A CAMERA AND A DREAM

A CAMERA AND A DREAM The Story of the Kolb Brothers at Grand Canyon

Alf a century of photography and life at the Grand Canyon was celebrated by Emery C. Kolb in October, 1952. It was in 1902 that Emery Kolb, a young man of 21 years with a camera and a dream, came to the Grand Canyon. He came from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to work in an asbestos mine. He arrived to find the mine temporarily closed, and bought out a photographic studio in Williams, Arizona. In 1903 he moved permanently to the Grand Canyon. Since then he has explored and photographed most of the Canyon; he has run the Colorado River twice-once with his brother Ellsworth; he has been to Alaska to photograph the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes for National Geographic Magazine; he has lectured across the continent on his adventures and to hundreds of thousands at Grand Canyon about his river trips; he has photographed and known many of the celebrities of the world; and he has made pictures of thousands of parties on muleback trips into the Grand Canyon. But always his home and his great love has been the Grand Canyon and to it he has returned from all of his travels.

He is known to many for his Colorado River expedition in 1911 and 1912, which he later described in National Geographic Magazine. This adventure, written by Ellsworth and Emery, has been printed as a book, Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico, and is now in its 14th reprinting. He is known to others as the photographer for the daily mule parties down the Bright Angel Trail into the Grand Canyon, and his negative file of these trips extends back over 30 years. He is known to countless thousands who have heard his daily lectures and seen his motion pictures of his boat trips, given in his studio at the Grand Canyon, and bringing to visitors a feeling of the power, the might, and the size of the river as well as admiration for his courage.

But he came to the Grand Canyon in 1902 with a camera and a dream. As the third of four sons of a Methodist minister, he was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, and the family later moved to Pittsburgh. Here he attended school. He also acquired a 5 x 7 view camera and fixed a darkroom in his home. At that time there was a vogue for pictures or portraits on buttons, so he fitted his camera with a shield with twelve holes in front of the plate holder so that one plate would give him 12 of the oneor two-inch pictures he wanted. These buttons were fitted with tiny gold frames

problem, and occasionally they would accumulate a stack of orders several feet high waiting for the sun to shine long enough for them to get their work done.

In 1905, his business well started, Emery travelled to Bisbee, Arizona, to marry Miss Minnie Blanche Bender of Chicago who was working there. He had met her when she took an earlier trip to the Grand Canyon. They returned to the Grand Canyon to live, and she has worked very closely with him in their business operations throughout the years. Their one child, a daughter Edith, was born in 1907 and for several years was the only white child at the Grand Canyon.

In 1908 she was taken on a trip to Havasupai Canyon, travelling by way of Bass Camp. Down the Lee Canyon trail from Topocoba Hilltop, Edith, in a little wicker basket, rode in a pannier on one side of a burro and Emery's cameras on the other.

By 1911, Emery and Ellsworth were ready for their greatest adventure-running the entire length of the Colorado River by boat from Green River, Wyoming, to the Gulf of California. They wanted motion pictures of the expedition -surely as fantastic an idea in 1911 as the notion that the gasoline engine would ever replace the horse! They ordered two boats of the Stone-Galloway type, patterned after those developed by the Stone-Galloway expedition of 1909. They made careful preparations-food, equipment, film, spare parts, and a thorough study of all available records of the river and of previous expeditions. They started from Green River, Wyoming, in September, 1911, with one helper, who abandoned the trip in Southern Utah. They reached Bright Angel Creek in the bottom of Grand Canyon in December and hiked out to their studio. Here they were joined by another young stalwart, Bert Lauzon, who later became a park ranger at Grand Canyon,and continued their trip. They reached Needles, California, in January of 1912, after 101 days on the river. Later, Ellsworth completed the journey to the Gulf of California. Even with their thorough preparations, it was a bitterly difficult trip, and a constant grinding and battering fight with the heavy gear and boats against the rapids, floods, whirlpools, sand boils, rain and cold. But their motion pictures were a success, and these motion pictures were Emery's key to a career as a lecturer. Beginning with Los Angeles, and followed by a tour of the Eastern states, he presented his pictures, and lectured on theboat trip to a number of schools and colleges, and to many famous groups, including an appearance in Carnegie Hall in his own home town of Pittsburgh Through one of these talks he met Gilbert Grosvenor, editor of National Geographic Magazine, leading to almost all of one issue of that magazine in 1914 being devoted to Kolb's article and pictures.

This in turn, after World War I, when Emery Kolb was a first lieutenant in the Signal Corps, brought an assignment to accompany the National Geographic expedition exploring and photographing the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes on the Katmai Peninsula in Alaska in 1919. In 1921 he and Ellsworth were employed by the United States Geological Survey as guides and boatmen for a survey expedition through the upper canyons of the Colorado River down to Lees Ferry. In 1923 the survey was continued from Lees Ferry to Needles, California, with Emery in charge of the boats and again running the thundering and mighty rapids of the silt-laden Colorado River deep within the granite gorge of the Grand Canyon.

Following this distinguished career as a Colorado River boatman, Emery more or less settled down at Grand Canyon, taking trail pictures and establishing his daily routine of lectures on his canyon voyages. That is, he settled down if the term is in any way compatible with his many photographing trips into and around the Grand Canyon. On one of their early journeys to photograph 800-foot-high Cheyava Falls on Clear Creek, Ellsworth survived the harrowing experience of being forced to sit out a desert cloudburst and thunderstorm while suspended below the falls in a bosun's chair with a twisted rope above him. The wind was so severe that Emery, who was handling the ropes on the rim above, had to leave and get behind a rock for fear of being blown off the cliff. Photography can at times be very exciting.

Emery Kolb was the first man called upon when the Hyde party, consisting of a honeymooning couple, disappeared on a boat expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1928. They were never found, but Emery located their empty boat. All succeeding generations of Colorado River boatmen have not thought it amiss to study his book and consult him about the river and its vagaries, the rapids and the best way to run them, the most advantageous stages of water, and boat-handling techniques. In 1937 Emery accompanied Norman Nevils from Bright Angel Creek to Lake Mead on Norm's first of seven trips through the Grand Canyon.

In 1924, Ellsworth Kolb sold his interest to Emery and moved to Los Angeles, where he lives today. Emery and Blanche Kolb have run the business of lectures, trail pictures, books, petrified wood, and photographs for the past twenty-eight years. His file of trail pictures now numbers around ten thousand. Each print carries a negative number on the back, and as long as the picture was taken after 1922, when his permanent file was established, a duplicate print can be secured by writing to Kolb at the Grand Canyon.

A list of the celebrities he has photographed at the canyon is impressive-Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan, Emerson Hough, Owen Wister, John Muir, John Burroughs, Ida M. Tarbell, Thomas Moran, Harold Bell Wright, Frederick Remington, James Swinnerton, and many others.

He came to the Grand Canyon in 1902 with his camera and his dream. He has combined these into half a century of active living and of sharing his adventures with thousands of others. Many of these join in congratulations to him in celebration of his Golden Anniversary at the Grand Canyon!