Freighting on the Colorado River

FREIGHTING ON THE COLORADO RIVER: Reminiscenses of VIRGIL FAY BALDWIN

BY BARBARA BALDWIN EKKER

The Colorado River has been of interest to numerous persons for years, but for five years it was part of my daily life. It all began in 1924.

The Mid-West Exploration Company sent their geologist, Mr. H. A. Aurand, to study the geology of the country and to find a location for drilling a well on the Colorado River downstream from Moab, Utah.

The Moab Garage Company had several boats. One called The Pumpkin Seed, so named because of its shape, was 20 feet long with an Evinrude four-horsepower outboard motor. The Black Boat, 20 feet in length with a 4 1 / 2 -foot beam, was powered by a Ford automobile engine. The company also owned a 27 footer with a 6-foot beam and equipped with a Chandler motor, an 18-foot motorboat, and several rowboats and canoes powered with outboard motors.

These boats were hired by Aurand and operated by myself and my brothers, Clarence and Dennis Baldwin of the Moab Garage Company. Aurand made several trips up and down the river during that year collecting data.

Finally, a location was made on the John L. Shafer Dome, 18 miles downstream from Moab, where the formation dipped quite abruptly.

The first of January 1925, the Mid-West Company offered the Moab Garage a contract to move 200 tons of drilling equipment from the railroad station at Thompson, a Denver & Rio Grande railhead 38 miles north of Moab. This equipment was to be hauled from Thompson to Moab by truck and then by boat to the well on the river. This posed a problem as a larger boat than the Moab Garage owned was needed to do this hauling job.

Many ideas were discussed, and finally a paddle-wheel boat or barge seemed most feasible for we knew that the river was quite shallow in low water — at times less than two feet in places. So plans were drawn to construct a boat with shallow draft.

At a cost of nearly $7,000, a large scow was built. It measured 75 feet in length and 16 feet in width. It had a depth of three feet with a 40-horsepower automobile engine and an eight-foot paddle wheel. It had a draft of four inches when empty and 12 inches when loaded with 12 tons of freight. It was provided with a capstan and a 500-foot steel line for pulling it off sand bars. It took all of January 1925 to build this barge, while the river was frozen over. This made it possible to use a sled and a team to haul lumber to the location to build bunk houses and other necessary buildings.

Late in the month the usual thaw came and softened the ice. The change in the weather made it unsafe to haul any more material by sled. But it was not until March 2, 1925, that the barge was launched and the finishing touches were made for its first trip with Clarence Baldwin at the helm. Dennis Baldwin and Bob Clark, members of the Moab Garage Company, accompanied him on the maiden voyage.

I was ahead of the barge in one of the smaller boats trying to find the deepest channel, but I hit a shallow place and got stuck on a sand bar which delayed us more than an hour. We completed the trip to the location without further incident and unloaded the barge by hand. This hand labor proved a need for a power hoist which was installed later. Starting back upstream without any load caused the front end to project out of the water and the stern to settle too deep for the wheel to operate properly. So we found a rocky bank and took on a load of boulders to hold the bow down in the water. We were in sight of home port when one drive chain broke and went into the river and was lost. We were very fortunate to have an extra one aboard. During the confusion we began to drift downstream, and then discovered that during the building we had forgotten an anchor. However, we had plenty of rope which we tied to boulders and threw overboard until we got the craft stopped. After installation of a new chain, we returned to Moab.

The next day we spent in making adjustments such as raising the paddle wheel, building a trough under the drive chains to keep them out of the water if they broke again, and most necessary—installing an anchor. But on another trip our self-devised anchor failed, and so we had to order a regulation anchor from San Francisco. We made trips almost daily for the next week. On the ninth trip we got stuck on a sand bar and took two days to make a round trip. After this experience my brother, Clarence, said he had enough, and I became the master.

At the outset the barge made three round trips in a week to the Shafer No. 1 well, taking down each time a load of 12 to 15 tons. The down-trip was made at about six miles an hour and the return trip at about three miles an hour. In two weeks 100 tons of equipment were transported. In April a pointed prow was added, which enabled the boat to make a round trip in about nine hours.

By May 1 we had hauled 30 loads of equipment. The next trip was on a Sunday. The load consisted of 46 passengers for a picnic and sight-seeing excursion.

The John L. Shafer No. 1 well began operations and progressed very rapidly even in hard lime rock most of the time. It was at this early period that the Mid-West Company decided to have a telephone line built to the location. The line was built by Midland Telephone of Moab — a length of eight miles, a much shorter distance than the 18 by river. Not many poles were used as they would have been almost impossible to set, so holes were drilled in the rock ledges. Into these were installed a short piece of pipe with insulators and wire connecting through them. This was truly a lifesaver for the company.

At first the water in the river was low for boating and then about the 15th of May, to the same time in June, almost too high to be safe. There was usually a 10- to 12-foot raise or 50,000 second-feet. This is fine for downstream travel if you do not strike a whirlpool where the water is going both up and downstream at the same time. A boat will turn halfway around with the water piling high on one side and sometimes coming over the top. After we had fought the Colorado at such high levels, it would return to its normal level with its treacherous sand bars. The river would shift from one bank to the other and cut out the bars by carving out great slabs from one bank, wash it downstream, and deposit it somewhere else. One of the discomforts of river travel was when we would pull ashore to rest our weary selves we would be pestered by mosquitoes. They never bothered us while we were on the water but welcomed us ashore singing.

By June 24, 1925, we had hauled 40 loads to the well. In my daily diary, kept during these years, on this date I recorded a record rain storm. It lightninged and rained on us throughout the entire trip. But it was not as terrible as it might seem, as beautiful waterfalls were created which fell over the canyon walls in cascades.

Drilling operations continued around the clock all summer and late fall at the Shafer well. On the morning of December 8, an urgent telephone call was received in Moab saying the drilling company had struck a gusher. The oil and gas pressure was so great that it had blown the tools right out of the hole and then caught fire. Help was needed as was firefighting equipment. The drillers requested fire hoses as they already had pumping engines. Water was pumped onto the smouldering structure; and with aid from a jet of steam from the boiler, the fire was extinguished. The next time the well flowed it did not catch fire.

The oil was of the highest quality and beautiful in appearance. No arrangements had been made to shut off this flow, so mud was needed to pump into the well to quiet it down long enough for another derrick to be built.

Suitable mud was found in the foothills of the La Sal Mountains, 15 miles south of Moab. This was put into old, cloth cement sacks so it could be trucked to the boat dock. Three, 15-ton boat loads were taken to the well and pumped into its bowels. To me this seemed like a silly thing to do, but those were our orders.

After getting the well cleaned out and the collapsed casing removed, the drillers failed to bring back the oil that was first struck. But an official of the company stated a fissure in the rock had been drilled into and that the oil was actually coming from a distant source. The first strike was at 2,028 feet, so the company drilled to a new depth of 3,600 and hit another oil showing, but it was nothing like the first strike. The well was drilled to a depth of 5,100 feet before operations were halted.

While operations slowed up on this well, the Mid-West Company decided to drill another well 10 miles down the river. On January 17, 1926, the first load was taken to this new location. It consisted of lumber, groceries, bedding, and carpenters. Extra passengers were numerous as news had spread of striking oil.

On March 6, 1926, J. L. Dougan and George T. Hansen of the Utah Southern Oil Company, of Salt Lake City, flew to Moab to make a trip down the river. They were interested in drilling on the Colorado and did so later at a place called Lockhart. This was about 40 miles from Moab. They only drilled about 500 feet and discontinued operations.

Governor George Dern and a party of nine came aboard the boat the 11 th of April for a trip to the well location. They returned by a smaller boat to save time. About this time Snowden and McSweeny came to drill a well across the river from the Shafer No. 1 and about two miles away from the river on much higher ground. The Moab Garage received the contract to do their hauling.

One of the first items of freight for this new company was a seven-ton steam boiler. We had a power hoist to unload all machinery, so this boiler was unloaded directly onto a farm wagon. A small tractor was brought down to the dock to pull the load to the location, but the load was too heavy for a straight pull. So a long cable and pulley were used to give double power. All this blocking and tackling took a week to move the twomiles.

A peculiar thing happened during the drilling of this hole which might be well to mention. At a depth of a 1,000 feet or so, they drilled into an open pit or cave. This caused them to loose circulation. They had to call it quits as no matter how much mud they poured into the hole they could not fill it up, nor could they drill deeper. So the company began moving out.

A truck, to replace the tractor which had given them nothing but grief, had been taken down on the boat to haul supplies from the dock to the drilling location. Bets were made that the truck could not haul the huge boiler back to the dock, but the work was completed in less than an hour.

Another drilling company set up operation at Indian Creek, 50 miles down the Colorado, and built a barge similar to ours. This operation was short-lived as the road built from the river to the location was too steep for hauling. It was almost a 35 per cent grade.

On January 2, 1927, we went down with our 167th load. This time the ice was flowing, and we broke the shore ice with the waves of the boat. These large chunks followed in our wake. It was not until we started back upstream that we ran into an ice jam in a narrow place on the river. We got stuck and finally managed to back out and return to the well camp and spend the night. We phoned Moab for help, and the next morning my brothers came with dynamite and blasted the channel through. But this did not work as it only formed a dam in the river. The river began backing up and started cutting a new channel on the opposite shore. We waited until this passage was large enough for us to pass through and then worked the boat past the jam and returned to Moab.

Not many trips were made during January, February, or March as Shafer No. 1 well shut down operations for a while. On April 17,1 made a trip to Lockhart and hauled out their equipment. This trip took about two days as the equipment was heavy and the trip was 40 miles each way.

Between March 1925 and June 1927, our scow made about 200 trips (between June 1927 to June 1929 about 40 trips in addition) being taken in every month of the year. Most of the trips were made to the Shafer No. 1, Shafer No. 2, and the Frank Shafer wells. For transportation of freight alone, the oil companies paid about $250,000. Many passengers were also carried.

After the first well strike in December 1925, a survey was begun by the Mid-West Company for construction of a road and a pipeline leading from the west bank of the river to Thompson. It was thought that if the oil field proved productive, the Moab Garage Company scow and others could not handle the necessary freight and equipment. In 1927, however, the oil field proved nonproductive and wells were closed down. The Mid- West Refining Company in two and a half years of oil production spent $2 million. This figure included freight and well operations. It was estimated that since 1925, the Moab Garage Company had hauled down the river 3,500 tons of freight, coal, supplies, cattle feed, and heavy equipment. On up-stream trips it hauled equipment needing repairs, and on one or two occasions barrels of crude oil from the well. These trips took a lot of fuel as well as human endurance and will power.

The boat went into "moth balls" and was later sold to some fellows to use on the river for camping purposes. They left it submerged near Moab, where it is today. Another craft, the Charles H. Spencer, is another ghost steamship of the Colorado that is submerged near Lee's Ferry, Arizona. Only these remains know the hardships and stories of the colorful Colorado during this era, and they too will soon be lost in the depths after the Glen Canyon Dam is completed.

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