Farewells

Derald Stewart

They were at the Pearce Ferry take-out, ending a private Grand Canyon trip, mid-1980s. He had watched the dories run Lava Falls a few days back and was now de-rigging together. Derald approached Jane Whelan, manager at the time for Martin Litton’s Grand Canyon Dories and asked, “So, what does it take to row for you guys?” She eyed him and his funky, udisco raft and replied, “You don’t have what it takes!”
A dear friend and I were sitting on the banks of the Dolores River, sipping single malt and telling Derald stories. It was the day we’d found out the news about Derald’s sudden passing and it hit us all hard, like a boat’s bowpost striking a rock. Unbelievable and hard to accept, especially for a guy who was fitter than most and way too young. Damn…another familiar story happening around us with more frequency. Is it in the water? Ozone? Age? Regardless of reason, Derald has joined a growing number of boatmen angels…up there…on that…Other River. We sat, watching the current and eddies swirl as the stories spilled out like smoky spirits from a bottle.
“Well, Derald rose to that challenge,” I continued with the story. It wasn’t long before he’d built his own wooden dory and had rowed a baggage boat or two training for Martin’s dories. By his fourth or fifth trip through Grand Canyon he, by god, did have what it took; rowing one of those dreamboats, fulfilling another dream.
Derald Stewart was like that in his approach to life, taking on loves and interests—one hundred and ten percent in full pursuit and not backing down. From his falling in love with the west and leaving his childhood in Atlanta to taking on new pursuits of raising a family to jobs, sports, etc., he definitely wasn’t one to waste time. He, no doubt passed away contented with all of his accomplishments and completed goals.
Among his accomplishments and goals, besides being a father, were salesman, mechanic, boatman, boatbuilder, carpenter, arborist, pilot, skier, bike racer (pedal & motor), open (whitewater) canoeing, backhoe operator, welder…and I could go on. Like many Grand Canyon boatman, he chose an alternative means to measure success in this life we’re given, and he moved on with an impressive, “jack of all trades” résumé in this regard.
Derald was introduced to Grand Canyon by his soon-to-be second wife, Jan Yost, on a backpacking trip and after catching a ride with a motor trip downstream to another trail, he was bitten by the whitewater bug. Since he had been around boats and water most of his life, his learning curve was short in his newfound joy, and he soon borrowed a raft to row the canyon. He learned about dories and construction working with Milt Wiley of Durango and by talking/ working with Martin’s dory boatman. This lead to his first wooden boat, Canyon Wren, and he subsequently used it commercially. Next followed his small business of building boats, mostly dories for commercial and private use. He named his company Cañonita Dories and it cranked out well over fifty boats over the years, not counting repairs, and earned the nickname Dr. Dory around Durango. He assisted Grand Canyon Expeditions in putting together their budding dory program and continued to row trips for over twelve seasons.
Regarding rowing, Dr. Dory absolutely loved the art of “pulling on the sticks,” and the way those hard-hulled boats responded to those strokes. One of Derald’s favorite trips through the canyon, of which he did several, was an eight-day, private, rowing trip. If he liked rowing the flat water, he for sure loved the rapids, and all that rowing was a quicker means of getting to the next stretch of whitewater.
I, along with many folks, will remember Derald as an innovator, athlete, cowboy philosopher, leader, builder, competitor, and probably most of all—a lover of life. And—cooking for a group of passengers?—let’s just say he excelled in making a gourmet pot of beans! He latched onto the philosophy that a river trip was an “expedition not a holiday,” and most folks enjoyed his tongue-in-cheek, “John Wayne”-approach and humor. His world-class “Robert Duval” moustache could not hide a grin or that twinkle in his eye.
Derald loved Bob Dylan’s lyrics and music and he had most of Dylan’s art collected on vinyl. I recall helping him in his boat shop with the turntable spinning the album “Desire,” cranked to nine and Dr. “D” singing at the top of his lungs. I guess he related to Dylan’s philosophy and approach to life; the mystery, the romance, the everyday, talking/tangled blues of…it all.
Dr. Dory lives on with his spirit’s torch being carried by his many pards, on and off the river, his beautiful new bride Donna, his sons George and Gerry and his families, both east and west. And there’s plenty of gaily-painted boats floating rivers out there with his signature on them as living art. I’ll always remember him most, probably at Lava Falls, though. This rapid, this place seemed to be the culmination of what river life was all about for him—the ultimate metaphor for “why we’re here.” Are we always “above Lava?” For Derald it may very well have been…somewhere in the middle, crashing through the V-Wave, oars tucked. This is where he liked it best, in the meat of it all. We’ll see ya’ there, pard! Adios amigo!

Andy Hutchinson

Don Harris

In a business where most boatmen are associated with one type of boat and one era, Don Harris ran them all—wooden cataract boats, rafts, fiberglass speedboats, and motor rigs—and he ran them for over half a century. In an occupation filled with egos, boasts, and ballyhoo, Don Harris is the one man whom everyone liked, everyone admired, and everyone looked up to. He was a friend to all and never never said a bad word about a soul. He was a boatman’s boatman. Moreover, he was a gentleman’s gentleman.
LaPhene “Don” Harris was born in Soda Springs, Idaho in 1911. He grew up working on the family farm, then headed down to Utah and studied engineering in college. Upon graduation he picked up a job with the United States Geological Survey in Green River, Utah, and by 1937 had been transferred to the tiny outpost of Mexican Hat. Prominent among the handful of residents was Norman Nevills, the aspiring river runner. A few San Juan River trips with Nevills whetted Harris’s appetite enough to agree to help Nevills build a new fleet of Cataract boats and row one of them down the Colorado in 1938. In return for his efforts, Harris earned custody of one of the boats, the Mexican Hat.
After a laborious passage of Cataract, portaging and lining along the rocky shore, the Nevills group arrived at Lees Ferry several days late with growing friction in the group. Not wanting to risk losing his usgs job in those post-depression years, Harris decided to leave the trip and return to work.
The following year Harris met Bert Loper in Salt Lake City. Loper had been running rivers since 1893, but like Harris, had been frustrated by failed chances to run Grand Canyon. They agreed to join forces and run it in honor of Loper’s upcoming 70th birthday. At Badger Creek Harris asked Loper if he thought they could run it. “Of course we can run it,” answered Loper. “It’s just a matter of how we’re going to run it.” From that day on Harris never asked if they could run a rapid, he just asked how. Harris rarely lined or portaged again.
Loper and Harris had a fabulous trip, running every rapid, and agreed to do it again in ten years for Loper’s eightieth birthday. In the intervening years the two men ran several more trips together. In 1940 they rowed from the Green River Lakes to Green River, Utah—the only known group to do so before Flaming Gorge Dam. They ran Cataract Canyon together; they ran the Yampa. Harris soon found more river partners. Jack Brennan, a postal employee, answered Harris and Loper’s ad in the Salt Lake Tribune for someone to share the expenses of a Cataract Canyon trip. Brennan, too, fell in love with the rivers, built a Cataract boat called the Loper, and went into partnership with Harris, running a few trips each year in their vacation time. In 1949, Loper and Harris launched on their tenth anniversary trip on Grand Canyon. On the second afternoon, Loper disappeared into the waves of 24-1/2-Mile Rapid and an era of old-school boating came to an end.
In 1953 Dock Marston invited Harris on a scouting trip for Disney’s Ten Who Dared movie—based on the Powell expedition. Harris piloted an aluminum speedboat, and was so smitten with it that he and Jack Brennan soon bought twin fifteen-foot fiberglass motorboats for their fleet. They decked them over for whitewater use and ran trips throughout the West for the next fifteen years. At a Guides Training Seminar about ten years ago, Harris showed a film of himself running his speedboat through Lava on the 1957 flood of well over 100,000 cfs. As the tiny boat disappeared into the maw of Lava, Harris calmly said, “We’re getting down into the fuzzy part now.” The disconnect between this gentle, quiet, diminutive man and the maniacal boatman in the film was, to say the least, striking.
By the mid-1960s, Harris had seen the advantages of the large pontoon boats and purchased two. After retiring from the usgs, he and his second wife Mary began running full seasons, building a small business out of his former hobby. But a 1972 car crash damaged his left arm enough that he retired from commercial boating. He passed his business on to his son Alan and Alan’s partner Dave Kloepfer. Don continued to run his own boat on private trips for another decade. Don’s last river trip was in 1992, and fittingly was on the San Juan—the river that his old mentor Bert Loper had begun his boating on one hundred years before.
With Don’s passing, one of the last windows into the birth of commercial boating swings closed. Don Harris saw it all.

Brad Dimock

Wesley Pratt “Peachpit” Larsen (1916 – 2004)

Wes Larsen, a longtime professor at Southern Utah University with strong interests in botany, ethnology, and history, died on April 29. He is remembered as one of those rare, sensitive people who had both excellence and humility. His ethnobotanical writings often appeared in the Boatman’s Quarterly, but it was his historical work that livened up our campfire stories.
In the Spring 1994 bqr, Larsen relayed the Colorado City legend that John D. Lee’s execution was faked—that Lee wore armor beneath his shirt. “Let them shoot the balls through my heart! Don’t let them mangle my body,” he said. After falling back into his coffin he was spirited away by his son and “buried.” But Colorado City folk tell of him crossing at Lees Ferry the next day on his way to Mexico. So although Lee, Brigham Young’s adopted son, was convicted as the official scapegoat for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the church may have pardoned him after all.
But it was Larsen’s 1993 story in Canyon Legacy that made him famous. “Were the Powell Men Really Killed by Indians?” detailed an 1883 letter from one Mormon elder to another mentioning, among other things, “the day those three were murdered in our ward & the murderer killed to stop the shedding of more blood.” In his article, Larsen made a strong case for the three murdered men to be William Dunn and the Howland brothers, the three who hiked out Separation Canyon from the Powell Expedition in 1869. Although Don Lago recently refuted that interpretation and supplied a more plausible set of victims [bqr fall 2003], many details of the Howland and Dunn murders remain problematic. Although a telegram to Erastus Snow dated September 7, 1869 stated, “Powell’s three men killed by three She-bits [Shivwits Paiutes]… Two of the She-bits who killed the men are in the Washington Indian camp with two of the guns,” no attempt was ever made to apprehend the killers, retrieve the bodies or property of the victims, or avenge their deaths—unheard-of behavior in those days. “No matter how you cut it,” chuckled Larsen, “Powell’s men were killed by Mormons. You see, in 1862 the Mormons baptised the entire Paiute tribe. They were all Mormons!”

Brad Dimock