Colorado River Days.

DECEMBER, 1936 ARIZONA HIGHWAYS Colorado River Days

STEAMBOATING on the Colorado river was already on the wane in 1886. The river above Ehrenburg would have seen little enough of the "Gila" and of the "Mojave" had it not been for the mining and smelting operations then carried on at Eldorado canyon in Nevada, and the military occupancy of Fort Mojave, Arizona. Both of these places gave some business to the river boats. Of these two sternwheel boats then remaining in service it may be said that the "Gila" had but one smokestack while the "Mojave" boasted two; otherwise they were pretty much alike and neither was at all palatial. They were captained respeсtively by Isaac Polhamus and Jack Mellen.

Captain Mellen was the typical steamboat captain of fiction. Bluff, yet kindhearted and vocally exuberant, he had a truly amazing vocabulary. To hear him exhort his Indian crew when his boat ran aground on a sand-bar, with a falling river in prospect, evoked the listener's sincere admiration. The choicest gems culled from three languages barely sufficed on those occasions for Captain Mellen to express himself adequately.

Captain Polhamus, elderly, with handsome gray whiskers, was more suave, more diplomatic in bearing. When he, in turn, was confronted with similar difficulties in navigation, he would manage to overcome them with, perhaps, equal celerity to that of his associate, but with much less noise.

It Is a Far Cry From the 'Gila' and 'Mojave' but Their Memory Lingers On

It was a slow, leisurely mode of travel on those old boats. Still, Captain Mellen told this writer that once he had made the trip from Eldorado canyon to Yuma in one day. This, he explained, was made possible by a favorable combination of high water, good luck and a long summer day.

On the other hand an instance is recalled when two miners, with a large shipment of high-grade ore stacked up on the river bank (the reward of many months of hard work) fretted and fumed for two weeks or more, waiting for the steamboat from the south to show up, while the price of silver slowly but steadily dropped from a trifle under a dollar an ounce to some point between eighty and ninety cents (exact figures forgotten). That ore, eventually picked up by the steamboat and shipped to the ore-sampling works at Kingman, Arizona, stili returned a very good profit to the owners, who, nevertheless, for some time thereafter bewailed their hard luck in missing the higher price. As one partner remarked to the other, "When I think of all the good, cold beer that extra money would have bought it makes me plum sick." And it was aggravating, to be sure.

Living here and there along the river were a few oldtimers, when my friend William Hutt and I first navigated, by rowboat, its muddy waters. They are all gone now and pretty well forgotten. One and all they welcomed us wholeheartedly whenever we dropped in on them during the course of our peregrinations up and down stream. To the casual eye life did not seem to offer much to these men, stranded as they were in such a stagnant backwater of existence. There was something Micawber-like about it all . . . and nothing ever turned up. They were glad to hear the latest news of the outside world, not that we were fountains of information, still we generally were able to tell them something of interest. Our occasional visits were, at least, a slight break in their monotony. Their chief contact was with the river Indians, Yumas, Chemihuevis and Mojaves.

Some of these pioneers were married to Indian women and had families; others