying to escape, and most of the remainder had to be released. Only one reached the railroad alive.

Another plan, a massive, federally authorized hunt left Arizona sportsmen and con-servationists outraged at the prospect of large-scale slaughter.

Into the breach rode McCormick, whose wild idea had exactly no chance of succeeding. But in a climate of immense frustration, it seemed worth a try. The story it produced was one of the grandest failures of its kind ever to come out of Arizona.

McCormick left Flagstaff on December them was on deposit in a Flagstaff bank. Several prominent Flagstaff residents hurried to put up money, as did one of the story's strangest characters, Martiana Wentworth-Berteling, wife of McCormick's right-hand man, Neil Berteling.

She became a regular player in the Sun's coverage, the paper referring to her as the Countess Martiana, without explaining how she earned the distinction. Martiana evidently had money, however, and tossed $1,250 of her own collateral into the pot.

With $2,250 finally on deposit, the Indians began gathering for transport to deer country.

"The Navajos will get $2 a day and grub," reported the Sun. But by the time the drive started on December 14, only 12 of the 72 hired Navajos had shown up.

Even in the final hours, uncluttered minds were saying the drive was impossible. One of them, Fuss, met with several officials at the Kaibab ranger station to deliver a report on prospects.

"I said, 'Gentlemen, what I got to say isn't gonna please ya but it's the truth,'" Fuss remembered in the recorded interview. "I think the man's crazy. I don't see how in the world he can ever drive a herd of deer over the trail, and not lose two-thirds of 'em. Even if he got 'em down to the river, it's 300 feet across the rapids, practically.... And the trail that he expects them to go over is ridiculous."

But it was too late. The romance and excitement of it all had overwhelmed common sense.

McCormick's plan was to comb a section of forest, roughly 10 by 20 miles, leading to the head of Saddle Canyon, then plunge the animals into it, near what is now Nanko-weap Trail.

The Indians, who eventually numbered around 100, including some Paiutes, were on foot, strung out in a huge ellipse. With them were another 50 mounted men. An estimated 5,000 deer filled the immense tract between this human throng and the Canyon's edge.

The Indians carried cowbells and rang them to get the deer moving out of the woods. They also beat metal pans with sticks, while the men on horseback waved hats, shouted and fired guns.

"But as they drew near the deer, instead of retreating, the animals almost invariably dashed through the cordon of men," reported the Sun. "Not only did they refuse to run away forward, but in charging the line, the animals seemed not to care a particle how close they came to the men. In used it to move stolen horses across the Canyon from Utah. Fuss noted that McCormick kept a galvanized boat stashed in a cave at the river, and surmised that this also might've been part of his horse-running operation. But no one else involved in the drive made a similar charge, making the truth of the matter difficult to determine.

McCormick's party required six days to reach the Kaibab Plateau. There he met others who'd streamed out of Flagstaff in a colorful caravan of trucks and touring cars bearing actors, cameramen and cele-brities.

The motion picture company Famous Players-Lasky Corp. paid McCormick $2,000 for rights to film the drive, his main source of money. If their cameras could capture thousands of deer swimming across the Colorado River, the company believed it would make millions.

July 7, 1924. His party of 25 men, including sad-dle and packhorses, followed the old Grand Canyon Road to the head of Tanner Trail, about 30 miles east of El Tovar Hotel. McCormick was to follow the trail from the South Rim down to the Colorado, swim his men and horses across, then ride up Lava Canyon to the east side of Kaibab preserve, site of the drive.

Within six days, he boasted, the deer would be on the south side of the Canyon, where there was plentiful food for them.

But trouble came early. Two horses in McCormick's party were killed when they jumped Canyon trails. Expedition member Jack Fuss described how one horse, walk-ing behind its rider, suddenly bounded over the edge and hurtled hundreds of feet to the bottom.

"Went off . . . brand new saddle and all . . . and we never even heard it hit or seen where it went-just disappeared entirely," said Fuss, then a state deputy game warden.

In the same oral history interview, recorded in 1975 through a project by the Coconino County Public Library, Fuss described McCormick as "an old prospector and a horse thief" who knew the Tanner Trail better than anyone because he'd Zane Grey, the famous writer and a member of Lasky's board of directors, was there, too, along with his attentive staff, including a Japanese cook. He planned to write a book and make a motion picture.

"Mr. Grey has his story, for a book and the films, pretty well sketched out, the drive to be its main episode . . . whether or not it succeeds," reported the Coconino Sun.

Accompanying Grey was famed movie director D.W. Griffith, whose 1915 film Birth of a Nation is still considered one of the industry's most important. Deciding who'd win the film rights became a pro-duction in itself.

Regional forest supervisor R.H. Rutledge first granted the rights to the Hearst Inter-national News Service, but he scrapped that plan and switched to Lasky.

At the last minute, Grey added to the frenzy by insisting that no writers or reporters except him be allowed on the scene. Rutledge refused the demand, saying he had no legal right to exclude other newspapers and magazines.

Another obstacle arose when the Indian superintendent at Tuba City announced that the Navajo Indians hired by McCormick to help drive the deer would not be allowed to leave the reservation until money to pay Even in the final hours, uncluttered minds were saying the drive was impossible. But it was too late. The romance and excitement of it all had overwhelmed common sense.

In many instances the latter had to give ground. “One immense buck charged four mounted men, of whom Mr. Grey was one, and the latter reached for his gun, expecting to be run down. The deer just missed the quartet.” Another writer has the same incident ending with Grey sitting ignominiously on his rear end, “watching his horse disappear at high speed into the Arizona buckbrush before the determined charge” of deer.

The effort continued through that day and the next. But it never approached anything but total chaos, with deer stampeding in every direction. The hoped-for movie footage was an utter bust. None of the cameramen captured a single shot. The deer wouldn't stand still long enough, and the sky was overcast.

It turned out that McCormick's mounted army consisted mainly of starry-eyed boys, most from Fredonia and Flagstaff, out for a frontier adventure. They were utterly ineffectual against thousands of rampaging deer.

“So far as known there were no casualties to any of the men,” reported the Sun. But many deer died amid the commotion. They were promptly set upon by Indians with knives, eager to bring home meat and a hide.

Fuss reported seeing Indians laughing hysterically as they shimmied up trees to escape the deer. Mark Musgrave, predator control agent for the Arizona division of the U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey, later asked a Navajo named Grey Hat Charlie if the Indians drove the deer. “Yes, drive deer. Drive lots of deer,” was the response.

Asked where they were driven, Grey Hat Charlie swung his hand around, accompanying the motion with a whistling sound to indicate the deer were driven in all directions.

On December 16, heavy snow and sleet began falling, and within hours the call to quit was sounded. Fuss recalled what it was like: “When I got back to camp, Lasky had packed up, tore down all their tents, snowin' like booger.” Grey and Griffith fled the scene in a Cadillac. They left in such a rush that a Lasky photographer and four cameramen had no ride back to Flagstaff. Fuss drove them, but even that went sour. When their car got stuck in the road past Lee's Ferry, they spent the night at a ranch, the six men sleeping on the floor by the fireplace.

“The spectacular drive, featured in every daily paper and many magazines throughout the world, was over,” said the Sun, leav-ing the much-fretted Kaibab deer on their own. The herd did go on to experience dramatic death rates, but eventually rebounded, proving dire predictions wrong.

The tortured explanations and fancy foot-work began almost immediately. Grey published a front-page apology in the Sun, stating emphatically, if belatedly, that deer could not be driven, and calling for a return of mountain lions to the Kaibab. His account of the episode was serialized in The Country Gentleman magazine in 1925, and published as a novel, called The Deer Stalker, in the same year.

The mysterious Countess Martiana also weighed in, somewhat daffily, declaring that “all sportsmen should be as one in appreciating” McCormick's and Berteling's “glorious undertaking.” For his part, McCormick was unrepentant, departing the Kaibab only when Lasky's people did and it was clear his Indians were leaving, too, ending his movie dream.

Musgrave wrote that even “after three days of absolute failure,” McCormick refused to acknowledge he could not drive deer.

“I would not term him a man of ordinary intelligence. He was irresponsible,” wrote Musgrave. “I cannot understand . . . how the people who were interested in the drive could go ahead without investigating McCormick.” McCormick died in Flagstaff in 1945 at age 79, without again coming to public notice. But one deer did make it to the South Rim, according to chief Grand Canyon Ranger E.T. Scoyen. In Grand Canyon Nature Notes, published in 1926, Scoyen told of a young fawn abandoned by its mother and taken in for the summer by a North Rim ranger, Fred Johnson, who named the animal Chummie. Knowing the friendly baby couldn't survive winter on the north side, Johnson coaxed it into his car and drove 282 miles around the great gorge, making Chummie the only Kaibab deer to get to the South Rim, valet-style.