'Profitless' Splendor

Profitless' Splendor Lt. Ives' epic journey upriver to the Grand Canyon yielded stirring adventure and a foolish prediction. BY GREGORY MCNAMEE

IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1858, A YOUNG U.S. ARMY OFFICER stood on the brink of the Grand Canyon and gazed into Lower Granite Gorge. He was impressed by the spectacle, but mindful of his important reason for being there, an actor in what historians have come to call the Great Reconnaissance of the American West. His later report fully acknowledged the desert's beauty but also concluded, "The region is, of course, altogether valueless. It can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locality."

Just shy of 30 years old, Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives had good reason to think that the country would stay unexplored. It had been half a century since the Lewis and Clark expedition had returned from its overland voyage to the Pacific, and still the interior West was only partly mapped. The origins of the Colorado River, for one, were unknown, and now Ives was undertaking the difficult mission of traveling not down from the source somewhere in the Nebraska Territory, but up from the river's end in Mexico to learn what he could of the possibilities of making the river a water route into the uncharted country.

Ives' superiors in Washington had another reason for sending him upriver. Years of conflict between the U.S. government and the residents of Utah had erupted into open warfare, so Ives' journey was meant to answer an eminently practical question: Could supplies for the U.S. Army garrisons in southern Utah and elsewhere in the great desert be transported on the river?

TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION, IVES FIRST HAD TO LOCATE A suitable boat. In Philadelphia, he ordered a custom-built, 54-footlong steam-powered stern-wheeler he dubbed Explorer. After a shakedown cruise on the Delaware River, the ship was carefully disassembled, crated and sent off by sea to San Francisco. There, Ives and his men transferred Explorer to a schooner called Monterey. On November 1, 1857, they started a four-week sea journey that eventually brought them to the mouth of the Colorado River in the Sea of Cortes.

Today, scarcely a trickle of water flows into the sea across the broad, sandy delta, but in Ives' time, the Colorado flowed energetically. The tidal bore at the confluence challenged even a ship as large as the obliging Monterey, to say nothing of the smaller craft. Liking what he saw of the passing countryside, Ives noted in his elegant "Report Upon the Colorado River of the West," "Itwould be hard to say whether the dazzling radiance of the day or the sparkling clearness of the night was the more beautiful and brilliant.” Still, after he had watched the incoming tide drag the mother ship a mile up the river's overflowing channel before calming down, Ives determined to get his vessel and crew away from the sea as soon as he could.

I can scarcely blame him for his disgust, Ives wrote of one unhappy Mojave Indian...

It took weeks to assemble Explorer, which had been damaged in transit. Moreover, Ives wanted to reinforce the ship to keep its 3-ton boiler from breaking through the hull. In the meantime, other members of the crew scoured the delta for driftwood to fuel the steamship. In December, they set out for Yuma to meet the rest of the expedition in the face of the blustering winds and cold rain they scarcely expected in this tropical desert.

Ives found that part of the journey tedious indeed; in two days, Explorer made only 31 miles, for the river was full of sandbars and snags, jamming the rudder and grounding the ship. Ives grumbled that he was so frozen to the bone and was so impatient to get to the American military post that he left Explorer 15 miles later and found a nearby ranch, where he spent the night “between the dirtiest pair of blankets and, meaning no disparagement, with the dirtiest looking man I ever saw in my life.” The ranch hand may have been unwashed, but he had a way with horses, and soon Ives was mounted on a semiwild stallion that took him through the desert to the fort.

Explorer followed a few days later, gladdening Ives, who remarked of the rough-and-tumble post, “Fort Yuma is not a place to inspire one with regret at leaving.” He had his full party now, made up of men who would have done the captain of HMS Beagle proud. One was a 34-year-old German baron named Frederick von Egloffstein, an able explorer who also possessed great skills as an artist, and who drew beautiful relief maps of the lower Colorado River, as well as some gloomy paintings of the river canyons. Another German, the artist and novelist Heinrich Balduin Mõllhausen, drew extraordinary panoramas of the landscape and detailed ethnographic portraits ofthe native people. American geologist and paleontologist John Strong Newberry made a careful accounting of the landscape. It was a brilliant crew, but there was one small fly in the ointment. A civilian entrepreneur named Alonzo Johnson had also been at work on the river, with an eye to establishing a steamship line between the delta and the place that would become Fort Mojave near present-day Bullhead City. When Congress refused to fund his efforts, Johnson pressed on anyway, making an inaugural run as far north as The Needles. Möllhausen was bitterly disappointed, later remarking, “The prospect of being able to think during the journey that we were following along a route that had never been previously explored by a European lost its attraction.” But if Ives was troubled, he did not let on. He ignored Johnson altogether and went about his work.

Off they went, leaving Fort Yuma on January 11, 1858. They did not get far; Explorer ran aground on a sandbar about 2 miles upstream. “We were in plain sight of the fort,” Ives recalled, “and knew that this sudden check to our progress was affording an evening of great entertainment to those in and out of the garrison.” Ives had a sense of humor, his report makes clear, and he gamely rolled up his shirtsleeves with the rest of the men. Hours later, and free of the sandbar, Explorer was off again. It would not be the first pesky sandbar the little steamship would encounter, but Ives and his crew learned by trial and error how to predict such troubles. One indicator, they soon realized, was groups of Indian women and children along the riverside. “The coincidence between their presence and a bad bar is so unfailing,” Ives reported, “that the man at the helm quickly learned to slow the engine whenever he spotted them, lest he afford onlookers still more entertainment.” The country through which they passed was rugged and little populated. Ives delighted in the valleys and ranges as Explorer passed by: the Chocolate Mountains, the Black Mountains, Explorers Pass, Sleepers Bend, the Monument Mountains, Sand Island. The snags, he allowed, were inconvenient but not