Curmudgeons’ Chronicles—
The dark side of river history

History is by and large determined by historians. Those whose opinions and writings remain popular are those who determine what “really” happened. The importance of a historian being impartial, thorough, and honest cannot be overstated. Yet on occasion, even good historians succumb to the dark side, and their biases, opinions, and distortions come to be presented as fact. Grand Canyon has had its share of both types of history. The roots of the darker side are five-fold.
Possessory interest: Beginning with Powell, river runners have shown the human foible of feeling that those who came later were irrelevant, that Johnny-come-latelies had little merit, that their own expedition was the last one to truly matter.
Selective slanted revisionism: Robert Brewster Stanton kicked off “attack-history” with his assaults on Powell and James White. Although his negativism was certainly warranted in places and counterbalanced by Powell worshipers such as Dellenbaugh, Stanton’s Colorado River Controversies goes beyond honesty into deviousness—a tradition that others would follow.
Freudian pop psychology: By the late 1950s, trendy intellectuals were brandishing Freudian and pseudo-Freudian analysis with great abandon at cocktail parties and around the campfire. It was all the rage to analyze people based real or imagined traits and relationships, and all too often, people began to believe their own psychobabble.
Egos and feuds: In the 1940s and ’50s, egos were raging on the Colorado. Nevills cut a broad swath, as did his boatmen Dock Marston and P.T. Reilly. Harry Aleson, Bert Loper, Georgie White and others all were drawn, not always willingly, into the swirl of name calling, baiting, feuding.
The Curmudgeon Effect: Although Stanton and, later, Marston and Reilly, did strong, honest, and comprehensive research for the majority of their lives, as they reached their seventies and eighties their opinions began to calcify as their objectivity decayed. Some may remember Dock Marston’s embarrassing speech at the Boatman’s Training Session in the mid seventies, wherein he psychoanalyzed and defamed most known boatmen and explained how he, Marston, had driven Nevills to suicide. Fortunately—at least in the case of all three aforementioned historians—their main bodies of strong research remain intact for current and future generations to consult. With good luck, that will be their legacy.
However: In order to put the accusations and allegations fomented by these gentlemen to rest, I feel that, rather than sweep them back beneath the carpet to fester, it is better to let them wither in the noonday sun. For that reason I have assembled an addendum to the P.T. Reilly interview, wherein he describes much of the feuding and bile, and showcases some of his own and Marston’s latter-day opinions. By knowing where these rumors originated, and in what company they grew, it can help today’s audience evaluate these tales for what they are. And rather than condemn Stanton, Reilly, or Marston, it is important to understand that this segment of their legacy, although it does exist and has tainted much modern storytelling, is but a wart on otherwise brilliant careers.
Brad Dimock
Underhill: What interested you in historical aspects of river running?
Reilly: I guess it was Nevills’s incessant, ah, display of—his so-called dramatic ability of distorting history. Norm really got me interested in the history of the place, mainly because of his wild stories. Hell, I began to read the stuff that had been written, and I saw that the early runners were amazingly inefficient. I saw Powell’s deficiencies, and I saw Stanton was a con man.
Underhill: Any particular example come to mind of powerful myth where you know that something was not true?
Reilly: Well, I guess it started out with Powell. And Stanton and Nevills, certainly magnified it. And Nevills completely distorted things beyond all reason. It was awful. But I didn’t know enough about it to tell how much he exaggerated. Then I started digging into it. It was awful.
As soon as I went through the Canyon, Dock Marston made a habit of getting hold of all the passengers. He was building a case on Nevills, and he contacted all the passengers, and evidently he thought I was a pretty good one, because he and I got to corresponding and he really interested me in getting the record. And both of us, preferred to get the actual truth of what really happened. And we didn’t like to repeat the bunch of baloney like Nevills. I just trying to gather the record. As it happened. Some of it’s rather astounding. And ah, I guess you can say that some people rather hide the truth, and maintain their fiction. And I like to try to break through that.
Steiger: What was your opinion of Marston? Sounds like he was pretty knowledgeable both about the river and about the history.
Reilly: Dock was. He went right to the original source. He was an ornery old goat, and you couldn’t trust him, but he knew. (laughs) Dock and I had many years of a fruitful relationship. What broke it up, he double-crossed me. And I told him off about it, and that ended it.
Steiger: Well, you said that he was making a case against Nevills. Why was he so interested in doing that?
Reilly: Because Nevills fired him.
Underhill: Why do you think Dock Marston started running the river?
Reilly: Well, he started in 1942.
Underhill: What made him get interested, do you think?
Reilly: I think he had grandiose ideas about his ability to write. Dock never did learn to write. His writing is atrocious. Really bad. He never learned to structure grammar. He never learned how to compose a paragraph…a single thought, and this and that. It was just something he didn’t know.
Steiger: Now, let me get this straight: Powell, you didn’t think much of him.
Reilly: I don’t think much of Powell.
Steiger: As a river runner, or as a scientist, when it comes to Powell?
Reilly: Well, neither one. I think in the case of Powell, he was clearly trying to shoot himself into the public recognition with the other surveyors.
Steiger: Stanton?
Reilly: Well, Stanton was an engineer who was primarily used to spending other people’s money, and he sure spent some on that. Now, Stanton had a heck of a good crew. Every time Stanton got in trouble, which was pretty often, MacDonald would bail him out.
Steiger: Who were the individuals that really stood out as being the best?
Reilly: Galloway and Flavell. They knew what they were doing. I named my second boat Flavell. They were good boatmen. They recognized the job. Before them, all of them went down the rapids backwards. Looked over their shoulder as they went down. Galloway backed down. Faced downstream. Flavell turned his seat around. I take my hat off to those two. To me they were the forerunners of the modern, technique—from Nevills on up to Litton.
Flavell had a open boat. That’s a hell of a job taking an open boat through the Grand Canyon. Dock claimed he was homosexual. And that he trapped coyotes down on the Delta, and took them at that time to the only office where you could redeem the pelts and get the bounty—San Fernando. And that’s where he met the Mexican fellah. Flavell called him Montoss or—something like that—some Mexican name. We never had gotten the guy’s name straight. But ah, Dock claimed that he was Flavell’s boy. An Flavell was a homosexual and all that. Well, I didn’t see any evidence of that whatsoever. Dock was kind of hung up that way anyway. (laughter)

Susie: He accused everybody of being a homosexual.
Reilly: The Kolbs were just laughs. You see, Emery’s brother, Ellsworth, he was the one that was the dare devil, who would do anything. What Ellsworth did scared the hell out of Emery, and he was sitting there wringing his hands, and Ellsworth was out just having a good time and didn’t know any better. Emery Kolb is pathetic. Poor old guy. He exposed himself in the 1923 trip when he got a job as head boatmen. And he—couldn’t fill the bill. Emery was a chicken boatman.
Steiger: Well, and then those guys that took the bear down?
Reilly: Eddy? They didn’t know from nuthin’. I don’t have much respect for Clyde Eddy. I wouldn’t give that ass the time of day. Clyde Eddy, the less said about him the better. He was as neurotic, as they come. Some of his crewman were very good.
Steiger: Well, they had to be pretty competent to take a bear cub.
Reilly: No, they didn’t know any better. Now that was a good trip to illustrate that going through the Canyon wasn’t the heroic thing that Stanton and Powell had built it up to be—Powell especially. I hold that as a black mark against Powell, “Only superhuman people can do this.” Baloney!
Then came down the Dusty Dozen. Not a heck of a lot can be said for them. [laughs]
Steiger: Did you know the Hatch boys? How did they strike you?
Reilly: Well, I don’t think too much of them. I knew the old man.
Steiger: What was he like?
Reilly: Just a big old country hick—not too big—a little old country hick.
After Flavell and Galloway, the next good boatman, I think, who went all the way through, was Buzz. Well, he had his personal miseries, but he know how to handle oars, and that’s all you can ask of a boatman, Can he handle the oars? And he ran solo. I don’t you could throw mud at anything that Buzz did. When I read Vince Welch’s little ditty about Buzz (chuckles), and I had to smile. Didn’t act like he knew Buzz was homosexual.
Steiger: (in surprise) Oh, I had never heard that one!
Reilly: Buzz was queer as a goat. That’s why he killed himself.
Susie: That’s why he committed suicide. Oh, his was a very sad story.
Reilly: Buzz was a good boatman, a heck of a good boatman.
Steiger: How did you ever find out that he was…
Reilly: Well, he had domineering mother. Buzz’s mother had literary ambitions, and she cleaned up Buzz’s journals as best as she could. If you get a supposed copy of Buzz’s journal with everything’s cohesive in it, and the sentences are complete, you can bet damned well his mother worked ‘em over. Buzz had very little education. In the first place, he couldn’t write anything very good. His mother rewrote Buzz’s diaries to suit herself. She thought she was literary.
Of course Dock had a lot of screwy ideas about just about everything, and he said that he could understand Buzz being homosexual, he had a domineering mother and a very weak father, and he was just homosexual, that’s all there was to it. Why did you think Buzz killed himself?
Steiger: Well, let’s just go down the list. After Holmstrom, just running through the characters of the times: How about Bert Loper? What did you think of him as a boatman?
Reilly: Lousy!
Steiger: Really?!
Reilly: Oh, one of the worst!
Steiger: And Nevills?
Reilly: Oh Norm ran a lousy operation!
Suzie: It was haphazard. Oh, it was kind of pitiful.
Reilly: Norm just wasn’t educated enough to know what it was all about.
Suzie: And he didn’t get along well with his boatmen.
Reilly: He didn’t get along with anybody. He had a little man’s ego, and he just…
Suzie: Was difficult.
Reilly: Nevills got more cautious as he grew older. Of course, I was thirty-eight when I made my first trip through the Canyon. Norm wasn’t quite forty-four when he got killed. He was just coming into his prime as a boatmen. But Nevills had practically no education. And he was a little guy. Little guys seem to have to prove themselves more than big guys do. He had quite a cross to bear.
You get into a little river feuds. Larabee and Aleson hated Norm, and Norm hated them. Don Harris hated Nevills, and Bert Loper hated Nevills. Oh, they were feuding to beat hell! So they were going to use Bert Loper to take the play away from…they knew what a publicity hound Norm Nevills was, and they were going to use the “Grand Old Man of the River”—Harry Aleson gave him the nickname—and they got all the publicity generated about that, and they took off about a week ahead of us in 1949. They’d balonied old Bert into thinking he was going to lead the trip against the hated Nevills. Well, they didn’t intend for Loper to lead that trip at all. Well hell, the old fool shouldn’t have even been on the river at eighty years old, and he wasn’t leading the boat, and he tried to shove to the front all the time and they didn’t want him to do that. And they took the lead away from him, but old Bert figured out a way to out-fox them. So he shoved off first before they got the camp gear stowed on this fateful day, and he piled into 24 1/2. He had a passenger named Wayne Nichol. Wayne Nichol said that Bert just entered the rapid and he was slumped over the oars—he was just too damned old to do it, is the truth of it.
I saw that boat right after it was pulled out of the river. We came by three days later, and the boat was… I’ve got pictures of it. He used shingle nails to build it! Oh, it was the lousiest boat! That poor guy had no more idea how to build a boat than I have of atomic science. There was no rock to it at all. It was the most terrible, most horrible answer to running a rapid. God himself couldn’t have rowed that boat and made a respectable showing.
•••
Reilly: Nevills fired Dock Marston and gave me his job after the 1948 party. And that just teed Dock off something awful. So Dock set up with Ed Hudson to run motors through the Canyon.
Well Marston was jealous of Ed. And it was his misdirection that got them hung up in the eddy on the mud bank going upstream. Marston wanted to take credit for getting the Esmeralda through in 1949. Marston was going to be navigator. He wanted to be kind of bold in bringing that out. Dog that he was. I can see it as plain as anything. You’ve got to go with the outflow. Follow the curve. He tried to cut a bend too close and he got the Essie stuck. It took them, two or three hours, to get it off. That’s when they burned out the head gasket, by running the engine so fast and all the power and everything.
Steiger: So there wasn’t any love lost, in other words, between him and Dock Marston then.
Reilly: Well, there was no love lost between Marston and Ed Hudson. That was a big feud. They hated each other’s guts. (laughter) In the old days there were a lot of loves and hates that you had to really get in there and probe to learn them all. That’s what it boils down to.