’ve always thought, having been my age, granted, the Grand Canyon is one of the last things that was comparable to the Old West. You may laugh about it, but one of the last, like the fur trappers, the cowboys, the explorers that went west and did things on their own, improvised, set it up. The river was that way and that’s why it was so free. It was like heading west in the wagons or something. We felt as soon as you passed under the bridge you were free, unrestricted, your own person. You had to live by your wits. We didn’t have helicopter help then as much, or things like that. Didn’t have a lot of regulation. You could build big bonfires to stand around. People would enjoy it because they could look in the fire, they could dream, they could think. The first times, you have to think about it... we designed our boats, we built them, we approved them. We were always—every company—we weren’t jealous of each other to the point we wouldn’t help each other. Boatmen worked back and forth for different companies. With rare exceptions, there wasn’t any conflict.
Those were great days. They were so much fun. We call them “the rape and pillage” days now. (laughs) We didn’t hurt anything though. Environmentally, we were way ahead of the Park Service... As a matter of fact, we had to wait and let them catch up. People forget: the river runners were in the forefront of a lot of things— to take care of the Canyon and keep it clean, to haul human waste out. Step-by-step.
It’s such a great experience, though. As the young people used to say, “You get your doo-doo together down there.” I’ve watched them, you sit on a rock, look at the Canyon, it’s so big that it straightens out your mind. If a person’s going to marry somebody, you go down the Canyon with them and maybe find out what a jerk the guy is— right there you’ve saved yourself a lifetime of trouble. You get rid of him, because he’s the head of the line when it comes time to eat, and he elbows the old people out of the way to get on the boat. You don’t want to marry somebody like that—get rid of him. The Canyon. . . teenagers love to go down there with their folks. I’ve heard them say, “Dad was never like this! Look at Dad jumping in the water, yelling, hollering…” And this is the Canyon, this is what it is... I don’t think the Park wants to restrict it to where it is just a Disneyland thing. It is not a Disneyland thing. You have to remember all the time, there’s an element of danger, there’s an element of chance that makes it exciting, along with being a great place for the human mind.
We had so much fun. (laughs) A lot of it we can’t put on tape!

**
Fred Burke sits back. He surveys the scene from his house on the hill these days (in between the occasional mule trade or commission he’s asked to sit on); and visiting him there it might be tempting to harbor a little jealousy about his present circumstances, or maybe even resentment at the unrecognized but tremendous impact he had on our times and on river running in the Grand Canyon. He wasn’t alone—they never are—but in much the same way that Martin Litton willed the Marble Canyon Dam fight into being, Fred Burke dug his heels in and led the charge to keep motors on the river. You can love him for that or hate him, but what you can’t begin to do, until you know a little of his history, is understand him.
**

My mother died in the flu epidemic in 1917, right after I was born. My dad worked in California for the Edison Company, where they were building the dams along the Sierra Nevadas. He was a mechanic, but we spent our time up in the mountains—Kern River Valley, very isolated, hard to get to, just barely progressing. Kernville was about a hundred and fifty people; and there was Weldon and Onyx—they were little—just stores that were owned by big cattle companies. I went to school in a one-room schoolhouse. I think when I graduated from the eighth grade, we had three of us graduated. We can’t have a reunion any more, because I’m the only one left.
In those days, you had to go to Bakersfield to go to [high] school, and that was around seventy miles away—no buses, no transportation, nothing furnished—so I didn’t go. I took an extra year in that little schoolhouse, so it would be the equivalent of a ninth grade. The teacher was good enough to give me advanced—probably better than going to high school! And that was it—then I went to cowboying. I was about fourteen or fifteen, I guess.

How much did they pay, and what was your job?

The old days sounds romantic, but it wasn’t, it was a lot of work. That was right around the Depression and they paid by the day, you’d get anywhere from a dollar-and-a-half to two dollars, board and room. If you worked by the month, fifty dollars if you just did straight cowboy work; sixty dollars if you rode colts. A misconception is that cowboys rode all the time. Unless you worked for the big companies, few cowboys did. The others had to fix fence and put up hay in the summertime. In between moving the cattle, why, you did other jobs—all manual labor, seven days a week in the busy season. We could go to a party in those days, though, with two dollars.
It was a pretty poor existence: Hard work, no money, you’re camped out in the High Sierras. You’d spend months up there, or else out in the desert, and it wasn’t as glamorous as it appears to be. But it was fun, it was a way of life you don’t really see today. And I enjoyed it! Thought it was great! I rode colts, mostly, so I got top pay.
All the little ranches were owned by families, and when you worked for them you were just like part of the family. We had a couple of big companies: had A. Brown Company, and they owned a company store. Onyx Ranch owned a company store, and ran it just like in the old days. No payday, all you received was a little statement from the store saying you’d earned sixty dollars that month, and spent twenty-five or thirty in the store, and you had a running balance of “X” number of dollars... of which they didn’t pay you any interest or anything else. Or never really paid you, they just carried it on. That’s something nowadays, if you did that everybody would be upset, because it’s just like sharecropping. You didn’t have any money of your own, didn’t have a payday. But we were happy. Didn’t know any better. No unemployment, no workmen’s compensation—if you got hurt, you were on your own.
It was a nice country to live in. Pretty, nice rivers. Kern River, we used to take cattle up in the High Sierras, up at the headwaters of the Kern and the south fork of the Kern. We’d swim in the rivers. My first [river] experience was there.

Did you like water?

Oh, yeah, the little one-room school at Kernville, at noontime. . . all we wore then was a shirt and Levis—you didn’t wear any underwear or anything else, a lot of the boys. We’d run like hell—no shoes on, barefoot—down to the Kern River, swim like fish all during the noon hour, then grab our clothes and run back to school, start putting on our clothes about the time we got to school. The teacher would stand in the door and whack us if we were five, ten minutes late! But it went on, the same thing. There was probably, oh, thirty or forty kids in one room. It was real interesting going to school there.

What took you out of that cycle of being a cowboy?

Oh, I don’t know. I realized there was no future to it. Another fellow and I started down to Los Angeles to get on a ship and see the world. Didn’t make it, we got kind of lost down there. So rather than starve, I joined the Cavalry. At that time, the Cavalry had horses, and it seemed like an exciting thing to do. I liked horses, been with them. So I enlisted in the 11th Cavalry, Presidio, Monterey, California. I had a cut in pay from fifty or sixty dollars down to twenty dollars and seventy-five cents. (Really, it’s supposed to be twenty-one, but they took a quarter out for the Old Soldiers’ Home, which I’ve never been able to find yet, don’t know where it is!) So it was not much pay, but you rode horses every day.

What year was that? Right in the middle of the Depression?

Yeah, jobs were scarce. It gets confusing if you’re trying to get a timetable, because you’re here for a while and there for a while. For example, after a year in the Cavalry, I could see no big future there. So I won some money shooting craps. And in those days, you could buy your way out of the Army for a hundred and some dollars. And you had a clothing allowance, you could use that credit. A hundred and some dollars that I won shooting craps, I could buy out of there, and I did that and went back to cowboying again.
About the end of 1937, I tried rodeoing. They gave me some time off to go down to Bakersfield to rodeo, and I won the all-around Kern County Amateur Championship that year. I thought I was going to be a big rodeo rider! But that was the height, the pinnacle—I didn’t realize—right there. From then on it was all downhill: I probably got bucked off more times than I rode! I traveled around and went up the west coast and up in Idaho. You’d irrigate potatoes at night to get enough money to enter a rodeo, and then rodeo in the daytime. Starving all the time—one step from starvation. You had to hitchhike or get on a train, ride a boxcar to the next rodeo. All you had was spurs and a bucking rein, a couple of shirts, a pair of Levis.

How long did it take to figure out the future in that?

About a year. I wound up in Florida. Went down there in the wintertime: they were going to have a rodeo going every weekend for the tourists. It sounded like a good deal. A couple of us went and found out it was a fake. So we were broke and in Florida, and that’s the worst thing could happen to a Westerner! I figured if I died, I wanted to fall west. So I was walking, had about two-and-a-half dollars in my pocket. I caught a ride with a produce truck hauling tomatoes back to Fort Worth. Said he’d give me a ride if I’d help him drive. And unfortunately, just how fate’s fickle finger will get to you, we crossed the line into Alabama, and I got picked up speeding with the truck: 47 miles per hour in a 45-mile zone. So the cop took me to jail. The guy was going to bail me out, but he didn’t. He went on to Texas and left me there. So I spent ten days in jail in Nokomis, Alabama. It was quite an education! You spend ten days in a “tank,” as they call it, all of you, maybe twenty-five or thirty guys all dumped into one bare tank.

For driving a truck two miles over the limit?

That’s right! Well, all they wanted was your body, because the Sheriff would get paid so much a prisoner to feed them. He’d only feed you a little greasy piece of pork with some black-eyed peas—and he’d make money on feeding you. Ten days seemed to be the limit they could keep you without going in front of a judge. I never went before a judge! I never had anything to say to anybody—they just put me in there! And the guy said, “Quit hollering, or you’re going to stay longer.” So you learned to be nice, and ten days later they let me out. They’d taken my two-and-half for the kangaroo court. Kangaroo court there in jail, they’d beat you if you didn’t give them the money you had. All I had was two-and-a-half, so I gave it up. I stepped out of jail, the deputy took me to the edge of town and said, “Don’t come back.” I headed west and just started walking and hitchhiking, got as far as Texas. I would have killed that guy if I could have found him, but I couldn’t find him.
Got on a freight train in Fort Worth, then, and rode it all the way to Tucson. It was kind of a low point, you know, in your life.

How old were you then?

Oh, Christ, must have been somewhere in my teens. That was about 1938, somewhere along in there. ...When this guy left me in the jail, he took my bag with all my clothes, everything. All I had was just a shirt and a pair of Levis, and brother, it was cold! I came all the way out west there, and the shirt was filthy. So I went down to Drachman’s Cleaners and asked them if I could trade them that shirt—it was a good shirt—for a clean shirt, which they did. Years later when I was a State Representative and down at Tucson, [they] were having a little wing-ding for the legislators, trying to sell us on giving them more money for the university. Drachman was master of ceremonies, and he was calling us up to take some kind of award. I told him, “You know, you helped me out here, thirty, forty years ago, giving me a clean shirt.” I felt it was kind of an achievement, somehow [from being broke to State Representative].
But there was supposed to be a job at a dude ranch. I walked and hitchhiked all the way out to the dude ranch, got there too late, the job was gone. The guy said he’d take me back into town—one of the dudes—and he asked me what my problem was, and I told him: no money, had been in jail, trying to get home to California. And he threw thirty dollars—a twenty and a ten—down in my lap. Said, “Here, go get a bus ticket and go home.” And that kind of stuck with me all through life, that when you get to the bottom like that, somebody would come along and help you. It’s really important, I mean, to help people once in a while. And he didn’t ask for anything. He said, “Don’t worry about sending it to me or anything.” Of course, I was a little hesitant to take it, because I thought he had some ulterior motive. But I took it anyway. He didn’t have a motive. After getting a bus ticket and eating a lot in Tucson, boy, I went home! I was sure happy to get back up there in the Kern River and punching cows.
Finally, an old cowboy that was quite a reader, pretty sharp guy—he told me, “Why don’t you go back and get in the Army, get a commission if you can. Get as much rank as you can, because if you’re going to get killed, you might as well get it as an officer, making more money!”

You could see World War II coming?

Well, he could see it coming. And a lot of us could after we began talking like that—I wasn’t as smart as he was—but after listening to him, sure, we could see it coming, somewhere. We didn’t know the exact details, naturally.

**

Naturally... the exact details turned out to be pretty amazing. Fred bluffed his way back into the 11th Cavalry as a corporal (so he wouldn’t have to do k.p.) and began an epic journey that lasted nearly fifteen years. When he left the military he was a lieutenant colonel.
The early days were wild. He went from guarding the Mexican border as part of a horse troop armed with .45 handguns (trying to hit silhouette targets while galloping abreast in training—in case they had to stop a sneak attack by the Japanese), to a motorcycle squad, then officers’ school and then to the 10th Mountain Division (ski troops who were sent to the Apeninnes in Italy to fight the Germans). As a freshly minted officer, he’d been ordered to start his own company of seventy-five men and two hundred fifty mules. That company became the lifeblood of a regiment fighting in country too rugged for machines. After the war, his cowboy background followed him throughout a tour of duty that took him all over the world. For the Marshall Plan he supplied mules and horses to Turkey, Greece, Italy and Mexico, buying them all over the midwest, then taking them down the Mississippi and across the Mediterranean by ship. Later he saw Korea and Japan. Finally he mustered out from Fort Huachuca, Arizona—back into the cow business. But really, the adventures had only begun.
He’d been married and divorced by then, and had two grown daughters. Somehow, luck and tenacity helped him hook his second wife, Carol, who was a stewardess then for Western Airlines. Fred proceeded to lose his shirt in the cow business. Not once, but twice. Along the way he ran for the state legislature, and won. [“I don’t know why I had this political bug all of a sudden, but we gotta save humanity. And I got this bug. I don’t know, I just started to run.”] He was summoned to a meeting with the local wheels, who recommended he do exactly what the old representative said (... a guy who’d just been beat in a run for the senate after being Speaker of the House for three terms). When Fred refused, [“Hell no, the people elected me!”] they explained the situation: Okay, we’ll just beat you next term. Which they did, by running the old Speaker again.
At the same time I got beat in the fall, it was a pretty low point, because that’s when we had to ship the cattle to the feed lot. I lost the election, the cattle. . . . Jesus criminee, we sold them, lost our ass on that—I mean, wiped us out completely.

So you got whupped in the election, and whupped in the cow business too?

Whupped! I mean, whupped in the cow business! We owed—Carol didn’t know it, but we lost all our money. All I had was my Army retirement to get by on. I had cattle out at Eaton Feed Lot then, at McDowell. Old Ray Eaton owned it. I didn’t know him real well, but a hell of a nice guy. We’d done business with him and we knew the fellow that ran his feed lot, Shannon Tomlinson—he’d partnered with us. But after I paid the bank off, I owed Ray a feed bill. I don’t know, something like twenty thousand dollars. Ray loaned me ten thousand more without a note, without anything! Just a check! He said, “Here, take this back to the bank.” In those days, the Valley Bank would margin you about 90 percent on your cattle. So if you had ten thousand dollars, you could buy a hundred thousand dollars worth of cattle. So I bought some more! Just gritted my teeth and said, “To hell with it.” We bought some more, and by God, the market turned around the next spring and we were able to contract them for June delivery and paid off Eaton, and paid everybody, but didn’t have any more money. We were living over in the west side of Phoenix, right across from the Reynolds Plant, Van Buren and Thirty-fifth, and you read today where Van Buren and Thirty-fifth is. . . . Man, I mean, it was a tough neighborhood! You couldn’t even barbecue a steak unless you stood over the top of your barbecue with a club! You’d come inside to get some seasoning, and a guy would swipe your steak by the time you got back out there again!
I was very depressed during that period, you could imagine: forty-some years old. . . I went to work in the feed lot.

After you’d borrowed this money?

Yeah! Here’s a guy that was a State Representative being wined and dined up in the Arizona Club, people running around blowing smoke up you how great you are. He’s wearing white shirts, sport coats, ties, shoes shined. Next thing, he’s out on West McDowell in a feed lot, in an old pair of boots, with cow doo-doo up almost half-way to your knees, slogging around in there for about five hundred dollars a month! I always stunk so bad when I come back to the apartment, Carol wouldn’t let me in until I stripped outside! Do you think that wasn’t a let-down, mentally and everything else?!

The two of them got decent jobs in Phoenix after paying their debts off, but really their hearts weren’t in it anymore, and finally they opted for a change of scene.

We went north, took a vacation, stopped by Lee’s Ferry on the way down, and the Fish and Game had a fellow stationed there that used to be a sergeant for me in the Army. He said, “Hey, there’s a good deal coming up here. . . .”
Carol Burke: The USGS.
Yeah, “the Geological Survey just built a brand new house up on the hill there at Lee’s Ferry. Nobody’s lived in it. All you got to do is measure water.” I said, “Hell, I don’t know anything about Geological Survey, measuring water.” He said, “You don’t have to know very much.” So, with my connections in the Legislature with friends that were still there—I did have some friends...

So you just loaded up the car and moved to Lee’s Ferry?

Fred: Well, I was kind of going through the “change of life” then, I think. You know, here you are, I’m about fifty years old and haven’t been a success yet—everything’s gone to hell. We just wanted to pull back and get out of the world. Get back in that little hole, tucked back in there at Lee’s Ferry. That’s the image you get, if you think about it next time you’re at Lee’s Ferry: the world goes out like this to those cliffs, way out in here, but you can’t see it. You’re in here with your back against the wall. You go back there and lick your wounds.
Carol Burke: Well, that’s when we got to meeting the early river runners.
Fred: Yeah.

So, going out there, it wasn’t like you were going to launch this great adventure?

Fred: But see, life is just exactly that way. You don’t know tomorrow what you’re going to run into. If you move around, look around a little bit, you stumble onto something—just like an old blind sow gets an acorn! I mean, we went up there and stumbled around and found this acorn. The “acorn” was river running.
**
And the acorn, it turns out, was about to explode.
Life was quiet at first. The road in from Marble Canyon was dirt; you could see a car coming all the way in by the dust and there weren’t many of them anyway. The water was warm still and anytime a boat launched, that was a big deal. The people who had put the trip in would often stay and have a cocktail with Fred and Carol. Half the time they’d float the Paria too, in inner tubes just for the hell of it.

Fred: See at that time, as memory serves me, there was Ted [Hatch]and Georgie [White]and Harris—the partners [Harris-Brennan]—and Sanderson, Ron Smith. But they all ran just one or two trips.
Carol: Ted was a schoolteacher.
Fred: It was a poverty thing.
Carol: Bill Diamond was working down in the dam. Jerry [Sanderson] was a ranger.
Fred: Well, a policeman for the Bureau of Reclamation in Page. Ron Smith, I forget what he was doing in Salt Lake, but Sheila was working up there in the office.
Carol: So this was a sideline for everybody. Nobody had a warehouse.
Fred: And they’d just come in and stay a day or two, and go. There was clean out (whistles)—nothing.
Carol: Our first trip must have been about 1966.
Fred: Ted just said, “Why don’t you run a boat? You follow Dennis Massey.” I said, “I don’t know how to run a boat!” Hell, I’d never even run an outboard. He said, “Well, just follow Dennis.” That’s the way we did things in those days. Go do it! You think you can do it, do it. So I did!
That was your second trip?
Fred: Second time. I’d been down once, but I didn’t know anything the first time.
Your first trip, what was that like?
Carol: Oh, it was great! The weather was great.
Fred: Great trip, great trip.
How many boats?
Carol: It was low water: low, low water...
Fred: Two or three boats.
Carol: ...and I remember Ron Smith had a boat in front of us, and Ed Abbey was on that boat. That’s the way he got started out: on motorized trips too.
His first trip?
Fred: Yeah. Keep this in mind too: at that period of time, everybody ran motors. You didn’t see rowboats. I can’t remember anybody. . . . As a matter of fact—now, I won’t say the dories weren’t running—but I can’t remember them going down. If they did, they only made about one trip, but maybe they did that summer, I don’t know. I wouldn’t argue that point with Martin. But nobody had these little rowboats. Everybody was happy going on the big boats. Wasn’t any of this baloney boat business, wasn’t all that negative stuff. But the Sierra Club came up, like I said, this one trip [Fred’s first time running a boat], which was just like the rest of them, was a hundred and twenty-five people, with thirteen boats. Now, Ted gave them a cut, I think, of—10 percent strikes my mind—that they got for selling the trips for him. They made a bundle. This was just one trip, but he was taking several of them, a lot of them.
Are these multiple-boat, hundred and twenty people trips?
Fred: Thirteen boats at one time! One flotilla! Going down through Marble Canyon, thirteen boats, one behind the other. I thought it looked kind of pretty! Myself, looking back, I thought, “God, isn’t that nice? Look at them going woo, woo, woo.”
Carol: Like a horse train!
Fred: Yeah, just cruising down there. We could only camp at certain camps that had to be real big camps down there—oh, not Furnace Flats, but up above there a little bit, there’s one on the left. See, there wasn’t all the tamarisk in there then—it was sand. And there was a great big, horrendous camp there.
But the first one you did was two or three boats?
Fred: Yeah, two I think.
And who were the boatmen?
Fred: Oh, Dennis and. . . . Oh, the crazy guy.
Dean Agee?
Fred: No, before him.
Carol: He was an amateur boxer.
both Carol and Fred: I can’t think of his name.
Fred: But Agee went later. Agee was on the big trip. He’s the one that got hung up in Hance. Well, you’re getting ahead of yourself. The point is, if you’re talking, in a sense, history, the point is that the Sierra Club came in and were happy to allow these big trips to go down and get the money for it, and that’s the same money that they turned around and starting fighting us with later on.
But... was Marble Canyon Dam already whupped when they started running these big trips? You mean they weren’t fighting the dam?
Fred: Yeah.
The dam issue was over?
Fred: Yeah.
The point of running the trips was to get the money?
Fred: The dam fight was over in the 26th Legislature—I believe it’s the second session—you can historically find it by writing the House of Representatives and asking them... and that’s when it was over, because we [the State of Arizona] gave them [the U.S. government] the permit [to build Marble Canyon Dam] back in 1964.
But. . . I thought that all those big trips were going on right in the middle of that, and you’re saying they began later on?
Fred: Oh, no, the big trips didn’t start until the end, because Ted wasn’t running that much.
Early sixties?
Fred: No, no, no, Ted wasn’t running that much.
I guess the thing I’m trying to get. . . .
Fred: Ready was that guy’s name!
Carol: Uh-huh, Ready.
Fred: Ready, that was the boatman.
Okay, so the motive of the Sierra Club wasn’t so much political as it was economic? For running these big trips?
Fred: Economic, sure.
Carol: Well, I think they all discovered you could run through the Grand Canyon, and they just wanted a trip, strictly for fun.
Fred: But you have to remember that the way the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and all these organizations make their money is, they have to have controversy. They can’t say, “we fought this dam and won,” and kick back. They gotta keep something going, or they’d be out of business. But they did . . . The worst trips, the worst damage on the ecology in that Canyon were done by the Sierra Club in those days, because every poor practice that’s since been corrected, they were doing!
All the cooking was done on wood?
Fred: Sure.
And toilets were. . . .

Carol: The biggest rock nearest the beach. So behind the rock got a little bad.
Fred: Yeah, Mile 75, that whole long narrow strip of sand there was always full of toilet paper.
Carol: And Bass Camp.
So the camps were generally lots dirtier than they are now?
Carol: Yeah.
Fred: But you know what people overlook, and I don’t think they should overlook it: because you can blame the river runners all day long, and you can blame these owners, or you can blame the boatmen—whatever you want to do—but the real blame should rest right on the Park Service. Because the Park Service sat there and watched these things happening, and didn’t do a damn thing to stop it.
Carol: Oh, three to four years!
Fred: Everything that was done to correct it and make it better was done on the initiative of the people—I’ll call them “people,” because owners and boatmen, throwing them together, we started to clean our own act up. Not the Park Service.
Now let’s get off that and go back and talk some more about starting out.
So everybody... Ted was down there, and he just had some equipment thrown in there, and he wasn’t a big-time operation at first and nobody else was either?
Carol: That’s the way everybody ran. Now, Don and Ted were together at that time—Don Hatch and Ted.
You guys do this first trip and Ready and Dennis Massey are the boatmen. What did those guys look like, and what were they like?
Fred: Well, they looked just like anybody else as a boatman. Massey was a really good boatman.
Carol: He was the best boatman of his time.
Fred: See, he’d been a boatman for Ted up in Utah, and he was, in my opinion, one of the best boatmen ever on the river. If he had stayed longer he would have absolutely been head and shoulders [above the rest]. He really could read water, he knew what he was doing, very athletic—he’d been a wrestling champion—and I had complete confidence in him. I followed him down there in water so low—that guys are bitching about now, it’s terrible they can’t run it and everything else. I followed him down, not knowing anything, with all the confidence in the world, and never had any trouble—well, a ding here and there. And broke a few boards. We had board frames then, you remember? And you’d go over a rock, your board would split. You’d have to have a brace and bit, pick up a piece of driftwood and drill some holes in it and tie it back on again to the outfit and go on.
Were there side tubes on the boats then?

Fred: No side tubes. Outside rigs with the two-by-sixes coming back and hanging over the back end. The early boats had the rubber, the neoprene floor. You had to bail. It was a bitch! The boat would get so heavy, you couldn’t turn it. It was all full of crud and crap and everything else when you’d get down to the bottom.
You’re getting a little bit ahead of yourself, though, I think, in a way, because first you’ve got to back up a little bit. We’re talking about Ted Hatch, in a sense, but everybody—Ron [Smith], [Don] Harris—they all pretty much ran the same kind of boat. It was typical, same kind of frame then.
Everybody used a twenty-horse motor?
Fred: They used a twenty-horse, with an outfit hanging over behind. And as I say, I don’t remember many rowboats. Everybody was using pretty much the same frames. Everybody was just hand-to-mouth. Jerry Sanderson had practically nothing. Ron Smith came all the way down from Salt Lake in a pickup and a trailer.
You know, in those days. . . . like Sanderson’s were working for salaries. And this was a part-time thing with them, getting this started. They had no backing, no money. They never, to my knowledge, never had any money.
Carol: He’d have to take his vacation time to run it.
Fred: Ron [Smith], the same thing: no money back of him. He just generated and poured his money back in, and poured his money back in. And he did that for years and years. Rather than pay taxes, he was buying equipment, equipment, equipment. That’s why he had so much equipment over there, so many new motors and things. But he had nothing to start with.
See, all of us, you’ve got to think too, we weren’t businessmen, per se. We were river runners, and the wives did all the work about figuring things out—we didn’t figure things out. We didn’t charge, I don’t think, everything that we should have in our build up of the price of our trip.
Carol: We couldn’t have, we were just getting started! Everybody was the same way.
You said that the wives “ran the show.” What’s that mean?
Carol: Kept the books, did all the correspondence. Did the menu. That was important. Did a lot of the shopping. Did cooking for things that had to be cooked ahead of time: like you’d do a beef stroganoff—and we tried to make it as simple as possible, because the boatmen—that’s the way I always felt about it, the boatmen worked hard all day, and I didn’t feel like. . . .
Fred: Hell, they didn’t know how to cook anyway.
Carol: Well, that’s true. But we cooked, like beef for a beef stroganoff, so all they had to do was warm it up and add what they needed to it. We did all that kind of stuff, and we helped pack. We met the passengers—the wives almost always met the passengers.
Fred: Behind every company. . . .
Carol: Washed the sheets, when we started that.
Fred: June Sanderson, Pat Hatch, Sheila Smith...
Carol: Vicki with Dave Mackay.
Fred: Dave Mackay’s Vicki, Jack Curry’s...
Carol: Betty... Everybody.
Fred: Gay Staveley’s Joan. Every one of them were instrumental in starting the companies. I seriously question whether some of the companies would ever have gotten started, if it hadn’t’ve been for the wives doing it.
Carol: When we’d write a passenger back—we were always so thrilled to get a passenger—that we’d write back a separate typed letter to each passenger. There were no forms other than equipment forms, things like that. But the correspondence was typed on a manual typewriter.
What did you guys think of the business prospects then?
Fred: I don’t think any of us, for some reason or another, even Ted. . . thought it was going to last. We some way thought it was going to be a flash in the pan and as soon as it caught up with us, the Park was going to shut us down. Now, there’s some premonition that we had, because we’ve been on the verge of that ever since it started. And I think we just had that feeling. See, until Kennedy went down, you didn’t have political and public opinion behind you for river running. There were just people running, so it would have been easy for them to shut it down, then. Once it got started, though, then everybody wanted to go. So all the pressure was on them to let us keep going. And there were some people—you’d hesitate to use their names, because that doesn’t look right, maybe, but it’s hard to do it without it. But some were more mercenary than others. Some were strictly—well, you got to say what it is, because it’s still that way. They wanted to push people down: the bigger, the faster boats they could get down there, the better. And then people started, slowly. . . . Some of them would take Boy Scouts down—fifty, sixty Boy Scouts at a time. But slowly then, they began to realize that it was going to last longer and they’d better start developing some prototypes to go on into the future. Ron Smith was one of the leaders, developing those aluminum boats. He was progressive, I think, in what he did. Unfortunately, though—and I think it’s very unfortunate over a period of time—unfortunately, about that same time, he got together with some of the environmentalists, the Whiteheads or. . . .
Craigheads?
Fred: Some kind of heads. He got together with them, and they got on this kick of rowing.
But see, here’s another thing: going back again, while we’re on that subject—I’ll get off it, but just to finish up—When they finally decided they’d better set the limit on it, quotas, because it was starting to build up so fast, they came out with a document—it’s probably in this historical file someplace of Carol’s—and it said the quotas are going to be based on several factors. One of them, of course, was prior usage, and then it was the type of trip, equipment, the financial resources, and everything else jumped in together that you would think would come out of a financial office as a requirement for a contract or something like that. Fine and dandy! But they never did a thing about really looking at your equipment, the way you ran trips, getting any information from the passengers—they didn’t do any of that. They arbitrarily went down- they did use some historical data, but they went down the line and gave quotas based on numbers alone. There’s where they went wrong. Now, gosh, again, I hate to use any names, but the guys that were most mercenary, in a sense, were rewarded with this big quota they got. The smaller companies—and there were other smaller companies besides us that were taking good trips, and wouldn’t take the big ones—they were penalized for that. And there is where the Park went wrong. Now, if they’d done it right, they could have slowed down a lot of that trouble later on, see. They could have still left the big ones to be the biggest, but not as big as they were, and not rewarding them for those big fast trips they’d taken down.

But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves again... There was first a magical time—late ‘60s, early ‘70s—when nobody took any of that stuff personally. The acorn had already exploded. Pain and suffering was just around the bend, but all most boatmen really saw were blue skies and wide open spaces. You were still pretty much setting out in covered wagons every time you shoved off. You and everybody with you were leaving town and “lighting out for the territory,” a place where you could drink out of the river, find a little firewood to cook dinner on, say goodbye to the 20th century.
At Carol’s urging, the Burkes had sold the best painting they had and jumped into the river business. The painting wasn’t enough, so they had to rope some stockholders in as well, among which were the Moody and Reznick families. The new company was called Arizona River Runners (and it was no coincidence that young Tom Moody and Pete Reznick later became two of ARR’s top boatmen). The very first trip the company ran, though, another boatman got in trouble pulling out of Havasu and dropped a brand new motor straight to the bottom. Two trips later, the horse trailer hauling most of their equipment caught fire in Seligman on the drive home and burnt to a crisp. No matter. They kept going.
From Day One they did something almost no one else did. Provided their whole crew with free room and board all summer. Paid for rigging days. Paid their swampers. [“Well, because they were working! They should be paid for what they do. Now, can’t pay them a lot, but you should pay them something. Can’t expect them to do it for free. Another thing, you want to keep a swamper on trip after trip. He’s supposed to be building up to where he’s a boatman sometime, and keep him with the organization if he’s any good. If you just keep giving freebies to go down one trip, and then they’re gone, that puts a load on the boatmen.”]
From Day One they set out to do right by everybody—took care of all their people as well they did the crew. Met every trip on both ends. Knew everybody’s name. Gave good deals to people from all over, united by just a couple of common denominators—a thirst for adventure, the willingness to put up with a little hardship. The trip cost 350 bucks and that counted dinner and a motel room at each end. The people who came were truck drivers and schoolteachers, librarians, nurses, carpenters, milkmen, (stewardesses!), stock contractors, fry cooks, college coaches, ex-pro linemen, you name it. They came from east, west, north, south, all points in between.
Pretty soon the Burkes left Lee’s Ferry and bought Vermilion Cliffs, where the good times rolled. In its heyday V.C. was home to three different companies, (and several boatmen from Hatch, which was just down the road). The nearest permanent link to the outside world was the payphone at Bitter Springs—clear across the river. The only immediate communication was a mobile phone out in an old GMC pickup, wired up to the horn instead of a ringer. Every time a call came in the horn went off, and that horn never did quit honking. All three outfits—ARR, Harris Trips, and Moki Mac—did business from the front seat of that truck.
They ran a little bar in the half of the building that wasn’t given over to dry goods for the river company, and every night during the main season the place was jam-packed with all kinds of crazy characters in there whooping and hollering from every company, cause next day they were going down the river! There’d be fifty people every night, wildest characters imaginable. You might never see half of them again but if you lived there (in one of the wings to the side) you could go off down the river for a week or two and leave your door unlocked and a hundred dollar bill sitting on top of your dresser- and never worry once that it might not be there when you got back. Nobody ever locked a car door. There were guitars galore and pool games after dinner and country songs on the jukebox, beautiful women everywhere in cutoff jeans. Up at the Burkes’ trailer, Carol cooked three meals a day and fed not just the ARR crew, but anybody else who happened along too. The place was like an outpost on the frontier- the river was the promised land- gold in them thar hills- and the outside world, bursting with tragedy and hope, was very far away.
For all but a very few, the gold had little to do with money. It was much more than that, actually... adventure and indescribable beauty and a huge knock on the head regarding your own life and the scant time you had here. The real gold was a method of keeping score that was totally foreign to Madison Avenue.
Somewhere past the distant horizon- out there a million miles away -the war in Vietnam wound down. President Nixon called it quits. The country suffered a spasm of optimism.
Closer to home, somebody had a vision.
The motor v. rowing deal wasn’t an ugly idea. It just came along terribly late was all; after a great big train had long since left the station (and built up a lot of steam). It penciled-out quite differently in the minds of different people, and in no time at all, it split the river world asunder. ARR was no exception. The damned idea was a brick wall waiting on the tracks at the bottom of a long steep hill. Young Moody and Reznick thought it might be pretty cool to row dories, of all things. To Fred, who sat down and ran the numbers on it right away, it made no sense at all. The obstacles were economic, logistic, emotional. They’d invested several hard years refining one set of equipment and one program that worked fine already and was only just poised to pay for itself. Rowing cost too much, took too long, was suspect for little old ladies and young children. To an old colonel in charge of supply lines and delivery systems, the overall traffic flow on the river didn’t add up at all, either. You’d have a solid line of little boats from Lee’s Ferry to the lake. The absolute worst, though, was the sanctimonious air so many of the rowing advocates took. The snot-nosed sonsabitches and stuffed-shirt “environmentalists” came on so strong, and so holier-than-thou on it all, it about made you puke to listen to them. Especially since “doing good” was a racket for so many of them too. Making this shift either wouldn’t cost them a cent, or they stood to gain from it some way themselves.
There was a big hoopla about it, for sure. The researchers did their studies and learned whatever they wanted to. The pundits beat their breasts. The politicians wavered in the wind. The Park leaned into it and pushed on through the storm. Down on the river, things got tense. People snubbed each other right and left. It definitely wasn’t pretty.
In the end, after a huge and bitter battle, a little group of outfitters, including Fred, packed their bags and went to Washington, got ahold of one of the big boys back there, and put the thing to bed. The argument that won the day was: elitists vs. the common man.
Somehow, once the dust settled, the overall numbers had gone up significantly.

Fred: It strictly amazes me that we were able to get that through. But we spent a lot of money trooping back there, staying several days or a week and going from office to office to office to try to get support or at least somebody that would listen to our position. We were up against the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and several other organizations, and it was a pretty tough row to hoe. And every time we had a general meeting of all of the river runners, there was definite animosity between the people that rowed and people that had motors. It just changed the complexion of the whole river running from a fun, outdoor vacation, nice business, to a sort of bitter, just dog-against-dog sort of an operation.
I believe that now in the years passed since we resolved that—that has worn off, and I think

the companies are proving they can run together and get along together and not have this business of flashing the finger at each other as they pass and passengers hollering derogatory remarks back and forth. And everybody can get together and start enjoying the Canyon. The argument of what is the best trip is open for so much debate: I mean, a small boat, or a large boat—what is the right way? Because a quality trip to one person is not necessarily a quality trip to another person. There should be something down there for all of the people to enjoy. So it’s my hope that this fight is over.
There’s no argument, I think—you’re a young fellow—to row a boat and drift along with three or four passengers. You’ve got more crew, more help, you can take turns cooking. It’s understandable that the boatmen would like it. The boatmen were not interested in the monetary aspect of it. Their salaries were down, the rowers weren’t getting paid the money the motorboat people were, for one thing. And then, it’s expensive to take the rowing trips: they’re longer, you have to charge more. I don’t really think the boatmen ever considered the outfitters’ position in it. There wasn’t the feeling, in those days, so much of a camaraderie that we’re all in this together. . . Now, today, there’s boatmen now that are more mature, they’re looking at the big picture, where if the outfitter is successful, they can be too. They [the boatmen] should have health insurance. They should have all kinds of [benefits] that any other working person in the United States is supposed to have, or should have. The argument where they only have four people to the boat, therefore they can’t pay a boatman so much, isn’t really valid. Your boatman is worth so much money, and his time is worth so much money, and whether he’s overseas or stateside or rowing or motoring, his time is worth something and he should be paid a commensurate salary for it. But they really weren’t concerned. Look at your boatmen. We’re talking ten and fifteen years ago, most of them were a lot younger. They didn’t think about the future. They were thinking about fun.

I don’t think we thought the future was going to get here this fast!

Well, they’re specialists, really. More is required from them than in most occupations. I mean, when you think they have to be a boatman, they have to be a guide, understand medical, they have to be able to cook, have to know the psychology of their passengers, keep their disposition in hand. Really, when you think about it, it’s a pretty tough job, and the outfitters would be way ahead to start thinking of the future, and some of these people start really trying to take care of them for the long run. If they want to stay on the river, try to help them set up a savings program, set up some way that in the future they’ll be all right, and also use them to train younger boatmen.

You know, it’s funny, the way the quota system came in, the user-day system. . . We do have a system that rewards the big, the fast, and all that, and I wonder why that is, within the government? Do the numbers just look better to them too?

Well, you come right down to it, river running crept up on them pretty fast. It wasn’t a big deal—there were a lot more things to worry about up on the rim of the Canyon, and in other parts too, than the people going down the river, and how many, unless they were pressured into it. The high-level people didn’t give it, I don’t think, enough deep thought to see that. I think there is no reason in the world why they can’t control it today—cut back and get it under control. They very simply can convert the user-day concept to a people concept, and count the people. Now, we’re getting figures of, say, twenty-five thousand a year, when there shouldn’t be that many going down the river. The quota was set in 1972, it was raised about 1985. In 1985 it was raised about a hundred user-days a company, which is not a great big raise. But whatever it is, it should stay the same, whenever you convert that into people. Now, if the Park really wants to do it, they should go back and say, “Alright, the user-day concept. . . .” which came out of thin air, never had any background discussion or anything on it, it was just reached at and grabbed. They should go back and study, give it thought, to going to people days. Then you start out with so many people at Lee’s Ferry. If you exchange at Phantom Ranch, you cannot exchange more than you had on the boat coming in. You cannot exchange more at Whitmore than you had coming in. Therefore, there’s “X” number of people going down the river, and it’s just as simple to look at as day and night.
I’m concerned about the future, because people won’t let it alone. They keep it in a turmoil all the time. Like they say, you can’t discuss it now that you won’t be able to sell your company. There’s no logical reason you shouldn’t be able to sell your company. I just don’t get the point. You’ve got a company that’s run historically good and somebody else wants to buy it, the owner wants to quit, why should he be forced to hang onto it to the bitter end? His investment has taken him years to get to where he is. Personally, I think they’d be better off in the long run to encourage merging the companies—not cutting them out, but merging them. How you do it, I’m not real sure, how you’d have to force them to do it. But merge the companies so you had fewer to control, for one thing. Too, the companies would be larger and able to take better care of their boatmen, pay them a larger salary, offer them better benefits. And another thing, they could plow money back into the Canyon better if you had larger companies, than some of these little companies that are just borderline.
You know, I just wonder if you get the quality that way. I mean, I look at the way you guys operated. . . .

Well, I think quality is in the eye of the owner. If he wants quality, he can get it whether he’s small or large. Take, for example, let’s pick on one of the big companies and say, okay, you got the owner or manager to watch for quality, one of them has a local manager that’s in charge to watch for it, they have people in the warehouse, people fixing/preparing the food, they have facilities, freezer facilities, ice facilities—they have everything in the world to make a good quality trip. Now a smaller company, he strains, he has to buy his ice, he has to pack his food in smaller quantities and it costs him more. He doesn’t have the managerial help to spread himself out. I think, personally, I guess if I was in the Park Service, I’d be tougher. It would be a requirement that top management would visit a certain percent of their trips at the end of every trip and interview the passengers. I personally think that’s more important than putting them on. And I think that’s something that either… Now, you might argue the point, say owner or manager. It’s fine for the manager in a large company to go be there—he should, definitely, once in a while—but the owner also, I don’t care how big he is, should also be required to go down there and stand on the beach and watch when his boatman comes in, and say to the people, “I’m Joe Blow, how did you like your trip? How was your boatman? Do you have any comments?” look at his equipment, look at the way the people react to the boatman, and that would help the quality of the trip, in the long run.
I wish you could sit down with the Park Service, with not more than, say, two or three people, like the superintendent and a couple, three more—somebody like Crumbo, maybe, [NPS ranger, Kim Crumbo] that really knows the river, somebody else—and sit down with them in a room and just really discuss and spend as much time as we’ve spent today, putting this thing out, just rolling up your sleeves and talking about different ways this could be improved. Some of them you would cast aside, but open the door to everything—not necessarily with the idea that everything has to be more regulations or anything like that. Maybe you change it. Not that things are set in cement, the user-day concept shouldn’t be set in cement. Neither should it be set in cement that you use helicopters at Whitmore. You may want to reconsider that. The whole concept of the park, the whole operation, is begging to have somebody sit down and talk about it. Maybe have a boatman or two on this group and a couple of owners and somebody outside that’s out of the business. I don’t know. Maybe somebody representing the passengers. But just- not one of these big mass meetings like you and I went to [1993 Constituency Panel] where the privates are in there and you’re talking about who’s bull is getting gored, and who did what to who, who got on a beach first and wouldn’t let the other guy on, and all that kind of piddly crap. Get down to the basic things of what we want to do: protect the Canyon, we want to limit the number of people who can go through there, we want to have a quality trip, and never mind these little crumbs on the sand for a while. Get off that kick! Just see if you can’t self-police enough to make it go. They don’t need policemen down there writing tickets for crumbs on the beach!
But I think we’ve just about expired ourselves, for today. There may be some other things you want to discuss later, and I’d be happy to go to it, but I think, let’s make this history.

History it is. A brief footnote: when the U.S. Coast Guard got into the act last fall, the unsung hero who punched in for GCRG for days on end was Fred Burke. Fred knew right where to go, who to call, what to say. He hung tough all the way.
He’s sold the company, but he and Carol keep an eye on us all still, and remain interested members of the family. Fred at first glance might not seem like a romantic figure for the times. But a surprising number of people who comment on the river in the 90s bemoan the relative absence of our two best fighters: Martin Litton and Fred Burke. How could you lump those two together? It’s hard to explain, but somehow it works... of all the people we’ve interviewed for the River Runners Oral History Project, three peas in a pod come to mind: Fred, Martin, and Barry Goldwater. Three full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, tell-it-like-it-is kind of guys who, when you think about it, are monuments to the country at her best… youngsters who marched off to the crucible of WW ll long ago when the chips were down and, suddenly, it was all so simple. It’s hilarious to think how unprepared they were in the beginning. Look, there’s Fred galloping around with his .45 on the Mexican border; and Martin on patrol, flying up and down the coast of California two days after Pearl Harbor, when the entire on-duty Air Force, for a moment, was just him and one other pilot in two rickety little planes with one machine gun that barely worked, defending the homeland while the country caught its breath.
It’ll never be that simple again. We may not see that Goldwater, Litton, Burke kind of absolute confidence or moral certainty again, anytime soon.
Fred’s a fighter, and pushed into a corner, with his back against the wall twenty years ago, he was a force to be reckoned with. Right now though, for a forty-year-old boatman looking the other way (forward) what resonates most about Fred is kinda comforting: Every time he fell, he got back up. And, even at fifty-five, the game wasn’t close to being over. It was still just beginning.

Lew Steiger