iscerned joining it,
which their Amerind guides pronounced to be that of Green River. Finding
it utterly impossible for them to reach this place, they returned.

Thus, after all these years of endeavour, the mighty Colorado foamed
away amidst this terrible environment as if no human element yet existed
in the world. And as it continued to baffle all attempts to probe its
deeper mysteries, the dread of it and the fear of it grew and grew, till
he who suggested that a man might pass through the bewildering chasms
and live, was regarded as light-headed. Then came the awful war of the
Rebellion, and for several years little thought was bestowed on the
problem.*

* The troops that were so foolishly and feebly sent against the
Mormons in 1857 had some experience in Green River Valley, but it was
not directly connected with this story and I will not introduce an
account of it here.

Some few prospectors for mineral veins began investigations in the
neighbourhood of the lower part of the Grand Canyon, and the gorge was
entered from below, about 1864, by O. D. Gass and three other men. I met
Gass at his home at Las Vegas (see cut, page 137) in 1875, but I did not
then know he had been in the canyon and did not hear his story. It
was not till 1866 that any one tried again to navigate the river above
Mohave. In that year Captain Rodgers, who for four years had been on the
lower Colorado, took the steamboat Esmeralda, ninety-seven feet long and
drawing three and one-half feet of water, up as far as Callville, near
the mouth of the Virgen, which was several miles beyond the highest
point attained by Ives in his skiff, but little, if any, farther than
Johnson had gone with his steamboat. He ascended the most difficult
place, Roaring Rapids in Black Canyon, in seven minutes, and was of the
opinion that it could as easily be surmounted at any stage of water,
except perhaps during the spring rise. It does not matter much now, for
it is not likely that any steam craft will soon again have occasion to
traverse that canyon. The completion of the railways was a death blow to
steam navigation on the Colorado, yet, in the future, when the fertile
bottoms are brought under cultivation, small steamboats will probably be
utilised for local transportation.

The journey of the Esmeralda added nothing to what was already known.
The following year, 1867, a man was picked up at Callville, in an
exhausted and famishing condition, by a fron