"I Had Arrived at Perfection": The Lost Canyon of the Green River

“I had arrived at perfection”: The Lost Canyons of the Green River

BY ROY WEBB

In August 1843, John Charles Fremont, The Pathfinder, camped on the banks of the Green River in Browns Park with his guide, the famous mountain man, Kit Carson. It is easy to imagine Carson regaling the Pathfinder with tales of the old days, but Fremont’s attention was caught by what Carson said about what the trappers had long called the Seeds-kee-dee Agie (Prairie Hen River in Shoshone), the river rolling by their camp. The course of the Green and Colorado, he wrote,

“…is but little known, and that little derived from vague report. Three hundred miles of its lower part, as it approaches the Gulf of California, is reported to be smooth and tranquil; but its upper part is manifestly broken into many falls and rapids. From many descriptions of trappers, it is probably that in its foaming course among its lofty precipices, it presents many scenes of wild grandeur; and though offering many temptations and often discussed, no trappers have been found bold enough to undertake a voyage which has so certain a prospect of a fatal termination.” 1

The Green River and Flaming Gorge in 1909.

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Since Fremont’s camp in Browns Park, despite many years of exploration, exploitation, settlement, and the construction of one of the largest dams in the United States, it is still the case that little is known about the canyons and valleys of this section of the Green, one of the largest river systems in North America. The blank spaces on Fremont’s map remained blank until late in the nineteenth century when some of them began to be filled with ranches, towns, canyons, rapids, and forests. However, the Green River between the town of Green River, Wyoming, and Flaming Gorge Dam in northeastern Utah, some one hundred miles downstream, remains, in some ways, just as unknown as it was when Fremont talked to Kit Carson so many years ago.

Downriver at Glen Canyon, where the United States Congress in 1956 authorized the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam—a chronological twin of Flaming Gorge Dam—large teams of archeologists, historians, biologists, and other scientists were organized and sent to survey the cultural and natural resources about to be lost to Lake Powell.The surveys produced shelves of documents, thousands of photographs, and dozens of scientific reports. In the ensuing years, scores of non-fiction books, hundreds of articles, a number of novels, documentaries, and memoirs of Glen Canyon have been produced, rhapsodizing about its lost beauty. Poems have been penned, songs have been composed, and environmentalists have launched campaigns in all seriousness to remove the dam.

And yet even though the canyons and valleys of the upper Green River were of rare beauty and filled with a rich historical heritage, only two brief studies were commissioned when Flaming Gorge Dam was authorized and constructed at the same time as Glen Canyon Dam. 2 As Flaming Gorge Reservoir filled, the entire stretch of river, some eighty miles of valleys and canyons, was flooded and forever changed. Since that time, there have been no books, songs, films, no poems, and no environmentalists calling for the removal of Flaming Gorge Dam. Flaming Gorge Reservoir, and the truncated stretch of Red Canyon below the dam, has become known as a blue-ribbon fishery, a playground for water skiers and boaters, and an impoundment that stores water primarily for upper Colorado River Basin states. Along the reach of the Green from Green River, Wyoming, to the middle of Red Canyon, where now only power boats can be seen, there was once a river. On land now beneath the cold, clear impounded water, ranchers and farmers and families once lived, deer and elk and antelope and mountain lions and bears thrived, and millions of waterfowl graced the skies. Simply put, Glen Canyon was not the only “Place No One Knew.”

Before 1956, the Green flowed uninterrupted as it had for millennia. From its source in the Wind River Mountains, the river traveled for about 175 miles through high mountain valleys. Below the town of Green River, established as a “Hell on Wheels” railroad town during the building of the transcontinental railroad in 1868, the Green flowed through mostly open country for about thirty miles, with only a few bluffs and spires—known today as North and South Chimney Rocks, north of Firehole Canyon—to interrupt the skyline. Cid Ricketts Sumner of the 1955 Hatch-Eggert Film Expedition described this stretch of the Green as follows:

The Green River flowing through Red Canyon.

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Gradually the scene around us altered. The buttes on one side rose higher and more color came into them red and buff mixed with the gray brown. Some were ribboned masses topped now and then with a small nipple, reminding me of the Paps of Jura. At times these formations were close to the riverside, again they were set back beyond a level stretch of green woods and grasses or a bleak expanse of shale.Then, as the buttes grew higher, turreted castles appeared. 3

This stretch of river was lined with cottonwoods and willows, home to innumerable waterfowl and a number of small ranches. At the mouth of Black’s Fork, however, the landscape changed, as the river travelers got their first view of the Uinta Mountains, a seemingly impassable barrier for the river, forty miles downriver. From Black’s Fork to the Uintas was likewise open country, with more cottonwoods, willows, waterfowl, deer, and other wildlife. There were also more ranches, which took advantage of the rich river bottoms to graze cattle, while sheep grazed on the arid hills away from the river. Ranches included the Taylor ranch, the Kraus ranch, the Logan ranch, and a number of others. The most notable was the Holmes Ranch, located a few miles downriver from Black’s Fork on the left side of the river. Just about every river traveler from 1909 until the area was flooded by the reservoir stopped at the ranch, and commented on the fine hospitality afforded by Mr. and Mrs. Walter Holmes. The first to describe the ranch was Ellsworth Kolb, who along with his brother Emery visited there in September 1911:

Our next camp was at the Holmes’ ranch, a few miles below Black’s Fork. We tried to buy some eggs of Walter Holmes, and were told that we could have them on one condition—that we visit him that evening. This was a price we were only too glad to pay, and the evening will linger long in our memories.

The John Wesley Powell Expedition lining boats on the Green River at Ashley Falls.

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Mr. Holmes entertained us with stories of hunting trips—after big game in the wilds of Colorado; and among the lakes of the Wind River Mountains, the distant source of the Green River. Mrs. Holmes and two young ladies entertained us with music; [and] it was late that night when we rolled ourselves in our blankets, on the banks twenty feet above the river. 4

Every other river runner who passed by the Holmes Ranch in the ensuing years stopped for a visit; all left with fond memories of the Holmes and their picturesque ranch. Below the Holmes Ranch, the river slowed and widened, meandering across open bottomlands that, while excellent grazing, were also home to clouds of mosquitoes that feasted on anyone unfortunate enough to be there during the hatch.This stretch was not all bugs and sandbars, however; a few miles below the Holmes Ranch, in Halfway Hollow, was the Buckboard Hotel, a small hostelry established to serve travelers on the route between the little towns of Manila and Linwood, Utah, and Green River, Wyoming. William Purdy, the schoolmaster in Manila, and author of the only historical salvage document written regarding this stretch of the Green, wrote “Peter Wall noticed that people traveling from one settlement to the other had to camp out one night. He decided to relieve their discomforts, and make a good investment besides, by building the hotel on the banks of the Green in 1912.” 5 Downriver there were more ranches, including the Lowe Ranch and the Brennigar Ranch, where the settlers had established a ferry to cross to grazing lands on either side of the river.

Beehive Rock at the Mouth of Kingfisher Canyon on the Green River.

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Not far below the Kraus Ranch, about fifty miles below Green River, Wyoming, the landscape began to change again; the bluffs along the river rose, and about ten miles below the Kraus Ranch the river cut through the first of a series of hogbacks that had been formed by the rising of the east-west trending Uinta Mountains. Once past the first ridge, the river reentered open country for another few miles, passing the Smith Ranch, reached by a ferry and a footbridge.

Downstream, at the mouth of Henry’s Fork, was the little town of Linwood, Utah. Linwood was established by George Solomon in the 1890s, during the Lucerne Valley land boom, and by the first decades of the twentieth century it was a thriving small community serving the many ranches and farms in the area. At one time, Linwood boasted a school, a gas station, a number of homes, the Smith and Larsen Mercantile Company, and a post office, but by the time Flaming Gorge Dam was built, the town was in decline.

Linwood was also the downstream terminus of the Green River Navigation Company, established in March 1908 by a group of local businessmen from Green River and Rock Springs, Wyoming. Their plan was to build a steamboat to carry passengers and freight from the railroad at Green River to Linwood, thereby avoiding the two-day trip over rough roads. After boilers and a steam engine were obtained from Chicago, the steamboat was built in Green River and christened the COMET. Built at a cost of twenty-five thousand dollars, the sixty-foot long craft was launched on July 4, 1908, and the maiden voyage to Linwood undertaken three days later. Passengers included the officers of the Green River Navigation Company and local dignitaries, refreshed by “ample supplies of beer.” Linwood was reached after a journey of only eight hours. The return voyage against the current took much longer—thirty-three hours—and the boat ran out of coal. The deep draft proved to be unsuitable for the shallow Green and the boat frequently had to be hauled off of sandbars using winches. A second voyage, hauling freight for Linwood, proved to be no more successful, and the effort was abandoned. 6 Two other vessels, the SUNBEAM and the patriotically-named TEDDY R, were no more successful. 7

Brenniger’s Ferry on the Green River, August 10, 1917.

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Just below Linwood the river’s course changed dramatically, and from this point on, save for a few open areas, is confined by canyons for almost two hundred miles. Here river travelers first saw the aptly-named Flaming Gorge, where the river entered the Uinta Mountains through a narrow cleft between red cliffs that towered more than a thousand feet above the river. From upstream, it appeared that the river flowed into a cave in the mountains, giving some early explorers anxious moments. William Manly, who floated the Green on his way to California for the Gold Rush in 1849, recorded his first impression of what would later be named Flaming Gorge:

[The] boat came around a small angle in the stream, and all at once there seemed to be a higher, steeper range of mountains right across the valley. The boys thought the river was coming to a rather sudden end…and for the life of me I could not say they were not right, for there was no way in sight for it to go. I remembered while looking over a map the military men had, I found a place named Brown’s Hole, and I told the boys I guessed we were elected to go on foot to California after all, for I did not propose to follow the river down any sort of hole into any mountain. 8

The community of Linwood in 1945.

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Named by John Wesley Powell in 1869— like all of the other canyons from this point to the confluence with the Colorado, five hundred miles downstream—Flaming Gorge was short but spectacular. During spring high water, the river pooled and swirled as it entered this narrow gap, and the resulting whirlpools gave rise to the legend of the dreaded Green River Suck, which was supposed to be an impassable cataract that would mean certain death to any who tried to navigate it. 9 It was a good story, but hardly the truth; once the river entered the canyon it sorted itself out quickly and flowed with hardly a ripple until Red Canyon.

Despite the imagined dangers of the Green River Suck, the reality was far different; there might be swirling waters, but everyone who saw Flaming Gorge marveled at its beauty. Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, who accompanied John Wesley Powell’s second expedition in 1871, was the first to see beyond the Green River Suck to the beauty of the canyon:

Just below the mouth of Henry’s Fork [the river] doubled to the left and we found ourselves between two low cliffs, then in a moment we dashed to the right into the beautiful canyon, whose summit we had seen, rising about 1300 feet on the right, and a steep slope on the left at the base of which was a small bottom covered with all cottonwood trees, whose green shone resplendent against the red rocks….The canyon was surprisingly beautiful and romantic. 10

Ralf Woolley, the USGS engineer who was in charge of the 1922 dam site survey, abandoned his usual dispassionate, engineer’s style and waxed eloquent about the canyon: “[T]he north wall of Flaming Gorge, with its vivid hues of red, brown, and ocher, rises like a huge flame of fire ahead. The gorge… forms a very impressive entrance to the series of canyons below.” 11

A 1922 photograph of Amos Hill (seated at far right) with three members of the USGS survey party.

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Three miles below the dramatic entrance at Flaming Gorge, the river made a long U-shaped bend that was known as Horseshoe Canyon. Equallyspectacular, Horseshoe Canyon was evidence of the dramatic geological forces that had accompanied the creation of the Uintas. Like Flaming Gorge, Horseshoe was a short canyon, only three miles long, but unlike the flaring red rocks of Flaming Gorge, Horseshoe was composed of gray quartzite. After the river worked its way through Horseshoe Canyon, it flowed through a small open area called Nielsen’s Flat, and immediately entered Kingfisher Canyon, named by Powell in 1869 for the numerous birds he saw along the river in the canyon.

The dividing point between Kingfisher and Red Canyons was the mouth of Sheep Creek Canyon—one of the most impressive geologic areas in the West. 12 After passing Sheep Creek Canyon, the river rounded Beehive Point where the thousands of swallows making homes in the sandstone cliff reminded Powell of a busy beehive. Downriver from Beehive Point was another small open area known as Hideout Flat, long considered a haunt of the many outlaws who had passed through the area during the heyday of the Wild Bunch. In 1911, the Kolb brothers encountered some suspicious characters not far from this part of the river:

Nathaniel Galloway in Ashley Falls—1909.

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We had previously been informed that some of these mountains were the hiding-places of men who were “wanted” in the three states which bordered near here. Some escaping prisoners had also been traced to the mountains in this direction; then all tracks had ceased. [A rancher] asked us to help him swim some of his horses across the river. He said the high water had taken out his own boat. The horses were rounded up in a mountain-hidden valley and driven into the water ahead of the boat. After securing the horses, [his] welcome seemed to turn to suspicion and he questioned our reasons for being there, wanting to know what we could find in that wild country to interest us. [Later they were told] Our former host […] had committed many depredations and had served one term for cattle stealing. 13

It was also the site of a forest camp, reached by a rough road from the plateau above. Many early river runners started their trips here, to avoid the flat water above, with its wind and mosquitoes. Since the canyons were all so short, they were usually passed in a single day. Dellenbaugh summed up the whole series thusly: “Flaming Gorge is the gateway, Horseshoe the vestibule, and Kingfisher the antechamber to the whole grand series.” 14 Travelers encountered real rapids for the first time below Hideout Flat. There had been small riffles, such as the one off Beehive Point, but as the river entered the durable Uinta Mountain Quartzite that made up Red Canyon, the rapids became much more difficult; harder rock generally makes for more challenging rapids.There were four rapids in the first three miles, and boatmen became cautious and concerned. But this stretch had its enjoyable side, too; there were a number of fresh-water creeks that entered on the south side of the river, providing not only good water but open space for camps. Carter Creek, just below the head of Red Canyon, was one such place. Ralf Woolley, a USGS surveyor who ran the river in 1922, wrote:

Norm Nevills and Joseph DesLoge in Ashley Falls, 1947.

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Carter Creek flows in a rugged gorge with steep walls, entering Green River from the south [right].The stream carried about 100 or 125 second-feet of clear, cold water at the time of our visit and seemed to be very well stocked with mountain trout.Thirty-five fine trout were caught during the two or three hours before dark. [...] The camp at Carter Creek was a beautiful spot in a cluster of pine trees, with a fine cold spring of sparkling water close at hand for drinking water. 15

Cid Sumner was even more enthusiastic in 1955:

The sun, not yet quite cut off by the towering cliff opposite, was still shining down here. By a cleft in this wall and a wooded widening, a clear rushing stream dashed down over a tumble of rocks to join the river.Tall pines glinted silver and green, their straight trunks rosied by the sun. The ground sloped gently back to a more level spot under the trees where a rough table had been set, a board bench alongside it, for others had camped here. Carter Creek. I shall never think of it but with a sense of completion, of fulfillment, as if here at last I had arrived at perfection. 16

But the traveler could never escape a sense of gloom in Red Canyon. By now the river was committed to an easterly course toward the Gates of Lodore, seventy-five miles downstream. The high walls that precluded the sun, the deep red rock thickly covered with Ponderosa Pine, and the constant background noise of rapids, made this an intimidating stretch for early river runners. Many of them had been told tall tales not only of the dreaded Green River Suck, but of Ashley Falls, where early trappers and prospectors had purportedly lost their boats, and in some cases their lives. 17 There was some truth in the legends; prospector Theodore Hook of Cheyenne led a party of fifteen miners that followed Powell’s first expedition by a few days. At one point in Red Canyon, probably the rapid at Skull Creek, Hook’s boat capsized and he was drowned. Frederick Dellenbaugh as he passed the site of the accident two years later noted that “Their abandoned boats, flat-bottomed and inadequate, still lay half-buried in sand on the left-hand bank, and not far off on a sandy knoll was the grave of the unfortunate leader marked by a pine board set up, with his name painted on it. Old sacks, ropes, oars, etc., emphasized the completeness of the disaster.” 18 For the most part, however, the rapids above Ashley Falls were difficult but not life-threatening.

Just below Skull Creek, the river made a hairpin turn around Gold Point, and passed the mouths of Trail and Allen Creeks, where Ralf Woolley in 1922 met, to his surprise, a hermit named Amos Hill:

The hermit was at home, and he was as much surprised to see the visitors as they were to see him. He gave his name as Amos Hill and said that he was 71 years old and had lived in the canyon about 20 years. His house or hovel was a crude tepee of boards over a small hole in the ground. […] He conversed freely. Among other things he claimed to have gone through the Green River canyons on a raft, taking a horse with him, a feat which one who has been through the canyons would be justified in believing impossible. 19

Just a few miles below Hill’s hermit hideaway, river runners came on the biggest rapid in Red Canyon—one of the biggest on the entire Green River—and one that everyone had heard of and dreaded—Ashley Falls. Ashley Falls was named by Powell when he saw the inscription left there by William Ashley in 1825. While Ashley’s party of trappers portaged their supplies and “bullboats” around the rapid, Ashley painted “ASHLEY 1825” on the left wall. Formed by house-sized boulders that had fallen from the canyon wall, it was a tricky run in low flows, but a truly daunting prospect at high water. Then, huge lateral waves and holes made it seem almost impossible to run safely at first glance, and lining or portaging Ashley Falls was especially difficult because of the huge boulders on either side of the river. In 1871 Frederick Dellenbaugh described the arduous labor required to carry their supplies around Ashley Falls:

In the morning soon after leaving this camp a dull roar ahead told of our approach to Ashley Falls, for which we were on the lookout. […] An immense rock stuck up in the middle of the river and the water divided on this and shot down on each side in a sharp fall of about eight feet. Each was a clear chute and not dangerous to look at, but the effect of so sudden a plunge on one of our loaded boats was too much of a problem for trial. A portage was decided on.The left bank where we were was a mass of enormous broken rocks where it seemed next to impossible to haul a boat. 20

A.K. Reynolds in Red Canyon, 1950.

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The name of the first person to run Falls, rather than portage or line it, has been Ashley lost to history, but it was probably Nathaniel Galloway, the famous river man from Vernal, who started taking small skiffs down the Green late in the 1880s. 21 George Flavell, who ran the entire river in his little punt PANTHON in 1896, left what is probably the first record of a run of Ashley Falls. He noted that “One place the river was completely dammed up with boulders which caused a falls of four feet, the widest passage being ten feet. That was enough for the PANTHON, so we passed on.” 22 Galloway wrote about the rapid in his journal during the Galloway-Stone expedition of 1909. Reaching the rapid in September’s low water, Galloway and Julius Stone scouted it and then ran it with no real problems:

After examination I decide to run all the boats thru the center channel running directly towards the large cubelar [sic] rock in the center. This channel is so narrow at the entrance that one must fold the oars back by the side of the boat as soon as the first rocks are passed. One has but about 15 ft. to direct the boat to prevent dashing into the large rock. 23

Virtually every river runner, from William Ashley in 1825 until the rapid was flooded when the gates on Flaming Gorge Dam closed in 1963, left an account of Ashley Falls. Norm Nevills, the pioneer commercial river outfitter, first ran Ashley Falls in 1940, and wrote "Mile 292. ASHLEY FALLS. After some study I decided to run thru on the left, with passengers. It's a bit tricky, tho no danterous. [...] With the landing of the WEN, look across the river and see names of various parties on wall. Decide to crossover and put our names up too.” 24 Here Nevills brings up two interesting points about Ashley Falls. First, it was the site of a long-standing river register, where many earlier travelers painted or chiseled their names. Starting with William Ashley, numbers of later travelers followed his example, including William Manly in 1849, the Galloway-Stone Expedition in 1909, Amos Burg and Buzz Holmstrom in 1937, Norm Nevills in 1940, and many others. Pictures of the register are, unfortunately, not existent, but glimpses of it can be seen in films taken of runs through the rapid. Dellenbaugh was barely able to make out Ashley’s inscription in 1871, and the last time anyone noted the Ashley inscription was in 1950, when peripatetic river runner Harry Alesen recorded that he had been able to find it. 25

The second salient point about Ashley Falls offered by Nevills is that it was actually a pretty easy run. For all the waves and holes and the huge rocks, and for the huge roar caused by the rapid and the imposing look of it, the route through the rapid was very straightforward, and just below it was a huge calm pool, without another rapid for over a mile. Boaters would usually run to the right of the main, “cubelar” boulder at low water in the late summer and fall, and to the left at high water during the spring run-off. The high-water run to the left was an exciting one, with big lateral waves coming off both sides of the rocks—in those days, before any dams, the Green could flood up to twenty thousand cubic feet per second—but it was a forgiving one as well. 26 Even before Nevills’s comments in 1940, Ashley Falls was beginning to lose its fearsome reputation, for in 1926 the Todd-Page party ran the rapid, walked back upstream, and swam through in their life jackets 27 In fact, the only known river runner to have any trouble in Ashley Falls was Don Harris, by 1940 a veteran of Cataract and Grand Canyons. In a 1990 interview, Harris was asked if he had ever capsized a boat:

Construction work at the Flaming Gorge Dam site in the 1950s.

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First time is when we were on a USGS trip in high water in Ashley Falls and we capsized there. Pilot error, let’s see had I known just exactly how the rapid was I should have pulled ashore.We ran down the left side of that big rock. If I could have had one of the fellows stand on shore and keep tossing some pebbles over where I was supposed to hit the break off then I’d have been in position. I was just about a boat width too far one way or the other, too far left I believe. If I would have been another boat width over I would have run it without capsizing. 28

So all of the worry about Ashley Falls by early river runners was actually for nothing. Cal Giddings, a pioneer Utah kayaker, ran Ashley Falls in the late 1950s and summed it up thus: “I remember we worried a lot about that because we’ d heard about it, but it was pretty simple when we got there. So I think that was a little bit over-exaggerated in difficulty.” 29

There was still a lot of Red Canyon to go below Ashley Falls, and a number of smaller, unnamed rapids, such as the ones at the mouth of Dutch John Draw and Cart Creek. 30 It was just below there, however, that the river finally met its match. In the late 1940s, Congress began debate on the Colorado River Storage Project, whose stated aim was to turn the Green and Colorado Rivers and many of their tributaries from a “natural menace to a national resource.” Plans were drawn up for one of the most ambitious dam-building projects ever conceived, with impoundments planned for a number of a places on the Green and Colorado Rivers, as well as on many of their tributaries. Downstream on the Green, at Echo Park, controversy over a proposed dam in Dinosaur National Monument threatened to derail the entire enterprise, but by the mid-1950s that had been resolved—that dam was never built—and work proceeded apace on some of the other units, including Flaming Gorge Dam, less than three miles downstream from Ashley Falls. Shortly after the legislation was signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 11, 1956, crews moved into the remote region in the Uinta Mountains, previously only inhabited by Indians, outlaws, and the occasional hermit. Arch Dam Constructors, a consortium of western construction companies, got to work, bulldozing roads to the dam site, blasting out the keyways, and building a coffer dam to divert the Green from its ancient bed, de-watering the site so that the dam’s foundation could be prepared and the concrete could be poured. Ashley Falls was soon inundated. The huge, “cubelar” rock that gave the rapid its distinctive look is still there, for it was too large to be moved, but the river register is long gone. In 1957, the Green tried to reclaim the dam site, when a huge flood of almost twenty-five thousand cubic feet per second came down the river, but the coffer dam held and the construction proceeded. Site preparation was not finished until late 1960, but the huge pour of concrete started on September 18 of that year, and did not stop despite floods and snow for almost three years. In the meantime, crews were sent out to salvage the thousands of board feet of prime timber that would otherwise be lost beneath the reservoir, giving the canyons a strange shaved look. Once the generators were in place, the first power was generated at the flip of a switch by President John F. Kennedy on September 27, 1963, two months before he was killed in Dallas. The dam was officially dedicated by Jacqueline Kennedy on August 17, 1964.

Today Flaming Gorge Reservoir is, in the tourist board phrase, a “playground for millions.” Even if that number is a bit exaggerated, there is no denying that the reservoir is one of the most popular spots in the West for fishing, boating, and camping. Below the dam, literally thousands of people now run the remaining fifteen miles of Red Canyon, which because of the cold, clear water, has become known world-wide as a trout fishery. During the fishing season, it almost seems like one could walk down the river, stepping from drift boat to drift boat. The wait for a launch is sometimes two hours. That pressure, and the conflict with trout fishermen for the clear, cold water and splashing rapids below the dam, has caused the Forest Service to consider implementing a permit system. With the completion of the dam, the Green is forever changed, at least forever as measured by man. The wildlife and the trees are gone, as are the rapids, the ranches, the little town of Linwood, the hermit hole where Amos Hill lived out his days. Don Hatch, who literally learned the Green River at his father Bus Hatch’s knee, recalled:

President John F. Kennedy in Salt Lake City on September 27, 1963, for a ceremony to start the first generator at Flaming Gorge Dam.

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[T]he living space was the bottom of the canyon…where all the deer were—the animals, the geese and all of these; the wildlife was along the bottom. So when you put the dam there and flooded it, it essentially killed all the living space for animals. There were a lot of animals there…the beauty of the canyons seemed to be the bottomlands of the river—the immediate bottomlands…you take a picture of the canyon the way it was then—and it’s a beautiful picture—and then if you take the scissors and cut off the bottom third, that’s what it looks like now. 31

Indeed, Ken Sleight, who ran a few river trips for hunters as the dam was being built, remembered that deer were so thick in the canyons that he had to make a rule that his clients had to wait to get off the boat before shooting a deer; otherwise, he said, it was like fish in a barrel. 32 “Ah Well,” as Major Powell said, “we may conjecture many things.” Better to remember the canyons as they were; to remember that there was once a river beneath the waters of the reservoir. Cal Giddings, a University of Utah chemistry professor who was also a pioneer kayaker, remembered what it was like in the lost canyons of the Green River:

One characteristic of those canyons—those are probably the most ideal places for beginning river runners to get going. They were fairly big waves but easy and straightforward. It was very beautiful ...We worried a lot about Ashley Falls but it was pretty simple ...a good part of that area was forested ...Iremember one morning having mist hanging over the canyon, hanging over the forested walls;it was one of the loveliest sights I’ve seen on the river. 33

NOTES

Roy Webb is the Multimedia Archivist in the J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections Department at the University of Utah.

1 John Charles Fremont. Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the year 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-44 (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1845), 129-30.

2 See William Purdy, An Outline of the History of the Flaming Gorge Area, University of Utah Anthropological Papers, No. 37 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1962), which is forty-two pages long and the 121-page document by Angus Woodbury, Stephen D. Durrant, and Seville Flowers, A Survey of Vegetation in the Flaming Gorge Reservoir Basin, University of Utah Anthropological Papers, No. 45 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1960). In contrast, the catalog at the Marriott Library contains almost 250 books about Glen Canyon, not to mention numerous magazine and newspaper articles, photographs, films, and oral histories.

3 Cid Ricketts Sumner, Traveler in the Wilderness (New York: Harpers, 1957), 45-46. Cid Sumner, author of the “Tammy” series of young adult books, was seventy years old when she signed up for the Eggert- Hatch Film Expedition in 1955.

4 Ellsworth Kolb, Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914), 16-17.

5 Purdy, History of the Flaming Gorge Area, 29-30. By the time construction was started on Flaming Gorge Dam, the hotel had been abandoned, but it was still standing until taken down by work crews from the Bureau of Reclamation.

6 Today only the bell of the COMET survives, in the possession of the Green River Rotary Club.

7 Roy,Webb, If we had a boat: Green River explorers, adventurers, and runners (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), 104. Also, http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/griver2.html, (accessed October 2, 2009).The TEDDY R was named for President Theodore Roosevelt.

8 William L. Manly, Death Valley in ’49: An important chapter of California Pioneer History (New York: Wallace Hebberd, 1929), 73-74.

9 T.D. Bonner, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 59-60. The first account of the Green River Suck appeared in Beckwourth’s ghost-written memoirs, cited above. In 1989, as I was preparing for a lengthy river trip in Green River, Wyoming, that would commemorate John Wesley Powell’s voyage, we were told by a number of local residents that Flaming Gorge Reservoir and the river below were too dangerous to navigate, even though people had been doing it for well over a hundred years. It was the latter-day version of the “Green River Suck.”

10 Frederic S. Dellenbaugh, A Canyon Voyage (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1962),17.

11 Ralf R.Woolley, The Green River and its Utilization USGS WATER SUPPLY PAPER Number 618, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1930), 40-41.

12 Sheep Creek Canyon, where colorful and significant examples of geology can be seen, has been preserved as a Geological Area by the U.S. Forest Service.

13 Ellsworth Kolb, Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914), 41-44. Hideout Flat is one of the few local names that have survived.

14 Dellenbaugh,A Canyon Voyage, 22.

15 Ralf R. Woolley, “A Boat Trip Down Green River from Green River, Wyo. to Green River, Utah,” Accession 1407, Special Collections, J.Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

16 Cid Ricketts Sumner,Traveler in the Wilderness (New York: Harpers, 1957), 62-63.

17 None of the tales about Ashley Falls were true; no one is ever recorded as having been lost in Ashley Falls, and there were only two recorded capsizes. There was a legend current in Green River about the rapid being named because Ashley, or various members of his party, were drowned there and the survivors were forced to climb out of the canyon and struggle back to civilization, but it never happened. Powell passed along this legend in his book, but placed the disaster downriver in the Canyon of Lodore.

18 Dellenbaugh, A Canyon Voyage, 25. It’s hard not to detect a note of self-satisfaction in Dellenbaugh’s writing about Hook’s unfortunate demise.

19 Woolley, The Green River and its Utilization, 42-43.The Todd-Page party did not find him when they came by in 1926.

20 Dellenbaugh, A Canyon Voyage,27.

21 Webb, If we had a boat, 87-89.

22 George F. Flavell, The Log of the Panthon, ed. by Neil B. Carmony and David E. Brown (Boulder: Pruett Publishing, 1987), 19.

23 Nathaniel Galloway, Diary, September 18, 1909, Nathaniel Galloway Papers, Accession 1938, Special Collections, J.Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

24 Roy Webb, ed., High,Wide, and Handsome: the River Journals of Norman D. Nevills (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005), 67. Nevills ran it again in 1947 and 1949 with equal success.

25 “Notes on Green River trip, 1951” Harry Aleson papers, p. 5, Utah State Historical Society. Dellenbaugh noted about the Ashley inscription:“On one of my trips over the rocks with cargo I made a slight detour on the return to see the boulder where the Major had discovered Ashley’s name with a date. The letters were in black, just under a slight projection and were surprisingly distinct considering the forty-six years of exposure.The “2” was illegible and looked like a “3.” None of our party seemed to know that it could have been only a “2” for by the year 1835 Ashley had sold out and had given up the fur business in the mountains.” Dellenbaugh,A Canyon Voyage, 28.

26 Indeed, one of the ironies of this stretch of river is that all early river parties commented on how worried they were about Ashley Falls, until they got there and discovered that it wasn’t that bad. Then, relieved and incautious, they would go downriver about twenty miles and wreck their boats in Red Creek Rapid, just above the flat water of Browns Park. Red Creek was, and still is, a very difficult rapid that has been the scene of a number of wrecks and at least one death.

27 F. Lemoyne Page,“My Trip down the Green River,” 1926. copy in author’s possession.

28 Don Harris Oral Interview, March 14, 1990. Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library,University of Utah.

29 Cal Giddings Oral Interview, July 3, 1984. Special Collections, J.Willard Marriott Library, Universityof Utah.

30 John W.Van Cott, Utah Place Names (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), 119. Dutch John was named for “Dutch John” Hanselena, a Prussian immigrant who had mining claims in the Red Creek area in the 1860s. German speakers were often referred to as “Dutch” in that period. Dutch John, Utah, was the home of up to 3,500 workers during the construction of Flaming Gorge Dam, but today is all but a ghost town. Cart Creek refers to the large two-wheeled carts that were used in logging.

31 Don Hatch Oral Interview, March 10, 1984. Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

32 Ken Sleight Oral Interview, 2003. Special Collections, J.Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

33 Giddings, interview.