Chapter
5
El Rio Colorado, the International Finale
Spaniards on the Banks
OPPOSITE~From the air, the Colorado River Delta in Mexico looks like shimmering tree branches.
Since humankind first learned to travel by boat, they sailed into bays, gulfs, and large river deltas faster and easier than was ever possible traveling overland by foot and horse. This was true of the Colorado, as well. Though the upper Green and Colorado rivers near their sources were first explored by fur trappers in the early 19th century, Spaniard Francisco Ulloa sailed three small vessels into the Gulf of California in 1539. He named it the Sea of Cortez after his benefactor, and conqueror of the Aztec empire, Hernán Cortés. Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Kino visited the Yuma area several times from 1699 to 1702, Juan Bautista de Anza passed through in 1774 and 1775 on his way to set up a Spanish colony in what is now San Francisco, and Father Francisco Garcés and several others were massacred by Quechan Indians at Yuma in 1781 while trying to set up a mission and a colony.
Steamboats on the River It is a little strange to realize that the first mechanized transportation in Arizona, where about two-thirds of the state is desert, would be steamboats. But in the early winter of 1852, some Yuma Indians took one look at the strange craft on the Colorado River and ran away. These Yumas, also known as Quechans, had seen various boats on the river before, but never a paddle wheeler, with its smokestack belching smoke and sparks and its paddle wheel tossing the water into the air. Starting with the 65-foot Uncle Sam in 1852 (the length of an RV towing a boat these days), various configurations of steamboats, sidewheelers, sternwheelers, and towing barges, sailed the Colorado until 1916, when several new dams made it impossible to pass. The U.S. Army established Camp Yuma in 1850 to protect prospectors headed for the California goldfields. After much trial and error it was decided that a shallow-draft steamboat, one whose hull was so flat that it could float in less than two feet of water, was the only way to ship goods and people on the Colorado River. But one of the strangest juxtapositions of transportation modes on the Colorado River came in 1858, when Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale
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