Bob Euler

Bob Euler, continued from cover
Then I thought to myself: “Gosh! Wonder what the rest of Grand Canyon is like archaeologically.” And I hooked up with, just by coincidence, the Arizona Power Authority. At that time they were interested in building a couple of dams in Grand Canyon: one at Bridge Canyon and one at Marble Canyon… It was the late '50s by that time: '58, '59. They took me on a couple of trips over to where they wanted to build Bridge Canyon Dam. They even took me on a river trip up from Pierce Ferry up to the damsite just above Separation Canyon. And that whetted my appetite even more. So the Arizona Power Authority in 1960 said: “Would you like to take a river trip and just sort of see what archeological resources are in the way, that would have to be excavated if and when we build these dams?”
So 1960 was my first river trip and I went with the Sandersons. It wasn't a company then. They were just a family affair. They had three small outboard boats—aluminum boats: fourteen feet long, each with twin 35-horse engines on them. And I remember on that trip there were twelve of us and nine of the twelve were Sandersons. It was just a “family outing”. That's what it amounted to. And the Arizona Power Authority paid my expenses on the trip. I think they gave Sanderson something like $200 for the whole trip…which lasted— I can't remember exactly—about eleven days, something like that—that we were on the river.
Another professional archeologist had preceded me on river trips in the early 1950s: Dr. Walter W. Taylor, who was a very well-known archeologist, retired now. I don't remember the details of his trip except it was on some boats that had inboard motors. And he was among the first 200 to make the trip down the river, when Dock Marston was still keeping records of how many people went on those trips. He was among the first 200. Somebody on my trip in 1960 was among the first 500 to make the trip.
It was a pretty exciting trip. The river was flowing a little over 60,000 cfs. This was in June of 1960. And I really didn't know what I was getting into at all (laughing). But I do remember that when we got above Lava Falls it was the only time Rod Sanderson ever said anything to us. He said, “I just want you to remember, no matter what happens, hang onto that boat. That's your transportation out of here!” And we made it all right. We took a lot of water, but we got through it just fine on that trip.
I did revisit some of the archeological sites that Walt Taylor had recorded a few years before, and recorded a few more at that time. That of course whetted my appetite even more. “I got sand in my hip pockets”, as they say! And, um, I managed to make altogether three trips with the Sandersons prior to the building of the Dam. The last trip I remember was— guess the Dam was being filled then— 1965 I think it was. Um…those three boats had just about had it. On our first trip in 1960 we took welding equipment with us for the aluminum. When we'd hit rocks they would stop and patch it. On the third trip in those boats they were so full of holes that we were patching them with flattened out tin cans and pieces of Levis and that sort of thing. They were in pretty bad shape by that time. They'd made ten trips altogether and I made three with those boats and I think it may have been the last trip they ever made. It certainly was the last trip I ever made in, uh, an aluminum power boat, going down the river.
Do you remember who were the pilots or who was driving the first three boats?
Well, Rod Sanderson, Jerry's father. Jerry was too young to drive one himself. He was learning then. And Jerry's uncle from Phoenix—big, husky man, I've forgotten his name, now; maybe it was Bill, something like that. He ran another one. And I've forgotten who ran the third, maybe it was [Jerry's brother, Bill.] Somewhere in my files I've got pictures of that, that trip, going through various rapids. And we ran every single one of them. I didn't have too much time to stop and look for archeological sites because it was too difficult at that high water to tie up where we wanted to. Although I know on the last trip we, at lower water, maybe 40,000, something like that, we were able to run back up the river through Granite Narrows because I had seen a site up on the cliff and I didn't have time to stop and the next day they ran me back up with these power boats. So they had pretty good power for them.
And you remember them actually hitting rocks.
Oh, you bet! Yeah! You bet. And I remember them beaching the boat, turning it over, welding the gashes that were in it. I remember they told me it was very difficult to weld aluminum. But some of the Sandersons were expert at this and so we had torches and I don't know how big the tanks were they used. But that was the only trip we had welding equipment with us. The rest of the time it was patching with other materials.
In the last trip I took with those power boats, in 1965, I said earlier they were in pretty bad shape by then, the boats were, and so were the motors. And I remember having all sorts of trouble with the motors. Uh, down near Fern Glen we ruined a lower unit and the Sandersons stuck it up under a rock on the left bank. Last time I was down you could barely see it…. They did that just to mark our passage, I guess! On that same trip, by the time we got to Lava Falls, we were out of spare parts for the motors. One of the boats was down to one motor. So I remember very vividly we ran one boat through and then we waited below Lava Falls to watch the second boat come through. And then we were supposed to take off…uh…to go to St. George to try to find another lower unit while the second boat carried one of their engines back up above Lava Falls, through that mess over at Warm Springs. Uh, and they all made it…made it through.
We hiked up and I think it was with Bill Sanderson. Let me back up a minute. We were met on each of these trips at the foot of the Bundy Trail, there [at Whitmore], with gasoline. Uh, I know we took on…in that time they had a pipeline coming down from the rim and they'd pour five gallons in the top and we'd catch it at the bottom. They rigged that up for those jet boats that were going upriver about the same time. The Bundys met us at the foot of the trail, three Bundys. And they had a pickup truck up on top. And we hiked up that trail, something like 1300 feet up, and got in their pickup and drove to Bundyville, which had 28 Bundys living in it at the time. And then they drove us into St. George and we did find a lower unit that would fit, and drove back, got to the rim of the Canyon about eleven o'clock at night, and hiked down in the dark…carrying that thing. Forgot to take a flashlight, of course!…
In all those trips the boats never flipped, I was never out of the boat at all. I thought I was once in Lava Falls, but, uh, you know, at that high water it was just terrible and I hung on for dear life and made it! [laughing]
Man, I tell you! To be down there at 60,000 in a…And these are fourteen foot boats?
Yes. Seven feet wide, fourteen…They held four people—a pilot and three passengers. And we didn't have much room for gear. We didn't take tents or anything like that with us.
What would you do in the rain?
We all huddled together and put a tarp over us [laughing]…Over all twelve people, when it rained. I can remember on one of those trips, opposite Deer Creek Falls, it just poured all night and we had this tarp over us that got hot and sticky and we were afraid of scorpions in fact [laughing]. We stayed relatively dry anyway.
What was Rod Sanderson like? How did he strike you? How was he to be around?
Uh…he was a no-nonsense person. Very stern with the kids. I know on one of those trips he caught Jerry up at Phantom Ranch drinking beer and he raised holy hell about that. I can remember him saying, “This river water and booze don't mix! There won't be any of it on my trips!”
So he didn't…so he wasn't a hard-drinking guy himself.
Oh, I think he might have been. Yes. But not on the river he wasn't. Yes. But he was very skilled. He'd been on the river lots before that. I think he told me once he'd been on at some great flood of over a hundred thousand cfs and, uh, just had practically no control over the boats. He was working, I guess, for the Bureau of Reclamation at an early damsite, which was…hmm…up near Redwall Cavern someplace. So that's when he first got on the river, I think. And then he's the one that found the body of that Boy Scout in the late '40s that drowned up in Glen Canyon and they found him at…in that big eddy at President Harding Rapid. The same place where Hansbrough was found by the Stanton Expedition and buried there up in the cliffs. Rod was on the trip with Willie Taylor who's grave is just down below President Harding there. He died of a heart attack down there.
So Rod was a very fine person, a very good man with those power boats. He was a very strict individual with everybody on the trips. He was quite conservative. Above many of the rapids we would stop and look them over and he and the other two pilots would plot a course down. Of course this was especially true at Lava. We'd always stopped on the left side of Lava in those days to look it over, rather than the right bank…
Well, those were exciting days. I didn't get as much archeology done as I would have liked because we just didn't have the time to spend a lot of time on land exploring. And on my last trip with the Sandersons, last trip in the power boats, Walt Taylor went with me, the archeologist who had been on the river in the '50s. And we plotted out some research sitting around the campfire. And I think that must have been '65, because in 1966 I got a National Science Foundation grant—I've forgotten how much money was involved—but it was enough for me to spend a couple of months in a helicopter flying all the side canyons from the dam down as far as Havasu on the left and Kanab Canyon on the right. And I…it was just marvelous. The pilot was very good. It was an old piston-driven Hiller. But we'd go up the side canyons and then just sort of moosh our way down as low and as slow as he could fly. When we'd spot a ruin we'd land and record it and then go on our way. Those were exciting trips in those piston-driven helicopters.
The pilot…uh…I think his name was Wayne Learn. And he had visions of starting the first helicopter tour business out of Tusayan. I contracted with him with my National Science Foundation money to fly us every day— two of us—my assistant, Larry Powers, who lives in Flagstaff now. And, uh, we just had a marvelous time in that helicopter. There were times when we got a lot of down-drafts and we had trouble getting up out of the Canyon. And we'd search around until we found an updraft and then away we'd go. It was much different from the Jet Rangers that I flew in later with the Park Service.
I've forgotten how many ruins I recorded—about 60 on that long couple of months that we were flying almost every day. And, uh, then just to wind up that part of the story, in later years when I was with the Park Service at Grand Canyon I was able to commandeer, so to speak, the Jet Ranger and fly into other areas that I had not been in before. For example, we flew the area that's called the Havasupai Traditional Use Lands—mostly the Esplanade, around the Great Thumb and near Mount Sinyala. We spent three weeks every day flying that area and recorded a tremendous number of ruins in there. I finally got to the point where I felt I knew something about the archeology of Grand Canyon.

* * *
Dr. Bob Euler is an archeologist who has spent a good part of his career studying people who lived in the Grand Canyon. Dr. Euler has worked for, been affiliated with, or taught at a variety of institutions and entities, including the Hualapai Nation, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Arizona Power Authority, the National Park Service, Northern Arizona University, and Prescott College to name just a few. He was pretty much a Grand Canyon fixture from the late '60s through the early '80s.
We sat down with him at his home in Prescott for two different sessions way back in the winter of 1994 and recorded the interview from which the following excerpts were taken.

* * *
I was born in New York, 1924, and my parents moved to Colorado when I was about eight and so I really grew up in Colorado right under the shadow of Pikes Peak, west of Colorado Springs. Went to high school there. Became interested in Indians at that time. I had a job cleaning out an Indian curio store—sweeping it out in the evenings while I was in high school. And I got all interested in Indians. And I decided to go to college and study anthropology. I didn't know much about it and I didn't know where I wanted to go to college. But in my senior year in high school the famous Egyptologist, James Henry Breasted, came to talk in our little high school—200 kids in the whole high school— and my mother said, “Why don't you go up after his talk and ask him about where you might go to college or university?”
So I did. I went up and introduced myself and he said, “Well, are you interested in New World or Old World archeology?” Well, I barely knew the difference. I said, “Well, I'm in the New World. I guess I'm interested in that.” And he suggested that I apply to go to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, which had a very up and coming department even that time before World War II.
So I went there as a freshman in 1940. I spent two years there, until I had to go into the service for World War II. I joined the Marine Corps in the fall of 1942, sort of following in my father's footsteps—he'd been in the Marines in World War I and the Marine Corps at that time promised they'd leave me in school till I graduated, which was a big lie! So by the first of July of '43 I was on active duty. And I had my first experience with Flagstaff that year. The Navy had a v-12 unit, training unit, there. They had 200 Marines and 200 sailors there; and I spent two semesters in school at what is now nau before I went back to boot camp and on to officer candidate school. I got my commission in the end of September of 1944. Immediately shipped overseas to join a unit in Hawaii and from there went to Iwo Jima. Spent nineteen days there until I got shot and then back to various hospitals on Guam and in Hawaii and finally, back to the States.
After I was relieved from active duty I went—I liked nau quite a bit and I went back to school there—eventually took a bachelor's degree and the master's degree there. But not in anthropology—they didn't have any anthropology there. But I took it in economics.
And then I decided, “Well, economics isn't really what I want after all. I want to go back to anthropology.” So I reapplied to the University of New Mexico. They took me in on sort of a probationary status and I spent three or four years there in course work, trying to make up for what I had missed all the years of the war. And I finally took a job in 1952 at the Museum of Northern Arizona with Dr. Harold Colton. I hadn't quite finished my degree then, but I was out of money and I needed to get a job, so I went there and eventually finished my Ph.D in 1958 while I was working part time at the museum in Flagstaff and teaching part time at what later became nau…
Dr. Colton founded the Museum of Northern Arizona in the late 1920s. And he was a very wealthy man from Philadelphia, I believe. But he had a Ph.D in zoology that he took about 1908, something like that. He and his wife used to spend their summers in Flagstaff, out in what is now East Flagstaff. And then they decided they liked it so much that they built a house up on Fort Valley Road and started that museum. He was a wonderful old gentleman. Uh, I don't know how to really to describe him. He was a very gentle man, came from a very wealthy family in Philadelphia, and was very supportive of me when I worked there. I worked for him from 1952 until 1956 when I went full-time teaching at the university. All the time I was trying to finish my Ph.D dissertation and raise a family and that sort of thing…I mentioned a little bit earlier that Colton had sent me over to the Hualapai Reservation to help them with their land claim case. I wound up excavating ten archeological sites, not all on the Reservation. I said earlier some, in some of those tributary canyons, but also some off the Reservation that we thought had a bearing on their land claim case. Excavated ten of them and I turned that into a Ph.D dissertation…
When I first started doing archeology I wasn't interested solely in archeology, but I was also interested in the relationship of archeology to living peoples, like the Hopi or the Hualapai or Havasupai. And, um, we simply would develop a research design and a series of questions that we wanted answered through our research and try to follow that as best we could in the field. A lot of my early work was just pure archeological survey. By that I mean you simply went out and covered a piece of ground and tried to see what was there in the way of either historical or prehistorical ruins, before you started thinking about excavating sites. Then you picked out a few important sites that you thought might shed more light on the prehistory of the people you were dealing with and excavate those…. It was about the time that what then was called “salvage archeology” was getting going…uh, when highways were supposed to be constructed. We were able to go out and do a reconnaissance of that highway right-of-way. And, uh, that became very big business, uh, not just on highways but dams, reservoirs, pipelines. In fact before Glen Canyon Dam was built there were huge archeological projects in the area of that proposed reservoir pool to excavate. The University of Utah had a big contract. The Museum of Northern Arizona had another one. And a tremendous amount of work was done, thanks to those federal laws that required this sort of thing.
* * *
The earliest record that we have of human beings in Grand Canyon is represented by the makers of the split-twig figurines, which have been radio-carbon dated at between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. They are found in a number of isolated caves in the Redwall Limestone in the Canyon. They've also been found out on the Mojave Desert of California and at one site in Walnut Canyon south of Flagstaff. We don't know who made these figurines. They left no evidence except the figurines themselves. They're very ingeniously, but simply, made out of one twig of willow—usually willow—sometimes squaw bush, the plant that's called Rhus trilobata. A twig about three feet long usually, although this varied, which was split lengthwise down most but not all of its length. The unsplit portion became the hind leg of the animal. One of the splints was bent to wrap around and form the body. The other splint was put up vertically to form the neck, head, and front legs of this animal. Occasionally, relatively rarely, we find pieces of dung stuck inside the body of the figurine, usually the dung of a now-extinct mountain goat that lived in the Canyon, a goat called Oreamnos. But that goat lived and died long before the split-twig figurine makers came along. They found the dung in these caves and, uh, for some reason or other they put a piece in the body occasionally.
While we don't know who made these we have a guess. Along the South Rim of the Canyon and near the summit of Red Butte just south of the Canyon we've recorded some sites of archaic…um…hunters who were in the area making a distinctive type of spear point that we refer to as a Pinto Basin point because the first of them were found over in the Pinto Basin of the Mojave Desert. Now, the Pinto projectile points or spear points have been dated at about the same age as the figurines. So we assume, if they're found in proximity to one another, maybe the Pinto Basin hunters are the ones who made the figurines. We're never going to be sure of this, of course, until we find one of those Pinto Basin points sticking in one of the figurines…
More recently some paleontologists working in the Canyon, looking primarily for remains of Pleistocene birds and animals, have found additional figurines in caves that are exceedingly difficult to get into, requiring ropes and climbing equipment. In those caves they've found the cairns of rock or in some cases cairns of the dung of this extinct mountain goat with figurines in association. This gives us a little bit more information, perhaps, as to the significance of the figurines. That's about all we know at present about them.
When I was working in the Canyon I took a National Geographic photographer down to Stanton's Cave. He was interested in the cave and the figurines and the history of Stanton leaving his gear in the cave. And we talked about the figurines quite a bit and he said at that time, “Why don't you do an excavation in the cave to see if you can find out more about the figurine makers.” And I said, very blankly, “Because it costs money to do this.” Well, lo and behold, the National Geographic Society then came up with two grants to enable me to go down.
I spent a month down there in the summer of I think it was 1969 with a couple of my students—three of my students. Um, we camped on the beach just below the mouth of South Canyon and worked in the cave every day. We put in two test trenches. We didn't find any evidence of human use below the surface. That is to say, all of the figurines that we recovered, and we recovered over 60 of them, which are now at Grand Canyon National Park, all of them were on the surface or just covered by a little cave dust or, in a number of cases, hidden under rockfall. The cave floor was littered with rockfall when we first started to work there. As we dug down, like sensible archeologists, we went down all the way to bedrock. We did find a great deal of biological material in those trenches that we put down, very important biological material that, when analyzed, told us a great deal about the past environment of the Canyon, perhaps going back as much as 40,000 years. Right resting on bedrock in the bottom of our trenches were masses of driftwood—wood that was bedded in the cave deposits just like driftwood is buried or deposited along the beach lines. We've had this driftwood dated at …well, it's almost beyond the ability of normal radio carbon equipment to count, to determine. We sent it off, some of it off to a usgs lab in Palo Alto, California, and they came back with a date of 47,000 plus years ago, for the driftwood. They don't know how much beyond that it was. There are some geologists who feel that perhaps the driftwood was put in there about the time one of the lava dams by…down by Lava Falls, caused the huge backup in the river. That may well be. I've never done any actual measurements, elevational measurements, to see whether that's true or not.
The other biological materials we found—a lot of plant remains that indicated that at about 12 or 13,000 years ago, the Canyon environment was a cold desert, like you get up in Northern Utah today with sagebrush and that sort of thing. We also found above the driftwood the dung and the remains, fragmentary remains, of this extinct mountain goat, Oreamnos… That's the genus. It was not related to the present bighorn sheep at all that are in the Canyon, but a distinct species of goat that is now extinct, died out around the end of the Pleistocene geological period.
We found also the fragmentary remains of a giant vulture, whose scientific name is Teratornis. It was in some ways related to the condors. This beast had a wingspan of seventeen feet. A huge beast that probably brought its prey into the cave to eat and then some of them died there. At least we found fragmentary remains of it. Condors have also been found in the Canyon—Pleistocene condors, but not in Stanton's Cave. The paleontologist, Steve Emslie and his colleague at nau, Jim Mead, are the ones that are hot in pursuit of this Pleistocene fauna; doing quite a bit of work in these isolated caves, today.
So that's the earliest evidence we have of human beings in the Canyon.
Interestingly enough during the work that Emslie and Mead have done in the last year, one of the members of their party came across another very early type of projectile point somewhere up on Nankoweap Mesa. It's the fragment of a Folsom projectile point, the first one ever found in the Canyon. We have no idea what it's doing there, it wasn't found in association with anything else. But the Folsom hunters were mostly out on the high plains hunting giant Pleistocene bison. And, how this got into the Canyon I don't know…
The other evidence that we have for early people in the Canyon has to do with some pictographs, archaic pictographs that are very similar to some up in Utah, relating to an archaic culture that lived up there. These are found at one site in the western part of the Canyon and, nowhere else that I know of. But they've been studied fairly carefully. And they seem to date less than 3,000 years ago, but not much less. I don't think at the moment we can say there is any connection between the people who painted these weird human-like figures on the rocks or walls of the Canyon with the split-twig figurine people.
Then we don't get any more evidence of humans in the Canyon until around 300 or 400 a.d., maybe even 500 a.d., when the “Anasazi” (or “Hisatsinam”) people first made some halting explorations into the Canyon, coming from their heartland just to the east, around the present-day Hopi and Navajo country. Apparently they found the Canyon to their liking and by 1050, 1100, there were simply hundreds of ruins occupied by Anasazi hunters and farmers; farming corn, beans, squash, maybe a little cotton, even, in the Canyon. And, uh, they enjoyed a pretty good life there. They moved around almost at will on some very hairy trails in the Canyon, for about a hundred years. By 1150 a.d. or shortly thereafter, primarily because of drought conditions in the northern Southwest, at that time they moved out and moved probably back to the present-day Hopi country because they were the direct ancestors of the Hopi Indians.

At the same time, beginning about 700 a.d., a little bit to the west of the Anasazi area of the Canyon, there was another group of people, whom we call the Cohonina. They were in friendly contact with the Anasazi. They tried to emulate the cultural traits of the Anasazi—pottery and pottery designs, and architecture in the form of masonry structures. They didn't always get the hang of it, but there they were, mostly along the South Rim, oh, just west of the Bass Trail, in that area, and also in some places even east of there on the South Rim, as far east as Tusayan Ruin where they were in contact with the Anasazi people. They disappeared from the record about a.d. 1150 and we have no idea where they went. As I may have mentioned the other day the archeologist Doug Schwartz believed at one time for a number of years that they were the ancestors of the Havasupai and the Hualapai, but there's no evidence of that. In fact, as I said the other day, the Canyon seems to have been abandoned by human beings from about 1150 or 1200 until 1300 a.d. At that time the correct ancestors of the Havasupai and the Hualapai, people archeologists speak of as belonging to the

Cerbat traditions, moved eastward up over the Grand Wash Cliffs and settled the entire area of mostly the south side of the Canyon extending, that is, in the Canyon as well as on the South Rim, extending over as far as the Little Colorado River, maybe even a little bit beyond that.
While the Cerbat or Pai people were settling the South Rim, the ancestors of the Southern Paiute were coming in from the north, settling the North Rim, some of this…the tributary canyons to the North Rim. Paiute evidences have been found, oh, down in Nankoweap Canyon. Way to the west, in what is called Indian Canyon, there are good Paiute sites in there. A lot of Paiute sites in Parashant Canyon. And, uh, they remained there in the Canyon as well as up on the rim and back up into southern Utah, including all of the Arizona Strip country, until they were forcibly removed from there by European advances. Farther north Europeans wiped out a lot of Southern Paiute.
When you say “Europeans”, do you mean the Spanish or…?
When I talk about “Europeans” I'm talking first of all about the Spaniards who had fairly decent relationships on their explorations through Paiute country in the late 1700s, early 1800s. When the Anglos came along, uh, the relationships changed. The Anglos looked down on the Paiutes, they took advantage of them, they shot a lot of them, and, uh, tried to teach them how to farm, which they already knew how to do, and finally put them on reservations, such as at Kaibab and Shivwits and places like that. So that was essentially the end—let's say in the 1850s, 1860s. That was essentially the end of Paiute occupation of the North Rim of Grand Canyon.

* * *
Maybe we ought to go over how you found the Anasazi Bridge and um…Kenton and Elly hiking out the route for you.
Okay. Alright. Harvey Butchart claims that one of his friends first discovered that bridge and that may be the case. I first saw it…oh, when was it?…Nineteen… 60…oh, in the 1960s sometime…I was doing this helicopter survey for the Arizona Power Authority at the proposed Marble Canyon dam site and we just saw it from the air. And, somebody climbed up to it. I guess it was Harvey Butchart that later climbed up to it and brought me down a piece of wood from the bridge so I could have it radio-carbon dated. Later on, on one of my river trips, I managed to climb up to it and found broken bits of prehistoric pottery along the route. I don't know how in the devil I ever got down from there—I'm not much of a climber, but I know they had a rope around me and helped me to get back down from that. Then we got Kenton Grua and Ellen Tibbetts interested in it and we arranged to fly them up to the bottom of the route to the bridge in the helicopter and gave them one of the Park Service radios so they could talk to us. We—Trinkle Jones and I stayed down on the beach. And we have good telephoto slides of their route climb up to there. You can see their white hardhats as they went up. They took ropes with them, but they didn't use them—they made a free climb all the way. And didn't step on the bridge—it's just very fragile. And they worked their way around behind it and on up several traverses. And some distance above the bridge they came across this cave in which they found pieces of weaving equipment from a loom. Um…they went all the way up to the top of the rim and then back down bringing us some of those loom tools down with them so that we could, as archeologists, analyze them and make sure that's what they were. Those two are up in the study collections at Grand Canyon now. And they got back down and away we went, flying…and flying out.
Trinkle Jones and I wanted to get in that cave once…after that. We wanted to really study it. So we had a very good helicopter pilot who took us up there just below the mouth of the cave. And he said, “Now, I can put you down here on one skid and let you get out very gently and then I'll fly off and come back later and pick you up.” Well, he did that and just as he was about to tell us to get out, the rock on which the skid was sitting collapsed! And we peeled off and that was the end of our attempts to visit that cave.
Um…This loom that Kenton and Elly found… I'm trying to grasp the implications of that.
Okay. The Anasazi were carrying this…pieces of this wooden loom on the route out of the Canyon that they had pioneered. And they for some reason or another left the parts of it in the cave. I'm sure they weren't doing any weaving down there; they just were taking it from one place to another and left it there.
Does that mean that they grew cotton and used it? Is that…I wonder what they would weave with it.
They wove things out of cotton, out of dog hair, and out of a flax-like wild plant, the name of which escapes me at the moment, a wild fibrous plant, you know. Now…we found very little evidence of cotton in the Canyon proper. But we know that the Hisatsinam were growing cotton elsewhere and weaving very nice robes from it.
I'm trying to visualize, when they were living down there during the heyday, there are places that…uh…you know, kind of the typical spots where we visit, in South Canyon; where we talk about the bridge; and we talk about Nankoweap and Unkar and stuff, maybe it would be good to just visualize what...Did they…were they actually farming right there in all those places?
Um, yes, they certainly were, but probably not right up by the area going up to the bridge or not right at above Vasey's Paradise where that ruin is.
Those were migratory routes.
That's too rugged a country, yes. But down at the…Basalt and Unkar we found check dams, rock dams across areas where drainage would come down, that were ideal for farming. And then, going back to the bridge, up on top, there by Buck Farm—the rim at Buck Farm Canyon —um, there's an area…really it's the very upper part of the South Canyon drainage where it's just a very shallow swale…uh, I have recorded up there…I think I am correct in these figures…over 30 Anasazi ruins that were occupied around 1100 a.d. And, in the wash, 77 check dams. And I dug down behind one of those dams to recover soil from which pollen analysis could be done and we found corn pollen there. That was a big Anasazi settlement up there above South Canyon…
Same is true on the North Rim. As one explores the North Rim itself, oh, from Bright Angel Canyon westward, wherever there's a way to get down into the Canyon there are ruins on the rim. Where there's no route down there aren't any sites, or very, very few. All of the sites are located…. I say all…most of them…the Anasazi sites are located near the Rim and there's plenty of evidence of farming in the way of check dams and little what we call “waffle gardens,” that sort of thing. And the reason that they could farm up at that altitude, um, say 8,000 feet, was because unknowingly they took advantage of the warm air coming up out of the Canyon. And you get a hundred, 200 yards back from the rim, you're back in a different vegetative zone. You're into white fir and spruce, things like that, aspen. And there are no sites. They just…it was just too cold to farm there.
There is a story I'll tell you…maybe I shouldn't…um, when I was working up at the Canyon one winter the heaviest snowfall on record fell at the North Rim, 300 inches, and I conned the Park Service into letting me take the helicopter over there because they had a helipad packed down. I told them I wanted to see whether Indians can survive up there in the winter time. Well, two or three of us went over in the helicopter and we dug down into one of the Park Service cabins so we could get the door open and get in, and then we went cross-country skiing all over that area. And we skied up on the roof of the North Rim Lodge and sat there and had a beer and [laughter]…and I'm sure that Indians were not there in the dead of winter. Just too much snow.

I think the thing that…one of the things that hits me the longer…the more time I spend there…is how extensive the…population was. I mean, it seems like when you…from the perspective of a river passenger or a river guide, when you first go down and there's a few sites that you see and you know, there's these…the ones that are easily accessible from the river, um…it's been my experience that the more time I spend the more I realize that there was quite the culture, quite the numbers of people down there. Is that true?
Well, the Park Service recently contracted…or a couple of years ago…contracted to do a thorough survey along the river corridor in connection with this gces study. And they went back up the cliffs, or in the side canyons just a little way, I don't know how far, and they said they found over 400 sites along the river corridor there. And I don't doubt that. I think in all my trips down I may have found as many as 60 sites, something like that.
* * *
Now, with James White…
I got very intrigued with the James White story back in the 1950s when the historian, Richard Lingenfelter, wrote a little book called First Through the Grand Canyon, and I was asked by a historical journal to review that book. And I didn't know anything about the Canyon or the River or anything else. But I concluded that, yeah, he probably did. He may not have deserved to have been the first through the Canyon, but I think he did.
And then I got all involved with Dock Marston on this and Dock introduced me to James White's granddaughter. And to make this story relatively short, James White's granddaughter lives down in Lake Havasu City and she and I are co-authoring a book. My portion of the book has to do with what evidence do we have that James White actually made this trip. The evidence is pretty slim. We'll never know for sure whether he actually did it. But, I've been able to retrace the area that he claims he and his partners were ambushed by Ute Indians. Uh, I've been able to take aerial photographs of the area that fits his description of the area they were in, the distance that he and his companion, George Strole, had to hike down to the Colorado River from where they were ambushed, and Captain Baker was murdered.
And, the impossibility of White's fabricating this by going overland down to Callville, either on the south side or the north side. The north side would have been just almost impossible for somebody that didn't know the canyon country up there—Waterpocket Fold and that…that general region. And getting over the Kaibab—impossible. And on the south side the Indians would have killed him. The Hualapais were at war with all white people in 1867 and they would have just done him in. I think the only reasonable thing is to have gone down on his little raft.
There's one thing in his… I can't say his journal—he was semi-literate; he just…we just have this letter that he wrote to his brother. The one thing that rings a bell, that someone who had never been on the river would not be able to describe and that's Deer Creek Falls. He talks about this stream of water, about the size of a man's body, coming over a notch in a cliff about a hundred feet above the…above the river. Uh, I don't think that was Vasey's Paradise. I think it was Deer Creek Falls. And that, had he not been there, he would not have known how to describe that thing.
The one fact that we really do know is that he was pulled off the river at Callville and in a horribly emaciated, sunburned state. He thought he'd been on the river twelve days, but we think it may have been longer than that. Um, he was just practically incoherent when they found him and pulled him off the river.
He had bumped into a Paiute camp just a couple of days before he reached Callville and he traded one of his pistols that he still had with him to the Paiutes for the hind quarters of a dog that they were cooking…there in a camp. And he still had that dog in his hand when they found him at Callville.
Well, his granddaughter remembers her grandfather, remembers what kind of a man he was. Uh, he never tried to make anything out of this. He just said, “Well, I accidentally came down the river and I didn't mean to.” And he lived to a ripe old age of almost 90, I think. Lived up in Trinidad, Colorado.
His detractors are numerous, of course. Major Powell didn't want to acknowledge that somebody had beaten him to the…to the first trip down the river, although he did mention it to some of his men while they were on the river. And some of them…his men's journals…they talk about this. Stanton, of course, who wrote in his Colorado River Controversies a long story, and who interviewed White certainly didn't want to be the third man down the river. It was bad enough to be the second, so he pooh-poohed the whole thing. And, um, other explorers of the river, Julius Stone, people like that, have claimed it was impossible to do.
Anyway, we think he did it and we're doing this book…or I'm doing the physical evidence and Eilean, his granddaughter, is doing a really interesting narrative of, oh, how he was taken off the river and what people thought down there at Callville when they took him off. And the newspaper accounts a few days later about it. And then her reminiscences of her grandfather.
A lot of people say that he was a hothead and killed his companions. Well, he'd gotten himself in trouble, alright. He was in the Civil War and he got arrested by the Army for allegedly stealing some equipment. When he got out of the service he and two or three other men went on this prospecting trip and they went up to, oh, somewhere near Lake City in Colorado. And he got in an argument with one of the men on the party, and he shot him. It didn't kill him—wounded him, left him there to get well again. So people say, “Well, he just murdered his companions.” Well, in 1867, where he was between the Colorado River and the San Juan, he could simply have gone back to the settlements in Southern Colorado and said, “We were ambushed by Indians and everybody was killed except me” and nobody would have thought a thing about it. But he didn't. He went on to describe as best he could this trip that he took…
They had come down from about where Silverton is now, in Colorado, down into the area around Mancos, and then they started down the San Juan. And they were on horseback, three of them. And when they got to the mouth of Comb Wash, and where the San Juan becomes entrenched going down toward Mexican Hat, they couldn't get their horses through. So they turned north and, uh, we've been able to follow this route through the descriptions that he made…um, about 50 miles over to the Colorado. Well, they had to skirt Grand Gulch, for one thing, and there are several canyons, side canyons, going down to the Colorado that may be candidates for the trip down, but the first one they came to was White Canyon. No relationship to James White. Can't get horses down there. The next canyon, I've forgotten the name of now at the moment, but the…visibility of that canyon is blocked by the Red House cliffs there. And the first place they could get through was…uh…uh, what's the name of that pass? It's now on the paved road going down to the ferry there. Well, it's a break in the…in the Red House cliffs there that goes over past a spring. And then there's a place where White said, “We needed water for the horses and we saw water in this little canyon and we worked our way down a sand dune and got water, but we couldn't get up the other side because there were sheer cliffs.” And that's about the time they were ambushed by the Ute Indians. There's only one place that fits that description and it's in Moki Canyon about twelve miles from the Colorado. I've flown over it and got all the photographs of it. Sand dunes are still there, the cliff's still on the other side. And I think that's about the place where they…where they started.
And then his companion, Strole, was washed off the raft a few days later and drowned. Of course they didn't have life jackets or anything. Then White went on from there.
People…his detractors have said, “Well, he couldn't remember which side of the river the Little Colorado came in on.” That sort of thing. Well, this poor man was uneducated. He'd never been in that area before. He was hallucinating by that time. It's, uh, no wonder that he couldn't remember where certain things were, as we know today. As a matter of fact in the 1950s there was a…a pilot that was forced down up in Glen Canyon. He survived and built himself a raft and got down to Lees Ferry in two days and he was just…non compos mentis by the time he got there. He didn't know anything. He was so hallucinating and so afraid of this whole situation. So…I can understand why somebody wouldn't remember just where he was.
But, as I say, in the final analysis we'll never be able to prove it. We just know that he was pulled out of the river at Callville and the rest of it's his story.
* * *
Well, thinking along the lines of really leaving some information behind for posterity or whatever, I wonder if you can think of something that isn't written down. You know, something important…that we haven't covered.
The minute you drive away I'll think of something I suppose [laughing].
That's the way it works.
Well, let me say something personal for a few moments here. I am just so pleased that I was able to make three trips down the river before the Dam was filled up…or the reservoir was filled up. Those were exciting trips in those…those power boats and really got me excited about the archeology of…of the Canyon. Likewise the long trips in 1966 that I had in the helicopter.
As I told you before, I made my first trip in 1960 at a little over 60,000 cfs, with Rod Sanderson in three little aluminum power boats. The water was warm and of course very muddy. All we had to drink was that river water. And I remember when Jerry Sanderson was a kid on those trips he came up with some little tablet called “Fizzies” that was supposed to make soda pop, if you put it in water. And we would drop one of those in a cup full of this muddy, sandy water, and it would fizz and fizz and all this sand would come up in bubbles over the side [laughing]. We took some fresh food for the first couple of days and after that we just had to…had canned goods. We didn't have any other fresh food at all, except on that first trip when we were at Tapeats and camped there and one of the Sandersons said, “Now, you go and hike up the River looking for ruins. When you get up so far you'll see us there and bring a fork and a piece of aluminum foil. We'll have some trout.” And, lo and behold, they did. We had trout right up there, below where Thunder River comes in.
It was also on that first trip when we had stopped briefly at the mouth of Monument Canyon, and the other boats had gone on. There were just two Sandersons and myself and the boat started to drift away and one of the men yelled at me…I was closest, “Jump on that boat and start that motor! Bring it back in!” And I did and I pulled on that cord and threw my shoulder out of joint. Separated shoulder. And I said, uh…I had done it before in skiing accidents, but I said to them, “Any of you know how to put a shoulder back in place?” “No.” So I'd heard of this “sock method” where somebody lies down next to you and puts their socked foot up in your armpit and pulls on it. And I said, “Well, that's…You know, we have to do something here. I can't…I can't stand the pain, I can't ride the rest of the river with the thing out of joint.” So they did and we got it back in. But I rode the rest of the trip with my arm in a sling [laughing], sort of like Major Powell!…And it took a week or so and I was all better again.
The Sandersons were marvelous people to travel with. Rod was a very stern person on the river. He commanded those boats. He told you what to do and what not to do. At that time there was a big ledger in an overhang down near Elves Chasm and we all signed in on that and other people, parties, had before us. And on my later trips, that thing, somebody stole it. It was missing. Dock Marston said he never knew what happened to it. It was a marvelous, big, leather-bound ledger, about so big [demonstrating]. And a lot of historic names in there—people who had gone down the River in the 1930s and '40s…
We made that trip in about ten days, I think. And, um, for example, we stopped for a day at Tapeats, camped two nights there. But when we wanted to make time we could really move it out and, uh, could make 40 miles a day easily.
We got down to the Grand Wash Cliffs at the beginning of the Lake and we stopped someplace there where there were some other boaters that come up the lake. And here we were in these three dinky little power boats and somebody said, “Where are you coming from?” We said, “Lees Ferry”. Well they thought that was some place like Pierces Ferry on the…on the Lake. And they said, “Where are you going?” And we said, “We're going down to Pierces Ferry.” And he said, “I wouldn't go out there in those little boats. That water is pretty bad, pretty choppy today.” And away we went, down through the Lake [laughing]. And I guess we went to Temple Bar, that's where it was, where we ended up.
So they were great…great trips…really.
It must have seemed like—when you started out there, that first trip—it must have been such an adventure. Was there doubt that you would make it?
I never had any doubt. Because Rod had done it before and he knew what he was doing. I was pretty frightened at times in some of the big rapids. But the boats never tripped over. In fact, in 40 trips I've never been out of a boat. I used to say I swim like an anvil. [laughter] So we did just fine. I would guess I was too naive to be scared about too much of it. [laughing]
Did people who knew you were going…I wonder what the general feeling at that time was. It must have seemed like quite the adventure.
Oh, yes. Yes. As I said, somebody in our party was number 500 to have made the trip. I have a list that Marston gave me years ago of the first 200 people to make the trip. Um…Well, my wife knew about it. And she didn't know any more about the river than I did, so she wasn't particularly worried. She thought I could handle myself alright. Other members of the Sanderson family—I don't know whether I'd mentioned this or not—when we got down near Tanner we built a big fire on the beach and there were people up at Desert View who were Sanderson family, so they knew we'd gotten that far all right without any great problems. Didn't have any radio or anything like that with us. Rod did have a list of side canyons through which people thought, if we got in trouble, we could make it…hike up to the rim. But we never had to use that at all.
So I guess cooking and stuff was just, uh, would you just make a fire and cook on the fire?
Yes. It was a…we had a pretty neat set-up. The hatch covers on the boats could be taken off, turned over, and legs screwed in and make a little table there for cooking on. Uh, yes, in those trips we built fires right on the beach out of driftwood. In fact the Park Service said, according to what Rod had told me, encouraged us to burn driftwood…uh…that in high water would break loose and go down and be a navigational hazard down on the Lake. And we burned some tremendous piles of driftwood on that trip. [laughing] And we just sat around, eating. We had a little game that we played in the evening that we called “Washers”. They'd bury a…it was almost like horseshoes…they'd bury a can in the sand and we had these big washers that we'd toss at that can to see if we could flip it in…into the open part of the can. Just for something to do in the late evening before it got dark.
Did you see the riparian zone, comparing it the way, um, between the way it was the first trip and, say, the last trip?
Yes, indeed. There were a lot more beaches on that first trip, first three trips, to camp on. We never had any trouble finding a place to camp except way down in the far end of the Canyon toward the…toward the lake. Uh, we did find that sometimes when we'd tie the boats up at night we'd simply drive a big metal stake into the dune and tie the boat up. And I remember a couple of times when we heard noises like the whole sand bank was caving off into the river and it was the boats chafing against the bank that was causing this—huge chunks of sand going off to the point where we had to really move the boats and be very, very careful. But wonderful campsites, really.
I remember one time, on the third trip in the power boats, we were camped there at Tapeats, like we always did, and we woke up in the morning and, we were in the little lagoon there at Tapeats, one of the boats was under water. It had developed a leak somehow or other, a hole in the boat, and there it was, nose sticking up, the rest of it down in the bottom of that little lagoon. [laughing] And we managed to get it out, of course. I don't remember just how. I think we tied a line onto the stern and…and pulled with the other boats to try to get it out of there. But they patched it, fixed it up. Those Sandersons were very self-sufficient, I'll tell you. Very…what shall I say…very tough guys. They knew what they were doing.
How…did…that first trip, how did it affect you, just the Canyon and all that stuff at that point in your life? I wonder what kind of impression it made on you.

Well it was…it was really awesome to me. I was trying to do my scientific work, the archeology, I was trying to stay in the boat and not get flipped out. There were a lot of times when I had to concentrate on that. But, gosh, especially sitting around a campfire in the evening and looking up at the cliffs, I just…I could hardly believe it. You know, I had seen the Canyon from the rims before, but nothing like that. And…to be able to get…well, we didn't do much hiking. We had to move along pretty fast. Um…hiked a little bit up Fossil Canyon, because I'd heard about a ruin up there. And the two days we spent at Tapeats. I just thought…you know, this…the immensity of this thing! And I thought, “Gosh, it's just impossible that a lot of Indians ever came in here.” I knew that Major Powell had found a few ruins along the river and I thought, “Well, maybe if we find 40 or 50 sites, that will be it. And they weren't up in these side canyons.” I didn't know anything about routes at that time and nothing was farther from the truth when I really started doing reconnaissance in the Canyon. I don't know how many sites I personally recorded over the years I was there. Several hundred anyway.
Yes, it was very exciting for me. Intellectually stimulating and exciting to be in that type of natural environment that was relatively unspoiled.