Glen Canyon … A Dam Wonder

History

claimed to have made it from the upper San Juan River all the way to the Virgin River by log raft in 1867. Self-promoter Sam Adams said he had run the Colorado about the same time - but somehow didn't mention such landmarks as the Grand Canyon.Adams conned Congress into a resolution recognizing his hyped-up role in "opening up the navigation of the Colorado River, the great natural thoroughfare of Arizona and Utah Territories."

Right. The rugged canyons of the Colorado made it anything but a thoroughfare-but they didn't keep the adventurers away, even though railroads were soon to take people quickly from coast to coast.

No sooner was the Golden Spike driven than a driven man set out to chart the canyonlands - to treat them as land worth knowing and, of course, to be the first one to really make it down that vicious river.

He was Major John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran whose missing right forearm testified to his valor at Shiloh.

Powell had spent 1867 and '68 exploring the Colorado Rockies, where he picked up on tales of the river-runners. He decided to take on the toughest parts of the Green and Colorado, and packed in for a close look before launching an expedition.

He shipped four boats west from Chicago. Then, with his brother and a mixed bag of bullwhackers and adventure-seeking mountain men, the 35-year-old Powell headed downstream from Green River, Wyoming, in May of 1869.

His pilot boat, the Emma Dean, was 16 feet long, built of pine to allow a bit of maneuvering. The other three were stout, heavy oaken craft, 21-footers with watertight compartments for stowing a couple of tons of food and equipment.

Powell's gear included the latest in scientific measuring devices, bought by Illinois scientific groups. This was a private venture; all that came from the federal government were rations from Army posts along the way.

To make its way down the fearful rapids, the Powell Expedition was long on ropes and nerve.

Powell was professorial to the point of boring some of his men silly. He was slight of build. But he was imaginative - and utterly fearless.

During a gut-wrenching run through rapids on his second voyage, Powell was asked, "Major, what would you have done in the first trip if just beyond that bend you had come upon a fall like Niagara?"

Powell gave the guy a penetrating gaze, then finally answered: "I don't know."

While a fascinated public Back East followed newspaper reports of their daring - and even their death, Powell and Company followed the Green through boring

On October 15, 1956, the sheer walls of Glen Canyon reverberated with a thunderous explosion when President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed a button on his desk in the White House 2100 miles away to set off the first blast of a major Bureau of Reclamation project. The construction of Glen Canyon Dam was underway.

The first bucket of concrete was poured June 17, 1960. The last, 4,901,000 cubic yards later, was poured September 13, 1963. The final result, a graceful 583-foot-high wall-to-wall arc that backs up the second largest man-made lake in North America.

At the visitor center, displays, photographs, paintings, and exhibits feature highlights of the dam and general area. This is also the starting point of an informative, free, self-guided tour of the interior and exterior of Glen Canyon Dam.

Glen Canyon Dam was constructed at a cost of $260 million. It is estimated at today's prices the cost would be more than $800 million.

The maximum eight turbine energy output is 1,100,000 kilowatts a day. Electrical sales of more than $350 million have been produced since its start-up in 1964.

Except for operation and maintenance costs, all income from produced electricity is returned to the U.S. Treasury.

By controlling the irregular seasonal runoff of an unruly, unpredictable river, Glen Canyon Dam has proven to be a great help to a million acres of Southwest farmland. It conserves water from a 246,000-square-mile watershed and provides electrical energy for the Pacific Southwest and Rocky Mountain areas. And it has made possible one of America's greatest recreation sites.

But perhaps the most impressive element of all is Glen Canyon Dam is one federal project that has all but paid for itself.

Journey into a water-washed world where the canyons are measureless to man, where nature's brilliant colors and wondrous architecture alone dominate the senses. Lake Powell offers all this and more. Awesome in its dimensions and complexity, it is an experience never to be forgotten.

Photos by Gary Ladd

History

Calm and frightening rapids; through breathtaking beauty and drab desolation. Early on, the rapids gave one man his fill of the river. He left for Salt Lake City. He'd been aboard the No-Name, one of the oak boats. It broke apart at what Powell would call Disaster Falls, after nearly drowning its two-man crew. With that vessel went lots of valuable equipment. Powell was crushed. "No sleep comes to me in all these dark hours," he told his journal. Two gallant souls, Jack Sumner and Bill Dunn, took a great interest in salvaging the No-Name. Battling the whitewater, they reached her in the Emma Dean. A cry of joy went up from Powell's team. Dedicated men, thought Powelluntil he saw that, with the equipment, Sumner and Dunn had also rescued a keg of whiskey they'd smuggled along, to Powell's teetotaling distress. Thus fortified, the nine men made their way south and west, soaked, bruised, tattered, and mosquito-bitten - but lucky to be alive. They were all washed overboard at one time or another, pitched down the rapids like so many pieces of wood, and recovered, sometimes more dead than alive. As if that danger weren't enough, Powell would climb cliff after crumbly cliff to survey the wild country. At one point, high above the river, Powell was caught - unable to go up or down from a tiny shelf. George Bradley, climbing with him, couldn't reach him. Powell's single hand held him tip-toe'd from a rock above. He was tiring fast. Then Bradley, an ex-Army sergeant, did some fast thinking. He pulled off his pants-and his long undies, too, and strung them down to the Major. Powell let go of the rock with his only hand, stabbed at the drawers and grabbed 'em. Safe again. With boosts from his companions, Powell eventually scrambled all over the rocks rising from the canyon country, helping put it on the map. They also kept him free of danger in the water. "I was a maimed man," Powell would say in his journal, "my right arm was gone; and these brave men, these good men, never forgot it. In every danger my safety was their first care, and in every waking hour some kind of service was rendered me, and they transfigured my misfortune into a boon."

Boon companions? Hardly. The men wanted adventure. They wanted gold. They wanted to be on their way. Powell had other ideas - namely scientific study of the canyons. The men sang lusty ballads. Powell was given to bursts of Shakespeare and other poetry. The men complained about spoiled food and shortness of supplies. Powell took deprivation in the same stride that outpaced danger. Past the perils of Cataract Canyon and across the mouth of a river Powell called the Dirty Devil, they zipped and bounced in their fragile craft, rowing the way they'd row on a lake-facing astern. Frightening - but it hadn't occurred to them that they could've dodged some perils by seeing them first. Some water was a bit calmer - like that along some delightful glens below the Dirty Devil. This was Glen Canyon. Below lay Marble Canyon, then the Grand Canyon, where the ferocious Sockdolager and other rapids lay waiting to fling their fragile craft every which way. Finally Powell brought his expedition to a halt in the lowlands where the Virgin River joins the Colorado. It was a small band that got that far. Three men had made it through the most harrowing part of the trip, then gave up. Too dangerous, they decided. No sooner had they climbed out of the canyons than they came across a band of Shivwit Paiutes. The three were killed. With his heroic river-running and his careful measurements, Powell filled in America's maps of the Colorado. To do it, he had taken his brittle boats through rapids which even today are dangerous for men in sophisticated, super-flexible inflatable boats. An old Indian warrior had warned Powell of what he'd find: "Rocks h-e-a-p, h-e-a-p high; the water go h-oo-woogh, h-oo-woogh; water-pony h-e-a-p buck; water catch 'em; no see 'em squaw any more! No see 'em papoose any more!" Well, he did, and-buoyed by his success-Powell did it again in 1871. The second Powell expedition put the Major face to face with another legend of this land, Jacob Hamblin - and one of its most mysterious, John D. Lee. These were the main men of the Mormon Frontier, which Brigham Young sought to push southward toward territory trekked by the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican War. Hamblin was here as a chosen leader. Lee landed in the canyonlands as a kind of refugee/fugitive in the wake of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hamblin led the Latter-Day Saints from the Virgin Valley of Utah's Dixie, downriver near today's Lake Mead, to the Arizona Strip and, eventually, to the Little Colorado River. Big, tough, and talented, Hamblin learned Hopi and other Indian languages.

History

It was Hamblin who saw the possibility of running a ferry across the Colorado at the Paria, where the Spanish Fathers found no way across a century before.

Who better to run that ferry than John D. Lee? After all, there was a warrant for his arrest in the civilized parts of Mor-mondom. Of at least 50 men responsible for killing more than twice as many men, women and children from a California-bound wagon train, Lee was the desig-nated villain. That devout supporter of Brigham Young wouldn't easily be turned in by his fellow Mormons, though, and the ragged edge of civilization was a good place for him.

By raft, then by the Nellie Powell, ditched as unseaworthy by the second Powell expedition, Lee took folks across the unfordable river, a grim kind of Charon, 1870s-style. He started the ferry service 15 long years after the massacre, in 1872.

For more than half a century, Lees Ferry would be the way in and out of Arizona from the north, until Navajo Bridge was built across Marble Canyon in 1929.

Polygamous Lee brought wife Emma to live at the ferry. To her, the place was a "lonely dell," and that's a name the place would be called by many.

Reports of his impending arrest kept Lee on edge. The click of a gun would send him reeling, and some of the Powell party had fun at his expense by sneaking up behind him and doing just that during dull moments at Lonely Dell.

In 1874, Lee was brought in by a zealous sheriff. In 1877 he was taken back to Mountain Meadows, near Cedar City, where he sat on his own coffin awaiting a firing squad. Moments later, Mormondom had closed its books on Mountain Mead-ows.

Other Mormons, then the Grand Canyon Cattle Company, and finally Coconino County ran the ferry, carrying horses, wagons, people, and supplies across the always-dangerous Colorado.

In 1928, three men and a couple of Model "T" Fords were lost in the swirling waters. It was Lees Ferry's last run.

The canyonlands, in most people's minds, have been places to get into and out of as soon as possible. Still, there were the visionaries: Frank Brown, who looked down the gorges and saw a railway route, was one. He led a surveying party down the Colorado in 1889, and died in a whirl-pool in Marble Canyon. The party's engineer, Robert Brewster Stanton, saw the survey through, and it proved helpful as the cry of "Gold!" echoed through Glen Canyon.

Placer mining became the rage of the 1890s, and huge pieces of hardware were hauled over the barren plateaus and down the twisting trails to the muddy river where prospectors hoped to wash away enough dirt to make themselves wealthy on gold dust. As many as a thousand of them tramped along the Colorado from the Dirty Devil to Lees Ferry, panning, pound-ing together sluice-boxes, dredging, and hosing down hillsides.

For all the talk about gold enough in Glen Canyon to pay off the national debt, no one came out a millionaire. A few made a few thousand dollars-not bad for those days - and lots made a few hundred by sloshing around the sandspits - Good Hope Bar, Olympia Bar, Klondike Bar, and other spots now at the bottom of Lake Powell.

The prospectors also contributed to some aquatic traffic unmatched until the lake covered their stomping-grounds. Rowboats, sailboats, side-wheelers, and stern-paddle craft crossed paths on Glen Canyon's waterways.

Robert Stanton, the railroad surveyor, formed a company that brought in a gold dredge bigger than a gymnasium. For all its huffing and puffing, the equipment couldn't capture gold dust, and the $100,000 venture produced less than $100 worth of gold.

Years later, says historian Gregory Crampton in his panorama of the canyonlands, Standing Up Country, the first president of Stanton's company, made a trip down the river. Stopping at the wreckage of the huge dredge, they pried off lumber for a fire, over which they made coffee. At last Julius Stone got a return on his investment in the Hoskaninni Company. Said Stone, "This cup of coffee cost me $5,000."

Cass Hite, whose early-'80s discovery of gold led so many would-be plutocrats to the canyonlands, wound up as a ranch-er, and lived out his days there. He died at Ticaboo in 1914 - of natural causes, and not at the hands of the disgruntled prospector who scratched into the sandstone: "One hundred dollars reward for the d---d fool who started the gold boom."

Another man went after gold a bit below Glen Canyon, and remnants of his large-scale quest for the metal still may be seen. The man was Charlie Spencer, a tough, hard-working fellow whose tales of potential wealth led lots of men into his employ. At Lees Ferry, he built an elaborate boiler-driven system of sluicing and amalgamation that would extract gold dust from shale.

The boiler took coal; lots of it. Spencer found a vein of coal about 28 miles up from the ferry. To carry the coal, he had a steamboat built in San Francisco. With great difficulty, it was carried to the Col-orado.

In 1911, the Charles H. Spencer began its coal-hauling runs, but the crew soon discovered that it took all the coal the vessel could carry just to make its upriver trip. Down, but not out, Spencer had the Spencer haul a barge. Some coal finally reached his machinery, but by then the land which had so tightly gripped its gold