Historical Utilization of Paria River

Historic Utilization of Paria River

BY P. T. REILLY

HEADING BENEATH THE RIM of Bryce Canyon National Park, the Paria River courses generally south-southeast through Utah and Arizona to join the Colorado River at Lee's Ferry. The United States Geological Survey defines the area drained as 1,570 square miles. The stream's exact length has never been measured accurately, but it probably covers eighty to ninety miles, with one-fourth of this distance meandering between the precipitous walls of a deep gorge. Officially called a river, the stream usually appears as a small creek and in dry years disappears underground. On some occasions, however, raging floods have thundered downstream to leave marks high on the narrow walls and to measure a volume greater than the Colorado River itself.

Man's efforts to utilize the water of Paria River date from the spring of 1865 when Peter Shirts preempted a low bench on the banks of the stream. Peter was a Daniel Boone type of pioneer who shunned the proximity of his brethren and usually located on the outermost fringe of Mormon exploration. If other settlers gathered around him, he moved to a more remote place. His home on the Paria was in a cove that protected him from attack on three sides. He built his house of rock; and, to counter the danger of flaming arrows being shot from the cliff, he covered the roof with thin slabs of flagstone. Lastly, he dug a trench from the creek into and through his house, presumably watering his garden by means of a headgate as the ditch returned to the stream.

Shirts was besieged by Paiutes when Dr. J. M. Whitmore and Robert Mclntyre were murdered by other Indians near Pipe Spring in January 1866. This was the first act of a general uprising that signaled the opening of the Black Hawk War in southern Utah and the Arizona Strip. Deep snows prevented Col. D. D. McArthur's militia out of St. George from making a rescue attempt. For several weeks the fate of the Shirts family was unknown. Tradition says that Peter's stone fort and water ditch enabled him to withstand the siege, and when spring arrived the defenders were in better condition than the attackers. A truce ensued and Shirts shared his food with the natives, by then on the verge of starvation. During the meeting he pointed out that since they had killed one of his two oxen he was unable to plow and thus raise food to feed them all. After being promised part of the crop, the Paiutes agreed to pull the plow and the garden was planted. The settlement of Kanab, however, was abandoned later in March 1866. At the same time Peter Shirts and his family were removed unwillingly to the larger villages to the west. Shirts never returned to his remote homestead, and its exact location has not been preserved. A subsequent flood is said to have taken out his water-conveying trench and much of his bench, ending the first use of Paria water for irrigation.

Mormon relations with the Southern Paiutes gradually improved, and in the summer of 1869 Jacob Hamblin and three others ventured to plant a crop and cut wild hay at Pipe Spring. Then he organized the Indians on Kanab Creek into cadres to raise food and to guard against Navajo raids. Kanab's old log fort was refurbished to serve as shelter and protection for both white man and Paiute. In December of the same year Hamblin headed a small group in organizing an Indian farm on Paria River. This foothold was a handy place from which to rotate a guard at the Ute Crossing and it effectively stopped Navajo raids directed against the livestock of the larger ranches to the west. At the same time, agriculture was expanded behind the safety of the guard in an effort to make the Indians self-sustaining. Jacob Hamblin wrote the following to his superior, Apostle Erastus Snow:

Bro. Erastus Snow

Kanab. March 27th, 1870

Dear Sir:

I have just returned from Pahreah. All well there. Business prospering finely under the Presidency of William Meeks. There is a safe Guard House and small corral there where men can cook and lodge safely with 20 or 25 horses; one outside gate only for horses and corral. We have finished there one mile and a half of water ditch. I consider it permanent, as we need no dam. We have put in 6 acres of wheat and some garden seeds. We have eight laboring native men there ; two women and six children. I took them in on condition that they subsist on half rations depending on roots and their former diet for the balance. They have a large bredth of land ready for the plow and were still clearing off, when I came away, at the rate of one acre and a half a day. There is no lack of water or the very best of land on the stream.

We have not been able to discern any sign of Navajos since Bro. Miller was there. We have 800 yards of good fence newly put up at Kanab, we expect to finish the fencing this week

Jacob Hamblin

Canalized irrigation had come to the Paria, and at the same time the first of several settlements appeared on its banks.

John D. Lee settled at the mouth of Paria Canyon during the waning days of December 1871. Six weeks later Lee had a dam under construction, a ditch dug and leveled. His ground was plowed, sowed, and irrigated early in March. But within another month the unpredictable stream had flooded and washed out the dam.

Lee's dams, and those of his successors, were flimsy affairs. The builders were forced to use materials at hand—driftwood deposited by the seasonal high water of the Colorado, willows and other local brush, rocks, and wagonloads of soft Moenkopi shale. The backbone of each dam usually was a crooked cottonwood snaked out of the Paria delta by a team and placed crosswise in the creek. Willows, shale, and rocks were placed on the upstream side of the cottonwood, intermixed with additional cross-trunks and branches until the structure had impounded enough water to enter the ditch—usually about four or five feet above the normal bed of the stream.

Subsequent dams were moved farther up the canyon to take advantage of the natural fall of the bed. At the same time the ditches, of necessity, became longer. When Lee's successor, Warren M. Johnson, sold his interest in the ranch in 1896 the deed included one and one-half miles of ditch. A longer ditch ushered in other problems: invasive cottonwoods took root in the channel and had to be eradicated each spring; flumes had to be built across the tributary washes and even if a minor flood did not take out the dam, it filled the ditch with stinking mud that had to be shoveled out by hand.

James S. Emett succeeded Johnson as proprietor of the ranch, and his luck with Paria River was no better than his predecessors'. The same was true of the Grand Canyon Cattle Company which operated the ranch from 1909 to 1925. A group of polygamists, some of whom had been born on the ranch prior to 1900, fared no better; and when the last family departed in June 1934, the headgate had been washed out and the fields unwatered for a month.

The Paria has had its share of exploitation through promotion, too. After the Charles H. Spencer placer schemes collapsed at Lee's Ferry in the spring of 1912, the officers moved field headquarters to the dying village of Pahreah, then inhabited only by Abner Potter and his wife. The extensive outcropping of the Chinle formation west of town and the need to escape Arizona creditors are said to have been the decisive factors behind the relocation. Most of the itinerant crew scattered, but a handful—hoping that new sources of finance would be found to pay back wages and prolong their jobs—accompanied Spencer and Herbert A. Parkyn, the chief purveyors of the enterprise. Refinancing of the plan to recover gold from placering the Chinle did not materialize, however, and the promoters gradually shifted their efforts to land and water development.

One mile below the townsite, Paria River breaches the upturned Jurassic sandstone in the East Kaibab monocline, resultingin a short, narrow box canyon. To the laymen this place appeared to be a natural and ideal damsite. They gained control of it by locating eight lode-mining claims December 10, 1913. At the same time they made application for use of 300,000 acre-feet of Paria water, along with lesser amounts from Warm and Sentinel (Wahweap) creeks.

Six months later, with Spencer's name conspicuous by its absence, Parkyn sold an interest in the eight lode-claims and water rights to Rolla E. and Marbeth B. Clapp of Salt Lake County. The trio then set up the Cucan Corporation under the laws of Utah. The Clapp couple appears to have had second thoughts about their venture because the operation never became active. On November 11, 1914, Parkyn reorganized the scheme as the Pahreah Mining Company but referred to it privately as the Arizutah Land Company. Unable to obtain capital, the project never got off the ground.

Abortion of this plan appears to have satisfied Parkyn's desire to promote in the West because he returned to Chicago and, despite several overtures, never again collaborated with his erstwhile partner.

Spencer, however, had faith that land and water development was a promising field and in 1915 he filed a number of claims for water rights and millsites between Lee's Ferry and Jacob's Pools. These claims seem to have been filed for their effect as assets when he organized the Coconino Water Development Company on December 9, 1916. This promotion was designed to collect water from the heavy snowfall on the San Francisco Peaks and channel it through ditches and pipelines to silt-lined crater reservoirs in the numerous cinder cones in the area.

Several companies were formed to handle the promotion. The Arizutah Company was resurrected and legally incorporated in 1917, augmented by a glowing report by A. L. Field and N. D. Ingham, who represented the Paria range as being potentially capable of supporting 12,000 to 15,000 head of cattle. Sixty thousand acres of choice land were said to be available on Clark Bench. The Paria Reservoir, holding 350,000 acre-feet of water, was sketched on plats, with minor dams planned for Coyote and Hackberry creeks.

Entry of the United States into the European war on April 6, 1917, combined with several judgment errors, doomed Spencer's projects to failure and they dropped into the limbo of inactivity.

But Charlie made one more run at his objective. In 1922 he obtained limited backing from F. C. Rockwell and L. S. Hackney to resurrect the Paria scheme. He had thrown in with a drinking engineer, John W. Calhoun, who claimed to be a great-grandson of the nineteenth-century states' rights advocate. Spencer also obtained the services of four Lee's Ferry citizens to form a crew that eventually ran the levels for six miles of flume from the Paria damsite to the Clark Bench. The financing, however, dried up and the scheme died of atrophy, thus ending the promotional phase of Paria water.

Meanwhile, political struggles over the West's last major waterhole resulted in the Colorado River Compact, signed at Santa Fe on November 24, 1922. The compact divided the river's water between the upper and lower basin states and established Compact Point as a hypothetical place one mile below the mouth of the Paria. This action placed the Paria watershed in the upper basin. Since sizeable floods had been known to come down the tributary in the past, it was necessary to establish a gauge above its mouth to determine the amount of water it contributed to the parent stream. This was done and hydrographer James E. Klohr made the first reading on November 22, 1923.

A major Paria flood of more than 16,000 second-feet destroyed the gauge on October 5, 1925. This figure stood as the maximum measured flow for the Paria until 1958 when 19,000 cubic feet per second was recorded on September 12. In slightly more than a half-century, over a score of floods have been measured in four figures and three have run into five digits.

Leo Weaver, citizen of Flagstaff and next owner of the ranch, made no attempt to farm there but concentrated instead on a guest ranch operation and the raising of Anglo-Arabian horses. Faced with the need to grow feed for his stock, he built a dam in the winter of 1938—39 on the same site as that selected by his Mormon predecessors and put enough water down the ditch for a couple of irrigations. Then a minor Paria flood in late March 1939 enlarged the reservoir and created sufficient pressure to wash the dam away. The calamity discouraged Leo who ceased his marginal operation and returned to Flagstaff.

A subsequent proprietor of the ranch, C. A. Griffin, abandoned the dam concept entirely and installed an engine-driven pump on the bank of the creek. A large flexible hose sucked Paria water directly from a natural pool into a slab-lined ditch and thence it went by gravity-flow to the cultivated land.

The following owners improved on Griffin's idea by bulldozing a large settling pond and reservoir in the shale above the pump. This enabled them to pump water into the settling pond even when the creek was a muddy flood. The settled water then flowed into the reservoir and a valve controlled the gravity-flow of clear water onto the extensive fields and orchards of the ranch. Variations of this technique are presently in use in the hamlets along the Paria's upper drainage.

Perhaps the most interesting attempts to utilize Paria water were dual efforts about ten years apart which never quite came off.

The decade of the 1930s ushered in more than the Great Depression; it also brought widespread drought throughout the West. Winter precipitation usually was subnormal, and although summer skies frequently grew dark and threatening, little rain fell. The Arizona Strip was especially hard hit. Many cattle failed to survive. There was scarcely enough rain to fill the waterholes, although the hard-pressed cattlemen hung on in hope that the dry period was about to end. But the drought did not end and the cattle business became more marginal there each year, Pioneer cowman Johnny Adams was one of the pinched owners.

Adams's range was in the Sandhills, officially known as the Paria Plateau—an island of rock in an area noted for spectacular erosion. The plateau is unique in that it is almost completely isolated. Its southern exposure is the 1,600-foot escarpment called the Vermilion Cliffs that bends northward on the edge of House Rock Valley on the west and along the rim of Paria Canyon on the east. To the north, the deeply incised Buckskin Gulch joins Paria Canyon close to the Utah-Arizona state line to form an intaglio in sandstone impossible to cross for man or beast. Near the House Rock-Coyote divide, however, there is access to the naturally isolated four hundred square miles.

From the desert below, the Sandhills give little indication of being able to support stock. Nobody expected to find living water there, and no one did. The surface of the Navajo sandstone is an undulating continuum of knoll, dune, and hollow, covered with juniper, piny on, and a surprising amount of grama grass. The innumerable depressions in the bare rock held precipitation for weeks and proved to be natural water tanks whose supply, when periodically renewed, appeared to be inexhaustible. Mormon stockmen had learned the value of the Sandhills range at an early date and had been using its resources for over fifty years when the drought arrived.

The shallow basins dried up first, and the cattle were forced to travel farther to seek out the large tanks. The nature of the country made it difficult to locate stock; a rider might pass within a few yards of a cow and not see it. As one dry month followed another the weaker animals fell beside the dry basins and the smell of death was in the air.

The Adams range was in the northeast corner of the Sandhills. M any times the old cattleman had pondered the possibility of gaining access to the Paria water which he knew was bubbling away in the depths of the canyon below. As the waterholes dried up and the carcasses of his cattle littered the landscape, Adams decided during the winter of 1938- 39 that his operation could not survive another waterless summer. He had investigated pump capabilities and knew that equipment was available that could move water from the Paria River to the rim, a vertical distance of about seven hundred feet at that point. He also had spotted a likely place to reach the canyon floor. Although building an access trail would be laborious, it was feasible.

The trail was hacked out in the spring of 1939, and the pump, gasoline engine, and a thousand feet of two-inch pipe were trucked over the access road. Pack animals were used from the end of the road to the jump-off.

Dean Cutler straw-bossed the job for the elderly owner. The remaining members of the crew were Lorin Broadbent, Eugene McAllister, and Lynn Ford. The country was very rough; merely getting the equipment to the rim was a major undertaking. Water and food were packed in, and the most luxurious comfort was one's bedroll spread out on the ground, although rattlesnakes were numerous after the weather warmed.

The trail was never intended as a pack route but was only the pecking of a narrow ledge as a means for the men to scramble up and down. Horses were left on top, as no one even thought of subjecting a pack animal to the trail's precarious footing. The pump was lowered by ropes, one difficult leg after another, and finally came to rest on the shelf above the creek. Each section of pipe was carried down as it was needed, the first length having one end immersed in a fair-sized pool, the other connected to the pump.

It had been Adams's plan to use several large natural potholes in the sandstone for reservoirs and to fill them with water'from the creek. But the conditions were difficult and the job went slowly. At times it seemed that the summer might come and go while the pipeline was being inched up the cliffs. When still a good fifty feet below the rim, the last section of pipe was coupled and the job came to a halt. Doggedly the men determined to test the rig by starting the pump the following morning before going in to town for more pipe. But when they climbed down into the canyon they found the creek thick with gray-green silt and rising fast. Rather than get the pump clogged with mud, they abandoned their plan and climbed back to the rim.

That night rain began to fall in the Sandhills. It not only rained, it poured. Never had there been such a storm. All potholes were filled and overflowing as the drought was broken. The last few lengths of pipe were never brought to the job and the pump remained untested because there was no need.

In 1941 Adams sold the rig to another cattleman, A. T. Spence, who made no effort to use it. He sold it to Merle Findlay three years later. Findlay's reason for buying the pump is not known, and the untested rig continued to rest, never having fulfilled its purpose. But every cattleman in the country knew the story of the pump, its location and availability.

Northeast of the Adams Sandhills range, on the opposite side of Paria Canyon, lie the Flat Top and East Clark Bench, the sandy range of Gerald Swapp. It had sufficient feed when favored by rain but there was relatively little bare sandstone on the surface and consequently few natural potholes to catch and hold precipitation. In fact, the lack of water restricted Swapp's range from ever attaining its grazing potential. Ten years after Johnny Adams decided to install a rig to pump water to the Sandhills, Gerald Swapp bought the unused outfit to bring water up Judd Hollow to his thirsty land beyond the Echo Cliffs.

Swapp obtained the services of Eugene McAllister (of the original Adams crew) and Tony Woolley. The three men tested the pump in December 1948 and got a good stream of water out of the upper end of the pipeline. Several days were devoted to uncoupling the pipe and toting the sections to the floor of the canyon. Woolley then emulated the 1871 feat of John D. Lee by riding a horse down the canyon to the foot of the Adams trail.

By this time it was January 1949 and the weather was bitter cold. Ice was thick on the floor of Paria Canyon, with much of the creek frozen. The problem of packing the awkward lengths of two-inch pipe was solved by tying several pipes near one end and looping the rope over the cross-tree of a pack saddle. The horse dragged the pipes travoisfashion over the ice to the mouth of Judd Hollow, two miles below the Adams pump site. The pump was packed on the horse.

The men dug a sump along the Paria's left bank and lined it with native rock. A test showed that water filtered into the reservoir as fast as it was pumped out, insuring the feasibility of Swapp's plan. However, it was nearly a thousand vertical feet from the creek to the Echo rim and about two miles of additional pipe would be needed, along with a booster. The men separated, Woolley riding the horse downstream to Lee's Ferry, Swapp and McAllister hiking out to drive the truck in to town for the booster.

Gerald Swapp had been ill, presumably from something he had ingested. It was only with difficulty that he remained in Paria Canyon as long as he did, and the hike out required a mighty effort. He managed to drive his truck back to Kanab but resolved to remain there until he recovered. But his condition became worse and he never returned to Judd Hollow. Instead, he was taken to a hospital in Cedar City and after a prolonged stay he died there on March 28, 1949.

No one else revived the scheme to pump Paria water to either plateau. Today the equipment that remains is being disintegrated by the elements. It is examined by occasional backpackers, some of whom probably wonder at the story behind its presence.

Man has used the water of Paria River for drinking and culinary purposes since he first entered the drainage basin, but it was inevitable that the introduction of livestock and human habitation along its banks would result in pollution, and it did. Records reveal that the Lees, Johnsons, and Emetts all drank Paria water directly from the stream or irrigation ditch. They also show that these people suffered frequently from dysentery and related illnesses. In April 1914 Tom Caff all, then operating the Lee's Ferry ranch for the Grand Canyon Cattle Company, came down with a severe case of typhoid. The Caffalls concluded that he could have caught the disease only by drinking from the creek, which he was in the habit of doing. The illness incapacitated him for several weeks.

Duties of the hydrographer at Lee's Ferry for the United States Geological Survey have changed drastically over the years. With water flows now measured automatically, the gauger merely maintains the equipment and has become more involved with water quality. Mathew Pierce, Lee's Ferry hydrographer since May 1971, takes samples of water from both the Colorado River above the mouth of the Paria and from the tributary itself. The samples are tested for specific conductants (salt buildup) and for bacterial content in the USGS Tunar Topographic Laboratory. The water of the Colorado above the mouth of the Paria, which comes from the lower levels of the Powell Reservoir 15.25 miles upstream, is pure and safe for drinking. The water of Paria River, however, has a very high bacterial content of both fecal coliforms and fecal streptococci. Bacterial counts in the Colorado below the mouth of the Paria continue at such high levels that the water is unfit for drinking except after treatment. It is evident that major pollution comes from the Paria and is augmented by dangerous amounts of bacteria from the other large tributaries.

Mandates of the federal government first affected the Paria watershed when Bryce Canyon National Monument was created by presidential proclamation on June 8, 1923. A year later Congress authorized the establishment of "Utah National Park" which was to include the monument. Consequently Bryce Canyon National Park was created September 15, 1928, and the original allotment of 12,920 acres was nearly tripled in size.

Mormon villages had appeared on the upper part of the drainage when Cannonville was founded in 1875. Henrieville came into being three years later. Tropic, now the largest and most prosperous of the settlements due to the economic advantage derived from being closest to the park, appeared in 1891. Clifton, Losee, and Georgetown, villages long abandoned, now are unknown except to the older inhabitants.

The mid-region saw limited life spans for Pahreah and Adairsville, settlements that bracketed the rock house of Peter Shirts upstream and downstream, about ten miles apart.

Congressional authorization of Glen Canyon Dam in 1956 led to the building of Page and the rerouting of Highway 89 between Bitter Spring, Arizona, and Kanab, Utah. The highway crosses the Paria in its midregion, a short distance downstream from the remnants of abandoned Adairsville and about five miles above the entrenchment of Paria Canyon. This provided convenient access for backpackers to the scenic values of the gorge, and several traverses to Lee's Ferry were made before the end of the 1950s.

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area was established April 18, 1958. Its boundaries encompass the lower ten miles of Paria Canyon, wdth the entire reserve being administered by the National Park Service.

In the late 1960s the secretary of the interior established the Paria Canyon Primitive Area and delegated its control to the Bureau of Land A4anagement. Besides emphasizing the spectacular grandeur of the gorge, the bureau stress archaeology, history, geology, and wildlife. It also warns hikers about the seasonal danger in the narrows from flash floods and the need to purify the water if it is to be used for drinking.

In June 1974, the historic ranch where John D. Lee and his successors struggled to keep Paria water on the parched crops passed by sale from private ownership to the United States for the National Park Service.

Although presently polluted, the Paria, over the centuries, has been a proven resource to aborigine, pioneer, and modern man. The scope of its utilization has been extensive, ranging from a simple source of lifesustaining water for Indians to the basis for complex water-distribution formulas to urban areas. With burgeoning industries and populations, the seven states directly affected base many of their projected plans on the apportionment of the West's last waterhole. If the Colorado River Compact should be adjusted to include Mexico in a redistribution of this water, the Paria would remain a viable political factor and its national significance would assume an international stature. The gauging facilities near the Paria's mouth will remain, as James J. Ligner of the U.S. Geological Survey said, "the most important station in the United States."

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