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 with engines, sometimes mechanical problems develop, and they developed a mechanical problem.
It's a 160 horse power, I believe, Gray marine engine, that was in the Esmeralda, and it would not develop full rpm nor full power, and they were a little bit befuddled. It sounded like it had a blown valve, but whatever the reason was, they elected to abandon it. Ed Hudson, and I believe his son, left a big SOS sign on a sandbar in the Granite Gorge and were either contacted by radio by Dock Marston, or else were seen by someone who saw the SOS and Ed and his son were taken to the South Rim by helicopter—which again was not all that common at that particular era.

Roy Webb: Right at Tuna, right about Mile 100 or so, is where they abandoned it. Ed Hudson's in the Esmeralda, and he loses control and bangs into the wall and Dock Marston is in his Criscraft, and he sees what's happenin', so he kind of turns it around. And in the meantime, Willie Taylor had gotten thrown off the boat, and so Marston sees him off the boat and he picks up a rope and throws it to him, and then he sees the Esmeralda in trouble, so he spins the wheel and guns the engine, and Taylor's struggling with the rope, and he's gotten it wrapped it around his neck, and Marston guns the engine and there they go, they're draggin' Willie underwater with the rope around his neck. So that area right there is called “Willie's Necktie. ”And so then he finally realized, he got up to the Esmeralda and he turned around, and there's Taylor with the rope around his neck, and he's floatin' around in the water, and so he pulled it off of him, he had a big bruise all around his neck.
Actually, it didn't sound like he really [damaged the Esmeralda] that much, but he banged it up, and he thought it was wounded mortally. And Hudson was kind of an emotional sort of guy. He'd put a lot of work into this boat, too, and a lot of money. He'd modified it a couple of times, he'd put a bigger engine in and everything, and was real committed to this run, but somehow he thought that this was the end of the Esmeralda. And Dock Marston was just standing there saying, “No, there's nothing wrong with this boat. What are you doin'?”He was just aghast that Hudson was gonna abandon this perfectly good boat. And Hudson just said, basically, “It's my boat, and so we'll commit it to the river,” in this real emotional scene. And as Bob described, that's exactly what they did—pushed it off shore. It sounds like they didn't even unload it.

They didn't, they didn't. Everything was there. It's just like somebody's house—everything was there.

Roy Webb: There was some rumor that Hudson was kind of secretly relieved. And indeed, he never came back. He was never on the river again.

Then Dock headed on down the river. Ed Hudson told the Park Service that they cast the Esmeralda loose—which they did, they put it out in the river and cast it down the river—and said, “If it ever shows up in Lake Mead, why, it's yours. ” Well, eddies along the river collect everything from boats to bodies and driftwood and everything in between.

Beer.

Beer cans, whatever you want. But the Esmeralda washed up on the right side of the Canyon up there [around Forster].
As we came on the 1950 trip, it was my first trip through the Canyon. We picked up Pat Reilly as an extra boatman at Phantom Ranch, so there were really five boatmen in four cataract boats: Frank Wright, Jim Rigg, Don Smith was a boatman, and myself, and then there was Pat Reilly. We were takin' turns after the first day or so out of Phantom Ranch. But we come around the corner, and high and dry about fifty yards from the Colorado River was the Esmeralda sitting upright, facing the Colorado River. We of course immediately clamored, because after all, anything that you can salvage, you try to salvage along the river. And we went up to the boat, and just swarmed over it, is really what people did. We had a party of about twelve of us, as I recall. The keys were in the engine, everything looked fine, it looked shipshape. There were just a couple of little dings on the hull where it bounced off rocks as it had been abandoned—nothing that leaked, and nothing that we ever repaired. It was very minimal damage, a good hull. Jim turned on the engine and sure enough, in about ten or fifteen seconds—I mean, just literally, immediately—took off and cranked up. We began to look at each other and thought about the possibility of gettin' the Esmeralda out of the Grand Canyon, and if not, why not? I mean, no guts at all—without a little bit of guts, why, you don't run rivers. We fiddled with it, it didn't sound quite right, but we thought we could get it on down the river. The river had dropped considerably since Hudson and Marston had gone through—witness where the Esmeralda was.
We turned it on its side. At least half of the passengers were women, or more probably six or seven women—great gals. And boy, I tell ya', they all pitched in, we heaved and hawed and hoed. Major Bill Matthews took some of the films of that trip. We got logs and just rolled it down, log after log. It took maybe twenty or thirty minutes to get it down to the edge of the river, put it in the river, set it and roll it back upright. Everything really was in pretty good shape. All of the logs were there, as far as the cache for gasoline on down the river. The gas cache, maps, tools.

They apparently abandoned it without really lookin' at the engine to see what was the matter. Jim cranked it up in a little bit of eddy there. We were able to get on the River and it worked pretty darned good, you know. That sure beat the heck out of rowin' (laughter), so off we went. The Esmeralda took off down the river. The rest of us piled back in the cataract boats and tried to keep up. And Jim was up and down the river and entertaining us, goofin' around, tryin' to figure out what might be the matter, workin' on the carburetor and everything else. We still thought it was probably a valve.
That evening we pulled into camp, and I cannot tell you where, but it was on down the river a few miles. We spent about ten days or so on the lower half. Couldn't go too far any one day. That evening, with the tool box and everything that was already there, we pulled the pump, we pulled the head, to see what was going. It was a simple thing to do, a flat head. Frank's eyes and Jim's eyes just lit up when they pulled the head off and looked down here, and here's a broken gasket between the third and fourth cylinder. And just a little section, about one inch. It wasn't very wide, not over a quarter-inch wide—very narrow between the cylinders. And you know, they were airplane mechanics, and Smith was a plumber. Jim was a mechanic, Frank was a very well-versed mechanic. We'd all been in aviation, we were all pilots, I guess. We knew at least “gee and haw” on those things, and it wasn't thirty minutes until Frank had cut out a little piece of head gasket from the engine of the head gasket, and fit it to form. We put little jagged edges, pointed edges on each side, and wrapped [it] up. We had a piece of foil from a piece of chewing gum that he had there. Wrapped it around it, and put the gasket on the head, put the head back on, and we cranked up the engine and it ran perfect. We took it on out, took it clear across the lake. We pulled the cataract boats down to Pearce's Ferry and took the Esmeralda and went on across the lake.
So that was the rescue of the Esmeralda. When we came out at 205, it was quite a temptation to go back up 205, because it was fairly low, and there was not much of a drop and the waves were quite small. The only reason we didn't take the Esmeralda, or Jim didn't run the Esmeralda back up, is we were comin' down with the cataract boats, and we didn't really want to take a chance of blowin' the gasket out again. But I'm confident we could have gone up 205, and we didn't have anything between there and Lava that would have stopped us from taking the Esmeralda up the river, which was Ed Hudson's goal. So we claimed to be the first group that ever went through with four boats and came out with five. [laughter] We went clear across to Boulder City with it, and Jim called Ed Hudson, and all Ed Hudson could say [was], “Oh, my God, is my face red!” That was Ed Hudson's comment on the Esmeralda. From then on it was, whose boat was it, who did it really belong to? They tried to keep the Esmeralda, but the Park Service was adamant that it was gonna be their boat. They tried to pull the strings, you know, about who does what on the river—and they still do, and I don't think that their intelligence function has gone up very great since that.
So if you go to the South Rim, take a look at the Esmeralda. It's kind of a slim-built thing, but it really splattered a lot of water, and it was a great boat.
That sort of whetted our interest in power boats, and it was 1952 then when we ran Criscraft cabin cruisers for the first time. We ran those from ‘52 to ‘57 or ‘8, I guess.

Didn't you have a funny little run at Bedrock in one of those?

Well, I lost the steering one time goin' through Bedrock. I came down the tongue, and Bedrock didn't have the change that it has now, but we changed the positive steering system, which went bolts and nuts and pipes to the rudder, to a fast response aviation-type aileron thing, where you turn your wheel 180 degrees and you can get 180 degrees of rudder. You can turn it the whole swing within just a matter of a half a turn or so. We were hoping to get faster response. The ones that Criscraft made, you had to make sometimes about fifteen turns before you get to the other side and back the same way. You know how it is in Granite Narrows in turbulent water, and we were in big water and turbulent water a lot, and we just couldn't turn the darned thing fast enough to keep off the walls sometimes. And we did flounder, I guess, once or twice—just put it right in the wall, couldn't stop, couldn't do anything about it. Nothing was ever damaged—just a hell of a bang—but no damage.
Anyway, we changed it and used a cable system like they have on the ailerons on an airplane. I came into Bedrock, and settin' off there, pointin' a little bit to the side, and I thought, “Well, just give it a little bit of a goose and turn the wheel at the same time,” and I did that, and no sooner I did that, than I pulled the pulleys, so that the cable with the pulleys just pulled completely loose, and I was rudderless—couldn't guide the darn thing. So I throttled back, grabbed the cables going down on each side, and I was able to get the rudder adjusted to what I felt was a better position, and give it some gas and to go that way, and you had to pull the power off and take your hands and jockey the cables back and forth to get the rudder goin' a different direction—and this is all the way through Bedrock. I don't think I missed Bedrock by twelve inches. I mean, it was right out here in big water, really frothing at us. But we didn't hit anything, never dinged a prop on it or anything, but I thought I'd bought a piece of real estate in the middle of Bedrock Rapids for a few minutes.
We got along with the Criscraft pretty well, actually. I went through here two and a half times before I changed a prop one time. That shows you some reasonableness of lack of contact of rocks, and lack of contact with driftwood. Driftwood was the biggest hazard on props. But the Criscrafts and the Esmeralda, they were fun boats. Dock Marston sure took down a bunch of different powered outfits. It's a good way to see the river, it was kinda fun.
With the high water coming up next year, I know where there's a Criscraft cabin cruiser that's well-preserved. [laughter] Keep me in mind. We'll resurrect it if you think you'd like to take one down sometime.

All in favor?

Aye!

Opposed? [no response] Carried!

We'll go, we'll do it!