The Little River That Did

Background research by Sam Lowe What the Little Colorado River likes to do most even more than watching a summer cloudburst over the high mesas or breaking down a freshly built beaver dam - is to brag to somebody about what it has done for Arizona.

So sit down on the damp, mossy bank... dangle your toes in the icy cold, blue water... and listen for a while as the River tells you a hundred stories about how it fed and clothed the Indians, cleared the way for the pioneers, and even helped to build the Santa Fe Railroad.

If you listen long enough, you'll begin to notice that the River uses a lot of puffed-up words like longest, largest, deepest, highest, and coldest. Of course, you don't want to believe everything you hear, but some of it is true.

For instance, the Little Colorado River is the longest tributary in the northern part of Arizona, traveling more than 200 miles from its headwaters in the White Mountains, west and north, to the place where it finally joins the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

En route and it really brags about it - the River passes over a waterfall that is higher than Niagara. In fact, Grand Falls has been called a "chocolate Niagara" because of its reddish brown color.

On top of that, the Little Colorado separates one of the largest ponderosa pine forests in the world - timber that stretches for 200 miles along the Mogollon Rim - from the largest Indian reserve in the state, the nine-million-acre Navajo Reservation. Naturally, the River claims to have seen just about every kind of country there is to see in Arizona from the wet, timber land on the east border to the low grassy plains of the northeast to the high, dry desert in the north. On any one jaunt through the state, the River will pass through some of the coldest country in the White Mountains and some of the hottest on the northern plateau.

Whistling, gurgling, murmuring the Little Colorado River wends its way northward through the pines of the White Mountains. A trickle in full summer, the river becomes a torrent of brown water in the rainy part of the year.

David Muench While much of what the Little Colorado says about itself is quite true, sometimes words like "bravest," "toughest," and "first" will sneak into a story, giving it the one-sided slant of a tall tale. One such tale the River likes to tell is about the time it ran as swift as a white-tailed deer across a summer meadow full of larkspur and monkshood, how it slipped - silent as a bull snake - under the unsuspecting nose of a gigantic grizzly, and then, with all the raw courage of a pack of skunks, squirted the old bear right in the eye. Another favorite tale is about a time, long before men were writing down such stories, when the River promised a Sinagua chieftain more water for his crops if he would just keep the young Indian boys from throwing stones at the frogs. When the chieftain failed to keep his part of the bargain, the River dried up. The jackrabbit and prairie dog and antelope became scarce. The corn and squash would not grow. Finally, the Sinagua (which means "without water") were forced to leave their home - the arid land around Wupatki National Monument - and move south. Are you listening? Then you know by now that these are not the ramblings of any old run-of-the-mill river. Rather, they are the recollections of a very proud river... a river that boasts, by the way, of being the pioneer of pioneers in northern Arizona. After all, who else worked so many years to break ground for all the people who followed later?

The River is the first to point out, for instance, that it was the one, back in 1540, that watered the horses of the Spanish adventurer Francisco Coronado on his way to find the golden cities of Cibola. And wasn't it the first to introduce some of Coronado's caballeros to the Hopis living on the high Colorado Plateau? That was where the Spaniards taught the Indians how to raise sheep and make silver jewelry, and where Lt. Garcia Lopez de Cardenas chose the name Rio del Lino ("Flax River") for a waterway along whose bank wild flax grew in profusion. Later he called it the Rio Bermejo or Red River "because its water was muddy and red."

The River remembers, too, that it was not until 1604 that Don Juan de Onate, the wealthy governor of New Mexico, passed by and called it "Colorado," the name it chose to keep. When it discovered, sometime later, that its bigger - and tougher - brother also liked the name "Colorado," the River decided that "Little Colorado" sounded much better.

Of course, the River really swells up when it mentions the fact that the first Anglo people to live in northeastern Arizona built their settlements along its fertile banks. In 1873 Jacob Hamblin, known to many as the "Saint in Buckskin," blazed a wagon trail from southern Utah to the Little Colorado and up the river to its headwaters. Later, when Brigham Young sent 200 Mormon families from Utah tocolonize Arizona, the emigrants followed Hamblin's trail along the river to a spot they called Cumorah (now called Joseph City). There they stopped on March 24, 1876, to build a fort of drift cottonwood logs and dam up the river for farming.

According to the Little Colorado, it not only encouraged the Mormons to settle in Arizona, it also brought in the railroad builders and the cattle ranchers as well. For example, the River claims to have played host to Captain Lorenzo Sitgreaves and Lt. Amiel Whipple who made military surveys in the 1850s to determine if a railroad could be built across northern Arizona. Once these men were sure that they had the River's support, they told the government "Yes," and, by 1880, the Atlantic and Pacific (now Santa Fe) railroad was completed.Other close acquaintances on a first name basis, of course who depended on the River were Edward Kinsley, Henry Kinsley, and Frank Ames. In 1884, these men, backed by rich friends in the East, started the Aztec Land and Cattle Company with 33,000 head of Texas longhorns, 400 horses, and one million acres of land along the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad right-of-way. This enterprise, which came to be known in cowboy circles as the "Hash Knife Outfit" (the cattle brand looked like an old chuckwagon hash knife), lasted until about 1900.

(Left) Near Holbrook the waters of Colorado Chiquito, Little Red, as Father Francisco Garces dubbed the Little Colorado during his early travels, runs wide and free. On its twisting, turning path the little river touches or passes close to seven other Arizona communities. Wayne Davis (Far left) Where the Little Colorado flows through Hall Ranch North of Springerville carpets of spring flowers grow in wild profusion, Wayne Davis (Following panel) Formed centuries ago when molten lava blocked the canyon the Little Colorado River had cut. Grand Falls today has a drop of 185 feet... when water is flowing during the rainy season. Roaring then with a muddy flood, the falls becomes a chocolate Niagara. Dick Dietrich

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Of all its friends, the River most fondly remembers Commodore Perry Owens, a man elected as Navajo County's first sheriff and the gunman expected to bring law and order to the one-street town of Holbrook. It was 1887, the time of the Pleasant Valley War when the cattlemen and the sheepmen were at each other's throats over grazing land and the Grahams were killing off the Tewksburys (and vice versa). The River claims that it suggested a compromise to Owens - give the flat grassland around Holbrook to the cattlemen and the dense, green forage around Sheep's Crossing on its West Fork to the sheepmen - but the Commodore, the tough and cool LongHaired Man, preferred to settle such disputes with a six-shooter.

Give it half a chance and the Little Colorado will reminisce like this forever. However, there are two things that it will never mention. One is the long drought spells in Arizona, especially on the high d desert plateaus, that can reduce a raging river to a mere trickle and, sometimes, make it disappear altogether. When the River remembers those times, it is sad, for it also remembers losing many of its friends. The other thing that the River refuses to talk about is a volcanic lava flow like the one which once filled up 20 miles of its channel near Grand Falls, forcing it to find a new course around the end of the spill. The very thought of the burning fluid rock makes the Little Colorado's water run cold.

This does not mean - not by any stretch of the imagination - that the Little Colorado River is a coward! No cowardly river would ever have been on speaking terms with such western daredevils as "Old Bill" Williams who trapped beaver in its waters, "Iron Man"

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Al Sieber (commander of the Apache Scouts) who killed wild turkeys along its banks, and the several unnamed outlaws who are buried at the bottom of Becker Lake. No recreant river could ever boast of having seen the first transcontinental automobile route in Arizona (through Springerville), the last grizzly bear and Merriam elk in the north country, and the taming of such wild and wooly frontier towns as Holbrook and Winslow and St. Johns.

While the Little Colorado can never be called a timid river, it cannot be called a modest one either. It has refused the role of the unsung American hero who goes, without so much as a ripple, off to die on some obscure shore. Instead, the River struts in the grand manner of the bravados and braggadocios of the Old West - from one side of Arizona to the other, shouting about how it has spent a good part of its life watering the livestock, growing the lumber, and entertaining the tourists that northern Arizona depends on. The River, with its fierce pride in the part it has played in Arizona's history, seeks no Congressional Medal of Honor, no Purple Heart, no long ceremonial speeches. All it really wants is for someone to listen.

So listen to the Little Colorado... hear it whistling, gurgling, murmuring, and thundering its way across Arizona, from Mt. Baldy in the White Mountains to a spot 30 miles above Phantom Ranch on the floor of the Grand Canyon, where it finally joins with its big brother and together they run - laughin' up a storm, braggin' and swappin' tall tales - all the way to the Gulf of California.