Jack Fuss and the Great Kaibab Deer Drive

“Deer just can’t be driven!”
Coconino Sun, December 19, 1924

I saw thousands of deer, most of which ran in small bands,” wrote Zane Grey. “The ringing of bells, the yelling of the Indians did not seem to frighten them, but the approach of riders on horseback, trying to herd them, brought swift flight.” Grey Hat Charlie, a Navajo Indian, asked if the Indians drove the deer, replied, “Yes, drive deer, drive lots and lots of deer.” But when asked where the deer were driven he swung his hand around and made a whistling sound, indicating every direction under the sun. Summarizing the Great Kaibab Deer Drive, District Forester R.H. Rutledge called it “the most interesting failure I have witnessed.”
Shortly after Theodore Roosevelt designated Grand Canyon National Game Preserve in 1906, Uncle Jimmy Owens and other rangers began the systematic annihilation of North Rim predators. Over the next two decades, according to one count, they slaughtered some 4,899 coyotes, 781 mountain lions, 554 bobcats, and twenty wolves. At the same time, hunting of the native mule deer was prohibited. Thus the healthy herd of three thousand, that existed when Roosevelt founded the preserve, exploded. Meanwhile, sheep and cattle ranchers continued encroaching into the pine forests of the rim, reducing the range of the burgeoning deer herd. By 1924 there was virtually nothing edible within eight feet of the ground. The formally sleek, fat deer were reduced to staggering, starving zombies, and the Game Refuge had become an embarrassment to the country.
While Arizona Governor George Hunt was searching for a solution, Flagstaff resident George McCormick made a novel proposition. He would herd five- to eight-thousand deer, he claimed, from the North Rim, down the Nankoweap and Horsethief Trails, swim them across the river, and bring them out the Tanner Trail to the south side where the forests were healthy. He would then drive portions of the herd to various range lands further south. For a price, of course. McCormick was no newcomer to peculiar propositions. Since 1893 he had worked the copper mines in the Lava Canyon / Palisades Creek area to little avail, driving him to less honorable means of income. Rumors of salting the mines to attract investors pop up from time to time. His son Mel admitted that his father drove rustled horses over the Tanner and Nankoweap Trails and inferred stolen horses were traded in both directions. During Prohibition nps Naturalist Glen Sturdevant found a moonshine still in Lava Canyon—the heart of McCormick country.
Reputation notwithstanding, McCormick was able to generate enough enthusiasm for his deer drive that Governor Hunt agreed to pay $2.50 per deer that McCormick could cajole across the Canyon. Zane Grey, already a famous author and a partner in Famous Players / Lasky Studios of Hollywood (later Paramount Pictures) offered five thousand dollars for exclusive film and story rights. And Flagstaff locals circulated a subscription to raise another one thousand dollars to drive one thousand of the deer through the streets of Flagstaff “where we may all have a look at them.” McCormick said he’d do it. Although he planned to begin the drive in the autumn, bureaucracy delayed the start until mid-December as the winter snows descended across Northern Arizona.
McCormick hired nearly one hundred Navajos and Paiutes at two dollars per day to herd deer with shouts and cowbells. (The Bureau of Indian Affairs wisely required McCormick to pay in advance.) In addition, McCormick recruited nearly fifty mounted cowboys to ride herd. On the North Rim he built a large V-shaped fence covered in burlap to funnel the deer down into the Nankoweap trailhead, and readied his troops in the Kaibab Forest to drive the estimated ten-thousand to one-hundred-thousand mule deer toward Point Imperial. Meanwhile Zane Grey and veteran movie director D.W. Griffith (his five-hundredth film, The Birth of a Nation, had made him famous in 1915), drove north with a crew—including their Japanese chef and a tailor—and established an elaborate base camp.
On December 6, 1924, George McCormick and a group of men rode from Flagstaff toward the South Rim to blaze the cross-canyon trail in reverse and meet the rest of the crew on the Kaibab Plateau. Among the cowboys rode 31-year-old Jack Fuss, a Flagstaff sign painter, taxi driver, piano player, and game warden. Fuss knew Grand Canyon, having mined for W.W. Bass in the Shinumo Creek area, and had lived here and there along the rim. Governor Hunt had asked him to tag along to keep an eye on McCormick and minimize damage to the deer.
Nearly six decades later in his Flagstaff living room, nonagenarian Jack described the debacle to me. His wife Mimi hollered occasional prompts, pitched to Jack’s failing ears, whenever he got stuck on a name or detail. Although Jack’s tale was burned into my memory that afternoon, my attempt to tape record the session failed, so I have told Jack’s story from memory around the campfire for the last two decades. But ever since that day I have wanted to do justice to his story in print. For this rendition I have synthesized the best parts of an address he gave to the Flagstaff Lions Club in 1963, and a 1975 interview by Susan Rogers.
edited by Brad Dimock
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Jack Fuss: George McCormick, an old prospector and horse thief from Utah, used to steal horses over there and bring ’em across this crossing that he knew, down the Tanner Trail and up the Baumgart Trail [an old name for the Horsethief Trail] in the Grand Canyon, to get up to the South Canyon [the South Canyon Forest Service Ranger Station was just a few miles north of the head of the Nankoweap Trail] where they was gonna have the deer drive in the Kaibab. Nobody knew the trail but him. So Lasky [Studios] said they’d give him $5,000 for the story, if they completed the deal, you know. And he contended that he was gonna drive ten thousand head of deer—not five, but ten thousand—out of the Kaibab, over across the river, and bring ’em up into Coconino County.
So Lasky brought over a great big crew, a studio, cameras and—oh, they spent a lot of money—had Zane Grey come to write the story.
Mimi Fuss: You were game warden then, weren’t you?
Jack Fuss: I went along along to take care of the situation.
Mimi Fuss: [Louder] You were game warden, weren’t you?
Jack Fuss: Yeah, I was game warden. I was to supervise the deal so that they wouldn’t slaughter or anything. We left here on the sixth of December.
Now, there was Jimmy Babbitt, dear old Jimmy, one of the finest men I ever knew—he finally died in the Mogollon; he froze to death with a heart attack or something. Johnny Wetzel, who was an old laborer here and one of the finest old Swedes I ever knew, he went along. Lou Wesley, was our blacksmith, he went along to shoe the horses. Bob Mackey was a city policeman at the time, and Everett Mercer’s younger brother—I can’t recall his first name—and Jack Walker from Kendrick Park. We met Jack out at Kendrick Park on our way.
We left with 27 head of horses. We rode with our pack outfits to Jack Walker’s the first day and it was colder than a son-of-a-gun. So we all slept in Jack Walker’s potato cellar that night with our horses in his pasture. Put our saddles in his barn. That night it started to snow, so we got up before daylight, and George made us some kind of slapstick breakfast. He never did feed us decent on the whole trip. I’m not condemning the guy, but he didn’t have the facilities nor the time to do it.
The next night we arrived at…at… [pause]
Mimi Fuss: The Buggeln Ranch. The Buggeln Ranch, Jack!
Jack Fuss: Yeah, Buggeln, the Martin Buggeln Ranch. It’s over in the Moqui hunting grounds there, toward the canyon. We got there around five o’clock in the evenin’, it was just gettin’ dark. Mrs. Bugglen was a wonderful—they were a wonderful old couple. They invited us all, and we unsaddled our horses and fed ’em, and put ’em in their little pasture they had. It snowed all that day. It was gettin’ about a foot deep. That evening, she made supper for us; and that morning she made breakfast for all of us, and never charged us a cent—just fed us and took care of us. We slept in the barn in the hay.
We took off before daylight, it was nearly zero, and boy, was that saddle cold! [laughs] And the horses were all nutty, you know, full of pep and vinegar, wanting to buck you off and everything. It was cold, and they were shiverin’ and all, had frost on their hair.
So we got to where the Hopi Tower is now—it wasn’t there then—along about three o’clock in the afternoon, I imagine. And we started down the trail, and the trail was snow drifted two or three feet deep in places, and the horses—the lead horses and the boys that were herding them—they drove on ahead. Jimmy and I, we always rode behind just to take in the situation and study it and see how feasible the thing was, how it looked to us like it would be capable of doing. So on our way down we were always a city block or two behind. When we got into the third night, down on the first plateau as they called the Blue Lime, there was about six inches of snow down there. [Miners called the Redwall Limestone the Blue Lime, due to the blue-gray color of the actual rock.]
Jimmy and I come into camp, it was just about suppertime, and I looked all around and I couldn’t find my packhorse. I looked all around and said, “George, where the heck’s my pack horse?” “Well,” he said, “it went off the trail up there about halfway up the trail.” I says, “Well, that’s a nice deal. Why the heck didn’t you tell me about it?” When I asked this kid that was a city cop here, Bob Mackey—to help me, if he’d go back up with me and help me get… He said, “No, I’m too tired.” I said, “Okay.” So I’d been livin’ in the canyon for a year and a half, it didn’t bother me. So I got a fresh horse from George. It was moonlight, real big, bright moonlight and snow. It was just like daylight. I went back up the trail to look for the spot where my horse went off, and finally I found the spot in the snow where he had gone off. There was a ledge sticking out, a sharp rock ledge, and the trail was kind of narrow and a horse, not as good as a mule or a burro on a trail, is always entitled to get flighty and make a lunge, instead of taking things easy. He had wooden kyacks on and naturally when he lunged, why, that old wooden kyack humped him off, so he went down about a hundred feet. I could see where he rolled down in the snow. He was dead, layin’ there with his neck broke.
Mimi Fuss: Wait, explain what a kyack is.
Jack Fuss: It’s what you put your…
Mimi Fuss: Supplies
Jack Fuss: …stuff in when you go campin’.
Mimi Fuss: Over a horse.
Jack Fuss: You put it over a pack saddle, you know, hang ’em on each side. They’re saddlebags—kyacks, they’re called. And these were wooden. Most of ’em are made out of cat skin.
Luckily I could manage to climb down and cut the ropes and get my bedroll. I didn’t bother with the stuff that was in the kyacks, ’cause most of it was just stuff that George wanted to take over there and I couldn’t bother packing it back up and down over that hundred feet of rock cliffs and snow. I dragged my bed up and packed it on the horse, got back into camp at daylight. And they were ready to leave when I got back there. Never got no breakfast. They didn’t save any breakfast. They didn’t like the game warden, see—that was the whole deal. So they didn’t want to help me any. But I got even with ’em.
So then we made the river. If you’ve been to the Hopi Tower and looked down, you can see down there a curve in the river, a big wide open spot with a big sandy place in there. Down in there is a cave. Now how he got it there—he must have brought it in from Lees Ferry, ’cause I don’t know how he could have got it in there any other way—but he had it stashed: an old galvanized boat, and the oars. Now, you see, what he was usin’ it for was crossin’ that river all the time. We didn’t know the trail or that he had that boat, even. But I surmised things when I seen that.
So I was the only guy that could row, bein’ born on the Delaware River, and boats, you know. These other cowboys and horse-shoers and one thing and another, miners and picks, they didn’t know how to row a boat. George was pretty good, ’cause he’d rowed the river. And then, you see, the river was rough, because there wasn’t no dams in it. And it was two- to three-hundred feet across. We had to land on a sandbar, wasn’t over two hundred feet long. And we had to land on that bar as we were goin’ down the canyon. And then we had to drag a horse behind us. That made it tough, see. We’d tie a horse on the back, and the cowboys would push him in the water. Then he had to swim. Well, the first one they put in was this big mule we had, a lead mule. And he tried to get in the boat, and George was rowin’. He got one foot in, and I liked to broke my fist hittin’ him in the jaw, knockin’ him out. I finally stood up and lifted his foot out of the boat. It’s a wonder he didn’t upset us. Oh! it was sure dangerous. And that river was really somethin’, you know, then. And we had to make that sand bar, or else we’d have gone down the river. But we finally made it.

And after we got that big mule across, then the other horses would see him, when we was bringin’ ’em across, and they’d swim better. So we swam each horse, each one of them twenty-seven horses across, one at a time. And I had to row one, and then George would row one, because nobody else knew how to row, and it was eleven o’clock at night before we got them all across. And we had to make that bank every time.
Well, we got there, got the work done. It was moonlight, and we worked in the night, in the nighttime. The moonlight was good as daylight, prit’ near. We got over, and George, in the meantime, had put a galvanized bucket of water on the fire, and he had a great big hunk of meat in it, about the size of your head—boiled it with just a little bit of water around it, you know. It was fresh meat. We got over there, it was time to eat. Poor old Jimmy Babbitt, he says, “Jack, I can’t eat that food.” I said, “I can’t either. My stomach’s burnin’ up, it’s on fire,” from the stuff that he was cookin’ and givin’ us on the other three days. It was half cooked, you know. So when he’d open up the biscuits, the dough would run out of ’em even. It was terrible. I had the damnedest burnin’ in my belly I ever had in my life. I thought I had an ulcer for sure.
I had some Hershey bars in my saddlebag and I went up in the draw and I got some Mormon tea and I got a can from old George and boiled some water and proceeded to make some Mormon tea. So Jimmy and I we had Mormon tea and Hershey bars.
We laid our beds out, and the moon was shining just as bright as day—like the ceiling here—right down on the bottom of the canyon. Nice sandy beach, we rolled our beds out. Just along about twelve o’clock then, you could see the moon was moving, the shadows was starting to creep up off the cliffs. And just about the time the moon got out of sight old George come along and kicked us all in the ass and told us it was time to get up. It was about three o’clock. He wanted to get started, you know. So we was laying there and old Johnny Wetzel, the old Swede—he worked out at the ordinance when they built it, blastin’ holes, you know, to blow the rocks—and he was along to help us with our rock work, if we needed any. He says “Hey George, you tink ve going to come some place vere ve vant to stay all night sometime?” Old George he give that big hearty laugh of his and he says, “Never mind. Come on, roll out!” [laughs] We all got to laughin’. That started us off.
So we all got up and packed our bedrolls, and we started up the Baumgart Trail. The Baumgart Trail came into the beach there. There was a crack in the rock about twenty, twenty-five feet across and there was a wash that came down there, and that’s where the trail went out.
That day we went up about a thousand feet, just straight up, and we hit this ridge, then we come down about a thousand feet and we hit [Kwagunt], a nice stream of water, then we went up again. Now, I tell you this to show you how ridiculous the deer drive was in fact. We went up again about a thousand or fifteen hundred feet, and down on the other side we come to Nankoweap, which was a nice little stream.
So there we decided we’d camp and spend the night. The horses could feed there. There was a little stuff along the crick there, the wash, and we washed our feet and one thing or another. It wasn’t too cold down there. It was cold enough, but if you couldn’t take a bath, anyhow you could wash the sweaty spots.
So the next morning we started out on the trail again, and you couldn’t see the trail. It was absolutely no trail. I don’t know how old George ever found it, but he never lost it. That’s the reason he didn’t have to find it I guess. But, anyhow, we came to a shale slide. It was about a forty-five degree pitch, real hard, just solid shale. Well, you couldn’t stand up on it. You couldn’t walk around on it. But we had to get around it, so old George and Lou Wesley and Johnny, all of us took George’s mining picks and one thing or another that he had and picked toe holds about the size of a saucer, or so, around in this shale so this old mule could make the first steps around. Then all the rest of the horses, of course, they followed along. Anyhow we got around the shale slide.
Anyhow, when we got up, oh, about a thousand feet from the top, there’s a battleship stuck out—you know, one of them big rocks—we call that a battleship. And the trail come around the side of it. Down here there’s a ledge. About half way down, four- or five-hundred feet, there’s a ledge around there, and it’s maybe eight or ten feet wide and all filled on a forty-five degree pitch with rocks. And on the north side it was all snow and ice. Well, off of that darn thing it was about five-hundred feet right straight down. You couldn’t look down, it would scare you to death. And we all just creeped along, holding on to our horses coming along behind us. We made the north side where it was cold and it was all ice, as slick as a goose. And then when we got around to the south side it was all mud. Same condition only mud, five-hundred feet, six-hundred feet down. Straight down. You couldn’t see. You couldn’t get out and look. Just like going off of an airplane, and that was the trail.
When we got to the end of that we were getting pretty close to the top. It was about two-hundred or three-hundred feet up to the saddle. Well, from where that trail quit there was a switch back, an old deer trail or something that switched back and forth. We’d each wait till the one ahead of us got up, so I stopped at the foot of it.
Standing there watching me was Bob Mackey, a policeman from Flagstaff. He had a big, beautiful, black horse and a big black, brand new saddle, slicker, everything tied on. Well, he got up pretty near to the top, and I don’t know what ever made him do it, but he turned the horse around with his rump out and the horse’s hind feet went off the rock. I heard the rocks begin to slide and rumble and rattle, and I looked up, and here come that horse, just head first, just diving on each side, just rolling like a hoop, and my horse commencing to back up and I thought, oh, my God, I’m going to lose him too. And he was a-snorting and a-pulling up. That horse lit, honest to God, from me to you, right on the back of his head in front of me, and you never heard such a noise and such a crunchin’. It was the most horrible noise I ever heard. And he made one bounce and plooey! Couldn’t even see where it went. Never seen where it went at all. Just disappeared entirely. Mr. Mackey said, “I wonder if you’ll help me find my horse?” I said, “Bob, no deal.” You couldn’t have found it with a helicopter.
So then after ten, fifteen minutes I got my horse quieted down and we started up. And we made it—the rest of us made it. So anyhow, I got my horse up and we got up onto the top.
Lou Wesley was the city blacksmith, he went along. He met me at the top and said, “Gee, I’m sure glad this is over with!” And I said, “So am I!” It was sure a hair’s breadth…
It was all quinine cliff-rose right there at that section, which the deer were eating in and it was all chewed off as high up as they could stand. You could look right through the woods, through the pinyons and the cedars and the manzanita and everything else just as far as you wanted to see, and there wasn’t a bit of vegetation. They’d eaten it all.
We had about five or six miles to go from the top, over into South Canyon where the ranger station was. Mr. Sitgreaves and Mercer, the state biologist, and the rangers, and Zane Grey—they were all in there, waitin’ for me to come in and give a report. It was dark then.
But before I went over there to the station, I built a fire under a cedar tree and put a lot of rocks in it. And then I took the rocks when they got hot, and scratched out a bunch of cedar needles and stuff, and put my bedroll down in there, and then I put these hot rocks around the bedroll. I slept nice and warm. It was down to zero, and snow all over the place.
When the news got around that we’d got in they sent word over for the game warden to come up to the ranger station. When I got up to the ranger station, I went over and they wanted to have a talk with me about the trip, find out the feasibility of the thing.
There was Zane Grey, I have his picture. D.W. Griffith, he was the director of Lasky Studios, who footed the bill for 5,000 bucks to take the pictures and have the right of it—Grey was going to write the story. They had set up a beautiful camp, tents, chuck tent, they had five photographers, and I got all their pictures, wonderful bunch of guys. And old Shy Thomas was there and—these names I just wrote down this morning from the Coconino Sun that I saved—Ed Miller, Johnny Adams, and Mr. Locklin, that was in our Forest Service. They were up there in South Canyon Ranger Station. They give me a big bowl of deer stew and that was really okay. I hadn’t had anything decent to eat in a week.
So I ate my stew and I told them what I just told you fellows. And I said I think it’s the most crazy damn thing I ever heard of. To think that a guy would have a thought that he could drive a whole bunch of deer, let alone a few milk cows or horses, over the trail without losing half of them, because they wouldn’t single out single file, which they had to do to go over that first three miles, was terrible. And then after they got past that, they had to go over the shale slide, and you can imagine what a bunch of deer would have done scramblin’ over that. Course they’d probably made it all right, but then it was ridiculous to think of it.
Then when I told you about going over these ridges, Nankoweap and Kwagunt, these streams, these ridges a thousand feet high all going down towards the river, to think that the deer would be nice little deer and all go over the trail and not go down these canyons and not go down these ridges, which I knew damn well they would, by golly it’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of! They wouldn’t go up and down that trail because George wanted ’em to. And there’s no way under God’s sun that you could herd ’em.
When I told them my story, they all had a pretty long face, especially the guys that put out all that dough.
The next morning I took Bill Sickner—I see his name as photographer on lots of tv shows, wonderful old fellow. I packed up two mules with his telescopic lenses and his photography and his cameras and films and everything, and took them over to South Canyon and got up on a nice high point there, which I have pictures of, photographs, and we sat there.
Well, they had hired about two-hundred Navajos, gave them bells and they strung out a couple hundred yards of chicken wire, which led into the South Canyon, they put some sheeting on it. And these deer were suppose to come in like a bunch of cattle into this chute into the South Canyon. Well, we sat there for about two hours and finally we heard some Navajos yellin’ and ringin’ their bells. We could see about a city block up this opening. Here come a great big buck out, and about two-hundred deer of all kinds—does and little bucks and fawns and everything. He was the ring leader, I guess. But anyhow, he decided it was the wrong way to go, so he swapped ends and whamo! Back he went. The rest of them followed him. Just like a bunch of sheep, away they went, and the Indians all got up in the trees, got out of the way…Navajos in every tree. And that [laughs, slaps knee] was the end of the Great Kaibab Deer Drive!
Bill he forgot even to pull the trigger on the camera. He never got a shot. So we sat there, and we sat there, till about two o’clock, and I says, “Well, I guess it’s all over with, Bill.” Started snowin’ again, so we packed up and come back into camp. They never got even a still picture of that thing.
So we packed up, and when I got back to camp, Lasky had packed up, started to unroll the tents, snowin’ like a bugger. Bill Sickner and the other four cameramen were there, and the big shot from Lasky—Griffith—the director. Him and Zane Grey took off in the Cadillac and went home, when it started stormin’ there the last time, and left all these cameramen. So George McCormick come over to me and he says, “Jack, are you gonna go home with the horses?” And I said, “Heck, no, I don’t want no more of this. I’m full up! I’ve done my job. That’s all I was asked to do.” And he said, “Well, I’ll tell ya’, I’ve got a Cadillac here. There’s five cameramen that have to get to town. I wonder if you’d drive ’em in.” I said, “I sure will, I’ll be tickled to death.” In those days you had to cross over at Lees Ferry.
So we got in, I took the five cameramen, and we got on the ferry and got across, went up the dugway. The old dugway you had to go up was chiseled out with a hammer and chisel clear up, to get up to the road, you know, from the river. And it was only wide enough for a car. There was only about six inches on the outside of the tire. One of the old taxi drivers that was here, he used to stutter awful bad. When they took him to the top of this dugway.
Mimi Fuss: Bucko was the one.
Jack Fuss: Bucko Sisk was his name.
Mimi Fuss: That stuttered.
Jack Fuss: And he got to the top of the hill and he said, “S-s-s-stop, Earl!” “What’s the matter?” “I would sooner w-w-walk.” So he walked. And he was a taxi driver. So anyhow, I took ’em up and we got to the divide. The old road now is different than it was in those days. This new highway goes on around. There used to be a summit. On the old road, they called it the summit, that went around through the cinders, goin’ into Tuba to Cameron. We got to the divide, and the snow was really packed. We got stuck, couldn’t budge. I looked in the car and he didn’t have no chains, didn’t have no shovel. I said, “Gentlemen, we’re here, unless you want to walk a couple of miles to Mr. Claude Knight’s ranch house. I’m sure we can go in there.” “Well, let’s go. We’ve got to, we can’t sit here and freeze to death.” So I picked out a trail on the side of the hill that wasn’t quite so deep, and we got into Claude’s about five o’clock in the morning.
I knocked on the door and he come to the door in his pajamas. “What the hell do you want here at this time of day?!” I said, “I’ve got five cameramen here, and they’re all froze to death and starved. I wonder if they could come in and get breakfast and go to sleep?” He said, “Sure, come on in.” So we all went in, and she made breakfast—his wife. They all slept on the floor by the fireplace. About ten o’clock in the morning, the county drag—grader—came along, and they were gradin’ out. But in the meantime, Claude and I had taken a team of his horses and we went down and hooked onto the car and was pullin’ it out with the horses. I’ve got a picture of that somewhere, just when we got to Claude’s with the car.
So when we got in the car to go back home to town, we went into the Monte Vista [Hotel] and they kind of gave the big man a bad time. [laughs] But that was the end of that.
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Jack told me that story and several tales about working for old Bill Bass in the asbestos mine. And he told of starting Flagstaff’s annual All-Indian Pow Wow. The Navajo name for Jack translated to Mr. Big Party. Then he showed me his picture album. Reminiscing about his nine decades he said, “Mimi and I have been married sixty-one years!”
“Sixty, Jack! Only sixty,” shrieked Mimi. “We’ve only been married SIXTY years!”
“Well,” said Jack, laughing, “It seems like sixty-one!”