but the captain was posted and
he put the men in irons to be transported to California for trial. The
Yumas now established a ferry by using an old army-waggon box which
they made water-tight, as the Craig Ferry had suffered the fate of its
owners. Hobbs employed the Yumas to take his party over, the horses
swimming, and the arrangement seems to have worked very well.

According to Hobbs, the first steamboat came up the river while he
was there, frightening the Yumas so that they ran for their lives,
exclaiming the devil was coming, blowing fire and smoke out of his nose,
and kicking back with his feet in the water. It was the stern-wheel
steamboat Yuma, and this is the only mention of it I can find. It had
supplies for the troops, but what became of it afterward I do not know.
This was evidently before the coming of the Uncle Sam, usually credited
with being the first steamboat on the Colorado, which did not arrive
till a year after the reconnaissance of the river mouth by Lieutenant
Derby of the Topographical Engineers, for the War Department, seeking a
route for the water transportation of supplies to Fort Yuma, now
ordered to be a permanent military establishment. He came up the river
a considerable distance, in the topsail schooner Invincible and made
a further advance in his small boats. The only guide he had to the
navigation of the river was Hardy's book, referred to in a previous
chapter, which assisted him a good deal. He arrived at the mouth
December 23, 1850. "The land," he says, "was plainly discernible on both
coasts of the gulf, on the California side bold and mountainous, but on
the Mexican low and sandy." There could, therefore, never, have been any
doubt in the minds of any of those who had previously reached this point
as to the character of Lower California. The Invincible sailed daily up
the river with the flood tide, anchoring during the ebb, and they got on
very well till the night of January 1, 1851, when the vessel grounded at
the ebb,

"swung round on her heel, and, thumping violently, was carried by the
tide (dragging her anchor) some two or three miles, grounding finally
upon the shoal of Gull Island. At flood tide sail was made on her as
soon as she floated, and we succeeded in getting her back into the
channel. As the vessel grounded at every ebb tide and on the return
of the water was violently swung around, thumping on her bottom and
swinging on her anchor, I began to see that it would