Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/29

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to the unlimited possibilities of navigation on the Colorado. Following the second meeting, on the twenty-fourth, a committee was appointed to take stock subscriptions for the purpose of continuing the trade. On November 8, the committee reported that it had raised $22,000, and, although the members were charged with having property on the river from which they would benefit, the campaign continued.^^^ It is probable that as a result of these meetings, the Pacific and Colorado Steam Navigation Company was reorganized as the Arizona Navigation Company. The title did not last long, for within a few months the company sold its interest in the Esmeralda and the Nina Tilden to the Colorado Steam Navigation Company,^*^^ marking the end of four years of competition on the Colorado.^^^ Never again was the supremacy of the latter challenged; until the coming of the railroad in 1877 it remained the sole transportation agency on the river.

Although traffic on the lower Colorado was at its height in the 1870's, navigation on the upper waters of the river ceased after the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in May 1869. Little business was carried on at Callville after i %66}^^ The trip was long, the river treacherous, and freight rates high. The experiment, the brunt of which the Trueworthy Company had borne, proved too difficult and costly. As a result of the expense of the business and the competition of the Johnson Company, Trueworthy's financial insolvency and eventual withdrawal from the river trade were inevitable. The second legislative assembly of Arizona, in appreciation of their efforts, thanked Trueworthy and Adams "for their untiring energy and indomitable enterprise ... in opening up the navigation of the Colorado River,"^"* and two years later the California legislature passed a similar resolution.^^^ As for Callville, the mail rider in 1869 reported that horse thieves from St. George had "wrenched four doors from the warehouse there, constructed a raft of them, and . . . had launched out upon the turbulent stream."^^^ The old rock walls, however, remained an enduring monument to a once promising enterprise until the rising waters of Lake Mead enveloped them in their present unconventional grave.^^^

(To be continued)

NOTES

1. San Francisco Alta California^ December 31, 1852.

2. James M. Guinn, "Yuma Indian Depredations and the Glanton War," Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California, VI (1903), 50.

According to Bancroft, a Mr. Howard and party descended the Gila on a flatboat which arrived at the Gila-Colorado junction on November i, 1849. Lieutenant Cave Johnson Coutts, commanding an escort to the party engaged in surveying the United States-Mexican boundary, supposedly purchased the craft and used it as a ferry during his stay there. Coutts himself mentions neither the purchase nor the ferry. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Arizona and New Mexico (San Francisco, 1889), pp. 486-87.

3. Guinn, op. cit., pp. 50-51; "Depredations by the Yumas" (deposition of W