Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/175

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
Steam Navigation on the Colorado River
165

type vessel, valued at $75,000. She was built at Bath, Maine, in 1865. Purchase vv^as made from the Pacific Mail Steamship Co.

126. Prescott Arizona Miner, January 4, 1873.

127. Both of these barges vv^ere in use for some twelve to fifteen years. In 1878 the White Fawn was being used as a wharf boat at Port Isabel.

128. The Pumpkin Seed, loaded with iron, filled with water during a heavy storm in 1867 and sank.

129. Prescott Arizona Miner, February 18, 1871. The Miner announced that the Colorado No. 2 had arrived at Hardyville with a barge containing two hundred tons of freight. This was the largest cargo ever transported up the river by one boat, according to the same paper.

130. Yuma Arizona Sentinel, October 5, 1872.

131. Ibid., January 1874 to 1876. This was the only period for which complete files were available, but, since freight notices were not always recorded, it cannot be considered complete.

132. Hiram C. Hodge, Arizona As It Is (New York, 1877), p. 208.

133. Prescott Arizona Miner, December 19, 1873.

134. See, for instance, Yuma Arizona Sentinel, April 27, June 29, September 21, 1872, March 22, 1873, and Prescott Arizona Miner, March 8, 1873; also Hodge, op. cit., p. 208.

135. Prescott Arizona Miner, January 4, 1873.

136. Prescott Arizona Miner, May 29, 1874.

137. Frank Rolfe, "Trip to Arizona," Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California, XIV, Part 3 (1930), 374. From a letter of Miss Franc V. Bishop, who visited Arizona by way of the Colorado River.

138. Prescott Arizona Miner, February 17, 1872.

139. Ibid., March 2, 1872.

140. Yuma Arizona Sentinel, April 27, 1872.

141. Ibid., July 20, 1872.

142. Ibid., August 17 and 31, 1872.

143. Prescott Arizona Miner, November 2, 1872.

144. Yuma Arizona Sentinel, November 30, 1872.

145. Albert H. Payson, "Examination and Survey of the Colorado of the West," Annual Report of Engineers, 1879, p. 1779.

146. Prescott Arizona Miner, May i, 1874.

147. Captain Robinson came to the Colorado in 1852 as mate on the transport Invincible under Captain Wilcox. He returned to the river the following year and was employed by the Colorado Steam Navigation Company. He took command of the Explorer for Lieutenant Ives on her voyage up the Colorado in 1857. The Sentifiel, August i, 1874, carries an account of his death.

148. See Lockwood, op. cit., pp. 13-16. Isaac Polhamus was bom in New York in 1828. As a boy he acquired steamboat experience working for his father on the Hudson River. He came to California by way of Cape Horn in 1846, a voyage which took 327 days, and went to Arizona in 1856. In 1873 he became superintendent of the Colorado Steam Navigation Company, and after the railroad reached Yuma he continued in business there, running sightseeing tours up the Colorado. For sixty-six years he was a leading figure in Yuma, and he died there in January 1922 at the age of ninety-four.

149. Miss Mills, op. cit., states that Jack Mellon was a native of Nova Scotia. He went to sea at the age of nine, shipped over most of the world and, as has been shown, came to the Colorado in 1864 with Thomas E. Trueworthy.

150. Yuma Arizona Sentinel, September 6, 1873. See also Godfrey Sykes, "The Colorado Delta," American Geographical Society, Special Publication No. 19 (Baltimore, 1937),