Bill Diamond

This fall the river community lost an Original. Bill Diamond died November 11th. William August Diamond was born Sept 11th, 1932 in Provo, Utah, and moved to Castle Dale, Utah when he was 16. In Castle Dale he worked as a cowboy on surrounding cattle ranches and it was here he met his wife, Patricia. They were married on December 1, 1950 and later at the LDS Temple in St. George. Over the next 8 years Bill worked as a coal miner, a local policeman and an Emery and Carbon County deputy sheriff. Additionally he helped his father-in-law run his cattle ranch and devoted his spare time to teaching himself the art of photography—not just taking the pictures but developing them in his own laboratory. Thus it was that, after an injury in the coal mine, he was well qualified for a position with the Bureau of Reclamation in their photography division and police department. Bill and Pat moved their family to Page, Arizona in December, 1958. His primary duties as a photographer were to take progress photos of Glen Canyon Dam and to record crime scenes. Bill was on the first Page police force, the “Page Rangers,” and was a Coconino and Kane County deputy Sheriff.
With the completion of the dam, Bill continued to work for the Bureau of Reclamation and in 1966 was asked to be the photographer on a trip run by Jerry and Larry Sanderson that included Congressman Tunney of California. His abilities were such that on his second trip in July 1967 he piloted one of the motorized rafts. That trip left with 10 congressmen and their families and included C.B. Morton, Sam Gibbons, and Morris Udall. In a subsequent letter to Floyd Dominy, Commissioner of Reclamation, Mo Udall wrote of Bill's “…great skills and outstanding judgment… he displayed unusual abilities as a boat pilot, guide and counselor. We believe the Bureau is most fortunate in having a person such as Mr. Diamond in its employ.” Bill's association with the Bureau was to be short-lived however. With his appetite for the river whetted by those first trips he soon formed a partnership with Jerry Sanderson as Sanderson River Expeditions. Those early years saw the huge Sierra Club charters, the boom of the early seventies and the crafting of river companies into the professional organizations we recognize today. Bill was a working owner, running over 70 trips in those years. He was instrumental in designing the boats (the S-Rig) frames and equipment that are still used today by a variety of companies.
The year 1978 saw Bill and Jerry divide the company, and acquisition of Harris Boat Trips by the newly formed Diamond River Adventures (DRA). In retrospect this was an extremely bold move during a time of uncertain motor use and other provisions of the Colorado River Management Plan. Throughout this time Bill remained upbeat about the future of commercial river running. To the relief of many he remained true to his vision in the early eighties when he resisted the temptation afforded by Del Webb to become part of a mega-company comprised of Sanderson, Arizona River Runners, Fort Lee and Diamonds. As the eighties became the nineties DRA matured under Bill's direction into his ideal: a family business—owned, managed and guided by the family. The sense of family envisioned by Bill and Pat has overflowed to both crew and passengers. Almost from inception DRA has offered high wages, health insurance, profit sharing and Christmas bonuses. Bill was among the first to take on the responsibility of managing 401K plans for employees.
He also built on the idea of “Rat Parties,” originally held at the Sanderson warehouse, then creating 3-day bashes at the Diamond Cabin in Southern Utah. These affairs included family friends, employees, past clients and other outfitters. Later it was the impromptu mid-summer “Pool Parties” at his house which were riotous affairs where Bill would tell improbable river stories that invariably turned out to be true.
In an era when all river pilots worth their salt had a nickname, Bill's was S.O.B., testament to the fact that in those wild times someone had to be the hard guy. To hear Bill tell it however, S.O.B. stood for Sweet Old Bill and so Sweet William was a second moniker. In the nickname lies the truth about Bill Diamond: a tough guy with a heart of gold. A shrewd businessman who asked for more than it was worth but, who would give it away if you really needed it. Bill was a stern, demanding, but fair boss who continually confounded employees with moments of levity. The title Company President was lost on him. Bill often did the jobs that no one could or wanted to do. On any given day you could find him welding frames, sewing straps, watering plants, chauffeuring late arrivals around Page for last minute items or picking up trips at Diamond Creek. After last summer's flash flood stranded the take-out truck at the river it was Bill who had to lay rocks through the creek to get the wrecker to the river. Since his early teens Bill was never without a job, priding himself on being self-sufficient and beholding to no-one. The idea that he might slow down or delegate “dirty” jobs to someone else would never have occurred to him.
Bill Diamond's greatest love was not the Colorado River. His love and inspiration was his wife, children, and grandchildren. Their slightest accomplishments were a source of great pleasure and much bragging. With the passing of this pioneer, however, the river and its community are the poorer. Thankfully, he leaves behind him a legacy and tradition that his family intends to honor and continue through the river company he built. He was loved by many and will be greatly missed.

The Diamond Family

Bayer

On March 24, 1996, the Canyon lost one of its great admirers. James Gilbert Bayer lost a brief, hard battle with cancer. Bayer, as all of his friends knew him, had a long, intimate affair with the Canyon and the River. He was born on June 8, 1929 in California and thereafter he moved and lived most of his life in Arizona. He spent as much time as he could hiking into the Canyon's depths. In the 1970s he started swamping on river trips with relatives and friends, and he added his own special touch on all trips he was associated with. After swamping a number of years, he was encouraged by his pards to become a boatman and run his own boat. This he did, and again, he added his own special magic, not only to his own trips, but to all trips he came into contact with.

River Runner/Historian P.T. Runs the Last Rapid

“Pat Reilly is a breed apart. He's one of the last of the real pioneers, perhaps the best informed person on the human history of the Grand Canyon.” Martin Litton presented those accolades to P.T. “Pat” Reilly in Where God Lost His Boots, a 1984 documentary on the Reilly-Litton reunion river trip. Unfortunately, the river runner and historian, who was number 109 on Marston's lists, ran his last rapid on 14 October 1996 at the age of eighty-five.
Reilly began his boating career on a 1947 Norman Nevills San Juan trip. On his first Grand Canyon run in 1949 with Nevills, Pat was once again a boatman. He claimed he got interested in the historical aspects because Norm's flare for the dramatic led him to alter history for a good story. In one of P.T.'s last published articles, Utah Historical Quarterly's The Lost World of Glen Canyon, he wrote that “Nevills, tending to add as much color to his trips as possible, elected to call this feature [a large arch 2.3 miles upstream from Glen Canyon Dam] Outlaw Cave, supposedly after a man named Neal Johnson who Nevills said used the place to evade the law… Since this feature was known as Galloway [after Nathaniel Galloway] long before Nevills came on the scene, there is no reason to rename it for a character of imagination.”
One of Pat's last river trips was as a historical interpreter with Art Gallenson of Grand Canyon Expeditions in June, 1982. The water wasn't particularly high that week, and boats became stacked up at Hance on the 15th (with flows anywhere between 3,000 and 8,000 cfs). I was following Michael Denoyer down the river. We had been stalling around all morning waiting for some water; as we slowly motored and drifted to our ultimate fate, we came upon Pat and Art drifting also. In a letter to Denoyer the next month, Pat wrote: “This year at Hance was an eye-opener for me. I never saw so many BFRs exposed, and the 13 rigs and approximately 200 people at the head were more people than I saw in the canyon during my entire career, even including Georgie's large parties which I saw twice during the late 1950s and early 1960s.”
Reilly led his own non-commercial trips from 1953 to 1964. Although at least three other trips left within days in June 1957, Pat's was the only oar-powered trip to run on that highest-recorded Colorado River flow of 126,700 cfs. From the 11th to the 16th, when the trip ended at Bright Angel, the entire run of Marble Canyon and part of Grand Canyon had been done at over 114,000 cfs, the highest water ever attempted by oars through these canyons of the Colorado River.
In response to Denoyer's question about a Dwain “Nort” Norton photo of Pat passing Boulder Narrows on June 11, 1957, he related this observation from his river log: “Tuesday, June 11, 1957 (Volume at LF 122,000; at BA 118,000) ...We play the LH side as we approach Boulder Narrows and land in a cove on the edge of the slide. It looks fantastic. The boulder on the LH shore is completely covered and there is a strong eddy, heavy with drift, rolling upstream. The mid-stream boulder is also covered, the log gone from the highpoint and the large RH hole filled in. Higher water has made the RH channel OK and the hole by the RH projecting boulder at the foot is nearly filled in. The water pours over the vertical downstream face of the big point and we watch large logs take this dive and never do see some of them come up. We can see about 10 ft of this hole, but not the bottom. We take pix, then I run LH channel with Susie and Joe. OK. Ship 3” as we crashed large lateral from eddy. This maneuver required nearly a 180 degree pivot in a comparatively short distance. We pull into eddy to photo others as they run...”
The narrator in Where God Lost His Boots proclaimed that “the dory is Pat and Martin's legacy.” Pat referred to the dory's handling as “you can spin those things like a knob on an outhouse door.” Several photographs in this article show the various hard-hulled row boats with which Reilly was involved: the “Norm,” a Mexican Hat Expeditions sadiron boat of Nevills' design, 1950; one of Pat's cataract-style boats, 1957; and the Ticaboo, a Litton dory, 1984.
Author of enumerable articles and book reviews in scholarly journals such as Utah Historical Quarterly, Journal of Arizona History, The Masterkey, Cave Notes, Plateau, Sierra Club Bulletin and Dialogue, Pat also made a 16mm film in 1955-56 with Tom Cox entitled Below the Rim. He proofread In the House of Stone and Light and Time and the River Flowing, the story of the “flush-on-down” Reilly-led river trip in April, 1964, when the Bureau of Reclamation closed the gates at Glen Canyon Dam.
Reilly was willing to share his knowledge of river and canyon history. He also allowed use of his vast photographic image collection and donated copies of his river logs to archival departments at the University of Utah and Northern Arizona University.
The presenters for “Grand Canyon: The Next Century of Change” (see that article elsewhere in this issue) dedicated the proceedings to the memory of P.T. and for his willingness to share his notes and photographs of the pre-dam Colorado River. Coordinator Bob Webb said: “I owe P.T. Reilly a great deal, and his passing is a great loss to me.” In his Grand Canyon, a Century of Change, Webb wrote: “I especially thank P.T. Reilly, who contributed in one way or another to most of the interesting aspects of this work...Reilly graciously loaned photographs (he had) taken that replicated Stanton views or showed other aspects of change in Grand Canyon.”
Reilly wrote Search for the Site of the Hansbrough-Richards Tragedy, the first sidebar for Webb's book. Pat had contemplated matching the Brown-Stanton party photograph for several trips. He had a good inkling of the camera location from previous experiences in 25-Mile rapid. In the early 1950s below the rapid “the strong current swiftly carried the boat toward an overhanging cliff on the left...I noticed the strong current as it hit the cliff and plunged downward, and I realized that this probably was the place where Hansbrough and Richards had overturned and lost their lives in 1889.” On his 1959 trip, Reilly flipped in 24 1/2-Mile Rapid and floated through 25-Mile. “As the boat and I cleared the rapid, a very strong current caught my legs and straightened them out toward the left wall. I was sure then that I knew how (they) had drowned.” “In the 1950s, water higher than that which the Stanton crew had experienced in 1889 prevented my positive identification of the site, but on April 29, 1964, our party landed on a small fan at mile 25.3. I walked directly to the location from which Nims had taken the picture documenting where Hansbrough and Richards had drowned.” In regards to flips, Pat quipped: “I know now how a handkerchief goes through a washing machine.”
But Pat was not willing to suffer fools. You better have your homework done before you asked questions. He did not easily offer answers to the simple questions, those whose answers should be common knowledge, or at least known with some effort on the part of researchers. Several times a year since 1993, I accompanied Karen Underhill, Head of the Cline Library's Special Collections and Archives, to P.T. and Susie's home in Sun City. On my first visit to look at black and white prints, arranged by river mile, Pat said that every photograph in the set was taken for a purpose. He pulled out one, handed it to me, and then asked what I knew of the photo. I lucked-out by identifying the site of the Hansbrough-Richards drowning. My answer received a “very good,” what I figured to be about a “B+”—good enough to be invited back. Pat then informed me of the rest of the answer, the one that would have earned me an “A.”
One topic Pat was hesitant to reveal too much information about was Lees Ferry. For two to three decades, researchers have been waiting to read what will turn out to be the seminal work on the Ferry. In two volumes, publishers have been reluctant to publish until it is shortened. Pat's wife of almost fifty-nine years, Elizabeth M. “Susie” Reilly, is now discussing the prospect with another round of publishers. An example of what may be found in the work is that in 1964 P.T. and Susie, assisted by Ranger P.D. Martin, completed what is probably the only survey of the Lees Ferry buildings, buildings that the Park Service demolished in 1967.
From 1947 to 1984, Pat made forty flights over the Colorado, San Juan, and Green rivers and Grand Canyon, sometimes as pilot, sometimes as photographer. March 21, 1955, and again on April 16, 1956, he photographed a large natural bridge on the Sinyala fault, which neither P.T. nor anyone in the plane noticed. On April 26, he discovered Keyhole Bridge while examining the slides. Martin Litton, Bill McGill, and Pat hiked from the river up 140-Mile Canyon to document and photograph the bridge on June 29, 1956, one of the last major geographic discoveries in North America. A rock replica of the bridge found at the top confirmed that, once again, native peoples had visited the area long before explorers, adventurers, and river runners.
Reilly had a good sense of humor and could often be found playing a practical joke. It seemed that there was a certain amount of competition between and amongst that generation of river runners, and one-upmanship was not uncommon. Pat told how Norman Nevills wanted to best Dock Marston. Borrowing one of the Nevills' family skulls from the lodge at Mexican Hat, P.T. took a picture of Norm at South Canyon with the 1934-found skeleton lying on the ground—the photo showing the formally headless skeleton with a new skull. Georgie White was not immune either. Camped at Hance one trip with Georgie camped above, he and Nevills retrieved a broken oar floating in the eddy. P.T. had an idea to fake the oar as belonging to John Wesley Powell. He carefully carved initials and a date in it, prematurely weathered it, and left it in camp to be found by Georgie, who turned it into the Park Service.
Sometimes the competition could be carried a bit far. On Dock Marston's Huntington Library copies of Pat's definitive Desert Magazine articles on E.B. “Hum” Woolley, Dock had cut the author byline out of the pages. But through it all P.T. maintained his respect for the river's history. In late 1951, he met Arthur Sanger at the Los Angeles Adventurer's Club and learned of a previously unknown Colorado River traverse in 1903, led by Woolley and accompanied by Sanger and John King. Reilly alerted Marston, who came down from Berkeley to meet Sanger. Dock and P.T. copied Sanger's log.
A bit of Reilly's philosophy might be revealed from some 1984 quotes: “This is a canyon that is so remote, very remote, beyond your eyesite; it is so remote it could be where God lost his boots.” “Relaxing on the river is the easiest thing in the world, as far as I'm concerned. When I'm in the canyon, and I come back, and I find that all the things that have people shook-up like a sackful of chickens don't really matter.” “Well, I try to appreciate everything the canyon has to offer, and I know that, and you couldn't do it in ten lifetimes; but you can do the best you can.”
River runners and historians of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon will miss P.T. and his vast knowledge. Our condolences to Mrs. Elizabeth M. Reilly, herself number 126 through the Canyon, on the passing of her husband and partner, Pat Reilly. Fortunately, P.T. left a grand and valuable legacy in his published works, research papers, and photographs that all will appreciate for a long time to come.