Lake Mead National Recreation Area

The Lake Mead National Recreation Area

The miracle started with Hoover Dam back in 1935. Suddenly, the raging waters of the Colorado River were calmed and the harsh and bitter land of beaver hunter and steamboatman, camel driver and cavalryman, wild Indian and righteous missionary was no more. And then came the rest of the miracle. It's called...

It's empty, eerie country where the Colorado River squeezes past the last of the sheer cliffs and sharp shelves of the Grand Canyon and rolls into a rounder, softer - yet still colorfulland of volcanic hills and gravel flats, then back through sharp canyons before easing its way down to the sea.

This is where the Powell Expeditions ended and it's where prospector James White was washed ashore after claiming to have been the first man through the Grand Canyon... but that was more than a hundred years ago.

Today it's filled with two long lakefuls of fishing, swimming, boating, waterskiing, and year-round camping beneath clear skies.

Lakes Mead and Mohave, and the oncerambunctious river pouring into them, are the main attractions of the hundredmile-long Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

They draw weekend visitors from half a dozen Western states and vacationers -long-term and just-passing-through - from all over the United States and from far-off Canada and nearby Mexico, to boot.

Hoover and Davis dams are floodcontrolling, water-storing, power-producing monuments to America's determination to make its deserts livable. At the same time, the reservoirs and their shores offer infinities of fun in scenic settings. Visitors may take fast elevators on a 52-story ride deep into the innards of 726-foot-tall Hoover Dam for a look at its formidable and complex structure - and for a gopher's-eye-view of the dynamos spun by force-fed flows of water to generate an average 4 billion kilowatts of power per year primarily for the fast-growing cities of Southern California.

On the still, clear, and sun-warmed water behind the dams, boaters may lose themselves in the back canyons and find themselves at one with nature in wide-open spaces where desert-dwelling animals come to graze on marsh grasses and to guzzle from a plentiful-and reliable-supply of water, a rare commodity in the parched terrain surrounding the Colorado.

Even today, the northwest section of Arizona is a bit out of the way for anyone not driving between Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Interstate 40-old Route 66-rolls through Kingman, south and west toward Los Angeles, while Interstate 15, the Salt Lake City-Los Angeles freeway, goes through Las Vegas. Between Las Vegas and Kingman, though, there's only U.S. 93, carrying travelers across the top of Hoover Dam-an adventure today as it has been since the dam was finished in 1935.Davis Dam, too, provides a crossing -between Kingman and the CaliforniaNevada border, by way of State Route 68. Once into this forbidding land, access to the lake and riverside beaches is easy: Paved roads off U.S. 93 lead to South Cove and to Temple Bar, on the Arizona side of Lake Mead, and to Overton Beach, Echo Bay, Callville Bay, and Boulder Beach. Below Boulder Canyon is Willow Beach, on the river. Down the way, Cottonwood Cove and Katherine offer access to Lake Mohave.

Long before these places attracted motorists to a bleached, baked - and endlessly fascinating - corner of the country, some truly tough travelers turned the Colorado's southward bend into an important crossroads.

Soul-searing and body-broiling as it was, this land of oven heat and Turkish bath humidity was a place some of the American West's most daring adventurers were happy to see.

California-bound riders still had to cross the Mohave Desert, and the often muddy water of the Colorado was the most they'd see before San Berdoo.

From the south, trekkers would follow the Colorado up from the Sea of Cortes - or from mid-desert, where the Gila River comes in above Yuma.

That's were James Ohio Pattie, the riproaring mountain man, headed north after trapping his way down the Gila from New

Mexico, where he mostly made war on bears and hostile Indians - when he wasn't wooing Spanish señoritas.

Pattie and a handful of cohorts beaver trapped their way up the Colorado in 1826. As told to an Eastern preacher a few years later, Pattie's path upriver simply bristled with Indian arrows.

"They poured upon us a shower of arrows, by which they killed two men, and wounded two more.... My own hunting shirt had two arrows in it, and my blanket was pinned fast to the ground by arrows," goes the Pattie narrative. "There were 16 arrows discharged into my bed."

All in a day's work for the peripatetic Pattie, who wandered the entire West - yesterday's Mexico, and today's as well-in search of pelts, romance, and adventure.

Pattie was particularly impressed with the Indians he met on his way up the Colorado. After all, he wasn't always fight-ing them.

"A great many of these Indians crossed the river to our camp, and brought us dried beans, for which we paid them with red cloth, with which they were delighted beyond measure, tearing it into ribbands, and tying it round their arms and legs; for if the truth be told, they were as naked as Adam and Eve in their birthday suits.

"They were the stoutest men, with the finest forms I ever saw, well-proportionedthroughout and straight as an arrow" Other travelers would share Pattie's awe of the Mojaves, Hualapais, and Chemehuevis of the Colorado corner. Others, too, would find themselves fighting with some of them and trading with others. The three tribes were reluctant hosts, mostly. They'd accept Anglo incursions sometimes - but when they figured they'd been done wrong, they'd aim their arrows and the bullets of their burgeoning arsenals against the intruders. Still other times, their refined senses of humor and curiosity would leave them amused and bemused over what the white-eyes might think of next. The Indians of this part of the Colorado were simple only in the eyes of their materialistic observers from the Western World.

The broad-shouldered Chemehuevi warriors were skilled hunters. Their women planted crops along the river while the precision bow-and-arrow work of the men kept them well supplied with deer and mountain sheep-not to mention lizards and rabbits.

"They're known as talkative, yet they know when silence is stronger. They're proud, yet capable of laughing at themselves. Their sense of the supernatural was well advanced and so was their lore - much of it delightfully told in Carobeth Laird's book, The Chemehuevis. They had tales About the Coyote's war with the Gila Monster and his ally, the Turtle, told in a mystically vague way, allowing characters to change from animals to people and back. Another tale, that of how Dove's son escaped the lustful possessive Wind Woman, is a story rivaling the ribaldry of Chaucer's saucier tales.

Tiring of her advances, he makes good his escape. She's fast as the wind, though, so he makes himself tiny and hides inside arrows shot by warriors. One warrior traps Wind Woman in a cave and renders her into an Echo.

Then there's Horned Toad's visit to the Giants, who ate anyone who laughed at them and did their best to provoke laughter. But Horned Toad's friend, Small Bird, outfitted him with a collar of arrowheads. The Giants coughed up the reptileand to this day, horned toads wear pointy collars and wide grins.

There were cults of animal worship, and there was a cult with whom thousands of modern-day Arizona fitness buffs might well identify: the cult of the runner. Probably a spin-off from the times when runners would carry messages of knotted string between one village and another, they remained as high-spirited athletes by the time American explorers came across them.

The Indians of this far-flung desert river area didn't fall under Spanish rule. Not

Lake Mead National Park Service

Until the wake of the Mexican War-and the midst of Manifest Destiny-did their culture collide with one which soon would dominate from sea to shining sea.

The Indians got hints of what would come, however, when they heard tales of big, noisy, smoky vessels chugging about the Colorado's lower reaches.

At Yuma, Captain George Alonzo Johnson was ferrying 49ers across the Colorado. He was curious about the land upstream, and he tried to get government backing for an expedition north. No luck.

The guy who got the grant was Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, a well-connected West Pointer.

Ives saw the Colorado as the way to supply Army forces trying to pacify the Mormons of Utah. Overland from the east would be tough, especially in winter. A warm-water route from the south would be more than just a supply line. It would squeeze Brigham Young between pincers.

Ives co-opted Johnson's notion and ordered up a special boat for exploring the Colorado, a 54-footer he called the Explorer.

It was built-then taken apart-in Philadelphia, then shipped in pieces to Panama.

There, it was a pain in the neck for the folks who shipped it across the Isthmus by train. Aboard another ship, the Explorer and its party went all the way to San Francisco. From there, it was crammed and lashed aboard the schooner Monterey for a month-long trip around Baja California to the mouth of the Colorado.

At Robinson's Landing, a crew of shipwrights bolted the shallow-draft ship together in the cold and muddy tidal flats of the Colorado Delta. It was December, 1857.

At midnight, as 1858 began, the Explorer, gussied up with the supports to keep its shaky steam engine from rattling the vessel apart, chugged upstream atop a high tide. Destination: Fort Yuma and points beyond.

Once out of tidal water, the Explorer's pace was pitifully slow. But it kept the Indians entertained. They'd laugh as they walked upriver faster than the laboriously assembled, smoke-puffing, gangly looking Explorer could go.

It was frustrating to Ives because he knew he was in a race, of sorts. Johnson had supplied him a river pilot, but the captain still wanted to be first up the river by steamer. So Johnson rounded up a military escort on 24 hours' notice and steamed out of Fort Yuma a day before Ives was leaving the mouth of the Colorado.

Ives was in the shallow-draft Explorer. Johnson had his 105-foot General Jessupplus plenty of river savvy. He got all the way up to Eldorado Canyon, not far from Cottonwood Cove-320 miles above the mouth of the Gila, according to the figures of Lieutenant J. L. White, the man in charge of Johnson's not-so-official Army escort. From there, Johnson's party went on foot a few miles farther, past Roaring Rapids.

Johnson may have been first, but Ives forged farther up the river. He made it all the way into Boulder Canyon, opening up all kinds of possibilities for river traffic between Mormon territory and the Gulf of Mexico.

And even though Lieutenant White filed a report full of navigation guides and solid information on the expedition, it went ignored by the War Department, which made Ives' report the official one-confirming suspicions that the ambitious Ives owed his Colorado-exploration orders to the fact that he was married to the Secre-

tary of War's daughter. LEGEND PRIMARY SYMBOLS

Primary symbols are designed to assist the user in locating public recreational use areas at the lakes shown in this guide and to indicate primary recreation facilities available at each area. Additional information for primary symbols can be found in the table at left.

LAKE FACTS Each lake has its shoreline length, surface area, depth and elevation noted as shown in the diagram below.

SHORELINE LENGTH in miles at normal lake capacity.

SURFACE AREA in acres at normal lake capacity DEPTH in feet at normal lake capacity.

ELEVATION in feet above sea level.

WINTER FREEZE A snowflake means the lake freezes in winter. Use of the lake is seasonal and is usually from May to October, Ice fishing is possible at some lakes.

SECONDARY SYMBOLS

Secondary symbols provide the user with additional information about support services and facilities available at each recreational use area.

ROADS

DISTANCE SCALE The Arizona Lakes Guide was designed by Desert Charts, Glendale, Arizona for the Arizona Outdoor Recreation Coordinating Commission as a part of the the State Loke Improvement Fund Plan January 1983 Secretary of War's niece. That connection would lead Ives, a Northerner, into the Confederate Army three years later-where a play presented at his home in Richmond was the social highlight of 1864. Never mind that a war was going on; Ives was Jefferson Davis' aide-de-camp, and he was making a career of social connections.

At any rate, Ives' report, F. W. Egloffstein's fine-lined drawings of the Explorer and the territory it helped open up, fanned the flames of Western expansion.

Nowhere does it acknowledge crossing paths with the General Jessup, nor does it mention the redoubtable Captain Johnson. Yet Johnson, Lieutenant White, and their big boatload of soldiers and mountain men, came up only 35 miles short of Ivesand did it without that specially built iron-bottomed boat sent at such great cost to its launching point.

Ives wasn't expecting it, but he did make "contact" with the "enemy."

Mormon missionaries were hard at work baptizing river Indians-and scouting out movements of the government, which was trying to enforce federal law on Utah, which not that long before had been part of Mexico.

Three who found themselves together along the Colorado were Thales Haskell, Dudley Leavitt-and Jacob Hamblin, hero of Mormondom's southern frontier and fearless ambassador for Brigham Young to tribe after Arizona tribe.

Hamblin's journeys would take him across the Colorado at many points, as he pushed the Mormon frontier ever southward. But here he was in the spring of 1858, hiding in the bushes with Haskell and Leavitt watching the Explorer at anchor off Cottonwood Island.

Hamblin had a way with Indians. They had been full of talk about "Americats" on the river. He had to check it out.

"Government expedition, all right," he told Haskell and Leavitt.

"Don't expect to take Utah with that army!" cracked Leavitt.

"Looks like the navy to me," added Haskell.

"This may only be the first boat," Hamblin warned.

"How'll we find out?" Haskell asked.

"You're going aboard."

"They'll hang me!"

They didn't, of course-this wasn't a war. But Haskell fooled no one.

"As soon as the visitor made his appearance," went Ives' account, "we perceived that he was a Mormon...but we gave him a night's lodging-that is a pair of blankets to sleep upon-and entertained him as well as corn and beans would permit... The bishop departed with early dawn to join his companions, first extracting all the information he could concerning our expedition and the practicability of navigating the river."

Johnson, too, crossed paths with fellow Americans-in what must have been the most bizarre rendezvous in the annals of the American West. Some 300 miles up the Colorado River, so far from civilization most must have forgotten there was such a thing, Johnson's ship ran smackdab into other ships-ships of the desert. They were the first of the camel trains. Twelve of the animals were part of the Beale Expedition.

Congress was intrigued by America's newly won territory of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty. Among several surveys it commissioned was one headed by Navy Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale.

Today, the route is the basis of Interstate 40 and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. In 1857 and 1858, though, he surveyed it as Beale's Road.

Beale was a swashbuckler. He went to sea at 14, and from then on, it was one adventure after another.

In the Mexican War, he fought in the battle of San Pasqual, where Mexicans surrounded the Yankee troops. Beale and two others slipped through the Mexican lines. Beale then ran-barefoot-for 40 miles to get help.

After that, he spent two years crossing the rugged West from California, carrying military messages and, on one trip, gold nuggets and the first official accounts of the California gold strikes.

To get that gold to Washington, he rode through Mexico dressed as a vaquero. He fought off bandidos time and time again, then took a ship from Veracruz to New Orleans before riding overland over 900 miles, as crows fly, to the Potomac.

He was Commissioner of Indian Affairs for California and Nevada when he was called to build a wagon road to California.

On his first trip, Beale came into Arizona by way of Fort Defiance with a survey crew-and camels.

Their noise, their size, and their smell stampeded horses and kept the party's mules on edge-but they were at home in the American Desert, and each could carry 700 pounds of gear. That's a good 500 pounds more than the mules could pack.

Still, it was a real circus for those who saw the ungainly creatures working their way west-and the circus included a couple of clowns who claimed they knew the best route to the Colorado. Hired as guides in Albuquerque, they said they'd been slave-trading all the way to California.

They weren't funny. Beale's party nearly died of thirst as the two, known as Leco and Saavedra, guessed one way, then another, through some dangerously dry country.

Warm desert sunshine, cool blue waters, hundreds of miles of scenic shoreline to explore, and the company of family and good friends all combine to create a perfect boating vacation in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. Alan Benoit photos

LAKE MEAD NATIONAL RECREATION AREA

(Left) Setting out for a day's fishing on Lake Mohave. Both lakes Mead and Mohave are known for terrific year-round trout, cat-fish, largemouth and striper bass fishing. (Left, below) Although most visitors to the Lake Mead National Recreation Area spend their time on the water, the scenic desert and canyon country surrounding the lakes also deserves investigating. Alan Benoit photos "We unfortunately have no guide," the lieutenant wrote of Saavedra in his diary, "the wretch I employed at the urgent request and advice of everyone in Albuquerque, and at enormous wages, being the most ignorant and irresolute old ass extant."

Leco was no better. He got the group turned around then turned around again as water ran low. Beale sent two camels back with barrels to the last water he'd crossed, telling himself all the time, "I ought to have killed him there, but I did not."

At last, in mid-October, 1857, the survey crew reached the Colorado. Its path along the 35th Parallel was blazed. Beale and Company would be back the next year to make a real road out of it.

"A year in the wilderness has ended," he wrote in his report on travels that took him from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of the Pacific and back again, "through a country for a great part entirely unknown, and inhabited by hostile Indians, without the loss of a man.

"I have tested the value of the camels, marked a new road to the Pacific, and traveled 4,000 miles without an accident."

His road linked today's Holbrook, Winslow, Flagstaff, and Kingman. It crossed the Colorado not far from Oatman, that prize among (near) ghost towns.

Beale's Crossing, in years to come, would be the riverboat terminus-and jumpingoff spot for folks headed into Arizona's wildest parts.

Back in Washington, word of heavy traffic on Beale's Road-westward bound as well as eastward-retreating-led to the establishment of Fort Mojave on the Colorado. Through the end of the 19th century, it was the Army's chief supply point to Arizona's northern and eastern outposts-and those outposts became more and more vital to travelers as more and more traffic drove off the Indians' supply of wildlife and turned generally peaceable people into ever-more-violent defenders of what had been theirs alone.

Captain Edward Carlson had this to say about the early days of Fort Mojave: "Here a fort was nothing more than a few miserable shanties, built by placing cottonwood logs upright in a trench, then filled in between with pieces of wood and mud, a roof composed of brush, tules and mud. Openings were left for door and windows, but no door or windows to put in. The floor was also mud, and when it rained or blew, it was more pleasant to go into open air than to stay in the house, for we escaped the mud-bath that came from the roof through the holes."

It was also considered one of the hottest places on the American continent. But there was gold and silver. So, in their off-duty hours, the soldiers took to prospecting. Some even made small fortunes, and Fort Mojave became less of a terrible posting and more of an attraction for the adventurous.

Few fit that mold better than Captain John Moss.

"Moss was a hero for a novelist," said a fellow soldier, "broad of shoulder and small of waist, lithe of limb, small hands, active as a cat, rough as a backwoodsman on the trail, but a Lord Chesterfield on occasion. He was evidently well educated, but of an intelligence that would make him learned without it."

Moss made good friends of the Indiansmainly through fair dealing with them, same as Jacob Hamblin.

The peak of his diplomacy came in 1864 when Moss overcame the Mojaves' fear and distrust of the white man and talked their chief, Irataba, into going with him to Washington. There, the chief was received by President Lincoln, with special honors from the president.

Moss was the interpreter, and he guided Irataba about the wartime capital, showing the chief how well-armed the government was. The subtle message: Make peace with the government, and keep it.

Moss and the chief were the toast of Washington, New York, and Philadelphia during nearly three months Back East. When he came home to the Colorado, decked out in a brass-buttoned suit and cocked hat and wearing a colonel's sword, his people, who'd feared he was a captive, swarmed about him.

The 50,000 troops he'd reviewed in Washington had made an impression. When Irataba had their attention, he gathered up a handful of sand. He held it out to his people and said, "Mojaves." Then he swept his arms about the river sandbar on which he stood, and said, "Americans."

While soldiers made peace and scrabbled for gold along the Colorado, merchants kept seeking upriver ports. Mormons especially wanted access to navigation.

In 1864, the Deseret Mercantile Association sent Anson Call to the Colorado to set up warehouses as far upriver as it seemed steamers could make it.

Not far from the meeting of the Virgin River and the Colorado, he built what was called Call's Landing-later Callville.

Merchants in St. George, Utah, pinned high hopes on Callville as the main route into Mormondom for passengers and cargo alike, for east-west traffic went best by sea to Panama or Tehuantepec, across the isthmuses by land, then once again aboard ship.

The goods and people might just as well stay on the water as long as possible, went the Utah merchants' reasoning-and per-pound costs of shipping through Callville bore them out.

Callville thrived. In fact, for a while-a short while it was an Arizona county seat! That was owing to the silver tongue of a territorial legislator named Octavius Decatur Gass.

Gass came to the Territorial Legislature from what was then known as Las Vegas Ranch. He pushed through a bill splitting off Pah-Ute County from Mohave amid bombastic predictions that Pah-Ute's Callville would become the biggest city in Arizona. He was to be disappointed on a number of counts.

A year earlier, mineral-rich Nevada became a state, and it wanted that corner of Arizona. To the surprise of many, the Congress of the United States gave it to them in 1866, turning a deaf ear to the hue and cry from Gass and other Arizonans. Pah-Ute is now Nevada's neon-lit southern corner.

As for Gass, he insisted on representing Pah-Ute County in the Arizona Legislature for two more years, despite the switch-taking a rowboat to Yuma and a stagecoach to what was then the capital, Tucson.

But by this time other changes were afoot. Steamers were having trouble negotiating the rapids between Callville and Hardyville, farther downriver, which wound up as the practical head of navigation. And Anson Call, the energetic pioneer founder of Callville, went back to northern Utah.

Toward century's end, with the Indian problem well in hand, Fort Mojave was turned over to the Interior Department to serve as a reservation school. And before Callville was covered by the waters of Lake Mead, the railroads had already ended the transportation career of rival Hardyville. With the passing of the desert wilderness went the struggle for survival. The Indian and the cavalryman, the teamster and the steamboatman, the gold-hunter and the missionary who sought for riches of a different sort, are all now part of that rich tapestry of the past. Today, this sundrenched country has a different set of characters who flock to this water wonderland to do nothing more than swim, boat, fish, or just relax. For them, Mead's the name when recreation's the game!