The rock that missed the hull

The rock stands in the center of the channel below Black Canyon, steep-sided, conical, its point about four inches under the water. The Explorer struck it fair on the joint where the iron flanges of the two bow sections met. Ives writes that the flanges were torn away, that no hole was made, and that the hull was uninjured. The boiler was thrown out of place, the steam pipe doubled, the wheel-house torn off. People on board, except the engineer Mr. Carroll, thought she would fill at once. Carroll was watching the injured steam pipes and expecting an explosion instead. She stayed afloat. Captain Robinson took a line into the skiff and they towed her onto a gravel spit. The other damage, Ives says, was a day or two of work.

That accident is the best introduction to the boat, because it shows what she was. She was not a river packet with a single hull. She was sections, bolted together, and the bolt line was exactly where the rock found her. Ives had ordered her that way on purpose.

Philadelphia, the Delaware, Aspinwall

He had been told to start work at the mouth of the Colorado on the first of December, which left little time, since a steamer had to be built and the parts carried a long way. In the latter part of June he ordered from Reaney, Neafie & Co. of Philadelphia an iron steamer fifty feet long, built in sections so the pieces could go by railroad. The shortness of time required the Isthmus of Panama rather than a voyage around the continent. About the middle of August the boat was finished, tried on the Delaware, and found satisfactory aside from a few alterations. She was taken apart, sent to New York, and put aboard the California steamer that sailed on the twentieth of August for Aspinwall. A. J. Carroll of Philadelphia, engaged as steamboat engineer, went out in charge of the pieces.

Ives is frank that the freight was more trouble than profit to the carriers. Agents of the Panama Railroad and the captains on both oceans, plus Carroll's care, got what he calls an awkward mass to San Francisco safely by the first of October. He sailed from San Francisco on the first of November 1857, in the schooner Monterey, 120 tons, already loaded with stores for Fort Yuma. Colonel Swords, the quartermaster, made room. The expedition's property went into whatever nooks were left.

The letter to Captain A. A. Humphreys, in charge of the Office of Explorations and Surveys, names the rest of the work. Dr. J. S. Newberry was physician and had the natural history, and Ives calls the geology the most interesting result of the trip. F. W. Egloffstein, who had been with Frémont in 1853 and on the 41st-parallel railroad survey, was topographer. P. H. Taylor and C. K. Booker did astronomy and meteorology. Mollhausen, who had been with Whipple, was artist and collector, appointed by the Secretary of War. C. Bielawski of San Francisco did the hydrography of the navigable river. G. H. Peacock of California had the mule train. Lieutenant Tipton of the 3d Artillery commanded the escort. Captain Robinson was the pilot. Ives says the ascent owed a large share of its success to Carroll and Robinson. The report is an official book. It is also a list of who kept the boat alive.

January 11, above Fort Yuma

Camp 12, at the Yuma shoals, is dated January 11. They meant to start early and got away near eleven. The garrison came down to the wharf. Indians lined the bluff. Lieutenant Winder had pressed a chief to send guides, and two were engaged, reluctantly: an older Diegueño named Mariano, and a young chief who liked to be called the Capitan, a man who had come unhurt out of a recent fight with the Pima and Maricopa. They waited until the plank was about to come in, then walked aboard and sat on the rail. Ives writes that their friends on shore, being out of it themselves, were delighted, and that the Explorer's whistle answered the shouting. Two miles upstream the boat stuck on a bar in sight of the fort. The anchor would not hold in the quicksand. Most of the men went overboard. It took four and a half hours to push her into deeper water. They camped a mile farther on, where there was wood. Ives knew the garrison had been entertained.

The footnote on that fight is where the digital text goes wrong, and it is worth slowing down. A sentence in the file reads as if a Yuma chief's deathbed charge happened "in the year 1866." The next sentences place the expedition in September 1857: between one hundred and one hundred and fifty Yuma and Mojave warriors, guided by an ambitious Yuma chief, caught in a canyon by Pima, Maricopa, and Papago fighters, the fight over in less than an hour, only three or four of the attackers escaping. The Pima and Maricopa, Ives says, live on the Gila, farm, have been friendly to whites, and have been foes of the Yuma and Mojave as far back as the records go. The year 1866 is a misread. The battle he is describing is the one of September 1857. Copy the season and the count. Do not copy the impossible year.

The valley, and the railroad line he did not invent

On February 10 he came out of the Mojave canyon into the valley. A column of smoke from a little peak announced them. He describes a belt of alluvial land from one or two to six or seven miles wide, meadows, willow and mesquite, fields of grain, and gray terraces up to the mountains. He notes that this is the season before the heat burns the vegetation back, and that eyes tired of the barren river below may be exaggerating. Even with that caution, the entry is the opposite of a desert blank. People were already farming it.

The letter to Humphreys ties this voyage to Whipple's unfinished railroad. Going east from the river, Ives could connect the Big Sandy, on Whipple's line, with the point on the river north of the Needles. Whipple had not walked that cutoff. Ives says the examination verified Whipple's judgment anyway. By Whipple's traveled route the distance was 180 miles, over rough country. By the railroad route it was 80. Thirty-five of those miles were nearly level. The other forty-five had a uniform grade of about seventy feet to the mile. "During the whole distance there is scarcely an irregularity upon the surface of the ground." That is Ives in 1861, confirming a line Whipple had drawn in the mid-1850s. It is also the geography under Beale's road and under every later argument about whether wagons could cross from the river toward the Big Sandy. The Explorer did not build the road. She proved a piece of the map the road was drawn on.

Where a novelist should get off the boat

The novel can put a reader on the deck. It cannot honestly put thoughts in Carroll's head beyond the one Ives records, that Carroll was waiting for the steam pipe to burst while everyone else waited for the hull to fill. It cannot make Mariano and the Capitan into comic guides. Ives already leans that way, with his remark about theatrical effect, and a novel that copies his smirk has chosen his side. Cairook on the upper deck, the raft, the beans and corn, the rock, the fifty-foot length, the sailing date of August 20, the arrival in San Francisco by October 1: those are in the report. A speech the pilot makes about Manifest Destiny is not, unless Ives wrote it down, and he did not.

Sources

These are the documents and studies this essay actually uses. Spellings of Mojave names follow the source being quoted.

• Joseph C. Ives, Report upon the Colorado River of the West (Government Printing Office, 1861), letter of transmittal to Captain A. A. Humphreys, the introduction on the boat's construction, the January 11, 1858 departure from the Yuma shoals, the Mojave Valley chapters, and the Black Canyon accident. Internet Archive text.
• Bean and Vane (2002) are not the source for the boat. They are the source, via Sherer, for the Mojave memory of Beale and for later military events. This essay stays inside Ives except where the digital text is visibly corrupt.

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