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Harry Aleson and the Place No One Knew
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 52, 1984, No. 2
Harry Aleson and the Place No One Knew
BY GARY TOPPING
THE WEST AS A SCENIC LURE for tourists is a well known fact, a fact that accounts for the existence of entire libraries of guide books, travelers' accounts, novels, and downright propaganda. Although the veracity of that literature varies widely, nearly all of it makes good reading, and it shows that the scenic West is and always has been, in various ways, big business.
Among the western states Utah ranks high in scenic resources; perhaps only Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon National Parks possess scenic beauty and tourist appeal equal to or greater than the canyonlands parks in southern Utah. This is not to say that Utah has ever tried to realize fully its tourist potential; and one of its most magnificent resources, Glen Canyon of the Colorado River, has come to be known, through Eliot Porter's photographic essay of 1963, as "the place no one knew."
Whether Glen Canyon was generally unknown is a debatable point to which this essay will offer relevant data but does not pretend to resolve. It is true that few white men, with occasional exceptions like Cass Hite, Bert Loper, and Arthur Chaffin, had chosen to linger in Glen Canyon during the three-quarters of a century after Maj. John Wesley Powell's first description of its beauties in his 1875 report. Prior to the 1940s most of the human activity in the canyon resulted from three classes of people: prehistoric cliff-dwelling people who found the canyon's remoteness, its gentle climate, and plentiful supply of wildlife much to their liking, cattlemen, and various mining entrepreneurs who, singly and in groups, were lured in the years around the turn of the century by the idea that Glen Canyon's gentle currents and sandy river bottoms were "nature's sluice box," trapping all the gold washed out of the Rocky Mountains by the Colorado River. Glen Canyon had its gold, but it was much too fine to be practically recoverable, and more money by far was spent than earned on gold mining there.
Human activity in Glen Canyon accelerated rapidly in the 1940s as entrepreneurs of a different kind began to mine the less tangible but more productive resources offered by tourism. Guides like David Rust and John Wetherill had offered trips either on or around the river thirty years and more earlier, but it remained for Norman D. Nevills, operating from his Mexican Hat Lodge on the San Juan River, to demonstrate the solid business potential of regular river trips for tourists on the San Juan, the Green, and the Colorado rivers. Through off-season advertising and recruitment of famous and articulate passengers like Barry Goldwater and Wallace Stegner, Nevills built a reputation as a knowledgeable and skillful river guide that no other individual, perhaps, has since been able to equal. From the late 1930s until the 1949 airplane crash that ended his life, Norman Nevills, in the minds of some, owned the Colorado River.
Few seem to realize, though, that Nevills was far from alone on the river, for his success quickly bred imitators. The decade of the 1940s saw the birth and growth of a number of other firms, and the 1950s witnessed such growth in commercial river traffic that it was unlikely that one could take a trip through Glen Canyon during the tourist season of April to October without encountering several other boating parties. Among those who joined or followed the Nevills expeditions were the Hatch, Wright-Rigg, and Harris- Brennan firms and the parties of Georgie White, Ken Sleight, and several others. However, the most frequent trips through Glen Canyon were probably those guided by one of Utah's most colorful yet least known characters, a redoubtable Norwegian river boatman named Harry Leroy Aleson.
Waterville, Iowa, where Aleson was born in 1899, was an auspicious name for the birthplace of a future riverman. Though he altered the family name of Asleson to the more manageable Aleson, he was fiercely proud of his Nordic heritage, a feature that he had in common with several other outstanding Colorado River explorers such as Amos Burg and Haldane Holmstrom. World War I interrupted his education after two years of high school and very nearly destroyed the rest of his life, for he was gassed in France , which left him with a severe chronic stomach ailment and entitled him to a total disability pension.
For roughly twenty years after his return from the war, Aleson was adrift, unable to find a stable role in life. He completed high school and took a few engineering courses at Iowa State University which resulted in several insignificant jobs with geophysical exploration teams searching for oil in the Southwest. By the end of the 1930s, though, he had discovered the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, and he quickly gave up any desire for a life apart from the river. His love for the river cost him his marriage; after twelve years together, he and his urban-oriented wife separated in 1940. "So you want to go live at Meade [sic] Lake," his wife wrote, "Of course I don't have to tell you how I feel about it. To make a success of my life I will have to live in a city, and I guess you know that."
Aleson had taken up residence at a tent camp in Quartermaster Canyon on upper Lake Mead. Through the knowledge he had gained of the upper reaches of the lake and the lower Grand Canyon, he had secured sporadic employment by the Bureau of Reclamation and Grand Canyon-Boulder Dam Tours, the National Park Service-sanctioned concessionaires for tours on the lake. Since the firm knew little of the area in which Aleson was operating, he was useful to them in extending their tours.
It was not long before Aleson's penchant for offbeat activities on the river came to the fore. One of these was his love for hair-raising upriver motorboat runs, one of which cost him his job. One evening he borrowed a boat without authorization and ran it up through several big rapids where it eventually capsized. As he stood up on the overturned hull of the boat to signal his fellow workers on the way back down, one of them sarcastically likened him to Christ walking on the water, but Aleson's employer failed to see the humor in the waterlogged motor and unnecessary risk to his boat.
Aleson accomplished several other daredevil feats in the company of Georgie White, later famous (and still active though past eighty years of age) as "the woman of the river." Together with herpetologist Gerhard Bakker, Aleson and White hiked most of the intended route of the three ill-fated members of Powell's 1869 expedition from Separation Canyon to St. George, much of which Bakker covered while carrying a live specimen of a rare species ofrattlesnake in a muslin bag on top of his backpack. On another occasion Aleson and White hiked down Parashont Wash to the river and attempted unsuccessfully to build a raft in a reenactment of James White's supposed pre-Powell trip down the river. Unable to move their driftwood raft out of backcurrent eddies into the main river, they eventually inflated a small rubber raft they had fortunately brought along and completed the trip. The most celebrated of their expeditions, though, were the two long life-preserver runs they made on the lower river in 1945 and 1946. In later years, responding to an inquiry from a man who wished to make a similar trip, Aleson remembered his experience with little enthusiasm:
Aleson's entry into the commercial guide business came about through a daring, though nearly disastrous, exploit. River trips through the Grand Canyon as late as the early 1940s were such an event that the Park Service, often accompanied by reporters, would send a large cutter up the lake to meet each expedition and tow it down to Boulder Dam. Knowing of the estimated time of arrival of the 1940 Nevills expedition and of the Park Service's reluctance to venture very far into the upper lake, Aleson and Louis West decided to surprise Nevills by meeting him with a motorboat in Separation Canyon and win his favor by towing his party through the still water of the upper lake. Arriving at the rendezvous point a few days early to explore the side canyons afoot, the surprisers were themselves surprised one morning to find that a rise in the river during the night had carried their boat away. Fortunately the Nevills party, which included Barry Goldwater and Aleson's future partner Charles Larabee, saw their signal and took them down about ten miles to where the motorboat was lying adrift in a backwater.
In spite of Aleson's improper mooring of his boat, Nevills saw the advantage of a partnership with him that would save many miles of hard rowing each trip. The eventual agreement reached by the partners was ambitious and ambiguous in conception and erratic in practice. Aleson was either to meet each expedition or arrange for a motor to be left at a prearranged site in the lower canyon for a fee of thirty dollars. In addition, he was to recruit passengers for Nevills for a commission, which would be either a free trip for himself or 10 percent of the profit. Aleson was encouraged to build a permanent cabin at Bridge Canyon for tourist accommodations, evidently along the lines of Dave Rust's Phantom Ranch midway through the Grand Canyon. Finally, the two partners were to travel together, mainly in the East, during the off-season to show movies of the Nevills trips and recruit passengers for the next year.
The Nevills-Aleson partnership could not have lasted long, and in fact it was over by 1943, with most of the fruits of the association and all of the larger ambitions coming to naught. Both men had complex and capricious personalities, so much so that one might wonder that their association endured as long as it did. The two saw little of each other from then until Nevills's death. But one important result of the association was that Nevills introduced Aleson to the possibilities of river trips in Glen Canyon.
Aleson's first river trip through Glen Canyon seems to have been on a Nevills run down the San Juan-Colorado from Mexican Hat to Lee's Ferry in 1941. Given the predominance of Glen Canyon in Aleson's later river trip business, the Nevills expedition must have had a profound influence on him. The documents, however, show no unusual interest until the following January when he suggested that Nevills might want to place special emphasis on Glen Canyon during his longer runs. "What are the chances," he asked, "for adding a week for side canyon exploring by geologists, botonists [sic], etc.?'"
Aleson's early Glen Canyon trips, which began in 1944, were relatively unbusinesslike affairs that show that he had not yet completely made the transition from stunt man to tourist guide. For one thing, they were mostly upriver motorboat runs from Lee's Ferry as far upriver as he could get — either to Mille Crag Bend or Dark Canyon Rapid. Also, his rates were not yet established at a reasonable amount. In recruiting for his river trips, Nevills seems to have charged whatever the traffic would bear, quoting as much as nearly sixty dollars per day per person (though only actually charging eleven), for example, for roughly a sixty-day trip over the route of Powell's 1869 expedition. Partly reacting against such high rates, partly aware of his own inexperience, Aleson charged only six dollars per day per person on his early Glen Canyon trips. Eventually his prices would settle at something less than twenty dollars per day per person.
Aleson's management of his early trips, too, elicited occasional criticism. One proposed two-week trip in 1945 lasted less than half a day, ending with a fierce altercation on a Glen Canyon beach when a passenger, complaining of Aleson's filth, lack of organization and proper drinking water, and general physical and mental unfitness, demanded to be returned to Lee's Ferry. Aleson demurred, protesting that eight food caches up the river would be lost to spring floods. When the passenger demanded immediate return, refusing to let Aleson leave the party to rescue his supplies, Aleson extorted a cancellation fee of ninety dollars — in the form of a check on which the passenger promptly stopped payment as soon as they reached Lee's Ferry.
Overt conflicts of that kind were mercifully infrequent, but milder criticisms were common enough that Aleson must have realized that he had some lessons to learn. Randall Henderson, editor of Desert magazine, who was to become one of Aleson's closest friends, was a persistent critic in those early years. "You and Norman have chosen a fascinating vocation," he wrote in 1945, "and I anticipate that both of you will have more passengers than you can take care of when the war is over. My only suggestion is that you get together and improve your overnight camps — put in grills and garbage pits and keep 'em spic and span." As Late as 1948 Henderson was not yet convinced that the Aleson trips were being run well enough that his magazine would want to risk its reputation by accepting advertising:
Though Harry Aleson often humorously emphasized his Norwegian stubbornness — a fact of his personality remembered by friends to this day — he was able to learn from his mistakes, and his business steadily grew. One factor that may have helped him, as he mentioned in a 1944 letter, was the Second World War, which restricted access to gasoline and spare parts for motors. Grand Canyon-Boulder Dam Tours, Aleson's previous employer and now competitor for tours on Lake Mead, was virtually driven out of business by such restrictions. Evidently Aleson, though he was subject to the same difficulties, did not have the overhead in his business that would cause him the problems experienced by bigger firms. As he shifted to oar-powered downriver trips in Glen Canyon, he could use his precious gasoline entirely for the Lake Mead tours.
Experience, then, and reduced competition were two factors giving Aleson's river business impetus as the country emerged from World War II. There were also other developments about that time that helped his postwar trips. One was his partnership with the financial backer Charles Larabee, his friend since the 1940 Nevills expedition. For interesting reasons, the exact nature of the partnership with Larabee is obscure. As a friend and supporter of Barry Goldwater, Harry Aleson fit comfortably into the right wing of the political spectrum. He went much further than even Goldwater in his opposition to big government, however, and often boasted that he refused to pay all taxes except those on his automobile and sales taxes, both of which could hardly be avoided. He doggedly refused to file income tax returns, and somehow managed to evade, throughout his entire life, the tentacles of the Internal Revenue Service. A curious fact of Aleson's papers, then, is that while he kept, compulsively, records on the most trivial matters of his daily life, he studiously avoided keeping records of taxable transactions, including the Larabee partnership.
It seems reasonable to assume, though, that the sudden acquisition in the late 1940s of a fleet of Navy surplus ten-man inflatable landing craft for the Aleson river tours was one product of the Larabee partnership. The boats were a giant step forward in comfort, safety, and off-stream portability; and they were a major factor in the success of Larabee & Aleson Western River Tours. The practicality of inflatable craft was a well-known fact after Amos Burg's historic 1938 expedition down the Colorado with Haldane Holmstrom, but the easy availability of the surplus boats after the war brought them within reach of anyone, and their obvious advantages have made them all but universal today. Larabee & Aleson's advertising literature was not backward in proclaiming the boats' virtues:
Besides the safe, comfortable boats, Aleson's cuisine no doubt accounted for much of the popularity of his trips. Aleson had learned the importance of food on river trips from the criticisms of Randall Henderson and others, and partly, no doubt, from bad experiences with Nevills. Experience belied Nevills's claim, in one of his early letters to Aleson that
Aleson once quoted with obvious pleasure a comment by Dock Marston, one of Nevills's boatmen, that he "could never quite figure out what [the Nevills menus] were supposed to balance, unless it was the Nevills budget."
Aleson made no such mistake. Although examination of his actual provision lists disclose a certain exaggeration in his advertising claims that he carried one hundred different foods, the lists reveal, nevertheless, that his passengers ate extremely well. Forced for most of his life by his World War I injury to restrict his own diet to baby food and other bland fare, Aleson poured his gastronomic fantasies into his river guests' meals. One provision list for a twoweek trip in Glen Canyon in 1955 shows that he carried eight different fruit juices, four different soups, six different dinner meats, seven different dinner vegetables, and five different varieties of canned fruit, candies, jellies, jams, and cheeses. Every meal, furthermore, was served on real china dishes — no paper plates on an Aleson trip.
Glen Canyon soon became the favorite haunt of Harry Aleson. Though he varied his schedule somewhat with trips down the San Juan, the Green, the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, and Far North expeditions on the Peace, Slave, and Mackenzie rivers, he spent most of every river season in Glen Canyon: as early as 1947, he was offering two-week trips from Hite to Lee's Ferry every third week during the season April to October.
An Aleson Glen Canyon trip was a memorable experience, not only because of the comfortable boats and good food. Dick Sprang, one of Aleson's favorite boating partners, remembers that many of Aleson's passengers were attracted to him by his highly idiosyncratic behavior and mysterious sense of humor, characteristics that "drove everybody insane, but as their insanity increased, their love for him swelled by a multiplying factor often." Elizabeth Sprang, who also knew him well, says that on the private trips he would put on clothes over his pajamas on a cold morning, then strip back to his pajamas during the heat of the day.
Of course the canyon itself was the great attraction on such a trip; one could hardly name another trip anywhere in the West that would expose the visitor to an equally varied concentration of scenic, geologic, archaeological, and historical features. Hole-in-the-Rock, the Stanton Dredge, Hidden Passage, the hike to Rainbow Bridge, Music Temple, Crossing of the Fathers — these were only a few of the more memorable sites that met one's gaze on every hand.
Besides being blessed with a high degree of innate curiosity, Harry Aleson considered it his responsibility, as an effective river guide, to be as thoroughly informed about the canyon's points of interest as possible. In addition to exchanging voluminous correspondence over the years with other students of the river, especially Dock Marston, Aleson used many days of his off-season time every year to explore, by boat and on foot, as much of the side canyon and plateau country as he could reach. In 1952 Aleson, Dick Sprang, and Dudy Thomas organized a group called Canyon Surveys to explore, research, film, and record systematically one-tenth of a mile at a time, every aspect of possible human interest in Glen Canyon. Though they made a valiant start on the project, the joys of relaxed river life soon overcame the researcher in all three; and the task of surveying Glen Canyon eventually fell to C Gregory Crampton, a more disciplined student of the river.
This is not to say that the accomplishments of Canyon Surveys during the 1952 and 1953 seasons were insignificant, and only their laxness in reporting the discoveries recorded in their journals and on the U.S. Soil Conservation Service aerial photographs they used in lieu of maps has kept them from receiving considerable scientific recognition. No doubt their most dramatic discovery was Sprang's sighting, on October 23, 1952, of the Anasazi ruin known today as Defiance House, which they called "Three Warriors Ruin" after the now-famous pictographs. The canyon in which the ruin appears was unmapped in 1952, and Thomas's suggestion of the name "Forgotten Canyon" was accepted by later mapmakers. Spring and fall expeditions in 1953 accomplished a thorough survey of historical and archaeological sites along the Mormon road from Hermit Lake through the Clay Hills Pass, and of the lower twenty-five miles of Grand Gulch.
Where was the man who knew Glen Canyon when "the place no one knew" was consigned to the depths of Lake Powell? The question is worth asking, though one might more reasonably expect some of his over one thousand passengers to whom he introduced the canyon, many of whom were wealthy, articulate, and politically sagacious — all qualities Aleson lacked — to lead a protest against the Glen Canyon Dam.
Aleson's strategy for fighting the Glen Canyon Dam proposal was complex, partly well conceived and partly bizarre. The bizarre part consisted of strong support for the alternative project to Glen Canyon, the Echo Park Dam, which would have flooded a part of Dinosaur National Monument. Aleson hoped that his support would entitle him to be called as an expert and favorable witness before the Congressional hearings. Once on the stand, he planned to deliver a fiery denunciation of the Glen Canyon project. This, of course, did not occur. Aleson was rowing upstream against an irresistible political current by that time anyway, for the Sierra Club had already decided to sacrifice Glen Canyon to save Dinosaur. Much more promising was his attempt to enlist support from Sen. Barry Goldwater, his friend from the Nevills days and his only high political connection. But Aleson failed to realize that it was political suicide for any Arizona politician to vote against a water development project. "Just between us river rats, I wish they would leave the Colorado River alone," Goldwater wrote to him; "however, it is my duty and responsibility to see that the river is utilized for the benefit of most people and the Upper Colorado River Project at this time seems to be the answer."
During the 1960s Aleson conducted a few desultory exursions on Lake Powell, but with none of the enthusiasm or significance of the old Glen Canyon trips. With most of the old sites of tourist interest now under water and convenient access to the others by self-guided charter boats available at several marinas, Harry Aleson had become as expendable as Glen Canyon itself. An irreplaceable canyon and an irreplaceable man were both gone forever.
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