The Kolbs of the Grand Canyon

No dams stemmed its flow to the Sea of Cortes through 19 imposing canyons bearing names like Desolation, Cataract, Marble, and Grand. Fueled by waters that could rise more than 20 feet in a day, the turbulent river rushed through capricious channels and over hidden rocks and shifting sandbars. The river Powell had described in apocalyptic terms was a killer, a maze in which boats shattered on rapids and men drowned. Nor would the Kolbs be the first to take photographs during the trip. They did add a new wrinkle, though: They would take along a hand-cranked Pathé motion picture camera and make the first movie of the journey.

The brothers hired the Racine Boat Company of Racine, Wisconsin, to build two identical flat-bottomed cedar boats, a little more than 16 feet long, designed to be piloted stern-first by a single oarsman. Ellsworth named his boat the Defiance. Emery, married to a former Harvey girl since 1905, settled on Edith for his young daughter.

The Big Trip began with a September, 1911, launch from Green River City, Wyoming. The Kolbs were accompanied by James Fagan, who soon quit. “It wasn’t so much the rapids as the rocks coming off the cliffs during the storms it rained big rocks,” Emery explained. When they reached Bright Angel Creek two months later, the brothers left the river for a month so Emery could take his wife to Los Angeles for medical treatment. They returned to the Colorado in December, taking younger brother Ernest along for the first 20 miles and Bert Lauzon, a trustworthy cowboy-turned-boatman, for the remainder of the trip. On Christmas Eve, Ellsworth, Emery, and Lauzon arrived at Mile 112 (mileage on Canyon runs is measured from Lees Ferry). Here disaster struck: Emery’s boat crashed onto rocks in the rapids and Ellsworth’s capsized. Emery freed his craft only to see it smash into more rocks downstream. As Ellsworth made his way to shore, Lauzon, swimming from the riverbank, saved the Defiance. Christmas was spent repairing the Edith and burning nitrate film to keep warm.

On January 18, 1912, the trio reached Needles, California a customary place of exit for river runners in those days and returned overland to their Canyon home. A year and a half later, Ellsworth went back to Needles and made the 400mile voyage to the Colorado’s mouth on the Sea of Cortes. The Big Trip into the canyons of the Colorado, past 365 major rapids (and twice that many minor obstacles), through several capsizings, and 14 two-boat and three single-boat portages was over. Next to Powell’s expeditions, this odyssey became the best known such endeavor in history for the Kolbs became adept promoters of their epic voyage.

Ellsworth occupied himself writing Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico. Published in 1914 the same year The National Geographic Magazine ran his 85-page, 70-photograph article about the trip the book brought readers up against the Colorado’s rapids, of which there were three types: “good,” “bad,” and “nasty.” As an example of a “nasty,” Ellsworth offered Soap Creek Rapid, 12 miles below Lees Ferry: “The rapid had a fall of twenty-five feet, and was a quarter of a mile long. Most of the fall occurred in the first fifty yards. The river had narrowed down until it was less than two hundred feet wide at the beginning of the descent. Many rocks were scattered all through the upper end, especially at the first drop. On the very brink or edge of the first fall, there was a submerged rock in the centre of the channel, making an eight-foot fall over the rock. A violentcurrent deflected from the left shore, shot into this centre and added to the confu-sion. Twelve-foot waves from the conflict-ing current played leap-frog, jumping over or through each other alternately.

"At a rapid in Marble Canyon, Emery was thrown forward in his boat, when he reached the bottom of the chute, striking his mouth, and bruising his hands, as he dropped his oars and caught the bulk-head. An extra oar was wrenched from the boat and disappeared in the white water, or foam that was as nearly white as muddy water ever gets. I nearly upset, and broke the pin of a rowlock, the released oar be-ing jerked from my hand, sending me scrambling for an extra oar, when the boat swept into a swift whirlpool. Emery caught my oar as it whirled past him; the other was found a half-mile below in an eddy."

Ellsworth also related tales of great nat-ural beauty. A canyon fissure showed "the true colour of the rock beneath the stain; lime crystals studded its surface like gems glinting in the sunlight; beautifully tinted jasper, resembling the petrified wood found in another part of Arizona, was em-bedded in the marble wall." During "one of those remarkable Arizona desert sun-sets," sunlight broke through the clouds, "telegraphing its approach long before itreached us, the rays being visibly hurtled through space like a javelin, or a lightning bolt, striking peak after peak so that one almost imagined they would hear the thunder roll."

The year before Ellsworth's book appeared, Emery went back East and gave a hundred travelog lectures to audiences ranging from Washington's staid National Geographic Society to a crowd of 1,700 in Pittsburgh. It was a simpler age then, devoid of glitzy high-tech video imagery, but the talk, lantern slides, and motion pictures fueled public interest in the Canyon. As Emery predicted, "There is no question that many people will be coming West to see some of the things I told about." Indeed, the following year the brothers added a two-story auditorium to the studioit eventually held 185 to accommodate tourists flocking to hear Emery's four-times-a-day narration of what became the longest running commercial movie in history. The brothers received a letter from Stephen V. Jones, a veteran of Powell's 1871-72 expedition on which he manned the steering oar on lead boat Emma Dean, and whose passengers included Powell, Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, and photographer John K. Hillers. Jones had not actually seen their film, but he said that "a member of our party recently wrote that he had and easily recognized Ashley Falls, Disaster Falls, Hell's Half Mile, Echo Rock, and many other places, saying in short that 'I lived over all that canyon experience again."

Seen today the film is a wonderful period piece replete with jostling cameras, horrendous rapids, abundant danger, even the discovery of a skeleton - probably a prospector. Emery noted: "We found a 1900 Los Angeles newspaper in his pocket, but no identification" and covered him with stones where he lay. "The Grand Canyon is not like a mountain, a passive thing," Emery said at one point in the narrative he taped in 1948. "It is a live thing, cruel and violent. It can be like a roaring lion in one section; in the next section, a quiet sinuous beauty carrying the reflections of the walls, towers and pinnacles on its glistening surface."

Above all, the film tells the irresistible story of two incredibly hardworking Everyman types who undertook a very dangerous journey and made it through because they had a lot of luck and plenty of grit.

There would be other adventures. In 1921 the brothers were on the federal government's damsite selection survey of the Colorado between Green River, Utah, and Lees Ferry. Two years later,

Emery rode with the final survey from Lees Ferry to Needles. In the winter of 1928, the Kolbs played a part in the search for Glen and Bessie Hyde, the "Lost Honeymooners."

Riding a boat through the Grand Canyon, the Hydes had ignored Emery's advice to take along life preservers and were never seen again. The brothers found the couple's scow above Separation Rapids with their belongings intact, including a copy of Ellsworth's Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico.

Like many siblings, the Kolbs were not well-suited for close contact with each other. They made various compromises dividing the nation for travelog presentations at the Mississippi River, leasing the studio to each other for alternating two-year periods until 1924, when Ellsworth moved to Los Angeles.

Ellsworth exhibited signs of being unstable, much given to melancholy. One detects this in his book when he describes naming the boats for the Big Trip: "Emery painted the name Edith on the bow of his boat.... The name was given in honour of his four-year-old daughter, waiting for us at the Grand Canyon. I remarked that as no one loved me, I would name my boat the Defiance."

Ellsworth became a painfully reclusive man who by 1922 was hearing voices and would write that "because I'm made that way I have to be alone much of the time." He died in Los Angeles in 1960 at 85. Today Ellsworth is the forgotten man in the Kolb story. Too bad, because he played a pivotal role. He was the one who felt the lure of the West, bought the photography shop, conceived of the Big Trip, and wrote about it.

Emery, who photographed tourists along Bright Angel Trail until his death in 1976 at the age of 95, is remembered today as a sort of curmudgeonly grandfather of the Canyon. ("The Grand Canyon? It's my religion," he told one interviewer.) Ellsworth left him alone with the Canyon for 52 years, and thus Emery came to personify both men's exploits. Indeed, when Ellsworth's book was recently reissued, its publishers identified Emery as its author.

But Emery also had problems, a trio of nemeses: the Santa Fe Railroad, the Fred Harvey Company, and the National Park Service. Each wanted the studio removed from the Canyon's Rim, the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey to quash competition for tourist dollars, the park service on aesthetic grounds. Various stratagems were tried to drive Emery off, including building corrals to block tourists' view of the studio and forcing suppliers of high-quality prints to suspend service.

In 1963 Emery finally sold the studio to the park service with the stipulation that he could live in it until his death. This was a bit of an arm-twist, according to Emery, because the government threatened to withhold an operating permit if he sold the studio to anyone else. When he asked the park's superintendent what would be done with Kolb Brothers Studio after he died, Emery reported the official replied, "Oh, tear it down, I guess."

Traces of the Kolb brothers remain at the Grand Canyon. Their studio, now on the National Register of Historic Places, serves as an information and sales outlet for the Grand Canyon Natural History Association, which hopes to restore the structure. In its westernmost corner, below Asmall window, the hinged, book-size wooden shelf on which the brothers fastened a camera to take pictures of people along Bright Angel Trail remains in place. The Edith is preserved at the visitors center, and she is still, as Ellsworth wrote, "graceful, yet strong in line."

In Flagstaff, Northern Arizona University's Special Collections at the Cline Library houses the Kolb Collection, including 250,000 photographs and 40,000 feet of motion picture film. The Colorado's 205Mile Rapid has been renamed Kolb Rapid, and in the Canyon there's a Kolb Arch.

The most poignant memory is found at the Canyon's Pioneer's Cemetery, where Ellsworth and Emery Kolb, joined and then separated by life, both lie. Fitting that, for though the brothers Kolb grew apart, they must be linked in our memories because neither alone could have made the Big Trip and accomplished what they managed together as a team. M