Who Was Kitty Clyde Anyway?

Anyone who has read of John Wesley Powell's 1869 trip down the Green and Colorado Rivers must have puzzled over the name of one of his boats: Kitty Clyde's Sister. It's an odd name for two young bucks, Andy Hall and Billy Hawkins, a.k.a. Missouri Rhodes, to have chosen*. They were strangers to one another when the trip started so Kitty or her sister can hardly have been a mutual acquaintance. And wouldn't it have been a lot simpler to use the sister's name and to forget about Kitty?
These peculiarities kept haunting me as I researched my forthcoming historical novel, The Strong Brown God, about the Powell trip. I'd read just about everything written by and about Powell and that first trip, and a lot of unpublished material as well. In the latter I had found answers to other questions that had puzzled some writers, e.g. were the men to be paid? (answer: yes for three of the crew, no for the others). But there was nary a line that identified the Clyde sisters.
My first invention about the boat's name was that some can-can dancers had named their act Kitty Clyde and Her Sister. That at least spoke to the need for both Hawkins and Hall to know, or to know of, the ladies in question.
Still the question nagged. I was nearly through my second draft when coincidence struck, or serendipity: I had journeyed out to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, to deliver some of my photographs that the museum had acquired for their permanent collection, when I happened on an exhibition of Winslow Homer's drawings and lithographs. Always eager to see more of this wonderful artist's work, I wandered in.
According to the program for the exhibit, Homer paid the rent in his formative years by doing cover drawings for magazines like Harper's Weekly, drawing pencil portraits of the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and making lithographs for songsheet covers. In those days sheet music was to home entertainment what cd's are today. An appealing songsheet cover could lead to a sale, which made Homer's skills much in demand.
The first songsheet cover on display was Annie Lawrie (sic) and was a pleasing lithograph of an equally pleasing young Annie, presumably. The next one showed a young woman leaning against a well, a wooden bucket in one hand, a dog near her feet and a thatched roofed mill with an overshot water wheel in the background. A tree branch arches overhead with a flapping bird on it's outermost branch and, in the lower right-hand corner, a frog surveys the scene.
Lettered at the top of the sheet was:
To Mrs. T.B. Pendergast

Below that, in a curve matching the arching branch, was:
Minnie Clyde
Kitty Clyde's Sister
My jaw and my program dropped. Chance? Maybe, but as Pasteur had it, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and I was prepared to seize on any clue about the Hawkins/Hall boat name.
At the bottom of the song sheet, we are informed that the words and music are by L.V.H. Crosby, though judging both I wonder he would admit it. The words are redolent of the sentimentalism of the day, and the music won't send you away whistling. Here's how the song opens.
Oh, long have I sung of sweet Kitty Clyde,
Who lived at the foot of the hill;
And 'tho that sweet pretty bird has flown,
Another is living there still.
She's blithe and gay as the robin that sings
On the trees by the old mill-side;
And if ever I loved a girl in my life,
‘Tis the charming, sweet Minnie Clyde
The chorus goes:
Oh, Minnie Clyde, she is my pride,
And sure I am no jester;
For if ever I loved a girl in my life,
‘Tis Minnie, Kitty Clyde's sister.
In my book I have the men making up their own lyrics with the prize for best (or worst) going to the lead boatman, Jack Sumner, who sings:
Oh Kitty Clyde, I'll tan your hide
And give you quite a blister
If you tell your mom or your dad
What I did to your sister
But the coincidences weren't over. A few weeks later I was asked by an artist friend to review the opening chapters of a book he was writing about Winslow Homer. When I mailed my comments to him, I included my story of the songsheet in the Brooklyn Museum. By return mail he sent a copy of the songsheet cover; he had recently bought the original on e-bay.
So one small mystery is solved, but another remains. Why didn't they just name the boat Minnie?

Ardian Gill
* Most writers (following Powell) get the boats and crews wrong, assigning Walter Powell and George Bradley to Sister, but the diaries and letters of the crew make it clear that those two men were in Maid of the Canyon.