Category: History Makers

History Makers: The Powell Society

Post author By Candice Cravins
Post date 08/04/2025

History Makers: The Powell Society

By Herm Hoops, 2006

[adapted from an article by Herm Hoops, River Runners Hall of Fame inductee, that appeared in The Confluence, the journal of the Colorado Plateau River Guides Association]

The Powell Society was an interesting assemblage of kindred souls: geologists, doctors, lawyers and professionals from Boulder and Denver, Colorado. A collection of free spirits, they had never taken life too seriously. They were also avid river runners. One day, relaxing in the shade by the riverbank below Powell Point in the Grand Canyon, Dave Gaskill , one of the founding members of the Society, suggested that the Powell Society “get serious.” He and George Simmons proposed a geological log and river guide of the entire Colorado River from Green River to Lake Mead. At that time the best map and information was from the river survey undertaken in the 1920s by the US Geological Survey. They selected the name “Powell Society” on their application to participate in the Bureau of Reclamation’s 1958 river trip to commemorate the 90th Anniversary of John Wesley Powell’s passing through what is now the site of Flaming Gorge Dam. The commemoration was the idea of well-known Denver attorney Jerry Hart. The trip couldn’t be conducted on the 100th Anniversary because of the dam construction at Flaming Gorge. It was probably the last transit of Flaming Gorge before the coﬀer dam materials, piled along the sides of the river canyon, were pushed together to close the channel.

Society members George Simmons and Dave Gaskill became aware of Gene Shoemaker’s plan to repeat Powell’s trip of 1869 and replicate all of Hiller’s photographs of the Powell trip. The U.S.G.S., Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society sponsored the trip. Gene Shoemaker was a famous astro-astronomer who combined his knowledge of geology and river running. The publication “In the Footsteps of John Wesley Powell,” was published in 1987, and began photo matching work that has continued.)

Simmons and Gaskill proposed to Gene that they join the trip and create geological river logs for six segments of the Colorado River. The Society’s proposal was accepted and Gene Shoemaker, Dave Gaskill, Phil Hayes and Felix Mutschler spent the entire summer running the Colorado River in 10-man rafts from Green River to Lake Mead. Several other members of the Powell Society joined in various segments of the trip. The Society marked the 100th anniversary of the parting at Separation Rapid in the Grand Canyon, with commemorative, postmarked letters called cachets (designs added to an envelope for stamp first day of issue covers and event covers). They actually applied the rubber stamp cachets and the stamps to the envelopes at Separation Rapid on the 100th anniversary of Powell’s men leaving the expedition in 1869.

U.S.G.S. funds were originally budgeted to publish the comparison photographs as a professional paper. Ultimately the money budgeted was not available and the Powell Society, working with Johnson Press of Boulder, Colorado, participated in the publishing of the book “In the Footsteps of John Wesley Powell.” In the meantime, the Society published their river logs:

Dinosaur National Monument and Vicinity by Hayes and Simmons –

Desolation and Grey Canyons by Mutschler

Labyrinth, Stillwater and Cataract Canyons by Mutschler
Marble and Grand Canyon by Simmons and Gaskill
Yampa Supplement

The Yampa supplement was eventually incorporated into the Dinosaur publication. Most of these river guides are out of print. Mackay Marine and Outdoor Supply of Murray, Utah have recently republished the Desolation and Grey Volume. Although the river maps are small, one can follow the progress down the river through detailed descriptions. The guides locate and rate all of the rapids, rating them on the 1-10 Colorado River Rating System. Thus, the ratings are open to some individual interpretation, but they provide historic insight on the old silt-laden Colorado and the present-day river.

While the guidebooks were detailed and serious, the authors were not without a sense of humor. In the guidebook to Labyrinth, Stillwater, and Cataract Canyons, the author, Felix Mutschler, professor of geology at Eastern Washington University, discussed what to do if your boat was lost along with all of your food. There are plenty of lizards to be found, author Mutschler advised, “and a good rock thrower can squash a feast.”

The Powell Society did not survive the passing of the principal organizers, authors and members. By the early 2000s, the only thing that remains of the Society are the guidebooks. They have gone out of print, but have been revived by various organizations and businesses. Today there are dozens of different guidebooks, river maps, apps, and other online resources to help guide modern river runners. But the Powell Society’s books are a unique entry in the literature of the rivers of the Colorado Basin; not a bad legacy to be left by an “interesting assemblage of free spirits.”

History History Makers

History Makers: Great Surveys of the Colorado River

Post author By Candice Cravins
Post date 06/02/2025

History Makers: Great Surveys of the Colorado River

By Roy Webb

The Hayden, Wheeler, King, and Powell surveys are known to historians as the four Great Surveys of the American West. Just before, and immediately after, the Civil War, these four expeditions covered many different parts of the Intermountain West. Of those, John Wesley Powell’s time spent not only on the Colorado River, but in remote lands in southwestern Utah that could only be reached by pack train, is by far the best known. A lesser known series of surveys, though, have had an impact that continues to this day.

The story of the great surveys of the Colorado River is a TL/DR. It’s far too much to put into one blog post; it would take volumes to adequately recount the entire saga. So this entry into the History Makers series will be an introduction, an overview, to set the stage. After this, it will be an occasional series, with later posts that will go into each survey in more detail, as well as some that will highlight significant figures that participated in the surveys.

In the first years of the 20th century, the Colorado River was completely wild and untamed, with sometimes disastrous floods all along its length, and on all of its tributaries. In 1905, one flood, along with a little human help, changed the course of the river and what had been the Salton Sink became the Salton Sea. These floods wiped out mines, railroads, docks, and roads. By the 1920s, cities and industries in all of the seven basin states—Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California–were developing and requiring more and more water, but the Colorado could not be put to “beneficial use” because it was so unpredictable and powerful. So a movement arose to “tame” the Colorado River; a later generation of engineers would use the catchphrase “to turn a natural menace into a national resource.” This took the political form of the Colorado River Compact, signed by all the basin states, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in October 1922, with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover presiding.

Even before the compact was signed, the US Geological Survey, along with the various state agencies and other federal land use offices, determined to do an extensive survey of the entire length of the river and its major tributaries, to provide data not only for the negotiators in Santa Fe, but for development of the river after the papers were signed. These were major expeditions, well outfitted and supplied with the latest survey equipment; in the case of the Grand Canyon survey, they even had a two-way radio to communicate with their base team. The crews were comprised of some of the leading water engineering experts of the day, people like E.C. LaRue, Claude Birdseye, W.R. Chenoweth, and some of the most iconic Colorado River runners, like Emery Kolb, Bert Loper, and Frank Dodge. The surveys were co-sponsored by large power companies, such as Southern California Edison and Utah Power and Light, who sent along representatives and their own engineers. Boats were all Galloway-style skiffs, scaled up for expedition use. The support crews were a mix of trained assistants, drifters, miners, cowboys, farmers, plus some experienced with the river. All were used to living hard in the outdoors.

These weren’t the first surveys along the river; there had been earlier government teams who were seeking out dam and reclamation sites; Julius Stone’s 1909 river party ran into a party at the head of the Canyon of Lodore in 1909 who were drilling tests for a damsite. And there were private ones like Robert Brewster Stanton’s railroad survey in 1889-90. But the expeditions that ran from 1921 to 1923 were by far the most comprehensive and extensive studies ever conducted along the river corridor up to that time.

The Colorado River surveys went on for almost three years, covering thousands of miles along the river corridor, by boat, by pack train and wagon and on foot. They surveyed dozens of dam sites, places for infrastructure such as roads and railroads, mineral resources, potential farmlands, not that was all that much of the latter. But if it was there they found it and they recorded it.

In 1921, there were three surveys along the San Juan River and Glen and Cataract Canyons. These were to “establish baseline elevation and gauge construction” sites (thanks to board member John Weisheit for the basics on the surveys!). They all met at the mouth of the San Juan River to coordinate their data. The next year, 1922, the Woolley survey, in tandem with Utah Power and Light, studied the Green River from the railroad town of Green River, Wyoming, to another railroad town, Green River, Utah. They identified 17 separate dam sites; fortunately, only one was ever built. The capstone of the Colorado River Surveys was the Grand Canyon survey in 1923. The crews, led by engineer Claude Birdseye, took 76 days to intensively study the inner corridor of the Grand Canyon, from Lees Ferry to Needles, California. Birdseye’s crew included some of the best known Colorado River figures of the time, like photographer Emery Kolb and Lewis Freeman, a journalist and author who later wrote two books about the river and his experiences.

For all their expertise and preparations and careful study, the engineers got one of the most basic facts they had been sent to establish dead wrong. One of their primary tasks was to determine the amount of water that flowed through the canyons, so that the lawyers and state officials in Santa Fe could determine how to divide the water between the upper and lower basin states. The surveyors decided that a figure of 15 million acre-feet a year was about right, and all subsequent legal maneuverings and raised voices as the Compact was hammered out were based on that amount. The actual amount, based on later trends and more sophisticated data, was around 10 million acre feet. Thus the fight over the waters of the Colorado River continues unabated to this very day.

Watch the History Makers page for more on the Colorado River Surveys, and other exciting stories of the Green and Colorado Rivers.

History History Makers

History Makers: Frank Swain

Post author By Candice Cravins
Post date 04/15/2025

History Makers: Frank Swain

By Roy Webb

Welcome to the John Wesley Powell River History Museum’s new monthly feature, History Makers of the Colorado River! Each month we will highlight an individual, group, or event that had a significant impact on the history of the Colorado and Green Rivers, and their tributaries.

This month’s feature is Frank Swain. If you look at any photo, or watch any movie, from the adventures of Bus Hatch on the river in the early days, in the background will be a big tall lanky guy, often wearing a cowboy hat. That would be Frank Swain.

Frank and Bus were double cousins; a sister and a brother married a brother and a sister. Both were the eldest of big families that ran to boys. Enough, in fact, to have their own general contracting business and a baseball team and to run a still in Split Mountain Canyon.

When it came to the exploring the Green River, near their home in Vernal, Utah, Bus, and Frank, also took the lead. In the lean years of the 1930s in Vernal, Frank took a job as deputy sheriff of Uintah County. One of his jobs was guarding prisoners at the jail. Parley Galloway was one such unfortunate, imprisoned for non-support of his wife. Parley was the son of the Ur-boatman, Nathaniel Galloway—a member of the River Runners Hall of Fame, and learned boats and rivers at his daddy’s knee. Learning of this, Frank invited his cousin Bus to come to the jail and talk to Parley about the nearby canyons of the Green and Yampa Rivers.

Sensing an opportunity, Parley wove tales of wonder to be found in the nearby canyons of the Green River, the canyon of Lodore, the Yampa, Desolation Canyon. Frank and Bus were rapt listeners. Having set the hook, Parley reeled them in by promising to help them build a boat and guide them down the river. He only needed a little loan to make his bail…

Frank and Bus paid Parley’s bail, whereupon he promptly disappeared. Who needs him, they must have said, we’re contractors, we can build a boat. They’d already built a small skiff to go fishing out on Pelican Lake, so they built the same kind of little skiff, reinforced with a hardwood bow piece and more ribs, to withstand the rigors of the canyon rapids So they did, a little plywood skiff about 14 feet long.

The trip through Lodore, with Bus, Frank, Bus’s brother in law “Cap” Mowrey, and Alt Hatch, one of Bus’s brothers, was one disaster after another. They capsized, lost most of their gear and food, and had to live on what they could scrounge from the river. The best thing to come from it was teaching them how much they didn’t know, that and a desire to do it again. After that, Bus, along with Frank and a rotating cast of Hatch family and later, others they met along the way, ran one stretch of the Green and Colorado after another: Desolation Canyon, Cataract Canyon, the Grand Canyon (the famous “Dusty Dozen” trip in 1934) and then moved up into Idaho to run the Middle Fork and Main Salmon Rivers the next two years. In between, they were constantly on the river for one reason or another, hunting fishing, or just having a good time.

After the arduous Dusty Dozen trip, and those difficult Idaho journeys, Bus and Frank didn’t run as many rivers together, but they kept working and playing baseball and hunting and fishing together, as families do. Even if they went their separate ways on the river, and Bus became the founder of Hatch River Expeditions, Bus and Frank stayed close for the rest of their lives.