Traffic on the river had been established as early as December, 1852.
Capt. Geo. A. Johnston, an early steamboat pilot, ferried the Beale
party, in January, 1858, near where Fort Mohave later was established.
Johnston made several trips far up the river with the Jesup and with a
newer steamer, the Colorado. He is understood to have gone even farther
than Lieut. J. C. Ives, of the Topographical Corps, in the little steamer
Explorer. This stern-wheeler made the trip in January, 1858, and was
passed by Johnston on his way downstream. The river was at low stage and
the Explorer butted into snags and muddy banks continually. Finally there
was disaster when Black Canyon was reached, when the boat ran upon a
sunken rock. Ives rowed as far up as Vegas Wash.
In 1866, the Arizona Legislature, at Prescott, by resolution thanked
"Admiral" Robert Rogers, commander of the steamer Esmeralda, and Capt.
William Gilmore, for the successful accomplishment of the navigation of
the Colorado River to Callville, "effected by the indomitable energy of
the enterprising Pacific and Colorado Navigation Co.," a concern managed
by Thos. E. Trueworthy, an experienced steamboat man from the Sacramento
River of California. Both Arizona and Nevada Legislatures petitioned
Congress to improve the stream.
Captain Johnston later formed the Colorado Steam Navigation Company and,
more or less, controlled the river traffic for years. There were other
noted Captains, including C.V. Meeden, Isaac Polhamus, A.D. Johnson,
William Poole, S. Thorn, J.H. Godfrey and J.A. Mellen.
Captain Mellen told that sometimes schooner barges were used in the lower
canyons, where the wind was either upstream or downstream. When it was
downstream, the upward-bound craft moored until the breeze changed to
astern.
The deck hands were Cocopah or Yuma Indians, amphibious, always ready to
plunge overboard to help in lightening their craft over any of the
numerous sand bars. Mellen told of lying 52 days in one bar and of often
being held up for a week. There was no possible mapping of the river
channel, for the bars changed from week to week. Even in the earliest
times, steamboats were never molested by the Indians. They seemed in awe
of the puffing, snorting craft that threw showers of sparks from the
smokestacks. Not infrequently, a steamer had to tie up for a few days at
a point where fuel conveniently could be cut from the cottonwood or
mesquite thickets.
In June, the river is at flood, with danger always present in floating
trees and driftwood, muddy torrents coming from the melting snows of the
Rocky Mountains. In the autumn the river falls, until in places there are
mere trickles around the muddy banks. Navigation, perforce, had to be
suspended. These were the conditions under which it was proposed to make
of the Colorado the great trade artery of the inter-mountain region.
The Colorado now absolutely has lost all possibilities for commerce.
Pioneer conditions are about the same as far southward as the Laguna dam.
This structure, built to divert water for the Yuma and Imperial valleys,
absolutely bars the river channel for navigation. Above it and below it
now are only ferries and a few power boats. The great Imperial canal
system, at a point below Yuma, for much of the year drains the river
flow. Where good-sized steamers once plied from tidewater, at the head of
the Gulf of California, now, for months at a time, is only a dry sand
wash. To this extent the advance of civilization has obliterated a river
that ranks, in geography at least, among the greatest streams of the
United States.