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Bob Rigg
 he Esmeralda was basically a Higgins landing craft. It had kind of a spoon bill on it and went down in 1949 with Dock Marston and Ed Hudson. They came back the following year—they ultimately desired to come back up the Canyon. Garth can probably tell you a lot of details I don't know about, that I'm not familiar with, or I might embellish in the wrong direction.
Marston: That's the best thing to do, both of us lie. [laughter]
Dock and Ed took off in 1950 for a second trip with the Esmeralda and Dock's Criscraft. They came down in really quite fast time. They cached a lot of gasoline along the way, for the eventuality of an upstream run. As things happen
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John Cross Jr.
 bout 1969 or ‘70, I decided that the way of the future was a little bit faster boat through the Canyon. So I got talkin' to Don Harris and Bill Belknap and a couple of others about the possibility of runnin' a power boat through, because they had done it before. They kinda thought it was a neat idea, just for an expedition, but they didn't really think it was too good an idea to be takin' passengers down. But I disagreed, and ended up puttin' together about a 27-foot fiberglass jet boat.
The early history of it was it had made the first documented successful upstream run in Cataract Canyon a few years before that. The guy that had done it, John Newland—I don't know that he had a whole lot of interest in river running, but it was just something to do—a “guts and glory” thing. He
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