Steam Navigation on the Colorado River
By Francis Hale Leavitt
Experimentation and Development, 1850-1864
ON DECEMBER 31, 1852, the San Francisco Alta California carried the novel announcement that a steamboat had ascended the Colorado River and was then lying at anchor at Fort Yuma, Arizona, loaded with supplies for the military post.1 This heroic precursor of river transportation was the small steam tug Uncle Sam. Ten days earlier the Alta California had reported that she was unable to get up to the fort, but after a persistent struggle of almost two weeks she succeeded in reaching her destination. Her arrival presaged a new period in the history of the Colorado River—an era of steam navigation which, before it came to a close early in the twentieth century, played an important role in the development of Arizona.
The voyage of the Uncle Sam was in no sense the first voyage up the Colorado River. Indeed, her arrival might be considered the termination of more than three centuries of intermittent activity on the river, during which the Spanish conquistador, the padre, and the American trapper all played important parts. Space does not permit a detailed discussion of these early years of discovery and exploration. This paper is concerned primarily with the period of steam navigation which was ushered in by the discovery of gold in California. After 1848 thousands of emigrants crowded every conceivable trail to the gold fields. On the southern route alone, by way of the Gila, it is estimated that in 1851 between twenty and sixty thousand immigrants entered California at the Gila-Colorado junction.
Clearly one of the first needs at Yuma, once this westward rush of emigrants began, was a ferry to carry across the Colorado River the gold seekers and settlers bound for San Diego. The first person to realize this need was Dr. A. L. Lincoln, who in 1849 had come from Mexico via the river to California. Returning to the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers about the first of January 1850, with the aid of several emigrants from Sonora he soon began the operation of the first commercial ferry on the Colorado.2 Trouble with the Indians ensued when a member of the party, John J. Glanton, confiscated a small boat which had been given to the Indians by a General Anderson from Tennessee, and mistreated their chief. Later, in revenge, the Indians massacred eleven of the men connected with the ferry, including Glanton and Doctor Lincoln. They then located and seized, in addition to the personal belongings of the ferrymen and their boats, an estimated fifty1
