Serendipity
Serendipity. A fine word, the
way it rolls around on the tongue. A nice way of saying dumb luck, or
being in the right place at the right spot to witness a big rockfall without
worrying about it crushing you.
It was serendipity that came into play when the University of Utah gained
access to Nathaniel Galloway’s diary and a selection of the photos
taken by Raymond Cogswell during the 1909 Stone-Galloway river expedition.
Because of serendipity, we were able to gather these two elements together
in the digital world and put them up on the Marriott Library website,
so that they can be viewed and admired and seen by people the world over,
even Grand Canyon river guides! Because of dumb luck, you can go to the
Marriott Library’s web page and see scans of the original pages
of Galloways diary from that trip, and view a hundred of the fine black&white
images that Cogswell made during the voyage.
Let me explain how serendipity made this possible: one day I was sitting
in my office in the library, doing whatever it is I usually do, and the
phone rang. Hoping it wasn’t another media company trying to weasel
out of paying use fees, or an activist telling us we had mistakes on our
Japanese-Internment camp web exhibit, I answered. The woman on the other
end identified herself as a descendant of Nathaniel Galloway, and said
she had some photographs from him; would I be interested in copying them?
Well! That made me sit straight up. It turned out that she was a granddaughter
of Parley, Nathaniel’s ne’er-do-well son; her grandmother
was Loretta Luck, that appropriately named if ill-used woman who was the
one who swore out a warrant for Parley for non-support, which landed him
in the Uintah County jail in Vernal about 1930.
About that same time —more serendipity— Frank Swain was a
deputy sheriff, and would often be visited by his cousin, Bus Hatch. Bus
and Frank listened to Parley’s tales of going down the river with
his father; and with Clyde Eddy, and were inspired to give it a try themselves.
Parley, sensing a way out of jail, told Bus and Frank if they would loan
him the money for his bail, he would build them a boat and take them down
the river. They did so, whereupon Parley promptly jumped his bail and
disappeared, and was not seen in Uintah County thereafter; he froze to
death in a sheep camp in central Utah not long after that. But luck was
not through with Parley and Bus, for it was Parley who rescued the Galloway-style
boat from the rocks in Lodore, where it had been abandoned by the Todd-Page
party in 1926, and who sold it to Hod Ruple in Island Park, where it so
happened Bus saw it on his first serious river trip in 1931. Bus took
measurements from the boat and built his own, and took it and others like
it down the Green in 1932; Cataract in 1933; the Grand in 1934, and on
and on. So in an odd way Parley not only fulfilled his end of the bargain
after all, by helping Bus build a boat; he helped Bus start Hatch River
Expeditions, the river business that became the dynasty it is today.
We copied all of the photos in the nice, leather-bound album, and returned
it to her in a nice, specially made phase box as a way of saying thanks
for letting us add these images to our collections. Then a few years passed,
and I was asked to give a river history talk at the public library in
Richfield, Utah. I did so, to a sparse crowd (this was just two weeks
after September 11); but among them was a local woman, who, it turned
out, was likewise a descendant of Nathaniel Galloway, this time a granddaughter
of Galloway’s daughter Eva. Eva wasn’t so colorful or ill-fated
as her brother Parley, but she did have a sense of the family’s
history, and passed down a precious artifact from generation to generation.
Nathaniel Galloway spent his last years in Richfield, but I didn’t
know that some of his family had stayed in the area. So when this great-granddaughter
opened a small metal box and showed me
Galloway’s original,
penciled diary from the 1909 trip, my eyes just about popped out and my
breath caught as I held the child’s copy book in my hands. This
was blind luck if I had ever seen it; even more so, as I talked with her
after the program. It turned out that she was planning to go out of town,
but was friends with the librarian, who told her about the program, not
even knowing of her river history connections. She delayed her trip to
come to the program and show me the diary. I was able to persuade her
to let me take it with me back to the library, where we scanned each page
at a high resolution, and I returned it to her when I passed through a
month later on my way to give another talk.
Finally, it just so happened that the powers-that-be in the library were
looking for a scanning project that involved western water, as part of
a larger digitization effort. When I heard that I proposed that we scan
the photographs from Cogswell; and put it together with the diary as a
digital exhibit. And so we did; you can see the results at http://www.lib.utah.edu/digital/galloway.
You can browse the photographs, which are arranged in down-river order;
or you can look at the original diary pages, with Galloway’s unique
spelling and grammar; or you can read the transcribed text of the diary;
or you can view them both side by side. Here’s an example from November
8, 1909:
“Running out of the granite and around the big bend Powell’s
Plate[au]. A short distance below the nooning place we enter the granite
again and run a few rough rapids. When we land at the head of one much
rougher than the others and decide we can run it. I and Mr. Stone came
through all right, but Mr. Dubendorff struck a rock with the stern of
his boat and the waves tipped the boat over striking him on the forehead
and cut a gash 1= inches long. Duby and the boat both came through the
rapid Duby going under every wave and the boat came through upside down.
I caught the boat and towed her in. I and Mr. Stone stripped off our clothes
and wade in and tip it right side up. I and Duby bail the water out as
he had reached there by that time. We cross over to the other side. Make
camp. A fire is built and Duby exchanges the wet clothing for dry ones
taken from the wrecked boats and rubber bags made specially for keeping
clothing dry in case of a wreck.”
The events of that day, of course, were later commemorated by the usgs,
who named the rapid after Dubendorff; the side canyon that creates it
after Galloway; the creek after Stone, and the butte overlooking it all
after Cogswell. So due to serendipity, modern river runners can actually
see the source documents from an expedition that we all know about.
Roy Webb
